Fine Fine Music writing samples
One More Saturday Night
In the bathroom at work, my gaze jumps between a thirty-year-old
promotional poster of Sha Na Na and my feet swinging just above
the piss-encrusted floor. I am the only woman to break the gender
barrier at the record store in its thirty-four year history and the
bathroom is gross. A black mold has formed in the sink from a drip
that has been active for a generation. Pieces of wet toilet paper have
mummified onto the dark-wood paneling and the mirror has turned
orange between the glass and metallic coating, giving it a haunted,
otherworldly appearance. I have cleaned the bathroom twice in my
career here and both times were when a coworker left feces on the
seat. It lingered for four days until I gave in and I sprayed it down,
gagging and wearing latex gloves.
I try to stay hydrated on the job. Adding “thirsty” to the mix of
“generally irritable” and “never sleeps” doesn’t make for a positive
workday experience. I get hit on by middle-aged men all day, and if I
were not with a constant supply of bottled water, my title of Smiling,
Cleverly Rude Tattooed Girl would be traded in favor of Openly
Hostile, Dehydrated, Alternative-Looking Bitch. As much as I hate
my town, I enjoy the novelty of being Ronkonkoma’s† sweetheart and
do not wish to jeopardize it. I bring five bottles of water to work and
usually visit Sha Na Na about six or seven times a shift .
The poster is an unusual choice of decor for a store populated
by men. Sha Na Na is taped to the bathroom door, opposite where
someone has graffiti’d, BEATLES TOURS 1966-PRESENT=0.
Sha Na Na is posed in varied stages of greaser cool, perched on
trash cans in an alley, running combs through their hair, sneering
or looking indifferent to the lens. They are wearing leather jackets and
pedal pushers, cut-off denim vests and muscle shirts, ostentatiously
flexing for the camera. There is one nerd, identifiable by his glasses,
and one black guy, who looks out of place in an iridescent Thriller
jacket. Sha Na Na is young, beautiful and tormented. Sha Na Na fucks
on the first date. The skyscrapers rise up over Sha Na Na, laundry
lines strewn from fire escape to fire escape, but the urban landscape
doesn’t get Sha Na Na down. They own everything on their side of
the tracks.
The Long Island Railroad cuts Ronkonkoma in half. I always hoped
that would mean I lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Although this
side has a haunted lake and a trailer park, the other side is home to
an industrial park that contains a strip club called “Sugar Bush.” That
side has an airport, boarded-up buildings and vacant lots. This side
has a retirement home, a candy shop, and the record store, making
it less seedy than my imagination wishes it was. There are many bars
in Ronkonkoma and an equal amount of Camaros swerving between
them at all times of the day. Kids skateboard in the bank parking lot.
Geriatrics motor along on Rascals and carry heavy gallons of milk like
they are sandbags. Ronkonkoma is populated with lawns of crabgrass
and no sidewalks, but it is an altogether okay neighborhood.
I feel like I really get Sha Na Na. Not just for the obvious reason
that they are the image I wish to cultivate for myself, but because they
were of the wrong time. Sha Na Na missed the West Side Story-boat by
twenty years. They doo-wopped Top Forty radio of the seventies right
over the head, blindsiding the disco movement with sweet harmonies
and antiquated hand jives. I work in a record store in the twenty-first
century. I help people who can’t afford iPods or aftermarket stereos
dig through the cassettes to find Saigon Kick and Tesla tapes.
I hear a lot of great stories of how things used to be. All-night
parties, midnight releases, boozing in the store. Home of the bootleg
LP. Any live show you could want. In-store performances. Young
people with mohawks working the counter in yellowed pictures.
Ramones shirts. Plaid jackets. Nothing but vinyl. The New York Dolls
played around the corner, you know. Ronkonkoma: 180 grams of
balls and possibility, breathing down the neck of Long Island, daring
you to start something. Go ahead.
“How about the guy with the moustache? Real quiet?” Alvin said.
It was morning and we were talking about regulars at the store. I didn’t
know him. “Wears flannel? Comes in every Saturday ten minutes be-
fore closing and won’t leave and doesn’t buy anything?
“Oh! That guy!”
“Yeah, that guy!” We stood nodding in a moment of mutual
recognition. We both knew that guy.
“Yeah, I hate that guy,” he said.
I had never noticed that That Guy didn’t buy anything, or that he
lingered aft er closing on Saturdays. I thought I knew every regular
customer, their likes and dislikes, the offish characteristics they had
that come from staying in one place their whole life. Technically, as
Tattoo Girl From the Record Store, I was no better than they were.
I was a bookmark, keeping a page on the main drag of town for the
people with bleachy perms and acid-washed jeans. I fit in somewhere
between them cashing their check and losing it at the Dirty Martini.
“I never really noticed,” I said.
“Yeah. Can’t stand him,” Alvin said. “I tell him I’m closing. He
stays twenty more minutes and says he’ll come back on Tuesday to
buy stuff . He never comes back, and he never buys anything.”
I shook my head in disapproval, but inside I felt like I had let That
Guy down in not noticing him. Part of the psychology of being a
regular anywhere is that you have both an identifiable characteristic
and specific time frame in which you exist. This person had both, and
I had failed him. I vowed to take note of him the next time.
Alvin left , and I loafed through the rest of the day. I was on two
hours of sleep, which used to cut it until the onset of my mid-twenties.
I didn’t even drink coffee then, but managed to stay alert for twenty
hours a day. I was on edge all the time, but it never occurred to me to
sleep.
“Sleep is for the weak! I’ve got better things to do!” I would say.
My logic was that while the world was sleeping, I was maintaining a
higher productivity rate than everyone else. This gave me the upper
hand over the somnambulistic public whose bodies were repairing
themselves by processing memories and white blood cells while I was
making tapes and sewing handbags. As a result, I cannot remember
anything that happened from the ages of nineteen to twenty-four. I
don’t think I should be held accountable for my actions during those
years, but that is like an alcoholic parent asking his cigar-burned
children for amnesty.
There were a lot of regulars at those many jobs I had back then,
but I am sure I only noticed half of them as I stumbled around in a
tweaker’s insomnia. At the record store now, I notice everyone. The
irregular stitching on their jeans. The strange urine smells. If it’s tar or
asphalt or concrete spotting their steel-toed boots. What union logo
adorns the pockets of their shirts. The memories they share with me
because I am friendly and they have no one else to talk to.
“I bet you’ve never even heard of Motorhead!” Or Hot Tuna.
Or Foreigner. Or Steve Winwood. Or any other artist that came out
before the turn of the century. “Saw them at the Commack Arena
in ’78. Quiet Riot opened. Fuck, that was a long time ago. How old
are you? Eighteen? Yeah. I remember that age. Shit, that was a good
show.”
No one seems to notice that I am not eighteen, that I have bags
under my eyes and enough body modifications to indicate that I am
probably not a teenager, but a displaced Aborigine. I nod, taking their
memory and tucking it away in my brain where it will one day replace
long division or my mother’s birthday. Each story that slips out when
someone spies the first record they ever bought or rolls through town
for the first time in twenty years to ask if the same guy still owns the
place settles somewhere in my brain like the snow in a souvenir globe.
I listen, sometimes irritated, sometimes intently, drinking my coffee
and wondering how they ended up here, spilling their memories on
long-play to a total stranger.
I am flossing my teeth in the orange bathroom mirror, thinking
about Sha Na Na. We were both placed here accidentally on purpose
in this time by something beyond our control. They gaze at me while
I floss, saying, “Aaaay! You’re gonna miss this place!” and “Rock and
roll is here to stay!”
I hear someone enter the store and toss the floss. It’s ten to seven
and That Guy is here to check out records.
“Hey, man,” I say, playing it cool, “Ten minutes.”
He nods. We are there until 7:20, but I do not get angry. We
both have our parts to play. Mine is to drink enough liquids, narrate
everything in my head, and listen.
“Are these bootlegs pressed or burned?”
“Can you get Van Halen at the Coliseum in 1980?”
“Is it soundboard?”
“That was such a good show.”
“I had fourth row. Went with my best friend.”
“Haven’t seen him in twenty years.”
“Heard you say on the phone you only got three hours sleep.”
“You gotta get home and sleep, so I’ll come back Tuesday.”
“See ya.”
His car is filled with trash. Bags and clothes. He drives away and I
turn out the light. I count the drawer and set the alarm. I walk to my car
and drive to the all-night diner on the other side of the Ronkonkoma
train track.
“Isn’t it a little early for you?” the night manager says in his Greek
accent.
“I just got out of work,” says the Girl with Tattoos and Laptop,
settling into her usual booth. She orders black coffee and one slice of
cheesecake, nursing them until she is done pecking out a story, leaving
a five-dollar tip and making small talk with the waiters, busboys, and
anyone else who will talk to her. She goes home, crossing over the
tracks again, passing the bars, and the people, and the neon lights
advertising COMPACT DISCS, LPS, TAPES BOUGHT AND
SOLD, and thinks about how the timing is always all wrong.
†
The name of my hometown is pronounced “Ron-Kahn-Kuh-Muh.” Christina Ricci
mentions it in the movie 200 Cigarettes, but does a poor job reproducing the accent. If
I were to recast that movie using regular customers at the record store, I would take on
her role, and Daniel, the guy who came in every day to ask if Hatebreed put out a new
album, would be Casey Affleck’s character.
CASSIE J. SNEIDER pages 9-13