Excerpt from Record Palace

Cindy

I come from alternative FM. Not the vanity of folk singers like Tom Rush or Judy Collins, of electronic rockers like Santana or Pink Floyd. I come from the gentlest voice, optimism breathed, over one acoustic guitar, in Nick Drake. I come from the trance-like intensity of Tim Buckley’s sung improvisations, from the sense of dark room, dark night in Laura Nyro’s diminuendos or in Leonard Cohen’s rolling guitar strings beneath a baritone incantation. Jazz only in “Twisted” by Joni Mitchell, in Tim Buckley’s slippery wails in “Gypsy Woman,” or through the walls: my dad’s big-band 78s and, on occasion, glissandos on his own clarinet.

Mainly I come from alone. Thousand Oaks, San Fernando Valley. I come from the tract house and the Lay’s potato chips in a jumbo Folger’s can, its red plastic lid. I come from materials made to resemble leather. A spice rack, gutted by the prior tenants, with which we “made do.” A tetherball hole in the ten-foot driveway. I come from waiting in the car while Mom did errands on Saturday morning or on late, hot afternoons with the car windows down. In front of the mock-stucco post office. In the shopping-center parking lot with her pug’s tongue spittling the finish on the car door as it drooled. I come from lockers where the Allman Brothers albums my boyfriend brought to school had to be inserted at a slant, from corner to far corner. From mistaking color sugar dots on paper for LSD. I come from swallowing one toke only and then pretending to be more stoned than I was, but bellying up to the Boone’s Farm as it was passed about. From stealing Slickers at Sav-On. Jean Shrimpton, Lady Jane Grey. Op-art poster in the living room.

I come from wanting, from the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz certain as daylight savings, from Boiled Frozen Brick of Vegetables Late of Cardboard with Frankfurters and Beans, from the advent of Familia cereal on our shores. The incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blond girl. The “beach,” Zuma Beach, where, embarrassed by the stick figure I made in my bikini, every other girl’s breasts an indictment, I watched the complicated configurations of my classmates from my box ten years deep of not belonging.

I come from a small room with a door with a large desk with a large drawer for candles and matches, with a stack of odd 45s, careful 33s, with a stereo of gray plastic with attached speakers that folded up for carrying, set on a floor once wall-to-wall blue and now splotched with wax, with Tang, walls papered with small blue and purple flowers on small green stalks. A pitch-eaved, square window.

I come from a father who came from playing the clarinet in what he called “jazz clubs,” but he was an asshole and the clubs were lounges. From a mother (alleged) who worked as a pole climber for DWP for two years after he left and who then wrenched her back one day and went on disability. From her getting migraines by sitting on Naugahyde and so switching those upholsteries for a masculine plaid soon rutted with cigarette holes, and from “your father was a sap.” I come from Dacron, from stereo headphones with the telephone ringer on LOUD. Trying to prove it to them with grades.

I come from what had to be my father sleeping with his dog, figuring this out in retrospect. From his excitement over his first Shell Oil card, his scraping it along the length of my thigh to demonstrate its sharp edge and then drawing back, shook up. From Mom smoking, from my own trying to give my dolls to any kid who said they wanted them.

I come from despair at ever getting out, from one mulberry tree per lot, pine bark littering a patchy ground, and the neighbors at hand with their sprinklers. To the southeast, just past Universal Studios, a glittering Hollywood, Sharon Tate and TM™. Elliott Gould, private eye in a sad-sack rental. More sun and blonds. More cars. I come from driving my mother’s, the Ford Fairlane, ancient then, I come from burning out its engine on the macadam of the Ventura Freeway and crying for the state I was in, no money, no resources, my mother hiding her mysterious few, my car windows rolled up against a mist, more of a spitting really, crying until the highway patrolman knocked on the fly window and although I told a boyfriend later that the patrolman had said Well Miss Thang he really said License please. And registration.

I come from circle-sitting with other kids who pulled their mothers off the floor at night, from commuting to Pierce College and then to UCLA, falling that year for a boy with sandy, curly hair, an Adam’s apple and a Boston accent, poly-sci and a year on me, no beach culture to judge me by. From wanting to do well as he did well, from redeeming myself by serious purpose. From wanting his friends to be my friends, especially the woman Bobbi, wanting to be her—her fine features, her halo of Afro, her intactness, her skepticism, her laugh; to do what she could do—paint, paint big figural still lives; to understand painting as she did, to be able to talk about it in such an interesting way, to know what Clement Greenberg had written, and to know the music she listened to—jazz, jazz filled her apartment off-campus, jazz some secret code that would render me an initiate to her own hip world. From sweetening up and clamming up on the outside, trying to fit in, but also to be smart, so not forgoing wit: I wanted blend not bland, wishing I knew what she knew: choir practice, Chicago, the smell of her mother processing her hair.

And I come from that one night’s outing with my boyfriend, with Bobbi ad with others, to a hall in East L.A. to hear the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the length of the hall filled with clumps of gongs and horns and drums, what I took to be bongo drums and drum sets; stands holding miniature straight saxophones and outsized baritone horns; children’s trumpets and bugles and stringed uprights. Musicians wearing tribal pants, or the reeds of an African dancer, or a doctor’s getup, white coat over tie and slacks, or a suit, the one in front waving a stick from which sprouted limp, fall-over strings from its tip; all of them humming, the hum growing, five of them altogether. The doctor raising a coronet and playing the first line of “When the saints,” then a bleat, triangles pulled from the others’ pockets tinkling underneath, then a chorus of “Devil May Care,” something my dad would have denied was jazz, his music, but I knew it was. Their reaching the area, a good tenth mile, the bastion or installation of their instruments, and moving in deliberate fashion to their quarters, one by one notes emerging and then a melody, “The Great Pretender,” springing from the doctor’s trumpet, their amusement and seriousness of purpose palpable in the hall.

And then, having come, it was I, here, deciding to major in art history, reading Harold Rosenberg and thinking what advances style, buying new LPs of a music new to me, an I-don’t-care jazz and not the pandering slop my father served up, learning and listening with Bobbi my coach, setting my Laura Nyros in the back of the crate, learning to come from anywhere but home.

And when I look back, this anywhere had to be Chicago, clueless as I was. Bobbi was from Chicago, her father a South-Side minister, so I thought then that she would visit if I went there for graduate school. I imagined its jazz—this jazz I was absorbing, Bobbi’s, legion with homegrown, boisterous, sly—and going to Chicago’s jazz clubs with my boyfriend and Bobbi. The university took me, the only one to admit me. I thought I’d learn how to look at a painting as Bobbi could look at a painting; I imagined becoming new, different, whole in Chicago. Packed, arrived, began. The university was a swipe of gray at the base of the city’s canvas, and I, alone.

In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago’s Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: RECORD PALACE: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.

Knuckles scraping rutted paint as the door opened; inside, a form on a stool blocked most of the store, and I spooked. Don’t let on. Only two front bins of records beneath a low, bare bulb; I’d click through them, leave. Then–Acie’s voice. Indifferent.

“They are standing on end so as the men do not have to pull them out to look at the covers. Men get distracted on account some gal has got herself big headlights or big taillights, and then they end up with some shit music for some wrong reasons.” My own chest flat as rain.

He paused and I looked at him then.

“You in the market for anything special?” I saw his right eye staring off the side of his face while the left fixed on me. He was big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds. Maybe a hundred bins were blocked by the wall of him.

I was alone, in that sea a new city is, using my flippers to feel out the surf. Most white girls would leave, I thought. Not me. My new brave life.

“Have any Featherweight Garnell?”

His left eye, squinting. “LPs or 45s?”

45s? “45s.”

He moved and when he scissored a ladder and stepped up on it, quickly, I saw a mat of black hair in the pit of his arm as he reached for a shelf. Cardboard box, size of a book box and one among many, swung onto the bin in front of me.

The 45s were stacked, manifold, all by Featherweight Garnell.

From Record Palace. Copyright 2005 by Susan Wheeler. All rights reserved.