The Man With The Glass Briefcase
Addison Godel - ENGL 3800
The only thing standing between me and the most sought-after box set of our era is that damned ghost standing behind the counter.
And he knows it, too. I thought I’d seen indie-rock insider elitism before, but never so honed, never so cruelly concentrated, and never so undead. “If there’s something else you’re interested in, just ask,” says the ghost with a nasal, pretentious drawl. “You know, we have over a hundred thousand records in our warehouse.” His hand brushes idly over the box set, which vibrates slightly on the narrow countertop, enduring the squirming tendrils of one-thousand-beats-per-minute bass waves rolling through the walls. It is ten in the evening, and a concert is taking place next door. My mission, however, is here in the record shop. I have to get that box set, and I have to get it tonight.
Perhaps I should double back and explain the situation a little better. I’m an avid consumer of vinyl LPs; I just can’t stand it anymore to leave a record store with a mere CD, such a tiny piece of shiny plastic, bright but shallow somehow. Nothing compares to the feeling of walking home with a big, beautiful new record, heavy and substantial to hold! Sitting down on the couch, gently removing the deep, rich black disc from the sleeve… and then setting it on the turntable for the first time. That’s the climactic moment, when the needle first makes contact with the groove – that’s the moment I live for. And, unfortunately, a number of other people live for that moment as well. The problem is that we’re relatively few but generally rabid, meaning that operators of cramped record shops, stacked with odd merchandise and ironic decorations, can charge whatever they want for their wares, set whatever outlandish standards they desire.
The ghost is one of these crooked proprietors; the worst I’ve ever encountered. He wasn’t as bad, or as dead, when I first started shopping here. Around once a week for most of my freshman year, I’d get the hankering to rummage through bins of music, and I’d make the trek through the desolate and wind-blown sections of downtown to reach this tiny, cluttered speck of retail. In those days, old Tad (that’s the ghost’s proper name) was at best quirky and helpful - and at worst, quirky and obnoxious. He was of an unclear age, at least 35 and as old as 55, with large round glasses that bugged out his eyes and made every bit of the dim light in the store seem to wrap around his eyeballs. Maybe he hunched over a lot, and gripped the counter a little too tightly, and complained a little too loud and often about the splinters in his fingers, but he was always willing to search his own archives for a used copy of some out-of-print LP, always offering to special-order anything that couldn’t be found in his unseen bales of dusty discs. Now I think his good service in the early days was due solely to a desperate desire to see his store do well, to put food on the table. That all changed when an out of control truck crashed through the front of the store in early August; liberated by death, Tad devolved into a cranky record snob of the worst order.
So now I’m in the store, it’s late, and I spot the recently released Sid Swift & The Sorry Sods collector’s box set, Les Invisibles. Pressed on four discs of transparent vinyl in clear plastic sleeves, with the lyric sheets printed on overhead transparencies, and the whole package crammed into a gorgeous, indulgently heavy glass briefcase. Only a few thousand were made, but Sid Swift isn’t that high-profile an artist, and the thing really is only worth about $75, which is the price stickered on it. I’m a Sorry Sods nut, and I’d be willing to splurge on it as an early Christmas present for myself. But when I ask about it, the ghost of Tad sneers, his eyes narrowing with contempt for my obviously not-quite-hip-enough self. “For you, $150.”
That’s when he launches into the whole spiel about the warehouse and the 100,000 other records. I can’t take it – not tonight, not with that box set at stake. I mumble a goodbye and head for the door, planning to return another day, perhaps with help. I stumble past a box of jazz records and push on the door.
The door does not open.
I give it another push, but it doesn’t give; I stare at it dumbly. The chalkboard schedule of upcoming releases seems twisted somehow, dark, laughing in my face. I wheel around, and the whole store seems changed. What little light had been coming from the street lights outside is faded, and only two of the fluorescent bulbs, distant as the ceiling, are still lit. I attempt to cry out, or at least make a snide comment, but the bass from next door is now so overpowering that the words are knocked out of my chest before I can form them. Tad stands behind the counter, his face dripping light like a 45 melting in the sun. Somehow his voice cuts through the din. “You should browse a little longer…maybe you’ll find something else you like…you know, we have over a hundred thousand records in our warehouse.”
Tad steps around the counter and grins, wide and toothy. The Sid Swift box set is in his hands, swinging gently as he moves deliberately through the maze of shelves and record boxes. The lights flicker; I desperately reach around for something to use in my defense. Can you kill a ghost by smacking him with mildewed records? Maybe not, but I can at least try to irritate him. I begin grabbing records at random as Tad slowly plods forward – then fling them to the ground, one after the other. Will his love of music make him pause with fear at the shattering of so much precious vinyl?
Death has liberated him from that worry as well, it seems. Tad shows no change in his steady, unrelenting advance – although his grin does seem to widen slightly with increased evil. Some sense of dread and inevitability paralyzes me. The only thing I can think of is that maybe another truck will crash into the store and give me a way out, but that slim chance disappears as Tad moves past the last record rack.
"You know,” he says, in a voice pulsing with the arrogance of an album nut and the rage of a man dead before his time, “I have over a hundred thousand other uneducated cheapskates in my crypt. If there’s something else you’re interested in… too bad.” He brings his arm up suddenly, the glass briefcase sparkles sickeningly in the cramped light of the record store, and as it comes crashing down towards me my last thought is that I maybe should have stuck with CDs after all.
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