Vinyl Cafe Unplugged by Stuart McLean

Author:Stuart McLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Canada, Fiction - General, Humorous Stories, Canadian, Short Story, Short Stories (single author), Fiction, Literary, Record stores, Canadian wit and humor, General, Short stories
ISBN: 9781594484063
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2009-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

That was seven years ago. Sam was only three years old the last time Dave had seen the Geechie Wiley record. Now Sam is in school—grade four. Any way you cut it, seven years is a long time. The seven-year itch, the seventh-inning stretch. They say every seven years your body replaces every single cell. After seven years there is nothing left of you.

Dave went through many stages with Geechie Wiley. First he blamed himself for leaving it lying around and sank into a pool of self-loathing. He was convinced a collector had spotted it and bought it when he wasn’t in the store.

Then he decided that Ken, that fastidious little tidy-up clerk, knew all along what the record was worth and had swiped it when he fired him.

For a while he allowed himself to believe the record was still somewhere in the store, and that one day it would surface. As the months passed he thought of it less and less, wondering about it from time to time when he was alone and feeling wistful. But when he told the story of how it had slipped through his fingers, he was eventually able to tell it with humor, and these days when he told it, the joke was on him.

And now the kid had come back. And he was standing there in his blue suit and his yellow tie, and what was he saying? He was saying, “I can’t believe your store is still here. Everything else has changed,” he said. “But this place is exactly the same.”

Dave looked around the store. He pointed to the lamp by the cash register.

“The lamp is new,” he said. “I got that for my birthday, maybe three years ago.”

“I remember that lamp,” said Kevin. “You’ve had that lamp for at least seven years.”

“We got rid of a lot of the eight-tracks,” said Dave. “I don’t buy eight-tracks anymore. Except for the Partridge Family. Not that anyone is offering.” The boy kept smiling as he looked around.

Seven years. He was a man now, not a boy. He said, “I’m not married anymore. Do you remember Lisa? We got married. But it didn’t work. She left. After three years. She said that I hadn’t grown up. We didn’t have kids. You have three, right?”

“Two,” said Dave.

“You can make a living at this?” he said, waving his arm expansively around the store.

“Depends on what kind of living you want,” said Dave, glancing at the cellphone Kevin had put down on the counter. He didn’t finish the thought.

Kevin picked up the phone self-consciously and slipped it into his pocket. “For work,” he said. Then he added, “I’m going to look around, okay?”

When he came back to the counter he was carrying five albums. “Rock Lobster,” he said holding a record up. “Rock Lobster. This might be the copy I sold you. I haven’t heard this record for seven years.”

“Do you still have a turntable?” said Dave.

“Somewhere,” said Kevin. “Lisa took the CD player. I didn’t buy a new one.

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