Page 19 of Melt With You

That was easy enough to answer: go buy the fucking album. Inspired, she went to the kitchen and took the car keys off the hook. Then she opened the cabinet where her mother kept her tea collection. There were the tins of Earl Grey all jumbled together. Dori peeked into the first tin, finding only tea leaves inside. The second had more heft, but when she shook the tin and heard the coins clink, she wasn’t surprised to find only pennies inside. The third was more promising. A quick shake gave the sound of paper rustling, but when she pried off the lid, thinking she’d find cash, she was shocked by what she found instead.

Who knew her mother smoked pot?

Exhaling in frustration, Dori reached for another container, plucking off the lid to finally find what she was looking for – a wad of bills. She’d remembered correctly. The tea tins were where her mom often stashed extra cash. She grabbed two twenties and slipped them into her purse. The only issue was her driver’s license. She couldn’t imagine showing a cop her ID, dated with a renewal to 2010. The high-tech license with the hologram: it looked like the worst fake ID ever.

She’d just have to not get caught.

Although she hadn’t traveled this route in years, she fell into the drive automatically. A left onto Middlefield. A right onto Escondido. She and her friends had hung out at Revolution Records so often in their youth, the owner had made them up honorary name badges. She remembered a perfect day in high school, buying U2’s War, along with the soundtrack to Rocky Horror and Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics. A day she and Violet had gone out to lunch together, and the waiter had mistaken her age by five years, asking her out, thinking she was nineteen when she was fourteen.

She’d saved the Saltines from that date. She remembered that now. Saved them and taped them to her wall. ‘Something to remember me by,’ the waiter had teased her, and she had considered the crackers a souvenir. That was the sort of thing she and Violet lived for.

The car was a stick shift, but after a bumpy start, she handled the gears easily, even though she didn’t drive in New York, even though she hadn’t been in the driver’s seat of a car that wasn’t an automatic in the last fifteen years. It felt natural to be driving this car, natural to be heading toward Revolution Records.

After parking the old Renault, she hesitated for a moment outside of the store. In the windows dangled different-colored records: scarlet, emerald, sapphire, lemony yellow. There were T-shirts displayed along one wall: The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Violent Femmes. She felt a thrill as she pushed open the door, and heard the bell registering her presence, the way it had hundreds of times before.

The clerk looked up as she stepped inside. He’d been reading a magazine – Rolling Stone, she’d bet, or Spin – and she felt him do a double-take. Her own eyes scanned the room. All of the other customers were teenage boys. She definitely stood out. She returned the clerk’s smile, recalling on sight that he had been one of the perks to shopping in a brick-and-mortars store, a check-mark in the ‘Pro’ column that shopping online could never offer.

Feeling his eyes remain on her, she perused the aisles, feeling the first positive wave of excitement at being back in time. The prices. Look at the prices! She wanted to grab hold of someone and tell them how much albums cost in the future, except that there were no albums in the future. But something – she wanted to talk to someone. Wanted to share the experience with a human.

Instead, she continued to drink in her surroundings, excited by the fact that nearly the whole store was devoted to albums, with only a sliver of space given over to cassettes, and a special room at the back for the very expensive CDs, almost all of them classical or opera. Dori remembered that. The first CDs she’d ever seen had been at Janie’s house. Janie’s father was a huge opera buff, and had been willing to shell out the thirty dollars or more each opera had cost, claiming the quality was so much better than the sound on an album.

Once focused on the music, she only peripherally noticed the rest of the customers. There were only a few, mostly boys fondling a Beastie Boys album, or the latest release from Aerosmith. She passed them on the way to the end of the row, still feeling eyes on her as she walked. The good-looking clerk was clocking her every move, and she felt herself bat her eyelashes, automatically flirting.

For the first time all day, she felt as if she were caught in a really good dream rather than a nightmare. The kind of dream where she found glittering coins scattered on the scarred concrete sidewalk, and she just scooped the money up into her hands, following a trail that never ended. Being in this record store – one of her all-time favorite places on earth – and having enough cash in her purse to buy a handful of albums was almost too good to be true.

If she really were dead, then she’d made it to heaven.

Dori felt the clerk’s eyes on her again, and when she blushed, he winked at her. What was she thinking? He had to be college age, someone who had been too old for her when she’d been in school. But was he too young now? Dori had never dated a younger man. Playing the role of teacher had never appealed to her.

She stacked up the albums and brought them to the counter, grinning at the surprise in the clerk’s eyes. Maybe she didn’t look as if she’d buy these sorts of songs or would be into these types of bands. But she wanted Led Zeppelin, she wanted Dire Straits, and she wanted Pink Floyd.

She thought of that scene in High Fidelity, the record store clerk refusing to sell ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ to a customer because he thought the song was pathetic. And then she realized that book hadn’t been written yet and her head started to hurt once more.

‘Are you okay?’

She was startled by his words, and looked harder at the cute boy behind the counter. She was staring too long, wasn’t she? Because he seemed concerned by her behavior. When he handed her back her change, he held onto her hand a beat too long.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked next.

This was the same question Gael had asked. She looked familiar to these people because they saw her often. She spent all of her spare money at this record store, after all. Yet the people seemed unfamiliar to her because it had been twenty years since she’d last caught a glimpse.

But did she know this boy better than she was remembering? Should she recall him more than as a hazy cute face from her past?

He had long dark hair streaked an electric green, and eyes the color of the ocean off Santa Cruz. Not like Violet’s dark purple-blue eyes, but a gray-blue, like a stormy sky. He was built tall and lean, and he had on a black concert T-shirt that showed off his hard, flat chest. She noted the badge pinned over his heart read OZZY, and she smiled at the joke.

She thought of Ozzy Osbourne of the 1980s, thought of the way the man had seemed invincible, the stories about how he’d snorted everything, including a line of ants, to show how tough he was. And then she thought of Ozzy Osbourne in modern times, with his own MTV show and his wife with her talk show. Thought of all the former celebrities who now were cashing in with reality TV shows, a concept that didn’t even exist in the 80s. There was Gene Simmons from Kiss. And Hulk Hogan. And Bret Michaels from Poison. And the kid from the Brady Bunch, and the two Coreys. Oh, and Chachi. God. Chachi, who was now 45 and had his own reality show simply to capitalize on the fact that he’d lived this long.

‘I do know you, don’t I?’ he repeated, tightening his grip on her. She looked down, saw that he was wearing a sterling silver skull ring on the middle finger of his right hand, and wondered why that ring seemed so familiar.

‘I don’t think so,’ Dori said, but she didn’t pull her hand away. Two other customers had now fallen behind her in line, but the boy slipped a yellow plastic ‘closed’ sign onto the top of his register. ‘Sorry,’ he told the impatient customers, ‘I’m on break. You’ll need to go to the station in CDs.’ Dori turned her head to look. The CD section was a wasteland, totally empty.

‘You like Pink Floyd?’

She nodded.

‘Do you know how long that album was in the charts?’

She did know, pleasing herself as she said, ‘Thirteen years, right?’ And the boy gave her a wide grin and said, ‘Give her a cigar, she’s going to go far.’

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