Amp'd Read Online Free

that flip easily with one hand. The proprietor is older than I might have imagined if I’d bothered imagining him at all—less Jack Black in High Fidelity than Jack Palance in City Slickers .
    â€œJust gonna look around a little,” I announce before he can ask, “Can I help you?” and I’m forced to respond, “I could use a hand.”
    I start flipping through the A s and figure by the time I make my stoned way past ZZ Top, that should kill the best part of the day. “Show Tunes” should take care of the rest. I barely make it to ABBA when he insists on engaging me.
    â€œYou went to Paris Middle School.”
    â€œI did,” I admit, before jabbing back at his age. “Were we in the same class?”
    â€œI taught math. Or in your case, tried to.”
    It’s Mr. Madnick, my eighth-grade math teacher. I needled him for nine months, September through June, like a gassy, unwanted pregnancy, birthed and then handed over for adoption to the oblivion of summer, never to be seen again until now. Of all the record stores in all the towns in all the worlds, he must be thinking, he walks into mine.
    â€œMath was an abstract concept I couldn’t grasp,” I explain. “And with fewer fingers to count on, I’ve only gotten worse at both math and grasping. Also, air guitar.”
    â€œIt had nothing to do with concepts. You didn’t want to do the work.”
    â€œMaybe I just needed it in simpler terms: ‘Aaron leaves town, heading west, at fifty-five miles an hour. When he intersects twenty-five years later with an SUV, traveling east, how many limbs will be subtracted from Aaron?’”
    â€œThat’s recent, then? Surely you can’t be whining about something that happened a long time ago.”
    I slam the stack of A s upright and stare at him.
    â€œRespect the vinyl,” he says, instantly rendering records as uncool as textbooks. “So, Aaron. What do you do now?”
    â€œI’m a teacher,” I say, and I can’t help laughing, but it’s no match for his.
    â€œGod, you want to talk abstract concepts? I love that the universe does shit like that!” He steps down from behind the counter, and his transformation to actual human is complete enough to make me feel guilty about the terrorist snark that only a fourteen-year-old boy is capable of wreaking upon a teacher.
    â€œAnd my eighth-grade math teacher retired and opened a cool record store.”
    â€œActually, I had sex with one of my students and got fired. Did a little time! You’d be surprised how really bad shit can turn out good for you.”
    â€œRight. People keep telling me that.”
    â€œOh. Your arm,” he realizes. “No, I wasn’t thinking that. That’s completely fucked. I can’t think of one good thing that might come from that.”
    I’m not sure if he’s serious or if this is some residual teacher mind trick meant to inspire me to prove him wrong, but even my currently stoned self isn’t buying it.
    â€œSo, do you own a phonograph, or are you just browsing?”
    â€œMy father still has the stackable components that were so popular in the late eighties.” It makes me wish that of all the things Dad has squirreled away, he’d have kept the younger, whole version of me.
    â€œJust one of many things wrong with the eighties. Ease over virtue. A good stereo system is comprised of the best pieces. That might mean a Fisher tuner, Marantz amplifier, JBL speakers, Technics turntable. And of course the cartridge, and even the stylus matters. But that’s too much trouble, so you buy the single-manufacturer stackable set in the prefab unit with the Plexiglas window to display your mediocrity.”
    â€œOr, I just play my iPod through my clock radio dock.”
    â€œIt’s a slow, downward spiral,” he laughs. “No way to treat our best memories.” He pulls The Allman Brothers