Old Records Never Die Read Online Free

eyes meet, and I know that he knows that I know it’s him, and he smiles at me in that weak way that says, “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you over these past fifteen years, and I’m sorry that I missed so much of your life. I love you more than you can begin to imagine, and I wish I didn’t have to leave, but
la vida es corta
! You’ll understand someday.”
    And then
poof
, he’s gone, disappeared into the crowd. I chase after him, pushing people out of the way, stumbling over revelers in masks and slipping through guys on stilts and knocking drinks out of the hands of tourists and running and running and running, the sound of joyous laughter and music and celebration all around me. I know I’m never going to find him, but somehow it’s okay, just knowing he’s still out there, and he’s still breathing the same humid air that I am, and at least now he realizes that he never fooled me with his silly “he had a heart attack at sixty” ruse.
    Just like I’d recognize my father’s eyes in a Mardi Gras parade, I’d recognize my copy of the Replacements’
Let It Be
. The one that was with me through puberty and too many girlfriends and years of stomach-clenching loneliness and an ego that sometimes felt like it was held together with Scotch tape and sloppy punk riffs. If I saw it again, I’d know it was mine. And not just because it smells like weed.
    Of course I’d recognize it. Assuming I was ever in the same room with it again, it’d be impossible for me not to recognize it. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part would be finding it, since I sold the record when I was still in my twenties. A lot has happened in my life since I let it go. I got married, and had my first meaningful employment, and buried my father, and almost got divorced, andbecame a parent. It would be laughably impossible, but maybe, if you looked long enough, and hard enough, and refused to give up, maybe you do find it again. Maybe you find your dead dad in the Mardi Gras parade. The thing you thought was lost forever, that part of yourself that just disappeared, that vanished when you weren’t paying attention, maybe you chased it down and kept running until you cornered it in a back alley and you managed to get it back.
    But then what?

One
    C an I help you?”
    A female employee with blond hair and pink highlights had noticed me loitering near the register, obviously wanting to ask something. She looked exactly like you’d want a woman who works at a record store to look: punk but not so punk you think she might cut you, a Cramps T-shirt and lip ring, eating grapes.
    She’d asked a pretty innocuous question—one I’ve been asked thousands of times by a thousand different store employees—and it’s not a complicated question. It’s not like a troll is asking you to answer a riddle before you can cross his bridge. It usually requires nothing more than a “No, thanks, I’m fine.” But my mouth muscles weren’t cooperating. She smiled at me, waiting for me to get my bearings. This was obviously not unfamiliar territory for her.
    I was at Reckless Records, in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood—just a few blocks from my first apartment. I hadn’t been inside this store in almost two decades. And it felt, well, pretty much the same as the last time I was here. The store’s soundtrack, as always, was something obscure and amazing, designed to make you feelmusically illiterate. (All I know is that there were trumpets, and the vocalist sounded like Iggy Pop trying to do a Bono-circa-
Rattle-and-Hum
impression.) Sullen, unshaven men guarded their sections as they flipped through records like old-timey accountants tapping calculators.
    Every other record store I’d frequented during the eighties and nineties was, as far as I could tell, extinct. The legendary Rose Records in