Free Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel Page A

of way that felt weirdly intimate, like I was witnessing something I wasn’t supposed to. That’s what listening to KISS’s
Alive II
while looking at a grainy photo of Gene Simmons gurgling blood in the rain felt like.
    But more than any of that, I wanted my old copy of KISS
Alive II
for the threatening graffiti on the front sleeve—irrefutable proof that my brother and I used to be the most important people in each other’s lives.
    Band on the Run , Paul McCartney and Wings. Contains a large sticker on the front sleeve that reads PROPERTY OF RICHTON PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY . The last person to have listened to this record, before I stole it from the library, was a guy named Steve, who went to my high school.
    I knew this because I’d tried to check it out from theRichton Park library, but the librarian told me that Steve had it. And then he returned it, and the librarian called to tell me it was back. And then I heard that Steve killed his mom.
    The details were pretty grim. He shot her during an argument at their home, and then dragged her body into the trunk of his car, intending to bury it in a nearby forest preserve. He almost made it, but a cop pulled him over for having a busted taillight and noticed the stench of death. Whenever I get together with my friends from back in the day we still talk about it. “Remember that guy who killed his mom?” one of us will say. And then we’ll all solemnly nod our heads, like matricide was just a normal part of our day-to-day lives.
    In the months after Steve was caught, I listened to
Band on the Run
a lot. I became obsessed with it. I wondered, was this what did it? Is this what drove him to murder his own mom? And when it came time to return the record to the library, I hid it. First in my closet, and then in the basement, tucked into the bottom of a box filled with blankets. I couldn’t take the chance that it might be discovered and returned to the nonprofit lending institution that couldn’t possibly understand the value of what they had. I had no interest in Paul McCartney, and even less in
Band on the Run
. But this particular record, which was probably still smeared with Steve’s fingerprints, was like owning one of John Wayne Gacy’s paintings. It was like owning a document of madness. I paid the fine, made some excuse about having lost it, and it was mine.
    Rain Dogs , Tom Waits. With red lipstick smeared on the cover, over the lips of who I thought at the time was Tom Waits but apparently is just a really old photo of a sailor being comforted by a prostitute. I don’t remember whose lipstick it was. Probably somebody I was dating, or just sleeping with. Was it her record or mine? I don’t have any recall of those details.Since then, I’ve lived with many roommates, and a few girlfriends, and every time we parted ways, and it came time to divvy up our respective record collections, I could say, “My
Rain Dogs
is the one with the lipstick on it.”
    New York Dolls —but with Prince’s
Sign o’ the Times
inside (or maybe vice versa). I never really got over making a monumental ass of myself with Abby or Abigail—the girl with the purple dreadlocks who assumed I had any idea who the New York Dolls were, because she confused me with somebody she might feasibly have sex with. That’s not something you just forget. It’s not a “learn from my mistakes” moment. It’s an “I need to buy and study the New York Dolls immediately just in case lightning strikes twice” moment. But there was a problem, in that I was concurrently in a pretty heavy Prince period. I was much more interested in listening to
Sign o’ the Times
than an androgynous junkie glam punk band that’d broken up when I was six years old. But a guy hoping to have sex with girls with a punk sensibility can’t be openly expressing a Prince fandom and hope to reap sexual rewards. So I hid my
Sign