Free Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel Page B

o’ the Times
in the New York Dolls record, and the Dolls record ended up in the
Sign
o
’ the Times
sleeve. I’m almost positive both records were sold or given away before the records were reunited with their correct packaging.
    Let It Be , The Replacements. Of all my old records, this is the one I’m most confident I’ll be able to find again. It was the last record from my collection that I gave up, so the law of averages is on my side. It’s only been in wide circulation for sixteen or so years. How long do they wait before giving up on a missing child? At least twenty, right? Maybe never.
    If it’s still out there, if it’s findable, I’ll smell it before I see it. I don’t care if it’s buried underground like a cemetery underthe
Poltergeist
house, those pot resin fumes will come bubbling to the surface like angry ghosts.
    I wasn’t just doodling. This was a battle plan. A declaration of intent.
    I wasn’t about to give up because the record store where I’d sold the majority of my records was gone, out of business and with no forwarding address. My records were still out there. They had to be. Unless they’d been melted down to ash in a warehouse fire, they at least still existed. Somebody owned them. Maybe the people who had them didn’t even know they had them. Maybe they were in a basement, shoved into the bottom of a water-damaged Meijer’s wine box, or in a friend’s attic, in a stack of high school yearbooks and letters from dead relatives that nobody remembers were left up there. They were gathering dust in some dark corner, waiting to be rediscovered.
    Was I just being stupidly nostalgic? I’d considered that. But it’s not like I wanted my floppy disks back. I wasn’t on a mission to find old AOL sign-up CDs, or those Nintendo cartridges that could be “fixed” by blowing in them. If I could find these records again, it’d rewire my brain somehow. I was sure of it. It’d be like hitting the reset button.
    It was raining when I left the restaurant. I let it drench me as I walked too slowly back to my car.
    A good Chicago rain reminds me of that John Cusack movie
Say Anything
, when he’s in the backseat of a car with his girlfriend, or the girl he wants to be his girlfriend, and they’ve just had sex for the first time, and they’re listening to Peter Gabriel and shivering. I always thought that he was as much in love with the music as he was with the girl. Because the music captured his emotions at that exact moment he was feeling them, and reflected them back to himperfectly. That kind of connection happens so rarely, almost never between two human beings, and only occasionally between a person and a song. You can’t really wrap your head around what you’re feeling, but then a song comes on and you’re like, “That’s it!”
    Cusack’s character in
Say Anything
is going to remember that moment for the rest of his life. He may not remember the girl; he probably lost touch with her, or he’s Facebook friends with her. He may not even remember her name anymore. But he remembers that night in the rainstorm, listening to Peter Gabriel in the backseat of a car, holding on to a girl and shivering because he was so overcome with feelings that Peter Gabriel helped him feel a little more beautifully.
    That’s everything I’ve ever wanted from any song. I just want it to make me tremble while I’m falling in love in a car during a rainstorm. But not every song can be that perfect.
    I climbed into the Honda and flipped on the radio, hoping for something goose bumps–inducing, something that would make me want to just sit there with the car off, clutching the steering wheel, watching the rain beat out a gentle rhythm on the front windshield as I thought about life in some profound new way.
    It was Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
    Again.
    For