The Record Store

Fresh and Snarky | Short Fiction

NATHAN WAS A BASS PLAYER, but not the Bill Wyman kind. Not another Mingus or Jaco Pastorius or even Les Claypool; all these were too conventional to compare with the things Nathan did with a bass. No one had ever seen his kind of bass-playing before, but if you’re thinking virtuosic—don’t. This was an entirely different take, the way he literally dismembered a Fender Rhodes, so that it would hurl and spout and hawk desperate, uncanny sounds. His artistry could be summed up quite simply: he imposed his abstract experimental demands, and the instrument acquiesced to the brutality.

The way I came to know Nathan was innocent enough. We were cashiers/stockers at Low Dive, the city’s coolest, most erudite record store. He was eight years older than any of us, but that was all we knew about him. He said very little about his background. His family, his education and his past in general were off-limits. These topics of conversation had no bearing on what he was thinking about at any given moment, and we were doomed to fail if we tried to bring any of that up as a way to spark friendship. No one could make friends with Nathan, not unless you played an instrument and had arrived at the same teleological juncture in music-making. Other than that, you were like furniture in a room. His admirers called it single-mindedness; we had other names for it.

In an age of digital technology, the two owners were like antiquarian curators of the analog. They sold strictly vinyl, and people came from all over the country, if not the world, to augment their vinyl collections or to find that rare jewel: a first pressing in mint condition. Philip and Jacob even attended to their customers wearing white cotton conservator gloves, and made us wear them as well. I grudgingly understood their logic, but the store was hardly a clean space. In reality, the gloves were just for show.

Nathan was their darling wunderkind. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every style of jazz and rhythm and blues, as though he’d been there to witness their birth. His familiarity with the blues went back over a hundred years, and he could rattle off the history of every defunct record label of the twentieth century. In his head nested oodles of stories about famous and not so famous musicians, committed to memory and told like some idiot savant on a roll.

As a lauded new composer, these served him well when being interviewed. All downtown Trinchton was following him in Instagram and stampeding to his abstruse concerts, where you could hear a pin drop between—what to call them—decibel peaks. You might think I’m down on new music, but this is certainly not the case. I’ve written reviews for NME and actively champion all kinds of emerging trends in music.

Here’s what I knew about Nathan: he was a mean, arrogant prick, who now and again stooped to interact with the rest of the world. At those times, he could be hilarious and charming and informative, bathing our nerves in dopamine, before he subjected us to another of his foul tempers, ridiculing people’s last names or plunging them into agony for not understanding what he was talking about. Worse still, unlike the telltale signs of rain or an incipient epileptic fit, there was no discernible warning pattern to it. And worst of all, none of this prevented me from getting enmeshed in his world or the society that orbited his talent, even though I grew up in a toxic household and could flag this unsavory shit before he opened his mouth. More’s the pity.

I understood his inconsistencies. Like any raging narcissist, Nathan could be very nice if you were feeding his ego. Most of my coworkers were so threatened by him, they called him genius behind his back. Not only because they believed it fervently, but as a fig leaf to cover their own humiliation and fear. I liked to call that self-gaslighting.

In one of his more solicitous moments, Nathan invited a few of us, those who had met some inscrutable criterion of his, to where he lived. To be honest, we were probably just the ones he found least annoying. The purpose of the visit was to show off his newest work. We were guinea pigs, in other words. I could tell the others felt as if they had won an award. More than one of them wore a facial expression that I would translate as: “History in the making” or “A red-letter day in my life”, one of those things. I had to laugh as we walked over the ground floor mosaic, sprouting Japanese knotweed in the corners. There were Roman mosaics from the fifth century that were in better condition. The building seemed to have missed being condemned through pure administrative error. Lots of the buildings on Nathan’s block were like this. The entire district seemed to have never made it onto the city’s slate for demolition or reformation. As such, it flaked, chipped, burned, and mouldered as Nature wished. One of Her more successful reclamations, I wondered if it was due to the might of Nathan’s egotism that the building hadn’t already collapsed on his head.

Why would this renowned artist, who had all downtown in the palm of his hand, agree to live in such a dump? They all asked me this later, as if I were the ambassador to Nathan’s mind. How to explain reverse snobbery to a bunch of middle-class kids whose parents still drove them everywhere? I just said I didn’t know.

The cold in Nathan’s dark apartment was shocking. It was January, and the black trash bags over the windows weren’t contributing squat to the apartment’s heat retention. I could see my breath. The main room had a floor-to-ceiling-length painting of Nathan's hero, Shostakovich. Basses and bass parts, pick-ups, jacks and cables, esoteric electronic devices, amplifiers, homemade instruments, detritus and quirky things, presumably found on the street, a contrabass lurking in a corner, music scores, some food stained, and three whole walls lined top to bottom with records. It was a madman’s workshop. I knew we were not there because he wanted to share anything with us. It was a way of backing his claims, the stated and the implied, asserting once and for all his artistic sovereignty, like any twenty-eight-year-old eight-year-old might do.

All of us had gone to his concerts, and although they were reviewed in the most important newspaper in the country, none of us liked his music because it sounded exactly like him: angry, mean-spirited and aggressive. If he had been born handsome, they would have called him an enfant terrible. It made me glad I was not a musician. Nathan only talked to me because I didn’t give a fuck, was neither afraid of him, nor impressed by what he did, and the constant bickering with my mother had sharpened my tongue to the point that I was also pretty good at leaving people cut and bleeding.

I thought long and hard about this, how I responded to aggression in my environment in general. My mother had reacted to these same pressures, letting them mold her character. I was following in her footsteps. Nathan was just overreacting to what he perceived as encroachment on his extended creative space, a.k.a., the store. He imputed judgment on anyone who dared put themselves on his level, even if it was for no other purpose than to run Low Dive in a friendly fashion. You would think the collective reaction would have been to vilify him, but no, my coworkers idolized him.

That afternoon Nathan did not play anything for us. From a cupboard crammed with junk, he pulled out a light box and surprised us with a show of feathery fishing tackles he collected and altered. Like Rorschach figures, they were supposed to mean something strung together in sentences. I watched him, and it hit me. There he was, in his dirty pullover and jeans, and his horrible school-scissors haircut, in an apartment as filthy as an abandoned train station. Smiling. It was the first time I had seen him forget the command and fury of his compositions or performances, the serious work. He was playing, and it was fun. Fun to watch, fun to see him like that, like a kid who was bursting with ideas he knew no one would understand, yet was content to share anyway. The shapes were beautiful and funny and cool. After a while, they started to look like animation, like dancing figures in a mummers' pantomime.

The little performance was creating an ambience, a story, a fairy tale or myth, until one of the dummies said, “What’s it supposed to be?” My stomach contracted, and I looked over to Nathan, bracing for the furnace blast of his scorn and invective. Instead, he just kept going. “They’re whatever you want to imagine them to be.” The mass of bodies that had visibly tensed, relaxed, and someone else said, “It’s so creative. I love it.” And this is what broke the spell.

He stopped and told us all to leave, that he had work to do. I stayed after the others had left to talk just a little more. It was about Leonard Feathers. I was happy for this new view of my coworker, the famous, or soon to be famous, Nathan Baines. It made it just a little easier to tolerate him in the record store, and as I left, it occurred to me that the whole thing might have been orchestrated for my benefit because he asked me if I would come see the next one. I said sure. Was this his humanity and amity poking through the hubris? If I hadn’t fallen for it, I would have said no straight away.

Curiously, Nathan stayed at Low Dive a lot longer than anyone would ever have predicted. I think he needed his day job because he only gave it up when his touring commitments got in the way of working a regular schedule. In the end, like all stars, he ascended beyond the stratosphere, and we never saw him again.