Was Blind, But Now I See

You Spin Me 'Round Right
Last week I had a profound existential revelation: for the past five years, I have been living--speaking, I mean, and working and riding buses and bicycles--with only half a heart. I'm not sure if anyone recognized my predicament, and for the most part I hardly remembered it myself. I would speak non-committally, agree or disagree on any topic without much investment in the outcome, even hurl myself, scientifically, into emotional exchanges in which I knew I could never be touched deeply. I was there and not there. How can a person whose clearer, more refined half has gone missing ever be in one place at the same time?

Then I fixed my record player.

For months it had been lying on the floor of my apartment. Bryce's parents had given me this magnificent piece of machinery without a second thought, when I helped his sister move from their house in Kaneohe. For them it was as simple as reducing the clutter in a room, and to be honest I didn't understand the significance of the gift until much later. As soon as I'd gotten home I attempted to connect it to my stereo, but the sound came out thin, barely audible. I proceeded to take it apart, cleaning the needle and its attachments, the RCA connections and, even though the platter surface spun correctly, I removed it and disengaged the rubber band that propels the record under the needle, which I had to fix all over again. After all that only a reverberating hum through the speakers, and underneath it a tinny whisper of voices and instruments all jammed up together.

I didn't even have any records--my vinyl collection is with my parents in Arizona, and the chances of them mailing it back to me after they've already had it shipped over there don't look so good. I considered wrapping the machine up in its own wires and putting it in my closet, waiting for the right opportunity to palm it off on someone else. But the promise of sound emitting from this record player (a Marantz, for all the gearheads) resonated in that big black absence in my heart, and instead of moving on I embarked on a search that lasted a full day, when fate intervened in the person of an unneccessarily imperious Radio Shack salesperson. He explained that all I needed was a stereo receiver with PHONO setting (AUX doesn't cut it for phonographs) and then proceeded to bend my ear about how useful a Radio Shack credit card was, when in the past ten years I've been in Radio Shack about three times. After not going out to the bars one weekend and not spending a prodigious amount of my paycheck on liquor and 24-hour diners, I had enough to pay for the receiver. Slowly, and with great relish, I set up the record player with the stereo, and when the glorious sounds of Ravi Shankar's sitar came bright and full from the speakers, I felt like I was being attacked with a hatchet. It was a sublime pain, of one jagged half of the soul being affixed to the other.

I've had record players in my life for as long as I've had my WalkMan and my portable CD player. When I moved out of my house in Kaneohe to town, one of the great pleasures of my week was smoking, drinking cheap wine, and listening to records. Or picking out records from Goodwill stores, stocking up on LPS from the HPR record sales that came around in the winter. Back in those days it was Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday's live version of "I Cover the Waterfront," an Otis Redding anthology I stole from my dad, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen's Greetings From Asbury Park and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. When I was feeling particularly desolate I would play Jack Nietzche's score from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest again and again.

And from 2003, when the motor on my turntable burnt out, I'd been trying to fill the void left by those unplayed records with countless CDs, MP3s, i tunes and downloads. Despite the amount of digitized music data that has flowed through my i-pod into my mind, nothing could compensate for the anticipatory crackle of a stylus on the record's groove before the first track, and in-between each of the songs. I can't explain the sensation any way that does it justice--bass from a CD comes at you, while bass from an LP moves through you.

So now I'm whole once more. Feeling good, feeling optimistic, rebuilding my record collection from nothing. My attempts at establishing a library have led to some arbitrary purchases--just yesterday I bought a copy of Van Cliburn playing Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto. Why? Search me. But I've bought some pretty revelatory records, too, especially Richard and Mimi Farina's Best Of album, which I'm sure I'll write about later.

What is this deep connection we tend to have to material things? Dumbo had a feather, Arthur had a grail, B. B. King had Lucille and Jack Kerouac had a car and a mountain. I have a record player.