🔭 The Record Essay

Back when I had a record player. HSS-CRCK-POP!

“No!” my little sister shouts. It's her room and she's scared. 

“Last one,” I lie, cross-legged on a Garfield-colored rag rug. I can't listen alone. Because of the nightmares.

The yellow-orange Fisher-Price record arm surfs vinyl. MONSTER SERIES, POWER RECORDS. All caps. Yellow label. The logo looks like The Hulk in a not-so-incredible Mummy costume.

We have three. 

Drunk DRACULA, head tilted, blood dribbling; a WEREWOLF doing his best Jack Nicholson; and a constipated FRANKENSTEIN, although it's clearly the Creature. (“They must be idiots,” I think then. “Branding trumps accuracy,” I think now. “Thanks, Capitalism.”) 

The two of us weathered near-universal monsters, snowstorms, helicopter crashes, dead parents, dying parents, corpse desecration, and drowning.

Seven minutes at a time. Over and over. Looped fever dreams.

My sister whispers, “Stop, please.”

I jam the dial from 33 to 45 RPM.

“Listen,” I say. “They're chipmunks.”

We laugh. I swap records.

“Last one,” she lies.

Back when I had an 8-track player. CLICK, CLACK, CLUNK!

Let It Be is the last album by The Beatles and my first 8-track. Well, technically, their second-to-last. And I just tossed aside a half-dozen other sandwich-sized hunks of plastic.

All through the day, I replay it between nuggets of Steppenwolf's Gold, Issac Hayes' Shaft, and Art Garfunkel's Fate For Breakfast. (I know what you're thinking: “Which of the six electrifying album covers of Art at the breakfast table was it?” Sorry, I must've blocked that out.)

Then bedtime. The chuckle of sitcoms in the living room muffles my music—as long as it’s quiet enough. Crawl over the rag rug—mine's blue and purple, the kind reserved for hippos, elephants, and marine animals in children's books—hold your breath through the analog clonks, and twist the volume to a hair above zilch.

Now crawl back in bed and drift off to George Harrison singing…

KHKRRHH! (Shit! Something's crushing me!)

KHKRRHH! (What's that noise? What's happening?)

KHKRRHH! (What's that thing over there? NO-NO-NO!)

A decade later, I learn about sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations. This answers most of my questions about The Beatles, the witch who lived in the wood grain of my closet doors, and those swirling lights that turned into Mutilor and Scorpius, robeasts from planet Doom. (You know, from Voltron. Or are they deros from The Shaver Mystery? Wait, is all this just a screen memory?)

These days I'm more of an Elvis guy.

Back when I had a boombox. ZHEE-VGN-VGN-ZHEEP!

That's the sound of the radio. It's also got a tape deck and a CD player.

Between birthday presents and piggybacking on Mom's Columbia House dozen-albums-for-a-penny-then-we-get-your-firstborn, I've collected a couple dozen jewel cases.

But I keep coming back to mixtapes. I can listen to any song I want, as long as they play it on the radio first.

Right now I'm mashing ⏩︎ and ⏯︎, looking for The Prodigy's “Breathe.” It's somewhere after Our Lady Peace's “Superman's Dead” and right before Green Day's “Basket Case.”

Context: I'm in middle school and just started lifting weights.

Over-sharing: a weight. A belt weight, to be precise, like for diving, attached to my genitals with medical tape. (Let's ⏸ here and say, unequivocally, that this is dangerous. And doesn't work.) Short story long, the weight slips, bounces off the boombox, and now the CD player lid won't stay shut.

Not my first rodeo, but I don't have a spare copy of Jack London's “The Sea Wolf,” which is the perfect weight for holding down the lid at Mom's house. The closest thing at Dad's is a red, illustrated children's bible—the only bible in the house, actually.

Nope, too light.

I try the weight. It works, but leaves scratch marks where the moon don't shine.

Back when I had a CD player. VING-VING-VRIHRING-ING!

The end is nigh. Not Y2K, though that's nigh, too. The local alternative radio station, 107.9 The End, is changing formats. On their last day, they play R.E.M.'s “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” over and over again. (They did this when they started, too, but I didn't know that. I do know R.E.M.'s Monster summons a dope dragon on the Playstation game “Monster Rancher.”)

I only tune in a few minutes. I'm distracted.

You guessed it, I'm in love.

Her name is DragonRealms. She's a MUD—Multi-User Dungeon—and she's a text-based, open fantasy world, like Zork, but with D&D rules.

A month later, I meet a girl. (On DragonRealms, duh.) She invites me to an AOL chat room where we roleplay we're in a goth club and she cyber kisses me. I promptly raid the neighbors' mailboxes and swipe enough free AOL trial discs to outlast the Apocalypse.

Evenings pass as the answering machine picks up calls from pollsters and telemarketers who want to know if we'd be more likely to vote for Al Gore if he switched long-distance carriers.

One evening, I lose my cyber virginity. All while listening to a CD player with headphones around my neck so I can hear if Mom or my sister comes downstairs. Probably a Sony Walkman with Dynamic Bass Boost. Winamp is lame. I need to be mobile.

I start downloading music on this new thing called Napster and burning CD-Rs. I even make a few bucks selling bootlegs in high school. (Thanks Jason!)

One evening, my cyber girlfriend turns me into a vampire. Then she dumps me for a werewolf or something.

The world is over, but life goes on. I keep burning CDs until Columbia House shows up to collect.