(This is a very old piece of writing that I did in 2013. Appropriate to revive as it’s that season where we revisit the past to look forward. A correlating piece from a few years ago can be found here on Tasteful Rude).
This story is one of those stories I sort of tell, half-heartedly, in conversation. It’s one of those that I use to divert from superficial small talk. I’d rather know where people will stand in terms of relating to me quicker than most. For someone perceived as placating and diplomatic, I’m not exactly patient. There’s nothing of depth to it really until I really wonder why I tell this story, and other stories over and over again. I’m writing this story first because one, I’ve had a logical trigger. Two, I’ve had time to really think about it. Three, I have a current photograph to remind me of the memory.
When my father was diagnosed with congestive heart failure 2 years ago, I returned to the house I grew up in for the first time in 7 years. The home I grew up in, that 1,100 concrete and clay structure of the post war boom sat there, in the middle of the block a time warp of everything I ran from in 2003. Sure, my dad finally moved on from the palettes of grey and charcoal for the exterior walls.
But the shag carpet, pure white under plastic runners, butterscotch aged where the air actually meets it exposed, the thick deeper from cigarette smoke beige drapes, the mismatched furniture surrounding an exquisitely preserved rust brown velour Levitz sofa set. I’d be wrong to say I wasn’t comforted along with suffocated by it all at the same time. Never changing can be a life vest that can drown you. I was supposed to “clean it up” as my Aunts Dorothy and Marjorie were coming for a month to “help” in the way meddling older sisters do. My father, ever the anti-social, but still the consummate Virgo, didn’t want his home to appear in disarray, ironic since the same lack of control had him in intensive care.
My own need to do everything “right” (as ordered) fought with the desire to just sit, and be in the walls and divisions that created me. The house still sits 70 years after it was built not succumbing to open format remodels. I was 28 , approximately the same age my father was when he bought this house in 1975, prodded by his older brothers to “invest” the trust money left by my New Orleans mystery man great grandfather in real estate. He always has to be prodded to do, I’ve done my fair share, never with the power of sibling rank, but with plenty “I told you so” of a snarky only child able to serve the best version of Crow Au Vin arrogance when I’m eventually proven right.
I can’t help but ignore the tasks of cleaning out the cabinets of 17 year old Dinty Moore Beef Stew cans when I run across Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle plates from my 8th birthday tucked behind them. I can’t pour out the Chevas Regal without looking at the oil lamps we used to light when the power went out during storms. The power hasn’t gone out in a storm in years. I’ve almost forgotten about that.
It overwhelms me. I tell Zandra she can go home, she’s been a great help in laughing among the museum artifacts, but I can tell I want a bit more intimacy with this place now. Her Buick fires to life with the same sneeze the Eighty Eight Royale does in the Garage. “Remember when people were brand loyal to American cars?” we laugh. I hadn’t been to the garage yet. I’ll get there.
I close the heavy oak door, with the tinfoil over the iron and glass work for “privacy.” The irony is that the glasswork is so beveled you can’t see in anyways. It started as a mischievous curiosity as a child, peaking through the outside world behind the foil, past beveled glass to a on the nose rainbow kaleidoscope of a suburban world. It became a mark of shame as I became a teenager and friends would come over to visit, a sign that at least one of the residents of this house didn’t want to see you, acknowledged that the outside world existed.
I sit on the brown tufted velour couch, no worse for the wear given its 35 years of age, never really accepting the public on its seats. I immediately go to the photos, being the visual learner even in review of materials as I am, to verify that I belong to this place. There’s a “me” that doesn’t exist except in the photos tucked away in this coffee table, from being an ovum in my mothers ovaries on her wedding day, to the red headed infant, to the 13 year old at Yosemite with a Koala sweatshirt from Australia. Most likely a last minute “at the airport” type. Thanks Uncle Lawrence.
The photos mean nothing without the soundtrack, and the old Admiral is still there. I always thought of that thing, in all of its inherited 1965ish glory, was some palace of sonic education. The black as shoe polish discs hidden in beautiful colors of people and places. This combination of wood, rounds, chrome heavy as the Oldsmobiles in the garage, grounds and wires took me around the world and back and forward in time with 3 sets of mechanical operations. I think of it now and smile, and get a little sad that I’m not forever married to it. I am though, guess we’re just estranged. The LPs lay in candy colored assortment, with no logical rhyme or reason. At least to an outsider. That observation could be held of the 5 year old “me” too. It’s not in alphabetical order, which perplexed me as a child, and called into question my dad’s sense of logic from there on out. Nor were they bound by age or necessarily genre.
But there was one jarring contrast. You see, after Barbra Streisand’s People LP, all of a sudden there’s a shift, to this day, to comedy records. The bawdy night club humor of the Redd Foxx and LaWanda Page variety. Of words I have a hard time using as a 30 year old now. Records I never heard my father play. Records then my mother kept an eye on to make sure I’d never reach during my own tutorials in pop culture’s past. By 5 years old I had made it through Off The Wall, The Sensitive Sounds of Dionne Warwick and Wake Up Everybody. I was winding the corner through Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Songbook and wound up at the “Jewish Chick on the Beach in Khaki” People LP. Finishing that I encountered something different.
Richard Pryor, even to my young ears, wasn’t an unfamiliar name. But not a “records” name. Not a music name. Then the records started reflecting this weird paradox: These sound discs of people who I knew from Television. A lot off them were on this label called LAFF. Spelled L-A-F-F. Sound that out as a 5 year old and you start putting the pieces together. Haha. These must be “Funny” records. “I don’t get why I can’t listen to the ‘funny’” records. It’s wild in hindsight to also know that Richard Pryor also sang a tune or two during his early comedy career. He was a consummate entertainer flexible of many genres to make the world happy, to get a little more love from adoring eyes.
I don’t know the power of the word Nigger and why he’s crazy. I don’t get why I can’t listen to this. I have to learn (and risk finding out why) I can’t listen to this. Babs and the beach go back into the stack. Given its place next to Streisand, how was I supposed to get that there was any context to the word, or the subject(s) within. Everything being equal in my brain as 5 year old. Everything being equal in my mind as a 30 year old even. Aren’t both equally relevant? I set the disc on the turntable, still spinning at 33 and a third. I had no clue about stripping gears on turntables and breaking things. That beautiful crackle of anticipation spills out of worn stereophonic speakers and the laughter folds forth, then the cognac soaked environment of where it was recorded. It’s night, a night I never have known, I still sleep at night. This might as well be Mars or Vulcan on Star Trek instead of a nightclub in Los Angeles for all I care.
From the first motherfucker and the proximity of my mother, I know I was in for a ride.
“This is very exciting.”
No Shit I can say now, No shit is what I felt then. The feel of the forbidden washing over you like sound waves. I had heard these words, muffled, in after hours, just out of earshot. My uncle Albert isn’t one to meter his language. My dad sometimes keeps up in competition. My aunt Robertine admonishes them both. Sometimes these words are illicited by things that arrive in the mail. By phone calls, in conversations about my Grandmother, my dad never really seems to have anything nice to say about Grandma Anne, and goes on about how her fat ass put those crescent moons in the tiles of the fucking floor.
I didn’t notice that I had it a bit too loud not to be noticed my my mother. I had opened some sort of Pandora’s box of bad manners that she had to close, and she closed it on my right hand, still poised to move the needle need I feel the need to move on. The irony is that that doesn’t stop the sound, so in the fury of the moment she slaps me away from the Admiral while she turns it off. In the fury of not being organized with her methods, in the visceral moment she can’t think of what she’s protecting me against. Protecting me against the inevitable? I was gonna get to the laughter at some point. I think of now also the not-til-recently discussed bisexuality of Pryor himself. I still haven’t listened to the LP all the way through. Were there wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes in there about the joys of sucking dick or eating ass? I guess she hoped I’d linger with some favorites and play them over and over again until I never realized I’d stop moving forward with the records.
“LOOK at that huge scratch You put in this record!” she screams.
My mother has a loose grip with logical thought progressions and reality. A lot. She knows damn well if she didn’t slam my hand in the Admiral this wouldn’t have happened. Damn well. Damn well it begins, or Damn well I’m reflecting. Damn well indeed. She’s good at switching the narrative to rile my blood then just as now.
“You’re never to listen to these records.”
Thing is she didn’t really point to which these she meant. I assumed all of them. So I didn’t touch any of “them” until she disappeared from the house 7 years later when she divorced my father, never to come between me and the Admiral. My sojourn through the records were replaced by an update in technology. I got a tape deck. A Sony, non stereo. One speaker. In that oh so blindingly, almost neon 1987 white that seems almost nuclear. It shines through caked dust in the garage these days, providing the soundtrack to my dad’s yardwork.
I was also given an allowance, and the first trip with the allowance was to The Wherehouse. It’s a routine that stuck, all the way until I was 17. Of course it alternated to Tower Records every so often, but every Saturday, after the grocery shopping, or the trip to Lane Bryant for pantyhouse, I got my weekly errand done of buying a new cassette tape, and as I got older, a New CD. It was a way to regulate my education. No longer was I able to access this free library of potentially corrupting materials. Well until no one was looking anymore. By then I was so lost in the pursuit of knowing more and more about the outputs of Angela Bofill or The Supremes that the tawdry didn’t matter anymore. I’ve never heard Richard Pryor’s That Nigger’s Crazy all the way through. I haven’t listened to it at all since that day in 1987.
3 years ago, a Sunday in January, as I put on the Where Did Our Love Go? LP and let it blast in all of its glee, I continued to flip through the records. There’s been no change since I’ve last flipped through them as the contrast from beach to bad language happened. There it was. Such a defining moment that lasted all of 30 seconds staring me back in the face in the illogical order of things. I pull both the records out of the stack and place them under the light on the sofa. I don’t think the picture I took of this really has the same weight as those two moment colliding into each other. It couldn’t have shaped me without the 20 more years in between. It couldn’t have been more sudden.
This is one of the moments that defines me. I think I understand it a little more.
