Chapter 9: Everything Happens to Me    (print this)

IT WAS TIME to go back to work. After his meeting with Maude S—, Henry spent a full day with the phone unplugged, dealing with email, and slipping back into his solitude as if the last few odd days had not happened. He needed to catch up on his neglected business, to slip into the world of selling and buying manifestations of Francis Albert Sinatra. Fortunately, WaxCon 2001 had arrived just in time to claim him. He called Housman on Friday morning after 24 blissful hours of isolation.

"The needle descends once again," Henry intoned.

"Already? Ahhhh, Jesus fuck," said Housman, sleepily. "Give me an hour."

An hour and twenty minutes later, they were on the escalator to the Sahara Hotel & Casino's convention center, Housman with a Parliament in the side of his mouth and clutching a large cup of 7-11 coffee; Henry feeling more calm and alert than he had in days, his large, leather satchel hung loosely over his shoulder, ready to be stuffed with old vinyl.

Henry looked over at Housman, whose hair hung over his thick glasses. His mustache looked like a definition of the word "scraggly." "Hous, I hope you're not expecting me to lug your finds around for you," said Henry.

Housman made a face. "I'm probably not going to buy anything. The store is overflowing with crap as it is."

"Right. As if you can ever resist."

"You'd be surprised how much I can resist these days," Housman said wearily. It was true: the turnover of rare stuff at Roomful of Mirrors CDs and Records had dropped off quite a bit in the last few months. Every time Henry saw Housman his enthusiasm had waned just that much more, the bright collector's fire in his eye had dimmed just that much further. Housman had entered the ennui stage of record collecting, had even sold off things that five years before he would have parted with only on pain of death. Housman himself looked grayer and grayer with each passing year. Perhaps if he had been Roomful of Mirror's owner his motivation would still be there, but he was merely its manager, constantly enduring petty humiliations at the hands of the absentee owner. Somewhere along the way, Henry reflected, Housman resigned himself to his fate as a used record store clerk, a figure sitting, Buddha-like, serenely smoking and occasionally ringing up a purchase or answering someone's question in a flat voice, drained of the excitement that music once generated in it.

As they flashed their badges at the desk and walked into the main hall, Henry, at least, allowed himself a little twinge of anticipation. He rarely spent a day at WaxCon without finding something, and the thought of being here after the hectic strangeness of the past week was very soothing. He stopped for a moment and appraised row upon row of vendor booths, with every conceivable kind of music represented, every desperate collector's urge ready to be satisfied or dashed. Bargains and rip-offs floated around in the grooves, a great black spinning that always made Henry a little dizzy with excitement. Trash or art, cherished or discarded, the music in the room drifted from passion to commodity and back again. Henry smiled, while Housman squinted and stubbed out his cigarette.

"Let's just work our way around the fringe first," said Henry.

Housman shrugged. They stepped into the desultory flow of scattered bodies. It was early yet, and many vendors and collectors looked fresh, not yet exhausted by hours of flipping through album after album or searching face after face hoping for a sale. Pompadours hovered in a booth selling 60s rockabilly, while a pale curtain of dark hair and silver rings hunched intently over industrial and goth imports from Germany. One booth was dominated by life-size statues of KISS; a cute girl was arguing with the vendor over the price of a hideous Journey baseball jersey while telling her friend in Spanish to "just hang on for a fucking minute." Henry lingered at a booth with some marvelous 78s of country blues, but saw nothing outstanding. Housman took an obscure Ornette Coleman live album out of its sleeve a half-dozen times, staring at it in the light like a jeweler, before finally putting it back in its bin to the disgust of the vendor, a graying hippie who looked almost as washed out as Housman.

They had only worked their way down to the end of the north side of the hall, where Henry was carefully going through a young lounge lizard's collection, when he heard a familiar voice. "Hey, Bethel."

Henry smiled to see Vaughn Ellison, a thin Englishman with an enormous beard, and embraced him. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."

"I've already picked up some fantastic garage stuff," said Vaughn, waving a slightly weathered copy of The Standells' Good Guys Don't Wear White at him. "Right off the bat too."

"Quit while you're ahead," smiled Henry.

"Hey, look at this," said Housman, butting in with a copy of something with a psychedelic cover.

"How much does he want?" said Vaughn.

"Forty-five."

"Feh. He's crazy. Offer twenty-five."

"I did. He's not budging."

Vaughn rolled his eyes. "Tell him he shouldn't be asking that from his worst enemy. You can find these for next to nothing."

Henry's attention wandered back to the lounge kid's stuff. The kid couldn't be more than twenty, standing there in his thin tie and thin-lapeled shiny suit. Yet, inexplicably, he seemed to have every disc Perry Como had every put out.

Henry regarded him. "Really into Como I see."

"Oh yeah. Oh yeah," said the kid, as if the pope had just appeared on the balcony. Henry shook his head. Como?

He moved on, walking just behind Housman and Vaughn as they continued to debate whether the vendor of this forgotten psychedelic band was clueless or a chiseler. "Twenty years old and into Perry Como. The lounge revival really has eaten itself," said Henry to no one in particular.

They continued their way through the growing throngs. Henry felt very happy, happier than he had in days. Even his twitch seemed to have vanished. He let his eye wander, looking at the crowd as much as the wares. So many pretty girls, he mused. A lovely, pale girl wearing a crucifix was blissfully clutching what looked like Czech Folk Songs to her chest. Another beautiful thin girl with striking eyes who looked as if she had stepped out The Ballad of the Sad Café was sitting at the back of a booth, strumming a guitar as if she was someplace else.

"Forget it," Vaughn was saying. "He's probably charging thirty bucks for Blue Cheer reissues."

Housman sighed. "Yeah, fuck it."

They stopped at a booth with row after row of multicolored electronica 12-inches. The vendor was a scrawny, dark-skinned boy actually wearing headphones and dancing as people wandered by. The booth next to him was a shrine to Doris Day manned by what appeared to be a middle-aged man in a bowling shirt with the most unfortunate crewcut in the world.

Someone shouted to Vaughn. "Hey, somebody is selling Nick Cave bootlegs the next aisle over."

Vaughn nodded, and turned back to Housman. "So what you're saying is you sold ALL of your original Zappas without calling me."

"I thought you had all that shit," Housman said defensively.

Henry flipped through some blues records, watching the Rev. Gary Davis' toothless face appear and disappear. He felt utterly relaxed, floating really. An academic type bumped his shoulder as she leaned into the adjoining booth.

"Have you got a copy of First World War Noises?"

The vendor looked blank. "Uhhh… is that by the Ronettes?"

"No, no, the French and the Germans."

"Look, please swear to me," Vaughn was saying. "Repeat after me. 'I will not sell off my personal stock without calling Vaughn.'"

"I'm in recovery," snorted Housman. "Why should I make your habit worse?"

Henry had yet to see any worthwhile Sinatra at all. But it didn't matter. He trailed behind Vaughn and Housman, listening to them bicker, pleased to be immersed in a world he still felt something for. The words even occurred to him: I still feel something for this. It was an adolescent feeling, nostalgic for a time when music was all, but Henry didn't mind. He had chosen to regress.

He looked over at a booth decorated with Frida Kahlo prints. A handsome woman, her dark hair tied in braids, was selling Mexican albums, wonderful old collections of corridos. She smiled at him in a friendly, look-at-my-wares way, and Henry smiled back. Conversations drifted around him. A girl with a distinct 1920s style walked by, telling her friend "He's gone, but I kept his ties." The booth behind him has some sort of Web demo going on, something about audio erotica. Naturally, Vaughn and Housman were transfixed as a smartly dressed woman on a web cam explained from her mysterious remote locale about the "radical reinvention of sonic pleasure" or some such.

"Amazing. Did you know that talking dirty was the wave of the future, Bethel?" asked Vaughn.

"I thought old record shows were supposed to be all about the past," grumbled Housman.

"Gentleman, you can't go wrong with being all about the past. Don't let any one tell you differently," said Henry, and that's when his eye spied it. A copy of Frank Sinatra Sings Songs of Great Britain, right between a Julie London and an Esquivel. He slipped between his fellow travelers and headed straight for it.

A very lovely woman with short blonde hair was sitting there. "Hi, can I show you something?" she asked Henry in a husky voice.

Henry smiled, pointing to the Sinatra. Luck was with him: it was an original English pressing in near mint, reasonably priced. "I'll take it," he said.

As she rung it up, he looked over the rest of the material, which was weirdly split between popular vocalists and Grateful Dead bootlegs. "You have an eclectic booth," Henry commented.

The woman laughed. "Thanks. I'm not really a collector. I'm just helping out a friend while I avoid my dissertation."

Henry smiled. "Avoid it as long as you can."

When he turned away, Vaughn and Housman were arguing again.

"How can you even say that? How can you even bear to live in a reality where you actually think that George Strait is more important than Johnny Cash?"

"Ahhhhh, what do you care what I think," said Housman.

Henry laughed. All around him people chased their obsessions, some free of irony, some drenched in it, but all united in love. Well, all except the professional collectors who had descended into fetish, for whom having a rare record was simply one more box to be checked off. But Henry didn't mind even those types today. He felt good and happily disposed toward everyone, and he was suddenly aware that he was trying to hold on to the feeling for as long as he could.

He looked over at one booth that dealt in nothing but soundtracks and saw the couple that ran it, happy in each other's company, bound no doubt by their shared enthusiasm. The man, wearing a Mexican wedding shirt and a dark goatee, was loudly regaling someone with an anecdote about Henry Mancini, and the woman, her eyes shining ridiculously bright behind her glasses, was drawing people to the table just by smiling at them, her charisma a palpable thing. Henry stood there a while, simply watching them, soaking up their obvious simpatico. They had their troubles, of course. There was no guarantee that things would not end badly for them. Yet here they were, right now, in the depths of their passion, fully in it. Even though they didn't look at each other you could tell they were in love.

Henry suddenly thought of Maude S— for some reason, alone but for efficient assistants in her ivory tower. Well, ivory ranch house. And as if the thought of her had conjured him, Henry suddenly saw Madison Monroe, standing on the other side of the row, staring at him. Henry blinked, and the crowd suddenly swallowed Monroe.

Henry's mouth dropped open a little. Had he just imagined that? And the dream with Monroe in his car came back in full force. "Excuse me," he said over his shoulder, unnoticed by Vaughn and Housman, and he dashed around the corner, moving down the aisle, searching for Monroe's red hair.

He went the length of the row when he caught a glimpse of Monroe exiting the hall through a side door. Henry sprinted after him, realizing that he was angry. Was Monroe following him?

He reached the door and pushed it open, only to be brought up short by a woman with a camera. "Smile," she cried, and flashed his picture, lowering her camera to reveal a bemused expression, piercing eyes atop high cheekbones. Henry pushed past her, rushing down the stairs, spots before his eyes.

Henry burst through the door and into the long enclosed walkway that led to the hotel's back parking lot. His eyes searched the hall for Monroe, when someone called his name and came into his field of vision.

"Henry Bethel? Wow, I thought that was you! What an honor!"

A fat man in a Panama hat thrust his hand out at Henry. "I'm Mark Bixby, with SCENE WEEKLY! I've wanted to meet you for the longest time!"

Henry smiled and shook the proffered hand, eyes still trying to pick out Monroe. He dimly realized that this was the pest who wrote art reviews for one of the local alternative newspapers. He had written to Henry on numerous occasions, asking for an interview. He had no discernible talent.

"It's a real pleasure, I'm such a big fan of yours," gushed Bixby. Henry sagged. He had lost Monroe completely. If that even was Monroe. "I hear you're working on a secret project, a book of some sort. I can't wait to see it!"

"I'm not working on a book," said Henry. His eye was twitching.

"Oh. Well, whatever you're working on I'm sure it will be brilliant!"
Bixby was the sort who used "brilliant" in every other sentence.

"Excuse me, it's nice to meet you, but I'm in a rush," said Henry.

"Oh, gosh! Sure! Here's my card," said Bixby, pressing it into Henry's hand. "Hey, I would love to do an interv—"

But Henry had broken off, smiling and walking quickly toward the exit. He was no longer floating. Now he felt the dark tide of the past week wash over him again, but it was tinged with anger now. Something was going on, and Henry had been stumbling along like a sleepwalker. It was time to get to the bottom of Madison Monroe and his enigmatic employer.