Aries. Fairfield Parlour. 1970. Vertigo.

 Privileged with the gift of memory, I peer into the skull-domed darkness behind my eyes, past the stringed, jumbled network of starkly colored arteries and veins and the firing nerves, hoping for a quick glimpse of the years’ detritus; the smashed cassette tapes, the unusable cameras full of ruined batteries, the rain damaged paperback novels with their bloated pages, all the old magazines with the best pictures scissored out. Here’s another memory, ghostly like all the rest, yet shareable with persons still living. It’s of a cavernous, brightly lit retail space whose three interior walls are covered in a blond wood paneling. Every several feet along the walls, the paneling—installed on the diagonal—is interrupted by a large square frame decorated with colorful posters of varying size that are periodically replaced by the employees of the various record labels promoting a current release. (Once, in the spring of 1990, Charles, the store manager, asked me to build a wall display for Billy Idol’s latest record. It was called Charmed Life; his career was in a nose dive. I spent all of one morning and the better part of an afternoon trying to visualize a concept, and in the end put up what materials I had to work with in a creative frenzy. The result was less than inspiring.) Another of the store’s defining characteristics was its bright lighting. A fourth wall was all large windows, admitting a flood of natural, Texas light, and rows and rows of white fluorescent tubes lined the ceiling. Replacing a tube meant hauling out the giraffe-like ladder and climbing up. Other times, two employees were tasked with taking out the store trash, which meant piling days’ worth of garbage onto the hydraulic lift for a trip out to the dumpster across the rear parking lot (the rear of the store faced out onto a steep decline from the front of the property; more businesses were located down there). You could amuse yourself with disposing of one of those long fluorescent tubes by hurling one like Zeus with a thunderbolt at a dumpster wall and watching it disintegrate into powder when one end would hit the inside wall of the big brown trash bin. When I began working at Sound Warehouse in 1985, nine months and a semester and a half of college after graduating from high school, the store still stocked its cassette tape inventory behind shelved, glass display cases that ran, L-shaped, parallel to the store’s southern and western walls. You know that feeling you get when you’ve started a new job and you begin doing work that makes you feel a vital part of the workplace’s daily operations, almost to the point of enacting a ritual? I still remember acquiring that feeling at Sound Warehouse, asking customers at the tape wall if they needed help, carrying the merchandise for them to the cash register. You’d set the cassette at the register area, just to the right of the cashier, above the display of incense, and, if she didn’t have any customers, Lisa I. leans over and gossips, in a quiet voice, “What happened to Dave?” Over the weekend, Dave telephoned Dan, asking for help. There had been a physical altercation between the store employee and his brother. Dan drove over to pick Dave up and let him spend the night at his and Linda’s house on the far east side, off of Meadowbrook. The next day, Sunday, Dave drove back to his brother’s place, packed up his belongings, and left town. Before social media and the ubiquity of the online profile, it was possible to interact with strangers who weren’t so practiced at communicating in the now homogenous style of accumulated self-data and identity exhibition. We were awkward, and ingeniously we made it work for us, using prop cigarettes and musical tastes to signify our familiarity with cool, misthinking it made us so; using the brazen, tender-fleshed stupidity of our youth, and the commonality of desire as a North Star; abusing alcohol and cheap drugs to calm the compulsive, high-pitched mania of overthinking until, ironically, we lost everything; using the high gleam polish of a weekend car wash, the improbable fashion of shoes worn without socks; I used the words “college dropout” once as a self-descriptive, hoping to evoke not a time in my life of failure to focus and work, but instead a mythic American parade of daringly heroic, marginalized lives as foreign to me as mountains on the moon; the tradition of Herbert Hunke, not Kurt Vonnegut. When you are thrust into living, you use everything at your disposal to resist the undertow of nonexistence, that same resistance alluded to in the chorus that lead vocalist Peter Daltry sings in Fairfield Parlour’s achingly beautiful song. In the absence of the commercialized resistance known as rock and roll, I guess I feel like the early Christians in the wake of the Christ’s promised return. The air around me still vibrant with the residual energy of that raucous, high volume time, the heart bruised with the certainty that the mystic air is all of it that remains.