(Twenty Years) Part 5: Good Times

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

What I once thought was half-senile nonsense has revealed itself as incontrovertible truth: time moves a lot faster as you age. I'm sure most of this sense of temporal distortion has to do with increased, competing demands on what free time I have by added responsibilities. Beyond the background noise of everyday life, however, lurks a growing acknowledgment in the back of my mind that time itself is no longer necessarily in infinite supply, especially now that entire months seem to be stealthily zipping on by with distressingly increasing frequency. While it seemed I could while away an entire day tooling around aimlessly listening to OU812, ...And Justice For All, or A Momentary Lapse Of Reason during the middle of 1988 (and this is something my friend Rob and I did quite a bit that wonderful endless summer, come to think of it), such freedoms seem frustratingly luxurious and out of reach nineteen years later.

I still love what I do, though these feelings of lost, carefree days of youth sometimes extend to the job as well. Due to the fact that we had four or five full-time workers on the schedule at Record Den into the mid 1990s, I was able to learn how to perform many of the necessary duties to run the store, yet at the same time I remained far enough down the pecking order that my actual responsibilities were few and it was difficult sometimes not to think of work as a minimum wage giggle. Getting days or whole weekends off was never a problem as there were always more than enough employees handy to cover whatever time you needed off. Boy, do I miss that flexibility sometimes.

Then again, vacation time was never much of sticking point for me: for most of my time at the Den between January 1988 and December 1991, working was often more like hanging out with a group of similarly-obsessed friends, which is basically what we all were. To this day, I have hundreds of pleasant memories of cutting up during the days or going out to shows or movies (or bars) on odd nights over those years with Don, Dave, the Steves, Greg, Beth, Jim, and Theresa.

A few favorite recollections spanning the end of the Old Record Den era ...

The 1988 Record Den Christmas Party: the one and only time during my tenure that we got together for the holiday at a place other than the store. "Big" Steve hosted the shindig at his house (we had two Steves on the payroll until late 1989, you see, one was "big" and one was "little"), and I clearly recall most of us sitting in his living room late that evening, listening to his homemade "best of Howard Stern" compilation tape, and laughing so hard we could barely breathe (The King Of All Media was still 5 years or so from his Cleveland radio debut at the time, so this was something we'd never even heard of before). I don't think to this day that I have ever seen the usually-reserved Greg losing it like he did that night.

Customer Torture: Record Den was not physically walled off from Newberry's per se: only a long, chest-high row of album bins separated our floorspace from theirs. As a result, anything we played on the stereo also went blaring well into their store. Once in a while, we'd forget this little fact of life while playing something particularly brutal/obnoxious (Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod" or Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine), lewd (pick a Blowfly track), or just plain strange (Laibach, Madhouse, Was (Not Was)). I also remember a time Greg threw on Monty Python's The Final Rip Off CD during one slow afternoon, regaling Newberry's shoppers with such classics as "I Like Chinese," "Cannibalism," "Sit On My Face," "Bookshop," and "Lumberjack Song."

Send In The Clowns: Pretty much any night Dave, "Little" Steve and I worked together was a regular laffalympics. Between sales, we'd spend most of the time simply doing our best to crack each other up, either by amateur physical comedy or with the aid of silly-ass cheap-o toys we'd snag from the Newberry's bargain aisle. The most memorable of these toys were these little beady-eyed pneumatic skulls (you squeezed this little bulb and their mouths opened and closed). While the Cocktail soundtrack was red-hot during the second half of 1988, I'd often line 3 or 4 of these guys up on the counter and make them "lip-sync" to such future karaoke classics as "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "Kokomo," which never ceased to reduce "Little" Steve to stitches. Also in this category would be "Big" Steve's amusing penchant for playing records at the wrong speed (one of the stunts I miss the most from the age of vinyl). Listening to a capella works by Bob Rivers, Shinehead or Prince at 45 speed (or just about any George Michael song at 33 1/3) always made for a great way to speed along a dead shift.

Half-Baked: My first few attempts at getting stoned over the years hadn't really panned out, probably because by the time I ever got up the nerve to puff on a joint at a get-together, I was already pretty well bombed, which tended to dull (if not completely obliterate) the effects of the grass. That said, one of the best highs I ever had was after work one Sunday night after work when Jim and I were hanging out and shootin' the shit at Garfield Park. The late great Bill Hicks used to talk about "getting (his) third eye thoroughly squeegeed," and that is exactly the effect of Jim's stinky, very high-grade weed. As I pulled out of the parking lot to go home afterward, I felt like my head was about six feet tall from chin to crown and my mouth had been stuffed to bursting with packing peanuts. I had to straight-arm the steering wheel on the way home as it seemed to be just out of my comfortable reach (which was odd considering that I never adjusted my drivers seat that day). Upon reaching home (miraculously in one piece), I donned a pair of sunglasses to conceal my eyes, which felt like they were bugging right out of my head. Without a word, I slipped upstairs, devoured half a box of Ritz crackers, and fell asleep in a boneless sprawl. Only the time that I mistakenly ate three of my sister's altered brownies and wound up listening to my own heartbeat for an hour surpassed that feeling of utter and total bonelessness, both mentally and physically.

Steppin' Out: It was a rare non-holiday occasion when a bunch of us would meet somewhere outside of work, but the release of a Beatles-related movie provided one of them. So it was that four of the resident Beatlemaniacs in the Den crew (even notoriously cinema-phobic Greg) headed out one weeknight after work in October 1988 to catch Imagine: John Lennon at the theater. The night started off as a merry lark as we tapped our feet and smiled throughout the segment devoted to the Fab Four and made snide remarks whenever Yoko Ono appeared onscreen. Of course, history then ran its course, and we ultimately got up from our seats after the shattering conclusion, mute and saddened, each of us re-living the loss of one of our heroes once again.

Stupid Drunk Human Tricks: I saw the 1990 re-release of Fantasia probably three times, but the most memorable was the night I attended with a lady friend who was working for Camelot Music at the time (yup, fraternizing with the enemy, that's me). We had managed to sneak a couple of drinks into the showing in her purse and the both of us got pretty well lit by midway through, which unfortunately made the rest of the film feel a lot longer than 2 hours ... in fact, it felt fucking endless. Anyway, at some point during (or just after) the bit with the hippos in ballet dresses gallivanting around with the alligators in capes and fezzes, I was feeling all flushed and dopey and started to doze off in my chair. Just as the music dropped down to a low ebb, a nearly-empty bottle slipped through my relaxed fingers. Thank Goat there weren't any ushers around, because the sound of that nearly empty glass container hitting the uncarpeted floor was shockingly loud in the sparsely-populated theater, and I felt myself sinking low into my chair, mortified (while my companion started giggling helplessly), as my lost contraband began a long, deliberate, and excruciating roll down to the very front of the theater.

At The Movies: I'd be remiss to not mention one of the biggest benefits of my job in those early years (and a big part of the reason I saw Fantasia a bunch of times): all the free movies I could watch, and then some. Sometime before I'd started at the Den, Greg had made deals with two local multiplexes to regularly trade VIP movie passes for CDs (mostly classical titles that were played softly over the lobby PA or in the theaters themselves in between showings while the multicolored psychedelic blobs wandered about on the screen). I kept seeing passes being dropped off and traded for over the months, and gradually realized after a while that hardly anyone at the store ever used them. Thus, my friend Kris and I, both filling the nighttime vacuum in our activity-bereft lives, started seeing a lot of movies together (probably a sizable balance of the entire 1989-1991 Hollywood release schedule, really). Whether it was a spectacular summer blockbuster (Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk The Kids), a big-name comedy (The 'Burbs, Hudson Hawk), some miserable, deservedly-forgotten dud (Gleaming The Cube, Let It Ride) or even an excursion into lesbian-leaning soft core porn disguised as period horror (The Haunting Of Morella, which I have yet to stop hearing about), we made time to see a little bit of everything, and we nearly always wound up in a booth at Denny's for hours afterward. Yes, there were oceans of time to waste back then ...

I certainly am not trying to imply by this list that all good times at Record Den ended when the old Newberry's store closed for good, but looking back from now, the whole atmosphere at the store began to change very soon thereafter. After twenty years and change of doing boffo business in the same corner of the same department store, the end was nigh for our old location, and the clock was rapidly winding down ...