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Brand New Box of Matches

I’m sure when my parents were selecting items for my sister’s birthday, so cavalier in their choices, they were completely unaware of the course they were setting in place for my life. Now, looking back on a lifetime of addiction, I can see that this is where it all began. All of the elements: the flash of color, the crackling of papers, the sound of the needle dropping, every sweet seed that was strewn along the path is as present in my mind as if it were yesterday. I sold my soul to rock and roll that day for the price of a 12-inch 33 rpm record and I have never looked back.

It was a momentous birthday. Jodi was turning ten, which wasn’t quite a teenager, but still had a lot more cred than nine. She decided to mark the occasion with her first slumber party. My mom loved planning parties, going all out with the twisted crepe paper and shiny cardboard hats and noisemakers. My brothers and I blew up pink and orange and green balloons that matched the paper plates and napkins. Jodi’s friends arrived in ones and twos as their mothers dropped them off. My mom leaned against the doorjamb as the girls paraded past in multicolored hip-huggers and peasant tops and ponchos, verifying pick-up times and offering reassurances that they wouldn’t stay up too late. The girls settled around our living room, kicking off their clogs under the coffee table, long hair swinging across their faces as they peered carefully at each brightly wrapped package. I sat as close as I dared, mesmerized by these impossibly pretty and grown-up girls. I felt my body stretch toward the sky, aching to be one of them.

Jodi chose the largest present to open first. By the time she had pulled off the paper I felt that this same sky had opened and rained bounty upon both of us. Mom and Dad had gotten her a record player, an orange and white portable one. The all-consuming passion for pop music that my father had ignited in her the day he brought home Meet the Beatles, the passion that she carried around like a talisman in her pocket, now had a place to land. Namely the room we shared, upstairs at the end of the hall, which meant that we could shimmy and shake any time we wanted, instead of having to wait for Dad to get home to operate the console stereo. I lived for those moments when we listened to records. I felt something not dissimilar to the sensation experienced that time I stuck my right index finger into the wall socket. As I jerked my finger back it pulled a string of blue lightning with it that terrified and thrilled me. When Paul counted off “One, two, three, FAH!” that same blue lightning made its way down my spine and into my toes. My mouth opened and the words came out. I held my head in my hands as I swung it around, for fear that the top might come off.

My sister jumped up and ran across the room to the stereo cabinet and retrieved her copy of More of the Monkees for a maiden voyage on the new turntable. I had already decided months ago that I was going to marry Davy Jones. I previously thought I would marry Paul McCartney (and he was still a strong contender), but the level of scoff with which my sister had received this information (“Well that’s dumb. You are only five. How are you going to meet him?) had sealed my lips from any future such disclosures. I swooned with secret dreams of Davy, leaning my head in as close to that little record player as I could, watching the red Colgems label go round and round. I wanted to fall down inside of I’m a Believer, sensing the freedom that owning one’s own audio equipment brings.

As side two finished, Jodi opened the rest of her presents with an infuriating precision, careful as she was in all things, determined not to tear the paper. These last few gifts included a gorgeous leopard print sleeping bag and a Barbie that I would not be allowed to touch. At last she slid the paper off the last one from Dad: a flat square one that we both knew could only be an album. She laid it out on the coffee table and smoothed the front of it. It was black, with a beautiful blonde girl posed in the center. She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow, wearing what appeared to be a black and white long-sleeved unitard under a red mini skirt. With really killer red boots. Jodi slipped the vinyl from the sleeve and placed it on the turntable, her fingers careful not to spread their oily prints across the surface, like Dad had shown her. As the record began to spin, a dum dum dum dum bass line lifted out of that little orange speaker and into my hips. Nancy Sinatra sang Lee Hazlewood’s words that let me know that it was all right to be a girl. We came supplied with ass-kicking equipment. Before I knew it I was out there frugging like mad with my sister and her friends. I spun around and saw my brothers were there, too. Our living room became a seething mass of children digging the thick horn section of These Boots Were Made For Walkin’ with our thumbs. Big dreams were born that day and my life took that final inalterable turn. It was as if someone had set a big bucketful of sweet smooth songs on the floor in front of me and dunked my delighted head in.

We left New Jersey and moved to the burgeoning suburban sprawl of southeast Texas not long after my sister’s birthday. Our new house was large and square, with four bedrooms on the second story and a master suite on the first. I heard my mother tell more than one new friend that she was really looking forward to the privacy. I wasn’t quite sure that I embraced this notion of privacy, which seemed to equal solitude and a loneliness I had never experienced. There was no talk of how to adjust, it was just expected of us. Yet a transfer to the Middle East could not have been more of a culture shock. My mom soon grew exasperated with our whining about boredom and why New Jersey was far superior to Texas while she was trying to get the boxes unpacked. As she stood hefting piles of hardback books into the built in bookcases, we buried our noses in the fat encyclopedia, searching for ammunition:

“It was one of the original colonies. The thirteenth. Did you KNOW THAT? George Washington spent more time there than any of the others! And it has snow. And basements and the Holland Tunnel.”

“Why don’t you go outside and play? You have that whole big golf course out there.”

“But there are golfers on it. And it looks like it’s going to rain. The sky is kind of green.”

“Well, just go watch for tornadoes, then,” she’d say, pointing to the floor to ceiling windows that covered the back of our house.

We’d eventually find something to capture our attention, wending our way down to the muddy San Jacinto River, which ran alongside our brand new subdivision, or climbing through foolishly unguarded new home construction sites, where petty larceny ensued whenever possible. Yet the moods of four displaced children soon melted in the eternal sweltering humidity of a summer that lasted into fall, dreading the days at new schools where we were either tagged with a derisive “Yankee” or threatened with violence for our use of “you guys” as a plural pronoun. The natural buoyant confidence I’d had in kindergarten waned as I moved through first grade.

Saturday morning brought the eagerly anticipated distraction of car rides uptown to run my mother’s never ending errands, buying socks at JC Penney’s or fabric for some project she was working on for the bazaar at our new church. We were usually allowed to pick out something at the Green Stamp store as payment for the minty green tongues we obtained while filling books with stamps collected from the Piggly Wiggly. We sought solace in the AM car radio, but barely heard the music over the fighting about who got to listen to what, or whether I was allowed to sing the backup part on Close To You.

“Mollie, STOP SINGING. Stop singing, you’re ruining it! Mom! Tell her to stop singing.”

My mom lit a cigarette as Jodi pursued the perfect song with emphatic radio button punches, ignoring my requests for the Jackson Five while furiously spurning my mother’s suggestion that she leave it on that Statler Brothers song. Eventually something came on that fit us all, and a silence settled around the car. Jimmy lifted his chin slightly and said, “Turn it up,” with a restraint that belied his deep appreciation for the selection. Mom leaned over and turned the silver knob, willing to do anything to sustain the unspoken truce for as long as possible. The resonance of Duane Allman’s slide solo on Layla filled the Country Squire and made us all feel like we liked each other for a little while. We’d usually end up at Wacker’s, at which point my mom would be so exhausted from refereeing all day that she let us load up on five and dime goodies (which always seemed to cost twenty-five cents) like record singles and hamsters and Hershey bars, each of us retreating to our separate rooms upon arriving home with our respective booty.

One inspired Sunday morning, perhaps in the midst of a small guilt trip regarding his decision to completely disrupt the lives of five people, but more likely as a means of continuing the tacit lesson regarding the importance of music, my father decided to join the Columbia House Record Club. It was also probably an intended means of distraction at the behest of my mother, but what he bestowed upon us that day was a legacy. My head was fairly spinning as he handed me the card he’d pulled from the Houston Post over breakfast, telling me that I might choose one record, not a 45, but an actual album. The choices were overwhelming, forcing me into my first anxiety attack at age six. I eventually chose Shopping Bag by the Partridge Family, which seemed instantly inadequate when listed next to my sister’s choice of Honky Chateau. David Cassidy was for little girls, I realized. At that moment I wanted nothing less than to be a kid. Jodi was right, no boy worth his whammy bar was going to be interested in a girl whose ears were filled with bubble gum and popcorn. I realized that if I were truly going to marry a rock and roll star, I had better start figuring out which music met the appropriate criteria of cool. I became an avid student at my sister’s resistant feet.

The doors on our new rooms came with push button locks that were easily picked. I began a regular trespass into Jodi’s room whenever she was gone, one that would continue until she left for college and took her albums with her. I began to study her always-growing music collection, as well as Jimmy’s, getting to know them through the liner notes of After the Gold Rush and Weasels Ripped my Flesh. They despised me much of the time, my sister especially, as a result of my poorly disguised intrusions which usually ended in the needle skipping over and over at the end of a record, albums strewn about their rooms, while I sat in a bean bag chair downstairs with my younger brother Scott eating Cheetos and watching Gilligan’s Island. My mother always took my side for some reason, perhaps because she had been an awful little sister once, too. By the time Jodi reached high school we barely spoke, other than to argue over whether or not I would clean my side of the bathroom. Yet she seemed compelled to continue my education, perhaps realizing the shame a kid sister who thought the Gibb brothers were the pinnacle of pop music perfection could bring on her if she opened her mouth (and she definitely would) in the wrong situation.

She felt obliged to inform Scott and me of every song that contained a Bad Word, or a reference to something carnal. She had zero tolerance for most Top 40 singles, but still loved the sweet sounds of Bread or the Eagles.

“You know what they mean, right, about “make it with you.’”

“Well, yeah.”

“Ok, what?”

She’d fix me with a piercing gaze that could see right through my ridiculous masquerade. I eventually had to confess my ignorance, whereupon she would enlighten me, letting me know the measure of cool the song reflected, especially in the radio station’s defiance of the man by playing it. She liked dissonant guitars that played beautifully complex chord progressions. The level of a song’s importance was proportionately increased by my mother’s dislike of it. As I moved through junior high into high school, I realized that she had given me a skill, and it was the only thing I had, the only weapon in my arsenal that might keep me from drowning. She ripped the Tiger Beat out of my hands and replaced it with Rolling Stone. I found myself floating through school in my big sweet bucket with a Billboard chart back page sticking out of my library book, ready to answer questions about what was really going on in Miss You or transcribe the lyrics of Rapper’s Delight (12-inch single), which provided me with some small measure of protection when it came to my seizure-like movements Friday nights at Roadrunner Roller Rink.

My brothers and sister and I have never had heart to heart talks. We don’t hold hands and our graceless hugs leave everyone feeling slightly weird. But we know each other like the back of an album sleeve. Our bond was formed on late nights, quietly watching The Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert after Mom and Dad had gone to bed. We could always tell each other’s moods based on what song was pounding through the shag carpeting when we came in through the back door. It’s a system of checks and balances, and it works well enough. We didn’t get a lot of direct life instruction from our parents. But they never really told us to turn it down. Not even when there were four copies of Frampton Comes Alive playing simultaneously in four rooms equipped with various hand-me-down components. A flat, square package under the Christmas tree was always, always anticipated and appreciated. It’s a shared timeline that doesn’t really need letters or phone calls. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a hard path, this silently trod thoroughfare of our antecedents. We lead increasingly separate lives as we make our way through middle age. But all it takes to bring us back together is the right song, and a few floater filled margaritas in my sister’s hot tub: we are transported, back to that room at the end of the hall in New Jersey, my sister and I dancing on our bed, our brothers running in and out as we convulse with the sheer delight of Hold Me Tight pouring out of that little orange and white record player and into our toes. This moment is forever hanging out there with the others, interspersed through our collective continuum and in it, we will always be one.

#beatles #monkees #dancingonthebed #uptightwhitepeople #musicsavedmysoul