The Vinyl Princess Read Online Free PDF

I inherited from my dad, a set of enormous headphones that look like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island made them out of coconut shells, and a Pioneer amp that looks very mid-eighties to me that I bought at a garage sale for ten bucks. It’s a mess to the naked eye but, after years of my tweaking and moving and adjusting, the sound quality is finally magnificent. Two entire walls of my room are lined with wooden cases filled with vinyl LPs, a collection that consumes my thoughts.
    I flip through the stack of LPs from Bob’s and decide on a European import of David Bowie —Young Americans . I slide the vinyl LP out of its jacket, holding it with my fingertips. I love the look of vinyl, the smell of it, the tiny crackles you hear before the song starts. I place it on the turntable, click on my amp and lower the diamond needle on the first song. The honky-tonk piano and sax intro to “Young Americans,” possibly—no, definitely—one of the most amazing songs ever recorded, starts up. I arrange myself on my bed with the album cover and my mug. I sip the chai and lie there watching Bowie watching me in all his airbrushed, androgynous perfection. Cigarette smoke curls around his painted fingernails. He dares me not to fall in love. I close my eyes and listen.
    As I’m flipping the record over to the B side I hear my mom saying good-bye to Ravi at the front door. She comes up the stairs and leans far enough into my room to lower the volume on my stereo.
    “Hey, I’ve got that thing tonight,” she says, running her fingers through her long brown hair and letting it fall onto her shoulders. She looks tired. “I think I’ll wear my Nicole Miller.”
    “Good. I like that dress.” I smile at her.
    “Would you mind taking your sneakers off the bed? That’s gross.”
    I kick one Converse onto the floor and then the other; they land with a clunk on the rag rug next to the bed.
    My mom has recently started roaming the vast and perilous sea of love known as internet dating, searching for her intellectual equal. When it comes to men, my mom’s at a bit of a loss. She fell in love with my dad when she was nineteen. He was drumming in a band called Fool’s Gold, a retro-Byrdsy, vocally heavy group. They sounded a bit like the Jayhawks. My mom was in the first row, a pretty college girl with a tan and a wide smile. My dad was smitten. Now, at forty-two, my mom says she refuses to give up on men just because Dad turned out to be a huge disappointment. She’s taken a sort of “someday my prince will come” attitude to surfing for love, and I hate to discourage her, but I just don’t think it works that way. My mom’s already been on two dates with toads. The first one was with a guy who listed reading and opera as two of his interests. He made a reservation at Chez Panisse for dinner and my mom ran around like a schoolgirl getting ready for her prom, trying on every piece of clothing she owns. She was home two hours later. Jeff didn’t read much beyond the sports page and the backs of cereal boxes, and he’d never actually been to the opera. He was quick to mention that he did write a tax-deductible check to the San Francisco Opera every year on behalf of his business, which had something to do with bilking retirees out of their retirement money. Turns out he was getting his sister-in-law to respond to my mom’s emails because he wasn’t much of a writer (duh). He snapped his fingers at the waitress at Chez Panisse and that was it for my mom. She pretended to have a migraine and excused herself. She was back from the second date even faster, looking pale, and she wouldn’t talk about that one. Now she asks for IQ scores. She’s not leaving the house for anything less than one twenty-five. For one forty, she’ll even shave her legs. Tonight’s date is a civil engineer, a freshly divorced transplant from the Midwest with an IQ of a hundred and twenty-eight, or so he says. Who wouldn’t lie about their IQ score? And