What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

corner looking well used and well kept.
    The kitchen belonged in a small restaurant. Hanging pots, stacked steamers, juicers, blenders, knives, woks, and three well-stocked spice racks. After I fixed myself a drink, he told me dinner would be ready in twenty minutes and I could put on anything I wanted to hear.
    I always like to look at people’s music. It can alert you to the presence of things that you might not find out otherwise until much later. I remember going to a guy’s apartment in Atlanta for the first time and discovering that he had a huge collection of heavy metal. The
bad
white boys. The ones who have to go to court all the time to prove their evil lyrics and demonic chord progressions didn’t make somebody’s child shoot himself in the head. He had the good sense to be a little embarrassed about it, but I never felt the same about him after that.
    Eddie looked like a jazz fan, and those dreads definitely indicated reggae. He had hundreds of records, neatly filed in alphabetical order. The first one was one of my favorites: King Sunny Ade,
JuJu Music.
I pulled it out of the cover and held the edges, checking for cracks. People who have grown up on CDs don’t understand the sensual appeal of a well-loved piece of vinyl. Joyce and Mitch
loved
their albums, even the ones that were so scratched up you could barely make out the vocals. Every scratch meant something. Every nick recalled a perfect party; every smudge, a teenage heartache.
    From the condition of the cover,
Juju Music
was well used, but inside, it was perfect. I placed it carefully on the turntable and lowered the dust cover. This was somebody who took his records seriously. I had been wrong about the jazz, except for two John Coltranes and a Miles Davis or two, but right on the reggae. Old school. He seemed to have every album Bob Marley and Gregory Isaacs ever recorded, but he also had a serious Motown library (heavy on the Temptations and Marvin Gaye), a fair number of funk classics by George Clinton, James Brown, and the Ohio Players, and the essential Sly and the Family Stone. There was also a lot of international stuff that I was curious about, but I was too exhausted to look any further.
    When I complimented him on having his music so well organized, he looked embarrassed.
    “Shows I’ve got too much time on my hands.”
    “Idlewild still the fun capital of the Great North Woods?” I said, wondering again why he was living here.
    “Absolutely,” he said. “That’s half the reason these young people are acting such a big fool. Nothing else to do.”
    He was chopping vegetables rhythmically and I liked the kitcheny sound of the knife hitting the gleaming piece of butcher block. I took my drink back over to the counter. He checked the oil in a large wok he’d put on the stove.
    “You know the thing I always remember about you?” he said.
    I was surprised he remembered anything about me. Last time I saw him, I was eight years old and my sister was hoping he would get there in time to stand up with Mitch at their wedding. He did, even though his uniform looked like he’d slept in it.
Twice.
    “I have no idea,” I said, dropping another ice cube into my already watery drink.
    “You told me not to go to ‘Nam.”
    “I did?”
    “Yes, you did,” he said, dumping the vegetables into the wok and tossing them in the air with a slotted bamboo paddle. He made it look easy, but I know if I had tried it, we’d be eating dinner off the kitchen floor. “You waited until my date went to the bathroom….”
    “I loved what she had on. That was the first strapless dress I’d ever seen up close.”
    “Me, too,” he said, spooning the vegetables onto two plates of steaming noodles. It looked and smelled wonderful and I realized I was starving. I’d been drinking all day, but I couldn’t remember when I had eaten anything.
    “When you saw me standing by myself, you came over and asked me if I was really going to go to Vietnam. When I