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Naked Nights and Vinyl Records

Anne Mangahas

    There are certain things people do that can really date them. There was a day when Carmen realized just how old she was. Some years ago, as a school teacher when she worked with a group of kids she would bargain with them, that in exchange for their silence while working that she would promise to play some of her favorite CD’s. Carmen always worried they would bring in some newbie hipster poppy crap reminding her of the dismal state of the music industry, but was pleasantly surprised to find some of the kids had some pretty decent musical tastes presenting albums like - Led Zep’s II, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The last one was 3rd period’s favorite. Once, they almost got to the 4th track on Wish You Were Here, same title of that album, the song being one of her “all time desert island favorites” - when the bell rang.
    Earlier that day the class talked about the Revolver and Rubber Soul albums as being the more listened to, but not more superior to Abbey Road or the more depressing break up album Let It Be. The kid who brought in Abbey Road asked if it was ok to bring in Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. Carmen said ok, so long as he didn’t bring in Stevie Nick’s solo stuff, as she refused to play it, on account of it being the remaining 3 records fought over during her divorce settlement. Unless of course, it was the album with the song Landslide, because she was able to keep that one in her collection.
    Carmen realized that all the music knowledge she exploded with freaked out half her class when they realized she didn’t hide out in the stock room all night, grading, assessing and lesson planning. That somehow it was thought she would do so until the administrators would come in at the end of the day dressed in white lab coats to turn off the switches on the backs of the robotic staff, storing them in their proper locations to be reanimated for the next school day, like some kind of surreal Westworld high school.
    She remembered mentioning to one of the kids that she owned the David Bowie single Moonage Daydream on vinyl but couldn’t bring it to class because she didn’t have a record player to play it on; and as any true music connoisseur, she owned most of her music on vinyl. It was at just that moment where she realized how old she really was. She was greeted with blank stares and looks of fear like she was some kind of alien from an ancient Sumerian myth listening to strange foreign black obelisks with microscopic grooves mysteriously playing sounds off a device with a needle that resembled the front end of a heroin trip.
    She now knew what the vinyl symbolized. It represented a time when they were not yet conceived. A time when their “ew’s” and “grosses” from their parent’s procreation of their being, was a Reality, and where they weren’t the “real” they perceived, but some external “otherness” from which was encased a kind of Pandora’s box of possibility outside their current realm of understanding.
    It’s the kind of agoraphobia that starts to well up from the realization of a previous and archaic actuality beyond the reaches of one’s imagination. Where the figures who had demanded their respect might have been strewn haphazardly on lazy floors naked near beat-up record players, around tipped over bottles of cirrhosis angels, on the consummations of pre-nuptialistic “morning after” regrets consumed by their youthful naiveté. For the children, it was an artifact full of possibilities, a world much larger and more frightening than they were yet willing to entertain. It became a point of maturation, the end of their childish caprice. The point where they would one day stand in rank file with their somber adult selves.

*****

    Carmen never had another year like that again in her entirety of teaching. It may have been one of the reasons she finally decided to leave. The point at which she realized she no longer connected with them. The day they finally graduated, Carmen too realized, it was time for her to graduate as well.

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