You Can't Wear Nail Polish to a Surgery

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CURRENT TEN
Clyde Alexander & Sanction: “Got to Get Your Love (Special Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez Edit)”
Dillinger: “Cokane in My Brain”
Dim Dim: “Kika”
Missy Elliott feat. Method Man: “Bring the Pain”
Fatboy Slim: “Song for Shelter (Pete Heller Beats and Pieces)”
Koenig Cylinders: “99.9 (Selway Remix)”
Nitzer Ebb: “Control I’m Here”
Max Romeo: “Play with Your Pussy”
Scarface: “My Block”
Underground Resistance: “Transition”

[This was written for Robert Christgau’s 60th birthday festschrift, a project put together by Tom Carson, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon, and I thank all of them for including me. Carson edited it. It ran pretty much the way it’s written here; there might be some minor differences, but I’m not going to bother sorting them out. If you’re interested in the book itself--and you should be, it’s terrific--its purchasing page is linked at the bottom of this one.--MM]

The Media Center

Going to the two-story Hennepin County Library, in downtown Minneapolis, was far more romantic than visiting the library of Richfield High School. (Excuse me: it wasn’t a library. It was a media center.) Obviously, selection factored in, not to mention my long-standing fantasy that book-loving mole people inhabited the semi-mythical stacks where rare books were shipped up via dumbwaiter. (I wondered: how big were the stacks? were they on the third floor or in the basement? did the mole people get out for meals or were they thrown bread and water?) But HCL never let me go into the magazine stacks and write my own checkout slips when I borrowed the same issues of Rolling Stone--the ones featuring 100 Best singles and albums lists--for the umpteenth time. The RHS media center ladies did. So ultimately, it was a draw.

The main advantage the media center had, though, was its freely circulating copy of Robert Christgau’s Any Old Way You Choose It (Hennepin County’s was reference-only). My strongest memory of the book is sitting on the living room couch at my great-grandaunt Arlene’s house and reading for the first time, “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” I finished the piece, got my best friend on the phone, and read it to him. He accused me of rehearsing my delivery. He was right.

The book was, of course, long out of print and impossible to find even at the used bookstores I went to. But I was trying to reverse a childhood habit that began at nine, when three weeks turned into three months and I finally said fuck it and put three tabloid-sized hardback collections of Carl Barks-drawn Donald Duck adventures from the 1940s into my closet. No, I was through stealing books from the library, and besides, this was my high school. And then I graduated.

I am nineteen and I have no fucking idea what I am doing with my life. When my family moved from Richfield to Bloomington the summer before senior year, college recruitment literature stopped coming, and my interest in attending, always nebulous at best, died completely. I am washing dishes in a soon-to-bankrupt cafe and living in a small apartment across the street from a used-vinyl outlet in Uptown, of Prince fame, that I can barely afford. There is no furniture and no computer, just a stereo and tapes and a futon. Life is good, which it takes a few years to figure out.

After co-editing the Spotlite, my high school newspaper, I find it hard to stop writing altogether, so I go back to RHS occasionally, where Bruce Wiebe, my journalism teacher, lets me use the computer lab after school hours. Sometimes I show up during classes and hang out. During my senior year, a guy named Dan who’d graduated the year before kept coming around during Spotlite hour, and we all wondered why the hell he didn’t get a life. I am becoming Dan.

Then Arlene dies. I am willed enough money to buy a computer, but before that happens I go back to my alma matter again. Bruce is around, we have lunch, sure I can use the computer. To kill time I go to the media center, where the front desk is empty, and browse the music books again. And think, nobody’s around. Why not?

Let’s face it: this book all but belongs to me. The entire time I went to school here I was the only person who checked it out, who had any interest in checking it out. Who’d even notice?

So, how to do this? I can’t check the book out and then not return it, the way you do at a normal library. Maybe if I duck behind a partition and quietly tear the UPC sticker from the back of the book--it might damage the cover some, maybe, but big deal--then toss it in my backpack and be on my way. That’ll work, I decide, and begin to wedge my fingernail underneath the sticker when I hear footsteps.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I respond cheerfully.

“What are you doing back here?” I can’t tell if she means the school or the aisle.

“Visiting Wiebe,” I say, pulling my hand back from the book’s back cover.

“Well, what are you doing here?” she asks, nodding sharply.

“Just looking at an old book,” I say, and put it back on the shelf.

The entire time I attended Richfield High, the media center ladies never intimidated me, no matter how hard they tried. This time, though, it works. Without another word, I walk out of the media center, bypass the computer room, and leave Richfield High School for the last time. Two years later, I found a bagged copy of Any Old Way You Choose It in the fiction section of a used bookstore in downtown Seattle, paid $7 for it, and read it until the spine fell off. [Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Nortex Press, 2002]