Jesus didn’t save me, Lester Bangs did. When Creem put Kiss on the cover in August 1977 I stole a copy from the 7-11. I studied the text like runes and felt the scales fall from my eyes. I carved the words on my heart, especially the ones I didn’t understand; I wanted everything. After that I never missed an issue. While other kids were getting baptized I got a new name. Kids called me gay, ugly, gross. I called myself punk. They didn’t know what that was. I was ten.
It was starvation season, the middle
of nowhere (Lubbock, Texas, check a map), long before the internet. The chain
stores didn’t carry the records and radio stations didn’t play them. Most of
the bands I loved I’d never heard.
I didn’t find a house of worship
until 1980, when Ralph’s, a used record shop, opened on University Avenue. My
first time there, and my second, I stared drop-jawed at records I’d only read
about, never seen or heard—the Slits, Big Star, Sex Pistols and Clash bootlegs.
The punk section at the back became my place of peace; I spent hours meditating
on the sleeves and reading the fine print.
Ralph’s was a place of hope, rows and
rows of hope, thousands of records, each one a chance for joy. It’s where I
first found records by Television and Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Velvet
Underground, bits of guitar like shards of glass and voices that made me feel,
not whole, exactly, but less alone.
Ralph’s was where I’d spend my last
dollar after buying weed before I realized I could tuck records up the back of
my shirt, under my jacket, and walk out with them. Ralph’s should’ve gone
bankrupt on my thefts alone, but somehow it survived. The old location was
razed years ago; now the shop carries on in a strip mall south of the Loop.
Out front, the lot’s empty. The odor
of neglect, dust and mildew, greet me when I go in. The space feels cavernous,
hollow, absent even ghosts. Behind the counter, two clerks watching football
don’t acknowledge me. Besides the clerks I’m the only one there.
Three walls of shelves are packed
floor to ceiling, too tight and suffocating. I pick a likely spot and begin.
R—Reed, Ramones, Rolling Stones—and find nothing. I jump around the alphabet and
search through hundreds of albums, straining for the ones above my head. I’ve
never seen so many records in one place. No Kiss, no Thin Lizzy, no T. Rex, not
even Bad Company, but countless records by Chicago, Kansas, and Three Dog
Night. It’s a gathering of the unwanted, like any record with dignity fled long
ago.
An hour in I find something, a Johnny
Thunders twelve-inch. A quarter of the cover is ripped off and the vinyl’s
exposed; it looks unplayed, pristine. On the cover, Johnny is dressed to kill,
his expression forlorn.
A man walks in and heads for the
counter. Do they have “Little Wing”by
Jimi Hendrix? One of the clerks walks down an aisle and grabs a greatest hits
CD. After the sale they go back to the game.
One says, “We need a coach who wants to be in West Texas.”
As if.
I hate this town.
My heart aches for the records. I save a handful—Johnny, the Kingsmen, Burt Bacharach. Back home in Austin, I wipe the dust off their jackets and add fresh inner sleeves. I hold them up and read the liner notes. I listen to each one through and file them alphabetically.
Robin Storey grew up hearing “Hitler was right” at the dinner table. She ran away from home and was adopted by a Black spiritualist church, where she spent the next decade. When it became impossible to stay, she had to find her way alone in the world.
