Jamie & Holly: 'Vinyl' Who: Jamie M and Holly W Where: Music store Warnings: unlikely
Jamie had been into the music store before it opened. Before, when it was dusty windows and dark. He'd googled, man and he knew it had been a thing, a thing that was more city-hipster than small town where the grocery store was pushing the boat out when it carried more than plain white Wonder bread. And Jamie liked the small town vibe, he did. He liked that he didn't feel like super alone in a crowd, he liked that someone would like, notice if he didn't show up one day and he liked that he knew the names of the people that came to his class. New York and before that Miami, and he dropped in on classes like - non-ballet, jazz or maybe hip-hop or just like, contemporary that wasn't super pressured - and he didn't know anyone and that was the point. Anonymity, after living alongside people he knew well, like - he knew what their sweat smelled like, he knew what they strained, he knew their bad habits and he knew who was hungover and he knew who was like surviving on black coffee and cigarettes and adrenaline right that second.
But right, the point. The point was Jamie had been curious about the store way back when. He just hadn't made it in when the place had been open and so had he. And in the chaos (which still pinged through his head in like, moments that he didn't fill with sound from the TV or the computer or class) it had ...closed. So it was kind of happenstance, to swing by. If it was an ordinary day he would have been in class, with Doris and Joe and Sammi and the other people who reminded him of the seniors he had seen back in Florida, the kind who were living like they had finally gotten the check in the mail from like, life. But no shuffle-ball-change. He had dropped by the little hospital that was pretty much a check in desk and a bunch of beds screened off with curtains that looked like they had been put up in the seventies. And then he had dropped by the coffee store, to down his own black coffee and he had smoked a cigarette for the first time in like a month until he'd dropped the butt under the flat of his cherry-red sneakers and he was kind of looking for a distraction or something in the dead time before he could, idk, Uber it to the Capital, open up an app and find a little oblivion for a night.
So the store. Which was open. It wasn't hectic. It wasn't busy in a hustle sort of way when Jamie walked in. People took their time, they browsed. It was you know, mellow. With a lot of records in boxes, and chalk signs and a vibe that felt like going someplace it was okay to be into shit like this. It reminded Jamie of comic book stores, the same level of commitment to their shit, like a home away from home for someone to geek out in and just be. No pressure. Okay, a little pressure, you kind of had to be committed to vinyl to hang out, but he had enough hipster cred. He wasn't committed to a genre and vinyl sort of slimmed down the mix, but he started by rifling through the classics - and then anything that had a cool name.
He had time to kill and the feeling, that whole, I-have-a-secret of indie stores that had a community that left residue inside the place - the smell of a night of open mic, or preserved paper, or whatever, which had been a rehearsal room for a really long time and might/not be again, Jamie was way up for letting that settle.