On another night like this three years before, I also got a call from Billy. Would I come over? He has something to talk over with me. And on that night too, dread entered my bloodstream. I dutifully walked down St. James Place to the G Train. He hadn't paid rent in four months and, although he received threats, his landlady hadn't thrown his ass out. He had received eviction letters, but no dates. Billy didn't know, and by extension neither did we, how evictions worked. We expected some note slipped under his door that told him he had 48 hours to vacate the premises or he would be forcibly removed by the police. But that hadn't happened yet.
Still, Billy was broke. His unemployment had run out. He would work a little, and salt away just enough to pay for a week's worth of food. But there was something worse than being broke. Billy, standing up tall, never filled out his shirts to begin with. He had started eating less, twice a day to be economical, but also, I think, Billy had lost his appetite. He had survived losing his job just fine. Something about losing his unemployment hurt him, though. He grew thin and his face grew black around the eyes. His face thinned, too, and that made his big Jewish nose loom even larger. He had stopped smiling his sarcastic, gap-toothed grin at comments Billy or I made. He would just look back at us, unwavering, and then maybe shake his head, his new form of acknowledgement . I'm exaggerating here, but he began to remind me of a Holocaust survivor, those dark eyes. How can a skinny dude get even thinner?
As I sat there on the train that night I wondered what it was that he wanted to talk to me about. I thought about it as I stared at the subway ads for a dermatologist and a brand of rum, the scratched-out graffiti on the windows, the faces of the subway riders, most of whom rode alone.
I didn't know what to expect, but I didn't expect anything good. My therapist told me to think of depression as a little man in my head, someone smaller and weaker, and that I should do the opposite of whatever he says. But I just don't know. Depression always seemed to me like the chicken and egg question—do you get depressed when something happens to you, or does something happen to you because you got depressed? Is that Little Man always inside of you, needing some depressing condition to wake him from the dead? Billy didn't act morose before he lost his job. And his sarcasm hit new highs between the time he got fired and the time his unemployment ran out. But when he realized he had to act—to find a new job—he couldn't. He'd wake up every morning knowing he had to send his resume out, pound the pavement, call temp agencies. He had people willing to sit with him and help strategize and he couldn't set up meetings with them. He'd lie in bed, he said, until 10. He's make some coffee and read the entire newspaper on the internet. Then he'd smoke some grass if he had any, as a way of getting up the energy to start calling around or to stuffing envelopes with his resume. But despite his claims otherwise, pot doesn't energize anyone. More often than not, he'd procrastinate the day away, feeling worse and worse about himself, smoking and smoking to combat that worthlessness. Then, at about six, the drinking would begin, progressively cheaper and cheaper beer and then malt liquor. And by midnight, he'd feel God awful but too numb to worry about it. Objectively God awful.
His living room looked like he was moving. Normally he doesn't have anything on the walls. And Billy and I made fun of that. But there was a feel that night that Billy didn't live there anymore, that he was summoning me to say goodbye to this place where he had lived for three years.
"Sit on the sofa," he said. He wore a white tee shirt, his jeans with no shoes, his bald head full of stubble. I glanced up through the windows and looked at the neon of the Turkish restaurant on the corner. Then I looked back at the floor and noticed. He had taken his records out of his bedroom and stacked them on the floor of the living room. There were ten piles of 100 records each and they were stacked alphabetically and by genre, the jazz came first, then the soul, then the rock, then the reggae. None were being played, only sounds from the street could be heard. I knew what Billy wanted to talk to me about.
"Your selling your records, aren't you?"
"I'm giving you first crack."
Billy's situation hit me and I slumped against the back of the sofa. He had collected these record albums for as long as I've known him. He didn't collect as a way of amassing objects that were worth lots of money. He collected music he wanted to hear, not to find the rarest albums. So he had all these exceptional Sun Ra albums, Mingus, Stax, Lee Perry, Nina Simone, Earth Wind and Fire. He kept them in protective dust covers. You've got to hear this, he used to say, and it didn't matter that the world had moved on from the long playing record. He thought the thickness of the vinyl carried the best sound. He anticipated the scratchy sound of vinyl the way he anticipated that he would one day, again, become incapacitated from mental illness.
The record covers looked pristine, blue colors visible, red, black, the bold colors. The Eric Dolphy records caught my eye. Out There. The Quest. Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot. Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise. Dolphy reminded me of Coltrane so I looked for the giant stack of his records, and then for Ole Coltrane, its two toned orange cover peaking out. We discovered that record high on hash in the college library listening room. We had realized our freshmen year that the school library had a whole trove of jazz records. We set about to educate ourselves, and on top of that, each of us were not too secretly infatuated with the girl who worked there. We called her Jazz Girl. We had never heard the record, Ole, and sat there listening to it, perhaps because of the hash, over and over in the neat little listening room one Saturday night. Dolphy is not credited with his real name—they use George Lane because of contract issues, I think— and the song "Ole," which spans the whole first side and was played in three-four time, reminded us of our favorite jazz song, Coltrane's "My Favorite Things."
I walked up to the stack of jazz records and pulled Ole from the middle. He had bought it on a Friday night when we had hitchhiked to San Francisco from Santa Cruz and stayed out nearly to morning in North Beach, 20 years too late for the jazz scene but too young to notice. I turned it over there in Billy's apartment, looking at the musician credits. He looked over at me sour, appearing drawn and wane, almost as though he had just woken. He looked angry, too. He had no money and he needed to sell his records, which would earn him more than his other commodity, his books.
"Don't talk about it. I don't want to. Yes, I remember where and when I got that record."
"How much?"
"For that record?"
"No, the whole collection."
"I'm not trying to sell the whole thing to you. I just thought that before I get rid of these, you might want your pick." I sat down on the sofa with Ole, looked at it again. Billy stood there, waiting. How full of self hatred he must have been. I didn't know, because he didn't say. I sat there quiet and guessing to myself. To the extent that Billy had an identity wrapped up in material items, this was it, Billy's record collection, started in high school. And what he had here—five hundred records? More?—didn't include what he had stored in his mother's basement, four times the amount.
"I want to buy them all from you, Billy. But I don't have the money. I do have an idea. Why don't I give you a thousand? I'll pick out whatever number you tell me. One hundred? Fewer? Doesn't matter. You say. Let's pick the 100 you want to keep the most, and then you can buy them back."
"Billy, I don't know either. But I like that idea." He looked out at the Turkish restaurant as though he were considering something. "That's a really nice thing, Billy. A really nice offer. I'll probably take you up on it." The large neon sign said "Cok Guzel" on one level, and just underneath a translation, "Very Beautiful." He held his chin. Then he walked over to the other side of the couch from where I sat. He put his face in his hands. I wanted Billy to say something to me.
"Billy, you're not just selling some records here. This is more than that."
"I know. I know. I was thinking about what I used to do every Saturday afternoon. Do you remember?"
I did. We called it the Circuit.
"First we'd go to Mercer Street Records. Then Bleecker's Golden Oldies. Then the Strand and buy a book. Or two. Then we'd go to Academy Records, and then Jazz Record Center. We'd walk back down to Old Town. We'd sit in a booth and get those cheddar burgers and go over the day's take. The table would be covered with books and burgers and beer and record albums." The waitress knew us. The Saturday Boys, she's call us. Sometimes Billy would come too. She'd pick up one of the records and ask about it. Or the books. "But it wasn't the books and the records, Billy, was it? It never was. We'd sit there for hours until we drank too much and had to go home, and we'd talk about whatever the books and records made us talk about."
I realized, just when he was talking, that Billy had been drinking, and that it probably took a lot for him to have me here, to give up his records like this.
"You're selling off everything about you."
And there I said it, something I had been thinking about. The books and the records. The TV set he sold. Those didn't make up Billy. They never make up the person, do they? But we live in a city, and a city is a built environment. We are not the objects with which we chose to surround ourselves, but we move in between those objects, and in a way, those objects give our lives some form.
Billy spoke and it was as if he could read my mind. "I can see on your face how you think this is terrible. But I don't. I mean, I do. I don't want to get rid of all these records. Look at these. But these record albums, man, they were only my background, you know what I mean? In my house there is always music on. Did you notice that?"
Of course I noticed that. You never came to Billy's house and did anything, watch the game, drank, played poker, nothing, even pick him up to go out again, without Billy jumping up to change the record: You've got to hear this. This is great. There were nights, one, two AM, when I didn't want to get on the subway to go back to Brooklyn, and Billy would wake me up to the coffee grinder and the stereo. I'd open my eyes and I'd hear: Hey man. Archie Shepp and The New York Contemporary Five. A mug of America's finest coffee, Maxwell's house. I've got some eggs going. Some Turkey sausage. Man, we're really living, aren't we, we're really living.
"Yeah Billy," I said to him that night, with the Coltrane record still in my hand. I remember the lights were out except for his kitchen light, and that Turkish restaurant sign. That neon glimmered off the plastic dust cover of one of the records in the last pile, Neil Young.
Few of us have such a thing we associate our lives with. I don't, although I have quite a few record albums myself. I could tell that if I bought $1000 of records from Billy, he'd think I'm taking a $1000 of his memories.
"I built every Saturday around finding random records and books, and that's gone, and I don't replace that time with something just as completely outside myself as those records and those books, I have to turn inside that much more. I don't know. Maybe I'm making no sense."
I felt like we had finally arrived at the important point, even though I wasn't exactly sure what that point was.