Michael Chabon: Manhood for Amateurs

Bill accepted his commission from my mother with characteristic gravity and aplomb. He drove me down to an audio equipment store in Laurel, Maryland, half an hour away, that catered to men who knew how to be grave about their audio equipment. It was a no-frills kind of place, tangled cables and metal shelving and a smell of ashtray, harshly lit except for the radiant dark luxury of its banks of tuners, amps, and speakers. I stood quietly to one side, a candidate for some kind of experimental surgery, while my fate as a listener was determined by Dr. Warriner and his team of consultants. Like the planet Alderaan, a record (it was Boston’s debut album, as I recall) was selected to serve as a demonstration of the destructive capability of various audio Death Stars. I pretended solemnly to be able to distinguish among their highs, lows, and middles, when in fact all I heard when listening to them was might, a kind of amplitude that seemed to emerge not from the speakers or the shining grooves of the record but from the mind or thews or rumbling belly of God himself.

“I like that one,” I said, repeatedly.

I came home with a Yamaha tuner-amplifier, a Technics direct-drive turntable, and a pair of modestly sized Genesis speakers, and Bill helped me set everything up in my bedroom, with the turntable and tuner right beside my bed and the speakers at two corners of the room. It was a business not merely of decor but of engineering, of pliers and wire cutters and heavy strands of cable on spools. Then it was time to put something on. At this point, my collection consisted of a number of 45 rpm records, many of them painfully embarrassing (“Convoy,” “The Streak,” Grand Funk’s cover of “The Locomotion”), and the complete works to date of Queen. The bulk of the records to which I regularly listened on the old family Dual were part of the family’s collection — Dylan, the Beatles, Godspell, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon —or they were things I checked out of the public library, discs of passage. I had a feeling that “Bohemian Rhapsody” would probably be an amazing experience on my new system, but as with all the records I liked, the house copy of A Night at the Opera was illused, scratched and dusty, incriminated with the prints of my adolescent fingers. Having just spent an hour at the audio store, where the records were handled like fissionable material or founding revelations, I felt acutely conscious of my records’ unworthiness for the pristine Shure stylus that Bill had decided upon. So I delved into the small reserve of classical albums that my father had left behind when he moved out of the house and chose a Vox Box set of Bach organ music that appeared never even to have been opened.

I slid the first record from its sleeve, touching only the label, and eased it like a pan of nitro onto the black rubber turntable pad. I pushed the chunky button, and the gears engaged with a whir, and like a sentient thing, the tonearm lowered the stylus right into the outermost groove of the record. Walter Kraft began to play some toccata-and-fugue or other, erecting giant structures of sound, the music itself a kind of invisible pipe organ, a madness of stairways and arches and tubes that reached down to deepest valves of the earth itself.

“Whoa,” Bill said. He blinked his mild eyes and bobbed his head in time. “Well, that’s rock and roll.”

“It’s like being in church,” my mother observed. She had come in to observe the dedicatory proceedings, standing just behind the man whom she had determined to be admirably suited to certain tasks in her life and yet woefully lacking in other key ways. The criteria for her decision to break up with Bill remained a painful mystery to me, and yet I did not question them. I trusted my mother to know what she was about. I had known, I suppose, that Bill was not husband material, though it was another painful mystery that he should so clearly be cut out for the job of a stepfather. She had made sure that they stayed friends, and now here he had remained in our lives just long enough to make me the happiest human being in Columbia, Maryland.

“It’s like being on Captain Nemo’s submarine,” Bill said.

I told him that was it, exactly. And then we stood there, Bill, my mother, and I, listening to the mystery.

“Well, now you got everything you need,” he said finally, with the simple profundity of the engineer. “Enjoy it.”

I thanked him with a hug and a handshake, and then my mother walked him back downstairs, where he made what turned out to be more or less his final exit from my life. I closed my door, and turned up the volume, and sailed my bed through the monsters and wonders of the music and of life as an adult, heat vents and black caverns at the bottom, sun sparkling across the surface. The sea of Bach — it was so rock and roll — enfolded me, alone in the middle of it all as Nemo at his keyboard. A stereo system, properly configured, is precisely that: a Nautilus of solitude, a vehicle for conveying one, alone, through the deep and all its raptures.

And now here I sit, with a new set of 2.1-channel desktop speaker sticks plugged into my computer’s sound-out port and a space-invader landing craft of a subwoofer parked under the desk, listening to a lossless recording of Fragile by Yes, and Steve Howe’s guitar is growling like a ship’s klaxon, and Chris Squire’s bass line is rumbling like a whale. The sound quality is probably still not anything close to what I used to get from the vinyl copy of Fragile that I picked up a couple of weeks after Bill took me shopping. And it’s definitely not everything that I need. Nothing is. That’s part of rock and roll, too, I suppose, and something that Bill and my mother and I all understood that day, without understanding it. And like Nemo at my keyboard, I will sail on, through 20,000 leagues or pages, chasing that mystery, and all the others that I can hear, once again, in the music.