Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

Everything was jumbled and mixed, except for the milk crates. She had dozens of them, stacked floor to ceiling on either side of the stereo and filled with old records. The stereo setup, too, he had to admire. She wasn’t messing around there. It was good-quality gear, great speakers, plus several turntables, a couple of CD players, and a top-of-the-line eight-track tape machine. And the eight-track looked brand new rather than something from a salvage yard. Sure, Whitey had an eight-track, but it was something he’d pulled out of a junked car, and it sat on the floor next to his stereo with wires running every which way. But hers was a home stereo model and didn’t look more than a year or two old. Didn’t even know you could still get those, thought Whitey. Maybe she’d had it for years and just took great care of it. Fuck, hot and knew her electronics, too—that was not only rare: it was downright impossible.

“Where’d you get the eight-track?” he asked.

“Huh?” she said. “My dad.”

“Was he a DJ, too?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He just liked his music.”

“You see him much?” he asked.

“No,” she said, her eyes a little absent. “He died.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, and gave him a sad smile. “It’s been a while now. I’m getting used to it.”

She went into the kitchen. After a few minutes of looking the stereo up and down, he started in on the vinyl. Great collection. Lots of stuff he used to have before he dumped his own vinyl, and lots of stuff he wished he still had. Good taste.

“Like what you see?” she asked when she came back from the kitchen. He swallowed, then nodded.

“You are the only chick I’ve ever met with such a killer rack,” he said, gesturing at the stereo, and then wincing when he realized what he’d said.

“What was that about a killer rack?” she asked in her dumb-blonde voice from behind him. If he turned around, she’d probably be standing there with her hips canted and one knee bent like some Miss America contestant. He decided to ignore it.

“Man,” he said, continuing to thumb through the albums. “Seeing your collection really makes me miss my vinyl. I can’t believe I sold all my shit.”

“I warned you,” she said.

Well, maybe she did, but that was no reason to lord it over him. “Yeah, well,” he said, a little defensively. “I mean, CDs do technically sound better, but they’re dead, too.”

She came around to where he could see her, gave him an exhausted stare.

“Fuck that.” Her voice, too, was exhausted and didn’t have much fight to it, but she wasn’t going to concede. “You and every other muso miss the point,” she said. “Everything sounds the same, but my records only sound like my records. The pops and scratches are my pops and scratches, you know. They belong to me.”

“I guess I never really thought about it that way,” he said. He sat staring at the albums in front of them. Yeah, she was right. It was like the way your car, as it got older, became even more your car: the key you had to jiggle just right, the window that wouldn’t roll down all the way, the ceiling fabric that came loose and brushed your head while you drove—all the little problems that gave it personality. “Fuck,” he said. “Now I’m really depressed. I’ve destroyed my entire musical history. What was I thinking?”

She had gone back into the kitchen. He cast a glance over his shoulder, saw her flip a pancake.

“You weren’t thinking,” she claimed. “Just walking off the cliff with all the other lemmings.” Then she laughed. “Don’t worry, these will make you forget your troubles.”

Whitey shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. Though it was true, the smell of the pancakes was already making his mouth start to water. “Mind if I play something?” he asked.

“Go for it,” Heidi said, “but choose wisely.”

Choose wisely? Was this a test? “Oh no,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “You’re going to make some judgment based on my choice, I assume?”

Heidi flipped the pancake out of a pan and onto a plate. “Don’t assume,” she said.

He couldn’t decide if she was serious or joking. That was always the problem. It wasn’t like he was a stupid guy, only that when it came to people like Heidi, girls he liked, it was like some switch turned off in his brain and he found himself doubting how he should read them. With Chip it was different—the way that guy thought was just too boring and predictable to follow. His mind rebelled against that. But with Heidi it was probably that he listened too closely and worried he was hearing things that weren’t really there.

He flipped through the records, found the Velvet Underground & Nico’s self-titled album. Shit, she actually had the early edition, where the banana peel was still a sticker, and the sticker was still on. Not bad. That, and wondering where the pops and scratches would come on Heidi’s copy, was enough to convince him to get the record out of the sleeve and put it on one of the turntables, side one up. He started the table spinning and carefully lifted the needle, placing it on track four.

The sound of “Venus in Furs” filled the room. When he turned, Heidi had her wrist balanced on one hip, the spatula balanced loosely in the other hand. She was giving him a wry look.

“What?” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing,” she said.

“Too obvious?” he said. He liked her, so what? It wasn’t like he thought playing “Venus in Furs” was likely to get her to invite him into the bedroom.

She shrugged and began to sing along to the record. After a moment, he joined in as well.

Chapter Eighteen

Steve made his appearance as soon as the pancakes were served. How he’d known food was on, and why he hadn’t come before when he’d first smelled them, Whitey didn’t know. Steve was like that. A much smarter dog than he let on. Kind of freaky, if you thought about it.

But there Steve was, begging bites of pancake until they’d finished their first round and got their second and Heidi told him to go lie down. He did, with a kind of exasperated noise, crawling up onto the fainting couch where he quickly fell asleep. “He’s not supposed to be up there,” Heidi confided to Whitey, but she let him stay anyway. Considering how unhesitatingly Steve had hopped up there, Whitey would guess that probably happened a lot, that Steve had her wrapped around his little finger. Or whatever it was that dogs had rather than fingers.

“This is one sweet apartment,” said Whitey, carving off another bite of pancake. “The rent must be insane.”

“Only three hundred bucks a month,” said Heidi.

Three hundred bucks? He was paying basically double that for a shit hole. “How is that possible?” said Whitey. “What’s the catch?”

Heidi shrugged. “Weird story,” she said. “I was walking Steve and ran into my landlady. We got talking, just chatting about nothing really, and she told me she thought she was going to have an apartment open and asked if I was interested. I was perfectly fine where I was, so I told her no, but then she told me how little she wanted and how could I say anything but yes?”

“You couldn’t,” said Whitey. “Not if you were sane.”

“Right,” she said. “But she’s kind of a freak, too. When we were talking, very first time we met, she grabbed my hand and stroked it like it was an animal or something. For a while she wouldn’t let go. I was on the way to getting creeped out when she told me I could have the place for three hundred bucks a month. I couldn’t believe it.”

Whitey shrugged. “Old ladies have different rules about how long they can hold your hand. My grandma was that way. And for the price, you’re just lucky,” he said. “That’s probably all it is.”