Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hanging out with Nic Devine, I found, was like hanging with your older brother, if your older brother had seemingly unlimited financial resources and infinitely great taste. Every day would've been like the first of summer. We raced--he raced, and I stumbled--into the next room, filled with box upon box of dusty seven-inch singles. There were old soul records on King, Minit, and San-Su; punk 45s on Hearthan and Rough Trade; girl groups on Cameo and impossibly rare garage rock or funk records that might've been pressed in editions of a few dozen copies, regional treasures that had never escaped the heartland. A first edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang lay over on a table beside rare and gorgeous volumes of Phillip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Counterfeit Unrealities, read one spine; Savage Night, read another. Apparently the VTE had been plundered before Marcus even knew where to find it. (And where was Marcus now, now that I was hanging out with our hero? I hadn't seen him, and I doubted suddenly he would care. Now at long last it felt somehow like all of this, Nic and the band, and even the city itself, all of it was on me.) The amber lampshades were art deco, silver salt-shakers had the satisfying heft of brass knuckles. He blew dust off a record--"The Loser," it was called, with the artist's name scratched off the label, only the slogan, Tomorrow's Hits Today, Right `Round The World, left legible--and sat it down gently on the turntable. I couldn't imagine Nic knew anything about losing--the guy was too clearly a winner--but the song was phenomenal. Jamaican sunshine soul harmonies, airy as a helium balloon. As always, he played it at tooth-loosening volume. I felt its sweetness ripple through my sternum, a whole shimmering summer compressed into two-minutes-fourteen-seconds. Once he filed the record, I knew I'd never hear it again.
"Don't you have neighbors?"
"Sure." He grinned, crouched over there by the stereo, at his feet different musical instruments: a Vox Starstreamer, Fender Jaguar, Burns Jazz Guitar. I had to cram this question into an interstice of silence; he was getting ready to blow my mind with another seven-inch brick of psychedelic brilliance, this one pressed on yellow vinyl. "One of `em's upstairs."
"Don't you have neighbors...who aren't sex slaves?"
He stepped back from the turntable, having set the needle down. We moved away as if he'd just lit an M-80, scrambling for cover at the far end of the room.
"Nah. I used to, but he moved."
"Gee--I flinched at the concussive blast--"I wonder why?"
