Chapter1
NOVA
Let me tellyou about the worst thing that has ever happened to me at a vinyl show. I fell in love at one. Not with a record, though I’ve done that too and it’s a perfectly respectable way to spend a Saturday. No, I fell in love with my best friend. Which sounds romantic in a movie and feels, in real life, like finding a crack in the foundation of your house. You see it every single day. You just keep hoping the whole thing doesn’t come down on your head while you’re standing in the kitchen making coffee.
It didn’t happen all at once. It never does. It started simple, with pockets of conversation and time getting away from me the way it does on a long walk at the start of spring. Offering up a few too many reasons to stay longer than I planned. Jill Scott warned us about those long walks and I still chose to mind my business.
This is that kind of story. It takes its time, and by the time you think you’ve reached the good part, you’ll realizeyou’ve been in it the whole time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the Laura Nyro.
WaxCon ran twice a year in a drill hall on the edge of Center City. A building with brick walls, arched windows running the length of both sides, and steel trusses overhead holding a roof high enough to make you feel, briefly, like the city had made space for you. The concrete floor was original and unforgiving, the type of surface that would keep a chiropractor in business for years.
By the time I arrived on Saturday morning the floor had already been given over entirely to the seventy-something vendors who’d materialized to fill it, their tables running in rows under the industrial light. Milk crates, long boxes, wire bins, and face-out displays along the perimeter. The sound of the place was people having conversations they could have had anywhere else but were having here because the records were the point. The air also smelled like old paper and something older underneath it, the scent of things that had been kept and were now being offered again.
I had been coming to WaxCon since before I could remember. I knew where regulars were located before I crossed the threshold like the woman who always surprised us with a hard-to-find addition to any New Edition collector’s dream and that I was going to spend more than I intended at her table and had already made my peace with that.
What I did not know, standing at the first table on a Saturday morning in October, was that this was the day the drawer—the one I used for anything I wasn’t ready to deal with yet—was going to stop closing all the way.
But I’m rambling. Back to Laura.
The first table belonged to a young guy, maybe thirty-five, who had organized his seventies soul by label instead of artist, which told you something about his priorities. I was moving through his Philly International section when I felt Deion go still beside me.
“Third from the left,” he said, quietly, not pointing.
I looked where he was looking. An album tucked between two Spinners, the spine facing out, nothing visible but the edge of a sleeve. I had moved my eyes over it twice already and kept going. I reached in and slid it free.
My hands slowed without me thinking about it. The sleeve showed its age, corners softened, a faint crease along the bottom edge that told me it had been handled, not just stored. I turned it over and felt it for real this time. Fully taking in what I was seeing.
Bahamadia’sKollage.
Definitely not an easy pull. The pressing looked early. I eased the vinyl out just enough to check the surface. It was clean. Cleaner than it had any right to be sitting in a crate like this.
“How did you—” I started.
“Spine color,” he said.
He was already looking at the next crate.
“You’d been through that section twice,” he added. “You skip things when you’re looking for something else.”
I had skipped it.
“You would’ve gotten there,” he said.
I looked up at him. He didn’t look back.
“Deion,” I said.
“Find something else.” He nodded at the crate. “You’re holding up the line.”
There was no line. I went back to digging and said nothing, because whatever it was, it was too much for right then.
Three tables later I found Laura Nyro.
She was a 1971 promo copy ofGonna Take a Miracle, Laura Nyro and Labelle together on one record, the same Patti, Nona, and Sarah from the Bluebelles, grown and transformed and still doing something no one else was doing. Finding this at a table on a random Saturday was not a normal thing that happened to normal people. This was a find. I pressed her to my chest, closed my eyes, and released a squeal that had absolutely no business coming out of a grown woman.
“You good over there?”
I did not open my eyes. “I’m busy.”
