The Record Store

Dennis Reinholt got the keys to the storefront on South Virginia Street in September and spent six weeks making it into something before he opened the door to anyone.

He was twenty-two. He had grown up over his mother Agnes’s objections and his grandmother Clara’s quiet encouragement, the two of them a study in opposites, Agnes wanting him to finish at the university up the hill and take a real job, Clara saying nothing much but slipping him forty dollars at Christmas with a look that meant do what you are going to do. Clara had come to Reno in 1920 to shed a husband and had stayed to open a dress shop downtown with money no one thought she should risk, and she had run it forty years, and when Dennis told her he wanted to open a store that sold nothing but records she had looked at him a long moment and said, well, you come by it honestly.

The storefront was cheap because South Virginia, south of the casino blocks, was where the rent was cheap. It was a street of small old buildings, motels and auto-parts counters and a Mexican place and a five-and-dime, the working part of town that the tourists never saw, and it suited him. He had no money for a good address. He had money for paint and lumber and a deposit, most of it his own from two years of pumping gas, and he built the bins himself out of pine and ran them down both walls and put a counter near the door and a turntable behind the counter with two big speakers he had saved a year to buy.

The records came in October, the first real order, boxes of them off the truck, and he spent a whole night opening the boxes and filing them into the bins he had built. He filed them by hand, every one, reading the covers as he went, and it was the best night he could remember. The new things were extraordinary that fall. The band from up in Woodstock had a record out, pink cover, that did not sound like anything. There was the Hendrix double album that you had to play loud. There was the long strange one from the English band that ran a whole side. He stood them up in the bins facing out, the covers like a wall of windows, and he thought that a person could walk in off that hard little street and stand in front of this wall and hear something that had not existed a year ago, and that this was a thing worth doing with a life, whatever his mother thought.

He could not call the neighborhood anything but South Virginia, because that was its name. The fancy people did not come down here. The university was at the other end of town, two miles north, past the casinos and over the tracks, and Dennis figured the students would have to want it enough to drive, and he figured some of them would. Things were moving even in Reno. It was a careful town, a gambling town, a town that had made its money for forty years on divorces and dice and did not go in for the long hair and the marches, but the kids were the same kids as everywhere, Dennis knew that, he was one of them, and the music got to them the same way it got to him, and a kid who heard the right record at the right age was changed by it, and would come back for the next one.

He had built one thing he was proud of past the bins. In the back corner he had put up a listening booth, a little plywood closet with a stool and a turntable and a single speaker, the kind the big stores had torn out years ago because the sample copies got scratched and a scratched record was a record you could not sell. Dennis did not much care about the scratches. He wanted a kid with two dollars in his pocket to be able to come in off the hard street and shut the door of that booth and play a whole side through before he decided, the way Dennis himself had never once been let to do in a store, and walk back out having heard the thing even if he bought nothing that day. A store that let you do that, he figured, was a store a person came back to. His grandmother had made her customers feel like the only woman in the shop. This was the only way he knew to do the same.

His grandmother came down to see it the day before he opened. Clara was near eighty now, small and straight, and she walked the length of the bins slowly with her hand on the pine he had cut, and she looked at the wall of covers and at the speakers and at the sign he had painted himself for the window, and she did not say much, which was her way.

“You built the bins,” she said.

“Every one.”

“Good,” she said. “When it is yours you should be able to say you built it.” She turned and looked at him. “The street is wrong, you know. Too far down. The rent is low because nobody walks here.”

“I know it.”

“My shop was downtown where the people were,” Clara said. “That cost. You will have to make them come to you instead. That is harder.” She looked at the wall of records again. “But you have a thing they cannot get downtown. So make them come.”

She left him a little before dark, and Dennis stayed and swept the floor that did not need sweeping and straightened the bins that were already straight, and in the morning he came back early and put a record on, loud, the pink-covered one, and let it fill the empty store. Then he turned the lock and flipped the cardboard sign in the window so it read OPEN to the street, and he stood behind the counter he had built and watched the door and waited to see who in this town would walk through it.

A kid came up the sidewalk a little after ten, sixteen or so, in a denim jacket, and slowed at the window, and looked at the wall of covers through the glass, and Dennis watched him decide. Then the kid pulled the door open, and the music came out at him, and he came in.

He stood just inside the door a moment, taking in the bins and the sound and the wall of covers facing out, and then he went to the records and began to walk the length of them slowly, with one finger tipping the albums forward and back, the way a person walks a thing he has been wanting without quite knowing it had a place he could go and find it. Dennis did not crowd him. He let the record play and stayed behind the counter he had built with his own hands and his gas-station money, and he watched a stranger move down the bins in the store he had made, and he thought that his grandmother had been right about the street, that it was too far down and nobody walked it and he would have to make them come. And here, on the first morning, before he had sold a thing, was one of them. Come.

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