Tracks.

Pulling out of the driveway of my parents’ house in Saint Clair Shores, I fell back into the muscle memory of spinning around on the parking pad and navigating the suburban streets as if I hadn’t been away from driving and the area for the past 3 years. St. Clair Shores lies in Detroit’s metro area, overshadowed by the much less affordable Grosse Pointes: the home of the rich and famous along the shores of Lake Saint Clair that was once divided from Detroit’s East Side by a wall that ran along Alter Road, that sit between the Shores and the City. It was the week after Mother’s Day, and I was coming up from my Detroit apartment with fresh pizza for an early dinner since that was the only day reasonably near the holiday that my brother and I could work out to do dinner with our parents and our partners. My partner Joseph and I got picked up by my dad, which led to a drive in the kind of awkward silence that develops when you only just saw each other the week before and have nothing left to catch up on. Dinner was similar.

My brother Isaac had come up with the idea of taking our mother out to dinner for Mother’s Day, but since he doesn’t frequent restaurants and eats selectively it fell on me to think of a place that could accommodate both his diet and our mother’s vegan one. When I took up his suggestion of Grandma Bobs Pizza, a Corktown pizza spot with the stomp-clap atmosphere of a Mumford and Sons song, the bill ran a bit on the high side. This led to an uncomfortable drive up where I ignored texts about how unfair it is that Isaac should pay half the bill when he only liked one of the 3 pizzas that were ordered. It led to an uncomfortable dinner where the conversation was very forced and light, spending a lot of time on how my brother dislikes vapid pop songs for their empty lyricism and my mom had to discover that Pumped up Kicks by Foster the People told the story of a school shooter.

When the meal was over and the seating moved from the dining table to the living room couches, I was eager to leave. It’s rough enough to sit for a meal with the awkward family air between us, but with the standoffishness I was ready to do anything but watch the latest basketball college game. Fortunately, my parents had gotten Joseph a gift card to a local antique shop near the flower store I had spent my homeschooler’s high school years working at. The gift card turned out to be the perfect excuse, and with the shop closing in 40 minutes I borrowed the keys and the two of us were out the door to go explore.

Time Warp, the shop I had recalled being only a couple blocks away from my parents’ house, was in reality nearly 3 miles away. The store was absolutely jam-packed, with shelves of stuff that obscured just how small the store really was. Every direction had more to see than could really be seen in the last half an hour before closing, but we spent the time looking at records and cassettes to grow our physical library of music. I found a shelf covered in old boy scout manuals that reminded me of the neglected spiral bound laminated guide that still lingered somewhere in the basement with the rest of my childhood objects. These older books looked, at least to me, someone who prides himself on his shelf of antique books, much more appealing than the beige and green guide that I had been given 15 or more years ago. They were actually presented in hard or leather cover with the pages yellowed over time! They looked as if they’d seen about as much use as my copy had back in the day—which is to say, none at all—they at least made the extracurricular society look like something worth doing instead of a sort of child-led MLM scheme that took place in the basement of the local church designed to fund campsites with popcorn sales. At least, that’s the form it took in my childhood suburbia.

We left Time Warp with 20 or more cassettes to add to the shelf back downtown, along with a couple of unique and inexpensive vinyl records (South American Folk Songs and Marlene Dietrich) and a folding fishing knife to open packages with. From there, realizing that the record store Trax-N-Wax was still open for another hour, we decided to head over there to check out what they had for sale and continue to avoid spending too much time in vapid conversation between bouts of televised sporting that elicited shouts or groans from my dad and brother. The drive back down Harper Ave back towards my parents was a strange one. On the one hand, there were shops that hadn’t changed since my family moved to that house back in 2009-or-so. Shops that I estimate must have been there since the age of black and white TV and dinosaurs: an upholsterer with a yellow awning; a salon with a Parisian wrought-iron entrance; the ice cream stand that sits behind the high school.

Driving back and forth from work and home in those summers I worked at the flower shop I must have passed Trax-N-Wax hundreds of times. It’s kind of funny thinking about that at the time in my life when I had the most consistent income I never stopped at the shop, it is only now that I have the inconsistent funding of a Ph.D. student with summers off work that I’ve started a costly collecting hobby. I have a faint recollection of the building being this bright highlighter green siding with white accents, and awning posts that were striped and polka dotted, though now it is a much more standard grey and white with the logo of the record store front and center. The outside lined with folding tables and peeling paper boxes of on-sale 45s that the shop had trouble selling next to the more conventional stock of full-sized LPs and big-name artists both new and old.

The inside was more sparsely decorated, though not for lack of style. Each wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves with CDs, DVDs, and Cassettes, while the aisles were made up of trough after trough of vinyl. Joseph and I immediately split up to look through different boxes and shelves to find music or movies that catch our attention. Here, with the kind of organization that disc-based media excels in, we are able to look more attentively and get lost more effectively than in the towering chaos of an antique store.

 I find a filthy vinyl of the soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in a bin on the floor for a dollar; he finds a sealed Greatest Hits of Kenny Rogers from 1988. He finds Rounders (1998) starring Matt Damon on dusty DVD; I find the only copy of Lebanon Hanover in the whole store (a blue/white pressing of Sci-Fi Sky). I find a $4 collection of Japanese flute and harp music pressed in 1978; He finds Albert King’s King of the Blues Guitar album on CD.

I didn’t realize the time until the ambient music was cut out and replaced with Semisonic’s Closing Time—two minutes to close. We paid for our eclectic hauls and added them to the rest of our finds of cassettes and vinyl from Time Warp. The evening hadn’t cooled off like I had dressed for, instead settling into a sticky dusk as the cloud cover brought nighttime sooner than usual and I was left sweating in my sweatshirt and patch-riddled denim jacket. I thought it would feel different driving around with my boyfriend showing him the sites of my childhood, like the kind of tour that my family did of my dad’s tiny hometown in Arkansas when I was 9 or 10, like nostalgia would be the tour guide. Maybe I’m just not far enough removed from living in St. Clair Shores. Instead, I wished that I had my bed still at my parents’ place and we could return and steal away to listen to our new music while laying on the bed looking at the ceiling. Or maybe walk out into the mushy, marshy backyard and sit on the roof of the garage that I used to climb on and watch fiery clouds go dark. Or maybe walk to the catholic school a couple blocks away, where the playground was ever empty, where we could sit around and talk as the suburban night overtook us.

Instead, we returned my parents’ car and went home. I stopped feeling like a teenaged home schooler trying desperately to show his boyfriend that his family is normal, being back in my apartment that I’ve cultivated for the past few years felt like being an adult again, jarring in its immediacy. We added the music to their place on the shelves, which overloaded the cassettes so as to require some to be stacked on top of the others. The CDs, though the fewest, now take up half of their shelf next to my desk. The vinyl box turned out to have a capacity of only about 70, which we discovered after sliding in our 69th acquisition. Oops.

Joseph and I resolved to go back to visit the shops again once we could budget for the extra expenses, after moving in June. I would like to go back on a day less fraught with tension and with more time to explore the different shops we stopped into. I’d love to go on a day where I don’t want to spend the time visiting family in my childhood bedroom-turned-home-gym; returning so that we can collect more tracks.