I think Phoebe hit the nail on the head last night when she told me, “Never pick things up at night.” This was while I was on my way home from Newport Beach, where I purchased a new turntable from somebody I found on Craigslist. I’m not lying when I say this, because I’ve never quite had this sensation before…but I’m pretty sure the guy I bought the record player from wanted to kill and eat me. If that had happened, I would have held all of you responsible.
The night started out innocently with a phone call from the potential serial killer in question telling me that I might want to leave after rush hour, or I’d risk being stuck in traffic for an uncomfortable length of time. I waited until roughly 8:00pm, and it wasn’t until I was grabbing some LPs (Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space for its rocking-ness, Will Oldham’s I See A Darkness for its quietude, and Radiohead’s The Bends because I’ve heard it a million times and have almost every sound on the album memorized). My roommate informed me that it was an unusual time to be driving such a long distance to pick something up from a stranger’s apartment, and suddenly I became paralyzed with fear. She was right — what the fuck was I doing driving deep into the O.C. alone to meet a guy I didn’t know? I passed the 45 minute car ride by calling people and telling them that I loved them all very much, but if I died it was my own fault. This might have been overkill, but trust me, it was totally justifiable.
After several twists and turns, I located the guy’s condo development. I parked on the street, found the guy standing a few yards away, and we walked maybe 100 yards through a courtyard to a tiny first-level apartment in a far corner of the development. When we got inside, I had a chance to study him. He was roughly my height, a bit stockier, very tanned and with slicked black hair. He kind of looked like an older version of Christian Bale in American Psycho except he was weathered and leathery from living in Southern California. His hand shake was firm. When we got inside, he offered me a beer. He had been watching Futurama, so I momentarily let down my guard and figured he was a normal guy…maybe even a nerd.
My suspicions about the guy were raised again roughly five minutes into our meeting, when he took a phone call in the other room, and spoke loudly about how he had somebody over. While on the phone he said, “Evan, let me get you a Coke or a beer.” When I politely declined, he said, “C’mon let me fix you a drink.” I told him I had one in the car waiting for me, as images of Jeffrey Dahmer mixing animal tranquilizers or sleeping pills into an unsuspecting victim’s drink flashed before my eyes.
At the 30 minute mark, we’re sitting on his couch (ugh. don’t ask) talking about the speakers that he built himself (and sold a duplicate pair he built for $2,300), his dual monoblock amplifiers ($1,700 each), his preamp, and his subwoofer, and the guy has the gal to complain about having to pay $30 for a Grinderman LP on eBay. That’s when I glanced over at his record shelf and realized the guy only had a dozen or so records. I didn’t see any CDs anywhere in his living room. What the hell is the guy with the $10,000 audio setup complaining about a $30 record for? That was the first time I saw the weird look in his eye. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen that glint before, it’s just that most of the time I see it, it’s while watching a segment of “America’s Most Wanted”, or a documentary on Charles Manson. I saw the twinkle again while he was talking about driving his motorcycle to Canada in a day, when he talked about partying at clubs in Hollywood, and when he offered to let me see the brown recluse spider he’d caught last night in his bedroom.
I laughed and said that I’d just read an article written by a college professor about how the brown recluse has not established itself in California yet, but the guy smiled and told me to look behind me. It was then that I noticed I was sitting a few inches in front of a pint glass with a good-sized brown spider in it. There didn’t seem to be a top on the glass. I looked next to it and saw a small, flimsy piece of Saran wrap sitting on the table next to the glass. He’d gone and removed it a few minutes earlier without telling me.
Forty five minutes into our meeting, I was standing on the far side of the living room, as far as I could get from the spider glass. I was starting to unhook the machine when he began telling me about his method for removing warps from old LPs, and for cleaning them with steam vacuums. Apparently if you place a record on your turntable and use a steam vacuum while the disc is rotating at 45rpm, after a few minutes the disc will begin to warp from the steam. Once the record starts to form a bowl shape, he said to stop the vacuum and let the record return to its normal shape. Because it’s resting on a level platter, the record will flatten out perfectly. Or so he said. Afterwards, use a record brush to clean the gunk out of the grooves that the steam helps rise to the surface. He told me it worked perfectly. Then he asked me how I clean records. I told him D4 solution with a brush and an anti-static brush, or ammonia-free glass cleaner with an adult diaper. He said he uses a solution that he invented on his own, which includes equal parts ionized water filtered using reverse osmosis (or something, I forget), “prescription grain alcohol” and urine.
Seventy minutes into our meeting, I was clawing at my skin from the inside, trying to figure out any way I could leave the guy’s apartment. I told him I’d heard enough, and was ready to pay him and leave. We packed the record into a cardboard box a few feet from the spider glass, and while he was cleaning out the box he somehow managed to pull a condom out from a clump of Styrofoam peanuts. I don’t know if that was his idea of a joke, if he really had a shipment of condoms sent to him in a large shipping box packed with Styrofoam peanuts, or if he had placed the condom in there when he left the room in order to let me know that everything was cool, and he had condoms if I hadn’t brought any. I wanted to vomit. Instead, I made a phone call to my sister and pretended I was already on my way home to her. As I did this, the guy pulled a knife and a screwdriver out of his pocket. I stepped over him and moved to the other side of the living room, closer to the front door. He spent a few minutes removing the phono cartridge (he damaged it and cursed himself excessively in the process of removing it). We carried two boxes out to my car, I slammed the door, and seventy five minutes after I arrived at the guy’s apartment, I was finally on my way home.
Now that my phone and turntable situations have been resolved, I can begin to create Thank You notes to all those who donated to the website. They’ll be in the mail shortly.
***
Living in LA, I haven’t really had any interesting celebrity encounters. Maybe it’s because I’m a transplanted East Coaster who walks with his head down. Maybe it’s because I really couldn’t give a shit. Either way, I had a pretty awesome comedic moment today involving a D-list celebrity, so I’ll mention it here.
I was at Costco this afternoon picking up a prescription and munching on free samples when Nicci called me. She thought I was in my car, as we were trying out my new phone’s speaker / headphone system. I told her that I wasn’t in the car at the moment, so please call back in ten minutes. Right when we hung up, I noticed that guy Dax Sheppard who played Frito in Idiocracy, a film I’ve seen multiple times and have referenced frequently on this website. If it wasn’t for that movie, I wouldn’t have noticed him coming right towards me. My comedic wit and timing being as good as it is, I instantly thought of the scene in Idiocracy where he and Owen Wilson and the black girl from SNL “The Un-Funny Years” enter Costco, where they are greeted by a mentally handicapped man who says, “Welcome to Costco. I love you.” So, I decided at that very moment to adopt a mentally handicapped dialect (or is it an accent?) and loudly say, “Welcome to Costco. I love you” to him. He didn’t seem impressed. If I’d said “Ow, My balls!” he might have laughed, but I wasn’t really interested in making the guy laugh, just interested in calling attention to the irony of the situation.
