Colin Meloy - The Replacements Let It Be

I stood on the corner of State and Rodney in my Keds and Levis, hands stuffed in the pocket of my hooded sweatshirt, waiting for Mark. I could see him a ways off, kicking along the sidewalk. I was impatient and shouted for him to hurry up. In my sweatshirt pocket I could feel the ten-dollar bill I had earned from mowing lawns that spring, and I crumpled and uncrumpled it between my fingers while I waited. It was 1987; we had just graduated from elementary school and were gearing up for the plunge into the middle school.

Ready? I asked when he got to the corner.

Yep, he said.

We walked down Rodney, past the old Governors mansion, past the May Butler school where my mother had worked for a short time, teaching life science to high school dropouts, when it was the Project for Alternative Living. We shuffled down past the Red Meadow and Jesters Bar, their sidewalk curbs all fender to fender with Harley Davidson motorcycles. We talked about school, about the girls we would meet at our new school. Mark had had more experience with girls than I had and he talked about dating, how youre not supposed to talk about school on a date.

Itll just make em bored, he said.

Really? I said. I was imagining myself on a date with a girl: we were sitting at a booth at the Parrot confectionary; she toyed with her sundae straw while I yammered on about my English homework. I tried several times to revise the fantasy in my mind, but I couldnt get the me in the fantasy to talk about anything but school. I was doomed.

We were walking to Pegasus Music at the mall, that day, to buy a cassette. Actually, I was the one buying the cassette; Mark was just along for the walk. It was a Saturday and we both had little else to do.

The air was crisp and there were melting remnants of snow on the edges of the sidewalksthe glacial core of a drift that had fallen in February, now seeing its final demise in April. Veins of mud ran across the surface of the snow.

At the time, there were two record stores of note in Helena, Montana, where I was born. One was Pegasus Music, where Mark and I were walking that afternoon, and the other was Henry Js. Henry Js was on the west side of town, on Euclid, past Ben Franklins. It was owned by two guys in their forties. The clerks wore mustaches and bandannas and they played the Rolling Stones over the in-store stereo. My dad bought records there because it was on the way to our house in the valley and I often went in with him. I remember someone buying a Prudence Dredge record there, the one with the cartoon cover, and I overheard the clerk highly recommending it to the purchaser. The first two records I ever owned came from Henry Js. They were Chicago 16 and Cargo by Men at Work and my mother had bought them for me for my birthday. I had heard each of the records respective singles on the radio and had asked for the albums by name, along with my usual list of the years latest Star Wars toys. It was seen as a sign of my maturation.

We walked past St. Helenas Cathedral, with its stained glass windows and spires, and I told Mark about how Id heard that someone, back in the old days, had flown a plane between the two spires to win a bet. We both stopped for a moment and stared up a the spires, at the golden crosses atop each spire and imagined a bi-plane speeding, wheeling, through the space between them, its goggled pilot still drunk from the night before.

Really? asked Mark.

Yep, I said, and we kept walking.

We turned right on Neill Avenue, walking carefully over the weather-wracked sidewalks, the cement all cracked and upended by another harsh winter. Crossing Montana Avenue, we stopped momentarily at the Mini Mart for Sweet-Tarts and taffy. In the corner of the store there was a video game called Shenobi where for twenty-five cents you assumed the role of a martial artist in your choice of red or white robes, fighting for the love of a short, digitized geisha who expressed her love for the winner in pixilated hearts that appeared above her head. With the change Mark had in his pocket, we played a few games; he played the white-robe fighter, I was the red-robed. When neither of us succeeded in winning the affections of the geisha, we shrugged our shoulders, pocketed our candy and continued on our walk to Pegasus Music.

The last few blocks to the Capitol Hill Mall were quick and the scenery was bland. Neill Avenue past Montana Avenue was just a series of strip malls and office buildings. The mall parking lot was full, this being a Saturday, and we zigzagged between parked cars to reach the entrance through the J. C. Penneys on the west side. We followed the granite tiles in the floor that made a trail through the clothing racks and perfume counters of the department store, to the place where Penneys gave way to the malls main corridor. There was only one corridor in this mall and it ran east to west in a straight, continuous line.

We were hungry but I wanted to go to Pegasus Music first. We didnt know if wed have money left over for Bobs Pizza, where the food sat under brilliant red lights on the counter top and the counter girls were beautiful and bitter and mean. We could see Pegasus Music from yards away; the neon above its entryway cast bright blue and pink reflections across the polished mall floor. There was a horse with wings in white neon galloping along the pink and blue rainbow above the doorway. Inside, everything was brilliantly white. We walked along the rows of racks of tapes that covered the walls, gliding our fingers along the spines of the cassettes. A boy sat behind the cash register, silently flipping through a magazine. He looked up briefly to watch the two of us entering the store, and then looked back at the pages.

Mark wandered off to the two rows of compact disc bins that sat in the middle of the room and began shuffling through the CDs in their long, colorful boxes and shoplifter-proof plastic sheaves. I walked to the Rs. There was a poster over the tape racks advertising the Jesus and Mary Chains Darklands, and I stopped and marveled at their black hair and their black sunglasses. I decided I wanted hair like the Jesus and Mary Chains. I wanted black hair and black sunglasses. Hair that sprouted from my head like a geyser. I wondered how they got it to stay up like that.

In the Rs, I traced my fingers over the spines of the cassettes until I got to the Replacements. There were two of them: Pleased to Meet Me and Let It Be. With a little difficulty, I slid both of them from their space on the rack, letting three R.E.O. Speedwagon tapes fall down into their place. I scanned the song listing on both of them, turned them over, and studied the covers, side by side. On one were two hands shaking, on the other were four guys sitting on a rooftop. I squinted at this one, studying each of the characters individually: one was mop-topped and looked like he was rubbing something out of his eye; one had black curly hair and was looking away from the camera, like he didnt know that the picture was being taken; there was a blond haired one behind him who was smirking; and one guy in the back with unruly black hair, craning his neck over the other three to make good for the camera. I slid Pleased to Meet Me back into the rack above the R.E.O. Speedwagon tapes and walked to the cash register, Let It Be in hand. Mark saw that I was ready and put away a CD he had been looking at.

The boy at the cash register looked up from his magazine and took the tape from my hand. He took my ten-dollar bill and gave me a couple bucks in change. He slammed the tape into a machine that removed the security sheaf and handed the naked, cellophaned cassette to me. Have a good day, he said, halfheartedly, and returned to his magazine. Mark and I smiled at each other.

We shared a piece of pepperoni pizza from Bobs Pizza and talked about the counter girls.