I've always been a bit of a collector. As a kid, it was comic books. Not just strewn around or in some cardboard box under a bed, but lovingly preserved in sleek plastic protective sleeves with a thin sheet of cardboard tucked behind each to keep them straight. I had rows of comics painstakingly preserved and chronologically ordered. My big title was Ghost Rider, and I had every issue right up to end the first series (the "Johnny Blaze" era -- including his first appearances in Marvel Spotlight, which I handled as reverently and as gingerly as one would the Shroud of Turin). I collected other titles as well -- notably the Champions, the New Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four (when John Byrne was drawing them) and the X-men,...but then, everyone collected the X-men. After school, friends and I would troop over to SuperSnipe on the Upper East Side, The Comic Art Gallery in midtown (a truly seedy, poorly ventilated concrete room on E. 59th street, up a dark, dank, graffiti-ridden flight of stairs) or Forbidden Planet down in the village to prize the latest issues or fork over our hardly earned allowances to fill gaps in our burgeoning comic libraries. I even attended the odd comic convention (and "odd" is the perfect word for them). I was in pretty deep.
My comic collecting days lasted until about halfway through high school. I pretty much gave it up around the same time I realized that still playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons wasn't exactly doing wonders for my reputation. By this time, I'd started to collect records anyway (although the records I'd started to collect -- future classics by bands like Iron Maiden, the Misfits and Venom -- weren't exactly helping my afore-mentioned "rep" any more than the comic collecting had. But, out went the comics, "Star Wars" action figures and role-playing games and in came music. I even sold off huge chunks of my comic collection to make money (which invariably went towards buying more records). I still have all my issues of Ghost Rider, though. They're packed into crates that now reside in either a storage space in Lower Manhattan or in my mother's flood-courting basement out on Long Island.
The vinyl started to amass pretty rapidly as I hungrily immersed myself into zealous fandom for implausibly stupid heavy metal, needlessly antagonistic punk rock and wildly pompous gothic rock. Each weekend was devoted to scouring through Greenwich Village records shops looking for new records, band posters and other music ephemera. By the time it came time to pack up my stuff for my freshman year of college, it was clear that there was no way I could take all my records. Something had to stay behind.
I ended up temporarily forsaking my love for heavy metal in order to lighten the load (also rightly deducing that the girls at college probably wouldn't go for guys who extolled the merits of Judas Priest). As such, all my albums by Twisted Sister, Dio, Grim Reaper, Lita Ford, W.A.S.P, Quiet Riot, Ratt, Helix, Hanoi Rocks, etc. ended up either staying home or being pawned off to my friend Greg, who in turn posted them off to poor, rock-starved relatives in Poland (fact!). I kept the Motorhead, `Sabbath, Van Halen, Rush, `Maiden, AC/DC, Metallica, Venom and Kiss, but all the other poodle-haired crap had to go.
In college, my vinyl addiction worsened. Via the influence of similarly inclined schoolmates (who'd turn me onto bands I hadn't yet encountered like XTC, the Velvet Underground and King Crimson) and involvement with my school's radio station ( WDUB 91.1 on your fm dial ....whose slogan at the time was a meek "We Don't Suck!"), I'd procured such an amount of records that there wasn't much room for clothing in my closet. I had heated arguments over the phone with my mother, demanding that she drive out to Ohio and pick me up at the end of the year (I was without a car -- much less a license -- at the time) and help me cart my record collection home, instead of rolling the dice and having my music shipped. She'd always win, and I'd fret like a nervous grandmother every time I packed up my precious records into cardboard crates, hoping to see them pristine and intact on the other side.
It didn't get any better after college. Upon the advent of the compact disc (initially a more refined and accordingly more expensive medium), I was slow to make the change-over (balking at the notion that these thin slabs of purportedly unscratchable space-age polymer were going to be the dominant format). But, sure enough, my shelves swiftly became choked with rows of plastic jewel-boxes. Pseudo-employment (read: no benefits, job security or even the promise of timely paycheck) at a variety of music magazines ensured a weekly stack of promotional discs (having wormed my way into the good graces of several record labels' publicity departments, my name was added to their respective mailing lists). Compact discs started accumulating faster than I could quantify. Stacking the undesirable ones on my windowsill, sunlight was completely obstructed by unwanted albums within only a couple of weeks. At the same time, I was still voraciously seeking out new music (my imagination now captured by British indie bands like The Wedding Present and the Kitchens of Distinction and local noise-rock bands like Barkmarket and Cop Shoot Cop). What had started out as a hobby had turned into a habit.
I moved downtown to East 12th street in 1996. By this time, I'd packed up all my vinyl into crates and crammed them all into storage. Even though I'd carted piles of discs off to the Salvation Army (specifically the unwanted promo ones) and sold a few at the few used places around town who'd buy (though never for very much), my music collection still commanded a worrying amount of space. On top of the elevated loft bed in my apartment, my disc collection sat like a fat angry beast, taking up a platform originally designed to accommodate a mattress. My life was changing, though. Now fully employed at a weekly news magazine, I didn't quite have the same amount of time to go disc shopping. But old habits die hard.
After a couple of years, I got married, and my wife moved all her stuff into the apartment. Virtually overnight, space became a scarcity. I packed more and more of my stuff (lovingly framed Plasmatics posters, Kiss action figures, commemorative Iron Maiden coffee mugs, etc.) into storage (vainly hoping one day to have a bigger place wherein these items might again be properly displayed) but I was fighting a losing battle. Stacks twice my height of my wife's enviable book collection now battled for dominance and shelf space with my compact disc collection. Then there was the added challenge of having to merge my wife's CDs in with mine (picture me wincing as I gingerly slipped discs by Van Morrison, Simply Red and Billie Holiday in with my Ramones, Bauhaus and Stranglers discs). While compromise was the order of the day, the discs still had a stranglehold on my life.
We ended up moving in 2002. While we were re-locating to a bigger space (merficully just four blocks away), I knew I had to relegate even more stuff into storage. This was going to really be our space, not just my old space that my wife had moved into. As such, more of my tactile juvenalia got packed up and put away (forcing me to upgrade my space at Manhattan MiniStorage from "personal closet" to "small room"). Divvying up the bookshelves, my wife and I found a happy middle ground where both her books and my discs could more or less co-exist. Détente achieved.
Then came Charlotte.
Our daughter was born in the spring of 2004 and life was -- quite expectedly and understandably -- turned completely upside down. Knowing that the days of cranking our stereo to lawnmower-reminiscent volumes were over, I sprang for a 40 gig iPod. Access to our book & disc shelves was swiftly obstructed by what had become a stroller parking area. Time spent schlepping around Manhattan, browsing in record stores with headphones on (already a no-no given the Tinnitus I'd developed in my right ear in 1999) was jettisoned in favor of long walks pushing a stroller. In very short order, Charlotte became mobile. A crawling, drooling, quasi-autonomous force of nature keen on giggling and destroying. Both a stack of miniature vintage novellas that belonged to my wife and rows of CDs in the U's and the V's (the shelves my daughter could reach) fell prey to her saliva-drenched little digits. Albums by the Undertones, U2 and the Unband found themselves being utilized as bludgeoning tools, while favorites by Van Halen, the Vibrators, Visage and the Virgin Prunes were used as de facto floor-sanders. Whole rows in the "various artists" section were yanked out and splayed around like cards after a zealous round of 52 Pick-Up. These were new challenges altogether.
In recent days, Charlotte has infiltrated the back reaches of the bookshelf that holds up our television, which until very recently acted as a home for my box sets. After finding my prized copy of the box set by enigmatic Californian post-punk ensemble, Savage Republic (renowned for their delicate, intricately die-cut cardboard disc sleeves) well and truly savaged by my preternaturally adorable offspring (a die-hard music fan of lesser moxie might overlook her otherwise unimpeachable cuteness and ignore restraint in a feverish thirst for vengeance), I was forced to find new box set accommodations. As I scrambled to create space in my closet whilst yanking box sets by Echo & the Bunnymen, XTC and Alice Cooper out of Charlotte's smeary little paws, I realized that this was simply not working. I need to cut the clutter and succumb.
Having "ripped" most of the important bits of my collection onto my computer (we don't really use the stereo itself that much anymore, itself having its limits repeatedly tested by my daughter's curious fingers), it seems I'm but a stone's throw away from putting my entire compact disc collection in storage for its own protection and to simply to create some breathing room. I still meander around compact disc shops, but the gnawing urge to buy new discs doesn't seem to be as tenacious these days (although maybe that's because I haven't heard anything in a while that really rocked my socks off). Have I been cured of my addiction? Was the answer all along to simply have a child? Seems a bit extreme. The notion of locking my discs away in a dank basement chamber isn't a happy one. But, maybe that's the best way,...or at least until my daughter is tall enough to reach the keyboard of my computer.
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