THE MAUVE ALBUM

              She strolled into Andre’s record store with an armload of LPs to sell and that’s all it took.  He was entranced.

            “You guys buy records, right?” she asked, pulling a cute, little half-smile.

            “Yeah, yeah,” Andre said.  “Whatcha’ got there?”

            As he took the records from her frail arms, his hand brushed her bracelet, a silver snake eating its own tail.

            “Oh, it’s just some of my dad’s old albums and few of my brother used to own.  He turned Seventh Day Adventist, so . . .”

            “Your dad?”

            “No, no!” she laughed.  “My brother.  Once you join, they make you get rid of all your devil music, I guess.”

            Andre chuckled with her as he scanned the stack of album covers before him.  His jaw dropped at his discovery.

            “Wait a minute,” he said to her.  “ The Seventh Day Adventists made your brother give away a first pressing of Pieface Tibbet’s “Smoking Gun Blues?”

            “Oh, that’s my dad’s.  He died last year and my mom’s just getting around to selling all his stuff.”

            Andre’s heart dropped to his checkered Chuck Taylor’s.  He wanted to walk around the counter and hold her for the next three hours while the fifth track on “Smoking Gun Blues,” called “Playin’ Quarters in Heaven,” played.

            “Gee, I’m sorry,” he replied meekly.

            “That’s cool.  It’s just the longer they stay in her house, the more she misses him, you know?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Most of my brother’s stuff is old Chartreuse LPs and that worthless nil-core junk.  But my dad had some pretty interesting stuff.  So, is any of that valuable?”

            Andre’s eyes widened from one album to the next.  The entire discography of the Hotel Keys, a limited edition, DJ copy of Tiger Madison demos, volumes 1-7 of the Land Ho Records sampler, a Japanese import of Barrier Reef’s last album “Uncle Liver’s Molecule,” four of The Barrister’s Halloween albums specially recorded for their fan clubs in the early 70’s, plus a seemingly unreleased album by the one-hit wonder band Fandancer.

            “Honestly,”  Andre sighed, “this stuff’s so valuable, I wouldn’t know what to pay for most of it.”

            “Oh, c’mon.”

            “Seriously.  Um . . . okay, look.  See this?” he asked her, holding up a purple album which had no words or graphics on it.  “This was called ‘The Mauve Album,’ put out by this Detroit garage band called Carbine Arm.  Now, only a thousand of these were printed and five hundred of them were destroyed in a warehouse fire.  But you wanna’ know why this one’s rarer than the five hundred were burned up in that fire?”

            “Sure,” she replied, genuinely excited.

            “Tell me.  What color is this, would you say?”

            “It’s . . . well, it’s mauve, right?”

            “Right!  But they called it ‘The Mauve Album’ as a joke because they didn’t have enough money for graphics, so they found a company that had blank sleeves and agreed to dye them a shade of green, but once a thousand were printed, a mistake in the ink mixing turned all the albums a weird blue color.”

            “So, why is that one mauve?”

            “It turned all by five of them blue.  The rest turned this purple color.  This album is quite possibly worth more than my car.”

            “Jesus!”

            “Listen, I don’t know you, but . .”

            “Stephanie.”

            “Andre.  Nice to meet you.  Look, I don’t know you, but I’d be willing to sit down with you one night and go through these suckers one by one and make sure you get your money’s worth for them.”

            “You really think they’re worth that much?”

            “Are you kidding me?  There’s a Theiving Llama album in this stack that could put your kids through college.”

            “Oh, I would never have kids.”

            “Yeah,” Andre smiles, “me either.”

            Stephanie adjusted her bracelet as she wrote her phone number on the Yahtzee playing sheets lying on the counter.  Andre watched her walk away, then glanced at the phone number and the way she drew a little heart to dot her “i” with.  His nostrils took in the musty LPs in his arms.  He thought that nothing could replace this as the greatest smell in the world.




-SLL