Prologue Draft From My Upcoming Novel, 'Final Vinyl'
Here's a very drafty draft to look back on when the book is done (and likely much different).
If Star had been born within the expected confines of a society, she probably would have visited an amusement park at least once.
Maybe with friends. Or on a school trip for soon-to-be-graduates. Or even with her parents during a down-and-back weekend road-trip. Regardless, she would have spotted the rollercoasters from the interstate and worshiped the giant metal structures as they grew larger, twisting high above their lowly surroundings. Like all daring kids, she would have begged to ride the tallest, fastest one first, embracing the thrill churning in her gut. Impatiently waiting her turn in a long winding line until a pimply teenager with a sweat-stained Thrillville employee uniform and oversized Adam’s apple slammed the metal bar over her sunburnt thighs.
“Good luck, don’t die,” he’d spit, with unexpected Barry White bravado, pleased to witness a bulb of excited terror bloom in the young girl’s eyes.
If Star had grown up in a normal family, she would probably connect the memory of this initial rollercoaster ride to the first time she ever heard a vinyl record. On the cusp of her 21st birthday, seated on the floor of a dingy motel room, somewhere off the interstate, sharing the space with a milk crate filled with vintage albums and a red portable turntable bequeathed to her by an estranged uncle named Roddy.
But Star can’t make comparisons the rest of us would understand. Not to rollercoasters, or road-trips, or long lines, or pimply pubescent carnie boys. She’s never seen an amusement park, she’s never waited in a line, and she’s never met a boy (or a carnie). And until recently, she’d never listened to a vinyl record, an 8-track, a CD, or an MP3. She’d never heard a song played by humans. The only songs Star had heard come from the wild inhabitants of Ghost Town, her family’s fringe-dwelling located in a remote corner of the California desert. The hollow buzz of a sidewinder rattler. A kit fox’s throaty coo. Coyotes’ harmonized howls. Skittish reddish-brown ground squirrels chirping at dawn. A meadowlark singing its disjointed jingle from a fence post. Until recently, these are the only songs that have echoed through the skinny bones of Star Annabella Chaser.
But when Star’s estranged uncle Roddy posthumously inserted himself into the folds of his niece’s bizarre isolated life, the world of recorded music became more than just a mystery to the lonesome desert girl. A vast void transformed into a sturdy rope of chain linking Star with her inner self and an entire history of human expression. The unheard songs, the undiscovered records, all of that sonic magic — it’s become one sharp slab of un-struck flint to the exquisite furnace of Star’s soul, a furnace desperate to burn.
So. Describing the mere milliseconds in which Star’s imaginary rollercoaster cart crests its apex, ticking forward under the spell of gravity’s weighty insistence, just before the hair-whipping plunge — this might actually be the simplest way to describe to you, someone who presumably grew up within the confines of society, a normal family etc. etc., what it was like for the lonesome desert girl to hear the static of the needle as it slid slowly from the far edge of Lee Oskar’s 1976 debut solo record like a figure skate on black ice until finally dropping effortlessly into the wide groove of Track One.
Stay tuned for Chapter 1, featuring Roddy’s will and testament, a Peregrin falcon, a musical baptism, a doomsday bunker, ash-filled joints, groovy t-shirt models and more!