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 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 ride first. Embracing the raw thrill churning in her gut. Waiting impatiently for her turn in an endless line, until the pimply teenager in a sweat-stained Thrillville employee uniform slammed the metal bar over her sunburnt thighs.
“Good luck, don’t die,” he’d spit, with unexpected Barry White bravado and an oversized Adam’s apple rising and falling in his throat, 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 might connect the memory of her 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 barren interstate, sharing 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 isn’t good at making 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). She’s never listened to an 8-track, a CD, or an MP3. And until spinning her first vinyl record, she’d never heard a song played by a human.
The only songs Star knows come from the wild inhabitants of Ghost Town, her family’s doomsday fringe-dwelling located in a remote corner of the California desert: the hollow buzz of a rattler; a kit fox’s throaty coo; coyotes howling in the dark; skittish ground squirrels chirping at dawn; a meadowlark bellowing its disjointed jingle from a sturdy fence post.
For most of her short life, these are the only songs that echoed through the skinny bones of Star Annabella Chaser.
But when 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 morphed into a sturdy rope of chain linking Star to a shared history of human expression. The unheard songs, the undiscovered records, all 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!