004: Chapter 4
It was 5:58am when Eric Elbogen awoke and fuzzily recalled that he needed to go to a job today. He lay there for two more minutes until the alarm went off, hit the brick-like clock radio hard and propelled himself out of bed. It was a novelty for him to shower so early in the morning, and despite the fact that it had been many many years since he could sleep later than 7am, his first order of business was normally black coffee and lightly-buttered wheat toast, immediately followed (until recently) by several hours of working on making records. As part of this old routine, bathing wouldn’t come until much later in the day, when he needed to give his ears a break. It felt good though, to switch it up like this.
The outside world was already filled with commuters and pet owners by the time he started walking back to Werewolf Diskdrive. It was a very different scene than what he would normally encounter on his late afternoon strolls and he was struck by how focused everyone was at this early hour. Something else felt different too, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it until he’d passed several dog owners with Great Danes or Shih Tzus, each defecating on a different pristine lawn. The eye contact, he finally thought. He’d spent a lot of time in his life thinking about the reasons why most strangers wouldn’t acknowledge each other when they passed on the street and, granted, sometimes more fervently than others, he’d try to smile and say hello whenever possible. These greetings were mostly met with confusion, but occasionally someone would smile back. He liked to think that when that happened, both parties received a little jolt of level-up energy in the video game of life.
What was different in this morning hour was that the pet owners WERE making eye contact, but, it oddly seemed like they were doing so not to be friendly, but rather to assert some kind of dominance. He looked closely as he passed two more leashed pets relieving themselves (this time a scrappy brown and grey cat and a ferret) and confirmed what he thought he’d seen before. Sure enough, not only were the human owners making eye contact, they would sort of flex their muscles and shake their heads ever so slightly to indicate that they wouldn’t be cleaning up after the animals. He cocked his own head in confusion and kept walking.
As he pondered the possible motivations behind such behavior, an already-full bus was rolling up to a crowded stop he was about to pass. He made no indication he was there to catch the bus, but his eyes were nevertheless met with what could only be described as feral glares from the gaggle of bus-waiters staking their spot in the makeshift line. He maneuvered around, still confused, and passed by just as the bus doors opened and the orderly line turned into a mob, every man and woman trying to push past each other to get through the narrow threshold. There was something comedic about it, he thought, as he shamefully recounted certain instances of his own selfish behavior while boarding airplanes or merging into a single highway lane. He made a little internal joke about how it was a wonder the world was still standing.
For the most part, the rest of the walk was uneventful and he’d only needed to dodge the trajectory of a few people with their necks craned down staring at their hand-computers.
Eric arrived at the shop at 7:45am and, despite the poopers and bus-riders, was brimming with optimism as he turned the keys to the front door and walked back into the silent shop, eager to get back to the giant instructional manual and looking forward to seeing what kind of nice people would come in today. He parked himself behind the counter and started reading the tome, making a hefty dent in the section that dealt with the differences in the colors and thicknesses of certain wires. This time around, the nicknames of the different wires were based on the names of Smurfs, an odd choice considering the fact that all The Smurfs (in comic or cartoon form) were generally the same color and same size, but he didn’t question the logic too much once the manual started getting down to the nitty gritty of what each wire’s function was. He thought that perhaps when he arrived home that evening, he would unscrew his old 70s radio tuner to see what kind of wires made it run. His best guess was two Papas, three –Ettes, a Brainy, a Vanity and an Azrael braided neatly with a Gargamel.
The first customers of the day arrived just as he finished the chapter and he was both pleased and nostalgic to watch as four twenty-somethings who were obviously a musical group came in. They’d read somewhere on the computer-internet that Werewolf Diskdrive had a rare and now-out-of-production metronome made by a long-out-of-business company in Japan called Personality. The four women (guitar, guitar, bass, keyboard, respectively) had first encountered one at their friend’s home studio and liked how the metronome swayed in and out of perfect time, slightly ahead or slightly behind the beat at any given moment. It was the most human feeling of all the digital time-keepers they’d tried, and they’d spent many hours in the van discussing the theory that their moderate success (in a good way) had a lot to do with the fact that most of the other bands they encountered quantized everything right on the beat.
Eric knew that he’d better find some kind of manifest or inventory list of what the shop had in stock if people were going to keep coming in so frequently looking for things like the Personality Metronome. Still, he walked over to where the Rocket Typewriter had been the day prior and, sure enough, there it was. He didn’t remember seeing it there yesterday, but again, the whole experience was still quite a blur. He brought it over to the counter, opened the classic looking, suitcase box it was built into and turned the black chicken-head knob to the “On” position. Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock it went. Wow, he thought. He closed his eyes in delight, like he’d just taken a bite of something incredibly and surprisingly delicious. The four women were smiling at him when he opened his eyes again. “Right?” all four of them said at the same time.
Once the band had paid for the metronome and left, he felt a bit fidgety, no doubt because he had been reminded of something precious from what seemed like another lifetime. It almost felt like when he had tried to quit a person or a food or a vice and had made it through a week, only to be cruelly tricked by his brain into indulging himself with whatever he was trying to quit. He sighed a very deep sigh, but picked up the giant manual to try and tackle another chapter.
Needless to say, it didn’t work very well because he kept doing that thing where you’re trying to read but your mind keeps wandering, so you keep reading the same sentence over and over again, until finally you force yourself to concentrate, taking the sentence very slowly until the words finally stop being words and morph into ideas. He knew he was on the clock and needed to absorb the entirety of the instructional manual, but his brief trip down metronome lane was making it too hard to concentrate, so he decided to close the book and try something else. Almost by reflex, he reached behind the counter for the racing LCD game with the werewolf on it and decided to try his luck again.
