Her Fidelity

Track Three

So, no doubt you’re wondering what came first: the music, or the photographs of Robert Plant’s trouser snake. In my case, the music, but only by a day.

It was 2002. Unbeknownst to me when I woke up that morning, I was about to learn about rock music and the eroticism of an untamed monobrow. Both discoveries would alter the course of my life forever. On this particular day, I was bored at home, and rifling through my dad’s record collection, which I had previously written off because it was old and therefore excruciatingly daggy. There was no TLC anywhere in it. But Mum and Dad had bagsed the telly to watch reruns of Inspector Morse (1987–2000), so it was fated that I was to stumble across a battered copy of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (1973).

I didn’t know what it sounded like, but on the other hand I knew without looking what old boy Morse was up to (solving crimes in a curmudgeonly fashion). So I decided I had nothing to lose. I clumsily dropped the needle, not knowing what to expect but definitely not expecting to have a fire lit in my belly, a fire that even the painfully Caucasian dub of ‘D’yer Mak’er’ on the B-side couldn’t quench. All of a sudden, I found myself moving steadily down a path to destination: MUSIC. The journey was slow, because I had to save up my scant pocket money to buy expensive CD singles, so it wasn’t so much a rock’n’rollercoaster as one of those conveyor belts at the airport. Regardless, I was on my way. I rode it all the way to the council library where I borrowed an unauthorised book of Led Zeppelin photographs. Plant’s accentuated bulge was the first thing I noticed, but it left me cold. Clocking David Bowie’s codpiece in Labyrinth (1986) as a wide-eyed child meant that no other man’s pecker could compare. Instead, it was Jimmy Page that irrevocably ruined me. The words ‘double-necked guitar’ had never sounded more provocative. I pored over pictures of him onstage; his sweat-drenched hair, pouting lips, even – nay, especially – his unibrow making me feel, well, things. He looked like a tender lover, the kind of guy who would brush both your and his hair as foreplay. Of course, this was before I learned such fun trivia as Page’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend, and the cheerful anecdote involving the band molesting a groupie with a red snapper. Until such a day, though, I would renew my loan so many times that the librarian would eventually ask me if everything was okay at home.

All of this is to say that I was done for. I threw myself into research mode: borrowing biographies from the library, nicking Dad’s LPs, and weighing down my backpack with home-made mixed CDs to play in my Discman at every given opportunity.

As soon as I discovered Dusty’s, it immediately became my favourite indie record shop. Of course, in a one-horse town like Brisbane, I had limited choices, but still. Habitually visiting the shop after school and on weekends, I attempted to ingratiate myself with what I ambitiously considered to be my tribe. Like an Olympian in training, I was honing my skills in preparation for the opportunity of a lifetime: work experience, the one week where students experience the thrills of capitalism but with no financial recompense. So . . . I guess that’s technically socialism? I digress. When work experience week approached, I was ready.

Being accepted at Dusty’s to do work experience turned out to be a breeze. After all, I was unpaid labour, offering myself on a veritable platter. Getting hired afterwards would also be surprisingly easy, considering how few girls made the cut. Maybe I was brought on board because they deduced that I’d be hanging around regardless, so they may as well pay me. Either way, it turned out that getting in wasn’t the issue. Leaving . . . well, that would be another story.

For my first day of work experience, I wore my prized Ramones T-shirt. I’d bought it at Kmart but it bore an official merchandise tag. I’d also dyed my hair jet black and cut a stark, angular fringe. I was living my fantasy, hunty. Until a customer approached me to ask, apparently entirely rhetorically, if I really liked the Ramones or was just wearing the T-shirt. But I didn’t let it get me down. I committed to vacuuming, dusting, and picking Blu Tack and gum off the walls. Not that there was much in the way of bare wall space. Posters covered every conceivable surface. Even the countertop was three inches thick with laminated posters stuck one on top of the other. There was sticky dust caked to the outside of the air-con vents, out of which tendrils of hair limply wafted. Apparently the carpet used to be green but it was grey, even back then. It crunched underfoot as if it was covered in peanut shells. The empty beer bottles piled up in the overflowing trash cans behind the counter added to the impression that it was actually a bar. Occasionally, I’d shift a pile of CDs or records only to discover a discarded 7-Eleven sandwich or long-forgotten cup of coffee staring back at me. That’s not figurative language: I once stumbled across a half-eaten sausage roll so mouldy it had grown limbs, and was seconds away from starting up its own record shop. I find myself using past tense for these remembrances, but it would be just as accurate to replace all the instances of ‘was’ with ‘is’. Let’s do the time warp again.