A Good Day's Work (14 page)

Dayna—tall, blond bangs, looking kind of corporate in her pea coat, scarf and boots—is already inside tidying up around the cash. She remembers her first record too: Elton John's “The Bitch Is Back”—a single in a cover showing the future Sir Elton in a big white boa—purchased in some long-forgotten mall chain store near her South Saskatoon home. “Every time we got our allowance we'd go there and buy a 45,” she says. “We'd be some of the few girls in the store. Then we'd go back to my house—which was one of those places where the kids would congregate; anytime somebody had some troubles they'd stay there—and trade them around.”

She's animated, effusive—the Type A yin to Stu's mellow yang. While her husband, humming, goes about his start-of-business duties, she tells me how her older sister turned her on
to Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Lighthouse and all the other seventies stuff. How by high school she was big into Cheap Trick and, in the eternal question of Beatles versus Rolling Stones, always came down more on the side of the Fab Four than the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band.

The information tumbles from her as she sits atop the shop's glass display counter, kicking her long legs like a kid as she talks, raising her voice a bit to be heard over the sprightly Diana Ross floating from the sound system. Dayna freely admits that she is restless by nature: the kind of girl about whom teachers used to say with a sigh of exasperation, “If only she applied herself.” Instead, she just wanted out of school, out of what then seemed like a provincial Prairie town. At fifteen she dreamed of moving to Los Angeles. Four years later she settled for following a sister to Toronto.

Now, back where she started, Dayna is fidgety for a reason. She's killed most of the morning picking up a total stranger—me—at the airport. The woman has places to be. Revenues at the Vinyl Diner have climbed every year except one since the place opened in 1996. Don't mistake this for the meteoric arc of a company in a growth industry. Along with putting in her hours at the shop, Dayna works for Canada Disc, an outfit that produces CDs and DVDs for companies and NGOs, and she's due there any minute. She likes the work and is good at it. It also has a decent benefits package.

That allows Stu to arrive at work in this blissful state. To run a business where his first daily task is to pay a single bill. He does so as a reminder: even though the worst shift at the record shop is better than the best day as an ad company exec—which is what he did for the first fifteen years of his
working life—this is still a commercial enterprise. The lights have to stay on. Inventory has to be purchased. Merchandise must be moved.

Stu pulls out a yellow file folder that contains scraps of paper covered with the scribbled names of albums and CDs and the people who desire them. He shifts his old-school invoice pad on the display case next to the pink-and-white calculator he uses to figure out the 10 percent provincial and federal sales taxes that apply in the province of Saskatchewan. Working one-handed, he puts out a box of vintage soul 45s. Then he slaps some old Nick Lowe—one of Dayna's favourites—into the sound system and cranks the music a little. He takes a sip of chai from his blue Motown Museum mug. He works his neck around a couple of times like an athlete loosening up. “Good morning. The Vinyl Diner,” he says when the phone rings. It is about 11:20. A happy man smiles a patient smile.

THE first record I bought, if memory serves, was a Booker T. and the MG's 45. I can't remember the B side, just the band's signature tune, “Time Is Tight,” driven by Booker T. Jones's Hammond organ line. That I can summon up this fact forty-some years later, when I have long forgotten, for instance, the name of the first girl I kissed, says something about vinyl and me. Because it's a complicated relationship. There's a long gap in my listening memory bank until the Queen Elizabeth High basketball locker room and Kool and the Gang, The O'Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Edwin Starr. Even then, I don't remember buying any records at all in the seventies
when the hard-core music nuts my age were getting hooked on vinyl. Somehow, somewhere, cassettes started appearing in cars and crappy tape decks. During one memorable summer a couple of buddies and I drove around in a blue Pinto listening to an R and B mixed tape, imagining that we lived in South Philly instead of South End Halifax. But I recall not a single album being in the house that year, or the disco years to come.

One day in 1987 my wife and I walked into an audio shop near our Toronto apartment. I emerged an hour later in a state of shock, the owner of my first record player at the age of thirty-one. Life had surely changed. Whenever possible I made a beeline down what was said to be the longest street in the world to hit the gargantuan Sam the Record Man outlet a few minutes from the newspaper where I worked. (Friends liked to drop by our apartment during this period because it was the only place they knew of where the Dylan records wouldn't be all scratched up.) Millions of people visited that store from its opening in 1961 to its closing in 2007, six years after Sam Sniderman's chain of record stores went bankrupt. We'd walk in the main entrance on Yonge or slip past the outdoor chess tables on Gould Street. Then, pulse quickening, we'd try to figure out where in the place, which to the eye had no discernible pattern, to start.

Here, out of necessity, I developed the manual dexterity to delicately feather LPs forward with middle and index fingers at the right pace to make a considered decision to pull one out and stack it on top of the next row or simply to move on. Browsing, I discovered, was as much a state of mind as a physical act. Sometimes I actually had a goal in my head. Mostly I wandered around.

Once we all did. We were a nation of browsers and mean-derers. Price was part of it. Real prosperity didn't come to this country until the post—Second World War years. Our parents, like their parents, didn't part with a dollar unless they got 101 cents' worth of value. A commercial purchase in those days signalled the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship between owner and object. Discarded laptop computers, ice cream makers and video game consuls didn't spill onto the street from the curb on municipal clean-up day. People didn't just throw stuff away in the limited-choice age before the global economy and big-box stores because what precisely would be the point? Things got patched, repaired and, if need be, completely rebuilt. Only when the inevitable could no longer be avoided would a replacement be purchased.

If your family was comfortable enough that it didn't have to make a choice between new shoes or keeping the heat on, shopping was a blast. Families donned their best clothes. They piled into their fin-backed cars. They made a night of it back when shopping was still something a person did in person rather than pointing and clicking. They took their time, luxuriating in the experience when department stores in Canadian cities seemed to represent the culmination of all of civilization until that point in time.

Who can blame them for being a little awed by the massive Simpson's in Toronto at Yonge and Queen, the colossal Woodward's at the corner of Hastings and Abbott Streets in Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg. These weren't airport-hangar-sized boxes inside of which people in sweats pushed around shopping carts. The six-storey art deco building that Scottish entrepreneur
Robert Simpson built was designed by the same architect who did Toronto's iconic Bloor Viaduct. The massive stores that Hudson's Bay built in the 1930s in Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and Winnipeg were fashioned in an “Edwardian classical” style. In 1930 T. Eaton and Company invited French designer Jacques Carlu to design interiors for its stores in Montreal and Toronto.

Those places demanded attention and commanded respect. I found the old floor plan for Simpson's flagship Toronto store, which in 1929 had expanded to nine floors. The lower level carried power tools, hardware, garden equipment and auto equipment, and had a coffee shop and lunch counter. along with a wig bar, a men's tailor, a smoke shop and a bakery shop. On the second floor you could get lingerie, luggage and ladies shoes, on the third furs, wigs and ladies hats. The fourth and fifth floors carried furniture and furnishings, the sixth was home to the bridal registry, the Elizabeth Arden Salon, and where a person got Wedgwood china, television sets and hearing aids. The seventh floor included an auditorium, the ninth a grill. The Arcadian Court, which occupied most of the eighth floor, is especially worth mentioning. When it opened in 1929—at the dawn of the Great Depression—the court could seat up to a thousand people on its main floor and mezzanine, making it, at the time, the largest department store restaurant in the world. The restaurant was soon said to be serving over a million meals a year. In 1962 the kitchen prided itself of being able to roast “six hundred birds … at one time.”

PLACES like that, of course, were for the big-city slickers. Most of us lived in towns where it was a big deal to walk through the door of a KMart, Woolco, Kresge's, Zellers or some other discount chain, where instead of the Arcadian Court's fabled chicken pot pie we grazed on hot hamburger sandwiches washed down with soda fountain Cokes. In 1967, as millionaires inside the Simpson's at Yonge and Queen bid on British masters in Sotheby's first auction outside of Great Britain, kids like me were booting it down to the neighbourhood drugstore, where the new
Doctor Strange
cost a dime as long as you had a pop bottle worth two cents for trade-in.

The rack of comics had a handwritten sign exhorting customers to read after they bought. But management wasn't serious. We were allowed, maybe even expected, to take our time, because the tempo to life was slower before seven-day workweeks. Time unspooled at a more leisurely pace when a phone call or even a letter—not some device vibrating in your pocket—was the only way for people to get in touch with you. It was, admittedly, kind of boring back in those days before speed dating and spinning classes, when the ferrets and Arctic owls of
Hinterland Who's Who
were enough to command a Canadian's attention on the television. But there was room within the spaces when life was slower. You could think a little. Civility was honoured. Human interaction took place when there was no need to find some out-to-pasture type and station him at the entrance to a vast shopping emporium with the spirit-sapping title of “greeter.”

It was that way in this country for a long time. Even, I recall, twenty-five years ago when I frequented the Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street in Toronto and they still
respected your right to loiter. There, a quarter of century ago, it was entirely conceivable that a tall guy with brown hair and glasses could have said “excuse me” so I'd stop clogging an aisle. Being Canadian I would have stepped aside, or at least turned sideways. Then Stu Cousins could have slipped by.

At that point in Stu's life Sarnia was history. So was Sudbury's Laurentian University, where he knocked off a sports administration degree (baseball being almost as much of a passion as music). A stint in Ottawa working for—and Dayna still finds this hilarious—the Canadian Amateur Wrestling Association followed. It wasn't the right fit. “I applied for jobs at fifteen or twenty ad agencies—I don't know why,” he says. In 1983 Stu moved to Toronto to work as an assistant media buyer, which he says meant “I bought air.”

He bounced around from big-name firm to big-name firm. But his heart wasn't really in it. In the mid-1980s, as much as today, what he really loved was music. Not playing it, although he had taken a little piano as a kid. Listening to it. Had ever since he'd lain on his back in his room in Sarnia and tuned into Top 40 stuff on CKLW on his transistor radio. To be fair, a little escapism was perhaps recommended if you are the son of chemical factory workers growing up in a city where a job for life with Dow was about all a fella could ask for. Stu paid for his university by working summers in “Chemical Valley.” He still remembers the summers of 1979–81 and the job he had breaking toxic, hardened aluminum chloride off the walls of a chemical facility. Afterward he would jump in his beater and crank Springsteen's
Darkness on the Edge of Town
up loud. Then he would drive around the southern Ontario back roads vowing to get the hell away from the life he feared awaited.