Today my obsession is old country-and-western music. Already this morning I’ve crawled butt-up in a skirt across the filthy floor to retrieve some records that had fallen beneath the bins. But the first two thrift stores bottomed out, and I can feel my early-morning ardor fading. And this Unique, so busy by noon, has such a tiny record section.
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On a circuitous, halfhearted route to the records, I slow down to admire an old leather suitcase and a man walks smack into me. “Oh, excuse me,” I say. My fault, but as the man walks away I wonder if I felt him rub against me as he passed. Maybe it’s just the narrow aisles.
I take less than a split second to decide I’m not moving. No jerk-off is gonna scare me off–not when I’m scoring this hard. I move on to the second and third racks of records and find still more goodies. The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers! Mr. Man, just a few inches away, is rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. I’m flipping, flipping, flipping through the LPs. There’s just one rack left and he’s right in front of it.
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