I got paid on Fridays, and by Saturday afternoon, I was broke. That was the way of things. That was the rhythm. The week was a grind of homework and half-hearted dishwashing at the seafood place on Mass Ave, but then—salvation. Cash in my pocket, the whole city humming, the air alive with bus brakes and cigarette smoke and all the neon reflections of some impossible American dream. And I knew exactly where I was going.
Disc Diggers, Davis Square, my holy place. The kind of store that smelled like cardboard and stale incense, where the clerks looked like they’d been born behind the counter and judged you by the weight of your stack. They had these old wooden bins, these yellowing hand-written tags—"$4.99 Used,” “Imports,” “Bootlegs (Ask Joe).” If you wanted something new, something clean, you went to Newbury Comics like a tourist. But if you wanted the real thing, the half-forgotten, the stolen, the shrouded-in-static, you came here.
Fifteen bucks, burning a hole in my ripped Dickies. A king’s ransom. You could walk out of there with three, four albums if you played it right, if you could ignore the siren call of the $19.99 Velvet Underground live bootlegs with the tracklist written in smeared ballpoint pen.
The store was full of guys just like me, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, kids in army jackets and Sonic Youth T-shirts, flipping through the stacks like they were handling ancient manuscripts, like somewhere in there was the one record that was gonna change their whole goddamn life. Some tattooed guy with a neck like a tree trunk was having a very serious conversation with the clerk about whether the Oblivians were better than The Gories—"Nah, man, you don’t get it, Greg Cartwright was on a whole other level by then."
I found my way to the Used Punk and Garage bin. That was the good stuff. That was where you found the weirdos, the burned-out minor legends, the bands that only ever existed in shitty Xeroxed flyers and some guy’s memory of a basement show in ’91. And then—there it was. The Scientists – Blood Red River. I’d been looking for this. Australian swamp punk, all reverb and fuzz and bad intentions. Five bucks. Five. It went under my arm. Mine now.
Then came the real test—the wild card. The gamble. That one album you bought just because, something with a strange cover, a band you’d never heard of but had a name that sounded like a threat. The Necessary Evils – The Sicko Inside Me. The cover was a blurry black-and-white photo of some gaunt creep clutching a microphone like he was about to strangle it. The description on the back just said, “Sounds like a fever. Sounds like a murder.”
Perfect.
Eleven bucks down. Four left. Enough for a cheap used copy of Johnny Thunders – So Alone, thrown on top like a blessing.
I took my stack to the counter, trying to act casual as the clerk flipped through them with one hand, nodding, judging, approving. I felt like I’d passed some unspoken test. He slid them into a crinkled plastic bag and said, “Good haul, man.” And I floated out of there, high on the whole ritual, the whole goddamn sanctity of it.
Took the Red Line home, knees bouncing, clutching my bag like it was full of treasure. Couldn’t even wait—dug out my janky old Discman from my backpack, slipped in Blood Red River, pressed play.
And Jesus—the first song hit, all jagged, snarling guitar and some guy howling like he was stuck in a bad dream, and the train was rattling over the Charles, and the sky was going gold in that perfect, doomed, teenage way where you feel like you’ve just cracked some great cosmic joke that no one else will ever understand.
And I knew—I knew—this was all I’d ever need.
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