Featured Essay: The Night I traded Dinner for a Broken Turntable

by Carena Josep

I was so hungry that night that it tore my ribs and banged into my ears. I had lost my purse, and even the little change I possessed would have done to procure me a plain supper or, what I was soon to find, a dream. Months had passed, and I was piling up records which I could not play; each sleeve I had was, meanwhile, a vow of silence I was going to say. On the one hand, I believed that I should not have been silent the previous night anymore.

 The neon streetlights were shining, and it smelt like corn was roasting. Venders Street: sellers were screaming their prices. Traffic noise and the music from nearby establishments, such as the cafe, smothered the vendors. I was wandering aimlessly along until I reached a small stand, a ragtime stand, a ragtime motley of radios, choked cords, and fragmented speakers, and in the corner, as you would say, asleep, a turntable.

The salesman was an anemic gentleman with shiny glassy eyes. He noticed my look of wonder, and the speakers did as well, smiling at me knowingly.

Love needs the tapped platter, the dusted platter, and doesn’t ask for anything but to stare.

“How much?” I questioned, begged, and questioned; I was now almost beginning to be afraid.

“Two fifty.”

I separated the change and found that there were two dollars and a few useless coins in it. I told him that was all I had. He shrugged, stared at me for a long second and then nodded. “For you,  two even.”

I parted with my coins, with the weight of my hunger on me, and placed the turntable on my arm. The bag holding the turntable was made of plastic; on one side it had two holes that were torn, and with each step that I made in the direction of home, the bag was hitting my ribs like a heartbeat.

By the time I got into my tiny room, with unsteady piles of records and things that had belonged to more than one owner, I took the turntable and put it on my desk as a sacrifice. I scuffled off the dust motes and got the light. As I activated the hand motor, it made a rattling sound, indicating that something within was not amused by the disturbance. However, the dish rotated slowly and jerkily. Hope flickered.

I wore out a 45, which had been months in the bank: What Gaye Says. The toner arm swayed around slowly and dropped. The needle scraped. Then there was a sound, deep in the silence, a tremulous silence, a sound, unsystematized, gentle, half stifled by the sound. In the chaos of disorderly interference, Marvin bled, broke and struggled to survive. The song seemed to painfully stretch, groaning and squealing as it emerged from the silence to reach me.

“What’s going on…”

Crack, crack, crack, and breathe, and crack. Then there was a hiss, and the words were lost. I bent forward, wishing them to stay there. At that point, I discovered that I had not really bought a turntable, but I had learnt how to crack it, so I became patient and persistent. That was not perfection, but it was an attempt to hear the beauty.

During the following weeks, I tried to correct it.

 I picked out components from the ancient radios and borrowed W’s tools, but I was not familiar with them. I have viewed tutorials on the process of refitting a tonearm and cleaning wire oxidation. Any little gain was a triumph. After spending a long time finding a substitute needle in a flea market, the seller informed me, “Should it still play, it is worth saving. I did not know whether he was referring to the record or me.

The music was more and more distinct with every effort. The bass began to vibrate below the distortion. Their drums rustled their rhythm. And when Marvin finally sang a song at once, I sat in awe of fear that I should breathe, lest I should bring a curse upon the magic. I had never heard such lively music, not that it was excellent, but that I had had difficulty listening to it.

That turntable, which had been broken, was my teacher. It taught me not to hear what the noise is about, to see the beauty in things that hardly hold together. I started to feel the tempered warmth of analogue sound I had never had before: a slight hiss preceding the analogue sound, the hiss preceding the start of the song, the hiss preceding the song and pop, and the song and pop heralding the lapse of time. Vinyl flaunts its flaws, which are life’s imprints. In its fragility, I saw my own.

I understood that hunger does not just concern food. It is the feeling of missing togetherness and a sense of meaning, which makes the silence tolerable. In the evening, I fancied that I was selling dinner to music. Actually, I was satisfying another kind of appetite, the pop-heralding appetite, the one that must discover an echo in shattered things.

Months later, I was able to get a finer turntable. Innovative, smooth, immaculate. It was playing all records perfectly but somehow, I had lost the old ones; I had altered my mind, which made me forget the wobbling, the wavering, the feeling, the hum, the appetite, and the sense that we were both trying to keep one another alive. I preserved it as a memory, a reminder, not of beauty, but of how beauty is sometimes ugly and how virtue and beauty are unsuccessful.

 Whenever I hear What’s Going On, I hear the memories of the very first evening with it: the food, the people in the street and the shivering start of a broken motor. I listen to the heartbeat of the street, and this experience has caused me to learn how to listen. Vinyl can transform you into both a restorer and a witness. It reminds you more of beauty than comfort, highlighting the labored heart that goes into every sound. It is a reminder that, like labor and life, music is something we continue to rescue time and again until it sings.

Carena Joseph is a writer and a person who has been collecting records her whole life, and in her opinion every record has two stories: the story pressed on the vinyl and the story we have as we listen. Her essays tend to touch on memories, imperfections, and the emotional structure of music. She grew up in a world of the little markets and used second-hand stores, and so she was taught to judge value not by the price but by persistence. When she’s not rushing to the next record with a scarred sleeve on her arm, she writes about the beauty of objects that are held together with bare hands. The result is her debut at I Have That on Vinyl.