A Promise

I got several jobs after getting the car.  I don't know why.  I didn't need to.  Although my parents weren't rich, I was an only child and a little spoiled in a working class way, and I never had a need for money.  But I was sixteen and working seemed a privilege, I guess, and I could pick and choose what jobs I wanted to work. 

 My first job was a good one.  I had a friend whose parents owned a record shop and they took me on part time.  I felt pretty cool.  

At first, I worked the floor helping people find records and ringing up sales, but the owner had another business in back.  If you brought him a list of songs, he would make a tape of them for you.  It was illegal, but it brought in a lot of money, and it was there that he had me spending more and more of my time.  

Burning tapes from play lists was interesting at first.  The little shopping center had a diverse clientele, so I was burning songs I'd never heard before--country music, soul music--and it was here that I began to expand my musical taste.  

The bins of the store were a wonder of music to me.  I began listening to everything.  I was already losing interest in rock and roll and was fascinated by strange albums like the Mystic Strings Orchestra, which I burned onto an eight track and played in the car to annoy my friends.  I listened to the Harmonicats and other harmonica groups, and I especially liked to play the soundtrack from Elvis Presley's "Blue Hawaii."  

But the real score, the thing that really knocked me out, was bossa nova music (or what I called Brazillian Jazz).  The first time I heard Antonio Carlos Jobim, I went mad.  Quickly, I burned every one of his albums onto tape and spent my time driving and listening, transported to some place and time I'd only seen in movies.  Way led to way, of course, and I discovered the albums of Jao Gilberto.  When I heard "Girl from Ipanema" with Charlie Byrd and Jao's wife Astrud, I was done for.  I couldn't get the tune out of my head.  By day and by night, in class or at home in my bed, the sweet notes of that song accompanied me.  Astrud's voice was the voice of the unseen beauty for which I was searching.  A layer of that distant fog had been swept away.  I drove imaginary highways toward that voice on mountain sides overlooking bays and harbors, my Biscayne transformed into a foreign convertible in deep red or baby blue.  Somewhere, I knew, there was a girl waiting for me, not like the girls in my class or the women who peopled my neighborhood.  She was like the music, like something they had never heard of, something they had never seen.  I had not yet seen her, either, but I knew she was there, somewhere, still vague, but driving sometimes, her image began to take shape in the hazy distance, an outline, a shadow, a beckoning promise, a Holy Grail.