AMBASSADOR HOTEL
DEEP THROAT
FOREVERLAND
LITTLE HOUSE
ROADKILL DAN
SLIDE PROJECTORS
KIM BAUER
THE POLYPHONIC
SPREE
TEENAGE VIRGINS
STEVEN COJOCARU
MICHAEL JACKSON
DEATH OF CASSETTES
JACKASSES
UROLOGY MUSEUM
MISSING MUSIC
HERB RITTS
GUITAR HEAVEN
MORMON UNDERWEAR
BILL HANNA
JAKE RYAN
The Case of the Found CDs
Portrait of a Missing Music Lover
(The Washington Post | Feb. 3, 2002)
By Hank Stuever
For the purpose of a back-story that I do not have, I imagine it all starting with (let's say) a 1995 Honda Accord that might have been wedged into a Zone 1 parking spot on a residential Adams Morgan street, in the middle of the night. There is no noise.
I imagine it happening with a clean punch to the window, for him to reach in and unlock the driver's-side door. Someone rifling through the empty coffee cups and fringey half-rolls of Certs, then the glove compartment. The breath of the intruder is acrid and liquored. The thief takes a CD case that's on the floor by the passenger seat, and later realizes it's of no use to him, that he can't even sell the CDs without their original plastic boxes, so he tosses it, over his shoulder, two or three blocks later, walking away, pretending nothing happened. Nothing almost did.
The next part I didn't imagine: In chilly, early-morning darkness a few Wednesdays ago, Kathy Summers -- a 33-year-old mother of two, who has the kind of luxurious blond hair you see in shampoo commercial slo-mos -- set out for a jog with the family Labrador, Charley. She started in the alley behind her house in a row house maze between Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant. After a few steps she looked down and saw it.
A small, black, zippered compact-disc carrying case. She doesn't think it could have been there long, because drivers use the alley as a shortcut, and someone would have run right over it and smashed it. She put the CD case in her pocket and finished her run.
Later, at her dining room table, she opened it.
She flipped through the plastic sleeves.
The tiniest mysteries are sometimes the best ones.
CDs FOUND I found a CD case filled with CDs in the alley behind [deleted]. I am sure that whomever owns these is missing them. . . . Write me with a description of the case and the contents and I will be happy to make sure you get them back. -- Kathy [e-mail address follows]
Within a few hours, she received several answers.
People gave elaborate descriptions of CD cases and lists of the musicians and album titles inside, but they were all looking for the wrong CDs.
"I thought it was kind of sad," Kathy says, having agreed to meet with me and talk about the CDs, because it seems we both harbor a fascination for the benignly unknown. "All these people had lost music and had gone on thinking about it, hoping someone would find it. Some of them told me thank you anyway, for trying to find the owner, even if it wasn't theirs."
This happened to her once, too, in California, a million years ago. Someone stole some CDs out of her car while she was at the gym. Among the things she lost were recordings of her then-boyfriend's rock band, which no one would have wanted, which probably she wouldn't even want anymore, except that she does. Lose a collection of your favorite music, and even if you replace it, you never quite replace it. It's not just the CDs that were taken, it's the moment of owning them originally, of it being that exact combination of your favorites.
Example: "I'm sick of this tape," remarked a man I once knew about a self-made "mix" cassette he'd played to death, pushing the eject button and flinging it cavalierly out the car window as we sat in traffic on a tollway. He'd been drinking. About 20 minutes later, in a rare demonstration of regret, he wanted to drive back and find it. But we didn't. He'd remembered that on the second side was a song he could not replace, for reasons of rarity or format or, really, some sentimental whatever.
Consider the world and its disappeared music: I'm thinking here about the strange lot of vinyl LPs left on the sidewalk in a cardboard box on a Saturday afternoon last spring. (Whose? Why? I took three anyhow: Mel Torme, something Korean, and the Motels.) Or the cassette found under the seat of a newly purchased used car.
Or a discarded CD case sitting in your alley. Those who come upon it and examine it -- if they give it the slightest thought -- may very well tap into a part of you that you might or might not wish to reveal.
Here are 10 of the artists/titles of the 14 CDs in the case discovered by Kathy Summers. (The rest shall remain unnamed, on the chance that the rightful owner might read this and have a way to further prove they are his):
- Lou Reed, "Transformer"
- Elvis Costello, "Get Happy"
- The Beatles, "Revolver"
- The New York Dolls (eponymous)
- Mercury Rev, "See You on the Other Side"
- Talking Heads, "Speaking in Tongues"
- Guided by Voices, "Isolation Drills"
- The Clash, "London Calling"
- Bob Marley and the Wailers, "The Bob Marley Collection"
- Pete Yorn, "Music for the Morning After"
Kathy thinks the CDs belong to a white man.
What's more, Kathy thinks -- and I will break off from whatever objective goal I may still cling to at this point and heartily agree -- the CDs belong to a man in his mid- to late-thirties who might live around the neighborhood.
It feels like we've all seen him at parties, or waiting around at the 9:30 club -- guys exactly like him. We just know. We think he has a day job that pays the bills but isn't exactly the kind of job he thought he'd wind up having. I go a little further here: I think he's a bit of a smarty -- well-educated, and has one of those jobs that you might want to hear more about, if it weren't so boring. (World Bank.)
"I don't want to come off as sounding judgmental," Kathy worries. "But you can't help but sort of think of what he may be like, just from the kinds of CDs he was carrying around. I get a picture, almost."
And that's what this is about. The almost of him. This is why we're sitting in a coffeehouse on a Friday morning a week after Kathy placed the first notice in the Mount Pleasant Forum. We are coaxing these CDs to tell us a story.
It can't be helped. Music choice reveals the details we no longer talk about in correct company, such as race, income or gender. This is a world where everyone is special, an individual, untypified.
Which is fine, unless you're in a record store.
A record store is a truer America; your CD case is autobiographical.
It's not just one CD that forms our picture of him. Not just the Elvis Costello, not just the absence of any women artists. It's the Elvis Costello and the Lou Reed. It's the New York Dolls. It's the fact that the Dave Matthews Band is not there, nor any Jane's Addiction, because that's a different kind of guy on a finely gradated spectrum.
More data: It's the sampling of currently popular, latter-day artists set against the classic 1970s and '80s, in an excruciatingly certain way. It's how those CDs that are from the late '70s (the Clash, for example) did not really come into their own, did not start to pop up in the record collection of every guy at college, until about 1983, which is where we get his age. Imagine this man being frozen into a glacier. "Revolver," by the Beatles, is kind of the essential flint tool of his epoch, something he always carried with him in case he needed to make fire.
After she listened to some of the CDs (why not?), Kathy began to think that the owner views himself as being a little bit edgy, but he's also slowly becoming a relic from another time, the Reagan age.
We do have one glaring clue about who this fellow is: It's the latest album by a band called Guided by Voices, "Isolation Drills."
In the persnickety echelons of American small-time rock, right now, there is no more of a guy's band than Guided by Voices. Go to a Guided by Voices show and you will see our mystery man, and hundreds just like him, in a state of semi-ecstatic, three-chord derivative post-pop worship. Guided by Voices is to mid-thirties white guys what the Beatles were to 12-year-old girls in 1964. Women at Guided by Voices shows tend to be there with their boyfriends, politely and not entirely uncomfortably waiting for it to be over. (To see the inverse of this phenomenon, go to an Ani DiFranco show and watch the slight detachment of the men. Or a Sleater-Kinney show.)
Kathy thinks maybe he has blond streaky (kind of punkish) highlights in his hair.
She amends that. He did, but maybe not anymore. (I think he owns a guitar, but he keeps it under his bed. As for hair, I think he's losing it.)
How tall is he? (We think 5-9.) Does he work out? "He doesn't belong to a gym that he has to pay for," Kathy says. "I think he maybe rides a bike for exercise, like in Rock Creek Park. He doesn't have a gym body or anything like that."
I think he plays basketball sometimes, pickup games, that kind of thing.
"Yes, he plays basketball."
There is a girlfriend, we decided. Kathy presents a very bold theory: "There is a girlfriend, but it's not serious. He likes her. But if he could figure out a way to end it without . . . making her cry or hurting her, I think he probably would."
Sometimes he just wants to relax. "That's what the Bob Marley is for," Kathy says. "I would do the same thing, but a different Bob Marley album." ("Legend," she adds.)
Kathy wonders what someone would think if he found her CD case thrown in an alley. "What would I have in there? Oh gosh, let me think. U2 'October' and 'The Joshua Tree' would be in there." She thinks some more. There would be the singers Maxwell, and Seal, and so the finder might think . . . woman. (And calculate from there.)
"I used to be so into music, and knew all the bands," she says. "Basically as soon as I got pregnant I went to mommy land. I have two kids. We listen a lot to a CD called 'Soul.' It's from Pottery Barn."
She kind of winces when she realizes that. "Someone gave it to us," she explains. "My son likes it. It has James Brown on it . . . Tina Turner."
I tell her not to explain, it's perfectly okay.
We did decide that he's a nice enough guy. We like him and we're here to help, and we think he'll forgive us for reading too much into his CD case.
So until further evidence presents itself, we'd like everyone to keep an eye out for . . . an average-looking unmarried white guy, about 37, in a baseball cap, who works somewhere boring, and likes the Clash, and sometimes plays basketball with his friends. In other words, we are looking for a sizable demographic chunk of Northwest Washington and the close-in suburbs.
Kathy starts getting ready to leave the coffeehouse, to go pick up her kids.
"I was hoping you'd have an answer about what to do with these CDs, since I don't think I'm going to find him," Kathy says. "Should I put the ad out again?"
She has already said she will keep them until she finds the owner, which could be never, and probably won't listen to them again.
I propose she make a collage out of them, centered by a rough painting of a man of smudgy details. "Yes," she says. "Art!"
Leads are drying up. She sent her brother to talk to the kids in the group house down the street, and no one was missing any CDs. She thought about putting up a flier in the alley, in case it fell out of his backpack while he was biking along. She's still answering e-mail from people who are all looking for the wrong lost CDs.
That rootless feeling, the anomie of loss -- you almost wish for a song about it. Something fast and crunchy, with a nice bridge to a chorus about missing a small part of your heart.
