Noise Pollution #67

These Are The Words Of The Dying

This morning I got up, made myself presentable and drove a half hour to a job interview. It was my second interview with the company for a position where the Glassdoor estimate was $70k. During the relatively quick interview I was told “so this position starts at $15 an hour..” and that was the sum of my morning. I decided I’d be fucking charming and take the interview seriously regardless, though the first question was a “test” where they offered me a comfortable chair or an uncomfortable one. I’m told by choosing the stiff desk chair that I passed but who the fuck knows, the manager had her fucking nametag on upside down, which I mentioned as I was leaving.

It made me think of jobs passed, especially those times where a job was more a vehicle to buy as many CDs as possible, which thanks to the circle of life, is helping finance my middle age. That, and the charity of others, so thanks everyone.

I worked a series of shitty jobs during my high school and college years, mostly dish washing or busboy and I’ve talked about in ghosts of Noise Pollution past but I think the one that kind of set the pace for a lot of themes in my life would be when I did a stint at ACRAT, an indie record shop that eventually became a drug paraphenalia shop where you could buy glass dildos, meth and also some CDs.

Standing for “Atlantic City Records And Tapes”, ACRAT had been a local institution for decades before I’d ever stepped foot into it, sometime in 1994. I guess it had changed hands from the original owner and was purchased by a gentleman named Bill. Bill was a bit of a character as he was always on some kind of amphetemine and would get caught offering hitchhikers money to blow him. This is all shit I found out much later but honestly the signs were there. This isn’t just about Bill or any of the next few people I write about but a way to pay tribute to a south New Jersey institution before it’s completely forgotten.

Photo credits to jaytuffluck.blogspot.com, the only place that seemed to mourn ACRAT’s death in 2013. Maybe not “mourn” but at least mentioned it.

For the music this piece I wanted to take a few tracks off one of the coolest used items we got in during my tenure, that I never picked up and regret to this day: Wax Trax’s “Blackbox: Wax Traxs Records: The First 13 Years”, which I used to listen to constantly on my shifts. It held a lot of cool discoveries I obsessed over for a brief time but continue to come back to, that seem to go hand in hand with my time behind the counter there.

ACRAT was the first indie record store I really hung around. There was a smattering in Ocean City where I grew up, but that was mostly during the tourist season or ran slightly concurrent with when I’d badger my mom for rides off island to ACRAT. It’s where I learned about a lot of music, a bit about the industry and did the bulk of my shopping until I learned about distros or ditching school to take a bus to Philly.

Sometime in early 1998 Bill offered me a gig there. I don’t remember the exacts but I’m sure it was under the table and I was hardly supervised. I was able to listen to whatever I wanted, dress however I felt like and I was never really encouraged to be a good salesperson which, after many years in management, I can look back on as a mistake. But at the time? Fucking great.

By the time I joined there were two other employees besides myself; Scott, who I had known from the store for years and would leave to become my mailman-a gentleman who I hope the years have treated well, and Charlie, a street punk with a penchant for fucking under aged girls, just in case you thought that was a new thing in that scene. The focus was beginning to shift as Bill had realized there was more money in selling glassware used for recreational drug use than CDs, so my custom base was split about 50% between music lovers and 50% drug enjoyers, with the last batch split between weed and crack.

It was here that I learned how semantics worked, mostly as a way to sell something that would be used for illegal purposes, legally. If a customer called any of the glassware a “bong” or anything else than “water pipe” they were to be thrown out. The seriousness of this was driven home to me by the fact that we would have police parked in the lot next door who would routinely pull people over who left the shop, especially towards the end of my run.

But that’s not the only ethically questionable thing we did. ACRAT were also a notable source for bootleg CDs, which during the 1990s were an actual legal sorespot where the majors would send people scouring stores to either ask for or buy bootlegs to then have them raided and sued out of existence. We had dozens which were kept under the counter, the way many record stores would keep their nazi music they don’t want their leftist customers to know about. We had that, too. We also scalped tickets, though the markup wasn’t horrendous if I remember correctly, I think it was more a way to launder money than anything.

For a time I was given carte blanche to order from labels to build a metal section. Years earlier when Chuck Miller, who owned Temperance Records and would go on to be south Jersey hardcore’s Blake Judd, worked there the metal section was pretty well stocked but it withered after he left so Bill wanted to rebuild it. I had the business sense of a limp dick so I mostly wanted to order super underground titles from Moribund and Red Stream and completely ignored cornerstone titles, something I would remember a decade and a half later when I built the metal section at The Rock Shop.

Charlie would eventually be fired for some impropriety, either fucking a minor or stealing-I don’t remember. Bill found me at Orchard Studio when I was recording god knows what, some Krieg bullshit that never got released I’m sure, and asked me a series of questions that were increasingly paranoid. The next day I found out I was the only employee.

We would open on Easter, which wasn’t much of a retail day in the 90s, so the only kind of customers we would get would be the degenerates. I remember a man coming in with his friends and asking for our “finest crack pipe” and would not be swayed to use any terminology that wouldn’t get him or me locked up. Reading the room I figured he wasn’t law enforcement and if I kicked him out I’d probably get my ass kicked, so I sold him his precious to which he loudly sang from the counter to the parking lot “I got a new crack pipe! I got a new crack pipe!”

Another shining customer moment was a day I was wearing a Darkthrone shirt and a guy came in, to buy a pipe, and told me he used to listen to black metal “until I grew up” which I guess was a dig at me but hey, you’re buying a small glass pipe and fucking Chore Boy, I think I’ll be fine.

Around this time Bill had decided he was going to open MULTIPLE locations not just of ACRAT but also a candle business. So I was by myself constantly. That kind of lack of supervision in your very early 20s in an environment of decadence leads to apathy. The drug shit sold itself, as did the tickets, so there wasn’t much motivation for me to provide a winning customer experience. That’s what led to my getting fired.

Bill had become difficult to be around. His personal hygiene had something very off about it and his track suits always had a weird, sour odor to them. And he was constantly aggitated, yelling about this and that, or he would fucking fall asleep behind the counter. I’d never been around people who went the speedier route, so this was all new and somewhat confusing to me. I began to hunt for another job.

One night a guy came in and asked me the question that would haunt me as a record store employee (and some of you as well) for years: “where are the Beatles?” I was reading and told him they were in “B”. It turns out this was Bill’s new business partner and I was fired for not getting up and showing him. Keep in mind I was never told to do that kind of shit in the first place, I was supposed to keep the display cases where the bongs were clean, keep the money in check and not mention anything besides “tobacco”, customer service (which should have been common sense but fuck me) was not at front of mind.

For years after I got fired I would meet people who said “oh did you know your boss would try to pick up hitchikers to blow them?” which I would laugh off until I met someone who he actually asked. It was apparently an open secret Bill was into teenaged boys. This wasn’t the only thing I wasn’t entirely aware of.

ACRAT would eventually be raided for an operation happening in the back of the store regarding Bill’s business partner, who was selling meth out of the stockroom toilet. Apparently this was happening while I was employed there, which means I dodged a fucking bullet. It was also a foreshadowing on how this would all end.

The store closed down for a bit but eventually reopened. The area was changing and the strip mall we were located in was disintegrating. Record stores on the islands (and down the street) were opening and closing and the area was going through a bit of a rough patch since the Trump casinos closed. ACRAT’s final nail would be….synthetic gas station weed.

By the time they were selling gas station weed (and I’m sure off brand dick pills) the store was nothing like it used to be. Mostly a vehicle to sell pipes and what not, Bill expanded into glass blown dildos, a lot of hippy shit and just general junk. It was a head shop. Far cry from being the only record store in the area to support punk and metal in the 1990s.

Bill eventually had a stroke and died, leaving ACRAT to the wind. While it may not seem like I’m very complimentary of him, it’s the opposite. For years he provided a place where me and others like me could go and talk to other fans of the music, be turned on to new shit and feel like our shitty part of the world had a culture. He was also a pretty good boss, all things considered, with a well hidden compassionate side and a biting sense of humor. He also helped out other record stores, especially with legal and financial advice. A perfect study in duality, like a lot of us are.

Again credit to jaytuffluck.blogspot.com for the picture. The place next to the store was like seven different businesses just in my time there. God that strip mall sucked.