Fifty percent of Shelly’s mail was from Japan. About 30 percent came from Scandinavia. Looking back, I marvel at how Shelly ran his business with faded Xeroxed catalogues, checks, and money orders, all of it conducted at a snail’s pace through the narrow slot of a P. O. Box, an unthinkable and completely impractical arrangement for a dealer of Shelly’s ilk today. One of Shelly’s devoted customers, a bar owner in Barcelona, was obsessed with Don Ho. The French wanted jazz ( je regrette). The Swedes loved surf music, and with all that ABBA right up to their eyebrows, I knew they’d love punk, but Shelly didn’t deal in punk. Punk was smut to him. So were rap, heavy metal, and disco. He had a few discriminating customers, that fellow in the Hague, for example, who couldn’t get enough Cannonball Adderley. There was the occasional letter in English, but the majority of the order forms were simply accompanied by money orders, personal checks, and the occasional international reply coupon or envelope of U. S. cash.
These orders were not hard to fill. Shelly shipped his vinyl discs, bubble-wrapped and cardboard slip-covered, in flat boxes. Most people ordered multiple records because the shipping price of five records was only nominally more than the cost of shipping one. The Japanese, who loved fifties and sixties Americana more than Americans did, would take almost anything from that period, especially if the singers had been TV or movie stars like Ricky Nelson, Jim Nabors, Dean Martin, or Dinah Shore.
I opened three to six envelopes a day. The postal clerks, all three of them, were delighted to hear that I represented Shelly Hubbard. I was treated as if I were royalty. “Hey, so where is the old fuss budget?”
“He had to go back to Alabama,” I explained.
“His mom?”
“Dad this time.”
“Oh no.” Their faces registered genuine concern. This was my first experience with post office emotion. I was impressed but not surprised by the scope of Shelly’s charm. The clerks stressed to me that whatever it was I might need that I should please let them know.
Week two watching Shelly’s business, I got a postcard from him:
Doctors say Dad will die soon, but they don’t know him. The track here is no good, even if they run all year. All the horses are lame. Birmingham’s not a llamadrome but a lame-o-drome. It’s like Return of the Mummy. I can’t play thousand-dollar claimers. How goes it with you?
By the end of the second week I’d run out of Don Ho. The Barcelona bar owner had made a run on me and his customers still wanted mo’ Ho. Shelly never said anything about replenishing stock, but he did say if I needed anything, petty cash was in the medicine cabinet. There was over four hundred dollars stuffed into the Band-Aid box, and since I was getting a 10 percent commission on all sales I didn’t mind funding some of the effort out of my own pocket.
Don Ho won’t be hard to find, I thought. In my mind was a picture of a thousand garage sales and in each a box full of Don Ho, but as I flipped through the garage-sale boxes I found no amiable Hawaiian faces. I saw a lot of Christmas albums, Chicago XVIII through XXI, Mantovani, One Hundred & One Strings Orchestra, the balladic efforts of an actor who played in a popular police drama, endless hairy dope children, polka players, dancing polyester schlockmeisters, cowboy crooners, blues stealers, and vacant clean-cut Dylan clones with Brylcreemed heads and big wooden guitars.
On Sunday I hit the swap meet at the Aero Drive-in in El Cajon and struck out there, too, though I loaded up on Elvis, Bobby, Ricky, Pat, Debbie, Dinah, and Doris. The Japanese, unlike their counterpart Scandinavians, worshiped blonds, even those who couldn’t sing. And no one was going to argue that this Loggins and Messina album was worth any more than seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, there were Portuguese teenagers who would pay seventeen dollars for a copy of Mother Lode, not including shipping, without batting an eye.
Which didn’t address the Don Ho desires of the Barcelona saloonkeeper, so on Monday I ventured to one of Shelly’s regular dealers, a used record store in Del Mar. I was over my head here. There were no bargains, no steals, no exploiting market differentials. The records were pricey, more the realm of coin collecting, where you could get what you wanted but had to pay the going rate. I wouldn’t net for Shelly or myself any kind of reasonable profit. And Don Ho should have been a 700 percent prospect, minimum. Nevertheless, I needed that Ho.
One of the clerks recognized me. “Hey, you’re Shelly’s buddy, right?
“That’s me. Willie Wihooley.” I put out my hand.
He nearly embraced me. “I’m Dirk,” he said. “Where’s the kid?”
“Had to go back to Alabama.” I gestured east with my thumb.
Dirk nodded for a while. “You don’t say?”
“I’m sort of running his business for him. His mother died and now his father is sick.”
“I heard about his mom.” He bit his lip. “Gee, that’s tough.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I got the best prices for you, man.” He clapped my shoulder. “You just tell me what you’re looking for. Everything’s 50 percent off for you.”
“Hey,
