Later on, Pat opened the door of the listening booth, and they talked about his situation.
“Maybe Herb would hire you here,” Pat said. “You’re in the store all the time, you know the stock, and you know a lot about classical music.”
“I know where every record in the store is,” Nicholas said, excited at the idea.
“You’d have to wear a suit and tie.”
“I have a suit and tie,” Nicholas said.
Going to work for University Music at nineteen was probably the greatest move of his life, because it froze him into a mold that never broke, an egg that never opened – or at least did not open for twenty-five more years, an awfully long time for someone who had really never done anything but play in the parks of Berkeley, go to the Berkeley public schools, and spend Saturday afternoons at the kiddies” matinee at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue, where they showed a newsreel, a selected short subject, and two cartoons before the regular subject, all for eleven cents.
Working for University Music on Telegraph Avenue made him part of the Berkeley scene for decades to come and shut off all possibilities of growth or knowledge of any other life, any larger world. Nicholas had grown up in Berkeley and he remained in Berkeley, learning how to sell records and later how to buy records, how to interest customers in new artists, how to refuse taking back defective records, how to change the toilet paper roll in the bathroom behind the number three listening booth – it became his whole world: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Ella Mae Morse, Oklahoma, and later South Pacific, and “Open the Door, Richard” and “If I’d Known You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” He was behind the counter when Columbia brought out LP records. He was opening cartons from the distributors when Mario Lanza appeared, and he was checking inventory and back orders when Mario Lanza died. He personally sold five thousand copies of Jan Peerce’s “Bluebird of Happiness,” hating each copy. He was there when Capitol Records went into the classical music line and when their classical music line folded. He was always glad he had gone into the retail record business, because he loved classical music and loved being around records all the time, selling them to customers he personally knew and buying them at discount for his own collection; but he also hated the fact that he had gone into the record business because he realized the first day he was told to sweep the floor that he would be a semi-janitor, semi-clerk the rest of his life – he had the sarrie mixed attitude toward it he had had toward the university and toward his father. Also, he had the same mixed attitude toward Herb Jackman, his boss, who was married to Pat, an Irish girl. Pat was very pretty and a lot younger than Herb, and Nicholas had a heavy crush on her for years and years, up until the time they all became older and did a lot of drinking together at Hambone Kelley’s, a cabaret in El Cerrito that featured Lu Walters and his Dixieland jazz band.
I met Nicholas for the first time in 1951, after Lu Watters’s band had become Turk Murphy’s band and signed up with Columbia Records. Nicholas often came into the bookstore where I worked during his lunch hour, to browse among the used copies of Proust and Joyce and Kafka, the used textbooks the students at the university sold us after their courses – and their interest in literature – ended. Cut off from the university, Nicholas Brady bought the used textbooks from the poly sci and literature classes that he could never attend; he had quite a knowledge of English lit, and it wasn’t very long before we got to talking, became friends, and finally became roommates in an upstairs apartment in a brown shingle house on Bancroft Way, near his store and mine.
I had just sold my first science fiction story, to Tony Boucher at a magazine called Fantasy and Science Fiction, for $75, and was considering quitting my job as book clerk and becoming a full time writer, something I subsequently did. Science fiction writing became my career.
The first of Nicholas Brady’s paranormal experiences occurred at the house on Francisco Street where he lived for years; he and his wife, Rachel, bought the house for $3,750 when they first got married in 1953. The house was very old – one of the original Berkeley farmhouses -on a lot only thirty feet wide, with no garage, on a mud sill, the only heat being from the oven in the kitchen. His monthly payments were $27.50, which is why he stayed there so long.
I used to ask Nicholas why he never painted or repaired the house; the roof leaked and in wintertime during the heavy rains he and Rachel put out empty coffee cans to catch the water dripping everywhere. The house was an ugly peeling yellow.
“It would defeat the purpose of having such an inexpensive house,” Nicholas explained. He still spent most of his money on records. Rachel took courses at the University, in the political science department. I rarely found her home when I dropped by. Nicholas told me one time that his wife had a crush on a fellow student, who headed the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party just off campus. She resembled the other Berkeley girls I used to see: jeans, glasses, long dark hair, assertive loud voice, continually discussing politics. This, of course, was during the McCarthy period. Berkeley was becoming extremely political.
Nicholas had Wednesdays and Sundays off from work.
On Wednesday he was home alone. On Sunday both he and Rachel were home.
One Wednesday – this is not the paranormal experience – when Nicholas was home listening to Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony on his Magnavox phonograph, two FBI agents dropped by.
“Is Mrs Brady home?” they asked.They wore business suits and carried bulging briefcases. Nicholas thought they were insurance salesmen.
“What do you want from her?” he demanded with hostility. He imagined they were trying to sell her something.
The two agents exchanged glances and then presented Nicholas with their identification. Nicholas was filled with rage and terror. He started telling the two FBI agents, in a stammering voice, a joke he had read in Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker about two FBI agents who were checking up on a man, and, while interviewing a neighbor, the neighbor had said that the man listened to symphonies, and the agents asked suspiciously what language the symphonies were in.
The two agents standing on Nicholas’s front porch; on hearing his garbled version of the story, did not find it funny.
That wasn’t our office,” one of them said.
“Why don’t you talk to me? ” Nicholas demanded, protecting his wife.
Again the two FBI agents exchanged glances, nodded, and entered the house. Nicholas, in a state of terror, sat facing them, trying to quell his shaking.
“As you know,” the agent with the greater double chin explained, “it is our job to protect the liberties of American citizens from totalitarian intrusion. We never investigate legitimate political parties such as the Democratic or Republican parties, which are bona fide political parties under American law.” He then began to talk about the Socialist Workers Party, which, he explained to Nicholas, was not a legitimate political party but a Communist organization devoted to violent revolution at the expense of American liberties.
Nicholas knew all that. He kept silent, however.
“And your wife,” the other agent said, “could be of use to us, since she belongs to the student corps of the SWP, in reporting who attends their meetings and what is said there.” Both agents looked expectantly at Nicholas.
“I’ll have to discuss this with Rachel,” Nicholas said. “When she comes home.”
“Are you engaged in political activity, Mr Brady?” the agent with the greater double chin asked him. He had a notebook before him and a fountain pen. The two agents had propped one of their briefcases between Nicholas and them; he saw a square object bulging within it and knew he was being taped.
“No,” Nicholas said, truthfully. All he did was listen to exotic rare foreign vocal records, especially those of Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, and Gerhard Husch.
“Would you like to be?” the lesser agent asked.
“Um,” Nicholas said.
“You’re familiar with the International People’s Party,” the greater agent said. “Had you ever considered attending meetings of it? They hold them about a block from here, on the other side of San Pablo Avenue.”
“We could use someone in there at the local group meeting,” the lesser agent said. “Are you interested?”
“We can finance you,” his colleague added.
Nicholas blinked, gulped, and then gave the first speech of his life. The agents were not pleased, but they listened.