Bear's Lair

I was thinking about writing a book based on my years in the record industry. I'll make it more like my memoirs. To start it off, the first place I worked for was Record Haven on Pines Bld. in Pembroke Pines Florida, this store was in business since 1966. Record Haven was famous for 2 things:

1) A huge selection of bootleg vinyl

2) The worlds largest sellection of used 8-track tapes.

The store had racks and bins filled with 8-track carts. When the place got over run with the things, Irv would stuff the racks with them and nail a piece of plywood in the front of the rack to keep the junk from falling out.

The year was 1979 and I was in work experience in high school and needed a job. The 2 guys who worked there before me got fired for stealing and he was left with this mentally unbalanced girl. Most of the time when I shopped there, she was laying down on the trade 8-track racks complaining "my stomach hurts" while I combed though the used LP racks.

How I got the job.

One of these days she promised to drop me off since I did not have a driving licence, but she had to go to her house first. I was nervous at first but said "OK". To describe her, she had a dykeish quality to her and wore the same clothes day after day. Plus she smoked these cheap cigarettes that smelled like burning smoldering Everglades brush and she talked with a deep voice. This girl was affectionally known as "Skunkwoman" due to her long salt & pepper hair with a grey streak down the middle. She lived in a townhouse in North Miami which was a low income area with all these sleezy looking people around. Across the street from her lived this hippy chick and her Pakistani boyfriend, she had a son who was (in this girl's words) inbread, the offspring from her and a relatives liason (I guess it does'nt matter who you do it with, as long as the sex is good, but next time use birth control). I met her once, she seemed somewhat OK, the sterotypical acid damaged hippy airhead. The boyfriend made me feel unconfortable staring and scowling with these crazed eyes because I'm talking to his old lady, I'm sure if you handed him a sabre he would work over the neighborhood, he was one scary looking dude. Skunkwoman used to drive the kid around and crack jokes at his expence while listening to him explain how to play with the phones. He knew every phone number in the book, which ones to call for free long distance and test tones which were great for crank calls. This was going on for awhile but it went sour when she cracked a joke about "your hot mom", a night or two earlier Skunkwoman was confessing her bi-sexual experiences to the both of us. That night, the kid nailed a letter on her door mentioning "please end your love affair with my mother, please leave us alone" which set her off. The next thing you know was she burst though their front door and started wailing on the kid as he watched TV. Then the boyfriend started wailing on her, then she called for me to help. I stood there motionless thinking "I should have called home instead of having this flake drive me". When I walked in the door, all 3 had her dogpiled on the ground untill the police came. The North Miami police came and questioned everyone there including me about "what happened". After 3 hours of BS, she dropped me off yelling the entire time about "the psycho inbread kid" and "why did you stand there". I told her "why didn't you call him out and confront him singularly instead of storming in his house, use your brain". Hey! I'm just a 17 year old kid on a school night waiting to get dropped off, not to be pummeled by a crazy Pakistani who's 6' 5" and 300 pounds to same your dumb ass.

Two days later at Record Haven, I confronted Irv again for a job. The store was getting crank calls (the kid loved giving them) every couple of minutes and Skunkwoman was a screaming mess throwing 8-tracks and yelling. Irv looked at her and asked her to leave. He told her "you better go home and get your problems sorted out, you cannot bring them to the store". Then he looked at me and said "you want a job, you're hired". I was the quiet person that Irv liked and followed orders without a arguement. After a month Irv showed me the ropes on how the store worked, how to order, how to do inventory, and dealing with the 1-stops like MJS and Tone. When things started to roll, Irv made me the manager. Irv owned some condos on University drive and wanted to do mantenance work on them but had to leave the store, so Irv was there in the mornings and I was there from 2 o' clock on till closing. The only thing I did not do was the deposit drop which Irv did since I did not drive, Irv came by at closing to lock the store up and collect the recepts. Four months after work experience started, Mr. Verbecke (our work experience/DECA teacher) asked us each "how are you doing at your job?". One kid blurted out "I started sweeping floors and now I got promoted to cashier". The next one was like "at Winn-Dixie I started in produce and now I'm in the Deli"; "over at Taco Viva I started as a server and now I'm a cook" yada yada yada yada. Now it's my turn "OK you Michael, how did you progress at you job?", I sheepishly blurted "oh umm....I'm the manager of the store". No one belived me. Everyone there was eiter flipping burgers or bagging groceries and here I am running a record store at 17 (going on 18). Mr. Verbecke did not belive me so he went there and seen it for himself and confirmed it with Irv. It was known in class that I ran the store and was not a BS artist, all the students were trying to get me to sell them records at cost, or let them know when the new blockbusters are comming out. All this was not going to last. Since Record Haven was bootleg mecca, a new competetor on 441 called "Record Liquidators" wanted to be the big game. To get Irv out of the picture, Aaron called the RIAA and fingered all of Irv's bootleg distibutors. A few months after the call, Aaron's store got broken into and all of his bootlegs and rare wax was stolen. After the break-in, he moved to 167th street next to Peaches. Not long after his move, Aaron was busted for selling drug paraphenalia in North Miami Beach, it is illegal to sell it in North Miami but not in Broward where he was. That day when I arrived to work, Irv was scrambling around the store pulling all the bootlegs and boxing them after he got a phone call that tipped him off about Aaron's RIAA phone call. We got all the albums boxed up and out of the store in case if they paid us a visit. I think all this was getting to Irv, the RIAA call, the scene changing, the Quadrophenia style clashes between punks and stoners in the parking lot. In the spring of 1981, Irv sold the store to Lou who was the local rep for Polygram (and a lousy businessman to boot) so he can put the money into his condo. I talked to Lou and he wanted to make this "a family affair" with him and his wife but asked me "not to tell a soul because it will cost him his Polygram pention". Days after the purchase, Lou turns to store into a Polygram dump bin, half of the store's inventory was all Polygram product. Word got out anyway from label reps and Lou lost his pention, the dolt could not wait another month to dump his crap. When I got word I went to another record store that was opening up on 441 called "Vibrations 3", I talked to the manager there and he hired me on the spot, I never filled out a application if I remember correctly. Then Lou hired Skunkwoman to help his wife on the weekends.

The saga of Lou.....
To end the story of Record Haven, Lou killed it. First with a "Heavy Metal club" in which you pay $25 a year and you can get 15% off any metal record in the store. Lou did not know how to mark up a album. I tried to teach him he he would bellow "this is my store and I do things my way". He would mark a import $3 over what he paid for it so he would be cheaper than Open, or any of the other local shops. He lost his shirt on that and stopped it after a few months. The metal crowd was ready to kill him since he took their membership cash but refused to give the discounts. It would have been better for him to "do the math" first before starting this club since all the decent Metal records were either a import or a indie label release which cost more. I remeber him bragging about selling a full 50 count box of Metallica's "Kill 'Em All" in a weekend when it was on Megaforce. Since he pissed off the metal crowd after the demise of the "Heavy Metal Club" they went someplace else, probably to Zac's Rock Shoppe. I remember when the First Baptist Church of Taft street was protesting in the parking lot after Lou's wife sold a Venom album to a kid in the church's congregation, this is a crazy neo fascist church that burns records and books on a regular basis. They were anointing crosses on the windows and carrying on like there was no tomorrow over a Venom album. During this time, Skunkwoman was robbing him blind. She was stealing his rock cassettes and returning them to Jeffersons department store for cash refunds. Lou did a trade with some guy for country cassettes for the leftover metal albums. What a sucker! Most of them were non-returnable anyway. Since country albums have the shelf life of milk, those albums go out of print fast and most of them were from the late 70's and this was 1983. Lou's saviors at this time were the Seminole Indians who came in and started buying the country cassettes. Then he started ordering newer titles for the customers, and when he found his new niche he steps on his dick as usual. His wife made a crack when she was cashing them out like "you injuns are always crying that you're poor, you got more jack than me" when one of them handed her a Visa platinum card. One of my high school friends is a full blooded Iroquois and his mother attends the Seminole's tribal meetings. His Mother asked me "do you still work at Record Haven?", I responded "no, I left them ages ago after the place was sold". Then she said "the Native Americans are boycotting them after the owner's wife made a crack about us being poor injuns". What a schmoe. Lou's wife is like Roseanne, big and ugly and has a mouth to match. She likes to curse out and insult customers and not thinking about the aftershocks. With the Seminoles and metalheads gone you thing the USS Record Haven would sink, not yet. He opens up a rock and rap store in the late 80's in a conservative country yahoo redneck section known as Davie. That place went out with a wimper. Know your area before you open, rednecks don't listen to Run DMC, Slayer or Public Enemy, he would have had better luck selling off the country cassettes that he was ordering for the Seminoles that are now sitting dormat. I would go by there every couple of months just to see "what he's done now". He traded all the tapes for useless promo 45's, the stuff that looked like it was cleaned from the backroom of a AM station and dumpstered. He though he had treasure trove but it was trash. I felt bad after buying 3 45's from him since I creamed it out. A few months after that it was Sports memorbilia with a line on the floor separating the records from the jock junk. After that Pokemon cards. The saga came to a end when Lou's wife sent her son to the high school across the street from the store to sell pot. She and her son were busted and the store closed down. Then she died of cancer a year later. I was wondering if they were selling pot pay for her medical expenses or to keep the store afloat. Anyway it's gone but it was a blast while it lasted, right up to when Irv sold it.

One of my treasured mementos from my Record Haven days is a pile of 8-tracks. When Lou bought the store he was giving away all of the 8-track trade bin racks. I got one of them which weighed a ton. After I got it home I was wonering what tresures does it contain, so I took out a hammer and pulled off the plywood pannels in the front and it was chock full of old early 70's promo posters, Muntz 4-track carts, beat-up trade LP's, a broken Muntz 4-track player, crumbling brown paper shopping bags, and a bunch of other things that I can't remember.

I can write a book on Record Haven, so much freaky stuff happened in that place. Maybee later.