Dominic lost his right leg three years ago. Coincidentally it was about that same time K and I made a deliberate decision to visit Wyoming family every year for an extended period over the summer. Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger and one of the perils of having children later in life is the risk they’ll miss knowing extended family.
The men in this family have always been early risers. Maybe, as with so many things, it all started with Dad, spending so much time in the military and then running a house of five kids forty-five miles away from their school. Whatever the case may be, Dom came limping out of his bedroom and plopped down at the table. Dad and I were already on our second cup of coffee and the sun was just shaking the cobwebs.
“Where you off to, bud?” I said to Dom as I handed him a cup.
“Gotta take Bluey for a walk,” he responded as he took his cycle of medications.
Bluey was a rescue. Some wildly comic mix of corgi and heeler rolled up in an affable grumpy old sausage body. Bluey had three legs.
“Let’s talk Casper when you get back,” I said.
“Allright, but are you sure you don’t want to do Billings?” Dom said as he walked out the door.
I returned to my conversation with Dad as Dom walked out the door. Dammit, I’m going to Sonic Rainbow. I texted Patrick who’d recently moved to Grants Pass, Oregon, one of the five and my second in command. I’m the oldest, Patrick is 11 months younger than me.
“You ever been to Sonic Rainbow?”
Blue Dots
“I think I went there once with you back in the day, why aren’t you going to Billings?”
What the actual fuck here … these two taterheads have lived in Sheridan for this many years and they’ve never made it to Sonic Rainbow? I let it slide. He’s right, back in 08 we made the trek to Ernie November’s in Cheyenne for the first ever Record Store Day and shortly after that I dragged him to Sonic Rainbow.
“I’m buying you a t-shirt, is there anything you’re looking for?” my thumbs connecting to my brain and send.
Blue Dots
“If you can find it at a reasonable price, I’m looking for a copy of Pablo Hony.”
Normally Pat would have headed over to see Jesse at Time Machine Records. Since moving to Grants Pass he’s become a regular customer at the little record store and struck up a friendship with Jesse, owner of the store. For reasons unknown, the Radiohead record has eluded them, which says something. Time Machine Records is generally considered the best record store in the country that isn’t in a major city. Jesse is the hinge point, stocking the store with records he would listen to, with all the personality you’d want in a store run by its owner. But greatest record store not in a major city? Sonic Rainbow has some thoughts on that claim.
You ever been somewhere and you just knew instantly you were home? Maybe it was a new city or a new apartment, but somehow it just felt right? I have this theory, as much as we like to think we control things, we don’t — the universe has an incredible sense of humor. Not in any sort of ten commandments way, more in your gloriously off his rocker uncle in the basement playing with his revolutionary war toy soldiers. You’ve learned to ignore the occassional hoop and holler coming from below but every so often something catches your attention. We don’t pick places or things, they pick us and they find us at the right moment. Sonic Rainbow picked me.
Casper, Wyoming isn’t the sort of place most people would consider for a vacation. It’s north enough to be damn cold and east enough to be desolate. Cows intermixed with prongies and oil rigs dotting a landscape that resembles its residents — weathered and worn but built for the fight. Something truly strange took place in this northern Wyoming town as it clawed its way back from the devastating closure of the Amoco refinery in 1991 — an unlikely punk scene emerged. Suddenly, all those abandoned warehouses and other spaces became performance venues for the myriad of noisy punk bands formed by disaffected and bored youth. Into that landscape stepped Jude Carino, one half of the ownership team of Sonic Rainbow, with a dream. Sonic just celebrated their 30th anniversary as a Casper institution in 2025.
A whole lifetime ago I lived in Wyoming managing a newspaper, the Pine Bluffs Post, at the extreme southeast of the state. I was also a member of the Wyoming National Guard and made my way up to Casper once a month. Mere was one of my Soldiers with the unit. When she wasn’t busy college-ing or soldiering, she worked at Sonic Rainbow. We would, when circumstances allowed, ditch drill early and make our way to the record store at 140 S. Center St — her to connect with her music family, me to dig through crates. We’re talking sometime around 2009; vinyl was still a footnote to everyone beyond the die-hard and collectors. Within those walls, you could feel the family, the shared inside jokes, stories of everyone’s favorite obnoxious customer and of course what each of us was listening to at that moment. Mere turned me on to Volbeat and the Airborne Toxic Event because they were selling out at Sonic Rainbow. Some months later, Mere would find herself deployed with me to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — where we collected Fidel Castro bobbleheads, stories for the day job and sea glass because it was pretty — but that’s a song for another day.
Dom walked back in the door. We’d been talking about Bad Religion the day before — how Generator was his favorite album and mine was Recipe for Hate.
“Dude, I didn’t know “Portrait of Authority” was on Recipe for Hate,” Dom says as he tossed the leash down and Bluey scampered to her couch.
“Told you it was fuckin’ good,” I snapped back.
Dom took his hat off, rubbed his leg and sat down.
“So have you really never been to Sonic Rainbow?” I ask, somewhat incredulous.
To be fair, Dom was never much of a driver, and the loss of a limb wasn’t helping matters. He proudly wears a t-shirt that reads — don’t pull my leg, no really, it’ll come off. So I had to cut him some slack, just maybe not so much as to take his other leg.
“Never made it there, dude, always wanted to, just never did.”
“Cool,” I said, dropping the sigh of authority only an older brother can. “We’re going tomorrow and the monkeys are coming with us.”
Sheridan to Casper is just over a two-hour drive. I had wanted to get on the road around 8 a.m. as Sonic Rainbow opened around 10 and I didn’t want this to be a trip that went into the evening as I am wont to do. The monkeys had other plans so about 9 we pulled out of Sheridan and eased onto Interstate 90. As the miles unfolded Dom and I talked the talk of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in more than a year — how’s our brother Shaun doing, music, how are Mom and Dad doing, music, you hungry, yep I’m hungry, music — with an occasional interjection from the back seat as the boys lobbed tangents from underneath their headphones.
“I don’t know what Shaun’s going to do when Mom and Dad pass,” Dom says, talking about our somewhat troubled brother.
“Me either, man,” I sigh, knowing this problem we’ve debated for nearly twenty years wasn’t getting solved in Shaka, our 2016 Xterra. The monkey’s say it came from the name of a dragon in one of the books they were reading, I’ll allow it, but I prefer to think it’s after the warrior king.
Pulling off the interstate I tossed Dom my phone.
“Navigate me the last few miles,” I said to him.
“Cool. Turn left at the next light,” Dom replied.
I wasn’t expecting downtown Casper to be as busy as it was but we circled the block a few times looking for a place to park. We tumble out of the car, stretch and make our way down the street. It’s been nearly 15 years since the last time I walked this sidewalk, but there it is and except for a few new stickers on the door, it looks exactly the same.
“Hoooollllly Shit,” Dom exclaims as we walk down the narrow store doing an initial glance at the records in their crates. There’s the new releases, there’s the punk, there’s the metal. Tristan runs up to me and tugs at the bottom of my shirt.
“Daddy, where’s the kids’ section?”
Directing Tristan to the counter, I have him ask the clerk, who looks slightly taken aback by the question. He thinks for a second and then moves from behind the counter and directs Tristan and Lucien to a crate tucked between the soundtracks and the bargain bin. I chat the fella up as we walk to the back of the store.
“Been about 15 years since the last time I was here,” I say.
“Oh really, wow,” he says with that polite retail banter that’s hearing what you’re saying even if not completely interested.
“Yeah, one of my Soldiers, Meredith, used to work here years ago and we would come over after drill.”
He stops, sort of turns and looks at me with a quizzical expression — “Wait, Meredith?!”
“Yep — wait, did you know her?!” I replied.
“Oh hell yeah, that’s awesome — what’s she up to now?”
Now we’re friends.
Dom digging through the 7-inches, the monkeys working together to dig through the kids’ section, I shot Mere a text.
“Visiting fam in Wyo — made an intentional stop in Sonic Rainbow in honor of you and to add to my collection!”
Mere is a notoriously bad texter; it may take days for her to get back to a message, but it’s also totally understandable. An absolutely fabulous and committed full-time elementary school teacher and single mother to two young adult children, she has her hands full. Soon after we returned from Guantanamo she hightailed it out of Wyoming for the Pacific Northwest, a lifelong dream of hers. I stuff my phone back in my pocket only to immediately feel the vibration against my body.
“Oh wow! That’s awesome <3!”
I pop her a photo of me with Dom in the background deep in the hunt.
“Are you still there?!” and I can hear the little squee Mere gets in her voice when she’s excited.
Tristan is struggling to reach the crates and I can see his frustration growing. They may be twins but that’s where the similarities end. Lucien came into the world at 6 pounds, 15 ounces; Tristan 3 pounds, 9 ounces.
I reach down, grab around his waist, hoist him up, resting his body against my waist. Content, he starts flipping through the records. I hand Lucien my phone, knowing full well what I’m asking. At seven years old, Lucien considers himself a maestro at everything he touches and everything he touches becomes a process.
“Take a picture of us?” I ask him.
He enthusiastically agrees.
“Ok, hold on, move to the left Daddy, look down brother, a little to the right.”
“Take the damn picture, monkey!” I say, my eyes widening a little with exasperation.
“Fine,” he responds and the shutter drop sound of the phone camera is audible.
Tristan and I go back to the soundtracks … wait a minute, holy crap, is that what I think it is.
“Tristan, flip back two albums.”
“This one?”
We negotiate the too many forward too many back until I see what I thought I saw — Flash Gordon, original soundtrack by Queen.
“Holy crap,” I mutter as I pull it out and immediately add it to my must buy pile. You just don’t find this in the wild I think to myself.
I send Mere the picture of Tristan and me.
“Just got here, passing the torch.”
Heart emoji
“Who’s behind the counter? If it’s a tall skinny guy with an epic mustache, that’s Brandon and you can tell him I say hi 😜”
I yell down the store — “Hey brother, I’m talking to Meredith right now, what’s your name?”
I make out that he used to be a customer and started working there a couple years ago but his name is lost to distance and din.
“It’s apparently a customer who came in a lot when you worked here.”
“Joe Eason?”
I yell back down — “Did you say Joe?”
He mumbles something and again comprehension and hearing are beyond my reach.
“Fuck maybe…. I’m fuckin’ deaf, I think he said Stink and I’m not asking again! 🤣🤣🤣” I text back.
Sorry man, whatever your name is, now it’s Stink.
I begin my search in earnest; Flash Gordon tucked under my arm, I saddle up to the new arrivals. I pull a Franz Ferdinand and a Dave Brubeck live record. Dom walks up to me thrilled about a Cherry Poppin’ Daddies 7-inch he found. We both go back to our search as I set my collection down and flip. Dropkick Murphys’ “The Gang’s All Here” comes into view and I pull it out — I should get this one.
“Dude, check it out,” I say to Dom and I hand him the record — I just broke the first rule of record buying — never, under any circumstances, pass a record without laying claim.
“Oh, that’s awesome,” Dom exclaims, “I love this record.” As he slides it into his must buys.
Dammit. Well, my mistake. I go back to searching and hear an excited glee come from Dom. I flip around all wide-eyed and ready to be wowed.
“Dude! Flash Gordon! This is so coming home with me!”
“Whoa, man, that’s mine,” I snap back, genuine concern filling me — Dropkicks conceded, I am not losing this one.
“The hell it is, I found it,” Dom says.
“Yeah, you found it in my stack,” I say, pointing to the stack of records that are, admittedly, sitting with all of the other records. “Not even a just-got-hired knucklehead is going to stack Flash Gordon, Dave Brubeck and Franz Ferdinand together!”
We make posturing facial expressions at each other for a minute and he finally gives in.
“Fine.”
Flash Gordon is safely back in my pile — Gordon’s alive!
We both go back to our search and I come across Pablo Honey and quickly text Patrick — “Still want it?”
The phone rings. It’s Patrick.
“What’s up, bud?” I say.
“How much is it?”
I give him the price and we chat while he thinks about it.
“Yeah, go ahead and grab it for me, please.”
I drop the call from Oregon and show Dom Patrick’s new score.
“Oh I so want that one,” Dom exclaims.
“Sorry bro, just got off the phone with Pat, grabbing it for him.”
“Dammit!” Dom exclaims and I start making my way to the counter feeling like I’d pushed my luck enough for one day.
Lucien and Tristan are both looking at the sticker book at the counter as Stink rings up my haul.
“Dude, tell you what, I’m gonna give you the Flash Gordon record for two bucks,” Stink says.
I can’t even get out a thank you before I hear Dom.
“What?! I lost the record and now you’re getting a discount on it?! Why universe, why?!”
We all laugh as the records are put into a bag. Taking one last look behind the counter, trying to write every moment to memory, I see it and a laugh erupts from me.
“What?” Dom asks, very confused by the moment, and I point to the bookshelf behind the counter.
Tucked away in all of the knick-knacks and toys — a Fidel Castro bobblehead and the universe laughs.
