4
Two of the very first CDs I owned, unless my increasingly moth-ridden memory is betraying me, were Erasure’s greatest hits album
Pop! and the Pet Shop Boys’
Very, whose bright orange, Lego-like case I can still recall to this day. I ordered them in secret from a Columbia House catalog; their offer of what essentially amounted to free CDs before they made you pay up the nose for shit you didn’t want got me good. Remember that scam, where you started off by buying a handful of CDs for a penny?
For a middle schooler, their promise of shackling you to a lifetime of harassment from debt collection agencies felt like an answered prayer. I probably stole my dad’s credit card to pay for my habit after the initial outlay of a single cent, thus confining him and not me to that lifetime of harassment from debt collection agencies. (He never mentioned anything though, so I got away with it, and at any rate, it’s fine now because he’s dead!)