Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin's raincoat. PEACE IS COMING--BE PREPARED. Most the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they are selling, Role-Reveral Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions--jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.
They went into a hole in the wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you're not talking about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he's a hard-on with a briefcase--you're talking about men on the eleven o'clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take take over a person's life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

I almost excerpted the part about Marvin having progessively worse-smelling BMs while traveling across Soviet Eastern Europe, but you know. This is more foretelling, considering it was copyrighted in 1997.