Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (5 page)

love makes me do foolish things

OCTOBER 1987

T
his was my very first breakup tape,
slapped together in the aftermath of my very first breakup. I was twenty-one. My social skills had not advanced all that much since my
Roller Boogie
days, I’m sad to say. I was just one of those graves that pretty girls make. I wore black every day, and grooved to the morose strains of Lou Reed and Richard Thompson and Tom Verlaine. I was a senior at Yale, plugged in to my Walkman, still hiding from the world most of the time. In fact, until I met my first girlfriend, Maria, I was a safe bet to graduate from college without ever having kissed a woman, a fate spared me only when Maria launched a tenacious attack on my innocence not unlike the one led by Charles Bronson in the 1970s TV movie
Raid on Entebbe
.

It was a spring romance that lasted, blissfully, all summer long. Maria was obsessed with R.E.M. and Sonic Youth; she also taught me to wear Converse high-tops, smoked and drank, and did all kinds of wild shit that was new to me. We spent the summer sitting in her room, under her Michael Stipe posters, listening to R.E.M. bootlegs. I DJ’d the all-night radio show on WYBC, so Maria would always call me on the air at 4
A.M.
to request the Modern Lovers’ “Hospital.”

When we broke up, I was devastated. I made myself this breakup tape as a sound track for my afternoon walks through the city. It includes lots of sad guitar dudes and soul singers, especially Martha and the Vandellas, sobbing their way through “Love (Makes Me Do Foolish Things).” The opening drums of that lost Motown gem still make me gasp, ushering me into Martha’s lonely room, where she doesn’t even have any Vandellas to keep her company, just weepy piano and strings and drums. Martha sits there on the edge of her bed, praying to hear that knock on her door, except she knows she will never hear that knock . . . no
more
! I would rewind and play that song over and over, certain that if I could only hear all the way through Martha’s voice to the core of her soul I, too, could suffer gorgeously enough to be one of her Vandellas.

Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.

My chick friends were always trying to find girls for me. They were my mentors in girl vanity, and after growing up with three sisters, I was a more than capable student. My chick friends got tired of their boyfriends pretty fast, but they didn’t get tired of me; I nursed them through romantic crises and answered their tearful late-night calls. I knew the hell they wreaked on their boyfriends, and I thought it was funny—man, their boyfriends were suckers. I was too smart for such things. I lived by the code of Emersonian self-reliance. “Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee,” Emerson thundered. “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”

I was young, idealistic, and reluctant to learn any of the ways of the world, even when it would have been to my advantage to do so. I was wasted, not on drugs, but on something possibly worse. I read an aphorism of Nietzsche’s, in which he says, “The man who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” I laughed and said, Totally. That describes everybody I know, except me. It was time for a change.

But how do you start getting out of your room? I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, “The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.” My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,” and I didn’t want to waste mine.

I felt like I was strong enough for a girl, but made for a woman. Yet I had no idea how to start looking to find this woman. Fortunately, she was looking for me.

Maria was a cool, punk-rock girl from Georgia who worked at the Waldenbooks in the Chapel Square Mall. She dyed her hair red and played bass in a hardcore band, the Uncalled Four. She’d dropped out of high school and taken the bus to New Haven to be with a boy. They broke up as soon as she arrived, but she stayed around town and got a job. One night, she spotted me at a hardcore show and smelled blood. She invited me over to her place. The first things I noticed were the Michael Stipe poster on the wall, her boombox, and loads of tapes. Then I noticed that she had no furniture except a mattress on the floor. You know the Beatles song where the girl invites John to sit down, except she doesn’t have a chair? This girl didn’t even have a
rug
. She put on a tape from her vast collection of R.E.M. bootlegs, a rehearsal tape from 1982. Michael Stipe started to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The room began to spin.

I couldn’t believe she liked me. I couldn’t believe how much I liked her. She told me I looked like Dr. Robert from the Blow Monkeys. No girl ever told me I looked like
anything
before. In the evenings, I would get off work at the library and take the bus up Whalley Avenue to her house, where we’d order pizza and watch MTV. It was a great summer for bittersweet songs about the pangs of first love: Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” Simply Red’s “The Right Thing,” Eddie Money’s “Endless Nights,” Janet Jackson’s “Let’s Wait Awhile,” Mötley Cruë’s “Too Young to Fall in Love,” Sheila E.’s “Koo Koo,” Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me.”

It was the first time I had ever been in love. Suddenly, I felt like part of the world. I had never met a southern girl before, so Maria was full of surprises: She baked pies, she fried catfish, she pronounced “umbrella” funny, she called me “baby” totally unironically. I wondered, Where have southern girls been all my life? She was also an avid shoplifter. She told me it was easy—the managers at chain stores were not allowed to interfere with shoplifters because the corporate bosses were afraid of lawsuits, so she could walk right through the scanners with her arms full of goodies and they wouldn’t do a thing to stop her. All my female friends assured me this was a lie. Maria invited me to watch her shoplift but I was too nervous to make a good wheelman.

She’d keep me on the phone for hours during my all-night radio shows, and I would play songs for her, improvising a mix tape on the air. If anybody else was listening, which I doubt, they probably had no idea what was going on. Maybe indie rock circa ’87 was not the most romantic music—boys in basements screaming for other boys in basements—and yet there was plenty of romance to be heard in that, if you were listening. And we were. I had been to lots of rock shows, but I had never held hands at one. Maria used to play me R.E.M.’s live version of “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” recorded the same day she got off the bus in New Haven. We listened to Prince’s
Sign ‘O’ the Times
. (Everybody’s favorite Prince album must be the first one they heard while actually making out.) I made her a tape called
Cic-cone Island Baby
. She made me a tape called
Jumpin’ Sylvia Plath, It’s a Gas Gas Gas
. It was love, obviously.

Maria was a door-slammer, big on stomping out of rooms and expecting me to follow. I was new at this boyfriend stuff, so I didn’t question her way of doing things. Her roommate hated me (I used too many paper towels), and they had screaming fights about me, which was hot. But things started to wobble around the time R.E.M. put out a truly wretched album called
Document
, the one that made her reconsider whether she could continue to worship Michael Stipe. I blamed R.E.M. for not saving us by making a better record. That, I realize now, was unfair.

It was young. It was true. It lasted about six months. October first was the end of the world as I knew it. She called to say it was over. Well, not in those words—what she said was, “I’m fed up to my back teeth with you.” I sat on my bed and looked out at the city lights. My clock radio was playing Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” I realized I would never get to put this song on a tape for Maria, and my face began to crumple. She gave me a farewell gift, a 1988 Bon Jovi calendar shoplifted from Sam Goody, which was a nice gesture, but that was the end. I felt sad when her friends stopped saying hi to me at rock shows, but I didn’t realize that’s just the way it rolls. I loathed myself for secretly wishing I’d taped her records before she ditched me.

At least I had Martha and the Vandellas to guide me through the experience. They didn’t have any good news, but they sure didn’t lie. Love makes me do foolish things. I was lucky to learn early.

big star: for renée

OCTOBER 1989

A
s far as mix tapes go,
Big Star: For Renée is totally unimaginative. It’s basically just one complete album on each side of a tape. But this is the tape that changed everything. Everything in my life comes directly from this Maxell XLII crush tape, made on October 10,1989, for Renée.

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris at a table in the back when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s
Radio City
. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song—the acoustic ballad “Thirteen.” She’d never heard their third album,
Sister Lovers
. So, naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”

As Renée left the bar, I asked my friend, “What was that girl’s name again?”

“Renée.”

“She’s really beautiful.”

“Uh-huh. And there’s her boyfriend.”

The boyfriend’s name was Jimm, and he really did spell his name with two M’s—a dealbreaker if I ever heard one. Renée had actually just broken up with the guy that night, but I didn’t know that yet. So I just cursed my luck, and crushed out on her from afar. I memorized her teaching schedule and hung around the English department whenever she had office hours, hoping to run into her in the hallway. I wrote poems about her. I made her this tape and slipped it into her mailbox. I just taped my two favorite Big Star albums and filled up the spaces at the end of the tape with other songs I liked, hoping it would impress her. How cool was this girl? She was an Appalachian country girl from southwestern Virginia. She had big, curly brown hair, little round glasses, and a girlish drawl. I just knew her favorite Go-Go was Jane Wiedlin.

One Saturday night we met at a party and danced to a few B-52’s songs. Like all southern girls, Renée had an intense relationship with the first three B-52’s albums. “All girls are either Kate girls or Cindy girls,” she told me. “Like how boys are either Beatles or Stones boys. You like them both, but there’s only one who’s totally yours.” Her B-52 idol was Kate, the brunette with the auburn melancholy in her voice. I wanted to stay all night and keep talking to Renée about the B-52’s, but my ride wanted to go early. So I left her stranded and went home to pace up and down the parking lot outside the subdivision, shivering in the cold with my Walkman, listening to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” The ache in his voice summed up my mood, as he sang about a girl driving right past him, the kind of car that doesn’t pass you every day.

Renée and I ran into each other again when the poet John Ashbery came to town for a reading. He was one of my idols, the man who wrote
The Double Dream of Spring
. I got to meet him after the reading, but I blew it. A bunch of us were hovering around, trying to think of clever things to say. He’d just read his poem “The Songs We Know Best” and was explaining that he’d written it to go with the melody of Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited” because the song was all over the radio and he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. So I asked if he was a fan of Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” which of course has the same melody as “Reunited.” He smiled graciously and said no, he wasn’t, but that he liked George Michael. Then he went back to saying nothing at all and my friends were furious and I was mortified and I will go to my grave wondering why I spent my one moment in the presence of this great man discussing Wham! (and not even a
good
Wham! song), but I guess that’s the double dream of dipshit I am.

Afterward I stood at the bar, drowning my sorrows. Renée came up to kick my shins and bum a cigarette. She mentioned that her birthday was coming up in a few days. As always, there were a few other boys from her fan club hovering around, so we all went out for a late-night tour of Charlottesville’s cheaper drinking establishments. I squeezed into a booth next to her and we talked about music. She told me you can sing the
Beverly Hillbillies
theme to the tune of R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion.” That was it, basically; as soon as she started to sing “Talk About the Clampetts,” any thought I had of not falling in love with her went down in some serious
Towering Inferno
flames. It was over. I was over.

We hung out again the next night—Renée showed up with another gang of suitor boys, all giving her puppy-dog looks, but I wasn’t too worried about outlasting them. Joe passed out around midnight. Paul staggered out a few minutes later. Steve’s offer to help walk Renée home lasted as long as it took for him to smash into the wall twice on his way down the stairs. I was the last man standing. Renée led me to her place, a couple of miles away. It was so dark I couldn’t see her at all while we walked; I just followed her voice. I spent the night on her couch, sleeping under a huge portrait of her painted by some sweet indie-rock boy back in Roanoke. I was a little sad about being on the couch, but I was going for the long bomb. Her incredibly annoying cat, Molly, kept jumping on my face all night. I woke up at dawn and lay there drowsing, feeling a little less lonely than I had the morning before, waiting for this girl to make some noise.

Renée had Saturday errands to run, and I invited myself along to keep her company. We drove all around Charlottesville in the afternoon sun. We listened to a mix tape another guy had made her, back in Roanoke. It had some lame indie rock, some decent indie rock, and one really great song: Flatt & Scruggs doing their bluegrass version of “Ode to Billie Joe.” She told me she’d thrown a Billie Joe party that summer. “I had it on the third of June,” she crowed. “You know, the day the song takes place. I served all the food they eat in the song: black-eyed peas, biscuits, apple pie.”

We couldn’t think of anything else to talk about, so we just drove in silence until she dropped me off at my place. I spent the rest of the day making a birthday tape for her, mostly Senegalese acoustic music by Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, just in case she smoked pot. I started to add Bob Dylan’s “I Want You,” but then thought better of it. Instead, I added Scrawl’s “Breaker Breaker,” to show off my affinity with feminist trucker punk songs, and the Neville Brothers, to make her think maybe
I
smoked pot.

We met up at a dive called the Garrett on Monday, the night before her birthday. It was not a romantic bar—the carpet was so pot-soaked you got a buzz walking to the bathroom—but it offered privacy, cheap liquor, a cigarette machine that was easy to tilt, and pool tables to distract pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. I’d spent the day writing a sonnet sequence for her. I’m not sure what I was thinking—I mean, I used the word “catachresis” in the first line. But I was certain my prosodic ingenuity would melt her heart for good. I used one of my favorite rhyme schemes—stolen from the James Merrill poem “The Octopus,” though he’d stolen it himself, from W. H. Auden’s
The Sea and the Mirror
—rhyming the first syllable of a trochee with the final syllable in the next line. How could she resist?

At midnight, I gave her the poems.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Well, the last word in the first line is a trochee, and it rhymes with the end of the next line. So ‘catachresis’ rhymes with ‘fleece.’”

“No, what’s going
on
?”

“In a catachresis?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“Uh . . . I have a big crush on you.”

“
Oooooh
,” she said. She smiled and let the pages drop on the table. She relaxed in front of my eyes. “So how did it start?”

“Well, I think you’re really beautiful.”

She relaxed a lot more—in fact, her face changed shape a little, got a little more round, as if her jaw had unclenched. I didn’t know whether that was a good sign or not, but I couldn’t shut up yet.

“I always thought so. Right away, when I saw you.”

“The amazing black dress,” she nodded. “I was wearing that when I met you. There’s, uh, a lot of
me
in that dress. My Fuck the Hostess dress. It’s a real ‘drop to your knees and say amen’ dress.”

“I noticed. It’s gotten worse since then.”

“I know.” She lit one of my Dunhills. I had never seen her so comfortable. “I was on the phone with my friend Merit tonight, and she was like, Does Rob like you? And I said, I don’t know, he made me a tape and he didn’t call and then we danced together and then he left and called and left a message but didn’t call after that. And Merit was like, So, do you like Rob?”

I couldn’t believe she was making me do this. “So, do you?”

She smiled. “I don’t know. He’s not my type, but I really like him.” She told me her type was farm boys with broad shoulders, football players. She took her time smoking that cigarette. She still had most of her beer left and she was in no hurry at all. I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.

“I don’t know what your type is. I don’t know what your deal is. I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in your life, that’s it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don’t have any room, I would like to be your friend. Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.”

“But you’d rather be a boyfriend than a friend?”

“Given the choice. No, not given the choice. That’s what I want.”

“Where are you parked?”

“I walked.”

“What’s a catachresis?”

“A rhetorical inversion of tense, kind of like a transumption. Let’s go.”

In her car, we listened to Marshall Crenshaw’s first album, and when we got to her place, we sat on the couch under that big painting. She was not comfortable anymore; she was really scared. She got up and put on my Big Star mix, then took it off. She put on Marshall Crenshaw again. I went through her shoe-boxes of tapes. This girl was definitely an eighties girl. She had a tape with R.E.M.’s
Murmur
on one side and U2’s
War
on the other, another with
The Velvet Underground & Nico
backed with
Moondance
. Uh-oh, she also had a lot of XTC tapes. We’d have to work that out later.

“Oh, Rob,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

I was scared, too. That was a long, long night. I swear her face changed shape several times. I don’t know how this is possible, but it did. Her eyelids got heavier and wider. Her breathing got slower and deeper, and her jaw kept dropping lower, making her whole face bigger. She had a solemn look in her eyes. Around dawn, she said, “I hope I do right by you.” I didn’t know what she meant, so I didn’t say anything. I was wearing my Hüsker Dü T-shirt from the
Warehouse
tour. She was wearing a Bob Jones University sweatshirt. I figured there must be a disturbing story there, but I didn’t ask.

Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late. I felt myself just melting in Renée’s room that night. I remembered being a kid, standing on the bridge over the Pine Tree Brook, when we would find a wax six-ring holder from a six-pack the older kids had killed. We would touch a match to one corner, hold it over the water, and just watch it drip, drip, drip. We’d watch the circular rings, long before the flame even touched them, curl up or bend over in agony. Six rings of wax, twisting and contorting permanently, doing a spastic death dance like the one Christopher Lee does at the end of
Horror of Dracula
, when the sunlight hits him.

The minutes dripped by, each one totally bending and twisting my shape. We eventually stopped getting up to flip the tape, and just listened to dead air. I could feel serious changes happening to me the longer I stayed in Renée’s room. I felt knots untie themselves, knots I didn’t know were there. I could already tell there were things happening deep inside me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than “irreversible”? It’s a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage—no backing up. Falling in love with Renée felt that way. I felt strange things going on inside me, and I knew that these weren’t things I would recover from. These were changes that were shaping the way things were going to be, and I wouldn’t find out how until later. Irreversible. I remember that we discussed
The Towering Inferno
that night, the scene with Steve McQueen, the valiant firefighter, and William Holden, the evil tycoon who owns the hotel. William Holden asks, “How bad is it?” and Steve McQueen answers, “It’s a fire, mister. And all fires are bad!” That’s the last thing I remember before I fell asleep.