Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (7 page)

a little down, a little duvet

JULY 1991

R
enée made this tape
for us to listen to while falling asleep, and it served us well on many nights. It’s a tape full of soothing soul and vintage country and whispery rock and private jokes and intimate history. Some of the choices I didn’t like at the time, such as Aerosmith’s “Angel,” but they all flow together in my memory now. I think about this tape years later, when I’m interviewing Aerosmith, and they tell me how much they hate “Angel.” Steven Tyler tells me, “Sometimes a heavy leather biker guy with tattoos will come up to me and say, ‘Oh, man, let me tell you my favorite song,’ and every time, I know it’s gonna be ‘Angel.’ And I just gulp, and I don’t know what to say. Ugh,
that
one?”

I wonder whether I should tell Steven Tyler I used to hate “Angel,” too, but after my wife put it on this romantic mix tape, tucked in between Big Star and the Beatles, I fell in love with it. I decide not to tell him. I’m sure somewhere in his cosmic rock-star heart, he knows the whole story.

“Thirteen” was the song we chose as the first dance at our wedding.

I never planned to get married when I was only twenty-five, and I’m not sure exactly how it happened—neither of us ever officially proposed, or anything dramatic like that. It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn’t hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened.

It really started one Saturday when we were driving around in the mountains off Route 33, listening to a Marshall Crenshaw song called “Lesson Number One.” It’s a sad rockabilly ballad about how lying is bad, and telling the truth is lesson number one. We started talking about the song, and I carelessly said, “I’ve never lied to you.”

“Yeah?” she said. “And you never will?”

“No, I never will.”

Then we were both quiet for a few minutes. I was afraid that I’d just ruined everything; it was the first time either of us had ever promised anything. But it felt all right. I guess making little promises made us braver about the bigger ones.

There was never any epiphanic moment when we decided we should get married, no bolt of lightning. As soon as we started talking about it, we started trying to talk ourselves out of it, but we failed. Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don’t give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933. My cousin Sis Boyle in Southie was engaged for seventeen years before she finally threw caution to the wind and got hitched—and then she gave birth nine months later to the day. Renée was not psyched to hear stories like this. She informed me that Appalachians wed early, give birth immediately, and worry about feeding all their offspring later. Her parents met at eighteen, married at nineteen, and became parents at twenty. This terrified me. Between the two of us, we had three master’s degrees, thousands of records, and no future.

I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. “Lonely place,” Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, “Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it’s private. That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private.” That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you give up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you’re just screwed. So I felt safer not even thinking about it. No doubt about it, the idea of staying together was scary. But we also didn’t want to wait around for a few years to see if it was going to happen. Why not just
make
it happen? It felt disingenuous to keep saying, “If we’re still together next year . . . ” since we knew we
wanted
to be together next year. Pretending to keep those options open became dead weight.

We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We’d heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy’s Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever. What if we just decide
not
to fall apart? What if we decide
not
to wait to see what happens, but instead decide what we want to happen and then decide how to make it happen? Like Burt Reynolds says to Jerry Reed in
Smokey and the Bandit
, “We ain’t never not made it before, have we?”

So I gave Renée my grandmother’s ring. My grandfather was crazy about Renée, at least partly because she was practically a foot shorter than all his granddaughters, so he could lean over and talk right into her ear. I knew my grandmother would have loved Renée, but I still hoped I wasn’t letting her down. Renée and I were acting like a couple of foolhardy American brats. Nana had always warned me: Never marry an American girl. “These American girls are lazy!” she would fume. “They won’t cook or clean. You need an Irish girl.”

When Renée and I talked about it years later, we agreed on one point: We were insane. Renée always said, “If any of our kids want to get married when they’re twenty-five, we’ll have to lock them in the attic.” We were just kids, and everybody who came to the wedding was guilty of shameful if not criminal negligence—look at the shiny pretty toaster, isn’t it cute to see the babies playing with it in the bathtub? Jesus, people! There is such a thing as “tough love.” But for whatever reason, nobody tried to stop us, or even talk sense into us. Instead, everybody wanted to help us out. We had no money, so all our friends did wedding favors for us. Our friend Gavin offered to DJ the wedding. Neither of us wanted to go crazy planning a wedding—we had our hands full planning the marriage.

I tried to talk Renée into doing our wedding dance to Van Halen’s “Everybody Wants Some” because I had a romantic vision of us wangoing our fandango to the part where Alex Van Halen is playing the bongos and David Lee Roth is doing his heartfelt “I like the way the line runs up the back of the stocking” monologue. But Renée quickly squashed that idea—no romance in the girl. So Big Star’s “Thirteen” it was, the song that brought us together. We rented the university chapel for an hour, which cost a hundred bucks, and booked a reception at the Best Western down the street. For the ceremony Renée chose a Baptist hymn I’d never heard of, “Shall We Gather at the River,” and we had fun picking out readings from Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf. We were looking forward to drawing up a prenuptial agreement, but unfortunately, we found out you can’t get one unless you actually own something. Renée picked out a tux for me—I hadn’t worn one since the Walpole High senior prom (theme: “We’ve Got Tonight”)—and she selected a morning coat because it made me look like Janet Jackson in her “Escapade” video.

All I remember about the actual wedding is standing there on the altar steps like Enzo the baker in
The Godfather
stood on the hospital stairs with Al Pacino, waiting for the Turk’s hit men to come, trying to scare the hit men away by looking like they were ready for them. We both felt like Enzo that day. He’s a baker; he doesn’t know anything about guns. He just came to bring some flowers for his Don, who did him a big favor on Connie’s wedding day. Now he and Pacino are standing on the stairs, shaking, pretending they know what they’re doing. They don’t fool each other, but maybe they can fool everybody else.

During the wedding
Renée put my ring on my right hand. She started whispering, “Wrong hand! Wrong hand!” I whispered back, “Let’s switch it
later
,” but she insisted on grabbing my hand, slipping the ring off, and putting it on my left hand, all in the middle of the ceremony. Nobody in the crowd noticed this. You did good, Enzo.

When we got to the Best Western, we hit the dance floor, as Gavin favored us with our special request, James Brown’s “I’m a Greedy Man.” The Godfather of Soul laid out his three-point program for domestic bliss:

• Don’t leave the homework undone,

• Don’t tell the neighbors,

and, most crucially,

• You got to have something to sit on before I carry you home.

Everybody shook it to the Go-Go’s and the Human League and Chuck Berry, and we drank champagne and Gavin played Al Green’s version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at least four times. I danced with Renée’s mom to the Chuck Berry song “Nadine.” My sisters told me I needed to make a speech to the guests. I began by quoting the rapper Kool Moe Dee; my sisters told me that was a nice speech and cut me off. Gavin put on C&C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now” and my Uncle Ray took that as a cue to start the electric slide. (Uncle Ray and the electric slide go together like a 1976 Ford Pinto and a box of matches.) At any wedding we attend, my family is the problem table, the one everybody gradually drifts away from out of self-preservation. It’s a proud family tradition. Now this was
our
wedding, and nobody could stop us. Giving us a crate of champagne and a dance floor was like handing a madman the keys to a 747 and saying, “Now, seriously, dude, don’t crash it. Promise?”

Right before the party broke up, Renée’s Uncle Troy came up and gave her a big hug and whispered into her ear. I was touched. I didn’t realize he was saying, “Go easy on the boy.”

After the reception our friends drove us to the Eastern Standard, the bar where we met. The bartender on duty was Ruby, one of our favorites, a profane and excellent old lady who didn’t give a damn about our precious memories. Ruby, She-Wolf of the SS. Ruby put the “freak” in “frequently drunk and belligerent.” Since Virginia state law prohibits a bartender from consuming alcohol behind the bar, she instead lit up a big fatty and ignored all our drunken requests to play the Big Star tape. There was a big party across the street that night, at Silver Fox, the only drag joint in town, and since the club didn’t have a liquor license the room was full of Chers and Jackies popping over to the Eastern Standard for a drink. Cornered on separate sides of the room, Renée and I watched our friends mingle, and occasionally locked eyes, trying to spot which guests were in the running for wedding nookie. Renée quizzed the Jews about what “mazel tov” means, the Baptists quizzed me about whether Renée was now obligated to bear Catholic babies and donate them to the Vatican, and the southerners quizzed the northerners about why nobody really eats grits. Around eleven, everybody drained their glasses and went off to the mall to see
Terminator 2
.

Renée and I stayed behind for one more bourbon and ginger, which neither of us had any appetite to finish. We had waited all day to get just one minute to ourselves, but neither of us could think of a thing to say.

“Why did he kiss the book?” Renée finally asked me.

“Excuse me?”

“Father Cunningham, he kissed the book.”

“It’s a standard thing.”

“Does it mean I’m Catholic now? Because if he made me Catholic without asking, my mama is gonna be pissed.”

“He made you a bishop.”

Renée poked her ice cubes with a plastic pirate sword and put her head on my shoulder. She asked me, “Was Mel gay?”

“You have a question, Your Holiness?”

“Mel. From Mel’s diner. Kiss my grits.”

“You mean Vic Tayback.”

“No, just Mel.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mel never got any chicks. EVER.”

“He was a hardworking man. Devoted to his diner.”

“He never got any chicks. He never hung around anybody except Alice, with her show tunes. And Vera, with the tap dancing.”

“He had Flo.”

“Flo was a total drag queen.”