Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (8 page)

“I just don’t see it.”

“Queer as a three-dollar bill, honey,” Ruby said. “Last call.”

Nobody remembered to give us a lift home. The last bus had stopped running hours ago. So I grabbed Renée’s hand, or maybe she grabbed mine, and we walked. Maybe it took an hour or two; neither of us was wearing a watch, so I don’t know. We were too tired to gossip, so we sang songs we knew, like “O.P.P.” and “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” Turned out we both remembered the words to a bunch of other Andy Gibb songs.

If I had my way, the story would end here. Renée was always braver. She always wanted to know what happens next.

that’s entertainment

JULY 1991

N
ow that we were married,
Renée stopped having dreams about her ex-boyfriends every night. She was pissed about that. So was I. The months leading up to the wedding had been a pageant of highly entertaining (for me) and traumatic (for her) dreams, which she confessed with shame every morning. They all had the same plot: Renée trysts with a boy from her past, he begs her to run away with him, she thinks about it, and then she decides instead to move on to her future with me. She thought these dreams were guilty secrets. I thought they were funny. I loved meeting these clowns. My favorite was the volleyball player from Roanoke. The last time she booty-called him, he said he was busy—he didn’t want to miss the farewell episode of
Magnum, P.I.
Years after the fact, Renée was still fuming. I wanted to shake his hand. This was my competition? No wonder I got a shot. Compared to her memories, I felt like Pelé kicking a couple around with the 1981 Tampa Bay Rowdies.

Now we were married, and the dreams stopped. I guess she’d said her goodbyes. We both missed these boys. Now we were alone with each other.

Which meant we had all these neighbors to deal with. The old lady next door dropped by with a plate of muffins one Sunday afternoon, right in the middle of
Studs
. Renée explained that in the South, this is normal—you just drop in on your married neighbors. I was aghast. I was a husband in the South now. We had married into this alien landscape with its strange customs. Had I chosen this? Had Renée? It felt like a hangover from a country song: You pass out on the train, miss your stop, wake up in a town you’ve never heard of, and that’s where you live now. Renée and I
were
just passing through, on our way somewhere, but suddenly we
lived
here.

As newlyweds, we crammed into Renée’s basement on Highland Avenue. It was the first place we ever had to ourselves, with side two of Earth, Wind & Fire’s
Greatest Hits, Volume 1
on the stereo, never needing to be flipped—we just lifted the needle every eighteen minutes. Renée had a pantyhose job as a paralegal at a law firm. At work, she turned the radio down low so she could listen to my radio show, and I serenaded her with long-distance dedications like Frightwig’s “My Crotch Does Not Say Go.” Around five, I drove downtown to pick her up from work, and then we could go anywhere we wanted. It was too hot to go home until the sun went down, so we usually hit the Fashion Square Mall, where we’d sit on a bench, basking in the free air-conditioning, breathing in the scent of cookie-corns and cinna-clusters and crunch-o-cottons, chattering to keep our minds from wandering places we couldn’t afford to go. For pinball, we hit the Seminole Theater, where we could play the
Rollerball
machine all night without buying a movie ticket. If we were feeling lazy, we just went to MJ Design to browse through all the leopardskin fun fur.

Our backyard looked into the woods, and we’d sit out there when it got too humid to breathe inside. Charlottesville turns into a rain forest every summer; the sea winds blow in from Tidewater, a few hundred miles to the east, and then they run slam into the Blue Ridge, so all the hot, wet air just hovers over Charlottesville. We’d look out across our neighbors’ yards and try to imagine their lives. Did they really
live
here, call it home? Or were they on their way to bigger things, like us? Did they get stuck here on their way somewhere else, or was this the town where they arrived and said, This is the place? Did they give up and blame each other? Were they lying low and planning their next move?

I was still serfing away
at grad school. My friends and I assumed that we would soon be tenured professors, which is an excellent life goal—it’s like planning to be Cher. You think, I’m going to wear beads and fringed gowns, and sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on the way to work every morning, and then one day, I’m going to get a call saying, “Congratulations! You’re Cher! Can you make it to Vegas by showtime?”

Renée and I would shiver in the air-conditioning of the Fashion Square Mall and talk about how excellent it was going to be when we finally got out of Charlottesville. We’d go to the early bird special at the Chicken House, over in the Sears end of the mall. It was cheap, and we liked being surrounded by crotchety old couples. Someday, we’d be one of them. Meanwhile, we couldn’t believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We’d lived for just twenty-five years; we weren’t planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

That summer we got our dog, and our new favorite band.

“I want to meet our dog,” Renée said one night. We were sitting in the Fashion Square Mall parking lot, around midnight, the windows rolled down.

“We don’t have a dog,” I said.

“That’s why I want to meet him.”

“I hate dogs.”

“You’re gonna love dogs.”

“I grew up with dogs.”

“Yappy little northern things. Wait till you meet Duane.”

Duane Allman, the guitarist for the Allman Brothers, the sweet blond Georgia angel who played the solos on “Whipping Post” and “You Don’t Love Me” and “Blue Sky.” We drove to the SPCA and went looking for Duane.

“I hate dogs.”

“This dog is gonna be Duane Allman. A southern dog. He’s gonna sleep in the sun all day. He’s gonna be a ramblin’ man.”

“Duane Allman didn’t play on ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ actually. That was Dickey Betts.”

“You’re such a boy.”

Duane Allman was a beagle. The ladies at the SPCA put her on a leash and had Renée take her out for a walk around the grounds. Her name used to be “Dutchess,” with a T. She was about a year old and tall for a beagle, and she wagged her tail as soon as she saw Renée. We walked a couple of dogs that day, but none of them had fit the name. This one was Duane.

“The next dog will be Ronnie Van Zandt,” Renée said on the way home while Duane was in the backseat getting carsick.

My interest in dogs defined the term “scant.” Interests don’t come any scanter. I was hoping Duane Allman would change my mind. She didn’t. Duane was nowhere near mellow—she was a high-strung little bundle of nightmares in fur. She was not so much Duane Allman; more like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Duane bit the cable guy and banged her head against the screen door; Renée didn’t notice. Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid. Duane and I never would have tolerated each other if we’d had a choice. But what could we do? We were two animals in love with the same girl.

Now there were three of us, and the apartment was even smaller, so we turned up the stereo and made it a little louder. Like all our friends in Charlottesville, we lived for music. In the summer of 1991, the world was teeming with hot young guitar bands. We didn’t know “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on the way in a few months. We just knew that after a few years of rock bands sounding smug and doddering, there was something new in the air. We played Nirvana’s “Sliver” single a lot. They did not sound like a band that was getting ready to challenge the world. Truth be told, they sounded kind of like the Lemon-heads. But that was fine. This was the music we’d fallen in love to, the music that brought us together, and now there was more of it around than ever.

We waited all that summer for the Pavement show. The flier was up all over town:

We mean it man

PAVEMENT

with very special guests

ROYAL TRUX

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29

$5, only $4 for anyone wearing a WTJU T-shirt

Basically he’s a nice suburban kid who got hold of a guitar and some heroin and went a little bit wrong.

The night of the show, the floor was abuzz with anticipation. None of us in the crowd knew what Pavement looked like, or even who was in the band. They put out mysterious seven-inch singles without any band info or photos, just credits for instruments like “guitar slug,” “psued-piano gritt-gitt,” “keybored,” “chime scheme,” and “last crash simbiosis.” We assumed that they were manly and jaded, that they would stare at the floor and make abstract boy noise. That would be a good night out.

Royal Trux went on a few hours late, which I’m sure had nothing to do with buying drugs in Richmond. They were great, like a scuzz-rock Katrina and the Waves. The peroxide girl in the football jersey jumped around and screamed while the boy with the scary home-cut bangs played his guitar and tried to stay out of her way. She threw a cymbal at him. We wanted to take them home for a bath, a hot meal, and a blood change.

But Pavement was nothing at all like we pictured them. They were a bunch of foxy dudes, and they were
into it
. As soon as they hit the stage, you could hear all the girls in the crowd ovulate in unison. There were five or six of them up there, some banging on guitars, some just clapping their hands or singing along. They did not stare at the floor. They were there to make some noise and have some fun. They had fuzz and feedback and unironically beautiful sha-la-la melodies. The bassist looked just like Renée’s high school boyfriend. Stephen Malkmus leaned into the mike, furrowed his brows, and sang lyrics like “I only really want you for your rock and roll” or “When I fuck you once it’s never enough / When I fuck you two times it’s always too much.” The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should be either fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.

Afterward, we staggered to the parking lot in total silence. When we got to the car, Renée spoke up in a mournful voice: “I don’t think The Feelies are ever gonna be good enough again.”

Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album
Slanted and Enchanted
. Renée and I decided this was our favorite tape of all time. The guitars were all boyish ache and shiver. The vocals were funny bad poetry sung through a Burger World drive-through mike. The melodies were full of surfer-boy serenity, dreaming through a haze of tape hiss and mysterious amp noise. This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn’t live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or five years ago. They were right now. They were ours.

I think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles:
I AM MADE OF BLUE SKY AND HARD ROCK AND I WILL LIVE THIS WAY FOREVER.

the comfort zone

APRIL 1992

T
he Comfort Zone
was a dishes tape, maybe the finest of all dishes tapes, guaranteed to get me up to my elbows in Dawn Power Sudsing Formula and through the loading of the drying rack. I cranked it on the boombox we kept on the kitchen counter, right next to the sink. I taped most of it from Casey Kasem’s
American Top 40
countdown on Z-95, our local Top 40 station, with Casey nattering between songs. But that just adds to the ambience, since for any pop devotee, Casey’s voice is music of the spheres. This tape counts down the hits from coast to coast! As the numbers get smaller, the hits get bigger! And we don’t stop! Till we reach the top!

Like all radio tapes, it’s a mixed bag. Disco scam artists, hair-metal schnauzers in red leather chaps, gangstas, ravers, fly-by-night pop smoothies, cartoon lip-synchers, sequin divas, flukes, hacks, one-hit scandals—we loved it all. Nobody remembers The KLF today, but they made one of the decade’s most sublime one-shots in 1992 with their hit “Justified and Ancient.” A couple of British art-school poseurs hire Tammy Wynette to sing an incredibly beautiful disco song about an ice cream van? Genius! And of course, it became a gigantic international hit. Only in the nineties, brothers and sisters. Nobody ever took this music seriously, but we loved it anyway: Vanilla Williams, Paula Abominable, Kris Kross, my beloved Hi-Five.

In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt’s funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap. The beauty of Top 40 is you don’t have to be any kind of great artist to make a great record—indeed, great artistness is just a pain in the ass, which is why moron-rock choo-choo hack Tom Cochrane sounds right at home here with his idiot anthem, while U2 sound like Jesuits trying to act cool for the youth-group retreat. Tom Cochrane had nothing to say, plus a stupid way of saying it, but he helped me get the dishes done. As Casey Kasem would say, he kept my feet on the ground, and kept me reaching for the stars—even with my hands full of soap suds.

Z-95 was the only Top 40 station in town, and my wife and I loved it fiercely. Z-95 played hits like “I’m Too Sexy” and “Baby Got Back” and “Justified and Ancient” once an hour. They also constantly played this terrible British techno hit called “Groovy Train” by The Farm. Or maybe it was “Groovy Farm” by The Train—how would I know? Z-95 played all sorts of alleged hits that didn’t exist in the real Billboard Top 40 charts, songs our friends in the big cities never heard of. We thought 2 In A Room’s “Wiggle It” was the biggest hit in the world. It wasn’t. We thought Martika’s “Love . . . Thy Will Be Done” was the musical-youth anthem of the mid-to-late spring of 1992. It wasn’t. We pitied the fools in New York and L.A. who had no idea Hi-Five were the world’s greatest rock and roll band. MTV wouldn’t touch this stuff. But what did they know? This was a golden age, and just by being stuck out in the middle of nowhere, we were right in the heat of the action. Nobody remembers, nobody cares, and I guess that’s fine with me. But I could hum Nikki’s “Notice Me” for you. A few years ago there were two of us.

One night Renée and I
were watching the En Vogue video where they shimmy in a swank club wearing those foxy red dresses. She said, “They’re not wearing underwear.”

“They’re not? How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“They’re not?”

“They’re not.”

I looked, but I could not see. I guess a woman just knows these things. Maybe it was the way the girls grind their hips, to and fro, in a way that underwear simply cannot contain; maybe it was the absence of panty lines. Renée wouldn’t tell me.

There’s also a scene in the video where one of the guys in the audience slips his wedding ring off his finger and hides it in his pocket. Renée hated that scene, but I loved it because it reminded me that it was time to do the dishes. Whenever I did dishes, I had to slip off my wedding ring and put it on the microwave so it wouldn’t go down the drain. So, I think this is the perfect pop song—it reminds me of not wearing underwear, and it also reminds me of the dishes. What more could you want?

I come from a long line of dish-washing men. When I was a little kid, I was amazed at the energy my grandfather had for washing dishes. My mom always told me, “He does it for the peace.” I didn’t understand until I was grown-up and a husband myself, when it made perfect sense. I found I had joined a club, a tribe extending backward through the centuries, mild-mannered Irish men married to loud, tempestuous Irish women. Sometimes, the only way to escape is to turn on a couple of jets of extremely loud water and disappear into the sound for a few hours. Sometimes, when Renée and I were fighting, I would wash dishes that weren’t even dirty, just to create a little noise.

Renée and I were surprised at all the drama we had to deal with, just living together in our tiny room. For one thing, we always argued about the telephone. I’m not much of a phone person. I always vowed if I ever met a woman who ignored a ringing phone for me, she was the one. But of course, this never happened, and I fell for a woman who would have dropped a scalpel into my spleen in the middle of performing open-heart surgery on me to grab the phone. You know the Prince song where the girl’s phone rings but she tells him, “Whoever’s calling couldn’t be as cute as you?” I long to live out this moment in real life. But I doubt it ever happened to Prince either. I bet even Apollonia got the phone.

Neither of us was a skilled fighter. My ancestors were neither warriors nor kings. I am descended from generations of peace-loving shepherds who tended their flocks in the hills of Kealduve and never killed anybody. Their strength was in their patience. Growing up I never got into fights because I never wanted to disgrace my ancestors—God knows they knew how to disgrace themselves, and fair play to them. But they lived in the grassy fields, so when the house was full of ugly emotions they could step outside, smoke a pipe, kick a sheep or something, and let the air clear. Renée and I did not have a farm, or even walls in our apartment, so we had to do our fighting in the same room where we had to sleep and eat, and that’s no good. Her temper was a zero-to-sixty machine. We were pretty good at keeping the two-minute fights from escalating into three-minute fights. The problem was keeping the three-minute fights from turning into eight-hour fights. When the air in the house got toxic, I would go out into the driveway and sit in the car and read, waiting for the smoke to clear.

One Saturday afternoon, I got tired of the driveway, so I said, Fuck this, and drove to the parking lot at the Barracks Road Shopping Center, got a cup of coffee, and locked myself in with a book. I sat there all day, reading Shelley’s
The Witch of Atlas
, hoping for the bad blood in my head to simmer down. When the sun went down, I still wasn’t ready to go home, so I cracked the door to turn on the inside light for as long as I could stand the cold. After that, I turned on the engine and sat there with it running and tried to keep reading. I turned on the radio and heard an old 1970s hit I have loathed since my childhood: “Hitchin’ a Ride” by Vanity Fare. I hate this song. The singer chirps about how he’s stuck on the side of the road, hitchin’ a ride, since his girl threw him out. “Ride, ride, ride. Hitchin’ a ride.” There’s a flute solo. I sat there huddling in the cold, breathing out steam, fuming, I hate this song. Then I drove home. A couple of nights later, Renée asked, “Where did you take the car the other day?” I told her. She laughed at me.

Stupid shit we used to fight about:

The Telephone:
Would she stop to answer the phone in the middle of a fight about the phone? Yes, she would. This definitely proved one of us right, but I’m not sure which one.

Money:
One of us was a scrimp-and-saver, the other was a big spender. Neither of us was what is known as an “earner.”

Reproduction:
We were programmed very differently about this one, in terms of our ancestry and culture. She was into the idea of having babies fast; I wasn’t. Three or four times a year we would have a conversation about this, which would usually begin as a whimsical anecdote about a college friend’s baby or a pregnant relative, and suddenly turn into the last twenty minutes of
The Wild Bunch
. Why didn’t we discuss this
before
we got married? I don’t know. We just didn’t. Renée had this excellent country-girl pal at her mall job named Tiffany, who quit to have a baby and go on welfare. When she brought her baby to the mall to show everybody, Tiffany asked Renée how come she didn’t have a baby yet. Renée said something about saving up. Tiffany said, “Aw, hon, the money always comes from somewhere!” The weird part is, not only did we both love this story, we each felt it proved us right. Strange! But true!

The Word “Repulse”:
I
hate
this word. I believe “repel” is a perfectly good word, and “repulsion” is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says “compulse” or “impulse” as a verb. So why would you ever say “repulse”? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renée looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I’m right.

The Word “Utilize”:
Even worse.

Figure Skating:
She won this one. I’m glad she did. Figure skating saved us. No matter how bad a mood Renée was in, those twirls and axels melted her butter. Figure skaters were always on TV somewhere. Ice dancers were the best: brooding Slav castrati dudes with tree-trunk thighs, packed into a glittery fistful of L’Eggs, twirling feminine whisks named Natasha or Alexandra, enacting the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice to the orchestral strains of “Loving on Borrowed Time: Love Theme from
Cobra
.” How did married people stay together before this shit was invented? I honestly have no idea. Renée drooled over Paul Wiley (the clean-cut American), Victor Petrenko (the ruthless Russian), Kurt Browning (the burly Canadian), and good old Scott Hamilton. That guy’s enduring success as a sex symbol is the sort of thing that makes me wipe tears of joy from my eyes and proclaim, “Thumbs up, America!” For me, the ladies all dissolved into a blur of vowels and poofy skirts, except Katarina Witt. That girl had an ass on her.
The Cutting Edge
—I don’t see why this isn’t the most famous movie ever made. Moira Kelly as the skate princess! Brrrrrr—she’s cold as ice! She’s willing to sacrifice her love! D.B. Sweeney as the hockey stud! “I do two things well, babe—and skating’s the other one.” Can they win the medal and triple-lutz their way to love? (Of
course
they can! Pay attention!) For Renée, this flick was liquid Vicodin. We watched it several thousand times. I can still recite the whole thing from memory. “In case you can’ttell . . . I’m throwing myself at you!”

TV in General:
We both loved
The Banana Splits
and MTV. We disagreed about everything else. As far as I was concerned, TV had been crap ever since Freddie Prinze died. But we did our best to appreciate each other’s tastes—she got me into
The Andy Griffith Show
, I got her into
Sanford and Son
. My preferred method of avoiding her shows was just to go into the kitchen and do dishes, turning the water up loud whenever Renée got hooked on a show that involved doctors, lawyers, a small town full of lovable eccentrics, or Kirstie Alley.

Getting a Dog:
She won this one easily, as I’ve already mentioned; I thought my graceful surrender would win me a concession or two down the line. I was wrong. Renée saw the dog not as a personal victory for her, but as a huge favor she was doing me by teaching me the joys of being pissed on by an animal. This is just one of the adorable quirks of the dog, the best friend God ever gave humanity in this crazy little world. Thanks, God!

The Air-conditioning Commercial:
You know this one. It comes back every spring, like the gypsy moth caterpillar. The husband and wife sit sweating at the kitchen table. She says, “Honeeeeeey, why don’t we have aaaaaair-conditioning?” He says, “I’ll call tomorrow.” She says, “You’ll call today?” He smiles and says, “I’ll call today.” Then he’s on the phone, giving her a hearty thumbs-up, while Renée sits frozen, knuckles white on the remote, and asks, “I’m not like
her
, am I?” This question is like the cowboy in
Mulholland Drive
, who you see again one time if you do good and two times if you do bad. Answer the question wisely, and you won’t have to hear it again for another year. Try to give a clever answer, and you have bigger immediate problems than the humidity index.

The Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed”:
Similar to the above, but when she gets depressed and asks, “Honey, is this song about us?” the strategic answer is, “Yes, but so is ‘Just Like Heaven.’”