Turn Around Bright Eyes (18 page)

DJ Astrogrrl turned out to be WTJU’s rock director, a grad student in astronomy; she’d moved to Charlottesville in the summer of 2000, two weeks after I’d left town. We chatted for a while in the record stacks, surrounded by all the overflowing shelves of vinyl. It turns out she was doing the Pixies tribute show only because the scheduled DJ didn’t show up, and she needed to whip up a show on the spot; so she just grabbed a handful of Pixies records and went on the air. (I will always be grateful to the jerk who didn’t show up.) She was on her way to an astronomy department function, so she already had her coat on when I popped in to say hello. Lucky for me, she hung out for a few minutes, and we talked some rock-geek talk. I’m not sure how long it took for the Smiths to come up, but it was under two minutes.

A bunch of WTJU friends went out to dinner the next night at our local strip-mall sushi place, Tokyo Rose. I had spent my twenties at this place, because they hosted bands in the basement—some of the happiest nights of my youth had been spent bouncing off the walls here. Now I was feasting on pumpkin sushi and miso soup, talking to Ally Astrogrrl. She was a cool rock girl who filled me in on the details about the Milky Way’s impending merger with Andromeda, an event that will form a new galaxy called Milkomeda. It’s scheduled to happen in about three billion years, due to the gravitational attraction between the two.

I found this news a little startling. “Won’t this have a drastic impact on the sun?”

“Well, the sun will run out of hydrogen in about five billion years,” she assured me. “It’s halfway through its life span.”

“How does this affect the earth?”

“It’ll get engulfed by the remnants of the sun.”

“So what’s your favorite Pavement album?”

When she answered
Wowie Zowie
, I somehow found that even more disturbing than the news about the sun. I thought, “Well, I will never have a chance with this woman. I’m a
Slanted and Enchanted
guy. We are from different worlds.” But the more we talked, the more intrigued I got. She told me she was coming up to New York in a couple of weeks—she was coming for an Interpol show. We agreed we should hang out, so I jotted down my email address on the wrapper of my soda straw. As the dinner wore on, and more rock-geek conversation flowed, I kept adding to the straw, making notes of bands and song titles I thought she would like. The whole table began to argue about the hottest men in rock & roll. Ally’s nominees were Morrissey (naturally), David Bowie (no question), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (hey, that could be good news for me), and Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore (that might be bad news). When she capped her top five with Dave Gahan, I decided I needed to reevaluate my personal relationship to white jeans and leather tank tops.

It was WTJU’s Rock Marathon Weekend—in a music-crazed town like Charlottesville, that’s one of the central events of the year. I had come to town to help out, DJ a few shows, answer the phones, file records, that kind of thing. But all I could think about was the fact that Ally was going to host a Depeche Mode tribute show on Sunday night. My flight home was that afternoon.

“Too bad you won’t hear my show,” Ally said. “It’s going to be fun.” She went on to discuss all the great B-sides Depeche Mode mysteriously left off
Violator
, and how it could have been a much better album if they’d included “Sea of Sin.”

Back at the Econo Lodge, the first thing I did was frantically call the airline to reschedule my flight. They switched my Sunday flight to Tuesday. It looked like I was sticking around town for a few extra days.

So right, this is trouble
, I thought.
God, I missed you, trouble
.

I WASN’T SURE WHAT WAS
going to happen. I wasn’t sure what I
wanted
to happen. I wasn’t sure what I was ready for. But I knew I needed to know a lot more about this woman. The next few days presented me with a finite number of opportunities to hang out with her, and I was going to pounce on them like Martin Gore on a crimping iron.

And I knew I was not going to blow it, whatever “it” was going to be. I had blown it before. My recent experiences with dating had taught me a painful lesson: I did not know much about how to be a boyfriend. Let me rephrase that. I knew
nothing
about how to be a boyfriend. I have no idea why I was so shocked about that—after all, I’d spent my twenties married. When would I have learned any boyfriend skills? I had spent all those years working hard on my husband skills, trying to get that job right. When I started dating again, after three years as a lonely widower, I figured at least my husband skills would carry over into new relationships. I knew a little about how to do this boyfriend stuff, right? Ah, no. I was devastated to learn that (brace yourself for a surprise) starting a new relationship is
hard
. Two people, two genuinely good people, can try to make each other happy but
fail
. In fact, they can make each other wretched.

I mean, when I was married, my single friends told me stories like this all the time. They kept telling me how lucky I was not to be dating. Hell, I thought they were just trying to cheer me up. Now I was mad at them all for not warning me enough. I had a lot to learn. I had
everything
to learn.

Why was I just finding out about all this now? Because I got lucky early in life. I settled down when I was twenty-three. It was still the eighties. Milli Vanilli were about to win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. That’s when I had stopped learning how to be a single guy. So here I was, well into my thirties, trying to learn the basics other people study in college. Welcome back to earth, Major Fucking Tom.

So I didn’t know what I wanted to happen with Ally—I just knew I wanted to find out. And I was determined not to blow it. Fear? None at all. I felt total curiosity. I felt total confidence. I was going to find out what happened next. All I needed was a plan. I knew how to make those. My plan, like most brilliant plans, involved Depeche Mode. I knew her radio show started at ten. So I would show up at the studio and hang out. That should be easy, right? That counts as a plan? I hoped so. It was a scheme, at the very least.

I couldn’t sleep, so even though it was February, I opened the window of my motel room. The Econo Lodge on Route 29 is only one story tall, so when I stuck my head out the window, to gaze out at the rainy night sky, all I could see was the motel parking lot. It was only one day since I’d gotten off the plane, yet the dark landscape of Charlottesville seemed transformed. The black puddles in the parking lot were sparkling with stars I had barely noticed before. This place was different from the way I remembered it. It wasn’t like the old days. I guess that’s one of the things I had to come back here to figure out. There was no past waiting for me here; turning back the clock wasn’t an option. My old home had changed while I was away, like I had. It wasn’t offering me any escape back into the past. All it had to offer was the future, and I was going to have to find that out for myself.

I stared out the window. Another parking lot, another deep breath. Another lungful of the sweet taste of trouble.

1:01 a.m.:

Okay, so in the cold light of morning, I could tell it wasn’t much of a plan. There wasn’t much nuance to it. I was just going to drop by the radio station around ten, casually, you know, just to help Ally file her records. This was an obvious DJ-groupie move. But I had no problem with obvious. Time was tight. This was boy-say-go time. It was one of those times when, in the words of the old Depeche Mode song, tomorrow won’t do.

I spent Sunday afternoon walking around some of my old haunts in Charlottesville, kicking through the winter slush on Main Street, listening to the radio on my Walkman. I ended up sitting in the McDonald’s at the Barracks Road Shopping Center. How many evenings had I sat here over the years, back when I couldn’t face the idea of going home to my empty widower apartment? It stayed open until midnight, when practically everything else in town was closed by nine, so this was a place where I had killed time on countless weekend nights, in the not-so-distant past. I ordered two hamburgers and fries, just like in the old days, then sat at the corner table by the window, looking out into the empty mall. There were no other customers, which made sense since it was after dark on a Sunday night. My fries were cold by the time I got to them, so I nursed my coffee, staring out the window at the concrete McDonaldland playground where I had literally never seen a single kid play. I breathed in the soothing stop-and-lurch rhythm of the cars at the drive-through.

“I could sit here forever,” I thought. “I don’t have to go to the radio station. I told her I was leaving town today. I could skip the Depeche Mode show, sit here another two hours until McDonald’s closes, then go back to the motel. I’d fly back Tuesday. Nobody would know. I could just sit here, and listen to her voice.”

The wind rattled the window a bit, and I looked out again at the playground. Then I bused my tray. I got to the station a few minutes after ten, while DJ Astrogrrl was spinning the first song, “Just Can’t Get Enough.” I told her I was still in town because my flight was postponed because of the snow. She smiled and said, “Yeah, sure.” (To this day she swears she was kidding—she believed me at the time. I have my doubts.) We hung out for a couple of hours, talking about music and books and science, as she cued up the records. We argued about which was Depeche Mode’s best album (
Black Celebration
or
Violator
?) as well as the ever-controversial Vince Clarke question. She even played my Depeche Mode request, “Dreaming of Me.” And we agreed that for next year’s WTJU Rock Marathon, we should do a Smiths tribute show as DJ Shoplifter and DJ Backscrubber.

I was wondering if she had a boyfriend. She was wondering if I was straight, given my enthusiasm for the Pet Shop Boys and my near-total recall of the Anne Bancroft filmography.

I had plenty of time on the plane to wonder what had happened to me. All my moves had been totally obvious—the most obvious ones in the book. What could I say? I like obvious. Subtle and elegant is for kiddies. I was an adult now. I did not have the winds of youthful innocence at my back. I knew all about being a subtle kid. I had done my share of hint-dropping and throat-clearing and better-never-than-now stalling when it came to women. I’d done the shy boy thing. I aced that course.

But I realized I wasn’t that kid anymore. I was an adult. I’d been in love. I’d been married. I had all the subtle beaten out of me by the time I was old enough to rent a car.

I’d been that boy, for the first twenty years of my life. I’d dialed a woman’s number, chickened out, and hung up during the first ring. I’d told a woman, “I really like your friend” while her friend was in the ladies’ room, in hopes that the message would get passed along. I’d been an altar boy sighing over the girls during communion. I’d been told by a girl reclining on my dorm room bed, “I’m thinking the same thing you are—just
say
it,” and couldn’t guess what she meant. I’d been a college librarian, looking up my crushes in the computer to see what books they checked out. One girl I liked kept this book called
Sexual Unfolding
overdue for months and I kept secretly renewing it for her. I erased her overdue fines but never spoke a word to her.

I had been that kid
. I’d proudly upheld the shyness-is-nice tradition. I had passed the torch to a new generation of bumbling fumbletons. I liked that boy, and I hoped I still had a lot in common with him. I was grateful to him for growing up to be me. He’d done me a lot of favors on the way, mostly by learning to get trampled by not-so-shy women. I had no regrets about being him. But I wasn’t that boy now.

This was going to have to be adult romance, if there was going to be a romance, and this was going to be different. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t going to involve dropping hints and cryptic clues. I had no patience for that now. I had been a man, a husband, a lover. I’d been through some things and shed some tears. There was no way to forget where I’d been. I couldn’t go back to being vague and subtle even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I had enough problems of my own, adult problems, without going back to his. I had to be direct, because I knew from experience how love can be fleeting. Life is short. The sun is going to run out of hydrogen. I knew there was no time to waste getting cute. I was going to have to find out what it was like to do this kind of thing as a full-grown man.

I knew this would be trial and error. But it was something I wanted to try and err at. And I thought she might be someone I wanted to try and err with. I knew what I wanted. Was I supposed to pretend I was a confused kid? Was I supposed to act tormented about what I wanted? I wasn’t confused. Just curious.

I hoped she was into obvious, too. There was only one way to find out. The extremely obvious way.

WITHIN HOURS OF MY PLANE
touching down at LaGuardia, we’d already traded emails full of Morrissey jokes. My subject heading: “I left the South again, I traveled North again.” Her subject heading: “My only weakness is a list of crime.” I still couldn’t tell if she had a boyfriend, until a couple of weeks later, when she came to New York and we met for dinner. I wasn’t sure whether this was a date or not—maybe it was just dinner with a new friend from Virginia? But I walked into the hotel lobby, and when I saw her shoes, I knew it was a date. She looked up from her book and smiled when she recognized me. Date shoes, date smile. I took her to see Erasure, since I knew she was a Depeche Mode fan. Andy Bell came out in a leather corset with a peacock tail. Halfway through the first song, his whole outfit was on the floor and he was preening in his underwear. I knew that meant it was going to be a good night. There were some irate Erasure fans behind me, who took offense (understandably) to the fact that I am tall, so they started punching me in the back and screaming at me, before they realized it was much easier to walk away and stand in front of me instead. I kept glancing over at Ally to see if this was stressing her out, but it wasn’t, so I didn’t stress, either. I admire a woman who can watch her date get savagely beaten by strange females and keep her cool.