Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (16 page)

You tell yourself, I’ll get to the end of this. But there’s no finish line, just more doors to pass through, more goodbyes to say. You know that Smiths song “Girlfriend in a Coma”? At the end of the song, Morrissey whispers his last goodbye. I love that part; that line cracks me up now. Yeah, right, you
think
it’s your last goodbye. He has no idea how many more he’s got left. Good luck, kid.

Ralph Waldo Emerson knew the score: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” That’s from “Experience,” his late essay about human loss and his son’s death. There’s a lot of cold-blooded shit in that essay, and the winter after Renée died I read it over and over. I always had to stop to butt my head against that sentence: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” I was hoping that was a lie. But it wasn’t. Whatever I learn from this grief, none of it will take me any closer to what I want, which is Renée, who is gone forever. None of my tears will bring her closer to me. I can fit other things into the space she used to occupy, but whether I choose to do that, her absence from that space is permanent. No matter how good I get at being Renée’s widower, I won’t get promoted to being her husband again. The loss doesn’t go away—it just gets bigger the longer you look at it.

It’s the same with people who say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

That’s part of why I worship Jackie. She just kept the story going. After she died, she went straight to the top of the charts, as the world’s second-most-famous dead person. Jackie had no manager, but she went right on being the national widow, the way Elvis continued as the King after he died, with a legendary heart full of affection for America and all the grieving nobodies in it. She owns the name Jackie in a way her husband could never own his. When you say Jack, most people probably think of Nicholson, the closest thing to a default Jack in American pop culture, but Jackie Kennedy owns Jackie, despite the gentlemen named Robinson, Chan, Stewart, or Earle Haley. When Tammy Wynette died, The Nashville Network did a tribute special in which the singer Marty Stuart mused, “I bet she’s hanging out right now with Jackie O.” I thought this was a shockingly beautiful thing to say. Tammy and Jackie didn’t exactly come from the same neighborhood. In life, Jackie wasn’t what you’d call down home; Loretta Lynn sang about her as a celebrity snob in the 1970 hit “One’s on the Way.” I’m sure Tammy felt the same. But in death, Jackie can be anything we want her to be, even a country star. She has red blood on her pink dress, but she’s wild and blue.

glossin’ and flossin’

DECEMBER 1998

W
hen you want to start living,
what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?

I wanted to start. That was something. But what do you do with a desire like that? I didn’t know, so I did nothing with it. I had been a widower for over a year and the second year was rougher than the first. I had done nothing with 1998, and had no ambitions for 1999 except getting it over with as fast as possible. Given another year that Renée didn’t get, I planned to waste it. I made no plans to make things better. All I did was sit in my empty yard. Planet earth was blue, nothing left to do. Planet earth was pink, nothing left to drink.

I looked for spiritual solace in
Chained Heat 2,
arguably the finest straight-to-video women’s-prison flick of the early nineties (nosing out
Caged Heat 2: Stripped of Freedom
). Brigitte Nielsen plays Magda Kasar, the sadistic warden. You see, after the fall of Communism, they have empty prisons in Eastern Europe, so the sadistic wardens need to rustle up fresh prisoners. This is where innocent American girls come in. Innocent American girls who foolishly fall asleep on trains, allowing Brigitte Nielsen’s agents to plant drugs on them, setting up phony busts so Brigitte Nielsen can brush the hair out of their eyes with her riding crop (all sadistic wardens carry those, to handle insolent prisoners with hair in their eyes) and murmur, “Mmmm—your skin is so pink.” This is all in the first five minutes. They played it a lot on the USA Network around three
A.M.
, when everybody who had a reason to fall asleep, or a way of getting there, was gone for the night and it was just us inmates, watching in our cells.

I would watch
Chained Heat 2
, or some other movie, and lie on the couch hoping I would fall asleep. If I tried lying in bed, I would hyperventilate and my heart would start beating too fast, until I would have to breathe into a paper bag. The worse the movie was, the more it cheered me up. I was grateful to stumble across
Witchblade
, featuring Julie Strain as a creature of the dark who feeds on the blood of gangsters. Or was it
Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway
? I know—it was
Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart
. There’s a scene where one of the gangsters asks, “What time is it?” The other one says, “What, do I look like Big Ben? Am I Swiss? Am I ticking?” I was grateful to resume hyperventilating, just to drown out the dialogue. If I was lucky, I got to sleep before dawn; if not, I knew there were at least three other
Witchcraft
movies out there somewhere.

On one such night, I decided I was having a pulmonary embolism. There was no other explanation for the way I felt. I waited until six, when I thought the emergency room would open for business. I drank some bourbon, figuring that would either slow down the heart attack or make me too clumsy to die right. I raided the boxes in the bathroom closet, looking for some kind of medication that might come in handy, and found some Stelazine from 1986. I watched MTV all night and held on to my paper bag. Eventually I said Fuck it and started walking to the hospital, since it was too cold for the car to start. If they weren’t open, I’d just get in line and wait. I walked along the train tracks, paper bag in hand, clutching a throw pillow to my chest with the other arm, with the dawn over my head, and sat in the emergency room. Dr. Lutz was incredibly kind to me. She was so kind, I wanted to cry with humiliation that I was taking up her time when all I would do was let her down, the way I let down every other person trying to be kind to me. All she was going to get out of this was a reminder that some people aren’t worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness. But I was standing right there, with electric wires hooked up to my chest, and it was too late to protect her from me.

My EKG proved I wasn’t having a pulmonary embolism. It was so good, in fact, that the doctors were handing it around and complimenting it as if I had just done my first finger-painting. Dr. Lutz asked, “Has there been any major stress in your life lately?” I went, “Ummm . . . ” She sent me home with a handful of Xanax, a bottle of Mylanta, and my word that I would do a little better to make some changes. That was a start. I walked down to the train tracks and headed home. That was a start, too.

Christmas was coming. Everybody in my family was dreading it, so we decided to flee to Florida. We could swim in the pool and drink margaritas at the Astro-Lanes Bowling Lounge in Nokomis and cheer one another up until it was safe to return to the world. This was a really excellent plan. (Christmas is like the “Hey Jude” of holidays—every five years, at one-third the length, it would be a perfectly nice idea.)

As I flew down to Tampa, I watched the old couple in the next row doing a crossword together. I watched them the whole way, even though I hate crosswords, because I hate planes more. He was a lot slower than she was. Her vision was better, so she read the clues out loud and tapped his serving tray impatiently while he made his guesses. He spoke very slowly and loudly. The idea that Renée and I were never going to be these people made me furious, until I could feel my heart pound with rage against my chest. I felt better once I got to the Tampa airport. The walls were a bright 1970s orange, like a Houston Astros uniform from the days when J. R. Richards was their pitcher, and everything looked shiny and cheery. I felt even better when I caught up with my sisters and parents in the airport. I realized I was starved for some color and noise, and I knew that’s what I would get.

My sister Tracey was pregnant with the first grandchild in the family. It was very exciting. We assumed she was doing this to provide us with entertainment. Just for fun, Ann explained to her what an episiotomy is. As a biology teacher, Ann is a pro at explaining these things—pro enough to drain all the color from Tracey’s face. Tracey was standing there in the pool, shaking her head, while Ann and Caroline swam around her, nodding. Tracey turned to me and said, “Rob? It’s not true, is it?” But I was staying the hell out of that one. Tracey was reading a book called
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
. I told her they should do a special edition for her called
What to Demand When You’re Demanding
. The girls took turns playing rounds of “how to exhaust when you’re exhausting” and “who to madden when you’re maddening.” It was a good time. It didn’t make us all better or anything, but it was a start.

Tracey surprised her husband, Bryant, with a mix CD as a Christmas gift. This was the first mix CD any of us had seen, and we crowded around to gape at it. There was definitely a sense that the mix tape as we knew it was going through a major change. She titled it
Mackey Music
, filled it with his favorite Shawn Mullins and Garth Brooks songs, and put a picture of him on the cover. We were all wicked impressed at this technological breakthrough and got to know the mix extremely well when it went into heavy poolside rotation. But a clear advantage of mix tapes made itself immediately clear: Each side of the tape goes on for forty-five minutes, and then comes to a stop, allowing a chance for somebody to discreetly change the music, whereas a mix CD has only one side. Which means it goes on for eighty minutes, and you can’t turn it off halfway through without offering some sort of lame excuse, such as “Garth is singing about cocaine in this song and it’s bad for the baby,” or “Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it’s bad for the baby.”

The house was cold
when I got back home from Florida. I realized the house was always cold, and would stay cold no matter how long I stayed back. Am I Swiss? Am I ticking? Sometimes.

To get out of my cold house, I went to a New Year’s party at Darius’s house, the same night I made this tape. Usually, I made any excuse not to leave the house, so going to a party was a big deal for me. I caught a ride with the Glimmer Girl, a bassist friend of mine. Glimmer didn’t come to town until after Renée died, and I wished they could have met—they would have wagged their tails over each other—but they never got the chance. Glimmer was brilliant at getting me out of the house. She always made me feel safe, something I was not used to feeling around other people. I guess she and her boyfriend used to fight a lot, so she’d always call my radio show to request sad songs like PJ Harvey’s “Dry.” She would talk me into going to see bands at Tokyo Rose, and once I forced myself out of the house, it was usually fun to go hang with her gaggle of glam glimmerettes. If I couldn’t take it, I would just sneak away, and Glimmer Girl would never ask why.

This night was fun. We danced to old disco records. I was extremely happy to hear “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.” She’d never heard the song before, and she was astounded at how bouncy it made me. We sat on the front stairs and smoked. At one point, I leaned in to light her cigarette, but she was just putting on lipgloss.

She and her boyfriend gave me a ride home. I didn’t feel like going to bed by myself and lying there freezing, so I put on a pot of coffee and started making this tape. I decided to make the tape, then sit in the backyard and listen to it on my Walkman while drinking more cigarettes and smoking another bourbon. It was only two
A.M.
, and I banged it out by four, so I’d have time to listen to it twice by the time the sun rose at seven. The chair in the backyard was covered with ice, but I sat on it anyway.

This is a classic example of a tape that tries to ruin a bunch of great songs by reminding you of a time you would rather forget. Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you. (I made another tape that winter that began with Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl,” one of my favorite songs since I was sixteen, but I haven’t been able to listen to it since. That tape was so agonizing to hear, it took all the other songs down with it. Louis Prima’s “Banana Split for My Baby”? Come on! Great tune! But ruined.)

Individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder. Listening to this tape is like going back somewhere I never belonged in the first place, and it’s spooky to tiptoe back in. All these sad songs: “SOS,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” “No More No More,” “She’s So Cold.” Stevie Nicks in “Gold Dust Woman,” chanting “widow” over and over. Mick Jagger in “Emotional Rescue,” sneering at a poor girl trapped in a rich man’s house. Even the fun songs sound miserable here. In any other context, Heart’s “Magic Man” fires my blood corpuscles with images of erotic abundance. Ann Wilson? Love her! Nancy Wilson? Like her lots! The album cover where they’re wearing capes and feeding a goat on the pastures of their own mystical Salisbury Plain dream world? I’m so there. But on this tape, “Magic Man” sounds scary. The “Magic Man” is magic just because he’s
unreal
. Surely he’s in love with somebody dead, so he’s too magic to fit into the real world. He’s isolated from everybody around him, and his isolation is contagious, making him a vampire who turns everybody he touches into a cold shell of abandoned humanity. Yes, even the lustrously busty ladies of Heart!

(It’s only now I realize that the lyrics of this song are all about drugs. How embarrassing that I never noticed it before.)

Don’t go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don’t trust him! He might be magic, but he’s not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he’ll get you so high you can’t come back down. He’ll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you’ll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You’ll lose your sense of time. You’ll lose your appetite. When your mama cries on the phone, you won’t understand a word she’s saying. You’ll just tell her, “Try to understand.” And Mrs. Wilson isn’t falling for that shit. Ann! Nance! Get the hell out of there! One smile from that magic man, and you’re done. You’ll be so fucking magic, you won’t be real any more. He’ll even set your lipgloss on fire.

I hoped Glimmer Girl and her boy were sleeping somewhere, young and safe and together. I hoped they were breathing hard into each other’s hair. I hoped her feet were bumping into his shins. I hoped they were asleep and not thinking about any of the things I was thinking about, and I hoped they never would. I listened to this tape twice all the way through, and then hurried into the cold house before the sun started to rise. If I waited for the house to warm up before I tried to start something, I would never start anything.