Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (17 page)

blue ridge gold

APRIL 2000

O
ne night I had a bit
of a revelation. I was up late, as usual, unable to sleep, drinking ginger ale and flipping channels, looking for something to soothe my nerves, the way a Discovery Channel panda forages for bamboo. This time I found something—a newsmagazine piece about a breaking news story in Milwaukee. I watched with awe and reverence. The story concerned a nacho dwarf. He was the most famous and successful nacho dwarf in Milwaukee—maybe the world. His job was walking around in a Mexican restaurant wearing an oversized sombrero with a brim full of tasty nachos. The crown of the sombrero held a cup of salsa. The nacho dwarf greeted the customers, shook hands, worked the room. He would invite everybody to sample the treats he had on his head. He was there to serve. He was there to honor the nacho-dwarf code.

Understandably, quite a few of his fellow dwarves felt this was a degrading and insulting gig. Steve Vento (for that was his name), a former car salesman (for that was his trade), disagreed. He proclaimed himself proud to be a nacho dwarf. But other dwarves complained angrily that he was perpetuating inhumane stereotypes and encouraging mistreatment of non-nacho dwarves. In fact, they were protesting the restaurant, demanding a boycott until the nacho dwarf was canned.

I watched this with intense fascination. They showed a clip from the Anthony Michael Hall movie
Johnny Be Good
, which apparently had a party scene that had inspired the whole nacho-dwarf thing. They showed the dwarf lawyer who was representing the protesters. And they showed the nacho dwarf himself, defending his profession. He implied that maybe the other dwarves were just a little jealous that they did not have the talent to make it as a nacho dwarf. They resented his success, so they were trying to drive a fellow dwarf out of work and into the gutter. Why, they were taking food right out of his mouth!

“We are not trying to take food out of Mr. Vento’s mouth,” said the lawyer. “We are merely trying to take it off his head.”

And then, dear friends, at those words, a little light flickered in my mind. Some sort of divine revelation started to make itself clear before my eyes, and a voice began to articulate unto me the horrible truth: I needed to get out of the apartment more. No, I
really
needed to get out of the apartment more.

Maybe it was time to think about leaving Charlottesville. I loved it here, but there were serious changes I needed to make, and this was not the place to make them. It was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past. I needed to go. I wanted to walk before they made me run. There was too much happening there that I couldn’t share with Renée, and if I was going to keep living, I needed to move on to a new location. Charlottesville was always going to be her place. I wanted it to stay that way.

I had new friends in Charlottesville who didn’t know Renée, although they’d all heard stories about her before I got the chance to bring her up for the first time. It was bittersweet making friends who never got to hang with her, especially when they were so cool they reminded me of her. It was kind of like that Sade song “Maureen,” where she’s sad her dead friend can’t meet her new friends. I knew I needed to learn some manners about when it was okay to tell people stories about Renée, and when it was just too traumatic for them to hear about her. I didn’t want to scare them away. I was trying to learn some of Renée’s social finesse, to remember the way she used to put people at ease and make them feel free. That was just never my department, but I tried to get better at it.

I had a support system in Charlottesville that I felt crazy walking away from, and I was glad I had stayed as long as I had, but it was time to go. Most of my friends were now in New York, so I figured I’d go there, although friends in other towns lobbied—Stephanie called from San Francisco and read the sublet listings into my machine until the tape ran out. I set up a goodbye shelf, where I put things I needed to get rid of. If something sat on the goodbye shelf for a few days and I still got a pang when I looked at it sitting there, it wasn’t ready to go yet.

I said goodbye to our dog Duane (who I gave away) and our favorite band Pavement (who broke up but whose members made excellent solo albums). Duane spent her last year with me barking and howling, wishing she were anywhere else; Pavement spent their last tour fighting onstage. At their final shows, the band members reportedly wore handcuffs onstage as symbols of their frustration. Each goodbye came with different levels of relief, guilt, and confusion, so I put them off as long as I could. But dogs need to run free, and so do guitarists. It wasn’t right to hold them back. I had a lot of goodbyes left to say, to places and people and trees and radio stations.

For all of us who loved Renée, there were many goodbyes. At my friend Amanda’s wedding that spring, two of Renée’s best friends had a little meltdown in the ladies’ room when they saw that they were both wearing bike shorts under their fancy dresses to keep their thighs from rubbing together, a trick they’d both learned from Renée. They stayed in the ladies’ room and cried, while their husbands wondered what was going on. There were lots of moments like that for all of us—encounters with clothes, baseball, books, music. Every few years, I buy an old Stylistics record and think, Man, these guys were great, it’s been way too long. I get it home, make it halfway through side one, and then file it away in the Whenever pile because Renée loved them and it is too hard. Maybe next year, maybe not. I also assumed I’d never be able to take listening to the Replacements again, but then I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg’s name written on it. Her favorite song was “Unsatisfied” and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever. You just never know.

When friends came down
to visit from New York, they were amused by my deplorable car-radio tastes. I had become addicted to AM 1600, Cavalier Memories. The station was stuck in 1963, keeping me sane on the road with a steady sound track of Nancy Sinatra and Ray Charles and The Shangri-La’s. They seemed to play “Moon River” every forty minutes. All weekend, we drove around in the mountains listening to Cavalier Memories, where we heard most of the songs on this tape. After they went home, I sent them a copy of the tape as a Blue Ridge souvenir. I decided this was my new favorite mix. I walked around with it all spring. I made sequels:
Blue Ridge Platinum
,
Blue Ridge Velvet
,
Blue Ridge Silver
,
Blue Ridge Turquoise
.

Cavalier Memories was the only station Renée and I could always get in the old LeBaron, which didn’t have an FM dial, but now that I had a new car with a working radio, I just wanted to go back to my huckleberry friends on AM 1600. My appetite for this music was raging. Every time I was in the car, I heard all these great songs I’d never appreciated before. I’m sure I startled the other people at intersections whenever I would idle at a red light, screaming “I Am . . . I Said” using the rearview as a mike.

It was bittersweet getting to know these songs I never got to share with Renée. I mean, it was one thing to make new friends, and have to explain to them who Renée was, and how cool she was, and how much she loved Ricky Nelson and Shania Twain and Biggie Smalls, and so on. I figured that would always happen, since there are so many billions of new people. But it was a lonesome surprise to make new friends with songs. One day I turned on the ignition in the parking lot and heard Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind,” a song I’d known all my life and never paid any attention to, and fell totally in love with it. I bet Renée loved this song. We never heard it together, so I have no way of knowing. Now I loved this song, and there was no way to tell her about it. I found myself desperately trying to start a conversation with this song, introducing myself. “You don’t know me, ‘Gentle on My Mind,’ but I’m sure you’ve met my wife. Let me tell you a thing or two about her . . . .”

I’d drive around town, running errands or just escaping the house, and sing harmony duets with a partner who wasn’t there. I would picture Renée in the empty passenger seat, singing along with me. What the hell good is it to sing a Glen Campbell song to yourself? Nancy Sinatra, Perez Prado, Ella Mae Morse, Dean Martin—my mirror was getting jammed up with all my friends. I was desperate for them all to meet Renée. It was strange to fall back in love with really old songs, or to hear them for the first time and not get to hear Renée sing along with them.

I loved these songs, learned the tunes and the words, took them into my heart to stay. I had no idea what to
do
with them. But they were doing something with me. I had a lot of goodbyes to say. This was going to take time. I had time.

via vespucci

DECEMBER 2002

I
made this tape while
moving into my new apartment in Brooklyn. The living room has a china cabinet, but I loaded it up with tapes instead of dishes, unpacking one box of cassettes after another. I still haven’t finished unpacking—by the time I do, it’ll be time to move again.

One of the things I love about my neighborhood is the junk shop on Manhattan Avenue that has a basement full of used vinyl. The store doesn’t have a name, or a sign out front, but once you venture down the stairs, you’re in a shrine. I have never seen so many records crammed into one room, ceiling to floor. They’re not in any order, so it’s a place to spend a winter day scavenging for buried treasure. After my first visit there, I took my armful of records home and made this tape. There are crackles and scratches everywhere. Some of the songs are old favorites, some are new to me. I had never even heard of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Mirage”—how did I possibly live so much of my life without that song? Martha and the Vandellas’
Watchout!
—how did I manage without that one?

I live in a new city, where I have found friends who never met Renée and only know her through me. My ears runneth over with new favorite songs, new favorite bands, new favorite people to share them with. I met a girl, an astrophysicist who moved here from Charlottesville, and fell in love. We met while I was visiting friends down there; I first heard her voice on the car radio, where she was doing a Pixies tribute show on WTJU as DJ Astrogrrrl. She made me a mix for my birthday, a real cassette, although I couldn’t read the label because she wrote it in Japanese. So many great songs: The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” Siouxsie’s “Happy House,” The Pixies’ “Cactus,” The Cure’s “A Night Like This.” Well, clearly this was nothing but good.

Ally Astrogrrrl and I listen to the iPod I gave her for her birthday, which is pink to match the winter coat she wears over her fishnets. Last Christmas she used it to DJ the NASA holiday party, blasting the Stooges and David Bowie until one of the other scientists came over to turn the volume down. On Friday nights, we go eat sushi and play pinball, while she feeds quarters into the jukebox to play Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, bands I used to hate until I met her. Her specialty is galactic structure—and I can’t even find my way around McGuinness Boulevard. She explains the movements of the galaxies to me; she digs through her shoebox of high school tapes and plays me Skinny Puppy, Revolting Cocks, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and other bands I never gave a damn about. They took Love and Rockets’ “Ball of Confusion” off the jukebox at The Library on Avenue A because she wouldn’t stop playing it. Her karaoke anthem is Nirvana’s “Lithium.”

On weekend afternoons, Astrogrrrl and I can hear my upstairs neighbor sing along with her favorite Queen song, which is “Don’t Stop Me Now.” She likes that song
a lot
. She never plays it just once. I didn’t notice before, but it has the exact same lyrics as Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” I don’t know my upstairs neighbor’s name, or where she’s from, but I know she loves to hit those Freddy Mercury high notes and blast off. She had a boyfriend for a while who used to listen to folk music, but now he doesn’t seem to be around anymore. She still has “Don’t Stop Me Now,” though. The cars outside of my window blast Polish hip-hop, 24/7. I’m literally surrounded by music.

Sometimes I run into old friends I haven’t seen in years, who ask how Renée is—that still happens. Now it happens maybe once a year or so. They usually tell me a Renée story I haven’t yet heard. I am always happy to hear her name. I was once at a house party in Brooklyn, waiting in line for the bathroom with a friend I didn’t meet until a couple of years ago, when he randomly asked, “Hey, what was Renée’s favorite Hank Williams song?” That made my night. (It was “Setting the Woods on Fire.”) I meet new songs, too, and the new songs will sometimes bring her up. Renée told me about Gary Stewart’s “Out of Hand” once, said it could have been written about us. I recently heard it for the first time. She was right.

I make new friends and hear their stories. Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn’t decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention it was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones’
Exile on Main Street
. Needless to say, he was the suitor who won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I’ve heard of these postcards—over the years, I’ve heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl
Exile on Main Street
with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I’ve never heard of
anybody
getting rid of their prized
Exile
postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they’ve shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

I even met another young widower once, the only one I’ve met in eight years. We were in a sleazy West Village indie-rock bar, at the after-party for a Strokes show. He was the fiancé of a photographer I knew. We chatted about New York, and he asked why I’d moved here. I blurted out something about Virginia, where I used to live, when I was a husband, and then my wife died and I had to start over. He said, Uh, me, too.

We spent the whole night in a corner of the bar, breaking it all down. How did she die? When did you start sleeping again? When did you start eating again? Did people talk about it, or were they too scared? Do people avoid mentioning her around you? If they say “ex-wife,” do you correct them? When does it stop hurting? Did her parents stay in touch? For how long afterward did you try living in the same house? Did you ever have that dream where you run into her on the street, and don’t recognize her, and then you wake up and don’t go back to bed for a week?

Neither of us had ever met another one of the species. We couldn’t stop interrogating each other. All around us, people were dancing and guzzling Rolling Rocks and snorting bumps off their knuckles. His fiancée kept dancing over to check on us. We knew we were being rude, but we also knew we’d never get another chance to have this conversation.

After Renée died, I assumed the rest of my life would be just a consolation prize. I would keep living, and keep having new experiences, but none of them would compare to the old days. I would have to settle for a lonely life I didn’t want, which would always remind me of the life I couldn’t have anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way, and there’s something strange and upsetting about that. I would have stayed in 1996 if I could have, but it wasn’t my choice, so now I have to move either forward or back—it’s up to me. Not changing isn’t an option. And even though I’ve changed in so many ways—I’m a different person with a different life—the past is still with me every minute.

Last summer I took all of Renée’s hats to Central Park. I walked around the Great Lawn, leaving a hat every few benches. I thought of leaving a note on each hat saying, “This belonged to somebody very cool who loved hats, although she hardly ever wore them after the day she bought them, don’t get me started, and she loved this park, although she only came here once, in 1992, and we heard some guy with a banjo playing ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ and she laughed because this guy had no idea he was getting a chance to sing it for a real West Virginian girl.” But none of the hats were big enough for a story that long. So I just put a yellow sticky note on each one, saying, “Free.” There was the dark green bowler with the black velvet trim, the soft green cotton sun-hat she wore when we were walking around Dingle Bay in Ireland, the crimson cloche made of hemp fiber. There was the pink pillbox that she bought in a Salvation Army in North Carolina, with the mildew on it that made her sneeze. There were two different straw hats, one of which she wore to a barbeque lunch our wedding weekend, except I could no longer remember which one. I walked from bench to bench, trying not to be noticed as I left each hat, vaguely expecting to get stopped by cops and taken downtown for suspicious headgear disposal. The harder I tried not to look criminal, the harder my heart pounded and the faster I walked. After dropping off the last hat, I did a few loops around the statue of King Jagiello, who led Poland and Lithuania to victory over the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. I worried that some of the hats were not beautiful enough for anybody to want to wear them. They would get left behind; they would be forgotten. But I headed back to the Great Lawn twenty minutes later, and of course there were no hats left on the benches. The hats were free.

There’s a lot I miss about the nineties. It was an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent. It seemed inconceivable that things would ever go back to the way they were in the eighties, when monsters were running the country and women were only allowed to play bass in indie-rock bands. The nineties moment has been stomped over so completely, it’s hard to imagine it ever happened, much less that it lasted five, six, seven years. Remember Brittany Murphy, the funny, frizzy-haired, Mentos-loving dork in
Clueless
? By 2002, she was the hood ornament in
8 Mile
, just another skinny starlet, an index of everything we’ve lost in that time.

When Avril Lavigne sings “Sk8tr Boi,” a song about how lucky she is to wait backstage for her rock boy, how is anybody supposed to remember that the Avril Lavignes of yesteryear were sold pop fantasies in which
they
had a place onstage, too? (“Sk8tr Boi” is a great song, too—which is part of the reason why there’s nothing simple about these questions.) Something was happening in nineties music that isn’t happening
anywhere
in pop culture these days, with women making noise in public ways that seem distant now. Nirvana brought mass appeal back to guitar rock, and the mass appeal made the bands braver—some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians. A kind of popular song existed that didn’t before and doesn’t any more, as arty guitar bands seized the moment to communicate with huge numbers of fans and go to extremes and indulge their appalling drug-addled muses and say dangerous or dumb things and expand the emotional/musical languages with which people communicated.

I remember the summer of 1996, at a drunken wedding with one of my professors, a Hendrix-freak baby boomer, when he was complaining about the “bullet-in-the-head rock and roll” the kids were listening to today, and he asked Renée, “What does rock and roll have today that it didn’t have in the sixties?” Renée said, “Tits,” which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl—that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way—hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do.

America is a different place than it was in the nineties, when peace and prosperity and freedom were here to stay. The radio has become homogenized, with practically every station around the country bought up and programmed by the same corporation, and in a shocking coincidence, the weird girls have been shoved back underground. The economy is in the toilet. The war is here to stay. Since the coup of 2000, those nineties dreams have been stomped down so hard it seems crazy to remember that they were real, or at least part of real lives. I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.

I recently met a girl, a friend of a friend, and it took me only a minute to recognize her—she was Melissa, from the John Fluevog shoe store in Boston, where Renée would go to look for cool shoes. She’d helped Renée find three of her all-time top five pairs of shoes. I’d never even learned her name, but I remembered her kindness, and I remembered the way she talked about her cool indie-rock drummer boyfriend, who is now her husband and touring with the Dixie Chicks. At first, I felt strange telling her why I remembered her, or that my wife had been buried in shoes she’d helped pick out, but she got it. I told her about the day Renée bought the platform mod creepers and walked down Newbury Street, saying, “Nobody in Charlottesville has shoes this cool. None of the skinny girls have shoes this cool. That skinny Lori from Georgia doesn’t have shoes this cool.”

If I didn’t want to have these experiences, didn’t want to run into living things that reminded me of the past, I would have to hide under a rock—except that would remind me of the past, too, so I try not to hide. What shocks me is that the present is alive. It wouldn’t have shocked Renée.