Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (6 page)

sheena was a man

NOVEMBER 1989

R
enée was my hero.
Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire then drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That’s what Renée was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal. It didn’t take long for us to get all tangled up in each other’s hair.

One day that fall we were driving around in her 1978 Chrysler LeBaron and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” came on the radio. Renée sang lead, while I sang the Pips’ backup routine. She’s leavin’! Leavin’ on the midnight train! Woo woo! A superstar but he didn’t get far! When we got to the final fade-out, with Gladys on board the train and the Pips choo-chooing their goodbyes, Renée cocked an eyebrow and said, “You make a good Pip.”

That’s all I ever wanted to hear a girl tell me. That’s all I ever dreamed of being. Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips. I marveled unto my Pip soul how lucky I was to choo-choo and woo-woo behind a real Gladys girl.

Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one. She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive. One day, she announced she had found the guitar of her dreams at a local junk shop. I said, “You don’t even play the guitar.”

She said, “This is the guitar that’s gonna teach me.”

We drove up Route 29 and she got the guitar. It was a great big Gibson Les Paul with stickers of the Carter Family and the Go-Gos and Lynyrd Skynyrd plastered all over the case. We drove it home and spent the whole weekend kicking around the house as Renée sat on the couch figuring out how to play her favorite Johnny Cash and George Jones songs.

Unlike me, Renée was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people’s secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did. She was finishing her MFA in fiction, and was always working on stories and novels. She had more ideas than she had time to finish. She loved to get up early in the morning. She loved to talk about wild things she wanted to do in the future. She’d never gone two weeks without a boyfriend since she was fifteen. (Two weeks? I could do a year standing on my head.) Before she met me, her wish list for the next boyfriend had contained three items: older than her (I failed that one), rural (that one, too), and no facial hair (I would have needed six months’ notice to slap an acceptable sideburn together).

I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked. She was particular about her bourbon, winced if I forgot to put the ice cubes in before I poured. She’d hiss, “Don’t bruise the bourbon!”

She was the first person on either side of her family to go to college, and she held herself to insanely high standards. She worried a lot about whether she was good enough. It was surprising to see how relieved she seemed whenever I told her how amazing she was. I wanted her to feel strong and free. She was beautiful when she was free.

She could play a little piano, mostly hymns that she learned to play for her grandfather. They were tight. When he came home from the mine, she would rub lotion into his blackened hands. When he was on the dialysis machine, she would sit next to him and feed him Pringles. She had some of the scrip they used to pay miners in, instead of cash, to keep them in debt to the mining company. Her grandfather, like mine, worshiped FDR.

Sometimes she would say romantic things like, “I feel like I been rode hard and put away wet.” I couldn’t fully translate this. I was from the suburbs—I had no idea whether you’re supposed to dry off a horse before you put it away somewhere. But if Renée was trying to make herself unforgettable, she was doing it right.

Renée and I spent
a lot of time that fall driving in her Chrysler, the kind of mile-wide ride southern daddies like their girls to drive around in. She would look out the window and say, “It’s sunny, let’s go driving”—and then we’d actually do it. She loved to hit the highway and would say things like, “Let’s open ’er up.” Or we would just drive around aimlessly in the Blue Ridge mountains. She loved to take sharp corners, something her grandpa had taught her back in West Virginia. He could steer with just one index finger on the wheel. I would start to feel a little dizzy as the roads started to twist at funny angles, but Renée would just accelerate and cackle, “We’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!”

We would always sing along to the radio. I was eager to be her full-time Pip, but I had a lot to learn about harmony. Whenever we tried “California Dreamin’,” I could never remember whether I was the Mamas or the Papas. I had never sung duets before. She did her best to whip me into shape.

“They could never be!”

“What she was!”

“Was!”

“Was!”

“To!”

“To!”

“To!”

“No,
no
, damn it! I’m Oates!”

“I thought
I
was Oates.”

“You started as Hall. You have to stay Hall.”

We never resolved that dispute. We both always wanted to be Oates. Believe me, you don’t want to hear the fights we had over England Dan and John Ford Coley.

Have you ever been in a car with a southern girl blasting through South Carolina when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Call Me the Breeze” comes on the radio? Sunday afternoon, sun out, windows down, nowhere to hurry back to? I never had. I was twenty-three. Renée turned up the radio and began screaming along. Renée was driving. She always preferred driving, since she said I drove like an old Irish lady. I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve ever been in was just to get me here, any road I’ve ever been on was just to get me here, any other passenger seat I’ve ever sat on, I was just riding here. I barely recognized this girl sitting next to me, screaming along to the piano solo.

I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.

personics

AUGUST 1990

I
brought this Personics tape
home to Renée as a present from Boston. The Personics fad didn’t last long, but everybody got one that summer. You went to the record store, flipped through the catalog of available songs, some costing $1.75, some $1.15, some just 75 cents. You filled out your order form, handed it to the clerk, and a few hot minutes later you had your own Personics Custom Cassette with a foxy silver-and-turquoise label.
Toast in the Machine
, my tape from the Tower Records on Newbury Street, is labeled: “Made by the Personics System Especially for: RENÉE.” Très romantique!

Personics seemed incredibly high-tech at the time, but really, it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. The worst song on this tape is “Bird Song” by the Holy Modal Rounders, which I had never even heard before; I included it because I was curious how bad a song had to be to cost only 50 cents in the Personics booklet. It’s two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of giggly hippie folk shit; I think it had a whistling solo, but I don’t have the stomach to listen again to find out. I guess you had to be there, and by “there” I mean “dangerously baked for about three months in 1969.” This tape doesn’t exactly flow; it’s just a bunch of burnt offerings to this goddess girl.

I realize it’s frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me. In the animal kingdom, Renée and I would have recognized each other’s scents; for us, it was a matter of having the same favorite Meat Puppets album. Music was a physical bond between us, and the fact that she still owned her childhood 45 of Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” was tantamount to an arranged marriage. The idea that we might not belong together never really crossed my mind.

I went home with Renée,
and she drove me around her hometown, three hours southwest of Charlottesville, down in the New River Valley. We drove around Pulaski County. We went to dinner at the Pizza Den and ate fried potato wedges at Wade’s. Gary Clark, who played for the Washington Redskins, was from Pulaski County, and his mom had a sporting goods store right next to Wade’s, so we checked it out. The closer we got to Pulaski County, the sharper Renée’s accent got. She started using words like “reckon.” I even heard her say “dad gum it” once, in the Safe-way parking lot. We stopped at gas stations along the way and she’d buy Hank Williams or Dwight Yoakam tapes to play until we got near enough to a town to pick up some radio.

Her people were from Greenbrier County, West Virginia, hardcore Appalachian coal country, where her grandfathers were miners. Her parents, Buddy and Nadine Crist, went to work in Washington, D.C., out of high school, and met in the Department of Commerce cafeteria. They got married at Hines Baptist Church, back in Greenbrier County, when they were both nineteen and just before Buddy was transferred to Georgia. Her high school boyfriends were all football players. Her kind of guy drove a truck and wore thermals; she was always amused when she saw thermals in the J. Crew catalog, tastefully renamed “waffle weave.” Every September, no matter who her boyfriend was, the same thing would happen—he’d be out sick from school the first day of buck season, along with all the other guys. Renée considered herself open-minded to be dating a dude who had never shot anything.

When Renée drove me out to Pulaski County to meet her folks, she warned me that her dad was a boyfriend killer. She was right. He looked like Jim Rockford. At our first meeting he shook my hand and went right back into the story he was telling, about one of his least favorite relatives, Uncle Amos, a professional dynamiter whose South Carolina vanity plate read
I BLAST
. Buddy snorted, “He’s shithead number two.” I came to play ball, so I got right in there and asked, “Who’s shithead number one?”

Buddy nodded in Renée’s direction. “Her last boyfriend.”

I swallowed my face into the back of my throat. That night, I slept in Nadine’s sewing room. Monday morning, Renée got the lowdown from her mom. All Buddy had said about me was, “Well, better than the last one.”

We went to a couple of family reunions that summer. We rolled out to West Virginia, and she took me to the famous gas station in Hughart country where the locals say Hank Williams stopped for gas on New Year’s Eve 1953, in the middle of his fatal all-night ride in that long black limousine. Renée’s family reunions were fun because they were all about music. Her dad would bring his guitar, and so would all her uncles—Dalton, Zennis, Troy, Kermit, and Grover—and her Aunt Caroline. By day, they stood in a circle and sang “Sweet Thing,” with cousin Jerry taking the Ernest Tubb part and Aunt Caroline taking the Loretta Lynn part. At night, we stayed up late in somebody’s motel room and they sang the old songs they grew up singing together, trying to remember their old harmony parts, and taught one another new radio songs. Uncle Grover’s lead vocal was “Cool Water,” by Sons of the Pioneers. Everybody sang on “Rocky Top.” Renée’s dad played a few songs, including a sad song about the coal mines he’d written for his father and one called “Itty Bitty Girl” that he wrote for Renée when she was a baby. He did one of his favorites, the old Waylon Jennings–Willie Nelson tune “Good Hearted Woman,” and busted out a Porter Wagoner song I’d never heard, “The Cold Hard Facts of Life,” which rhymes with “knife,” which is what you get offed with when you mess with another man’s “wife.” I assumed Buddy meant it as a warning. He also dedicated a song to me, a rowdy version of “Red Necks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer.”

After she told her
grandmother I was an Irish Catholic boy, her grandmother said, “You know, the Catholics killed the Christians in Spain.” I had no idea what she meant, but fortunately, she didn’t seem to hold me personally responsible.

Renée didn’t just sit back and wait for adventures to happen. She covered ground and took me with her. Renée drove me out to Danville to find a reclusive old fifties rockabilly singer she worshipped, Janis Martin. Janis invited us in for coffee and told us stories about Patsy Cline and Ruth Brown and Elvis Elvis Elvis while her prize greyhounds bit my ankles.

Janis Martin nodded in my direction and told Renée, “He don’t say much, do he? But he’s got a sweet smile. I think he likes me.”

Renée nodded and smiled. “Oh, he likes you.”

Janis said, “He’s thinking, hell, she’s old but she’s fine. The tits ain’t bad.”

Renée said, “Definitely the tits.”

We visited each other’s rivers, the New River and An Beithe. Water was important to our ancestors. Renée’s people worried about droughts, mine worried about floods. Some places you don’t miss your water till the well runs dry, but in the old country, my people lived in fear of water. You had to build your house close enough to water so you could go fetch some, but on a hill big enough so you wouldn’t get flooded. It was a guessing game—estimate too low and you lose your whole family. That’s why Auntie Peggy, still living in the old boireen in Kealduve Upper, refused to allow indoor plumbing right up to her dying day, which was in 1987. Whenever anybody suggested indoor plumbing, she always said, “Sure we’ll be drowned in our beds!”

That’s the way they did it in the old country. Two people battle the elements that are trying to kill them, and if one of them weakens, the other dies. If they stay strong, they get to die some other way. That was romance. My grandparents stayed in love for over sixty years.