by Sarah Vowell
I called the number in the ad and talked to Bob, a very nice, sane person actually. I expressed my reservations about his work using subtle, professional phrases such as “What a weird job!” Bob explains that by taping his clients’ old Dottie West and Frank Sinatra Jr. records, he “brings to life something that was essentially lying dormant in their life. I see it as providing a service that people are happy to pay for. They think it’s worth the money. I feel great, make a little money on the side. No problem.”
So Bob’s business is much more businesslike than I imagined. He doesn’t make the kind of painstaking mix tapes you make for someone you have a crush on. “Actually,” Bob points out, “people call me and they’re so delighted that this service exists that they’re super happy and almost not even that price sensitive.” His rates vary depending on the quantity of taping his clients demand. He says each tape costs, on average, about ten dollars. Hardly prostitution, more like giving it away.
Still, I remained fascinated by the unsavory if fictional idea that someone might be willing to pay someone else good money to make a compilation tape for his or her loved one. I decided I wanted the job. I had heard that my friend Dave has a new lady in his life, so I roped him into hiring me to make a tape for her.
“It honestly would be a good idea,” said my client during our first consultation.
“You’re at the tape stage?”
“Well, it could use a spark.”
“So tell me about her. Let’s try and get at who she is. Is she a femme fatale kind of girl, or more of a my funny valentine?”
He cringed. “Oh God. In sort of a scary way, she’s maybe too much of a carbon copy of me.”
“And are you a femme fatale, Dave?”
“No. I wouldn’t say either one of those. It’s not a saccharine, sweet thing. It’s kind of low-key.”
I wanted to know how intense he feels about this girl, hoping that the term “low-key” wouldn’t come up again. I ran some iconic song titles by him so he can decide how far to go with his musical expression of love and/or like. He said that he’s okay with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”; “Let’s Spend the Night Together” by the Rolling Stones “has been done”; “Kiss” by Prince is “nice”; though Frank Sinatra singing “Love and Marriage” is nixed because their relationship is “not sentimental. The I-love-you, I-need-you genre would be out. It would be more upbeat, fun stuff than ‘Love Me Tender’ kind of stuff at this point.”
I thought making the tape was going to be easy. If Dave was calling his romance “not sentimental,” then he was not having a romance. Thus anything was going to be an improvement. But once I started making Dave’s tape, I discovered something I hadn’t suspected. Choosing the songs and their order was sweaty, arduous toil. Making a mix tape isn’t like writing a letter, it’s like having a job. Without love as the engine of my labor, it was unpleasant. And I discovered something else. I did not want to follow Dave’s instructions. Sure, I had worked in the service industry before. I understood its abiding principle, “the customer is always right.” At first, I was committed to following Dave’s wish not to get too sentimental. I don’t know if he’s listened to much popular music recorded in the last, oh, half century, but it’s pretty gushy stuff. Even though Dave hired me to choose love songs which didn’t say I love you, there aren’t that many out there. And even if there were, I’m fully confident that his desire for them is dead wrong. My reasoning? He’s a boy. I’m a girl. I know better.
Certainly in making the tape I exercised restraint. After all, they’ve only been together two months. My role in their relationship is important, perhaps pivotal, and I take that responsibility seriously. I want to reassure her, not scare her off. I steered clear of the heavies, avoiding the serious courtship crooner Al Green. I vetoed Elvis, who should, in my opinion, only be employed when you really mean it. And when I did invoke Sinatra, I played it safe: not “Taking a Chance on Love” or even “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” but picking instead cheerful, subtle “Let’s Get Away from It All” as a low-key, you-and-me-baby, just-the-two-of-us-out-of-town sort of thing. Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” found a place, too. But I went with urbane jokester Noël Coward’s live in Las Vegas rendition, in which he moons, “Each man out there shooting craps does it / Davy Crockett in that dreadful cap does it.” Still, despite Dave’s request to hold the sugar, the word “love” must pop up something like ninety-eight times over the course of the tape.
So I dropped off the tape at his house and the next day we got together to talk about it.
“I like the tape a lot,” he says cheerfully. “There isn’t anything that I don’t really like.”
“I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I sort of ditched your instructions. Because you told me not to be too sentimental, and to keep it light and upbeat.”
“I thought it was light.”
“The word ‘love’ is bandied about, let’s say. Yesterday, you said, the ‘I-love-you, I-need-you’ genre would be out.”
“I did. I don’t know where they say that in this tape. Do they?”
“Well, ‘I love you’ is certainly in there.”
“I don’t think it is.”
But the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” (with the climax, “I need you! I love you! I need you!”) is on the tape. Along with Chic’s “Give Me the Lovin’ ” and James Brown’s “Hot (I Need to Be Loved Loved Loved).” Can the differences between the way he heard the songs and the way I heard them be attributed to something as cheap and clumsy as a gender cliché? That Dave hears them as songs about sex and I hear them as songs about love? Maybe. But it’s not as if I’ve wanted to marry every man I ever slept with. And since Dave is such a good friend to have, a rememberer of birthdays even, I know firsthand he’s not without a certain softness. If we both like the tape, if we both think the tape would make a nice gift for his sweetheart, could the impasse be in the way we’re talking about the tape? This being my story, however, I get to like the way I talk about it better. Even if James Brown hollers the verb “love” as a radio-friendly way of saying “fuck” I don’t think he means it unsentimentally. James Brown is not, and never was, “low-key.”
Anyway, the argument might be moot.
“We got into some sort of fight this morning,” he confesses.
“So now you need a tape.”
“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know what’s up, actually.”
I know exactly what’s up. Dave has a problem that all the love songs in the world couldn’t solve. Dave has a problem that could not be solved even by a one-hundred-minute, Chet Baker/Al Green/Elvis Presley medley recorded on a master-quality, super low-noise, high-bias, five-dollar cassette played in the moonlight as he asks her to dance. His love affair was too far gone before I ever pushed record and play on his behalf. It isn’t that Dave is necessarily unsentimental. It’s that he’s unsentimental about her. He liked the songs I picked. He just didn’t mean what the songs said. I can make a tape of “I Believe in Miracles” but I cannot perform miracles.
Drive Through Please
WHEN SOMEONE ASKS ME WHY I don’t drive, I usually say that my sister drives. Which sounds a little loony. But my sister, Amy, and I are twins. The downside of being a twin involves the sharing of attention, affection, and, especially for those born in December, gifts. “Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas, Amy and Sarah!” exclaimed many a box with a single toy inside. The advantage is that twins share responsibilities. There is little or no pressure to become a whole person, which creates a very clear, very liberating division of labor. I did the indoor things, she did the outdoor ones. She learned to ride a bike before I did. I learned to read before she did. She owns at least three pairs of skis. I own at least three brands of bourbon. Driving was her jurisdiction. Criticizing her driving was mine.
“But aren’t you from Montana?” the still-unconvinced inquisitor will usually ask. Yes, I’m from Montana, I’ll say, a very big state full of very small towns, towns so small that one m
ay walk everywhere.
The next question is always, “Still, aren’t you a journalist? Don’t journalists need to drive to their stories?” I suppose they do, if they’re interviewing bigamists in rural Utah, but not if they live two blocks from an el stop in Chicago and write book reviews in their pajamas. On the four or five days a year when I have to wear shoes to do my job, it has been my experience that the friendly folks at Condé Nast and Public Radio International are very generous about reimbursing cab receipts. If this fails to convince, I bring out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?
This sort of accusatory conversation, of course, almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
In the United States of America, however, if you have reached the age of seventeen without obtaining a driver’s license, you get used to The Look. Once a new acquaintance watches you buy beer with a passport, that person will ogle you with the kind of condescending, frightened glance usually reserved for unwed pregnant teenagers. Like you’re not a person but instead a kind of sociological statistic, sucking the taxpayers with your moochy demands of food stamps and public transportation. I have seen that look. And, walking home from the grocery store laden with plastic bags, I have heard the voice, too, the voice screaming from the window of a Honda, graciously advising me to “get a fucking car.”
Nothing scares me more than driving. I can’t even ride a bike without mangling my digits and hitting parked cars. I’ve always been terrified that I’d get behind the wheel and it would turn into one of those death scenes in a Shangri-Las song with bystanders screaming, “Lookoutlookoutlookoutlookout!”
In most families, I hear, the father teaches the kids to drive. But I had been in the backseat when he was screaming at Amy not to damage the U-joints, whatever those are. I figured he already had plenty of reasons to yell at me without adding car damage to his list of behavioral complaints. So Amy tried to teach me—once. Before I even got around to turning the key in the ignition I couldn’t stop giggling so she kicked me out of her car and made me walk. After that, I blocked the possibility of driving out of my mind. I’m never going to drive, like I’m never going to murder anyone, like I’m never going to like Celine Dion.
What possessed me, then, at the age of twenty-eight, to learn how to drive? Maybe I agreed to learn because the person who was going to teach me was my boss on the radio show I work for, Ira Glass. While learning to drive has dramatic, once-in-a-lifetime, overcoming-adversity consequences, Ira Glass telling me what to do is a quotidian routine. If my editor is teaching me, I reasoned, I won’t really be learning how to drive, I’ll be working on a story. Working on a story isn’t really life, unless your life happens to involve getting paid to talk to your parents or Burt Bacharach. Or maybe rethinking driving was just part of the general mind-changing trend of adulthood, part of the same impulse that caused me to reverse my previously held opinions on cucumbers, lipstick, and Neil Young. Or maybe the continuing-education aspect of the lessons appealed to me. After spending twenty years in school, I missed the random learning curve, how one day you’re counting haiku syllables and the next day they have you constructing solar-powered hot dog roasters out of tinfoil. Being a grownup requires a twelve-month calendar, and that calendar is mostly filled up with doing things you know how to do.
Besides, I tell myself as I study the Illinois “Rules of the Road” pamphlet, it’s not like I’m learning how to swim. I lied when I said that nothing scares me more than driving. At least I’ll get into a car. I’m so afraid of drowning that I tend to drink beer in half-pints.
“Rules of the Road” is an alarming, apocalyptic work of literature filled with foreboding information such as “carbon monoxide is a deadly poison” and “if fire is an immediate danger you must jump clear of the vehicle” and “if your vehicle runs off the roadway into water but does not sink right away, try to escape through a window.” (And if you can’t swim?) I am nonplussed about the erratic portrayal of non-drivers, the warnings that “bicyclists may make unexpected moves.” The language is also transparently right-wing, full of diagrams in which the good car is white while the “Black Car is Breaking the Law,” and then there’s the Sieg Heil salute of a right-turn hand signal, or “the vehicle on the left should yield to the vehicle on the right.” This booklet feels like a Wes Craven remake of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and reading it made me panic.
So by the time I’m ready to go to the DMV and take the written test, I have worked myself into such a frenzy that I feel as though I’ve just consumed twelve gallons of coffee. I am twitching and tapping my fingers nonstop, ready to forget the whole thing. I go talk to Ira, hoping he’ll let me off the hook. He does not. Instead, he gives me a comforting pep talk about how I look “pre-throwup.”
I start ranting against what I like to call the car class. The car class runs the world! The car class is the ruling class! The car class is the class which the American world is set up for! The car class pollutes our world! The car class burns fossil fuels! Normally, I care about fossil fuels as much as everyone else in America, which is to say not at all. But I am so terrified of taking the driving test that I’m looking for any way out. As I leave for the test I feel like I’m off to join a cult.
In Chicago, the Department of Motor Vehicles is the Jonestown, the Heaven’s Gate, of the American mainstream. And, just as I never really got lawyer jokes until an attorney made me cry, I finally understand all previous DMV humor—those lines are long. Other than the fact that the song on the radio when I come in is “Killing Me Softly,” it’s pretty uneventful. I pass the test, pay twenty bucks, receive a learner’s permit.
The next morning Ira picks me up for my first lesson. He is parked in front of a fire hydrant, a bad sign. We go to an elementary school parking lot and I get behind the wheel. I should point out that it is Saturday morning, so I’m not about to bump into or over any six-year-olds.
I am In the Driver’s Seat. How I loathe that little colloquialism. I reach to the right for my seat belt, perpetual passenger that I am, and grab hold of the air. I don’t know if my feet should be touching the pedals, how much my legs should be bent. I ask Ira what I’m supposed to see out of the mirror, as if reflected glass were some kind of crazy, newfangled technology. I don’t know which way to turn the key in the ignition. Ira patiently answers my questions, pointing out which pedal is the brake, which one’s the accelerator. He tells me to give it a little gas. My foot nudges the pedal with the delicacy of a Don Rickles punchline. “We just lurched forward like in Star Trek,” Ira points out.
I drive in circles. Round and round, over and over. Ira notices that every time I make a turn I stick out my tongue, “like a little kid concentrating really hard on drawing a pony.” I make more circles. I turn left a little. I lurch left a lot. It is hypnotic. I am coddled. I am encouraged. My instructor coos, “I’m so impressed. Sarah, you’re doing so well.” Then, “Don’t hit the handicapped people!”
It reminds me of learning to play the piano: In the beginning you look at your hands as much as you look at the sheet music. The difficulty isn’t decoding the notes, it’s doing it in time, without stopping to think about every little move.
After half an hour in which I play the driving equivalent of “Chopsticks,” Ira takes over the wheel again to take us to the next parking lot. I look out the window as he drives. Never in my life have I viewed the nation’s roadways through the eyes of a driver. Suddenly, our lane appears so narrow and fraught with danger. My beautiful city of orderly boulevards and responsible fellow citizens has turned into some film noir back alley where you can’t trust a soul, where even the parked cars look like they’re packing heat and they don’t care who knows. Ira, formerly hatless, is now tipping his fedora at a skirt in a
doorway, though around here a dame’s pretty smile gets you nothing but the jaws of life.
Ira drives past Rosehill Cemetery, exclaiming, “Perfect! No one around. No one you can hurt anyway.”
I drive past mausoleums and headstones, past graves dating back to the Civil War. Lucky bastards, to live in an America before cars. It occurs to me that some of the occupants must have died in car accidents.
I sigh. I’m bored. I’m no longer nervous, but I’m not really concentrating. I don’t feel like myself. I feel stoned, like someone other than me is skidding in the snow. And then, out of nowhere, another car.
Ira screams, “Signal!”
“I can’t.”
“Signal!”
I’d forgotten there would be other cars involved. I have problems of my own without worrying about the other drivers. Not just their actions—their actual existence. Now that I’m nervous again, I start giggling. When I’m scared, I laugh. A lot. Another truck passed us in the cemetery and I drive straight off the road. Ira, helpful teacher, points out that I drove straight off the road. He calls me a coward. I tell him that, on the contrary, I was protecting the other car, that driving off the road was a heroic move.
I’m such a brand-new driver that I have no habits. Five minutes after I lurched away from the truck, a Buick passes and I am magnetically compelled toward it. Ira grabs the wheel and swerves us away, screaming, “Slow! Slow!”
After an hour in the cemetery, he decides I’m ready to drive among the living. To celebrate, he pops in a tape.
“123456!” yells Jonathan Richman. “Road runner, road runner, going faster miles an hour.” He remembered. It’s one of my favorite songs. We bicker a minute about what it’s about—he says it’s about driving, I say it’s about listening to the radio—as I slowly navigate a residential street and pull up to big, noisy Western Avenue. The song is so blissfully distracting that I find myself keeping pace with the music and not the traffic. And four cars, in a kind of convergence of hate, honk a big welcome to the car class.