Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  As Renée left the bar, I asked my friend, “What was that girl’s name again?”

  “Renée.”

  “She’s really beautiful.”

  “Uh-huh. And there’s her boyfriend.”

  The boyfriend’s name was Jimm, and he really did spell his name with two M’s—a dealbreaker if I ever heard one. Renée had actually just broken up with the guy that night, but I didn’t know that yet. So I just cursed my luck, and crushed out on her from afar. I memorized her teaching schedule and hung around the English department whenever she had office hours, hoping to run into her in the hallway. I wrote poems about her. I made her this tape and slipped it into her mailbox. I just taped my two favorite Big Star albums and filled up the spaces at the end of the tape with other songs I liked, hoping it would impress her. How cool was this girl? She was an Appalachian country girl from southwestern Virginia. She had big, curly brown hair, little round glasses, and a girlish drawl. I just knew her favorite Go-Go was Jane Wiedlin.

  One Saturday night we met at a party and danced to a few B-52’s songs. Like all southern girls, Renée had an intense relationship with the first three B-52’s albums. “All girls are either Kate girls or Cindy girls,” she told me. “Like how boys are either Beatles or Stones boys. You like them both, but there’s only one who’s totally yours.” Her B-52 idol was Kate, the brunette with the auburn melancholy in her voice. I wanted to stay all night and keep talking to Renée about the B-52’s, but my ride wanted to go early. So I left her stranded and went home to pace up and down the parking lot outside the subdivision, shivering in the cold with my Walkman, listening to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” The ache in his voice summed up my mood, as he sang about a girl driving right past him, the kind of car that doesn’t pass you every day.

  Renée and I ran into each other again when the poet John Ashbery came to town for a reading. He was one of my idols, the man who wrote The Double Dream of Spring. I got to meet him after the reading, but I blew it. A bunch of us were hovering around, trying to think of clever things to say. He’d just read his poem “The Songs We Know Best” and was explaining that he’d written it to go with the melody of Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited” because the song was all over the radio and he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. So I asked if he was a fan of Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” which of course has the same melody as “Reunited.” He smiled graciously and said no, he wasn’t, but that he liked George Michael. Then he went back to saying nothing at all and my friends were furious and I was mortified and I will go to my grave wondering why I spent my one moment in the presence of this great man discussing Wham! (and not even a good Wham! song), but I guess that’s the double dream of dipshit I am.

  Afterward I stood at the bar, drowning my sorrows. Renée came up to kick my shins and bum a cigarette. She mentioned that her birthday was coming up in a few days. As always, there were a few other boys from her fan club hovering around, so we all went out for a late-night tour of Charlottesville’s cheaper drinking establishments. I squeezed into a booth next to her and we talked about music. She told me you can sing the Beverly Hillbillies theme to the tune of R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion.” That was it, basically; as soon as she started to sing “Talk About the Clampetts,” any thought I had of not falling in love with her went down in some serious Towering Inferno flames. It was over. I was over.

  We hung out again the next night—Renée showed up with another gang of suitor boys, all giving her puppy-dog looks, but I wasn’t too worried about outlasting them. Joe passed out around midnight. Paul staggered out a few minutes later. Steve’s offer to help walk Renée home lasted as long as it took for him to smash into the wall twice on his way down the stairs. I was the last man standing. Renée led me to her place, a couple of miles away. It was so dark I couldn’t see her at all while we walked; I just followed her voice. I spent the night on her couch, sleeping under a huge portrait of her painted by some sweet indie-rock boy back in Roanoke. I was a little sad about being on the couch, but I was going for the long bomb. Her incredibly annoying cat, Molly, kept jumping on my face all night. I woke up at dawn and lay there drowsing, feeling a little less lonely than I had the morning before, waiting for this girl to make some noise.

  Renée had Saturday errands to run, and I invited myself along to keep her company. We drove all around Charlottesville in the afternoon sun. We listened to a mix tape another guy had made her, back in Roanoke. It had some lame indie rock, some decent indie rock, and one really great song: Flatt & Scruggs doing their bluegrass version of “Ode to Billie Joe.” She told me she’d thrown a Billie Joe party that summer. “I had it on the third of June,” she crowed. “You know, the day the song takes place. I served all the food they eat in the song: black-eyed peas, biscuits, apple pie.”

  We couldn’t think of anything else to talk about, so we just drove in silence until she dropped me off at my place. I spent the rest of the day making a birthday tape for her, mostly Senegalese acoustic music by Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, just in case she smoked pot. I started to add Bob Dylan’s “I Want You,” but then thought better of it. Instead, I added Scrawl’s “Breaker Breaker,” to show off my affinity with feminist trucker punk songs, and the Neville Brothers, to make her think maybe I smoked pot.

  We met up at a dive called the Garrett on Monday, the night before her birthday. It was not a romantic bar—the carpet was so pot-soaked you got a buzz walking to the bathroom—but it offered privacy, cheap liquor, a cigarette machine that was easy to tilt, and pool tables to distract pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. I’d spent the day writing a sonnet sequence for her. I’m not sure what I was thinking—I mean, I used the word “catachresis” in the first line. But I was certain my prosodic ingenuity would melt her heart for good. I used one of my favorite rhyme schemes—stolen from the James Merrill poem “The Octopus,” though he’d stolen it himself, from W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror—rhyming the first syllable of a trochee with the final syllable in the next line. How could she resist?

  At midnight, I gave her the poems.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Well, the last word in the first line is a trochee, and it rhymes with the end of the next line. So ‘catachresis’ rhymes with ‘fleece.’”

  “No, what’s going on?”

  “In a catachresis?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “Uh . . . I have a big crush on you.”

  “Oooooh,” she said. She smiled and let the pages drop on the table. She relaxed in front of my eyes. “So how did it start?”

  “Well, I think you’re really beautiful.”

  She relaxed a lot more—in fact, her face changed shape a little, got a little more round, as if her jaw had unclenched. I didn’t know whether that was a good sign or not, but I couldn’t shut up yet.

  “I always thought so. Right away, when I saw you.”

  “The amazing black dress,” she nodded. “I was wearing that when I met you. There’s, uh, a lot of me in that dress. My Fuck the Hostess dress. It’s a real ‘drop to your knees and say amen’ dress.”

  “I noticed. It’s gotten worse since then.”

  “I know.” She lit one of my Dunhills. I had never seen her so comfortable. “I was on the phone with my friend Merit tonight, and she was like, Does Rob like you? And I said, I don’t know, he made me a tape and he didn’t call and then we danced together and then he left and called and left a message but didn’t call after that. And Merit was like, So, do you like Rob?”

  I couldn’t believe she was making me do this. “So, do you?”

  She smiled. “I don’t know. He’s not my type, but I really like him.” She told me her type was farm boys with broad shoulders, football players. She took her time smoking that cigarette. She still had most of her beer left and she was in no hurry at all. I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.

  “I don’t know what your type is. I don’t know what your de
al is. I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in your life, that’s it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don’t have any room, I would like to be your friend. Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.”

  “But you’d rather be a boyfriend than a friend?”

  “Given the choice. No, not given the choice. That’s what I want.”

  “Where are you parked?”

  “I walked.”

  “What’s a catachresis?”

  “A rhetorical inversion of tense, kind of like a transumption. Let’s go.”

  In her car, we listened to Marshall Crenshaw’s first album, and when we got to her place, we sat on the couch under that big painting. She was not comfortable anymore; she was really scared. She got up and put on my Big Star mix, then took it off. She put on Marshall Crenshaw again. I went through her shoe-boxes of tapes. This girl was definitely an eighties girl. She had a tape with R.E.M.’s Murmur on one side and U2’s War on the other, another with The Velvet Underground & Nico backed with Moondance. Uh-oh, she also had a lot of XTC tapes. We’d have to work that out later.

  “Oh, Rob,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

  I was scared, too. That was a long, long night. I swear her face changed shape several times. I don’t know how this is possible, but it did. Her eyelids got heavier and wider. Her breathing got slower and deeper, and her jaw kept dropping lower, making her whole face bigger. She had a solemn look in her eyes. Around dawn, she said, “I hope I do right by you.” I didn’t know what she meant, so I didn’t say anything. I was wearing my Hüsker Dü T-shirt from the Warehouse tour. She was wearing a Bob Jones University sweatshirt. I figured there must be a disturbing story there, but I didn’t ask.

  Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late. I felt myself just melting in Renée’s room that night. I remembered being a kid, standing on the bridge over the Pine Tree Brook, when we would find a wax six-ring holder from a six-pack the older kids had killed. We would touch a match to one corner, hold it over the water, and just watch it drip, drip, drip. We’d watch the circular rings, long before the flame even touched them, curl up or bend over in agony. Six rings of wax, twisting and contorting permanently, doing a spastic death dance like the one Christopher Lee does at the end of Horror of Dracula, when the sunlight hits him.

  The minutes dripped by, each one totally bending and twisting my shape. We eventually stopped getting up to flip the tape, and just listened to dead air. I could feel serious changes happening to me the longer I stayed in Renée’s room. I felt knots untie themselves, knots I didn’t know were there. I could already tell there were things happening deep inside me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than “irreversible”? It’s a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage—no backing up. Falling in love with Renée felt that way. I felt strange things going on inside me, and I knew that these weren’t things I would recover from. These were changes that were shaping the way things were going to be, and I wouldn’t find out how until later. Irreversible. I remember that we discussed The Towering Inferno that night, the scene with Steve McQueen, the valiant firefighter, and William Holden, the evil tycoon who owns the hotel. William Holden asks, “How bad is it?” and Steve McQueen answers, “It’s a fire, mister. And all fires are bad!” That’s the last thing I remember before I fell asleep.

  sheena was a man

  NOVEMBER 1989

  Renée 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 o
pen ’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.