After the reception our friends drove us to the Eastern Standard, the bar where we met. The bartender on duty was Ruby, one of our favorites, a profane and excellent old lady who didn’t give a damn about our precious memories. Ruby, She-Wolf of the SS. Ruby put the “freak” in “frequently drunk and belligerent.” Since Virginia state law prohibits a bartender from consuming alcohol behind the bar, she instead lit up a big fatty and ignored all our drunken requests to play the Big Star tape. There was a big party across the street that night, at Silver Fox, the only drag joint in town, and since the club didn’t have a liquor license the room was full of Chers and Jackies popping over to the Eastern Standard for a drink. Cornered on separate sides of the room, Renée and I watched our friends mingle, and occasionally locked eyes, trying to spot which guests were in the running for wedding nookie. Renée quizzed the Jews about what “mazel tov” means, the Baptists quizzed me about whether Renée was now obligated to bear Catholic babies and donate them to the Vatican, and the southerners quizzed the northerners about why nobody really eats grits. Around eleven, everybody drained their glasses and went off to the mall to see Terminator 2.
Renée and I stayed behind for one more bourbon and ginger, which neither of us had any appetite to finish. We had waited all day to get just one minute to ourselves, but neither of us could think of a thing to say.
“Why did he kiss the book?” Renée finally asked me.
“Excuse me?”
“Father Cunningham, he kissed the book.”
“It’s a standard thing.”
“Does it mean I’m Catholic now? Because if he made me Catholic without asking, my mama is gonna be pissed.”
“He made you a bishop.”
Renée poked her ice cubes with a plastic pirate sword and put her head on my shoulder. She asked me, “Was Mel gay?”
“You have a question, Your Holiness?”
“Mel. From Mel’s diner. Kiss my grits.”
“You mean Vic Tayback.”
“No, just Mel.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Mel never got any chicks. EVER.”
“He was a hardworking man. Devoted to his diner.”
“He never got any chicks. He never hung around anybody except Alice, with her show tunes. And Vera, with the tap dancing.”
“He had Flo.”
“Flo was a total drag queen.”
“I just don’t see it.”
“Queer as a three-dollar bill, honey,” Ruby said. “Last call.”
Nobody remembered to give us a lift home. The last bus had stopped running hours ago. So I grabbed Renée’s hand, or maybe she grabbed mine, and we walked. Maybe it took an hour or two; neither of us was wearing a watch, so I don’t know. We were too tired to gossip, so we sang songs we knew, like “O.P.P.” and “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” Turned out we both remembered the words to a bunch of other Andy Gibb songs.
If I had my way, the story would end here. Renée was always braver. She always wanted to know what happens next.
that’s entertainment
JULY 1991
Now that we were married, Renée stopped having dreams about her ex-boyfriends every night. She was pissed about that. So was I. The months leading up to the wedding had been a pageant of highly entertaining (for me) and traumatic (for her) dreams, which she confessed with shame every morning. They all had the same plot: Renée trysts with a boy from her past, he begs her to run away with him, she thinks about it, and then she decides instead to move on to her future with me. She thought these dreams were guilty secrets. I thought they were funny. I loved meeting these clowns. My favorite was the volleyball player from Roanoke. The last time she booty-called him, he said he was busy—he didn’t want to miss the farewell episode of Magnum, P.I. Years after the fact, Renée was still fuming. I wanted to shake his hand. This was my competition? No wonder I got a shot. Compared to her memories, I felt like Pelé kicking a couple around with the 1981 Tampa Bay Rowdies.
Now we were married, and the dreams stopped. I guess she’d said her goodbyes. We both missed these boys. Now we were alone with each other.
Which meant we had all these neighbors to deal with. The old lady next door dropped by with a plate of muffins one Sunday afternoon, right in the middle of Studs. Renée explained that in the South, this is normal—you just drop in on your married neighbors. I was aghast. I was a husband in the South now. We had married into this alien landscape with its strange customs. Had I chosen this? Had Renée? It felt like a hangover from a country song: You pass out on the train, miss your stop, wake up in a town you’ve never heard of, and that’s where you live now. Renée and I were just passing through, on our way somewhere, but suddenly we lived here.
As newlyweds, we crammed into Renée’s basement on Highland Avenue. It was the first place we ever had to ourselves, with side two of Earth, Wind & Fire’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1 on the stereo, never needing to be flipped—we just lifted the needle every eighteen minutes. Renée had a pantyhose job as a paralegal at a law firm. At work, she turned the radio down low so she could listen to my radio show, and I serenaded her with long-distance dedications like Frightwig’s “My Crotch Does Not Say Go.” Around five, I drove downtown to pick her up from work, and then we could go anywhere we wanted. It was too hot to go home until the sun went down, so we usually hit the Fashion Square Mall, where we’d sit on a bench, basking in the free air-conditioning, breathing in the scent of cookie-corns and cinna-clusters and crunch-o-cottons, chattering to keep our minds from wandering places we couldn’t afford to go. For pinball, we hit the Seminole Theater, where we could play the Rollerball machine all night without buying a movie ticket. If we were feeling lazy, we just went to MJ Design to browse through all the leopardskin fun fur.
Our backyard looked into the woods, and we’d sit out there when it got too humid to breathe inside. Charlottesville turns into a rain forest every summer; the sea winds blow in from Tidewater, a few hundred miles to the east, and then they run slam into the Blue Ridge, so all the hot, wet air just hovers over Charlottesville. We’d look out across our neighbors’ yards and try to imagine their lives. Did they really live here, call it home? Or were they on their way to bigger things, like us? Did they get stuck here on their way somewhere else, or was this the town where they arrived and said, This is the place? Did they give up and blame each other? Were they lying low and planning their next move?
I was still serfing away at grad school. My friends and I assumed that we would soon be tenured professors, which is an excellent life goal—it’s like planning to be Cher. You think, I’m going to wear beads and fringed gowns, and sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on the way to work every morning, and then one day, I’m going to get a call saying, “Congratulations! You’re Cher! Can you make it to Vegas by showtime?”
Renée and I would shiver in the air-conditioning of the Fashion Square Mall and talk about how excellent it was going to be when we finally got out of Charlottesville. We’d go to the early bird special at the Chicken House, over in the Sears end of the mall. It was cheap, and we liked being surrounded by crotchety old couples. Someday, we’d be one of them. Meanwhile, we couldn’t believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We’d lived for just twenty-five years; we weren’t planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
That summer we got our dog, and our new favorite band.
“I want to meet our dog,” Renée said one night. We were sitting in the Fashion Square Mall parking lot, around midnight, the windows rolled down.
“We don’t have a dog,” I said.
“That’s why I want to meet him.”
“I hate dogs.”
“You’re gonna love dogs.”
“I grew up with dogs.”
“Yappy little northern things. Wait till you meet Duane.”
/> Duane Allman, the guitarist for the Allman Brothers, the sweet blond Georgia angel who played the solos on “Whipping Post” and “You Don’t Love Me” and “Blue Sky.” We drove to the SPCA and went looking for Duane.
“I hate dogs.”
“This dog is gonna be Duane Allman. A southern dog. He’s gonna sleep in the sun all day. He’s gonna be a ramblin’ man.”
“Duane Allman didn’t play on ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ actually. That was Dickey Betts.”
“You’re such a boy.”
Duane Allman was a beagle. The ladies at the SPCA put her on a leash and had Renée take her out for a walk around the grounds. Her name used to be “Dutchess,” with a T. She was about a year old and tall for a beagle, and she wagged her tail as soon as she saw Renée. We walked a couple of dogs that day, but none of them had fit the name. This one was Duane.
“The next dog will be Ronnie Van Zandt,” Renée said on the way home while Duane was in the backseat getting carsick.
My interest in dogs defined the term “scant.” Interests don’t come any scanter. I was hoping Duane Allman would change my mind. She didn’t. Duane was nowhere near mellow—she was a high-strung little bundle of nightmares in fur. She was not so much Duane Allman; more like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Duane bit the cable guy and banged her head against the screen door; Renée didn’t notice. Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid. Duane and I never would have tolerated each other if we’d had a choice. But what could we do? We were two animals in love with the same girl.
Now there were three of us, and the apartment was even smaller, so we turned up the stereo and made it a little louder. Like all our friends in Charlottesville, we lived for music. In the summer of 1991, the world was teeming with hot young guitar bands. We didn’t know “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on the way in a few months. We just knew that after a few years of rock bands sounding smug and doddering, there was something new in the air. We played Nirvana’s “Sliver” single a lot. They did not sound like a band that was getting ready to challenge the world. Truth be told, they sounded kind of like the Lemon-heads. But that was fine. This was the music we’d fallen in love to, the music that brought us together, and now there was more of it around than ever.
We waited all that summer for the Pavement show. The flier was up all over town:
* * *
We mean it man
PAVEMENT
with very special guests
ROYAL TRUX
THURSDAY, AUGUST 29
$5, only $4 for anyone wearing a WTJU T-shirt
Basically he’s a nice suburban kid who got hold of a guitar and some heroin and went a little bit wrong.
* * *
The night of the show, the floor was abuzz with anticipation. None of us in the crowd knew what Pavement looked like, or even who was in the band. They put out mysterious seven-inch singles without any band info or photos, just credits for instruments like “guitar slug,” “psued-piano gritt-gitt,” “keybored,” “chime scheme,” and “last crash simbiosis.” We assumed that they were manly and jaded, that they would stare at the floor and make abstract boy noise. That would be a good night out.
Royal Trux went on a few hours late, which I’m sure had nothing to do with buying drugs in Richmond. They were great, like a scuzz-rock Katrina and the Waves. The peroxide girl in the football jersey jumped around and screamed while the boy with the scary home-cut bangs played his guitar and tried to stay out of her way. She threw a cymbal at him. We wanted to take them home for a bath, a hot meal, and a blood change.
But Pavement was nothing at all like we pictured them. They were a bunch of foxy dudes, and they were into it. As soon as they hit the stage, you could hear all the girls in the crowd ovulate in unison. There were five or six of them up there, some banging on guitars, some just clapping their hands or singing along. They did not stare at the floor. They were there to make some noise and have some fun. They had fuzz and feedback and unironically beautiful sha-la-la melodies. The bassist looked just like Renée’s high school boyfriend. Stephen Malkmus leaned into the mike, furrowed his brows, and sang lyrics like “I only really want you for your rock and roll” or “When I fuck you once it’s never enough / When I fuck you two times it’s always too much.” The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should be either fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.
Afterward, we staggered to the parking lot in total silence. When we got to the car, Renée spoke up in a mournful voice: “I don’t think The Feelies are ever gonna be good enough again.”
Our friend Joe in New York sent us a tape, a third-generation dub of the Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted. Renée and I decided this was our favorite tape of all time. The guitars were all boyish ache and shiver. The vocals were funny bad poetry sung through a Burger World drive-through mike. The melodies were full of surfer-boy serenity, dreaming through a haze of tape hiss and mysterious amp noise. This was the greatest band ever, obviously. And they didn’t live twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or five years ago. They were right now. They were ours.
I think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles: I AM MADE OF BLUE SKY AND HARD ROCK AND I WILL LIVE THIS WAY FOREVER.
the comfort zone
APRIL 1992
The Comfort Zone was a dishes tape, maybe the finest of all dishes tapes, guaranteed to get me up to my elbows in Dawn Power Sudsing Formula and through the loading of the drying rack. I cranked it on the boombox we kept on the kitchen counter, right next to the sink. I taped most of it from Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 countdown on Z-95, our local Top 40 station, with Casey nattering between songs. But that just adds to the ambience, since for any pop devotee, Casey’s voice is music of the spheres. This tape counts down the hits from coast to coast! As the numbers get smaller, the hits get bigger! And we don’t stop! Till we reach the top!
Like all radio tapes, it’s a mixed bag. Disco scam artists, hair-metal schnauzers in red leather chaps, gangstas, ravers, fly-by-night pop smoothies, cartoon lip-synchers, sequin divas, flukes, hacks, one-hit scandals—we loved it all. Nobody remembers The KLF today, but they made one of the decade’s most sublime one-shots in 1992 with their hit “Justified and Ancient.” A couple of British art-school poseurs hire Tammy Wynette to sing an incredibly beautiful disco song about an ice cream van? Genius! And of course, it became a gigantic international hit. Only in the nineties, brothers and sisters. Nobody ever took this music seriously, but we loved it anyway: Vanilla Williams, Paula Abominable, Kris Kross, my beloved Hi-Five.
In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt’s funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap. The beauty of Top 40 is you don’t have to be any kind of great artist to make a great record—indeed, great artistness is just a pain in the ass, which is why moron-rock choo-choo hack Tom Cochrane sounds right at home here with his idiot anthem, while U2 sound like Jesuits trying to act cool for the youth-group retreat. Tom Cochrane had nothing to say, plus a stupid way of saying it, but he helped me get the dishes done. As Casey Kasem would say, he kept my feet on the ground, and kept me reaching for the stars—even with my hands full of soap suds.
Z-95 was the only Top 40 station in town, and my wife and I loved it fiercely. Z-95 played hits like “I’m Too Sexy” and “Baby Got Back” and “Justified and Ancient” once an hour. They also constantly played this terrible British techno hit called “Groovy Train” by The Farm. Or maybe it was “Groovy Farm” by The Train—how would I know? Z-95 played all sorts of alleged hits that didn’t exist in the real Billboard Top 40 charts, songs our friends in the big cities never heard of. We thought 2 In A Room’s “Wiggle It” was the biggest hit in the world. It wasn’t. We thought Martika’s “Love . . . Thy Will Be Done” was the musical-youth anthem of the mid-to-late spring of 1992. It
wasn’t. We pitied the fools in New York and L.A. who had no idea Hi-Five were the world’s greatest rock and roll band. MTV wouldn’t touch this stuff. But what did they know? This was a golden age, and just by being stuck out in the middle of nowhere, we were right in the heat of the action. Nobody remembers, nobody cares, and I guess that’s fine with me. But I could hum Nikki’s “Notice Me” for you. A few years ago there were two of us.
One night Renée and I were watching the En Vogue video where they shimmy in a swank club wearing those foxy red dresses. She said, “They’re not wearing underwear.”
“They’re not? How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“They’re not?”
“They’re not.”
I looked, but I could not see. I guess a woman just knows these things. Maybe it was the way the girls grind their hips, to and fro, in a way that underwear simply cannot contain; maybe it was the absence of panty lines. Renée wouldn’t tell me.
There’s also a scene in the video where one of the guys in the audience slips his wedding ring off his finger and hides it in his pocket. Renée hated that scene, but I loved it because it reminded me that it was time to do the dishes. Whenever I did dishes, I had to slip off my wedding ring and put it on the microwave so it wouldn’t go down the drain. So, I think this is the perfect pop song—it reminds me of not wearing underwear, and it also reminds me of the dishes. What more could you want?
I come from a long line of dish-washing men. When I was a little kid, I was amazed at the energy my grandfather had for washing dishes. My mom always told me, “He does it for the peace.” I didn’t understand until I was grown-up and a husband myself, when it made perfect sense. I found I had joined a club, a tribe extending backward through the centuries, mild-mannered Irish men married to loud, tempestuous Irish women. Sometimes, the only way to escape is to turn on a couple of jets of extremely loud water and disappear into the sound for a few hours. Sometimes, when Renée and I were fighting, I would wash dishes that weren’t even dirty, just to create a little noise.
Love Is a Mix Tape Page 7