Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  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!”

&n
bsp; 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.

  a little down, a little duvet

  JULY 1991

  Renée made this tape for us to listen to while falling asleep, and it served us well on many nights. It’s a tape full of soothing soul and vintage country and whispery rock and private jokes and intimate history. Some of the choices I didn’t like at the time, such as Aerosmith’s “Angel,” but they all flow together in my memory now. I think about this tape years later, when I’m interviewing Aerosmith, and they tell me how much they hate “Angel.” Steven Tyler tells me, “Sometimes a heavy leather biker guy with tattoos will come up to me and say, ‘Oh, man, let me tell you my favorite song,’ and every time, I know it’s gonna be ‘Angel.’ And I just gulp, and I don’t know what to say. Ugh, that one?”

  I wonder whether I should tell Steven Tyler I used to hate “Angel,” too, but after my wife put it on this romantic mix tape, tucked in between Big Star and the Beatles, I fell in love with it. I decide not to tell him. I’m sure somewhere in his cosmic rock-star heart, he knows the whole story.

  “Thirteen” was the song we chose as the first dance at our wedding.

  I never planned to get married when I was only twenty-five, and I’m not sure exactly how it happened—neither of us ever officially proposed, or anything dramatic like that. It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn’t hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened.

  It really started one Saturday when we were driving around in the mountains off Route 33, listening to a Marshall Crenshaw song called “Lesson Number One.” It’s a sad rockabilly ballad about how lying is bad, and telling the truth is lesson number one. We started talking about the song, and I carelessly said, “I’ve never lied to you.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “And you never will?”

  “No, I never will.”

  Then we were both quiet for a few minutes. I was afraid that I’d just ruined everything; it was the first time either of us had ever promised anything. But it felt all right. I guess making little promises made us braver about the bigger ones.

  There was never any epiphanic moment when we decided we should get married, no bolt of lightning. As soon as we started talking about it, we started trying to talk ourselves out of it, but we failed. Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don’t give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933. My cousin Sis Boyle in Southie was engaged for seventeen years before she finally threw caution to the wind and got hitched—and then she gave birth nine months later to the day. Renée was not psyched to hear stories like this. She informed me that Appalachians wed early, give birth immediately, and worry about feeding all their offspring later. Her parents met at eighteen, married at nineteen, and became parents at twenty. This terrified me. Between the two of us, we had three master’s degrees, thousands of records, and no future.

  I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. “Lonely place,” Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, “Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it’s private. That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private.” That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you give up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you’re just screwed. So I felt safer not even thinking about it. No doubt about it, the idea of staying together was scary. But we also didn’t want to wait around for a few years to see if it was going to happen. Why not just make it happen? It felt disingenuous to keep saying, “If we’re still together next year . . . ” since we knew we wanted to be together next year. Pretending to keep those options open became dead weight.

  We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We’d heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy’s Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever. What if we just decide not to fall apart? What if we decide not to wait to see what happens, but instead decide what we want to happen and then decide how to make it happen? Like Burt Reynolds says to Jerry Reed in Smokey and the Bandit, “We ain’t never not made it before, have we?”

  So I gave Renée my grandmother’s ring. My grandfather was crazy about Renée, at least partly because she was practically a foot shorter than all his granddaughters, so he could lean over and talk right into her ear. I knew my grandmother would have loved Renée, but I still hoped I wasn’t letting her down. Renée and I were acting like a couple of foolhardy American brats. Nana had always warned me: Never marry an American girl. “These American girls are lazy!” she would fume. “They won’t cook or clean. You need an Irish girl.”

  When Renée and I talked about it years later, we agreed on one point: We were insane. Renée always said, “If any of our kids want to get married when they’re twenty-five, we’ll have to lock them in the attic.” We were just kids, and everybody who came to the wedding was guilty of shameful if not criminal negligence—look at the shiny pretty toaster, isn’t it cute to see the babies playing with it in the bathtub? Jesus, people! There is such a thing as “tough love.” But for whatever reason, nobody tried to stop us, or even talk sense into us. Instead, everybody wanted to help us out. We had no money, so all our friends did wedding favors for us. Our friend Gavin offered to DJ the wedding. Neither of us wanted to go crazy planning a wedding—we had our hands full planning the marriage.

  I tried to talk Renée into doing our wedding dance to Van Halen’s “Everybody Wants Some” because I had a romantic vision of us wangoing our fandango to the part where Alex Van Halen is playing the bongos and David Lee Roth is doing his heartfelt “I like the way the line runs up the back of the stocking” monologue. But Renée quickly squashed that idea—no romance in the girl. So Big Star’s “Thirteen” it was, the song that brought us together. We rented the university chapel for an hour, which cost a hundred bucks, and booked a reception at the Best Western down the street. For the ceremony Renée chose a Baptist hymn I’d never heard of, “Shall We Gather at the River,” and we had fun picking out readings from Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf. We were looking forward to drawing up a prenuptial agreement, but unfortunately, we found out you can’t get one unless you actually own something. Renée picked out a tux for me—I hadn’t worn one since the Walpole High senior prom (theme: “We’ve Got Tonight”)—and she selected a morning coat because it made me look like Janet Jackson in her “Escapade” video.

  All I remember about the actual wedding is standing there on the altar steps like Enzo the baker in The Godfather stood on the hospital stairs with Al Pacino, waiting for the Turk’s hit men to come, trying to scare the hit men away by looking like they were ready for them. We both felt like Enzo that day. He’s a baker; he doesn’t know anything about guns. He just came to bring some flowers for his Don, who did him a big favor on Connie’s wedding day. Now he and Pacino are standing on the stairs, shaking, pretending they know what they’re doing. They don’t fool each other, but maybe they can fool everybody else.

  During the wedding Renée put m
y ring on my right hand. She started whispering, “Wrong hand! Wrong hand!” I whispered back, “Let’s switch it later,” but she insisted on grabbing my hand, slipping the ring off, and putting it on my left hand, all in the middle of the ceremony. Nobody in the crowd noticed this. You did good, Enzo.

  When we got to the Best Western, we hit the dance floor, as Gavin favored us with our special request, James Brown’s “I’m a Greedy Man.” The Godfather of Soul laid out his three-point program for domestic bliss:

  • Don’t leave the homework undone,

  • Don’t tell the neighbors,

  and, most crucially,

  • You got to have something to sit on before I carry you home.

  Everybody shook it to the Go-Go’s and the Human League and Chuck Berry, and we drank champagne and Gavin played Al Green’s version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at least four times. I danced with Renée’s mom to the Chuck Berry song “Nadine.” My sisters told me I needed to make a speech to the guests. I began by quoting the rapper Kool Moe Dee; my sisters told me that was a nice speech and cut me off. Gavin put on C&C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now” and my Uncle Ray took that as a cue to start the electric slide. (Uncle Ray and the electric slide go together like a 1976 Ford Pinto and a box of matches.) At any wedding we attend, my family is the problem table, the one everybody gradually drifts away from out of self-preservation. It’s a proud family tradition. Now this was our wedding, and nobody could stop us. Giving us a crate of champagne and a dance floor was like handing a madman the keys to a 747 and saying, “Now, seriously, dude, don’t crash it. Promise?”

  Right before the party broke up, Renée’s Uncle Troy came up and gave her a big hug and whispered into her ear. I was touched. I didn’t realize he was saying, “Go easy on the boy.”