Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  The cops were extremely kind. They were young and scared husbands, like me. They wouldn’t leave until I called somebody to come over. But I didn’t want to call anybody because I didn’t want to have to call them later and apologize for the false alarm; of course Renée would be coming back. I let the cops call St. Thomas, and they sent a young priest over right away. Renée and I knew him as the guy who’d given a sermon in which he mentioned the Primitive Radio Gods, which seemed at the time like a strange way for a young priest to try to be hip. He arrived in a polo shirt and khakis, just out of the shower, and he seemed annoyed to be there. I tried to make conversation but he had nothing to say, not even some drivel about God. I asked if he could give Renée extreme unction, and he said, “We can bless the body at the funeral,” like I was too dumb to know the difference. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to get rid of him. After a few minutes I told him I was okay, and he believed me. I needed to be alone.

  Our living room was just the way the EMTs left it: The couch was pushed up against the bookcase, and there was medical debris all over the floor—yellow plastic caps, syringe wrappers, needles, styrofoam pads for the heart-jumper-cables. I was grateful that the room was so trashed because it offered visible proof that something bad was happening, that this wasn’t just a bad dream. I cleared a little space and sat on the floor between Renée’s purple desk and her bureau—where her body had been—in the fetal position, my knees up, holding the phone.

  I sat there alone for hours. I’m not sure how much time passed. It was maybe four in the afternoon, about an hour after Renée collapsed. Renée (unlike me) had a notebook in which she kept people’s phone numbers, so I started there. Everybody I called was surprised to hear my voice on the phone in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I simply told everybody, “I have bad news. Renée died.” There was no way to tell people—nobody had seen her sick, nobody had had any idea she was about to die. Many of the friends and family I called had spoken to her within the past couple of days. It was Mother’s Day, so both my mom and hers were expecting happy calls. Pavement was playing in New York that night, so most of our friends there were out at the show, and I couldn’t reach them.

  I didn’t want to get up off the floor because I wanted to be there when Renée called and said she was coming home. People wanted to come over, but I told them to wait. Her parents, Buddy and Nadine, asked if they could come and get me, but I didn’t want to leave the house, since I didn’t want to miss the call from Richmond that would explain that it was all a mistake. I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving the room where she died; I guess I must have known I couldn’t get back in.

  The sun set and the house grew dark. The call from Richmond didn’t come. I have no idea how long I sat there. Finally, our friend Susan came over, even though I’d begged her not to. Talking to her face-to-face, I realized that I had said something that could never be taken back—Renée died—and that saying it made it true. The change had come. It was irreversible. It was ten or eleven before I left the house. I packed the beagle in the car and drove to Pulaski County. I took the phone, even though it was a land line and would be totally useless in the car. But I couldn’t stand to leave the phone behind, in that room. I thought if I left it there, Renée might call, trying to get back home, and she wouldn’t be able to reach me, and I would have lost her for good.

  It was a long drive, about three hours. I tried the radio only once, after the turn off of Route 646 onto the main drag in Christiansburg, a long string of truck stops and gas stations. The radio was playing “American Pie,” but I only made it a few seconds before I had to change the station. I got Jerry Lee Lewis on the oldies station. He’s still alive, I thought. Jerry Lee Lewis. Reagan is, too. The Pope. I turned off the radio and left it off. The beagle and I were both making a lot of noise, howling in our complete privacy. The signboard outside the Pulaski Baptist Church read NO MAN IS POOR WHO HAS A GODLY MOTHER.

  The next few days were a blur. Less than twenty-four hours after I was making Renée’s cinnamon toast, I was driving around Pulaski County with her parents, shopping for grave-sites. The saleslady wore a blue prom dress and carried smelling salts. She leaned on me hard to buy a grave for myself; I guess she thought it would seem romantic. I told her, No thanks, not today. She smirked a bit. “You’re young now,” she said. “A few years down the line, you’ll be changing your tune, and that spot will be taken.”

  We found a spot for Renée on the side of a hill, in Sunrise Burial Park on Route 11. It was better than flat ground. You could hear the roar of the racetrack, just an exit away.

  Now everybody knew it was true. I hated telling people because I thought I would have to apologize later for scaring them unnecessarily, but slowly it became obvious that the bad news wasn’t going to change. Her family was so kind to me, although I felt ashamed that their daughter had died on my watch. Neighbors brought over trays of sausage biscuits. I picked out a casket (they show you a catalog) and wrote an obituary for the Roanoke paper. Friends were calling each other instead of hearing it from me. It was out of my hands. I stayed down the hall from her parents, in the room where she grew up. We’d stayed here many times as a couple. I lay there in the dark but didn’t sleep, surrounded by her records, her photo albums, her Nancy Drew mysteries, her high school yearbooks, the model horses on her bureau.

  Our friends and family converged on Pulaski County, even though it’s an hour from the nearest airport and has hardly anywhere to stay. People who barely knew each other were squeezing into EconoLodge singles together. People drove hours to attend the wake, bringing me little things of hers to drop into the casket so she could be buried with them, Beowulf-style. Karl brought a guitar pick because he used to teach Renée guitar. Matt brought her batting gloves; they used to drive out to the batting cage in Richmond together, and he kept her gloves in his glove compartment. I lost track of how many people brought baseballs. Uncle Zennis’s car broke down on the drive from South Carolina, which was a blessing in a way, since the uncles then got to spend the whole week in the yard working on a car together. It was just the distraction they needed, and I heard the comforting clank from the front yard all week long.

  I wish I’d been together enough to organize a funeral, the kind of funeral people imagine when they say, “I want this song played at my funeral” or “Dress sexy at my funeral.” But I wasn’t. Renée was a gal with many fantasies, but as far as I knew she never spent her time fantasizing about funerals, which was one of the millions of things I loved about her. So I left it up to the preacher. I knew she had a favorite hymn (“Shall We Gather at the River”) and a favorite psalm (the forty-third), so I mentioned those. My dad called around and found a Catholic monsignor in Roanoke. I went back to Charlottesville to pick out some glam burial clothes with Renée’s sister, Drema, and her friend Merit. We spent an afternoon at our house picking out the shoes. We thought about the platform black-and-white creepers, but we decided to go instead with the pink patent leather pumps she’d bought at Fluevog in Boston. We picked out some jewelry and a green dress she’d sewn and some photos to put on the casket so people could see her the way she really looked in life. Drema checked Renée’s speed-dial just to make sure she was number one. She was. Drema and Merit then drove me back to Pulaski County. On the way we talked about the road sign BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROAD. I always wondered, If that’s a problem, why don’t they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn’t made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it’s alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm.

  The funeral was Thursday afternoon, May 15, in Renée’s old radio time-slot on WTJU. Nobody wanted to be there. My mom and dad sat in the pew right behind me and literally held me upright. During the funeral, I could hear a baby crying, which meant that our friend Heather had flown out from Utah with her month-old son, Eli. I counted ninety-six cars on the way to Sunrise Burial Park beca
use I knew Renée would have counted. I was grateful for every pedestrian who took off his hat, everyone who sent flowers, every state trooper who saluted as the procession went by. We stood at the grave and listened to the cars on the racetrack make their noise.

  After the service we all went to the basement of Fairlawn Baptist Church for lunch. It was a strange crowd: poker-night buddies, hometown pals, fellow baseball freaks. People sat with strangers, friends, enemies, exes, former coworkers, people they’d hoped they’d never have to run into again. They were all in one room, for the worst reason. I buzzed around the room, trying to take care of everybody; that’s what Renée would have done.

  We had come to say goodbye to Renée, but many of us were saying goodbye to each other. I didn’t know which of our friends I’d never see again. Neither did they. I caught a ride back to Buddy and Nadine’s with the two friends who’d hooked up at our wedding, plus one of our groomsmen, plus Tyler, who got carded when we stopped for cigarettes. We stayed around the house all day, telling stories about Renée, arguing about the things she liked to argue about. The uncles kept working on the car in the front yard. Duane ran around to the neighboring farms to roll in cow shit. The coroner called to explain how it had happened. “Pulmonary embolism,” he told me. “She never knew what hit her.” The coroner was very kind, and stayed on the phone with me for forty-five minutes. I’d never heard of a pulmonary embolism; he explained to me that a blood clot in her leg broke off and got carried through her bloodstream to her heart. I asked why. He said, “She was just unlucky.” What can I say? Renée was healthy. She was young. She didn’t do drugs, not even pot. She took zinc and used all-cotton organic tampons. She walked the dog. She recycled glass. She wrote thank-you notes and slowed down for yellow lights. She was planning to live a long time. Still, she died, just because her blood stopped working.

  I drove back to Charlottesville with Duane. She was howling because she knew that Renée wasn’t going to be on the other end of the drive. She was way ahead of me there. Stupidly, I stopped at the grave the morning I was going back. I parked in the Wal-Mart parking lot at the foot of the hill, bought a carton of Camel Lights, and walked up to the Sunrise Burial Park. There were no trees, no shade, just the widow boy standing on the side of a hill, with a dog waiting in the car. The sun was shriveling me up, the air was draining out of my lungs, but there was nothing to see. She wasn’t here. I couldn’t have felt farther from her anywhere else. Duane and I drove away with nothing inside us. I talked to Duane a bit, kept repeating to her the line Harvey Keitel says to Tim Roth at the end of Reservoir Dogs: It looks like we’re gonna have to do a little time.

  It was high noon, and I remember it all—the nausea, the dizziness, the way my head felt like it was melting in the heat. I pulled off at a gas station in Syria, a small town near the Natural Bridge, and bought a souvenir shot glass. It was a Florida souvenir glass, with a big smiling yellow sun. We had always liked this town. It had a few junk shops, a Little League park, a movie theater. It was pronounced “sigh-REE-a,” for the same reason Buena Vista was “BYOO-na-vih-sta” and Buchanan was “BUCK-cannon.” I got back on 81 and tried the radio. Biggie’s “Hypnotize” was comforting; George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was too hard. I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again. Every time I started to cry, I remembered how Renée used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody knows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks. There was an empty house on the other side of this drive, and I had no idea what it would be like to try to go inside it. There was nobody there. I wasn’t driving back home—just back.

  As I started to approach Afton Mountain, I heard a Prince song I’d never heard on the radio before, and I haven’t since, either. “Adore” is a slow jam from 1987, the last song on Sign ‘O’ the Times, and I always thought of it as one of those Prince songs that should have been a hit. But it’s over six minutes long, and there’s no way to trim it down without losing the whole point. “Adore” might be the most beautiful make-out ballad ever—six minutes of erotic bliss that’s more delfonic than The Stylistics and more stylistic than The Delfonics. I don’t know why they played it. It was one of those lonesome stations you pick up between mountains when there’s nothing else on the air, no mike breaks or commercials, just a song or two before the signal fades.

  Prince was singing in his falsetto about heavenly angels crying tears of joy down on him and his lady. It was hard to hear. I pulled into a rest stop on 64 East, at mile 105 in Greenwood, on the side of the mountain. I parked and listened to the rest of the song, then got out and walked the dog. I sat on the trunk of the car in the sun and smoked a cigarette. It made me dizzy. I made my plans for the day. I was going all the way over the mountain, just another half-hour to Charlottesville. What would happen on the other side, I couldn’t tell you.

  I thought about this tape, Crazy Feeling, and wondered if I would play it when I got back. I kept hearing a song in my head, the first song on the tape, Sleater-Kinney’s “One More Hour.” I didn’t know if I would play that song when I got back, or whether I’d ever want to hear it again. But ever since Renée died, I’d been thinking about “One More Hour,” the saddest Sleater-Kinney song ever. It was blaring in my mind all week, whether I was at the funeral home, or trying to sleep, or sitting on the floor waiting for Richmond to call and say it was all a mistake. It was all around and in my head, like the train rumble Al Pacino hears in The Godfather right before he shoots the Turk.

  “One More Hour” is a punk-rock song where Corin Tucker sings about how she has to leave in one more hour. Once she leaves this room, she can’t come back. She doesn’t want to go, and she tries to talk her way out of it. But Carrie Brownstein sings to her in the background vocal, telling her it’s over. The way their voices interact is like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Corin sings about walking out of a place she can never return to, leaving something she never wanted to let go, trying to haggle with someone who can’t talk back. The guitars try to hold her in check, but she screams right through them, refusing to go quietly because it’s already too late for a graceful exit. Corin snarls and she stalls, all for a little bit, just a little more time.

  paramount hotel

  JUNE 1997

  There was a lot of music that summer. I made tapes for the long nights when I would sit out all night in my backyard chair, smoking Camel Lights and listening to my Walkman, staring out into the black woods at the edge of the backyard. I’d watch as deer with glowing eyes would tiptoe out of the woods, and then tiptoe back. Anything to keep from going back into my empty bed in our empty house.

  My mix tapes were the life rafts that I held on to. I sat out there in the yard all night and listened to Frank Sinatra sing about waiting in vain, when the moon is on the wane, because he’d rather be swingin’ down the lane with you. I would listen to the Germs scream L.A. punk noise about damaged kids sharing secret agonies nobody else can understand. I would listen to Bryan Ferry serenade his lonesome star in the sky.

  I would listen and dream along. Sometimes I would sing to Renée; sometimes I would let her sing to me.

  Sleep was the worst. I would lie in bed and my shins would ache, remembering how she used to kick them while she slept. Who knew shins had feelings, much less memories? I had no idea how to eat alone or sleep alone. I didn’t know how to cook alone, go out alone, listen to music alone, shop for groceries alone. The things we used to do together were alien now. Lonesome star, shine on.

  A few days after the funeral, a box arrived in the mail from New York’s Chinatown. Inside was a bright green cuckoo clock, the old-fashioned kind with bells on top. On the dial were a couple of orange chickens. With each tick of the second hand, the big chicken would peck at the corn. Renée definitely picked this thing out. According to the credit card
slip, she ordered it a few days before she died. She hadn’t said a word about it to me. I had no idea where it came from or why she wanted it. I put it up on her purple desk and let the orange chickens peck away.

  I kept everything in the house exactly how Renée left it, so she could find her way back. I left her toothbrush hanging right by the sink. Her boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese stayed on the same shelf where they’d always been. I didn’t move a thing—her lipsticks, her cookbooks, her clothes, her shoes, the Pee Wee Herman bicycle she hadn’t ridden once in all the time I’d known her. The pile of CDs we were listening to the night she died stayed right where it was. I wore her old Sonic Youth and Boss Hog T-shirts every day. I put my keys on her Guided By Voices bottle-opener key chain and used her Pavement ashtray. Sometimes I opened her sweater drawer to breathe in traces of her scent. I knew every time I opened the drawer, more of the scent would get lost for good. Duane kept scuffing over to her notebooks or her baseball glove, looking for any scent she could find.

  At night, I would sometimes go out and drive in the mountains. I stayed out on the roads for hours, listening to Renée’s old George Jones and Hank Williams tapes. Sometimes I’d go find roads we used to drive on together; other nights, I’d look for somewhere new. I had shrines and altars for her all over town, cruising around Route 33, “The Gateway To The Blue Ridge,” or Waynesboro, where we went to the movies on our honeymoon. I decided to revisit the outlet mall where we got The Best of the Best of Skeeter Davis, so I just popped Skeeter Davis in the tape deck and let her guide me there. Now that I lived alone, I could do all the driving I wanted, and nobody would know or care. Renée’s old country tapes kept me on the road. Hank Williams would sing all night about Jonah in the belly of the whale, Daniel in the lion’s den, and how they tried to get along. If you don’t try to get along, brother, you don’t get another chance. Dear John, I sent your saddle home. I was looking for glimmers of light, but I only wanted to go looking for them in the hills where the dead spirits hung out.