Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  I drove up to Boston for my wedding-anniversary weekend, since I couldn’t stand being in the house alone. All the way up 95, the radio played an endless loop of Missy and Biggie and Puffy, “The Rain” into “Hypnotize” into “I’ll Be Missing You” into “Mo Money Mo Problems”—all the current hits. The car was too battered to take it. My battery was running down. Every time I stopped for a traffic jam or a light, the engine stalled out and took up to half an hour to start again. I overheated on the D.C. Beltway, shifted into neutral, and tried to nose onto the shoulder. An old guy in a pickup jumped out and helped me push. He called a tow truck on his cell, but it didn’t come, so I used my Kleenex pocket-pack to wipe the engine and then kept going.

  Missy and Timbaland were still ruling the radio north of the Mason-Dixon line. When it actually started to rain, I held my breath and hit the lights. There was a thunderstorm at midnight on the George Washington Bridge, but Timbaland squooshed the bass in time with the wipers and pushed me to the other side. The river is deep and the river is wide. The funky drummer’s on the other side. Every time I found “The Rain” on the radio, the bassline would pump for miles and miles. It felt like it was raining all over the world. Here comes the rain, here comes the wind, five six seven eight nine ten. Oh, Missy, try to maintain. And in an mmmbop you’re gone.

  hypnotize

  OCTOBER 1997

  It was already cold before the sun went down. Duane and I walked down Sunset Drive to the bottom of the hill and into the woods. We crossed the footbridge over the creek, past the farmlands, where we would see the cows laze in the sun. Usually, we turned around when we got to the path under the I-64 overpass, but this time we kept going for a few miles, all the way down Green County Road, out to a stretch of Charlottesville I’d never seen before, not even in a car. Two-lane blacktop, a Taco Bell, Hardee’s, strip malls, and gas stations. We didn’t get home until around midnight. Duane went to sleep on her rug. I sat in the yard and lit a cigarette. On the earphones, Biggie was talking about a girl. They’ve been together a long time, and she knows a lot of secrets about him she is never going to tell anybody. Tonight, he’s got something special planned—he knows the kind of music she likes, that soft Luther love-man Harveys Bristol Cream R&B shit, so for once he wrote that kind of song for her, just to show he’s listening. “Fuck You Tonight” is full of mournful R&B chill but it also has a cold-eyed gangsta pimp strut. Hail Biggie, full of grace, you got a gun up in your waist, please don’t shoot up the place.

  I longed for a pimp strut of my own. Like Shaft, I’m a complicated man and no one understands me but my woman, except she’s dead and she doesn’t understand that any better than I do.

  September had come and nothing had changed. I moved into a new apartment, across from the Baptist church, one block over from the Seventh Day Adventist church. But I had no appetite to unpack the boxes, so I just left them on the floor and stepped over them. It was more a shrine than a place to live in, but at the time that’s how I wanted it. Renée had never lived there, and never would have consented to, since the bathroom had barely any girlie storage at all and there was no counter space in the kitchen. In my dreams, she came looking for me at my old address and couldn’t find me. A couple of times, Duane ran away and showed up the next day at the old apartment, no doubt looking for Renée. The people who lived there now were very nice to her and called the landlord, who called me. At night, I sat in the same chair in a different backyard, staring all night into different woods, except nothing I saw there had any good news to tell me about the future.

  A few days after I moved in, I was sitting in the yard and Mr. Kirby from next door came over to say hi. He was a widower, too. His first wife died of liver cancer in 1988, and a year and a half later, he married Mrs. Kirby, who came over the next day with some banana bread. They went to the Baptist church across the street. They were in their seventies. The boys who lived upstairs worked at the Higher Grounds coffee stand and played in one of our town’s most popular underground funk-metal bands, Navel. All day, the guitarist would practice licks (Rage’s “Killing in the Name” was a big favorite), and all night his brother the bassist, would have incredibly loud sex in the room above mine, to the point where I would get up and go sleep on the couch.

  I had no idea until that year that Charlottesville could get so windy in October. I had never slept there alone in cold weather. Our old blankets were still packed in a box somewhere. While looking for them, I opened up a box of Renée’s fabric, the fabric she left behind in the middle of her grandiose fashion designs. I pulled out massive sheets of red and blue corduroy and piled them on the bed for covers. There was plenty more of the corduroy (what the hell was she making, a sofa?) so I draped it over the windows to keep out the wind and the light. One red window, one blue window.

  The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you’re standing outside. You’ll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you’ve been out there a while, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you’re getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it. I was trying so hard to be strong. I knew how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it.

  Some nights I would drive up Route 29 to the all-night Wal-Mart. I’d push a cart around with some paper towels inside to look like a real shopper, just to spy on married people. I just wanted to be near them, to listen to them argue. This one is $2.99! But this one is $1.49 for just one! But $2.99 is cheaper per roll! But $1.49 is cheaper than $2.99! But we can store the other one! We live in a house, not a spare-towel storage unit, and we’ll pay more than $1.49 rent on the space it takes to store it! But you can never have too much of it! And so on. Married people fight over some dumb shit when they think there aren’t any widowers eavesdropping. And they never think there are widowers eavesdropping.

  The Wal-Mart was always full of couples taking care of business. None of them were happy to be there, but they were there together, and I tried not to get caught staring while I followed them around from aisle to aisle. I was so hungry for the company. I was scared I would be caught, that my wedding ring would be put under a scanner and exposed as a fraud, a widower trying to pass as a husband. The store would start to empty around two in the morning, but I would often stay later. I was never the only person there, just the only man alone. I would look busy browsing the racks of two- or three-dollar cassettes: line-dance country, Christian anthologies, hit collections by groups like Three Dog Night or Air Supply.

  Lots of the couples were younger than Renée and me. Some looked angry; others seemed comfortable. Sometimes I wondered if they were scared, the way I used to get scared when I was young and married. I sometimes wondered if they noticed me and wondered why the hell I didn’t have a place to go instead of rolling a cart around under those fluorescent lights. But nobody ever noticed me. I never felt like going back home.

  I ate a lot of widower food: peanut butter sandwiches, cereal, frozen steak burritos. I heated the burritos in the oven, and if they didn’t come out thoroughly defrosted I said, Hell, what’s the difference, and crunched through the frost. The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart. I stopped cooking. Couldn’t stand the idea of it. Who would eat it? Who would notice? Who would care? I gave away all of Renée’s kitchen stuff, her cookbooks, her fancy knives, her chop dishes, her KitchenAid mixer. But there’s still hunger. The sun goes down and there are quick decisions to make. Everything in Charlottesville closes by nine o’clock. If you live in a small town, and you aren’t cooking, you’re going hungry for a while. The restaurants where you used to eat together? Write them off. It’s like they closed. I stopped going to the College Inn for pancakes because I knew I would see Gail, a waitress there who doted on us, and I never felt like having that conversation. So I went to the Tavern. Except Ga
il was a waitress there now, and she came over to pour me some coffee. She asked, “Where’s the girl with the red hair?” I told her. Gail cried and said, “God takes the good people first.” I couldn’t go back there anymore, either.

  I started going to Applebee’s, a chain restaurant where I was guaranteed not to see any of my friends. I would sit in a booth with a book and be left alone, eating a steak and getting soda refills and eavesdropping on people who belonged to each other. I became a connoisseur of volume-oriented family-identified chain restaurants—the cheesier the better, especially ones with themes such as the Wild West or the Australian desert, where all the steaks would be named after resort cities and the baked potatoes would all have names like Uncle Stuffy’s Baco-Blaster Cheddar-Chernobyl Twicersplosion. I knew I would be anonymous there, a guy nobody would notice or feel sorry for because the booths were too private and people had their own families to keep a lid on. The waitresses would be nice to me because I had no kids and therefore gave them no trouble aside from my unreasonable soda-refill desires. It was always hard to make myself go, especially facing that table-for-one moment, bluffing like it was a perfectly ordinary request. I had to be mighty hungry before I would even try, and more than once I got all the way to the parking lot and turned around.

  Applebee’s was my fave because the booths had the highest walls. Ruby Tuesday had better steaks, but the walls between the booths were too low, which meant a potential eye-contact issue. Outback Steakhouse also had short walls, but they turned the lights down low so it didn’t matter. They blasted the air-conditioning to move people in and out fast, so I brought a sweater. I didn’t have to worry about being spotted as a regular, because nobody worked at those places long—I don’t think I ever had the same waitress twice. They were always cool about letting me stay and read. Sometimes I’d get static from the high school kid at the door. Maybe one time out of five, they would ask, “Do you mind eating at the bar?” But I never ate at the bar because once I said okay I would always have to say okay.

  I still bought women’s magazines at the grocery store, trying to pass as a husband shopping for a wife at home instead of a man living alone with a shopping cart full of two dozen frozen steak burritos. I hated living in a man’s house, with a man’s refrigerator and a man’s bathroom. A man-woman bathroom only takes a couple of weeks to become a man’s bathroom when the woman is no longer there. What a demotion: exiled to a bachelor pad. You know the Johnny Paycheck song “The Feminine Touch,” or the George Jones song “Things Have Gone to Pieces”? Another thing only country singers understand. One day, you’re in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she’s female but alien because you’re a fool in love and there’s nothing not alien about that. And then when she’s gone, you’re alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you’re still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn’t make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn’t get fixed when it breaks. Like Johnny Paycheck, I missed the feminine touch—not just hers, but mine. I missed being half-girl, half-boy, part of a whole. Now that I was male in a male environment, it was harder to manifest her physical chick presence, no matter how many of her MAC lipsticks I set out on the coffee table in a basket like so many M&Ms.

  When my refrigerator broke down, I didn’t call the landlord to replace it. I tried to fix it myself, enraged that my male fridge was giving me attitude. I lived on peanut butter and warm ginger ale for a whole month before I finally caved and called the landlord. I took out the champagne bottle, the one from the old house, the one Renée always kept around because she believed in always having a spare bottle of champagne in the fridge. Now it was warm and probably about to explode. I was too terrified to dispose of the champagne in a rational way, so I put on protective shades, wrapped up the bottle in Renée’s old Motörhead T-shirt, and slowly dragged it through the yard and into the woods. I planned to go back and smash the bottle with a rock, rendering it harmless, but I could never find it again. For all I know, the champagne’s still out there in the woods, waiting for the right moment to blow up.

  It was hard to explain to my friends what was happening. When my friends and family would ask how I was doing, I stalled or stuttered or lied. Sometimes I could feel the glaciers shifting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable. All these monstrous contortions in me were warping the outside of my body, I was sure. No doubt people could spot me a block away and know that I had lived past my till-death-do-you-part date.

  Sometimes I could hear my voice approaching the level of the Elizabeth Taylor mad scene. You know how in all the really great Elizabeth Taylor movies, the gnarly-ass melodramas, there’s always the scene where she freaks out because she’s living inside a horrible secret she can’t explain?

  Liz in Butterfield 8: “You don’t know this. Nobody knows this.”

  Liz in Suddenly, Last Summer: “This you won’t believe. Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it.”

  I love Liz Taylor. Renée and I had a favorite Liz movie, Conspirator, where she’s married to Robert Taylor, who’s living a secret double life as a Soviet spy. At the end of the movie she’s a widow because her husband has just been shot dead by agents of the free world. One of the agents explains to Liz that none of this ever happened, that for reasons of national security her widowhood is a secret she can never tell. Then, I guess, she’s supposed to go back to her family and invent a cover story about where her husband is. I don’t know. The movie just ends with Liz getting told that nobody can ever know what happened to her and her husband. Nobody would believe her anyway.

  jackie blue

  FEBRUARY 1998

  On the plane to New York, where I was to interview some bands for Rolling Stone, I heard the two middle-aged women behind me getting acquainted. One was traveling to her son-in-law’s wedding. Her daughter had died of cancer six months earlier. The other woman asked, “Don’t you feel strange that he’s remarrying?” The mother-in-law said, “No, Manny is the kind of person who needs to be married. When she was sick, my daughter said, ‘Manny will be married again before dinner.’”

  While I was in the city, I found an album at a record store in the East Village. It was a Jackie Kennedy documentary LP called Portrait of a Valiant Lady, rushed out right after the assassination. According to the back cover, this was “an inspiring documentary record specially written and produced for the listening pleasure of all Americans,” put together by something called the Research Craft Corporation, in association with the Bureau of Auditory Education. Both sides of the album are devoted to a biography of Jackie, “tragic heroine and First Lady of the World.” It has spoken-word tributes, a poem written especially for this record, cheesy re-created versions of news sound bites, and the voice of Jackie herself, from a TV address she gave around Christmas 1963, saying thank you to the world for their condolences.

  I couldn’t stop staring at Jackie’s face on the front of the album. The whole album cover is just one big photo of Jackie, with no text or decoration. I don’t know when this picture was taken, before or after November 22. She sits pensively on a white couch, facing the camera with a sad little smile. She’s wearing white. Her outfit is casual, maybe the top half of a dress seen from the waist up, maybe a sweater, with a discreet collar. She wears no jewelry. She’s in a living room—hers? somebody else’s? the White House?—with a lamp turned on behind her, on a coffee table laden with photos (too blurred to tell who’s in them) and an ashtray. She’s turned to the camera, as if we just interrupted her while she was staring out the window. The curtains are billowy and white. She rests her chin on her right hand, her elbow propped on the couch. Her left arm is casually draped over the top of the couch, and her left hand is hidden in the curtains.

  You can’t see whether she’s wearing her wedding ring or not.

 
After I found this record I played it constantly. The Jackie bio follows her life story, as the narrator harps on the theme of her nobility with purple prose like, “She keeps a loyal, lonely vigil with his world.” Her “Thank You” message on side two is really strange. The words are articulate, but her voice sounds shell-shocked. She seems to wander from the script, at one point pausing mid-sentence to say, “All his bright light gone from the world.” It’s a little scary to hear. Jackie apologizes for not answering condolence letters. For some reason, that’s the main theme of the minute or so she speaks. She explains that she’s gotten 800,000 letters. “Whenever I can bear to, I read them,” she says. “It is my greatest wish that all these letters be acknowledged. They will be. But it will take time.”

  I wonder if all widows are obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy. Probably. Renée and I were always obsessed with her, long before we knew either of us would be a widow. We were Jackies-ploitation junkies, poring over every biography, no matter how trashy. Renée, of course, already had a fetish for 1960s fashion (she even owned a vintage pink pillbox hat, which smelled bad enough to trigger her asthma), and I’m sure the obsession just got worse after she married into an Irish Catholic family. We looked down on people who called her Jackie O—they did not understand Jackie Kennedy, the Profile in Cleavage, the most bouviesscent of all American Catholic girls. We watched Jaclyn Smith (the Charliest Angel) in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, but we preferred Jacqueline Bisset in The Greek Tycoon. Once, when we were driving up to Boston, Renée made me drive hours out of our way down Route 3 to Hyannis, just because she was determined to buy some Jackie shades and a Jackie scarf to tie around her head. I assured her that Hyannis was literally the last place on earth Jacqueline Kennedy would have considered buying clothes, as it’s a skanky little burnout beach town. But there was no way to talk her out of it. We got to Hyannis and hit the 99-cent stores. I don’t know how, but Renée found exactly the shades and scarf she had imagined. The sunglasses were pointy at the edges; the scarf was multicolored and mod. She wore them the whole drive back to Boston, all three hours, tying the scarf around her head and making tragic faces out the window.