Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

  “Too bad you won’t hear my show,” Ally said. “It’s going to be fun.” She went on to discuss all the great B-sides Depeche Mode mysteriously left off Violator, and how it could have been a much better album if they’d included “Sea of Sin.”

  Back at the Econo Lodge, the first thing I did was frantically call the airline to reschedule my flight. They switched my Sunday flight to Tuesday. It looked like I was sticking around town for a few extra days.

  So right, this is trouble, I thought. God, I missed you, trouble.

  I WASN’T SURE WHAT WAS going to happen. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen. I wasn’t sure what I was ready for. But I knew I needed to know a lot more about this woman. The next few days presented me with a finite number of opportunities to hang out with her, and I was going to pounce on them like Martin Gore on a crimping iron.

  And I knew I was not going to blow it, whatever “it” was going to be. I had blown it before. My recent experiences with dating had taught me a painful lesson: I did not know much about how to be a boyfriend. Let me rephrase that. I knew nothing about how to be a boyfriend. I have no idea why I was so shocked about that—after all, I’d spent my twenties married. When would I have learned any boyfriend skills? I had spent all those years working hard on my husband skills, trying to get that job right. When I started dating again, after three years as a lonely widower, I figured at least my husband skills would carry over into new relationships. I knew a little about how to do this boyfriend stuff, right? Ah, no. I was devastated to learn that (brace yourself for a surprise) starting a new relationship is hard. Two people, two genuinely good people, can try to make each other happy but fail. In fact, they can make each other wretched.

  I mean, when I was married, my single friends told me stories like this all the time. They kept telling me how lucky I was not to be dating. Hell, I thought they were just trying to cheer me up. Now I was mad at them all for not warning me enough. I had a lot to learn. I had everything to learn.

  Why was I just finding out about all this now? Because I got lucky early in life. I settled down when I was twenty-three. It was still the eighties. Milli Vanilli were about to win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. That’s when I had stopped learning how to be a single guy. So here I was, well into my thirties, trying to learn the basics other people study in college. Welcome back to earth, Major Fucking Tom.

  So I didn’t know what I wanted to happen with Ally—I just knew I wanted to find out. And I was determined not to blow it. Fear? None at all. I felt total curiosity. I felt total confidence. I was going to find out what happened next. All I needed was a plan. I knew how to make those. My plan, like most brilliant plans, involved Depeche Mode. I knew her radio show started at ten. So I would show up at the studio and hang out. That should be easy, right? That counts as a plan? I hoped so. It was a scheme, at the very least.

  I couldn’t sleep, so even though it was February, I opened the window of my motel room. The Econo Lodge on Route 29 is only one story tall, so when I stuck my head out the window, to gaze out at the rainy night sky, all I could see was the motel parking lot. It was only one day since I’d gotten off the plane, yet the dark landscape of Charlottesville seemed transformed. The black puddles in the parking lot were sparkling with stars I had barely noticed before. This place was different from the way I remembered it. It wasn’t like the old days. I guess that’s one of the things I had to come back here to figure out. There was no past waiting for me here; turning back the clock wasn’t an option. My old home had changed while I was away, like I had. It wasn’t offering me any escape back into the past. All it had to offer was the future, and I was going to have to find that out for myself.

  I stared out the window. Another parking lot, another deep breath. Another lungful of the sweet taste of trouble.

  SEVENTEEN

  1:01 a.m.:

  Dreaming of Me

  Okay, so in the cold light of morning, I could tell it wasn’t much of a plan. There wasn’t much nuance to it. I was just going to drop by the radio station around ten, casually, you know, just to help Ally file her records. This was an obvious DJ-groupie move. But I had no problem with obvious. Time was tight. This was boy-say-go time. It was one of those times when, in the words of the old Depeche Mode song, tomorrow won’t do.

  I spent Sunday afternoon walking around some of my old haunts in Charlottesville, kicking through the winter slush on Main Street, listening to the radio on my Walkman. I ended up sitting in the McDonald’s at the Barracks Road Shopping Center. How many evenings had I sat here over the years, back when I couldn’t face the idea of going home to my empty widower apartment? It stayed open until midnight, when practically everything else in town was closed by nine, so this was a place where I had killed time on countless weekend nights, in the not-so-distant past. I ordered two hamburgers and fries, just like in the old days, then sat at the corner table by the window, looking out into the empty mall. There were no other customers, which made sense since it was after dark on a Sunday night. My fries were cold by the time I got to them, so I nursed my coffee, staring out the window at the concrete McDonaldland playground where I had literally never seen a single kid play. I breathed in the soothing stop-and-lurch rhythm of the cars at the drive-through.

  “I could sit here forever,” I thought. “I don’t have to go to the radio station. I told her I was leaving town today. I could skip the Depeche Mode show, sit here another two hours until McDonald’s closes, then go back to the motel. I’d fly back Tuesday. Nobody would know. I could just sit here, and listen to her voice.”

  The wind rattled the window a bit, and I looked out again at the playground. Then I bused my tray. I got to the station a few minutes after ten, while DJ Astrogrrl was spinning the first song, “Just Can’t Get Enough.” I told her I was still in town because my flight was postponed because of the snow. She smiled and said, “Yeah, sure.” (To this day she swears she was kidding—she believed me at the time. I have my doubts.) We hung out for a couple of hours, talking about music and books and science, as she cued up the records. We argued about which was Depeche Mode’s best album (Black Celebration or Violator?) as well as the ever-controversial Vince Clarke question. She even played my Depeche Mode request, “Dreaming of Me.” And we agreed that for next year’s WTJU Rock Marathon, we should do a Smiths tribute show as DJ Shoplifter and DJ Backscrubber.

  I was wondering if she had a boyfriend. She was wondering if I was straight, given my enthusiasm for the Pet Shop Boys and my near-total recall of the Anne Bancroft filmography.

  I had plenty of time on the plane to wonder what had happened to me. All my moves had been totally obvious—the most obvious ones in the book. What could I say? I like obvious. Subtle and elegant is for kiddies. I was an adult now. I did not have the winds of youthful innocence at my back. I knew all about being a subtle kid. I had done my share of hint-dropping and throat-clearing and better-never-than-now stalling when it came to women. I’d done the shy boy thing. I aced that course.

  But I realized I wasn’t that kid anymore. I was an adult. I’d been in love. I’d been married. I had all the subtle beaten out of me by the time I was old enough to rent a car.

  I’d been that boy, for the first twenty years of my life. I’d dialed a woman’s number, chickened out, and hung up during the first ring. I’d told a woman, “I really like your friend” while her friend was in the ladies’ room, in hopes that the message would get passed along. I’d been an altar boy sighing over the girls during communion. I’d been told by a girl reclining on my dorm room bed, “I’m thinking the same thing you are—just say it,” and couldn’t guess what she meant. I’d been a college librarian, looking up my crushes in the computer to see what books they checked out. One girl I liked kept this book called Sexual Unfolding overdue for months and I kept secretly renewing it for her. I erased her overdue fines but never spoke a word to her.

  I had been that kid. I’d proudly upheld the shyness-is-nice tradition. I had pass
ed the torch to a new generation of bumbling fumbletons. I liked that boy, and I hoped I still had a lot in common with him. I was grateful to him for growing up to be me. He’d done me a lot of favors on the way, mostly by learning to get trampled by not-so-shy women. I had no regrets about being him. But I wasn’t that boy now.

  This was going to have to be adult romance, if there was going to be a romance, and this was going to be different. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t going to involve dropping hints and cryptic clues. I had no patience for that now. I had been a man, a husband, a lover. I’d been through some things and shed some tears. There was no way to forget where I’d been. I couldn’t go back to being vague and subtle even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I had enough problems of my own, adult problems, without going back to his. I had to be direct, because I knew from experience how love can be fleeting. Life is short. The sun is going to run out of hydrogen. I knew there was no time to waste getting cute. I was going to have to find out what it was like to do this kind of thing as a full-grown man.

  I knew this would be trial and error. But it was something I wanted to try and err at. And I thought she might be someone I wanted to try and err with. I knew what I wanted. Was I supposed to pretend I was a confused kid? Was I supposed to act tormented about what I wanted? I wasn’t confused. Just curious.

  I hoped she was into obvious, too. There was only one way to find out. The extremely obvious way.

  WITHIN HOURS OF MY PLANE touching down at LaGuardia, we’d already traded emails full of Morrissey jokes. My subject heading: “I left the South again, I traveled North again.” Her subject heading: “My only weakness is a list of crime.” I still couldn’t tell if she had a boyfriend, until a couple of weeks later, when she came to New York and we met for dinner. I wasn’t sure whether this was a date or not—maybe it was just dinner with a new friend from Virginia? But I walked into the hotel lobby, and when I saw her shoes, I knew it was a date. She looked up from her book and smiled when she recognized me. Date shoes, date smile. I took her to see Erasure, since I knew she was a Depeche Mode fan. Andy Bell came out in a leather corset with a peacock tail. Halfway through the first song, his whole outfit was on the floor and he was preening in his underwear. I knew that meant it was going to be a good night. There were some irate Erasure fans behind me, who took offense (understandably) to the fact that I am tall, so they started punching me in the back and screaming at me, before they realized it was much easier to walk away and stand in front of me instead. I kept glancing over at Ally to see if this was stressing her out, but it wasn’t, so I didn’t stress, either. I admire a woman who can watch her date get savagely beaten by strange females and keep her cool.

  We headed back to the hotel to meet her friend Marisa. They were having a girls’ weekend in New York, which I was now shamelessly crashing. We went out bar-hopping on the Lower East Side, as I listened to them tell stories about the Catholic high school they had gone to back in Rhode Island. They discussed the locker they shared at St. Mary Academy–Bay View, the Sisters of Mercy who taught them there, and how the nuns influenced their fondness for the band Sisters of Mercy. They discussed the current whereabouts of their Catholic school uniforms. (I somehow waited over an hour to ask, which I was proud of.) They recalled their high school band Mary Tard Lincoln, which specialized in obscene parodies inspired by U2, like “Where the Sheets Have No Stain,” “Straddle and Come,” and “I Will Swallow.”

  I met up with them again the next night and whisked them off to Brooklyn for a late-night electroclash after-party. (Give me a break—it was 2003.) We went to the “Berliniamsburg” party at Club Luxx on Grand Street, with a live performance by the synth-chick sex-robot trio W.I.T. I got to dance with Ally for the first time, to New Order’s “Blue Monday.” Since she’d been so bemused by how much I loved the Pet Shop Boys, I gave her a mix CD of their finest songs, with a hidden Erasure track at the end, “Oh L’Amour.” Back in Charlottesville, she made me a mix CD of her favorite Depeche Mode deep cuts. She put “Dreaming of Me” on that mix, because she knew it was my favorite song of theirs. But she also had a hidden track at the end, the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

  She came back to town a couple of weeks later for a job interview at NASA, and this time it was just the two of us. We went to a Ladytron DJ gig in the basement of the Tribeca Grand hotel. We leaned against the wall and our heads were close and it was time for our first kiss except I suddenly had a sense that for our first kiss, we should be all alone. So I took her hand and we raced upstairs, into a cab, where we somehow managed not to kiss, either, until we were safely back in my apartment. I was nervous, so I put on side one of More of the Monkees. Davy Jones started singing “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow).”

  “I really want to kiss you, Ally,” I said.

  She nodded. “I think you’d better, then.”

  Waiting for that moment had been a good idea. Everything about this night had been a good idea. The next few days were overflowing with good ideas, and they just got better. Things were looking up for me. It was obvious.

  EIGHTEEN

  1:12 a.m.:

  Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around

  “So am I overdoing?” I asked my friend Melissa, as we walked down Mercer Street after dinner. We were on our way to the after-hours basement karaoke place in Little Italy, a walk we’d done many nights before. We knew that when we got there, we would sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” Melissa loves to sing the Stevie Nicks songs, and this one is a duet, so I already knew I was getting drafted into Tom Petty duty. But there were a few other things I needed to know first.

  “Why are you giving her shoes?”

  “It’s her birthday next week.”

  “You’ve kissed her, but you haven’t slept together?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, man. That’s the best phase. All that anticipation.”

  “No, it’s not the best phase. If it were that phase.”

  “But it is, right?”

  “I am not presently disposed to discuss such a situation, if it did exist. Besides, you know I would still buy shoes for her in other phases.”

  “I know you would. I know you will.”

  Melissa knew a lot about shoes. She worked at the John Fluevog store on Mulberry Street. I had met her years and years earlier, when she was working at the Fluevog store in Boston, on Newbury Street. She was married to the drummer she was dating back then. She knows a lot about everything.

  “We were walking around window-shopping and we went to Kate Spade. I saw her pick up these patent leather Mary Janes. She kind of sighed. It was hot.”

  “She likes those shoes.”

  “So am I overdoing?”

  “It’s not the shoes. It’s you noticing. She wants to know if you know how to notice a girl looking at something.”

  “I know her shoe size, too. It’s seven and a half.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked in her shoes while she was in the shower.”

  “Don’t tell her that, okay? That’s kind of overdoing.”

  “But the patent leather Mary Janes are okay?”

  “You should pair them up with some fishnets. That would be hot. But save the receipt, all right?”

  “Thanks.”

  “And don’t say how you got her shoe size. She’ll like it if you ask her for that direct.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You up for some ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around?’”

  Like I said, Melissa knows about everything.

  ALLY WAS ONE COOL CUCUMBER. She was not given to dramatics. Things had been going really well for a few months. She had taken the job at NASA, so she was moving to New York at the end of the summer. We were going to be living in the same city. I thought this probably meant I was her boyfriend. But I was trying to take it slow and play everything as cool as Ally was playing it.

  That was a challenge for me. I had no experience taking thi
ngs slow. Like I said, I had never acquired any boyfriend game, so I had everything to learn. I was new at this, but I knew I wasn’t going to blow it. I was not letting this woman drift away. I would master this whole dating operation. Wait—were we “dating” or “going out”? Did people even say “going out” anymore? I had no idea what the kids were into these days.

  I called in all my female confidantes for emergency coaching sessions. I had put in so many late-night hours of listening to them complain about the guys they were seeing, giving them my perspective on things, following along with their DTR (Define That Relationship) discussions. Now I was asking them to return the favor. I needed a crash course in the basics. Like, the really basic basics.

  My friend Niki spent an entire dinner patiently explaining the difference between “dating,” “seeing,” and “going out.” It turns out I had it all backwards—“dating” was actually a commitment level way beyond “going out.” Going out meant everything was so casual it was practically “seeing.” Trying to learn the lingo was like trying to figure out the four bases.

  “You aren’t ‘going out’ anymore,” Niki told me. “She is moving to New York, so then you can be a couple. You’re lucky you met her before she got here.”

  “I know.”

  “Really lucky. She would have dates by the time she got through baggage claim.”

  “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Don’t be nervous. Is she your Friendster yet?”

  Ally had indeed accepted my invitation to start a Friendster profile, but like everyone else in the summer of 2003, she had set her relationship status to “Open Marriage.” There was no resisting the comedy value of the “Open Marriage” setting.