Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  We loved every minute of this deplorable film, even though practically every scene in this movie comes from Rebel Without a Cause, Purple Rain, or some other teen-outlaw biker flick. Randy Quaid plays the sheriff trying to solve the mystery, but like everybody else in this town, he’s never seen a TV movie before, so he has no idea Charlie Sheen is the Wraith. The soundtrack is the essence of ’80s electro-blare: Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” Nick Gilder’s “Scream of Angels,” Ozzy’s “Secret Loser.” It’s a star-crossed romance for sure, because while Charlie might be from out in the great blue yonder, Sherilyn is wearing a red bikini, and this girl is definitely flesh and blood. She works at the roadside drive-in burger joint as a roller-girl waitress, which means she skates through the parking lot shaking her ass to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” She’s literally sex on wheels, a spaceboy’s dream girl with wide rock-and-roll hips and a foxy ankle bracelet. But she can’t figure out why she’s so drawn to Charlie Sheen, gosh darn it. Why does he remind her of somebody she used to know, like the boy who was killed by the biker gang? And where did Charlie get those mysterious scars on his back? Hmmmmmm!

  “Are we not supposed to know Charlie Sheen is like an E.T.?” Renee asked.

  “No, I think we’re supposed to know. But Sherilyn doesn’t know.”

  “Is she a moron?”

  “She’s never seen a wraith before.”

  “She just switched from a red bikini to a blue bikini. That means she’s totally going to do him.”

  “If she does him and she still doesn’t notice he’s from outer space, she’s got big problems.”

  “She’s got big something. Look at those! She’s wearing that to work!”

  “I’m worried about these two,” I said, rummaging for crumbs at the bottom of the cracker box. “It’s time for them to make out but we’ve already heard ‘Rebel Yell.’ Maybe if they didn’t make out during ‘Rebel Yell’ they missed their shot.”

  “No way. She’s too hot. No boy is from that far outer space.”

  They share their first kiss on his motorcycle, while a Bonnie Tyler ballad plays on the soundtrack. Then Charlie kills practically everybody in town except for Sherilyn, and that’s when our hero confesses his secret identity to the flesh-and-blood girl he left behind on earth. He can’t stay on this planet, but he’s returned to carry her off into the stars with him. Charlie tells Sherilyn, “I’ve come a long ways for you.” She cannot resist the Wraith. The movie ends with Sherilyn on the back of Charlie’s motorcycle as we watch their taillights fade.

  For some reason, I started sobbing at the end of The Wraith and couldn’t stop. I’d never cried in front of Renee before, much less at a Charlie Sheen movie, and I felt like an idiot. But she was completely cool about it. As the credits rolled, she patted me on the back and mused, “Sherilyn has a nice ass, doesn’t she?” At that moment, I knew she was the girl for me. Of course, we’d already been going out for a few weeks, so I wasn’t, like, shocked or anything. But still, it’s never not nice to keep realizing.

  I was somebody’s boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.

  Our first fall together, we did a lot of aimless driving around in the countryside. We’d cruise by the Amoco Food Shoppe on Route 29 for some chicken-battered french fries and hit the open road. When I say “aimless,” I do not mean anything negative—“aimless” was the major achievement of my life so far. Who needs aims, anyway? I’d spent twenty-three years collecting aims, and now I was sitting on so many I couldn’t give them away. Aimless was something I was just learning. So I kept telling myself how lucky I was to learn it from her, and kept praying I wouldn’t get carsick in her ’78 LeBaron as she whipped around the hills. No doubt you’ve heard the expression “She drove it like she stole it?” This girl drove it like she stole it from the cops and then did donuts on the altar of the Basilica of the Holy Redeemer on Mission Hill. That’s how she drove it.

  We’d listen to hip-hop, which was all new to her. She’d never gotten into it before, and so she gobbled up my hip-hop cassettes. Her favorites were the women rappers like Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, and L’Trimm, who were two badass Miami teenagers who liked the cars that go boom.Their names were Lady Tigra and Bunny D, and they only valued two things in a man, bass and booty, especially the former. “Cars with the Boom” was about rolling around in the Miami streets with your top down and the woofers exploding, but she thought it was excellent for zooming down the Blue Ridge Parkway. She’d always chant along. “We like the cars! The cars that go boom! We’re Tigra and Bunny! And we like the boom!”

  Some afternoons she let me drive her around, which was a special occasion. I borrowed my sister Tracey’s cherry-red Ford Granada, which she hated because it couldn’t do more than forty without shaking all over like the girl in an Eddie Money song. This piece-of-crap Yankee car didn’t even have a gun rack. This car did not have boom. I secretly thought I was a better driver than she was, but it was just that I was a city driver and she was a country driver. She laughed at me for getting winded on mountain roads at forty-five degree angles, but that’s nothing compared with the way she panicked the first time I took her to Boston and drove her down the Arborway.

  “There are no lines on this road!” she screamed.

  “The lines are in my mind.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Remember, this is Boston and everyone on the road is a lunatic. Relax.”

  “I still don’t see any lines.”

  “They don’t give you a license here if you notice lines.”

  “They’re not letting you in.”

  “I’m feeling my way in.”

  “I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Now what in God’s name is that thing?”

  “It’s called a rotary.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  I took an extra couple of loops around the rotary just for fun, and just to hear her scream like a crazed old Southern lady. She actually said, “Great time of day!” I never heard her yell that one again.

  I had never gotten the hang of dating—I was always going to be somebody who either had a girlfriend or didn’t. To me, dating was like the scene in The French Connection where Gene Hackman is shadowing the perp, Fernando Rey. Gene follows him into the subway. Fernando gets on the train, Gene gets on the train. Fernando gets off, Gene gets off. Back on, the doors close, but Fernando jams his umbrella in the door, so the doors open. Back out, back in, back out, the train pulls out of the station, Fernando waves good-bye through the window, Gene’s stuck standing on the platform. There’s your date. At least Gene didn’t have to pay for it.

  But now I was actually on the train with the girl, and for the first time, I felt like we were going somewhere. She’d had millions of boyfriends, so she would get a little impatient at having to tell me all the time that she was not being annoying. She was just being a girlfriend. She thought she was doing me a huge favor by explaining to me what girlfriends were like.

  “I’m gonna tell you a secret about women,” Renee told me one Saturday night after we’d stayed up at least two bourbons and two Bowie albums too late.

  “I heard this one before.”

  “No, this one’s different. It’s a secret, I promise. There are two kinds of women. The women who’d rather get their way, and women who’d rather get the credit for getting their way. This is the secret: we’re all the second kind.”

  “But you always get your way.”

  “No, you just keep telling me I always get my way. I like that better than actually getting my way.”

  “Well, you like to get your way and get the credit.”

  “I do like that, don’t I. And I like you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you know how to freshen a girl’s drink.”

  “We’re out of ice.”

  She loved ordering me to beat people up for her. She didn’t want me to mean it; she just wanted to me to say, s
ure honey, even though she knew I couldn’t bust the proverbial grape in a fruit fight.

  When Renee died in 1997, I could no longer fantasize about beating up people who were mean to her. It was like Lord Byron asked: “Let the object of affection be snatched away by death, and how is all the pain ever inflicted on them avenged?” Good question. After she died, she left her pain in the world, and I couldn’t protect her from it anymore. But then, I never could. I’d come a long way for her. And now I was somewhere new. From the start, I had to realize how helpless I was to protect her from her pain, and the longer we stayed together, the more I felt swamped with awareness of all the bad shit in the world from which I could not protect her.

  When Renee had trouble at her day job, she kept a Robin Ventura baseball card on her desk. When steam came out of her ears, she would look at Robin Ventura and think, “Don’t charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don’t start none, won’t be none.” It calmed her down, reminded her to keep her head. To anybody just passing by her desk, it looked like an innocent baseball card of the White Sox third baseman, a handsome jock, nothing more. But to her, it was a coded message, and it had to do with Robin charging the mound when Nolan Ryan hit him in 1993, and how a pitcher on a mound always has the first-punch advantage and it was a total no-win display of temper, even though he was right. Being right is no advantage in the fight—if anything, it’s a piano on your back, making you pitifully easy to put in a headlock. When Renee would feel her temperature rising, she would whisper the name to herself, “Robin Ventura,” over and over, and usually it would go away. Also, Robin Ventura had a righteous ass, which probably was also partly why she kept the baseball card.

  Not being able to protect her from things was the most frightening thing I’d ever felt, and it kicked in as soon as we got together. With every year we spent together, I became more conscious that I now had an infinitely expanding number of reasons to be afraid. I had something to lose. You know the movie Swamp Thing? The mad scientist takes Adrienne Barbeau hostage shortly after her topless scene and uses her as bait to entrap the Swamp Thing. When the trap works, the mad scientist gives an evil laugh at the Swamp Thing and says, “The man who loves gives hostages to fortune.”

  It was lonely, grappling with all those fears. Did all adult people worry about this? I didn’t know.

  One Sunday afternoon, Renee and I ran out of gas in the middle of a fight, driving across Afton Mountain in my sister’s Granada. That car couldn’t claim to have a lot of road-worthy virtues, but it did have a functioning gas gauge, and I really should have noticed that the needle was on empty, except Renee and I were too busy sniping at each other about some topic that seemed incredibly important at the time. I honestly don’t even remember what it was we were mad about. The car stalled out and I nosed into the breakdown lane. We really wanted to sit in the car and keep fighting, but instead, we got out of the car to fight about which one of us would have to walk down the mountain in search of the nearest gas station.

  We stood out there on the side of the road, leaning against the car, both of us staring bleakly at the traffic rushing by us. We began to understand how stupid we were to stay together. Neither of us said a word—we just stood there, our shirts flapping in the breeze like a couple of rags tied to the antenna. We were going to have to use our brains, but it was our brains that got us up here, so something else had to get us down. Is there anyone stupider, weaker, more helpless, but especially stupider, than two twenty-three-year-old kids in love?

  Not stupid for running out of gas or even for fighting, but for staying together in the first place. That was the first moment I realized how fucked we were. For the rest of my life, I would have reasons to be afraid. I now had something in my blood stronger and meaner than I was. Two people leaning against a ’76 Granada by the side of the road, arms folded, staring at the gravel—this was a posture we could stay in forever, and nobody could protect us from it except each other. Like the Turk says in The Godfather, blood is a big expense.

  As we stood there, I knew what “hostages to fortune” meant. Love can do whatever it wants to you. And it’s a lot meaner than you are. (And then love starts talking to you the way Kirk Douglas talks to Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) It won’t be quick. I’ll break you first. You won’t be able to answer the phone or walk around in your own apartment without wondering, is this it? And when it does come, it still won’t be quick. And it won’t be pretty.

  I’m not sure how long we stood there. A car pulled into the breakdown lane ahead of us. It was Renee’s friend Becky from Waynesboro, another paralegal in her office. Becky rolled down her driver’s-side window. “Yooo-hoooo!” she yelled. “Y’all look like you’re in a bit of a pickle.” She laughed a bit, then drove off to get us some gas.

  “I’ll be right back,” she hollered before she peeled out. “You two don’t go anywhere!”

  It took her about twenty minutes. But she came back with a can of gas from the station down the other side of the mountain. Becky taught me how to open a hood and pour gas from a can directly onto a carburetor, a skill I have never used again. Renee and I didn’t tell her we’d been fighting. Becky probably guessed.

  We thanked her and told her we didn’t know what we would have done without her (that was true). She said, “Have a good night,” and we said, “We will” (that was a lie).

  We nosed back onto Route 250 in silence and defeat. It took a few miles for Renee to turn on the radio again. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too. I just don’t want to talk.”

  “Smile?”

  “Not now.”

  “Come on. You know I love this song. Rox-ANNE!”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Rox-ANNE!”

  Pffff. Teeth still clenched. Slow exhale.

  “Don’t leave me hanging from the Roxanne tree, darlin’. RAAAK-ZAAAAN!”

  “Put on a red light.”

  “That’s it! Rox-ANNNE!”

  “Purrron uuuh RED! LYYYYY!”

  “Yeah! Roxanne!”

  “Purrron uuuh REEEEEH! LYYYYY!”

  “Roxanne!”

  “You don’t have to PURRRON UUUH REEEH! LYYYYY!”

  “Roxanne!”

  Miles go by, no red lights at all.

  DURAN DURAN

  “All She Wants Is”

  1989

  Duran Duran celebrated the end of the 1980s by releasing their greatest hits album, which they called Decade. This was either their way of making fun of Neil Young, exactly the kind of old-school rock idol they had no use for, or their way of reminding everybody they’d stuck around five times as long as anyone expected. I thought I was Duran Duran’s biggest fan, but I never dreamed they’d still be making hits in 1989.

  “All She Wants Is” was their answer to “I Know What Boys Like.” They sang, “All she wants is, all she wants is”—but they wouldn’t say what she wants! Duran Duran knew, they just wouldn’t tell me. That wasn’t fair. George Michael wasn’t coy about what the girl wanted from him (she wanted money) and neither was Billy Idol (she wanted mo, mo, mo). Girls want things—to have fun, to be free tonight, to dance—and that’s the engine that drives pop music. Nobody seemed more sure of what girls wanted than Duran Duran, and that was why I seemed to be still stuck with them. Now that I had a girlfriend, I needed to know more than ever.

  It worked. They got my money. I waited in line at Plan 9 Records and spent my nine bucks for the Decade tape. That weekend, I took it to a grad-student party as a novelty item, but the hostesses put it on, inflicting it on everyone who showed up. The fact that Duran Duran left “New Moon on Monday” off their greatest hits album made my friends mad, so they pulled their twelve-inch Duran singles from the back of the pile, where they’d been carefully hidden, and slapped the records on. It was a long, sweaty, Duran-filled night.

  Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour th
rough my past. Every song is a time capsule full of things that girls want. So I keep listening.

  Side 1 starts with “Planet Earth.” Duran Duran’s first hit. Reached number twelve on the U.K. charts in 1981.

  Everybody knows who Duran Duran are, and everybody knows a few of the big hits: “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Rio,” “Planet Earth.” Some people also know the tiny hits, like “New Moon on Monday” and “Hold Back the Rain.” A few of us even made it to Side 2 of the Arcadia record. So Red the Rose—now there’s a poetic album title.

  There are five Durannies, although some periodically leave the band and get replaced by nobodies. The replacements are never attractive, because the Durannies are too vain to share the stage with anyone as hot as they are.

  The Fab Five: Simon Le Bon is the lead singer, the one who wears towels around his neck and had a famous yacht wreck in 1985. He has always claimed Simon Le Bon is his real name. John Taylor is the bassist, and the foxiest member of the group. He did the theme song for the popular film 9½ Weeks, “I Do What I Do (To Have You),” and starred in the indie film Sugar Town. Nick Rhodes is the keyboardist, who is (besides Simon) the only Durannie who has never quit the band. Andy Taylor, the ponytailed guitarist, was the first to quit and go solo. Roger Taylor, the drummer, was the first to quit and not do much of anything.

  They first blew into my world in late 1982, when the radio started playing “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio.” I knew these songs months before I saw the videos—from the sheer sound, you could tell this was a whole new thing. They claimed they wanted to combine Chic with the Sex Pistols, and talked in lofty art-school terms about their fusion of punk, funk and glam. They wore makeup. They sang mind-humpingly bad poetry, every word of which I loved.

  Oh, those fiendish Durannies, with their bat-shit pretensions and their preening pretty-boy bitch faces. Duran Duran, with their ridiculous feverish poetry about the mysterious Cleopatras who seduced and defanged them every few minutes. They made a lot of enemies as well as lifelong fans. Every time they come back and do a reunion tour, the adult women in my life turn into bobby-soxer battalions.