Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield Read Free Book Online Page A

romantic crises and answered their tearful late-night calls. I knew the hell they wreaked on their boyfriends, and I thought it was funny—man, their boyfriends were suckers. I was too smart for such things. I lived by the code of Emersonian self-reliance. “Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee,” Emerson thundered. “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”
    I was young, idealistic, and reluctant to learn any of the ways of the world, even when it would have been to my advantage to do so. I was wasted, not on drugs, but on something possibly worse. I read an aphorism of Nietzsche’s, in which he says, “The man who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” I laughed and said, Totally. That describes everybody I know, except me. It was time for a change.
    But how do you start getting out of your room? I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, “The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.” My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,” and I didn’t want to waste mine.
    I felt like I was strong enough for a girl, but made for a woman. Yet I had no idea how to start looking to find this woman. Fortunately, she was looking for me.
    Maria was a cool, punk-rock girl from Georgia who worked at the Waldenbooks in the Chapel Square Mall. She dyed her hair red and played bass in a hardcore band, the Uncalled Four. She’d dropped out of high school and taken the bus to New Haven to be with a boy. They broke up as soon as she arrived, but she stayed around town and got a job. One night, she spotted me at a hardcore show and smelled blood. She invited me over to her place. The first things I noticed were the Michael Stipe poster on the wall, her boombox, and loads of tapes. Then I noticed that she had no furniture except a mattress on the floor. You know the Beatles song where the girl invites John to sit down, except she doesn’t have a chair? This girl didn’t even have a
rug
. She put on a tape from her vast collection of R.E.M. bootlegs, a rehearsal tape from 1982. Michael Stipe started to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The room began to spin.
    I couldn’t believe she liked me. I couldn’t believe how much I liked her. She told me I looked like Dr. Robert from the Blow Monkeys. No girl ever told me I looked like
anything
before. In the evenings, I would get off work at the library and take the bus up Whalley Avenue to her house, where we’d order pizza and watch MTV. It was a great summer for bittersweet songs about the pangs of first love: Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” Simply Red’s “The Right Thing,” Eddie Money’s “Endless Nights,” Janet Jackson’s “Let’s Wait Awhile,” Mötley Cruë’s “Too Young to Fall in Love,” Sheila E.’s “Koo Koo,” Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me.”
    It was the first time I had ever been in love. Suddenly, I felt like part of the world. I had never met a southern girl before, so Maria was full of surprises: She baked pies, she fried catfish, she pronounced “umbrella” funny, she called me “baby” totally unironically. I wondered, Where have southern girls been all my life? She was also an avid shoplifter. She told