Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

She was in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her.

Renée loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them.

I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be. Suddenly, I got all tangled up in this girl’s noisy, juicy, sparkly life. Without her, I didn’t want to do anything, except keep being good at Renée.

I’d rather hear the Beatles’ “Getting Better” on a mix tape than on Sgt. Pepper any day. I’d rather hear a Frank Sinatra song between Run-DMC and Bananarama than between two other Frank Sinatra songs. When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

But when I listen to Kurt, he’s not ready to die, at least not in his music—the boy on Unplugged doesn’t sound the same as the man who gave up on him. A boy is what he sounds like, turning his private pain into teenage news. He comes clean as a Bowie fan, up to his neck in Catholic guilt, a Major Tom trying to put his Low and his Pin Ups on the same album, by mixing up his favorite oldies with his own folk-mass confessionals. I hear a scruffy sloppy guitar boy trying to sing his life. I hear a teenage Jesus superstar on the radio with a song about a sunbeam, a song about a girl, flushed with the romance of punk rock. I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.

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.

Sometimes I could feel the glaciers shifting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable.