Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Read Online Free PDF

one braid dangling down the side of her face. Her CB-radio handle was Whammer Jammer, after a J. Geils Band song. Once I was in the tree while she was on the porch with a boy. I was hoping she didn’t see me, but she came over to talk. She said, “You won’t tell my mom I was smoking, will you?” I said, Of course not. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “You’re a doll.” She was more than a woman to me.
    Every day Susan came home after school and followed the same ritual: She opened her bedroom window and played one or both of her favorite albums, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
(side two only) and Boz Scaggs’s
Silk Degrees
(side one only). Sometimes, she would just play her favorite songs. She would play Boz Scaggs’s “Georgia” for hours, lifting the needle over and over. If Susan wasn’t in the mood for “Georgia,” she would play the second half of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” starting with the bass solo and then going into the “Chaaa-yaaay-yaaain!” chant. I would sit in my tree, gazing up at Susan’s window and trying to imagine her intense communion with the music and what it must feel like inside her soul at such moments.
    When you’re a little kid, you’re fascinated by the mystery of what the big kids do, and for me these mysteries were associated with music. The music I loved kept scaring the bejeezus out of me, with the nebulous concepts of “sex” and “drugs.” I’d sit in the basement with Eddie and Jimmy Durfer, listening to records like Meat Loaf’s
Bat out of Hell
or Kiss’s
Alive II
, trying to figure out the plots. The music was full of danger. Every note evoked the terror of the don’t-take-drugs paperbacks I’d read at school, like
Go Ask Alice
(“Dear diary, the squirrels are eating my face again”) or
That Was Then, This Is Now
(“The colors screamed at me! Purple screamed loudest!”). At school, we studied Rush’s
2112
and
Lord of the Rings
. In the cafeteria, I looked anxiously at my chocolate milk and recalled how Alice got dosed at the sleepover party. Was somebody playing “button, button, who’s got the button” with our lunches? Would my teacher do such a thing? Why not? She was into
Lord of the Rings
. I was just one chocolate-milk mustache away from slipping into a hellhole of bare feet and crash pads and diary entries like “another day, another blowjob” until my inevitable fatal pot overdose.
    But I couldn’t wait for the eighth-grade dance—this was the culmination of my years of obsession with rockness. I spent days sweating over those dance tapes.
    “Hey, I like this one,” my mom said. “We will, we will rock you! That’s a catchy song!”
    I erased “We Will Rock You.”
    The night of the dance, the whole class gathered in Strauss Hall. The girls looked very cool over on their side of the room, a swirl of velour and Love’s Baby Soft. The boys did not look so cool. Every time a rocking song came on, the girls would sit down. It was enough to make you doubt their commitment to rockness. When the boys busted out the air guitar, the girls parked the Calvin Klein labels on their jeans firmly on the bench. In fact, the harder the boys rocked, the farther away the girls drifted. That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance,
nobody’s
happy.
    The girls got hot for “Pop Muzik” and “Heart of Glass” and “Bad Girls.” The boys stood around and waited for rock anthems so we could untuck our shirts and chant the lyrics to “Hot Blooded,” which by some strange coincidence were the same as the title. But all the majesty of rock could not impress these girls; it failed to move their stony hearts despite the cathedral-like grandeur of Tom Scholz’s guitar solo in the second movement of Boston’s “Don’t Look Back.” Asking a classmate to dance was scary enough when the song was a girl-pleaser. But when the song involved acoustic guitars and elaborate metaphors about