Read Online Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield - Free Book Online
Authors: Rob Sheffield
Ads: Link
were going to be, and I wouldn’t find out how until later. Irreversible. I remember that we discussed
The Towering Inferno
that night, the scene with Steve McQueen, the valiant firefighter, and William Holden, the evil tycoon who owns the hotel. William Holden asks, “How bad is it?” and Steve McQueen answers, “It’s a fire, mister. And all fires are bad!” That’s the last thing I remember before I fell asleep.
sheena was a man
NOVEMBER 1989
R
enée was my hero.
Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire then drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That’s what Renée was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal. It didn’t take long for us to get all tangled up in each other’s hair.
One day that fall we were driving around in her 1978 Chrysler LeBaron and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” came on the radio. Renée sang lead, while I sang the Pips’ backup routine. She’s leavin’! Leavin’ on the midnight train! Woo woo! A superstar but he didn’t get far! When we got to the final fade-out, with Gladys on board the train and the Pips choo-chooing their goodbyes, Renée cocked an eyebrow and said, “You make a good Pip.”
That’s all I ever wanted to hear a girl tell me. That’s all I ever dreamed of being. Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips. I marveled unto my Pip soul how lucky I was to choo-choo and woo-woo behind a real Gladys girl.
Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one. She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive. One day, she announced she had found the guitar of her dreams at a local junk shop. I said, “You don’t even play the guitar.”
She said, “This is the guitar that’s gonna teach me.”
We drove up Route 29 and she got the guitar. It was a great big Gibson Les Paul with stickers of the Carter Family and the Go-Gos and Lynyrd Skynyrd plastered all over the case. We drove it home and spent the whole weekend kicking around the house as Renée sat on the couch figuring out how to play her favorite Johnny Cash and George Jones songs.
Unlike me, Renée was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people’s secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did. She was finishing her MFA in fiction, and was always working on stories and novels. She had more ideas than she had time to finish. She loved to get up early in the morning. She loved to talk about wild things she wanted to do in the future. She’d never gone two weeks without a boyfriend since she was fifteen. (Two weeks? I could do a year standing on my head.) Before she met me, her wish list for the next boyfriend had contained three items: older than her (I failed that one), rural (that one, too), and no facial hair (I would have needed six months’ notice to slap an acceptable sideburn together).
I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked. She was particular about her bourbon, winced if I forgot to put the ice cubes in before I poured. She’d hiss, “Don’t bruise the bourbon!”
She was the first person on either side of her family to go to college, and she held herself to insanely high standards. She worried a lot about whether she was good enough. It was surprising to see how relieved she seemed whenever I told her how amazing she was. I wanted her to feel strong and free. She was beautiful when she was free.
She could play a little piano, mostly hymns that she learned to play for her
The Towering Inferno
that night, the scene with Steve McQueen, the valiant firefighter, and William Holden, the evil tycoon who owns the hotel. William Holden asks, “How bad is it?” and Steve McQueen answers, “It’s a fire, mister. And all fires are bad!” That’s the last thing I remember before I fell asleep.
sheena was a man
NOVEMBER 1989
R
enée was my hero.
Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire then drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That’s what Renée was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal. It didn’t take long for us to get all tangled up in each other’s hair.
One day that fall we were driving around in her 1978 Chrysler LeBaron and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” came on the radio. Renée sang lead, while I sang the Pips’ backup routine. She’s leavin’! Leavin’ on the midnight train! Woo woo! A superstar but he didn’t get far! When we got to the final fade-out, with Gladys on board the train and the Pips choo-chooing their goodbyes, Renée cocked an eyebrow and said, “You make a good Pip.”
That’s all I ever wanted to hear a girl tell me. That’s all I ever dreamed of being. Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips. I marveled unto my Pip soul how lucky I was to choo-choo and woo-woo behind a real Gladys girl.
Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one. She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive. One day, she announced she had found the guitar of her dreams at a local junk shop. I said, “You don’t even play the guitar.”
She said, “This is the guitar that’s gonna teach me.”
We drove up Route 29 and she got the guitar. It was a great big Gibson Les Paul with stickers of the Carter Family and the Go-Gos and Lynyrd Skynyrd plastered all over the case. We drove it home and spent the whole weekend kicking around the house as Renée sat on the couch figuring out how to play her favorite Johnny Cash and George Jones songs.
Unlike me, Renée was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people’s secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did. She was finishing her MFA in fiction, and was always working on stories and novels. She had more ideas than she had time to finish. She loved to get up early in the morning. She loved to talk about wild things she wanted to do in the future. She’d never gone two weeks without a boyfriend since she was fifteen. (Two weeks? I could do a year standing on my head.) Before she met me, her wish list for the next boyfriend had contained three items: older than her (I failed that one), rural (that one, too), and no facial hair (I would have needed six months’ notice to slap an acceptable sideburn together).
I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked. She was particular about her bourbon, winced if I forgot to put the ice cubes in before I poured. She’d hiss, “Don’t bruise the bourbon!”
She was the first person on either side of her family to go to college, and she held herself to insanely high standards. She worried a lot about whether she was good enough. It was surprising to see how relieved she seemed whenever I told her how amazing she was. I wanted her to feel strong and free. She was beautiful when she was free.
She could play a little piano, mostly hymns that she learned to play for her
Similar Books
