Take the Cannoli (17 page)

That music of his did not bother me when we were making out on a bench in front of the La Brea Tar Pits or the alley behind my favorite Chicago bar. It bothered me in those ponderous solitary moments when I asked myself if I could really love a man who did not think, as I do, that a band with two drummers playing two drum sets was some kind of mortal sin, just as I'm sure he asked himself if such a freewheeling, free-jazz, open mind as himself could really fall for such an oldfangled, verse-chorus-verse relic like me. Which might be shallow, but our incompatible music pointed to incompatible world views. He was the ocean, preferring waves of sound to wash over him with no beginning, middle, or end. I'm more of a garden hose, fancying short bursts of emotion that are aimed somewhere and get turned on and off real quick.

A couple of days after the last time I saw him, I got a typically well-written postcard. He said that after he kissed me goodbye at LAX he was driving away and turned on the radio. Elvis was singing “It's Now or Never.” In my personal religion, a faith cobbled together out of pop songs and books and movies, there is nothing closer to a sign from God than Elvis Presley telling you “tomorrow will be too late” at precisely the moment you drop off a girl you're not sure you want to drop off. Sitting on the stairs to my apartment, I read that card and wept. It said he heard the song and thought about running after me. But he didn't. And just as well—those mixed-faith marriages hardly ever work. An Elvis song coming out of the radio wasn't a sign from God to him, it was just another one of those corny pop tunes he could live without.

What I did get out of the entire sad situation, besides big phone bills, a box of cassettes I'll never touch again, and a newfound appreciation for the short stories of Denis Johnson—especially the sentence in
Jesus' Son
that says, “The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs,” which was pretty prophetic considering that the two men I took up with after my heart was broken were Jack Daniel and Neil Young—was a lingering sentimentality about the act of taping itself. A homemade tape is a work of friendship, an act of love.

I was reminded of that when I was reading Nick Hornby's novel
High Fidelity.
One of the subtexts of his story is the emotional complexities of the taping ritual. Much of the book takes place in a London record store. Clerks Barry and Dick are emotional cripples stuck in that mostly male pop culture circle of hell in which having seen a film (the right kind) or owning a record (ditto) acts as a substitute for being able to express what these things mean to them. Since they are incapable of really talking about human feelings, they get by on standing next to each other at rock shows and making each other complicated tapes of obscure songs.

Rob, their boss at the record store, met his girlfriend Laura when he was a DJ at a dance club. She first approached him because she liked a song he was playing called “Got to Get You Off My Mind.” Rob woos Laura by making her a compilation tape, claiming, “I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like
writing a letter—there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with ‘Got to Get You Off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and . . . oh, there are loads of rules.”

While I was reading Hornby's book, I happened to glance at an ad in
San Francisco Weekly
that read, “I'll tape record albums for you. Reasonable rates, excellent service. Pick-up available. Bob.” And it gave a phone number. Prostitution! That's what I thought, anyway. Paying someone to make a tape for you seems a whole lot like paying someone for a kiss. It is traditional to cover for one's inability to articulate feelings of love through store-bought greeting cards. It's another thing entirely to pass off a purchased compilation tape, a form which is inherently amateur and therefore more heartfelt. To spend money on such a tape would be a crime against love. Aphrodite herself might rise from the ocean to conk such a criminal on the head with the seashell she rode in on.

I asked Hornby what his music-mad record clerks would think if they saw Bob's ad in the paper. “Their public view would be that it's a
terrible, awful job for a grown man to do, and why haven't all these people got their own turntables? But I think maybe they'd think secretly it was kind of a neat job and they'd like to sit at home all day taping other people's records.”

I called the number in the ad and talked to Bob, a very nice, sane person actually. I expressed my reservations about his work using subtle, professional phrases such as “What a weird job!” Bob explains that by taping his clients' old Dottie West and Frank Sinatra Jr. records, he “brings to life something that was essentially lying dormant in their life. I see it as providing a service that people are happy to pay for. They think it's worth the money. I feel great, make a little money on the side. No problem.”

So Bob's business is much more businesslike than I imagined. He doesn't make the kind of painstaking mix tapes you make for someone you have a crush on. “Actually,” Bob points out, “people call me and they're so delighted that this service exists that they're super happy and almost not even that price sensitive.” His rates vary depending on the quantity of taping his clients demand. He says each tape costs, on average, about ten dollars. Hardly prostitution, more like giving it away.

Still, I remained fascinated by the unsavory if fictional idea that someone might be willing to pay someone else good money to make a compilation tape for his or her loved one. I decided I wanted the job. I had heard that my friend Dave has a new lady in his life, so I roped him into hiring me to make a tape for her.

“It honestly would be a good idea,” said my client during our first consultation.

“You're at the tape stage?”

“Well, it could use a spark.”

“So tell me about her. Let's try and get at who she is. Is she a femme fatale kind of girl, or more of a my funny valentine?”

He cringed. “Oh God. In sort of a scary way, she's maybe too much of a carbon copy of me.”

“And are you a femme fatale, Dave?”

“No. I wouldn't say either one of those. It's not a saccharine, sweet thing. It's kind of low-key.”

I wanted to know how intense he feels about this girl, hoping that the term “low-key” wouldn't come up again. I ran some iconic song titles by him so he can decide how far to go with his musical expression of love and/or like. He said that he's okay with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”; “Let's Spend the Night Together” by the Rolling Stones “has been done”; “Kiss” by Prince is “nice”; though Frank Sinatra singing “Love and Marriage” is nixed because their relationship is “not sentimental. The I-love-you, I-need-you genre would be out. It would be more upbeat, fun stuff than ‘Love Me Tender' kind of stuff at this point.”

I thought making the tape was going to be easy. If Dave was calling his romance “not sentimental,” then he was not having a romance. Thus anything was going to be an improvement. But once I started making Dave's tape, I discovered something I hadn't suspected.
Choosing the songs and their order was sweaty, arduous toil. Making a mix tape isn't like writing a letter, it's like having a job. Without love as the engine of my labor, it was unpleasant. And I discovered something else. I did not want to follow Dave's instructions. Sure, I had worked in the service industry before. I understood its abiding principle, “the customer is always right.” At first, I was committed to following Dave's wish not to get too sentimental. I don't know if he's listened to much popular music recorded in the last, oh, half century, but it's pretty gushy stuff. Even though Dave hired me to choose love songs which didn't say I love you, there aren't that many out there. And even if there were, I'm fully confident that his desire for them is dead wrong. My reasoning? He's a boy. I'm a girl. I know better.

Certainly in making the tape I exercised restraint. After all, they've only been together two months. My role in their relationship is important, perhaps pivotal, and I take that responsibility seriously. I want to reassure her, not scare her off. I steered clear of the heavies, avoiding the serious courtship crooner Al Green. I vetoed Elvis, who should, in my opinion, only be employed when you
really
mean it. And when I did invoke Sinatra, I played it safe: not “Taking a Chance on Love” or even “I've Got a Crush on You,” but picking instead cheerful, subtle “Let's Get Away from It All” as a low-key, you-and-me-baby, just-the-two-of-us-out-of-town sort of thing. Cole Porter's “Let's Do It” found a place, too. But I went with urbane jokester Noël Coward's live in Las Vegas rendition, in which he moons, “Each man out there shooting craps does it / Davy Crockett in that dreadful cap does it.”
Still, despite Dave's request to hold the sugar, the word “love” must pop up something like ninety-eight times over the course of the tape.

So I dropped off the tape at his house and the next day we got together to talk about it.

“I like the tape a lot,” he says cheerfully. “There isn't anything that I don't really like.”

“I don't know if you noticed or not, but I sort of ditched your instructions. Because you told me not to be too sentimental, and to keep it light and upbeat.”

“I thought it was light.”

“The word ‘love' is bandied about, let's say. Yesterday, you said, the ‘I-love-you, I-need-you' genre would be out.”

“I did. I don't know where they say that in this tape. Do they?”

“Well, ‘I love you' is certainly in there.”

“I don't think it is.”

But the Raspberries' “Go All the Way” (with the climax, “I need you! I love you! I need you!”) is on the tape. Along with Chic's “Give Me the Lovin' ” and James Brown's “Hot (I Need to Be Loved Loved Loved).” Can the differences between the way he heard the songs and the way I heard them be attributed to something as cheap and clumsy as a gender cliché? That Dave hears them as songs about sex and I hear them as songs about love? Maybe. But it's not as if I've wanted to marry every man I ever slept with. And since Dave is such a good friend to have, a rememberer of birthdays even, I know firsthand he's not without a certain softness. If we both like the tape, if we both think the tape
would make a nice gift for his sweetheart, could the impasse be in the way we're talking about the tape? This being my story, however, I get to like the way I talk about it better. Even if James Brown hollers the verb “love” as a radio-friendly way of saying “fuck” I don't think he means it unsentimentally. James Brown is not, and never was, “low-key.”

Anyway, the argument might be moot.

“We got into some sort of fight this morning,” he confesses.

“So now you need a tape.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don't know what's up, actually.”

I know exactly what's up. Dave has a problem that all the love songs in the world couldn't solve. Dave has a problem that could not be solved even by a one-hundred-minute, Chet Baker/Al Green/Elvis Presley medley recorded on a master-quality, super low-noise, high-bias, five-dollar cassette played in the moonlight as he asks her to dance. His love affair was too far gone before I ever pushed record and play on his behalf. It isn't that Dave is necessarily unsentimental. It's that he's unsentimental about her. He liked the songs I picked. He just didn't mean what the songs said. I can make a tape of “I Believe in Miracles” but I cannot perform miracles.

W
HEN SOMEONE ASKS ME WHY
I don't drive, I usually say that my sister drives. Which sounds a little loony. But my sister, Amy, and I are twins. The downside of being a twin involves the sharing of attention, affection, and, especially for those born in December, gifts. “Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas, Amy and Sarah!” exclaimed many a box with a single toy inside. The advantage is that twins share responsibilities. There is little or no pressure to become a whole person, which creates a very clear, very liberating division of labor. I did the indoor things, she did the outdoor ones. She learned to ride a bike before I did. I learned to read before she did. She owns at least three pairs of skis. I own at least three brands of bourbon. Driving was her jurisdiction. Criticizing her driving was mine.

“But aren't you from Montana?” the still-unconvinced inquisitor will usually ask. Yes, I'm from Montana, I'll say, a very big state full of very small towns, towns so small that one may walk everywhere.

The next question is always, “Still, aren't you a journalist? Don't journalists need to drive to their stories?” I suppose they do, if they're interviewing bigamists in rural Utah, but not if they live two blocks from an el stop in Chicago and write book reviews in their pajamas. On the four or five days a year when I have to wear shoes to do my job, it has been my experience that the friendly folks at Condé Nast and Public Radio International are very generous about reimbursing cab receipts. If this fails to convince, I bring out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?

This sort of accusatory conversation, of course, almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.