contents title page dedication epigraph rumblefish hey jude roller boogie tape 635 love makes me do foolish things big star: for renée sheena was a man personics a little down, a little duvet that’s entertainment the comfort zone dancing with myself how i got that look 52 girls on film crazy feeling paramount hotel mmmrob hypnotize jackie blue glossin’ and flossin’ blue ridge gold via vespucci acknowledgments about the author copyright for Mom and Dad I wasted all your precious time I wasted it all on you. —PAVEMENT rumblefish IDES O’ MARCH 1993 T he playback: late night, Brooklyn, a pot of coffee, and a chair by the window. I’m listening to a mix tape from 1993. Nobody can hear it but me. The neighbors are asleep. The skater kids who sit on my front steps, drink beer, and blast Polish hip-hop—they’re gone for the night. The diner next door is closed, but the air is still full of borscht and kielbasa. This is where I live now. A different town, a different apartment, a different year. This mix tape is just another piece of useless junk that Renée left behind. A category that I guess tonight includes me. I should have gone to sleep hours ago. Instead, I was rummaging through old boxes, looking for some random paperwork, and I found this tape with her curly scribble on the label. She never played this one for me. She didn’t write down the songs, so I have no idea what’s in store. But I can already tell it’s going to be a late night. It always is. I pop Rumblefish into my Panasonic RXC36 boombox on the kitchen counter, pour some more coffee, and let the music have its way with me. It’s a date. Just me and Renée and some tunes she picked out. All these tunes remind me of her now. It’s like that old song, “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Except it’s 8,844 lines about one woman. We’ve done this before. We get together sometimes, in the dark, share a few songs. It’s the closest we’ll get to hearing each other’s voices tonight. The first song: Pavement’s “Shoot the Singer.” Just a sad California boy, plucking his guitar and singing about a girl he likes. They were Renée’s favorite band. She used to say, “There’s a lot of room in my dress for these boys.” Renée called this tape Rumblefish. I don’t know why. She recorded it over a promo cassette by some band called Drunken Boat, who obviously didn’t make a big impression, because she stuck her own label over their name, put Scotch tape over the punch holes, and made her own mix. She dated it “Ides o’ March 1993.” She also wrote this inspirational credo on the label: “You know what I’m doing—just follow along!” —JENNIE GARTH Ah, the old Jennie Garth workout video, Body in Progress. Some nights you go to the mall with your squeeze, you’re both a little wasted, and you come home with a Jennie Garth workout video. That’s probably buried in one of these boxes, too. Neither of us ever threw anything away. We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I don’t even have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boombox on the counter, next to the sink. So many tapes. I met Renée in Charlottesville, Virginia, when we were both twenty-three. When the bartender at the Eastern Standard put on a tape, Big Star’s Radio City, she was the only other person in the room who perked up. So we drank bourbon and talked about music. We traded stories about the bands we liked, shows we’d seen. Renée loved the Replacements and Alex Chilton and the Meat Puppets. So did I. I loved the Smiths. Renée hated the Smiths. The second song on the tape is “Cemetry Gates” by The Smiths. The first night we met, I told her the same thing I’ve told every single girl I’ve ever had a crush on: “I’ll make you a tape!” Except this time, with this girl, it worked. When we were planning our wedding a year later, she said that instead of stepping on a glass at the end of the ceremony, she wanted to step on a cassette case, since that’s what she’d been doing ever since she met me. Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like “What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?” or “Why don’t they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?” Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested. Renée was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. Her favorite song was the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Her favorite album was Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She could rap Roxanne Shante’s “Go on Girl” all the way through. She called Eudora Welty “Miss Eudora.” She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway. She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red. Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music. Renée was a country girl, three months older than me. She was born on November 21, 1965, the same day as Björk, in the Metropolitan Mobile Home Park in Northcross, Georgia. She grew up in southwest Virginia, with her parents, Buddy and Nadine, and her little sister. When she was three, Buddy was transferred to the defense plant in Pulaski County, and so her folks spent a summer building a house there. Renée used to sit in the backyard, feeding grass to the horses next door through the fence. She had glasses, curly brown hair, and a beagle named Snoopy. She went to Fairlawn Baptist Church and Pulaski High School and Hollins College. She got full-immersion baptized in Claytor Lake. The first record she ever owned was KC & the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight.” KC was her first love. I was her last. I was a shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston. I’d never met anybody like Renée before. I moved to Charlottesville for grad school, my plans all set: