Love Is A Mix Tape Part 6

What I wanted to do was simple: write notes to people, say thank you for making Renee's life better, you made her happier, you took care of her, I remember you for that, thanks. I got two of these notes written-one to her shrink and one to her ma.s.sage therapist. And then I lay down on the floor and shut my eyes and thought, Well, that's enough of that. It knocked the wind out of me. I tried to say as many of Renee's goodbyes as I could, but d.a.m.n, there was no way I could ever get her slate clean. She wasn't a person to tie up loose ends or settle scores. I wanted so much to write to Jean, her hair stylist at Bristles. She gave Renee three of her all-time top-four haircuts. She took care of the fake-redhead dirty work. She wrote out a list of Bette Davis's five best movies and told Renee how easy it was to get an annulment after we got hitched (well, thanks for that that one). I wanted to explain why Renee wasn't calling anymore. Our friend Elizabeth, G.o.d bless her, wrote that note. I still have so many questions and regrets about all the people who knew Renee and enjoyed her and never got to hear the news from me, wondering what happened to that girl, why doesn't she come around anymore. To my great sorrow and shame. one). I wanted to explain why Renee wasn't calling anymore. Our friend Elizabeth, G.o.d bless her, wrote that note. I still have so many questions and regrets about all the people who knew Renee and enjoyed her and never got to hear the news from me, wondering what happened to that girl, why doesn't she come around anymore. To my great sorrow and shame.

I heard from the owner of the Meander Inn, the bed and breakfast in Nellysford where we spent our honeymoon. She saw Renee's name in the paper and sent me a card. What do you do with kindness like that? I felt tiny beside it, and stupid for not understanding the first thing about it. I had a lot to learn. It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing. There are a hundred excellent ways to talk yourself out of writing a note like the one she sent me, and I've used them all.

I even went to the bookstore and read Emily Post on the etiquette of thank-you notes. It said not to use the funeral home note cards, but to buy new stationery with black gilt around the edges and to use black ink. I got as far as the stationery store, but I didn't get out of there with any stationery because while I was browsing, I ran into my friend David, whose girlfriend was printing up some business cards. We talked for an hour. He said some nice things he'd been thinking about Renee lately. I drove home and crawled into my now-customary fetal position. I never got the stationery and left countless notes unwritten, again to my sorrow and shame.

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.

I was awed and ruined by this knowledge. Renee knew it all the time; I was learning it these days.

I played Stephanie's tape only in the daylight because I didn't want to ruin it by a.s.sociating it with my nights. "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" was for brooding alone at night, with Missy Elliott and Timbaland cheering each other up over those melancholy Tidewater swamp-funk beats. I couldn't believe both Hanson and Missy Elliott blew up at the same moment that Renee died; they were both made for Renee, and it was insane that she never got to hear them. Missy wrote a note to Biggie in her CD booklet: "Rest in peace, Big. I hope you can hear my alb.u.m, wherever you rest." I felt the same way.

As usual, Charlottesville got a thunderstorm every afternoon that summer. I made a tape in which Missy's "The Rain" segued into Irma Thomas's "It's Raining," two of the saddest rain songs ever. Can you stand the rain? You say you can, but you don't know. I can't stand the rain. Counting every drop, about to blow my top. Falling on my head like a memory. I think I'll lose my mind, but not my memory. Missy babbles to keep herself awake at the wheel, making winds.h.i.+eld-wiper noises with her mouth, singing "wikka wikka wikka," telling herself, "Oh, Missy, try to maintain."

I drove up to Boston for my wedding-anniversary weekend, since I couldn't stand being in the house alone. All the way up 95, the radio played an endless loop of Missy and Biggie and Puffy, "The Rain" into "Hypnotize" into "I'll Be Missing You" into "Mo Money Mo Problems"-all the current hits. The car was too battered to take it. My battery was running down. Every time I stopped for a traffic jam or a light, the engine stalled out and took up to half an hour to start again. I overheated on the D.C. Beltway, s.h.i.+fted into neutral, and tried to nose onto the shoulder. An old guy in a pickup jumped out and helped me push. He called a tow truck on his cell, but it didn't come, so I used my Kleenex pocket-pack to wipe the engine and then kept going.

Missy and Timbaland were still ruling the radio north of the Mason-Dixon line. When it actually started to rain, I held my breath and hit the lights. There was a thunderstorm at midnight on the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge, but Timbaland squooshed the ba.s.s in time with the wipers and pushed me to the other side. The river is deep and the river is wide. The funky drummer's on the other side. Every time I found "The Rain" on the radio, the ba.s.sline would pump for miles and miles. It felt like it was raining all over the world. Here comes the rain, here comes the wind, five six seven eight nine ten. Oh, Missy, try to maintain. And in an mmmbop you're gone.

hypnotize

OCTOBER 1997.

It was already cold before the sun went down. Duane and I walked down Sunset Drive to the bottom of the hill and into the woods. We crossed the footbridge over the creek, past the farmlands, where we would see the cows laze in the sun. Usually, we turned around when we got to the path under the I-64 overpa.s.s, but this time we kept going for a few miles, all the way down Green County Road, out to a stretch of Charlottesville I'd never seen before, not even in a car. Two-lane blacktop, a Taco Bell, Hardee's, strip malls, and gas stations. We didn't get home until around midnight. Duane went to sleep on her rug. I sat in the yard and lit a cigarette. On the earphones, Biggie was talking about a girl. They've been together a long time, and she knows a lot of secrets about him she is never going to tell anybody. Tonight, he's got something special planned-he knows the kind of music she likes, that soft Luther love-man Harveys Bristol Cream R&B s.h.i.+t, so for once he wrote that kind of song for her, just to show he's listening. "f.u.c.k You Tonight" is full of mournful R&B chill but it also has a cold-eyed gangsta pimp strut. Hail Biggie, full of grace, you got a gun up in your waist, please don't shoot up the place. the sun went down. Duane and I walked down Sunset Drive to the bottom of the hill and into the woods. We crossed the footbridge over the creek, past the farmlands, where we would see the cows laze in the sun. Usually, we turned around when we got to the path under the I-64 overpa.s.s, but this time we kept going for a few miles, all the way down Green County Road, out to a stretch of Charlottesville I'd never seen before, not even in a car. Two-lane blacktop, a Taco Bell, Hardee's, strip malls, and gas stations. We didn't get home until around midnight. Duane went to sleep on her rug. I sat in the yard and lit a cigarette. On the earphones, Biggie was talking about a girl. They've been together a long time, and she knows a lot of secrets about him she is never going to tell anybody. Tonight, he's got something special planned-he knows the kind of music she likes, that soft Luther love-man Harveys Bristol Cream R&B s.h.i.+t, so for once he wrote that kind of song for her, just to show he's listening. "f.u.c.k You Tonight" is full of mournful R&B chill but it also has a cold-eyed gangsta pimp strut. Hail Biggie, full of grace, you got a gun up in your waist, please don't shoot up the place.

I longed for a pimp strut of my own. Like Shaft, I'm a complicated man and no one understands me but my woman, except she's dead and she doesn't understand that any better than I do.

September had come and nothing had changed. I moved into a new apartment, across from the Baptist church, one block over from the Seventh Day Adventist church. But I had no appet.i.te to unpack the boxes, so I just left them on the floor and stepped over them. It was more a shrine than a place to live in, but at the time that's how I wanted it. Renee had never lived there, and never would have consented to, since the bathroom had barely any girlie storage at all and there was no counter s.p.a.ce in the kitchen. In my dreams, she came looking for me at my old address and couldn't find me. A couple of times, Duane ran away and showed up the next day at the old apartment, no doubt looking for Renee. The people who lived there now were very nice to her and called the landlord, who called me. At night, I sat in the same chair in a different backyard, staring all night into different woods, except nothing I saw there had any good news to tell me about the future.

A few days after I moved in, I was sitting in the yard and Mr. Kirby from next door came over to say hi. He was a widower, too. His first wife died of liver cancer in 1988, and a year and a half later, he married Mrs. Kirby, who came over the next day with some banana bread. They went to the Baptist church across the street. They were in their seventies. The boys who lived upstairs worked at the Higher Grounds coffee stand and played in one of our town's most popular underground funk-metal bands, Navel. All day, the guitarist would practice licks (Rage's "Killing in the Name" was a big favorite), and all night his brother the ba.s.sist, would have incredibly loud s.e.x in the room above mine, to the point where I would get up and go sleep on the couch.

I had no idea until that year that Charlottesville could get so windy in October. I had never slept there alone in cold weather. Our old blankets were still packed in a box somewhere. While looking for them, I opened up a box of Renee's fabric, the fabric she left behind in the middle of her grandiose fas.h.i.+on designs. I pulled out ma.s.sive sheets of red and blue corduroy and piled them on the bed for covers. There was plenty more of the corduroy (what the h.e.l.l was she making, a sofa?) so I draped it over the windows to keep out the wind and the light. One red window, one blue window.

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there a while, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it. I was trying so hard to be strong. I knew how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it.

Some nights I would drive up Route 29 to the all-night Wal-Mart. I'd push a cart around with some paper towels inside to look like a real shopper, just to spy on married people. I just wanted to be near them, to listen to them argue. This one is $2.99! But this one is $1.49 for just one! But $2.99 is cheaper per roll! But $1.49 is cheaper than $2.99! But we can store the other one! We live in a house, not a spare-towel storage unit, and we'll pay more than $1.49 rent on the s.p.a.ce it takes to store it! But you can never have too much of it! And so on. Married people fight over some dumb s.h.i.+t when they think there aren't any widowers eavesdropping. And they never think there are widowers eavesdropping.

The Wal-Mart was always full of couples taking care of business. None of them were happy to be there, but they were there together, and I tried not to get caught staring while I followed them around from aisle to aisle. I was so hungry for the company. I was scared I would be caught, that my wedding ring would be put under a scanner and exposed as a fraud, a widower trying to pa.s.s as a husband. The store would start to empty around two in the morning, but I would often stay later. I was never the only person there, just the only man alone. I would look busy browsing the racks of two- or three-dollar ca.s.settes: line-dance country, Christian anthologies, hit collections by groups like Three Dog Night or Air Supply.

Lots of the couples were younger than Renee and me. Some looked angry; others seemed comfortable. Sometimes I wondered if they were scared, the way I used to get scared when I was young and married. I sometimes wondered if they noticed me and wondered why the h.e.l.l I didn't have a place to go instead of rolling a cart around under those fluorescent lights. But n.o.body ever noticed me. I never felt like going back home.

I ate a lot of widower food: peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches, cereal, frozen steak burritos. I heated the burritos in the oven, and if they didn't come out thoroughly defrosted I said, h.e.l.l, what's the difference, and crunched through the frost. The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart. I stopped cooking. Couldn't stand the idea of it. Who would eat it? Who would notice? Who would care? I gave away all of Renee's kitchen stuff, her cookbooks, her fancy knives, her chop dishes, her KitchenAid mixer. But there's still hunger. The sun goes down and there are quick decisions to make. Everything in Charlottesville closes by nine o'clock. If you live in a small town, and you aren't cooking, you're going hungry for a while. The restaurants where you used to eat together? Write them off. It's like they closed. I stopped going to the College Inn for pancakes because I knew I would see Gail, a waitress there who doted on us, and I never felt like having that conversation. So I went to the Tavern. Except Gail was a waitress there now, and she came over to pour me some coffee. She asked, "Where's the girl with the red hair?" I told her. Gail cried and said, "G.o.d takes the good people first." I couldn't go back there anymore, either.

I started going to Applebee's, a chain restaurant where I was guaranteed not to see any of my friends. I would sit in a booth with a book and be left alone, eating a steak and getting soda refills and eavesdropping on people who belonged to each other. I became a connoisseur of volume-oriented family-identified chain restaurants-the cheesier the better, especially ones with themes such as the Wild West or the Australian desert, where all the steaks would be named after resort cities and the baked potatoes would all have names like Uncle Stuffy's Baco-Blaster Cheddar-Chern.o.byl Twicersplosion. I knew I would be anonymous there, a guy n.o.body would notice or feel sorry for because the booths were too private and people had their own families to keep a lid on. The waitresses would be nice to me because I had no kids and therefore gave them no trouble aside from my unreasonable soda-refill desires. It was always hard to make myself go, especially facing that table-for-one moment, bluffing like it was a perfectly ordinary request. I had to be mighty hungry before I would even try, and more than once I got all the way to the parking lot and turned around.

Applebee's was my fave because the booths had the highest walls. Ruby Tuesday had better steaks, but the walls between the booths were too low, which meant a potential eye-contact issue. Outback Steakhouse also had short walls, but they turned the lights down low so it didn't matter. They blasted the air-conditioning to move people in and out fast, so I brought a sweater. I didn't have to worry about being spotted as a regular, because n.o.body worked at those places long-I don't think I ever had the same waitress twice. They were always cool about letting me stay and read. Sometimes I'd get static from the high school kid at the door. Maybe one time out of five, they would ask, "Do you mind eating at the bar?" But I never ate at the bar because once I said okay I would always have to say okay.

I still bought women's magazines at the grocery store, trying to pa.s.s 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 n.o.body 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.

When my refrigerator broke down, I didn't call the landlord to replace it. I tried to fix it myself, enraged that my male fridge was giving me att.i.tude. I lived on peanut b.u.t.ter and warm ginger ale for a whole month before I finally caved and called the landlord. I took out the champagne bottle, the one from the old house, the one Renee always kept around because she believed in always having a spare bottle of champagne in the fridge. Now it was warm and probably about to explode. I was too terrified to dispose of the champagne in a rational way, so I put on protective shades, wrapped up the bottle in Renee's old Motorhead T-s.h.i.+rt, and slowly dragged it through the yard and into the woods. I planned to go back and smash the bottle with a rock, rendering it harmless, but I could never find it again. For all I know, the champagne's still out there in the woods, waiting for the right moment to blow up.

It was hard to explain to my friends what was happening. When my friends and family would ask how I was doing, I stalled or stuttered or lied. Sometimes I could feel the glaciers s.h.i.+fting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable. All these monstrous contortions in me were warping the outside of my body, I was sure. No doubt people could spot me a block away and know that I had lived past my till-death-do-you-part date.

Sometimes I could hear my voice approaching the level of the Elizabeth Taylor mad scene. You know how in all the really great Elizabeth Taylor movies, the gnarly-a.s.s melodramas, there's always the scene where she freaks out because she's living inside a horrible secret she can't explain?

Liz in b.u.t.terfield 8 b.u.t.terfield 8: "You don't know this. n.o.body knows this."

Liz in Suddenly, Last Summer Suddenly, Last Summer: "This you won't believe. n.o.body, n.o.body, n.o.body could believe it."

I love Liz Taylor. Renee and I had a favorite Liz movie, Conspirator Conspirator, where she's married to Robert Taylor, who's living a secret double life as a Soviet spy. At the end of the movie she's a widow because her husband has just been shot dead by agents of the free world. One of the agents explains to Liz that none of this ever happened, that for reasons of national security her widowhood is a secret she can never tell. Then, I guess, she's supposed to go back to her family and invent a cover story about where her husband is. I don't know. The movie just ends with Liz getting told that n.o.body can ever know what happened to her and her husband. n.o.body would believe her anyway.

jackie blue

FEBRUARY 1998.

On the plane to New York, where I was to interview some bands for where I was to interview some bands for Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, I heard the two middle-aged women behind me getting acquainted. One was traveling to her son-in-law's wedding. Her daughter had died of cancer six months earlier. The other woman asked, "Don't you feel strange that he's remarrying?" The mother-in-law said, "No, Manny is the kind of person who needs to be married. When she was sick, my daughter said, 'Manny will be married again before dinner.'"

While I was in the city, I found an alb.u.m at a record store in the East Village. It was a Jackie Kennedy doc.u.mentary LP called Portrait of a Valiant Lady Portrait of a Valiant Lady, rushed out right after the a.s.sa.s.sination. According to the back cover, this was "an inspiring doc.u.mentary record specially written and produced for the listening pleasure of all Americans," put together by something called the Research Craft Corporation, in a.s.sociation with the Bureau of Auditory Education. Both sides of the alb.u.m are devoted to a biography of Jackie, "tragic heroine and First Lady of the World." It has spoken-word tributes, a poem written especially for this record, cheesy re-created versions of news sound bites, and the voice of Jackie herself, from a TV address she gave around Christmas 1963, saying thank you to the world for their condolences.

I couldn't stop staring at Jackie's face on the front of the alb.u.m. The whole alb.u.m cover is just one big photo of Jackie, with no text or decoration. I don't know when this picture was taken, before or after November 22. She sits pensively on a white couch, facing the camera with a sad little smile. She's wearing white. Her outfit is casual, maybe the top half of a dress seen from the waist up, maybe a sweater, with a discreet collar. She wears no jewelry. She's in a living room-hers? somebody else's? the White House?-with a lamp turned on behind her, on a coffee table laden with photos (too blurred to tell who's in them) and an ashtray. She's turned to the camera, as if we just interrupted her while she was staring out the window. The curtains are billowy and white. She rests her chin on her right hand, her elbow propped on the couch. Her left arm is casually draped over the top of the couch, and her left hand is hidden in the curtains.

You can't see whether she's wearing her wedding ring or not.

After I found this record I played it constantly. The Jackie bio follows her life story, as the narrator harps on the theme of her n.o.bility with purple prose like, "She keeps a loyal, lonely vigil with his world." Her "Thank You" message on side two is really strange. The words are articulate, but her voice sounds sh.e.l.l-shocked. She seems to wander from the script, at one point pausing mid-sentence to say, "All his bright light gone from the world." It's a little scary to hear. Jackie apologizes for not answering condolence letters. For some reason, that's the main theme of the minute or so she speaks. She explains that she's gotten 800,000 letters. "Whenever I can bear to, I read them," she says. "It is my greatest wish that all these letters be acknowledged. They will be. But it will take time."

I wonder if all widows are obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy. Probably. Renee and I were always obsessed with her, long before we knew either of us would be a widow. We were Jackies-ploitation junkies, poring over every biography, no matter how trashy. Renee, of course, already had a fetish for 1960s fas.h.i.+on (she even owned a vintage pink pillbox hat, which smelled bad enough to trigger her asthma), and I'm sure the obsession just got worse after she married into an Irish Catholic family. We looked down on people who called her Jackie O-they did not understand Jackie Kennedy, the Profile in Cleavage, the most bouviesscent of all American Catholic girls. We watched Jaclyn Smith (the Charliest Angel) in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, but we preferred Jacqueline Bisset in The Greek Tyc.o.o.n The Greek Tyc.o.o.n. Once, when we were driving up to Boston, Renee made me drive hours out of our way down Route 3 to Hyannis, just because she was determined to buy some Jackie shades and a Jackie scarf to tie around her head. I a.s.sured her that Hyannis was literally the last place on earth Jacqueline Kennedy would have considered buying clothes, as it's a s.k.a.n.ky little burnout beach town. But there was no way to talk her out of it. We got to Hyannis and hit the 99-cent stores. I don't know how, but Renee found exactly the shades and scarf she had imagined. The sungla.s.ses were pointy at the edges; the scarf was multicolored and mod. She wore them the whole drive back to Boston, all three hours, tying the scarf around her head and making tragic faces out the window.

Jackie's the most famous widow ever, young or old. She's our Elvis, our Muhammed Ali. I was obsessive about her before, but now I was over the edge. I kept playing the first Pogues alb.u.m, Red Roses for Me Red Roses for Me, just because of the alb.u.m t.i.tle-Jackie once said that those were the last words to cross her mind in Dallas before the shots, looking out at people in the crowd holding roses and thinking, "How funny, red roses for me."

People remember her-well, let's stop right there. Most of us weren't born then. We don't "remember" her, and we aren't even picking up secondhand memories from older folks who were were there. We invent our own memories of her based on tokens like the Air Force One photo with the b.l.o.o.d.y dress, the funeral salute, and so on, including the doc.u.mentary record I found. For lots of people, Jackie is a symbol of poise in the middle of grief, and since she was thirty-four at the time, she's also a symbol of youth. It's weird how you sometimes hear divorced people complain that they'd rather be widowed. It's not fun to hear people say this, if you're a widow, but I don't want to be judgmental about that-love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the gra.s.s to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a compet.i.tion; there's plenty of pain to go around. These people just don't know-and why should they?-that widowhood is not dignified, but degrading enough to strip away every bit of dignity you ever kidded yourself you had, and that in her time Jacqueline Kennedy made a fool of herself in public over and over. People project all sorts of strength and dignity onto her, but she was a mess, which is part of why I wors.h.i.+p her. there. We invent our own memories of her based on tokens like the Air Force One photo with the b.l.o.o.d.y dress, the funeral salute, and so on, including the doc.u.mentary record I found. For lots of people, Jackie is a symbol of poise in the middle of grief, and since she was thirty-four at the time, she's also a symbol of youth. It's weird how you sometimes hear divorced people complain that they'd rather be widowed. It's not fun to hear people say this, if you're a widow, but I don't want to be judgmental about that-love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the gra.s.s to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a compet.i.tion; there's plenty of pain to go around. These people just don't know-and why should they?-that widowhood is not dignified, but degrading enough to strip away every bit of dignity you ever kidded yourself you had, and that in her time Jacqueline Kennedy made a fool of herself in public over and over. People project all sorts of strength and dignity onto her, but she was a mess, which is part of why I wors.h.i.+p her.

Jackie wouldn't move out of the White House for two weeks after the a.s.sa.s.sination. It's an incident that's totally forgotten now, but it was a national scandal at the time. The Johnsons were trying to a.s.sume control of the White House, taking on their roles as President and First Lady, but they had to deal with the widow refusing to move out of her old room. They couldn't very well kick her out, even when Harry Truman was on the phone to LBJ, telling him he needed to get rid of her and claim his own G.o.dd.a.m.n White House. Lady Bird was a champ about it, saying, "I wish to G.o.d I could serve Mrs. Kennedy's comfort; I can at least serve her convenience." But Jackie wouldn't go. Two weeks! Not very "together" of her, now was it? Perhaps she knew she was being rude; she wasn't born in a barn. But she did it anyway. She overstepped the boundaries of manners, dignity, taste, and basic human kindness, because what else could she do? Where was she going to go? How would she get there? Where would she take her kids? How would she find a new place to live? How could she pay for it? She had so many decisions to make and no time to make them. This one she blew. History has forgotten, but it's one of my most cherished Jackie moments.

Jackie blew lots of other decisions, too, depending on which shady bios you believe. Did she sleep with her Secret Service agent? Did she sleep with Bobby, Sinatra, Brando, or the architect designing the JFK library? If she didn't, why the h.e.l.l not? Wouldn't you? Did Ethel invite Angie d.i.c.kinson to sit in the front row at RFK's funeral just to get back at Jackie for holding hands with Bobby at JFK's funeral, since JFK slept with Angie on the night of his inauguration? Apparently, during the first few months, Jackie drank herself to sleep. Which means . . . what? She got to sleep? Fair play to her. I tried drinking myself to sleep, too, but it didn't work. All it did was make me drunk, listening to the clink, clink clink, clink of my ice cubes as they melted. Being drunk was a drag, but I liked the of my ice cubes as they melted. Being drunk was a drag, but I liked the clink, clink clink, clink and hoped enough bourbon would get the job done, so I drank a lot. Bourbon made me miss Renee bad, though, so I switched to Bushmills, but I still missed drinking with Renee and I still stayed awake. and hoped enough bourbon would get the job done, so I drank a lot. Bourbon made me miss Renee bad, though, so I switched to Bushmills, but I still missed drinking with Renee and I still stayed awake.

The Jackie doc.u.mentary record begins with the narrator announcing, "On Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:25 P.M P.M., Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy began an ordeal unparalleled in human history!" It's a low-budget quickie for sure, with the same actor doing the same accents for the Indian and African amba.s.sadors. A French voice proclaims her "charmante!," with accordion in the background. Somebody recites a poem ("The awful scream of the a.s.sa.s.sin's gun / Widowed her for life") in which "prayer" rhymes with "Bouvier." The LP covers the eighty-hour rush from Friday afternoon, when the a.s.sa.s.sination happened, to Monday afternoon, when the funeral was over and the story ends. In this version of the story, the funeral is the happy ending: "Never before has such a grueling ordeal been faced with such grace and poise as Jackie Kennedy displayed throughout the tragic circ.u.mstances so abruptly and atrociously thrust upon her."

I came to cherish this as a rock-and-roll record, as Jackie Kennedy's debut alb.u.m, the greatest hit of a spectacularly f.u.c.ked up sixties pop star. I realize she did not "release" this alb.u.m. She did not authorize it, produce it, endorse it, or anything like that. Yet I hear it as a Jackie record, perfect 1960s diva pop that's up there with Dusty Springfield or Ann-Margret. It's a bootleg auth.o.r.ed by her against her will, stolen from her like her husband, beyond her control, in the grand girl-group tradition of starlets who get trapped and manipulated by the Svengali producer, sort of like Ronnie and Phil Spector.

I put my Jackie record up on the kitchen stove so I could look at it all day. I left it in its protective plastic sleeve so food wouldn't get splattered on it. Since I never cooked anything but pasta on the stove, with tomato sauce out of jars, there were little red splotches all over the plastic sleeve. I liked the red splotches, yet felt guilty about not was.h.i.+ng them away. When I had friends coming over I'd slip off the sleeve, and then Jackie was pure and pristine, on her white couch with the white curtains. When my friends left, I'd slip the cover back on, and she'd be spattered with blood all over again, corrupted by death, corrupted by being alive when her husband is dead, corrupted by knowing more than she's supposed to know about death.

I also have my grandmother's old copy of a quickie tribute mag, Jacqueline Kennedy: Woman of Valor Jacqueline Kennedy: Woman of Valor. It reports, "Mrs. Kennedy's appet.i.te, never robust, has returned." There was a lot of widow gossip in that mag that made me wonder, especially concerning the whereabouts of her ring. She put it on her dead husband's hand in the hospital? Then how did she get it back? Did she get photographed without her ring on? What did his family think about that? After she put it back on, when did she stop wearing it? I studied this and the other magazines in my Jackie shrine: Screen Stories, April 1965: "Jackie Pleads, If You Love Me, Please Leave Me Alone!" The article notes, "Many people have wondered why she was not at his grave at Christmastime."

TV and Screenworld, March 1970: "Exclusive: Liz and Jackie's Spending War!" The story has this scoop: "The two richest and most glamorous women in the world are having the most expensive cat fight ever known in history." Liz bought the $1.05 million Krupp diamond, which Jackie wanted for her fortieth birthday; Jackie had to settle for $40,000 "Apollo 11" gold earrings from Aristotle Ona.s.sis, in the shape of the moon and the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. According to the story, "Jackie, ever ready with the bon mot bon mot, chortled to actress Katina Paxinou, 'Ari was actually apologetic about them. But he promised me that if I'm good next year he'll give me the moon itself!'"

I immersed myself in Jackie trash like I was studying with a kung fu master. Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won't remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and death and pain. But on the other side, there's just more grief. to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won't remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and death and pain. But on the other side, there's just more grief.

On the eleventh of every month, my friend Elizabeth would say, "Well, we made it through another month. So do we get her back now?" We always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead. We expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We'd pa.s.sed the test and would get back what we'd lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from coming back. The idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye-that was a hard goodbye to say in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. No private eye has to tell you it's a long goodbye.

You tell yourself, I'll get to the end of this. But there's no finish line, just more doors to pa.s.s through, more goodbyes to say. You know that Smiths song "Girlfriend in a Coma"? At the end of the song, Morrissey whispers his last goodbye. I love that part; that line cracks me up now. Yeah, right, you think think it's your last goodbye. He has no idea how many more he's got left. Good luck, kid. it's your last goodbye. He has no idea how many more he's got left. Good luck, kid.

Ralph Waldo Emerson knew the score: "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." That's from "Experience," his late essay about human loss and his son's death. There's a lot of cold-blooded s.h.i.+t in that essay, and the winter after Renee died I read it over and over. I always had to stop to b.u.t.t my head against that sentence: "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." I was hoping that was a lie. But it wasn't. Whatever I learn from this grief, none of it will take me any closer to what I want, which is Renee, who is gone forever. None of my tears will bring her closer to me. I can fit other things into the s.p.a.ce she used to occupy, but whether I choose to do that, her absence from that s.p.a.ce is permanent. No matter how good I get at being Renee's widower, I won't get promoted to being her husband again. The loss doesn't go away-it just gets bigger the longer you look at it.

It's the same with people who say, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn't kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

That's part of why I wors.h.i.+p Jackie. She just kept the story going. After she died, she went straight to the top of the charts, as the world's second-most-famous dead person. Jackie had no manager, but she went right on being the national widow, the way Elvis continued as the King after he died, with a legendary heart full of affection for America and all the grieving n.o.bodies in it. She owns the name Jackie in a way her husband could never own his. When you say Jack, most people probably think of Nicholson, the closest thing to a default Jack in American pop culture, but Jackie Kennedy owns Jackie, despite the gentlemen named Robinson, Chan, Stewart, or Earle Haley. When Tammy Wynette died, The Nashville Network did a tribute special in which the singer Marty Stuart mused, "I bet she's hanging out right now with Jackie O." I thought this was a shockingly beautiful thing to say. Tammy and Jackie didn't exactly come from the same neighborhood. In life, Jackie wasn't what you'd call down home; Loretta Lynn sang about her as a celebrity sn.o.b in the 1970 hit "One's on the Way." I'm sure Tammy felt the same. But in death, Jackie can be anything we want her to be, even a country star. She has red blood on her pink dress, but she's wild and blue.

glossin' and flossin'

DECEMBER 1998.

When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow? what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?

I wanted to start. That was something. But what do you do with a desire like that? I didn't know, so I did nothing with it. I had been a widower for over a year and the second year was rougher than the first. I had done nothing with 1998, and had no ambitions for 1999 except getting it over with as fast as possible. Given another year that Renee didn't get, I planned to waste it. I made no plans to make things better. All I did was sit in my empty yard. Planet earth was blue, nothing left to do. Planet earth was pink, nothing left to drink.

I looked for spiritual solace in Chained Heat 2, Chained Heat 2, arguably the finest straight-to-video women's-prison flick of the early nineties (nosing out arguably the finest straight-to-video women's-prison flick of the early nineties (nosing out Caged Heat 2: Stripped of Freedom Caged Heat 2: Stripped of Freedom). Brigitte Nielsen plays Magda Kasar, the s.a.d.i.s.tic warden. You see, after the fall of Communism, they have empty prisons in Eastern Europe, so the s.a.d.i.s.tic wardens need to rustle up fresh prisoners. This is where innocent American girls come in. Innocent American girls who foolishly fall asleep on trains, allowing Brigitte Nielsen's agents to plant drugs on them, setting up phony busts so Brigitte Nielsen can brush the hair out of their eyes with her riding crop (all s.a.d.i.s.tic wardens carry those, to handle insolent prisoners with hair in their eyes) and murmur, "Mmmm-your skin is so pink." This is all in the first five minutes. They played it a lot on the USA Network around three A.M. A.M., when everybody who had a reason to fall asleep, or a way of getting there, was gone for the night and it was just us inmates, watching in our cells.

I would watch Chained Heat 2 Chained Heat 2, or some other movie, and lie on the couch hoping I would fall asleep. If I tried lying in bed, I would hyperventilate and my heart would start beating too fast, until I would have to breathe into a paper bag. The worse the movie was, the more it cheered me up. I was grateful to stumble across Witchblade Witchblade, featuring Julie Strain as a creature of the dark who feeds on the blood of gangsters. Or was it Witchboard 2: The Devil's Doorway Witchboard 2: The Devil's Doorway? I know-it was Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart. There's a scene where one of the gangsters asks, "What time is it?" The other one says, "What, do I look like Big Ben? Am I Swiss? Am I ticking?" I was grateful to resume hyperventilating, just to drown out the dialogue. If I was lucky, I got to sleep before dawn; if not, I knew there were at least three other Witchcraft Witchcraft movies out there somewhere. movies out there somewhere.

On one such night, I decided I was having a pulmonary embolism. There was no other explanation for the way I felt. I waited until six, when I thought the emergency room would open for business. I drank some bourbon, figuring that would either slow down the heart attack or make me too clumsy to die right. I raided the boxes in the bathroom closet, looking for some kind of medication that might come in handy, and found some Stelazine from 1986. I watched MTV all night and held on to my paper bag. Eventually I said f.u.c.k it and started walking to the hospital, since it was too cold for the car to start. If they weren't open, I'd just get in line and wait. I walked along the train tracks, paper bag in hand, clutching a throw pillow to my chest with the other arm, with the dawn over my head, and sat in the emergency room. Dr. Lutz was incredibly kind to me. She was so kind, I wanted to cry with humiliation that I was taking up her time when all I would do was let her down, the way I let down every other person trying to be kind to me. All she was going to get out of this was a reminder that some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness. But I was standing right there, with electric wires hooked up to my chest, and it was too late to protect her from me.

My EKG proved I wasn't having a pulmonary embolism. It was so good, in fact, that the doctors were handing it around and complimenting it as if I had just done my first finger-painting. Dr. Lutz asked, "Has there been any major stress in your life lately?" I went, "Ummm . . . " She sent me home with a handful of Xanax, a bottle of Mylanta, and my word that I would do a little better to make some changes. That was a start. I walked down to the train tracks and headed home. That was a start, too.

Christmas was coming. Everybody in my family was dreading it, so we decided to flee to Florida. We could swim in the pool and drink margaritas at the Astro-Lanes Bowling Lounge in Nokomis and cheer one another up until it was safe to return to the world. This was a really excellent plan. (Christmas is like the "Hey Jude" of holidays-every five years, at one-third the length, it would be a perfectly nice idea.) As I flew down to Tampa, I watched the old couple in the next row doing a crossword together. I watched them the whole way, even though I hate crosswords, because I hate planes more. He was a lot slower than she was. Her vision was better, so she read the clues out loud and tapped his serving tray impatiently while he made his guesses. He spoke very slowly and loudly. The idea that Renee and I were never going to be these people made me furious, until I could feel my heart pound with rage against my chest. I felt better once I got to the Tampa airport. The walls were a bright 1970s orange, like a Houston Astros uniform from the days when J. R. Richards was their pitcher, and everything looked s.h.i.+ny and cheery. I felt even better when I caught up with my sisters and parents in the airport. I realized I was starved for some color and noise, and I knew that's what I would get.

My sister Tracey was pregnant with the first grandchild in the family. It was very exciting. We a.s.sumed she was doing this to provide us with entertainment. Just for fun, Ann explained to her what an episiotomy is. As a biology teacher, Ann is a pro at explaining these things-pro enough to drain all the color from Tracey's face. Tracey was standing there in the pool, shaking her head, while Ann and Caroline swam around her, nodding. Tracey turned to me and said, "Rob? It's not true, is it?" But I was staying the h.e.l.l out of that one. Tracey was reading a book called What to Expect When You're Expecting What to Expect When You're Expecting. I told her they should do a special edition for her called What to Demand When You're Demanding What to Demand When You're Demanding. The girls took turns playing rounds of "how to exhaust when you're exhausting" and "who to madden when you're maddening." It was a good time. It didn't make us all better or anything, but it was a start.

Tracey surprised her husband, Bryant, with a mix CD as a Christmas gift. This was the first mix CD any of us had seen, and we crowded around to gape at it. There was definitely a sense that the mix tape as we knew it was going through a major change. She t.i.tled it Mackey Music Mackey Music, filled it with his favorite Shawn Mullins and Garth Brooks songs, and put a picture of him on the cover. We were all wicked impressed at this technological breakthrough and got to know the mix extremely well when it went into heavy poolside rotation. But a clear advantage of mix tapes made itself immediately clear: Each side of the tape goes on for forty-five minutes, and then comes to a stop, allowing a chance for somebody to discreetly change the music, whereas a mix CD has only one side. Which means it goes on for eighty minutes, and you can't turn it off halfway through without offering some sort of lame excuse, such as "Garth is singing about cocaine in this song and it's bad for the baby," or "Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby."

The house was cold when I got back home from Florida. I realized the house was always cold, and would stay cold no matter how long I stayed back. Am I Swiss? Am I ticking? Sometimes. when I got back home from Florida. I realized the house was always cold, and would stay cold no matter how long I stayed back. Am I Swiss? Am I ticking? Sometimes.

To get out of my cold house, I went to a New Year's party at Darius's house, the same night I made this tape. Usually, I made any excuse not to leave the house, so going to a party was a big deal for me. I caught a ride with the Glimmer Girl, a ba.s.sist friend of mine. Glimmer didn't come to town until after Renee died, and I wished they could have met-they would have wagged their tails over each other-but they never got the chance. Glimmer was brilliant at getting me out of the house. She always made me feel safe, something I was not used to feeling around other people. I guess she and her boyfriend used to fight a lot, so she'd always call my radio show to request sad songs like PJ Harvey's "Dry." She would talk me into going to see bands at Tokyo Rose, and once I forced myself out of the house, it was usually fun to go hang with her gaggle of glam glimmerettes. If I couldn't take it, I would just sneak away, and Glimmer Girl would never ask why.

This night was fun. We danced to old disco records. I was extremely happy to hear "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life." She'd never heard the song before, and she was astounded at how bouncy it made me. We sat on the front stairs and smoked. At one point, I leaned in to light her cigarette, but she was just putting on lipgloss.

She and her boyfriend gave me a ride home. I didn't feel like going to bed by myself and lying there freezing, so I put on a pot of coffee and started making this tape. I decided to make the tape, then sit in the backyard and listen to it on my Walkman while drinking more cigarettes and smoking another bourbon. It was only two A.M. A.M., and I banged it out by four, so I'd have time to listen to it twice by the time the sun rose at seven. The chair in the backyard was covered with ice, but I sat on it anyway.

This is a cla.s.sic example of a tape that tries to ruin a bunch of great songs by reminding you of a time you would rather forget. Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you. (I made another tape that winter that began with Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl," one of my favorite songs since I was sixteen, but I haven't been able to listen to it since. That tape was so agonizing to hear, it took all the other songs down with it. Louis Prima's "Banana Split for My Baby"? Come on! Great tune! But ruined.) Individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder. Listening to this tape is like going back somewhere I never belonged in the first place, and it's spooky to tiptoe back in. All these sad songs: "SOS," "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself," "No More No More," "She's So Cold." Stevie Nicks in "Gold Dust Woman," chanting "widow" over and over. Mick Jagger in "Emotional Rescue," sneering at a poor girl trapped in a rich man's house. Even the fun songs sound miserable here. In any other context, Heart's "Magic Man" fires my blood corpuscles with images of erotic abundance. Ann Wilson? Love her! Nancy Wilson? Like her lots! The alb.u.m cover where they're wearing capes and feeding a goat on the pastures of their own mystical Salisbury Plain dream world? I'm so there. But on this tape, "Magic Man" sounds scary. The "Magic Man" is magic just because he's unreal unreal. Surely he's in love with somebody dead, so he's too magic to fit into the real world. He's isolated from everybody around him, and his isolation is contagious, making him a vampire who turns everybody he touches into a cold sh.e.l.l of abandoned humanity. Yes, even the l.u.s.trously busty ladies of Heart!

(It's only now I realize that the lyrics of this song are all about drugs. How embarra.s.sing that I never noticed it before.) Don't go home with that magic man! I wanted to shake my Walkman, warn the Heart girls to run away. Don't trust him! He might be magic, but he's not very nice! He says he just wants to get high awhile, but he'll get you so high you can't come back down. He'll make you stay inside so long, it hurts your eyes to go out, so you'll spend whole years wasting away in his mansion. You'll lose your sense of time. You'll lose your appet.i.te. When your mama cries on the phone, you won't understand a word she's saying. You'll just tell her, "Try to understand." And Mrs. Wilson isn't falling for that s.h.i.+t. Ann! Nance! Get the h.e.l.l out of there! One smile from that magic man, and you're done. You'll be so f.u.c.king magic, you won't be real any more. He'll even set your lipgloss on fire.

I hoped Glimmer Girl and her boy were sleeping somewhere, young and safe and together. I hoped they were breathing hard into each other's hair. I hoped her feet were b.u.mping into his s.h.i.+ns. I hoped they were asleep and not thinking about any of the things I was thinking about, and I hoped they never would. I listened to this tape twice all the way through, and then hurried into the cold house before the sun started to rise. If I waited for the house to warm up before I tried to start something, I would never start anything.

blue ridge gold

APRIL 2000.

One night I had a bit of a revelation. I was up late, as usual, unable to sleep, drinking ginger ale and flipping channels, looking for something to soothe my nerves, the way a Discovery Channel panda forages for bamboo. This time I found something-a newsmagazine piece about a breaking news story in Milwaukee. I watched with awe and reverence. The story concerned a nacho dwarf. He was the most famous and successful nacho dwarf in Milwaukee-maybe the world. His job was walking around in a Mexican restaurant wearing an oversized sombrero with a brim full of tasty nachos. The crown of the sombrero held a cup of salsa. The nacho dwarf greeted the customers, shook hands, worked the room. He would invite everybody to sample the treats he had on his head. He was there to serve. He was there to honor the nacho-dwarf code. of a revelation. I was up late, as usual, unable to sleep, drinking ginger ale and flipping channels, looking for something to soothe my nerves, the way a Discovery Channel panda forages for bamboo. This time I found something-a newsmagazine piece about a breaking news story in Milwaukee. I watched with awe and reverence. The story concerned a nacho dwarf. He was the most famous and successful nacho dwarf in Milwaukee-maybe the world. His job was walking around in a Mexican restaurant wearing an oversized sombrero with a brim full of tasty nachos. The crown of the sombrero held a cup of salsa. The nacho dwarf greeted the customers, shook hands, worked the room. He would invite everybody to sample the treats he had on his head. He was there to serve. He was there to honor the nacho-dwarf code.

Understandably, quite a few of his fellow dwarves felt this was a degrading and insulting gig. Steve Vento (for that was his name), a former car salesman (for that was his trade), disagreed. He proclaimed himself proud to be a nacho dwarf. But other dwarves complained angrily that he was perpetuating inhumane stereotypes and encouraging mistreatment of non-nacho dwarves. In fact, they were protesting the restaurant, demanding a boycott until the nacho dwarf was canned.

I watched this with intense fascination. They showed a clip from the Anthony Michael Hall movie Johnny Be Good Johnny Be Good, which apparently had a party scene that had inspired the whole nacho-dwarf thing. They showed the dwarf lawyer who was representing the protesters. And they showed the nacho dwarf himself, defending his profession. He implied that maybe the other dwarves were just a little jealous that they did not have the talent to make it as a nacho dwarf. They resented his success, so they were trying to drive a fellow dwarf out of work and into the gutter. Why, they were taking food right out of his mouth!

"We are not trying to take food out of Mr. Vento's mouth," said the lawyer. "We are merely trying to take it off his head."

And then, dear friends, at those words, a little light flickered in my mind. Some sort of divine revelation started to make itself clear before my eyes, and a voice began to articulate unto me the horrible truth: I needed to get out of the apartment more. No, I really really needed to get out of the apartment more. needed to get out of the apartment more.

Maybe it was time to think about leaving Charlottesville. I loved it here, but there were serious changes I needed to make, and this was not the place to make them. It was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past. I needed to go. I wanted to walk before they made me run. There was too much happening there that I couldn't share with Renee, and if I was going to keep living, I needed to move on to a new location. Charlottesville was always going to be her place. I wanted it to stay that way.

I had new friends in Charlottesville who didn't know Renee, although they'd all heard stories about her before I got the chance to bring her up for the first time. It was bittersweet making friends who never got to hang with her, especially when they were so cool they reminded me of her. It was kind of like that Sade song "Maureen," where she's sad her dead friend can't meet her new friends. I knew I needed to learn some manners about when it was okay to tell people stories about Renee, and when it was just too traumatic for them to hear about her. I didn't want to scare them away. I was trying to learn some of Renee's social finesse, to remember the way she used to put people at ease and make them feel free. That was just never my department, but I tried to get better at it.

I had a support system in Charlottesville that I felt crazy walking away from, and I was glad I had stayed as long as I had, but it was time to go. Most of my friends were now in New York, so I figured I'd go there, although friends in other towns lobbied-Stephanie called from San Francisco and read the sublet listings into my machine until the tape ran out. I set up a goodbye shelf, where I put things I needed to get rid of. If something sat on the goodbye shelf for a few days and I still got a pang when I looked at it sitting there, it wasn't ready to go yet.

I said goodbye to our dog Duane (who I gave away) and our favorite band Pavement (who broke up but whose members made excellent solo alb.u.ms). Duane spent her last year with me barking and howling, wis.h.i.+ng she were anywhere else; Pavement spent their last tour fighting onstage. At their final shows, the band members reportedly wore handcuffs onstage as symbols of their frustration. Each goodbye came with different levels of relief, guilt, and confusion, so I put them off as long as I could. But dogs need to run free, and so do guitarists. It wasn't right to hold them back. I had a lot of goodbyes left to say, to places and people and trees and radio stations.

For all of us who loved Renee, there were many goodbyes. At my friend Amanda's wedding that spring, two of Renee's best friends had a little meltdown in the ladies' room when they saw that they were both wearing bike shorts under their fancy dresses to keep their thighs from rubbing together, a trick they'd both learned from Renee. They stayed in the ladies' room and cried, while their husbands wondered what was going on. There were lots of moments like that for all of us-encounters with clothes, baseball, books, music. Every few years, I buy an old Stylistics record and think, Man, these guys were great, it's been way too long. I get it home, make it halfway through side one, and then file it away in the Whenever pile because Renee loved them and it is too hard. Maybe next year, maybe not. I also a.s.sumed I'd never be able to take listening to the Replacements again, but then I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg's name written on it. Her favorite song was "Unsatisfied" and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever. You just never know.