The Art of The Mix: Or Misery Loves Company

When I was 21 I moved to New Orleans to be with the girl I loved at the time. It was one of those first-loves that you swear to each other will last an eternity. Your head and heart swell to unhealthy proportions and you start writing bad poetry and don’t change the station when a sappy love song comes on the radio.

In keeping with the bad sitcom structure of the events in my life, my girlfriend Kelly and I broke up the very day I arrived in the Crescent City to be with her. The details of my arrival and subsequent dumping have burned themselves into my mind’s eye.

A few hours after my arrival in New Orleans, Kelly and I went out for dinner. She seemed disinterested at the time, but she told me she was just tired. She had just had her first day of classes at Loyola. She also said it might be the meds she was on. (She had a congenital heart murmur and was taking a form of Prozac for it.) I accepted this explanation, pre-occupied as I was with my own feelings of joy. I also kept thinking about having sex with her. It had been awhile since we’d last seen each other and I thought we always had pretty great sex after any time apart.

After dinner we took the streetcar back to Loyola. As we approached her dorm I pulled her to me and kissed her, but her mouth was closed and unresponsive. I pulled back and she just looked at me with sad eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I just think...well..."

And we spent the next half-hour in front of her dorm discussing it.

We were no more.

She felt she was too young to be in such a serious relationship. Nineteen and she wanted to sow her wild oats. She was a college girl, dammit.

I instinctively said I felt the same and tried to find those corresponding feelings somewhere inside me. I said that I never imagined being so complete and happy at such a young age. I said I was just as scared.

But I was lying out my ass. I was completely happy and content. I had envisioned my future with her, little daydreams of buying a house together, our marriage at a small chapel in the south of France, vacations scuba-diving in the Caribbean, an old couple who looked strikingly like the two of us opening Christmas presents with their grandchildren. I had lived the entire span of our lives together in my head over the last several months. And now she was telling me those dreams were false?!

"You will always be my first love Dave."

That was all she could give me. A year and a half, the best years of my young life, and all I had to show for it now was that I was somebody’s "first love".

I couldn’t respond. I was utterly incapable of stating how I truly felt. I just kept nodding and agreeing with everything she said. She told me she didn't want to lose me as a friend, blah, blah, blah... I just listened and watched everything burn before me. I made it so easy for her to rip my life apart. Why couldn’t I stand up and fight this? Where had my balls gone? They had retreated deep into my body and I stood there taking it all like an obedient eunuch.

And then we hugged limply and said good-bye.

Dazed, I wandered along St. Charles Avenue, rehashing the details of our encounter. I thought of all the rebuttals I wanted to make had I not been rendered mute by the shock and surprise. I began to question the validity of our breakup. There had been no deliberation. The verdict was completely one-sided. I was unequipped to represent myself and should be given a second chance on those grounds alone.

I felt emptied. Like I'd taken the biggest shit of my life and unloaded a couple organs as well. I couldn't think. I sat trance-like on the streetcar, watching the ground flood by below me. It was hot. The air stuck to me. I felt encased in rubber. I was her first love. I would always be her first love. First implying seconds and thirds and fourths and fifths. An infinity of future lovers! I felt like curling into a ball and dying. My center was gone...

But I was not one to give up so easily. As much as she tried to distance herself from me, I just wouldn’t go. I was always stopping by her dorm or calling or emailing. I became a miserable stalker.

I used to make mix tapes for Kelly every other week. If she could hear the pain I was feeling, maybe she would feel sorry for me and take me back. So I filled those 120 minute cassettes with the songs of heartache that I surrounded myself with. I felt a strong kinship to Chris Isaak, that troubadour of the broken heart, and his songs inevitably took up more and more room on those mixes. It was hard not to put them on when they spoke so clearly how I felt.

I remember dropping off a particularly heartfelt mix tape one afternoon. Kelly and her roommate Steph sat in their dorm room watching television and doing their homework. After the requisite "what’s new?" conversations and assorted pleasantries, I reached into my book-bag and withdrew the latest sonic testament to my misery.

"Here," I said, handing the mix tape to Kelly. "I made you another mix. Just some songs I thought you might like."

Kelly looked at the tape cautiously, as if it might have been wired to explode. Her roommate snickered.

"How many Chris Isaak songs are on this one?" Steph laughed.

Kelly burst forth with a loud guffaw.

I immediately wanted to take the tape back and hurry out of the room. Even though there were only three of Chris’ songs on this mix (three of his more upbeat offerings at that), I couldn’t help but feel like a walking cliché. Even my choice of songs was predictable.

I just wanted Kelly to understand how I felt, however lame and misguided those attempts at some sort of covenant between us were. We had spent a year and a half together, both deeply in love with one another. And now she just seemed disconnected and apathetic. I’m sure it was probably the Prozac she’d been taking, but I wanted desperately for her to feel some sort of remorse for her decision to excise me from her life. Instead I became a clown to laugh at.

Not that I was unsuited for that role. I had been a buffoon my entire life. But I had always worked hard to make fun of myself before others could, so as to avoid the sting of being the butt of someone else’s jokes. If I could find the absurdity in my own bumbling actions before the rest of the world did, I could safely cloak myself in "irony" and remain aloof. But now Kelly and her roommate accomplice were helping me revisit the pain of my awkward and confused childhood, by making fun of my emotional weaknesses.

"Actually," I said, reaching for the tape in Kelly’s hands. "I didn’t put any on this time, but if you want me to I’ll gladly remake the mix and give it to you later."

I snatched the tape and put it back in my bag.

"I’m just gonna go now," I said. "You guys look kinda busy. It was good seeing you. Bye." And I rushed out of the room.

It took several more months for me to wean myself from stalking Kelly. I tried the best I could to move forward with my life. She was better at moving on than I was. One of the tricks of successfully moving forward with your life is to have new relationships, new friends and lovers, to help fill the hours of your day. This is usually a lot easier when you are beautiful, since lots of people will want to hang out with you. Kelly had this covered and had no problem moving from boyfriend to boyfriend. I didn’t have much going for me in that area but I had booze and Chris Isaak.