Mixtape of Love

(This is a chapter from the book of short-stories I'm currently working on, "Everyday I Write The Book")

I have given many mixtapes to many girls and it has never once gotten me laid. Funnily enough, I have gotten multiple comments that they were the best mixtapes they had ever received. In my junior year of high school, I was very into a girl named Jackie Rosenthal, who was very wholesome but also a very good guitar player and reminded me of Winnie Cooper. She loved rock ‘n’ roll but wasn’t aware of the more obscure stuff, so I made her a tape that mostly featured a bunch of indie rock songs for her birthday (I also bought her a nice tambourine). I put the Violent Femmes’ “American Music” on the tape and the next week we were in this little room with a piano in the music department, and she had learned how to play it and we sang it together. I looked into her sweet eyes and she into mine. That was the moment, and I figured I had it in the bag. Soon after, I asked her out and she did not comply. However, I went to her house for dinner and her eight-year-old brother Matty Rosenthal seemed to know every word to “She Don’t Use Jelly” and “A Shady Lane.” This basically meant that while she didn’t respond to the me, she played the shit out of the tape enough that Matty Rosenthal was now the coolest kid in school.

Mixtapes of love are all about balancing your real message with subtext and speaking to the subconscious of the object of your affection. You don’t want to be too direct—you want to be subtle with your message. It’s tough for me because I generally gravitate to love songs anyway. I’m just a romantic guy; my favorite movies are romantic comedies and my favorite songs are love songs. By no coincidence, all best songs I write are love songs. It may be because I never got that first great romance, that Kevin Arnold-Winnie Cooper romance—it’s always been unrequited. Even if I was making a tape for male friend, it would difficult to not include a few ballads. It’s important to include some rockers, or at least some “club bangerz,” as they call them now. You might want to put on “Apeman” by The Kinks, which is about frustration in the modern world, or “Start Wearing Purple” by Gogol Bordello, which for the most part is about wearing purple. These songs give the tape what I like to call a “de-rection.” You don’t want your mixtapes to come off having a huge boner. That’s just not attractive.

Making mixtapes brings up big questions like, “Are you in love with this person?” If the answer is yes, you should go ahead and put on “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys because it is probably the best love song of the modern era (The rest of the top five: “My Funny Valentine,” Ella Fitzgerald; “Just Like Honey,” The Jesus and Mary Chain; “Something,” The Beatles; “I’m Your Man,” Leonard Cohen). Find me a sweeter, more desperate line (fifty feet from Morrissey) than If you should ever leave me/Life would still go on, believe me/The world would mean nothing to do/Then what good would livin’ do me?

If I am competing with a boyfriend (which, it seems, I constantly am), I might include “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” by Joe Jackson, to take a friendly jab at the competition. She’ll get a laugh but maybe it will turn out to reveal something about the situation she didn’t think of. If the girl happens to be from a more affluent background (this has yet to happen to me), you could put on “Rich Girl” by The Specials. If the girl and I have been platonic friends for a while and I want to transcend that, I’ll want to include the tearjerker “We’re Just Friends” by Wilco (which is actually about a defeated relationship, but it should click anyway). If the girl has the right sense of humor, you may want to include “Jack U Off” by Prince, just to prove you’re not a whiny pussy.

More recently, I discovered I was seriously and truly in love, the kind that the Beach Boys sing about—totally pure and potentially irrational (think about 350-pound Brian Wilson). She is a girl who I had spent years secretly fawning over, amazed by our similar tastes, while she complained to me about her mean boyfriend. She is brilliant, funny, and troubled, which is exactly my type, and now she is single and something is happening between us, I can feel it. I decide to throw out all my mixtape making tricks and just make her a truly unabashed love song mixtape. I decided the sole criterion for this tape would be great love songs that remind me of her, that I knew she liked too. It would be a gratuitous collage of my feelings for her expressed in amorous pop songs. I re- winded my memory back to the first day we met, which was the first day of college ever, coincidentally, and I thought of every song that reminded me of her. This girl and I had this type of relationship where we would always find out something new that we both loved. Since then, if I come across any of those things I can’t help but think of her. I can’t watch The Royal Tenenbaums or listen to Bruce Springsteen or catch a rerun of The Nanny without imagining her pretty face and cute, mousy laugh. I am receiving my first IM from her, so excited that her screen name was from a song by Jane’s Addiction, my favorite band in high school. I am listening to “Hey” by the Pixies in her dorm room while she is in the hall arguing with her dick boyfriend. I am having one of our endless sessions of praise for our unanimous best song ever: “Sweet Jane” by The Velvet Underground. I am slow-dancing with the her at a prom-themed party to “Always Be My Baby” by Mariah Carey, my hands around her hips for the first time. This was the easiest mixtape I’ve ever made, the track list had been complied for the past three years.

I listened to the CD when it was done and thought about how she might feel listening to it. For a brief moment, the type of love sung about in these songs was real and tangible and I could feel it and breathe it and hold it in my lungs. I gave it to her on the night that, in my mind, could have been the night. Needless to say, I did not get laid. In fact, not a few days later was there a new boyfriend and a new pumping heart, ripped straight from my chest. However, I still feel like the winner, because even though I have no idea if she even listened to it, I know her new boyfriend will never, ever be able to make a mixtape like that for her. He doesn’t know, he wasn’t there. And in my sad fuck world that means I win somehow.