A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Your bone's got a little machine

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 3

Meanwhile, I was staying in touch with friends, mostly women, on the east coast, writing letters (remember that? handwritten letters, several pages long, stamped and delivered by the post office?) and sending mix tapes. I pretty much never made mixes for guys. I wasn’t always romantically interested in the women I made mix tapes for but I guess I always had in the back of my mind.

Bella, for example, never made mixes for me but I’d still make them for her, weaving together a sort of subliminal message from the song titles and key lyrics.

Then there was Maura Romas, who’d I chased on and off for my last two years in college. There was some obvious chemistry between us but there must have been some kind of magnetic repulsion as well because whenever we started to get real close she’d flake out and vanish and not answer her phone or return my calls. She’d even turn and walk away when she saw me on campus.

Then inevitably a few months later I’d run into her out at a party and she’d be incredibly apologetic and say she’d been freaking out and under stress and we’d get into long conversations and go for walks and hnag out for hours without really saying much, just listening to music. I was just getting into the Dead then and during one of the phases when she was avoiding me I wrote out the words to Crazy Fingers because for whatever reason I thought they were relevant. Probably the last verse, where it goes

Midnight, on a carousel ride, reaching for the gold ring, down inside
never could reach, it just slips aways, when I try

And then another time I think I wrote out all the words to Helplessly Hoping. How pathetic is that? I was just coming out of the common vocabulary of sappy romantic music of the 70s back then - the James Taylor stuff and Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot - that we used to make out to.

One time when we were on the ins I was playing her one side of American Beauty and I sang her all the words to “Brokedown Palace.” I’ve never had any shame about music, I guess. That did make an impression on her, because she mentioned it later.

She’d been to one of New England prep schools and was sort of Dead-averse. There is a frat-like preppy Deadhead culture at those schools and I even had to overcome my prejudices before I finally went to a show around 1984 and “got it.” Worse, Maura had lived next to two rabid Deadheads one year and they would do things like eat acid and then play “Uncle John’s Band” 99 times in a row. It would be enough to put anyone off Jerry.

Now that I was out in California and Maura was in a grad-school writing program at BU, we had gotten into this intense epistolary thing. I had this big Maura file with her half of our exchange. All the stuff we were never able to say in person came out in the letters. We had a shared ambition to be writers and I was going through a lot of angst, at least in my letters, about not making progress, not finishing stories, not writing novels.

She would tell me that you couldn’t force it. When I was ready to write, I’d write. But that was easy for her to say. She was the one in the program. She was the one immersed in a culture that valued writing and being mentored (and seduced) by her writing teachers.

These days we were quoting R.E.M. lyrics in our letters to each other, things like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I made a mix tape for her that was fraught with obvious drama. I ended it with “Brokedown Palace.” I found a really good live version of “Uncle John’s” and put that on it, to rehabilitate the song for her. I put “You Are Like a Hurricane” on side two and I got my frustration out by including “Idiot Wind” on side one. She really liked it, even the harsh Dylan stuff (“I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me any better’n that”).

She made mixes for me in return and hers were really good. They always included stuff I’d never have listened to otherwise, probably never have bought, but that sounded great amidst the stuff I knew better. She also was getting a glimpse of some good stuff in the cutout bins in Boston that somehow hadn’t made it to my San Francisco ears yet. One of her mixes has “Bone Machine” on it, which was my first experience of the Pixies and another had a De La Soul tune, that was like a step into another world.

At first the Pixies sounded harsh and unlistenable to me. I’d put her mix on my walkman and listen on Muni on the way to work. But the second or third time through it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, and as classic as a Rolling Stones hit.

Our letters get getting more and more intense and it never occurred to me to mention it to Simone. It wasn’t real. I don’t know if I’d have said any of the things I was writing if I’d been looking at Maura in person. She sometimes talked about dropping out of her grad program at BU and moving out to San Francisco but I didn’t think she’d really go for it. That’s what all the “Rockville” stuff was about - the urge to pick up and move, leaving all her stuff behind.

I think I was keeping her on the backburner.