Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Two events redeemed the night. When a check of my watch showed it was time to go, Lorrie walked me to my car. After I thanked her for inviting me, I’d had a good time, her friends were cool, she said, “I’ve been thinking about the prom.”

At those words, my stomach lurched. She was about to announce her decision not to go with me, after all. Tonight had been a test and I’d flunked it with flying colors. I wondered if I’d be able to find another date in time.

Lorrie said, “Remember when I asked you if we were going as boyfriend-girlfriend, or as friends, and you said, ‘Friends?’”

I nodded. “Sure.” She was going with her boyfriend. Was it Jude? The other guy?

“I think we should go as boyfriend-girlfriend.”

For a moment, I literally did not understand what I had heard. Then, when the meaning caught up with the words that had delivered it, I said, “Really?” I like to think my voice wasn’t too high-pitched and incredulous.

“Uh huh,” Lorrie said, and stepped forward, raised up on her tip-toes, and kissed me on the lips. It was brief, almost chaste. Before I could respond, she said, “See you Monday,” and was walking away. Fully twenty-five years, a quarter century, have passed since that night in March, and the soft give of Lorrie Carter’s lips is as vivid to me as if she had pressed them to mine this minute past.

All right, all right: once again, too much information. The other thing that saved the occasion occurred as I was nodding to everyone, saying my goodbyes. Jude stepped away from his position on Lorrie’s car, his right hand held out to me. At first, I thought he was offering to shake my hand, which wasn’t something my friends and I did, but when in the DCCC parking lot . . . until I noticed the black plastic cassette tape in his fingers. “Here,” he said as I took it, “if you like Listen Like Thieves , you might get this.”

“Thanks,” I said, and slipped it into my jacket pocket. There it stayed until the following morning, when I was searching for my car keys. Do you know, I never asked Jude why he gave the tape to me? There were several moments later on when I could have, but the question always seemed to slip my mind until it was too late. And then it was.

The fact I’d been handed the cassette in the first place had vacated my thoughts, pushed out by the memory of my first kiss from my first girlfriend. There have been a lot of happy events in my life since then: your birth, my wedding to Liz, completing law school, opening my own practice — those and plenty more, but I’m not sure any of them made me happy in exactly the same way I was after that kiss. My first impulse is to compare the emotion I experienced during the drive home that night to what I felt as a child at some unexpected pleasure, say, your grandfather surprising Uncle Matt and me with a trip to the Roosevelt to see Star Wars. But that’s not it. The smell of Lorrie’s perfume, floral (lilacs, I think) without being overpowering; the faint taste of the mushroom and pepper dish she left on my lips; the momentary press of her body against mine — obviously, none of this is anything like sitting in a darkened theater as spaceships arc across a starscape, exchanging dashes of red and green fire. What is the same is the quality of the happiness which infused each occasion, a certain . . . the word that occurs to me is “purity,” which is accurate enough for me to set it down; although further reflection suggests “uncomplicated” wouldn’t be a bad choice, either.

By the trip to work the next day, my emotion had moderated, though the early sunlight that made me squint and flip down the visor seemed more intense, more charged with raw, unprocessed beauty, than I’d noticed before. I’d brought the tape with me. There was writing on it, a single word I couldn’t decipher beyond the extravagant “S” from which it unspooled. The word was repeated on the other side, no more legibly. I slotted the cassette into the tape deck, adjusted the volume, and waited.

Considering how important the tape was to become to me, you’d think my first listen to it would have been an experience to rival Lorrie’s kiss. It wasn’t. The quality of the recoding wasn’t particularly good. A low-level hiss underlay a fuzzy collection of longish songs built around an electric guitar whose heavy reverb kept getting in its own way, keyboards whose pipe organ tones clashed with the guitar, and a singer whose nasal whine frequently disappeared into the competing noise. Neither bass nor drums were especially clear, and what was audible through the din sounded basic, uninspired. Had I been told this was a garage band playing in an actual garage, I would have accepted the description without question. I left the tape on for the twenty minutes or so of the drive to the mall, not so much because I thought the music would improve — hope springs eternal, yes, but there are some albums, just as there are some books, movies, TV shows, that you know early on will not change. They may become more of what they already are, speed further and faster down the road they’re on, but they aren’t going to veer off it. I was more curious to see if I could deduce what had prompted Jude to pass this tape to me. Yes, he’d mentioned INXS, but this was nothing like Listen Like Thieves . That record was crisp, clear, the band’s assorted instruments working with one another and Michael Hutchence’s voice to construct each song. At least on a first listen-through — which I completed during the ride home from work that night and the drive back the following morning — I couldn’t hear any obvious connections. I wondered if the cassette was meant as a corrective to the more popular album, an example of the kind of music I should be listening to. I entertained the possibility it was some kind of joke; although if this were the case, it seemed unnecessarily obscure. Unless that was the point, to demonstrate to me that I was not part of the group. As far as explanations went, it fell pretty firmly under the paranoia column, but such is adolescent psychology.

When I started the tape a second time, on the way home Sunday afternoon, it was because I was no closer to understanding what I was supposed to take away from this music at its end than I had been at its beginning. To anyone in a similar situation, then or now, my counsel would have been, “Don’t worry about it,” but this was advice I myself was (and am) unable to accept. If someone tells me a work of art’s something special, I will stick with said piece of art until I: a) decide the person who recommended it was right, b) decide the person who recommended it was wrong, or c) decide I need more time with it. If something requires more time, I’ll take as much of it as I require, to the point of years. After my first listen to Jude’s tape, I was pretty close to option b), but enough doubt colored my impression for me to conclude another listen was in order. It didn’t hurt that the guy who’d handed it to me was a friend of my newly minted girlfriend.

However, the most my repeat play accomplished was to leave the cassette in the tape deck, resulting in a third and fourth exposure on the drive into school, the drive from school down Route 9 to work, and the drive home from work. Nothing clicked. There was no magic “Ah-Ha!” moment when understanding dawned on me. But by the time I was back at the beginning of the tape for run-through number five, a vague sense of what was so significant about the music on it had started to suggest itself to me.

That music. Once you accommodated yourself to the clash of the guitar and keyboard, and could concentrate on the melody they were fighting over, you realized the band’s songs were basically the kind of music that had filled the airwaves of 1950s radio, the bluegrass-inflected R&B gathering itself into rock n’ roll through the ministrations of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and of course Elvis Presley. In an odd way, The Subterraneans — it would be another couple of weeks until I deciphered their name — were doing something comparable to what a band like the Ramones was — only, where the Ramones were trying to refine the rock song down to its simplest, purest state, these guys were trying to widen it, start with those simple chord progressions, basic melodies, and throw open all the doors and windows. Had I known anything about jazz, then, I would have identified the parallel of starting with a straightforward progression of notes, stretching them into new configurations, and returning to the original arrangement. As it was, I just thought they were addicted to long, strange solos. The more used to the music I became, the more of its lyrics I was able to decode; although large patches of every song remained opaque to me. There were references to feeling like death, and to litter on the street, and to puddles of black water, and to walking around at two am. Someone named Jo-Jo lived in an apartment that was a great place to crash at. There were several mentions of standing outside the house, sometimes a church, and the words “in-between” seemed to find their way into every set of lyrics. At least once, the singer proclaimed, “You’ve got to watch out for the crows.”