The Mixtapes of August

I told myself I wouldn’t let him break my heart in a parking lot.

When Nick returned home for the summer, his parents had converted his room into a pilates studio. That meant he was sleeping on a pull-out in the living room. Spending time at his house had been difficult back when they were in high school, but now there was nowhere for them to hide. Maybe that had been the point of eradicating his homeward privacy. His parents, like many who suspected their child was growing up in ways they couldn’t adjust to, might have thought the solution was radical visibility. No choice but to spend an entire summer looking at their son while simultaneously refusing to see him.

Meanwhile, my house was ripe with nooks and pockets of discrepancy where two college students could listen to mixtapes without curious eyes surveying them. The trouble was, these spaces were all created by my father’s abandoned renovation projects that had turned our residence into something resembling the Winchester mansion had Lady Winchester been an out-of-work shop teacher who lost his job after showing up to work drunk for two weeks straight. My father had managed to stay sober since July 4th. He used the fireworks as a marker for his newfound stability. I didn’t expect it to last past Labor Day. Seasons seemed to hit him fairly hard, and my mother had left us both several Septembers ago. That meant autumn was a hurricane in his mind that rarely left anything undamaged. His sobriety also brought about this sudden interest in construction, and I refused to welcome anybody into a home that smelled of sawdust and broken attention.

That left us spending hours a day parked in a campus lot at the state school I attended while Nick was at a school in Maine studying Impressionism and discreetly dating adjunct professors. My college years were nowhere near as exciting. Most of the students were commuters, which filled up the dozen or so gray buildings that made up the college with a ghost town vibe on weekends and over breaks. We chose the parking lot outside the arts building as our rendezvous spot, because it was off the campus security checkpoint route when classes weren’t in session. I suppose the logic was that nobody would want to spend more than five seconds staring at the hideous mural of two trombones dancing together that was painted on the west wall of the building facing the lot.

Our one bit of luck was that it had been a tepid summer. The heat never reached more than eighty-five degrees, and that meant we could get away with having the windows of my beat-up Buick open instead of running the A/C which would have siphoned away precious gas. Whatever money I had was squirreled away from my summer job at the shaved ice emporium downtown, but it wasn’t much, and my father would borrow twenty dollars from me every other day or so for a tool he needed or extra screws.

“Where are you going,” he asked me one Wednesday, knowing I had the day off, “I thought you were going to help me take down that wall between the kitchen and the dining room?”

I told him I was going to hang out with Nick. There was no reason to lie to my father. He knew Nick was my best friend, and without making it explicit, I believe he assumed that there was something present beyond just two men who had spent their high school years isolating themselves from everyone else around them. Perhaps he was relieved that we might simply be gay instead of emotionally disturbed. Either way, he never brought it up, except to ask that I pick up a can of white paint on my way home.

“I put the remix of ‘Better in the Afternoon’ after ‘Lost Morning,’” Nick would explain his mixtapes like an artist doing a crit, “Because I wanted you to have something you could listen to all day long, and the remix is, like, twelve minutes. Right after that, I have ‘Afternoon Delight’ and ‘Every Day at Three and Five.’ I couldn’t find as many songs with ‘Evening’ in the title, but I found a few. I should have just done songs with the word ‘Night’ in them, but I know you like the word ‘Evening’ better, because you’re a weirdo.”

We had begun making the tapes that would have to last us until the holidays. This was a ritual we adopted when it became clear that I was not going to get into the university in Maine that would allow me to be close to Nick. My grades weren’t good enough, and even if they were, I have no idea how I would afford the tuition. My father’s financial background would never allow for any kind of loan, and the smart thing was to stay local, ace my undergrad career, and reconvene with Nick in grad school. We would both get on the phone every night and talk about Chicago or Seattle. It was only lately that I started to feel his dreams veer slightly from mine. To me, cities more than an hour away were as fantastical as Narnia or Oz. Nick had already had his world expanded just by virtue of being a train ride away. Now he was considering advanced education in Europe. Traveling. One of his recent ex-boyfriends suggested that he spend a year working on his art at this remote colony outside of Lisbon where he would have no contact with the outside world.

But what about me, I thought, All your dreams used to have me in them.

My mixtapes to him were meant to signal my distress with what I saw as our inevitable separation. I stockpiled Fiona Apple on top of Ella Fitzgerald on top of Amanda Marshall. Joss Stone dovetailed into Tracy Chapman. Barely any male singers were present other than, of course, Rufus Wainwright. I avoided the obvious torch tributes like Garland and Horne only because the energy between us at that point was still lingering somewhere between romance and uncertainty. Both of us were comfortable with who we were, but we weren’t sure who we wanted to be together. I had suggested a friends with benefits scenario multiple times, but Nick was intelligent enough to see that anything casual would derail what we had spent years constructing. I can see now that he was right, but at the time, I felt sure I could handle the sort of sophisticated purely sexual relationship with a friend that I had seen portrayed on various HBO shows. The folly of youth is being able to convince yourself that you can do quantum mechanics when you’ve only just learned basic subtraction.

In what was to be our last mixtape swap and listening session before Nick went back to Maine, we took turns recounting how we first met in Introduction to English Literature. It started when both of us centered individual projects on the play “Macbeth” around the music of Fleetwood Mac. We couldn’t believe the serendipity of our choice, even though, in theory, what other music would you use if you were doing a project on a Scottish tragedy? Both of us saw Stevie as Lady M and Lindsay as the doomed protagonist. Over lunch in the cafeteria, we began trading superlatives across the musical spectrum.

Best Song from the 70’s

Best Song from the 80’s

Best Break-Up Song

Best Song Everybody Can Sing

Best Song Nobody Can Sing But the Original Artist

We began bringing in mixtapes and leaving them taped to each other’s lockers. When we skipped prom, we spent the night walking around the city listening to mixtapes we made entitled “Songs for When You Didn’t Go to Prom.” At graduation, I told Nick if he gave me a mixtape with Vitamin C on it I would never speak to him again. He handed me a tape that had nothing on it but Vitamin C. I had prepared one just like it for him. My father wasn’t at graduation, because he had fallen asleep on the floor of the basement after looking at photos of my mother and drinking himself into unconsciousness. It didn’t phase me. I had Nick and I had Vitamin C. What else did I need?

That last day in the parking lot, I thought about how August might be the cruelest month. It’s the last chapter of the novel. It’s the final look someone gives you before they turn to walk away forever. It’s a constant feeling of looking for meaningful words to express something that was never meant to be expressed. Nick told me that he loved me and I said it back. We had reached the end of the mixtape he’d prepared. “Silver Springs” was playing and I was trying my hardest not to sweat, because I could sense that this was a powerful, emotional moment and I didn’t want to ruin it with perspiration. I could see that he was searching for a way to tell me that he’d always be there for me, but that our path had diverged. I knew he’d feel guilty about leaving me behind. I knew I would never push myself if I thought he might swoop in and rescue me at any moment. We both knew that we were great songs by the same band that belonged on different albums.

Stevie was singing about time and spells and how the person she was singing to would never forget her. I was trying not to look at Nick as he rolled up the windows and cleared his throat. The two trombones were dancing in front of me. Life seemed to be both absurd and much too real all at the same time. When I finally turned to look at him, he wasn’t trying to say anything at all. He was waiting for me to see him as I always had.

The thing about a broken heart is that I think we might all be born with our hearts broken. Then we spend the rest of our lives finding the people who know how to put it all back together. Sitting in that car in August, I realized that in bracing for something I was afraid of the one thing that might happen, I hadn’t opened myself up to the possibility of anything else happening either. I had created stasis. An unending August instead of a welcome to September. To whatever would be coming next. It wasn’t sustainable. Stevie would have told me to sing the damn song and move on. So that’s what I did. I leaned across the cup holders and I kissed my best friend for the very first time knowing it might also be the last. I’m proud to say I was only a little bit sweaty when it happened.

Later that night, I sat in one of my house’s many crannies listening to one of Nick’s mixtapes with a notebook writing down all the places I was determined to see at some point. I had nearly filled up two pages when the last song of the tape came on, and I had to put down my pen. It wasn’t a song at all. Just Nick’s voice.

Hey weirdo, if you’re listening to this, congratulations. I’m buying you a train ticket to Maine for Labor Day Weekend. I’m not ready for us to be tragic yet.

And wouldn’t you know it?

On the list of places I wrote down in my notebook--

Maine was Number One.