Court of a Stolen Mixtape

I don’t know how to write about Pearl Jam other than to begin with the Maxell UR 60 tape I stole from my friend in the seventh grade. Well, “stole” might be harsh. It’s accurate, but he loaned me the tape and then I never returned it.

The basketball court near his house was an uphill walk. His house sat halfway up that hill. My neighborhood held a decent enough basketball court, but he never seemed to want to come to my neighborhood. It was always me trekking to his. The only difference I saw was that my neighborhood brimmed with more apartment buildings. His boasted more houses. The dude could have held his own on any court, but even talking about my neighborhood felt like his nose twitched. Scent seems to affect people differently. Even when the smells are in their own heads.

On walks up that hill for a pick-up game, I thought I might be called out for that tape. Call it fear or insecurity, scarcity or abandonment, but anytime I felt the question looming, and the ghost of a hand sifting through my jacket, I diverted. I asked about his pull-up jumper or crossover dribble. Flattery. Sometimes his redirected train of thought, though, focused on the elbows I threw in the paint or the slaps I landed when I reached for the ball. Like he knew my compliments were just jabs and he aimed to punch back.

We had often had it out on the court. Shouting. Pointing fingers at every shot I shouldn’t have taken because he’d been wide open. At the extra pass I shouldn’t have made because I’d been open enough and should have shot it. Or at least should have passed it to him. The worst was the incidental contact. Even those times he barreled into me, the burden of physicality always seemed to rest with me. Like we were rams carving a grazing space for ourselves, and he only felt at ease with a nemesis.

We were both kids of working class immigrants. When we first met, my mother had just moved us out of a basement studio and into a three-bedroom, third-floor apartment. In addition to the sunlight that now streamed into the living room when I came home, the move paralleled my transfer to a Catholic elementary school. I still carried the mole-out-of-its-hole eyes that loved to wonder about the things I saw, which was fine for a public school where noise drowned most distinctions. But the feeling rang almost like an insult to a private school crowd that seemed to love its script of paid tuition. Even if more than a few of us came from parents pulling two and three jobs just to send us there.

When he gave me that Pearl Jam mixtape in the seventh grade, just its appearance came with a leisure I hadn’t quite touched before. A freedom I only later associated with craft. With creative license. With time to devote to carving the shapes of things.

Even before listening to the music, you could touch the care. Opening the case was like smelling the pages of a new book, and the card insert was damn near elegant. Index cards had been cut into pieces tailor made for the case’s constituent parts. The spine. The back. The lip. The index cards’ soft blue lines accompanied the interior track list. The unlined sides accompanied the exterior facing list. The tracks were hand printed in blue ink, in some combination of Arial Narrow and Calibri with the occasional Book Antiqua flourish. I used to think the kid who’d mixed the tape had invented a type font. I remember imitating the print in my homework, in the labels I made for my baseball card albums, in the greeting cards I wrote to my mother and my cousins. I even tried mirroring the spacing between letters and words. That much attention paid to packaging might have revealed a controlling nature, a self-consciousness to attention. But it also seemed to insist that presentation was crucial to content. That the sensory impressions we get when receiving a thing affects our long-term associations with the contents of that thing.

The kid who’d made the mix tape was my friend’s older brother’s best friend, and he’d technically leant my friend the tape before my friend leant it to me. Thefts come in layers. This original mixer had probably started trading in what I later learned was a robust 90s black market of Pearl Jam bootlegs. Sure, the mix tape included studio recordings from Ten, but it also included cover songs recorded in Den Haag in 1992, “Porch” and “Leash” performed live on New Year’s Eve later that year, and an acoustic version of “Oceans” that I can only hope was part of the set recorded at Tower Records in 1991. That tape played on my home stereo on weekends. It played on my Walkman when my mother walked me to baseball games. It played in the car when she drove me to basketball practice. More than a few times, the ribbon got caught in a pinch roller, and I had to spend over an hour pulling it out. The creases were just necessary bruises. Like welts on my arms playing basketball and scars on my legs playing baseball. Overplaying music impresses a constellation somewhere, if not on a material thing, then directly onto your skin.

I knew it as logic, of course, that a Walkman couldn’t tap-tap-tap on your body into perpetuity as you walked. You didn’t have to go to school to learn things have physical limitations. But twelve year-olds will always confuse stubbornness for hope, and I always needed to get somewhere, even if that somewhere was just the path to leaving.

Whenever I left the apartment, I fastened the Walkman onto my pants. I used the clip to tighten the player onto my pocket. I never wore belts. But the clip eventually snapped off, so I had to get inventive. I hot glued a plastic hook onto the base near the battery slot and then I slipped a shoelace through the hook and hung the Walkman around my neck. I was proud of myself. Until my collarbone started wearing the brunt of overplaying the music. A rash. A map of scars and black-and-blues. A constellation I only had myself to blame for.

But I couldn’t lie in bed or sit still listening to music. I had to move. Not like dancing-moving. Just up and about. Stasis reminded me of how my friend’s dads would sit at their kitchen or living room windows to smoke. Whether or not the nicotine killed them in the long term, just sitting there would hobble them in the short. Lung cancer had nothing on a crap, rickety wooden chair. Sure, those old men were actively trying not to kill other people second-hand. But with their elbows on the ledge, those white sweaty t-shirts, their knees pressed into the wall, their butts trying to squeeze through the space between the backrest and the seat—just watching the restraint gave me anxiety. And as a kid I didn’t do well knowing there was always a doorway to walk through.

That Walkman rattled against my legs, against the books in my backpack, against the groceries on my walk home from the supermarket. It rattled as I ran to catch the bus or biked my way through town or climbed the stairs back to our kitchen when the summer heat became impossible to bear on concrete.

When the Walkman expired, my mother promised me another—just one more—but I couldn’t get to it without first, painfully, trashing the first one, a scene I have often remembered like a slow motion basketball injury on permanent replay.

I laid the Walkman on discarded orange peels and spent paper towels. The scratches on the transparent plastic revealed the spools beneath. The scratches on the chipped plastic edges of the pause and rewind and really all the buttons revealed a bullheaded wear and tear. All those zagging and parallel and asymptotic scratches cutting acute angles that sometimes returned sharply to wherever stubbornness begins. Every line chopped off and their endings like punctuation marks arranged in a growl that dampened to a moan then into an abruptly choked lyric from the rafters of a concert hall as some guitarist picked his way through a solo while the bassist bobbed his head to a rhythm that shook the sweat off his pants. All those scratches like band members whose aversions to solidarity funneled into a boom that blasted more completely because they were playing it together.

Towards the end of that Walkman’s life, I held onto it while moving because the hook I’d hot glued onto the case had, because, of course, it would have, worn off. My fingers clenched the Walkman so tightly that who knows when my arms began swinging so minimally that they mirrored a grandfather clock’s pendulum whose time had either learned to speed up so quickly that the seconds blended into each other or had stopped altogether. It wasn’t until my late teens that I could even see it, and it was a college friend, in the ways college friends like to call out other people’s faults, who told me that my elbows barely moved for how fast I’d crossed the busy intersection at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street.

We had both just left some student club meeting. We had both just finished complaining about how, as Latin American immigrant kids, the world always expected us to know how to dance. Like we were supposed to be born with music grafted onto our skin. But I hated dancing merengues, and though she could do it, what was the point. We’d reasoned that enjoying salsas and bachatas were like white kids grooving to Sinatra. At some point, it’s your parents’ music, and it’s got nothing to do with you. What is yours is the music you choose to repeat. The stuff that you choose to wear because you were able, even in spirit, to buy it yourself.

After she and I had both crossed the street, she looked at me and asked why I walked so funny. Why I didn’t like moving my arms. I looked at her thinking there was a joke coming, but she just stared at me through the absent punch line. My subsequent impulse was to, above all things, swing my arms like an inflatable tube man at a car dealership. “Look,” I said, “I can move them just fine.” She shook her head and smirked. “Boy, please.” She said I looked like Frankenstein sprinting from a pitchfork just to find that he could only wobble like a penguin. Aware enough about the necessities of the present but with almost no self-awareness about the restraints I carried with me from the past.

I looked down at my hand. I was holding a book, light but thick, a collection of stories, my fingers clenched around the spine and covers. About the size of a Walkman. 

Where so many around me saw a hard, even unnatural restraint in Eddie Vedder’s voice, I heard a release. I didn’t argue with anyone who repeated some version of the same bark. Why does he do that to his voice? That can’t be good for his throat? Is that singing or just like trying to sing? I shrugged every time because it all felt like a rendition of the same thing: Why are you listening to the music that we aren’t? And there was no way to answer that question to anybody’s satisfaction. Not when all your neighborhood blares is Onyx or Boyz to Men or some merengue hit that means nothing to you. How do you even explain personal taste? Logos? Ethos? Mouthing off “Because it ain’t none of your business”?

I shrugged. “Cuz I like it.” Which was a lie. Because I loved that mixtape. In that childhood fascination for liking something people around you don’t, it became a tree house I didn’t have to share with anyone.

I first heard studio recordings from Ten on that mixtape, and they intermingled with studio versions of “Wash” and “Dirty Frank,” a live version of “State of Love and Trust,” a studio cover of “Crazy Mary,” and a live cover of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” Listening to “Dirty Frank” felt like Eddie had wrapped himself in a blanket. Like he’d punched a hole through the cloth so he could sing into the darkness only to muster the strength to pull off the wool. As if muscling through the restraint was the point of his voice. “Wash” felt the same but with a raspier range, and with the feeling that the lyrical purpose had never been about clean progressions within or beyond particular octaves. But that every song had been written to operate in some clef of anxiety.

And then there were the cover songs. I always figured other people’s arrangements shed the pressure to have be so perfect with your own music. As if playing other people’s melodies and singing other people’s lyrics didn’t carry the same intensity, that burden of proof to show people that you knew, really knew, how to sing and play live what you’ve just written. Which is why it feels like Pearl Jam has always felt so at home with covers. In “I’ve Got a Feeling” played live, the band seems to wear their childhood on their sleeves. Guitars ring with auras that feel unscripted, even in the face of a conventional chord progression. The bass and drums hold court like they’re playing handball against the backstage wall. And the vocals turn screaming into a celebration. On the flip side of that energy there’s “Crazy Mary,” a studio recording that wears its soft baritone like a weapon. Neither the vocals nor guitars vamp on any part of that rendition, a patience that reflects a master lesson in restraint, especially in the face of the band’s formative years where a hunger for contemporary relevance is always warring with a craving to sustain this crazy ride for the long haul. 

And then there was my favorite track, “Saying No” blended into a cover of Fugazi’s “Suggestion.” The live jam session improv feels like one the band had wound its way into before. Like the type of jam session they deployed in a studio to gauge how connected they were feeling that day, how well their minds and hearts were prepared to receive and send musical cues to each other. The slow start tugs at you to listen. The acceleration as the performance drives forward pulls you into a rumble, and the push to belt the whole song out before the energy in the room fades leaves you feeling like that that’s exactly how a track is supposed to end.

But repeating the track a few times produced my very first choke. When the cassette ribbon got caught in the Walkman, the whole machine came to a hard stop in the middle of a rewind. I had a heck of a time finagling the tape out, and after losing an hour, I pored over a long stretch of ribbon to make sure nothing had torn. Nothing had. But I found creases.

My friend’s bedroom walls boasted more posters of people dunking than mine. I stared at each one of them while playing video games at his house. Shawn Kemp. Gary Payton. Scottie Pippen. I hated thinking this way, but it almost felt like he’d called dibs on those guys. Like if I’d wanted my own posters, I had to choose other people. Except that I don’t ever remember wanting posters on my wall until I spent enough time surrounded by his. Like I didn't know what pre-teen aesthetic conventions were until I recognized how comfortable he seemed living into his own.

My mother and I were at the old Modell’s in our town buying me some new shirts when it occurred to me without premeditation. I happened by a poster rack. I pulled out a few rolls. Like I couldn’t just ask for one, I suddenly needed four. Patrick Ewing. Larry Johnson. Kevin Johnson. Alonzo Mourning. Really, though, they could have been anyone. Barkley. Mutombo. Robinson. Drexler. Any player, that is, that wasn’t already on my friend’s walls. When I got home, I taped my new posters above the television stand that had long been leaning like it wanted to topple over but was trying not to let me down. And I should have known that within that framing, the posters really didn’t fit into the architecture of the room.

White chipping paint. A window sill that rattled with passing trucks. An ill-fitting wooden door with space to spare between it and the frame. And then there was the décor I didn’t get to choose. The gray glossy dressers with gold trimmings. The floral black duvet cover and sheets. The cream, plaid floor covering. I was an impostor. An adolescent miming with no attention to craft.

I look back now, and I have grace for that kid. On the one hand, covering other people’s songs can feel like a break from the intensity of just being you. On the other, how do you ever know what clothes fit unless you try on the clothes that don’t. What if it takes playing all kinds of covers to get to something that feels like a recovered self. Like imitation en route to imagination. Copies until they converge into a consolidated craft.

Imagine receiving this mixtape at this time. An adolescence imitating adolescence. It’s no wonder I held onto that cassette in its case even when I wasn’t listening to it. The one thing that, in my neighborhood, illustrated better than anything that I was not all about imitation. Especially in light of the fact that even the person who gave me the tape didn’t wear the music like it left any impressions on his skin.

Almost right away in private school, I was the kid who didn’t seem so easy at a party. Internally, of course, I wasn’t. But not because I didn’t enjoy the company or the food parents set out on tables. As with all things, time would have caulked those cracks easily. But at that time, I couldn’t feel my way through a moment that wasn’t urgent. A moment that didn’t have actual stakes to it. Even perception didn’t register because it didn’t affect how I got my daily food. People’s opinions could drown in a gutter and I would never have known that any rumors had been trying to swim. It was into this headspace that my friend’s mother, on one of my many shuttle rides that my friend paid her to take me home, tells me that her son had finally conceded to let me come to his birthday party. But not without a lot of convincing, she added. And only after he grumbled about how much it seemed I didn’t like parties.

Only few life moments ever feel like someone wears a toga in the cold rain. Like it’s cool if you think it’s cool, and it’s cool if you’re trying to tell me you’re making a point, but, like, does it matter? Every day of my life, my mother had hauled ass fighting for her life and mine to make sure we didn’t return to a basement apartment where the winters burst holes in the heating bill. And here this kid was telling me through his mother that I didn’t know how to party. That he felt unsettled enough by something so thoroughly without any stakes to complain about it.

Verbal punches spun everywhere inside my head. I wanted to let them fly. But it’s one thing to sit on your building stoop watching a street brawl. You can narrate the play-by-play. You can tell people what everybody does or has to do to get out alive. But it’s something else to be able to process that frustration yourself. I didn’t know how to focus my anxiety at twelve. I didn’t have the tools to name it or where it came from. But I had music. I had a mix tape of someone was processing a language and telling me about all the subtleties of indecision and distrust and hard breaths that I didn’t have the wherewithal to find between the lines yet. I had the urgency of older men to illustrate for me what it took to navigate the emotional output of other men.

Our seventh-grade fight happened, as it should have, during basketball practice. A boiling that spilled onto waxed hardwood floors because we were angry and stubborn and without a language to call anything by its name.

Coach had been hollering about defense. Practice intensified when after a shot, the priority was to rush back and play D. To get in front of somebody else. To slide your feet. To make sure nobody got around you. We played man-to-man defense. I guarded my friend. Giver-of-the-mixtape friend. Connoisseur-of-parties friend. He had a crossover that was hard to guard, and his catch-and-shoot game was on point. People even liked setting hard screens for him, and so there I was. Trying to mimic his every step while not getting swiped. And there he was. Trying to shake off all the imitation that I threw his way so he could keep doing what he was doing without feeling encroached on.

Yes, I defended hard. And, yes, I was probably chippy. I might have slapped a wrist here and there making stabs for the ball. But I had dribbles to interrupt and shots to prevent. And I’m not sure who ran into whom after I tipped the ball loose, but a ball possession went from entangled to punches in under five seconds.

He caught a pass and then turned around to find me up on him. His elbows swiveled into mine. He shouted at me to back off. I didn’t. I followed his move left until he pivoted right to shoot, but the ball came out of his hands. He managed to get a hold of it just to throw it at my chest, and so I threw it right back at his face. He lunged forward swinging a punch. I swung what I could, but he pulled me into a headlock. I tripped him onto the floor where he loosened up and I could push him off, but not before he landed blows to my chest and shoulder. Teammates eventually pulled us apart. They shouted at us to stop, and he shouted at everybody that I was impossible. That it’s just practice and what’s the point of that kind of intensity and can’t people just chill because what’s the big deal.

Hard defense can be a comfort when it lives into an urgency you can’t live without. Hard defense can be a sin when you want the comfort that comes with respect. 

After practice, my mother picked me up in our old Pontiac. She followed me out and told me to slow down as she dangled the keys walking to the car. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know how to name all the shades of anger. So I said nothing.

At home, I threw the bedroom door shut. I pulled off my shoes. I sat at the edge of the bed and dug nails into my palms. That age-old habit to process affect when I don’t know what to else to say, even to myself. I changed out of my sweaty clothes. I grabbed my Walkman and then shut off the light.

Fast forwarding through a tape can feel grating. But I set myself to track four. I hit stop and then hit play and then caught the riff I wanted to hear, just not in its entirety. Rewind can also be a mission. When I hit play again, I landed into the faint echo of an outro. Between the nightstand and desk, the Walkman drove into white space, that empty ribbon between songs. I stood in my own soft dark space, street lights flickering through the blinds and onto the floor. Passing traffic. The moon. The bed. The sound our closed eyes make in silence. And then “Alone” came on. That chug-chug beginning beat into one hand, and I tapped my chest with the other. My headphones rattled. I paced the room beating the rhythm into my feet. Walking. Skipping. Movement comes in a language that comes with a treble and steady bass and drumming. Like, if and when you’re moving, the music is imitating you and not the other way around.

Juan Carlos Reyes teaches creative writing at Seattle University. He’s published A Summer’s Lynching (Quarterly West) and Elements of a Bystander (Arcadia Press). His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He is the chief editor of Big Fiction Magazine, and you can find him online at www.jcreyes.net