[You look like 1992 in that Albertson’s parking lot on University & the store’s blue sign glistens like a new moon reflecting the mint-white stripes of the spot we park my tan ’79 Celica. I close my eyes to see you: mascara like tawny sunset. Teased up hair. Stonewashed denim overalls. I jump on the hood & pull you up & we dance to Jesus Jones’s only hit blaring from the tape deck. I twirl you as the traffic signal haloes you in green, yellow, & red rainbows in rotation, & I exist for three minutes in that world when we made sushi in your kitchen on Sundays before watching In Living Color before I drove back to Miami before our divorce so many years in the future. Under the neon lamp light, you hold my hand & pull me close & we talk Clinton versus Bush versus Perot, swaying on top of the car when you shift gears, whisper as soft as a ballad in the November rain if I could name a Mazzy Star song & when I say “Fade into You” you ask how I first heard it & I tell you I saw the video on MTV’s 120 Minutes when I got home from working another 4-to-12. Our sandpaper tongues sweep each other’s mouths & the grocery store’s lights flicker before closing. The more I listened to bands like Mazzy Star the less their songs spoke to me as I stared at 30. Like windshield wipers never washing everything clear in summer storms – 120 Minutes aimed at shoegazing college kids but not the me I’d become: not old but not young but not yet middle-aged, just trying to stay relevant, relevance undefined, relevance nothing more than dancing on top of an old beater with a graduate student I’d marry & divorce.]
[1] Ok, readers, between us, I joined & canceled Columbia House record club memberships & picked 12 CDs for a penny, agreeing to buy eight more at inflated club prices over the next three years. Membership has its privileges, but relevance comes with a cost that includes shipping & handling.
[2] So Tonight That I Might See, Mazzy Star’s breakthrough album was a 12-for-a-penny selection, but I never listened to it then. No time for music with babies & careers. Relevance’s definition redefined.
[3] Tonight in 2024: an Instagram post on a 90s alt-rock account wishes Mazzy Star’s lead singer, Hope Sandoval, happy 57th birthday. Half the commenters thought she was dead. I stream their album on Spotify, loving it like a newborn, then shuffle through my CD shelf but it’s not there – maybe it’s in a box somewhere hidden like a time capsule: reminders that like Mazzy Star, I neither burned out nor faded away. We just exist.
4 Jesus Jones’s only hit “Right Here, Right Now” reached number two on the Billboard chart in July 1991.