The Dead End Love's Playlist
Playlist #1
Format: Cassette tape
Gifted from: The first love.
Song: Sugar Magnolia, The Grateful Dead, issued 1970
Play it in: Any car that we can borrow from your parents for the night. Sometimes this is a red minivan with a tape deck.
Lyrics: Sugar Magnolia blossom's blooming
Head's all empty and I don't care
Saw my baby down by the river
Knew she'd have to come up soon for air
—
I met you by the river the first time while the mist rose from the banks like it was trying to change elements. You were more fun to run from the cops with than anyone else I’d met, and man you made me reckless. I never had to test my legs though, the minivan did it for us while Jerry blasted through the blown speakers in the cornfield. You walked 2,000 miles up the country on trail and wrote me letters back home while I watched, sidelined. I could have walked myself from Georgia to Maine with you, but it was your own pilgrimage to undertake, your season spending nights under a green tarp. I still make good wishes for you when 11:11 rolls around on the digital clock like that night at Dead and Company, my intentions always good ones, your love for Jerry the biggest love you knew. That halfway house you lived in didn’t suit you ten years later. I saw death in your eye when I came to visit. There was death on the top of your dresser too, and in the photograph of a woman who had been yours, her face surrounded by a glittered frame whom you had loved years after me. You lost her to heroin in a heroin town and you told me you were now determined to survive her. Your accidental love for heroin made me glad I had survived and avoided you. I am glad you took the needle out of your arm and that you look back often enough to remember who you were when you most wanted to be alive, along the bank of the river in North Carolina, humming river songs against my ear.
—
Playlist #2
Format: AM radio tuned to Gamaliel Kentucky Community Radio, circa 2005
Gifted from: The southern love
Song: When the Levee Breaks, performed by Led Zepplin, 1971,
as inspired by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s 1929 When the Levee Breaks
Play it on: A white Ford F 350 with the doors open at the town green on the fourth of July.
Lyrics: Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down south
They got no work to do
If you're going down to Chicago
—
On a farm in deep Kentucky, we spend the fourth of July leaving work till later. We drink 40 oz Budweisers in the park in town before the fireworks along with everyone else. When actually working, we hop electric fences to move the cows and the sheep around by day, frying okra in the camper at night in hot oil and it turns out crunchy and sweet. You got out of jail free a couple of times, and paid up a couple of times too. You went back to the girl in the picture above the bed where we slept listening to southern Cicadas, the goats and cows talking in the field beyond the camper that housed us. You made necklaces from river fossils improbably shaped like beads that still hang around my neck. I walked miles of creek bed waiting for Hurricane Katrina to blow all the barns we worked in clean away, before I knew what was good for me.
—
Playlist #3
Format: CD
Gifted from: Dead end love #1
Song: Wagon Wheel by Bob Dylan 1973 followed by Ketch Secor and Old Crow Medicine Show, written with additional lyrics in 2003
Play it in: A beat up 1996 Black Tacoma pickup with Tennessee license plates in no rust southern truck that made it to Mexico a couple of times.
Lyrics: Walkin' due south out of Roanoke
I caught a trucker out of Philly
Had a nice long toke
But he's a headed west from the Cumberland Gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee
—
At eighteen years old I was spending many nights one summer sleeping in the back of a black pickup in the woods of Vermont. Nearby you could hear the Mad River roaring when it rained. When it wasn’t the truck, we spent our nights in the tree houses built by other people, and listening to owls that talked to our burning candles that lit up the railing amidst the trees canopy. We’d gotten off the grid. Once fall came, I found my silver filigreed ring when I got into the trucks cab, crushed by the movable seat tracks, the seat adjusted (unbeknownst to me) for the heights of five other women. The ring was covered by hair not mine and in colors that aren’t my shade of brown. On Halloween, you called to tell me you were having a baby. How odd for man, I remember thinking. It took me a moment to realize what this meant, and that it was not my body that made a body with yours, it was someone else’s. After that, I put the cow horn carved into a raven with white eyes, the one you brought me from Oaxaca, into a drawer. Nine months later in the spring, you had a son you felt you were too young to keep. This was the year I dressed as a trickster raven, trying to bring you the sun. But like the horn statuette you gave me from Mexico, this time, the joke was on me. You grow flowers now for a living on an island. It figures, you’d figure out a way to sell beauty. I have wondered if someday I’d see your son, all grown in the streets of Nashville walking in your Cherokee spitting image, and if I’d recognize him. And I wonder, have you ever sees your first son, after you gave him away? I think I learned to love in multitudes starting with you, the nature of a singular love seems often as farcical and hard to justify as that of loving many, and now I understand why you did it. The rabid girl I was drove 300 miles just to take the bone necklace I gave you back off your neck. Bone for bone, eye for an eye, I would not be denied.
—
Playlist #4
Format: CD, surface scratched to hell, not fully playable
Gifted from: The clandestine love #1
Song: C.R.E.A.M by Wu Tang Clan
Play it in: A Black 2015 Toyota Yaris, with an 11.1 gallon tank, a bow and arrow in the back seat, bird wings and camouflage on the dashboard.
Lyrics: grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side
Stayin' alive was no jive
At second hands, moms bounced on old men
So then we moved to Shaolin land
A young youth, yo rockin' the gold tooth, 'Lo goose
Only way, I begin to gee off was drug loot
And let's start it like this son, rollin' with this one
—
You and I often drove back from weekends in the woods from central Maine, always wishing we had more time to come by. You braided me baskets and built me fires in the snow when December came. In the morning we’d wake in the woods and have leftover hard ciders for breakfast. We tracked animals up the hill through the pine forest to the old railroad bed and back into the brush. We spent miles on the coyotes trail, the fisher, bear, otter, all our teachers, as you were mine. Pumping Wu-Tang from the sheared speakers in the Toyota, we’d drive out to the fields nearby to watch meteors. You were from a poor part of Maine, throwing fake dollar bills in the face of your lack and laughing at yourself. We laughed at our current and past poverties that also gave us a kind of shared power. Once we drove to visit your mother outside Lewiston five hours away. It was late summer, and she needed help trimming her ganja plants while living on disability. I sank into the leaves to hide from you. You were always playing games with me, teaching me how not to be followed, how to hide my footsteps in the duff. You tracked me like the mammals we practiced on, the ones you hunted, and just for fun, I always obliged. You were my teacher, studying red foxes in the hills where I was just a visitor, in the place I wished was my home. It was in reality, you, that I wanted to call home, just not badly enough. The cabin where you lived remains the quietest house I’ve ever slept in. This I know, because I was awake all night. Every time. The moon is always loud in Vermont.
—
Playlist #5
Format: Audio File
Gifted from: The fastest love
Song: Candy Paint by Post Malone and Louis Bell
Play it on: A 2018 Samsung Galaxy phone, speaker turned too loud in the kitchen before work at the machine shop. Continue listening from your jacket pocket while riding on a Triumph Street Triple R. motorcycle. Make sure you hold on tight, it goes 100 mph.
Lyrics: Didn't know that was your girl when she gave me top
Kicked her out the rolls said, "Thanks a lot"
Goddamn I love paper like I'm Michael Scott
I can do things that your man cannot
—
You are still the fastest thing on two wheels I’ve ever seen. Despite my strong legs I could never keep up. You balanced on rail road bridges in New England on your bicycle, suspended hundreds of feet in the air while gliding along the rusting tracks in New Hampshire while the water and rocks below taunted your skills against your skull. Balance was the only thing you cared about. I crashed on my mountain bike repeatedly as I hurled myself over rocks and logs and streams, and you even wanted me to jump over you as an obstacle, while you lay on the ground somehow trusting me. You lived in a tent in the trees, and while I tried to sleep suspended there, you were always too fast for me, always getting away. All my broken fingers and toes are bulging badges still, the dent deep on my thigh from a crash still now hides behind a tattoo. All those purple bruises that you tried to heal with your tongue like a dog to make me laugh, only some of these scars have faded. My own acquired recklessness in your presence grew to overpower me and I regret how blindly I followed. You were a forbidden secret that I got better at hiding after the first few tries.
—
Playlist #6
Format: Spotify playlist
Gifted from: The city love
Song: Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2
Play it on: A pair of shared earbuds connected to an I-phone 14 Pro while riding the C train, Harlem to Chelsea, New York City
Lyrics: None. Instrumental piano Sonata performed by Vadim Chaimovich—
On a glacial erratic in Central park, we ate candy cotton flavored grapes from a yellow plastic bag, and you took pictures of my knees. You ride your bike from job to job through the city with twenty pounds of cameras strapped to your back. You walk me back through your memories of the riots in Caracas Venezuela, before you came to America and before America became you. You cannot hear me as well from your right ear, a by-product of grenades exploding at Chavez. We went rocketing into the morning through the city of empire, and like always, you caught me looking up. I am always saying some kind of prayer, hoping that I will come back by summer to smell the roses again by the East river, hoping the street isn’t a dead end.
-Emma Corinne Weiss
Emma Corinne Weiss is a writer, spoken word poet, model, and carpenter from Rhode Island. She has been a featured reader at the story telling series Stranger Stories in Providence RI, the Catanquit Chronicles Podcast, and The United Literary Salon. She is a Graduate of the Essay Incubator program at GrubStreet in Boston. You can read more of her writing on music, film, and the arts at thesolidpage.substack.com