Lisa Selin Davis
Appearances
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
My father had strongly suggested if I wanted to stay in his house for the summer as the divorce agreement had decreed, I should take a job doing hard physical labor in Saratoga Spa State Park in upstate New York. My father's idea was to heal me through hard work and the grounding power of nature.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
The job paid $3.35 an hour for digging trenches, building foot bridges, and learning about anger management and the medical uses of jewel weed, which grew wild along the creek. The work was torture. I was cut out for songwriting, not construction. But the worst part was riding my Fuji 12-speed there with a green hard hat on the rear rack while wearing ochre-colored work boots.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
Boy, poison, I thought. I was disturbingly experienced. My older friends had introduced me to a variety of adult activities I shouldn't have known for years. But I'd never had actual sex, or an actual boyfriend, or been in love. And I wanted those things more than anything. After work one day, as I pulled my bike into our backyard, a boy was sitting there with my dad.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
My father was the local guitar teacher, and sometimes, gloriously stringy-haired rocker kids arrived at the house for lessons. This one wore beige shorts stained with bike grease, a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt, and very long red hair. The apogee of attractiveness. For me.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I had seen him before at parties with my friends, and each time I had tried to get his attention the only way I knew, by speaking loudly about my stealing and drugs and temper tantrums, expounding on how depressed and in pain I was. I thought this would make me attractive by way of emotional depth, but he never seemed to notice me. This time he looked up, but I was desperate to hide.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I went inside and stood at the screen door and watched as my father taught the beautiful boy the Travis style of finger-picking. After that, I daydreamed anxiously of the boy with the long red hair. At work, I wore scratchy work gloves and pulled tenacious weeds from the side of the creek bed, and every day I hoped to see him. But I feared it, too, lest he see me with my hard hat and work boots.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
And then... One Saturday afternoon, when I wasn't working, I saw him leap into the water beneath the Hadley-Lazerne Bridge, the place where the Hudson and Sakandaga Rivers meet. It was a magical spot, with a rope swing and swirls of black water, where my friends and I spent lazy afternoons and played guitars on the rocks.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
He had pale freckles all over his chest and collarbone that formed a beautiful dent below his neck. He mumbled hello to me. I knew nothing about how to interest a boy, but I took off my non-work clothes, tank top and cut-off jeans, and went in the river in my bra and underwear. I played the full tablature of Neil Young's Needle and the Damage Done on the guitar.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I put my body next to his as much as possible, standing close whenever I could. A few days later, the phone rang. My father answered, his face momentarily registering confusion as he handed the phone to me. The voice was so low and mumbly that I couldn't understand who it was or what he was saying, and that moment of intense awkwardness seemed interminable,
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
until I realized it was him, and he was asking me if I wanted to go swimming at Hadley Lazerne. Somehow, I managed to say yes, even though I could barely breathe. He had asked me on an actual date. I had taken LSD and made out with strangers at the Holiday Inn, but I had never been on a date.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
He picked me up in his battered yellow Subaru station wagon and we drove north, listening to the band X. It started pouring. We ducked into a cafe and he ordered coffee. I had never had coffee. I pretended I drank it black. It was bitter and gross and the best thing I ever tasted because he liked it. The rain didn't stop, so we went back to his house and listened to the replacements.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
He had a job fixing bikes, and he smelled like something tangy called Cornhusker's Lotion, which he used to get the grease off. Nothing else happened that day, but I was so happy it hurt. After that, I kept seeing him, walking downtown, going to concerts, but we never touched. Then, one Saturday night, we met at the radio station at the local college where our friend had a show.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
He and I took a walk. The night was warm and smelled of jewel weed, and there were meteor showers everywhere. He had that beautiful hair and the freckly collarbone, and it was way too much. The waiting had become intolerable. I stopped, turned toward him, and said, What is going on here? I was almost whining. What's happening? He grew quiet and looked down at his shoes. He mumbled again.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I think he said, I like you. But then he looked me clear in the eye and asked,
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
No one had ever said that to me. No one had ever been so solicitous and gentle and kind. No one had ever wanted me that way. They had used me that way, but never wanted me. I kissed him on the cheek as fast as I could and ran away, back to the radio station, amid the shelves of records and their musty cardboard smell.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
Ten minutes later, he found me there, pretending to study the cover of Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills. Couldn't look at him. He whispered, his hot breath on my hair. Um, that wasn't really what I meant. We went to his house. He sat on the couch, I sat on the floor, and he made this awkward attempt to rub my shoulders.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I was more on fire with desire and anticipation than I had ever been in my life. As he leaned down to kiss me, I scooted to the other side of the room.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I asked him. Why are you interested in me? I was just stalling, but he actually paused to consider the question. Okay, he said, I'll tell you. He said I was cute and funny and good at the Travis style of fingerpicking and had good taste in music, which among our crowd was the highest compliment. My heart seemed to break upon hearing this list, but in a good way.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
Everyone else in my life could rattle off a list of my faults, but the beautiful boy saw what was on the other side of my misdeeds. The lyrics to I'll Be Your Mirror go, Please put down your hands, because I see you. And it seemed he was able to see the beauty in me that I couldn't. He had his face very close to mine, that smell of cheap shampoo and Cornhusker's lotion.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
And then he said, I knew I really liked you when I saw you on your bike with the work boots and hard hat.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
My teeth hit his and my mouth was open too much and it was messy and delicious and terrifying. And then we fell into a rhythm. I kissed him for the entire B-side of REM's reckoning. I kissed him so much, I went home that night with red, swollen lips. I don't think I ever experienced a physical sensation better than that burn. It seemed to wipe clean the dirty slate of my childhood.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
I lost track of him years ago. I don't know where he lives or what he does. I don't know him digitally. I think of him only in analog. All that love twisted up with my records, which long ago warped and mildewed in my mother's basement. But the lesson from I'll Be Your Mirror remained. That someone can love me for what shames me the most. Now... I sing those same lyrics to my daughter before bed.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
The conservation job ended late that August. My soul or my depression or anger management problems hadn't been repaired by it. I hadn't learned about hard work or resilience or any of the other things the program was designed to teach me. But I was healed, just as that love song promised.
Modern Love
First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
When Lou Reed died, I got on Facebook and found out just how many friends had chosen I'll Be Your Mirror as their wedding song. I wasn't one of them. But that song, more than any other, taught me about love. I listened to it endlessly the summer I was 16.