Unknown Artist
by MOLLY CAMERON
I met Dan during my first November in New York City at a friend's housewarming party. I picked him out of the crowded basement immediately as being the only guy there who didn’t look like he had rolled straight out of a frat house. He was exactly my type: tall, slim, and slightly scruffy but in a way that looked thoroughly thought out — essentially just a shave and a corduroy blazer away from being Wes Anderson. I was wearing my best selection of H&M separates and attempting to look completely relaxed while I hijacked the host's computer in search of more party-worthy tunes. I had just started DJ-ing a much better playlist, when he came over to help me find some David Bowie and introduce himself. By the end of the night we were making out in the passenger seat of his friend’s parked car, steaming up the windows like a scene from some teenage movie.
When he called the next day to ask me out on a real date, I was overjoyed. Between complications of my own shyness and then a car accident that had kept me out of commission for awhile, I hadn’t had any male contact beyond a high five or an awkward hug in over two years. The fact that I had finally found someone I wanted to kiss and that person wanted to kiss me back was almost overwhelming. I had come barreling into the city practically declaring how independent I was going to be, working for a nonprofit theatre company and getting a gym membership and taking improv classes. But now here was Dan, so mature with his beard and his History degree that my brain started to forget about its need for schedules and computers and adult achievements. I wanted that other thing that grown-up city-dwellers had — a relationship.
We were essentially strangers to each other and so had very formal dates at the start — like sushi dinners and serious movies at BAM — as if we had to make up for steaming up a car before we had even talked about where we went to college and how many siblings we had. Dan was only a few months older than me, but I looked up to him as if that gap was ten years. He had attended NYU so his six-or-so years of city-dwelling made him a pro in comparison to me, constantly carrying a laminated map of Manhattan. He introduced me to McSorley’s, Korean restaurants in Woodside, downtown diners, Chinatown karaoke, and his friends’ creaky apartments in the South Slope. Though his apartment was modest, he lived just a short stroll away from Prospect Park and we spent our weekend mornings walking down Park Slope’s 5th Ave in search of good strong coffee and baked goods. He had a room full of books and a closet full of sweaters and kept a small, separate, unheated room in his apartment that he used strictly for writing. I was smitten with his seriousness.
I was totally falling for him. Not just him, but the whole relationship fantasy. I made us breakfast on the weekends. I bought him funny ties from the Salvation Army. At work, I would gchat him as often as possible, always waiting for that little window to blink at the bottom of my screen. One time I came straight from the gym to his place so we could make a “fancy” (meaning: served with wine) spaghetti dinner together — a move that felt very daring to me. I figured if Dan still wanted to see me with slightly sweaty hair and a sports-bra-induced uni-boob, then everything was going to be OK. We went to some holiday parties, friends of his from school, and if I’d start drinking and dancing, he’d get fake-embarrased and say “Oh no, Molly’s getting wild with the dance moves again!” It made me feel like we were an old married couple and this was our usual party-going schtick.
At Christmas time, we exchanged the ultimate early-relationship gifts: mix CDs. I put so much time into mine, packing it with hip, '70s rock, touches of ironic dance music, and a sly progression into serious topics. It started with Calvin Harris’ “I Created Disco” and ended with The Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside," which I figured was a pretty good emotional journey. I even got a blank jewel case and collaged an album cover, with weird animal pictures cut out of magazines. By contrast, Dan’s mix had been burned onto a blank disc and came without any attached description — not even a track listing. Plain and mysterious, but at the same time, charming. He also knew how to carefully scatter ironic pop, with the Tommy Jones and the Shondells hit "Crystal Blue Persuasion" and "She's Gone" by Hall & Oates placed in between more serious Pavement and Lou Reed tracks. I imported it into my iTunes and labeled the album "Xmas Dan,” leaving the ten or so songs I didn't know stuck with the standard double-digit track number and "Unknown Artist" listing. I listened to it over and over as if his mix, too, might have a buried message of true love and adoration that I could dig out after so many listens.
Towards the end of January, I figured we had made it through the awkwardness of the holidays and things could only get better. We had been dating nearly three whole months, which was pretty epic for me. I was starting to try out the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" — although still not quite ready to try them out in front of Dan. One freezing Saturday night I met him at his apartment so we could go to my friend James’ house party in Bushwick together. Dan usually met me at the stoop outside, but this time he called me and asked me to come upstairs first. I didn’t suspect anything could be wrong until he invited me in, asked me to sit down and offered me some water. I went stone-faced and slowly sat on his bed.
He said he liked me. I was a great person. But he didn’t see where this relationship was going. (I didn’t either, I suppose, but I had never realized that could be a problem.) His job was getting busier, he was trying to figure out some life goals, and this all meant that it was a bad time for him to be in a relationship. He thought it would be best if we stopped seeing each other. These were all stupid excuses that most ladies my age had surely heard many times and could just roll their eyes about and move on, but for me it was the first time. And it hit hard. It was like a switch flipped inside my chest — I went from sweet and composed to a crying and crumpled mess in about ten seconds. I begged him for a better explanation than “bad timing,” but he didn’t have one. He looked at the floor with his hands in his pockets, silent in contrast to my sobs. I finally pulled myself together, got up, and said I was leaving. He asked “Are you sure?” and for a moment I thought he was having second thoughts, but I realized he was just being polite, like I was a dinner guest who had lingered a little too long after dessert. He said goodbye, closed his door, and that was it. I walked out of his apartment in slow motion and stopped in the freezing air on his stoop. It felt like the me who had entered his apartment fifteen minutes ago was now curled up inside this harder, frozen shell of the new me. I had no idea what to do but I knew that I couldn’t go home and be alone. So I decided to go to the party anyway.
I showed up at James’ place in Bushwick about 45 minutes later, too early for the party but already exhausted. The long subway ride had given me time to replay the entire 2 and ¾ months with Dan in my head, searching for answers. Was it because of the sports bra uni-boob? Or was it the crazy dance moves? Was he secretly seeing someone else? James was shocked to see me at his place so early and red-faced from crying. Only he and his roommate were there, wearing their nice plaid shirts and quietly playing music from their rooms. I told James I was so sorry I was a mess and explained what had just happened, saying that I didn’t know where else to go. Like any good host, James immediately sat me down at the kitchen table and brought out a glass and some vodka. He didn’t have anything to mix it with except grape soda, which was gross but also so dismally perfect. In the absence of any lady friends, James assumed the role, saying “what a dickhead” and “you’re better off without him.” He promised me that I had made the right decision to come party with him rather than being alone and sad and said that I could drink as much vodka as a I wanted. So with him and his roommate, I drank my purple drink. And drank and drank. My blur of sadness mixed into my blur of drunkenness as more people began to arrive and the apartment filled with the smells of weed and sweat and the beats of old hip hop.
I kept going through the full cycle of emotions like a bipolar patient on speed. I would feel so drunk that I would nearly forget what happened and start dancing and yelling, like any old party, but then it would wash over me again. Dan wasn’t here to get fake-embarrassed about it and then take me home afterward. I’d slink into the corner and get silent, then go into the bathroom and curl up on the bathmat. Then after I’d cried all I could cry, I’d stumble out of the bathroom and James would hand me another grape soda cocktail and I’d start dancing again. Eventually I gave up and made the long journey home, numb from tears and vodka.
I kept listening to the “Xmas Dan” mix for weeks after the impact. But this time I was hoping to discover some kind of justification for why he would have dumped me. There wasn’t one. Eventually, the days got warmer and my insides stopped feeling like ice too. I met different boys — and even some men — and I pushed Dan into the back of my mind. I went back to my job, my blog, and improv classes, finding my own new city hangouts. That winter became just a little stumbling block in my memory, a misfire at the beginning of a race for coupledom and companionship. Eventually, he was out of my head and heart altogether — except for those brief memories that stirred whenever a mystery song from the mix showed up in the shuffle of my iPod, jolting me back to into that other time.
Track 07 is an Animal Collective song called "Winter's Love" and when I learned the title I had to smile a little at the perfection of it all. Dan was my winter's love. We didn’t have a love that was meant to blossom into spring or sweat into a dirty New York summer — even though that’s what I so wanted at the time. It was an experience that was just long enough to give me little moments that I could experience and then put away — just like the CD itself. I'll never know Dan's intention with that song — if there even was one beyond it being "cool" — but the sentimental part of me likes to think he put it there for the name too. It was my first New York winter and I needed someone — someone to go to the movies with, make fancy spaghetti dinners with, keep me warm and make me feel like I really belonged. But eventually I needed a soft push into the cold to figure it all out on my own.
Molly Cameron is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in New York. You can find her website here.
