No. 683 – Romeo and Juliet

Performer: Dire Straits

Songwriter: Mark Knopfler

Original Release: Making Movies

Year: 1980

Definitive Version: The Nelson Mandela 70^th Birthday Tribute Concert, 1988, although the version from On the Night in 1993 is more or less the same.

When I started work on this list a year ago, after I assembled all the songs and began the sorting process, I concentrated on the songs that I thought were in the 900s, because—obviously—those would be the first ones up. I had to make sure I had the order right on those.

I left everything above, say, 700 for the time being assuming when I got to those songs, they’d fall into place accordingly. What I found however is a few songs that I hadn’t listened to in a while that I assumed would be in the top 500 or even 300 shouldn’t be that high. (By the way, no, I don’t know at this point what the No. 1 song is, although I have a few contenders. I probably won’t decide that till next year at the earliest.)

This is one of those songs. This is an undeniably great song, and it would be impossible to write my autobiography to music without this one, but hearing it now elicits an unpleasant response, as in, oh man, am I tired of this song. It wasn’t something I was expecting, but now that we’re here, there’s no doubt this song should be ranked lower than it is, although I couldn’t tell you where it properly belongs. Oh well. We can fix this in editing …

So, yeah, my breakup with Melanie … It was heart-rending at the time, and it messed me up for a long time afterward. I’ve touched a bit on the aftershocks, and I’ll go further into that another time. This is the story of the actual breakup itself.

In 1988, I had been looking forward to Labor Day weekend for a while, because after covering the local rivalry football game—New Buffalo vs. River Valley—I would visit Melanie at her family home in the Detroit suburbs. (Remember what I said about women and southeast Michigan?)

But this wasn’t going to be just an ordinary visit. Melanie had decided to leave Albion, which she attended when we met, and transfer to Michigan State. This was good news, because we’d be closer … but not close enough for me.

At this point in my life (I was all of 24), I had been in relationships for roughly five years and all of them were of the long-distance variety for the most part. (Beth and I, of course, were long distance during the school year at Wabash.) I was pretty much done with that.

But more than that, I was so in love with Melanie that I didn’t want to be apart from her any more than was absolutely necessary. I wasn’t quite ready to propose or move in together or anything like that, but I wanted to be where she was. Melanie going to Michigan State was a big opportunity. Nearby Lansing was a decent sized city and had a much larger newspaper. My great scheme was to look for a job there in the fall and move as soon as I could.

This is what I proposed Saturday, the day I arrived. The proposal was soundly rejected.

For years afterward, I beat myself up about how I handled that surprising turn of events, which is to say very immaturely. I freaked out. We had started the conversation in my car while getting dinner somewhere, and we finished in her driveway. I got out of the car and started walking away, my heart splitting in half, and at some point I recall ending up lying face up in the middle of someone’s back yard. (No one had fences in Melanie’s neighborhood.) All I wanted was for the ground to open up and pull me in.

The sky was very gray and dark—perfect for a breakup—and it looked like it was about to pour at any second, but it never rained harder than a light mist. Rats. I couldn’t even get a good, I-hope-it-rains-so-hard-I-get-pnuemonia-and-die-and-then-YOU’LL-BE-SORRY funk going. I just felt empty.

Melanie knew I was upset and wouldn’t let me drive back that night to New Buffalo, which I wanted to do. So I spent the night and drove back as soon as I woke up the next morning, which was at dawn. (I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep much that night. It’s hard to sleep when you can’t breathe.) I had hoped to sneak out without seeing her again, but she was listening for me. If I didn’t cry the entire four-hour drive home, it had to have been three hours and 53 minutes of it.

What happened? Well, obviously, I pushed too hard, too fast and wasn’t adequately skilled enough to properly handle a rejection that left open the possibility for a later reconciliation. For example, when she called almost the second I arrived in New Buffalo, I snapped at her on the phone, saying I would call her LATER. (I still needed to process the events of the day before.) That was clearly the wrong move.

But the fact is, I DID give Melanie the back-off option. I DID say, OK, well, we can continue to see each other as before. It was only when she said at that point, well, we need to talk about THAT, too, that I saw what was coming. It was only after that that I got out of the car.

She had been agitated that day. Even when I arrived Saturday afternoon, usually a joyous occasion, something didn’t feel right. She obviously had something on her mind, too.

The truth is the breakup probably was inevitable. Things may very well have been moving too fast for her, but she also was about to enter the great social pool known as Michigan State and perhaps didn’t want to be tied down to one person. But whether it was more the former or latter or a combination of both, it doesn’t matter now.

All I knew at the time, however, was exactly how a beached whale feels: I just want to lie here on the floor of my apartment until I die—with Romeo and Juliet (Melanie played Juliet at Albion just before we met) on endless loop on my tape player to make my death as pathetic as possible.