The Annotated Mixtape

In seventh grade, unused to choosing my own classes—unused, in fact, to the concept of taking multiple classes rather than sitting in one classroom all day with twenty other students, listening to the steam radiator clank, breathing the bitter scent of chalk dust, and watching the flicker of fluorescence—I enrolled in Spanish 1 instead of French 1, a choice that, to this day, I regret. In many ways, being thirteen felt perpetually like being a foreigner; the introduction of foreign-language classes to the curriculum merely emphasized my struggles to comprehend the strange territory in which I found myself.

Spanish, my mother pointed out, was the more practical choice. I practiced the words I learned but which only a few of us in that classroom could properly pronounce by drafting letters to my patient Mexican grandmother, who simplified her vocabulary in the responses she wrote on pastel stationery. Along with the other kids tongue-testing a «¿Cómo se llama?» less eagerly than the Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers we sneaked into the high school football games, my face would blush when I was called upon to speak, though I showed no shame in joking about our teacher’s clothes. Mr. Nicholas’s fashion sense—paisleys and checks in a palette ranging from mustard and orange to brown, sport coats with sleeves no longer reaching his wrists, lapels and ties both too wide—reinforced what I saw as my own poor decision.

One afternoon early in the year, the boy at the desk in front of mine turned in his seat, pointing to a page near the end of our textbook: this page, titled Preguntas, showed a suggestive, soft-focus photo of a young woman with downcast gaze. “She’s pregnant,” my classmate insisted, eyes darting behind his glasses, cheeks suddenly flushed at this scandalous yet exciting possibility. Though we did later learn to define pregunta on a vocabulary quiz, our class stumbled so slowly through the textbook that even by the pollen-perfumed days of spring we had not reached that tantalizing page, and I like to imagine that my classmate spent his summer wondering about that young woman. What, indeed, were her questions?

The kids in French classes seemed perpetually, mysteriously other: their small numbers alone marked them as special. Even then I doubt I could have pinned down the nature of that specialness, or described its outward signs; now, I’ve mislaid such details, along with the other minor secrets of those days. In junior high, even certain homerooms seemed more prestigious than my own. Because I determined positive qualities such as prestige mainly by their absences in my life, I imagined that the kids taking French were free from the anxieties I felt about everything from girls to algebra. Did their French textbook contain references to teen pregnancy? I was certain it did not. I’m no Francophile, and though the rolled r’s and soft rising inflections did seduce me, I think I was seduced less by the language than by the kids who studied it, less by the kids than by the fact that they studied it, which underscored the disparity between them and me: they had chosen, impractically, a different course than the rest of us, and though at the age of thirteen I would not have expressed it this way, I have always admired refusals to yield to the practical. It took the presence of a native Castilian se llamaban Susana to redeem Spanish somewhat for me.

My wife, Sarah, a Canadian who practiced her school-mandated French during college in Montreal, claims that knowledge conferred no benefit: the Québécois shopkeepers would, when she attempted her French on them, stubbornly continue the conversation in English. Four years in Montreal left her with no romance for the French language, though of course some would argue that the French spoken in Quebec bears as much resemblance to the French spoken in Paris as the Spanish spoken in the dusty classrooms of Forest Grove Junior High School bore to the Spanish that Susana pronounced with a breezy lisp.

By the end of high school, my five years of Spanish classes were already fading—a vestigial memory, no different than orthodontics, after-school track meets, and lost locker combinations.

It’s easy to fetishize a language one does not speak, easy to lift that language from the culture—or to lift the culture from the language—and imagine it as some sort of romantic ideal. It’s similarly easy to fetishize a vinyl 7" record in these last days of vinyl, when the factories that press it grow nearly as few in number as the members of the Doherty Memorial High School French Honor Society (three, according to the photo in my yearbook, by which point they had, in my estimation, renounced all claim to mystery and allure and proven themselves no less dorky than the seven kids in the Spanish Honor Society). If a band releases a record on both vinyl and digital formats, I always choose the former, if only for the fact that, in the twenty-first century, vinyl appears invariably in a limited edition, the sort of thing that by virtue of its production run alone becomes sought-after, prestigious, special.

After a few home-released records, the Reading, UK band Saloon debuted in 2000 with their single “Shopping,” which was not available on CD, thus making it even more ideal for vinyl fetishists like myself. The sleeve’s artwork seemed a nod in the direction of the famous Factory Records label—itself famously fetishist (a 1981 label-defining LP was issued in a heavy match-book-style jacket that unfolded to reveal an interior printed with a marbled paper design under license from the French firm Ste. Keller-Dorian Papiers)—and the song too seemed an homage of sorts to the Factory Records sound: the nervous tick-tick-tick-tick of the ride cymbal; the shimmery wash of minor-key guitar chords; the droning analog synthesizers; the swooning and lovely and, yes, French female vocals. After the record had stayed on my turntable for a week, I asked Sarah to translate the lyrics for me: I felt some combination of the seventh-grader’s fear of being excluded and the familiar regret at not understanding what the singer was making sound so beautifully wistful; over the years I’ve picked up a vague reading knowledge of French, but remain tone-deaf to the spoken version. To my ears, the voice in “Shopping” conjured—well, maybe a wind-damaged dandelion, or the view through a wavy-glass windowpane to a rainswept street, or the feeling of walking home from the post office at which you’ve just mailed a letter to some distant and much-missed friend. Such foolish, sentimental imagery seemed, in this case, okay, in part because it occurred in the context of a pop song, in part because of the gauzy effect of the French.

I would like to buy a chair, sir

I would prefer the blue one

I saw it in the shop window the other day…

So even the most insipid and pedestrian thoughts, sung in French, attained a certain beauty. Did they seem beautiful only because I didn’t know their meaning, or because of the nostalgic connotations this language has for me? Or because I was—as if returned to a preliterate, prelinguistic state—reveling solely in the sound of that voice?

The sleeve of “Shopping,” in true Factory Records tradition, offered no information about Saloon’s members—not even their names—so it was not until later that I laughed upon learning that the chanteuse who so captivated me se llama Amanda Gomez, a surname from the “wrong” side of the Pyrenees. When I bought the band’s next record, I was similarly amused to see that one song was titled “Sueño Escolar”—appropriately, I thought, given how often those of us in Mr. Nicholas’s Spanish 1 class nodded off on our laminated desktops, unconcerned with the distinction between the preterite and the imperfect, between por y para, scholars of nothing linguistic at all. Our scholarship involved recalling the last time Mr. Nicholas had worn his lemon yellow blazer, re-enacting dialogue from Saturday Night Live skits, and debating endlessly the comparative merits of various exegeses over who had dumped whom in a particular relationship. We scribbled our dissertations on lined notebook paper folded into duodecimos and distributed in the corridors during passing time or flipped from desk to desk when Mr. Nicholas turned to scrape his chalk stub across the blackboard. Junior high school operated under the tacit specifics of the hegemony we inherited (few among us questioned the supremacy of Nike sneakers and Levi’s jeans), so I doubt that my inquiry into the nature of French 1‘s difference would have roused much critical interest, though I never allowed my admittedly weak hypothesis to be peer-reviewed. The French 1 kids were cool in a way that the Spanish 1 kids could not hope to be. I left it at that, and in those days that was enough for me.

But now I wonder what those kids in French class daydreamed about those of us taking Spanish—about our own myriad mysteries—while their teachers explained the distinction between I’accent aigu et I’accent grave. The accidental nature of my selection—the unbearable lightness of choosing—underscored the insignificance, for my adolescent self, in the difference between French and Spanish. Each language offered me the myth of access, but it would be another half-dozen years before, having worked after high school to save up for a Continental tour, I stood on European soil, struggling to understand and to make myself understood. In the meantime, I was untroubled by the complexities of the choice, aware of French and Spanish only as abstract indicators of junior-high cool, living a life free of any pressures to see myself as un extranjero. In seventh grade, using a discarded Harman-Kardon turntable, an old pair of speakers, and a new Sony receiver, I cobbled together my first stereo system, and, ever since, music has been my lingua franca.