The best mixtape I’ve ever gotten was made by a blonde mod boy named Demian who rode old Lambrettas around rural Maine and was always trying to cultivate a scene in whatever small town he was living in at the time. I met him at a punk rock show he had put on at a local Grange Hall (Contra Dancing every Tuesday night) along with his best friend and my future boyfriend. But it was Demian who made me the mix tape. It was dubbed entirely from 7"s and one EP, along with random nutty snippets taped off TV, like from The Island of Misfit Toys and those Slim Jim Commercials with the wrestler in it. The cover was scrawled with band names and rows of "-?-" for song titles. "Sorry so rushed… I’ll make you a better one if you make me a tape in return…" (Any taped reply made by me would have only consisted of REM and maybe a Violent Femmes song. That’s as edgy as I was at the time.)

Years later I stopped by Demian’s apartment in Portland – full of cats, lamps and scooter parts – with a friend from New York. We were looking for someone to buy pot from. I was sure Demian was still around. He was working on a mix tape when we arrived unannounced, changing records and pressing record while he talked to us. I remembered Demian as handsome, boyish and very hip. In the gray light of winter afternoon he was different. Noticeably aged. He had dyed his hair rocker-black and was wearing a too short little boys’ T-shirt that bunched up around his chest and his arms. He looked pale, and saggy, and slightly ridiculous. He was not 18 anymore, or 21 or 25. Well past the point where just biding his time until all the really cool stuff starts happening, man, seemed an okay profession. Demian was still dating high school girls, and dangerously toeing the line of dirty old man, though be it with the nicely maintained toe of a low-top, monochrome black Converse. He was making the tape for his present teenage-art-girl love.

Digging through his crates of 7", perusing rare singles acquired from subscribing to almost every indie label’s 7" club since 1992. Scribbling on the Memorex card little notes like the ones he scribbled to me when I was 16 "Sorry so rushed… make me one in return…" Passing onto this untouched Maine girl hints of the great beyond. To see him as serving this strange, and slightly creepy role, was in a way reassuring, asserting what part he plays within the ecosystem of cool. Without older boys and their mixtapes where would girls like me be? (I know this is a decidedly unfeminist statement to make, but I can’t help but see the truth in it. Older girls could serve this role, too but teenage boys don’t seem to hold that much mystique for women in their late 20s) Subculture is distributed so illicitly that only a substance as volatile as an unmarked tape given to you by an older man can initiate you into its ranks. It's probably one of the most potent substances inflicted on a teenage girl. (All that yearning and obscurity and subtext is just a breeding ground for neurosis, which I in particular, was ripe for.) And once a boy like Demian has opened that gateway it’s an easy step out of that small Maine town to Brooklyn, or LA, or wherever the really cool stuff is happening, man. But leaving Demian, alone with his records, to play Pygmalion again, and populate smoky Williamsburg bars with girls trading stories about a blonde mod boy who made them the best mixtape ever.