An Essay Tangentially About Janet Jackson’s “Someone to Call My Lover”

I hear the melancholy picked strums at the beginning of “Ventura Highway”—no, wait, it’s actually morphing into Janet Jackson’s last hit, the 2001 sample-classic “Someone to Call My Lover”—and I see the girls in the dorms at the University of Iowa, doors propped open so everyone could hear them getting ready, trying on different colors of the “going-out” top with their black polyester “going-out” pants, which had been recently acquired with new credit cards from the Express in the Old Capitol Town Center; fuck the fact no one had a job to pay them off.
They’re streaming out of the dorm doors into the breathy future of August in Iowa City and here comes the chorus, girded by—can it be? the melancholy note progressions of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1”??—as Janet sings All right, maybe gonna find him today, I gotta get someone to call my lover.
They’re on their way to the Ped Mall, these late-teenagers who’ve traveled from their former homes to the pocketed comfort of this university town where we’ve chosen to become adults. In 2000, the internet was a baby no one was ready to hold and cell phones had barely updated from pagers, so we all used calling cards, dialing out the eighteen digit code so our parents would be charged on our U-bill. We were buying dollar slices at the Airliner on Sunday because that was the one night they didn’t serve dinner across the street at Burge. There was a dorm desk in Currier that was staffed 24/7, but you had to use your dorm key to get in after midnight—a physical key; we carried three of them on our key rings, one for the dorm and one for our room and one for the coed bathroom across the hall where, at any given moment, some dude would be shitting and someone else would be showering behind two flimsy vinyl curtains that never closed all the way.
I did not go to college for my MRS degree but I also went to college for my MRS degree.
So, like, I know the whole point of college is fucking around (and finding out), but during the crescendo of high school senior year goodbyes, my friend’s mom—probably thinking she was being helpful and not apocryphal—warned us that after college, our likelihood of finding someone to marry would decrease by 75%. This was in 1999 or 2000; we had no way to fact-check those numbers she probably pulled out of her ass. We just took it as truth and as a Fact. Or at least I did. I always expected I would be married in my 20s because my mother was married at 20, and her own mother was married at 20 as well—both of them in beautiful, long-lasting, healthy marriages—and I was like PATTERN LOOKS GOOD! LET’S DO THE THING!
I did not know how to do the thing.
When my college roommate—a fellow 18-year-old girl, though she’d come to Iowa freshly engaged to her high school sweetheart back home in Colorado—allowed me to follow her out to the bars in downtown Iowa City, what I wanted most was to meet someone at the club, as Janet Jackson also hoped—but not someone to call my “lover.” Someone to call my HUSBAND.
I had never been to a bar.
Somehow, my roommate knew to wear black pants and a “fun, colorful top.” But I was like “Okay, so we wear our COOLEST OUTFITS, right?” which I thought was my fuzzy gray sweater with thumbholes (acquired from Hot Topic), reinforced-knee skater jeans from Old Navy, black Pumas, and my rainbow FlikFlak watch.
I failed out spectacularly, which is to say I did not talk to a single dude. Once we paid cover (congrats for being under 21; Iowa City at the time had a plethora of bars allowing patrons to enter underage, but you had to pay $5 or $10 “cover” before you could try to scam a 21-year-old to buy two $1 U-Call-Its, one for them and one for U) and the beefy bouncer let us pass, I was baffled by the scene in the Sports Column. I kept wondering where the guys I’d seen during my campus visit, the previous fall, had gone—like the hottie I’d seen crossing Iowa Ave (viewed through the passenger-side windshield of my parents’ minivan) who’d caused something to click in my head and my heart to beat faster and I suddenly knew this was where I wanted to go to college, to finally be somewhere where I could meet A MAN who HAD CURLY HAIR and DID NOT WEAR UGLY KHAKIS AND T-SHIRTS.
All the dudes in SpoCo were wearing ugly khakis and the closest thing to “styled hair” was on bros who’d frosted their tips and gelled the bangs upright like Nick fucking Lachey.
I did not want a single dude in that bar for my husband—or my lover; ugh, as if—but I watched girls snatching at the boys anyway. Thing was, if you danced with a dude and you wanted to see him again, you had to either give him your dorm room’s phone number or make a plan to hang out that the brah would REMEMBER THROUGH HIS DRUNKENNESS the next morning! There was no “looking him up on Facebook” because THERE WAS NO FACEBOOK! No social media! The doors opened to let us out into the world at 2 a.m. and everyone was stumbling down the Ped Mall to Panchero’s to wait in a long line for a $1.90 quesadilla ($2 exact after tax). My roommate and I passed a guy drunkenly hiccupping “I’m a Sig Ep! I’m a Sig Ep!” and I was like UGH! THESE are my options?!
And yet, hope sprang eternal every weekend (and FAC)! Maybe we WOULD meet at a bar! He wouldn’t drive a funky car, because his ass was probably hopping the next Cambus back to the west side of the river, but MAYBE?
I did not know that—in fact—there was a dude with curly hair (wearing ugly khakis and a t-shirt) hopping said Cambus, and that I’d be the girl of his dreams, but not yet.
So it wasn’t going to be at a bar, and it wasn’t going to be at a club, but I kept looking for someone to call my husband. Maybe we’d meet in Italian class! There was this guy with beautiful brown wavy hair who I stared at every morning after sliding into the classroom at 9:30 a.m., waiting to be taught the language of love by our instructor, this heavily-bearded grad student enrolled in some other program—not the Romance Languages—who’d apparently had enough language proficiency to land the position. I knew my Italian crush and I lived in the same dorm because when class let out, we both walked along the leaf-cluttered sidewalks of Clinton Street to Currier. I shortened my strides to follow behind my Italian crush and his green Jansport backpack—JUST LIKE MINE!—with his wavy hair covered by the earphones he slid on as soon as we left class. I told myself that the headphones were why I didn’t try to talk to my Italian crush, why I either followed behind him like a puppy or fast-walked in front of him so he could ascertain my purposefulness, surely an attribute to be admired in a potential WIFE.
I knew my Italian crush’s name, though I don’t know it now, and back in my dorm room, I looked him up in the online university directory and found out that he was from Madison, Wisconsin, which pleased me because I had relatives in Wisconsin and I figured we could visit them together. If he and I didn’t visit our relatives together, at least there was a chance that over Thanksgiving break, my family’s route would drive through Madison and I could preen in the minivan for the infinitesimal chance that during the brief collection of highway signs where we could be considered to be in Madison, my Italian crush might be in the car beside us, look over and see me, recognize me, later mention it to me when we were sitting near each other back in class.
Our instructor asked us to repeat prego; prego, my Italian crush had purred, as I sloppily tried to roll my r’s but sputtered out play-go. Play. Don’t go. But I never found the language to speak to the guy before the semester ended.
That was okay, though. Maybe we’d meet in the dorms! One of my new friends had met this guy from Conyers, Georgia, that Atlanta suburb they did the PBS high-school-sexposé about back when we were merely freshmen.
—I just went on a deep dive, reactivating my five-year-dead Facebook account, trying to find the guy’s last name. I sought out my friend, but the guy no longer appears on her list of friends. I forgot about the rabbit hole of Facebook; I don’t know how I thought I’d get through this essay without having to go back to see who I had befriended when I joined it in 2008. All that effort for a last name I’m going to give the guy the grace of not naming in the end. Ah well, the name remains in my draft files—
Anyway, Conyers Guy lived on the floor three below the room I shared with one of my new friends, who had actually become my second roommate—the first left Iowa (both the state and the school) over Christmas break, intending to stay with her fiancé, but her parents talked her into coming back to Iowa after I’d already moved into a different dorm room to live with my new friend.
My second roommate thought Conyers Guy was interesting—though not for her, of course, because she already had a boyfriend. Literally all six of the friends I made freshman year already had significant others. It was disheartening for me, a girl who wanted to find someone to call her husband, to realize her friends had already locked up theirs BEFORE coming to college.
Once, when Conyers Guy and his friend were tripping, my second roommate and I wore our “weirdest” clothes to mess with them while they were high (I was in a see-through batik-print shirt and my reinforced-knee jeans [once again], had braided my hair into eight braids, wore pink sunglasses and a pair of ANGEL WINGS; my second roommate was in her pajamas and wore my Loch Nessie stuffed dragon around her neck and carried a five-foot-long fish pillow).
There’s a picture in my photo album of that night, with some bro-y bro in a blue button-down and UGLY KHAKIS sitting on the futon in our dorm room right next to Conyers Guy, and then in the next photo the bro is massaging my bare feet while I sit on my roommate’s lofted bed and the bro sits on the futon below. What is even happening? I didn’t want that dude. He was definitely over 21, which even then I thought was scammy and gross because WHY WAS HE EVEN LIVING IN THE DORMS ANYWAY WHEN EVERYONE DECENT MOVED OUT SOPHOMORE YEAR?
The next photo is Conyers Guy sitting up on my roommate’s bed beside me (Foot Fetish Dude was apparently DE-NIED), and this photographic evidence is how I know that Conyers Guy really did say to me “Truth or dare?” and I answered “DARE” and then he said, “I dare you to go out with me when we come back from winter break.”
And I said okay, but then HE NEVER FOLLOWED UP TO ASK ME TO GO ON SAID DATE! Crushing!!! Even though I wrote a very pointed poem which I actually GAVE to Conyers Guy (I will not humiliate myself further than to share that the poem was very Alanis-Morissette-in-“Right Through You”) to somehow…prompt him to follow up? Maybe I scared Conyers Guy off, because buddy went on spring break back to Georgia and DECIDED NOT TO RETURN TO FINISH HIS FRESHMAN YEAR. Wow. But I came back to Iowa after spring break and I held my 5th Annual Cheese Party in my dorm room and my future husband came to it (he was in a class with my second roommate, who invited him knowing I liked boys with curly hair) and he massaged my feet (they are not that great, you guys; I don’t know how I attract weirdos like this) and then he and I went on a date like three days before summer vacation. Not exactly promising, but iacta alea est! Turns out Latin, not Italian, was my strong suit.
When I did finally hook up with my future husband the next fall, he had been hooking up with this girl who looked like she was thirty—which, when we were nineteen, was NOT COOL. She had one of those faces where she already looked like a middle-aged woman. It didn’t help that she was a theater major and was always wearing stage makeup. No one wore red lipstick and foundation when we were nineteen.
Anyway, my future husband was hooking up with Old Theater Woman, but after he hooked up with me, he told her they needed to stop because I was…a better opportunity? I don’t know—he and I have been watching the new season of “Love is Blind” and when one of the dudes in the pods found out his potential fiancée had cheated on her last boyfriend, the dude lost his shit. We realized—I mean I realized, because my husband definitely knew I’d not cheated on a boyfriend before, AS I HAD ONLY HAD ONE BEFORE HIM—that I’d never asked my husband if he’d ever been a real cheater, not just a “I’m hooking up with someone but I’ll stop hooking up with her now” cheater. For the sake of his romantic history, which I am using spousal privilege to record in this essay, let’s just say he pleads the fifth.
Anyway, when I hooked up with him, it was like zero to sixty; after all my bluster about looking for someone to call my husband, by sophomore year I’d HAD IT with trying to fall in love with other dudes and failing out. I was nineteen and LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO CALL MY LOVER.
Yo, why’d I get a husband out of it anyway? Like the worst way to “detach” ever. The thing is that, when my future husband called me the afternoon after I HAD CRAWLED OUT OF HIS LOFTED DORM BED AND WALKED MYSELF HOME AT 6 A.M., he was all “Hey, I want to see you again” and I was like OH MY GOD IS THIS HOW IT HAPPENS?
Everyone knows it’s only when you decide you’re “not interested in something serious” that they show up!
Has this gotten too self-absorbed? Am I not writing enough about Janet Jackson’s actual song, “Someone to Call My Lover,” which was a #1 dance-floor hit (#3 on the Billboard Hot 100)? Let me remind you that when you’re eighteen and nineteen, you think about one person: YOU. It’s toddler phase part two, but you’re resourced with a bed no one’s asking you to make and a “job” called “going to class” and all the bad eating habits you can finally indulge: pizza for dinner, Jiffy blueberry muffins for lunch, Poptarts for breakfast, a metabolism that evaporates it all.
Janet Jackson was 35 when she recorded “Someone to Call My Lover” and if I’d known it was a possibility that Queen Janet, progenitor of the “Escapade”/”Alright” dance routines of my youth and “This Time”/”If” skate-rink-songs of my adolescence, would still be looking for love at 35, I would have thrown up my hands and stopped trying. We didn’t even know Janet was married to Rene Elizondo until the marriage was over and she was singing about LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO CALL HER LOVER! Completely disheartening and sad.
Maybe that’s where the whole “Gymnopédie No. 1” sample in “Someone to Call My Lover” comes in. Wikipedia says the melodies of the Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies “use deliberate, but mild, dissonances against the harmony, producing a piquant, melancholy effect that matches the performance instructions, which are to play each piece "painfully" (douloureux), "sadly" (triste), or "gravely" (grave).”
That’s what it was like when I was looking for someone to call my lover. My husband. Sorry. There’s the deliberate—but mild—dissonance. Even when I was ready to just HOOK UP ALREADY, I never wanted someone to just call my lover. Maybe that’s the piquant, melancholy effect that matches my performance in the clubs of Iowa City: douloureux, triste, grave in my gray fuzzy thumbholed sweater and reinforced-knee jeans, thinking I might meet someone who wanted to do more than notice me dancing alone before jutting out a knee—a dude-invitation to scoot closer and straddle it, grinding my pelvis close to his—but I didn’t because I didn’t know; I kept swerving NEAR the guy, completely confused by his “dance position” until the dude leaned in and yelled, above the music, “That’s okay you don’t know what you’re doing,” withdrawing his knee from the space between us and turning away as I still stood there, mortified, unsure what I was supposed to do. Cue that plink-plink-plink-plink-plink-plink of “Gymnopédie No. 1.”
Janet’s “Someone to Call My Lover” samples both “Gymnopédie No. 1” by Erik Satie and “Ventura Highway” by the 70s band America, a band I’d grown up listening to because my parents were 70s soft rock enthusiasts. I come by my Yacht Rock love nostalgically; it doesn’t return me to my Boomer heydays, it returns me to my childhood when my Boomer parents were returning to their own heydays! Sometimes I think it’s amazing that I am unwittingly pushing Boomer-aesthetic into yet another generation by training my own children to hear America on Yacht Rock and think, longingly, of summer afternoons driving to the pool. I digress.
I grew up listening to “Ventura Highway,” but it was also always on the radio at the hospital in Iowa City (UIHC) in the OB/GYN chart control office, where I had my student job filing “loose corr” (doctors’ notes from OB/GYN visits) into the physical binders that held patient records. The four older women who worked in chart control full-time kept the station tuned to Oldies Radio, and so when I’d hear that unmistakable guitar riff at the beginning of the song, I wasn’t sure if they’d finally changed the channel to something poppy and more modern where I’d be hearing Janet’s song. They never did. It was always “Ventura Highway.”
My future husband and I actually saw America perform in Coralville—the town attached to Iowa City—in summer 2002. It seemed impossible that CORALVILLE had pulled the literal band NAMED AFTER THE COUNTRY on INDEPENDENCE DAY, but they did. My future husband and I went to the free concert because we were living in Iowa City that summer; he was working as a housekeeper at the Iowa House Hotel and I was performing Chart Control at UIHC and everything was hot and we were hot and we’d finally started doing it so that whole summer was just sweaty nights followed by sweaty mornings—to reference another Yacht Rock hit, “Abracadabra.”
My pal Jenn from UIHC OB/GYN made me a mix CD called “My partner in crime!” and the CD starts off with—what else?—Janet’s “Someone to Call My Lover”! Jenn and I did go out to the clubs—but only once. She was two years younger than me and actively looking for a dude; I was basically married to my boyfriend/future husband and I wore the dumbest outfit imaginable to the clubs: an ill-fitting black bucket hat, a green t-shirt I’d thrifted back in Terre Haute that said “Newport Antique Auto Hill Climb,” and most likely these idiotic rust-colored, oversized Levis I’d thrifted as well—I can’t see them in the photo. You know what I didn’t remember until I went looking for that stupid photo? That I HAD DRAGGED MY FUTURE HUSBAND OVER TO JENN’S APARTMENT AS WELL. I don’t know if he came out with us—that would have been even dumber, but then again what was I doing? Helping Jenn look for her lover? I had mine, and his ass was probably headed over to hang out with the losers from his freshman dorm, a bunch of bros who still called him “Mahi” in a wu-ha-ha voice, living in the shitty AUR apartments nearby. Maybe the apartment room I was renting that year was covered in dust and the floor was scraped and chipped wood, but it was A HUMAN HOUSE, not part of the AUR fail complex.
I know I’m digressing into Iowa City shorthand. I’m betting a lot of you know it. It's a gift not everybody gets, having their college town constantly surveilled and recorded for posterity thanks to the keen eyes of the Iowa Writers Workshoppers. Precious, protected Iowa City, a bastion of culture in the middle of the cornfields—even UIowa used that phrase on their marketing materials. It’s as good a setting as any for a writer to be paying attention and grabbing “real life” situations for their fiction: everyone wants to record the years they overdrank, slept over, fucked around and indeed found out. I drank down the early chapters of Leslie Jamison’s nonfiction book The Recovering as she gleefully namechecked all the places the Writers Workshop people would know, because I knew them too. I didn’t have to go to the Workshop to live in Iowa City. The writers who came to that town with their bachelor’s under their belts were most likely not looking for a husband or a wife but truly, someone to call their lover. Makes for a better story, anyway, getting loved and left. Or loving and leaving.
“Ventura Highway” is a song about leaving, by the way. Dewey Bunnell, the guy who wrote and sang “Ventura Highway,” said that “the song reminds me of the time I lived in Omaha as a kid and how we’d walk through cornfields and chew on pieces of grass.”
Omaha, hmm? Blessings be, because that’s the city where I’ve been living with my husband since we graduated from Iowa. Some people say this town don’t look good in snow, but I love it here. We first drove from Iowa City to Omaha (IN THE SNOW) for Valentine’s Day 2002 after we’d been dating for just over four months, and a guy named Sultan took us on the Courtyard Marriott shuttle bus down 10th Street to the Old Market; my future husband and I went into The French Café and tried to get served but we were nineteen and when we got turned down, we ordered cappuccinos instead, sitting by the fireplace, hands between each other’s legs before we returned to the hotel where, a touch over three years later, my future husband would take me to make his proposal. Of course I said yes.
I knew eight couples who met their spouses at Iowa: the first to marry was divorced within three years, the second set were divorced within two, the third remain married, we remain married, the fifth divorced after six or seven years, the sixth just separated, the seventh remain married, the eighth remain married: 4/8, right on point for the divorce rate. You know who else is still together? The couple who decided to just call one another their lover. Better odds!
My husband’s best friend also married the girl he began dating in college, and they WALKED DOWN THEIR WEDDING AISLE TO “GYMNOPÉDIE NO. 1.” Like wedding chimes in that damn song, those notes in “Gymnopédie No. 1,” some sort of back-of-brain subconscious connector between finding someone to call your lover and then MAKING THEM YOUR SPOUSE.
Did y’all ever read Tom Wolfe’s college tome “I Am Charlotte Simmons”? The protagonist, Charlotte, is this girl who goes to “Dupont University” (Duke) from her small hometown in western North Carolina, and we see the horrors of early-2000s college play out as Smart and Principled Charlotte recoils at first before reluctantly assimilating into “being like everyone else.” There’s this scene where Charlotte’s roommate Beverly comes back from the clubs and drunkenly moans at Charlotte about how she’s gotta find the lacrosse players because this one dude was talking to Beverly at the bar but then he left, and Beverly is like I gotta go find him while he’s still interested! and Beverly makes Charlotte drive her drunk ass back to the club (dude is obv long gone) and THEN! THEN! all the way to boy-o’s DORM, where Beverly still can’t convince the guy to let her stay the night—though in the morning, Charlotte looks at Beverly’s bed and she isn’t there; Charlotte realizes Beverly “must have finally sobbed, whined, wheedled her way back into the bed of her lacrosse player.”
That’s what I think of when I hear “Someone to Call My Lover”: the girls, like me, who wanted to be wanted—the girls who went out night after night hoping to find a boy who’d tell them she was the one, maybe. I’m a woman who is somehow still with her college sweetheart after twenty-two years; I don’t often reminisce about looking for someone to call my lover because I found him very early. When we stop through Iowa City—which we do frequently, as it’s on our Midwesterners-will-always-choose-driving-instead-of-flying route from Omaha to my in-laws’ house in Detroit—we drive the kids up Dubuque Street, point out the dorm I lived in, the corner where we first said “I love you” to each other, the pair of houses on Iowa Ave where we lived across the street from one another (I don’t mention we nearly always slept together at his). We make our kids walk through the Ped Mall with us and even though, every time, all I can do is remark on how much it’s changed, my husband points out all the places that are still the same. Prairie Lights is still there. Java House is still there. SpoCo’s still there, and August is always ushering in a fresh clutch of hopeful lovers.

Kristine Langley Mahler also took her marriage cues from the seminal 2001 club remix of J Lo’s “I’m Real.” Remember Ja Rule’s rap, “They be looking at me, smiling at me, laughing like we wasn’t happy/But not knowing that we’re growing and we’re gettin’ married/Hard lovin’, straight-thuggin’/Bitch, I ain’t doin’ this shit for nothing”??? Kristine is a memoirist on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska; author of two nonfiction books, A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus Books, 2023) and Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022); and her feet are literally not that great. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.