Seventeen In '88 - Installment 43: Afterword/Afterward, Then Forward

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

Afterword/Afterward, Then Forward

First, a quick note. This is the final installment in the Seventeen In ’88 series. If you’re stumbling across this blog for the first time, this series has been an exploration of one person’s experience as a seventeen-year-old music geek, seen through the prism of the records he was listening to at the time, circa 1988.  There’s also, occasionally, for inconsistency's sake, some baseball stuff thrown in. The series is over now, but it’s all still archived here, in sequenced installments, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. (And why wouldn’t you be?) If you are interested, it probably helps to read ‘em in order, but damn, that’s a lot of reading, so if you only wanna read one or two, or three, I like this one, and this one, and this one.

Peace & Jaundice will be going on a brief hiatus over the holidays and will resume regular activity in January, hopefully with more music, more dirty jokes, and fewer boring stories of glory days. Though I won’t make any promises. 

Our story ends, appropriately enough, with neither a bang nor a whimper. It's more like a long sigh or groan. A motorcycle sputtering out. A record spinning in the locked groove at the end of a side, waiting for someone to flip it over.

Yeah, that last one.

Life moves in stages, extended periods of time, sometimes lasting a few weeks, sometimes a few years, usually defined by whatever mood or feeling is prevalent at the time. With the benefit or curse of retrospect these stages take on an all-but-physical shape, shades of shifting tones and colors, free-flowing, in and out of focus. The dividing lines, the beginnings and endings, are determined in hindsight, and usually defined by external, real-world events – a move, a new job, a romantic relationship starting or ending.

1988, the year I was seventeen, was defined by a sense of uncertainty – confusion, excitement and apprehension about the future; the exploratory, open-minded joy of young love, lust, and new friendships; the disillusionment that comes with the withering of those relationships and the harsh realization that everything, your hopes, your ideals, life itself, can be pulled out from under you at any moment, for no good reason.

In my little world, all of that uncertainty had a soundtrack, a series of songs and albums that defined and illuminated that time. Music, for me, was the most convenient way to make sense of it all, or to blur it all out so I didn’t have to think about it. They say, though as usual I’m not sure who “they” are (scientists? rock critics?) that the music you listen to at age seventeen is the music that stays with you, the music that you hear in the keenest way, that ends up meaning the most to you and defining the terrain of your emotional world. I don’t know if that’s true in a broad sense, for most people, but it’s probably true for me. To the point that the music during 1988 came to seem less like mere entertainment, an interesting diversion, and more like a divining spirit, a holy ghost.

That spirit’s next move was to possess my three closest friends and I, and convince us to go in together and start a band. This was our resolution to the annoyingly ever-present question of what to do with the future. That particular choice of future - our band - wouldn’t turn out to last long, about a year and a half, and it wouldn’t yield much beyond a few laughs, a lot of disappointment, more than a couple of fractured friendships, and a handful of very muddy tapes containing hours of amateurish if earnest attempts at being the next U2 or REM.

Really, I probably should have spent the last year writing about all of that instead of what happened before, in 1988. It’s a much more obviously compelling story than the one I did tell. Throughout these posts, one recurring theme is the Seinfeldian notion that sometimes shit seems to be happening even when nothing is happening. That’s what it felt like in 1988, much of the time. The next year and a half – the time that our little band was together - had way more actual drama, more intrigue and emotion, more crazy turning-of-events. It’s probably a story worth telling. Maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now I gotta go back to living in the present. Inasmuch as I am capable of doing so.

So the formation of our band is a convenient dividing line, the signpost at the crossroads of the stages of life. Even the tone and effect of the music we listened to seemed to change. Around this time, U2 released Rattle and Hum and REM released Green, but both of those seem like part of the soundtrack to another stage, the next one, 1989. They don’t resonate in my memory with the same sense of foreboding or mystery that some of the music I’ve written about does. Horses, say, or Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”. They don’t throw open the doors of the mind with the kind of crazy spontaneity and newness that Double Nickels On The Dime does, or define a feeling in the way that Talking Heads’ “Heaven” does. In fact, if this blog were a TV show, “Heaven” would play at the end of each installment/episode, over the credits.

Music does a lot of things, but for a certain kind of person, the best thing it can do is get you through. And since you never know when or from which direction the confusion is going to come flying at you next, especially at seventeen, that function – getting you through – is more useful than drugs, sex, religion or psychoanalysis could ever be. 
 

Uncertainty, then and now, can be both thrilling and frightening. As I wrote in the introduction to all of this nonsense almost a year ago, that feeling of uncertainty in 1988 was so powerful, so entrancing in some mysterious, indefinable way, that I’ve never really been able to shake it. There’s a kind of heaviness there, in both the positive and negative memories, that I’ve always been pulled back to. And weirdly, I’ve always felt a sense of obligation to it somehow, like there was something back there left undone, or that needed checking up on. And because my life is still made up of music, and I still listen to the music from that year with some degree of regularity, those memories were/are always resurfacing, reminding me of….what, exactly?

That’s what I wanted to find out, and why I started writing this. It was a therapeutic exercise, done mostly for my own psyche, to exorcise demons and to make them dance. I did my best to make it relatable, and tried to steer it away from meaningless self-absorption. I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it ended up in that territory anyway. But I’m hoping maybe somebody could or can relate somehow. 
 

As for me, it’s a cliché, but hey, whattaya know, it turns out I actually feel like a weight has been lifted. Whatever it was that my subconscious felt the need to address, that need has been satiated. I’ve learned a lot from it, actually. Not all that I learned is pleasant, certainly, especially the realization that I still adhere to so many of the beliefs, habits, and points-of-view that I did when I was seventeen. Man, it is going to be a lot of fun figuring out what to do with that.

Primarily, I learned the age-old truism that the memory is a tricky beast – coloring the events of your life with a retrospective range of emotions that don’t logically correspond to the truth or import of things as they actually happened. In other words, we remember things the way we want to. If it took forty-three posts for me to realize that boring old self-evident truth, so be it.

Really, it was worth it just for the sheer catharsis of expunging this stuff from my brain. As a means of self-therapy, I highly recommend it. 
   

So in that sense, it worked. Now it’s back to the everyday confusion of modern life. Forty-one In ’12.

Hey, some of the music from ’88 still works in that context.

Cue “Heaven”.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 42: The Leaves

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

The Leaves

Who knows why some memories fade while others linger?

Really, I guess neurologists or psychologists might have some idea, but I mean the question rhetorically. I think.

More accurately, I wonder why some small, seemingly insignificant moments will often over time take on an emotional heft completely out of proportion with their impact or import at the time that they occur. To the point that you recall them with the same sense of fondness or psychic gravity as events like births, weddings, or deaths.

Responses that include use of the term "over-sensitive weirdo" will be disregarded.

One night in Fall 1988 I was driving over to a friend's house when I passed under a cove of trees. At just the right moment a gust of wind came along, blowing a torrent of leaves down onto my car in a thick shower of color. I can still see 'em now, sweeping across the windshield, what seemed like a thousand leaves, swirling crazily, impairing my vision to the point that I nearly had to stop the car. It felt like the Gods Of Autumn were carrying out some weird ordaining, or baptism.

It was, somehow, a really moving little moment. One that has become even more moving in my memory as the years pass. A trick of the brain? Maybe. Probably. I don't give a rat's ass.

It was just one of life’s cool little moments, for whatever reason. Maybe a reason isn’t necessary. And here’s the thing, even if a reason is necessary you can make one up. You make things up as you go along in life. Not everything has to be logical.

Maybe I just needed a signpost, a totemic moment to serve as a bookend for that moment back in the winter, when I went walking in the snow and looked up at the flakes falling in the orange glow of the streetlight. The moment with the leaves serves as a convenient reverse-mirror image of that one.

Those moments were solitary ones. If you are, like me, a loner-ish, inward-drawn person, maybe it’s easy to understand how those moments can be so affecting. Thankfully, though, life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the best moments are usually the ones spent with others. Even if you are a weirdo loner type.

Once, around the same time as the night of the leaves, Emily and Regina and I spent an afternoon painting with watercolors. It was November 1^st, the day after Halloween. It was gray and cool outside, leaves everywhere. Max and I had been to Nashville the night before, specifically to go to the record store, where I bought Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece. We listened to it as we painted.

That afternoon was one of the best of my life. Everything was so calm. Each of us was in a laid-back, open frame of mind. There was no melancholy, no foreboding, no weird undercurrent of insecurity or mistrust. Instead, the mood was one of tranquility, with creativity and quiet joy flowing freely.  

We listened to the Van Morrison album twice through. Veedon Fleece is a strange album, wistful and jazzy/folky on the surface, perfect for the mood of that afternoon, but beneath that surface moves a turbulent sea of ever-changing emotions. It’s an album haunted by memories of Van’s Irish homeland, which is brought to life in vivid green on the cover. Song after song explores the loneliness and longing of One Irish Rover. “You’re so fragile you just may break and you don’t know who to ask,” he sings in “Who Was That Masked Man” and you can feel the helplessness in his every breath. “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” is the title of another key song, and I’m betting even Van doesn’t know what that really means. But there’s a hint in there, somehow, of movement, of intense need, testing boundaries, the harsh ceaseless truth of nature.

Sometimes I think the great theme in Van Morrison’s seventies music is the inevitability of change. Little wonder then, that his music figured so prominently in my world during this time. Change was a fact of everyday life. Sometimes a painful one. That’s the way it goes during those teenage years. And all subsequent years, really. But especially the teenage ones.

“We stood and watched the river flow,” Van Morrison sings in “Country Fair”, a song where the sense of stillness, of yearning for something very far away, is so acute that it’s almost physically painful. He finishes the thought with this: “We were too young to really know”.

Chasing happiness can be a frustrating, disappointing endeavor. I’m a big believer in the idea that the best moments of life are the ones you weren’t necessarily looking for. You just get lucky sometimes, and more often than you might think. I also believe, to a certain extent, that you can create your own luck. So if I could go back and talk to my seventeen-year-old self I’d try to convince him of the same thing I’m going to try to tell my forty-plus-year-old self every day from now on. That is, you need to notice and appreciate more often those things like the time those leaves fell over your car, no matter how simple it seems, or how grossly romantic the idea might be.

And you need to set up more days like that time you and Emily and Regina spent the afternoon painting. Change happens, emotions flare up and subside, give way to other emotions. All of the hurt, the frustration, the flat-out knocked-on-your-back sadness of that time period lingers on to a certain extent, true, but none of that stuff can stand up to the pure untouched pleasure of great memories like that one, and that’s fuel for living.

“We were too young to really know.”

Boy, oh boy, were we.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 41: Classic Rock Is The Naked Truth

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

Classic Rock Is The Naked Truth 

It was a dark and stormy night. Only not really. It was actually one of those nights where the threat of a thunderstorm seems to linger in the air for hour after menacing hour, without actually giving way to full-on rain and thunder. One of those nights where the wind is swirling and howling and lightning periodically flashes like some quiet, crazy strobe light. It was unnerving.

Regina and I sat in her kitchen doing homework. I was cracking up because Regina’s father and his new wife were in their bedroom, and Regina and I kept hearing moans and gasps emanating from behind the door. Regina was mortified. At one point we heard a series of slaps, sharp and rhythmic. I totally lost it. Regina just put her hands over her face and shook her head wordlessly. Looking back, I’m tempted to think it was immaturity, a lack of experience with the ways of adult sexuality that made me react with a bout of hysterics, but I also suspect it was actually just really funny. Maybe I’m still immature, but I’m betting you woulda laughed too.

It was in this atmosphere, with Regina and I attempting to concentrate on our schoolwork, trying to ignore the distraction of loud parental bedroom shenanigans, that the last ghost of the year made an appearance.

On New Year’s Eve, while Elliot and Max and I listlessly rung in 1988, Elliot swore he saw a ghost. We thought he was delusional, but the eerie feeling of that event continued to chase us down. Throughout the summer, amid the natural confusion of teenage growing pains and paranoia about the future, all set to a soundtrack of oddly ominous music, the prevailing mood had been one of dread; the atmosphere seemed to be always touched by a strange haunted quality. Then in the fall death reared it’s all-too-real-and-ugly head.

On the night of the hilarious sex sounds and the pseudo-storm Regina and I were sitting quietly at her kitchen table, concentrating hard, lost in academia, when only a few feet away from us the back door of her house opened, all the way, all by itself, slowly, with a sick creak.

Neither of us said anything, we just looked at the door, then back at each other, wide-eyed.  Beyond the door there was nothing but the black sky and the trees swaying madly in the wind.

We started laughing, a little uneasily. Of course it was only the wind that jarred the door open, but hell, it may as well have been a ghost. I like to think it was the same ghost from New Year’s Eve, having grown tired of hanging out with me and my group of friends all year, finally deciding to say goodbye and head off to haunt somebody else. Yeah, that works. Dammit, you create closure where you find it.

1988, or 1988 as I think of it, was ending. One phase of my teenage life was morphing into another. Life moves in phases. Maybe we make those phases up in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and all that. But still.

The soundtrack for this phase, late fall 1988, towards the end of my age seventeen year, was classic rock radio. One of the local rock stations had recently shifted to the then fairly new classic rock format, and it was still enough of a novelty that we listened to it all the time. In addition to the predictable Zeppelin, Stones and ZZ Top the station also played some selected modern acts. So these days whenever I hear “Angel Of Harlem” by U2 or “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS it makes me think of driving to or from school in fall 1988. The sound of those songs makes the memory so vivid I can taste it, the sensation is almost physical. 

The personal connection between that time and those songs may seem like a quaint, virtually meaningless memory, but think of your own equivalent songs, whatever they may be, and the emotional resonance those songs carry with them. This is what music does. It’s a weirdly heavy thing. When I mention “Never Tear Us Apart” it’s more than some kind of wistful memory of bygone teenage days (though it definitely is that, too). It carries with it a kind of depth - part joy, part pain. Small doses of each, maybe, but still, it’s real. Like a scar.

And this effect can happen with great songs, mediocre songs, terrible songs, the whole gamut. Whatever hits you in a certain way, in a certain moment. Make no apologies. Maybe for you it was “Sea Of Love”, or “Stairway To Heaven”, or “Sweet Child Of Mine” or “I Want It That Way” or that stupid song about the way Mick Jagger dances. Er, I mean, I guess that song's not stupid. Especially if it means something to you. MAKE NO APOLOGIES.  

For me, one of the songs that hit at just the right moment in Fall 1988 was “Night Moves” by Bob Seger. These days I think there’s maybe a perception of Seger’s classic rock stalwart as a cheesy song, made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché. But so what? A good deal of life is made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché, who says you can’t revel in it every now and again, if you want.

I’d been hanging out with Regina regularly, and every night I’d drive home from her house and listen to the classic rock station. It was probably the night of the sex and the storm that I heard “Night Moves”. That seems like the right combination to lend extra resonance to the song.

We all have different lives, different experiences, but we also each have common denominator experiences, too, whether we want to admit to it or not. Clichés become clichés because they’re true, as the horrible cliché goes. 

So I’m driving home with the fall colors all around and Regina on the brain and Seger’s song comes on and for whatever reason I found myself relating to it in a way that I never had before. Seger sings about being too tall, says he coulda used a few pounds. I wasn’t tall, but I could relate to being gawky, physically insecure. Then he sings about he and his black-haired beauty, out past the corn fields, in his ’60 Chevy. I drove a gray ’82 Ford Escort. Not quite as romantic, but what are ya gonna do.  

Those kind of details don't matter anyway. What matters is the gist of it, and that’s outlined in the breakdown towards the end of the song. In the early nineties the comedy/folk singer Wally Pleasant had a song where towards the end he lowered his tone to a hush and announced “Okay, here’s the quiet dramatic part, like Bruce Springsteen would do.” I think he may have also been thinking of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves”. Maybe I’m a gullible simp, but the quiet dramatic part of “Night Moves” gets me every single time.

That night I actually pulled over so I could listen more intently to this song that I’d already heard a thousand times without really hearing it. So I’m sitting on the side of the road as Seger strums a few gentle chords and sings about sitting in bed listening to the thunder. Remembering a time he didn’t “have so much to lose”. I was acutely aware when I was a teenager that I should be milking each moment of those years while I could, but I don’t think I understood why. That line sums it up. You will never have so many roads open to you again, so little weight to carry around.

Then there’s this, sung so gently, so matter-of-factly: “Strange how the night moves…with autumn closing in.” The music lingers on the languid strumming for a while before building back up. Autumn, for Seger, in the case of this song, is obviously adulthood - unknowable, unstoppable.

I’d been freaking out about that unknowable future for the whole year, and suddenly here's Bob Seger, not solving any of my problems for me, but providing some kind of perspective, at least.

Things were changing. Phases ending, phases beginning. The creepy ominous feeling so prevalent throughout the year was fading. A fog was lifting, but new problems would fall into place, as they always do. The next few months would consist of a lot of clumsy maneuvering through a lot of stumbling blocks. I thought at the time that those would eventually clear up, but I was wrong. Way wrong. They never clear up. They just change shape, multiply, dissolve and reappear. All you can do is deal with it. Everything passes, everything changes, do what you think you should do. Bob Dylan said that.

The naked truth, the horrible truth, the wonderful truth, is that you make everything up as you go along. I said that.

       

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 40: A Howlin' Wind Runs Through Here, Or How I Missed The Single Greatest Moment In The Recent History Of My Favorite Sports Team

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

A Howlin' Wind Runs Through Here, Or How I Missed The Single Greatest Moment In The Recent History Of My Favorite Sports Team 

October is my favorite month. (I mean, c'mon, who doesn't have a favorite month?) I decided on the tenth month of the calendar year pretty early on in life. After all, when you’re a kid, Halloween is second only to Christmas when it comes to the levels of excitement and giddy anticipation. There’s also the vivid atmosphere of October, what with the arrival of autumn and its colors and cool air and dying things. Scary movies, pumpkins, caramel apples. And then there's the baseball playoffs, and the World Series. 

Baseball has a history in which superstition figures pretty heavily. Players have their rituals, like Wade Boggs eating chicken before games, or Mark Fidrych talking to the ball, and fans have any number of weird little things they do in the hopes that it will help their team. In the mid-eighties, whenever the Dodgers were televised, I would often leave the room while the opposing team was batting, thinking that they wouldn't score  if I wasn’t watching. Don’t ask me where this logic came from, but it seemed to work often enough that I kept doing it. So yeah, all those great games pitched by Valenzuela, Hershiser, Welch, Reuss? That was actually my doing.

As the Dodgers moved through September and on through the postseason in 1988 I had a good luck charm in the form of a record – Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind. Don’t ask why it was that particular record, it just came to be, pretty much arbitrarily. Though the title track does certainly hint at the kind of mysterious voodoo the Dodgers seemed to be using in making everything go right for them.

It was also kind of a good luck charm in reverse, in that I would only listen to the record after the games instead of before. Which of course makes no sense, how can a charm work its magic after the fact? But seriously, man, logic is overrated. I mean, baseball is hardly ever logical. If it was, the Yankees would win every year. Oh yeah, the Yankees do win every year. So they’re the exception that proves the rule, yeah? No? Whatever.

Anyway, I don’t know why I chose this album of hard-edged, fiery British pub-rock to soundtrack the Dodgers postseason adventures. Upbeat as they were, all those exercises in r & b-inflected roots rock couldn't have been much further removed from the sports world, or even anything going on in the music world in 1988. Maybe the song titles tell some of the story; “Soul Shoes” exemplifying the verve and grit that the Dodgers brought to their play, “Gypsy Blood” the never-say-die spirit, “Not If It Pleases Me” the boundless confidence bordering on arrogance.

Nah, it isn’t any of that. I just happened to listen to it the night the Dodgers clinched a playoff birth. Being a creature of habit, or possibly a slave to weird self-imposed OCD-like order, I carried the new tradition over to listening after each game during Orel Hershiser’s pursuit of Don Drysdale’s consecutive scoreless innings record, then kept it going through the Championship Series against the Mets. Next stop, World Series.

Game One of the Series took place on a Saturday, and I had to attend a Speech & Drama tournament that day, which meant that I would miss the first few innings, possibly the whole game. So I set the VCR, and set off for the tournament that day safe in the knowledge that I would be able to watch the whole game after the fact as if I was watching in real time, an activity that would depend on not finding out the final score beforehand.

Turns out we got home that night around nine-ish and of course I couldn’t resist turning on the TV at Max’s house to see what was happening. I turned it on just in time to see the Dodgers rallying. Mike Scioscia had singled to cut the score to a 4-3 Oakland A’s lead in the sixth inning. Just as I had my hopes up, the very next batter, Dodgers third baseman Jeff Hamilton, grounded into a double play, killing the rally. I blamed myself for watching.

Like everybody else in the group, I was still filled with the nervous energy and adrenaline of that day’s competition. Yes, theatre geeks get hyped up about competition, too. Sometimes. So everybody wanted to get out of the house. “C’mon, let’s go do something.” As always, it was an open question as to what we might actually do. Small town. Limited options.

One of the things we liked to do, strangely, was hang out at the Holiday Inn. I think being there amid the bustle and energy of travelers, with the smell of room service food and swimming pool chlorine in the air made us feel like we were out on the road, elsewhere. It was an oddly invigorating, if only vicarious, sensation.

So I relented to the urge to get out, figuring I could listen to the game on the radio. Max, who had only recently become a baseball fan, and therefore hadn’t yet acquired the jittery, jangled nerves of the fan who’d watched his team repeatedly come close only to fall short, stayed behind to watch.

I drove. We pulled into the parking lot at Holiday Inn and Roger, Regina and Emily went in. I told ‘em I’d be in momentarily. It was the top of the ninth, and Alejandro Pena was setting the A’s down with relative ease. Oakland still led by a run, though. The Dodgers would have one last chance in the bottom of the inning.

I debated. I wanted to go in and hang out with my friends. Fun was beckoning. I didn’t want to suffer the disappointment of listening to the Dodgers lose.

I’d already endured 1982, when Joe Morgan hit a home run on the last day of the season to dash the Dodgers playoff hopes, and 1983, when the Phillies' Gary Matthews could do no wrong against the Dodgers in the NLCS, and 1985, when first Ozzie Smith and then Jack F***ing Clark may as well have just come over to the house of fourteen year-old rabid Dodger fan JB Bennett and stabbed him in the guts repeatedly with a sharp knife.  

Look, I figured, I’m taping the game, so if anything interesting happens, which it probably won't,  I’ll be able to see it later. Besides, nothing really good ever happens in Game One anyway.

I don’t even remember what my friends and I did. All I remember is a frantic, breathless Max, barely able to collect and contain himself as he recounted what had happened upon our return to his house.

What happened, of course, has passed on into the realm of baseball legend and American myth. The details have been hashed over so often that it's redundant to do so here, yet the moment retains enough sheer wonder that I can’t help but indulge a bit. Kirk Gibson, the Dodgers unquestioned on-field leader and all-around tough guy, who was not expected to play in this game if at all in the series, simply pulled off the clutchiest of clutch at-bats in a year and career that had already seen more than his fair share. With legs so banged up that he quite literally could barely walk, Gibson hobbled to the plate to pinch hit against Dennis Eckersly, the future Hall Of Fame reliever who had enjoyed one of his most untouchable seasons that year. Flailing and grimacing his way to a 3-2 count, Gibson finally launched one of Eck’s back-door sliders in a gorgeous arc to the right field stands for an I-don’t-believe-what-I-just-saw game-winning two-run home run. The stuff of Hollywood, the stuff of childhood fantasy, all that. 

And I missed it. Sure, I watched it on tape later (I still have the tape, 1988 commercials and all – I watch it after the season every year to remind myself that the Dodgers once tasted genuine glory), but somehow all these years I’ve felt like I missed out on the real magic of the moment. I’ve also suspected that had I been watching, it might not have happened. Such is the weird psychology of baseball superstition.

The impact of the moment didn’t really hit me that night. I thought of it as just another game that the Dodgers were lucky to get away with winning. They still had to win three more against a formidable A’s team that was probably way better than the Dodgers, at least on paper. I didn’t like the odds, and couldn’t allow myself to let one great moment get my hopes up.

Still, I had a tradition to uphold, so after watching the tape I went up to my room and as usual after a Dodgers win put on the Graham Parker album. “White Honey” (a song about cocaine, fitting for ‘80’s baseball) never sounded so lively, “Nothing’s Gonna Pull Us Apart” so determined, “Don’t Ask Me Questions” so defiant. And those ominous organ build-ups in “Howlin’ Wind” sounded extra eerie, spurring Parker on as he growls a warning that an ill wind is blowing, taking his breathe away. That song, so redolent of autumn’s chill, always brings to mind the image of Kirk Gibson limping around the bases pumping his fist whenever I listen to it now.

Gibson’s home run, of course, set the tone, and Orel Hershiser did much of the rest of the heavy lifting as the Dodgers brushed the newly-punchless A’s aside in five games. As a Dodgers fan, I’ve been coasting on that elation for twenty-four years now. A guy has to hold onto something in a world that sometimes seems so desperate, so thin on inspiration. After all, like Graham Parker sang, a howling wind runs through here, so we gotta rock before the fever is upon us all.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 39: Fall 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

Fall 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music  

First day of school. Roger and I try to ease the anxiety caused by the impending school year by telling ourselves that since this year we’re seniors and we drive our own cars we’re gonna be respected, dammit. At the opening assembly there is a group of cute sophomore-year alterna-girls sitting near us. We amuse ourselves by jokingly encouraging one another to go up to them, hold up our keys and ask “Hey baby, you need a ride? I'm a Senior, you know.” During the early weeks of the school year, and beyond, Roger and I spend an inordinate amount of time each earnestly trying to cajole the other into actually speaking to one of the girls. Neither of us will speak to any of them during the course of the entire school year.

Movie nights. Movies, movies, boy do we love movies. Even completely forgettable ones. A group of us goes to see a movie every Monday. Movie Monday we call it, ‘cos we’re not terribly creative. Among the now-largely-forgotten movies we see in fall 1988: Eight Men Out, John Sayles’ account of the 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal (a little dry but still pretty good, and fairly historically accurate); Clean & Sober, with Michael Keaton as a recovering drug addict (depressing, but fairly watchable, mainly due to Keaton’s performance - it supposedly contributed to his landing the lead role in Batman); Heartbreak Hotel, with David Keith as Elvis Presley, kidnapped and held hostage by teenagers in 1972 (Just…godawful. Director Chris Columbus would go on to direct Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and several Harry Potter movies). The absolute king of forgettable fall 1988 films however, is a little movie called Kansas. That title is just about the most compelling thing about it, which says a lot. It stars Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy – Regina asked Max and I to see the movie because she had a crush on the latter – in a film so unbelievably bland, so ridiculously uninteresting, that years later, when we stumble across it on late night television, Max has no recollection of ever even having heard of it, much less having seen it. I'd suspect the movie might be some kind of weird ill-remembered dream if not for the IMDB entry that confirms its existence.   

My job at the radio station requires that I endure some less-than-great music. In two different formats, even. On the Adult Contemporary side I am regularly Rick-rolled – “Together Forever” is Astley’s big hit in fall ’88 – and I probably hear The Beach Boys’ nausea-inducing “Kokomo” at least three times as much as the average American, which is a lot. And way too much. On the Country end, while I have to tolerate atrocities like Hank Jr.’s “If The South Would Have Won”, I also open my ears enough to realize that not only is some of that old stuff pretty great, but so are some of the more recent acts, like Randy Travis and Patty Loveless. Also, Highway 101’s “Do You Love Me (Just Say Yes)” combines and countrifies the unerringly sound musicality of classic Brian Wilson with the delicate, euphoric touch of early Beatles. Which is a damn neat trick.

Regina has a part-time job delivering newspapers after school. For the heck of it, I start to chip in and help. There’s something relaxing about it – folding and rubber-banding all the papers neatly, then making the rounds to all the same houses as the day before, the air slightly chilly, leaves falling all around. The day after our friend and classmate RD is found dead we have to look at his picture on the front page a good fifty or so times as we fold each paper. There was nothing relaxing about that.

NLCS Game 4. Dodgers down 4-2 in the ninth inning. Dwight Gooden cruising, on his way to giving the Mets a 3-1 series edge. I’m listening to the game on the radio in the car, but I get home during the ninth inning. I consider staying in the car to listen, but I figure Gooden’s about to wrap it up anyway, so I turn off the engine and head inside. By the time I get inside and turn the game back on the crowd at Shea Stadium has gone eerily silent, a sound that fills me with disbelieving joy. Turns out Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia has hit a game-tying two-run home run, a feat that sets the Dodgers up for a high-wire, against-all-odds victory, and ultimately a Series win. As long as I live, Mike Scioscia is welcome to come into my house, eat all my food, drink all my liquor and take any valuables that he may like. I will merely smile and say, “Sure Mike, anything you want, and thanks again for hitting that home run off Gooden back in ’88.”

 

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money. From its Sgt. Pepper take-off cover to it’s smarmy version of “Hey Joe”, retitled “Hey Punk” (as in “Hey punk, where you goin’ with that flower in your hand? / I’m goin’ down to ‘Frisco, gonna join a psychedelic band”), it’s a record by smartasses for smartasses. As a budding smartass, I fall for it hard. The music is inventive, colorful, and funny, and the skewering of the hippie peace, love, and drugs ethos is especially attractive to my seventeen-year-old punk-besotted self. Also, song titles like “Hot Poop” are especially attractive to my inner five-year-old. It wouldn’t take long for my mindset to readjust, though, and nowadays while my sense of the puerile is still for-better-or worse intact – “Let’s Make The Water Turn Black” is still pretty funny – my tolerance for smarm has waned considerably, and as topical humor tends to do, most of the satire has aged poorly. It might be worth pointing out that the ugliest part of the body is the mind, but isn’t it also worth pointing out that the mind can be endlessly creative, useful, beautiful? And if simply asking that question makes me a damn hippie, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  

One night while browsing for video rentals we stumble across a little gem called Attack of the Killer Bimbos. Being wholeheartedly in favor of stretching the bounds of pure, senseless stupidity to maximum, we rented it, of course. Everything about the movie has faded from my memory except one thing - an extra's delivery of one fantastic line. With all of the gusto of someone who’s been waiting his whole life for one big moment in the spotlight, and all the flatness-of-delivery of someone who has never acted in his life, a cowboy-hatted gent declares, southern drawl drawing out each syllable: “Oh, no! A bimbo with a gun!”

Emily’s brothers have a Nintendo game set. Since we hang out there all the time, Max, Elliot and I are all soon enough completely addicted to Super Mario Brothers. Our world for weeks on end becomes a blur of giant mushrooms, coins, fireballs and evil turtles. We’re so enthralled with the game that Emily becomes irritated with us, as we frequently end up staying at her house well past appropriate hours, sometimes even making ourselves late for work. When we finally figure out how to win the game, the feeling is anticlimactic, even bittersweet. Luckily, we soon discover Tetris.

Randy Newman’s Sail Away. Based on his fiery, blood-and-guts reading of Danny Whitten’s “Gone Dead Train” on the soundtrack to Performance, I pick up Sail Away expecting a raw, blues-based rock’n’roll experience. Instead it’s full of piano ballads and smooth orchestral arrangements. What it lacks in liveliness it makes up for in humor, with plentiful dashes of empathy to chase away any bitter aftertaste left behind by the also plentiful irony. Newman ends the album with “God’s Song”, an easy-target tune in which The Creator appears as a megalomaniacal beast who laughs at man’s prayers. More effective is the simple, piano-backed “He Gives Us All His Love”, which comes across as a straightforward hymn, like The Velvet Underground’s “Jesus”. But there’s a sadness in the sound that calls into question the singer’s sincerity, and a beauty that in turn calls into question whether the degree of sincerity even matters. Also, there’s “Political Science”, where the narrator wants to nuke everybody outside the good old USA. Everybody, that is, except Australia. "Don't wanna hurt no kangaroos."

The crystal ball, blurred. Elliot, Max, Roger and I have been discussing for months now the idea of starting a rock and roll band. As the weeks progress, the idea snowballs, taking on a seriousness that feels a little deeper than it probably should for guys so young. Before most of us (Max already played guitar) have even picked up an instrument, we have a name – Myth, taken from Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth Adventures series of comedic fantasy books. One night I’m driving home and I stop by the park. The onset of autumn, with the cooler weather and dead leaves all around, has made me feel reflective, uneasy. I feel like a band, a life in noise and creativity, may be the only real way out of an otherwise hopelessly mundane existence. I walk over to a flat stretch of sand. Using a nearby stick, I write the word “MYTH” in big letters in the sand. I walk off wondering how long it will take for rain to wash it away.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 38: Everything Passes, Everything Changes, Do What You Think You Should Do

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer. 

Everything Passes, Everything Changes, Do What You Think You Should Do 

I’d always wanted to do that thing you see in movies where the guy goes to the girl’s house in the middle of the night and throws pebbles at her bedroom window. So I did. I’m not sure what I hoped to accomplish. Emily’s parents’ bedroom was right at the base of a very creaky stairway and they no doubt would have woken up if she tried to go outside. But I was caught up in the ridiculous romance of the idea, so I tried it anyway.

I’d just finished my shift at the radio station and it was after midnight. I was grateful to have that job, but I also found it to be an irritating distraction from my social life – I often felt like I was missing out on FUN. While everyone else was out doing wild & crazy teenage stuff I was stuck in a cramped little room listening to Rick Astley.

The fact that I wasn’t really missing out on much genuine excitement did nothing to curb this feeling. I remember one night Emily told me that while I had been at work she and a few of our friends were hanging out at Burger King, as was the tradition at the time, when a group of other kids our age began throwing french fries and shouting “Speech fags!” in our clan’s general direction. This kind of thing wasn’t all that unusual, and it wasn’t particularly pleasant when it did happen. And yet I was still sad that I had missed out on it.

There were perks that made up for it, though. Like for instance we got to broadcast all the playoff and World Series games. So when they asked me to work on the night of Game One of the National League Championship Series, I jumped at it.

The Dodgers were my team, had been for about ten years, and this was my fourth playoff go-round with them. Unfortunately they were matched up against a stacked Mets team that had won the World Series only two years before and had soundly thrashed the Dodgers to the tune of a 11-1 record during the 1988 regular season. I didn’t expect the Dodgers to win. I just hoped they’d put up a fight, prove that they deserved to be there.

So when King of Shutouts Orel Hershiser made the Mets look hapless for eight innings I was relieved and elated. Riding high. Our ace is going to throw yet another shutout.

I should have known better. Things started to unravel in the ninth, Howell relieved Hershiser and it all culminated in a ball smacked off the bat of the late great Gary Carter that just eluded Dodger center fielder John Shelby’s glove to give the Mets a 3-2 victory. I felt like a balloon deflating slowly, depressingly.

Never get your hopes up. At least in baseball.

The mood was languid for the rest of the night. Max and I sat stone-faced, listening to the adult contemporary tunes cranking out on the reel to reel, one three-minute bit of saccharine after another. Air Supply. Richard Marx. Bread. Urgh.

 

Cat Stevens' “Oh Very Young” came up, and somehow that lifted my spirits. It’s a fey, cloying little tune, the kind of thing that I ordinarily might have considered a little too cute. But somehow, on this night, it sounded right – the melody unspooling like yarn and the lyrics advising young people to feel it all while they’re still young. “You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.”

Maybe that’s what inspired me to go throw pebbles at Emily’s window. Maybe it was a combination of that and the recent up-close brush with mortality. You want things to last forever but you know they never will.

So I found myself out in the yard in front of her house, picking at the dirt near the driveway, trying to find suitably tiny rocks. Tossing gently enough to avoid breaking anything, but hard enough to make noise.

Emily didn’t respond. She told me the next day she heard the sound, but just thought it was a tree branch in the wind, or the house settling or something. It didn’t really matter. The romance of the moment shone through somehow, in some small way, despite the missed connection. Nothing happens and it still feels like something is happening.

 

Emily was so very bright, exceedingly mature, full of grace in body and mind. When she entered the picture earlier in the year she’d been somewhat shy and a little awkward, but in no time she became a central figure in our little clan, the steady hand that everyone turned to for guidance, for assistance in matters academic, philosophical or practical. A force of nonstop positivity. She was aware of her strengths, but she didn't make a big deal about it, a quality that made her extremely likeable, attractive. She was human like the rest of us of course, prone to the same lulls in confidence and errors in judgment that we all contend with, but somehow even her faults worked to enhance her preternaturally gifted aura.

“And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.”

There was too much going on in my mind. Job, death, school, future. My favorite team losing another playoff series. Ego and insecurity swarming around the brain like buzzing parasites. I was seventeen, and like most seventeen year-olds I had no idea what was going on. Around this time I broke off the relationship with Emily.

It was a little like Judge Reinhold's hapless character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High obliviously trying to tell his girlfriend hey, we’re gonna be seniors this year, and we really oughtta be free to explore, see other people. Just as awkward, not near as funny.  

I didn't know for sure if it was the right decision, but I was never too sure about any decision I ever made. I just knew something was wrong, and I had to figure it out.

There would be all kinds of regret, resentment, jealousies, accusations, recriminations, apologies, late-night phone calls and tear-stained letters ahead. Not only between Emily and I, but between almost every other member of our group. Everyone would fall in love, only to fall out with one another at least once, sometimes repeatedly, over the next several months. Sometimes the reconciliations would be very slow in coming. This happens to every group of close friends in all walks of life, doesn’t it?

  

But all that stuff is a long way away, and I’m only concerned with 1988, specifically early fall 1988, and what the mood was then, when the Dodgers were in the playoffs and RD died and Max, Roger, Elliot and I decided to start a band and Emily and I broke up. The latter was just one ending in a series. Stories don’t really ever have endings except the ones you create in retrospect.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 37: In Search Of Jolt Cola

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

In Search Of Jolt Cola

As summer morphed into fall the tone of everyday life took on a stale, washed-out quality. The shock of RD’s death, combined with my own personal philosophical turn to a raw-nerved truth-at-any-cost outlook on life, had left a bitter aftertaste. The leaves changed color and the weather turned cooler, but the prevailing mood was one of listlessness.

By this time I had a way of finding the right records to illuminate whatever mood prevailed. Or the records had a way of finding me. Sly And The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On had been on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Albums the year before, so given my relentless dedication to lists, it was natural I should be all over it. The accompanying blurb called it a blues album, and that sounded like the right kind of formula to help dissolve some malaise.

The only thing I knew about Sly and The Family Stone was their appearance in the Woodstock movie, where they performed a glitzy, loose-limbed, downright inspirational version of "(I Wanna Take You) Higher”. Based on that, plus exposure to “Dance To The Music” and “Everyday People” on oldies radio, I thought they were some kind of feel-good funk’n’roll party band. Which they were, kind of, at least early on. But, as I was in the process of learning out there in the real world, life is seldom so cut-and-dried simple, and things are almost never what they seem to be on the surface. Also, change happens, to everything and everyone, and it can sometimes be really fucking drastic.

The album opens with a slow-building, burbling bass and drum pattern, accompanied by a strange, treated wah-wah guitar sound and a choir of woozy gospel-ish voices moaning in the background. Then Sly comes in, his voice a combination of resignation and bemusement, and sets the tone for the rest of the album: “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” That line pretty much nails the feeling of the whole record - it's a long junkie nod, set to jagged, slow-motion dance rhythms.

The sessions for There’s A Riot Goin’ On were a darkly debauched affair. All of Sly Stone’s success, fame and money had fostered in him an ever-expanding sense of paranoia. He holed up in a sprawling Los Angeles mansion, surrounded by shady, gun-toting hangers-on with a never-ending drug supply, and beholden to a helpless creative obsession. He dubbed new parts over the master tapes so frequently that the sound of Riot is muddy and faded, an effect that only enhances the mood of alienation.

Like Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, it’s an album about disillusionment. Growing up and growing down. Fooling yourself. Cop-outs and craziness. Sly is a spaced cowboy poet out and down without a friend in the asphalt jungle. Crying just like a  baby.

It’s an entrancing listen, if you’re in the mood. Which is to say, if you’re not in the mood for much of anything.

I was in the mood for taking my mind off of the fact that I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. Which is where the Jolt Cola comes in.

The Sly Stone album had been lent to me by Regina’s father. Regina was a new addition to our group. Previously she had moved among the straighter, more popular clans of our class. She’d grown tired of the egos and petty backbiting there, and decided she needed a new crowd. It wouldn’t take long to realize that inflated egos and petty backbiting were just as prevalent among theater nerds, maybe more so. She hung out with us anyway, and we began to use the big, brand new house she'd just moved into as our primary center of congregation. And that's where we ended up on the night we all went looking to score Jolt Cola.

The Great Jolt Cola Search Of 1988 may have been an effort to show Regina how funny and cool and “offbeat” we were. Or maybe it was just another self-conscious attempt at weirdness for its own sake. We had a habit of taking a seemingly silly, mundane idea and creating a happening around it. This was a side effect of being young weirdos in a small town.

In any case, while other teenagers were out looking to score alcohol or pot or trying to get laid, we spent the better part of one Friday night scouring our town’s convenience stores for cans of Jolt Cola. The soft drink had acquired a strange notoriety in the mid-eighties for its crazy-high doses of caffeine and sugar. It was Coca-Cola on steroids. Which to us sounded like a fabulously absurd idea.

We were all mentally worn out from the events of the previous days and weeks. The murderer who had torn through our little town had been caught within a few days of RD’s death. He was, as might be expected, a particularly disturbed individual. At the time I felt only rage and bewilderment when I'd think about him. He was a year older than RD and myself, and I’d actually shared a split-grade classroom with him during one year of grade school. Once, we had each accidentally worn the other’s similar-looking coat home from school. My mother remembered that, and when she reminded me it absolutely sent a chill to the core of my being.

Such thin lines exist between us. What are the factors distributed among three kids of roughly the same age that leave one of them dead, one of them deranged and the other sifting through the details trying to make sense of it all?

Everyone felt drained. Or agitated. A strange combination - both worked up and worn out.

Some serious unwinding needed to be done, and the regular stuff - listening to records, driving around aimlessly, etc - wasn’t going to do the job thoroughly enough. We needed an event, the stupider the better. Nothing reflective or morose, please. As Otter said in Animal House: "I think this situation requires that a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!" And we were just the guys to do it. 

We must have gone to about ten stores before hitting the jackpot. When we finally found the motherlode of Jolt Cola in a musty convenience store on the outskirts of town it felt like a real accomplishment. We cheered and laughed and celebrated. At the very least it was a small catharsis.

The subsequent sugar rush left me so monumentally jacked up that my memory of the remainder of the evening is sketchy - all a blur of jittery nerves and indistinct chatter. A swelling of raw commotion morphing into a slow fade, Sly Stone's spidery Riot rhythms emerging to carry us into the fuzzy early morning hours.

As the Jolt high was reaching its peak, someone put Sid & Nancy in the VCR. The viewing progressed in a rollercoaster arc, with everyone initially laughing and shouting at the screen, Mystery Science Theatre-style, carried along on the infectious momentum of Sid Vicious’ rise to punk rock fame. 

Then Nancy and the drugs come in and everything goes to shit. By the end the tide had turned, and as Sid wallowed in blood-drenched misery on the screen we all sat quiet, motionless, a group of sad-eyed zombies. 

The mood had gone full circle from listlessness to elation, then back to utter emotional fatigue. 

“Wow, that movie really put a damper on things,” somebody said.

Near the end of the movie Sid dances comically, pathetically, to a song by KC and The Sunshine Band. I could just as easily hear Sly Stone in that place on the soundtrack, slurring and moaning and yodelay-hee-hooing through “Spaced Cowboy”. A disembodied voice giving voice to a disillusioned spirit. That would have been a pretty good reflection of the mood in the room. Worn down. Drained. Nerves completely wrecked. Right back where we had started from.

What do we do now?