Seventeen In '88 - Installment 3: The Walk

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 Walk

At a hotel bar near the mall my father and I got into an argument. I wanted to leave. He wanted to stay. We both got what we wanted. I took my bag from his car and started walking. We’d had arguments like this before, but before I was always trapped, unable to do anything, take any action other than resign myself to the situation and…wait. Finally, that day in winter 1988 I decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore. The fact that I had nowhere to go and no way to get there besides on foot through the bitter January cold was not going to be an obstacle.

The mall was right there, so why not? I fumbled my way down the steep hill that led to my humble hometown’s endearingly pitiable excuse for a shopping Mecca and made my way to the bookstore, where I picked up the latest issue of Musician magazine. It featured Michael Stipe and Peter Buck on the cover. That the magazine felt it appropriate to include only the vocals/guitar half of a band that was in the nascent stages of becoming the second-biggest band on the planet is something of a mystery now. Maybe they felt that the Stipe/Buck combo could be a newer hipper eighties alternative-style answer to the worn-out old seventies mystique of Page/Plant, Tyler/Perry, et al. Maybe they were creeped out by Bill Berry’s eyebrows.

Regardless, the article provided some needed respite from the anger that was quietly boiling inside me. My friends and I would later make much hash out of several of the quotes, including one member’s assertion that Fables of the Reconstruction (ahem), sucked. Fables, or F.O.R, was a firm favorite in our group. We were also bemused by the story of Michael Stipe attempting to puncture an overly worshipful young fan’s zealotry by exclaiming “Hey, I shit too, you know!”

Included in the same issue was an article about Arizona’s Meat Puppets. There were some colorful pictures of the band looking elegantly spaced-out. The music was described as combining the dreamy guitar jangle of R.E.M and the fried, strange atmosphere of the Arizona desert with the punk rock sonic assault of the band’s SST label-mates. I decided there and then, before hearing a note of their music, that they would become my next favorite band. And they eventually were, for a time. This was around the time that I developed a habit of having a new favorite band every few weeks or months. Such are the unpredictable vagaries of the teenage rock and roll lover’s tastes.

But before I could get to a store that actually sold Meat Puppets records I had to first figure out how I was going to get out of this mall. Out of this situation. Out of this shitty little town. Out of this life.

So I went outside and continued walking.

It was cold and I had nowhere to go. Maybe I should have felt helpless or frightened. Instead, I felt exhilarated. Strangely self-assured. There was a kick in my step as I walked. I felt like I was leaving behind so much baggage and heading off in what could be any number of exciting new directions.

It was a mirage, of course. But that brief taste of chimerical freedom would carry me further than the length of this walk. I would come to think of the walk as an important step in a kind of rebirth, a skin-shedding of an older, weaker version of myself, the version that would have sat waiting there in that dingy bar, stewing in his own personal cocktail of despondence and self-pity.

Somewhere around dusk I ended up at Claire’s house. Elliot was there. I hadn’t been walking for much more than an hour, maybe close to two, but it felt as though I had been on a long journey and had gone through many changes, so it was a welcome relief to see friends. They were warm and welcoming and I felt an immense sense of gratitude, which I was too young and graceless to make them aware of at the time.

Elliot and Claire and I would eventually develop varying degrees of tension and resentment in our relationships with one another. But I prefer to remember the moments like these. That’s what people are supposed to do, right? Should the memory of bad times diminish the memory of good times?

As was tradition at the time, we went to Burger King, which just happened to be right across the street from the bar where my walk had begun just a few hours earlier. Sitting there looking out the window, I felt victorious, like I was somehow having the last laugh at the expense of the bar and the street and the sidewalk and the streetlights and the mall and the cold. “Ha, ha! You all thought you’d beaten me didn’t you? But here I am now, with good friends and french fries and visions of the Meat Puppets in my head promising rock and roll glory!”

I wouldn’t actually hear the Meat Puppets for another few weeks yet, but oftentimes when I’ve listened to them in the years since I associate the sound with the pain and thrill of being seventeen. And walking. And that first brief flash of freedom.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 2: First Ghost Of The Year

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.

First Ghost of the Year

New Year’s Eve. 12/31/1987. I had just turned seventeen. I can remember the thrill of expectation, knowing that plans had been made and some kind of big event or series of events involving friends, music and general craziness was set to take place.

But my friends and I were never terribly good at making plans, so we spent most of the night bandying about the question “So what are we going to do?” to the point that it became almost rhetorical; asked with a sigh and a shrug, without any real chance that it would be answered. Still, even given the indecision and listlessness, a sense of anticipation hung in the air, buzzing quietly, like a threat.

As always, we drove. Winding through the loops, up the hills, and into the dark back roads. Going nowhere in particular. We drove by the house of the once-and-future boyfriend of the girl I was hopelessly in love with. “There’s where Rob used to have sex with Maggie regularly,” Elliot pointed out helpfully. Thanks, Elliot. Twenty-four years later that comment still makes me laugh and also still kind of stings. Elliot was good for that kind of thing.

We went to a party where none of us knew anybody. We felt awkward and out of place. Not so different than usual. We left early.

We ended up, as we so often did, at Max’s house. It was a very big house, old and roomy with high ceilings and hardwood floors. And for some reason, on this night, it was a strangely scary house. It was always creaky and full of shadows, but Max’s family had already begun the process of moving to a new house, so there were now boxes strewn everywhere and empty spaces where belongings used to be, creating an unnerving sense of disquiet.

The year was beginning with an ending, and a bittersweet one; after using Max’s house as the home base for all of the high times of 1987, maybe the idea that this would probably be the last night we’d spend there was weighing on us.

Or maybe the house was actually haunted. As we sat on the floor in Max’s room, listening to records and talking, as we always did, Elliot became increasingly agitated, convinced that someone (or something!) was there in the house with us. He stood in the bedroom doorway, peering out into the dark netherworld that the living room had become, exclaiming in a hoarse half-whisper “Guys, I swear there is somebody out there. I just saw something move.” Elliot had a way of being funny even in serious situations, so even if his paranoia darkened the mood, it was also decidedly comic. Body tense, fists clenching and unclenching, “I know I heard something! There! There it is again! Did you guys hear that? Somebody is in this house with us.”

It seemed plausible enough, actually. The house was hardly ever locked so anyone could have walked in anytime. And if a ghost could have chosen an ideal home base, it might have been this drafty, dark old house.
So for a few minutes we were filled with a strange mixture of creepiness and excitement. Something was happening! Maybe. Kind of.

Or maybe not. It was deep into the morning and we were getting sleepy, so rather than indulge the idea of an intruder, spectral or otherwise, we eventually laughed it off as Elliot being paranoid. Rude jokes were hurled into the living room, insults directed at our probably non-existent visitor.

Maybe we should have been more willing to believe. Maybe there was some strange, shadowy presence in the house with us - the first in what would be a year filled with mysterious, inexplicable visitations.
There was no way of knowing that at the time. We just wanted to sleep.

But we shut and locked the bedroom door, just in case.

Early the next morning I had breakfast with my family. Having only slept for a couple of hours I kept dozing off at the table and my mother gave me dirty looks. Later, I made a tape with The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy and The Lash on one side and 10,000 Maniacs’ The Wishing Chair on the other. This would be the tape that would get me through January and February. (There is a certain type of person, I think, who needs something to get him or her self through January and February. You know who you are.) The cassette was one of those distinctly Eighties tapes with garish pink and yellow pseudo-“New Wave” graphics imprinted on the clear plastic shell. I loved that at the time. Hell, I love it now.

The Pogues album has gone on to become an acknowledged classic, and its rough and rowdy songs about booze and fighting and dancing and puking would serve me well through the dark winter months, providing a much needed escape from the otherwise drab and morose January/February school days.

The 10,000 Maniacs album on the other hand has been more or less forgotten, overshadowed by the huge success of the band’s later releases and the subsequent solo career of lead singer Natalie Merchant. Maybe that’s justifiable, The Wishing Chair has many of the earmarks of a band in its awkward youth – earnestness, an overall sameness of sound. But for me, that first album is more appealing in its own way than any of what came later; modest, low-key, with a purity and lightness wound into the tangle of folk-rock guitars and Merchant’s poetically sophisticated lyrics.

During the winter of ’88 The Wishing Chair was the bright, gentle yin to The Pogues’ dank, rough-hewn yang. Seventeen is tough, so I needed both of those extremes. The winter of ’88 was long, with much personal drama, and it was comforting after a typical school day full of insecurity, paranoia, and barely suppressed rage to come home and listen to Shane MacGowan singing about being “spat on and shat on and raped and abused.” Flip the tape over and there was Natalie Merchant singing sweetly about sailing far off to the back o’ the moon. Whatever that meant.

So that tape served as the soundtrack for the transition from ’87 to ’88. I’m not sure what was on my mind as far as looking towards the year ahead, but whatever it was I’m sure I didn’t feel prepared for it. Music was the only thing I felt I could rely on and I leaned on it like a crutch during this time. And whenever I think about or listen to those albums now I remember New Year’s Eve and the ghost in the living room and the weight of unknowable expectations.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 1: Introduction

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.



Seventeen In ’88 – Introduction

1987 was my favorite year. I was sixteen and all of my firsts happened that year – first love, first sex, first road trips, first rock shows, first long endless nights doing nothing but hanging out and talking and listening to music with friends. Everything about it has a shimmering layer of wistfulness coated over it in my memory. Even the bad times were good - when it rained, it seemed somehow to be raining sunshine. 1987 was my favorite year.

It’s 1988 I can’t figure out.

It wasn’t a bad year. In fact, most of my memories of 1988 are good ones. I was seventeen and there was still much innocence to be lost. This time around, however, innocence didn’t want to go down without a fight.

My memory of 1988 divides into three distinct categories – fun, confusion, and dread. Fun because some of the happiness of 1987 carried over into the next year, and some of the fondest memories of my life happened in 1988, despite the confusion and dread. The memory of the previous year held sway in a negative way, too, which is where the confusion arose. You know how when you try to recreate the chemistry that led to a great or memorable event in your life and the result ends up feeling stale and flat? 1988 was like that, with my friends and I sometimes bewildered and wondering aloud among our selves why this year wasn’t as good as last year. Additionally, the specter of looming adulthood on the horizon seemed to cast a shadow of implicit worry and anxiety over everything we did.

Which brings us to dread. The real world was breathing down our necks, but there was also something else, something in the air - especially during the hot summer months - that seemed to suggest a kind of darkness, an ominous, eerie quality that even now, with twenty-odd years hindsight, seems to border on the supernatural. Not that me or any of the friends that I shared this time with ever believed in anything like that, I don’t think. But that’s what it felt like. It would culminate that fall in a run of bad luck, bad feelings, and my first up-close experience with death.

If 1987 represented the thrill of lost innocence, then 1988 was the hangover afterwards. It was the long, painful realization that life was not always magic and wonder; that even the giddy peaks of 1987 may well have been a mirage. And yet, 1988 has a strange, endlessly compelling tractor-beam pull in my memory more powerful than 1987. 1987 I understand; it was joyful and adventurous, a year of new sensations. 1988 is different. Something very strange and unknowable happened that year, particularly that summer, and I’ve never quite shaken the urge to figure out what it was. I’ve never quite shaken it, period.

So now, all these years later, I feel compelled to shake the 1988 tree harder than I ever have, if only to see how many and what kind of ghosts fall out.

What I’m going to do is this: follow the music. Adolescence and music go hand-in-hand after all, with every song seeming to incorporate and reflect the turbulence and hypersensitivity of the teenage mindset. A person’s favorite music almost always ends up being the music discovered during this period. Therefore I am going to re-trace my steps by going over the music I was listening to that year, my eighteenth on planet earth, in more or less chronological order.

I’m not sure what I ultimately hope to accomplish in doing this. On some level I’m maybe hoping it will be some kind of emotional exorcism. On another it is bound to be mere masturbatory nostalgia. I’m okay with either of those, I guess. Really though, I think I’m hoping that maybe I’ll get lucky and end up doing something else altogether.

And that would be this: illuminating a phenomenon that happens to most people with more that a passing interest in music – the subtle, unerring way that music and memory and life and emotion all coalesce and mingle together to create a whole new mysterious, endlessly fascinating feeling.