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.
