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.
