Seventeen In '88 - Installment 7: Goodbye Mouse

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.

Goodbye Mouse

Michelle: I can’t stop thinking about Tony. Wondering where he could be. Who he is with. What is he thinking? Is he thinking of me? And whether he’ll ever return someday… 

Silvie: I’m sorry, what did you say?

– “Hotel La Rut”, The Kids In The Hall

What about those people you meet who enter your orbit and hang around long enough to make an impression, only to disappear just as abruptly as they arrived? Where do those people go?

A new kid joined our class for Junior year. He wore glasses, had perpetually hunched shoulders and was even paler than the rest of our little group of misfits. Roger, who had a flair for nicknames (isn’t there always a guy who has a flair for nicknames?), dubbed him Mouse. It won Mouse serious cred points from the rest of us that instead of balking at this potentially unflattering sobriquet he instead chose to embrace it, even seeming to consider it a badge of honor.

Mouse had many quirks. Although he was generally a shy, soft-spoken type, Mouse had a few stories to tell when he wanted to. Or, more accurately, he was…given to fabrication. He claimed to be able to throw an eighty MPH fastball. He had hung out with the Violent Femmes. He had a girlfriend back in Milwaukee. This last bit to us was the biggest stretch – it seemed even then redolent of the teenage boy who brags about having scored with a gorgeous older girl while vacationing at Niagra Falls.

Maybe some or all of this stuff was actually true, but we assumed that Mouse was making it up. And we loved him for it. We were, after all, the outcasts and weirdos, so it was undoubtedly a boost to our fragile egos that someone would think enough of us to lie in order to impress us.

Mouse loved The Sex Pistols. I clearly remember the night I snatched up a cassette copy of Never Mind The Bollocks from the bargain bin at Sound Shop. As we listened to it in the car Mouse sang along to every word. I was particularly impressed with the ferocious glee he brought to “Bodies”. “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat!” Face contorted, eyes blazing, I might have been frightened by the intensity of his delivery had the pure joy he got from it not been apparent by the childlike burst of giggling that followed.

So he became a regular part of our group. Joining us in our usual endeavors - driving around aimlessly, hanging out at Burger King, discussing music and girls. In the latter category Mouse offered one of the school year’s more memorable running lines when he made a less than tactful but not altogether inaccurate observation of one female classmate who bore a striking resemblance to Carly Simon. “Those lips…” he began, in an earnest, slightly wistful deadpan that seemed to portend poetic reverie, before concluding his thought: “Good for giving head.”

No sooner had Mouse firmly established himself as one of us (gobble gobble, we accepted him) than his family decided to move, stealing him right out from under us with hardly any warning. We had a hastily organized going-away party, but it felt anti-climactic even then. And then he was gone. Did anyone even get an address or a phone number?

In the weeks and months that followed Mouse became to us something more than a pleasant memory – he became a kind of talisman, a signifier of better days. Our clan was given to wild mood swings, with the lows seeming earth-shatteringly bleak. Such is adolescence. But after his departure, as our tumultuous teenage lives ebbed and flowed with typical gracelessness, the mere invocation of Mouse’s name would somehow calm any sense of unease. If one of us was feeling down or frustrated, someone would inevitably pipe up “You know, if Mouse was here, everything would be okay again.” And then everything would…well, it wouldn’t really be okay again, but the general mood would be slightly but perceptibly improved.

And that went on for years. None of us ever talked to Mouse again. He may as well have been a figment of our collective imagination. But the running joke that if he hadn’t moved away our lives would be different - better - persisted until it came to seem like a fundamental truth. As though somewhere there was an alternate universe in which Mouse stuck around and we all lived happy and harmonious lives, rich with emotion and layers of meaning. And instead here we were, stuck in this cold, uninspired reality, full of confusion, resentment, empty spaces, missed connections.

We’re still there, in a way, or at least I am. Sometimes. Aimless and unfulfilled, morbidly fascinated with what might have been.

And in those dark moments I wonder where Mouse is. Who is he with? What is he doing? Is he thinking of me? Will he ever return one day?

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 6: Speech Nerds In Paradise

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.

Speech Nerds In Paradise

It’s a cliché, isn’t it? – the ex-high school football player now grown old, looking back with bittersweet longing at his gridiron glory days, the subsequent years having been one long slow slide downhill. But what about that rarer beast - the geeky kid, the academic wizard or the theater nerd who somehow peaked in high school, with their life in the years since never quite meeting whatever expectations they felt compelled to live up to?

From sophomore to senior year the center of my social world was the high school Speech and Drama team. Each school day was a waiting game, with every class a kind of mini-purgatory until the stress release of Drama class. In the social hierarchy of my High School the speech team was somewhere just below the band geeks, and we were regularly taunted with the epithet “Speech fags!” (I've written before about that particular f-word - not only were my friends and I on the receiving end of that ugliness, we perpetuated it, using it in our own everyday lives, pretty much daily. I wonder if I'm wrong in believing its usage among teenagers in the ensuing decades has diminished. Wouldn't be surprised either way, erasing hatred is a long, slow process.)

But hey, (cue syrupy, heartwarming music) at least we had each other.

The thing is, that last bit is actually kind of true. We had our own internal issues – all kinds of backbiting, petty jealousies and bitter recriminations. But in general I think we really did feel a sense of togetherness, us against the world and all that.

The best part of being on the Speech & Drama team was traveling to the tournaments, in which kids from schools throughout the surrounding area would compete against one another in a variety of speech- and drama-related categories: Debate, Poetry Reading, Duet Acting, etc. The biggest and best tournament of the year took place each February in Gatlinburg, a touristy stretch of cheap shops, hotels, and restaurants located in the Smoky Mountains. It may as well have been the setting of some imagined eighties teen comedy - hundreds of teenage alterna-kids gathered together in the mountains for three days of gothic synth-pop and the furious stirring of raging hormones.

It is hard to convey the sense of sheer excitement that would build up within the team in the days before the Gatlinburg tournament. It was like tremors before an earthquake. The air was charged with electricity, everyone was giddy and glowing with anticipation. The buzz would peak on the day before, when everybody would go to the grocery store and pile up on Doritos and Cokes and dozens of other types of processed cheeses and caffeine. Odd that so much junk food could inspire so much happiness.

The next morning everyone would meet in the Holiday Inn parking lot, pile into a school bus and drive away. The ride up would be strangely quiet, apart from the odd tape player blaring R.E.M. or The Smiths or The Cure. The best part of it was basking in the knowledge that everyone else had to go to school while we left them behind to go have fun. Ha-ha. Suckers.

Then there was the hotel - the echo of footsteps in the lobby, the smell of the chlorine in the swimming pools, the neatly-made beds, the mini-refrigerators. To this day simply being in a hotel gives me a strange thrill, no matter how mundane the circumstance.

Amid all the excitement of social opportunity and potential revelry the tournament itself became almost an afterthought. Except for those who had a chance at winning, for whom it was as grueling and intense as any high school sporting event. Sadly, in the twenty-odd years since high school I’ve often caught myself looking back at these tournaments, basking in the glory of victory or cursing a bitter defeat in much the same way that Al Bundy looked back on his high school football career. I always have to snap out of it by reminding myself that hey, nobody remembers that shit but you!

What do people remember, then?

What really must have counted, maybe, was all the time between the competitions; the random encounters, the lewd jokes, the passing flirtations, the life-altering mini-crises. But do people remember those things, even?

Maybe they only remember a feeling. And Gatlinburg was a great backdrop for stirring up feelings; the mountain air, the creeks and waterfalls, the tourist strip in all its gaudy glory – neon lights, Haunted Houses, novelty stores full of candy and cheap trinkets.

And that little record store. How that little record store ended up there in the same shopping area where you could watch the machine twist taffee is beyond me. Not the fact that there was a record store there at all, in those days there were record stores everywhere, but the fact that it was actually a pretty good record store. For some reason a huge portion of this record store’s stock consisted of the kind of indie/punk/underground music that back then could usually only be found in major cities and college towns. A tourist center in the south was not a particularly likely place to go buy a 7 Seconds record.

Or a Meat Puppets record. Which is what I bought at that little Gatlinburg record store in February 1988. More accurately, I bought it on cassette. (It was the eighties.) Huevos is a great record, one that I still listen to with some regularity. It’s the Puppets channeling ZZ Top, all greasy blues licks and catchy choruses, only filtered through their usual dreamy, acid-fried sensibility. I’ve always wondered why “Look at the Rain” hasn’t become a rock and roll standard.

The Gatlinburg tournament would culminate in the awards ceremony on Saturday evening. This was the payoff, the big moment when winners were announced. It was kind of a mini-Oscars, with all of the attendant jitters and forced enthusiasm. Hard work was vindicated, egos were boosted or crushed, jealousies flared, indifference ran subtly rampant.

I made it to the semi-finals round in 1988, reading Robert Bloch’s grisly, somewhat kinky “A Toy For Juliet”. And while I am now not altogether comfortable with the idea of a seventeen-year-old performing a piece that included fairly blatant sadomasochism as a plot point, all these years later I still harbor a grudge against the judge who kept me from the finals round because she “question(ed) the literary merit” of the piece.

The conclusion of the awards represented the metaphorical ringing of the bell, the uncorking of the champagne, the opening of the floodgates. After three days of intense competition and waiting around and fraying of nerves, everyone would be free to let loose.

First would be the usual antics, parading lustily down the strip, youthful exuberance screaming at full throttle. Loud voices and wild eyes, short diversions and grand plans, usually involving alcohol. It’s not clear to me now how we were able to procure alcohol, or how we were able to hide it from the chaperones. Except that they tended to turn the other way and let us do whatever we wanted on the last night of Gatlinburg. I don’t recall ever seeing an adult among us on those last nights. Were they oblivious? Or were those just different times? Maybe they were too wrapped up in their own personal shenanigans to notice.

But all of this revelry was conducted with the strange gentleness peculiar to high school geeks, there was never any of the rabid animal violence or implicit threat of your typical sex and alcohol-drenched college spring break. It was much more innocent, give or take some foul language and x-rated humor.

After the waves of giddy abandon began to subside, a kind of peacefulness would set in. And then the weird emotional bonding would start, with sworn enemies suddenly best friends amid cathartic Breakfast Club-style confessions. Suspicion and scorn morphed into openness and warmth.

Inevitably, there would be some coupling off. Everyone moving freely from room to room, falling asleep in strange beds next to people they’d never noticed before or had always been afraid of. Hovering over the group afterwards there would be a kind of warmth, a not altogether false sense of togetherness.

And it wasn’t false. For those moments, in that time, it was real.

Wasn’t it? If only briefly?

Some of us didn’t have a whole lot to carry us through back then. Let us have that, please.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 5: Another 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.

Another Walk

When you look back at the best moments of your life, it’s only natural that the special occasions like prom nights, birthdays, and marriages should come to mind immediately, right? But don’t most people also have less momentous, more mundane moments that they remember with the same sense of fondness? The times that nothing particularly notable was happening, but still a sense of wonder and mystery seemed to be infused in the moment anyway?

One February night in 1988 Max and I went to see a screening of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai at the local Drama Center. It was a Friday. Maggie, my first love, was in town for the weekend, and I couldn’t concentrate on the movie because I was so anxious to see her later that night. I remember shuffling around restlessly in my seat, just wishing that this incomprehensible mess of a movie would be over. Time crawled like a woozy slug.

Upon leaving the theatre we were startled to see that it had started snowing, and the ground was already covered with a pristine layer of white. A ripple of electric energy surged through the crowd as we exited. But I was pissed off. Not only was it a waste – what good is snow on a Friday night when there’s no school to get out of tomorrow anyway? – it was also going to make the walk from Max’s house to Maggie’s house that much more of a problem.

I had to wait until Maggie’s parents were asleep before I could make the journey, so when Max and I got back to his house we listened to records for a while. I had recently fallen in love with the music of Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, and the whole British folk-rock scene, and at the time I was annoyingly anxious to play this music for anyone who would listen. So I played the first side of Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking, hoping that Max would hear in it the same graceful, ghostly beauty that I did. He humored me amiably, but the religious fervor with which I preached the cause was probably just overbearing enough to keep anyone from hearing the music clearly, with an open mind. Nonetheless, Max showed the patience of a true friend and seemed to enjoy it as we sat in the still calm of his room, absorbing Sandy Denny’s wistful, haunted voice as it meshed elegantly with the swirling snow outside the window.

Around 1AM it was time for the walk. Unfortunately, there was an obstacle I hadn’t counted on. As I crept carefully into the hallway I discovered to my horror that Max’s mother was not only still awake, but also hyperactively zig-zagging from room to room, cleaning and organizing the house. They had only just moved in a few weeks before.

So I had a choice. Turn back dejectedly for a night of restless sleep on Max’s floor, or push on determinedly, and risk getting caught. Being seventeen, I of course opted for the foolhardy, consequences-be-damned latter. The call of teenage hormones is an incredibly powerful thing.

I’m still not quite sure how I managed to get past her undetected. The only door I could use was in the kitchen, which was right next to the living room. I waited in the dark bathroom doorway and watched her shuffle between these two rooms repeatedly. Finally, I decided to make a break for it. I watched her walk into the living room and I hastily made a dash, as quietly as possible, for the kitchen door. The television was on, so it must have helped muffle the sound of my footsteps and the door as it opened and closed. Once on the other side of the door, I exhaled, probably too loudly. Of course I didn’t know how I was going to get back into the house, especially as the door would likely be locked, but that didn’t matter. I was, for the moment, free.

It was a raw, exhilarating freedom. The cold and snow fell over me like a blanket as I set out. Three or four inches had accumulated by that point, and as I walked I kept looking back at the tracks I was leaving behind. It occurred to me that if Max’s mother went outside for any reason she would spot the tracks and probably freak out. All I could do was hope that wouldn’t happen. What did it matter anyway? I stuffed my freezing hands into the pockets of my favorite trench coat, the heavy green one, and pressed on.

The snow on the road was perfect and pure. No traffic had come through to sully it as of yet. The streetlights had an orange tint, which cast a lustrous golden hue over the landscape, and in every direction it glistened. The quiet was stirring, churchlike, though Sandy Denny’s honey-inflected voice still whispered and soared through my bones.

It was only a few blocks to Maggie’s house, so the walk would only take about ten minutes. The way I was feeling, though, I would have walked for hours. For whatever reason - the anticipation of seeing Maggie, the strange energy of the snow, the thrill of evading Max’s mom – I was filled with energy, a liquid sensation of electricity flowing through me.

The single moment that I remember best about the whole night happened here, and it was a ridiculously simple one; I looked up at the swirling snow in the pale orange glow of the streetlight, with the pink sky as background. I took a mental picture. Somehow, I think I felt intuitively that this was a signal event in my life, a time when circumstances had collided in such a way to create a situation, an atmosphere, a feeling that would prove indelible enough that I would want to access the memory frequently in the years to come.

So that was the big moment; I looked up.

There was more after that, of course, including the farcical discovery, upon returning to Max’s at around six AM, that his mother was still awake and going strong, and the ensuing scramble to figure out what to do with that situation. The night, however, had made its point, and it’s that moment during the walk, looking up at the snow falling, that comes to mind when I’m sorting through the favorite memories of my life.

Overall, the night may not have seemed like a big deal, there were no big milestones, no emotional revelations, no grand dramatic developments. Just a short trek through the snow. And some music. And a fleeting moment of brazen teenage recklessness. But it’s those kind of occasions, the ones that on the surface seem innocent, that I’ve always looked for, waited for, hoped would happen, tried to create, usually unsuccessfully. 

Maybe it’s a trick of the brain, like intuition, or déjà vu, or lust disguised as love. But generally, I don’t think you get to pick these moments yourself, they happen of their own accord. Sometimes you just look around and there it is.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 4: Winter 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. 

Winter 1988 Recalled As A Series of Random Glimpses, With Music 

It’s a strange thing, how memories work. Some of them come back to you wholesale, in perfect sequence, with every detail, every last word in place. Some of them are a blotch, a nebulous mass of color and sound, with only the atmosphere easily accessed. My memories of winter 1988 are a hybrid of both, and something else. They funnel through the mind in little bursts, some like still pictures, some like short movies that go in and out of focus, random frames left out. Always, though, with a clearly remembered soundtrack. 

At a party on a Friday night. Elliot and Max and I outside in the car, laughing and insulting one another. The house on a hill, the lights in the windows illuminating fun, music, conversation, potential life-altering encounters, unspeakable awkwardness. And us. Not going in. Instead waiting, pontificating, finally deciding that Reckoning actually is just as good as Murmur. Peter Buck’s guitar, that tangled, tumbling, cobweb sound, Stipe’s voice circling and weaving through and around it – “She-ee will returrrrnnn”. Will she? 

The snow. Admiring the swirl of tracks left in our wake. Maggie’s brother is driving, spinning the car around on the ice, (it’s called “doing doughnuts” but I hate that term, it's too cute) huge looping figure eight tire tracks left behind. Anxious. Not wanting to go home. Though at least at home it will be warm and there will be music. 

Fairport Convention’s “Sloth”. The funeral pace, the cold winter starkness, the bare-boned emptiness in the sound. Dave Swarbrick’s violin trying to comfort, then Richard Thompson spitting at the gesture, his guitar evoking the cold hard facts of history’s endless, inevitable brutality. Then it all comes ‘round again to the personal – “She’s run away, she’s run away / and she ran so bitterly.” Maybe she's got the right idea.

Study Hall. In the library, looking over a map of the nation with friends, laughing at Ralph Buckman when he points out the pond in his back yard. Or reading the pre-season baseball predictions, all of which projected the Dodgers to be a lackluster, middle-of-the pack team. Or being taunted by an oafish jock. And we break for that story here: Identifying me (fairly accurately) as a nerd, he attempted to verbally toy with me, asking with condescending fake earnestness if I had a girlfriend. To him the idea would have been preposterous. I should have lied to him, made up something ridiculous, or said something crude like “Ask your mom” but I’ve never been particularly quick-witted that way, I’m the type that thinks of the perfect comeback hours later, usually while lying in bed trying to go to sleep. So I just told him that yes, I did. He assumed, of course, that I was lying, but he took it and ran with it, firing off a series of questions about her, making a big show of responding to each guilelessly honest answer with mock serious interest and astonishment, even dragging one of his buddies into it, “Hey man, JB here’s telling me all about his amazing girlfriend!” I knew that I should have felt humiliated, and I suppose a part of me did feel that way, but I was also an arrogant little shit, so another part of me just felt bemused. That reaction was doubtless some kind of mental defense mechanism. Still, I wonder now what kind of deep dark secrets that guy had hidden in his psyche. 

Shane MacGowan again. If I Should Fall From Grace With God, and how excited Max and I are to hear it, only to end up mildly disappointed because it isn’t as good as Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Listening over and over anyway, trying to sort through the cleanliness and the eclecticism and find the next “Pair of Brown Eyes”. It isn’t there, but as good in its own way is the Christmas song, “Fairytale Of New York”, a mini-movie with Kirsty Macoll as the hard-bitten dame, sparring with MacGowan’s useless drunk to a draw. Back then it was funny when she sang “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot!" We didn't think twice about the now-obvious ugliness of that homophobic slur, even those of us who were out (not many) used the word as cavalierly as your average indefinite article. If all shouldn't be forgiven or forgotten, at least it can be contextualized. In this particular context the feelings the song gets at are unavoidable - by the time she gets to "you took my dreams from me, when I first found you" it's so heartbreaking you can feel your own dreams slipping away. 

English Class. Sitting in front of me is the voluptuous, wonderfully named Linda Lusk.* She is a cheerleader. She frequently turns around to make idle conversation. Passively looking over the scrawl on the front of my notebook she asks, “What’s The Velvet Underground?” I tell her but she doesn’t seem impressed. Later a boy from across the room is trying to get her attention. I tap her on the shoulder and say, “Hey Linda, Matt wants you. But then, so does every other guy in the school.” She smiles at me, sly, a light in her eyes. I feel the sharp thrill of a tiny victory. 

*All the names in Seventeen in ’88 have been changed, just in case anyone gets pissed off about me writing about them. But Linda Lusk’s name in real life was comparably wonderful, so I feel okay in describing it that way. 

Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground. The first Femmes album now passé, and the third an impenetrable mélange, all the cool kids have drifted to the second. Religious imagery, prophecy, blasphemy, murder. A Velvets pastiche and a down-home gospel hoedown. Though even heavy contextualizing can't really explain away the lyrics of "Black Girls" - what might now at best be thought of as childish provocation we charitably assumed was anti-racist and anti-homophobic at the time.  Thinking was hard, and getting caught up in the frenetic pace of the music - all jittery rhythms and sly horn patterns - was easy. My favorite was “Never Tell”, seven minutes of pure menace, bravado, and spite. Everybody’s favorite was “Country Death Song” with its take your lovely daughter and throw her in the well. A little campy in its self-consciousness. Or vice versa. It would come to feel pretty prescient, give or take. 

The Late Nights. I’ve taken to staying up way too late on school nights. The act becomes an adventure, a bold stand against the tyranny, the hideous normalcy of sleeping. Truthfully there isn't much adventure, mostly I just watch TV. Letterman, then maybe a movie. I saw Midnight Cowboy during one of these late nights. I related then to Joe Buck’s bewilderment, being a stranger in a strange land surrounded by con men and coldness. But when I see that movie now I just remember the joy of staying up late. 

Sandy Denny. My friend Brandon, who is obsessed with Natalie Merchant, will in a few weeks decide to give up the sound of the 10,000 Maniacs singer’s voice for Lent. He suggests that I do the same with Sandy Denny’s voice. I tell him he is crazy. In my room, lights out, the sound of her voice both earthy and ethereal. And the depth of feeling, the far-away soul, old but also mirroring the innate restlessness of a seventeen year-old kid in a dark bedroom, longing for something like oblivion. “I wish I was somewhere / but not in this town / maybe the ocean / next time around”. Will she sleep, will she rise again? Will any of us?

The Library. On Sunday afternoon, with Maggie, songs buzzing in the brain and it’s supposed to snow tomorrow. Across the room we spot Emily Waller. She’s the local queen of academia. Tall, thin, long dark hair, walking with what I arrogantly perceive as endearingly transparent false confidence. I'd seen her around a million times, even knew her somewhat - she'd just joined the drama club, which was still the center of my social world - but for some reason on this day I'm a little struck by her presence. She's radiant, like a ghost come walking in from the future. But we’re still here in the gray mid-winter. Maggie and I off in a corner, at a table by the window, books open, ostensibly there to study but of course we end up talking, laughing, flirting, planning. Slightly nervous, slightly melancholy. We’re young, drunk on possibility, so much of the world left to absorb. It’s cold outside.