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.
