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?
