Seventeen In '88 - Installment 11: Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

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.

Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

Max held the group together. Congenial, quick-witted, and outgoing, he was the glue that bonded the various people in our clan who were otherwise separated by age, temperament or fashion proclivities. Parties always happened at Max’s house. So when Max went on a trip with his father during the week of Spring Break, life became suddenly dull. When Max disappeared, so did our social lives.

Max’s favorite band was the Talking Heads. As a result, more than any band save R.E.M., Talking Heads figured into our little world as a symbol, a signpost, a measuring stick. They were perfectly suited to be Max’s favorite band – fond as both he and they were of jittery rhythms, day-glo colors and intelligent, offbeat humor.

We’d had an ongoing argument, as teenage music nerds tend to do (they do still, don’t they?) about what the greatest album ever made was. I’d opt for Who’s Next and Max would insist on Talking Heads 77, which baffled me at the time. Nobody ever talked about that album. I never even knew about it until I met him. It just couldn’t be among the greats. And yet, when Rolling Stone ran a special issue in 1987 celebrating the “100 Greatest Albums of the Last 20 Years”, there sat Talking Heads 77, along with three other Talking Heads records, validated as one of the greats. If it seems weird that Rolling Stone held so much authority, consider that we lived in a small town with no really good record stores and no other outlets for learning about music. It was also 1988, before any knowledge a person might be seeking could be dialed up instantly with hardly a thought. So I didn’t know Talking Heads 77. Or Television. Or The Modern Lovers. Hell, I only knew Iggy Pop from the Repo Man soundtrack, the Stooges to me meant Moe, Larry and Curly.

When Max got back into town on the Friday of Spring Break our clan breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was as though Spring was finally allowed to begin. He planned a party at his house for that evening. I knew it would be great to hang out with everybody, but more than that I wanted to tape two of the albums he had procured on his journey – Televisions’s Marquee Moon and The Modern Lovers' self-titled debut, both of which were also on the Rolling Stone list, and had become in our minds tokens of some other, better, mythical reality. I put them both on either side of one of those distinctively eighties day-glo Memorex cassettes and I ended up carrying that tape around everywhere, all the time. It became the soundtrack for the next couple months.

Listening through to the Television album for the first time was a small event in itself, our built-up anticipation paying off in the sound of those slithery, quicksilver guitars and Tom Verlaine’s strangled yelp of a voice. As everyone was gathering in Max’s front room, he and I hung back in the music room taking in the title track, that ten-minute aural thunderstorm, with the lightning striking itself and the post-storm fluorescent guitar drizzle after the climactic build-up.

More than the Television album though, the album that soundtracks my memory of Max’s homecoming party is Talking Head’s Fear Of Music. All those songs about everyday things – air (it can hurt you too), animals (they think they’re pretty smart), electric guitars (never listen to them). And all of it sounding strangely jagged and trebly, turning the commonplace into the surreal.

It was with all of this music buzzing in our brains and in the background that the party ensued. Everyone was there. But it wasn’t like the parties of your wildest memories, or of your typical teenage sex comedy. It was somehow a gentle, low-key affair. Through the smoke and noise and adolescent humor – one of my only specific memories of the night is of a long discussion comparing the relative similarities between sneezes and orgasms – a wave of calm set in. Even though there was sound and light and laughter, the joyous mood was somehow understated. Like stopping at the buzz that comes from the first drink.

The song that stands out is “Heaven”. That song seems to encapsulate a fundamental aspect of teenage living, at least for teenagers of a certain geeky temperament in the late ‘80’s. The band in Heaven, David Byrne tells us, always plays your favorite song. And in Heaven, you are assured that your reverie won’t be interrupted by any weird traumas, emotional or physical. Because in heaven nothing ever happens.

On the night of Max’s inaugural Spring party, nothing really seemed to be happening. And aren’t those the times that everyone remembers most fondly? Those times when nothing is really happening?

Back here in action-packed reality, I guess the answer is “Probably not.” But these are the times that hold the most allure in my memory, those moments when atmosphere takes precedence over action.

It was warm outside, so many of us wandered to the road outside. So much of 1988 involved roads and walking. There were train tracks nearby. As we walked, all of the angst and tension of winter at once seemed to recede. Out there wandering around, breathing in the sense of possibilities, the future still within our grasp, still under our control, I had the feeling that this is the way it would be, this is the feeling that would define the rest of the year.

Later, as was something of a custom, I fell asleep on Max’s couch while watching Talking Heads videos. That night felt like a rebirth. After the long cold gray winter we at last had some laughter and hopefulness and “Marquee Moon” and “Heaven” and dirty jokes and endless, promising roads. It was finally, officially, Springtime.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 10: Winning, Winning, Always Winning

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.

Winning, Winning, Always Winning 

 When Charlie Sheen went batshit crazy and conducted his “Winning” media blitz in 2011, he wasn’t merely laying bare his own psychosis for public consumption, but also, I believe, giving voice to a fundamental strain of the American psyche; no-holds-barred competitiveness, or the rabid desire to be better than everyone else at everything. This partly explains the glee with which the American public consumed his antics - we related, in a way. 

Well, I didn’t relate, really. I am just about the least competitive person I know. Maybe this is because I am, as Terry Lennox called Marlowe at the end of The Long Goodbye, “a born loser”. But it's mostly because I feel as though there is something ugly and unhealthy about our pervasive win-at-any cost attitude. Apart from my beyond-all-reason hopes that the Dodgers will one day win another World Series, any sense of competitive spirit I ever had has been beaten down and drained through years and years of false hopes and dashed expectations, not to mention my own weird self-limiting personality disorder. 

 This wasn’t the case in 1988, though. In those days I got all worked up over the Speech and Drama tournaments I regularly competed in, and in 1988 my teammates and I took our school play “Voices From The High School” to the district tournament, where we competed against a handful of other one-act plays presented by other schools. 

On the way up to the tournament we listened to The Modern Lovers. “Pablo Picasso” was a favorite, with its description of Pablo Picasso walking down the street making girls turn the color of an avocado, hypnotizing them with his stare, all despite being only five foot three. Never getting called an asshole. Which might be another way of saying that Pablo Picasso was a winner. 

Our school’s play consisted of an assortment of vignettes concerning the traditional teenage rites of passage and temptations, dealing with drugs and sex and depression. My role was a bit of comic relief, positioned at the end to alleviate the heaviness of the rest of the play (just before my slot, Elliot had a monologue about his character’s attempted suicide. It was cheery.) I played a kid who’s hired at a department store as a janitor but ends up playing Santa Claus for the Christmas crowd. For some reason, I gave the character a cigarette as a prop. Well, it was a piece of paper rolled up to look like a cigarette. I guess I did this because I thought it made the character seem rebellious, and therefore even less suited to play Santa Claus. I remember some consternation among my classmates about this choice, being as how it wasn’t in the script. But I was dead set on sticking with the choice and I eventually won the director’s approval. I had guts back then. Determination. I was a winner, dammit! 

 So was Max. During the delivery of his monologue he was required to catch a basketball thrown to him by someone off-stage, a move that the none-too-athletically-inclined Max pulled off effortlessly through dozens of rehearsals and school performances. Of course, during the District tournament performance the throw went wild, bounced of Max, and rolled off the front of the stage. In a moment of amazing calm and quick wittedness, and perhaps with some of Pablo Picasso’s cool under pressure in mind, Max pulled off an admirable bit of improvisation. His catch was supposed to coincide with the words “around the world”. So when the ball went awry he stretched that dialogue out to “Around the…county…the city….the state…the country…the world…why, the whole universe!” all as he walked down the steps to the side of the stage and went to retrieve the ball. Winning! 

Meanwhile, I had neglected to bring the pillows that made Santa fat, which I did not realize until the play was in progress. Convinced that my forgetfulness was going to ruin the play, I fretted backstage as the play went on. Of course, the lack of pillows only made the Santa incongruously skinny, which enhanced the character’s comic plight. Even when winners screw up, they still win. 

The best part of tournaments was waiting around after the competition was over for the awards ceremony. There’s that weird mixture of being able to relax after you’ve done all the work, combined with the buzz of expectation for the ceremony, which to us may as well have been the damn Academy Awards. 

And wouldn’t you know, our team actually got to do some intense celebrating. Our play took top honors as best one-act. It really was a thrill when the announcement came. The reaction was so genuinely excited, so loud and overpowering, that the sheer spontaneous purity makes it hard to be cynical about it even now, years after my antipathy towards winning has been fully ingrained. 

Maybe I got my fill of winning back then. Maybe that one big win was enough for me, and I just haven’t felt the need for any more since then. 

Around the time of our District victory Kirk Gibson appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Gibson had recently signed a free-agent contract with the Dodgers. The article relayed the story of the notoriously intense Gibson storming off the field after a teammate had put eye-black around the rim of his cap as a practical joke. Gibson didn’t find it funny, and he let everyone in the clubhouse know that he wasn’t going to tolerate the kind of high-jinks that led the team to a 79-83 record the previous year. Kirk Gibson wanted to win. 

Maybe that’s the way we all ought to be all the time. Survival of the fittest – or the winningest – and all that. Or maybe the idea of winning is a kind of false hope, a momentary escape. An illusion that steels us against the cold harsh inevitability of death. 

Eh, who cares. I don’t. But I would still like to see the Dodgers win another World Series, either way.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 9: The Date

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 Date

Elaine was the good-looking older sister of Bob, one of the guys on the periphery of our little group. One day when Elliot and Roger were over at my house after school we called up Bob, in hopes that we might also get to talk to Elaine. It worked. I somehow ended up on the phone with her, blathering. Somehow I felt already hardened by the experience with Maggie and this gave me an unusual and probably unwarranted confidence, so I asked her out. She said sure. I was shocked at how easy it was.

Later, in the car, Roger asked “How did you get a date with her?” Elliot answered for me: “He asked her!” 

My sister was driving us. Overhearing, she asked me “What about Maggie?” Elliot answered again, tactfully, “She finally dumped his sorry ass.”

My favorite records around this time were a couple that I had recently borrowed from my Dad. I was always “borrowing” records from my Dad – really, this amounted to simply taking them with little or no intention of returning them. The Doors’ Morrison Hotel was what I was listening to the night I went out with Elaine. It’s a great Springtime record, full of travel (“Land Ho!), lust (“The Spy”), and renewal (“Waiting For The Sun”). It’s the Doors' roots move. Arriving as it did in response to the failed ambition of their previous album The Soft Parade, most of Morrison Hotel’s songs are raw, earthy creations, based in and around the blues. It’s the most down-to-earth record The Doors ever made. The cover tells a good deal of the story – the band hanging out at a fortuitously named bar on skid row, looking fairly comfortable amid the shabbiness.

One of the overlooked highlights of The Doors catalog comes near the end of the second side, a ghostly little love song called “Indian Summer”. It was one of The Doors' earliest songs, so its mood is a departure from the roots’n’blues of the rest of the album, hearkening back to the poetics of the first two Doors records. In fact, in mood and sound it resembles “The End” – shadowy, foreboding. Unlike “The End”, though, it couldn’t be accused of being overblown and pretentious. It’s a simple love song, really, with a wistful, melancholic feeling, and words that stay direct, boiling down to a declaration of love, without giving way to the psychodrama at work in some of Jim Morrison’s other early lyrics. Truthfully, there are hardly any lyrics at all. “I love you the best,” Morrison sings, “Better than all the rest”. And that’s pretty much it. Affecting in its quiet boldness and brevity, it’s a Doors song for people who don’t like The Doors.

I don’t know if that’s the song I had in my brain as I ventured out that night with Elaine - I hope not, it’s way too intense for a first date - but it was probably in the mix somewhere along with the rest of the Doors album. And it tends to be the song I remember when I look back on this time.

I could have certainly used some of Jim Morrison’s fearless bravado that night, given how ill-prepared I was. Having never really been on a date before, I had no idea what to do. So I settled for the default destination at the time. We went to Burger King. (“You took her to Burger King?!” asked Claire later, incredulous. No, she took me. I didn’t drive.) My strategy was to keep jabbering in the hopes that something funny might slip out. And if things got awkward, my way of dealing with the awkwardness was to point it out, thereby meeting it head-on. I thought this made me seem down-to-earth and honest, but it probably just made things even more awkward.

All of this was in keeping with a kind of weird attitude about dating, and social norms in general, that I had been cultivating for the previous year or so, with help from Max and Elliot; namely, that the tiresome expectations placed on ordinary people by polite society’s traditions, exemplified by the rite-of-passage of dating, but also extending to ceremonies like weddings, or awards, or graduations, were a grand balloon ripe for puncturing.

At least that’s what I told myself. I mean, why go to some high-falutin’ fancy restaurant when burgers’n’fries will do? See, it’s a statement about class, man! Really though, the unfortunate truth was that I was simply clueless. I had no better ideas.

So powerful was this way of thinking however, that I still frequently fall into that mindset; that ceremonies and propriety are for suckers and bores. Then I catch myself and double back, thinking “Hey, that’s the way you used to see things when you were a teenage asshole. That thinking is way too simplistic. Show some maturity, dude. And stop calling yourself ‘dude.’” And still, even today, if suit and tie are demanded, I yearn to show up in a bathrobe.

In this way seventeen seems so much simpler than forty. At seventeen your gut feelings are always right, because they're all you know. Maybe maturity is the ability to look beyond those gut feelings.

Elaine and I ended up stranded in a parking lot, the battery in her car having died after the key had been left in the ignition too long while we listened to the radio. For some reason, we just stayed there through the night instead of looking for a phone or seeking help, until it was early in the morning. Kind of a “Wake Up Little Suzie” scenario, only without the convenient sleep excuse.

Her parents, and my mother, of course, were furious. What is it about teenagers that their ability to logic is so ridiculously impaired? Is it lack of experience or out-of-control hormones?

I don’t remember what the immediate repercussions were for this incident, but they probably weren’t harsh enough – it wasn’t the first or last time I would do something so careless. It should probably be some small comfort to my mother, however, that some twenty-odd years later, I am still extremely embarrassed about it.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 8: Two Breakups

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.

Two Breakups 

And then finally, mercifully, she broke up with me. I sat with my forehead pressed up against the bureau, bemoaning this awful (if inevitable) turn of events, the phone suddenly a foreign object in my hand. Typical stuff. 

No music was going to help in this situation. Maybe Leonard Cohen could have helped, but I’d never heard him at that point. Instead, I listened to nothing. I was afraid that I would forever associate whatever I might have listened to with the breakup. This went on for a couple of weeks. 

Then, out of nowhere, came word that Hüsker Dü had broken up. In addition to being, along with R.E.M. and The Replacements, one of the three brightest lights in my teenage music-dreams sky, Hüsker Dü held an especially important place in my world as the creators of the album (Warehouse: Songs and Stories) that had soundtracked the initial burst of what I would come to know as the Best Time Of My Teenage Life. That album’s songs seemed to bounce off of and react to the events of Spring 1987, coloring, even provoking them to the extent that, for instance, Prom Night and “She Floated Away” seemed like the same seamless thing.

 

Throughout 1987 I’d collected the back catalogue and read everything I could find on the band, marveling at their DIY ethic and dirty, down-to-earth approach to making music. Their songs were dense with sound and fury, with fuzzy, roaring guitars and bubblegum melodies mixing together to create a kaleidoscopic vortex of sound. Through the years the Hüskers stayed true to that vortex, stretching it only to the point that they found room for acoustic guitars and the occasional sea chantey, never feeling the need to go all Clash-like and expand into more exotic sonic territories. And the lyrics kept a firm dedication to the personal - relationships, depression, elation, everyday frustration. That sense of consistency and dedication represented to me a future worth living, a code to abide by. 

So when Max strolled into my house in the Spring of 1988, shortly after Maggie and I had split, and somberly handed me the Rolling Stone article that broke the news of the Hüsker Dü split to non-plugged-in middle-Americans like us, it was an extra-harsh blow to the system. The Hüskers had broken the unspoken vow we'd had between us as hard-working band and dedicated fan. This awful news ended my music-listening drought. I went to the stereo, despairing, and put on Flip Your Wig. Maybe it’s kind of cheesy or melodramatic to have keyed in on this particular song, but Grant Hart’s “Keep Hangin’ On” especially resonated in a new way at this point. After all, they didn’t hang on. They let go. 

Is this how life works? Does everyone eventually have to let go of everything? 

Time heals, of course, and I eventually got over the breakup with Maggie. 

I’m not sure whether I ever really got over the breakup of Hüsker Dü.