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!”
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.
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.
