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.
Stars Are Stars And They Shine So Hard
Teenagers, American teenagers particularly, are always looking for icons to emulate, to signify, to guide them. To shine some of the glory they themselves long to project. At seventeen I had plenty of idols. Each quintessentially American, each worthy of a certain amount of wariness, and each false, in their own peculiar way. On the weekend of the State tournament, four of these idols converged.
On the night before the State tournament my Dad took me over to my uncle’s house. My uncle had a VCR, which as late as 1988 still seemed like a luxury to me. A couple of years earlier my uncle had demonstrated to me, for the first time, the sound of a newfangled music playback technology called the Compact Disc. My mind was blown. Also a couple of years previous, my uncle had made me a tape of The Who Sell Out. I liked going over to my uncle’s house.
That night we watched a documentary about James Dean. I had aspirations toward acting as a career at the time, so my fascination with Dean was based on my interest in his craft. Or so I told myself. Truthfully, I was just drawn in by the moodiness and mystique. The raw Indiana earthiness turned darkly glamorous by Hollywood. A poster of Dean in his Rebel Without A Cause jacket held pride of place in my bedroom, so anyone entering was immediately met with his tough-guy stance and soulful sneer. I had all kinds of books about Dean and I romanticized him and his story beyond all boundaries of good taste. My personal equivalent to playing air-guitar was standing in front of the mirror, arms outstretched, body contorted, howling “I got the bullets!”
The State tournament took place in Knoxville, and Raven Records was within walking distance of our hotel. So I strode on over and purchased Double Nickels On The Dime, which I had heard playing in the same store just a couple of weeks earlier. I carried it back to the room, and what would you know but the Dodgers game was being televised. Pitching that night was the lanky, choirboy-like Orel Hershiser. Hershiser would find fame that year as the hymn-singing, shutout-pitching ace of the Dodgers' staff, and on that night he was proving why, inducing out after out from the hapless Atlanta Braves. As I sat looking over my new purchase, I remember the weird dichotomy between Hershiser’s pure-as-American-Pie, Richie Cunningham-esque appearance and the grim, black-humored Raymond Pettibon illustrations inside the Minutemen album.
The Minutemen were not a band who particularly sought any kind of adulation or glory, they defined themselves in terms of how hard they worked, how much bare-boned passion and creativity they could stuff into their combustible little tunes. That kind of stuff makes a strong impression on a seventeen year old, however, and it ends up provoking adulation anyway. Sure, they seemed to be saying “You can do this too”, but the way they played, putting their punk-funk-folk-jazz across with an unerring combination of intensity, looseness, humor and ferocity, came from a place that seemed less than accessible to a kid so many miles away from their world. They evoked an emotional landscape every bit as entrancing as the ones provided by grade-A popular rock stars like Bruce Springsteen or Led Zeppelin. (Or even the smaller scale college rock of Echo and the Bunneymen, another favorite at the time, whose “Stars Are Stars” provides the title of this post.) That The Minutemen did it mainly by way of sweat, good humor, and sheer raw nerve was a lesson not lost on me, but it was still somehow hard to accept.
In this sense, perhaps Orel Hershiser and The Minutemen were ideal idols. They were hard workers. And hard work is something that as I teenager I was not particularly interested in. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Teenagers dream of fame, riches, glory. But they also have an unfortunate sense of entitlement. A sense that the world owes them something for all that angst and weirdness and neurosis.
I think I probably felt that way. So I should have taken the lessons that Hershiser and The Minutemen were so obviously offering. But no, I felt like if I merely cultivated some of James Dean's moody charisma I'd win accolades and fans. I felt like I deserved, if not monetary gain, a little acknowledgement at least for the wayward passions of my soul. I want the depth of my feeling recognized, damn it!
But if that recognition wasn't forthcoming, at least there was some consolation in the friendship and togetherness of the drama team. My team’s play took second place at the State tournament, which, while a nifty achievement, was kind of like when the Dillon Panthers lost in the State championship game on Friday Night Lights. Anything less than all-out triumph may as well have been failure.
On getting back into town from Knoxville I hitched a ride home with Chris Timmons. Chris was a big shot speech dude from one of our competition schools, Woodbury, which was only about an hour outside our little town. He had been on the periphery of our little world for the last year or so, driving into town periodically to hang out and take part in our geeky drama club hi-jinks. He was like a special guest star. In a way, he fit in as an idol in my little world too, since he was always winning awards and all the girls wouldn’t shut up about him. Plus he had the all-important allure of being from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else was an even smaller, shittier town than the one we were in. In getting a ride home from him I felt like I’d scored a bit of a coup. I’d be spending time with the star from another school! Maybe I’d learn some of his star-making secrets and use ‘em for my own benefit.
I don’t know if I learned anything, though we did spend an intoxicating few hours standing in my driveway talking about the big things - acting, music, friendship, sex. Watching the moon spin round in the sky, each of us absorbing and reflecting the light of impossibly high teenage spirits off of one another. Each of us wary, nervous, putting on a front of what we imagined to be cool. Trying to embody the various degrees of aloofness, confidence, and charisma we found in our own separate teenage heroes.
And here’s another situation where the memory of little things trump the big events. When I think about the State tournament I don’t really think about the tournament itself, or the second-place finish. I think about watching Orel Hershiser in a hotel room while I look over the cover of a Minutemen album. And I think about “I got the bullets!” and I think about standing in the driveway talking to Chris Timmons, each of us buzzing with possibility and expectation, hoping for things that we couldn’t quite articulate.
