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 Trisha
In Spring of 1988 DC Comics released The Killing Joke, a graphic novel featuring a particularly grisly story in which Batman’s nemesis the Joker assaults Barbara Gordon and tortures her father, Commissioner Gordon. Written by Alan Moore, already established as a serious force with the wildly inventive, visionary storytelling he had brought to his Swamp Thing re-boot and Watchmen mini-series, the release of The Killing Joke was a major event in comics circles. Being an obedient comics geek, I bought mine on the first weekend of its release. I devoured it in one sitting on Saturday afternoon.
At the time, like many readers my age, I was probably a little over-impressed with the full-on graphically violent nature of the book – it was such a departure from the norm. But it was also a little show-offy, and disguised a somewhat slight storyline. There’s no denying, however, the spell that its daring and derangement had cast. I carried it with me as I set out that evening.
Another of our classmates was leaving for another state, another world, and we were holding a going-away party in her honor. Yet another celebration of yet another disappearance. Trisha was a tall, pretty girl that none of us knew particularly well, but somehow she seemed to have become an integral part of our little group in a very short time. Mouse had a crush on her. Like a ghost, Mouse had disappeared. Trisha followed suit shortly thereafter. Are they somewhere out there, together now?
The party was being held in a house way out in the woods, and to get there we had to travel miles of winding roads made up mostly of dirt and gravel. It felt like going back in time. The Minutemen blared incongruously from the tape deck, singing “This Ain’t No Picnic”. Indeed.
Of course we got lost and had to stop and ask for directions. The place we stopped at was a little backwoods gas station/convenience store, basically a wooden shack. Still possessed by the spirit of Alan Moore’s Joker, with maybe a little of Andy Kaufman’s unctuous wrestling persona thrown in, I had the bizarre notion that I would affect a harsh southern accent when speaking to the helpful employees. Maybe this was my idea of an acting exercise, and I thus thought that I might be able to blend in without the employees noticing. Oh, they noticed. My little Deliverance act made them a lot less helpful. I will never forget the way the eyes of the man behind the counter seemed to go black, almost piercing through me, puncturing all of my ultimately spineless teenage bravado. I thought for a moment that he might simply pound me straight into the ground with one swift blow to the top of the head, like in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Somehow, he found it within him to be merciful, and we escaped unscathed. “You nearly got us killed,” a stone-faced Elliot said, genuinely, and rightly, angry with me.
I often long for the brazenness of my youth. I want that blind sense of adventure back. I do not, however, want back any of the blind stupidity. Though often enough I end up with it anyway.
At the party my little yellow Memorex tape (like the kind that Charlize Theron’s character keeps playing in the recent film Young Adult) with Marquee Moon on one side and The Modern Lovers on the other provided the soundtrack. “Astral Plane” was the hit that night. It was Brandon’s favorite song, and he insisted on playing it over and over. He flailed about madly as it played, like a demented, spaced-out version of an American Bandstand dancer. It was great. Though at this point my memory so very much wants to conjure a huge group of excitable kids all around him, pogo-ing away to the sound of the Modern Lovers. I know it was only one person, but why not let my memory have its way? It was dozens of people! Laughing, singing, having the time of their lives!
Again here there is a blur of ill-remembered activity. A band was practicing in the garage of Trisha’s house. We stood and listened, hoping to measure the sound against our own musical ambitions, but it was only a mass of indistinct noise. A counterpoint to the clarity of the stereo.
And in the foreground a sea of voices and movement. Wayward moods and buzzing hormones. Profanity, innuendo, sex humor. Much of the latter probably over our own heads, even as we engaged in it. Unless it concerned masturbation, which it probably did. Masturbation was always a hot topic.
And here again, the mood shifts from one of frantic expectation, activity, to calm.
Somehow, Emily and I ended up on the roof together, talking, looking up at the stars, dreaming. The spell of lunatic derangement cast by The Killing Joke earlier in the day had dissipated. Now a sense of serenity prevailed. The tone of the day had completely changed, in a way that seems to me can only happen when you are young.
In my adult life, a day starts out one way and tends to stay that way. And the days run together, indistinct.
I want the variety, the openhearted recklessness of my youth back. I do not, however, want the crazed neurosis. Though often enough I end up with it anyway.
