Seventeen In '88 - Installment 20: Make Your Own Prom

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.

Make Your Own Prom

When I was in High School, Prom was something that my friends and I avoided like the damn plague. Maybe there was an element of fear or insecurity in doing so, a kind of “I’m going to hurt you before you hurt me” mindset at work, but I think we just had an overall aversion to ceremonies in general. Having to get dressed up and behave like civil adults (yes, this is ignoring the debauchery that many, or most, otherwise civil kids tend to engage in after Prom) while listening to shitty top-forty ballads was also a pretty strong deterrent. Too much pomp and circumstance, too few dick jokes.

The thing is, the day of Prom arrives and even if you're not going to go you still feel like you need to do something. Something big. Fun. Maybe the excitement of our classmates was infectious, that feeling of expectation and nervousness becoming an energy in the air that couldn't be avoided. So you create your own excitement.

Such as it is, anyway. On the day of Prom in 1988 our big plan was to take a trip to Nashville. Any big plans we ever came up with tended to involve going to Nashville. I mean, they had record stores there. It may as well have been New York freakin' City to us.

Sure, maybe we could have been more creative. Maybe we could have held an Anti-Prom rally or something. Or maybe one of us should have said "Hey everybody, let's put on a show!" At which point we could have mimed Elton John and Kiki Dee singing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", like on that episode of One Day At A Time. But all that would have taken a lot of effort. Effort is hard. So I guess Nashville seemed the safest, easiest bet.

On that trip I bought another Meat Puppets record, Up On The Sun. Weird how simply buying a record can end up being such a happy memory. Appropriate, because apart from the haunted, ethereal "Two Rivers", Up On The Sun is a pretty happy record. Go to the music streaming site of your choice and listen to "Maiden's Milk" and try not to break into a grin when the Puppets start whistling in wayward unison.

Up On The Sun replaced Double Nickels On The Dime as the ongoing soundtrack for the next several weeks. It's a summertime record - airy and upbeat, full of images of sun and water and heat, all evoking the band's home state of Arizona, which on the basis of this record seemed to be an exotic, otherworldly place. Even the titles sound summery and fun - "Hot Pink", "Swimming Ground", "Animal Kingdom". Jittery guitars and bouncy rhythms give way to shimmering textures and spaced-out vocals, often within the same song. It's not talked about as often, but it's in the same league as the more celebrated Meat Puppets II.

So that purchase is my enduring memory of Prom 1988. That, and making out on the stairs with Emily during the wee hours of Sheila Richards' after-Prom party, while everyone dozed in front of the television in the basement a few steps below. Periodically someone would get up to go upstairs to the bathroom and have to politely nudge us aside. I'm sure it was really irritating, but I also kind of marvel at our hormone-driven brazenness, and I sometimes wish that it hadn't so fully given way to the polite observation of boundaries that comes with adulthood. Though I guess it would be somewhat unbecoming of forty-something adults to openly make out on the stairway at a party. Depending on the adults in question.

The next afternoon I watched on television as the Houston Astros' Mike Scott, at the time one of the three or four best pitchers on Planet Earth, came within an out of throwing a no-hitter against the Atlanta Braves. I'd never seen a no-hitter up to that point (damn you, Ken Oberkfell!) and ever since then whenever I see a pitcher take a no-hitter into the late innings I flash back to Scott's near-miss on the day after Prom.* I've witnessed actual no-hitters on television since then, but that memory of Scott and his ridiculous split-fingered fastball stands out to me. Probably because I was under the spell of that weird hyper-real, afterglow-ish feeling that you get when you've been up all night in the name of fun.

*Upon doing some research, I've found that this game actually took place on Sunday, June 12, which means either that our school's Prom was held very late in the year - actually pretty feasible given the number of snow days we no doubt had to make up - or my memory is faulty. If the latter is the case, which I would find only mildly shocking, it of course means that nothing I write on this blog can be trusted. At least when it comes to sequence of events. So go forward with wide-eyed acceptance of whole-truth-and-nothing-but at your own risk.

It seems very quaint, I know, but the memory of Scott's unhittable-ness and the Meat Puppets and the stairs at Sheila Richards' house add up to something more than the sum of their parts. And that sum is as glowing and important to me as many people's memories of their own Prom Night. Maybe more so, given all of the horror stories I've heard from people about their own Proms in the years since.

Part of the point of my writing all this stuff about 1988 is to emphasize how it's the mundane moments that sometimes stand out above the big events as memorable. I think I intuitively suspected this was the case back then, which may be part of the reason I avoided things like the Prom. I wanted to invent my own memories, not have them forced on me artificially by some lame, codified tradition.

I recognize now that that outlook is at least partially flawed, that traditions and ceremonies have an important place in organized society. But I still prefer the records, the baseball games and the stairs. Creating new traditions. Is it possible to have it both ways?

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 19: Ace Buddies

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. 
     

                                         
Ace Buddies

Kids who constantly hang out together tend to develop a language that only they can understand, with their own idiosyncratic set of bywords and catch-phrases and running jokes. We had plenty of 'em in our little clan in 1988. Our favorite had been picked up from a pornographic video that Elliot had told us about. One scene featured a man offering his friend the opportunity to sleep with his beautiful new girlfriend. When the bewildered friend asks “Are you sure it’s okay?” the man replies “Hey man, how could I let my ace buddy miss out on this?” Cue much slurping and moaning. 

We all thought that line was hilarious, and from the moment Elliot told us about it we began referring to one another as “ace buddies”. As in, “C’mon, gimme a ride to work. I’ll be your ace buddy!” or “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you guys were gonna watch Sid & Nancy? What kind of ace buddy are you?”

Max was in charge of the Speech & Drama Team’s yearbook that year, and he dedicated a couple of pages to the Ace Buddies theme, featuring pictures of various combinations of friends, usually in pairs, laughing, mugging for the camera, doing the various fun things that friends do together. The final page featured matching photos of Elliot and I, each posing in Max’s back yard. I’m saluting the camera and Elliot is staring into the distance looking wistful, each of us with our pants down around our ankles.

Elliot was probably the most naturally funny person in our group. His personality was a weird combination of hangdog and smartass, like a teenage Bill Murray. He also had a kind of Lennon-esque wit - alternately hilarious and cutting, sometimes both at once. Sarcastic, deadpan, bullshit-detector always finely tuned. He had great comic timing. Once, when a lunk-headed moron threatened to rearrange his teeth (and yes, the guy actually used those words), Elliot responded, without missing a beat, “Oh, so in addition to being an asshole you’re also a dentist?”

For all of his humor Elliot also had a moody streak, and he was given to bouts of melancholy. He and I had this in common, and we often brought out the mopiness in one another. Elliot was a big Smiths fan, and Morrissey had only recently departed their ranks to begin his solo career. His debut, Viva Hate, had come out in March, and the key song for us, naturally, was “Late Night Maudlin Street”, the title of which pretty much says it all. 

Once, as Spring was closing in on Summer, Elliot and I walked home from school and had a long conversation about THE FUTURE. We both agreed it seemed hopeless. Or at the very least an incredibly vague, intimidating prospect. We walked for miles and miles, through parts of town we rarely saw, voices quiet, serious, considering the many years of bleakness ahead. It was a lot of fun.

No, really, it was. As ace buddies, simply being able to confront these ideas together, to bring them out in the open, made them seem less depressing somehow.

Later, over at my house, we listened to Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. Max came over just in time for the last song, the bluesy, mournful “Buckets Of Rain.”

“I feel like somebody just died,” Max remarked as the last notes faded.

Elliot’s favorite band was U2. I remember being amazed at his immaculately arranged cassettes, with all of U2’s releases arranged chronologically from Boy to The Joshua Tree, side-by-side with The Smiths catalog, self-titled to Strangeways Here We Come. I sometimes think that the distance in sensibility between those two bands goes a good way towards defining the temperament of not only Elliot but most of the guys in our little group.

If U2 and The Smiths shared anything, it was a proud and overt dedication to romanticism, albeit at opposite ends of the romantic spectrum. 

U2 were a grand, larger-than-life prospect, invoking windswept landscapes and keening drama. Like most of civilization back then, we saw some kind of mirror in their widescreen sensitivity. All that grandeur seemed to add up to a life that just might be worth living after all.

The Smiths, on the other hand, were homelier, smaller scale, with a slight, and sly, edge of camp. Bedroom music, meant for the inward-drawn, the proudly outcast. 

I’m not sure we really thought about it much, but if we did I think we would have counted ourselves more among the latter. At heart, we were fairly ill-at-ease in our own skins. Oddly though, I think we somehow latched onto that discomfort and made it a strength, using it to foster a weird kind of confidence. As a group, we were awkward, smart, funny, vulgar, sensitive, sharp. We were little shits. But we were decent.

And we did have ambition. Ambition to do what? Good fucking question. But we were together in all of this contradictory self-assured awkwardness and that counted for a lot. We became like brothers, for better or worse. And it was definitely sometimes worse.

We had our moments, though.

Once, in the summer, Emily took a picture of us - Max, Elliot, Roger and I. Emily had started a collage, hanging little mementos from this time period on her wall. She used as a backdrop an enormous paper table cloth that a few of us had brought back from Nashville where we had eaten at a restaurant at which they kept crayons on the table so patrons could draw while waiting for food. (Does anyplace like that exist now?)

Throughout the year she kept items of significance, including photographs, letters, notes, drawings, as well as more mundane items – receipts, movie stubs, the stray detritus of everyday living, putting it all up on display as an ongoing, living souvenir of our adolescence.

She put that picture of the four guys up there. It's our own little version of those band shots up top, only we weren't famous. Or a band. Still, that picture captures quite a bit about our collective mindset, I think. Our body language, our expressions, seem to convey a comic hyper-aloofness. We appear to be enjoying the act of trying to look cool by pretending to pretend to look cool. As though we know we are so uncool that we have to make fun of the very idea of being cool. Very postmodern. Though I'm not sure we knew what the hell postmodernism was. Come to think of it, I’m not terribly sure I know what it is now. Regardless, that was a moment in time that encapsulated our attitudes, our bond, our ace-buddiness, and Emily kept it on her wall for years, the four of us glowering and smirking in a way that says "We're not tough, we know we're not tough, and hey, screw you if you think we oughtta be tough anyway."

It was a self-defense mechanism, one fostered by mutual confusion in the face of teenage life's complications. Our biggest fear may actually have been a pretty perceptive, well-founded one: that life would never get any less complicated. 

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 18: The X Dream

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 X Dream

At some point in Spring of 1988 I had an extremely vivid dream, the feeling of which was ominous enough that I’ve never quite shaken it. It was only a dream, I’m sure. No more or less significant than any of the other bits of weirdness that the subconscious throws up on a nightly basis. But somehow, it seemed – seems - like something else.

In the dream, Max and I are driving through desert terrain. The landscape is littered with animal skeletons and industrial debris. It’s daytime. The sky is a deep, fathomless blue.

Music is playing, a humming, the sound of some spectral choir, like the sound that accompanies Dave Bowman’s journey into the infinite in 2001. We drive for what seems like forever, accompanied by this discomforting sound.

Eventually, we approach a highway sign that reads “X – 100 Miles”.

I know, in the dream, that the X represents something terrifying, but I don’t know what it is.

It's only a crazy dream, kind of funny even. Still, for reasons that I can’t explain, though I never stop trying, this dream, that X, affects me profoundly, haunting me for years afterwards.

Clearly, one might jump to the conclusion that it is a dream about anxiety. It probably is. The future is breathing down our necks and we are confounded by all of the choices, afraid of what might happen.

But it feels like something else. It feels like a voice calling out a warning from the future, or from some other side of this reality.

One of my favorite recordings around this time is Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays, which contains Fairport’s own idiosyncratic take on Blind Willie Johnson’s creepy “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground”, retitled “The Lord Is In This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place”.

A desolate, mournful slide guitar accompanied by haunted, wordless voices, it isn’t so much a song as a ghost, a spiritual presence floating through the speakers, passing from one netherworld to the next.

It sounds to me like a remembrance. Not necessarily - or only - of things past, but also of the future.

Or, maybe, something missing from the future. An emptiness. Things about to not be done. Or things about to be done that shouldn’t be. Consequences looming.

The future, man, is an oppressive thing. Forget what The Beatles said, tomorrow always knows.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 17: Spring 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music

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.

Spring 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music

Emily and I are walking around her neighborhood. We stop a few doors down to visit her friend Kathy. We’re standing in front of Kathy's house and I feel as though I’m floating. I wander out of body to the other side of the street so I can see what we look like from over there. What I see, the stiff body language, the stilted conversation, reminds me of Grady telling Jack to “correct” his family in The Shining. I tell Emily later that we looked like a scene from a Kubrick movie. I’m not sure why on earth I made that connection, nothing in the feeling of the day, or that moment, resembles a Kubrick movie, especially not that one. But I’m a seventeen year-old pop culture geek, and I’m always looking for excuses to talk about Stanley Kubrick, whether the situation calls for it or not.

The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime has become the soundtrack for every day. Every single day. Put the needle down on any of its four sides and the sound of a car engine revving gives way to a messy tumult of fat basslines, roiling rhythms, shouted socio-political diatribes, inscrutable jokes. So much stuff in 45 songs, and it sounds so fresh, so new, in keeping with the feel of springtime. Probably due to repeated use of the f-word, my mother refers to it as “That awful record with the car engine starting.”

Walking, walking, always walking. I’ve taken to avoiding the school bus in the afternoons after school, instead relying on friends, wits, and dumb luck to get home. The act becomes an adventure, a bold stand against the tyranny of not only the wretched school bus, but the safety, the horrible dependability that it represents. This bit of time between the last school bell and the determination of how I’m going to get home turns into an excitement that I thrive on. More than once I end up walking the long miles home. But I enjoy the hell out of it.

The Modern Lovers. The whole first album is great, but my favorite in 1988 is “I’m Straight”, a cool, simmering plea to the object of Jonathan Richman’s affections to give up on her always stoned love interest and turn instead to straight-edge Jonathon. Jerry Harrison’s ominous keyboard playing is the key, but the way Richman derisively drawls the name ‘Hippie Johnny’ as if he’s half-congested is the clincher. I want the song to be playing all the time, the soundtrack to everything. For a time, it is.

In May Lisa Bonet appears nearly naked on the cover of Rolling Stone. This was a pivotal event in my life at the time, and I do not believe I am anywhere near alone in this among my age group. 

Talking Heads’ Naked. In the grand scheme of the Talking Heads’ recorded oeuvre, their final album has become an afterthought when it’s thought of at all, but in the spring of ’88 it was an event record. It was the home of at least one of their great songs – “(Nothing But) Flowers”, and it contained the first flowering of David Byrne’s Brazilian influences. Oddly, the song we liked best was the austere folk-funk  “Democratic Circus”.  Still, for all that, the feeling was that the curtain was closing on Max’s favorite band. Another in a series of endings.

In English class we are reading the Grapes Of Wrath. The book is a classic, a must-read, especially if you want to have any kind of grasp on American literature or America itself. I understood that then (kind of) and I understand it now (slightly more so). But, man, in 1988 I just don’t have time for it. Our teacher insists we will not be able to pass if we only read the CliffsNotes. I only read the CliffsNotes. I pass, though only with a (charitable) B. During this time I read Catcher In The Rye and On The Road instead. I’ve never regretted this choice. Got to Steinbeck later. Read what you want when you want!

At Raven Records, which is a kind of Paradise on Earth, I purchase Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks on vinyl. I love all ten of its compact, fiery, hook-driven little tunes, but my favorite is “Saturday Night Is Dead”. Because Saturday night is dead. Saturday night is the night that things are supposed to happen. But on our Saturday nights nothing ever happens. And you know what? Good. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

More Kubrick. One Sunday afternoon Max, Emily and I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Emily and I are full of romance and passion and we’re desperate to demonstrate these qualities. During the climactic Star-child sequence we clench one another’s hands tightly enough to cut off circulation. Even though truthfully we do not actually understand what’s going on in the movie. I pretend that I do, offering a silly explanation involving nuclear war. Max says he thinks I’m full of it. He is correct.

Every Monday night a group of us goes to see a movie. Movie Monday we call it, ‘cos we’re fond of alliteration. On one of these occasions we go see The Last Emperor. It is the big winner at the Oscars that year. It is a grand, sprawling epic of a film, full of magnificent colors and intrigue and historical significance. But afterwards all any of us can talk about is the scene with the threesome.

The Meat Puppets’ “Up On The Sun”. A seamless melding of endless-sky Beach Boys luminosity, R.E.M. jangle & chime, and inscrutable Butthole Surfers weirdness.   I wanna hear it right now.

Well before the name was associated with a burger chain, Max, Elliot and two friends put together a band called The Five Guys (the joke being that there were only four guys in the band) to do a one-off show at a Spring benefit. They play covers of The Clash, Talking Heads, and "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love". They have fun with it, and so does everyone in attendance. Watching them, I feel a weird mixture of excitement and jealousy. This doesn't seem so hard. Maybe I could be in a band...