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. 
Ace Buddies
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.
