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 Joys of Driving Around Aimlessly
Early in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused one character says to another “So um, what have you guys been doing?” The reply comes with a faint shrug-of-the-shoulders; “I don’t know, driving around mostly.”
That line sums up my memory of summer 1988 pretty well – it’s a blur of roads, tires, street signs, movement. Heat, listlessness, music.
I guess driving around aimlessly is a long-standing tradition of American teenagers, but somehow the aimless driving around that I remember from 1988 doesn’t fit into the mold typified by the examples of Dazed And Confused or American Grafitti. Again, this is at least partly because in those movies, so much seemed to be happening. And in our little world nothing ever seemed to be happening. Yet somehow the memories of driving around aimlessly are still so vivid. Here’s a few now, in convenient paragraph form.
Max is the only one of us who has a car, so he usually drives. When anyone else drives, the result is usually awkward, comical. One day Roger drives his parents’ car, and he lets me have a go at the wheel. I have had my license for a while now, but my experience with driving encompassed little more than the few blocks I drove in order to pass the driving test. Driving Roger’s car that day, I’m overly cautious to the point that the passengers in the car all snicker at my expense. I see a stop sign ahead, so I bring the car to a halt. “You know,” Roger says, deadpan, “You don’t have to stop so far away from the sign.” I look around and realize that I have stopped the car a good twenty feet in front of the sign. Everyone cracks up.
Max is driving, two or three of us are in the car with him. It’s daytime. We look to our right, and from out of nowhere we see a single unattached tire rolling side-by-side with us. For a dazed moment, we fear it may be from Max’s car. But it can’t be, we’re still riding smoothly. Suddenly Max is pulling over, shouting “Get it! Get it!” and I find myself leaping clumsily out of the passenger door and running full speed after the tire. Somehow, I catch up with it, grab it and haul it back to Max’s car. My hands and clothes are covered in black grime. Emily is nonplussed. “Why did you do that?” she asks. Max is quick with the reply: “Are you kidding? Free tire!”
We’re driving Emily’s little brother to a softball game. Elliot is behind the wheel of his ratty old hand-me-down car. He drives recklessly, speeding and swerving wildly. Upon arrival at the game Emily has to take her brother aside and comfort him. Elliot’s driving has frayed his nerves, freaked him out. Elliot and I exchange eye-rolls, but truthfully I am a little unnerved too.
Max made a mixtape, specifically designed for road trips, though we also listen to it when driving nowhere in particular, which is often. Talking Heads, REM, Violent Femmes, Patti Smith’s “Gloria”, The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”, Television’s “See No Evil”. Costello, Clash, Ramones. Listening to this music is not an act of nostalgia, of yearning for a time that we may or may not have actually lived that may or may not have been wonderful or terrible. No, this music is alive, right fucking NOW, and we are living inside of it, and vice-versa. That’s the way it is, always, in 1988 and in 2012 and in 2036. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise is welcome to a swift punch in the gut.
