Seventeen In '88 - Installment 29: The Maze

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 Maze

Tonight you've got a flower of a different kind.
- Run Westy Run

None of what follows is true.

One night Max and Elliot and I set out from Max’s apartment and took a walk around the neighborhood. Only, we didn’t really intend to do so. I mean, it wasn’t a plan – nobody said “Hey guys, let’s take a walk.” We were just hanging around outside his apartment talking when we suddenly found ourselves walking down the street. As if some unseen force nudged us out onto the road.

It was one of those deep summer nights. The kind where the air is clear and warm and the sky is full of stars and it just seems to go on and on and up and up into forever. “An azure sky of deepest summer,” as Alex DeLarge would have it.

We got lost. As these things do, it happened gradually, without us noticing what was going on. One minute we’re talking, laughing, the next we realize we’ve taken a couple turns too many and can’t remember quite how to retrace our steps.

No problem, we’ll figure it out. We haven’t been out here long enough to be too far away from where we started. But of course, between the three of us, we couldn’t settle on an agreement as to which direction we should proceed in. So we just kept walking, hoping that we might see something recognizable around the next corner. But the next corner kept turning up darkness and unfamiliarity.

At some point, a weirdly comical sense of hysteria crept in. We imagined we might never be getting back. Like maybe we were going to end up walking into a whole new city, into whole new lives, completely distinct from what had come before.

In a sense, something like that might have really been the case, because that night represents to me the tipping point of 1988. It’s the fulcrum around which all the other events of that time revolve. That night, being lost in that maze of dark roads, was somehow emblematic of the feeling of the whole time – a mixture of fun and panic, vaguely exciting, vaguely menacing.

The sky was lit up with the moon and stars and still somehow the roads seemed to get darker the further we walked. The air was clear and we were enjoying ourselves, as always grasping for some kind of strange fun, but we were also a little worried. I mean, seriously, where the hell are we?

It’s a moment of perfect disorientation; you will never be more lost – the future is dangerously close, bearing down in the form of the mixed-up roads ahead, filling you with a dread that you can barely comprehend. And you will never be more found – you’re here with friends, practically brothers, facing up to the unknown with wit, sarcasm and pure teenage nerve, as you have become accustomed to doing. Who knows how long it will last, this carefree feeling? You better damn well enjoy it.

One of the albums in regular rotation around this time was Hardly, Not Even by the Minneapolis band Run Westy Run. I associate that album (cassette, really) with this memory partly because the cover seems to illustrate some of the feeling of being lost out there in that maze. It’s a cartoon cityscape, jumbled with shadows and angles and weird faces. The music, though…

There’s a short mirage of a tune buried deep on the second side of this mostly forgotten album, it’s titled “Bye Love”, but maybe the original title was “Flower” if the video of the band performing the song on YouTube (in a version that is much louder and more raw than the whispered recorded version) is any indication. (And if you take the time to watch that, be sure to also check out the amazing footage of the band performing "Heck House", from the same album.) It’s a simple song, softly played guitar and voice tracing a haunted melody. The song is hardly there. Long gone and yet to arrive. It’s like being in a desert at night and hearing a couple of lonely campers (or Manson and his family out in Death Valley, maybe?) singing softly, mournfully, in the far distance. “Bye love, bye love…”

Earlier in 1988 one of my favorite songs had been “Indian Summer” by The Doors. That song, eerie and quiet, a fading ember, could be a spiritual precursor to Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”. Both of them are wistful, gentle, and both emanate from some other plane of existence. Beyond. At once far away and vivid. Listen to the sound too closely and it's not there anymore.

“Bye Love” could be a lament for good times passed. Or it could be a warning from the future, a future fit for wasting, called in on some scratchy, barely-there long-distance line.

All these years I’ve had this memory of being lost on those dark roads and I hear this song accompanying it – “bye love, bye love” - and I’ve always assumed it was a song about departure, a lover moving on. So I was startled when I listened to the song again while writing this and noticed for the first time that it is actually a song about murder – “Murdered man rises and wipes off his gun / a target is drawn and the work it is done.”

No one was murdered on the night of the maze. But that summer, in our little town, two murders did happen. The resulting fear and paranoia covered that whole time in a black fog. This is likely the reason  why this song and so many of the other personal/cultural touchstones of the year 1988 (Sid & Nancy, the televised Manson interview) have continued to resonate so strongly in my memory through the years, consciously or subconsciously. Violent death was an unfortunate truth of the time.

Regardless, “Bye Love” to me feels like it’s about something else, something less sinister; open (if very dark) roads, quiet (if bizarre) dreams. Intoxication.

Whatever the song is about, whatever the song is saying, it sounds incredibly right, and it’s wrapped up seamlessly now with this moment, with the air and the streets in this maze, out under a sky lit bright with darkness, the way only summer can make happen.  

It’s a moment of perfect disorientation, and you’re sort of hoping that you never figure your way out of it. You want to stay lost and listening for on and on and into every everywhere, every nowhere.

The horrible truth, though, is that you still need shelter and food. Damn. Why does reality always demand that you wake up? So, really, there’s a little panic going on here at this crossroads. And a little bickering as we decide which direction to take.

Somehow we found our way out, or a way out found us. We ended up approaching Max’s apartment from the direction opposite where we had left it, as though we had traveled in a circle. After all that, we emerged out of the darkness unscathed.

Or not. It actually felt as though we had gone through something, gone through some kind of change. But we were the same, I guess.

Maybe we did go to some other side and we just don’t remember. Like in an alien abduction.

Nah, we just got lost. Simple. Nothing really happened. Does anything ever?

Yet that memory has begged to be explained for all these years. It lingers so vividly, and so faintly. Huge chunks of the experience seem to be erased. Missing. But that’s probably just the way memory works isn’t it? You remember the feeling more than the specifics.

I go back and forth. I want it explained, and then I just want to be lost again.

Maybe there is some alternate reality in which we never got out of there. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who knew a thing or two about alternate realities, theorized (or, more accurately, came to believe) that time is an illusion, that it doesn’t actually exist, that everything that has ever happened or will ever happen occurs all at once, forever.

So maybe we are still out there, under that limitless sky, searching, walking in circles. It’s dark, and we don’t know where the hell we are. Disorientation. Mild panic. Out there in the deep part of summer, walking. (Bye love, bye love.) A change is coming, but it isn’t really a change, because we were always that way anyway.

You’re always the same person.

All of the above is true.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 28: The Fight

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 Fight

One night we decided to rent a pornographic movie. We chose the one with the funniest title we could find - The Wizard of Aahhs.*  I think it took place on a spaceship, where three space-vixens were on a journey to find the wizard so they could get…oh, I don’t know, a brain, a heart, and better implants? The most memorable part was when a prone naked dude shows one of the astral nymphs a unique trick. He asks her to hover over him, snap her fingers and say “Up dick!”, which she dutifully does, at which point his previously lifeless dong springs up fully erect, like magic. Doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time we all thought that was freaking hil-arious, and we fell about laughing and rewound and re-watched about a dozen times. “Just snap your fingers and say ‘up dick’” became a running line that we’d resort to at most any opportunity, an all-purpose running joke, however inappropriate the situation. (Car won't start? Just snap your fingers and say...) I’m thinking of trying to bring that back, make it a catch-phrase. America just might be ready.

*This title would later be used as the name of a line of fine clothing, as well as the name (albeit with a slightly different spelling) of an EP by the indie rock group Black Kids. I'm dying to know if any of the folks involved in those enterprises got the name from the same dirty movie my friends and I rented.

The night of Wizard of Aahhs was an exception, though - we usually rented more traditional cinematic fare. Full Metal Jacket came out on video that summer, and that was a good movie to thoroughly bum everyone out with. Repo Man was another favorite, and I was always clamoring for The Kids Are Alright, or A Clockwork Orange. But the movie that defined the summer, and would later define the fall, and then on into winter, was Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

Roger had become obsessed with it, a by-product of his simultaneous obsessions with skateboarding, hardcore and punk rock. We rented it at least half-a-dozen times from July into December. It became part of our collective consciousness.

Given the subject matter - messed-up punk rock dude and his unhinged girlfriend descend into junkie hell, culminating in death-by-bloodbath - it’s an appropriately bleak movie. And yet we had so much fun watching it.

That fun probably had less to do with the drugs’n’degradation subject matter than it did with the film’s dry, downbeat sense of humor – like when Johnny Rotten responds to an interviewer who asks “What do you care about, John?” with a matter-of-fact “Not much really.” Or when Sid’s drug dealer walks in on the bloody aftermath of Nancy’s death, and rather than freaking out or helping out he simply shakes his head and mutters “Sid, this is a serious fuck-up.”

The film has its flaws, aesthetically and historically, but the lead performances go a long way towards making up for it. Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb are amazingly believable, shifting deftly through an exhausting range of emotions. Apathy, ecstasy, intense need. Oldman a perfect mixture of befuddlement and live-fast-die-young innocence, Webb alternately out-of-it and impossibly petulant. Scratching and kicking at each other, then clutching at one another’s bones as if for dear life. When Sid storms out of their room after a fight on the eve of leaving for a tour and Nancy shouts after him “What about the farewell drugs?” it’s a moment that works both as a good laugh and a pitiful summation of the mess their neediness has put them in.  

All that bickering between Sid and Nancy must have rubbed off on our group somehow, because one night while watching the movie at Max’s new apartment Claire and I got into a fight. In my memory it was a full-on shouting match, but I’m betting it was much closer to mildly heated conversation, voices barely even raised. Although we did have to take it outside so as not to irritate the people who were still watching the movie.

As these things often go, I have no recollection of what the fight was about, or what sparked it. I'm sure there were deep-seated insecurities and/or hormonally-driven jealousies involved. Regardless, I remember the occasion as among the first cracks in the veneer of the friendships that bonded our group.

Claire and I had known each other for a long time - three years, which translates to roughly twenty years in teenage time. Once you think you know someone pretty well, you start to think that they should always behave in the way that best suits your idea of them. When they don’t, the resulting confusion can be hard to deal with, especially when you’re young, and haven’t gone through the whole process yet. You start to measure your own strengths, fears, beliefs and inadequacies against theirs, and often find yourself or the other person wanting in some way. So you take it out on them.

And thus we were outside Max’s apartment one summer night, taking it out on each other. I don’t remember the specifics of the argument, but I remember the feel, the atmosphere of that night. It was beautiful. It had been raining, but the sky was clear now, no clouds, only stars. And it was warm, not hot. There was a breeze, and the smell of summer rain lingered in the air. And here we were in the middle of it, arguing.

Conflict within our group was a relatively new sensation. We were left with a feeling that was hard to reconcile with all the good times that had gone before. Only a short while ago we had been laughing together at a terrible joke from a pornographic movie. And we had become accustomed to helping one another maneuver through the random nonsense that life incessantly hurled our way. I imagined it would always be that way.

Does change have to be so relentless, so fucking inevitable?

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 27: The Storm

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 Storm

Max had moved into another new place, an apartment on the outskirts of the city. I think it was brand new. It smelled of wood and clean carpet. That place became headquarters for the remainder of summer.

Elliot and I often spent the night there. In my memory we are there all the time, every day, as though we lived there. The truth is, we may only have spent the night there three or four times. The memory plays tricks like that.

This place inspired a great deal of strangeness, in mood and behavior. One night we walked to the gas station/convenience store up the road, where I bought a pack of cigarettes, despite the fact that I didn’t smoke. I guess I thought I might try. I mean, maybe I’m a smoker and I just don’t know it because I never really gave it a shot. On that same trip Max stole a case of cokes from a stack that was sitting outside the store. We walked back to the apartment that night feeling like rebels. Elliot, acting as the voice of moral consciousness, or more likely the voice of simple contrarianism, brought us down from our rebellious high by verbally berating us all the way. "I can't believe you guys are smoking and stealing now, you must think you're so cool."  

Elliot could talk. Luckily he was usually funny, sometimes insightful. One night he kept Max and I awake for hours brainstorming aloud about the ingredients of cheese. “Just what is it about cheese that makes cheese cheese?” A question for the ages. Or at the very least a question for the remainder of the summer. For the next few weeks it became something like a mantra; The cheese that makes cheese cheese. What is it?

I always slept under the bed. I have no recollection as to why I chose to do so. I remember being under there and falling asleep to the sound of The Balancing Act’s “Three Cards”. The Balancing Act was a folky college-rock band from L.A. that specialized in weird, upbeat little tunes with titles like “A TV Guide In The Olduvai Gorge” and “Kicking Clouds Across The Sky”. “Three Cards”, like most of their songs, is an acoustically-based tune with elliptical lyrics and a slightly ominous mood. Every song in 1988 seemed to have a slightly ominous mood. An undercurrent of weirdness – something happening here, but I don’t know what it is.

Patti Smith’s Horses was not really like that. All of its ominousness was worn on its sleeve, in plain view. Along with its mystery, its drama, its ambition. That all of these things are right there on the surface does not make the album any less effective.

The day I filched the album from the dirty backroom at my Dad’s place was the day of the storm. There may have been other thunderstorms in summer 1988, but this one sticks out because I associate the buildup of black clouds, the rumbling thunder, the wind and wetness and chaos, with the experience of hearing Horses for the first time. What better setting to hear all of those songs about breaking through, transformation, transcendence?

Elliot and I were over at Max’s apartment. We put the album on and watched the storm brewing from the bedroom window. It was all happening, man. That was the same window from which earlier in the summer, maybe earlier that day, we had watched Cindy McCaslin swimming down at the pool. She must have lived or known somebody who lived nearby. She was a classmate, older, sexy in a quietly intimidating way. She tended to wear black. Even when swimming, apparently. Her one-piece was completely black, making her pale skin almost porcelain in contrast.

On the stereo Patti Smith was singing “Gloria”. She’s at a party, bored (of course, parties are boring), looking out the window at a sweet young thing leaning against a parking meter. Wants to put a spell on her. That was happening and I was looking out the bedroom window at the black sky and the lightning and I was remembering that vision of Cindy McCaslin.

There’s something about summertime storms. They have more color, more crazy atmosphere than any other kind of meteorological event. The leaves on the trees are still green and alive and the wind is making them shake in violent waves. The rain comes down in odd spasms, maybe drifting, maybe pounding. The lightning making everything glow. And then Patti gets into “Birdland”, where the sky lights up with such a naked joy and the stars start to slip. Then on the other side it’s "Kimberly", a song about birth, specifically that of Patti’s sister. “Little sister, the sky is falling,” she warns, and outside the storm is at full throttle.

By the time she’s into “Land” she’s on the other side for real, and she drags you along with her. The (neon) boy is in the hallway drinkin’ his tea, laughing hysterically, surrounded by horses. He disappears, and Cindy McCaslin rises from the pool all aglow with water and electricity. She floats up to us at the window, smiling, wicked. We all disappear together.

Blackout and a few beats, a few quiet scratches on the guitar and then Patti Smith is ranting, moaning, riding the sea of possibilities. It’s all about those possibilities, isn’t it? You’re young and everything is ahead of you, and you might be able to do any or all of it, or none of it, depending on your level of determination or stamina. We were so schizophrenic, we thought we had plenty of both, but we were so full of fear and indecisiveness that we were breathless with it all. I think we just hoped we’d get lucky.

But none of that matters right now, because that sea of possibilities is so intoxicating, you just want to drown in it.

“Elegie”. Here come the ghosts. And I feel for the people who moved into Max’s apartment after we were gone, because that place was haunted before we got there, even though it was new - maybe it was built on an old Indian burial ground or something - and then we proceeded to leave behind even more ghosts. That place was filthy with ghosts.

“Elegie” is a song dedicated to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, whose Electric Ladyland studios the album was recorded in. The song happens on some other plane, it's effectively both a haunting and a séance. “It’s just…too bad…our friends…can’t be with us…today,” is a direct quote from a Hendrix song, and Patti Smith sings it in a way that Hendrix likely would have appreciated - calling up spirits, dragging out the word “today”, stretching it into something unimaginably distant, far away, never coming back.

Spirits do come back, though. 

We were all there, that night, I remember it. Listening to that music and watching the storm outside. We were there, and we still are, and we will be again. Ha ha, then disappear.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 26: Eleven Guidelines For Living According To My 17-Year-Old Self

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.

Eleven Guidelines For Living According To My 17-Year-Old Self

1. Stay up late.
“Morning people” must be deluded, or hypnotized by aliens or something. Mornings are awful. Everyone knows that. All that dew everywhere, and all those damn birds chirping. Shut up. The windows of the mind can only really open at night. If clarity is what you need, nighttime is ideal for organizing the clutter in your head. If abandon is what you need, oblivion can be so much more easily accessed once the sun is blotted out from the sky. Illumination happens at night, and in those early morning hours. Thoughts flow more freely. Inhibitions loosen. So make sure you don’t miss out on anything - stay up late. Sure, you’ll be tired tomorrow, but it will be worth it. You can sleep in Study Hall.

2. Records have all the answers.
Especially at night (see #1), and especially if you are alone. Without distractions, the music communicates so much more clearly. The needle on the vinyl, with the accompanying static and crackling, is a conduit to another, better reality. A journey to some other side. Speaking of journeys, music is also an absolute requirement when driving or riding around in a car. So make sure your vehicle has a tape deck.

3. Propriety is for suckers.
Tell the cold, unrelenting truth at all times, especially if it makes other people uncomfortable. There is joy in watching them squirm.

(This is one of the guidelines that 41-year old J.B. Bennett can’t really get with much at all anymore. Few things are more tiresome than the person who thinks it’s cool to be cruel, gross, or insulting in the name of honesty. Though really I guess it depends on the circumstance. Among the right group of friends maybe it's okay to joke about heartbreak or poor complexion or unwanted weight gain. Just, you know, maybe don't push it. At seventeen we did nothing but push it. Right over the edge and into a canyon.)

4. Walk.
Don’t “go for a walk” or “take a walk”, just start walking. You don’t need a reason to walk, but it can certainly help clear up the mind. Problems may not disappear, but you might forget them for a while. Think of it as an adventure. You never know what you might encounter. Try not to get lost, but don’t panic if you do. The Gods of Walking are watching, and they will guide you to the place you need to be.

5. Baseball is life’s best mirror.
It’s mostly slow, with action that happens in sudden bursts. Tension builds and recedes. Often, things go exactly as you expect they will - the good teams win, the bad teams lose. Don Mattingly can hit. Rickey Henderson is fast. Rob Deer will either strike out or hit a home run. Etc. But then the absolutely unexpected happens, and reality as you know it is altered, twisted. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Game Six in ’86. Red Sox up by two, two outs. The weight of history lifting palpable. All odds smiling brightly in Boston’s direction. A few singles, a wild pitch, the ball goes through Buckner’s legs, Ray Knight streaks home and the Mets win. Sometimes you’re Knight, floating to the plate without touching the ground, drunk on euphoria. Sometimes you’re Buckner, walking away dejected, wondering what the hell just happened.
More often, you are simply an outsider, an observer, feeling whatever degree of joy or frustration your allegiance dictates. Sitting comfortably sipping a beverage, pontificating on the whys and the wherefores and the obvious-in-retrospect mistakes.
Some of the parallels are so obvious as to be clichés - hot streaks and slumps, diving catches and errors, line drives and dribblers. Striking out. Knocking it out of the park. The joy of victories large and small. The frustration of failure, the opportunities for retribution. But the most compelling reflection, the one that keeps people coming back to baseball and life, is the endless sense of possibilities. Hey, the Dodgers just might win this year. And maybe I’ll put together a band and we’ll conquer the world. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

6. Ceremonies are lame.
If you can avoid it, don’t attend them. Weddings? Do as James Dean did and startle the congregation by revving your motorcycle loudly outside the church. Or do as my crazy Goth friend Regina did, and stand outside the doors shouting “She’s got syph!” Awards? Find something better to do, like Woody Allen with his jazz band that keeps him occupied on Oscar night. And if you win an award, toss it aside, destroy it, forget about it. Just don’t fucking display it proudly on the mantle. Graduation? Don’t show up. What are they gonna do? Not let you graduate? (Actually, they might not. Paul Westerberg claims that this is why he never technically graduated high school.)

Truthfully, I never really held myself to any of the above. I so wanted to, though. And I was pretty good at living vicariously. I marveled at Elliot when he skipped out on having his Senior picture taken. I stood in awe as Chris Timmons tore up his Best Actor certificate. And I watched with envious glee when Max wore a bathrobe to the annual Speech Team Dinner. Peter Buck did the same at the Grammys a few years later. Pretty sure he stole that idea from Max.

7. Famous rebels are cool. 

Especially if they have a romantic, moody side. Think of the simmering emotionalism that links Arthur Rimbaud, James Dean, and Bob Dylan. Make sure to keep plenty of talismans around for inspiration. Books, records, photographs clipped from magazines. Posters of a brooding Dean or a sneering Brando. Copies of Illuminations, On The Road, and Hunter S. Thomspon’s Great Shark Hunt, preferably tattered paperbacks. Vinyl editions of Bringing It All Back Home and The Clash, with that cover picture of Strummer, Jones, and Simonon all looking like they wanna beat the crap out of you. Of course the overwhelming white/male/straight-ness of your little pantheon of rebellion and romance has completely escaped you and you'll need to expand the parameters of your relatable points of reference by great gaping leaps and bounds in the future if you really wanna understand what makes humanity human. And then maybe you'll figure out that so much of what you've admired is an illusion, a style, a stance, an artfully-captured fragment of momentary time that represents the tiniest sliver of incomprehensibly complicated lives, full of imperfections and contradictions and ridiculous complexity. But hey, for now, iconography rules. 

8. Don’t plan – improvise. 

As Jake Gittes says to his assistant, “Let me tell you something Walsh, this business requires a certain amount of finesse.” That’s as good an outlook on life as I’ve ever come across. So don’t worry about getting a ride home. You’ll find one. Go ahead and miss the bus. The resulting sense of freedom will be exhilarating. Maybe you’ll catch a ride with a friend. Maybe you’ll get to hang out with someone you wouldn’t normally get to hang around with. Maybe you’ll hang out with someone that you really shouldn’t hang around with. Hey, you may even have to walk. (See #4.) 

Unfortunately, this is the only guideline in the bunch that I seem to be unable to apply in my adult life, at least in the way I would like. This is unfortunate because I think it’s the only one that’s truly useful. These days I want to know exactly how things are going to work, where I’m going to be, and what’s going to happen when I get there. I miss that feeling of not caring, of just knowing that I’ll figure something out when the time comes. 

Once, a few members of the drama team went around to elementary schools to enact “The Night Before Christmas”. I was supposed to be Santa, but I missed the rehearsal and subsequently neglected to prepare anything before the performance. My teammates were angry and panicky, but I knew things would turn out okay. And they did - I just made up the performance as it went along, punctuating the reading with pulled faces and pratfalls. It went over gangbusters with the kids. I felt vindicated in my nonchalance. Of course now I realize that it was rude and disrespectful to put my teammates in that situation, and I wouldn’t want to do anything similar to friends or co-workers today. And I wouldn't. That's growth, right? Yet the memory of that attitude, that laissez-faire courageousness, still gnaws at me, and I often wonder - where the hell did I get the balls to do that, and where are those balls now? I would sure as hell like to find them. 

9. Emotion beats logic every time. 

And it never fails to piss off the ultra-logical people, which is a lot of fun to observe. This is another one that I can't really get fully behind now. It's a train of thought that is too often used to justify terrible ideas - especially in baseball, but also in everyday life. Still, I felt this one pretty keenly at the time, and since my 17-year-old self would have wanted me to I am going to repeat it, loudly. EMOTION BEATS LOGIC EVERY TIME. I mean, just choose judiciously where to apply. Also, style usually beats substance. Although sometimes the best style is no style at all, which is an idea that is often mistaken for substance. Sometimes by me.

10. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. 

When getting together with friends somebody always pipes up with “What are we gonna do?” So much mental energy is expended on deciding the best place to go, the coolest activity to participate in. Why does everybody always want to go somewhere, to do something? The truth is that some of the best times happen when nothing is happening. No big events (see #6) or grand plans are necessary. No emotional turbulence need be set in motion. Simply sitting around talking or listening to records (see #2) can be amazingly fulfilling. And if that’s still too little activity, try walking somewhere (again, do not “go for a walk”, just start walking and see where you end up) (see #4). Drive around aimlessly. Use some finesse (see #8). Action, noise & activity can be great, but if you need those things all the time to make your life interesting, you are probably a fairly uninteresting person to begin with. Which, yes, does sound counter-intuitive. But go with it anyway (see #11). 

11. Accept chaos. 

Even if it doesn’t accept you. Few things in life really make sense. Don’t bother trying to figure it all out. Some teachers will be good, others will be terrible, just learn whatever you can from whatever source. Some girls will treat you like dirt, brushing you off, barely acknowledging your existence, while others will drag you into a closet and teach you things that you didn’t know before. The Dodgers will be completely shut down by Pete Smith (lifetime 47-71, 4.55) one night, then another night they will win when Tim Leary, a pitcher, appears as a last ditch, no-other-options pinch hitter and drives in the game-winning run. (See #5.) Don’t worry about it. Just continue watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Get lost in it. It will make much more sense than real life. Soon you will get lost for real on long, dark, twisting roads. You will have crazy dreams that seem to radiate a sense of otherworldly prescience. You will receive repeated prank phone calls from a mystery figure who knows personal things about you and your friends. And soon your hometown will be terrorized by a crazed psychotic who ends up murdering two people, one of whom is a classmate and friend. Don’t try to figure any of this out. It will only drive you crazy and you will end up sorting through the details some twenty-plus years later, trying in vain to make sense of it all.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 25: Summer 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. 

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

The baseball world is all up in arms because Oakland’s A’s catcher Terry Steinbach, despite a poor offensive first half, is voted in by fans to start the All-Star Game. Rumors of ballot-stuffing by over-zealous A’s fans abound, and plenty of commentators make it known what a travesty they think it is that a guy who’s hitting .220 is starting the mid-summer classic. Terry Steinbach then proceeds to drive in both runs in a 2-1 AL victory, including a home run off in-his-prime Dwight Gooden.  For his efforts, he takes home MVP honors. Baseball is a wonderful thing. 

Driving around. Where the hell did we go? In circles mostly, though we would inevitably end up driving down the two-mile stretch known as “the strip” towards either Burger King or the Mall, or both. Burger King is the hangout, man. “The BK Lounge”.  Or, more commonly, just "BK". We go there and sit for hours loading up on refills of sugar and caffeine. We have what we think is an amusing little tradition of not cleaning up after ourselves before leaving. Years later when I find myself working in a fast-food place I realize how very un-amusing this little tradition actually was. Like the man said, karma’s a bitch. 

Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. We’re always on the lookout for the next band that can fit into our world as a symbol, an avatar, a mirror to reflect back our better selves.  Somehow, despite plenty of attractive traits – offbeat humor, rebellious spirit, crazy eclecticism - CVB never really took hold as part of our little pantheon. I wanted to love them – I mean, they had a violin player, just like Fairport Convention! Ultimately though, we tended towards bands who took either the heart-on-sleeve or seriously arty approach, with the Dead Milkmen as the exception that proved the bias. It’s a cool album, though, with a crazy-quilt mix of styles blended together by a keening fiddle and a good-humored sense of adventure. There’s the trad college-rock “Eye of Fatima”, the reggae-hued “Never Go Back”, ready-to-tango “Tania” and a non-ironic song called “Life Is Grand” which would provide a nice tonic for the darker days about to ensue. 

Emily’s younger brothers are skateboarders. And they are obsessive about it. Partly under the influence of their enthusiasm and partly under the influence of the hardcore music he loves, Roger also becomes obsessed with skateboarding. Which means that the rest of us also take an interest. Usually, I avoid anything that might result in bodily harm, but I think I was drawn in by the brightly-colored designs on the boards, and the way the whole culture seemed to operate under its own code, with participants speaking a kind of secret outsider language. Like a youthful biker gang. Roger might have had a knack for it. He certainly wasn’t too worried about getting hurt – I had once seen him insist on continuing a game of backyard football despite an enormous gash that sent blood flowing down his forehead. While he and Emily’s brothers are always attempting gravity and bone-defying feats, my own excursions amount to little more than breezing slowly down an extremely straight sidewalk. Ultimately, my interest waned as the need for self-preservation prevailed, though I may also have been a little self-conscious about the fact that I preferred Bob Dylan to The Circle Jerks. 

MTV has begun airing reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is the first time the show has been seen regularly in America since PBS ran it during the troupe’s seventies heyday. Back then, I was a small child and my parents would let me watch because I loved cartoons. The surreal quality of Terry Gilliam’s animated bits was lost on me, but I loved the show anyway. I associated it with being up late, and being in on something that was kind of adult and scary. In the years since I watched and loved the Python films, so I’m really anxious to see the show again. I watch a couple episodes, and at first I’m surprised at how boring I find it. This isn’t funny, I think. This is just nonsensical, disconnected weirdness. But I keep watching. Slowly I become attuned to the show’s rhythm, its peculiar language of absurdity. I find myself almost hypnotized by it, and the show’s air of weird chaos begins to color my days. I want to get lost in that strangeness, that irreverence, that craziness. I want to be immersed in it, and sometimes I feel as though I am. I begin to realize that indulging in nonsensical, disconnected weirdness may be the only suitable way of dealing with the bewildering, inexplicable world we live in.

Hardly, Not Even by Run Westy Run. Of interest to us because the band was from Minneapolis, like the Hüsker Dü /Replacements/Soul Asylum axis, and their album was not only released on SST, home to the Hüskers/Minutemen/Firehose/Meat Puppets/etc., but it was also co-produced by Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü. It was a perfect storm of greatness that of course couldn’t help but be a letdown. Although I don’t think we were so much disappointed by the album as we were confused. Run Westy Run sounded nothing like any of those bands. The music was sloppy, diffuse, as though performed by a drunken, deeply weird roots rock band. The titles give a decent idea of the sound – “Yolk Of The Dumbwish”, “Drag Planet”, “King Of  Zebra Pants”. Loping, wildcat rhythms, the vocalist yowling and slurring over it all. It’s a strange, fiery, funny record, but given the expectations we didn’t really know what to make of it in 1988. It’s aged pretty well, though, and if you’re at all interested in the Minneapolis, SST or ‘80’s indie rock scene you might think of it as a minor classic.

Movies, movies, boy, do we love movies. Even crappy ones. A group of us went to the movies every Monday. Movie Monday, we called it, ‘cos we liked to give snappy nicknames to everything we did. 1988 was the year of Die Hard and Big and Bull Durham and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the movie that sticks out in my memory as a quintessential Movie Monday movie is, of all things, Arthur 2: On The Rocks. I think it sticks out because I can’t really remember anything about it. All those other movies I can still give you a rough outline of the plot and the characters. Arthur 2, on the other hand, is just gone. Did he quit drinking? Lose all his money? Create an army of robot Liza Minnellis to wreak mascara-stained havoc on Planet Earth? I’m pretty sure one or two of those things happened, but I’m not about to watch it again to find out. 

“Two Rivers” by The Meat Puppets. On its surface another sun-splashed exercise in jangle, the song changes tone midway through, Curt Kirkwood's voice a disconnected moan calling up deserts, valleys, rivers. Nature. Serene on the surface, maybe, but there is more than a hint of the ominous underneath. A foreboding. A streak of dark clouds. Impending, impenetrable strangeness on the horizon. A parallel. 

The Play. Emily's mother drives us to Nashville to see a play directed by an older acquaintance. It's downtown, and everyone is dressed nicely. We feel sophisticated. Like real adults. Along for the ride is Randy Davis, who is a couple years younger than us. He's trying to figure out how to go about getting a girlfriend, and he asks Emily and I how we got together. The story we tell, fondly, amusedly, already seems a part of the distant past, as though we have been dating for many years. We have been dating for exactly three months. 

“Pocahontas”, by Neil Young. A folk song with a big, pretty melody. Words evoking open plains, sky, canoes on water. Suddenly it’s a scene of grisly violence, as white men come to Native American territory with their wagons and their guns and their savagery. The melody is still big, still pretty. Which makes the action seem somehow even more real, more alive. And it opens you up for the surrealism of the final verse, in which Neil and Pocahontas are lovers, and they sit around a campfire with Marlon Brando talking about the Astrodome and teepees and Hollywood. Time doesn’t exist. Everything happens all at once, forever. 

4^th of July. Emily’s parents took us all to our favorite hangout - yes, Burger King - and we watched our town’s fireworks show. For a good part of the several weeks building up to the holiday, Van Morrison had been a regular presence on my turntable, singing about how it’s “Almost Independence Day”. That lyric is metaphoric, I believe, but the song still lingered in my brain when Independence Day actually rolled around. Despite that, the memory of this night is not colored by anything that hints of the ominous, or the dark. There is no haunted quality about it. Thanks to the generous spirit of Emily’s family, and with an echo, maybe, of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Life Is Grand”, this night really was good wholesome fun for all, and you take that where you find it. 

The other side. One Friday night later on in the summer a few of us are sitting around on Emily's porch. It's hot. We're all feeling listless, not sure what to do with ourselves, with the evening, with the remainder of our youth. Talk turns to the previous summer, when everything felt new, exciting, touched by some kind of weird electricity. We look around at one another and wonder why that feeling is gone.