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.
