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