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.
Nice, Neat Rows Of Zeros
On Labor Day we took a quick
trip to Nashville. It was quick because I wanted to make sure we got home in
time to watch the Dodgers game that night. Elliot, who was not a sports fan, at
all, asked me why I cared so much.
Good question. Why did I care so
much? In answer I made up something about how the Dodgers represented to me the
underdog, the oppressed, the least likely.
Which was fairly ridiculous. It was true
at the time that outside of the Boston Red Sox the Dodgers probably had more
heartbreaking late-season and postseason meltdown moments than any other team.
But the Dodgers were also one of the three or four most successful and
prestigious franchises in all of baseball, so the idea of them as down and out
lovable losers was pure fabrication. If that was really my reasoning, I would
have been a Cubs fan.
The real reason I cared was something a
lot less romantic, and it exposes a kind of psychological issue that I am to
this day not particularly comfortable with. Simon Reynolds in his book
Retromania speaks at length about the peculiar mindset of the record collector
- the person with the insatiable need to collect and file things. The
gratification that comes from organizing arcane artifacts somehow makes up for
some emotional aspect that’s missing from the collector’s life. The collecting fills a vacuum by providing a means to control the chaos. When I first
read the paragraphs that explicate this idea in Reynolds' book, I had to put the
book down and exhale for a moment. It was hitting too close to home.
I became a
baseball fan mainly because my father was a baseball fan (and a Brooklyn Dodgers
fan who maintained allegiance when the franchise moved west, then duly passed
it along), but also because I have always been an obsessive collector, and one
of the early manifestations of this impulse was that in addition to comic books
and Star Wars memorabilia I also collected baseball cards. I learned early on
that there are few things in life more relaxing than separating a bunch of
baseball cards into neat stacks according to a subjective-as-you-wanna-be
system – by team, by star quality, by position, by funniest name, the latter a
category in which Jack Fimple and Bill Mooneyham reigned supreme.
As noted above the impulse to
categorize and file of course translated well to music collecting, and my
record collection expanded exponentially. From the age of fourteen on, I basically
morphed into a Nick Hornby character – always seeking some precious new rarity,
memorizing trivial rock minutia, composing endless lists.
Lists. Boy, oh, boy, lists.
These days, with the advent of limitless information sharing, pop culture-related lists have become an everyday, commonplace thing. We’re inundated with
them daily, to the point that it all feels more than a little meaningless. But in 1988 I took
any rock-related list I could get my hands on and basically tried to memorize
it.
On that Labor Day trip to
Nashville I bought Randy Newman’s Sail Away and Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It
For The Money, both of which I’d learned about from a list. Rolling Stone’s
1987 “100 Greatest Albums Of The Last 20 Years” special issue, to be exact. (In
2010, with the purchase of Paul Simon’s Graceland, I finally completed my
collection of every album on that list. It wasn't near as gratifying a moment as I would've guessed in 1987.) (And yeah it took me 24 years to finally buy Graceland, sue me.) Elliot saw my purchases and
asked “So what list were those on?”. He knew me pretty well.
My fascination with music lists
may actually have been born of baseball fandom, in a way. It's all in the organization, all those names and numerals neatly arranged in rows. Poring over box
scores, player stats, making up imaginary lineups, ranking favorites - it’s all a way to organize
facts, ideas. You can’t control life, but you can keep track of the numbers.
My sense of numeric symmetry
would be gratified that Labor Day night as I watched youth pastor look-alike Orel Hershiser mow down
the Atlanta Braves to the tune of a four-hit complete game shutout. It was the beginning of a historic run that would see Hershiser break fellow Dodger Don
Drysdale’s twenty-year-old record of 58 and 1/3 scoreless innings.
God, the box scores of those games were beautiful. All those zeroes, one after
another, looking so round and perfect, symbolizing dominance. That it was the dominance of a guy who looked even nerdier than I did was a bonus.
That day, Labor Day 1988, when
we took the trip to Nashville was the last of the carefree, innocent days. The
last in the win column before a serious losing streak. Everything was about to
take a turn for the dark.
Man, life is a messy, haphazard thing. I don't care if it's a weird psychological issue, let me have my stacks of neatly arranged vinyl, my lists of greatest British folk-rock albums, my ultimate all-time Dodgers line-up. These things are so much easier to deal with than the uncategorizable sprawl of everyday living.
