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.
And The World On A String Doesn't Mean A Thing
"Have you heard?” Ralph
Buckman’s tone was unusually subdued. “RD didn’t come home from work last
night, and he never came in to school today.”
Immediately I knew. I think
everyone did. One senseless murder had already happened in the mall parking lot
just a few weeks before, so it was the logical, if awful, conclusion to jump
to.
But it wasn’t confirmed until I
got home that afternoon. Max called with the news. He’d been at work at the
radio station and they’d been reporting about it for the last few hours. RD’s
body had been found by the side of the road, on the outside of town. He had
been shot in the head and his body bore tire marks.
When you get news like that, in
the moment of impact the emotions are impossible to process. You don’t know
what to think.
RD was a friend. I’d known him for about five years, since seventh grade. We'd shared a locker during our ninth grade year. He was simply one of the nicest guys around.
So then comes the question: Why him?
Of course, there’s no point in
asking. Life is full of chaos, and the world is never lacking for deranged minds ready to
snap at a moment’s notice. Maybe the kind of insanity that leads to murder is almost like a natural disaster – random and unstoppable.
But that’s logic talking, and
logic has no defense against raw emotion. And after the initial wave of
confusion and disbelief, the first fully-formed emotion that emerged was anger.
Rage at whatever wretched excuse for a human being had carried this
terrible thing out. I remember the next day at school Roger throwing his books
to the ground and stomping on them and exclaiming “That’s for the miserable
fucker that killed RD.” It felt really good seeing him do that. The feelings needed to be dealt with physically, somehow.
A pall was cast over the
school. The next day, after everyone had found out, it rained. An extra shade
of gloom. Trucks from TV networks showed up all the way from Nashville. During
the daily announcements given by the student body president there was a moment
of silence. We’d had those before, mostly for people who'd died in accidents. This was
different. This situation had so much helplessness in it. I can still feel that silence now.
All year long, I’d been
listening to music that carried in it an undercurrent of foreboding and dread. That ominous feeling could be possibly be written off as a fanciful teenage notion, a bit of willful drama to color the blander days. In the same sense that watching and re-watching Sid & Nancy or being creeped
out by a Charles Manson interview was all in good fun, so maybe was divining a sense of fear and unease in the music.
But this was reality. You couldn’t
just switch it off. Why this? Why him? Why now? None of the facts added up to anything.
Now all of that summer's music felt prescient, like it had been a warning. Maybe it was. Music can work that way if you want it to. If you let
it.
After Max delivered the news of
RD’s death, I locked myself in my room, shell-shocked, and put on side 1 of Tonight’s
The Night. Neil Young had written and
recorded the album in 1973, as a response to the deaths of his former bandmate
Danny Whitten and a roadie, Bruce Barry. It’s a shambling, emotional wreck of
an album. A drunken wake for departed friends. The song that resonated most,
for reasons I’ve never been able to fully understand, was “World On A String”.
It’s as close to a straightforward rock song as any on an otherwise mellow, country-ish album, and the ambiguous lyrics only hint at the themes of burn-out and loss that the rest of the album dwells on.
“It’s not alright to say
goodbye / and the world on a string doesn’t mean a thing.”
I ran those words over and over
again in my head. It was therapeutic somehow. The words made a strange kind of
sense that I couldn’t quite make sense of. It seemed to apply to this situation, but
I wasn’t sure how, exactly.
“It’s not alright to say
goodbye”. That was a comforting thought, I guess. Who wants to say goodbye this
way?
I had talked to RD just the day
before. More accurately, he had talked to me. We passed one another in the hall
as the late bell was ringing. He shouted out to me “You’re gonna be late, JB!” High School is a weird place socially - friendships come and go without any good reason. If you don't talk to a person for a while, you can feel like you're not friends with that person. RD and I didn’t have any classes together and hadn’t spoken in a while, and I
remember thinking how cool it was of him to acknowledge me in such a friendly
way despite us not having interacted in so long. That’s the kind of guy he was - solid, unassuming.
“And the world on a string
doesn’t mean a thing.”
I don’t know what that means.
I don't know what any of this means.
