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.
Everything Passes, Everything Changes, Do What You Think You Should Do
I’d always wanted to do that
thing you see in movies where the guy goes to the girl’s house in the middle of
the night and throws pebbles at her bedroom window. So I did. I’m not sure what
I hoped to accomplish. Emily’s parents’ bedroom was right at the base of a very
creaky stairway and they no doubt would have woken up if she tried to go
outside. But I was caught up in the ridiculous romance of the idea, so I tried
it anyway.
I’d just finished my shift at
the radio station and it was after midnight. I was grateful to have that job,
but I also found it to be an irritating distraction from my social life – I often felt like I was missing out on FUN. While everyone else was out doing wild
& crazy teenage stuff I was stuck in a cramped little room listening to
Rick Astley.
The fact that I wasn’t really
missing out on much genuine excitement did nothing to curb this feeling. I remember one night
Emily told me that while I had been at work she and a few of our friends were hanging
out at Burger King, as was the tradition at the time, when a group of other
kids our age began throwing french fries and shouting “Speech fags!” in our
clan’s general direction. This kind of thing wasn’t all that unusual, and it
wasn’t particularly pleasant when it did happen. And yet I was still sad that I
had missed out on it.
There were perks that made up
for it, though. Like for instance we got to broadcast all the playoff and World
Series games. So when they asked me to work on the night of Game One of the
National League Championship Series, I jumped at it.
The Dodgers were my team, had
been for about ten years, and this was my fourth playoff go-round with them.
Unfortunately they were matched up against a stacked Mets team that had won the
World Series only two years before and had soundly thrashed the Dodgers to the
tune of a 11-1 record during the 1988 regular season. I didn’t expect the
Dodgers to win. I just hoped they’d put up a fight, prove that they deserved to
be there.
So when King of Shutouts Orel
Hershiser made the Mets look hapless for eight innings I was relieved and
elated. Riding high. Our ace is going to throw yet another shutout.
I should have known better.
Things started to unravel in the ninth, Howell relieved Hershiser and it all
culminated in a ball smacked off the bat of the late great Gary Carter that
just eluded Dodger center fielder John Shelby’s glove to give the Mets a 3-2 victory. I felt like a balloon deflating slowly, depressingly.
Never get your hopes up. At
least in baseball.
The mood was languid for the
rest of the night. Max and I sat stone-faced, listening to the adult contemporary tunes cranking out
on the reel to reel, one three-minute bit of saccharine after another. Air
Supply. Richard Marx. Bread. Urgh.
Cat Stevens' “Oh Very Young”
came up, and somehow that lifted my spirits. It’s a fey, cloying little tune, the
kind of thing that I ordinarily might have considered a little too cute. But
somehow, on this night, it sounded right – the melody unspooling like yarn and
the lyrics advising young people to feel it all while they’re still young.
“You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.”
Maybe that’s what inspired me
to go throw pebbles at Emily’s window. Maybe it was a combination of that and the recent up-close brush with mortality. You want things to last forever but you
know they never will.
So I found myself out in the
yard in front of her house, picking at the dirt near the driveway, trying to find suitably tiny rocks. Tossing gently enough to avoid
breaking anything, but hard enough to make noise.
Emily didn’t respond. She told
me the next day she heard the sound, but just thought it was a tree branch in
the wind, or the house settling or something. It didn’t really matter. The romance of the moment shone through somehow, in some small way, despite the missed connection. Nothing happens and it still feels like something is happening.
Emily was so very bright, exceedingly
mature, full of grace in body and mind. When she entered the picture earlier in
the year she’d been somewhat shy and a little awkward, but in no time she
became a central figure in our little clan, the steady hand that everyone
turned to for guidance, for assistance in matters academic, philosophical or
practical. A force of nonstop positivity. She was aware of her strengths, but she didn't make a big deal about it, a quality that made her extremely likeable, attractive. She was human like the rest of us of course, prone to the same lulls in confidence and errors in judgment that we all contend with, but somehow even her
faults worked to enhance her preternaturally gifted aura.
“And the goodbye makes the
journey harder still.”
There was too much going on in
my mind. Job, death, school, future. My favorite team losing another playoff series. Ego and insecurity swarming around the brain like buzzing parasites. I was seventeen, and like most seventeen
year-olds I had no idea what was going on. Around this time I broke off the
relationship with Emily.
It was a little like Judge
Reinhold's hapless character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High obliviously trying to tell his girlfriend hey, we’re
gonna be seniors this year, and we really oughtta be free to explore, see other
people. Just as awkward, not near as funny.
I didn't know for sure if it was the right decision, but I was never too sure about any decision I ever made. I just knew something was wrong, and I had to figure it out.
There would be all kinds of regret, resentment, jealousies, accusations, recriminations, apologies,
late-night phone calls and tear-stained letters ahead. Not only between Emily
and I, but between almost every other member of our group. Everyone would fall
in love, only to fall out with one another at least once, sometimes repeatedly, over the next several months. Sometimes the reconciliations would be very slow in coming. This
happens to every group of close friends in all walks of life, doesn’t it?
But all
that stuff is a long way away, and I’m only concerned with 1988, specifically
early fall 1988, and what the mood was then, when the Dodgers were in the
playoffs and RD died and Max, Roger, Elliot and I decided to start a band and
Emily and I broke up. The latter was just one ending in a series. Stories don’t
really ever have endings except the ones you create in retrospect.
