Seventeen In '88 - Installment 16: And The Flowers Bloom Like Madness In The Spring

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 Flowers Bloom Like Madness In The Spring

Charles Manson: “What you’re doing is you’re creating a legend. You’re creating a beast. You’re creating whatever you are judging yourselves with into the word ‘Manson’. And that’s not me at all.”

Geraldo Rivera: “You’re not a beast Charlie? You are a beast.”

Charles Manson: “I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”



Spring 1988 was full of shaggy-haired, wild-eyed men. Well, two of them, at least. I was going through a phase that spring where I became obsessed with the music of Jethro Tull. A couple of years previous I’d discovered the Tull retrospective Living in the Past among my dad’s records and I was really taken with the ornate packaging, made out to look like a musty Olde English scrapbook, full of pictures of the hirsute, overcoat-wearing band members, most prominent among them leader Ian Anderson.

Aside from having heard “Aqualung” a zillion times on classic rock radio, my interest in  Anderson and Tull had been sparked by Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn’s book Rock Dreams, a justly legendary collection of Peellaert’s wildly imaginative paintings of rock history’s many icons, rebels and tragic figures. Peellaert was responsible for the simultaneously silly and unnerving covers of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and The Stones’ It’s Only Rock and Roll. His Rock Dreams paintings have a similar sinister dream-kitsch quality. Each is accompanied, and enhanced, by Nik Cohn’s prose, which is pitched somewhere between fairy tale & acid flashback. You should buy it if you ever see it used, then buy it a second time if you see it again, so you’ll have an extra to give to a friend.

The Tull entry in Rock Dreams is particularly creepy. It features Anderson perched on a park bench glaring wickedly at a wide-eyed little girl. (“Sitting on a park bench / Eyeing little girls with bad intent”, from "Aqualung", get it?) This image colored the way I heard Jethro Tull’s music in a sinister light. Which is a little odd to think about now, as there is very little that is sinister about Jethro Tull’s music. It’s mostly a harmless combination of British folk, heavy rock and prog/classical leanings, with emphasis on Anderson’s overflow of words and ever-present flute.

Harmless, sure, but if you want to, you can hear traces of real darkness. “With You There To Help Me”, the opening cut of Tull’s third album Benefit, became something of a keynote song for me during the early summer of ’88. These days Tull don't seem to share the same kind of 'cool' cachet that many of their classic rock peers maintain, but I’d heartily recommend this track to anyone who thinks of them merely as the band with the flute player who who stood on one leg and sang “Bungle In the Jungle” and controversially - not to mention hilariously - beat Metallica for the best metal album Grammy in 1989.

It’s a carefully built, slow-burning thing, full of tension and boiling unease. The lyrics belie the eerie feeling of the song with a hippie-dippy “back to the warmth of friendship and home” sentiment, but the thrust of the song is its mood. It’s the sound of the carnival train in the distance from Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Anderson’s flute and Martin Barre’s guitar riffs circle around the track’s bare bones, swirling and sparring until reaching a crazed crescendo that for a moment seizes on a very vivid sense of madness. Then it drifts away, Bradbury’s train passing by on its way to another town. The track seems to contain a barely suppressed sense of dread, and it haunted me that summer.

That haunting was foreshadowed in the spring when Chicago’s WGN ran a prime time special on Satanism, murder, and violence. The special featured a long interview with Charles Manson, conducted by Geraldo Rivera. Only a couple of years earlier, after weeks of speculation and anticipation, Rivera had famously opened Al Capone’s vault, anti-climactically finding only empty bottles and dust. So the Manson interview must have felt like quite a coup for him.

And it didn’t disappoint; in the footage Manson is his usual crazy-eyed, wildly gesticulating self, and Rivera does his best alpha-male-defending-the-morals-and-purity-of-America bit, baiting Manson with a series of loaded questions and accusations.

GR: Do you feel remorse?
CM: I don’t know what that is.
GR: I think you are an evil person.
CM: Right, I’m evil. I’m terrible. Oh yeah, I’m awful. I’m awful.
GR: You are a murdering dog.
CM: Oh, I’m a terrible dog. I’m a fiend.

And it goes on like that.

One of my favorite exchanges may or may not have actually occurred. I remember it like this: Manson proclaims to Geraldo: “If I wanted to, I could have your head delivered to me on a plate.” To which Geraldo gamely responds, “Do it, Charley. Do it!” Unfortunately I can’t find proof of this exchange anywhere online, so it might be a trick of my memory, or a trick of the 1988 WGN editing room. I’ve remembered that all these years, and it’s so disappointing to find out that it may not have actually happened. How many more of my memories are simply a melding of fancy and embellishment?

Regardless, nearly twenty years after the gruesome murders that got him locked up for good, the footage shows Manson retaining the same creepy combination of mystic aura and down-to-earth grit that so hypnotized the young people who carried out his awful plans. Like that other avatar of lunacy from Spring 1988 - The Joker in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, Manson has a powerful sense of iconoclasm, which he often puts across with a sense of humor, as when he attempts to explain away his evil deeds with this nugget: “I’m a hobo, man. I just fell out of the penitentiary. I hadn’t been out of jail long enough to do anything. I had a motorcycle and a guitar and a sleeping bag and a bunch of broads following me around talkin’ about I was Jesus!”

Don’t you love the casual quality of those words? It’s as though he’s saying “Yeah, what happened to me coulda happened to anybody, see?”

Also like Moore’s Killing Joke, the hints of madness and murderousness on display in the Manson interview ended up casting shadows that lingered over the next several months of 1988. Even in the good times that summer, something seemed slightly off, an odd sense of disquiet hung in the air like a question mark. As though Manson himself might be there, behind that park bench, watching, grinning, scheming. And maybe “With You There To Help Me” is playing, John Evan’s ominously elegant piano providing an appropriately eerie soundtrack to Manson’s lurking.  (Though I'm sure Anderson and his Tullmates, always amiable fellows in interviews, would not likely appreciate that juxtaposition. But I don't wanna worry about that now, or else I'd have to ditch this whole post.)

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this ominous feeling is just something I’m making up to conveniently fit my memory of that time. As Manson says of himself, “I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”

Manson is a psychotic, sure, but just because he is batshit nuts does not mean that his thought processes are always completely without logic, or a certain kind of perceptiveness. And when he says that he is whatever you need him to be for you, I think he is correct. If one needs him to represent salvation, a conduit to a higher spiritual plane, as his followers did, then he can be that. If one needs him to represent the ultimate in evil, the epitome of demonic urges unleashed and run rampant up here on earth, then he can be that, too.

The truth, as hard to pinpoint in this case as it is everywhere else in life, is more likely a lot less compelling than either of those options. Manson is probably just another example of a human being with something gone fundamentally wrong in his psyche, just like so many others. Only this particular psychic dysfunction led to horrific consequences. Which is also unfortunately like so many others, though seldom are those other individuals as creepily charismatic as Manson.

I want to be clear that in suggesting that he is not actually a prophet or a demon but rather simply a massively screwed-up individual I am by no means trying to make Manson into a tragic figure. I’m merely trying to point out that we view our lives, our motivations, through whatever prism feeds our needs at the moment, in a way that justifies whatever our opinions or feelings might be. If I need an innocuous Jethro Tull song to be the sound of barely perceptible evil floating like black fog in the summer air, then I will make it so. If I need a vaguely remembered television interview with Charles Manson to serve as a harbinger of a summer full of dread and unease, then I’ll make that happen too.

“I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”

It’s tempting to be shocked when you find something insightful within an irreversibly bent individual’s rambling spew. But really, it isn’t so insightful. Ultimately, in saying this, Manson is merely stating the obvious. It’s just another way of saying that we all rationalize our way through life. That shouldn’t be news to anyone. It’s how those rationalizations affect you and those around you that counts.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 15: Something Happens

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.

Something Happens

Shortly after the State tournament Emily and I started dating. She is the school’s reigning queen of academia. I am the school’s reigning king of theater nerds. So it makes sense, kind of.

Emily is tall and thin with long straight hair. A brunette. And she is good at everything – talented, gorgeous, easily the most gifted, intellectually astute individual in our peer group. Yet on the surface she also has an odd veneer of awkwardness, insecurity. Which of course makes her charming.

For my part, I am not particularly good at anything except Speech & Drama and memorizing Rolling Stones liner notes. (Hey, did you know that Keith Richards doesn’t even play on two of the best songs on Sticky Fingers?) My grades seldom rise above the upper end of mediocre and my plans for the future usually don’t extend much further than the next couple of hours, during which time I hope to be listening to The Meat Puppets, eating a frozen pizza, and watching the Dodgers game.

But, for whatever reason (extreme lack of self-awareness? blind stupidity?), I am confident. And confidence, I have learned, can take you a long damn way.

It is a whirlwind romance. Her parents disapprove. After a long, furious argument during which her father curses me and declares that I shall never see his daughter again, Emily and I resolve to steal away during the night and elope. I steal a car and meet her in the dark behind her house. Rain is pouring, a baptism of our sacred union. We take off, tires screeching across the pavement, joyously singing along to the radio, waving goodbye to all the losers left behind. They’ll never know what true love is!

Sigh. Sorry, none of that is true. Her parents, while not altogether comfortable, and clearly suspicious of this smirky new figure in their daughter’s life, are about as accommodating as can be expected. More so, really, given that my friends and I, with all of our noise and weird humor, are a sudden constant presence in their house. And despite a few bits of weirdness - Emily and I had an alarming tendency to make out in full view of others, a habit that alienated (and grossed out) more than a couple of our friends, the early part of our relationship is mostly the stuff of typical teenage romance. It’s clumsy, hyper-emotional, exploratory, blissful. Covered in the strange gauze of exciting newness that characterizes the early part of most relationships, but is especially acute in the teenage years.

Oddly, there is no music in my memory of this time. If there was it would probably be something a bit fey, cloying. “Oh Very Young” by Cat Stevens maybe. Although I do remember sitting around in my room playing records with her. The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Fairport, as always. No doubt feeling as though I was imparting great wisdom. I also composed for her a lengthy list of the “Greatest Rock Albums Ever Made”, cribbed primarily from The Rolling Stone Record Guide. Yeah, I must have thought, that’ll really make her heart skip a beat. What a Nerdy Teenage Boy thing to do.

For all my confidence, during this time I am not immune to insecurities of my own. At one point, in Emily’s room, I come across a list that she has made up of all the traits that her ideal mate should have. One of these is “He’s tall.” This makes me paranoid, because she is particularly tall for her age and I am an inch or two shorter than she is. I resolve to try to be taller.

Whatever our weaknesses, and whatever would become of us, we were good for each other. Another 1988 walking memory: the two of us are out walking at night and someone shouts her name from a moving car. She tells me it’s probably somebody making fun of her. As the brainy, gawky girl she gets that a lot. I am thrilled and relieved. Hey, she’s a misunderstood genius, too!

And, for good measure, one more walking memory (walking, walking, we were always walking):

Emily and I are walking around her neighborhood. It’s warm. There is green everywhere, bright green, almost fluorescent, and the air is clearer than it will ever be again. She’s wearing a checkered blue dress. Smiling, that wide stretch of perfect white teeth flashing some kind of other, better reality than the one I’d been living in before.

We’re walking, and I’m admiring the pattern of cracks in the sidewalk. We find an open space in some bushes, a cove where we are obscured from passersby.

This seems like a good place to stay for the foreseeable future.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 14: Goodbye Trisha

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.


Goodbye Trisha

In Spring of 1988 DC Comics released The Killing Joke, a graphic novel featuring a particularly grisly story in which Batman’s nemesis the Joker assaults Barbara Gordon and tortures her father, Commissioner Gordon. Written by Alan Moore, already established as a serious force with the wildly inventive, visionary storytelling he had brought to his Swamp Thing re-boot and Watchmen mini-series, the release of The Killing Joke was a major event in comics circles. Being an obedient comics geek, I bought mine on the first weekend of its release. I devoured it in one sitting on Saturday afternoon.

At the time, like many readers my age, I was probably a little over-impressed with the full-on graphically violent nature of the book – it was such a departure from the norm. But it was also a little show-offy, and disguised a somewhat slight storyline. There’s no denying, however, the spell that its daring and derangement had cast. I carried it with me as I set out that evening.

Another of our classmates was leaving for another state, another world, and we were holding a going-away party in her honor. Yet another celebration of yet another disappearance. Trisha was a tall, pretty girl that none of us knew particularly well, but somehow she seemed to have become an integral part of our little group in a very short time. Mouse had a crush on her. Like a ghost, Mouse had disappeared. Trisha followed suit shortly thereafter. Are they somewhere out there, together now?

The party was being held in a house way out in the woods, and to get there we had to travel miles of winding roads made up mostly of dirt and gravel. It felt like going back in time. The Minutemen blared incongruously from the tape deck, singing “This Ain’t No Picnic”. Indeed.

Of course we got lost and had to stop and ask for directions. The place we stopped at was a little backwoods gas station/convenience store, basically a wooden shack. Still possessed by the spirit of Alan Moore’s Joker, with maybe a little of Andy Kaufman’s unctuous wrestling persona thrown in, I had the bizarre notion that I would affect a harsh southern accent when speaking to the helpful employees. Maybe this was my idea of an acting exercise, and I thus thought that I might be able to blend in without the employees noticing. Oh, they noticed. My little Deliverance act made them a lot less helpful. I will never forget the way the eyes of the man behind the counter seemed to go black, almost piercing through me, puncturing all of my ultimately spineless teenage bravado. I thought for a moment that he might simply pound me straight into the ground with one swift blow to the top of the head, like in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Somehow, he found it within him to be merciful, and we escaped unscathed. “You nearly got us killed,” a stone-faced Elliot said, genuinely, and rightly, angry with me.

I often long for the brazenness of my youth. I want that blind sense of adventure back. I do not, however, want back any of the blind stupidity. Though often enough I end up with it anyway.

At the party my little yellow Memorex tape (like the kind that Charlize Theron’s character keeps playing in the recent film Young Adult) with Marquee Moon on one side and The Modern Lovers on the other provided the soundtrack. “Astral Plane” was the hit that night. It was Brandon’s favorite song, and he insisted on playing it over and over. He flailed about madly as it played, like a demented, spaced-out version of an American Bandstand dancer. It was great. Though at this point my memory so very much wants to conjure a huge group of excitable kids all around him, pogo-ing away to the sound of the Modern Lovers. I know it was only one person, but why not let my memory have its way? It was dozens of people! Laughing, singing, having the time of their lives!

Again here there is a blur of ill-remembered activity. A band was practicing in the garage of Trisha’s house. We stood and listened, hoping to measure the sound against our own musical ambitions, but it was only a mass of indistinct noise. A counterpoint to the clarity of the stereo.

And in the foreground a sea of voices and movement. Wayward moods and buzzing hormones. Profanity, innuendo, sex humor. Much of the latter probably over our own heads, even as we engaged in it. Unless it concerned masturbation, which it probably did. Masturbation was always a hot topic.

And here again, the mood shifts from one of frantic expectation, activity, to calm.

Somehow, Emily and I ended up on the roof together, talking, looking up at the stars, dreaming. The spell of lunatic derangement cast by The Killing Joke earlier in the day had dissipated. Now a sense of serenity prevailed. The tone of the day had completely changed, in a way that seems to me can only happen when you are young.

In my adult life, a day starts out one way and tends to stay that way. And the days run together, indistinct.

I want the variety, the openhearted recklessness of my youth back. I do not, however, want the crazed neurosis. Though often enough I end up with it anyway.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 13: Raven Records Is Heaven!

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.


Raven Records Is Heaven!

Right around age seventeen I began to view record stores as sanctuaries, safe havens from the rigors of the outside world. Max and Elliot and I traveled regularly to Nashville to visit Cat’s Records or to sift through used vinyl at The Great Escape. Somewhere along the way these sojourns went from being merely pleasant diversions to being something else entirely – events to look forward to at the very least, a reason for existing at the extreme.

Cat’s was the best record store in Nashville. They had a knowledgeable staff, cool in-stores, and the biggest import/indie section I’d ever seen at the time. Somehow we got wind that Cat’s had another location in Knoxville, and subsequently one Saturday afternoon in April Max and I took a journey there. It was on this trip that we ended up stumbling on the record store that would eventually become firmly entrenched in my mind as my all-time favorite record store. The ideal record store. It was a little collegiate store called Raven Records - one of those perfect record store names, like Strawberries, or Licorice Pizza.

Look, I don’t wanna come off like the curmudgeonly old man who swears that things were better in his day, but really, even though record stores still exist as I write this (it was getting dicey for a while), and the experience of going to the record store is still a unique and wonderful thing, the record store experience is simply different now. Things are not different in ways that are better or worse, necessarily, but so much about the context has changed. In 1988 record stores were everywhere. I lived in a really small town and even there we had two of ‘em. The catch being that even though it was easy to find record stores, it was very hard to find really good record stores. And both of my little town’s stores were…not great, at least for the music-obsessed freaks like me. In keeping with the modest demands of the small town, they generally catered to the Top 40 common denominator. (Not that the Top 40 is or was an evil thing, by any means. But when it's basically the only option it gets old fast.) These stores were immaculately designed, extremely clean places, where the most adventurous music to be found tended to be the predictable college chart stuff – R.E.M., The Cure, P.I.L., etc. (Again, not a dis, big fan of all three, sheesh, you think I'm a damn snob?) At the time I didn’t understand why these stores wouldn’t carry stuff from SST or Touch & Go or Twin/Tone. Of course, now I recognize that they simply couldn’t afford to carry that stuff, the demand simply wasn’t big enough. I got a D in Economics, too. Regardless, this is why the trips into Nashville and Knoxville came to seem necessary – the record stores there were such a refreshing change from the norm, in so many ways.

Raven was the best of all. It wasn’t too big, but the place was a beautiful mess of music - rambling aisles stuffed with records, posters everywhere (Iggy! The Velvets! Some band I'd barely heard of called The Red Hot Chili Peppers and they're wearing nothing but socks!), handmade signs pointing the way to the clerks’ latest enthusiasms (This Butthole Surfers record will fry your brain beyond recognition! Into dreamy and ethereal? Try Cocteau Twins.). A loose, disheveled barrage of color and noise, it was the perfect antidote to the antiseptic chain stores.

On our first visit The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime was playing over the store’s sound system. I knew immediately upon hearing “Maybe Partying Will Help” that I needed to own it. In a classic moment of wizened record store clerk imparting wisdom to the eager young music fan, the guy behind the counter (not actually wizened, probably college-age) told me that I should just go ahead and buy two copies, because I was bound to wear the first one out.

I still have a flyer from Raven Records, and it is a wonderful thing. It’s a picture of Elvis, emoting dramatically into a microphone, with a caption that reads “Stop picking at my bones you vultures! Quit exploiting me!” Do record stores still create that kind of thing?

Probably. And this is one good thing about the slow fade/near-demise of music retail – if a record store exists at all today, chances are that it is a pretty good record store. It probably caters mostly to music enthusiasts, with a staff of well-versed aficionados. And I’m absolutely not meaning to advocate any kind of music snobbery, à la Jack-Black-dissing-the-“I Just Called To Say I Love You” guy in High Fidelity, amusing as that scene is. I’m merely pumping for enthusiasm and knowledge and creativity as opposed to corporate blandness and predictability.

Our first visit to Raven was on Saturday, April 9. Driving back from Knoxville, listening to The Minutemen’s Ballot Result (a last minute substitution for the out-of-stock-but-for-the-play-copy Double Nickels) we had a feeling of excitement and discovery.

For me, this feeling was enhanced upon learning that the Dodgers had beaten the Braves that day 11-3 (Valenzuela over Glavine, and who would have correctly guessed that day which of those pitchers would have the Hall of Fame career?) to win their fourth game in a row. Spring 1988 was coming along nicely.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 12: Stars Are Stars And They Shine So Hard

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.

Stars Are Stars And They Shine So Hard

Teenagers, American teenagers particularly, are always looking for icons to emulate, to signify, to guide them. To shine some of the glory they themselves long to project. At seventeen I had plenty of idols. Each quintessentially American, each worthy of a certain amount of wariness, and each false, in their own peculiar way. On the weekend of the State tournament, four of these idols converged.

On the night before the State tournament my Dad took me over to my uncle’s house. My uncle had a VCR, which as late as 1988 still seemed like a luxury to me. A couple of years earlier my uncle had demonstrated to me, for the first time, the sound of a newfangled music playback technology called the Compact Disc. My mind was blown. Also a couple of years previous, my uncle had made me a tape of The Who Sell Out. I liked going over to my uncle’s house.

That night we watched a documentary about James Dean. I had aspirations toward acting as a career at the time, so my fascination with Dean was based on my interest in his craft. Or so I told myself. Truthfully, I was just drawn in by the moodiness and mystique. The raw Indiana earthiness turned darkly glamorous by Hollywood. A poster of Dean in his Rebel Without A Cause jacket held pride of place in my bedroom, so anyone entering was immediately met with his tough-guy stance and soulful sneer. I had all kinds of books about Dean and I romanticized him and his story beyond all boundaries of good taste. My personal equivalent to playing air-guitar was standing in front of the mirror, arms outstretched, body contorted, howling “I got the bullets!”

The State tournament took place in Knoxville, and Raven Records was within walking distance of our hotel. So I strode on over and purchased Double Nickels On The Dime, which I had heard playing in the same store just a couple of weeks earlier. I carried it back to the room, and what would you know but the Dodgers game was being televised. Pitching that night was the lanky, choirboy-like Orel Hershiser. Hershiser would find fame that year as the hymn-singing, shutout-pitching ace of the Dodgers' staff, and on that night he was proving why, inducing out after out from the hapless Atlanta Braves. As I sat looking over my new purchase, I remember the weird dichotomy between Hershiser’s pure-as-American-Pie, Richie Cunningham-esque appearance and the grim, black-humored Raymond Pettibon illustrations inside the Minutemen album.

The Minutemen were not a band who particularly sought any kind of adulation or glory, they defined themselves in terms of how hard they worked, how much bare-boned passion and creativity they could stuff into their combustible little tunes. That kind of stuff makes a strong impression on a seventeen year old, however, and it ends up provoking adulation anyway. Sure, they seemed to be saying “You can do this too”, but the way they played, putting their punk-funk-folk-jazz across with an unerring combination of intensity, looseness, humor and ferocity, came from a place that seemed less than accessible to a kid so many miles away from their world. They evoked an emotional landscape every bit as entrancing as the ones provided by grade-A popular rock stars like Bruce Springsteen or Led Zeppelin. (Or even the smaller scale college rock of Echo and the Bunneymen, another favorite at the time, whose “Stars Are Stars” provides the title of this post.) That The Minutemen did it mainly by way of sweat, good humor, and sheer raw nerve was a lesson not lost on me, but it was still somehow hard to accept.

In this sense, perhaps Orel Hershiser and The Minutemen were ideal idols. They were hard workers. And hard work is something that as I teenager I was not particularly interested in. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Teenagers dream of fame, riches, glory. But they also have an unfortunate sense of entitlement. A sense that the world owes them something for all that angst and weirdness and neurosis.

I think I probably felt that way. So I should have taken the lessons that Hershiser and The Minutemen were so obviously offering. But no, I felt like if I merely cultivated some of James Dean's moody charisma I'd win accolades and fans. I felt like I deserved, if not monetary gain, a little acknowledgement at least for the wayward passions of my soul. I want the depth of my feeling recognized, damn it!

But if that recognition wasn't forthcoming, at least there was some consolation in the friendship and togetherness of the drama team. My team’s play took second place at the State tournament, which, while a nifty achievement, was kind of like when the Dillon Panthers lost in the State championship game on Friday Night Lights. Anything less than all-out triumph may as well have been failure.

On getting back into town from Knoxville I hitched a ride home with Chris Timmons. Chris was a big shot speech dude from one of our competition schools, Woodbury, which was only about an hour outside our little town. He had been on the periphery of our little world for the last year or so, driving into town periodically to hang out and take part in our geeky drama club hi-jinks. He was like a special guest star. In a way, he fit in as an idol in my little world too, since he was always winning awards and all the girls wouldn’t shut up about him. Plus he had the all-important allure of being from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else was an even smaller, shittier town than the one we were in. In getting a ride home from him I felt like I’d scored a bit of a coup. I’d be spending time with the star from another school! Maybe I’d learn some of his star-making secrets and use ‘em for my own benefit.

I don’t know if I learned anything, though we did spend an intoxicating few hours standing in my driveway talking about the big things - acting, music, friendship, sex. Watching the moon spin round in the sky, each of us absorbing and reflecting the light of impossibly high teenage spirits off of one another. Each of us wary, nervous, putting on a front of what we imagined to be cool. Trying to embody the various degrees of aloofness, confidence, and charisma we found in our own separate teenage heroes.

And here’s another situation where the memory of little things trump the big events. When I think about the State tournament I don’t really think about the tournament itself, or the second-place finish. I think about watching Orel Hershiser in a hotel room while I look over the cover of a Minutemen album. And I think about “I got the bullets!” and I think about standing in the driveway talking to Chris Timmons, each of us buzzing with possibility and expectation, hoping for things that we couldn’t quite articulate.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 11: Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

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.

Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

Max held the group together. Congenial, quick-witted, and outgoing, he was the glue that bonded the various people in our clan who were otherwise separated by age, temperament or fashion proclivities. Parties always happened at Max’s house. So when Max went on a trip with his father during the week of Spring Break, life became suddenly dull. When Max disappeared, so did our social lives.

Max’s favorite band was the Talking Heads. As a result, more than any band save R.E.M., Talking Heads figured into our little world as a symbol, a signpost, a measuring stick. They were perfectly suited to be Max’s favorite band – fond as both he and they were of jittery rhythms, day-glo colors and intelligent, offbeat humor.

We’d had an ongoing argument, as teenage music nerds tend to do (they do still, don’t they?) about what the greatest album ever made was. I’d opt for Who’s Next and Max would insist on Talking Heads 77, which baffled me at the time. Nobody ever talked about that album. I never even knew about it until I met him. It just couldn’t be among the greats. And yet, when Rolling Stone ran a special issue in 1987 celebrating the “100 Greatest Albums of the Last 20 Years”, there sat Talking Heads 77, along with three other Talking Heads records, validated as one of the greats. If it seems weird that Rolling Stone held so much authority, consider that we lived in a small town with no really good record stores and no other outlets for learning about music. It was also 1988, before any knowledge a person might be seeking could be dialed up instantly with hardly a thought. So I didn’t know Talking Heads 77. Or Television. Or The Modern Lovers. Hell, I only knew Iggy Pop from the Repo Man soundtrack, the Stooges to me meant Moe, Larry and Curly.

When Max got back into town on the Friday of Spring Break our clan breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was as though Spring was finally allowed to begin. He planned a party at his house for that evening. I knew it would be great to hang out with everybody, but more than that I wanted to tape two of the albums he had procured on his journey – Televisions’s Marquee Moon and The Modern Lovers' self-titled debut, both of which were also on the Rolling Stone list, and had become in our minds tokens of some other, better, mythical reality. I put them both on either side of one of those distinctively eighties day-glo Memorex cassettes and I ended up carrying that tape around everywhere, all the time. It became the soundtrack for the next couple months.

Listening through to the Television album for the first time was a small event in itself, our built-up anticipation paying off in the sound of those slithery, quicksilver guitars and Tom Verlaine’s strangled yelp of a voice. As everyone was gathering in Max’s front room, he and I hung back in the music room taking in the title track, that ten-minute aural thunderstorm, with the lightning striking itself and the post-storm fluorescent guitar drizzle after the climactic build-up.

More than the Television album though, the album that soundtracks my memory of Max’s homecoming party is Talking Head’s Fear Of Music. All those songs about everyday things – air (it can hurt you too), animals (they think they’re pretty smart), electric guitars (never listen to them). And all of it sounding strangely jagged and trebly, turning the commonplace into the surreal.

It was with all of this music buzzing in our brains and in the background that the party ensued. Everyone was there. But it wasn’t like the parties of your wildest memories, or of your typical teenage sex comedy. It was somehow a gentle, low-key affair. Through the smoke and noise and adolescent humor – one of my only specific memories of the night is of a long discussion comparing the relative similarities between sneezes and orgasms – a wave of calm set in. Even though there was sound and light and laughter, the joyous mood was somehow understated. Like stopping at the buzz that comes from the first drink.

The song that stands out is “Heaven”. That song seems to encapsulate a fundamental aspect of teenage living, at least for teenagers of a certain geeky temperament in the late ‘80’s. The band in Heaven, David Byrne tells us, always plays your favorite song. And in Heaven, you are assured that your reverie won’t be interrupted by any weird traumas, emotional or physical. Because in heaven nothing ever happens.

On the night of Max’s inaugural Spring party, nothing really seemed to be happening. And aren’t those the times that everyone remembers most fondly? Those times when nothing is really happening?

Back here in action-packed reality, I guess the answer is “Probably not.” But these are the times that hold the most allure in my memory, those moments when atmosphere takes precedence over action.

It was warm outside, so many of us wandered to the road outside. So much of 1988 involved roads and walking. There were train tracks nearby. As we walked, all of the angst and tension of winter at once seemed to recede. Out there wandering around, breathing in the sense of possibilities, the future still within our grasp, still under our control, I had the feeling that this is the way it would be, this is the feeling that would define the rest of the year.

Later, as was something of a custom, I fell asleep on Max’s couch while watching Talking Heads videos. That night felt like a rebirth. After the long cold gray winter we at last had some laughter and hopefulness and “Marquee Moon” and “Heaven” and dirty jokes and endless, promising roads. It was finally, officially, Springtime.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 10: Winning, Winning, Always Winning

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.

Winning, Winning, Always Winning 

 When Charlie Sheen went batshit crazy and conducted his “Winning” media blitz in 2011, he wasn’t merely laying bare his own psychosis for public consumption, but also, I believe, giving voice to a fundamental strain of the American psyche; no-holds-barred competitiveness, or the rabid desire to be better than everyone else at everything. This partly explains the glee with which the American public consumed his antics - we related, in a way. 

Well, I didn’t relate, really. I am just about the least competitive person I know. Maybe this is because I am, as Terry Lennox called Marlowe at the end of The Long Goodbye, “a born loser”. But it's mostly because I feel as though there is something ugly and unhealthy about our pervasive win-at-any cost attitude. Apart from my beyond-all-reason hopes that the Dodgers will one day win another World Series, any sense of competitive spirit I ever had has been beaten down and drained through years and years of false hopes and dashed expectations, not to mention my own weird self-limiting personality disorder. 

 This wasn’t the case in 1988, though. In those days I got all worked up over the Speech and Drama tournaments I regularly competed in, and in 1988 my teammates and I took our school play “Voices From The High School” to the district tournament, where we competed against a handful of other one-act plays presented by other schools. 

On the way up to the tournament we listened to The Modern Lovers. “Pablo Picasso” was a favorite, with its description of Pablo Picasso walking down the street making girls turn the color of an avocado, hypnotizing them with his stare, all despite being only five foot three. Never getting called an asshole. Which might be another way of saying that Pablo Picasso was a winner. 

Our school’s play consisted of an assortment of vignettes concerning the traditional teenage rites of passage and temptations, dealing with drugs and sex and depression. My role was a bit of comic relief, positioned at the end to alleviate the heaviness of the rest of the play (just before my slot, Elliot had a monologue about his character’s attempted suicide. It was cheery.) I played a kid who’s hired at a department store as a janitor but ends up playing Santa Claus for the Christmas crowd. For some reason, I gave the character a cigarette as a prop. Well, it was a piece of paper rolled up to look like a cigarette. I guess I did this because I thought it made the character seem rebellious, and therefore even less suited to play Santa Claus. I remember some consternation among my classmates about this choice, being as how it wasn’t in the script. But I was dead set on sticking with the choice and I eventually won the director’s approval. I had guts back then. Determination. I was a winner, dammit! 

 So was Max. During the delivery of his monologue he was required to catch a basketball thrown to him by someone off-stage, a move that the none-too-athletically-inclined Max pulled off effortlessly through dozens of rehearsals and school performances. Of course, during the District tournament performance the throw went wild, bounced of Max, and rolled off the front of the stage. In a moment of amazing calm and quick wittedness, and perhaps with some of Pablo Picasso’s cool under pressure in mind, Max pulled off an admirable bit of improvisation. His catch was supposed to coincide with the words “around the world”. So when the ball went awry he stretched that dialogue out to “Around the…county…the city….the state…the country…the world…why, the whole universe!” all as he walked down the steps to the side of the stage and went to retrieve the ball. Winning! 

Meanwhile, I had neglected to bring the pillows that made Santa fat, which I did not realize until the play was in progress. Convinced that my forgetfulness was going to ruin the play, I fretted backstage as the play went on. Of course, the lack of pillows only made the Santa incongruously skinny, which enhanced the character’s comic plight. Even when winners screw up, they still win. 

The best part of tournaments was waiting around after the competition was over for the awards ceremony. There’s that weird mixture of being able to relax after you’ve done all the work, combined with the buzz of expectation for the ceremony, which to us may as well have been the damn Academy Awards. 

And wouldn’t you know, our team actually got to do some intense celebrating. Our play took top honors as best one-act. It really was a thrill when the announcement came. The reaction was so genuinely excited, so loud and overpowering, that the sheer spontaneous purity makes it hard to be cynical about it even now, years after my antipathy towards winning has been fully ingrained. 

Maybe I got my fill of winning back then. Maybe that one big win was enough for me, and I just haven’t felt the need for any more since then. 

Around the time of our District victory Kirk Gibson appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Gibson had recently signed a free-agent contract with the Dodgers. The article relayed the story of the notoriously intense Gibson storming off the field after a teammate had put eye-black around the rim of his cap as a practical joke. Gibson didn’t find it funny, and he let everyone in the clubhouse know that he wasn’t going to tolerate the kind of high-jinks that led the team to a 79-83 record the previous year. Kirk Gibson wanted to win. 

Maybe that’s the way we all ought to be all the time. Survival of the fittest – or the winningest – and all that. Or maybe the idea of winning is a kind of false hope, a momentary escape. An illusion that steels us against the cold harsh inevitability of death. 

Eh, who cares. I don’t. But I would still like to see the Dodgers win another World Series, either way.