Baby She Lied

Baby, I lied. This is the title of a song country singer Deborah Allen released in 1983. It was apparently a hit and although I was never aware of this, the song nonetheless had a profound effect on me in the mid-80s. The rendition I knew was by some local VA Beach gal named Diana Ray. I was familiar with the tearjerker having watched this gal perform it on several occasions circa '84/'85 at Michael's, a tidewater area country-western two-step shitkicker dance club. I'm pretty sure Baby I Lied was the only number Diana Ray sang, offered up as an estrogen-infused change of pace to the male house band's otherwise Good Ol' Boy set.

Thinking back on it now, I don't believe I'd even heard the name Deborah Allen until yesterday when I googled the tune after experiencing a strange nocturnal flashback from this period in my life. I didn't follow the top 40 back then, happy to collect most of my music from the bottom of the discount bins in an era when punk and new wave had, for the most part, not yet found a footing with the public in the US (the "poppier" stylings of Blondie, Joe Jackson and U2 aside). My preferences weren't yet classified "alternative" by the marketing machine (that didn't happen until "alternative" was popular enough for them to bother and by that time it meant mostly "mainstream"). My favorite type of music wouldn't be rescued from the bargain bin until Nirvana's sonic success nearly a decade further on down the road.

Given my musical proclivities, I was about as far from a country music fan as could be in the mid-80s so you might ask why I darkened the door of this yee-haw establishment even once to get out of the rain let alone repeatedly on purpose as a specific destination. It's a good question and one I'm not completely sure I can answer. I can tell you that it most certainly wasn't thanks to the crew I accompanied to the joint: I loathed those vermin one and all. They were merely my transportation. You see, these were my Navy days and I didn't have any means for getting around save for buses, taxis and my own two legs, which often posed a problem: mass transit took an ungodly long time to get anywhere and cabs were usually out of my price range on a sailor's salary unless it was a relatively short jaunt. As for my legs? Well, I wore down my fair share of shoe leather but it only gets you so far. The fuck-sticks with the all-important car were among my "shipmates," living and working in the same spaces on the same floating prison (a.k.a USS Dwight D. Eisenhower) but I couldn't have less in common with this particular group of charmers, made up as they were of equals parts racism, sadism, and abject idiocy. In other words, real sweethearts.

The first time I decided purely on whim to accompany them to Michael's, reasoning I could get drunk on the cheap, goof on the hillbillies - including my "buddies" - and gawk at the hot chicks that congregated at such establishments in southeastern Virginia back then (probably now too). But I went mainly because I thought it might kill the overpowering boredom I was mired in. I think I wore an Iggy and the Stooges shirt to my inaugural two-step dosey doe. Or maybe one that read, "fuck country music." Nah, it had to be the Stooges: I wasn't that ballsy. Certainly I wasn't decked out in the stetson, big belt buckle and cowboy boots my fellow travelers wore like a second skin.

I was vaguely aware that there was a chance I was gonna get my ass kicked courtesy of my dress and antics (shouting out requests for the Clash and B-52s, muttering "country sucks" and other such witticisms under my breath, attempting to pogo during a two-step; you get the idea). Maybe that was the point (I was and am nothing if not a masochist). And then Diana Ray sang that song and I was transfixed, my goofs melting away. All subsequent visits had one sole purpose: Diana Ray and "her" song. I'm not sure what it was that lit my fire: the song itself is a sub-par weeper and DRay was no great shakes in either the looks or talent department from what I recall. Together, though, it was magical to me. Ours is not to wonder why (well, of course it is but I can't for the life of me come up with a satisfactory answer). Where o' where are you now, Sister Ray? (Apologies to Lou Reed and the Velvets)

I immediately downloaded Baby I Lied from iTunes once I discovered it was in fact an actual hit my girl had been covering and not her own composition since lost to time. Hearing the original for the first time tonight brings back strangely powerful feelings. The song is now comfortably ensconced in my "80's Sense Memory Dreck" playlist, taking its rightful place alongside such charmers as Don't Stop Believin', Islands In the Stream, Hold On, Sister Christian and other slightly brighter dim bulbs I hate to love but can't quite hate: I adore the memories they invoke.

(Postscript: I've actually since overcome my own prejudices against country music and very much like some of it today, particularly the roots stuff that - along with R&B - helped to fuel what became rock and roll: I love the darker Hank Williams stuff, though I have little use for his son or most of the pop-gloss reactionary slop that passes for the genre these days. I also dig a lot of late forties/early fifties bluegrass and its drunken cousin, rockabilly. Of the contemporary variety, Rosanne Cash does it for me (and I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to her father, Johnny). Thanks to the Elvises Costello and Presley with turning me around on this subject. It still might constitute a fairly small slice of my listening pie but at least I don't reject the whole spectrum out of hand when something I'd otherwise classify as "good" pops up on the menu.)

The Norfolk Ballet '84 (Broken)

Squatting in the ambiance of stripper perfumed smoke haze,

shot glass run-off, PBR and cellulite unbounded.

***

Journey, Styx and Benatar careen off restroom mirrors,

evaporating into stalls where sickly souls go praying.

***

Echoes of my emptiness tear at my gut this Tuesday,

distilling into drunken numbing Huey Lewis hatred.

***

"Owner of a Lonely Heart" now soundtrack to my musings,

as "Lovely Lisa" takes the pole to creepy stage announcements.

***

I'm lost on Granby/Little Creek as Tuesday ticks to Wednesday,

then stagger out into the dark of early morning summer.

***

I hail a cab back down into my Pier 12 home and office,

tripping down the passageways toward berthing slumber solace.

***

Crawl into my bunk in back and pass out until morning;

rinse, repeat and hope to God this Groundhog's Day stops playing.

***

Some twenty six long years gone by since stumbling into stasis;

still, Pavlov's Dog lives in my ear when certain songs sing to it.

***

Those wretched tunes I just can't stand, they take me back to Clancy's,

when optimism for my fate had not yet died exhausted.

***

I sit here now and contemplate my mindset in those shitholes,

and wonder why - just why the hell - I look on those days fondly.

***

It could just be the booze, or that I was finally free of Everett,

or fantasies of hearts of gold wrapped up in 80's muzak.

***

In the end I think it's probably something a bit more basic:

it was a time when the future held a promise now since broken;

it was a time that I myself was not yet - not quite - broken.

Quite broken -

and facing the wrong direction looking to become whole again.

Club Med

May, 1983. I remember landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier the first time mainly because of the relief I felt after the nausea of the ride.

I'd been in the Navy for over six months by the time I touch down, two spent in San Diego at boot camp and the next four in Denver at the Navy intelligence training command on Lowry Air Force base. (Whatever happened to my "Rocky Mountain Navy" t-shirt?) I graduated in late April and I got my orders to the Ike, which had recently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea for a six month cruise. So they fly me to Sicily where I wait for transport out to the boat. That ride comes in the form of a Navy C-2 Greyhound "Carrier Onboard Delivery (COD)" aircraft, the ever reliable ferrier of mail and people.

After an hour or so of stomach churning turbulence, the C-2 makes a slow banking turn and a sickening dip to then fro. The seats face toward the rear of the plane and I'm strapped in tight against the backrest, cranial headgear and earplugs not really helping to muffle the whine of the props but making it impossible to hear anything else. There aren't any windows so I have to take the word of the flight crew member who shouts, "Five minutes!" Until the clown yells it again 10 minutes later.

Then suddenly, Wham! An instant of a few Gs sitting on my chest and the trip's over: I've just gone from over one hundred miles per hour to zero in the space of a second. The ending is anti-climactic. Taking off from a carrier in one of these lumbering beasts, I'd later learn, is where the real drama lives (you wonder whether or not the catapult has given you enough speed to straighten out and fly when it feels like you're nearly vertical and about to go tail first into the water ahead of the rushing ship set to run you over). But I wouldn't get to experience that joy for several more years, as a civilian software developer bopping around the Gulf just before Desert Storm.

Back in May of '83, the aft of the plane opens and the noise and heat of an active carrier flight deck hits me like a freight train. I go into sensory overload as I'm led out past a plethera of roaring jets and bombs and fuel lines being carted and dragged haphazardly in all directions by what looks to be an army of kids my age decked out in a rainbow of different colored jerseys. I know what none of it means but I do know I want nothing to do with any of it.

As I pass through the hatch into the island structure and the noise muffles, some joker sneers, "We'll see you back out here soon." No, no, I think. I'm destined for other things. Down into the air conditioning of the carrier intelligence center (CVIC). Closed off from the great unwashed. Just a bunch of us eggheads sitting around gleaming computer displays, tracking Soviet naval activity, wired on caffeine and gray matter. I quickly learned that we chosen few were merely the lesser unwashed, a shit hole within a shit hole. And the AC competed with a choking cloud of nicotine-laced smoke hanging perpetually in the air. The work itself was often fascinating, if morally frustrating (at least for me, somewhat of a rare animal: a died in the wool liberal working in military intelligence).

How in the world did I end up here? After all, I was just a year removed from protesting the recent federal selective service registration requirement, and vowing to defeat the evil of a Reagan-based growing military-industrial complex. Well, it came down to money and opportunity: I had neither and needed a kick in the ass to get my life moving. The plan then morphed into the thought that I'd go into the Air Force or Navy as a journalist (it was good enough for Hunter Thompson, after all). That hit a snag when I learned about the minimum two year waiting list for journalism training. The recruiter noticed my shrinking interest in things once that came to light and quickly began to spin Navy Intelligence as a "perfect" alternative. It was journalism, after a fashion. Top secret journalism, but that makes the assignment all that more exciting! The recruiter laid it on thick. The aptitude tests were pretty stringent but I somehow managed to make the grade, so off I went.

I despised but survived boot camp and actually enjoyed intelligence training in Denver (it was more like college than the military). We could wear civilian clothes and had university-style dorm rooms. But that wasn't the real Navy, isolated as we were in the mountains of Colorado and the seemingly more relaxed style of the Air Force. Now, though, I was thrust amidst the "real" Navy with a vengeance. Hard to get more in your face than an aircraft carrier at the beginning stages of a six month deployment, especially in 1983, with Beirut nearly boiling over, Libyan wacky monster Muammar threatening to sink my new home down to the bottom of the Mediterranean, and all manner of Soviet muscle buzzing beside, above and below us on a constant basis. But it wasn't boring, that's for sure.

As a Navy Intelligence weenie, I was privy to a lot of the goings on that my fellow shipmates were not. It certainly helped to know exactly why our port visits were regularly cancelled. I was eventually assigned to the Tactical Analysis Plot (TAP), an intelligence center within the intelligence center on the ship. You needed a Secret clearance to gain access to CVIC but better than Top Secret to get into TAP: what they called (and still call) Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Typical government alphabet soup. This work center was subsequently moved to Flag (Admiral's) operations spaces and re-christened the Supplemental Plot (SUPPLOT). It might sound glamorous and the work was interesting but TAP was a hellish environment to exist in. It was a room about fifteen feet in length and barely three feet in width. Generally three people worked there per shift (twelve on, twelve off, seven days a week at sea). Everyone assigned there smoked but me and there was little ventilation. Large acrylic maps ran along the length of both walls, with little magnetic "pucks" marking various air, sea, and land-based entities (friendlies and adversaries). The particulars of these charts would vary depending on our current area of operation: sometimes it was the North Atlantic, sometimes the Caribbean, and often just off the coast of Norfolk, VA, but usually it was "the Med." I can still recite the names and characteristics of all the Soviet naval anchorages in that body of water, the manner in which their inhabitants communicated and what that chatter and their subsequent movements meant, though I have no particular desire to remember them (those memories are lodged permanently in my lizard brain, alongside every episode of the Brady Bunch, and certain tingle that's stimulated whenever I see somebody doing coke on TV or the silver screen).

We had a teletype machine in TAP that continuously printed out messages coming in from numerous sources on developments in the world, from strategic geo-political happenings to tactical operational force movements. The sound of its rat-a-tat-tat still reverberates through my subconscious some 27 years later. We'd analyze these reports and compare the data to historic behavior to predict actions, positioning and recommended reactions (or pro actions, if possible). I'd write up our findings and produce a daily briefing book for the Captain. I honed my typing skills, for sure. And learned a lot of stuff about shit that has since become obsolete, a master of early eighties operational intelligence trivia. No scandalous misuse of power or other egregious moral dilemmas of the type found at more strategic positions in "the community." What I remember most about all this was blasting Nina Hagen and Elvis Costello on the tape deck while writing up the Captain's briefing book on the nightshift, my eyes watering from the blinding ubiquitous smoke. Also the thrill of finding a link, a pattern, in the mountains of data, triggered by some obscure factoid I'd memorized. Like the kind of kick I still get running down an elusive bug in the software I develop today. The bugs were different but the process strikingly similar.

I spent many of my days (and many of my nights) in TAP through the summer and fall of '83, monitoring cat and mouse games with Libya, tracking the rag tag terrorist groups jockeying for position in Lebanon (we had a whole wall mapping out the dozens of shadowy organizations as they moved, shrank and grew, and switched alliances). And through it all, the ebb and flow of US/Soviet Navy's simulated war games against one another below, on and above the water. Mission planning for our airborne response to the October US Marines barracks bombing (well, really to a number of things) took up the final month of the ship's time in the Med, leaving it to the USS JFK and others to execute once they relieved us on station in November.

Sometime during all this, I spent a couple weeks cleaning our berthing and doing the division's laundry as most junior enlisted end up doing at some point, along with the constant sweeping and swabbing and buffing of passageways for the weekly inspections of same. We even got to visit a couple ports in our six and a half months of "club Med" that year (Taranto, Livorno, and the ubiquitous Naples, Italy and Athens, Greece). We made up for it next time we deployed to these waters in late '84/early '85, but the three straight months between port visits in '83 (mid-July to mid-October) was tough. To make matters worse, the Marine barracks was bombed just after we finally stepped foot on land again in Naples so they instituted an emergency recall and a few hours later we were booking through the very narrow and heavily trafficked Straits of Messina at 40+ nautical miles an hour on a beeline to Lebanon. That was an interesting sight (and navigational endevor).

Ah, good times. Somewhere in there, I turned a very sober 21.  It was well over a month on either side of a drink for me on the big day, but I'm pretty sure I've since made up for that deprivation.  And then some.

Mallorca Memories

It wasn't familiar at first, I was still half asleep. The sound rose up from the living room, the unwatched television on some random channel I'd forgotten to switch off when I went to bed last night. Then it hit me and the song registered.

And I drifted back through time and space ...

It's a warm early March in 1985. I am in some shithole Palma cantina on the island of Mallorca, Spain. Julian Lennon's Too Late for Goodbyes is playing on the jukebox, I've drained a glass or three of Sangria and am making out with one of the lovely young senoritas employed there for that purpose. Well, to be precise, they are employed so that I can buy them very expensive watered down champagne, or perhaps it is just water. Either way, I am not one to bother over the particulars of another's profession and in any case am not in the mood to talk business or to much talk at all.

I have a room in a local hotel and am in my old clothes, I'm just a traveler trekking across the globe. I am transported from the real circumstances of my presence here as a US Navy sailor stationed on an aircraft carrier anchored just off-shore for a short port visit. But that's no longer me. I am merely a tourist, like many of the others in this bar. Lots of Brits and other northern European types floating around the island. I am released from the shackles, unbound from any constraints.

In a very real way, I'm home.

I was truly in heaven that night almost 25 years ago. In fact, I think I've probably never been happier before or since.

Looking at the short synopsis above, it seems vaguely sleazy and not a little pathetic. Typical sailor adventure - acting all "ugly American" in ports the world over.

But it wasn't like that at all.

There were one or two other sailors there in this particular dive, but we blended in with the tourists pretty well (I chose an out of the way place for precisely this reason).

And the girls may have been on the payroll but they were not your typical working girls.

Hookers usually do pretty much anything that doesn't require intimacy or affection; these girls though were very much the opposite. "Buy-me-drink" girls are pretty common, certainly they were back in the day, and especially in port cities. But the ladies in this particular establishment were very different; it was their vibe. I've not come across their kind before or since and I've been to a lot of gin joints the world over, both very swank and awfully dank. If any single word captures it, the one that comes to mind is "lost innocence" (okay, that's two). Perhaps "sweet."

Whenever I hear Julian Lennon's music - and his success was fleeting, so it's not all that often - I'm transported back to Palma, that evening, that cantina. Perhaps iTunes can help. It's not that I actually much enjoyed his brand of tuneage - sense memory music for me is usually happenstance/background, the random soundtrack to moments in time.

I guess in this case, it's apropos - it is much too late for goodbyes.

Journey to the Center of the Members Only Decade

I've never owned a Steve Perry or Journey album and his voice is just this side of Geddy Lee fingernails-on-the-blackboard spine-twisting agony. But he's also a lead contributor to the soundtrack of the 1980s for me, probably much more than the songs and artists that I actually liked. Anyway, my tastes leaned (and still lean) toward late 70s punk and the first "new" wave. The 80s were kinda lacking in "my" kind of tunes and nothing much emerged again until Nirvana in the early 90s. The 1980s were destitute in this regard, even with a few bright spots along the way (early U2, the LA punk scene).

But when I hear 'Don't Stop Believing', I'm 21, in the Navy, and transported back to the shitty strip clubs and dive bars in Norfolk, VA or running wild through the heart (gut?) of Naples, Italy. Perhaps not everybody's idea of a good time - and in so many ways, not mine either - but I recall those days fondly now.

There was this 'us-versus-them' band-of-brothers vibe that was compelling, even as the nights of jovial revelry were in retrospect pretty pathetic. We acted as though we had been drafted against our will into war, when we'd really just volunteered to live on a big floating airport with a lot of people we discovered we'd rather have never known. Very few ever got the girl - not for free, anyway - we were generally despised by the locals in towns throughout the world, and even fewer of us actually owned a car, forever slaves to public transportation in towns with few options.

Lots of booze and tunes, though.

A bunch of other mediocre but popular 80s artists trigger these same memories - pretty much whatever was stuck on replay in the jukeboxes of the crap watering holes we frequented: Huey Lewis, Styx, Laura Branigan, Pat Benatar, etc.

This same weird melding of bad music and sense-memory is especially strong with Night Ranger/Sister Christian.

Sister Christian will always be James Sprouse.

Where in the world is Jimmy Sprouse now? He was the older, goofy next-door-neighbor-who-lives-alone type with rapidly thinning hair trying in vain to cover his scalp in the desperate wrap-around style obvious to all but those who do it. (Hey, waitaminute - I'm older and live alone! whaterya implying? I'm not goofy, at least, and still have my hair - bettercheckinthemirror...)

Jimmy worked as the intelligence division draftsman in a little crawl space of a room near the ship's foc'sle and lived to watch bad movies and bemoan the younger generation. I never understood why the intelligence division needed a draftsman, and I don't imagine he did either.

Sprouse was frozen forever in time, as seemingly old as the hills to us then but probably 15 years younger than I am now.

Anyway, how is Jimmy Sprouse Sister Christian?

It comes down to a specific moment in time for me. An epiphany. One of those surreal, how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moments in life.

It hit me at a Night Ranger concert in Hampton, VA in 1985.

Scanning the crowd of wack-jobs 'rocking' to their groovy rhythms - Jimmy Sprouse 'jamming' harder than all the rest - scanning the crowd, it hit me dead on.

The question.

The question wasn't literally 'how did I get to this Night Ranger concert?' That much was easy enough: a bunch of others on the ship were going, I had nothing going on, there was an available ticket and beer was to be had before, during and after the show. In other words, a good time, riffing on the "uncool" and their "shitty music".

But that moment, scanning the crowd, with 'Sister Christian' in full swing and seeing Jimmy Sprouse playing air guitar and Dave "Rock Lobster" Ryan nodding to the tune like he was some strung-out jazz musician who had just shot up, I swear everything stopped and the urgency of the real question reverberated through my mind, drowning out everything else: How-the-fuck-did-I-get-here? And then: Find Something Else To Do With Your Life. Now. This place, this life, these people. It wasn't some grand conspiracy - I chose to do it and I could choose to do something else.

I'd met some great people - some fellow travelers, as it were - but this could not continue. The horror was that, yes it very well could. Sprouse was probably at some level thinking the same thing, 16 years earlier, and it did continue for him. Maybe he was, back then, even human. Now he appeared human only at odd moments such as this. What is your life when you can only express some kind of joy at a fucking Night Ranger concert?

Sister Christian took on another level of significance for me in 1998 when I first saw what might be the pivotal scene in Boogie Nights, set at a point in time almost exactly when my epiphany occurred - smack dab in the middle of the 1980s. For the most part the movie is silly, sharply, funny, riffing on 1970s porn and film.

But it takes a serious turn into the 1980s. Dirk Diggler, having become a has-been porn star turned drug addict and dealer, has exactly this same how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moment, listening to Sister Christian. The camera focuses in on Marky Mark and his expression - well, I think it was actually a pretty fine bit of acting (who'd have thunk it?)


It was eerie. Different circumstances, of course, but the moment was singular. And Sister Christian was playing. He's motoring, for sure.

Watch it and you'll know the place I was at. And in many ways, how I got to where I am.

Where ever that may be.


via videosift.com