Father time's goddamn Lunar calendar has shed its skin again and drawn another ring around my trunk, forcing me to symbolically drop into the musical fetal position of my early 20s. Well, very early 20s - 20, 21 to be exact. 1983. The first year I recall being relatively happy most of the time.
Which is odd because I spent a good deal of '83 on what constituted a floating prison with 5000 other people, 4995 of whom I didn't know or, worse, really didn't want to know. Strangely, it might have been great because I'd finally felt free. Free of what? Of the 20 years that came before it, I guess. It was my first real job, I did it well, and it was interesting if morally abhorrent (thus began the compartmentalization of my ethics).
Maybe it was all the great music I could buy really cheaply there (for some reason, very few others on the ship cared for Nina Hagen, The Jam, Elvis Costello, etc. yet the ship's store always seemed to have cassettes of their albums available, marked down because they presumably couldn't get rid of them).
Maybe it was that I saw a bit of Europe for the first time: Italy, Greece ... well, Italy and Greece, anyway. Qaddafi and troubles in Lebanon put the kibosh on planned visits to Israel, Egypt and Spain that year.
Really, though, I think it was the four months at the beginning of the year I spent at the Navy Intelligence School and Oxymoron Emporium in Denver, Colorado. There wasn't a lot of Navy in Denver (that was Air Force country) and it was more like college than the military, at least from my perspective. Slam dancing Thursday's (New Wave night) at Thirsty's and Friday/Saturday (not New Wave nights, but we slammed anyway) at After The Gold Rush, both 3.2 bars where us under-21 types could drink. I saw Wall of Voodoo live and hung out with other New Wave aficionados for the first time. Good memories.
Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom and The Jam's Snap compilation have been getting extra heavy play on the iPod, my feeble attempt to ignore father time's clock ticking off another year, one more I won't get back. One step closer to the proverbial grave.
These two albums bring me back to a specific year - 1983, in this case - more than any other music that I actually enjoy. There are a great many tunes that dredge up strong memories of the past, specific pinpoints in time; however, in almost all cases, they are songs I at least vaguely dislike and rarely have purchased (except when the memory overpowers the distaste and I need to hear the piece of shit jingle to help get me back to the moment).
I'm having a very surreal and oddly enjoyable time watching a Hallmark TV Movie staring Ally Sheedy and Meatloaf. It's a "drama," so they say: Citizen Jane. No relation to Citizen Kane.
Meatloaf is god awful and brilliant in this. He's a detective on the trail of the person who murdered Ally's niece. At first, he's just painfully bad. But then something strange happens ... his performance grows on you (sort of like a fungus). A half hour into it, you're transfixed by the monotone delivery. The ssssllllloowww manner in which he walks and speaks and reacts.
And. Then. You're. Hooked.
This just might be the best performance by an 'actor' in the history of the art form. Still, through all that, it remains horrible. I can't explain the paradox. Then again, I could never explain the existence of Meatloaf period. Stop right there! Before you go any further ... He was wonderful in Fight Club as the Testicular Cancer Guy with Breasts, so there you have your precedence. And in the Paradise video. Can't forget Rocky Horror. What about Roadie? Damn, the guy's a regular thespian. Inside the Actor's Studio material for sure.
And Ally? She's the reason I rode this wave on a channel surfing Saturday night. You see, Ms. Sheedy rocked my world in the 1980s. Her one-two punch of Breakfast Club goth-chick and St. Elmo's Fire Alex/Kevin girlfriend had me reeling.
I identified with Andrew McCarthy's Kevin in St. Elmo's more than any movie character to that point in my young life: he was almost exactly my age, he was a (wannabe) writer, everyone thought he was gay because he didn't have any recent conquests, and he was secretly in love with Ally (well, with her character, but let's not quibble).
For me it started and ended with her eyes. Then continued with her voice and her mannerisms. Her ... everything.
She knocked me for a loop all over again as John Candy's love in Only the Lonely in 1991. But there were danger signs ahead, I knew even then. Certain features you knew wouldn't stand the test of time. The softness was, just a touch, harder than in her brat packing days. Pointy features pointing a bit more.
Fast forward eighteen years and not much has changed with my life. I might as well have been put into suspended animation, waiting for something to snap me out of it.
But I think our 'romance' is over.
The danger signs were justified. The years have not been kind to her, with a hard edge where only sweetness once lived. Now to be fair, it could be the shrew of a character she's playing here. And the years have not been kind to most of us as we drift into our late forties (they were never all that sweet to me to begin with). But it's not her looks that have soured (it was never really her looks that got to me, so much as her aura, that glow).
Oh well, we'll always have Georgetown. Here's looking at you, kid.
Still, the ravages of age have been more than kind to some. My #1 top dog, big cheese Hollywood I-gotta-have-her gal, Mary Louise Parker, 45, looks WAY better than she did when I discovered her in Fried Green Tomatoes (the only thing good about that flick, in my eyes). And that movie was released in 1991, the same year as ... Only the Lonely.
As Paul Harvey would say, "And that's the rest of the Story ..."
The paint is no longer sticky for sure. For those that made it this far, hope you enjoyed watching it dry with me.
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 Reedand 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 musicand 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.)
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.
The sweat of my own futility drizzles down my back, cold. I'm lost in a weakness with no strength to shake it. Compelled back to familiar places as they continue to haunt my dreams, I unceasingly gnaw at this material like a nervous tic.
1990. I am heading down Providence in Delaware County, to where it intersects with Edgemont and I-95. The nexus of my pleasure, the gates of hell. Here, the Widener University campus on the western edge of the interstate represents safety and severe need. (Somewhat ironically, the rehab joint I ended up visiting to dry out from my wetter, more socially/legally acceptable proclivities some 15 years later also makes its home here, just up the street.) On this side of the highway I blend in as a milquetoast suburbanite, albeit one quaking with an endorphin thirst the likes of which only Bolivian withdrawal can induce. To the East, over the narrow bridges providing passage across the freeway's River Styx, lies Dante's Inferno.
For years those bridges represented a barrier I'd not dare cross, relying instead on an emissary in the form of my "pharmacist broker"/Sherpa to conduct these oh-so necessary transactions (for a hefty fee, naturally). Need and circumstance, though, eventually demanded that I show my face in person. It was a risky proposition, one that provided no guarantee of reward even if I didn't get robbed or arrested for my troubles (I narrowly averted both concerns on more than one occasion). These few blocks of misery and medicine did not compare to the North Philly badlands, but they were at least as scary to me because I was making the climb on my own. (I never visited the badlands without my Tenzing Norgay along for the ride to handle the currency/goods exchange.)
My dip into the underworld became routine, so much that I could navigate it round trip blind (on many occasions I effectively proved this out). Sometimes I had to make back-to-back runs in rapid succession, if I happened to get cheated the first time round. After all, there was little chance for taste tests on-scene to validate my purchase and the merchants weren't exactly registered with the better business bureau.
The premise was simple: hop into the Samurai and point it south down route 252 from my Media apartment, continuing on Providence as it became route 320 south and then the rest of the way to the Days Inn parking lot at the aforementioned nexus of pleasure. Six miles, ten minutes. Sometimes it seemed like a journey of days going down.
The Days Inn lot is where I'd wait for my Sherpa during the early years as he scaled the mountain top on my behalf and (sometimes) returned with the reward. Occasionally, he'd return with nothing and sometimes he wouldn't return at all. Later it became the spot where I'd park briefly to muster my inner guile for the push to the summit alone. Sort of a base camp, as it were. I remember this clearly, though I was rarely clearheaded, even on the first run of the evening (several hours of consumed liquid courage coursing through my blood stream was the norm). There were a couple of roads running over the interstate and into the snake pit, the most obvious being Edgemont/352. I preferred the road less traveled, Upland (plus I enjoyed its double entendre-laced moniker).
The boys would come running by the time my jeep crossed over Rose just east of the interstate. I'd ignore them and swing left onto 10th Street where I was assured of two or three entrepreneurs knocking on my windows on either side of the vehicle. This was where the risk of robbery was at its height: they could just as easily be shoving a gun into my face as a fistful of powdered pleasure. I never did see a weapon but often got a lot of pounding on the hood and shouts of "gimme your money, motherfucker." I never gave in until I had the goods. And then my window'd go up and I was off again, less than ten-seconds ticking by to complete the transaction. It certainly wasn't uncommon for the merchandise to be worthless (100% talcum powder or some other cutting agent). When that happened, I'd immediately make another run down. Sometimes I'd drive back to base camp and check it out to avoid having to traverse the whole way round from the apartment again but was usually too paranoid to risk prolonged exposure in public carrying what was presumably - hopefully - a controlled substance.
There were a few times when the boys would suddenly stop and move as one away from my car. Cops in the belfry. My mind would race, quickly running through a rehearsal of the "lost looking for the I-95 on-ramp" routine I'd planned to blurt out should I get pulled over. But it never happened. A patrol car even drove right by me on one occasion. I can't believe they didn't hit the lights and put me through the ringer. A white boy in a blue Suzuki Samurai on the east side of the freeway: I would have pulled me over. Perhaps they didn't want to deal with the paperwork (they knew I hadn't yet scored since they had to have seen the dealers scatter prior to reaching my window). The scariest moments for me were when I had my prize and was driving the four or five blocks to the I-95 north on-ramp, my passage to freedom. Not that I wasn't still filled with terror all the way back to Media, or that I wasn't nervous about the quality of my purchase and the thought of having to do it all over again. But the sickening feeling was concentrated with the spotlight shining on felonious Freddy here in the soft-top mini-Jeep cruising the wrong side of I-95. All these things reverberated through my mind seemingly at once. But never did I pause to ponder that the whole fucking trip (not to mention the addiction driving it) was plain madness. Which itself was crazy, especially for someone as prone to excessive introspection as I was and am.
This journey I made on a dozen or so occasions between 1990 and 1992 had its foundation in adrenaline and delusion, addiction and anticipation. Thoughtlessness in its most crystalized form. Instinct as pure as the driven snow I was driving toward but never found. Purity is an elusive state for most things in life and in particular when what you're hunting is pharmaceutical-based happiness. I stumbled closest to purity by happenstance, but it was inert: talcum, aspirin, or other like manner of subterfuge. Not the kind I had in mind.
I often think of the large circle I made driving from Media to Chester, surrounding the smaller, inner circle summiting the mountain from Days Inn to Upland. Vicious circles. Dante needs to up the ante a few notches. In some sense I'm still spinning 'round and 'round trying to break free.
My mind is screaming but my body is quiet, stomach churning.
And my brain is baking.
Parked and conspicuous on the side street of a neighborhood decimated by poverty, drugs and crime, menacing shadows seem to surround me as they pass by, turn/look, and finally, thankfully, move on.
I'm trying my best to blend into the driver's seat, scrunching down, wishing I could vanish. And fervently hoping it won't be too long even while logic and reason clue me into the futility of that. Then again, if logic and reason were my guides I wouldn't be here now. Somewhere west of Aramingo, a handful of blocks east of 3rd and Indiana. West Kensington. The Badlands. Waiting. Visions of the Velvet Underground's Waiting for the Man buzzing through my mind's eye.
My little Suzuki Samurai jeep is a bright blue beacon floating in the sea of the dirty gray that permeates the streets up here. Christ, I might as well have a big spot light shooting up from the vehicle into the sky, spelling out my intentions to the thieves and the cops alike.
Unlike the other bubble-gummers who dare to swing up into this area for their recreational party favors, I haven't arrived here as an outsider. I have my Sherpa, my guide. So no waiting in a line of cars at one of the outdoor drug bazaars catering to Joe and Jane Suburbanite for me. Those traffic jams are further east, closer to I-95. Instead, we pull into a dilapidated side street, kill the engine and lights, I give my Tenzing Norgay the money fresh from an ATM withdrawal, and he disappears into the hood while I sit there, alone.
It's plain to me that addiction does at least as fine a job eradicating judgement as it does dignity, money, a life, and the rest of what it takes. Even with all that, what it provides me, sitting here in 1989, is singular and compelling: glimpses of happiness or at least escape from my head for a few hours. In 2009, fifteen years clean of that particular indulgence, I've yet to find its equal. So, I sit there alone. Waiting.
Ten, fifteen minutes. Shadows and staring, aggression and hatred. Clearly, I'm not welcome.
Then suddenly Norgay emerges from the shadows, stupid smile and stoned shimmer virtually radiating from his being, already high on a large chunk of what should be mine. But that's the price I pay for his guidance up the mountain. I fire the ignition and we head out. Now comes perhaps the most terrifying part of this adventure through the looking glass: snaking my way through the burned out buildings and numerous patrol cars, an out-of-phase vehicle with an out-of-place driver and right-at-home junky sidekick nodding out beside him, a couple of bags of felonious powder in their pockets. Not a recipe for a happy ending. One slip and it's down the icy ravine, into the abyss.
Yet I always slip the noose and make it back down from the treacherous summit into base camp again, back to the comfort of suburbia. I drop off my guide, head back to my hovel, and drift off into sweet dreams of wide-eyed wired wakefulness. Fleeting happiness and escape. Only to repeat the cycle ad nausem, addicted as much perhaps to the russian roulette surrounding the hunt as I am to the consumption.
My tunnel vision eventually closes in on the fading point of light at the other end so completely that normalcy warps into the strange and this kind of shit into the norm. I even rope others into these kamikaze missions, keeping them blind to the destination and purpose until past the point of no return. A friend I hadn't seen in years arrives from out of town to catch up, hit the bars, have a few drinks and reminisce about the old days in the Navy together. I meet him at the airport with my Sherpa in tow, explaining we need to first take "a short road trip" before hitting the town. Great to see ya! It's been awhile! This'll just take "a few minutes." He's pretty shaken after the 20 minute Badlands park-and-sit scene. Afterward, I drop him off at the apartment and he's left to fend for himself while I drift off to wired island. When I get up the next afternoon, he is gone. And I haven't talked to him since.
Good times.
What tips the scale back to the land of the living for me? Enough mornings after. Enough afternoons after. Enough three days after. When the wired dreams morph into jittery, heart-palpatating waking nightmares. When the ATM is empty and the Sherpa goes missing in action. When the bills come due and the collection calls start at work. When the Samurai is repossessed. When my credit becomes truly fucked. When the blood from my nose turns my white pillowcase red, when it soaks through and covers my mattress in blotchy maroon patches. When my phone is turned off for non-payment. When booze no longer calms the shaking coming down. Coming down. Finally, the coming down. Finally, the coming down is simply that much more painful than the wired dreams are freeing. When all this comes to a head, I finally come to my senses. Four years after it comes to a head, anyway. After all, I'm slow to learn and a great procrastinator (I'll completely upend my world in the fight against any change to it, wise and at the same time oblivious to the irony of it all).
Then a year of living clean, 14 months, dissolves into a week back into the wood chipper when I spy my Sherpa "by chance" one weekend just prior to my 32nd birthday. But that week was my last, over 15 years gone by now. To be clear, that week busy getting my nose dirty included plunging my liver back into the briny deep as well. After all, it was the only way I knew to come down, slow the pulse to sleep. And keeping my nose clean thereafter didn't translate to pulling the liver back out of the river. In fact booze became a ready-made substitute for escaping the bonds of myself and I dove ever deeper across the span of the next nearly one dozen years. Time spent on the high seas before I nearly drowned making it to shore.
For those of us missing whatever it is we're missing, finding it even for a moment, and especially in concentrated bursts of what we imagine happiness feels like, is pretty fucking compelling. It carries with it a lot of weight, requiring that much more on the down side for us to run in the other direction, moving the scale back again toward the breathing end of life.
Many of us never get it righted and just keep going, going, going into oblivion.
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.
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.
I came across this gem when attempting to google up some repressed childhood memories through good ol' brand association (in this particular case, Gallo Tavola Red jug wine: good for staining the insides of mothers and coffee mugs alike, at least in my experience). I really just wanted a picture for the dysfunctional family scrapbook I'm compiling. (What do braided rugs, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, a haze of smoke, cheap jug wine and whiskey have in common? My living room growing up!)
I finally found what I was grepping for on Modern Drunkard but it's tough to come up with an appropriately specific query for the product "Tavola Red" when it translates in Italian literally to "red table wine." As you can imagine, that's like looking for "pilser beer": there's gobs of it. Plus Ernest and Julio became yuppie snobs in the 1980s and cut back on a lot of their more, well let's just say 'foundational' stock (thanks a lot, Gordon Gecko). My vino suppler of choice never wavered from their roots. I speak, naturally, of Mogen David, whose motto, "when nature needs a little boost..." captivated me from the get-go. Well, it should have been their motto. MD did get a little fancy with all the different flavors of 20/20: give me basic grape - no plum supreme or ... well, whatever you have in stock, but I preferred grape. I'd like one day to tour their vineyard, or their chemical processing plant (I think they may be one and the same).
My MD 20/20 phase was short lived, mainly played out in my early 20s in the Navy and then only when we were sufficiently broke to be priced out of clubs and bars. We could always scrape up enough scratch for a cheap room - can't bring the stuff back to the ship! - and a few bottles of Mogen David's fortified fun ('Tuesday' was an especially good vintage, I recall).
The mall arcades and movies took on an enhanced hue with a few swigs of the grape stuff. Since we couldn't afford bars and clubs - would we be drinking purple turpentine otherwise? - we terrorized the mall denizens instead.
I do remember one horrifying Saturday night around 11:45pm when we realized it was almost midnight and we were out of MD. We staggered across a heavily trafficked six lane highway at full stride, racing to beat the buzzer when Virginia's Sunday blue laws ticked into place, and the drug store booze fridge ("best served chilled") was padlocked until Monday. That would have put a real crimp in our Saturday night. We did make the cut but ended up dropping half the six bottles we purchased in our drunken glee (polishing off the others as we stumbled back toward the mall).
Sometimes we mixed it up and substituted 20/20 with Wild Irish Rose (WIR). WIR was an appropriate acronym as that was precisely the sound reverberating through your head the next day after a night ingesting that putrid shit (WWWWIIIIRRRRRRR!). When our first two choices weren't available, we just kept going down the list: Thunderbird, Night train, etc.
For whatever reason, beer was never considered - not enough bang for the buck, so to speak. We'd save beer for clubs, bars, etc.
Ahh, yes - Good times, indeed.
We were stuck without car, money or confidence in anything. Told time and again that our kind was despised by the townies before we ever set foot on dry land there (we jokingly referred to the town as No-fuck, Virginia). On top of that, we had the mark of the beast, the scarlet letter: our bad haircuts with the telltale taper above the collar, marking us as military. This was 1984 in a town where the younger locals grew their hair long precisely to 'clarify' such things. Some of the more creative among us attempted to wear "civilian" wigs, but that just made you look as desperate as we all felt anyway.
Wandering the highways and byways of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in groups of three, four, five with shitty clothes and pasty complexions borne from months in the bowels of floating gray prisons.
No wonder we became wine-o connoisseurs. Sort of a very low rent East Coast Sideways running on an endless loop, with the Military Circle Mall and its surroundings substituting for northern California wine country.
Yes, revisionist history is a fine thing, whether political or personal. Of course. Just like Sideways. Definitely. Memories should be like cars: you get new ones every so often.
f whom I didn't know or, worse, really didn't want to know. Strangely, it might have been great because I'd finally felt free. Free of what? Of the 20 years that came before it, I guess. It was my first real job, I did it well, and it was interesting if morally abhorrent (thus began the compartmentalization of my ethics).
's Imperial Bedroom and The Jam's Snap compilation have been getting extra heavy play on the iPod, my feeble attempt to ignore father time's clock ticking off another year, one more I won't get back. One step closer to the proverbial grave.
