Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  I spent more time looking at Joan Jett than listening to her music. This was a sexless pursuit. Jett was far too imperious for me to objectify her. She was better than me. She was a life goal—“How to Stand Out.”

  Soft Cell was a different story—two gawky dweebs with bad hair wearing leather jackets that looked as if they’d been stitched together from garbage bags. I was not a cool person, so I could tell these two weren’t either. However, they had recorded “Tainted Love,” which may contain the most infectious pop hook in history. I didn’t listen to the other nine songs on that album more than two or three times. I listened to “Tainted Love” until the cassette wore out.

  The next stage of musical advancement was the Smash Hits of the 70s or Biggest Rock Hits of the Year collections. Racks of these could be found at the cut-rate department stores where my mother shopped.

  This took guessing out of the equation. Someone had done the thinking for me.

  There is no more golden moment in your formative years than the one that comes after you’ve discovered something but haven’t yet had shame beaten into you. You don’t know what you’re supposed to like. No one has yet curled a lip when you announce, “Chilliwack is good” or “Journey is better than The Beatles.”

  I hadn’t yet learned that as soon as things become ubiquitous, you are supposed to pretend to sneer at them. You’ve closed this circle whenever you come around to the right way of thinking of things—that there are no guilty pleasures. Only pleasures. That takes years and years, and you often end up right back where you started.

  My next step up the ladder of musical maturation was Michael Jackson. Jackson was the forbidden fruit that helped me find shame. I loved him, but after a while learned to keep it to myself.

  After that, Def Leppard. This was my first true concession to what others thought, rather than what I liked myself. Not that Def Leppard isn’t a great band. But I came to them because it was clear to me that that was the done thing.

  Unlike Jackson, Def Leppard was hard and more acceptable to my white trash peers.

  Like all proper rock gods, they had a uniform you could copy. They wrote their name in a stylized font you could stencil onto your binder to advertise your affiliation. If you aren’t in a gang, belonging to one or other musical tribe is the closest you get.

  My mother was tolerant of my new mutability on the musical front, but that openness ended when I came home wearing the signature clothing item of Def Leppard’s lead singer, Joe Elliott—a tank top emblazoned with the Union Jack.

  There was a simple-to-follow line of political ethos that ruled my house—Britain bad; all other things up for argument. The Easter Rising. 1919. Provos. The Troubles. Pádraig Pearse, Michael Collins and all the rest. Those words meant something in my house. We were all volunteers in that fight whether we wanted to be or not, and should not be traipsing around cloaked in the dirty flag of the oppressor. No matter how great an album Pyromania was and remains.

  If I could time travel back to ten moments in my life, that would be one of them. So I could give myself a slap for being such a taunting, ungrateful little schmuck.

  My mother physically recoiled from that shirt. She was not an expressive person. She had the flat gaze that identifies the rural Irish more surely than any accent. Going back generations, those people had seen a lot. Today’s disasters weren’t going to surprise them.

  So the way her face twisted up when she caught sight of that shirt froze me on the spot. She lifted a hand and pointed at me. Like she’d spotted a witch.

  I’d seen this coming, but thought I might get away with it. I never did manage to get away with anything.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I just…”

  “No.”

  “I got it because…”

  “Not in this house.”

  “But, I…”

  “Take it off.”

  “But, it’s…”

  “Off.”

  I handed it over and stood there bare-chested and humiliated while she marched it out to the trash can.

  After I’d saved up more money, I bought another. I’d leave the house in the morning in one t-shirt, put the Union Jack on in the bathroom at school and take it off when I got home again.

  It wasn’t exactly driving a safety pin through your nose, but it was the first puny punk rock act of my life. After a few weeks, it occurred to me that it wasn’t terribly brave if I was too afraid to do it in front of my mother. So I stuffed the shirt down in a drawer and stopped wearing it. It disappeared soon thereafter.

  Of course, she had known. How? No idea. But my mother knew everything. That was another basic principle.

  I went to high school and all of this became far more important. Music was now tribal. What you liked determined where you belonged, and with whom. People now cared deeply about bands. These were real relationships.

  For the first time, I found myself a proper girlfriend. A hang-out-at-each-other’s-houses, talk-all-night-on-the-phone, occasionally-get-a-hand-under-the-shirt girlfriend. Her name was Sabrina. We were fourteen.

  Sabrina liked me (sort of, I think), but she loved Metallica. If a member of Metallica had rolled up on us in her bedroom while I was fiddling with the clasp on her bra and told her to murder me on the spot, she’d have picked up a lamp and crushed my head like a melon.

  She listened exclusively to Metallica. Even in uniform at a Catholic school, she was at all times wearing something that said Metallica—a sweatshirt, a patch on a jean jacket or a backpack. In civvies, she looked like she was in Metallica—everything black, skin-tight and severe. As a rule, she did not smile.

  I can’t remember what we used to talk about. She wasn’t a warm or gregarious person (outside of discussing the hermeneutics of Metallica). I suppose it was the hair that fascinated me.

  It is difficult to describe the ambition of Sabrina’s hairdo. It was spiked off her head at impossible angles and to incredible lengths. But the real star was the bangs. She combed them down over her forehead, her eyes and her nose. The only visible part of her face was her mouth. She was Batman wearing a blond mask. Occasionally, in an effort to be romantic, I’d lean in and sweep her bangs away and look into her eyes. Which was when she’d hit me.

  Sabrina made it clear that Metallica was a non-negotiable part of our relationship. They would have to become my favourite band, too.

  So they did. I bought all the albums. I listened to them like homework. I found some biographical material and memorized the band’s back stories. I got deep in a way I never had before.

  Sabrina and I didn’t last long. She dumped me for some heavy-metal aficionado in his twenties, the type we called a “handstand”—a skinny bastard with jeans painted onto his spindly legs and floppy white high-top sneakers. The sort of guy who looks like he’s walking around on his hands.

  I didn’t miss her much, but she had had a profound influence on me. Metallica stuck. I started wearing a lot of black. I began to consider my hair and what it said about me.

  The next year—grade ten—was my musical apotheosis. An actual one.

  My cousin Paula was about ten years older than me—adult, but still young. I didn’t see her often, but one day at her parents’ house she told me to go downstairs and flip through her albums to see if anything caught my eye.

  I was down in that basement for maybe a half-hour. I thought it presumptuous to put any of the records on. All I did was memorize titles. That half-hour defined the rest of my musical life.

  The band that recurred most in Paula’s milk-crate catalogue was one I had vaguely heard of but had never listened to—The Smiths.

  The next weekend, I went downtown and bought a cassette tape of The Queen Is Dead. I went home, sat on my bed and slipped it into my Walkman.

  The first song—the title song—kicks off with a shoddy recording of a vaudeville number. Drums come in urgently. A guitar holds a long discordant note. The song descends, rather than rises, into melo
dy. And then Morrissey’s posh, anguished whine floats the whole thing up symphonically.

  I don’t understand the trope of love at first sight, because it’s impossibly shallow. But love at first listen? Absolutely. You recognize your music when you first hear it.

  This was that, a perfect combination of style, tune, vocals, lyrics and, most importantly, manic-depressive outlook.

  For years, I judged people on where they stood on The Smiths. Not knowing them was forgivable. Knowing, but not rating them was proof of a dire lack of cool and—only a kid could feel this strongly about something that does not matter—moral character.

  If you were one of those people who thought The Smiths affected, simpering or mediocre, you were missing something basic—good taste.

  I listened to that tape everywhere, but where I remember listening to it best was on the subway. On the route to school, the train would come briefly above ground in a few spots. I’d be standing into a doorway, turned away from everyone else, staring out the window.

  The light would hit and I’d feel the core disconnect of my teen years—that whatever was happening in my world, right now (on the train—nothing) was so much less than whatever was happening out there in the big, brightly lit world (everything).

  The Smiths were the soundtrack of that idea.

  They are a band for people who suspect that life is going to disappoint them. Your girlfriend will fall into a coma, the flames will rise to your Roman nose, you’ll be looking for a job and then you’ll find a job, and heaven knows you’ll be miserable then. If they incorporated and had to write a mission statement, it would be “What else did you expect?”

  Morrissey armed me for all the letdowns to come, and assured me that I wasn’t special in suffering them. He was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a life coach and he may be the greatest friend I’ve ever had.

  I won’t try to shame you into agreeing that The Smiths are the finest act in musical history (though they are). I cared about and was influenced by a disparate hodgepodge of their contemporaries (though some were not very like them at all)—The Cure, Joy Division, Suicidal Tendencies, Pink Floyd, U2, Tom Waits, Public Enemy, The Replacements, R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, the Eurythmics….It’s a long list.

  But it was never again like hearing The Smiths for the first time. Because you’re only fifteen once.

  You will listen to other bands and like other songs, but nothing will ever connect you to a time and a place in the same way. Everything new will contain echoes of something old. School dances and all-ages clubs and the way you felt when you heard “Blue Monday” and came bouncing off the wall with all your friends at the same time. That can’t be repeated. It’s a small, necessary death.

  SEX

  LESS THAN I had hoped.

  LOVE

  THOUGH YOU WOULD LIKE to avoid the issue, eventually you will reach “women” on your grade school to-do list. What are they? How ought they to be approached? And who’s going to fill you in on all of this?

  Well, nobody. School will offer you a useless skill like geometry, but no one in a union job is going to teach a ten-year-old how best to flirt.

  There was no help at home in this regard. My mother would rather have had a conversation about the family converting to cannibalism than one involving romantic notions. The few times I tried I got “the pose”—one leg slowly drawn over the other, the opposite arm folded over chest, hand holding tea mug in death grip, blank stare. And after a long while, if I could hold my courage, “I’m not sure what I can tell you about that.” A vocal peak at the end to signal the conversation was over.

  This was most likely a problem of semantics. I’m not sure how I posed these questions, but it was probably something along the lines of “Do girls like me?” or “Am I old enough to have a girlfriend?”

  What could she say to that? Yes, son, you’re a regular Douglas Fairbanks. I doubt anyone could resist you. I suppose there are mothers who say things like that—creepy, overly supportive things—but mine was a realist. I was going to have trouble with a few things in life—regular employment, social graces, public speaking—and you could add women to the list. In her defence, she never said it out loud—“You are a bit gormless.” It was understood.

  The introduction of romance as a going concern is the point at which all of us become midget anthropologists. We study the tribe. Record observations. Attempt to repeat what we have seen.

  First, it’s important to accurately assess your standing in the grade four hierarchy. One of the girls I went to school with was the daughter of a former Toronto Maple Leaf. In terms of stature, that was Everest to us. Everyone else was crowded together in a trailing pack. No one had any money. No one dressed well. None of us were particularly good looking. We each had to find our own niche.

  Amongst the things that sociologists say determine a man’s attractiveness to women is “success at games.” (Perversely, it works the opposite way around for women.) I was not sporty, per se. Which is to say I was depressingly average at games. But this has its own social advantage because people who are good at games like playing games with people who are less good. This is the offshoot of sports called politics.

  The only game we played in any organized fashion was a bowdlerized handball with rules more complicated than contract bridge and a high incidence of physical brutality. We’d chalk outlines on a wall. The goal was to bounce the ball within them. Simple enough.

  But there were no “curvsies” (putting the ball at a near right angle to the wall and into a neighbouring backyard) and no “fakesies” (pretending to smash the ball and then tapping it lightly, causing your opponent to run back to the wall with such haste he ended up going into it face-first). Smashing was called “smashing” and was allowed, but within limits that changed depending on who you were playing and how they were doing. One man’s clean smash was another man’s cheat.

  A pack of us—ten, twelve boys—would start recess in a huge, undulating handball mob and it would go off like Thermopylae. People ramming into each other, clotheslining opponents, rabbit punching guys as they passed. Often, the game would end in a fist fight. It was so vicious we would have been better off playing football with hockey sticks. By the time the bell rang, it was something out of Apocalypse Now, with kids dragging other semi-conscious kids back into class so they could enjoy their concussions during geography.

  I was a serviceable handball player (i.e., rugby tackler) and that was noticed by important people. Important male people who had good connections into the female sphere of the schoolyard—the Michelles and Pattys and Jennifers who all terrified me. I was moving up in the world.

  The next stage was note passing.

  Only a certain class of people could pass notes. No one told you that. You just knew it.

  Once you’d become that sort of person, you had to decide what sort of note passer you would be. Were you a direct sort—“I like you”? Were you a teaser—“I know someone who likes you”? Were you a coward—“Do you like me?”

  Note passing was fraught with several layers of risk. Our teacher, Ms. Florio, was up there at the front like the Gestapo. She had nun-like detection instincts and several classroom snitches.

  In order to get a note moved from one row to another, you had to catch someone’s eye. And while you were highly invested in the operation’s success and took great care, the next guy was somewhat less invested. Sure, he didn’t want to be caught with the note, but he didn’t give a damn if your urgent communication made it across the lines. This indifference was compounded each time the note was passed. In general, it was best to fall for a girl who was, at most, two desks over from you. If you were at the back and she at the front, you’d have been better off pining for someone in Poland.

  Occasionally, Ms. Florio would intercept the note. She would not read it aloud. Instead, she’d identify the handwriting and then fix you with a look, giving everyone else permission to laugh at you.

  Even when a note made it through, i
t could take an agonizingly long time. Kids dawdled, or read the note for themselves and smirked, or passed it to the wrong person, or put it in their desk for safekeeping. You’d have to follow each stage of this journey because it was vitally important that you be looking when the intended recipient unfolded and read your message. That’s when you would know.

  Girls sent a different sort of note around—an origami job meant to be played like “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe,” ending up on one of several romantic outcomes. You were then to pass the note back with your (made-up) answer. The only point of this seemed to be to drive us boys mad with confusion, and it was notably successful in this regard.

  During all of grade school I sent only one direct romantic missive, to a girl named Patty who I knew in my heart was too good for me, but hoped might be the sort to take pity.

  The note read something along the lines of “I like you. Will you go to the dance with me?”

  I saw her get the note. She glanced over at me, tilted her head and smiled sadly. Even in the moment I was thinking, “Remember that look. You’ll be seeing it again in your life. Lots of times.”

  At recess, she handed me her own note—an alarming breach of classroom-only note-passing etiquette. It read—this part I remember precisely—“I like you as a friend.”

  Oh Lord, the humiliation. The wretched, wretched humiliation. I was ten years old and felt the weight of the Ancients upon me. While the other guys were maiming each other at handball, I hung on a fence, looking off into the distance like I’d just lost a brother in the war. Eventually, Patty came over to pat me on the shoulder while everyone stared, which was both cool and uncool of her.

  I decided then never to try again.

  Of course, I tried again. A whole bunch of different ways, most of them so subtle as to be indecipherable. Putting my faith in mind reading, I’d laugh a little too loudly around certain girls, or call them by their names too often, or try to hold a look too long.