by Jim Lindberg
So I help her into some new jammies and she’s a wreck of self-pity and lamentations for what she and I both know we’re about to go through, which is about six hours of puke sessions every twenty minutes or so until she’s dry-heaving into a Tupperware bowl at dawn’s early light. Once she’s comfortable I get to approach the wonderful chore of decontaminating and disinfecting the bathroom triage area that’s now covered in partially digested hot dogs, cottage cheese, carrot chunks, and gross-smelling muck, so the rest of the family doesn’t walk through it in the morning and get the stomach flu as well. While I’m on my knees with rubber gloves and my bucket of Lysol, trying to coax a piece of what looks like hot dog or carrot out of a crack of ceramic floor tile with a toothbrush, I start to wonder what other semifamous rock singers would be doing after a big L.A. show.
Maybe they’d get a couple of groupies and head back to the exclusive hotel on the sunset strip, sympathetically bringing along one of their kid brothers to provide him with a lifelong thrill so he can stroke his ego asking him intricate questions about how he came up with that one incredible riff on song four off the third album. He’d answer modestly, “Oh, I don’t know. You can’t really analyze where something that great comes from. You just have to be receptive to your creative flow and reach out and pluck it from your stream of consciousness and then mold it into your own mosaic so it touches something within the human spirit,” pausing for effect before he does another line off a stripper’s ass, and then kicks him out of the room. Yeah, that’d be great.
No, instead I’m cleaning barf off the bathroom floor at 2 A.M., and the little chunk of hot dog just keeps receding deeper into the crack in the ceramic tile. I prod, poke, and wedge but the damn piece of puke won’t be released. Now it’s become a test of will. Finally after much struggle, I manage to loosen the wretched speck and the bathroom is again free of bile and contaminant. I take off my rubber gloves and sit back on the couch and start to think of all the free beer, illicit drugs, and cheap sex that’s being voraciously consumed just a half an hour’s car ride away, just as daughter number one begins her second round of projectile vomiting next to me. She tries but misses the bucket I’d provided for her and covers the carpet with more hot dog parts and cottage cheese. I sigh and realize happily, I wouldn’t change a thing.
TEENAGERS FROM MARS
I was at a local surf shop trying to find a hat to hide my receding hair line from my adoring fans, when I overheard the following conversation between a blond teenage girl wearing micromini gym shorts and a sweat jacket from our local high school, and her mother, a weary-looking bottle blonde business executive or real estate agent.
TEENAGE GIRL: “Can I please stay at Stacy’s house tonight?”
WEARY MOM: “The answer when you asked me earlier was already ‘No,’ and if you keep pestering me about it the answer will be ‘No’ again tomorrow night.”
TEENAGE GIRL: “God, what crawled up your butt-hole?”
WEARY MOM: “Now you’re grounded for a week.”
Adolescence has traditionally been viewed by classroom psychologists like something out of one of those films made in the 1950s we used to have to sit through in health education class:
“Still dependent on the safety and security of home life, but eager to cut their emotional umbilical cord and stake out their own independent identities, teenagers engage in a constant battle with the conflicts brought on by their base impulses and surging hormones. They seem to think, feel, and perceive things more intensely, becoming preoccupied with their appearance and reputation, and experiencing chaotic mood swings between raging, emotional outbursts and endless bouts of boredom and despair. They feel misunderstood and confused by their incompatible urges to walk the straight and narrow path, but to also cut loose and rebel. At school they struggle to find a group to fit in with among the segregated cliques of jocks, nerds, stoners, brains, and party animals, or worse yet, be cast out, unaffiliated, into loner status. If you are lucky enough to find a group that accepts you, the relentless pull of peer pressure can force you into any number of compromising positions and embarrassing conflagrations that you will play over in your mind for the rest of your life. In fact, much of your middle age will be spent recovering from it.”
The problem with this description is that it defines pretty much everyone I know, no matter what age they are, which is, of course, the problem itself. In the past, parents have treated teenagers as pubescent hormone-crazed aliens, continually moving from one transitional “phase” to another, so we just write them off, deciding we won’t be able to deal with them until they someday grow up and grow out of it. We see them all as stereotypical “teenagers,” not as young people, and tend to treat them that way. This is why most of us couldn’t get along with our parents in high school, because to them, we were hardly even human yet. They loved us, of course, but the generation gap was so wide, they couldn’t possibly understand us, so why even try? Better to just ground us in perpetuity than unleash us on society when we weren’t even close to being ready.
By the time I entered my teens I already had my punk rock attitude of defiance perfected, and it seemed like every day I was on a collision course with some form of trouble. My teachers had to disrupt class to keep me from talking out of turn, and most of the time I was either late or absent altogether. Some of it was good, clean, typical adolescent hi-jinx, like when I started a food fight in the cafeteria and got myself and several other classmates suspended for a week, but I also engaged in other more dangerous activities that could have proved tragic. Whenever I had the chance, I would steal alcohol and cigarettes from my parents’ liquor cabinet, and by age sixteen, three times a week, after saying good night to my parents, my friend and I would sneak out of our bedrooms, take his mom’s car and drive out to Hollywood to go to punk shows and nightclubs, and then drive wobbly home at 5 A.M., sleep for two hours, and then go to school. I finally was expelled from the junior prom for illicit activities and had to serve one hundred hours of sweeping up the school grounds before first period every day, or be shipped out to our rival high school. Throughout my entire teenage years I was a chronic screwup, and there were more than a few episodes where I could have ended up in jail or dead.
I often wonder if my parents could have said or done anything to help me. Probably not. I’m sure initially I would have refused any attempts for them to talk to me about sex, drugs, and alcohol issues, but if they persisted, I might have come around. I think young people want to be talked to like equals and leveled with. They may pretend they don’t like to talk to adults, but that’s usually only the case if the parent isn’t really listening and is just trying to tell them what to do all the time. If my parents could have opened up a little and told me about some of the stupid things they did as teenagers, instead of the usual implied moral superiority, I might have seen them as more than just your stereotypical parental units whose soul purpose was to ground me and ruin my good time. Experience can be the best teacher, but a lot of times it’s someone else’s experience that teaches the best. If they were to tell me about their buddy who drank a fifth of whiskey and tried to pee out of a moving ’56 Bel Air and had his left testicle ripped off, I might not have tried it from their ’81 Volkswagen Rabbit. I probably would have, but at least we could have shared an amusing story.
For teenagers, the problem is that most parents, even if they are insanely wonderful and giving, can often become mortal enemies. It seems like they are the only two people in the world who constantly rain on your pubescent parade, and are capable of inspiring such extreme levels of embarrassment that you secretly pray they could somehow slip into a coma, wake up on Christmas Day, cut you a check, and then fall back into it. What was funny was that you could get caught stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and taking a crap on it, and somehow it would be all their fault and you’d yell, “I HATE YOU!” and slam the door when they sent you to your room for it. There seems to be no way parents can win in this situation, and many of us feel l
ike the best we can do is just hope to weather it somehow.
Probably the only way we’ll be able to help our kids get through this time in their lives and remain somewhat close to them is if we try to reconnect with our inner punk rock adolescent, and remember to treat them as individuals, not just stereotypical melodramatic teenagers. I doubt it will be fun discussing certain topics with my daughters and just thinking about all the boyfriends I am going to have to meet and introduce to my sawed-off shotgun and my pit bull already gives me a migraine.
Regardless of how young at heart I pretend to be, I know the day will come when my daughters are embarrassed to have me around. I only hope they don’t turn into those teens who just stop talking to their parents and treat them like furniture, or worse. Kids definitely won’t be able to identify with the thirty-five-and-over you who worries about taxes and impending senility, but they might be able to connect with the teenage you who started a pizza burrito food fight in the cafeteria and got everyone suspended and then felt bad about it. At some point I’ll tell my teenage daughters about all the stupid things I did in high school and try and commiserate a little bit when they screw up the same way, instead of always being the implied moral authority and parental judge and jury. Maybe then they’ll feel bad about telling people I am not their real father and pretend to want to hang out with me—at least for my wallet. This is one of the few ways I can imagine I’ll be able to stay involved somewhat in their lives and not just be considered their allowance provider and weekend jailer.
“I’M JUST A SUCKA WITH NO SELF-ESTEEM. AWAAYYOOO!”
I remember at age fourteen or fifteen being on a constant search to find something I was good at. I tried surfing and skating, and although I had moderate skills, some of my friends at school were already sponsored by big clothing companies and winning contests. My other friends were star football and basketball players, but I never made it past the first two or three rounds of tryouts. Some friends were even on the track team, but by this time, I was already smoking half a pack a day so that was out. It wasn’t until I was sitting there playing guitar in my room, like I did every day after school, thinking of what I could do that would interest me, that it suddenly came to me.
The active role I’ll be able to take in helping boost our kids’ self-esteem is never giving up in the search to find something that interests them. I can turn them on to music by buying them a secondhand guitar or drum set, get them involved in sports by taking them to basketball games or skate contests, or go down to the tide pools and try to get them interested in marine biology. If you haven’t introduced your child to all these things in an endless search to help them find something they’re interested in, you haven’t done your job. People both young and old tend to judge their self-worth based on their looks and popularity, which are usually factors out of our control, but having something you enjoy doing and feel passionate about can sometimes be the only thing that makes you feel good about yourself and help steer you away from other more self-destructive impulses.
The test for us as parents becomes how we can help our budding adults learn to cope with their inevitable failures and disappointments, and encourage them not to give up hope. If we have bolstered their self-esteem, setbacks can seem like temporary opportunities to build character, not life-ending defeats. If we’re able to remember what it was like to be an adolescent and treat our teenagers like real people, and not an age group, we should be able to better communicate with them and earn their admiration and respect. This way even if they do start listening to punk rock and decide that all figures of authority are worthy of contempt, they might at least let me pretend I’m on their side for a while.
I’M GONNA STAY YOUNG UNTIL I DIE
I love it when my kids call up a friend and ask if they can come over and “play.” It’s totally undefined. Just come over and we’ll figure something out. We’ll grab a ball and throw it at each other, or we can pretend we’re astronauts who then become pirates who shoot each other’s heads off and then have a tea party fashion show. Whatever! When there’s a group of them together, like on my street where a clan of about eight kids travels in one huge prepubescent pack, they’re like a child typhoon that storms through the area, careening from backyards to playrooms to driveways, front lawns, kitchens, and sidewalks. I’ll be playing guitar in the garage and the door will burst open and they’ll all come roaring in and grab the microphone and yell, “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH! ROCK ’N’ ROLL! ROCK ’N’ ROLL! COOL, DUDE! YEAH! YEAH!” and spaz out for a while doing crazy dances, then someone yells “LET’S PLAY TETHERBALL!” and they’ll all scream “YEAH!” and go barreling out the door. Why is it that adults have to be totally drunk to act like this?
A while back I went to my nephews’ school to engage in a game of kickball on Father’s Day because their own dad, my wife’s brother, had been called up by the Army Reserves to go to Iraq. I couldn’t believe how much fun an innocent game of kickball could be, and a couple of innings into it I was right back on the grassy field of my youth booting home runs and beaning kids in the head with a big rubber ball when they tried to steal second. Sometimes I think we may have as much to learn from kids as they do from us about what’s important in life.
Even though I turned forty last year, I still dress the same way I did when I was fourteen, Levi’s 501s, Vans slip-ons, and a surf shop T-shirt and baseball cap. Most guys my age start dressing more age-appropriate and by now are wearing the suit and tie to work, and the Dockers and striped polo on casual Fridays. I know my dad doesn’t still dress like the Fonz anymore, like his fading high school pictures suggest, with slicked-back hair, cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, rolled-up jeans, and black penny loafers. As if I’m in some kind of perennial time warp, I still skateboard to the store to get milk and cereal for the kids’ breakfast, and instead of golfing, I surf and skateboard. On our last tour of Europe, I cracked three ribs doing a stage dive at a music festival in Zurich. Let’s just say I’m not Ozzie Nelson.
That being said, someone asked me recently what I thought of a new screamo band that was playing the Warped Tour this year, and I replied that it sounded like a bunch of screaming and noise to me. As the words were coming out of my mouth I realized what an old fart I sounded like, complaining about kids today and the racket they call music. I’ve also noticed a lot of my friends and I don’t really listen to new music much anymore, preferring to listen to our old Clash and Ramones albums like old trusted friends, instead of worrying about keeping up with the latest trends. I imagine this is how it finally happens. We find that we can’t relate to the kids anymore and the next thing we know we’re wearing adult diapers and taking our teeth out and putting them in a glass of water on the nightstand every night.
I was also surprised to find my views on certain issues becoming more conservative in some ways. I’m not ready to start attending Republican fund-raisers at the local country club, but I do think that the increased glorification of violence, promiscuity, and drug use in films and music is having a negative impact on some young people. Video games about how great it is to be a pimp or a street thug, and DVDs about girls going wild have to in some small way affect their ability to distinguish right from wrong. Becoming a father has started making me take a look at some issues a little more differently. Many of our recent albums have had a strong political content in the lyrics, mainly because I was becoming concerned that the planet our kids would be inheriting would look like some kind of Orwellian nightmare, but populated by crystal meth–addicted pimps and hos.
Throughout the last century, the problem for many parent-child relationships has been what seemed to be an ever widening generation gap. Parents have always thought the music, fashion, and recreational activities of their kids were psychotic, irresponsible, and insane, and kids in turn found those of their parents hopelessly dull, old-fashioned, and boring. When I was listening to The Gears and The Germs, wearing Doc Martens and drinking from a beer bong for fun, my dad was listening to Frank Sinatra, w
earing Hush Puppies, and playing golf. We were as different as the parents who saw Elvis Presley’s singing a song about a ‘hound dog’ as the devil’s music.
Somehow, over the last few decades, the generation gap seems to have narrowed somewhat. You see adults dressing like teenagers, and kids listening to Nirvana, Green Day, and the same bands their parents listened to when they were graduating high school. Punk rock, in all its nihilistic glory, somehow became the catalyst that helped close the generation gap, probably due to the fact that many of the people from our generation saw growing up and taking on responsibility as selling out and giving up, and have tried to hold on to their youthful outlook that much longer.
The closing generation gap actually presents a unique opportunity for our generation to create better relationships with our kids, and if we do it right, we could produce a generation of independent-thinking, conscientious young people, who could in fact stop repeating some of the tragic mistakes we’ve made in the past. If instead of forcing our religions, dogmas, and shortsighted way of thinking on them, we could encourage them to think for themselves, and show them how to be gracious and tolerant, rather than selfish and close-minded, maybe we could in fact make the world a better place, simply by being good parents. Wasn’t this supposed to be the underlying goal of punk music in the first place, that we were to expose society for the sham it was, in the dim hopes of replacing it with a better one? Unfortunately, somewhere along the way we get caught up in the day-to-day struggle of ordinary life, and this becomes a lofty, unrealistic dream of utopia. There’s a good chance we’ll be so tired of chasing our kids around and keeping them out of trouble that we’ll get lazy and just try and survive it all, and perpetuate the same problems we’ve always had in the past. Sometimes all we can do as parents is hope we’ve given the next generation the opportunity not to screw things up as badly as we have.