The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  The annual “Battle of the Bands” was a coveted lip-synching contest held in the school cafeteria. David joined a band named “First Glance.” I tagged along at one of their rehearsals–in an orange grove with David’s truck stereo providing the music–after overhearing David and Richie discuss which song my brother would lip-synch. They decided on Sammy Hagar’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High. I sat in the truck and rewound the cassette tape, over and over again, as the “band” kicked up dirt practicing synchronized dance moves. As practice wound down, I meekly asked, “Uh … room for one more?” I was a freshman among upperclassman. It was a bold question.

  L to R, Roger Isom (Sr.), Kelly Cooksey (Sr.), Dean Larsen (Sr.), David Harvey (Jr.), Richie Morris (Jr.), myself (Freshman), Lisa Thomas (Sr.), and Allen Raye (Jr.)

  Everyone looked at each other, a domino reaction of shrugs. With smiles and nods, I was in.

  Fourteen bands auditioned for three spots. With each band auditioning two songs each, it was a long night of watching the competition. But it was worth the wait–“First Glance” made the finale! After much deliberation, I chose On The Loose by Saga with Sammy Hagar’s Remote Love a close second.

  We practiced in orange groves all over town.

  When the big night arrived, the cafeteria was packed. By random draw, we went second. We nervously walked through the crowd, then back outside to the side stage entrance. The loud music and applause stopped, the door opened and the guy running the music said, “Five minutes!”

  Drenched in sweat, an upperclassman from the first band said, “You’re gonna love the first five rows, dude!”

  Lisa, in her First Glance T-shirt and candy cane spandex, stood facing the closed curtain holding the dead microphone. We positioned behind her with guitars that weren’t plugged into anything–some of them didn’t even have strings. I stood at a small keyboard. David sat at the drumset. Colorful stage lights, both in the floor and overhead, operated by a student just off to the side, were black.

  From our side of the curtain, we could feel the electricity of the crowd. The kids in the packed cafeteria were in to it.

  Sporting my only pair of Jordache jeans (yes, Jordache made jeans for guys, too), I tied a purple bandana around my leg figuring it was something Mike Reno, lead singer of Loverboy, would have approved of.

  The curtain rose and the hot spotlight lit Lisa up in all her splendor. For a second, we stood there in silence staring into the blinding light. Shadows of the Night by Pat Benatar blasted out of the speakers and our glorious hour began.

  After my eyes adjusted to the lighting, I understood about the first five rows: all girls.

  Our set-list included Stand or Fall by The Fixx, Only a Lad by Oingo Boingo, Emotions in Motion by Billy Squier, Finger On The Trigger (Love Is In Control) by Donna Summer, Don’t Fight It by Kenny Loggins and Night Ranger by, of all groups, Night Ranger. Between songs the stage went black–but the curtain stayed up–and we stumbled into position for the next song. It never occurred to us to just stick to one instrument the whole hour.

  We tripped over microphone stands.

  Singing “On The Loose” into a dead microphone. Note Jordache horse head on pocket and bandana around leg. David in the background strumming a dead guitar (as if he knew how to play it in the first place).

  We crashed into each other.

  When it was my turn at the drums, I whispered in panic, “Where are the drumsticks?” I had heard of an air guitar; but, air drumsticks? Richie, in his camo pants and knee high moccasins ran them back to me at the last second. He had taken them with him to the keyboards.

  Midway through the hour, I performed my song, On The Loose. God bless that mob of front row girls–not a one of them a freshman–for making the youngest kid on stage feel like a rock star.

  No.

  A rock god.

  They squealed. They screamed. They pawed at my legs. It was priceless.

  The curtain came down on our hour and we were spent–and thrilled. We hugged and congratulated each other. Wow.

  As we passed the nervous members of the third band in the side door, I said to one of the guys, “The first five rows are bitchen, man.”

  We walked out into the cool night air to catch our breath. What a difference the hour made. I no longer felt like the freshman among upperclassman–suddenly I belonged.

  First Glance didn’t win. We weren’t preppy enough, but we were too excited to be disappointed.

  On Monday, I felt a new awareness around school. Students whispered, “Hey, that’s him!” as I walked by. Girls giggled. Guys nodded. Rock star for an hour. I highly recommend it.

  Nowadays, songs that are considered oldies keep me occupied during my 34-mile daily one-way commute. Some days I’m Michael Hutchence belting out the INXS classics. Some days I’m Bono fronting the best rock band in the world. Some days I’m Zack de la Rocha raging against the machine. And some days–to be perfectly honest–I’m Rick Astley singing about the six things I’d never do if you were my girl.

  When I’m lost in the music saturating my Mini Cooper, I don’t visualize strutting around a sold-out Madison Square Garden or L.A. Coliseum. The pretty teenager girls that are Betsy, Mary, Mari, and Jennifer are forever in the front row, laughing and singing along. In my mind, my rock star lives on the small stage in the Monache High School cafeteria. He’ll always be 18 and I’ll always love that guy to death.

  As the school year came to a close, Joe and I mulled over the best way to improve our girl meeting opportunities. Despite my temporary rock star status, my grandiose plan of dating a varsity cheerleader hadn’t panned out. I needed a different strategy.

  We interviewed for two open positions on the yearbook staff with the following conditions: 1) they had to accept both of us or neither of us, and 2) we would be photographers. We knew nothing about photography. The interview committee agreed to our demands.

  1983 Fun Fact #2:

  KISS appears on MTV without makeup for the first time. The traveling evangelist said the acronym stood for “Kings In Satan’s Service” but, really, who cares? I wanna rock and roll all night … and party every day!

  CHAPTER 8

  The crappy, 1972 Ford Courier farm truck, just before its candy apple red paint job and camper shell. With all mods complete, the truck would later be featured in “Truckin’” magazine.

  David decided on another trip to Walla Walla.

  That same thousand mile drive in the sweltering June heat we had taken with Mom two years earlier–only this time we had an eleven-year-old farm truck, and I only had my learner’s permit. David was seventeen and not legally old enough to supervise my driving. He didn’t ask permission–he simply informed Mom of the plan: drive straight through and I’d chat it up all the way to keep him awake.

  For eighteen hours.

  We hit the road on a hot morning with the plan to stop only for gas, the bathroom, and food. We figured it would take less than a day.

  We figured wrong.

  One of many problems was that David’s 1972 Ford Courier was in the process of being modified into a show truck. At that point, it was illegally lowered to the ground, the windows were illegally tinted, and we cranked the music so loud that we had no chance of carrying on a conversation or hearing an emergency vehicle approaching (also illegal). David poured every penny he made at the coffee shop into a candy apple red paintjob with colorful stripes across the louvered hood. (It wasn’t enough to just have a drop-dead paint job, holes punched into the hood and tailgate–louvers–were also a necessity.) All of these modifications made the truck standout to the California Highway Patrol (CHP) more than a band of Hells Angels. We didn’t get ten miles down the road before a CHP cruiser, heading in the opposite direction, flipped around and tailgated us to the county line. He waited for us to do something–anything–to give him reason to pull us over. (Whenever we saw a cop, we hastily rolled down the windows because of the illegal tint job.)

  His other customizations posed other
challenges:

  The front air dam nearly dragged the ground and meant swerving around even the smallest bump in the road (and slamming on the brakes over every railroad track).

  The Bondo’d-on visor above the windshield meant swerving away from oncoming semi-trucks in fear of the sudden airflow cracking the permanent fixture.

  The speaker box behind the seat meant we sat uncomfortably upright and forward in the small cab.

  The overhead console loaded with two heavy equalizers fell down every time we hit a bump (about every five minutes).

  No windshield wipers–windshield wipers weren’t cool.

  No tools to change a flat tire. Who needs them when you don’t have a spare to begin with?

  These were the things we knew about. Of course, it’s the surprises that get you. Little things like mountain ranges. Mechanical failure. Weather. Fatigue.

  Just two hours in the trip, the engine temperature indicator (the little arrow that usually resided in the middle of hot and cold) rose and stayed menacingly near the top of the gauge. Turns out that going seventy five miles per hour wasn’t going to work so he slowed down to sixty. Going sixty when everyone else is going eighty is hard on the ego, so he pushed the little truck to the verge of overheating, and we’d stop at gas stations to hose down the radiator. After doing this every hour, on the hour for eight hours, David pulled into a rest stop along I-5 and said, “Screw sixty miles an hour! We’re going to wait until night then make up our lost time.” The math didn’t quite work in my mind, but I was just along for the ride. Literally.

  We waited for the cool night air and started out again.

  Around midnight, we hit the Mount Shasta area of the Cascade Range near the Oregon/California border and learned another something about that truck: it could only do forty miles an hour up a steep grade. Big rigs blew by us, up and down the harrowing terrain.

  The other modification–a chrome front grill with four square headlights (because the stock round headlights had no place on a show truck)–put us at the greatest risk of all: he never adjusted the headlights correctly so they were pointed two feet ahead of the truck. Thanks to the funky wiring (necessary to power the heavy amplifiers that kept crashing down on our heads), we blew a fuse every couple hours. When this happened, we lost our headlights and taillights. When we ran out of fuses, David jammed a nail where the fuse went–it didn’t occur to us that we were ripe for an electrical fire. So while we could barely see ahead of us in the best of circumstances, we must have looked like a defective golf cart to those fast moving big rigs on the dark and winding highway.

  But, hey, we looked good.

  By the time we hit Ashland, Oregon, we were eight hours behind schedule and a combination of the heat, our long pit stop to wait for nightfall, and the white-knuckle adrenalin rush of driving through the Cascades equaled one thing: fatigue.

  We pressed on.

  We overshot our exit (I-84 East) in Portland–which is pretty hard to do, getting lost on I-5, that is–and had to stop and ask for directions. Admittedly, I am the world’s worst navigator and proved it to my weary, frustrated, sweaty brother. Once pointed east, with the state of Washington across the Columbia River on our left, we perked up.

  Only two hundred and fifty miles to go.

  The crawl continued.

  It was midmorning by this time, sweltering hot, and the wind off the Columbia River blew hard against us. People in backpacks hitchhiked along the highway. We had never seen anything like it and before I said a word, David said, “We are not picking anyone up.” The truck had a custom built camper shell–no side windows–so we could have taken on a couple guys in the back. It was a sauna back there but it was plausible.

  “Not even for gas money?”

  “No.”

  Just outside of the The Dalles, Oregon, with less than three hours to go … WOOOOOOOOOSH!

  Boiling hot green liquid flew out of the louvered hood and splashed against the windshield. We bolted upright out of our stupor.

  The temperature arrow sat all the way north on the gauge.

  David swerved the truck to the side of the highway and we jumped out in panic. Lifting the hood we discovered in horror that the radiator hose had burst. Big rigs flew by, blowing hot air and dirt in our faces. David looked at the hose, then at the migrating hitchhikers slowly making their way toward us.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “Whatever we do, we have to stay ahead of them!” he yelled, pointing to the people trekking along the highway–now just a half-mile away.

  It was as if the hitchhikers were the undead–zombies–shuffling along the highway. In our exhausted state, we were actually afraid. It didn’t help that, moments earlier, we cruised by their outstretched thumbs, stereo cranked to Rick Springfield’s Living In Oz cassette.

  David climbed in the back of the camper shell and emerged with a wide roll of silver duct tape. Lucky for us, the radiator hose hadn’t completely exploded; fluid spewed from a two-inch long crack along one side. As I held the shiny candy apple red hood in the bright sunlight (no latch for the hood, that wouldn’t have been cool!), I imagined that the slog of people approaching us were going to eat our brains. The hood was a beacon.

  The ground was boiling hot. The air was boiling hot.

  I watched David in silence. Sweat poured down his face.

  Finally, I said, “Hurry, man, hurry!”

  He looked over his shoulder at the scraggly hitchhikers and taped faster.

  “There! That should hold us for awhile!”

  We scrambled in the truck and pulled onto I-84 with a hundred yards to spare before the first group of hitchhikers reached us. We honestly thought they would beat the living hell out of us.

  A mile down the road, we pulled into a Chevron and explained our problem to the geezer who multi-tasked as the cashier, the mechanic, and the guy who pumped the gas (you can’t pump your own gas in the state of Oregon, by the way). He shuffled into the locked garage in no particular hurry. A few minutes later, he emerged holding a shiny black rubber radiator hose.

  It was the most beautiful radiator hose I’d ever seen.

  He handed it to David and said he’d have to trim it to fit. David borrowed his knife and got to work. After handing us a gallon of Prestone antifreeze, Grandpa Chevron announced the bill: $38.

  $38? I stood in stunned disbelief.

  The grizzled old fart stood there smiling proudly, his hands tucked in his dirty blue overalls. He had us and he knew it. No sympathy for the kids in the neon-painted farm truck with California license plates.

  I handed him two twenty dollar bills–a significant part of our total travel budget–and waited for the change. He shuffled back in the office and came back with two grimy dollar bills.

  As we pulled away, he said, “You fellas have a nice day now.”

  Hanging out the window, I replied, “Yeah. Merry Christmas, cheesedick!”

  We pulled into Walla Walla at five p.m.–989 miles from Porterville, seventeen hours behind schedule and forty dollars lighter.

  Lorne lived with our uncle Bart and Bart threw down the rules. “Lorne, don’t you get these guys drunk tonight.” Lorne assured him that everything was cool–the plan was to have some of Grandma Bun’s blackberry cobbler then maybe go to a movie.

  That was partially correct–we did have cobbler. Then we went to a party where everyone was drinking Jack Daniels and Coke. Van Halen blasted through the crammed apartment.

  Knowing nothing about proper whiskey to soda ratio, (I thought it was 50/50) I proceeded to show everyone how a fifteen-year-old from California could hang with these twenty-something’s. The revelers couldn’t believe my heavy mixing hand–then couldn’t believe I drank the awful mixture. I swallowed it like a chump–I mean, a champ. It burned like fire but I didn’t know any better.

  On the totem pole of brotherhood, it’s unwritten that the youngest brother gets the floor when all beds and couches are taken. I was only horizontal
on the floor for a minute before staggering to the bathroom, fighting back the churning, burning mess rising in my throat.

  Extrication was imminent.

  After the fifth projectile vomit in the general direction of the toilet, I looked up through blurry eyes and there stood Uncle Bart in nothing but his white Fruit of the Looms. His arms were crossed. His frown was legendary.

  “I think I got a touch of food poisoning tonight,” I croaked between wretches. Bart didn’t say a word.

  The next day I awoke face down on the floor. My face, hair, shirt, and the pristine white carpet were covered with drying, partially masticated blackberry cobbler. White carpet fibers clogged my crusted nostrils.

  The brothers in the summer of 1983.

  My stomach boiled. My head ached.

  David looked down from the couch and said, “Whoa. Look at all the blackberry seeds!”

  Lorne was grounded. For a month.

  A week later we left Walla Walla in the evening and drove down the more direct I-97 South through Bend, Oregon. Surviving the second harrowing trip up and over Mt. Shasta, ten hours into the drive, David pulled over on the side of the freeway.

  Without saying a word, he proceeded to climb in the back of the camper shell. It was 8 a.m. and the sun was just beginning its blazing assault. He never bought a boot to connect the cab with the camper (so not cool!) which meant there was no way to communicate with him back there.

  He laid out a sleeping bag (at least we had thought of that much) and was asleep as soon as he laid his head down.

  I was on my own behind the wheel.

  I pulled onto I-5 and prayed to God that the truck wouldn’t break down, or I wouldn’t get pulled over for any number of infractions the truck was guilty of. I wasn’t sure that I could keep myself awake in the blistering heat of the morning but it helped that the overhead console swung down and hit me in the head every five minutes. With sole control of the music selection, I blasted Tears For Fears’ Songs From The Big Chair and sang as loud as I could.