The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  One craze that began around this time was the brainchild of inventor Xavier Roberts: the Cabbage Patch Kid. Demand far exceeded supply and we watched the news in awe and amusement: New York City moms throwing blows over the one homely doll on the shelf.

  What was special about these simple dolls with oversized plastic heads and soft, fabric bodies wasn’t so much the doll itself–it was the story behind the doll.

  According to Mr. Roberts, the dolls were orphans. Not only that, but if they weren’t adopted they’d spend their “lives” toiling in a pit doing hard labor. Each doll had a name and, the coup de grace, a birth certificate.

  Every kid in America, including my eight-year-old sister, had to have one. Thus began the quest for the seemingly unattainable. Each night we’d watch the news for Cabbage Patch sightings: Channel 5 reports that the Fresno Gottschalks in the Fashion Fair Mall has 25 dolls …

  Before Mom could run to the phone, hoping to beg Gottschalks to hold one, the reporter continued: “... the dolls lasted all of ninety seconds as shoppers grabbed them as they were placed on the shelf. No blood flew but there was some pushing and shoving. Let’s now cut to another Cabbage Patch brawl in New York …”

  Mom would not be denied and called her brother in Atlanta. Soon a package arrived from our good Uncle Harold with huge block letters: TO BE OPENED BY YOUR MOTHER ONLY. I MEAN IT!

  Mom locked herself in her bedroom, let out a shriek, and emerged with, perhaps, the only Cabbage Patch Kid in Tulare County. It wasn’t my sister’s birthday, it wasn’t Christmas, it wasn’t even Kwanzaa, but it was a day that would forever be a part of Trish’s childhood: the day she adopted her very own Cabbage Patch Kid.

  It was a girl with thick strands of red yarn for hair. Her name, Jenny McFlowerypants, or some damn thing.

  Trish carefully filled out the adoption papers and pinned the birth certificate on the wall. This gave her two loving brothers an idea.

  On more than one occasion, my sister returned from school to find little Jenny dangling from a noose, complete with an official-looking death certificate.

  Kids.

  A couple years later, the Topps Company parodied the lovable dolls in the form of trading cards and stickers via the Garbage Pail Kids. With names like Adam Bomb, Stinky Stan, and Douche Bag Dennis (OK, I made up that last one), the vile Garbage Pail Kids were an instant hit with kids and teens alike.

  In the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy, Back To School, we see another parody reference via the Melon Patch Kids–dolls that weren’t orphaned, they were abandoned.

  In a movie no one saw in 1987, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Paramount Pictures tried to keep the flicker of interest alive but Topps was eventually sued for trademark infringement and the back country third cousins to the Cabbage Patch Kids soon dropped out of the mainstream.

  In the 1997 black comedy, Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack plays a guy who returns to his hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan for his 10-year high school reunion.

  In a coincidence I find ultra-cool, John’s character graduated in 1986.

  The soundtrack is New Wave all the way featuring songs by The Clash, English Beat, Violent Femmes, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Specials (who I absolutely love), The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pixies, and so on. It also has two of my favorite funk songs, Let It Whip by The Dazz Band and White Lines (Don’t Do It) by Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel. I listen to this CD religiously these days–such a departure from what I used to listen to.

  There’s a point to this ramble, trust me.

  So I was cruising along in the Mini-Cooper the other day, trying to keep up with Faith No More’s We Care a Lot (another song off the soundtrack) and nearly ran off the road when I heard the reference. If you listen closely, (it takes a bit of concentration because these guys have heavy British accents) you will hear a reference to the Garbage Pail Kids in this song!

  To think it only took 15 years of listening to finally hear it.

  Even today, you can find Garbage Pail Kids trading cards at your local store. Not too far, in fact, from the descendents of Jenny McFlowerypants, gathering dust on the shelf.

  1984 Fun Fact #1:

  George Orwell got it wrong in his classic novel published in 1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thankfully, Big Brother’s totalitarian society remains a few lifetimes away … I think … the book did spur a great song by Oingo Boingo, though—Wake Up (It’s 1984).

  CHAPTER 9

  I learned the proper protocol for riding in my brother’s truck to and from school. Not that he had much of a choice. For half of my sophomore year, I was his passenger–under the following conditions:

  1) You do not wave to anyone.

  2) You may nod–and nod only–but only if it’s in response to a wave or nod.

  3) The entire JV cheerleader squad is eligible for a ride home. If we stop to pick up a girl, she’ll ride between us. If we pick up two or more, I ride in the back.

  4) If we pick up Dayna, Teresa, or Renee, I ride in the back.

  We started our day together on the road and in the classroom, sharing Mr. Briscoe’s first period Spanish 2. The class was a riot since no one learned anything from his first year class (and if you took Spanish 1 from Mr. Briscoe, you had to take Spanish 2 from him, for that very reason). Mr. Briscoe was too lovable and not nearly strict enough. With Chevy Chase’s film, National Lampoon Vacation in the theaters, he was Clark W. Griswold in the flesh–bumbling, lovable, and oblivious.

  After Spanish 2, came Typing, Geometry, PE, English, then Yearbook.

  It wasn’t a common sight for a guy to take typing in 1983. Of the thirty students in my second period class, 90% were girls which was the reason I enrolled in the first place.

  That first quarter was rough for two reasons: 1) I was stuck on one of the few manual typewriters (Mr. Fishburn must have figured my fingers were stronger than his average student–you really had to mash down to put print to paper) and 2) memorizing the keys didn’t come easy to me. During daily typing drills, we looked straight ahead at a large poster of a keyboard–forbidden to look at our hands. A couple months into class, Mr. Fishburn took the poster down without warning. He knew his deviants and often stood next to me during class. When he saw me peering down in frustration, he’d clear his throat and say, “You’re only cheating yourself, Tom.”

  I finally learned the layout of the keys and was rewarded with an electric typewriter from the second quarter on. To my surprise, I excelled at typing and cracked the top ten of fastest typists (displayed on an obnoxious poster for all to see). By the end of the year–at our last timed exercise to determine the fastest typist in the class–it came down to me and a girl named Lori. Tension was high. We locked eyes like two gunslingers at the OK Corral.

  Ready? Set? Type!

  After the smoke settled on our final exercise, Mr. Fishburn announced, “Lori, congratulations on typing forty seven words a minute!”

  Lori looked at me and beamed.

  “Tom, congratulations on typing forty eight words a minute! Tom is the class’ fastest typist!” I sat back in my chair, not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed.

  Despite my brother Lorne’s advice to make math my friend, math had other ideas. All that side-angle-siding of sophomore geometry made no sense to me. The first time I raised my hand to ask a question, Mr. Reeder snapped, “Class time is my time to teach! If you have questions, see me before school!” He hurried through the day’s lesson, then sat in the back of the class working on football strategy–he was the JV football coach.

  After a D the first quarter (and I did meet with Mr. Reeder–once–before school but found it pointless–the guy had zero patience), temptation got the best of me and I cheated off a classmate. Candace was a senior so I figured she understood geometry better than I.

  A day after the test, Mr. Reeder kept the two of us after class. Holding up our tests, both emblazoned with big F’s circled in red ink, he asked, “These are so wrong and so identical that I want to know who
copied off of who.”

  We stood in silence–in cheating there is solidarity–maybe that was the lesson learned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he continued. “You’re both getting an F for the semester for cheating.” With that, he waved us out the door in a mix of disgust and twisted pleasure.

  I dropped Geometry that very day and finished the year in General Business.

  I enjoyed English 10 Honors with the venerable Margaret Land. She taught writing fundamentals and demanded excellence. While other sophomores read Catch 22 and A Farewell to Arms, we spent months picking apart the complex storyline of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic, Dune. Coincidentally, the movie was released in December 1984, and I went to see it the first weekend–anxious to show my devotion to Mrs. Land’s beloved book.

  “So I saw Dune this weekend. Wow, it was great!” I said before class the following Monday.

  “You think so?” she asked warily. “I saw it too and thought it was one of the worst adaptations of a book I’ve ever seen. Utterly horrible.”

  I shuffled back to my desk with my head down.

  There was no sucking up to Mrs. Land as I found out struggling to learn the comma rules.10 Hoping she’d go easy on me during her random, sadistic pop quizzes, I employed what I thought was a time-proven technique. The latin term, I believe, is Ass-kissis Maximus.

  “Mrs. Land, do you drive a blue Celica?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really, really like it. When I get my driver’s license this year, I hope to get one just like it.”

  “Really? Well, that’s nice …”

  The class bell rang and everyone sat down.

  She continued in the same breath, “Tom, what are the comma rules?”

  The last class of the day was Yearbook–a class not at all confined to a classroom. One thing Joe and I learned almost immediately was that being a yearbook photographer was a hell of a lot of work. Unlike today’s digital age, we shot rolls of film through the most manual 35 millimeter camera ever made: the Pentax K-1000. We learned aperture settings, film speed, and f-stops via accelerated trial and error. While the perks were great–time out of class, free entry into dances, ogling students at rallies and around campus–the workload more than offset the social advantages.

  Here’s why.

  Every roll of black and white film had to be developed, correctly, in the darkroom. From there, a proof (a thumbnail exposure of all the pictures on a standard sheet of photo paper) was produced for yearbook staffers. With ink pencil in eager hand, they circled the thumbnails they wanted enlarged for further consideration in their page layouts. We were, then, back in the putrid darkroom with dozens of photos to produce.

  The darkroom was nothing more than a small closet that reeked of sulfur within the interior hallway of the science building. The only way there was through one of six science building classrooms and, during seventh period, we interrupted the same teacher: Mr. Funderburk. We called him “Funder Chicken” and he didn’t mind it in the least. I never had Funder Chicken as a teacher and what I pulled on him a few years later amazes me to this day–but we’ll get to that.

  The workload was so great that we had a set of keys to the science building which allowed us in the building evenings and on the weekends. Imagine that today: Giving free reign to a couple of sophomores in a building full of chemicals, lamb eyeballs, and baby pigs suspended in formaldehyde. Oh, the mischief we could have caused.

  We weren’t exactly angels and embraced a tradition found the first time we closed the sliding darkroom door. There, in all its splendor, were a dozen pictures of cheerleaders caught in compromised positions. A note taped to the door was all the instruction needed: “$20 for the best beaver shot of the year. Keep the tradition alive boys.”

  Once again, I shake my head–now–at the brazenness, the ignorance, the sheer stupidity, of what we–a couple of honor students–were doing. Had a teacher–any teacher–walked in the darkroom, slid the door shut and turned around, we would have been in serious trouble.

  After a year of photographing our cheerleaders in action, Joe and I contemplated the finalists. My picture captured a tall blonde Porterville High cheerleader in full leg kick–her right toe practically touched her forehead. (The picture was taken at our annual rival basketball game.) Joe’s picture was our mascot (in her very Pocahontas-like outfit) doing the splits in mid-jump. After multiple enlargements of specific regions of our unknowing subjects–to the point of frustrating distortion–we ended in a stalemate. I thought my picture was clearly better and demanded the money. Joe countered that my picture was ineligible because it wasn’t a Monache cheerleader. For weeks we argued over it until we nearly asked Funder Chicken to step in and declare a winner. Thankfully, for all involved, we decided that wasn’t a good idea.

  [Note: We left the “Beaver Shot Collection” taped to the inside of the darkroom door and, upon returning for our junior year, discovered the pictures were gone. In full-stage panic our first day back as juniors, Joe and I awaited the page from the principal’s office, certain we’d start the first week of school on suspension.

  The week passed. Nothing.

  After the second week, we figured we were in the clear and a new collection began. I can only imagine what became of those pictures–but I like to think they’re aging gracefully in some retired, appreciative, janitor’s garage.]

  Our yearbook advisor, the lovable, aged, Mr. Schoenfeld, had his hands full overseeing the yearbook production staff and had no idea what his photographers were doing most of the time. He only taught yearbook that year because his daughter was a senior–a varsity cheerleader at that.

  One rule of the Beaver Shot competition was that crotch shots of Mr. Schoenfeld’s daughter were strictly out of bounds since he could have dropped in on us in the darkroom at any time and it would have been well within his right. Lucky for us, he never did.

  When the seventh period bell rang we were rarely in the yearbook classroom and got busted, on more than one occasion, playing hacky sack. (Hacky sacks were the size of Ping Pong balls, filled with sand, and made of leather. Kicking the bag around a small circle of guys was all the rage at the time, though I was never good at it. Sperry Topsiders were the best shoe for the game, but they were too expensive for me at $54 a pair.)

  With the advent of the digital camera, anyone can be a photographer without the laborious task of processing and developing film–the darkroom, as we both loved and hated it, is a thing of the past for all but true aficionados.

  But, oh, the inside of that darkroom door.

  Being a yearbook photographer definitely raised us up a notch on the ladder of popularity–people loved to have their picture taken. Thanks to the yearbook, I found my first high school girlfriend. I’ll call her Lynn.

  Lynn was part of the hardworking yearbook page designers. She was blonde, pretty, and a junior–yet again another older woman in my life.

  One fair night in the last months of 1983, I joined the ranks of the educated. In my insecurity and uncertainty, I applied one condom–and then another. It wasn’t out of a fear of AIDS (that only affected gay males, right?)–it was simple fear from a naive, fifteen-year-old kid. [Note: That’s much, much too young. Teenagers, take note! Keep it in your pants. You’ll be glad you did.] There, on my small twin size childhood bunk bed, under two posters of the swimsuit-clad super model, Paulina Poriskova, my virginity became a thing of the past.

  I thought I had a good idea of what went where after watching my first ever porno a few days earlier: Insatiable starring Marilyn Chambers. One of David’s friends brought over the video after-school–along with his VCR since we didn’t have one–and fifteen teenage guys huddled intensely around our 19” Philco. We thought we were pretty smart by dead bolting the front door which allowed a three second warning that Mom was home when she tried to open the door–we never dead bolted the front door. I have to credit the kid manning the VCR–he had that tape swapped out after my panicked, “Mom’s
home!” announcement. By the time she unbolted the upper deadbolt, we were casually watching John Travolta ride the mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy. Mom looked at the overflowing room of red-faced, cross-legged guys and smiled. She never said a word.

  After Insatiable, I never looked at a pool table quite the same way again.

  A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, Mom drove up in a severely oxidized reddish-pink 1977 Honda Civic. She didn’t say where she got it or why she had it but I secretly thought, God I hope that’s not for me. That sounds horribly inconsiderate, I know.

  My sixteenth birthday!

  After my trip and back to the DMV on February 8 (95% on my driving test; docked 5% for not turning my head while changing lanes on Main, damn!), Mom handed me a small box wrapped in birthday paper. Inside, the keys to the Honda. I hugged her.

  The best thing about that car, as Lynn and I discovered, was that the front seats folded completely horizontal. We, uh, practiced under the cover of darkness in one of the thousands of acres of orange groves around Tulare County.

  One night we decided on a change of venue and ended up at the rural Porterville airport. There was a large perimeter chain link fence around the property but the double wide gate was open. I drove down the crushed white gravel road and pulled off to the side–a hundred yards from the road.

  As we enjoyed each other’s company in the pitch black of night, a four-wheel-drive truck barreled down the gravel road toward us. He must have had quite a laugh when he spied a crappy Honda Civic rocking on the side of the road and skidded to a halt two inches from the rear bumper. White gravel showered the back of my car. I jumped into the driver’s seat and sprayed gravel all the way to the main road–what a sight, two half-naked teenagers speeding away from the scene of the crime.