Party of One
Page 2
I just thought: We need to get that kid over here.
And so one June morning, as my family gathered around the kitchen table for bacon and eggs, I asked my mom to call his mom and see if he’d want to come over. “It would be fun to hang around,” I told her. “I want to keep in touch with him.”
“Huh,” Mom said. “I didn’t know you and Donny were such good friends.”
“Oh, we’re not,” I told her. “I just think he’s cute.”
And the pause button was hit on the entire world.
Everyone and everything froze. I had stopped time. If this had happened in a movie trailer, we all would have heard a record scratch and our dog would have covered his eyes.
In that moment, I knew that I had done something that was a special kind of wrong. I hadn’t hurt anyone, I hadn’t lied, I hadn’t sworn or littered or taken Are Lard’s name in vain, I had done something worse. I knew it because I couldn’t even figure out what it was. I knew it because nobody knew how to react. We were all in new territory.
My mother spoke first: “So, when you say that you think Donny is cute”—she wasn’t angry, she was dazed, as if from a punch to the face—“do you mean that you think he’s handsome? Or do you mean something else, like he says cute things and he’s funny and that’s why you like him?”
It was clear which choice would make the world start spinning again.
“The second one. The cute things he says. He’s always saying funny things. He’s so funny.” He wasn’t all that funny.
“Okay,” she said. Relieved. A weight lifted. The air in the room began to circulate again. “Okay, hon. When that’s what you mean, you should say a boy is funny. Boys don’t call other boys cute.” The message was delivered with love, but she looked me right in the eyes to make sure it was delivered. She was just trying to protect me, I can see that now.
Different means unique and distinct, but in St. Louis in the 1970s, if you changed the tone up just a little bit, the word became an insult. People in the Midwest are kind to one another, so they won’t say someone is too loud or too quiet or thick in the head or light in the loafers, they’ll just say: “That kid is different.” It can mean a lot of things, and you don’t want to be any of them.
I remember this moment, because it is when I split into two pieces. It was the moment I realized that there would be a self that I could show the world and a self I’d have to keep hidden. If I wanted to be acceptable, if I wanted to spare myself and my family the shame of being different, I’d have to do some work.
I didn’t think about it again for a very long time, but it left behind an ache.
The drug I numbed myself with was the radio. The song we sang along to the most that summer was Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.”
There’s a reason why gay men have a finely tuned sense of irony.
Here’s a fun fact: before it became another of America’s numerous occasions for large groups of young adults to sleep with and/or spit up on one another, Halloween was a popular holiday among children. In St. Louis in the 1970s, the culture had yet to embrace adult cosplay or the concept that kittens could be made sexy; October 31 was a time for kids to collect fistfuls of fun-size Milky Way bars, thank their elders, and nothing more.
Candy notwithstanding, it wasn’t all that hot a holiday for kids, either. If you wanted to go as, say, C-3PO—as I did for three perfectly adequate years in a row—that meant your parents going to the drugstore and buying a $4 box that included a plastic suffocation hazard of a mask sprayed with carcinogenic gold paint, to be worn atop a vomit-repelling synthetic poncho carrying a fresco of scenes from Star Wars. One would go more as the idea of C-3PO than the droid himself. This didn’t satisfy my need for self-expression, so to amp up the realness, I would totter stiffly between houses, robot arms at perfect 90-degree angles, which would slow, and annoy, my neighborhood trick-or-treat group (and reduce my overall candy haul)—but I like to commit to a performance.
By the time I hit third grade, I was ready to take ownership of my Halloween experience. Since I’d seen some on television, by mid-September I had made the firm decision that for Halloween 1980, I would be a punk rocker. There was plenty of room for interpretation here; to anyone who wasn’t a coastal teenager at the turn of the decade, “punk rock” was a catchall term for “anything you didn’t often see.” Sort of spiky hair: punk. Those plastic sunglasses that were essentially one long narrow lens: very punk. One Specials button on an otherwise pristine denim jacket: Mister, you might as well be GG Allin. I began silently taking an inventory of clothing and household items I could use: Could I tear up an old pair of jeans? Snip a sleeve off a shirt? Cut a head hole in a trash bag and cinch it at the waist with a bike lock? My mind reeled with the possibilities, with the danger and responsibility that making a bold personal statement entails. I decided I’d show my family when the whole costume was thoroughly workshopped and realized.
I went down the street to my friend Molly’s house for dinner later that week and told her family of my tentative trick-or-treating plans. Her mom sprang up; “I have just the thing,” she said, and then disappeared into her bedroom, emerging moments later with a silver-sequined pantsuit and its own matching beret. “I never wear it anymore. It’s yours. You can cut it up however you like.” I thought: Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I walked that pantsuit back home, snuck it up to my room, used my safety scissors to alter the arms and legs to my size, and chose the perfect dangerous angle at which to wear the beret. After dinner the next night, I gathered my parents and brothers in the living room to model my creation.
Have you ever confused a Jack Russell terrier, to the point where it looks concerned and cocks its head at a 45-degree angle? Then you have seen what each member of my family looked like when I walked into our living room.
My oldest brother, Dan, could not find words. My middle brother, Steve, a senior in high school, said, “You know, Dave,” and after a moment or two of searching for the right thing to tell me, “that’s not really what punk rock is,” as though strict costume interpretation were the primary concern when your eight-year-old brother stands before you in a silver-sequined ladies’ pantsuit and matching beret.
My reply—I swear to God—was this: “But I can do the splits, like Mick Jagger. Watch!”
Okay. Here are a few of the flaws in this argument:
1. Mick Jagger could not do the splits.
2. The splits are not generally considered a punk-rock move.
3. Mick Jagger is not generally considered a punk rocker.
4. I also could not do the splits.
I rose from the ground, having attempted the splits and succeeded at nothing more than testing the tensile strength of the pantsuit’s base fabric, but I was triumphant. I was agile and dangerous. I was a punk rocker. It was immediately clear to my family that I would not be deterred, and I guess everyone agreed that there were some lessons I should learn the hard way.
A solid 70 percent of houses guessed that I was dressed as a fancy pimp. Whatever—I still got candy. Molly went as a calculator.
So, anyway, that was the Halloween I dressed as A Source of Concern to My Family.
They need not have worried, really. I come by my exuberance for music and popular culture naturally; it’s the primary thing I inherited from my family. There is nothing that you can say to either of my parents that won’t remind them of a song, and they will never fail to sing it. My point is not that they’ll break into “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” when you tell them it’s sunny outside, or “The Way We Were” when you mention something that has happened in the past, although these are absolutely things that will happen. What I’m saying is that literally everything—airplane tickets, Styrofoam, the flu—is a cue for a song, and it is always time to be singing. They’re like improv performers, just waiting for a suggestion so they can launch into their act. We’re Irish; it can’t be helped.
My father worked as a financial consul
tant of some sort; throughout my youth, he put on a tie and managed money and didn’t talk much about it when he got home. But he made a point of taking us to New York once a year, and when we were there he made sure to get Broadway tickets for at least three nights. He’d slip the concierge a few bucks for the really good seats, so we’d be always right up in front. (Except at Cats, whose good seats are in the first row of the balcony, where the cat chorus crawls right up next to you and rubs their heads on your chest and purrs and you silently wish you had slightly worse seats.) Dad would get lost in the show. I could see the whites of his eyes in the dark of the theater. And after the final number, he would stand. He would whoop. There would be tears in his eyes sometimes, even if it wasn’t a very good show. He’d been transported. He and my mother have been married since the early 1950s, when every suburban home had the Original Cast Recordings of West Side Story, The King And I, The Sound of Music. My dad had a secret identity as a theater buff.
My mother grew up in North St. Louis, a Sinatra-worshipping bobby-soxer from way back who wrote letters to Frank offering her babysitting services for Frank Jr. and Nancy. Any time my parents travel, my mother sees celebrities. It’s uncanny. They will come back from a trip and she’ll pull a list of names and quick first impressions out of her purse. “Marion Ross: nice as can be. Gavin MacLeod: seems impressed with himself. Sandy Duncan: no bigger than a minute.” Sometime in the ’90s when my folks visited me in New York, Mom came back from a shopping trip a little out of breath but exhilarated. “I saw Hugh Grant at FAO Schwarz and I followed him all the way down Fifth Avenue,” she told me. “And your thoughts?” “I’m not sure I trust him,” she confided. “It seemed like he was trying to hide from someone.” That it will absolutely never occur to my mother that Hugh Grant might have been trying to give her the slip is part of her charm. (It’s also possible that she’s just a shrewd judge of character; the Divine Brown thing happened only weeks later.)*1
Loving entertainment was the only thing I could do as well as everyone else in the house. When I was little and my brothers were still home, the car radio was always on the Top 40 AM radio station, and everybody sang along. If I couldn’t throw a ball the way my brothers could, if I couldn’t keep up with my parents’ conversation, when the radio was on we were all on the same page in the same songbook. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over. Jet, I thought that the major was a lady. I didn’t understand a word I was singing and it didn’t matter; I was doing the same thing my family was doing, and it felt good. (Years later, I told Kurt Loder about this, about how the music of Paul McCartney and Wings was the first thing that made me feel connected to the world, and his immediate reply was: “Did it bother you that Paul McCartney and Wings were awful?” Kurt Loder is Kurt Loder all day long.)
Like pretty much everyone in my generation whose home had electricity, I also spent hours sitting directly in front of the television. For the youth of the era, turn-of-the-decade Saturday nights were all about the ABC lineup: The Love Boat and, for those whose parents allowed it, Fantasy Island (Mr. Roarke got a little hard-PG with those fantasies sometimes). On Tuesdays, it was Charlie’s Angels, which I would watch with my mother. At the beginning of each episode, when the Angels gathered to talk to the squawk box on the desk, my mother would say the same thing, in the same way: “That’s John Forsythe,” she’d tell me, and then, in a whisper: “He’s quite handsome.” My immediate impression was that he was simply too handsome to be on camera; that if he were to show his face, the female viewers of Charlie’s Angels would pass out with hearts in their eyes like lovestruck young kittens in a Heckle & Jeckle cartoon and miss the show so many people had worked so hard to make. (I would go on to remain fully conscious when John Forsythe starred as Blake Carrington in Dynasty. He was all right. Settle down, Mom.)
I also developed a taste for daytime television. One Christmas break, I caught my mother watching All My Children as she ironed Dad’s shirts. It was her secret habit, and I sensed her shame at having become the kind of woman who watched soap operas. I mildly gave her the business at first—“Really, Mom? Love in the afternoon?” But by day two I was starting to recognize faces and names, and then I was starting to actively wonder why Erica and Brooke didn’t get along, or why Greg’s mom didn’t like Jenny, and Mom furnished the backstories. By the end of Christmas break I was teaching her how to program the VCR so that I could watch it after school. She quit cold turkey shortly thereafter; I stuck with it right up to the bitter end.*2
But I was drawn mostly to music, and my brothers’ peak record-buying years happened to produce the kind of music a younger brother would most want to borrow. Dan was into what at the time was called AOR—Kansas and Foghat and that “Iron Man” song by Black Sabbath that sent me screaming to my room to hide in the closet, because it was legitimately scary to a child, and also I was too young to recognize when I was actually living out a metaphor. Dan’s albums had gatefold sleeves and intricate artwork: Queen’s News of the World cover depicted a giant robot unwittingly wreaking havoc on a city, holding the dead, bloodied band in his cold, steel palm, thinking, What have I done? Led Zeppelin IV had mystical symbols and an old man carrying a massive bundle of sticks on his back, and only the teenagers seemed to know what it all meant. (St. Louis’s radio tastes froze at right around this time in history; when I go back to visit, everyone still seems to listen to KSHE-95, the classic rock station. It used to bother me, but coming home and hearing Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” within thirty minutes of my arrival brings order and stability to the world.)
Steve was into Magic 108, the soul music station. There are a few classic albums from this period in R&B—Off the Wall, Songs in the Key of Life, The Brothers Johnson’s Blam!—but it’s mostly about the singles: Ray, Goodman & Brown’s “Special Lady.” Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real.” Shalamar’s “Second Time Around.” Larry Graham’s “One in a Million You.” Dan and Steve’s stereos fought with each other every night until lights out at 10:00—dance beats and quiet storm ballads on one side, brainy lyrics and heavy guitars on the other. Right in the middle was the place to be.
The one thing they could agree on musically was Bruce Springsteen, who was revered by both as a god living among us. They each had their own copy of every one of his albums, from Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ right up to The River. They also pooled their money on a tape player for the Buick Wildcat convertible they shared so that they could each buy all of his albums on 8-track. I begged to tag along on their errands, where we’d sing along to “She’s the One,” and it would fade out in the middle, click, and fade back up. Errands are a major event for a kid with cool big brothers.
Each day, I became more aware that I was both different and different, and each day, I turned to music to ease the discomfort. I was insatiable. I took from my brothers, but I had to have more. Outside the family, my most reliable ally around these times was Casey Kasem. For Christmas 1980, I got roller skates—red Nike numbers that looked like sneakers with big red wheels on them. And each Sunday morning, I woke up early, pulled my clock radio out of the socket, attached it to an extension cord, and lugged it out to the driveway just in time to hear #40. I roller-skated in a circle, working on jumps and spins, as he counted them down. It didn’t matter whether I liked the songs, and frankly, there is a limit to the excitement a child can work up over Air Supply. But who cares; the star of the show was Casey. He pronounced each artist’s name, crisply and respectfully. He gave each band equal weight, even Franke and the Knockouts. Even Get Wet. He told us that this thing, pop music, was a thing to be taken seriously, no matter what the rest of the world told us. Casey got it.
By the time he got to #15, I’d have to shower and get ready for Mass, but once a song made it that far up the charts, I’d heard it enough. Plus, if Father Shea did a short enough homily, we’d make it back to the car in time to hear what was #1. A thrilling moment, even during the grim, endless reign of “Bette Davis Eyes.”
And then in a flash, my brothers were off to college. Dan went to Notre Dame, Steve two years later to Creighton. The timing could not have been better: Dan hit college just in time for the golden age of what we were then calling “college music.” He came back home from his freshman year with a Peaches Records & Tapes crate full of new treasures: the Clash, Squeeze, the Specials and the Pretenders and the English Beat. He caught the wave at the perfect time, and I got to reap the benefits. While he was gone at his summer job selling shirts at Brooks Brothers downtown, I rifled through and listened to messages from another planet: Split Enz’s True Colours, XTC’s Black Sea, U2’s Boy. Fine bands whose best quality was that nobody else at school had ever heard of them.