This wrestling was not like “pro wrestling,” which was big on television at the time but still a few years away from exploding into the mass entertainment juggernaut it has become, to the point where my dad would take my little sister to Boston Garden to see the stars stomp each other’s tracheas. Our team did not have colorful stage names or flamboyant personalities, nor were we permitted to jump from any lighting fixtures. I guess it was kind of a transitional period in terms of male-combat culture. Spiritually, we were trapped in the odd historical vacuum between Rocky II and Rocky III. Rocky was still the world heavyweight champion—he hadn’t lost his crown, wept at Mickey’s deathbed, been pitied by Mr. T.He had not regained the eye of the tiger. We had no way of knowing Apollo Creed was going to help him rise up to the challenge of his rival, much less that Rocky was going to eventually knock out Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, or Mason “The Line” Dixon. The jury was still out on this Balboa meathead. He would have been a great role model, but as it was, I had to face this battle on my own and don my tights of redemption-scented Lycra.
My coach, Steel Neil Coughlin, was a stoic about it, since he had no way to boot me from the junior varsity team—there was no level lower than JV, and I was equally unsuited for the other winter sports. Squash was fun, but in the winter the courts belonged to the varsity. Basketball was always a drag for me, as it is for most fifteen-year-olds who are six feet tall yet unable to throw things. My sisters, who were built like me, absolutely killed at volleyball, so I tried it once, and then I saw stars and that was the end of that. When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements? “Pleased to meet you, badminton,” I told the shuttlecock. “Hope you guessed my name.” But at this point, the badminton team was just a gleam in Steel Neil’s increasingly exasperated eye.
At that age, any physical activity vaguely resembling sexual contact is hilarious. But there’s nothing vague about wrestling. It begins with one dude on hands and knees, as the other one wraps an arm around to nestle against his chest (the “upside-down belt hold”) and another arm on his elbow. Then they roll around on the rubber mat. A wrestling match will often involve a friction boner or two. So a serious attitude is a must. Otherwise, you’ll just giggle and miss the more difficult pleasures available to the true wrestler. The varsity wrestling team, who used the practice room after we did, were very serious guys, and it was inspiring to watch them stretch for hours while we rehearsed our falls and clinches. There’s no denying that there was an element of showing off for these guys. The varsity team was undefeated, feared throughout the Independent School League. I hope it was inspirational to watch us warm up the mat for them, falling down in incredibly complicated ways.
At practice, I always paired up with my buddy Flynn, who had a similarly Zen approach to the sport, derived from Kung Fu reruns on Channel 38. We were fascinated with the strategy of combat, the chesslike logical quandaries, the questions of leverage and balance. It was yogic, in a way, even if I was the kind of yogi whose lotus position was two shoulders to the mat. We loved the uniform and the ritual of lacing up the boots. As adolescent boys who loved martial arts mythology but were too lazy to actually learn any martial arts, wrestling suited our warrior-philosopher fantasies.
Flynn and I were well matched physically and cerebrally, so the time we spent with our faces in proximity facilitated our philosophical discussions.
“You know what would suck?” he mused one day as we grappled on the leather mat, standing face to face for the clinch.
“What would suck?”
“In 1984, if Winston Smith was afraid of squirrels instead of rats.”
We were reading George Orwell in English class, and since we were the Class of ’84, we identified heavily with its dystopian vision.
“Why would that suck?”
“That would render him laughable. It wouldn’t be horrible when they show him rats in Room 101. It would just be funny.”
“True,” I conceded, scoring reversal points on the half nelson. “That would suck.”
“The torture guys would probably just laugh.”
“Even the squirrels would laugh. Winston’s resistance to evil would have meant nothing.”
“It would doubleplus suck.”
We dropped to our knees to execute the Olympic lift.
“This is all true,” I said. “Yet I cannot help but feel that what would really suck would be living in that futuristic totalitarian society. In fact, I think it’s a little strange, and maybe disturbing, you come away from the novel thinking that’s what would suck.”
“Or rabbits.”
“What about hamsters?”
“That would suck too.”
He slipped his arms into the forbidden full nelson. I nudged him away with my jaw.
“What about cats?”
“Not as much as rabbits.”
“Bats. That would be awesome.”
“Awesome.”
“What do you call a masturbating cow?”
“Beef stroganoff.”
Splaaat! Pinned. Again.
Wrestling team was my first experience riding in vans with groups of other boys who were all dressed alike. It was extremely exciting. Not surprising, since we were guys, we argued over music in the van, with the usual battle of rock versus disco. Doug Martilla had the boom box, and everyone had a different idea of what constituted proper psych-up music for the match ahead of us. Jose from the Bronx, the first kid I ever saw breakdance in real life, brought salsa tapes to get the testosterone pumping. He was serious, and clearly bound for varsity next year. The kid who brought in Yes was clearly killing time till Frisbee season. One kid always insisted on The Who’s Quadrophenia, which suggests a self-sabotaging sense of doom.
The tape everyone could agree on was the Stones. Jose pointed out the congas in “Sympathy for the Devil,” but Hot Rocks had too many slow songs, so it always ended up being the Maxell C-90 tape with Emotional Rescue on one side and Tattoo You on the other. “She’s So Cold,” that was the jam. Mick Jagger sang like he was a hot girl, so it was odd how perfect he was at psyching us up for a wrestling match. Mick Jagger was a skinny-guy role model for me, at a time when it was not acceptable to be skinny—those were the days of Soloflex Man posters and Nautilus ads. My bone structure would have been an undeniable asset if I’d been a future Eastern European tranny underwear model, yet it was a stigma for a high school boy in that time and place. It was embarrassing to have other people see my shoulders, arms or legs. But in wrestling drag, my body was invisible, because I was in character. All anyone could see was the unitard of valor.
Or at least that’s how I perceived it. Of course, at any match, the other team across the room would see me on the bench, and eagerly check the coach’s clipboard to see which one of them got that kid. I never had to check Mr. Coughlin’s clipboard, because I could always tell the guy who was paired up with me—he was the one sitting on the bench, salivating, twitching his knee because he could barely wait for his turn to get out there. He had that delirious look in his eye. You know in the cartoons when Bugs Bunny gets trapped in the desert, starved for food, so then he looks over at Daffy Duck and sees a mirage where Daffy’s a roast duck rotating on a spit? That look.
To pin me, he had to hold my shoulders down on the mat for three seconds, when the ref would blow his whistle and give the mat that resounding splaaat slap. So that means I was guaranteed to last at least three seconds out there, and I loved the adrenaline of stepping out by myself, no teammates to lean on, the eyes of the crowd on me, maybe a dropped jaw or two, all the bitterly jealous guys on the other side of the room wishing they’d gained or lost a few pounds in time to pair off with me. I loved the squeaky noises of our wrestling shoes on the mat. I was a star, or at least part of the
show, and I walked tall out there. Taking my stand. Defending my . . . splaaat!
On the way home, we bonded. If anyone resented me bringing our team record down, nobody ever mentioned it or made fun of me for it. We’d fought hard that day. Next year, some of us would make varsity; some of us would run around the gym waving a badminton racquet. But tonight, we sang the Stones all the way back to school.
Over two seasons, I lost fourteen matches. I made them earn it—no surrender, no retreat, no permanent spinal damage. I didn’t count how many times I went the distance and lost on points, rather than getting pinned before the match ended, but I know there were a bunch of those. I learned a lot about bringing down an opponent and using his aggressive energy against him, as long as he doesn’t have any muscles. If I ever end up in a bar brawl with a flamingo, I am taking that bastard down.
My wife still does not believe me.
THE HUMAN LEAGUE
“Love Action”
1982
Around ninth grade, my trusty clock radio began playing something weird. First, it went clink-clank. Then it went bloop-bloop. After the wrrrp-wrrrp kicked in, there came a blizzard of squisha-squisha-squisha noises. It sounded like a Morse code transmission from another planet, a world of lust and danger and nonstop erotic cabaret. What was this? It was the twitchy, spastic, brand-new beat of synth-pop. For those of us who were “Kids in America” at the time, it was a totally divisive sound. You either loved it or hated it. My friends and I argued for hours over whether it even counted as rock and roll. I remember hearing a DJ explain that the Human League didn’t have any instruments. No way—not even a drummer? Not even a guitarist? I was shocked.
I rode my bike to the public library and checked out the Human League’s Dare. This album was a brave new world. The sleeve showed close-ups of their mascara eyes and lipstick mouths on a frigid white background. Nobody was smiling. All summer long, I worked mowing lawns, listening to that tape over and over, taking it on the subway ride to driver’s ed. I spent countless hours trying to fathom Phil Oakey’s philosophy of life.
I was moved by “The Sound of the Crowd,” where Phil urged me to “get around town,” to explore the forbidden places “where the people are good, where the music is loud.” I had never been to a place remotely like this. It sounded awesome. The lyrics were a bit obscure, what with all the arcane cosmetics references (“The lines on a compact guide / A hat with alignment worn inside”—huh?), yet I devoured them. If I cracked his code well, I too would grow up to be a Phil Oakey, getting around the world on an existential quest for love action.
There were more where the League came from: Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Heaven 17, Duran Duran, Kim Wilde, my beloved Haysi Fantayzee. We got all the U.K. synth-poppers a year or so after the Brits were through with them, but we were glad to have them. Any arty Brit-twerp with a magenta wedge and octagonal drum pads was a go.
They were to the early ’80s what girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Chiffons were to the early ’60s: queen pimps of teen bathos, pumping up the drums and the mascara to cosmic levels. All these nobodies teased up their hair to fire-hazard levels and dolled themselves up into glitter-encrusted sex cookies. At the touch of a synth button, they turned into the things that dreams were made of.
The concept was New Romantic, which was a slippery term, since nobody ever admitted to being one. Even Duran Duran, who called themselves “New Romantics” in the first verse of their first single, didn’t want to get stuck with a label this silly. New Romantic songs are questing through the world or elsewhere in search of pleasure and danger and beauty. No New Romantic songs were about sitting in your room and staring at the wallpaper, even though (as far as I could tell) that’s probably how most New Romantic followers spent their time.
The New Romantics were a lot like the Old Romantics, the poets I was crazy about in high school—Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Blake—and none of those dead guys ever called themselves “Romantics” either. (Romanticism, like rockabilly or film noir, was a genre that only got its name after it was over.) John Keats declared, “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.” Boy George sang about a “karma chameleon.” Boy George and John Keats would have had a lot to say to each other—they were both poor London boys who dreamed up an extravagant mythology of transforming the world by transforming yourself. It was a sect where you had to commit to constant personal self-reinvention. That oldest of Romantics, William Blake, declared, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” And the New Romantics were most certainly tygers of wrath. They also obviously had a lot more fun than the Romantic poets, whose favorite recreational pastimes seemed to consist of catching tuberculosis, groping leech-gatherers and planting a deceased lover’s head in a pot of basil.
The Human League were the ultimate New Romantics, at least in terms of how we heard them in America, and they won everyone over, crossing over to the pop charts in that incredibly pivotal year of 1982, the year of Thriller and 1999 and “Super Freak” and “I Love Rock N’ Roll” and “I’m So Excited” and “Sexual Healing.” Kiss-108, the disco station, was playing Yaz and the Human League; WCBN, the rock station, was playing Grandmaster Flash and Michael Jackson. The Human League fit right in to a world where the most exciting and adventurous music on the planet seemed to be exactly what was exploding on Top 40 radio. Yet they didn’t lose their New Romantic cred by crossing over—quite the contrary. Their success validated the whole New Romantic credo.
The New Romantic anthem I studied most intently was “Love Action,” where Phil sings, “This is Phil talking! I want to tell you what I’ve found out to be true!” I have to admit, I have loved the Human League passionately for years, and I have never totally figured out what Phil Oakey has found out to be true. But I’ve never stopped delving into the mystery.
I would have loved to have gone to the clubs that Phil was singing about, but I was in Milton, Massachusetts, and the only fan here was me. (Were there other Human League fans in town? How would I know? We weren’t an outgoing bunch.)
I mean, it’s one thing to decide you’re Phil Oakey if you are Phil Oakey and you have that slide of hair down the side and the eyeliner. But it’s pretty silly deciding you’re a New Romantic when you’re stranded in the suburbs mowing lawns, playing video games, translating Virgil and just in general being a miserable little teenage fuck. At a thrift store in Saugus, I paid six dollars for a jacket that I hoped looked like the one Phil Oakey wears in the “Love Action” video, but when I got it home, it looked suspiciously like a shoulder-pad maitre d’ jacket left in the Dumpster behind Mr. Tux. I’m sure the collar was real velvet, though. (Pretty sure. Velvet’s fuzzy, right?)
Wearing this jacket to play Asteroids at the South Shore Plaza did not make me feel like a glamorous man of the world. It made me feel somewhat of a tool. But then, Phil had warned me that suffering was part of this path. And I knew ridicule is nothing to be scared of.
My sisters took me shopping and I came home with pants with pleats, which ended badly. (I blame a certain Scritti Politti video. What can I say? I was more into fashion theory than practice.) Although I worshipped Bowie, Roxy and the dashing New Romantics they left behind in their wake like so many droplets of champagne-flavored sweat, and studied their sartorial elegance, I was doomed to dress more like the harmonica player for the J. Geils Band. But I had the devotion, which was much more important than a genuine wedge haircut.
If I had wanted a wedge haircut, I have no idea how I’d have gotten one. Like everyone else in town, I went to the only barber around, Singin’ Jack in East Milton Square. Jack gave everyone the same haircut, while singing along with the radio’s Continuous Lite Favorites. He was particularly into Jim Croce, and you were lucky to show up for your haircut on a Croce day, because you would get to hear him sing “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” as he snipped. (Kenny Rogers days were unlucky, and if Jack was singing “Ru
by, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” it was best to sneak out before you ended up with a whiffle.) Since Jack was erratic at best, it would be foolhardy to ask him to try anything sideways, or to bring in a Dare tape for inspiration.
It didn’t matter. New wave wasn’t really about the right look; it was a state of mind. Still, shame about those pleats.
Something about this style of pop lent itself to devotion from shut-ins, losers, social twitchers like me. The electro bleeps were whispers from the wider world outside, beckoning us out, like the lights flickering from the stereo. I would watch the red vertical flickers of the EQ and imagine they were skyscrapers of a city just outside my window, a city full of the kind of clubs where the clubsters were getting around town in the sort of clubs Phil Oakey would sing about, and occasionally recruit girl singers from, and dance freely without worrying about startling the nice old lady next door. It was a club you could join just by believing it existed.
In any new-wave fan mag, you could find the lonely-hearts pen-pal section. From the Smash Hits from February 1983, which I’ve always kept because it had Kajagoogoo on the cover:“I’m a 15-year-old girl looking for any Boy George Lookalikes or anyone else interested in Culture Club. If you’re 15+ and dress weird write to Girl George, Essex.”
“Mad, blonde Swedish girl, 17, wants strange friends from London into Bowie, Toyah, Adam til 81, punks and pretty boys. Milla, Sweden.”
“I’m lonely. My name’s Warren, I’m 15 and desperate to hear from any females into Coronation St, Blancmange and Motorhead. My CB handle is Pigpen.”
Still using CB radio in 1983? Poor guy. But these were the fans that flocked to the League. These were my people.
With new wave for inspiration, I took to the stage, playing Duncan in the tenth grade production of Macbeth. (If you’re not familiar with the play, Macbeth kills Duncan to possess his donuts. He ends up having to kill Banquo for a coffee.) The kid who played Macbeth was the son of Franklin Cover, the late great TV actor who played Tom Willis on The Jeffersons, so I can look back on my acting career secure in the knowledge that Tom Willis has seen my Duncan.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 5