Friday, January 10, 2003
I don’t remember the last time a song struck this kind a chord in me. Not that it’s deep or meaningful – the lyrics are as garbled as Louie Louie, and I’m sure it’s horribly overplayed on the radio - but it’s like smelling an old basement, or traces of faded perfume. When I hear it, I’m instantly transported. It’s like a liquid aural swig of riding in a sun-baked Chevy with friends from back in the day. Who needs a time machine with songs like this?
It’s 1981. I’m in Trenton, NJ in the 9th grade, waiting for the school bus on the corner of Greenwood and Norway outside an abandoned Victorian house with twenty other sullen, insecure teens. We’re sitting on the peeling steps, pulling at the weeds growing through the cracks in the porch. We smoke Newports and tell each other stupid dirty jokes - until Pops, the portly old bus driver comes to whisk us away to our future at Hamilton High West. As always back then, I’m worrying about my hair - trying to look cool, making sure my makeup looks just right. I wore black as as often as I could, which isn’t surprising because we were in the Dead Zone…when the Seventies was rotting in its grave, disco momentarily sucked, and the infant Eighties were being born.
Or, It’s 1987. I’m starting my junior year of college at Plattsburgh State – the Dionysian Northern sibling of the State University of New York system. It’s where I attended my fateful open meeting of WPLT Pilot-94, the college radio station – and where I caught both stage fever and a door prize tossed into the crowd: a CD single of Debbie Harry’s Liar Liar. At this stage, CD’s are still hot property, and you could get a bunch of people in the door when you advertised a “CD giveaway”. This is where my fledgling DJ voice first hit a mike: in a few months I became obsessed with creating the “show” – the “Sanity Assassin” (named after an obscure Bauhaus track) and two years later I was “discovered” by local radio personality Ben Everest, Sr. of WEAV 960 AM - leading to my 7-year stint as a radio DJ. This is the era where I met my friends Ryan “Sly” Smith – also a Pilot-94 DJ, Daphne Vogel, Todd Nichols, Beth Stone, Dave White, Ben Cooper, Cindy Brauchler, and others – some have dispersed to the four winds, some I still keep in touch with today. This is also the period when I met my partner Bari for the first time - not knowing we’d get together 10 years hence.
You know, eras can be places, not just times.
Maybe it’s the early Nineties…say, 1993, for the sake of argument. I’m still in Plattsburgh at this point, still at WEAV/WGFB, and I’ve discovered a phenomenal graphic novel (OK, a –comic-, but the term doesn’t do it justice) called Sandman by Neil Gaiman. A friend, Ben, remarked to me at a college party that I looked like the character Death, which was emblazoned on his Sandman Death watch. I could see the resemblance: we both had shaggy hair dyed black, wore black tank tops and had ankh necklaces – a happy-go-lucky Goth look. Mind you, I’d never heard of the comic at this point, so it was strictly bizarre coincidence – but it was enough to get me hooked. We once had a photo session with Ben (an avid photographer) where we dressed as members of the Endless; my friend Daphne was Delirium, Sam was Desire, Todd was Fiddler’s Green (ok, not strictly a member of the Endless, but he would have made a spectacular Destruction) – and I, of course was Death. But a friendly, youthful Death. Wish I had a copy of those pictures.
Like times, or Fiddler’s Green from the Sandman, people can be places, too. So does this prove time and space are one? Neil Gaiman, by the way, has remarked on his weblog that he likes “Last Night” by the Strokes. There are no coincidences.By the way, I still wear black a lot…not just because it looks cool and urbane, but because now I love that it makes me look thinner (at 34, I don’t look like Death. But then, she probably doesn’t, either). But I never wear much makeup anymore - just for the record.
