An Open Letter For A Friend: On Your Birthday in 1979 I Was.....
April 3, 1979, you say? Of course I remember that week. That's a week I've been dealing with now for about 4 1/2 damn years. It's the week following the fricking Three Mile Island nuclear accident, of which I'm now writing and rewriting and rewriting that damned screenplay. Curses to you!
The China Syndrome was out, and I spent every night during those two weeks watching Walter Cronkite. It was scary times. (And not just because The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were huge hits, nor Three's Company.) By your birth day, the worst was over at Three Mile Island, but not for the imagination. The terror had just begun in our minds.
The top 10 for March 31, 1979 according to Billboard:
1. Tragedy - Bee Gees
2. I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
3. What A Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
4. Heaven Knows - Donna Summer and Brooklyn Dreams
5. Shake Your Groove Thing - Peaches & Herb
6. Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits
7. Do You Think I'm Sexy - Rod Stewart
8. Knock On Wood - Amii Stewart
9. What You Won't Do For Love - Bobby Caldwell
10. Don't Cry Out Loud - Melissa Manchester
It's funny. When you said the date, even though I'm dealing with that screenplay, I didn't think of it. Not until I looked in my Billboard Hot 100 book and saw that rather ironic pair of top 2 hits for the week that we thought the world (or at least the eastern seaboard) was going to end. What was I doing about that time?
Well, I was probably playing the 12" version of Do You Think I'm Sexy and the singles for Tragedy, Knock On Wood, and I Will Survive over and over and over and over again in my (secretly gayass) bedroom, although the only song in that list above that I would admit to liking was Sultans of Swing. I was probably grooving mostly to their FM radio hit "Lady Writer."
But the song I was probably most loving was one that was coming up the charts (#15 that week), Blondie's Heart of Glass. My sister HATED Blondie. Said she was a bitch. I'm like, "I know, right?"
Another song on the charts was Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills (#18!). I bought that for my mother later that summer for her birthday. The Logical Song by Supertramp was #76 in its second week on the charts, so I'm sure I was anxiously waiting for that to get played on the radio. The Village People's YMCA was moving down the charts, while their In The Navy was moving up. I remember my older brother had NO IDEA they were gay. (I later met several friends of his down in Milwaukee that he also had NO IDEA were gay.)
Anyway, Chic's Le Freak was moving down, I Want Your Love was moving up. Their Good Times was still to come.
When you were about two months old I escaped to Milwaukee and stayed with my oldest sister most of the rest of that summer. There I could embrace my love for Disco, listening to the all Disco station Disco 99! I was wearing platform shoes and colorful silk shirts. My hair was feathered. I wore chains and.... Oh, I'm going to stop embarrassing myself now.
But in April I was still trapped in Marlboro country, and had to pretend to love Bad Company. I could get by admitting to loving The Police's Roxanne and The Cars Good Times Roll. But nobody could dare know I was grooving to Leif Garrett's I Was Made For Dancing, or sneaking peeks at him posing sexily in teeny bop magazines while checking out car magazines at the local drug store. Nobody, you hear?
But down in Milwaukee later that summer, my sister had a book that featured people writing about their deepest sexual fantasies. I went through it and found all the gay guys and read their fantasies over and over again. Outside her apartment the prostitutes worked their trade, and I knew them all. Donna Summers had two hits that summer that I'll always associate with them: Hot Stuff and Bad Girls. We used to turn off all our lights on the nights that the cops set up sting operations in the parking lot below. We'd each take a window. My nephew in his bedroom, my sister in the kitchen, and me in the dining room next to the organ on which I learned to play Neil Diamond's I Am I Said, and beneath the two little canaries that would sing along as I played.
I remember feeling terrible heartbreak when they busted a big fat Lesbian. The men, we didn't mind that so much. But she just broke my heart as they were handcuffing her and taking her away.
But back at my parents' home and back to when you were born, I had a dog named Ben and my bedroom was A-frame shaped. I had read The Amityville Horror that past winter and scared the shit out of myself every time I went up the stairs. In April, I was writing short stories, trying to recreate the scary magic of that book. I was reading a lot of Stephen King short stories, including one about a hostage situation at a high school. And Trucks.
Far later that summer, after I returned from Milwaukee, after I put away my platform shoes, my silk shirts, and my burgeoning love for men, a friend of mine jumped off a dam while swimming at the North Wood County Park, hit his head on a rock, and drowned. I heard about it on the 10 o'clock news, probably Channel 7 from Wausau, ran out of the house and pounded my fist on the wall on my way out. My Dad yelled, "Hey!" from the living room. My mother followed me out a few minutes later and spoke with me, and then my sister came out and we talked for a while, swatting away the mosquitoes. (I had a tee shirt that year with a huge picture of a mosquito on it and the phrase, "Wisconsin State Bird.")
School was about to start up. My Junior year, which I would not complete. By then Blondie's One Way Or Another had already dropped out of the top 40, and my sister still hated Debbie Harry. "She's still a bitch." I was still in total agreement about that, although I saw it as a good thing. By then Dire Straits "Lady Writer" was moving up the charts, having crossed over from being an "FM hit," and by then DJs everywhere were all abuzz over the "new Beatles." The Knack's My Sharona was number one for six weeks. We were sure a new day had dawned.
M's Pop Muzik was the real dawning of a new day, though, and by the time you were six months old it had hit the top ten. A year and a half after that, when I was seventeen and hitting my first gay bars, I would play that song on the jukebox at C'est La Vie. My Sharona, not so much. But by the time My Sharona fell out of the top 40, as Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was ascending, I was working all night at the Ocean Spray cranberry plant, and I had dropped out of school. I would go to a bar that let me in on the one night I had off, play pool, and drink beer. I distinctly recall hearing Kenny Rogers' Coward of the County on the radio that very fall.
But back when you were born, I was still a beekeeper. That following winter I lost two hives during a January thaw. They just flew away. The next spring (1980), the last hive survived a flood in which I got my Plymouth Valiant (1962, a slant 6, with rusting floor boards, and with a push button transmission) trapped in the water on the road during a flood, I was rescued by boat. They took me to check the last hive, and it was okay, high on a hill. But that one took flight a few weeks later. But when you were being born, I was probably starting to expand those three hives, going out early in the morning before I'd go to school, smoking the hive, adding a box to the tops of each hive, filled with hope that this year the honey would double over last year. (It did. 1979 was a good year for my beehives. Although some time that year I was stung over a hundred times on a particularly hot and terrible year.)
When you were born, I was probably gearing up for my driver's test. I know I took the test soon after my birthday, and soon after that bought a green Dodge Dart. I think it was a 1973 model. It had a slant 6 engine (as my later cars would), and I had to replace the starter constantly. I kept having to start the car by touching two spots on the starter with a wrench. A few years later I bought a blue 1974 Dodge Dart, but I loved the green one best. It's floor boards rusted out beneath my feet (as my later cars would, too), so I laid steel plates down there and covered them with floor mats. But not right away.
One of the first things I did in the green Dodge Dart was to drive past the cranberry bogs between Babcock and Wisconsin Rapids and I saw John Carpenter's The Fog at a drive in with some friends. We were drinking a six pack of beer on our way back, when I was stopped by cops. I remember we debated sticking the beers down on the road beneath us through the rusty floorboards because my friend claimed that if it was out there, "They couldn't prove it was in the car!" We managed to hide them inside the car, and hide the smell, too. A back brake light was out. I got off with a verbal warning when I told them my father was a mechanic and we could "fix it in a jiffy." (The Richie Cunningham routine worked then with the cops.)
That fall I let my friends Mark and Cathy make out in that Dodge Dart near my house. I snuck through the woods with a chainsaw, because the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, after all, based on events that happened in Wisconsin (or so we were told), and I let it rip, destroying their sweet sixteen conjugal bliss. Served them right, the heterosexuals! (While I pretended for a while to love Cathy, I think in retrospect it's pretty clear that I had stronger feelings for Mark. A few years later, after I'd lived in Milwaukee a few years, I came back and came out to Cathy. She said she had guessed it when I wouldn't grab her tits one time. In retrospect, that was probably a strong clue to me, too.)
On my birthday that year, while you were still in swaddling clothing, I woke up in the yard outside a friend's house because we had a party and I got mighty drunk.
Truth be told? I was miserable when you were born. I realize that this may be surprising, since I'm such a chipper sort now. But that was the last full year I attended school. I was doing drugs, drinking, hiding my homosexuality from everyone. I had spent the previous year or so trying to turn straight while listening to Pink Floyd's Animals, convinced that during the part where they sing about being "dragged .... down.... by ..... the..... stone...." I would go deeply into myself far enough to change my sexuality and come up straight. I was stoned of course when I did this, and I also thought maybe I'd meet the devil while I was being dragged down by that stone and perhaps I could make a deal with him and come back up liking pussy. Didn't happen that way, of course.
I was reading Carlos Casteneda's don Juan books that year. All of them. Thought that could help me become straight, too.
I had two giant peacock feathers in my room, along with a bunch of blacklight posters of tigers and eagles and far away other-worldly landscapes.
My friends thought it was cool that year to burn their arms with pot pipe bowls. "Bowl burns." I managed to escape my teens without succumbing to that stupid ritual.
I ran away several times in the next year, eventually leaving home for good at seventeen. So thanks a lot. I'm sure it's all your fault. The peacock feathers, the misery. Pain that couldn't even be cured on Fantasy Island.
However, I held all that pain inside. You know why?
Because I knew: You Don't Cry Out Loud!
The China Syndrome was out, and I spent every night during those two weeks watching Walter Cronkite. It was scary times. (And not just because The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were huge hits, nor Three's Company.) By your birth day, the worst was over at Three Mile Island, but not for the imagination. The terror had just begun in our minds.
The top 10 for March 31, 1979 according to Billboard:
1. Tragedy - Bee Gees
2. I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
3. What A Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
4. Heaven Knows - Donna Summer and Brooklyn Dreams
5. Shake Your Groove Thing - Peaches & Herb
6. Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits
7. Do You Think I'm Sexy - Rod Stewart
8. Knock On Wood - Amii Stewart
9. What You Won't Do For Love - Bobby Caldwell
10. Don't Cry Out Loud - Melissa Manchester
It's funny. When you said the date, even though I'm dealing with that screenplay, I didn't think of it. Not until I looked in my Billboard Hot 100 book and saw that rather ironic pair of top 2 hits for the week that we thought the world (or at least the eastern seaboard) was going to end. What was I doing about that time?
Well, I was probably playing the 12" version of Do You Think I'm Sexy and the singles for Tragedy, Knock On Wood, and I Will Survive over and over and over and over again in my (secretly gayass) bedroom, although the only song in that list above that I would admit to liking was Sultans of Swing. I was probably grooving mostly to their FM radio hit "Lady Writer."
But the song I was probably most loving was one that was coming up the charts (#15 that week), Blondie's Heart of Glass. My sister HATED Blondie. Said she was a bitch. I'm like, "I know, right?"
Another song on the charts was Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills (#18!). I bought that for my mother later that summer for her birthday. The Logical Song by Supertramp was #76 in its second week on the charts, so I'm sure I was anxiously waiting for that to get played on the radio. The Village People's YMCA was moving down the charts, while their In The Navy was moving up. I remember my older brother had NO IDEA they were gay. (I later met several friends of his down in Milwaukee that he also had NO IDEA were gay.)
Anyway, Chic's Le Freak was moving down, I Want Your Love was moving up. Their Good Times was still to come.
When you were about two months old I escaped to Milwaukee and stayed with my oldest sister most of the rest of that summer. There I could embrace my love for Disco, listening to the all Disco station Disco 99! I was wearing platform shoes and colorful silk shirts. My hair was feathered. I wore chains and.... Oh, I'm going to stop embarrassing myself now.
But in April I was still trapped in Marlboro country, and had to pretend to love Bad Company. I could get by admitting to loving The Police's Roxanne and The Cars Good Times Roll. But nobody could dare know I was grooving to Leif Garrett's I Was Made For Dancing, or sneaking peeks at him posing sexily in teeny bop magazines while checking out car magazines at the local drug store. Nobody, you hear?
But down in Milwaukee later that summer, my sister had a book that featured people writing about their deepest sexual fantasies. I went through it and found all the gay guys and read their fantasies over and over again. Outside her apartment the prostitutes worked their trade, and I knew them all. Donna Summers had two hits that summer that I'll always associate with them: Hot Stuff and Bad Girls. We used to turn off all our lights on the nights that the cops set up sting operations in the parking lot below. We'd each take a window. My nephew in his bedroom, my sister in the kitchen, and me in the dining room next to the organ on which I learned to play Neil Diamond's I Am I Said, and beneath the two little canaries that would sing along as I played.
I remember feeling terrible heartbreak when they busted a big fat Lesbian. The men, we didn't mind that so much. But she just broke my heart as they were handcuffing her and taking her away.
But back at my parents' home and back to when you were born, I had a dog named Ben and my bedroom was A-frame shaped. I had read The Amityville Horror that past winter and scared the shit out of myself every time I went up the stairs. In April, I was writing short stories, trying to recreate the scary magic of that book. I was reading a lot of Stephen King short stories, including one about a hostage situation at a high school. And Trucks.
Far later that summer, after I returned from Milwaukee, after I put away my platform shoes, my silk shirts, and my burgeoning love for men, a friend of mine jumped off a dam while swimming at the North Wood County Park, hit his head on a rock, and drowned. I heard about it on the 10 o'clock news, probably Channel 7 from Wausau, ran out of the house and pounded my fist on the wall on my way out. My Dad yelled, "Hey!" from the living room. My mother followed me out a few minutes later and spoke with me, and then my sister came out and we talked for a while, swatting away the mosquitoes. (I had a tee shirt that year with a huge picture of a mosquito on it and the phrase, "Wisconsin State Bird.")
School was about to start up. My Junior year, which I would not complete. By then Blondie's One Way Or Another had already dropped out of the top 40, and my sister still hated Debbie Harry. "She's still a bitch." I was still in total agreement about that, although I saw it as a good thing. By then Dire Straits "Lady Writer" was moving up the charts, having crossed over from being an "FM hit," and by then DJs everywhere were all abuzz over the "new Beatles." The Knack's My Sharona was number one for six weeks. We were sure a new day had dawned.
M's Pop Muzik was the real dawning of a new day, though, and by the time you were six months old it had hit the top ten. A year and a half after that, when I was seventeen and hitting my first gay bars, I would play that song on the jukebox at C'est La Vie. My Sharona, not so much. But by the time My Sharona fell out of the top 40, as Fleetwood Mac's Tusk was ascending, I was working all night at the Ocean Spray cranberry plant, and I had dropped out of school. I would go to a bar that let me in on the one night I had off, play pool, and drink beer. I distinctly recall hearing Kenny Rogers' Coward of the County on the radio that very fall.
But back when you were born, I was still a beekeeper. That following winter I lost two hives during a January thaw. They just flew away. The next spring (1980), the last hive survived a flood in which I got my Plymouth Valiant (1962, a slant 6, with rusting floor boards, and with a push button transmission) trapped in the water on the road during a flood, I was rescued by boat. They took me to check the last hive, and it was okay, high on a hill. But that one took flight a few weeks later. But when you were being born, I was probably starting to expand those three hives, going out early in the morning before I'd go to school, smoking the hive, adding a box to the tops of each hive, filled with hope that this year the honey would double over last year. (It did. 1979 was a good year for my beehives. Although some time that year I was stung over a hundred times on a particularly hot and terrible year.)
When you were born, I was probably gearing up for my driver's test. I know I took the test soon after my birthday, and soon after that bought a green Dodge Dart. I think it was a 1973 model. It had a slant 6 engine (as my later cars would), and I had to replace the starter constantly. I kept having to start the car by touching two spots on the starter with a wrench. A few years later I bought a blue 1974 Dodge Dart, but I loved the green one best. It's floor boards rusted out beneath my feet (as my later cars would, too), so I laid steel plates down there and covered them with floor mats. But not right away.
One of the first things I did in the green Dodge Dart was to drive past the cranberry bogs between Babcock and Wisconsin Rapids and I saw John Carpenter's The Fog at a drive in with some friends. We were drinking a six pack of beer on our way back, when I was stopped by cops. I remember we debated sticking the beers down on the road beneath us through the rusty floorboards because my friend claimed that if it was out there, "They couldn't prove it was in the car!" We managed to hide them inside the car, and hide the smell, too. A back brake light was out. I got off with a verbal warning when I told them my father was a mechanic and we could "fix it in a jiffy." (The Richie Cunningham routine worked then with the cops.)
That fall I let my friends Mark and Cathy make out in that Dodge Dart near my house. I snuck through the woods with a chainsaw, because the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, after all, based on events that happened in Wisconsin (or so we were told), and I let it rip, destroying their sweet sixteen conjugal bliss. Served them right, the heterosexuals! (While I pretended for a while to love Cathy, I think in retrospect it's pretty clear that I had stronger feelings for Mark. A few years later, after I'd lived in Milwaukee a few years, I came back and came out to Cathy. She said she had guessed it when I wouldn't grab her tits one time. In retrospect, that was probably a strong clue to me, too.)
On my birthday that year, while you were still in swaddling clothing, I woke up in the yard outside a friend's house because we had a party and I got mighty drunk.
Truth be told? I was miserable when you were born. I realize that this may be surprising, since I'm such a chipper sort now. But that was the last full year I attended school. I was doing drugs, drinking, hiding my homosexuality from everyone. I had spent the previous year or so trying to turn straight while listening to Pink Floyd's Animals, convinced that during the part where they sing about being "dragged .... down.... by ..... the..... stone...." I would go deeply into myself far enough to change my sexuality and come up straight. I was stoned of course when I did this, and I also thought maybe I'd meet the devil while I was being dragged down by that stone and perhaps I could make a deal with him and come back up liking pussy. Didn't happen that way, of course.
I was reading Carlos Casteneda's don Juan books that year. All of them. Thought that could help me become straight, too.
I had two giant peacock feathers in my room, along with a bunch of blacklight posters of tigers and eagles and far away other-worldly landscapes.
My friends thought it was cool that year to burn their arms with pot pipe bowls. "Bowl burns." I managed to escape my teens without succumbing to that stupid ritual.
I ran away several times in the next year, eventually leaving home for good at seventeen. So thanks a lot. I'm sure it's all your fault. The peacock feathers, the misery. Pain that couldn't even be cured on Fantasy Island.
However, I held all that pain inside. You know why?
Because I knew: You Don't Cry Out Loud!