I'll skip through most of the 80s but the most important thing here is I met several of my life-long best friends, several of my brother's best friends, and even my father's best friends. Matt Everts grew up across the street and his house was the first place I spent the night over at another kid's house, I was scared but Billy Ocean's "Turn the Radio Up" on the clock radio got me through the night. My brother always had Damien Bennet, Robert "Astro" Lawrence, and Nate Bertram over. Dad was always taking us to see "Uncle Rick" who was his friend since junior high back in Osage where they met and promptly learned of "fun and girls" and quit "sports and school" in order to get six-packs of beer thrown out to them outta speeding muscle-cars his older brothers drove around.
There was "Jakester" Jack Mckee and dad's cousin Tom Kleckner - the epitome of rough and tumble "gnarly" working class fun. I heard one night he took the barstool to the liquor-rack at the New Haven bar. Uncle Rick was a hard-working iron worker around Cedar Rapids and took his "union yes" pay and bought a beautiful A-Frame cabin on Lake Delhi where we would spend a lot of weekends. Here I would first listen to the Stones (Ruby Tuesday), Dylan (Knockin' on Heaven's Door), Springsteen (Born to Run), and Tina Turner baby (Simply the Best). They would boat all day and all night and come home from "Freddy's Beach" bar hammered off their asses and blast Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" out of one of those 80s silver boom-boxes. I learned from an early age that life was about partying and I'll never change. I witnessed a lot of drama. I don't blame them for anything, I'll always thank them for everything.
In school I remember the "Kindergarten round-up" where I met the re-incarnation of the archangel Michael - David "Mikey" Bauer... The kid was nuts. Calvin and Hobbes on speed. In our first ever conversation he asked, "does your family have any movies with violence??" We worshipped his dad's VHS HBO bootlegs of Aliens, Predator, Freddy Krueger, Star Wars, and any other B action movie that involved terrorists, hostages, and explosions. We ran around outside with toy guns mowing down imaginary armies. He had some really cool brothers and sisters who made a "ewok village" in their back woods and his brother just started digging a hole to see how far he could dig and we called that "the bomb shelter..." We were "gun-nuts" little action soldiers and we liked the X-Men comic books too.
There was this old glacial rock about a mile into the middle of a corn field we called "the rock" and I consider the zenith of my early childhood the adventures we'd have out there pretending the rock was some fort to conquer or some starship we could ride on. We'd pack little lunches and wander on all afternoon until we came in before dark.
The neighbor kid was half-black and a natural outcast. His name is Ryan Fournier and with Mikey's older brother's help he became a talented cartoon artist. We were the only people who liked him. He was rough and tumble and got into a lotta fights, but he also was an outcast for being one of like two black kids at our little rural elementary school. One day Ryan wanted to test me and without really knowing or hearing of my old phrase "turn the cheek," Ryan started punching me on the playground and I wouldn't budge or be intimidated. He just kept punching and I just stood there taking it until he started balling in his beserker-rage. When I went in after recess I didn't have a mark on my face and Ryan had given several kids black eyes. I didn't tell on him either, I just forgave him then and there. I always could feel how much Ryan trusted me after that. Years would go by and Mikey's family moved to Nebraska which was the saddest moment of my young childhood and I stayed friends with Ryan... I was the only one who would sit with him on the bus home. And I didn't know anything about Rosa Parks either. I liked him because he was imaginative.
Existential quandary hit me from an early age. Before we went to the county fair one night my dad told me a story of him and my Uncle Doug crying when they were kids because they didn't have money to go to the fair. He said someone bummed them a couple bucks and they were really happy. This story shattered my heart that night at the fair because I realized that I never went without anything - my dad always gave me a bunch of money and things and I began to look at what made the difference between rich and poor people and I began to feel sympathy and confusion, and I began to feel bad.
I remember getting home from the fair that night and sitting in my room just staring at the floor completely absorbed in thought. Why was I who I was? Why was it that my father had to go through poverty and I didn't? Why are girls born girls and boys born boys? Looking back now these are all signs of what buddhist literature calls "the mind that seeks the buddha." They all led to my eventual absorption in college with taoist and buddhist literature. I had to solve it all. And later I did, but for the time being I felt great class-anguish. I took on the weight of the world like I took on Bowser in Super Mario Bros.
and uh, I guess "Turn the Radio Up" was by Eric Carmen and not Billy Ocean but here's a good one...
this fluff would play on 105.7 before 105.7 would play it now, retro...
ha. back then it was cutting edge... oh my... a million sunhine sparkles on a million childhood public-pool
summers.
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