Annals of Childhood: My Swinging 70s

I’ve previously written about the Decade of Brown as a cultural phenomenon, and more recently about the Big Kids and their heavy metal lives. The parents are their own story.

My own parents were the identified weirdos in the community. Our family was politically left, pacifist, intellectual, and artistic. And we all had big noses. One friendly neighbor said to my mother over a cup of coffee “Ann, you’re really nice people. But you’re not like the others.” Even in the corduroy 1970s, our corner of Orange County was lily-white, right-wing, know-nothing, and kinda stupid. As registered democrats who didn’t go to church and drove a Volvo, my parents were clearly alien.

The 70s were also the decade of divorce, though. More than half of my friends had split families in elementary school. They’d talk about their weekends with Dad, or how Dad and Mom were fighting about the house or the dog. A lot of them got pretty badly stressed by it. I particularly remember a couple of boys who, after their father left, became very combative and tried to ascend to alpha dog by shoving the other boys and challenging us to fights.

Going to their houses was odd too. You weren’t supposed to mention the dad when the mom was around, and a few of the houses had dad’s den preserved as he’d left it because either removing it or using it was too painful. When the mom said “your father…” to the kid there was ice hanging in the air. Being with a friend at the dad’s house was even weirder. Dad usually lived in a smaller place or in an unconventional kind of housing like the Balboa Bay Club or a boat or some condo tower. He’d be in full weekend dad mode trying to provide entertainment for junior and his friends, which was cool, but there was clearly some panic going on there.

And then there was the sex problem. This was the disco era, and the divorced moms and dads were dating like crazy. I’d be over at someone’s house and realize that the mustachioed, nervous Tom Selleck looking guy this week was different from the last one, and that he wasn’t addressed as a dad but as “Tim” or “mom’s friend”. Tim and mom would stand 5 feet apart when the kids were around, and Tim also had a habit of bringing gifts or candy and smiling in a terrified way at us.

The dads’ girlfriends were disco hoochie mamas mostly, and terrified of children. They’d totter around in heels and short skirts grinning at us and making inane small talk for the minimum possible time before vanishing. They were all very tan and wore lots of jewelry. Sometimes girlfriend and dad would go in a room and close the door and have really loud arguments.

The weirdest part of the divorced households was that the adults would just disappear. Mom or Dad and their life mate du jour would flit off for a precious weekend afternoon together leaving us kids to our own devices. I’m surprised that we didn’t manage to burn down any houses or kill any pets. We did break at least one major appliance that I remember.

Finally, drugs. My own parents were of the pre rock ‘n’ roll generation, and having seen a friend melt his head in very early LSD experimentation, they were anti-drug. Anything more than a glass of wine with dinner was a bad idea in our house. But it was pretty clear that Disco Dad and Saturday Night Mom didn’t live that way. I was fascinated by the sight of “responsible adults” being clearly high, or clumsily trying to hide paraphernalia or pills from us.

I think a lot of my cynicism comes from the huge contrast between the reactionary moral and political attitudes of the adults around me and their own behavior. My parents, the distrusted lefty secular humanist eggheads, had a stable and nurturing family and worked out their problems. And they were sober and didn’t go out on Saturday night and leave me at home with a TV dinner. Meanwhile, the local Elmer Gantrys and Dimmesdales were popping disco biscuits, partner-swapping, and shaking their butts to Peaches & Herb while Junior at home was finding their weed stash.

The Ice Storm was like a documentary about my friends’ families growing up.

Of course, now these conflicted right-wing hedonists are running the country. It explains a lot.

she blinded me with sinus

Made a good dinner. The tomato-based lamb curry again, this time with more fennel and asafoetida. I remembered not to put the yogurt in until the very end, so it didn’t separate and curdle. Also, cashews. Used Lundberg Wild Blend Rice, which is the most awesome blend of rices ever. Cucumber and sweet yellow pepper salad with a dill and black pepper sauce.

Therapy session was mostly about managing sensory overload and emotional swings from the neurofeedback.

Lately I’ve been feeling angry lately about being left out, left behind, rejected. It’s not overpowering but it is pretty constant. That, and the depressive self-hatred. I know that the amped-up bad feelings are a side effect, but that’s sort of like knowing that you’re hallucinating: only partly helpful.

I made a long bet for next year’s medical costs out of pocket and put money into an FSA. Hope that works as well as it should.

late nights and freeway flying always makes me sing

I got an In-N-Out double-double last night and ate it in my car. I had the seat kicked back and the sunroof open, and I was looking straight at the full moon. Mars is still very close, so I could see the Red Planet with an unaided eye right there too.

It doesn’t take much to send me into an astronomical trance. I think about the fact that I’m looking at another planet, and how far away and huge it has to be, just looking up at the moon. When it’s full and looks oversized on a clear night, the moon is just hypnotizing. Mars even more so, since I can look directly at and see an impossibly remote place that maybe, just maybe people might visit someday. I was pleasantly dragged back into sophomoric “oh wow the universe” mode that way and spent a while there.

Years ago I noticed that living in suburban Southern California has a particular depressive effect. When you’re surrounded entirely by man-made things — signs, stores, roads, parks, airplanes, houses, gas stations — the world starts to feel like an extension of the people around you and their attitudes. And here, the man-made world around us is new and cheap and tawdry and already falling apart. It’s a mess of convenience stores sprinkled over beige bedroom communities, strip malls, sterile little parks, drive throughs. The scenery does not inspire. Eventually I get bad theology in my head: the world was built by money-grubbing assholes who didn’t care about their work, and it’s falling apart.

The cure for this is nature. I am a city boy at heart. I don’t much enjoy camping, small-town rural life terrifies me, and I feel naked without a used bookstore and some good coffee down the street. But I like to visit nature. Even an hour staring out into the Pacific Ocean is a decent recharge. But really I need a day in the desert here every few months. When you’re out past 29 Palms with nothing between you and some craggy mountains 30 miles away, and it’s perfectly silent except for creatures you can’t see, there’s no 7-11 to get you down. For me it’s a reminder that the world has its own vastness, its own power, its own logic and function, and that my little world of stoplights and shoe discounters and empty greasy parking lots is small and not representative.

Slumped back in my car seat staring at the moon and Mars last night, I thought “Yeah. It’s time to go there.” Not Mars or the moon (which would be cool also), but the desert. It would be good to shed a layer of suburban grime and doom again.

Then I sat up to get going and fries fell down my pants.

Legends of the Blue Pencil

I used to work for a guy who was the God of Copy Editors.

He was an intense, slightly built man with fine features, a Roman nose, and long flowing brown hair. He wore tailored clothes and carried a man-purse. He spoke precisely with a fairly thick East Coast urban accent. He had been editing copy for 20 years when I met him. I was a young ex-rock-critic demoted to editorial assistant at a medical journal, and not at my peak of maturity, but I learned a lot from him.

He had geek social skills and frequently alienated others because he spoke very directly and did not engage in argument; he was just right. There were no differences of opinion about editing. There was a right way, and a wrong way. When the style guide offered two ways, he had one. His knowledge of all sorts of journalism, book editing, and publishing production was encyclopedic. We used to joke that he should be placed in a four-sided cubicle prison and have worked dropped in the top that he would slide out the bottom to avoid interpersonal conflict.

He remained a friend after I left that job. Years later, he took another technical editing job where he reported to an editor-in-chief who did not enjoy his brusque way with small editing disagreements. He would just say “You’re wrong. This is the way to do it.” Increasingly, she felt her authority was being undermined, and although he was undeniably talented and experienced, she was after all the boss.

One day he corrected her in his usual charming way on some small, abstruse bit of style. I think it was a type size, or whether a caption should be in italics. She finally lost her cool. “Goddamnit!” she yelled “I’m sick of you telling me all the time what to do without any reference. I’m the editor-in-chief here, and you’re not in charge. If you’re going to reverse everything I do you have to cite an accepted style guide for this or I’m not going to change a single thing!”

Without any pause and without looking up from his desk, he said: “Words Into Type, page 169. The footnote.”

She walked over to the bookcase, pulled out Words Into Type, and paged a bit. There was a long pause. With a snort she slammed the book back into the shelf and walked out for a long lunch.

He was right. After that, she didn’t yell at him any more.

I miss that guy.

it’s just the motion

Had a good dinner with A, sushi and catching up. As usual she’s pursuing two careers at once and, and this time she was was down here taking fitness instructor classes. Apparently to become a fitness instructor you go through fitness classes with extra yelling, as far as I can tell.

The yellowtail and toro at Sushi Wave were really good.

Jeremy Ed showed us his small, red, wrinkly new infant. The hat was larger than the baby.

I made the mistake of blathering about my problems and made people uncomfortable. Oops. I felt disapproved of and shut up.

Stopped by Tower on the way home and got some discount crap. I’ll only buy CDs if they’re cheapass on sale. Got an odd import Marianne Faithful folk record I’d never heard of for $10, coupla greatest hits records for $8, Dresden Dolls for $10.

I don’t feel lately like I have anyone in my corner. Like, if I do “get better” I should leave town. It’s not how I want to feel, and I’m not sure what’s up with it. My view of other people is blurry and dark, and I don’t know who likes me and who’s sick of me. Nor do I know really how to be a friend to half the people I know and like. Lately I always seem to be doing or saying the wrong thing. It’s the social equivalent of motion sickness.

Something that has not changed since last night is that Balvenie Port Wood 21yo is still really smooth and lovely stuff.

The Big Kids

I grew up in Southern California suburbia in the 1970s. It was an ideal place to be a kid. I was sheltered from the worst of life but not insulated from reality. There was always something to do, and the weather was always good. I had good schools to go to. And the neighborhood was full of kids, so I always had someone to play with when I ran out the door to find adventure. We had glorious dirt clod wars, made bombs, created entire Tonka truck empires, dug pits, and everything else that was fun.

Like most little kids, I was fascinated by the big kids. Starting at about seven or eight years older than me, they were gods of suburbia: large, loud, rough, authoritative, and frightening. They had long hair, and the older ones rode dirt bikes. They listened to crazy heavy metal music. They knew all the bad words, always had fireworks, wore cool surf clothes, and were big and tan and imposing.

The most impressive part about the Big Kids was that they were all apparently insane. For example, they’d get up on the roof of someone’s house with the heavy metal music blasting and scream at the sky repeatedly. In the middle of the night they would ride their dirt bikes up and down the street in nothing but swim shorts, also screaming at the sky. One time, some of the Big Kids stole another little kid’s bike and leaned it against the tree in front of their house. When he showed up to get it, they shot him a bunch of times with a BB Gun from their window while he sobbed and writhed and ran. I watched from my own window across the street, fascinated and terrified.

The death rate for Big Kids amazed me. The next door neighbors lost two of them, the family three doors down lost one, and I can remember three more just from our street during my childhood. Two others ended up permanently and severely handicapped.

The society of Big Kids was very masculine. The Big Kid girls were mousy and wide-eyed, long hair parted in the center. They were nice to me but totally alien in their teenage world. I remember one girl in particular who had an entirely purple bedroom: carpet, bedspread, walls, even a fuzzy purple toilet seat cover. I was at their house with my parents once staring in awe at her purple den. One of the Big Girls died too.

Not all of them were rough tough crazies. Two of the Big Kids I remember mostly for their cars. One was a paraplegic older brother of a friend’s. He had a ’60s Mustang California Special modified with hand controls that was the coolest thing ever, and he gave me a ride in it so I could see how it worked. Another guy had a VW bug full of CBC radio equipment and drove around talking to people in the bug, which I found ultimately awesome. And three identical tow-headed surfer boys down the street were in a locally famous rock band, and I got to watch them practice in their garage. They were rock gods, and one of them had a Van Halen sticker on his VW squareback.

The Big Kids’ music was dark and scary and fascinating itself. I remember looking at the window display in a Licorice Pizza record store for Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune, all weird imagery and craziness, and wondering what it was all about. The screaming sex noises of Led Zeppelin and Van Halen confused and attracted me. To this day my reaction to 70s heavy metal and hard rock is a flashback to those kids with their long hair and work shirts and corduroy pants with the comb stuck in back, howling along to Alice Cooper or something.

Since I was a sheltered little kid, I was unaware of what bound together the big kid craziness, the screaming on rooftops, the shirtless midnight motorcycle rides, the caterwauling music, and the deaths. They were of course all high on hard drugs, mostly heroin and hallucinogens, and drunk. All the time. Of the two kids next door, one died in a DUI motorcycle crash and the other OD’d on heroin and died in the snow in the mountains. The kid at the end of the street flipped his VW fastback on the S-curves under the influence. The girl who died had mixed her heroin wrong that day. Of the Big Kids who died on my street, only one that I remember didn’t die from drink or drugs; he got cancer. All of these things I found out years later.

Looking back on it, those kids were generationally doomed. They were all born within a couple of years of 1960 probably, and hit their adolescence just when the 1970s drugs ‘n’ sex culture was at full blast. At 14 it’s not easy to handle free-flowing hard drugs, no-consequences sex, and pop culture that celebrates total hedonism. Like me, they felt safe and insulated in suburbia. But they’d let in an assortment of incubi and succubi they couldn’t resist.

Victoria Williams wrote a great song for them, because she was one of the Big Kids. It’s called “Summer of Drugs”. When I hear that song I think about those stoner surfer kids shooting up and blasting their 70s rock, and dying.

We were too young to be hippies
We missed out on the love
Born to be teens in the late 70s
In the summer of drugs…

Suck City Slurpers

While installing mom’s new Mac today I tripped the power the computers are plugged into. When it all came back up I had no Internet connection. Two sets of cables, a new switch, two new network cards, three calls to the ISP, and four hours later I was out $70 and still no connection. Tomorrow I’m buying a new DSL modem in hopes that will fix it. After that I dunno. I do this for a living and this one has me stumped.

After that experience I am exhausted, deflated, and depressed. I am supposed to go to a Halloween thing tonight but I have no interest in dressing up and people will probably give me shit if I don’t, so maybe I’ll just go home and read.

D’s is full of ethereally beautiful women and their grunting, brutish boyfriends. It’s like a Popeye cartoon tonight.

None of us want fruit rollups now, ever

The day was a usual work day, which lately means trying to find out what’s going on mostly, or what I should be doing. This is less fun than actual work, but unfortunately it’s just as important.

I had an unexpected nap at 5 or so and didn’t wake up until 7:30. Groggle groggle. Staggered into the shower and out the door. Saw people at D’s. They had some dead guy playing classic rock as usual. Further performances by any artist of James Taylor or Cat Stevens songs may result in over-the-top violence of the kind seen only in imported Japanese DVDs. You have been warned.

It was good to introduce djfntstque to some more people, so he can see the freak show that is the patio.

Just in time I remembered not to go to Ruba and feel left out and old and ugly and pathetic, and instead went for a drive to clear my head and then home. Tamales + margaritas = pleasure.

I want to get lost in something and come out a year from now.

brains

Fourth neurofeedback session. I didn’t do too well on the left side. This may be at least partly because I had to deal with sociopathic drivers on the way, including Mr. Gridlock who kept me from doing a left on Newport from 19th. I did have the great pleasure of seeing the Angel of the Lord in the person of the Costa Mesa PD catch him doing this and pull him over.

The right side went a lot better, and she seemed to think I was “looking good” in terms of various sine waves I don’t understand well. It’s pretty exhausting work, although it doesn’t seem so at the time. Afterwards I need to be a zombie for a while, so I go to D’s. I could go to Alta which is right across the street, but I don’t.

At D’s post phrenology. Sitting next to A. at the bar, who is sitting next to a talkative hottie. I assume he’s warming up to give her the pitch, although she’s mentioned her boyfriend three times.

She’s a charming and intelligent egotist. I think I’m getting better at filtering egotists even when they’re cute, because after going back and forth with her a few times I decided not to keep going with the conversation; there’s no win here.

Pier Paolo Fettucine

I made dinner tonight consisting of: seared New England jumbo scallops; tricolor rotini pasta with fresh garlic and olive oil; and fresh green beans with butter and fines herbes. I do like to cook a good meal.

Went to D’s and Ruba in turn. I’m trying to get used to Movie Guy Dan’s way of telling a story which is in fits and starts with lots of digressions that go nowhere, and fragmented narrative that’s always getting derailed. Plus twitches. He’s just enough older than me that his “back in the day” stories are all about the big kids who were cool that I couldn’t hang out with, so I’m always hungry for the tale. But damn, it’s a frustrating conversational style.

Ruba was the usual trance-inducing mess. Fifteen-year-old rebel teenagers, twentyish blown-sideways-through-life people playing pool and smoking with “what the fuck happened” looks on their faces, and a rotating cast of alarming old men. The guy I call “Super-Catholic” was there. He’s a sixtyish guy with close-trimmed grey hair who wears Mr. Rogers cardigans and sensible shoes. The one time I overheard his conversation at D’s he was trying to get some college guys excited about the Catholic Church in a very Reach Out To The Generations With Youth Group Training way. He alarms me.

The pool playing and the weird lighting and the excess caffeine and the general Ruba atmosphere put me into a trance state in which I watched a rogues gallery play pool to an increasingly peculiar soundtrack: Billy Squier’s “In the Dark”, Van Hagar, Lionel Richie’s “Stuck On You” (worst song ever), and a long painful set of Easy Rockin’ Hits concluding with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. All for the benefit of the manager, a perky Middle Eastern lady in her late fifties. The kids weren’t impressed. I was pretty shocked when that awful Hungry Eyes song from “Dirty Dancing” came on. It’s like she was trying to clear the joint with music that I found painfully unhip twenty years ago.

I like watching people play pool. The rhythm of it, and trying to predict the shots, and watching them try to predict the shots, all of it. I like Ruba generally, because I’m such a complete outsider there that I don’t feel left out. I can just watch the circus go by in awe. Rich suburban boys with tough-guy neck tattoos, part-time porn stars, defrocked college athletes, half-reformed skinheads, dorkwad normals huffing on hookahs, teenaged girls trying to look older and more sophisticated, and every kind of almost-loser Orange County has to offer. There’s nothing like it.