Outcasts in Scoutland

I’m just finishing up the memoir by Damien Echols, one of the infamous West Memphis Three, who were placed in Arkansas jails for nearly two decades (Echols on death row) for the murder of three small boys in 1993 in a patch of woods in West Memphis (Robin Hood Hills), but were recently released under an Alford Plea that, as the Wiki page notes, “allows them to assert their innocence while acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict them.”

Strange stuff, and a strange ending to a troubling case.  This is the end of it, unless someone comes forward with either a blockbuster confession or fresh evidence.  Echols isn’t a bad writer, although he leans into purplish prose too often for my tastes.  His wild abuse of the word “magick” (he spells it that way) is something that should have been reined in by his editor – the word appears every other page.  It’s like reading a treatise from a private-school rebel who insists on using the word “America” constantly and spelling it with a “k.”

The pain of it for me is … I think he and his friends might be guilty.  “Might” is the key word there.  Thank God I didn’t have to sit on a jury for this case, because it’s one of those cases with a ton of circumstantial evidence, some physical evidence (but no smoking guns) and both direct and secondary confessions that can all be interpreted in any number of ways.  I touched on this case briefly in another post a few years ago.  You could tell at that point I had watched the documentaries and read one of the books on the case, all of which are stacked decks leaning far towards the not-guilty side.

The few hours of research I’ve done in the past few weeks while reading the Echols book have been illuminating.  I hadn’t known there was so much evidence available regarding the case.  The  Callahan site is a mother lode of material: evidence, testimonies, confessions, etc.  It would take weeks to wade through the whole site, and hats off to whoever compiled that mountain of material.

Why do I lean towards the guilty side now?  Well, I’d recommend that if you have any experience living in a small town, you should think about your small town and how this case would have happened there.  My hometown in Pennsylvania was and is surrounded by woods.  When we were growing up, we had a place on the edge of town called Scoutland that was a few acres of trails and cabins that must have been used as a camping site in previous decades.  By the time we got there in the late 60s and 70s, the cabins were still there, but no longer used.

We loved Scoutland.  If you were a kid, and you had a bike (meaning every kid in town), you went to Scoutland and spent a lot of time there, especially in summer.  Kids were there all day in summer, riding bikes through the woods, playing army or cowboys-and-indians, hiking, or just hanging out.  It was also a popular place for mini-bikes – these days, you would find four-wheelers.  Many kids probably had awkward first kisses and sexual encounters in those woods.  I think someone bought that property a few years back, so it’s probably no longer open to the public.  I’m not even sure how it was open to us back then, but it surely was.

And all I can think now is, Jesus Christ, the horrible shit that could have gone on there.  We were completely separated from the outside world.  Had we screamed, people in the few homes near the edge of Scoutland could have heard this, but probably would have assumed it was just kids messing around.  If anything strange, violent and/or sexual happened there, we would have had to deal with it on our own as children.  I recall once, sitting by a stream, just talking to myself and day-dreaming, when I suddenly heard a voice in the bushes nearby mimic what I had just said and snicker.  I was sure it was one of the older kids from town, probably out there getting stoned with one of his friends, but I pretended not to hear it, got on my bike and left as fast as I could, because I realized I was being watched, and being watched by someone I knew was a scumbag.

The same thing that happened to those kids could have easily happened to any of us there.  But ask yourself.  Who hangs out in the woods?  I can answer that easily: other kids.  Kids on bicycles.  Kids playing in the woods, because they present another world from the rural/suburban one with parents.  Kids with BB guns, shooting at birds and squirrels.  And not just those relatively innocent 8-12 year-old-kids.  Kids who are too young to drive, or old enough to drive but can’t afford to have cars.  When you get past that certain age of innocence, kids who are up to no good.  Getting high.  Drinking.  Hanging out in the woods because they feel dislocated and strange.  The woods are cool because it lets them escape from a world they see as complete bullshit.

I rarely saw adults in Scoutland, and if I did, they were there as part of some Boy Scout or fresh-air program.  Adults just didn’t go there of their own free volition.  You went there if you were a kid.  I don’t doubt Robin Hood Hills held the same allure for kids who live in West Memphis.  It was put forth that the three kids who were killed had some type of tree house or fort they were frequenting in that area.  It would make sense that they’d go there after school on a nice day in May and hang out.

It’s been put forth by some people that the crime scene at Robin Hood Hills was only a drop-off point for the already-murdered children … but two of the boys essentially drowned in the small creek there.  They were found with water in their lungs, i.e., still alive after they were bludgeoned, then hog-tied with shoelaces and not just thrown in the creek, but tied to sticks stuck in the creek bed with their own clothes so their bodies would stay submerged.  Meaning whoever killed them, killed them right there. 

Besides, think about it.  The boys were seen in the vicinity of those woods just before all this happened.  They were clearly headed there on their own.  Someone is going to go to the trouble of abducting them from those woods, taking them in a car or van, killing them somewhere else, and then bringing them back to dump them in the same place where they were last seen?  No.  We’re talking rural Arkansas.  This was a patch of woods on the edge of a town by an interstate.  If someone who saw those boys go into the woods transported them somewhere else and killed them, I’d wager that there were a few thousand better places to dump the bodies than a patch of woods on the edge of town by an interstate.  If it’s anything like Pennsylvania (and it is), there are places you can drive to for miles, dump a body, and the body may not be found for weeks or months, if ever.

So, I’m thinking whoever killed them, killed them right there in those woods, and had no way of transporting them out those woods.  It’s been put forth separately that two of their step-fathers were possible suspects.  Mind you, not acting together.  Three kids were killed.  I’m assuming one adult will not be able to kill three kids.  At least one of those kids could have broken free and run away when he saw what was happening.  This also rules out the possibility of a vagrant performing the murders.  There had to be more than one person present.  Either step-father acting on his own … forget about why on earth either of these men would want to murder his own son and two other boys … I’m not seeing how either could accomplish this on his own.  Or why.

There had to be more than one person involved.  I’m not sure of the alibis of the step-fathers, but they were apparently good enough for the police not to consider them suspects for long.  Whereas the three teenagers convicted had alibis that didn’t hold up in court.  Two of them tested positive for deception in polygraphs.  One of them, Echols, was seen walking near the woods later that night in muddy clothes.  One of them confessed to the killings numerous times: Jesse Misskelley.  (You can listen to a few of those confessions here, although be forewarned that it's gruesome listening.)  It’s been put forth that his extremely low IQ should have discounted at least the first confession to the police.  But he then confessed again, with his defense attorney present, and once again after being convicted, to two deputies driving him from the court. 

His story had holes in it.  And you could look at it this way.  If his story was air-tight and matched every loophole that could have occurred in this situation, then it would have been clear that he had been coached and somehow coerced into giving this air-tight explanation of what happened, case closed, they did it.  As it was, he got facts wrong and appeared confused at times … which is exactly how I’d picture someone with an extremely low IQ confessing.  He’s going to get things wrong, and embellish, and possibly just say stupid shit that is outrageous and totally incorrect. 

And if he’s supposedly that dumb … how on earth would he have the imagination to concoct such a story, especially the “cult” stuff the he claimed was going on in the woods previous to the murders?  I’d love to hear what cops said to him in the three hours before the taped confession, and what was publicly known about the case on June 3^rd, when he was first interviewed, to compare with what he put forth.  They should also understand Misskelley’s father was allowed to attend the questioning as his son was a minor, but chose not to, which boggles my mind, if I had a kid being hauled in by police on a murder investigation, you better believe I would make myself available every step of the way.

It’s this combination of things that has me wondering what happened that day.  In my mind, knowing how woods are in rural areas, knowing who spends time in them, only other kids, probably older kids, would have committed this crime.  And I don’t buy into the satanic bullshit (unless it was half-assed teenage attempts at mimicking this sort of decadence), which the prosecutors used successfully in a heavily Baptist/Christian part of the country.  (Believe me, if it had worked in the defense team’s favor, they’d have done this, too.)  Echols described himself as a Wiccan at the time and was clearly dabbling in the occult to judge by the evidence.  Even a cursory examination of his mental state around that time shows a severely troubled kid, not the sweet, well-meaning outcast, which is exactly how he remembers himself in his book, when the evidence suggests a much more mean-spirited kid.  But I’m just picturing him and the other two killing time in the woods, as bored teenagers often do, maybe drunk or stoned, when these three boys enter the woods, the older boys start picking on them, one of the boys fights back, things escalate, and next thing you know, this horrible turn of events.

But did that really happen?  There’s very little evidence to suggest so, and there’s the rub.  It’s hard to believe that three teenagers getting out of control like this and killing three small boys would not leave behind more evidence.  Granted, dumping the kids in the water destroyed what was more than likely a ton of DNA and blood evidence.  I doubt that was the killers’ motive – they just wanted to hide the bodies as much as possible.  But it’s unquestionably strange that in all these years, more evidence could not be produced linking any of them to the crime scene.

In his book, Echols makes a point of noting that people never grow up, actually when he was referring to Wiccans, that they somehow get stuck emotionally in their teen years and want to stay there forever.  Point well taken.  He makes a lot of good points in the book.  Frankly, I like the guy as I’m reading the book.  The interviews I’ve read of Jason Baldwin since his release, he seems like a thoroughly likable person who learned a lot from his time in prison.  Misskelley has been pretty quiet, but also seems to have shown some humanity by desiring to be close to his father and living quietly in that same area.

Which doesn’t mean they’re innocent!  It just means that I’m prone to liking them personally, or at least how they’ve been presented to me as someone reading along with recent developments.  Echols doesn’t consider that inability to grow up emotionally a positive thing.  But he should.  Because I’d put forth that’s the reason why he’s now free.  He and the other two have had a groundswell of support over the years, thanks mainly to the documentaries, from people who clearly view themselves as similar outcasts who could have easily been in their place in similar circumstances.

If you read along with the various guilty/not guilty websites, it’s clear that a lot of the people leaning in the not guilty direction know well that rural/suburban sense of dislocation and misunderstanding that kids like Echols were wandering around in circa the early 90s.  I’d say they view that sense of being outcast as a shadow that follows them around as adults, but I’d go a step further and suggest the shadow has become who they are.  They can’t or don’t want to let go of that teenage sense of dislocation, because it had such a deep impact on their psyche at the time, because it permanently tainted their view of humanity.  They spend all their lives viewing any authority figure as an alien presence that always means harm, and themselves as purely innocent people just trying to make sense of the world around them.  When reality is just as much them positioning themselves against anything that threatens this “innocent” view of the world.  Their entire lives are one big defense mechanism, which is how most people seem to go through life now, much less people with authority issues.

The world as I’ve experienced it has crossed itself so many times over, in terms of what I should or shouldn’t believe in, what is or isn’t true, how much I do know, how much I don’t, that I’d be hard-pressed to live by any set rule in terms of how I deal with other people, especially authority figures, some of whom I’ve found to be no more or less human than I am.  I treat each situation, each person, differently, based on what I’ve learned about life over the years, and I’m a lot more cautious/less trusting than I used to be, mainly because appearances can be deceiving.  I’d also put forth that I bend over backwards to avoid situations that could end up with me being institutionalized in any sense, particularly in places like court rooms, hospitals or prisons, because those worlds look like hell to me, and mainly because of the complete lack of control one is allowed to have over the course of his life in such places.  I can't blame these guys for wanting to go free after a few decades in that environment and seizing the opportunity,whatever the circumstance; we'd all do the same, innocent or guilty.

I really don’t know what happened here and am assuming very few people do.  But hopefully what I’ve noted above sheds some light on what I understand about small towns and “the woods” that surround them.  What I’ve noted above is an honest recollection of personal experience hanging out in the woods as a kid, which I’m putting forth because I really haven’t seen anyone else come at the story from this angle.  Which doesn’t make me right or wrong, or anyone guilty or innocent, but hopefully adds more things to think about with this awful case, as I'm sure there are plenty of other adults out there who remember the woods in their town the same way.

Aint There One Damn Song ...

… that can make me break down and cry.  I don’t have to tell serious music fans that this is the key line from David Bowie’s song, “Young Americans.”  This song will not make you break down and cry.  It will make you marvel at Bowie’s word play, the stream of images and one-liners that make no sense, but somehow nail a vibe of mid-70s America, bopping along through troubled times.  It sounds pretty good, too, never get tired hearing it.

I’ve noted Bowie’s influence on me before.  But I’m focusing in on that key line because I often ask myself, what songs can make me break down and cry?  And my response is very few.  I don’t think any song can reduce me to tears, but there are a select few that get my eyes watering, strike some chord that pulls me into that different emotional place where all shields come down.  It’s nice to be reminded that everything can stop on a dime and change, that there are things out there that can penetrate your façade so easily, so why the façade?

Of course, these moments often come when I’m on a bus or subway train, with my ear buds on, and it’s a bit awkward to be sitting there in public, having this deeply emotional moment.  I try to keep me head down when this happens, not make eye contact, because I know the feeling will subside in a few moments.  These songs are also a nice reminder of how your emotions work with real people, too, people who are gone, their presence will sweep over you at times, beyond your control.  Oddly, a lot of these song moments aren’t associated with any particular memory, it’s just some strange convergence of different variables.

So, I’m going to list a few of these songs in no particular order, as it’s a bad idea to quantify your emotions, although I’m sure these days there must be an app for that.

“Perfect Day” by Harry Nilsson.  The first time I heard this surely must have been the Bob Fosse movie, All That Jazz, where the song was misused.  As I recall, this song played while Roy Scheider’s conniving choreographer character seduced one of his dancers.  It didn’t register with me at the time.  It’s a flawed song, too.  The lyrics lose their way at times (Ride with me, glide with me, etc.), while the song gets a little too glossy, too.  But … the choir and background vocals are among the best recorded I’ve ever heard.  Particularly the choir in the last minute of the song, the sorrowful moans, the rising flourishes that perfectly match the string section.  It’s not easy to record a choir!  Whoever did it here nailed it.  Gets to me every time.

“Father and Son” by Cat Stevens.  Even before Dad passed on, this song would kill me.  Not a road song, but a pre-road song.  I got to go, leave home.  Leave home where I have parents who I know love me, but we’re driving each other a little nuts.  Loving someone is always a little nuts, particularly with parents, who are always going to present a mixed bag of emotions, because those people had to break you down and teach you some hard lessons along the way.  Cat Stevens gets that in this song.  That opening guitar riff, sounds like someone turning around one last time to get a good look.

“The Pretender” by Jackson Browne.  I’ll never quite understand the shit Jackson Browne took from critics in the 70s for being “too sensitive.”  This was a guy going into his 30s and writing songs that were wise beyond his years, much like Hank Williams Sr. or Bob Dylan in their 20s.  Surely not on that level, but good enough for me.  “The Pretender” nails that sense of not getting what you want in life, but going on anyway.  Which is everybody I know.  The ability to accept defeat and move forward is a necessary part of adulthood.  We want to bullshit ourselves with sports and money, these artificial win/loss situations that make us feel good when “we” win.  But our real lives are not the same.  You apply a sports mentality to life as an adult, you’ve got to be an asshole.  But people do it all the time!  Life isn’t about winning or losing.  It’s about living until you die.  A song like “The Pretender” acknowledges that life is going to get strange in ways you didn’t see coming, and you’re going to lose your way.  So Jackson Browne wasn’t running around in a Ramones t-shirt, getting stoned and insulting everyone in sight.  That’s not what you do when your wife OD’s on a bottle of pills and leaves you with an infant son.  You duct tape your broken life together, and if you’re lucky, write a song half as good as this.

“It Was You” by Fred Eaglesmith.  Time to get away from the 70s.  It occurs to me that a lot of songs that blindside me emotionally are from that decade, probably because childhood and teen years are such open times emotionally.  But good music is always being made, and I’ve surely heard plenty of songs since then that register.  Like “It Was You” – a simple, mournful break-up song by Fred Eaglesmith.  Also “Birches” by Bill Morrissey.  (More about Morrissey here.)  With the Eaglesmith song, it’s someone looking back and mourning a state of innocence that is no longer possible, while the Morrissey song is looking forward and realizing things aren’t going to work.  There’s something to be said for an artist simply picking up a guitar and singing.  I’m leery of any musician who can’t do this, who needs to stack the deck with production values and over-statement.

“Blue Moon with Heartache” by Roseanne Cash.  I can’t stand that easy-listening guitar noodling in the opening riff.  It nearly ruins the song for me.  But that’s where the disenchantment ends, as everything else about this song is perfect.  Her voice is well-suited to the subject matter especially with the line, “What would I give/To be a diamond in your eyes again?”  I’d love to hear a stripped-down version of this song, but have yet to find one.  Country music is filled with songs like this, which is why I like country music.  It allows you to be an adult, to have adult emotions, to age, to lose the urge to get over on people, to not wallow in self pity and anger.  Which discounts about 80% of pop music made in the past few decades.

“Houses on the Hill” by Whiskeytown.  Ryan Adams, another talented guy who takes a lot of shit for things that have little or nothing to do with his music.  A boyfriend rooting around the attic of his girlfriend’s house finds love letters another boyfriend wrote to her mother, decades ago when he was a soldier fighting in World War II.  He was killed over there, obviously not the man who went on to be her father.  Which explains and links up to this house on the hill, with this older woman, his girlfriend’s mother, who’s had issues with pills.  Just brilliant, simple songwriting.  He does this, every now and then.  Not near enough for me, but enough to let me know he can turn it on when he feels the need.

“I’ll Be Seeing You” by Bing Crosby.  There are any number of songs from this era that can hit me unexpectedly, due to Dad’s passing, and knowing that Mom is so much older.  She used to play Big Band music on her AM radio in the kitchen while making Sunday dinner.  At which time I’d harass her for having such archaic taste in music.  I had my head completely up my ass.  This song in particular, whoever does it, and countless singers have, kills me.  When someone dies on you ... this is the song to remind yourself that you’ll always carry around vestiges of that person.

“Orphan Year” by NOFX.  I often wonder how it feels for someone with a bad parent to mourn that parent’s passing.  Here it is.  I can live without the stupid “punk” vocal affectation.  I just want to hear this guy sing the song, defenseless, in his real voice.  This isn’t it.  But I guess the requirements of his job, being a snide punk rocker, prevent him from doing this, or that role he’s played has become who he is.  This underlines my problems with punk music as I age.  The affectation.  Which makes a lot more sense when you’re 17.  But makes no fucking sense when you’re long past that.  And trying to be honest.  Our youths are a prison of taste, and it’s a good feeling to break free of those constraints.  I can hear the constraints in the guy’s voice in this song, which is a shame, but doesn’t negate the fact that he’s written a great song about how awful a parent’s death feels.

“Days” by The Kinks.  The Kinks go all the way back for me, back to being a teenager and learning about what came before me.  I first heard “Days” on The Kinks Kronikles set that changed my life, and it registered from the first listen.  I later learned Ray Davies wrote it about the passing of a friend, but it could just as easily be about a break-up.  And the best response is to take what you learned from the person and carry it with grace.

“Pastoral” by Moondog.  I don’t know who Moondog was.  I don’t think anyone really does.  His work was all over the place, as was he.  This piece sounds as timeless as any famous classical piece.  I gather it was played on some type of harp.  The first time I heard it, I had to believe it was his version of some classical piece, but, no, he wrote it, apparently around 1970.  A similar piece for me is “Sligo River Blues” by John Fahey, a rolling acoustic piece he wrote in the 1950s that sounds like it could have been recorded at any time.  I don’t know what it is about music like this, but it sounds as elemental as the wind or water.  I gather it’s not that easy to be so simple, which I take as a mark of genius.

“Annie” by Ronnie Lane & Pete Townshend.  I’m not sure what Townshend has to do with this song, other than that he was gracious enough to record Rough Mix, a duet album with Lane, and raise a small fortune to help Lane get back on his feet financially.  (Unfortunately, while making this album, he’d feel the first pangs of Multiple Sclerosis that would take his life by 1997 at the age of 51.)  Every leaf must fall … that’s it.  A song that acknowledges the passing of time, and the dark side of ageing, that everyone must go.  Done beautifully.

“Waiting for a Superman / Do You Realize” by The Flaming Lips.  Wayne Coyne writing about the passing of his father.  “Is it getting heavy?”  That’s how you feel when you have no precedent to measure this thing against.  You don’t know if someone is just really sick, or days away from passing on.  I can tell you now, if everyone around you in a given situation with someone in very ill health can’t seem to come up with a straight answer about the person’s health, get ready.  We tend to push ourselves into these gray areas where no one can or wants to admit the truth, that this is the end, like a bad daydream that won’t end.  I think “Realize” covers the same ground.  I often get annoyed with Coyne for writing such flip/silly lyrics, but there are times when he can and does connect.  Unfortunately, haven't felt that way for a few albums!

“Clay Pigeons” by John Prine.  Prine has written so many great songs.  But he didn’t write this one.  Blaze Foley did, and his original just doesn’t seem to carry the same weight.  “Sing a song with a friend/Change the shape that I’m in/Get back in the game/And start playing again.”  This is a song about someone who knows he’s lost, but also knows he has to stop feeling sorry for himself and find his way again.  Which is why he's on the bus with the mother with two or three kids, maybe going nowhere, but at least moving.  We’ve all been there.  “Lake Marie” is another place and song for John Prine, that doesn’t make my eyes water up, but it is about a guy who links all these stories about that lake with his failing marriage, more of a “what can you do” vibe when life turns against you.  He wrote this one, and I’m guessing it’s not fiction!

The more I think of it, I could add about a dozen more songs.  But this is enough for now.

Late Retirement

I’m just finishing up the latest Joe Paterno biography by Joe Posnanski which seems to be getting mixed reviews because the author didn’t crucify Paterno as a vast majority of journalists (a better but less apt word choice than hacks, charlatans or necrophiliacs) have chosen to do in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.  It’s a good read that examines the man’s entire life as opposed to the bitter end.

A good read, but I surely have issues with it.  I’m left feeling much like when I read Keith Richards’ recent autobiography, which received glowing reviews.  I’m not sure why.  I’ve read at least a dozen books about The Rolling Stones.  Perhaps the most blunt was Spanish Tony Sanchez’s book, which Richards clearly doesn’t like for obvious reasons as it gets into touchy areas like Swedish blood transfusions and years of drug abuse.  But Richards’ book, I couldn’t help but feel afterwards that he was a profoundly spoiled rock star who found success very early in life and lived in a bubble of his own making for the rest of his days.  A self-serving, self-mythologizing bubble that, since he was a depraved, heroin-addicted rock star, doesn’t much lend itself to bubble-bursting, since low-level degradation is a sacrosanct understanding with most rock stars.

I feel like I’m being told a relevant story, but one that comes with a bill of goods, based on image and legend.  The last chapter in the Paterno book is where Posnanski loses me, as it’s a series of personal remembrances by family members and former players.  All positive in some respect, which feel like a stacked deck of cards.  (A biography is no place for a memorial like this; a coffee-table pictorial book would be a much better place for remembrances like this.)  All are “success stories” in some respect of players who have gone on to become businessmen, sportscasters, coaches, high-school principals, etc.  All because of the lessons they learned while associated with Paterno, the things he taught them that propelled them through life on this higher plane of existence, thanks to his guidance.

Which may be true on one level … but complete bullshit and against so much of what Paterno preached.  On one hand, you have him getting across the benefits of humility, a basic understanding of life, the simple desire for excellence of some sort, regardless of success to the outside world.  Boy, I can get behind that.  We all can.

On the other, look at it this way.  You could include Jerry Sandusky in that last chapter, sans what we’ve learned about his serial pedophilia.  Without that crucial bit of information, Sandusky is a raging success story thanks to Paterno’s tutelage and guidance.  Coach and defensive coordinator who helped forge two national champion college football teams, dozens of teams that finished in the Top 20 or even 10.  A man who also created an organization to help disadvantaged children get through life (we’d later learn the horrible, diabolical truth of why he created this organization).  In short, a winner in life.

Working in Manhattan offices my entire adult life, I’ve dealt with many “successful” people … a large percentage of whom tend to be oddly miserable people who have left a wake of destruction in terms of broken families and personal relationships, along with a crippling sense of personal insecurity that finds them never happy or satisfied with their financial wealth despite net worths well into seven figures.  Not everybody I’ve worked with, surely there are some people who have held on to their integrity and made efforts to be humane and decent with the people in the lives, personally and professionally.  But enough for me to know that people presented to you on paper as successful often do not see themselves this way and have lives no sane person would desire, as the personal unhappiness greatly outweights the financial wealth.

So, I’m a bit leery of Paterno’s “success stories” and would really feel no differently about those presented to me as people who “went nowhere” in life after clashing with Paterno or not living up to his expectations.  Don’t get me wrong – I know the man has done immeasurably more good than harm in his life.  If you can’t see that, you’re too focused on the awful way things ended for him and not taking into account the thousands of lives he’s touched in his work over the course of decades.  Millions when you count fans, of which I’ve been one since early childhood.

The truth is his inability to fully acknowledge simple human suffering – a boy being raped by a pedophile – ended up forever tainting his image and destroying a football program he spent his entire adult life creating and nurturing.  Forget about that for a moment.  Think about what he professed to believe in – winning with dignity, the great experiment, creating student athletes, etc.  There’s a story in the book about him quoting Shakespeare to his players to inspire them at a low point in Penn State’s history.

Cute stuff … but if he wanted to be an English teacher, why not be an English teacher?  If he loved literature that much, wanted people to share his wonder in the things he read, why not teach it?  At the end of the book, he claims he might have wanted to try his hand at poetry.  I can only imagine how awful it would have been, but kudos to him for even pondering the possibility.

My point being, he was a man so obsessed with always winning in some sense, winning in every way possible, even if it meant a minor personal argument that had no consequence, this was a man who could never truly grasp an artistic way of life or seeing the world.  Where you need to ponder, accept and in some way embrace losing, as it’s a simple part of the human condition we all face every day.  You need to accept and understand darkness on some level.  You need to accept failure.  You need to see through success to understand it often means nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Your personal success might mean everything to you, but it means nothing to everyone else.  All other people will care about is how you treat them, how humane and decent you are with them, what you genuinely show the world through your words and actions.  They don’t care about your statue.

The author claims that Joe understood this, but did he really?  He created a football program where he routinely put in 16-hour days to do nothing but win.  If you understand and accept failure … you just don’t do that.  Sure, failure will be part of your life in any sport.  But your obsession with winning will be so strong you will do whatever you can, within your moral parameters, whatever they may be, to ensure that you win.  Paterno certainly did, much to his credit.  If you’re a football coach, that’s what you’re paid to do.

There’s an interesting story one of his son tells, of being a bit of a black sheep in the family, the wild kid, who eventually got his head on straight, went to law school, and after his first year found himself ranked seventh in his class: a monumental achievement for someone who, it seems, might have spent the previous few years with a gurgling bong and fellow dudes attending college on the 10-year plan.  He tells his father about this, this incredible news of how he turned his life around.  Paterno’s response:  what, there are six kids smarter than you, and you’re resting on your laurels?

Think about how fucked up that is, in and of itself.  Here you have a son, who seemed on a path to nowhere, who had reversed his course in life to rise nearly to the top of his law-school class.  There are numerous stories like this in the book, of Paterno demanding his players to rise above, to keep pushing to do their best.  But in this personal case, a child he’s brought into the world, who had been stumbling and lost, turns his life around completely … and is then told his efforts are not good enough?

In the context of how Paterno handled the McQueary revelation in 2001, much less the knowledge (if we are to believe the Freeh Report) that he was aware of the 1998 shower incident with Sandusky, Paterno’s response to his son becomes even more pathetic.  Because bottom line, Joe did hardly anything.  Yes, he was a good administrator and reported the incident that a coach had reported to him.  But if he knew of the 1998 incident, with McQueary sitting at his kitchen table describing what sounded like a grown man having sex with a prepubescent boy on school premises that were his domain … the man should have been turning over the kitchen table, cursing his head off, grabbing McQueary, getting in his car, driving to Sandusky’s house and trying to kick the man’s ass knowing that this monster was raping a kid in the football coach’s locker room.  And after that, going straight to the police, forget about school policy, this is outrageous behavior he could not and would not tolerate.

If Paterno expected his sons and players to not rest on the laurels, settle for mediocrity and push the envelope … what in the hell was this?  Something doesn’t pan out here.  All these cute, inspirational stories of Paterno, in his yammering, high-pitched voice, pushing his players to go the extra yard … while he essentially did nothing in a situation that yearned for him to do so much more?

No.  I believe the reality was Paterno simply didn’t care.  No cover-up.  No evil scheme to protect his legacy.  He just didn’t care.  Which is almost as bad as a cover-up.  Because he turned his back on one particular young man who was in profound need of help from anyone … most likely because the situation did not impact his football program directly, and he didn’t want to get involved.  This radical moral error brought down not just him, but his entire program.

In the context of his entire life?  I think he just hung around far too long and should have retired at age 65, like most people do, record books be damned.  Problem being, he was incapable of letting go of that power he had.  It was obviously his only sense of identity.  Again, with my work in Manhattan offices, this is something else I see routinely, too.  Men working into their 80s because they have no identity without the sense of power their work grants them.  It’s sad to see.  These men are incapable of enjoying life without that identity – they’re afraid to even try.  For the men I see, it’s money.  For Paterno, it was being a legendary football coach.  For both, it’s power.  These men feel powerless as simple human beings which, again, as an English major in college and writer in my adult life, is how I will always see myself, just a human, with no desire to see myself as having more or less power than you have.  That’s about the only chance I have to see the world clearly.  I can only imagine how clouded your vision of the world must be if the only view you have of it is from some counterfeit citadel you’ve constructed out of your life.

Even through all this, I still consider myself on Joe Paterno’s side, his presence and influence  are woven into my life like so many other things I grew up with in Pennsylvania.  But I’m on his side with the knowledge that he blew it terribly in a situation that called for him to rise above and take control, as he so often demanded of his players, coaches and sons.  While I don’t advocate anyone losing his sense of power or legacy the way he did, losing his ultimately made him human again, which he wasn’t for a long time to so many people, be it weeping kids on campus when he got fired, or sports writers who felt the need to burn him in effigy when his situation blew the whistle on the shitty, plastic hustle their writing careers are.  He was a great college football coach who wanted to weave academics more into the sport to ensure that his players were ready for life after leaving college, as most of them would not become professional football players, and even if they did, would only do so for slightly more than a decade.

And do he did.  Would have been even better if he felt the same sense of protectiveness and dedication towards disenfranchised, defenseless kids in a program designed to help them, that really turned out to be a farm system for a pedophile.  But those kids offered him nothing.  They were just people … who were outside his program.  Even if something happened to one of them on premises that fell under his domain, and he chose not to be outraged, which he should have been, especially given that he couldn't stand Sandusky, according to Posnansky.  We still have a lot to learn about why he wasn’t and what really happened in 1998 and 2001 when this monster should have been stopped, as opposed to being ignored.  But again, I find myself learning more as new pieces, like this, keep getting added to the puzzle.  The next big pieces should be the upcoming trials next year.

Greatness?  Success?  Fortune?  They’re all things you should think about, balance with your own life, place in context with your experiences in the world, when you read a book like this, which I do recommend.  But the older I get, the less I want to respect people for presenting themselves as “successful” to the world.  I was raised by a factory worker, who was raised by a coal miner, and I have no idea what my great grandfather was.  Most of the kids I grew up with were raised by factory workers.  When I went to my class reunion recently, a lot of those people had basic working-class jobs and were struggling to put their kids into and through college.  They weren’t trying to impress upon me how successful they were – most of them professed to having a rough time.  We all do – that’s reality for most people.  We were all raised to recognize the only things we truly had were our word and each other.  What that has to do with beating everyone over the head with how wonderful and successful you are, I don't have a clue.

The Year of Living Strangely

A year ago this week, I had a close brush with death: house fire in the middle of the night.  The story I wrote shortly afterwards, and the follow-ups, do a nice job of describing all the emotions you go through with something like that.  I was under the impression that I’d be out of my apartment for X number of weeks or months, but raring to get back and start living there again …

Well, I’m still not there!  Long story short, the NYC Department of Buildings is a pretty foul organization.  The landlord had to get three separate building permits, each of which took 2-3 months to be approved, and during which time no work was allowed on the house.  More than anything, the house laid dormant for most of the past year, with weeks-long fits of construction activity, followed by two months of waiting for the next permit to be finalized.

I haven’t been back there since late March, at which time I was bagging up all my belongings as the decision was made to take down and replace the walls and ceiling in my place.  I guess it was within the budget, and I can’t get mad at anyone for that as it made sense.  The last permit was approved in early June, and I’m gathering this should all be wrapping up in the next month or so.

I wish I had known it was going to take this long!  I don’t think anyone did.  I can still recall the landlord’s daughter telling me, “We should have you and the upstairs tenant in by Christmas, and my mother by Easter.”  The original concept being they’d first fix these much-less damaged apartments and then go in for the big fix on the ground-floor apartment where the fire was.  (Mostly the back extension where the kitchen was … there was only smoke and water damage on the rest of that floor.  Admittedly, every time I’d been in the house, the stench from the completely-burned extension was hard to handle.)

But then it changed to refurbishing the whole house, floor by floor, rewiring the electrical and moving the motherboard up to my landlord’s apartment, re-doing the plumbing as they noticed it could use some work.  And that’s when it became a multiple-permit, year-long endeavor as opposed to a project occurring in stages with people moving back in as each floor became livable.  I gather the entire extension was torn down and rebuilt.

The house should be in top shape when it’s done.  The wiring, especially, was a constant worry, and what caused the fire to begin with.  Every time I plugged something into an outlet, I half-expected a popping sound and burst of smoke.  Not a good feeling!  But also new refrigerator, new walls, ceiling, maybe even flooring, essentially a rebuilt house.

Life has surely gone on, albeit strangely.  You learn a lot about yourself when you reduce your possessions to clothing, a comfy lawn chair, a wire-frame, roll-out bed, cooking utensils, a laptop with a broadband USB connection, an iPod and a Kindle.  I learned that air mattresses, while comfortable, aren’t made to use for indefinite periods of time.  The two I bought went pffft after about two months, although that might have been my fault for routinely putting in too much air.  The roll-out bed that the landlord’s daughter gave me shortly thereafter, while no frills, has worked out fine, although it makes me feel like an inmate sleeping on it.

I’ve realized that so long as I can listen to music, watch DVDs, get on the web at night, read books and exercise … life is fine.  This is pretty much what I did in Astoria!  It’s pretty much what I’d do anywhere.  And go out to eat at local eateries.  Shop at local stores.  Do a lot of walking.  As I’ve mentioned previously, most people I know in the NYC area are spread out, so it’s not a matter of being ripped from my old neighborhood … as I had originally felt.

At first it was unsettling to realize my surroundings were this inter-changeable.  But it dawned on me that this makes sense.  My life as an adult isn’t based so much on where I live as on how I choose to live it.  Once that realization sunk in , probably around Christmas, I started feeling like a normal human being again, just one thrown into a strange circumstance that he had to roll with and see where it went.  That day, I got my ass out to Bed Bath & Beyond, bought their over-priced cookware to make up some chili, and got off that asshole “college kid in a dorm room” diet of Hot Pockets, Ramen and canned soup.

Would I do it differently if I could go back?  Hell, yes.  Get one of my recliners, my mattress and my TV/cable box.  Life without TV?  I’m not here to lecture you on how much better it is.  It’s really no better or worse.  When I’m around TV now, like when I go back to PA for a routine visit, I don’t go insane watching everything for hours.  I’ve missed TV mainly for sports, but have come to realize, most times I have it on, it’s just sort of on, and I’m watching to pass the time.  A force of habit more than anything.  I’ll need to think about exactly how I want to have cable internet and TV in my life when I get back, as the internet hook-up is essential, but I’m no longer so sure about TV.  The monthly bill for both was creeping up to $120, which was grating on me something terrible before all this happened.

About the only thing that makes me feel strange living out where NYC fades into Long Island is walking … and how alien that simple function is to the vast majority of people who live out there.  Nobody walks out there.  Anywhere.  Walking three miles back from the gym on a Sunday afternoon?  Or a few miles home after getting off the bus early on the Union Turnpike so I can get in a workout?  You’d have to be a lunatic to do these things to judge by how people react when I tell them this.  Or a Sikh!  Those are the only people I see walking for exercise, old Sikh couples who nod and say hello whenever we cross paths.  (For the uninitiated, Long Island and the far edges of Queens have seen a tremendous influx of Indian immigrants over the past few decades.)

The suburbs of NYC are heavy car cultures, as everything is more spread out.  As a result, the concept of pedestrians walking to the laundromat or supermarket – things that are normal in any NYC neighborhood – are viewed as laughable anomalies by most people with that suburban mindset.  The pain of it being their communities are perfectly geared to handle this.  You’ll find mile after mile of sidewalks that are wide, unbroken and immaculate.  That walk from the gym, between towns, is along a rural/suburban four-lane highway with a paved walking path recessed about 10 yards from the road.  My weekend five-mile run skirts a major roadway, then a few huge hospital parking lots, then two industrial parks with no traffic so that I’m essentially running without stopping the same way I would in the country.

Yet people in cars gaze at me as if I’m in a Satan costume when they see me walking by the side of the road.  I’ve made that afternoon walk without seeing another soul, a few dozen times, in perfect weather.  There are more people riding bikes, but seeing them is almost as rare as seeing pedestrians.  You need a Texas-sized set of balls to ride a bike in the suburbs of New York.  So many car drivers have no respect for anyone else on the road.  Bikers?  The smart ones I’ve seen travel in small groups, so they’re less likely to be hit-and-run.  If I’m not mistaken, most highways in that part of New York, be it the city or surrounding suburbs, have speed limits of 35 mph, surely no more than 45.  Yet I’m constantly seeing cars doing well over 55 mph.  And walking over glittering pools of broken car window glass in so many intersections.

 

It’s a ramped-up way of life out there that extends beyond how people drive.  With no hope of ever ramping back down.  The odd thing is people are ramped up so they can try to relax: a self-defeating way of life.  You can’t relax when a good part of your day is spent seeing other people as necessary evils you need to dominate in some sense, whether we’re talking some guy in an SUV on the Northern Parkway, or your neighbor turning his humble bungalow into a grotesque three-story fortress that takes up every inch of his property.  Which is not my problem.  I can’t relax if I’m overly concerned with all this extraneous bullshit, so I’ve learned to let it go as much as I can.  Can’t single out Long Island for that – it’s all over, not just New York City, pretty much everywhere I go these days.

That’s the main thing I’ve learned living out there.  My way of life is no better or worse … simply geared towards less consumption, less material wealth, more mental and physical well being.  No sense of false superiority … just an urge to simplify my life as much as possible.  Which is wildly out of place with the general consensus, but I’m sure everyone out there has something in their lives that’s just as out of step with everyone else.  I do get a sense of the city falling away when I get on that Union Turnpike bus and take it a few miles farther out to the edge of Queens.  It’s much more quiet at night, a little cooler.  Less people along the road?  Shit, NO people along the road!  They’re all in their houses or driving like lunatics to get from local retail establishments back to their houses.  Where they bolt the door and fire up the cable TV.

Neighbors don’t talk to each other as much I’d think they would.  Again, same story in Astoria.  Same story in rural Pennsylvania.  There are certain neighbors you really get along with and make a point of saying hello to when you see them.  But it seem like the whole point of living in a house is to separate yourself from everyone else, to have this calm little oasis you can call your own, hell, even if you’re only renting.  I can’t bemoan any “loss of community” because I haven’t really felt that since I was a kid in the 70s.  When I go back to PA, I don’t talk to most of the neighbors unless I see them on the street. 

That sense of “stoop sitting because no one has air conditioning” that so many older New Yorkers are fond of recollecting … man, long before my time.  About the only situation I’ve had like this out there was the time the landlord inadvertently turned off the sewage pump to the house, thus causing a minor shit-water flood in my place, that surely provided for an angst-ridden few hours.  But when I got home from work that night, she had contacted a coworker who was also the super of his building in Astoria.  He had immediately diagnosed the problem, helped with the minor clean-up, and we sat around the backyard afterwards having a few Coronas while he regaled us with “building super” stories of finding days-old corpses and being left with valuable antiques and such because relative never came by to pick up possessions left behind by dead and missing tenants.  That was nice and reminded me what it’s like to have a few beers in the backyard in the summer, as opposed to scurrying home and closing the door on the world.

This is why people go to bars.  This is why I go to bars!  Or restaurants, to catch up with old friends on occasion.  It used to be my life was filled with these sort of engagements, but I noticed this in my 30s, everyone gets so spread out, and involved with their own lives, that these meetings spread themselves out accordingly as opposed to happening all the time.  I guess I could force these things, but they’d feel just like that, forced.

Whatever I’ve learned the past year in that regard, I’ve been learning all along, and the lessons really had little to do with the fire.  What I learned from the fire?  Simply that the possibility of you being here one moment and gone the next is ever present.  And this doesn’t compel you to jump from air planes or visit Tibet or call up old flames and read them the riot act.  You just sort of quietly grasp this quality of life and go on living, knowing that you could wake up one night to a wall of smoke and flames, and that might be all she wrote.  What can you do in the face of that, but go on living, not with any sort of vengeance or new-found knowledge, but with the understanding that we’re all living on borrowed time.

I don’t think that should be depressing or have any more depth than the same way you notice a bird outside your window, or how much cooler the mornings are come late August.  The defining characteristic of adulthood is an understanding of death.  What we have now is too many people who cling to their youths and that mind-set for decades into their adulthood, rather than moving with the tide and knowing that every wave expires on the shore.  Horror movies are effective because they play on a childlike/teenage fear of death, and it only makes sense to be afraid when you’re that age, because it’s all laid out in front of you, waiting to happen.

But halfway through?  You had better come to terms with this thing.  Because you will see it happening to your parents, your relatives, and even a few friends as you go along.  Nearly happened to me one night this time last year!  It makes you hard in ways that you were meant to be hard.  And it opens you up in a strange way because you realize that ultimately you have no defense, you can only fight so much, because in the end, everyone goes.  That might be the only thing I learned from the fire, and it’s an ongoing lesson that first truly registered with Dad’s passing a few years ago.  I’ve always appreciated life, but sooner or later, you need to appreciate death.  And see it clearly sometimes, like your shadow.

Rock and Roll High School

Not going to be writing about the bad movie that so many Ramones fans claim to be a cult classic.  I’m thinking more of the odd memories I have when rock and roll crept into our routine high-school lives back around the turn of the 1980s.  When teachers caught wind of the sub-culture and realized: we really were a bunch of assholes.  I’m sure nothing has changed.  But here are a few situations I still recall.

Harry Chapin.  This one isn’t so much rock and roll, but it sticks in my mind.  Ms. M was one of my favorite English teachers, a former model who came back home after her time in NYC must have not agreed with her.  She became a teacher and was known for having a big, horsey laugh, which seemed out of place on such an attractive woman.  It wasn’t unusual for teachers to bring rock records into class for a certain theme or lesson, always English class, anything to stimulate kids into writing a tolerable 500-word essay.

I still remember how hard it was for so many kids to write anything.  They just couldn’t formulate their thoughts into even the most basic themes.  It’s strange to me because I took to this like a duck to water, one of those rare kids who longed for essay questions, because I knew even if I didn’t know what the hell I was writing about, I could make the teacher see I was a smart kid trying to grasp the concept, and thus get a better grade. 

But your average kid in high school, despite reading plenty of books along the way, newspapers every day, magazines routinely … couldn’t put together a single, readable paragraph.  There would be kids in high school writing these short pieces that read like a second grader describing the sky.  All because they froze up and viewed this as something they never tried before, and would be judged harshly because they didn’t know what they were doing.  And that rigid sense of impending failure is something that would freeze up any writer.  If you think you’re going to suck, you will suck.  That goes for a lot more than writing.

Thus, some music to help open up the kids creatively.  I can’t remember why, but for one writing class, she brought in some Harry Chapin albums.  Chapin had passed away that summer, in an automobile accident on the Long Island Expressway.  We all knew “Cats in the Cradle,” a massive 70s hit absorbed into everyone’s musical DNA.  But not much else.  So she started playing his hit album Verities and Balderdash on the turntable.  (I remember this album because Brother M freaked out over it upon its release in the mid-70s; he zoned in on “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” as the song mentioned a banana truck having an accident just outside Scranton, PA.)

Some kids started to snicker.  Folk music.  This is the guy who did “Cats in the Cradle”?  Oh, man, what next, John Denver?  That’s how kids are, they laugh at new things they don’t understand, and most kids surely weren’t on the aging folk-singer bandwagon.  Hell, most of them thought Styx was better than The Beatles.

I don’t think she dragged the needle across the record to make that horrible scratching sound, but everything stopped cold.  And Ms. M freaked out.  Tears in her eyes.  Raised voice, nearly screaming, words along the lines of, “Harry Chapin was one of the best folk singers who ever lived, and I will not have you laugh at him like this when he just died a few months ago.  I try to broaden your horizons, and this is what I get in return?”

Most kids were shamed enough to stop snickering and avoid eye contact.  We sat there in silence while she quietly wept at her desk, clearly having one of those “what am I doing with my life” moments.  Honestly?  I thought Harry Chapin sucked!  I’ve since become more of a fan, have about a dozen of his tracks on the iPod, and like the pop-folky story/song vibe he had going.  But his image had that “overly serious, hairy-chested, pseudo-macho, pop/folk singer wearing boots and being taken way too seriously for his own good” vibe about him.  Started in the 60s by Barry McGuire with his silly song, “Eve of Destruction.”  We’d all seen too many variety shows on TV that would always feature a singer like this, like Neil Diamond or Gordon Lightfoot, gazing off in the middle distance, gold medallion gleaming on hairy chest, because his leisure suit with ruffled sleeves was open to his navel,  while an orchestra swelled behind him … and the whole thing felt like a 10-ton bag of shit falling from the sky.

Ms. M, while not considered hip by the kids, actually was pretty hip.  We had another project where we had to go through old yearbooks and note changing trends among kids over the course of years, and we found her graduation yearbook around the turn of the 70s, with her stunning picture … and the notation that she loved Jimi Hendrix!  This would have been a much hipper personal tidbit to spring on the kids, but she kept it hidden.  Kids regarded her as a strict disciplinarian, but I always got along with her because I could see this side of her.  And understand how someone born and raised when she was would be a huge Harry Chapin fan and hold that music dear to her heart.  But kids are pricks!

The Clash.  We’re in that same class, later in the school year.  Once again, Ms. M turns to music, but this time, it’s our turn.  We should bring a copy of the one song we love the most, write an essay about why we love it so much, and read it while the song plays in the background.  I’m sure I picked a Beatles or Kinks song at the time.  “Lola” was my favorite song in the high-school yearbook, a choice I’m still comfortable with.  Most kids picked the usual dreck floating around at the time: Journey, Styx, Boston, some disco, Barry Manilow.  Man, high-school girls, especially Catholic girls, loved Barry Manilow.  The metal kids would bring in Sabbath or AC-DC … it was pretty predictable.  A metal kid wouldn’t bring in “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian, even if the song nailed that teenage sense of dislocation he knew intimately as a stoner.  Most kids simply weren’t that generous or smart enough to recognize different people going through the same shit.

But there was one girl in that class who freaked out everyone.  She was a pretty girl, not a knockout, but I remember her being attractive, a grade behind me.  I always liked her, but never acted on it, which was my mistake, because I recall us making eyes at each other a few times.  And I would learn why in this class.  The day it was her turn to read her essay, she came in “dressed like a punk.”

That wasn’t true.  She was more a new-wave, slightly pre-Go-Go’s chick, but close enough to punk for everyone to think she was punk.  I think she had a neon blue headband, a very sexy short leather skirt with black stockings, and some sort of black/gold striped top that showed off her cleavage.  She looked great – all the guys were looking at her differently that day.  It occurs to me that she must have looked a lot like Pat Benatar … without the buck teeth!

Her composition was on The Clash, the song “Lost in the Supermarket” from the London Calling album.  You have to understand something about rural America, the early 80s and punk music.  Which is to say most of those kids thought “punk” sucked.  Punk meant anything from The Sex Pistols, to The Ramones, to Elvis Costello, to The Clash, to The Talking Heads … even to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  Punk was really rock and roll and new wave, but had been marketed as such to be the next step in rock.  And most kids were entirely comfortable with their older siblings’ taste in Classic Rock (Floyd, Led Zep, Beatles, Stones, etc.), Heavy Metal (Sabbath, AC-DC, Deep Purple, etc., a long list) and their own taste in current big rock bands (Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Boston, etc.).

Punk was for faggots and weirdoes.  I know … because I was one of about five people in the high school who owned any “punk” albums, and at that point, we’re talking the most cursory, plain collection: Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, etc.  I’d hear a song like “Mirror Star” by The Fabulous Poodles on WZZO, the classic-rock station out of Allentown, recognize it as a good pop-rock song, rush out and buy it, which wasn’t a mistake, that was a good album.  But most kids would have viewed a relatively harmless, tasteful rock band like this as “punk” because they were British and being marketed that way.

I really didn’t like the driving, chainsaw sort of punk that The Ramones helped create … still don’t, it’s boring as hell.  The Ramones were different in that they were actually a rock-and-roll band.  But a lot of what sprung from them, the mohawked bands who would play underage shows, barking out their unintelligible lyrics and slam-dancing … I hated that shit.  That was punk to me, as opposed to the new wave I grew to love.  Green Day was probably the last big band to break out … starting as this bratty, loud punk band … only to realize their lead singer had some raw talent and could grow … which immediately meant all the punks hated him.  It seemed like a shit proposition to me, like wanting to be 15 years old forever.  Man, I was more than glad to leave 15 in the rearview mirror.

But this pretty girl brings in London Calling and starts expounding on how much she connects to “Lost in the Supermarket” (which I did, too, the song on the album that initially grabbed me), which is really a disco song done by former punks.  Even worse! 

Kids just sat there stone-faced.  If this was on a stage, you’d have seen a huge hook extend from the side curtain and pull her off.  The vast majority of kids at that time hated punk/new-wave music.  The sales numbers bear this out, too, from that time period.  Older fans, people in college and their early 20s, were buying this music in droves.  But that huge driving market for pop music, teenagers, simply were not buying this kind of music.  They would shortly.  The Clash would have a huge hit two albums down the road with Combat Rock, but it took that long, a few years into the 80s, to slowly turn things around.  At which point, MTV and synth pop took over, and things got  very strange and hollow.

But I’ll never forget that pretty girl in her headband, standing there about as alone as she could be, and listening to “Lost in the Supermarket” with her.  When the song ended and it was commentary time, most kids were too embarrassed to say anything.  But I immediately chipped in and started a dialogue with her about the album, saying how much I liked “Train in Vain,” too, and had just bought the first two albums as a two-fer set up at Record Town in the mall.  The look on her face – she just opened up and smiled, thank Christ, one person out there gets me!  We should have left that class, arm in arm, and started a relationship right there, heavy petting and hand jobs while listening to Give 'Em Enough Rope on the stereo console in her parents’ rec room.  But I surely had my head completely up my ass at the time not to recognize this perfect opportunity.

The Vo-Tech Guitar Hero.  There were a few kids like this.  My friend Jim R was one of them.  Guys who got stoned.  A lot.  Smokey vans in parking lots.  Clandestine meetings in the woods where the peace pipe went around the circle.  These guys didn’t smell like cigarettes.  They smelled like pot.  And it didn’t seem like fun.  It seemed like a job, like a three-piece suit they had to wear every day as part of the stoner routine.  Drugs were meant to be fun, relaxation, blowing off reality for a few hours.  These guys wanted to blow off reality forever.

Vo-Tech is short for “vocational technical,” and back then, kids who were interested in acquiring skills for a trade, like carpentry, farming or bricklaying, would go to the vo-tech school for part or all of the school year.  They got to take a lot of these construction-type classes, or also food preparation and things like that.  It was a strange sort of academic defeat to go to Vo-Tech, a mild copout, because if you went to Vo-Tech, you weren’t going to college.  You were probably going into your father’s construction company or farm or something along those lines.  Or you were just a kid who got high a lot and wanted out of the more academically-inclined high school.

But I’m sure some of those guys are having the last laugh now, with their own construction companies, possibly making six figures and taking some satisfaction in barely getting through high school, yet coming out so well decades down the road.  Or at least I hope that’s the case for a lot of them!

Jim wasn’t a Vo-Tech kid, but he would sit in the cafeteria sometimes with those guys, and they all had acoustic guitars.  And they weren’t bad!  Jim was a huge Neil Young fan, and we’d have constant debates over which was better, After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps.  He really could play, just about any Neil Young song, and that wasn’t easy.  But he’d sit with these guys, future plumbers and welders, often playing “Hotel California” … and they’d be note perfect.  If not that, then “Pinball Wizard.”  Which sounded fantastic with three guys blasting away on acoustic guitars.

At one of the big auditorium presentations we had periodically, one of these guys served as a guitar tech and roadie for the band that had played.  I can’t even remember what they played, but high school feeling like prison, it could have been a hand puppet version of Waiting for Godot, and we would have been overjoyed just to get out of class and do something different.

Well, the show ended, and this kid, with his long, straggly hair and nicotine-stained fingers, got hold of the guitar he had set-up and started wailing.  It had to be “Stairway to Heaven.”  When he started playing, everyone stopped leaving the auditorium, went back to their seats and started applauding wildly.  It was spontaneous, and the teachers didn’t know what to do.  So they let him play.  And play he did, even handling that 12-string guitar break where the song then speeds off into a faster solo.  He had obviously played this song a thousand times in his bedroom – his eyes were closed the whole time.  And the kids went nuts the six or seven minutes he was up there playing.  Those few minutes were as exciting as any professional show I’d see as an adult.

But like a warden who knew when to reel in the inmates, the principal waited for the song to end, and pulled the plug, escorting the kid off the stage.  He was raising his clasped hands over his head like the heavyweight champ of the world.  Standing ovation.  I often wonder what happened to him.  Not then.  I’m sure he got some after-school detentions for his impromptu performance.  But I gather he never turned into that Joe Perry-type rock star, who was an outcast in high school, but turned that confusion and rage into rock-and-roll superstardom.  Most guys weren’t Joe Perry.  They were just guys who liked to get high and play guitar with their friends.  I would hope they still do!

And I noticed something weird on the recent tour I took of the high school as part of my high-school reunion.  This is the music room.  Check out that back wall.  There must be a dozen acoustic guitars hanging there.  I can assure you, they weren’t there when I was a kid.  All we had was a few boxes of percussion instruments and a moog synthesizer, which we could only play on special occasions.  Do you know how overjoyed I would have been to have a music class where I could have learned basic chords on a guitar?

So I have to believe, that lonely stoner kid on the stage, taking a chance and letting everyone know who he really was, moments like that, led to all these guitars on the music room wall in 2012.  It was a good thing to see.