Against the Eighties Bonus: Uncles, Uncles, Uncles

I just wrote this during the week, but it seemed to fit. So, an extra little bonus as we wind up the Eighties: 

Absent a trusted father figure, I turned throughout my childhood and adolescence to my uncles for male guidance and role models. My Uncle Mike taught me to fish. I developed my love of reading from my Uncle Monti’s bookshelves of horror novels. My Uncle Butch Proctor taught me sarcasm. My Uncle Butch Martin also taught me sarcasm. My Uncle Dana took me to Tae Known Do lessons when I was continually beat up in grade school. My Uncle Harry taught me by example to bear the blows of life with gentle humor. My Uncle Buster fixed my car and watched basketball games with me in high school. My Uncle Rob introduced me to my birth father. My Uncle Joe Gaines became my Alateen sponsor. My Uncle Brian sent me his two front teeth for Christmas when I was two years old, thirteen years before I ever met him. At least half of these men are not actually my uncles. 

Against the Eighties: In which my young athletic career opens a door

I was perhaps the worst high school football player in the history of the sport. I had to constantly hold up my pants because they didn’t make them small enough to fit my 26-inch waist, and I could never remember plays. To be honest, I didn’t really know what position I played. But it was through the football team that I met my birth father, Wayne Martin. In 1989, my junior year, the starting left guard on the offensive line approached my locker before practice and asked me if I wanted to meet my dad. I didn’t know it until later that night, but his sister was married to Wayne Martin, who had opened up a discount furniture outlet on New Hampshire Street. I played even worse than usual at practice that day and probably spent more than half of it doing wind sprints.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

This is why I love teaching.

Today in class I was talking about the different ways of referring to a text - quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing - when I saw a student with a pear in one hand and a pen in the other. There was writing spiraled all around the pear.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are you taking notes on a pear?"

"No," a student across the room said, "He's pear-aphrasing."

Against the Eighties: In which I receive an indecent proposal

Right before I entered high school, Greg Proctor sat me down and told me I needed to start masturbating, referring to it only as jerking off. He told me methods, and asked me at the dinner table how it was going. I didn’t masturbate until I was 22 years old, after I’d been in two sexual relationships, each with a girl I thought was the love of my life.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

My morning caps lock rant, from Grand Central

WHILE YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR COFFEE IN THE MORNING, CUTTING IN LINE, WAVING YOUR CREDIT CARD ABOVE YOUR HEAD AT THE CASHIER WHILE IN LINE, AND/OR PUSHING YOUR WAY IN FRONT OF PEOPLE AT THE MILK AND SUGAR TABLE IS RUDE. AND SAYING “I’M LATE FOR MY TRAIN” WHEN CALLED ON IT ISN’T AN EXCUSE. THAT’S ACTUALLY EVEN MORE RUDE. WE’RE AT A TRAIN STATION. WE ALL HAVE TRAINS TO CATCH. AND IF YOU’RE LATE FOR A TRAIN, WHY ARE YOU STOPPING TO GET A COFFEE?

Guest blog post in Superstition Review!

As part of the promotion for my podcast of The Revelator, I wrote a guest blog post for Superstition Review about my obsession with listing and my List and the Story project. Fun stuff, check it out!

Against the Eighties: In which an era begins and ends

From 1986-1988, I listened only to hair metal. This era ended for me when I entered high school and fell in love with the daughter of a professor at the university. I followed her everywhere from a distance, until my friend Kevin overheard her talking to her friend on the bleachers of a varsity football game. “John Proctor likes me,” she said. When asked who John Proctor was she replied, “You know, the guy who wears the same Whitesnake shirt every other day.” I threw that shirt away the next day, started listening to the Steve Miller Band, and joined the football team.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

The Revelator podcast is now up on Superstition Review!

The folks at Superstition Review just put up a podcast of my essay "The Revelator" that I recorded for them this summer. You should listen to it! You can do that here, and even read along while listening to Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)," if that's your thing.

Against the Eighties: In which I shamelessly lie about my favorite team

In spring of 1988, I witnessed the University of Kansas basketball team winning the NCAA tournament on a black and white TV in my room. I could hear the town explode outside my bedroom window as the whole town of Lawrence flooded into the streets, but I'd played sick that day so I had to stay in my room. The next day, other boys at my junior high school told of coeds on campus running naked around their sorority houses. To this day, I tell people that night was the first time I saw a naked girl in person.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which I get a lesson in race relations

Perhaps because of the clashing cultures of North and South Lawrence, perhaps because we were acting out what our parents said at home, perhaps because we were junior high boys and needed to throw our out-of-control bodies against each other, a series of race-related fights broke out at South Junior High my ninth-grade year. I wanted in on them. One afternoon in the crowded hallway between classes, Brent Tolbert pushed me from behind to get me moving. I told him to meet me in the morning, in front of the school, trying to sound ominous. He looked at me, puzzled, and just said, “OK.” I told everyone I knew that I was going to fight him the next morning, thinking of our jostle as the undercard of some professional wrestling bill. He showed up the next morning expressionless, and followed me out to the side of the building with most of the school in our wake shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” When we got there, he asked me, “You really wanna do this?” I lunged at him. He picked me up with surprisingly little effort, and held me over his head. Then he put me down to his left. I lunged again, he held me in the air again, and put me down to his right. “We done.” Then he walked away. Later on in high school, when I met my birth father, I found out Brent was my cousin by marriage.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which I watch TV

It seems everyone who lived through the Sixties remembers where they were when Martin Luther King and JFK were assassinated. People who lived through the Seventies all seem to remember where they were the day Nixon boarded Air Force One for the last time after resigning. Those of us who lived through the Eighties all remember where we were on January 28, 1986. I was in math class when the principal’s voice came over the intercom. She said she had some very bad news—the Space Shuttle Challenger had broken apart and exploded shortly after taking off, killing all seven passengers, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. When we all gathered in the gymnasium to watch the crash together, I remember being relieved. It was just TV.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties Bonus: Madonna!

All the hubbub about the 30-year anniversary of Madonna's debut album inspired me to write this last night and edit it this morning. Enjoy! 

As an eleven-year-old adolescent living in Kansas, my only connection to the burgeoning, wilting New York City art scene was Madonna’s self-titled debut album. Like so many other children of the Eighties, my own early conceptions of sex were shaped by my mediated interactions with her. It started innocently, with a dream I had sometime after hearing “Borderline” for the first time, when I had a dream that she visited my school with her artsy entourage and picked me out to be her friend. Things got complicated when Playboy printed photos in 1985 from her now-mythic 1978 Lee Friedlander photo shoot, and I spent more than an hour at the 7-11 pretending to play the Journey Escape video game while sidling over to the magazine rack, only to be kicked out by a college student working the front the moment I touched the Playboy. And I was spurned when she married Sean Penn in 1986 and rubbed it in my face by dedicating her next album, True Blue, to him. I was secretly gratified when the marriage publicly failed, and wanted to find Penn and hold him to account when I read that he’d beaten and left her “trussed up like a turkey” when she gave him the divorce papers. I’ve since forgiven Penn, but I still haven’t watched the movie At Close Range, which features my favorite Madonna song, “Live to Tell.”

Against the Eighties: In which I troll merrily

After my first year of junior high I had an additional thing to keep me company in my room at home—the yearbook. I knew everybody’s name and profile, what clubs they were in, what sports they played. I examined everyone’s signature, especially the ones who wrote me personalized notes. “Stay cool, Spidey.” “See ya next year, Monkey.” (My nickname was Spider Monkey.) “Hi eat a lot this summer and please lift weights.” “I’m glad you got out of my math class—the smell was getting to me.” I made friends and enemies with people I didn’t even talk to. Now, with Facebook, I can relive this.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties: In which I plan my escape

The town of Lawrence, where I grew up, is considered by most as either the redheaded stepchild of Kansas or the state’s only merit. An abolitionist stronghold after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the streets at the center of town named after the New England states the settlers came from, it was burned to the ground in 1863 by a band of mercenaries and thugs led by William Quantrill. After the war, it then secured the University of Kansas (nearby Leavenworth got the federal prison) and is now called variously a progressive bastion and a refuge for aging hippies. Sometime before I started junior high, the Lawrence City Council decided, in the spirit of economic equalization, to bus the residents of lower-income North Lawrence, where I lived, to upper-middle-class Lawrence South Junior High School. My friend Adrian, with whom I used to compare the size of the cockroaches in our respective houses, was permanently scarred. He recently posted on Facebook that he still hates Swatch watches, as that was how the natives separated themselves from the imports. I looked at it differently. That bus commute was my underground railroad.

Against the Eighties: In which I'm busted

I was caught shoplifting, twice. After the first time, I ran away from home. After the second time, when I was caught on Vermont Street running away from the Ben Franklin with a Transformer under my shirt, I was locked in my room every day when I came home from school during the long, cold winter of 1987. Every book, cassette tape, or other item that could be considered entertaining was removed and placed in my parents’ closet. My mom let me out every weekday from 4:00-5:00, before Greg Proctor came home, and ask me how school was that day. It was my favorite hour of every day. She smuggled into my room the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King novels, and a series of fantasy novels involving a dwarf, a bear, and an otter. I hid them in the AC vents. Almost a decade later I stopped reading King, when he wrote The Shawshank Redemption. It was still a little too close to home.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties: In which I attempt to call my way into the musical mainstream

Like everyone else, I wanted my MTV. So much, in fact, that in the sixth grade I called their 900 hotline every morning to hear Martha Quinn’s prerecorded message about Def Leppard or Duran Duran or Madonna at 50 cents a call. After Greg Proctor saw the phone bill, I spent the summer before I started junior high with my four-year-old sister at the babysitter’s.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays just published!

I promise, the timing on this is purely coincidental. As I was editing the Further Reading section of The List and the Story I discovered, to my delight, that Wayne Koestenbaum's seminal "My '80s" is now the title essay of his just-released collection, My 1980s and Other Essays!

This Monday I had the pleasure of hearing him read from it at the Franklin Park Reading Series, and fell in love anew with that piece. Can't wait to read the rest, especially the essay on Debbie Harry, whose ubiquitous influence on the late Seventies/early Eighties continues to manifest itself in strange and wonderful ways on the survivors of said epoch.

On that note, I have to also recommend the wonderful Meagan Brothers' YA novel, Debbie Harry Sings in French , whose protagonist is an ostensibly straight teenage boy whose fixation with the Blondie chanteuse leads him to discover that he loves to sing Blondie songs in drag.

OK, not all  of the Eighties was so bad.

Against the Eighties: In which the fallout begins

Parts of The Day After were filmed in Lawrence when I was in the fourth grade. Greg Proctor fancied himself a makeup artist and was obsessed with slasher flicks of the time. But watching Kansas City destroyed in the movie broadcast, families I grew to love in the first half hour of the movie turned to skeletons in one blinding flash, I was terrified more than I was watching Scanners or I Spit on Your Grave or any of the other movies Greg Proctor made me sit through with him. After the movie was over, my mother called the hotline ABC had set up for people who were traumatized watching it, then locked herself in her room. Greg Proctor told me it was just TV, probably made by the communists in Hollywood. The following week, a girl in my class gave a presentation on her performance as an extra in the movie. She was one of the thousands of radiation victims in the scenes at the KU Medical Center. I remember being jealous of her, and not knowing why. Sometimes when I tell this story now, I say I was an extra in the movie.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Steven Church wrote an entire book on the fallout from his own experience watching The Day After  as a child in Lawrence, The Day After The Day After . You can read me interviewing him here. 

The List and the Story - Calvino's Invisible Cities just added to Further Reading

I just finished this wonderful book on the train this morning, and I'm still recovering. I added this to the Further Reading section of The List and the Story: 

I’m tempted to call this thoroughly unique work a list-novel, but then I think it’s better to call it a collection of OCD urban folktales. Gore Vidal said of it, “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.” Bearing in mind my Sisyphean task, I’ll simply say two things: 1) the basic premise is that the explorer Marco Polo is describing the cities he’s ostensibly visited to the Kublai Khan in the waning days of the latter’s empire, a total of 55 allegorical tales of cities that exist mostly in Polo’s mind, and in all of ours, fragmentary glimpses of cities that any urbanite will recognize in their own; and 2) Calvino arranges the stories with perfect symmetry: 9 sections, each beginning and ending with a conversation between Polo and the Khan and containing either 5 or 10 descriptions of individual cities, and the cities are categorized by topic (Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities), five named cities per topic, and arranged in each section in descending order, e.g., Cities and Memory 5 (Maurilia), Cities and Desire 4 (Fedora), Cities and Signs 3 (Zoe), Thin Cities 2 (Zenoba), Trading Cities 1 (Euphemia). The combination of the individual power of each mythic city and the rhythmic presentation of each in the fabric of the book leads the reader (me, at least) into a dream-like openness to the imagined experience of not only traveling to each city, but seeing each city as merely one facet of a larger City. Polo ostensibly saw his own Venice in each, I see my own New York. At one point in their conversations, the Khan tells Polo, “Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables?” And Polo replies, “This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”

Against the Eighties: In which my early running career begins and ends

Many times, when I was walking the street, I raced the cars that passed me. I made it my mission to keep up with a car until it turned onto another street or stopped. One day, after I’d chased a blue minivan all the way to my friend’s house, my friend’s older sister was on the porch. “Why do you do that? You know those people are laughing at you?” That was the end of my street racing career.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties