Wild and Beautiful Insanity! I Wish It Was 1979 Again.
A tale of a suburban white boy’s innocence lost.
I was ten. I had never even heard of cannabis.
“Where’d ya get that belt buckle?” asked Sgt. Doberman.
Richie, played by fourteen-year-old-Matt Dillon, was seated before the cop. He looked down at his waist, grabbed at his bronze belt buckle to examine it and said, “friend gave it to me.”
“Well, what is it?” snapped Doberman.
“It’s a leaf,” replied Richie.
“What kind?” pressed the officer.
“Poison Ivy. I guess,” replied Richie.
The older kids laughed, and I laughed along with the cable television screen. I wouldn’t realise for a few minutes that the leaf on Richie’s belt buckle, the Acapulco Gold, was not poison ivy.
I was ten years old. We were watching a film called Over the Edge. It was 1980.
I don’t remember much about 1979. It began when I was in third grade. My first crush was on my teacher. I remember her. But she did assign us ten book reports in a six-week period, as retribution for some dumb kid stuff we’d pulled... Wait. The more I think about it, the more I remember. It was just third grade. Innocent. Tee ball fields and fossil pits dominate the mindscape when I glance back.
Then comes fourth grade. We started getting actual letter grades on our report cards instead of checkmarks, minuses, or frowny faces. I made the Honor Role that whole school year. Fourth grade started out simple enough. Fast forward to Christmas Break, New Year’s Eve, and my break with any reality I had known before then.
New Year’s Eve 1979 was every bit as icy-cool as the Series Finale of That 70s Show. It represents the last of my kid naivete, and a beginning of my own personal loss of innocence — and what that even means to me now. Most days I still don’t know, but it was the best memory of my life for too damn long.
Our parents let us run wild! They gave us lit cigarettes! How else could we set off the shoeboxes full of firecrackers and bottle rockets? And I mean, Black Cats, Lady Fingers, and M-80s. We all had dozens of the real bottle rockets too! I mean the ones that streaked across the street at you, launched from an older cousin’s Coke bottle, and screaming before loudly reporting against its target’s ribcage— exploding but slightly muffled by a wool-lined denim coat!
Stankin’-ass colorful Smoke Bombs and Jumping Jacks added an Apocalypse Now-meets-Lord of the Flies atmosphere. Thick smoke, repetitive explosions, and colorful flashing lights defined our perimeter. Smells of sulfur and black powder mixed with the teen anthems of Cheap Trick at Budokan under Pine canopy on a creekbank in Portsmouth, Virginia. We were all alright.
The whole neighborhood would convene at my grandma Mary’s house every year and line the bottles of booze up on the counter. They’d put out a big spread of food, party like it was 1979, and wait for the ball to drop. We’d dodge in and out, following the older kids’ lead, drinking the lasts of the old folks’ drinks: the bourbon, vodka, gin, or whatever was left to melt in ice as they fetched themselves a freshie.
I was nine and was about the median age of us kids at the party. In another week, I ‘d be ten years old.
There was a television on in the back den. That den smelled like leather chairs, bourbon, and smoke. It was one of my favorite places in the world to be up until then. But on New Year’s Eve 1979, it was just a peripheral afterthought and background noise in the house. None of us kids us cared about Dick Clark. After running all night, the inside of the house was too hot on our cold faces. Whenever we’d sneak in to beg another smoke, and steal another drink, it was in and out! And every kid for himself.
We puffed cigarettes, snuck watered-down highballs, and shot pistols and long guns into the creek. That’s how I remember 1979: as a kid who was laying-on-grandma’s- white couch-with-the-spins-drunk, staring at a periwinkle blue ceiling just moments after shooting off pistols and setting off the last of the good stuff.
I remember wondering, right then, “Is this drunk?” I was in the fourth grade.
Enter 1980.
Enter guilt. The surreal backdrop of NYE ’79 quickly gave way to more peer pressure. It hits me today like this: innocence gave way to guilt. By guilt, I associate loosely the idea of responsibility for knowing something. Now that I knew what things were. I might as well be guilty of doing them all. At least that’s how I took it all, as a lost little kid growing up faster in a world that didn’t match what I’d always been told.
Forty years later now, and that last bit is about the only thing that remains true. What we are told to believe is nearly never the truth. The bad guys have won, for now.
Our fucking school is on fire and us kids are rioting in the streets, but the law is coming with guns and bombs. A fascist in The White House wants to make more money for himself, his cronies, and his crooked kids. He’s rabid, and frothing. He cheers crowds of hate breeders and willful cultists. He urges violence, like from the good old days as his authoritarian shock troopers press closer.
Sgt. Doberman is kneeling on Richie’s neighbor’s neck.
He turns to me now in my dreamy dementia as he did to Richie’s friend, Carl, in Over the Edge. The authoritarian cries for violence while his lickspittles taunt, and ask me, America:
“You’re turning into more of a punk every day, you know that? Let me ask you something. You got some drivin’ need to louse things up for yourself?” he asks.
I’m just sitting here like Carl, who replied simply, without hesitation:
“I got a driving need to be left alone, Okay?”
And I just wish it were 1979 again.
- author’s note: racism was alive and well in 1979. This is a piece about the days before I was so angered by it, and every other dirty deed pulled by the rich and powerful on the poor and naive. It is my story of innocence lost, and a simple look back to a time when I was nine, and I wasn’t so aware that the world was already on fire. My life now is learning to embrace that fire, so that I can help the kids put it out.
