In the interest of creating more levity, I’d like to share a little joke with you.
McCartney: Knock, knock.
Lennon: Who’s there?
McCartney: Fuck.
Lennon: Fuck who?
McCartney: No. . .fuck WHOM.
Ha ha. I should, of course, mention that I didn’t invent that particular joke. I did, however, choose the names of the characters involved, and I chose the picture and the following interesting video for this blog entry.
After all the heaviness lately, it’s time to get BFS&T back on track, and get some levity around here again. Who among us doesn’t like levity?
I had a dream the other day in which I was having dinner with my Chinese-American girlfriend and her family. She and her teenaged sister were both very Americanized, but her parents were not, and they spoke very little English. We were spending the evening at an upscale Chinese restaurant in downtown Seattle, and a waitress was placing some miniature bowls on the table and making a rather elaborate show of gracefully spooning tiny ladels of seafood stew into each one. We watched her closely, fascinated, and we each took turns sniffing the delicious stew and commenting on it as our respective bowls would appear at our places.
Somehow the subject of dopamine came up (you know, like it does), and I was trying to explain to my girlfriend’s dad about the various functionalities it has on the brain. He was having a tough time understanding me, and I was having a tough time simplifying the terminology enough to get the ideas across, but we were both engaged in the conversation, and we were trying to communicate with each other as best we could. At one point, I attempted to use the seafood stew as a visual aide, but even that was unsuccessful, so we finally agreed to just drop the subject of dopamine altogether and move on to something else. “It’s really interesting, though,” I finished, a bit disappointed at having to give up on such a good topic.
Given the conversational choice between dopamine, politics, and religion, I’m gonna choose dopamine every time, even (and I daresay especially) on a dinner date with my girlfriend’s family, their tenuous grasp on the English language notwithstanding.
So.
It’s been a while since I wrote, a fact for which I must apologize, but I had to take a bit of a hiatus to see how everything was going to pan out. Three weeks later, inertia has settled over me, and I feel like I’m getting too far behind. I do have other things I want to write about, too, but I feel I should wrap up this story first.
The DUI was dropped, which was an obvious choice since I wasn’t even impaired. The related charge of reckless driving was also dropped, but they did decide to charge me with careless driving, which amounts to about the same thing as a speeding ticket. They cited me for a wide turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, which seems ridiculously trumped up, but they also agreed to lower the price of the ticket from six hundred dollars to two hundred since I had a clean record. I decided to plead guilty and quit while I was ahead.
A friend took the liberty of finding me in one of those newspapers that publishes mug shots, which I thought was humiliating but also kinda funny. At least they don’t publish peoples’ names. I thought it was funny until yesterday, when it occurred to me that while I may not care too much about ephemeral newspapers, I should probably see what’s out there online. I typed my name, and the first two results featured my mug shot. My blood turned to ice. Fucking hell, I thought, that’s the last thing I need. I e-mailed both of the web sites to have them remove the offending pages. It’s insult to injury, if you ask me.
Let’s hope that’s the end of the story. I’ll be quite happy when this stupid incident is nothing but a distant memory.
My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me. My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time. School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment. My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day. While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff. My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young. Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards. I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.
But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction. I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can. School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is. But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.
In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock. On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.” Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before. He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also. Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.
On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike. That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question. One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade. What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made. We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them. One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day: “Reynolds Wrap: the best wrap around.” M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.
“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”
My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it. I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time. When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him. “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny. I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.” We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it. When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.
Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.  Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason. One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“ I couldn’t agree more. I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now. I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life. I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.
Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure. My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe. By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed. I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written. I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.
There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years. The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played. The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week. My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day. I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.
I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.
I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus. From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss. You’re welcome.
All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed. She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.
Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so. He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed. One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.” Or DID it?
The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers. He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air. It made for hilarious and riveting radio.  When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician’s name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.” Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands. Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”
Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later? Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs? The mind boggles. All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson. We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.
At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too. That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.
It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music. One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough. She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall. The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.
“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered. “Take it down.”
“What?” my brother asked. “No way!”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”
“So? You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”
“Well. . .maybe.”
“Oh yeah, right. Why do I have to take this down? Come here.” He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck. “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face. “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”
At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”
I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too. He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.  Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit. The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.
“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.
“No. Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden? These pictures have been up here for two years.”
“Well, take them down now.”
“No. I like them.”
My brother and I won that particular argument. I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough. Or maybe she just gave in. Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.
In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more. When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.  One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.” Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out. That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it. As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough. People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.
The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.  Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills. If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.
By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers. I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.
