exploiting my youth – Pathetic Fallacy

We hear the playback and it seems so long ago

I suppose I should mention here that this is a comic essay and I am exaggerating for, you know, effect. I grew up in a podunk town in the middle of bupkis, so that no doubt is reflected here. If you had a cool 80s childhood that was different, then good for you.

These days the popular conception is that the 1980’s were all pink and aqua, but they were actually surprisingly brown if you lived through them. The success of Stranger Things (at least before its las season), the rise in retro synth-pop as practiced by artists like Chapell Roan, the popularity of $30 vinyl versions of albums one can stream for free, a revival of shoulder pads and denim jackets, the number of YouTube reaction videos for the Goonies—all of these point to an interest in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher that goes far beyond the nostalgia of aging Gen-Xers, and speaks to the generation of kids out there longing for a time before smart phones ruined everything. This amuses me because I am old enough to remember the 1980’s revival of the 1950’s, and even the 1970’s revival of the 1900’s, which was a pretty darn weird thing if you think of it.

Of course, when you look at the 80’s through rose-tinted (and leopard-print-framed) nostalgia glasses when you weren’t even yet alive in the 20th century, you are going to get things wrong, especially if you’re being lied to by Netflix. Correcting perceived misconceptions of the time of my youth—when nobody asked—is the most old-man thing ever, but I just turned 58, so here I go.

'OK, boomer': la frase edadista que triunfa en las redes — actually I’m Gen-X, but no one under 40 knows the difference

I. The music wasn’t that cool

I am grateful, really, that Netflix has popularized Kate Bush for the TikTok set, but the truth is back in the 1980’s no one outside of the UK was listening to her (except me, I was cool)¹. I remember playing my copy of Hounds of Love for my long-suffering high school girlfriend and her declaring the record “strange” and me “weird.”

These days, when a movie or tv show is set in the 1980s, the soundtracks are all songs by Echo and the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, etc. Likewise, Spotify playlists and Sirius radio stations would have you believe the decade’s music was entirely New Wave. But in reality, fm radio playlists were 60% Michael Jackson, 30% Madonna, and the rest was made up of Hair Bands, Yacht Rock, and Pop Country (Kenny Rodgers was very hot around 1982). College radio stations might play Punk or New Wave, but only college kids listened to college radio. Rap was still being invented at the time but it was strictly segregated.

So when a television show or movie tries to play it cool with a Post Punk/New Wave soundtrack (and yes, I’m looking at you, Stranger Things) remember that we all want to think we were cooler kids than we really were².

II. Design wasn’t totally radical

If you think of the eighties look, you probably are imagining some combination of pink, purple, aqua, and neon (“Miami Style”) or of angular floating shapes and zigzags atop backgrounds made up of repeating patterns of dot, lines, and squiggles (“Memphis Style³“). Or maybe you’re thinking of a mixture of both⁴. And if one is to go by the VH1 series I ♥ the 80’s, your conception would be true. But the truth is these styles were entirely the domain of MTV bumpers and overpriced boutiques that sold earrings made from shards of broken CDs⁵.

In reality, most design in the 80s was inherited from the 70s, which means a lot of browns and yellows, denim and tee shirts. It was the design of strip malls, K-marts, and ranch houses—but not cool mid-century ranch houses, cheap 70’s ranch houses with a lot of lucite. It was the age of particle board and the plastic shopping bag and those little springy doorstops that got all bent and never worked.

III. Punks weren’t everywhere

I was going to write a bit here about how in the 1980s it was de rigueur for crowd scenes in movies to feature a punk rocker with eyeliner and an enormous hairspray mohawk, or even violent gangs of these exotic creatures robbing convenience stores and fighting zombies, but it turns out that somebody else already wrote that better than I would.

I will add that punk culture was definitely a thing, but as a movement it was a lot less flashy, and more insular, and largely kept to itself. My wife had a punk era in her teens and she’s super cool. Real punk culture was rich in vernacular style and a DIY ethos. But mainstream America found punks to be scary and local news stories blamed them for everything that was wrong in society, and so fake, threatening punks were everywhere in movies and tv.

Also, valley-speak was entirely made up for that one Frank Zappa song.

IV. It was something of a hellscape

Look, I’m nostalgic for my childhood just like everyone else. I love my original 1980 Rubik’s Cube for which I still the original Ideal⁶-branded plastic case. But the 80s were not a good time to be alive if you were a woman, or black, or queer, or any combination of those. It was the decade when the Hippies made way for the Yuppies, and we elected a senile, jelly bean eating, horoscope believing B-movie actor who ruined everything. The myth of the Welfare Queen upset the squares so much that they tore apart the intricate support systems that fed starving children. Even as the Cold War was winding down, the U.S. couldn’t keep its imperialist hands out of Central America. Also, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an objectively awful cartoon.

This all may sound like a lot of complaints from a cranky old dude, but my motives are pure. I am a pathologically nostalgic person (just look at my tag cloud), but I am also aware of the toxic nature of nostalgia. As kids, my generation were brought up being told about the wondrous world of Boomer culture, of how everything was peace and love and drugs and sexual liberation and how each and every one of them had attended both Woodstock and Altamont. And how much the music today sucked, and how lazy and cynical the kids were. And I was determined that when I was older I would never let my own nostalgia cloud my memory, and I would not think that my childhood was more special and magical because I grew up when I did.

Now let me tell you why Talking Heads was the greatest band ever.

She was huge in the UK, which is one way they’re better than us. ↩︎
Except, of course, for me with my Laurie Anderson and my wife with her Smiths. ↩︎
Which originated in Milan, Italy, although it was named after Memphis, Tennessee, by way of a Bob Dylan song. Look, the 80s didn’t really make sense. ↩︎
It’s a free country. ↩︎
CDs were actually everywhere in the 80s. ↩︎
R.I.P. ↩︎

Roque & roll

In the summer of 1981 my family took a cross-country trip from our tiny college town of Eureka, Illinois to spend the summer Claremont, California, where we would live in a loaner house that was part of an affluent retirement community. My father was on sabbatical from his professorship and planned to spend a few months writing. I have many memories of this trip, but the three big ones were: 1) going to Disneyland, where I was able to experience Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and the 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea: Submarine Ride, both of which are now but memories; 2) the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is now a classic but at the time arrived seemingly out of nowhere with almost no promotion (Superman II was supposed to be the biggest movie that year); and 3) afternoons playing roque.

I remember the day my father first described the sport of roque to my mom, my brother Rob, and me over the dinner table. He said that a group of the retirees at the village were all hooked on a game that was sort of like pool, except instead of a table, it was played on a big hard court, and the players used mallets and hoops like croquet, but you hit your ball using a cueball, and also there was also a sort of a curb around the entire court, so that players could make bank shots, like the rails of a billiards table. I was confused but intrigued, and then my dad said that if we were interested, we were allowed to use the roque court when no one else was there—as long as we took part in its cleaning and upkeep.

The next day, Rob and I watched a game and it was fascinating. The court was only a short walk away in a central shared area of the community, surrounded by short palm trees. It was recessed into the ground and dog-eared at each corner, resembling an emerald gem cut. The surface was warm red clay, much like that of a clay tennis court, and it was dusty and got on the soles of the shoes of the elderly gentlemen who carefully and precisely lined up their shots. The mallets were short, compared to croquet mallets, and they had a soft rubber head on one side, for better control and possible spin on the cueball. The wickets were thick metal and were permanently anchored in place by cement below the clay. And boy howdy were the players serious. There was absolutely no talking when someone was taking his turn, and usually none after as well, unless to murmur approval for a good shot or to sympathetically click their tongues for a bad one.

My father had apparently petitioned the locals on Rob’s and my behalf—perhaps he realized we had little to do that summer on a daily basis—because a couple of the aged fellows took us aside and took us through the rules, which were mostly the same as croquet’s except when they weren’t. They showed us the proper way of holding the mallet straight up between the legs and making contact with the cueball. But most importantly, they showed us how to maintain the court. It had to be swept clean of debris (the California foliage produced stray leaves year-round). It had to be lightly sprinkled with water, to prevent cracking in the sun. When it inevitably did crack, there was a reserve of clay powder that was sifted into the fissure by hand and wetted. Finally there was a large metal roller, pushed like a lawn mower, that was used to keep everything level.

If the sport of roque is remembered at all today, it’s as a plot point in Steven King’s 1977 novel The Shining (but not in the Kubrick film adaptation of 1980). In the novel, the haunted Overlook Hotel features a roque court, and towards the start of the book the hotel’s owner, Stuart Ullman, describes the structure to Jack Torrance, the troubled author who has taken on a position as winter caretaker:

“It was Derwent who added the roque court I saw you admiring when you arrived.”

“Roque?”

“A British forebear of our croquet, Mr. Torrance. Croquet is bastardized roque. According to legend, Derwent learned the game from his social secretary and fell completely in love with it. Ours may be the finest roque court in America.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A life-sized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed?

Late in the novel, after he has been possessed by the malevolent spirit of the hotel, Jack uses a roque mallet to terrorize his wife and child, as well as to mutilate his own face (early King novels, am I right?). It’s remarkable that King went so out of his way to feature a forgotten sport and then get absolutely nothing right about its history. Roque is an American invention, developed in New York and named by Samuel Crosby in 1899; the name was derived by removing the first and last letters of “croquet.” Croquet itself was not a particularly old sport at the time. The earliest description of that game comes from 1856 in London, although it seems likely to have derived from previous vernacular sources. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, the Queen of Heart’s croquet game, played with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls, was a reflection of a recent craze for the invention.

Roque was something of an overnight sensation at the turn of the century. The innovations it brought to croquet greatly increased opportunities for skillful play, and the permanent courts, which required a significant investment of resources, made it into a serious sport for serious players. Competitive roque was played by two teams of two players and high-level play included the technique of hitting your ball into your partner’s ball, thus pushing the two balls along in tandem.

How big did roque get? It was a sport in the 1904 Olympics, replacing croquet, which was an event in 1900. The United States won all the medals, largely because roque wasn’t played outside of the country. In his 1954 novel Sweet Thursday, a sequel to Cannery Row, John Steinbeck spends a chapter describing how the town of Pacific Grove, California became torn apart by a rivalry between retiree players and fans of two opposing roque teams:

Once, during its history, Pacific Grove was in trouble, deep trouble. You see, when the town was founded many old people moved to the retreat, people you’d think didn’t have anything to retreat from. These old people became grumpy after a while and got to interfering in everything and causing trouble, until a philanthropist named Deems presented the town with two roque courts.

Roque is a complicated kind of croquet, with narrow wickets and short-handled mallets. You play off the sidelines, like billiards. Very complicated, it is. They say it develops character.

In the novel, Deems, the benefactor who paid for the courts regretted the rift they were causing and had them bulldozed in the dead of night right before a big tournament.

While I was researching the history of roque for this essay, I discovered that in its basic form it did not use a cueball, and that the version I had been taught was called “two-ball” roque. There was also, apparently, a version called “royal” roque, but what that entailed I can only imagine. In any case, roque’s popularity faded quickly after World War II. The American Roque League last published official rules in 1959 and the National Two Ball Roque Association last published its rules in 1961. In 2004 the American Roque and Croquet Association suspended its national roque tournaments.

A 2011 article in Croquet World Online Magazine details the construction of a contemporary court in Stuart, Florida. Its builder, Chris Bullock, remembered the game from having played it at Cape Cod in the 1950’s. The article say that Mr. Bullock and his friends play a new variant, “golf” roque, designed to be faster-playing. This article, now more than a decade old, is the most recent mention of play I could find, and I wonder if Bullock’s court sparked new interest or if it was the last of the dodos.

Whether or not there’s anyone left playing the game today, roque left a lasting impression in my mind, mostly for the memory of one ill-fated evening. It was late in my family’s stay in Claremont and Rob and I were a bit squirrelly with the realization that we were heading home soon after two and a half months. And we were going to miss roque. Generally we played in the late mornings because those were the only times that the courts were free. But that evening Rob and I decided we wanted to play late.

It had been raining that day, which of course is rare in southern California, and the court was a bit tacky, but we were determined to go through the upkeep routine, because that was in its own way as fun as playing. There was a sizable crack and I thought we should really fill that in as much as we could so we heaped on a few handfuls of the clay dust, but it wasn’t really settling in place, so we pulled out the hose and soaked the pile through. The court around the crack was already saturated and excess water from our repair attempt was puddling.

Now we had a sticky mound of clay that was noticeably higher than the rest of the court. So we did what seemed obvious—we pulled out the roller and set to work, running it back and forth as if we were making a pie crust. The mound was not getting smaller, so we took running starts; and then disaster struck: a layer of the court peeled off entirely, stuck to the roller, leaving a gash about two feet long, six inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The tacky clay had crumbled unevenly and the exposed surface was pockmarked and cratered.

We were horrified. We had been entrusted with the use and care of these men’s most prized possession, their passion in life, and we had ruined it. I was absolutely losing it while Rob was trying to figure out how we might fix things. The answer seemed to be more clay, and more rolling, but now nothing stuck at all. Any powder we put down just added the smear stuck to the roller, which would not scrape off. Darkness was falling, and we were supposed to return to the house. Eventually, we simply gave up. We replaced the roller and the hose and walked back in shame. We didn’t tell our parents, but we knew that the next day there would be a reckoning. I didn’t sleep well that night.

Late the next morning, Rob and I walked slowly out the back door and onto the path that lead to the scene of our crime. I played through scenarios in my head, mostly involving us having to somehow pay for the damage with a lien on any future wages, which were more than a decade off. I also imagined the sad retirees returning home to their wives and trying to hold back the tears. But instead, what greeted us was nothing of the sort. There were four old guys, lost deep in play at a forgotten sport. The court was immaculate. Nothing was ever said.

Safe & non-toxic

Back in the days when Halloween was primarily a night for kids to knock on doors to get stray change and popcorn balls; back before the holiday morphed into an excuse for young adults to dress as sexy versions of 90’s cartoons and get their slutty drink on; that is, back in the 70s, store-bought costumes were crap. They consisted of thin vacuum-formed plastic masks and silkscreened bodysuits which were made of a mystery fabric that was not quite muslin, not quite plastic, but 100% flammable. Eventually even this material was deemed too costly to produce and the suits were made entirely from vinyl, lending them all the drape of a deflated beach ball. These were the ubiquitous licensed character costumes made by Ben Cooper, inc., which, defying all reason, are highly collectable today. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Ben Cooper brand costumes: bring them up the next time a Gen-Xer complains about how everything was better back when.

Of course, there were kids and parents who wished to avoid paying a whopping three bucks for commercially-produced outfits that were only marginally recognizable (owing to the fact that they had the characters’ names emblazoned on their chests). For the non-conformists, costumes of hoboes, pirates, ghosts, and mummies were good options because you could make them out of last year’s ratty clothes and sheets and felt and other bits of stuff lying around (toilet paper was often involved). But for the true weirdos, those who aspired to be something scary or gross for Halloween, there was only one game in town, and that was the Imagineering line of makeup and prosthetics. They were cheep, funky, grungy, and surprisingly effective, especially when it came to making gaping wounds and the like, and I loved them so much.

Instead of selling full costumes of specific characters, the Imagineering line consisted of theatrical building blocks you could mix and match. There were evil teeth and fake fingers. There was fake blood and tooth blackout. And there were small pallets of ingenious stage makeup, such as Scar Stuf™, a mixture of beeswax and cotton fibers that seemed like it couldn’t possibly work but which did in fact produce startlingly realistic scars, wounds, and other abrasions.

For much of my childhood I was limited to the pointy teeth and fake blood. I was not particularly flush as a kid, and while most items in the Imagineering line ran 50-75 cents, that was still a lot for me. Until one October—maybe ’78 or ’79—when I finally had some income of my own from delivering The Peoria Journal Star (afternoon edition). That year I finally splurged on a pair of Evil Eyes, the prosthetic eyes that GLOWED IN THE DARK. In light they were just a couple of ovals of plastic but in complete darkness, they were Fire from the Very Depths of Hhell. To maximize the glow effect, I would hold the plastic eyes under my reading lamp—a gooseneck 75 watt lamp clipped to the headboard of my top-level bunk bed—for about five minutes. Then I would run to the darkest place in the house (mostly under a blanket in my closet) and stare in horror at the glowing orbs until they faded into blackness. Of course, like all glow-in-the-dark toys, the magic was over far too soon, and the best effect could only be achieved by holding the eyes a long time as close as I could to the incandescent bulb, which was blisteringly hot. To save my fingertips, I took to placing the eyes on my bed and bending the lamp down as close as I could. One day I decided I would get the best glow ever by bringing the lamp down so that the hood touched my quilt and the bulb pressed against the eyes, shutting the precious lumens in entirely. Pleased with this set-up, I went off to get a snack before I would take the eyes into the dark.

Two hours later, my mother came into the living room where I was sitting reading and asked if I smelled something funny. My father also was alarmed. We walked down the hall and it became apparent that thin black smoke was coming out of my bedroom door. When we entered there was a cloudy, oily plume coming from under my lamp, which was still directly on my quilt. My father grabbed a sock to push away the lamp, which had deformed from the heat. We were greeted with a massive billow of inky miasma; and underneath, a soupy, sticky mess of plastic making tendrils from the bulb to the quilt, which now had a smoldering hole in one block. My shocked parents asked me what on Earth I had been doing and I was at a loss to explain myself. Secretly, all I could think of was if there were a way to block out the windows because holy hell, those goopy, melted eyes would’ve glowed like the sun.