Category Archives: This Used To Be My Playground

There are many pieces of advice floating around out there when it comes to dating, most of them grade-A horseshit. It’s in matters of the heart where human behavior least conforms to set patterns. (Matters of the crotch are where human behavior most conforms to set patterns, but that was still a couple of months in my future.) “The prettiest girl never gets asked out because the boys are too intimidated” was one old saw that came a-cropper with the Holly Van Stone Christmas dance invitation. “Girls are attracted to confidence” was another bald-faced lie. I was far more confident than my track record entitled me to be, and was getting skunked left and right. “It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.” I never stopped looking for it, and it happened.

On Wednesdays and Fridays in Creative Writing, we put our desks in the “sharing circle” and read aloud our works in progress. When circle time came, I usually ended up next to a senior named Ronny Williams on my right, and on his right was another senior named Emily. Ronny and I had grown into a comfortable acquaintanceship, and he was clearly a close friend of Emily’s. I don’t recall ever saying a word to Emily before, mostly because she was a senior girl, and I didn’t quite pack the gear to talk to senior girls. One Wednesday in mid-December, Ronny was reading some of Emily’s poetry aloud for her. For reasons described earlier, I was in a fairly irritable and snarky mood that month, and certainly ready to call any feminine prima-donnaism on the carpet, even if it was a senior.

“Is she not capable of reading her material, Ron?” I asked in a slightly-too-loud voice. Emily looked at me with an expression that would become all too familiar in the coming years: withering contempt, but it was intermingled with a bemused shock that caused her mouth to drop open momentarily.

“She has laryngitis, Matt,” Ronny said. Emily snapped her mouth closed, and offered me an up-close look at the shiny metal cast on her middle finger that had been broken in an earlier mishap.

It was damn near love at first sight–although I had seen her plenty of times in class before that, so I guess it was love at first vaguely hostile confrontation. (There would be more of those.) Continue reading →

Upon returning to high school for my junior year, I found myself in the unique (to me) position of being something of a known commodity. I had spent two years maneuvering my way up from being a friendless and awkward nobody from a nowhere middle school to rubbing shoulders with folks in letterman jackets and cheerleader skirts. I was by no means a member of the elite, the inside circle, but the elite knew me. I was no longer a cipher. In dramatic moments of adolescent self-pity, I still thought of myself as the neglected outsider, but I could no longer really play that card, even to myself. In the brutal high school social strata, I now outranked the morbidly obese, the harelipped, the bad-skinned. I had bit and clawed my way into the comfortable middle. Enough acceptance to keep me from slitting my wrists or experimenting with auto-erotic asphyxiation, but enough angst to keep my edge and feed my growing cynicism.

I was secure in a fairly tight circle of friends, I had a conspicuous (read: ugly) vehicle that announced my presence with noise and color, and was meticulously putting together some emotional armor thanks to some hard lessons. Shelby? I was one of about fifteen boys that she expressed an interest in that month. Gina? She liked reform school boys. (May eventually have stopped liking boys altogether, if her mullet and Toyota 4X4 were any indication.) Amanda? Didn’t like me. Never did. Never would. But liked the fact that I liked her, and shamelessly played upon that for over two years whenever she was bored with the thousands of other things she had going for her. She was my Ideal Girl, from the first week of high school when I saw her in Introduction to Physical Science (IPS) to halfway through junior year, when I met…well, wait for song #41 in the next installment. Continue reading →

Having a car meant a number of things, not least of which was not having to bum rides off of Kevin S. and his vintage Volvo. Kevin had scored his license during the last quarter of sophomore year, and when he grudgingly granted my request for a daily lift (round-trip), I knew my royal blue Schwinn Neu Citi (“The Ford Edsel of Schwinn 10-Speeds”) was retired forever.

It wasn’t a free ride, by any means. I paid every day in ritual humiliation as Kevin and fellow passenger Rob L. would slowly approach where I stood outside my parents’ glorified apartment (“townhouse”) then quickly accelerate, forcing me to trot after them, until I got just close enough to reach the back door, at which point the acceleration was repeated, to the delight of all except Your Humble Narrator. If Kevin and Rob got a really early start, they would park the Volvo a block or so away, and crawl into the dense shrubbery that surrounded my domicile, make a few Monty Python-esque yelps of “Ni!” or “Meep!” then dash back to the car with me in hot pursuit. Every so often, they would call my answering machine and fill it with chants of “we hate your speed bumps, we hate your speed bumps, we hate your speed bumps, God, they suck.” (Yes, the interior driveways of my townhouse facility were practically corrugated with speed bumps.)

But I took it. Because all that was still better than riding my bike to school. And I knew my license was coming soon.

In one of life’s cruel coincidences, I received my license the same month that the city of Marysville banned “the cruise.” I’m sure every medium-sized town with a lack of better things to do has had some version of the cruise ever since the advent of paved roads. To see an example of this in action you can rent American Graffiti, which depicts a northern California cruise circa 1962, or come along with the Holy Bee for a moment as I walk you through a northern California cruise circa 1991. On Saturday nights, hundreds of kids aged about 16 to 20 (old enough to drive but too young to get into bars) would drive slowly up the main street of the town, reach the outskirts, turn around, and drive slowly back. There were frequent stops at Carl’s Jr, and AM/PM, frequent switching of cars (each car usually carried no fewer than five kids), and shouted conversations and come-ons between cars at stoplights. This rite of passage for several generations of young motorists, celebrated in hit songs and major motion pictures, I got to be a part of exactly once before The Man shut it down permanently.

It was after we had all left Joanne B.’s Hawaiian-themed 16^th birthday party held at some roadhouse’s rented party hall out on Lindhurst Ave, which I don’t think is there anymore. A group of us ended up in the back of a Toyota pickup (I forget whose), on the cruise for the first and last time in my life, with a large box of those leis made out of plastic garbage bag material. Of course, this provided us with an absolutely sublime proposition for other cruisers: “Wanna get lei’d?” Who could resist that? As it turns out, everyone.

“Cruising Prohibited” signs went up shortly after that early August night. Continue reading →

The line marking the cultural beginning and end of a decade is a fuzzy one. Any one who doubts 1980 was still part of the 70’s can just take a look at a 1980 JC Penney’s catalog and marvel at the width of the bell-bottoms, or look at a list of the top-selling 1980 songs and count up the disco tracks. Anyone who doubts 1990 was still in the clammy grasp of the 80’s need only look at the Yuba City High School 1990 yearbook, and observe the enormous Vuarnet sunglasses, Reeboks, and feathered hair.

#9. “Vogue” – Madonna

#10. “Blaze Of Glory” – Jon Bon Jovi

In piecing together the smoking ruins of my ego after the First Breakup, I realized I had to expand my social circle. Mr. Tackmier’s Geography C class seemed like

a good place to start. I became friends with guys like Jeff W., Kevin S., and Bret K. Through Anthony W. in math class, I met up with guys like Jeff O., Eric L., and Pawen D.

On the last day of school freshman year, I went to see Dick Tracy with Jeff W., which featured lots of Madonna songs, but not this one. It came from the album I’m Breathless: Music From and Inspired By The Film Dick Tracy. How Warren Beatty’s brutal evisceration of the Dick Tracy character with his engorged ego inspired a treatise on dance moves from gay discos is anyone’s guess, but I’m Breathless kicked off a trend of “inspired by” albums where artists loosely associated with a movie’s soundtrack could unload their B-sides and outtakes. (The Madonna video hit around the same time, featuring our pal Madoo in a see-through shirt that wasn’t quite see-through, though not for lack of trying on my part. A Holy Bee Tip of the Hat to the original queen of titillation.)

That summer, Jeff W. and I rode our bikes out to Movies 8 to see Young Guns II, which is better than the original (and if that isn’t damning with faint praise, then I don’t know what is.) The accompanying Jon Bon Jovi (solo) music video serves as a reminder that they used to drop some serious fuckin’ coin on music videos. Jon strummed his acoustic and mouthed his watered-down remake of “Wanted Dead Or Alive” on a massive, detailed set built on the edge of a cliff, and was photographed with more swooping helicopter shots than you can shake a stick at.

#11. “Moneytalks” – AC/DC

When school started up again in the fall of ‘90, I must have spotted half-a-dozen The Razor’s Edge T-shirts under the denim jackets of the metal kids heading for the smoking area across from the front of the high school on Frederick Street. I didn’t stare too long, as the wearers surely would’ve singled me out for a beating, and blood would’ve been hard to get out of my preppy Cosby sweater.

Continue reading →

Hey, folks, does anything suck more than Baby Boomers talking about the 60’s? Did you, like me, watch that Just For Men “Summer Of Life” commercial and wish a lingering death from some kind of impacted anal fissures on the fifty-something douche pretending to play guitar while some blonde thirty-something douchette pretends to be attracted to him through gritted teeth while visions of her Just For Men commercial paycheck dance in her empty little head? Maybe Generation X-ers talking about the 90’s is just a tad more irritating and pointless – but that’s not going to stop me. I’m going to walk you through 300 of the best, worst, and/or most memorable tracks from 1990 through 1999.

Inspired by our Idle Time Decades project, I spent my 2009 spring break  painstakingly compiling a 300-song 1990’s iTunes playlist, cued specifically to my own recollections. To quote the Jack Rabbit Slim’s slogan, it’s “The Next Best Thing To A Time Machine” (and if you don’t know what Jack Rabbit Slim’s is, turn in your 90’s card.) Listening to this playlist is akin to spinning the dial on the best Top 40 radio station of that decade. (Ironically, the 90’s marked the death of true Top 40 radio.) The 1990’s saw me going from a scrawny, gawky, 15-year-old high school freshman to a chubbier, only slightly less gawky, 25-year-old college graduate, father, and (soon-to-be-ex) husband. And of course, all of this growth and drama had a soundtrack. Continue reading →