Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (23 page)

Unfortunately, I no longer have my copy of this essay, since I made the mistake of giving it to her husband as a gift, whereupon Caroline grabbed it and ripped it to shreds. She has informed all her siblings that none of her four adorable children are ever allowed to know how much their mom loved the New Kids on the Block. This has something to do with the fact that it violates the fourth commandment against worshipping graven images (and that Donnie Wahlberg sure was graven). So my lips are sealed. Sydney, if you’re reading, put this book down now!
Dora
’s on! Go!

Caroline was the ultimate badass baby sister. She did not really have the neuroses that afflicted her big brother. In fact, she wasn’t frightened of anything. We big kids never stayed out all night or raised hell or stalked pop stars. We had no idea being badass was even an option. Our parents were infuriatingly trusting, so we never got to outrage them. They never gave us any curfew, so we never stayed out late. They never locked up their liquor, so it never occurred to us to sneak any of it. If we felt like cutting school, they’d just shrug and say “fine,” so what was the point? It drove us crazy.

But Caroline? She got away with the things that older siblings never even imagine. Believe me, none of us ever told one another to “fuck off” at the dinner table. Saying “fuck off” at dinner, with my mom sitting right there, would have been like kneeling before the Holy Inquisition and using my tongue to fold the communion wafer into a paper airplane. But when Caroline told Tracey to “fuck off,” all Mom did was make Caroline write up a list of twenty-five things she should have said instead. Caroline’s list of twenty-five “fuck off ” alternatives began strong, but by the end she was struggling—the final two items she came up with were “Forsake me” and “Begone.” “Forsake me!” is still a popular conversation-ender in our sibling circle.

My sisters and I were shocked. None of us dared to say “frickin’” or “stupid” or “douchebag” at home. Not even “d-bag,” which I tried once. We sure screwed up by getting born so early, when our folks had so much more energy.

Caz and I always traded tapes, trying to turn each other on to the music we loved. I taped her the Replacements and the Ramones; she taped me Bon Jovi and Tiffany. I taped her
Let It Be
for her birthday. (Conscientous big brother that I am, I omitted “Gary’s Got a Boner.”) We liked each other’s music way more than we would admit. Bon Jovi’s “Wild in the Streets” stopped me dead in my tracks, a stupid-rock mall anthem to end all mall anthems, to end all anthems, to end all malls. Meanwhile, Caroline was putting the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue” on her answering machine. Whenever we confessed how much we loved each other’s music, we each felt both flattered and disappointed at the same time.

Caroline made me a tape for my birthday that winter, when I turned twenty-three. According to the note she wrote inside the case, “This is dedicated to the men in my life—Jordan, Rob, Jon, Joe, Danny, & Donnie.” “Rob” is me. The other five are the New Kids on the Block. It’s called
Rob’s Cultural Experience
, and it has her narrating between the songs to explain the significance of why Bobby Brown is a genius or why Lita Ford kicks ass.

Caroline was really the only person on earth I could talk to about girls. That sounds weird, since she was only twelve, but she was always braver and bolder than I was, and did her best to teach me basic social skills. She could always be counted on to say, “Who needs girls? You have me.” She wore her hair pouffed up like Joan Jett in the video for “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” She wore a black leather jacket to play up her resemblance to Joan. Hell, she even took “Joan” as her confirmation name.

The New Kids were starting to blow up across the country, the way New Edition and Bobby Brown did a few years earlier. Caroline was plugged into the Catholic schoolgirl grapevine that knew exactly where they were at any given moment, allowing her to lead packs of her friends in chasing them down the street. She knew about it every time one of her friends had a friend who had a friend who saw them buying condoms at the Osco Drug in Dorchester. Her favorites were Joey and Donnie. She met Donnie once backstage and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. For months, she answered the phone, “Donnie kissed me!”

One day, Caroline was telling me Joey Mac stories and she mentioned that his nickname in high school was “Wedgie.” It only made her love him more fiercely. There was always something humble and lovable about those New Kids. They never had the disastrous post-teen-pop crash. After the hits dried up, they got on with their lives. My friend Desiree even went on a New Kids cruise last winter, where you’d call room service and Donnie or Jordan would show up at your cabin with your food.

Caroline made me another excellent tape that winter where she actually interviewed the New Kids. She did this by asking questions into the mike, and then sticking in a line from a song as the answer.

 

CAROLINE:

“Do you have something to tell me?”

 

JOEY MCINTYRE:

“Please don’t go, girl! You’re my best friend! You’re my everything!”

 

She orchestrates the whole tape as a news report (“This is Caroline Sheffield on WNOB, live from Dorchester”) about a rumble between the New Kids and Lita Ford, “the self-proclaimed First Lady of Rock.” Obviously, Lita kicks all their asses. The New Kids ask Lita, “What’cha Gonna Do About It?” Lita answers with a line from “Under the Gun”: “Now the time has come, it’s your turn to die.” The rumble gets messy, with rock stars from other tapes joining in: Ozzy, Poison, Public Enemy. I have to say, Caroline sure goes overboard creating all this dialogue.

 

AXL ROSE (from “One in a Million”):

“Hey man, won’t you cut me some slack?”

 

NEW KIDS (from “Hangin’ Tough”):

“We ain’t gonna cut anybody any slack!”

 

She even gets the Psychedelic Furs in the mix, with one word from the
Pretty in Pink
title song.

 

CAROLINE:

“Joey, what is the name of your girlfriend?”

 

JOEY:

“Caroline.”

 

These days, she mostly listens to Taylor Swift, because that’s what her toddlers are into. Sydney and Jack play a game where they take turns pretending to be Taylor; one sings “White Horse” while the other cheers and claps, then they trade places. The music changes, I guess, but the fan gene is a dominant one.

We still argue about music, because we love the argument too much to give it up. It’s always going to be one of our ways of talking to each other. She still loves the Replacements, so much that she actually buys Tommy Stinson’s solo albums, even though I urge her not to. A couple of Christmases ago, she gave me an autographed copy of Paul Westerberg’s solo album, which she got waiting in line at a Boston in-store signing. Needless to say, she was the only girl who showed up, plus the only person under thirty. It knocked me out to see her photos, posing with Paul Westerberg—two people who taught me so much about courage and not being afraid of life and going on your nerve, two soul confidants who got me through some grim times. It made me feel guilty for not liking the record, so I forced myself to play it until I liked it.

Paul Westerberg has a big crazy smile in the picture, with his arm around Caroline. He obviously didn’t get a lot of girls asking for pictures. He looks real happy to see her.

1989

 

 

 

 

I was twenty-three and living with my grandfather, just because he was ninety and by himself and I wanted to spend time with him while I could. Ever since my grandmother died in 1986, he’d lived alone in the three-decker in Forest Hills, an Irish neighborhood in Boston. I would take the T home every night and he’d cook us steaks, and we’d listen to the Irish folk music on WROL as he smoked his pipe and told stories about the railroad.

He’d lived in this house since 1933, when he and Nana got married. They came over separately in 1924, after growing up on dirt farms in Ireland, and got good jobs in America, she as a maid, he as a brake inspector on the New Haven Railroad. After he retired from the railroad, he was a security guard in a department store, and then in the Gardner Museum in the Fenway. He worshipped FDR and was active in his union. Every time he tried retiring, my grandmother would send him back out to work. She was deaf, but she wasn’t
that
deaf. And the man could talk.

They’d courted for nine years, as she’d always dreamed she’d eventually go back to County Kerry, whereas he was determined never to go back to County Cork again. As a little kid, I asked him if he ever missed the farm, and he said, “My boy, I was so glad to be off the farm I didn’t know I was working.” He didn’t get to emigrate until he was twenty-four because he had to wait until his elder brother got married. In accordance with tradition, his brother got the farm and he got the brother’s wedding dowry, which he spent on a boat ticket to America. Those two weeks on the boat were the happiest days of his life up to that point. America had a railroad, where he only had to work sixteen hours a day. This was the life. He was terrified that any of his grandchildren might someday move back, after all the trouble it took him to get out. In the sixty-five years since he emigrated, he’d only gone back once, to settle the estate (i.e., give the farm away to the neighbors) when his brother died in 1968. He told my uncle Gerard, “There was fuck all there when I left, and there’s fuck all there now.”

Every night, when I came home from work, I would hear him halfway down Craft Place yelling at the Red Sox on his TV set. “Come on, Ellis! Do it for your ancestors!” His favorite Red Sox player was Ellis Burks, who he called “The Irishman.” He loved to yell at Ellis about the glory of his Celtic name and the tradition of Irish sportsmen. “Think it for your ancestors, Ellis! Sure they had to hit it with a hurley, but you have a bat!” Ellis Burks is black, by the way. After my grandfather died in 1991, I went to County Cork and visited the cabin where he was born, and left an Ellis Burks baseball card there.

Some of my friends, when I told them I was rooming with my grandfather, assumed I was taking care of him, helping him go to the bathroom, stuff like that. These people have never met an old Irish guy. He wouldn’t even let me take him shopping. He would take the bus in by himself without telling me. When I got home and found out he’d been gallivanting alone on the bus at his age, I would blow a gasket and yell at him, while he sat in his easy chair laughing at me. He walked with a cane, but he just liked how it looked.

After the baseball game, he would cook us a steak and tell stories. Then we trooped out to the living room for
Sanford and Son
, a show we’d been watching together my entire life. He could relate to Fred Sanford. They were both cantankerous old men who wore cardigans and overalls. Both were widowers who liked to hear themselves talk. They were exiles with thick accents—Fred Sanford a St. Louis man in L.A., my grandfather a County Cork immigrant in Boston—bewildered by normal Americans. All the people around them who were at ease in the new world—these people all seemed as ridiculous as the white cop who tells Fred Sanford “right up” when he means “right on.” Being old and far from home was a joke my grandfather got.

After he went to bed, I’d stay up and watch
Yo! MTV Raps
for my fix of De La Soul and Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy. I would switch it back to the Eternal Word Network so he could get the first of his seven daily Masses. If I forgot to change the station back, we’d have the same conversation about it. “I got your jokers this morning,” he said. That meant he’d turned on the TV expecting Mass and got
Club MTV
or
Remote Control
.

When he tried watching MTV with me, he found it hilarious. The one tape of mine he liked, oddly enough, was the Smiths. His favorite was “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” He said, “At least that’s got a bit of an air to it.”

He preferred the radio in the kitchen, which would sing him the songs of the old country, even though when he was my age, he couldn’t wait to get out of the old country. The songs would remind him of other songs, and he’d sometimes close his eyes to recite.
One two three, balance like me. Now you’re a fairy, you’ve got your own faults.
Some of the songs were from Ireland, some were from America. Some were American pop songs about the Irish. Some were Irish songs about coming to America and getting lost.
Your right foot is crazy, your left foot is lazy, but don’t be un-aizy, I’ll teach you to waltz.

Irish songs make you feel a little nostalgic for the old country, even if it wasn’t the country where you were born. When Nana was alive, she would “go to Ireland” in the evenings, just sit with the lights out for an hour or two, dreaming that she was back on the farm. Then she’d get up and do her devotions around the apartment, with a Vermont Maid bottle full of holy water. She would walk around the apartment flinging it in all directions. To the south, for Uncle Eddie in Brazil. To the other directions, where her other children lived. All over my grandfather and me. Every object in the apartment being fairly damp and extremely holy, she had done her work for the night. Now that she was gone, he and I were alone with just the songs and the time to talk. So we talked.

Or, rather, he talked. When my mom was growing up, he was a silent man, but one day in 1961, he was given the job of riding up and down the Eastern seaboard with a couple of new engineers from the Philippines. Their English wasn’t good, so his job was explaining to them patiently and in detail every aspect of the train operation. He started talking that day and never stopped. So we sat in the kitchen and listened to the radio. He would sing songs about the old country and lecture me about men he idolized (FDR, Eamon de Valera, Cardinal Cushing) and men he despised (Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Cardinal Law).