Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (4 page)

Top 40 radio was a constant education in the ways of the world. I learned what sex was from Barry White appearing on
The Mike Douglas Show
to sing “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me.” Barry himself, looking fine in a green velour leisure suit, wandered out into the crowd to preach a little sermon as the band vamped on the bassline. “Is this song about one person? Is this song about three people? No! It’s about two people. Yeah. Two people.” I was grateful to the Round Mound of Sound for every scrap of wisdom he could throw me.

One of our favorite songs was Sister Sledge’s disco classic “We Are Family,” still all over the radio in 1980, getting played like it was a brand-new hit even though it dated back to the summer of 1979. Our baby sister, Caroline, a decade younger than me but picking up all of our cool music in the timeless tradition of sassy little sisters throughout human history, loved to sing along with this one, making up her own words: “We are family! We got all the sisters we need!” Those are still my favorite words to that song, because (in our case) they were true. But it’s funny how this song never goes away, and every generation of baby sisters puts their own spin on it. Just the other day, in a movie theater lobby outside the Harry Potter movie, I heard a little Puerto Rican girl singing it as “We are family! Yeah, Mama, sing it to me!” And she was singing it to a life-size cardboard cutout of Megan Fox, which only proves there is no limit to the Sledge sisterhood.

Rick Springfield from
General Hospital
had started making hard rock records, and although they were theoretically guitar rock records for boys, they were the girliest thing ever, and I was vaguely threatened by how much I loved them. I felt so dirty when Rick Springfield sang cute, but as Rick would say, the point is probably moot. “Jessie’s Girl” turned out to be one of the ’80’s most enduring hits. Hell, in the Rite Aid in my neighborhood, teen girls can still buy Jesse’s Girl Baked Powder Eye Shadow, which is stocked on the shelf right next to the Love’s Baby Soft and Hannah Montana Glamour Guitar Lollipops.

I thrilled to the glories of rock-and-roll radio, especially the Doors. Was any band ever so perfectly designed for teenage boys? My friends and I were typical eighth grade dorks at the time, in that our sex education mostly took the form of Jim Morrison. We studied
No One Here Gets Out Alive
as if it were holy writ, and memorized the entire soliloquy in “The End,” right down to the chilling “he walked on down the hall” conclusion. They seemed more like an ’80s new-wave combo than a classic rock legend, in part because they clearly had no idea what they were doing and didn’t even bother faking it. They prepared me for all the nightmarishly pretentious and incompetent new wave that would become my adolescent raison d’etre. The Doors revival was in full swing, with the immortal
Rolling Stone
cover that showed Jim Morrison with the words “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead.” (I was 0 for 3 in that department.)

Can you blame us? When you’re an eighth grade boy, everything sucks in your life
except
Jim Morrison. We felt Jim was a god—or at least a lord—who had faked his death and escaped to Africa. When he returned, he would reward our faith, telling us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servants.” Eventually, we started to get the sinking feeling that even if Morrison did fake his death, he probably died later anyway, and we never heard about it. But that’s too depressing to think about. Morrison lives! What was it Jim Morrison said? “People are strange, when you’re a stranger”? More like “People impose, when you’re a poseur.”

I assumed my sisters would scoff at the Doors, but Tracey ended up doing a book report on
No One Here Gets Out Alive
. We were always checking out each other’s music, books, magazines, everything, looking to surprise each other with new kinds of fun. One day I put on the cassette of
Jesus Christ Superstar
only to find that Tracey had taped something new over it: the Go-Go’s album
Beauty and the Beat
. I grieved for a few minutes before I realized I was now off the hook and never had to listen to that annoying, bogus show-tune church shit
ever again
. Praise Jesus!

And praise the Go-Go’s. Man, we listened to that tape over and over again. Every song sounded like it was the chronicle of a world that was much cooler than the ’70s burnout rock we heard all around us. It was a report from California, where sassy girls got dressed up and messed up and went out to cool places to do evil. “This town is our town,” they sang. “It is so glamorous! Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us!”

I used to dream about being the only boy in the Go-Go’s. I had to feel like that was the ultimate rock-star gig. I had the scenario all planned out, that I would learn to play bass and replace Kathy Valentine. (Sorry, Kathy!) I would be Jane Wiedlin’s true love, and she would take me to wherever she got her hair did and fix me up a little, because I wasn’t really presentable enough to hit cool places with her. Our lips would be sealed. I would get to borrow her stripey pants and sing backup on my favorite Go-Go’s song, “How Much More,” which was basically just the two words “girl” and “tonight” repeated over and over. Since those are the two new-waviest words in the English language, it was brilliant to give them their own song. I would rewind this song over and over, close my eyes and dream of being one of the girls. I want to be that girl tonight. Girl tonight!

I’m still in awe of my sisters. The only thing I would even consider changing about them is that their husbands are taller than I am. (We’ve had words about that.) But I would love to know anything as deeply as they know one another. I’ll never get their ability to laugh for hours over nothing, but I crave being part of their girl noise even when I don’t understand it.

What I don’t get, they are more than willing to teach. I am always learning new rules from them. Giving compliments, for example—always a good idea, yet there are rules for doing it right. My sisters taught me to start with the shoes, and then keep the compliments coming. Never compliment her eyes, because that means she thinks you think she’s plain. Always compliment something else before you compliment the hair, but always compliment the hair. If you’re giving a compliment you don’t mean, which is often advisable, sandwich it between a couple that you
do
mean. My sisters had a
lot
of rules.

Everything was changing so fast and moving in stereo. My voice was breaking, so I creaked from Andy Gibb highs to Isaac Hayes lows in the space of a single syllable, even when the syllable was “uuuuh.” I was saying it
and
spraying it, thanks to my brand-new braces. I was growing so rapidly that I had to relearn how to walk every few months, bumping into trees and tripping over my feet on such a regular basis, inspiring the classic greeting, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.” Nothing could really help me make sense out of my spindly, gangly body and all the hormones exchanging gunfire in it. Nothing, that is, except my radio.

My sisters did their best with me. Music helped.

1980

 

 

 

 

David Bowie ended life as I knew it one Sunday morning, entering my life the way a true prophet should—over a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. After church, I was waiting for my sisters to get done with the funnies, perusing
Parade.
There was a question in “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade.” “Does David Bowie dye his hair, and is he gay?” Mr. Scott responded, “David Bowie, who dyes his hair orange and claims to come from Mars, is reportedly bisexual.”

I never made it to the funnies. I had no idea what either “reportedly” or “bisexual” meant, but I knew now that rock and roll was as sinister and excellent as I always feared it was.

I first got a look at the man in rock-star mode at my grand-parents’ house on the last night of the 1970s, appropriately enough. It was
Dick Clark’s Salute to the Seventies
, his very special 1979 edition of the
New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
. Bowie came on to perform “Space Oddity,” looking mean in a gray jumpsuit buttoned up to his neck. My grandfather puffed his pipe and chuckled. “These jokers,” he said affectionately in his County Cork brogue. “The joker is from space, is he?”

As soon as Bowie was done, I kissed my grandfather goodnight and slipped off to hide under my bed in terror for a few hours. Hello, ’80s!

It was the beginning of a great teen romance. My relationship with Bowie was a quintessential junior high school relationship, with the caveat that he knew nothing about it. I kept breaking up with him, staging tearful reunions, having worrisome fits over “Where is this headed?” and “Do we have anything in common?” often renouncing him entirely and vowing to listen to nothing except hard-core punk or folk music or whatever was turning my head that week, only to realize there was no getting away from Bowie. It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent
e
. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I’d ever known.

I was full of complicated romantic feelings at this time. I was pretty sure I was madly in love, but had no idea with whom or what—I had it narrowed down to the girls’ JV squash team, but that’s not too helpful, and between
Dynasty
and
T.J. Hooker
, Heather Locklear was only on TV two nights a week, so what was a boy to do? Since I was ferociously pursuing a rigorous course in dimly understood Catholic devotion, I carried a safety pin in my pocket to jab myself in the event of carnal desires, to prevent them from happening, yet this was a defense mechanism that proved useless—it didn’t even get me through algebra class, not with Holly Greene sitting in front of me. That girl knew how to pronounce the word “parabola.”

I would come home from school and do my Latin homework in my room, stretched out on my Boston Bruins sleeping bag, with Wacky Packages stuck to every flat surface and pictures of rock stars taped up all over the wall. My
Star Wars
posters faced off as Bowie’s voice whispered over the tape deck to fill up the room. He made the space seem impossibly glamorous. I got to know his voice well, as he translated sexual confusions and cravings into the absurd romantic pageant I knew they were supposed to be, and he made it a lot less lonely.

I yearned to become the Thin White Duke, yet I was stuck being a Thin White Douche. I studiously imitated his every move. There were so many Bowies I could barely keep track of them, but somehow the Bowie I liked best was the one from right now. The way he looked, sounded and moved reminded me of C-3PO. Except not as cheerful. Sometimes he was a heavy-breathing rock stud, like in “Rebel Rebel.” Sometimes he was a disco queen, like in “Fame.” Sometimes he was a crooner straight from
The Lawrence Welk Show
, sometimes he was Dracula with a head cold, sometimes he was a clown with an eye patch. Sometimes he was a lonely space traveler stuck on earth, doomed to wander around in disguise without ever finding a home, kind of like the Incredible Hulk. (“Don’t make me sexy! You wouldn’t like me when I’m sexy!”)

Whoever he was, he made everything different. When his song is playing, that’s not just a radio—it’s Ground Control, picking up signals and random messages floating in from outer space. And you’re not a loser spending Friday night at home with the radio—you’re experiencing a night full of star-crossed romance and serious moonlight. He sang about girls in space—why not? That’s where all the cool girls were. (They weren’t where I could find them, that was for sure.)

He created a night world of new romantics and modern lovers, populated by all the bizarre creatures he sang about. He was a kindly presence, a cracked pastor for all of us moonage daydream believers, pretty things and hot tramps, queen bitches and slinky vagabonds, people from bad homes, night crawlers and pinups and young dudes and scary monsters. They moved in numbers and they plotted in corners. And you could join them just by listening. The
B
section of the local record store is where you’d find them. I started to spend many afternoons loitering around the
B
s.

True, it was somewhat unlikely the astral-traveling rebel chick of my dreams would show up at the Popcorn Records at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree, Massachusetts, sprinkle some stardust on me, and invite me to go on a “Young Americans” bus ride through the existential highways of our youth. But you never knew, right? It’s not like I had other plans. And waiting for her to stumble out of a Bowie song was a lot easier than attempting to go out and search for her, which was frankly out of the question for a tongue-tied trollop-in-training like me.

This was the era when Pat Benatar had just become a huge star, and in response, the Massachusetts State Legislature had issued a decree that no female between the ages of twelve and forty could leave the house without a killer headband-and-leotard combo. (It was still a couple years before the landmark Leg Warmer Bylaws of spring ’83.) But the new-wave girl was out there. I was sure of that. I would recognize her because she would have torn her dress and her face would be a mess. She’d take pity on my shaggy hair and Barracuda jacket and Toughskin pants, and she’d recognize me as a kindred spirit. She might teach me something about fashion, or at least dress me up a little, shine a little of her glimmer on me. Bowie was going to guide me to her world.

Bowie became my obsession. Bowieism and futurism and the whole new-wave mythology he invented were a way of life that seemed hunky-dory to me. I couldn’t get tickets when he played at Boston’s Sullivan Stadium, but I listened faithfully on WBCN as the DJ consoled those of us who were shut out from the concert with an all-night Bowie marathon. Sometime after midnight, a couple of other DJs came to the studio, straight from Sullivan Stadium, gibbering like kids about how excellent he was and how they got backstage and looked into his eyes and they really were
two different colors.
Then they announced they had a cigarette butt that they’d stolen out of Bowie’s ashtray, and they were going to ceremoniously
light it up
and
smoke it
on the air. Did I keep listening? Yes, I did. I probably had a better time than my friend Josh, who went to the show with his big sisters and tried to rise to the occasion by dyeing his hair orange. Some older rock dude saw him in the hot dog line and snickered, “Hey clown, what’s up?” I still think about that. I like to think a real citizen of Bowie World would never be that mean.