On January 20, 1982, I turned fourteen years old. I wouldn't say I was a happy kid, but I wasn't necessarily a sad one, either. The family was poor, I lived in a pretty lower-class apartment complex called
Villa Cordoba, & I knew it was a sketchy place to live not because I had any sense of such things but because two adults let me know: my mom once asked me, "Are you ashamed of the place where you live?" alerting me to the idea that I might be ashamed of the place where I lived, & one of the teachers who was the supervisor for the yearbook, on which I worked, made a weird face when I told her I lived at the apartment cater-corner from the school. "You live
there?" she said, like I had admitted I mainly lived in ooze & detritus.
The family had lived in
Villa Cordoba since I was in fourth grade, but in three different apartments, whose numbers I remember. They were, in order, 27, 18, & 48. 18 was the biggest apartment, which had three bedrooms, because my sister Karin was old enough then to have her own room. But she grew up & moved out, & the last couple of years we lived in apartment 48, which was in the front of the complex, looking out onto Fifth Street, with the bedroom I shared with my little brother overlooking the manager's office in the middle of the complex.
That last year we lived there, things had somewhat changed. So many of the people who had been my friends had moved away, as apartment denizens, especially in the suburbs, don't tend to stay for long. (I had in fact lived in four different apartment complexes since I was four.) As well, the age of the kids around me had dropped, to around an average of ten, & I had nothing in common with them. My brother Chris & I, we're about a year apart in age, we were quickly growing apart - he was more into sports, I was more into comic books & music like the Beatles. I remember a feeling of loneliness in the place where once, I felt, there had been so many people I could see, play with, hang out with. It didn't help of course that once puberty hit, girls tended to segregate themselves. I seem to recall only the manager's daughter, a girl named Samantha, would talk to me, but usually only to insult me.
My mother had previously worked at a convenience store owned by an old man named Fred from whom she stole
a lot. We always had many different kinds of junk food & other amenities in the house because Fred either didn't know or didn't care (I suspect he was involved in his own shady dealings) that his employees stole from him. Like, when I would go up to the store, & Fred wasn't there, my mom would give us soda & chips & would let me take any comic I wanted off the rack. At the time, I thought it was a perk of the job. It wasn't.
Fred sold the store, probably in early 1981, & my mother got a job at a local drugstore, at which she probably earned just enough to pay rent & keep us fed. That job was not a job at which she could steal, & our refrigerator showed it - I don't think we had soda for months. My mother had a boyfriend, named Ed, who was universally disliked by the family, but I think he helped out. He moved in just three doors down from us, & his apartment, which was like the worthless leftovers from a ransacked antique shop mixed with a slightly skewed idea of a Playboy-level bachelor pad, was endlessly fascinating to me. He had taken a mirror & broke it - not smashed - he made sure there were long shards - which he pasted onto some kind of board, which he had up on his wall. He gave one of these creations to my mother, who refused to have it in the house - she was very superstitious & she knew Ed would catch hell for that whole "breaking a mirror" thing.
At some point between the summer of 1981 & the beginning of 1982, my mother's fortune's changed. Fred had purchased another convenience store, called the Time Saver. I was near where I had lived before fourth grade, on Kingsley Road, in-between Garland Road & Saturn Road, & I remember walking to the store somewhere around that time through a big vacant lot with my father, who was picking up pecans & cracking them with his hands. He had taken us there to buy us soda. & now Fred wanted my mother to come work there for him.
But Fred decided soon enough he was too old to get back into that biz, & wonder of wonders,
Ed decided he would purchase the store. He figured my mother knew how to run it, & how hard could it be? They renovated - they laid the store out much like my mother's old place at Orchard Hills (which by the way was barely a half mile east on Kingsley) & I think even installed a deli. My mother seemed to feel the need to sell the place to me & my little brother, telling us that they'd make an area in the back for us to do homework & things like that. Whatever was going on there, certainly nothing like that materialized - why in the world would we want to go to a convenience store to hang out after school? Anyway, my mother tended to work mornings & Ed at nights - which probably suited her fine. She nowadays likes to laugh about how she "used" him, but even then I don't think anyone thought she was all that fond of him.
Which makes the next decision even weirder: that summer we moved out of
Villa Cordoba & into a rented house with him. With Ed. It was the first house I could remember living in (I had apparently lived in one when I was a baby) & even better, I got my own room, the walls of which I promptly covered with comic book posters I had been collecting for many years now.
The house - which did have age-appropriate children living in the neighborhood, although we weren't there long enough to make friends - was further away from my high school than the apartments (I could've walked to my high school from
Villa Cordoba) & my mother did
not want me taking the bus (she had heard of horrible things happening on buses, you see), so when school started I immediately had problems getting there. My mother enlisted family members, & my first day of high school (& much of the first month) I was dropped off at a donut shop across the street by my sister-in-law Julie I believe at around 6:30, & played video games until the school started letting people in an hour later.
Things at the house were odd. Ed was a strange man, a tall, grizzled, skeletal figure who enjoyed walking around late at night naked. He & my little brother did not get along, & soon enough Chris was spending most of his time at my sister Pat's house. Many times I was the only human there, Mom & Ed at the store, Chris at Pat's, my only companion an old mutt named Kalijah who had been my brother Ralph's dog but had been adopted by my mother when Ralph couldn't or wouldn't take care of him. I don't have a picture of my bedroom on Mayfield, I don't have a picture of the Time Saver from the outside (it was torn down by the folks who bought it from Ed), but I do have a picture of Kalijah, from a few years later:
Kalijah did not like me, & I didn't know how to make him like me. He was fond of my mother, because she fed him, & let him out when he needed to go out, &, as the picture shows, she let him sleep on her bed.
Boy did I like having my own room, & I liked that the place was closer to my comic book store. Here's something that's true: I could ride my bike to the comic book store from my house & never once touch my handlebars. It was all downhill. I couldn't do it the other way around.
But I was very far from school, & if I had to stay late, I would have to walk home, which was about two miles. For a short time, I got a ride with my friend Scott & his mom (I talked about him yesterday) & my sister Pat would meet us outside the Braum's next to the school after classes were done, & she'd give both me & him a ride home. But Pat at the time was pregnant with my nephew, & eventually she had to stop driving. So eventually Scott's mom stopped giving me rides to school.
This is already way too long but I want to say that I think it was in ninth grade I became friends with a fellow named Mike Jones, who became our school's valedictorian. We were never anything but school-friends, although we did play D&D together briefly, thanks to Scott, & I only saw him once after graduation, & it was pretty obvious we had very little in common.
& I was teased a bit in school because I was a nerd - girls in my first period algebra class didn't like my video game tee shirts, for example, but I was never picked on, never beaten up, never really noticed by mean upper classmen, mainly because I wasn't in sports, or band, or whatever. My brothers had told me that would happen to me & I confess I was a little baffled why it didn't - though also I was very happy too.
My father was an alcoholic - it's why his marriage with my mother ended - & it turns out Ed was too. My mother could sure pick 'em! So by the end of the year, we were no longer living in that house on Mayfield. I'm not sure if we moved out at the end of the year or before or after, but it seems a good stopping place, as that's when 1982 ended.
One thing about 1982 that's important to my radio show: my friend Russell made me a David Bowie tape that year. I think I still have it somewhere - whether it plays or not, that's questionable - but it opened my ears to sounds other than that which we now call classic rock on the radio. Plus, he & his friend Lee, with whom I sat during lunch for a time, they talked a lot about a guy named Elvis Costello, & it wasn't too long before I found some of his records (in cassette form) in a bargain bin at a mall record shop. The Gary who would become the Gary who has a radio show called Self Help Radio was just beginning to form in 1982.
