1984 Was If I Recall Correctly A Lonely Year

The next Self Help Radio will explore the music that I love that was released in 1984.

On my birthday week in 2003, the first birthday I had while doing Self Help Radio, which began in October of the previous year, I thought it might be fun to play my favorite music from the year I was born, 1968.  It occurred to me that that was something I could do every year around the time of my birthday, & so I have, with one exception - I skipped 1969 the next year because I had a guest do the show.  Which is why the show is almost eighteen years old, but I'm only sixteen years in.  (Remember: the show started in 2002, but my first birthday was in 2003.)

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about 1983 which may inform this year's reminiscence.  The too long didn't read portion is this: in eighth grade, I made my first real friend, & at the end of ninth grade he moved away.  So my tenth grade year - in which I was mainly around people I'd been to school with my entire life - was a bit of a challenge.

On January 20, 1984, I turned sixteen, but I was not like most sixteen year olds.  My younger sister Karin has told me - it was a bizarre thing to say & my wife likes to repeat it - that I wasn't "sexualized" early.  The truth is, like a lot of sixteen year olds, I masturbated as often as I could.  But I had no female friends, & probably couldn't have spoken to any of them unless it was for some assignment in class.  I don't think actually I had any friends at all for the first half of 1984.  I went to school, I came home, I guess I occasionally played video games, & I read comics.

This is something I said last year: I loved comics.  I still do, of course, but there was something transformative about comics that affected me in a way nothing else did.  I was still obsessed with the Beatles, although I had started to branch out; I still read a lot outside of comics, probably beginning my obsession with John Steinbeck around this time; but every week, I went to my comics shop - which was a little bookstore on Shiloh Road in Garland that carried comics - & I spent lots of money I did not have on comics.

How did I pay for the comics?  In the many years before 1984, in the convenience stores in which my mother worked, I would often show up, & if the boss weren't there - this is something I suspect I knew but I didn't admit to myself - I was allowed by my mother to grab as many comics as I wanted.  I had amassed a large number of comics - a lot of them Archie, Richie Rich, war comics, etc. - which just sat in my closet.  I discovered that the owner of the book store - Don was his name - would give me a lump sum for a number of comics.  That, in part, paid for my comic habit.

Something else happened in 1984: I began working at the Time Saver.  This was the convenience store purchased by my mother's boyfriend Ed, at which she worked as well.  My mother didn't want to be up there all the time, so I was asked if I would like to work there.  I confess I didn't like Ed.  But I needed the money.  So I accepted the job, showing up around five pm & working until close, which could've been nine or ten.  (The Time Saver didn't stay open all night.)

There is so much more to be said about Ed, I should save that.  The reason I know I was working there in 1984 is because of the Presidential Election.  I remember two things specifically about that election (in which I could not vote).

In the summer of 1984, Mario Cuomo gave the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention.  I always knew Reagan was a lunatic, & I never trusted his nonsense, but I didn't know quite what I believed about politics.  Cuomo laid it out so plainly.  He truly gave my feelings a voice.  At that point I realized I was a liberal, or a progressive, or a Democrat.

One night, in the Time Saver, Ed called me to the television - there was a television, always on, behind the counter - it was playing a Mondale/Ferraro campaign ad.  The music was the Crosby, Stills, & Nash song "Teach The Children."  I remember Ed saying, "That's your guy."  Ed didn't give a fuck, he probably never voted.

& I remember asking the fellow who owned the book store where I bought my comics, Don, about the election.  He said this: "If Mondale wins, the economy will tank, & people will come to buy their books here, at a used book store.  If Reagan wins, the economy will grow, & people will have money to buy books here.  Either way I win."

Ultimately, I came to realize Don was an odious man, but I was puzzled by his logic.  I couldn't square it with the language I heard Cuomo use about a just society.

Comics, politics, living mainly in my head.  I had no reason to believe, as tenth grade ended, that eleventh grade would be any better.  Something happened, though, in the summer of 1984 that would change my life forever.