Preface To 1984: Cars & Other Things About My Sixteenth Year On Earth

It's very weird thinking about the me I was over thirty years ago, but it's safe to say he wouldn't recognize me at all.  That Gary didn't quite know how it would work out, but he imagined he would be some kind of writer, hopefully comics, maybe sci-fi.  That Gary certainly loved music but it wasn't the most important thing in his life - he certainly didn't think he'd ever love other artists as much as he loved John Lennon, David Bowie, or Elvis Costello.  That Gary still felt some kind of attachment to his family, although he knew they didn't enjoy being around him, & vice versa.  That Gary knew less about how the world works than this Gary, & that's saying something.

Perhaps I don't say enough about my family.  I lived at the time with my mother & my little brother, who is one year younger than I am.  We lived in a two-bedroom, two-floor apartment in a six-apartment complex, just a block away from where my mother worked, a convenience store called The Time Saver.  It was owned by my mother's boyfriend, a decidedly unhandsome & gaunt man named Ed, who lived in the same apartment "complex."  We lived in number one, he lived in number five.

Ed deserves a longer description because he was a complex & awful man, & it's worth nothing that he met my mother when she worked at another convenience store, which he frequented to buy pornography.  My mother sure could pick 'em!  He said some very strange things to me from time-to-time, asking me questions that, when I remembered them to people who specialize in child sexual abuse cases, said that abusers say.  I have not asked him, nor would he admit it if it were true, but my little brother despised Ed, which made me wonder if Ed had maybe done something to him.  He spent most of his time with my oldest sister & brother-in-law.  It meant I tended to have the room I shared with him to myself, which suited me fine.  We did not like each other much in those days.

My other siblings were around.  Except possibly my oldest brother, Eddie, who had remarried & moved to Washington state.  I'm not sure when he moved.  He was never close to me, & a couple of years ago, when I was giving him a ride to the airport after he visited my mother in Texas, he mentioned it was natural, since he left the house when I was a child.  I pointed out to him that other families stay close even in such circumstances, but he seemed baffled by it.  In any event, we were never close, & he either stayed away from family functions or had moved away by then.

My sister Pat had many family gatherings, & invited us all; she felt she needed to keep the family together for some reason.  I confess I wasn't fond of her then.  She was openly racist, she was a tiring know-it-all, & worst of all, she was married to a short-tempered man named Dan, who clearly loathed me.  Both Pat & Dan thought I was a kind of social failure, & any time I was in their orbit they attempted to somehow make me into their idea of a better person, which of course I resisted.  Their favorite refrain about me was that I was "book smart" but had no "common sense."  Which meant I wasn't interested in cars or sports or whatever it was that they felt was important to success in their hardscrabble working-class world.  Which was ironic because so much of their success, as did my mother's, depended on theft.

My mother stole from Ed.  In later years, she would cackle about it: "I ripped that so & so off," she would say, laughing.  My brother-in-law worked for years for Oak Farms, & was fired at some point for stealing.  When later I worked at 7-11 - that's a story you'll have to wait a few years for - I was told to watch the Oak Farms guys, who supplied the store with milk & dairy goods.  Why?  Because they shorted 7-11 & took the leftovers to independent convenience stores where they sold them for cash.  & not just cash: Dan & Pat's refrigerator was full of milk, cheese, whipped cream, & butter.

My other siblings - my brothers Ralph & Steve, my sister Karin - I saw at holidays & whatever gathering Pat might have planned that I couldn't get out of.  They had very little interest in me.  Steve had three children, Ralph had just gotten married, Karin, too, I suppose.  It's hard to remember them so young.  I suppose my middle brothers were still heavily into drugs - Ralph was quite the proponent of pot at the time.  Karin would've been a very young 22 in 1984.  Maybe she hadn't been married yet.  In any event, they weren't interested in me, & I had almost nothing in common with them.

Oh, I just remembered something about my brother Eddie - this may have happened earlier - he, like my father, enjoyed responding to earnest questions with smart-ass answers.  I read the book 1984 around this time, & was deeply impressed by it; Orwell's essay on language at the end still resounds in me all these years later.  I asked my brother Eddie once if he read the book.  "No, but I've seen the movie," he said.  My eyes widened, "There's a movie?"  Then, as now, he was genuinely shocked when someone took something he said seriously.*

When it came time for me to get a car, though, it wasn't my mother or my siblings who helped me out.  It was, of all people, Ed.  (Probably with some prodding, though, from my mother.)  He got a car from someone, he offered it to me, & I would pay for it by working at the Time Saver, his convenience store.  It was a 1976 Ford Granada, & it looked like this, but with a maroon top:

(image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/267542034084219992/">here

The funny thing is, I spent the better part of two years in that car, & I don't think I have a picture of it anywhere.  I feel safe saying that a car for a teenager is freedom, even if I didn't really know how to express that freedom.  I wasn't brave, I was fearful.  I wasn't bold, I was cautious.  I lived inside my head, I was incurious about the rest of the world.  It would take a little prodding to get me out of that shell, & my car was the beginning of that.

It also facilitated friendships.  Yesterday I mentioned a friend named Kurt, whom I met through a comic book amateur press association.  When I got my car, I would drive to hang out with him where he lived in Richardson, the city just north of Garland.  One night, Kurt invited me up to his church where he was allowed to use their photocopy machine to make the copies of our pages for the next edition of the apa fanzine.  He brought along his friend Joe, & during that time we spent together, I found myself liking Joe's sense of humor & his modesty over Kurt's incessant bragging.  I thought I might like being friends with Joe better than with Kurt.

Which ended up happening in the next year.  Kurt was unreliable & disappeared for a time, although I did see him again in 1986, & he found me on the internet at some point in the 1990s.  I don't really remember what he looked like but maybe in a couple of years I'll tell you my favorite Kurt story.  If I haven't already.

As I approach my 52nd birthday, I try to recall if my 16th was very special, or what I wanted for Christmas in 1984.  I draw a blank.  I wonder if I could tell the Gary then about how awful people like his friends, his family, the fellow who sold him comics, the fellow he worked for at the convenience store would turn out to be.  Would he listen?

Nope.  He would say, "There's no way I turn out to be you!"

* This was before there was an actual film version of 1984, & anyway Eddie would never have gone to see that movie in a theater.  Video stores were in their infancy in 1984.