A selfie from 1987
It seems I won't have a lot of time & space for telling 1987 stories. Adopting a cat waylaid me. But. I think I can tell a few stories in this space.
My first year of college ended in May 1987 - I guess I did well. I had lived with two men who weren't really my friends, just guys I knew from high school, & one of them, named Todd, I literally never saw again after we moved out. He was charming & good-looking enough to occasionally bring girls home, & a couple of them were quite cute, but I never saw any of them more than once.
At school I didn't make many friends, but I had some friends I made in class & occasionally saw outside of class. One of them, a swell gal named Stacy, actually called me when I did my second 1986 show last summer. I would lose touch with her in a year when I met my second girlfriend but that's in 1988. My 1987 was loveless.
Though I tried to meet & talk to girls, I was pretty terrible at it. I would do dumb things like give them poems & then never speak to them again. In one situation, I went to a girl's apartment to give her a poem, & she invited me in & gave me tea. I went to her bathroom & in her shower was a large, I suppose life-sized poster of Prince, & what he was wearing was see-through. I was a little freaked-out about it - I didn't really like Prince & I didn't really like the girl. Or I should say: I wasn't in love with her. So I left abruptly. Naturally we didn't talk again.*
In those days I really needed & wanted to be in love. It was what all the music I loved was about, that & heartbreak. I was still carrying a torch for my first girlfriend, whom I dated for all of a week the year before. We wrote letters to each other but she was completely over me. During the summer of 1987, she had a layover at DFW Airport & I went to get her (borrowing again my sister's Subaru) & we spent some time together. I had hoped I was more charming after a year but she had no interest in me. But damn did I carry that torch for another very long year.
Working at 7-11 nights (see my previous entry) left me little time to go out & do stuff. I did run into a friend's brother at the store, a friend who had become a born-again Christian & stopped talking to me. We didn't talk for two more years, but we would reconnect & he would later play my spiritual mentor The Rev Dr Howard Gently on Self Help Radio.
He was in the class above me at our high school, but hadn't gone away to college - he went to a music school in town & lived with his parents. Another friend in that class had also stayed in town but had gone to SMU. His name was Kirk & before I got home from college, he died in a drunk driving accident. We hadn't spoken for a while but he had been a good friend in school. I couldn't bring myself to go to the funeral but wrote his mother a nice letter, to which she responded kindly. She lost her husband & son in the span of a few years.
When I returned to Austin, I had a new roommate - William, who had graduated from high school that year. I liked William a lot & he let me decorate our living room with my collection of posters that reflected my musical tastes but not his. I also for some dumb reason put my record player in the living room, which meant William was usually around when I listened to music, which was something that was very personal to me. William was smart but he didn't really go anywhere except class so he was always around. In addition, & I know this is stupid, I had become a vegetarian the previous year & he insisted on eating seafood. He had these little shrimps he cooked & it made the house smell icky.
Things were going to come to a head at some point - I had really begun to hate him - when he took me aside & told me that he was gay. I was the first person he came out to. I wanted to support him but I was not liking him very much - however, my built-in desire to be helpful overcame my enmity. I tried to get him to take advantage of the resources on campus - the Gay & Lesbian Student Association for example. He resisted for a long time, but eventually, probably at the beginning of 1988, he relented. The creepiest thing is, I think I was there when he lost his virginity - I didn't hear anything (I was in my room, listening to music) but I did meet the much older man who did the deed. Later on, William expressed a little regret because the guy only wanted him for that reason. I could only let him know straight guys can be just as gross.
A big decision I made in 1987 involved concert-going. I saw many more concerts in 1987 than I had in 1986. I think I saw the Cure, the Psychedelic Furs, the Mighty Lemon Drops, & U2 before I went back to school. The U2 concert was in Fort Worth, since U2 was upset about the gigantic venue in Dallas investing in apartheid South Africa. This was the Joshua Tree tour. It was my third & last time seeing a band at a giant venue. I guess they're called arenas or stadiums or something. I couldn't really hear the show, I definitely couldn't see the band, & I was annoyed by all the joints that were passed to me. So I vowed never to see a band in a giant space like that ever again. & I never did - which meant I never got to see some artists that are dear to me, like Dylan or Bowie or Neil Young. I regret it only a little.
At the end of the year, Thanksgiving weekend in fact, I got to see the Jesus & Mary Chain one night & Love & Rockets the next. It coincided with my first car accident & my first experience with radio.
Those days I still went home to Thanksgiving even though I couldn't really eat anything my family made, being a vegetarian.** The night after Thanksgiving I was returning to Austin with the person I called my best friend but who really didn't think that of me - it was glaringly obvious at the time but I chose not to see it - he really thought of me mostly with contempt. Anyway, he had tickets to see the Jesus & Mary Chain & that was the only reason he was taking me back to Austin. He never once did something nice for me out of the goodness of his heart - I either had to beg or guilt him, or it didn't inconvenience him to help me out. He had gone to see Love & Rockets that night in Dallas, & we were to drive in the night to Austin.
He picked me up late & we were turning probably from I-30 to I-35 in South Dallas when a car came barreling at us driving the wrong way in our lane. My "friend" tried to turn but they rammed us on the passenger side - where I was. We spun & they screeched to a halt & to this day I don't know how I got out of the car - I couldn't open my door, so I must've made it out of the driver's door. We approached the other car to see if they were all right, but they drove away - again, the wrong way in traffic. We didn't even get a license plate.
We were so dazed that we just started driving again & didn't stop to call the police until we were well out of town. That night when we got to Austin, I was so shook up that I somehow forgot how to use my key to open my door, so I broke my bedroom window to get into the apartment. Surprisingly, some security guard approached me & I showed him that my key actually worked. Hilariously, my "friend" had given up hope & was sleeping in the laundromat. As with many times in my life, I had to go looking for him.
Neither of us were hurt, thankfully, but we drove the dark two hundred miles to Austin with quite a lot of adrenalin & a weird youthful sense we had cheated death.
The show this week is one of the most personal I've ever done. While I am sure I had classes that I took that I enjoyed, I don't really remember them. I was a good student & did well. But in my personal life, I was very lonesome & absurdly socially awkward. Music was something that occupied me & defined me - I spent most of my non-school, non-rent money in record stores.
Oh shit I forgot to tell you the radio station thing. Well. For some reason my "friend" & I found ourselves the day of the Jesus & Mary Chain show at the only community radio station around at the time, KAZI. In Dallas, my "friend" listened to KNON regularly, & I tried to listen to when I could, especially a show on Thursday nights that seemed perfect for me. I guess he thought KAZI would be Austin's equivalent. We went there, they gave us volunteer badges, & we somehow thought we could use them to interview the Jesus & Mary Chain. Suffice it to say, the band didn't let us in their bus, & I never went back to KAZI again after my "friend" went back to Dallas. I didn't have a car & it was far from where I lived.***
But I do recall looking into that studio where a deejay was spinning records & talking on the mic, & thinking it was way cool & even a bit magical. I'd like to say I saw my future in there but really I didn't have that desire then. Not that it hadn't crossed my mind - but it seemed far away if not impossible at the time.
* Well, I saw her at a record store later on, but we just said hi.
** My sister Pat later told me my mother was so terrified I was going to die that she would make me stuff & put animal fat in it. So I guess I wasn't entirely vegetarian.
*** KAZI now is mainly an "urban contemporary" station but that happened largely after KVRX & KOOP went on the air. I remember listening to a late-night indie show on the station in 1989 - the sort of show I would've myself done.
