I grew up attending private Christian schools, mostly in the South – a period of incarceration that lasted from second through tenth grade, under the thumb of one or another Baptist legion. Teachers and administrators in these institutions tended to be the authoritarian sort (like Pink Floyd’s “The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” only with Southern accents). They were the kind who wielded the threat of eternal damnation and torture as the comeuppance for such offenses as kissing, canoodling, watching R-rated movies containing kissing and/or canoodling, “mixed bathing” (males and females sharing the same swimming pool), thinking about mixed bathing, taking a nip off someone’s granddaddy’s bottle of Old Granddad while discussing mixed bathing, and other sundry activities that most teenagers enjoy, simply because they’re teenagers.
Much of my attitude toward religion, politics, sex, and a given evening’s entertainment options were formed in reaction to those tinhorn despots. At the time, though, my friends and I took our teenage pleasures where we could find them, usually in secret. Mine tended to be of the spinning 33 RPM variety, which was unfortunate, because popular music was singled out for particular hostility in church services, weekly chapel periods, and even classrooms. To listen to rock ‘n’ roll on the radio was transgressive; to have an actual pop or rock record collection was a sign of immeasurable spiritual deficiency. And to move one’s body in time with the songs on those records … well, that was the highway to a very, very hot place. And not in a good way.
Enough about those Bible-slapping detestables, though. I want to tell you about a time my friends and I defied them and had one of the greatest nights of our young lives.
On February 25, 1984, my friend Tina’s parents threw her a Sweet 16 birthday party, inviting about a dozen of us repressed internees to enjoy hotdogs, assorted chips, Pepsi products, and cake in Tina’s honor. I was 13 going on 14; most of the others there were in Tina’s grade, a year ahead of me. They were a colorful bunch, none more so than Bonesy – the class clown; possibly the school clown. Also among the attendees was Lynette, his on-again, off-again girlfriend.
Bonesy and Lynette were in a strange state as a couple that night; it was rumored that not long before, they had achieved a level of private intimacy heretofore thought unachievable by two rather plain Christian school inmates, intimacy which may or may not have included some manner of canoodling, though no copulation. The hanky, but not the panky. Since the coupling, Lynette had been on a bit of an extended freak-out, not so much over the intimacy part, but over the weight of overwhelming guilt that had settled upon her, over the belief that perhaps angels had espied their congress.
T.J. was at the party, too. If Bonesy and Lynette were the old hands of teenage relationshipping, Teej and I were the newbies – just starting out and doomed to quick failure, though we didn’t know it. She was wispily thin, five-foot-nothing, with a Precious Time-era Pat Benatar haircut, thick, oversized brown-framed glasses, and a mouthful of metallic orthodontia. I was smitten. For a short time I got to call her my girlfriend. She was tiny and sweet, and neither of us had any idea what was about to happen.
Tina had asked me to bring over some records from my collection of forbidden sounds, and I obliged – Bonnie Tyler, Billy Joel, Thriller, Kool & the Gang’s In the Heart, Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down, Midnight Star, Air Supply, a few singles. Once everyone was down in the basement, someone dimmed the lights, and the needle gently dropped on the first song.
Which one was it? That detail is lost to the ravages of time and my old-man memory, but I think it was either Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” or Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” – two epic Jim Steinman-penned and -produced hits containing all the drama and power of teenage urges, compressed and packed into mini-operatic song structures. They were precision-guided projectiles, aimed at the heart, ones that hit the target every time.
We in the basement paired off, arms slipping around necks and waists, and the slow dancing began. T.J. and I became one single joined organism, swaying quietly in the warm space the basement had become, held in place as if by magnetic forces that brought us together and repelled the other couples in a similar state of precious physics. How did Robbie Dupree describe it … “Cheek to cheek, sweatshirt to sweater … Two hearts pound out a backbeat.” Years later, I would joke that you could almost see pheromones bumping into one another up near the drop ceiling.
Was it lustful? Yeah, there was lust there, but of a tame variety; certainly not the wild, tear-each-other’s-clothes-off stuff from the movies. Nothing like what Bonesy and Lynette had been rumored to have experienced. Standing there swaying, holding T.J., I felt … I don’t know … whole. Alive. My consciousness was introduced to a host of new sensations, gloriously strange and chock full of beauty and wonderment. It was a great hormonal awakening, perhaps The Great Hormonal Awakening.
In those hours, we sensed the importance of touch; with hindsight, we recognized how by standing in one place swaying with someone you care about, your bodies give grand soliloquies on the topic of affection, without uttering even one word. There was the insane rush of information exchanged in an embrace – how gentle you are, how you feel she might break if you hold on too tightly. How the first time you experience this prepares you for the next first time, all your next first times.
(I also, it should be noted, had a slow dance with Tina – the Birthday Girl – during a point in the evening when T.J. had slipped away upstairs to use the bathroom. That was … different. Tina was curvy and soft and about an inch taller than I was, and I didn’t know how to compute this new data. Add to that the fact that she was my friend, but Teej was my girlfriend, and the awkwardness just multiplied; I’m sure I made a bit of an ass of myself, as I floated back over to T.J. when she re-entered the room.)
And the music … “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was the evening’s most-repeated soundtrack number, and thus the song that best conjures the memories when I hear it. Side 2 of Air Supply’s Greatest Hits was the extended play we turned to at least twice – around 18 minutes when we didn’t have to lift the needle, except to play the whole thing over again. Billy Joel’s “Leave a Tender Moment Alone” and “This Night”; Lionel Richie’s “Hello”; Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and “Lady in My Life”; “Slow Jam,” by Midnight Star. “Slow Jam” was easily the theme of the party, aside from celebrating Tina’s 16 years on earth – “Play another slow jam, this time make it sweet / A slow jam for my baby and for me …”
How long were we there – three hours? Four? We all knew that we had to go back to school Monday and not speak of the evening – had the administration found out about the party and the dancing, there would have been punishment doled out. There was an unspoken promise of silence on the matter that each of us would observe, which made having done it all the sweeter.
And T.J. … Not many days after Tina’s party, she slipped me a note, breaking up with me; turns out she was deeply in like with someone else. It stayed in my backpack maybe a week, until the day I stayed home from school with a stomach bug, and at some point that day, I dropped the paper into the flames dancing in our fireplace and watched it burn away slowly. It’s a pity no blues songs were ever written about us – that was a real “Sky is Crying” moment, even for a 13-year-old. Indeed, I had a bad feeling my baby didn’t love me no more – pretty much because she told me so.
But we had those hours in Tina’s basement. All of us – T.J., Tina, me, the rest of that repressed crew. Forty years on and it all can come back in an instant. All it takes is a song.
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