By Zach Wyner
When I was a child in the 1980s, I vaguely understood some things and acutely understood others. I vaguely understood the big things that I was supposed to fear, like drugs, The Soviet Union, gang violence, and killer bees. I acutely understood the things I was supposed to celebrate, like baseball cards, hot dogs, Christie Brinkley, and air-conditioned movie theaters. I vaguely understood that the people who stoked my fears—my president, my governor, my city’s police chief—were not the beacons of virtue they purported to be. I acutely understood that sweatpants were superior to all other pants.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I vaguely understood what my dad meant when he said my ancestral homeland of Boston, Massachusetts, was more real than my actual homeland of Los Angeles, California; I acutely understood the greatness of Larry Bird. I vaguely understood the ways in which Hollywood shaped standards of beauty; I acutely understood that Stacy McBride was the prettiest girl at my elementary school and quite possibly the world. And, while I vaguely understood that we lived in a materialistic culture that placed too much value on stuff, a culture in which, sadly, our very self-worth seemed to be derived from the accumulation of this stuff, I acutely understood how important I felt when the coiled car-phone antennae first appeared on the rear windshield of my dad’s Acura Legend.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I acutely understood that all disposable allowance should be spent on double-dipped Nerds and movie tickets, that leather jackets ought to be red and have a minimum of twenty zippers, that my fluorescent orange and green Oakley Razorblade sunglasses were totally worth the $120 sticker price, and that the sitcom about the little girl who was also a robot and who could also freeze time was terrible, but that the one about the short, fluffy, bawdy alien who was always trying to eat the cat was hilarious.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I vaguely understood that, even to those who were not children, the world we inhabited was brand new, and that eras like the ‘60s and ‘70s—decades which I acutely understood had transpired many lifetimes ago—belonged to a tumultuous past, a past that, except for people like Epiphany’s photographer dad, many seemed content to forget. Epiphany’s dad had a ponytail and he wore old clothes; Epiphany’s dad danced around his house to loud music and was suspiciously unconcerned with money and the status derived from the accumulation of stuff. But Epiphany’s dad wasn’t so unconcerned with money that he wouldn’t take our family portraits, especially after my dad bought the Acura Legend and gave him his old Peugeot. So, when I was a child in the ‘80s, one of the great rock-and-roll documentarians of ancient history documented the evolution of my chubby cheeks, my sweaters, and the wave in my hair whose evolving intricacy paralleled my deepening devotion to Stacy McBride and my Hail-Mary hope that with the right hairdo, she might reciprocate the power of my love.
When I was a child in the ‘80s and I heard my dad and Epiphany’s dad talk about the past, I was sure that they were right, that our country would be a much better place if they hadn’t killed Martin and Bobby; but, despite their disdain for our actor president, despite the smog that made my swimmer’s lungs ache after an hour in the pool, despite the graffiti that reappeared on our school’s walls during every vacation, and the Working Girl soundtrack that lived in the cassette player of my mom’s brown Volvo station wagon, the country seemed pretty all right to me.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, for at least a portion of the ‘80s, I believed it was wrong to swear. When I was in the fourth grade, I stood up in a weekly all-school meeting, stuffed my hands into the pockets of my gray sweatpants and announced that the fifth graders were doing altogether too much swearing on the blacktop at lunch recess and I wanted it to stop.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I discovered that standing up for what you think is right, especially when what you think is right is dumb, will make you the punchline of a joke you hadn’t known you were telling. Their mop-headed heads had turned—the fifth-grade boys who were always getting into trouble and, inexplicably, found getting into trouble to be as hilarious as I found TV shows about fluffy, cat-consuming aliens—and, huddled there on the auditorium floor, they whispered and snickered. And while their derision failed to stop me from finishing my announcement, by the time I sat back down, I only vaguely understood why I had done what I did, and I acutely understood that the next time I stood up for what I believed, I would vet my beliefs on someone besides my mom and my bespectacled, dungeon-master friend Kyle.
That next school year, still a child in the ‘80s, I was regrouped with those mop-headed boys—who cursed and spat at recess, and who laughed when they got sent out of the classroom—in a combined fifth-and-sixth-grade class. And, gradually, some of those things that I had only vaguely understood came into focus. Gradually, I was forgiven my trespasses and let in on the joke.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I even received an invitation to sleep over at Captain Mop-head Zane Coleman’s house. There, in one mind-blowing night, I was introduced to both The Kentucky Fried Movie and The Misfits. I left Captain Zane’s house the next morning feeling slightly less a child than I had been going in. So, when I climbed into my mom’s brown station wagon, I turned down the Working Girl soundtrack and asked her to point the car toward Music Plus Video, where I intended to consecrate my interest in a sound that contained more anger than I had ever before reckoned with in my sheltered little life of sweatpants, sitcoms, and family portraits.
Once inside the Music Plus Video, I headed straight for the rock cassettes, and, with Mom looking over my shoulder, curious to see what her Larry Bird-worshipping, profanity-averse boy was so eager to get his hands on, I plucked The Misfits: Legacy of Brutality from the rack and turned it over in my hands reverently, like I later would a cigarette, a condom, a knife, a can of spray paint, a dime bag of weed, or any such object that contained the extraordinary power to change the way other people saw me and subsequently the way in which I saw myself.
And maybe it was the skeleton on the cover, or the crimson-splashed letters that seemed to bleed out a warning, but Mom’s interest was piqued. At her gentle request, eager to test this object’s power, I handed it over, let her examine it for herself, watched her process this new information, and witnessed, in her head-tilted reappraisal of my cherubic face, the realization that I was not the same boy that she had dropped off at Zane Coleman’s house the day before, that my vague understanding of the darkness which I had known existed in the world, but had never been personally touched by, might have been heightened by an acute exposure to elements outside her wheelhouse.
When I was a child in the ‘80s, I watched my mom turn Legacy of Brutality over in her hands and point to a song called “Angelfuck.” And when I heard her say that word, with a question mark affixed to it, like “Angel … fuck?” I felt my resolve bend and wobble like my stomach did whenever Stacy McBride’s hazel eyes caught me staring.
“It’s just a song name,” I said. “Don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?” She nodded her head, handed me back the tape, and said, “Are you sure this is what you want?”
I said that I was and was about to defend my decision when she said, “Okay.” And if this was a ploy, it worked, because as soon as she gave me permission, the question of what I truly desired to acutely understand started weighing on me. And standing there in my Bermuda shorts and my ambivalence, a saccharine sound blowing in from the Music Plus Video speakers like air conditioning on a balmy, drought-ridden LA summer day, sank its soothe, its syrupy sensibilities, into my young, sincere, profanity-averse soul. As I approached the register, ready to make my purchase with the cash that we all carried in the ‘80s, it occurred to me that I would very much like to continue feeling the way this other music was making me feel when I got home.
When I discovered that I only had enough cash for one cassette, I had to weigh this cool, luxurious, air-conditioned feeling that the mystery music gave me against the incendiary thrill I had felt when Mom had tilted her head and directed at me the very same bemused gaze I had once directed at the mop-headed boys.
So, when I was a child in the ‘80s, I walked into a Music Plus Video, determined to get acquainted with the anger smoldering beneath LA’s drought-stricken lawns, and walked out fifteen minutes later clutching “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere” by The Moody Blues.
When I was a child in the 1980s, I vaguely understood some things and acutely understood others. I vaguely understood that what was past had wrought what was present; I acutely understood that in this present, there was little appetite for the past. I vaguely understood that the world was complicated and that I wasn’t expected to process all there was for me to see; I acutely understood that I was okay with this arrangement, provided I could still see a way into Stacy McBride’s heart. But, while I vaguely understood that the patina of danger conferred by an appreciation for the Misfits would likely benefit my cause, I acutely understood that there was going to be plenty of time to get to know danger, plenty of time to not be a child, and, for the time being, the world about which The Moody Blues sang—a world in which one yearned, earnestly and faithfully, for that which they knew with all their bursting hearts was just on the horizon—was the world for which I was ready. It was, of course, a world from which I would soon feel an acute and urgent need to escape.
Zach Wyner is a writer and educator who works with incarcerated youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. His debut novel, What We Never Had, was published by Rare Bird Books in 2016. He is a contributor to The Good Men Project, Curly Red Stories, Unbroken Journal, and Atticus Review. Zach received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and lives in El Cerrito with his wife and children.
