In 1983 my dad decided that the home we'd lived in from the time I was six until I was twelve up north of the river was too far to his new job in Overland Park. He wanted to uproot his crumbling family from a place where they were starting to feel comfortable so he could arrive to work twenty minutes faster, even though he was already always the first person at the office nearly an hour and a half before he was supposed to be there.
He'd had trouble keeping jobs ever since I was born, he mentioned to me more than once. Before I was born he worked for a company for twenty years. Just after I was born, the company went under and Dad was laid off. He would get jobs pretty easily since he had worked his way up from bookkeeper to office controller which looked impressive on his resume. But he had trouble keeping the new jobs. Every few years he'd be out looking for another one. It might have been the pride-hurting salary cuts he had to take that made him more crabby. His wife having to go back to work full time to keep up with the bills. Or maybe he was just getting old and tired and ready to do more with his life than play with other people's money. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every year from the time I can remember until Dad retired when I was a senior in high school he seemed more and more miserable.
I remember some chuckles and smiles here and there - at his side of the family reunions, at Worlds of Fun, when he was gorging himself at a buffet, and when he heard big band era swing music. He loved Long John Silver's fried fish and Chinese food. He got up at 5:00 or earlier, got to work by 6:30, before I was even awake, and got home from work around 5:30-6:00. We ate dinner as a family but I don't remember dad talking much. Mom would be sitting there eating dinner in just her bra and slip because Dad was too cheap to turn on the air conditioner and it was a muggy summer night. After dinner Dad would sit in his La-z Boy and watch TV, then go to bed by 8:00.
When mom was in her early forties and I was about ten, she decided to go to college. She wanted to do something like graphic design or something where she could use her artistic abilities, but Dad said he wouldn't pay for college unless she did something practical. So she went to Maple Woods Community College and got a certificate in accounting. This was when my life seriously turned into hell living with the two of them. When they weren't ignoring each other, all they'd talk about was finances, debit this and credit that and all I could do was tune out. When they had finished their riveting discussion, Mom would start whispering to me. My dad was so hard of hearing if we talked softly enough we could have an entire conversation behind his back in front of his face. I feel badly now that we did that. My dad was a dick. Don't get me wrong. He and Mom were ill-suited for each other, for sure. Mom deserved way better. But instead of whispering to her middle-school age daughter complaints about her father right in front of him without his hearing, she should have left him long ago. It was like watching a really bad soap opera that had jumped the shark before even Happy Days was on.
So to shave twenty minutes off his morning commute, my father moved our family south of the river to the wealthiest county in the six county Kansas City metro area. Although we were doing ok for ourselves, we were definitely not the type of family that ran out and consumed the latest trends. It was pretty much library books, LPs, commercial radio and broadcast TV. We never owned a computer or a video game. We got a microwave when I was in middle school. We didn't even get a VCR until I was in ninth grade. I remember Mom and me giggling as we paused it at the scene in "A Room with a View" where the naked men are swimming in the pond.
The clothes I didn't inherit from my older siblings I got as gifts, from Mom's Blue Light Specials, and from my mom's own ingenuity with a sewing machine. She made me the coolest hippie clothes - flared pants and long skirts. I loved them. The problem was I was born ten years too late. In the early to late Eighties hippies were out of fashion, and I was the only one who dressed this way at school. It sheltered me from romantic attention. I guess people who weren't my friends thought I was a weirdo.
My ninth grade year I decided to settle among the punks even though I was not one of them. They accepted me into their mosh pit of underage drinking, anarchy, and drama. I was excited to be around people who didn't always talk about accounting and golf and TV. We were suburban kids, but we were the cool suburban kids who wished we weren't suburban kids.
Although we refused to follow the materialistic 80s pastel plasticism path, most of the kids in our group did dress alike, so you couldn't argue that they were dressing that way to be different. They didn't pay attention to the mainstream styles, but they wore the same all black outfits, black eyeliner, black undercut hair, silver jewelry and black canvas shoes they bought at Asian specialty stores. Or they wore jeans and concert Tshirts from bands like Robert Smith and Kate Bush. I wore mostly the hippie clothes my mom made me. I didn't even like to wear jeans and a concert Tshirt because jeans showed off my growing hips too much. I stood out physically from the group--I looked kinda like the group's matronly hippie grandma--but our social and political beliefs were pretty much the same. We all thought that gay people and women and immigrants and minorities and everyone should be treated fairly whether they have money or not. But we were suburban commies who ignored the political and social facets of our philosophy in favor of hanging out at the Liberty World War I memorial, getting drunk on Boone's Farm wine, making out with other mentally unstable teenagers and forgetting about our home lives for awhile. We were the kind of commies who hung out in our parent's basement inhaling ethyl off each other's body parts while listening to the Communards. Fuck you prom queen and student class president. Fuck you President Regan. Our leader was Morrissey.
At least that's what I told myself about my friends and I in high school. It actually probably had more to do with our common love of The Smiths and less to do with a shared hatred of Margaret Thatcher than I let myself believe. But it was a fun bunch of rejects who the preps and the jocks really missed out not knowing. But still, I never really felt like I fit in with them. They joked that I was a pippy, a punk hippie. But I really wasn't. I was more than that. I was curious about all sorts of subcultures and not just one that involved razor blades and safety pins.
Since I rarely got carded when I bought alcohol, I had lots of friends who wanted to hang out with me. But I knew looking like a hippie grandmother might be my style and it might get me easy access to alcohol for my friends and I but it apparently also kept most of my 14-19 year old friends from finding me attractive. So I'd hear about all kinds of intergender trysts and three-ways, in every mix and match imaginable. But I rarely got to participate in such bacchanal behavior. I was usually the one sitting in the corner, pining for whichever unrequited lover didn't see me.
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