The New Adventures of Old Fall Me

I’m thinking about going pumpkin picking on Friday. It’s my the last Friday for a month that I’ll have the day to myself, which means that it’s the last “weekend” day for a month where I’m not tied up. The summer went by and I didn’t go to the beach once. There wasn’t one day trip to the Jersey Shore, no miniature golf, no walks along the shore where I was convinced that I had it all figured out. On top of that, I have access to a car for the next month, so I might as well take advantage of it. Plus I think that I’ve arrived at one of those places where it would be a good idea to “get away from the city,” if just for a day. I don’t think that I have any real problem with the city. Oh, aside from being part of a culture that won’t leave a cop alone for accidentally tasing a retard and then holding guy up to the stake so much for a week that he became so overwhelmed, broke down and shot himself on his birthday, despite being a husband and father of three. Okay, well maybe it really is time to catch a breath from New York life, drink some cider and have some teenager dressed up like Freddie Krueger come running out of the woods at me as I pretend that I’m frightened.

This fall was the first year in many that I got excited by the new fall season arriving on television. I sprinted home to catch the premiere of the new 90210, I teared up on my bed watching the return of my favorite show The Office and I’m counting the days until I get to re-enter the universe of my newest fixation, Liz Lemon on 30 Rock. It all gives me such a warm feeling in my gut. I wish I had my fourth grade cafeteria table back where Matt Loonam and I showed up Thursday mornings ready to gab about the original Beverly Hills, 90210. I look back and regret not getting in on the dialogue of Twin Peaks Wednesdays. You don’t realize that you only get to experience a weekly existential nightmare as a ten-year-old once.

I bet that I had already had another show in the Twin Peaks block. Let’s see. Fresh Prince and Ferris Bueller (which became Blossom) led into to Monday Night Football on Mondays. 90210 was followed by The Wonder Years and I wanna say Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis in Anything But Love on Wednesdays before 48 Hours (where I’ll never forget how hypnotized I was by watching people do ecstasy at night clubs–or the concept of “Love at the Laundromat” for that matter). Friday was obviously TGIF (Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers and my favorite Just the Ten of Us) that led right into 20/20. Although maybe Full House and Growing Pains had moved to Tuesdays by this point and Dinosaurs or some other junk had become part of the TGIF lineup. Thursdays were Cosby, A Different World, Cheers and what–Dear John? Night Court?–I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t get me to stick around for LA Law because at 10:00 Knotts Landing was on. Tuesdays that year may have started out with Saved by the Bell: The College Years. I didn’t watch Falcon Crest. It seems like a night when Brooklyn Bridge would have been on or maybe even my Mom still watched Beauty and the Beast with that creature of a man who looked like such a lion that he had to live below the streets. And yet he was such a romantic. Quantum Leap I bet! Okay, that would be fair if I missed out on Twin Peaks because of Quantum Leap. Ten-year-old Billy, you are forgiven.

In fifth and sixth grade, I had a reputation of being able to tell you what show was on any given half hour of prime time on any of the major networks. Sometimes the things in my life that I’m proud of feel so few and far between that I feel the need to go back there to at least try to regain that. So here I am, rushing back home from dinner with friends so that I can see if there’s any chance of something taking off between me and The New Adventures of Old Christine. One of the main reasons I’m writing today is because I told myself that if I get something down, I can then watch a couple episodes of Mad Men online, the newest show in my life. Dominic had me over last week for pizza, whiskey and Menthols just so he could show me the pilot from last year before we tuned into the new episode that was airing that night. It felt like a perfect Sunday night.

Sometimes I seriously consider trying to sneak into the monthly dances that still go on at my high school. Occasionally things like that will be my primary motivation in wanting to be a high school teacher. Maybe Friday I’ll invite along Sean, one of my oldest best friends. Maybe we’ll even steal a pumpkin.

Fake It Til You Make It (Again)

When the movie The Wedding Singer came out in 1998, I remember fequently making the claim that I had been “all about the 80s” way before the decade started gaining momentum and abruptly stopped being considered lame and easily dismissable. I had been really into the 80s since 1995. That was the fall I went down to Baltimore to visit my cousin Deirdre during her freshman year at Loyola.

Deirdre lived below some dudes who seemed like the kind of guys who were cool and sort of dorky, but clearly didn’t care about being dorky and that only could be found when you went away to college. A couple of them were in a ska band. The first big event of the weekend was that Deirdre was taking me to a party her friends were throwing, a ‘G’ party. Everyone had to dress up as something that began with G. I told Deirdre that I was thinking about dressing as the devil.

“But how is that ‘G’?”

“I’ll say that I’m God.”

The upstairs guys decided they liked me. They liked me so much that they invited me into their group costume, the Goonies. They were in their apartment watching the movie to get the looks down. Benny, the leader of their group, was furiously trying to come up with gadgets to put inside his trench coat since he was going to be Data. I think that they let me be Mouth. Not only is he one of my favorite wiseasses in a movie, but he also gets to make out with an older girl who doesn’t know any better. Maybe I had more game than I thought.

I came back from that weekend and decided that I needed to buy The Goonies on VHS ASAP. There was just something that came over while I was watching it where I felt ‘this is what it’s all about.’ I told my Mom that I wanted a hooded sweatjacket. She promised to pick me up one because because she knew a spot that sold them for a mere fifteen dollars. I also sort of wanted braces, but settled for a retainer a few months later. I had wanted a ringer t-shirt for a long time and eventually settled on one with Smurfette on it. The red, white and blue Regis headband that had been sitting dormant in my top drawer became a staple of my wardrobe, along with a matching wrist band. On the arm I wore it on, I would roll the sleeve of my t-shirt up to my shoulder. And sometimes I would wear shorts over my sweatpants. If anyone asked, I would tell them that I was ‘waiting for my Punky Brewster.’ Maybe I still am.

The last jacket I got excited about buying was sky blue with rainbow stripes across it. When I described it to my Mom on the phone the day I bought it, she asked if it was gay. I said that I wasn’t sure. I’m pretty sure I’m not. But what if all of chaps from the eighties whose style has made such a big impact on my own were actually closeted homosexuals? This would be my ‘listening to techno’ or ‘joining the field hockey team.’ You rarely know why you get into the things that you do.

The rainbow jacket had a tiny logo on it of two green footprints. About a month after I got it, I was in a bar in Chicago and a drunk woman who had been at a bachelorette party spotted me and yelled, ‘Hang ten!’ Sure, why not? She looked like she was about five years older than me. And it turned out that she wasn’t just shouting a catchphrase at me to hammer home the point that she was more than down to party. Rather she had spotted the logo on my jacket and perked up because she hadn’t seen it in years. (Also, because she was drunk.) An inspection of the tag confirmed that this was in fact a Hang Ten product. She told me that they were an early eighties company that paved the way for Ocean Pacific, a line I do know because its name was written on many shirts worn by both me and my cousins growing up. And here I just thought it was a near looking jacket.

The one time I really had a sizeable hand in the decorating of my living space was when I moved into my own studio in Portland after Erin and I broke up. I inherited the fiery red-orange love seat I had picked out from the used furniture store, but the only other chair I had was the gross bean bag hand-me-down from Derek and Heidi. Then a few weeks after moving in, I was perusing the aisles of Value Village down in Milwaukie, the suburb I worked at a group home in. I spotted a piece of furniture unlike any I had seen before, a lime green love seat that both rocked and reclined. A rocking recliner love seat, wow. And it was only fifty dollars, a major steal. Of course being my Mom’s son, that price wasn’t good enough for me and instead I waited with bated breath for a week until Memorial Day, when everything at Value Village was 50% off. Can you believe that not one single person in suburban Oregon over that week realized what a steal they’d be getting for one of the most unique pieces of furniture ever crafted? At 8 a.m. on Memorial Day, I walked over to Value Village and paid a mere $25 for this dream of home furnishing.

Since I couldn’t exactly strap my rocking recliner on to the bus home, a guy I worked with named Joe Brown offered to take it back to the city with me in his pickup truck. Joe was 35, a lifelong Oregonian I believe and may have still lived with his mother. He also had a spare pickup truck. So the only thing I could think to offer him as a way of thanks and really, just of conversation, was to see if he wanted to smoke the pot that had been stored away in my freezer. He accepted the offer. So we sat on our respective love seats and got high. I remember that is wasn’t much past noon because one of the few stabs at conversation I made with Joe was saying, ‘It’s Christmas time.’ To which, he replied, ‘Huh?’ And then I explained ‘Oh, I just like to say that whenever I notice the (Mickey and Minnie Mouse) clock is at 12:25.’ I think he said something like, ‘You’re a pretty unique guy.’ Or maybe he just gave me that look. Joe looked around at the room and then said, ‘So you’re really into vintage stuff, huh?’

And the thought had honestly never crossed my mind before.