The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  In the evenings we were the Five Rangers, masquerading around in the dark, karate chopping each other and anyone unfortunate enough to be out walking. David was our ring-leader, the red guy (weapon: bullwhip). I was the blue guy in the number two position (weapon: crossbow). John Jr. (son of the crazy neighbor) was the yellow guy (weapon: staff). Maxine, our pretty blonde next door neighbor (the girl who swore to God she wasn’t moving the planchette as it flew across the Ouija Board the moment she touched it–she also cheated at Monopoly) was the pink girl (weapon: uh, see below).2 Brian was the green guy (weapon: boomerang). Even in superhero fantasyland, poor Brian was relegated to last.

  Our overactive imaginations were our only weapons.

  Life in Hawaii wasn’t dull: we were explorers, we idolized Japanese superheroes (especially the fourth Goranger), and we gobbled up treats unknown on the mainland: li hing mui, manapua, and rock salt plum. We drove abandoned stretches of unfinished Hawaiian freeway and hunted crayfish, centipedes and geckos. We swam with sharks and stingrays off Barbers Point (pre-Jaws, so, in our ignorance, we were fearless). We picked bananas from a tree in our backyard.

  One Saturday morning, David arranged my marriage to the homeliest girl in the neighborhood. At high noon, there she stood on the small sidewalk in front of her four-plex. In her Coke bottle glasses and best muumuu (a nice floral pattern), she wore flowers in her hair and patiently waited for the groom-to-be. A dozen kids stood around waiting for something to happen–girls beamed, boys looked bored. Tiny Bubbles (the tune, not the soapy concoction) drifted out of her upstairs bedroom window. Her little brother wore a suit and held a Bible.

  Quite the organizer, my brother.

  We rode our bikes through the ceremony without so much as a backward glance. The jilted bride burst into tears as the boys cheered. Kids can be so damn cruel.

  For a two story four-plex, the units were surprisingly spacious with four bedrooms and two and a half baths. Lorne and David had their own rooms, Brian and I shared a room, and Trish slept in a crib in the master bedroom. This worked out well enough except that I slept on the top bunk and one morning awoke on the cold linoleum floor. How a kid falls five feet and crashes to the floor without waking up is still a mystery to me–but it gave me an idea. Twenty minutes before it was time to get up for school, I climbed down the ladder careful not to wake my step-brother. Mom walked in, found me “asleep” on the floor, and checked for broken bones. Claiming pain all over, I stayed home from school. Unfortunately, this only worked a few times before Mother’s Intuition kicked in and she was on to my scam. Why didn’t I like Red Hill Elementary School? Two words: Gino Tolleto.

  Gino was the bully of the second grade. Six inches taller than me–with the afro, twelve inches taller–and he did not like “howlies.” For those unfamiliar with the Hawaiian caste system, a howlie is a non-Hawaiian-native. I think Gino was mulatto (not that I knew that word in 1976) because he was white and had an afro. I had enough sense not to question his heritage. Why piss him off further?

  Gino picked on me constantly. He reveled in Kill Howlie Day, a supposed Hawaiian holiday where locals had a one day pass to beat the crap out of their non-native brethren. Not one to pass on tradition, Gino embraced every day as Kill Howlie Day. Lucky me.

  He specialized in picking me up by the collar while pinning me against the wall–as my feet dangled six inches off the ground. This made the girls giggle. It didn’t matter that I had an older brother that could’ve kicked Gino’s ass. Gino claimed to have an older brother of his own.

  So I endured the second grade and won the award for “Most Days Missed.” I am not making this up. Everyone won something and that’s the only thing they could come up with for me. I accepted the recognition with mixed feelings.

  Third grade wasn’t much different since the two grades were combined and taught concurrently by the same trio of teachers: Mrs. Carr, Mrs. Kanishiro, and Mrs. Matsuda. One day, Mrs. Matsuda sent me home with a progress note that read: “Tommy does have periods when he tends to become absentminded and I have tried many ways to help him overcome it. I have found that he is capable and that he can remember most things when he wants to.”

  Hmpf. Clearly she didn’t have Gino picking her up by the collar.

  I wasn’t a shy kid–which may have partly explained Gino’s hostility–and jumped at the chance to enter the school’s 1977 talent show. Trouble was, I didn’t have a talent so I created one.

  Dressed in metallic purple pants, a shiny purple shirt, and a black fedora borrowed from a black neighbor, I lip-synced Car Wash by Rose Royce. David huffed and reminded me that “a chick sings that song.” I was OK with it. A girl named Becky won with her rendition of I’m Being Swallowed By A Boa Constrictor. As she sang, she slowly lifted a green sleeping bag up her body. C’mon people, it was a sleeping bag!

  The best thing to happen that year was my Cub Scout troupes’ Pine Wood Derby. John, the crazy neighbor two doors down, helped me pour liquefied lead into three holes drilled into the little block of wood. The guy got the weight right (not enough and the car was too light, too much and the car would be disqualified) and I was shocked that my plain red car went undefeated. We have a silent 8mm movie of the trophy presentation where I practically fall down in surprise. David’s car, carved into a shark and painted gray, won Most Original. The red paint splattered all over its open mouth put him over the top. Poor Brian didn’t win jack.

  The marriage to Meatball didn’t work out and a divorce in Hawaii, at least in 1977, was not something that happened overnight. So we were shipped out: Lorne to Washington State to live with our dad and David and I to our grandparents in Terra Bella, California. I’ll never forget my carryon luggage for the flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles: a suitcase full of Richie Rich comic books. In the event of a plane crash, I was going down clutching my most prized possession.

  Terra Bella lies in Central California, population 3,000 in 1977 (population Not Much More in 2012). Downtown consisted of a one-room library, a tiny post office, a Circle K convenience store, a row of boarded-up abandoned single story buildings, and a laundry mat. The day I ventured into the small library in search of Richie Rich comics, the blue-haired librarian just about hit the floor in ecstasy (either that or she was asleep in her chair). She gave me the rock star treatment–she had a bona fide customer! The library didn’t have Richie Rich, so I read all the Boxcar Children books making me a repeat customer much to the delight of the bored old hoot.

  Terra Bella, California 1978, in our church duds.

  David with the thumbs up–he really did think he was the Fonz.

  Grandma was an English teacher at Steve Garvey Junior High (they loved the Dodger so much that they named a school after him) in Lindsay, California, fifteen miles down the road. Her husband, our step-grandpa Adam, owned a junk yard. Surrounded by agriculture (oranges, olives, and pomegranates) and dirt, we led a frugal existence. For entertainment, we threw fruit at each other–the pomegranates were particularly effective in staining school clothes. Hey, we had to occupy ourselves someway and no longer had bunkers, and jungle, and a pink superhero who used her breasts as lethal weapons.

  The most excitement revolved around the frequency in which the Circle K was robbed at gunpoint–nearly every Saturday night between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Our house was one street over from the main drag, and David and I used to sit in the dark watching the convenience store in anticipation. To get in on the action, we walked in one day and pointed our Colt .45 BB guns at the clerk. “Stick ‘em up!” we said with a smile. Back then, toy guns weren’t plastic and bright-orange like they are today. Our BB guns looked and felt like the real thing. It’s a wonder we didn’t get our faces blown off by the paranoid clerk or arrested for armed robbery.

  Another form of entertainment was finding tiny body parts scattered in our yard. We lived on two large lots surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. We loved Grandpa’s two guard dogs fiercely: John the black Greyhound (“undefeated on the track durin
g his prime” Grandpa gushed), and Killer, the red Doberman. Killer was one bad hombre, too, since, as a puppy, he survived Grandma’s meat cleaver to the tail and scissors to the ears. Pay a vet to do it? Not my grandma. Without proper treatment, he scratched his ears so that they healed looking like two pieces of red cauliflower stuck on either side of his head. When he grinned on command for Grandpa, the poor dog looked like a reject from The Muppet Show.

  No one came into our yard with these two brutes on twenty four hour patrol. No human, that is. On a regular basis, we found evidence that a cat had tried its luck running the gauntlet–the draw of the chicken coop too much for the damned–but you don’t see that many two or three-legged cats so we assumed the rest went down the hatch. Occasionally, we found saliva-soaked kitty heads, much to our morbid fascination.

  I spent the fourth and fifth grades at Terra Bella Elementary School. The coolest thing about that first year was being the youngest kid in the A band. (The school had a B band, comprised mostly of fifth and sixth graders still learning music.) There I was, in the A band as a 4th grader pounding away on the sole bass drum. I realize now that I got the job because I was the only kid willing to play the thing. David, a sixth grader, not to be outdone by his little brother, picked up the French horn like he knew what he was doing and made the A band as well. We wore red and white polyester uniforms (white shoes and a white beret finished the look) at the annual band review in Selma. Mr. Vangsness, our clever bandleader, had his six-year-old daughter, Kirsten, pull the drum on a cart as I marched behind it. As the little girl labored in front of me, huffing and puffing in the 102 degree heat, we played the theme from Rocky and won absolutely nothing.3

  My favorite girl (you can’t have a girlfriend as a ten-year-old, can you?), a little blonde with a button nose and glasses named Pam, made Mrs. Ward’s class bearable in the stifling heat. The poor girl got busted trying to pass a note one day and suffered the consequences.

  Mrs. Ward: “Pam, if you’re going to pass notes, why not share it with the entire class?” It was more of a command, not a question.

  Pam stood up, unfolded the note, and mumbled under her breath.

  Mrs. Ward: “Speak up Pam!”

  Pam: “Thomas. Baby face.”

  The class erupted into chaos as Pam sat down in misery and I buried my face in my hands. Thank God the nickname didn’t stick.

  February 8, 1978 was a Wednesday–my tenth birthday. The phone rang at 9:30 p.m., but David and I were already in our bunk bed for the night. We were awake–talking about the birthday party invitations we’d pass out the next day. Since our birthdays are three days apart, the party was scheduled for Saturday the 11th, David’s twelfth birthday. In hushed tones, we heard our grandparents on the phone. When they told us the news the next day, we didn’t pass out the invitations. The party was cancelled.

  When Mom joined us in the waning months of 1978–and it wasn’t soon enough for this Mama’s Boy–we spent another year under my grandparents roof.

  Fifth grade passed uneventfully with the exception of the appearance of the new kid, Tracey. Dressed in plaid skirts with ribbons in her curled brown hair, Tracey made my heart beat a little faster in Mrs. Taylor’s class. The girl had some serious mojo and came to school, everyday, looking like she was dressed for church. She also wore glasses which made her look really smart. As my classmates openly wept at Mrs. Taylor’s reading of Where The Red Fern Grows, I tried to suck it up and look stoic for Tracey. It didn’t work. I cried like a baby with everyone else. Visiting Tracey at her house had two distinct benefits: 1) fifth grade romance in the air (consisting of holding hands of the sweaty variety) and 2) her dad’s Playboy centerfolds pinned-up all over the garage. Inspirational on both accounts.

  I tired of the bass drum so tried the trombone, then the baritone, but failed on both accounts. Brass instruments took a lot more skill than banging a big drum and I lost my spot in the A band. Live and learn.

  It was a simple existence.

  Grandma lined us up with the migrant farm workers for free blocks of cheese (“welfare cheese” we called it–one block per person!) every time the County gave it away. We ate bread from the Day Old Wonderbread Store (only ten cents a loaf!), collected eggs from a heavily-fortified henhouse in the corner of the yard, and, occasionally, killed the chickens for dinner.

  We watched Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, The Dukes of Hazzard and my favorite, BJ & the Bear, on the thirteen-inch black-and-white TV setup in the corner of the kitchen.

  We played Russian Rummy (the card game, not anything involving a loaded revolver) on Saturday nights and it was hell to pay during Sunday’s white glove bedroom inspection if Grandma didn’t win. Uh, I’m not kidding.

  For Christmas that year we asked for a dirt bike (a Yamaha YZ80 to be exact). The adults sprung for a 50cc moped–the thing lasted a couple months before every spoke snapped from too many jumps on our homemade dirt track down the road.

  Six people in the small three-bedroom, one-bath house wore on Mom so we moved six miles north to Porterville. With thirty thousand people, Porterville was ten times the size of Terra Bella–thank God for that.

  It was mid-1979 and I was in the sixth grade.

  That’s how we ended up an hour and a half south of Fresno and an hour north of Bakersfield–not exactly the center of the cultural world, but I’m not complaining.

  1980 Fun Fact #1:

  Mattel releases the Intellivision video game console. Our video game addiction began with the likes of “Baseball,” “Football,” and “Night Stalker.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Not quite 1980 but close.

  We moved to Porterville the second week of the new school year making me, officially, the new kid in Mrs. Alexander’s sixth grade class.

  The girls took notice of my long hair and peach fuzz upper lip. (The picture to the right is the “school picture haircut” look.) Unfortunately, so did the guys. By the end of the first day, one guy–Ryan Bernasconi–decided I needed an ass kicking. Images of Gino rushed in my mind. Here we go again!

  Kids are creative and Ryan was clever enough to enunciate my name Tom-Ass.

  As in: “Your name is Tom-Ass, huh? Tom-Ass, whatta name! Is that what we call you, Tom-Ass?”

  I countered: “Your last name is Bernasconi? What kind of dumb name is that? Sounds like cheap pasta to me, pal.”

  Our insults were mild by today’s standards. Nobody’s mother was brought into the discussion, but my retort was all Ryan needed.

  “Meet me after school!” he growled.

  A group of guys (and you know who you are Todd Bailey, Billy Pritchett, and Lenny Manson) stood around hoping for the best. I was still a stranger and junior high fist fights can be so much fun.

  I replied flatly, “I take the bus after school.”

  And that’s exactly what I did since, without a doubt, Ryan would have kicked my ass. He was bigger than me. Before I say another word, let me be clear that Ryan and I became good friends and after that initial week of posturing, I never had a problem with anyone at Burton Junior High.

  Mom rented a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment on West Olive Avenue and the Wildwood Apartments became home for the next six years. David and I initially shared a room and, once again, I occupied the top bunk. Lorne stayed in Washington, so David became the de facto “man of the apartment.”

  I called Tracey that first week in the new digs with the intent of lamenting how our six mile distance felt like six hundred miles. I never got the chance. As soon as I said “Hi,” David snatched the phone away and growled, “Put Tracey on the phone right now!” I grabbed the phone just in time to hear her dad snap, “I outta come over there and ring yer scrawny little neck! Don’t you ever call back!”

  Click.

  As fast as that, images of a long distance relationship evaporated. I never saw Tracey again. Thanks bro!

  Aside from squelching his little brother’s love interest, one thing David and I had in common w
as a love of music. Our combination record player/8-track saw a lot of action. The baddest LP in our small collection was AC/DC’s Highway To Hell. Just the name was cool since “hell” was (and is), technically, a cuss word and it felt rebellious just to say the album title out loud. Throw in the fact that the album cover displays Bon Scott wearing a pentagram necklace and Angus Young sporting horns and a spiked tail–all evil signs–and you’ve got yourself a real rebellion of an album cover. The music could have been total crap and we would have still bought it for the album cover alone.

  One example of just how old we pre-teen AC/DC listeners have become, consider this: Alanis Morissette was five years old when Highway To Hell was released. Years later, she released the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the U.S. and the highest selling debut album worldwide. (Oh, yes, I’m a big fan.) I seriously doubt that little Alanis listened to these hard-rocking Aussies on her plastic pink record player as a five-year-old (but it’s fun to imagine).

  When we weren’t listening to albums, we watched the coolest thing since Checkers and Pogo4: Home Box Office (HBO). In the beginning, God made HBO and it was good.

  HBO in the eighties was quite a bit different from what it is today. For starters, there was only one channel. It had “Short and Special” featurettes in between movies. (Who can forget Hardware Wars? If you haven’t seen it, you have to YouTube it. I mean it. If you haven’t seen it, put this book down and go watch it. Now! I mean it.) “Short and Specials” were just that–usually a few minutes long and always entertaining. Sometimes they were cartoons just a few seconds long (Godzilla vs. Bambi–Bambi peacefully grazing, Godzilla’s foot crashes down, The End) and sometimes they were funny skits with characters made of clay. One episode featured fans of Elvis Presley. My jaw hit the floor as a woman gushed on about a ring Elvis had given her–and the kid standing next to her was me! We had gone to an Elvis convention in San Jose a few months earlier–who would’ve known I’d end up on HBO?