The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager!

by Tom Harvey

  I looked at Pam in silence, unsure what to do next.

  Pam said, “If we lay back on the bed, I bet we could imagine there’s stars on the ceiling.”

  “Uh, OK.”

  We laid on our half of the bed, my back parallel with Joe’s. Pam lay under my left arm. Jenny under Joe’s right arm. Pam then placed my right hand on her well-endowed left boob and, somewhere in my brain a voice shouted, LET THE FUN BEGIN! With four bodies in motion on the bed, Jenny huffed and led Joe out of the bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom.

  Pam and I adjusted our positioning.

  More room.

  Cool.

  We continued kissing for fifteen minutes. Pam was right–I was seeing stars even though my eyes were closed.

  The beads flew apart and a terror-struck Jenny whispered loudly, “MY DAD IS UP AND HE ALWAYS CHECKS MY ROOM!” I franticly looked around. No closet. Nowhere to hide! We dashed into the only locked room in the house: the bathroom. Jenny locked the door while Joe and I looked for an escape route. The window was too small to shimmy through.

  Bam, bam, bam!

  “Jenny, what are you two doing in there? I have to get ready for work!” her dad yelled. He was a mere four inches away, and …

  We.

  Were.

  Trapped.

  Though I never actually saw the man, I imagined a Hells Angel biker dude. A big guy who would slam his fist through our chests for the atrocities committed under his roof.

  “Pam and I are, uh, washing our faces! We’ll be out in a sec!” She cranked on the faucet to full blast.

  My heart pounded.

  Joe was white as a ghost.

  “Hurry up, then! I have to get ready for work!”

  Jenny kept her finger raised and pressed against her lips: SHHHHHHH! I thought for sure the sound of my heart slamming inside my chest would give us away.

  Jenny listened, trying to determine where her dad was in the small house. After a few long moments of silence, she cracked open the door and peered out, ready to slam it closed. He was in the small kitchen, just out of our line of sight. Joe and I stood trembling in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled.

  “Not yet … not yet … wait … now!” she whispered.

  We flung back the shower curtain and, as one, the four of us made a beeline for the front door. Joe and I leapt out of the house and Jenny quickly shut the door but not before whispering, “Don’t go just yet.” The porch was pitch-black with the light off.

  Her dad went from the kitchen into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The door closed and locked behind him. He missed us by a matter of seconds.

  The front door cracked open and Jenny and Pam’s faces peered out, they were both flushed and smiling.

  “Well,” Jenny said, “that was exciting.”

  “Same time, same place tomorrow?” Joe laughed.

  Pam extended her hand through the open door. “It was really nice to meet you,” she said. I held out my hand, dumbstruck, and she shook it. I always found it odd that I went from boob stroking to a handshake in less than ten minutes.

  It took the entire two mile jog back to the pay phone before our adrenalin subsided. The supermarket at the edge of town was deserted. Joe called Dial-A-Colt but got their answering machine–they were closed for the night.

  “What do we do now?” I groaned. We were on the rough east side of town–in a darkened parking lot. Our safety was far from assured.

  Joe’s brother, Ted, came to the rescue.

  That summer we existed in no man’s land–no longer in junior high but not yet in high school.

  A few weeks before school started, I received a flyer in the mail that listed the freshman “walk around” day at Monache High School. Held in the school cafeteria, this marked the beginning of the high school journey. The choices made that day determined classes for the entire year. Joe and I agreed we’d go together.

  There were a lot of new faces since multiple junior highs made up the freshman class. Nervous and excited, we became separated in the bustle of the packed room. The day was also a fashion show: flipped-up collared shirts, hip-hugging jeans, and new shoes abounded. One face that wasn’t new was Pam’s. From across the crowded room I waved at her. My right hand, after all, was on a first name basis with her left boob. She looked back in horror and ducked out of sight. I didn’t make further contact.

  After signing up for my classes (World Studies, Algebra 9, English 9 Honors, PE, Physical Science, and Spanish 9), the hard work was done.

  Note: it only took me a few minutes to remember those classes, in that order, nearly thirty years later. Am I pathetic or do I just have a good memory? You tell me.

  A group of guys, including David Fine and Ryan Bernasconi, milled around one table, so I walked over to see what they were doing. Joe was nowhere to be found.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  David said, “We’re signing up for football. Sign up with us.”

  The three of us played flag football at Burton so we thought we knew a little something about the game. This was tackle football, though, and something entirely different. Surrounded by the chaos of the room, I looked at the dozen or so names on the signup sheet and only recognized a few.

  Suddenly the room was quiet. All I could see was the next empty line on the page. I was mesmerized.

  “Well?” Ryan asked, snapping me out of my trance, “you going to do this or what?”

  With a blank grin and shaky hand, I added my name.

  We unhinged the top bunk and moved it into my sister’s room and I said adios to David as a nightly bunkmate. Trish slept in Mom’s room anyway. Two posters of bikini-clad supermodel Paulina Porizkova adorned the walls, along with a poster of Finnish motocross racer Heikki Mikkola and a cartoony towel of a basset hound peering through round glasses. I secured the 8-track/radio from the living room and relished my newfound privacy.

  This new commitment, high school tackle football practice, preceded the start of school by a few weeks. Junior high, not even ninety days in the past, felt like it was a lifetime away.

  With David working at the coffee shop and Mom finishing her nursing studies, I walked the mile and a half to practice, alone.

  Walking into the locker room on that hot August summer day in 1982 was eye opening: big lockers, small lockers, offices, and one community shower. Showering with the fellas was going to take some getting used to.

  Coach Randy Quiram welcomed us by having us run up and down the grassy practice field. We immediately took to the man–he was in his mid-thirties, a PE teacher with a legendarily pretty blonde wife. With a bushy moustache and manicured beard, he ran laps with us and quickly memorized everyone’s names. He and assistant coach, Rich Lambie, sized up the collection of nervous, not-yet-freshman players.

  “Who’s a quarterback?” Coach Quiram shouted.

  A few guys, including Ryan Bernasconi, raised their hands. I smirked. News to me.

  “Who’s a running back?”

  Different guys raised their hands.

  “Who’s a receiver?” More hands, different guys.

  After each question, he pointed to an area where the respondents congregated. I didn’t know what I was, so I just knelt on one knee unsure what would happen next. David Fine, my drama buddy from Burton, knelt beside me. What was left was a mix of little and big guys.

  Coach Lambie yelled, “OK, all you linemen, over here!” and away the bigger guys went.

  Coach Quiram looked over his remaining players. While I tried to muster a look of calm self-respect, I felt like the last kid getting picked for dodge ball.

  “OK, I want all you guys to join the receivers and run routes for our quarterbacks.”

  I smirked at Bernasconi who stood with two other guys beaming with the instant recognition. He hadn’t even thrown a pass and he was moving up in the world. I felt like saying, “Oh, yeah ... um … I’m a quarterback, too,” but knew I’d only embarrass myself when I tried to throw the bal
l.

  The day before high school started, I asked David his advice on this new chapter in my life.

  He said, “Have as much fun as you can, but kick ass in school.”

  I nodded.

  “Hmm. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, don’t walk around alone or you’re likely to end up face first in a trashcan.”

  Ah, yes, the infamous freshman hazing.

  “So, the fact that you’re my older brother doesn’t offer me special protection?”

  “Nope,” he answered with a grin, “in fact, you might just be a target.”

  Swell.

  That summer I studied David’s sophomore yearbook like a kid possessed. I was particularly interested in all the pretty older women I would soon rub shoulders with in the hallways.

  Hey, I’m David Harvey’s little brother!

  That had to account for something.

  A freshman named Betsy sure looked cute. Shannon, too.

  So many girls. So little time.

  1983 Fun Fact #1:

  McDonald’s introduces the McNugget. At 100 milligrams of sodium per piece, who needs salt the rest of the day?

  CHAPTER 7

  The first day of school was September 7.

  At 5’ 7” and 134 pounds, I was an average sized fourteen-year-old. I rode to school with David in his mini-truck and nervously sought out my home room class.

  It was a cold morning. Mist hung in the air.

  Mr. Bierman assigned our seats in alphabetical order and, as fate would have it, my ex-girlfriend, Ellen, sat right behind me.

  Now, what are the odds of that? Same homeroom? Thirty kids and no one’s last name fell between H and M?

  Not at all happy with the thought of her staring at the back of my head every day, I turned around and growled, “Anybody but you!”

  She scoffed. “Anybody but you, too!”

  I wandered around the sprawling campus that day with the rest of the wide-eyed freshman, collecting textbooks, greeting my Burton friends and thinking I’d finish the day without incident.

  I could not, for the life of me, find my seventh period Spanish class. The bell rang for the last class of the day, and I found myself standing in the auto shop. Not to sound like a total geek, I asked someone, “Where the hell is Mr. Briscoe’s class?” The guy nodded at the woodshop building. Auto and Woodshop were on the back forty of the campus and I thought, This just isn’t right.

  Sliding back a set of heavy double doors, a makeshift classroom sat at the far end of the large room. Mr. Briscoe, standing behind his desk at the head of the room said, “Ah, buenos tardes! You must be Senor Harvey?” Thirty strangers looked at me blankly.

  “Yes, I am,” I said with a mix of relief and embarrassment finding a seat in the very back of the class. Looking around at large cutout trees and racks of costumes, I asked a pretty blonde girl I didn’t know, (Debbie was her name I’d discover), “What is this place?” She cheerfully answered, “This is the prop room for the drama department.”

  “What the hell are we doing in the prop room?”

  Gregg, a sophomore with blonde curly hair and thick glasses, answered, “They ran out of classroom space.”

  “Do we even have drama at this school?”

  “Nope, they axed the program at the end of last year,” he replied.

  With all hombres accounted for, under a Rydell High School sign and a cutout of a 1955 Buick, Mr. Briscoe began his lesson. No one in the back heard a word.

  It was a busy first week as David and I went to our first concert ever: Van Halen at the Selland Arena in Fresno. He, in turn, rounded up Sherman, and his friends Bill Bushey and Jason Patterson. Sherman offered to drive the Grand Prix. After school on that Thursday afternoon, Sherman picked us up in the high school parking lot. From there, we stopped at the Joy Jug liquor store.

  “Ante up boys!” Sherman announced.

  We pooled our money and he marched into the small liquor store. I thought, He isn’t old enough to buy alcohol.

  What I didn’t know was that the middle eastern guy at the Joy Jug would sell alcohol to anyone. Sherman walked out carrying a brown paper sack, smiling from ear to ear.

  David handed out the booty: The Club brand miniature aluminum cans of pre-mixed hard alcohol. We passed around a Fuzzy Naval, a Long Island Iced Tea, a Screwdriver, and a Harvey Wallbanger (purchased simply for the name and nothing else). By the time we piled out of the car in Fresno, I couldn’t feel my face and my stomach burned.

  In an odd pairing, After The Fire opened the show. The crowd showed no mercy and pelted them with empty cups, full cups, smuggled in beer cans, and rolls of toilet paper. The rowdy crowd came to see David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers, not this unknown New Wave band. I thought, Is this how all warm up bands are treated?

  Van Halen, in the middle of their “Hide Your Sheep” tour for their Diver Down album, had a sold out crowd including thousands of girls in tank-tops and skin-tight jeans. There were no floor seats–just a human mosh pit–and when the lights went out, a cloud of smoke quickly settled over the crowd.

  David yelled in my ear, “That’s marijuana!”

  No, really?

  The next day we wore our Van Halen concert shirts to school and instantly connected with the Stoners.

  Sidebar #1:

  High School Cliques

  Speaking of Stoners, the cliques (pronounced “clicks”), in no particular order, were:

  Stoners (also known as Metal Heads)–guys with long hair who wore concert shirts to school. Even if you didn’t smoke weed, a guy could find himself in this clique based on clothing alone.

  Preppies–open to both sexes, a Prep wore collared shirts (preferably of the Izod variety), Sperry Topsider shoes, and sweaters tied around their necks. Generally speaking, most of the cheerleaders and Student Council members fell into this category.

  Jocks–every school had these, whether it was the varsity football players or the varsity volleyball players, jocks covered both sexes (a bruiser upperclassman named Curt and a solid girl named Liz come to mind–I had the hots for Liz in a weird sort of way).

  Cowboys, also known as Shit Kickers–open to both sexes, these students wore skin-tight Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats. Most were members of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) club (We had a different name for the acronym pertaining to a guy’s sexual orientation but it wouldn’t be polite to state it here). You didn’t want to get in a fight with a Cowboy in fear of getting kicked by those pointy boots.

  Vatos, also known as Cholos–this referred to Hispanic students who wore black pants, white T-shirts, and black shoes, religiously. Some of the guys carried boom boxes (also known as ghetto blasters) on their shoulders between classes with Grandmaster Flash’s Scorpio cranked.

  Geeks, also known as Computer Nerds–Interestingly enough, this group wasn’t looked down on or treated poorly. Usually an undersized guy with glasses, this was the person to go to for help with Algebra, Trig, and Computer Programming. God knows I needed their help.

  New Wavers, also known as Punks (short for Punk Rockers)–these were guys and girls with funky, cropped haircuts and colorful, zippered clothing. They were defined by their music. To give you the true flavor, here’s an excerpt of what a New Waver named Jay (also known as the Spudboy) wrote in my freshman yearbook:

  Nu-Wave shall reign supreme in the kingdom of MHS. There will be masses of new wavers the likes of which the world has never known. And I, as the New Wave Emperor of the World, will see to it that no “Black Sabbath,” no “Ozzy Osbourne” and certainly no “Sammy Hagar” will be played within the boundaries of MHS. DEVO, OINGO, Wall of Voodoo, B-52s, Sparks, and all new wave shall win the day! Stay ultra cool and think “new wave.”

  Many students didn’t fall into any of these classifications and some changed their stripes over the years. Some of us (hint, hint) worked hard to change classifications.

  I fell into the Stoner class based on my long hair, peach fuzz mousta
che, and concert shirt despite the fact that I was an honors student. When I was offered a joint and declined that first week of school (“Only a dollar” the kid said), the stereotype took a hit.

  We played our freshman football games on Thursday afternoons on the varsity practice field. I saw Coach Quiram during PE the day of that first game. He asked, “Are you ready, Tom?”

  “Yes, Coach. And we’re going to win!”

  He looked at me for a moment without responding–for just a second, he looked sad. The look confused me.

  He answered quietly, “We’re going to give it our best.”

  What he knew that I didn’t was that our first game was against Visalia-based Redwood High School, and we hadn’t beaten them at any level of football in recent memory. After school we lined up for our game jerseys randomly handed out of a large cardboard box. When I reached the front of the line, number 21 was at the top of pile. I held it out proudly. The guy behind me jabbed me in the back. “Move! We haven’t got all day!” It’s been my favorite number ever since.

  Redwood crushed us that day. We didn’t even score.

  At practice the next day, I noticed that I was the only one still wearing tennis shoes.

  Going down the line of stretching players, Coach Quiram asked quietly, “Are you going to get some cleats, Tom?”

  “Yes, Coach.”

  Trouble was, Nike cleats cost more than forty dollars, and I didn’t want to ask Mom for the money. I had the weekend to figure it out and ended up raiding the cookie jar–at the expense of that weekend’s video gaming–and went to Payless Shoes. I walked out with a pair of twelve dollar Pro Wings. Barely passable as athletic shoes, they were made of cheap white plastic with little nubs for cleats. I was so embarrassed that I razor-bladed off the brand markings and scuffed them up in the dirt. I was the only player wearing them.

  We went 1-9 that year and I’d bet that, as our starting right cornerback, I still hold the record for giving up the most touchdowns in Monache High School freshman football history. While the memories of most of the games escape me, thankfully, I do have specific recollections.