Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  “This is pretty strong, Ms. Calasta.”

  “Yes, Rob.”

  “Where is your bathroom?”

  “Upstairs. You could call me Catherine.”

  One day when I was in town, I called to invite myself over for coffee and cigarettes. But she was gone—she’d left abruptly, in a cloud of mystery. When asked about her whereabouts, other faculty members cleared their throats uncomfortably and changed the subject. Had she killed a man? Robbed a bank? Corrupted a student? (A student who wasn’t me? Unthinkable!) Whoever knew wasn’t talking, at least not to me. I would never find out. She left no trace, like the green light going dark at the end of Gatsby’s dock, or like the siren on a Roxy Music record cover.

  The Gatsby blues made so much sense to me in Ms. Calasta’s class. When I read the book as an adult, I was startled to see that Gatsby and Daisy have only known each other for five years. When I was sixteen, this seemed like a lifetime’s worth of tragic romance. I’d always cherished Gatsby and Daisy as the emblem of a doomed, fatal, endless romantic obsession. They’d met, they’d fallen in love, they’d endured a tragic separation, but he had carried the torch for her all this time. But it was just five freaking years? I’m an adult now—I can do five years standing on my head.

  But as Gatsby knew, five years is a long time. That’s the time the boy and girl have spent together in the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” easily the most famous breakup song in history. They’ve had five years together, and now she’s got the world at her feet and she’s leaving him behind. That’s how long we’ve got until the planet burns out in Bowie’s “Five Years.” It’s how long John Wayne wanders the wilderness looking for Natalie Wood in The Searchers. It’s how long Ione Skye and her dad have lived together in Say Anything.

  Odysseus and Circe got five years in The Odyssey, so do Humbert and Dolores in Lolita, so do Axl Rose and his Sunset Strip groupie in “You Could Be Mine.” There’s something primal about that time span. Five years doesn’t seem quite as epic as it did back then, when it was a third of my life. But I still get it. LCD Soundsystem sang about it in “All My Friends”: “You spent five long years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” By the time you’re an adult, you’re used to seeing friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time—some come back, some don’t. Some of them you wait for and some you let go.

  Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song. Sometimes the song is the green light at the end of the dock, a sign that the dream we’ve been chasing is already behind us, in the past. Sometimes when a girl goes away, the conversation doesn’t end. You keep talking to her, just in case she can hear.

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into Bryan Ferry.

  BONNIE TYLER

  “Total Eclipse of the Heart ”

  1983

  People rarely threaten to kill me these days. That’s one of the weird things about being an adult. It’s illegal, so it just doesn’t happen very often. In the past few years, only two other guys have threatened me with murder, and neither time was all that alarming. One guy got mad at me in the accountant’s office when I was getting my taxes done. I was on crutches at the time, because of the tragic roller-disco crash of ’05 (don’t aaaask), and he tripped over my legs on his way to use the waiting-room coffee machine, which hasn’t worked since the Clinton administration. Enraged by the denial of coffee, he threw the Styrofoam cup at me and said, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” It was a weird threat to make, depending on how you rate Styrofoam murder weapons. It could be done, killing a man with Styrofoam, but it would require some degree of premeditation—carving a styro-scimitar, or maybe a blowgun to shoot those little peanuts. But for your garden-variety impulse killing, Styrofoam gets you nowhere, especially in Brooklyn. His wife made him come back over and apologize, which was embarrassing for both of us.

  The other guy was on an Amtrak train, using his cell phone in the quiet car. I usually avoid the quiet car because I loathe hearing myself chew, but this time I was in it, and although I didn’t mind this clod’s moronic conversation (reading the Star out loud), I couldn’t stand the slow exhales and exasperated sighs of my spineless fellow passengers. I always regard a succinct and informative shoosh as morally superior to an hour of feeble throat-clearing, and as a longtime librarian, I pride myself on my nonconfrontational shooshing skills. But my professional expertise must have failed me, because this guy took it hard, particularly after other passengers joined in. He waited till we were on the escalator at Penn Station to utter those same five magic words, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” It was hard to take him seriously, since it would have been much easier to kill me on the train. I mean, getting thrown from a moving train would be kind of hot. A very Robert Mitchum way to go. But escalator killings? No class.

  Strange as it may sound, though, whenever I hear those words, it always makes me feel all warm and gushy inside. It whisks me back in time to the golden summer of 1983, when I worked on a garbage truck with a bunch of other guys. We threatened to kill one another all the time. In fact, we considered the day a waste if nobody did any heavy bleeding.

  There was me, Soup, Okie, Psycho and Psycho’s brother, Chicken. They called me “Bones.” Our truck driver, a crusty old Irish guy named Harry, called us all the same name, which was “You faggots.” We were picking up garbage on the Southeast Expressway, working for the Massachusetts Highway Department, out of the Granite Avenue barracks. We had our orange vests, our plastic bags and our idiot sticks—you know, the stick with the little pointy spike at the tip for spearing trash. Every morning, we’d pile in the back of the truck and Harry would drive us to some point in the road, drop us off, then go get a beer.

  We cleaned the sides of the expressway between Exit 11 and Exit 20, the southern stretch, all the way to the Central Artery in downtown Boston, down to the Furnace Brook Parkway in Quincy. We covered I-93, the six-lane highway connecting Boston to the suburbs, down the Neponset River, through Savin Hall, beneath the Boston Gas tanks with the rainbow paintings. We cleaned the living fuck out of that place. We speared all the garbage that piles up along the side of any roadside: porno mags, paper bags, Burger King wrappers, crushed drink cups, beer cans, the occasional pair of pants.

  At the end of the day, with our truck loaded with garbage bags, Harry would drive us all to the dump, and we’d usually “go to the Qs for a jump,” which meant swimming in the quarries. Everybody had a story about dead bodies in the water, and Psycho claimed there were dead horses in it, but everyone swam in the stew anyway. That’s usually when damage would get done with those idiot sticks. Blood might get shed, but never tears.

  It was hard work but it meant being outside in the summer sun, which made it a perfect job. We took an aggressive attitude toward garbage, which meant that frequently the crew would tie rags around their heads like the soldiers in Apocalypse Now and head under the expressway exit ramps doing the war chant, which was the opening lines of Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” (Rise up! Gather round! Rock this place to the ground!), which in retrospect was somewhat doofy. We would stand around, talk shit about one another and use our idiot sticks to write the words “Fuck Harry” in the dirt. Soup would always draw the Blue Öyster Cult logo. Then Psycho would say, “Hey, Soup, how’s your mom, the Black and Decker Pecker Wrecker,” and more blood would get shed.

  I could not believe how cool it felt to wear the orange vest of pride. It was the garb of a working man. I had never felt before like I was part of a gang of guys. It was like being in the cast of The Great Escape—I got excited driving to work every day. These guys were from all over town: Psycho and Chicken were from Dorchester, Soup from Southie, Okie from Quincy and me from Milton. Okie was the one with the radio. I brought my Walkman the first day of work, but I never put it o
n, partly because I knew Harry would think it was goofing off, partly because I knew Soup and Okie would liberate me from it, but mainly because it was more fun to listen to a bunch of other seventeen-year-old males shoot the shit. We once spent an entire day debating whether you could kill a guy by biting off his thumb. Soup said the guy would bleed to death. Okie said the guy’s blood would clot, so he wouldn’t die in time, and he could use his other thumb to gouge out your eyes. Psycho just giggled.

  Psycho was probably the guy who knew from experience, but he never said much—he just laughed all the time, with flashing eyes that made everyone a little more scared of him than the others. We all just said, “That guy Psycho is fried.” When we were in the back of the truck, Psycho liked to beat on the roof and yell, “Onward!” Harry wouldn’t have taken that from the rest of us, but even he was too creeped out by Psycho to say anything.

  The day revolved around the coffee breaks at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Morrissey Boulevard. The radio was always playing “The Safety Dance,” with that boop-boop-beep one-finger synth loop blasting behind the counter. If Harry was at the counter with us, we’d listen to him tell us he was sick and tired of our goofing off. If Harry brought his friend Red, the supervisor of another truck crew, we’d listen to Red’s Vietnam stories. Sometimes Harry brought Frankie, who only knew how to say one sentence: “The only thing I give a fuck about is bucks, booze and broads—in that order!” For lunch, Harry dropped us at the McDonald’s on Gallivan Boulevard while he went to the Eire Pub across the street. I would listen in on the Soup-Okie debates.

  “You’re such a bitch-off, I can’t believe I’m even talking to you.”

  “Bitch-off? There’s no such thing as a bitch-off.”

  “Yes there is, and you are one.”

  “No, I’m saying there’s no such word. Nobody says bitch-off.”

  “I’m saying it.”

  “No, I mean, it isn’t even a fake word. Nobody says it as a name to call somebody. You just made it up.”

  “Fuck you, bitch-off. Don’t you know that song? Billy Joel. You had to be a bitch-off, didn’t cha? Oh no, you had to be a bitch-off. Don’t come bitching to me, you big bitch-off.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. You are such a fucking bitch-off.”

  One day in July, Harry told us things were going to be different. We had a new crew member. She was Kelly Ryan, and Harry told us her dad knew somebody. So there were rules: nobody was supposed to talk to Kelly Ryan, look at Kelly Ryan or bother Kelly Ryan. There was a girl on our truck now. Kelly Ryan showed up her first day wearing makeup and a cute little miniskirt, with Bonnie Tyler blond hair. Lots of girls had the Bonnie Tyler hair that summer.

  Kelly Ryan basically ruined everything, because all anyone tried to do now was put each other down to impress Kelly Ryan, which would have required an Act of God and not merely a bunch of hormonally crazed seventeen-year-old boys in orange vests. That first day, when we piled off the truck to clean the Casimir Pulaski Memorial Underpass, Kelly stayed behind, sitting on the truckbed, dangling her legs and reading Harper’s Bazaar. Nobody complained to Harry about Kelly Ryan not working. The crew got a lot more violent.

  Kelly Ryan seemed like what they used to call “stuck up.” She never talked to her coworkers on the back of the truck. At Dunkin’ Donuts, she sat at the other end of the counter and pretended not to know us, even though she had the same matching orange vest. She never had a nice word. Every time she opened her mouth, it was like she gave birth to a litter of bitch-kitties.

  After work on Wednesday, Kelly Ryan talked to me for the first time, because I had a car. She needed a ride home from work. She lived in Quincy, but I was happy to make the trip, especially since I knew it would piss off Okie, because he also had a car but she did not ask him for a lift. I didn’t know why she picked me, but I assumed it had something to do with being “sweet.” Teenage boys do not necessarily like it when girls tell them they’re “sweet,” because it means they’re safe, but I did not have a problem with this.

  I had never driven a girl around in my car before. It was the brown ’74 Chevy Nova with no windshield wipers and the floor rusted clean through. I had driven around with guy friends, which was no problem, because teenage boys are vaguely excited by the risk of losing a limb if you get your shoe caught in the hole. But I could tell it had been a while since Kelly had been in a car this crummy.

  “Nice car,” she said. “You got brakes in this thing?”

  “Used to. Now I just drag my feet, like the Flintstones.”

  “Do the windows go down?”

  “Mine does.”

  “Great. My boyfriend’s car has this thing called air-conditioning.”

  “Never heard of it. How’s your boyfriend?”

  “Fine. Tomorrow’s our three-month anniversary.”

  “Well, not reeeally. ‘Annus’ means ‘year.’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Latin. Technically you can’t have a three-month anniversary, because ‘annus’ means ‘year.’ As in ‘annual,’ or ‘annuit coeptis.’”

  “Right. What about anus?”

  “That’s different. They’re not etymologically related.”

  “But you’re related to an anus. As in, you are totally an anus.”

  “You have a point. This is your street?”

  “Let me off at the curb.”

  “Technically, I guess it’s your quarter-anniversary.”

  “The curb.”

  The next day, everyone on the truck knew I’d given Kelly Ryan a ride home, and there was a vague sense of aggro in the air. Nobody could figure out why she picked me. Kelly Ryan, as usual, didn’t say hi to anyone, and sat in the back of the truck, reading her fashion mags. We cleaned up alongside the breakdown lanes on Savin Hill and debated which of the models on her fashion mags was hotter, Christie Sprinkley or Paulina Pork Her All Over.

  Now that Kelly had seen the inside of my car, I assumed she wouldn’t bum any more rides—and now that she’d seen the inside of my personality, I assumed she would never speak to me again. But I still had a car, and she still needed a lift.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “His car is in the shop. His car, which has air-conditioning.”

  “Are you going out tonight?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t call him. I’ve been procrastinating all day.”

  A few exits went by before I spoke up again. “ ‘Cras’ means ‘tomorrow,’ by the way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “ ‘Pro cras’ is Latin. It means ‘for tomorrow.’ So technically you can’t procrastinate till tonight.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up. What’s Latin for douchebag?”

  “Ecce homo.”

  “Ever heard of the word ‘vagina’?”

  “That’s Latin too. Caesar uses that word in the Gallic Wars. I mean, I know what that word means. I know all about it, you know? I’m just making conversation here.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “What do you want to talk about then?”

  “Just don’t say anything and I won’t either. And fifteen or twenty minutes will go by, extremely fucking painful minutes, but then we’ll be in Boston and I will get out of this car and take an aspirin or something.”

  So I didn’t say anything.

  The next day, she told Harry she hated the garbage truck, and if he didn’t find an office job for her at the barracks, her dad was going to break his legs. Friday was our last day of Kelly Ryan, and we had a vague sense of detumescence. We knew we were still going to insult one another’s mothers and threaten to stab one another, but it wasn’t going to be as much fun. After lunch, Chicken went for Okie with his idiot stick and drew blood, and even that couldn’t cheer us up.

  Friday was the last day Kelly Ryan needed a ride home, and also the first day she didn’t even ask, just showed up at my car. I did a pretty good job of not talking. I turned on the radio and she looked out the window.
We were cruising north on the expressway, the same stretch of road we’d been cleaning up all week. Then I cleared my throat.

  “Am I always going to be this way?”

  “What?”

  I repeated my question. “Am I always going to be this way?”

  I was as surprised as she was. I was surprised I’d said it, but I was even more surprised she took a second to think about it.

  “Yes,” she said eventually. “You are always going to be this way. It’s okay, though. Some girls are probably this way too.”

  “Great. Do you know any?”

  “Shhh. It’s the tunnel.”

  We rolled into the Callahan Tunnel. She held her breath. In ordinary traffic, from one end of the tunnel to the other is a minute and twenty seconds. Some girls can hold their breath all the way through the tunnel. Kelly Ryan had her lips clenched and her eyes closed. There was no radio in the tunnel, so the only sound I could hear was Kelly holding her breath. I knew she was going to make it to the other side.

  HAYSI FANTAYZEE

  “Shiny Shiny”

  1983

  Now, really. Haysi Fantayzee. When the good Lord was handing out brain soup, these guys must have shown up with a fork. Any discussion of this group has to start with a few basic questions: (1) who were they? (2) what kind of idiot actually listened to this shit? and (3) how in the blood-spattered name of the lords and the creatures could such a musical atrocity happen?

  The first one is easy—they were an English new-wave duo who had one hit in 1983 called “Shiny Shiny.” The third one is easy too—we do not live in an ideal universe, and our tribe is a sewer of vanity and corruption, and songs like “Shiny Shiny” are the wounds we bear from our cosmic floggings. The second one is kind of hard, though. The only answer I can come up with is “me,” but since there were clearly a lot of other people out there who paid actual money for Haysi Fantayzee records, that’s just not an adequate answer.