A Fortified look through the Past

I'm officially cheered up with my new favorite web site, Modern Drunkard Magazine.

I came across this gem when attempting to google up some repressed childhood memories through good ol' brand association (in this particular case, Gallo Tavola Red jug wine: good for staining the insides of mothers and coffee mugs alike, at least in my experience). I really just wanted a picture for the dysfunctional family scrapbook I'm compiling. (What do braided rugs, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, a haze of smoke, cheap jug wine and whiskey have in common? My living room growing up!)

I finally found what I was grepping for on Modern Drunkard but it's tough to come up with an appropriately specific query for the product "Tavola Red" when it translates in Italian literally to "red table wine." As you can imagine, that's like looking for "pilser beer": there's gobs of it. Plus Ernest and Julio became yuppie snobs in the 1980s and cut back on a lot of their more, well let's just say 'foundational' stock (thanks a lot, Gordon Gecko).

My vino suppler of choice never wavered from their roots. I speak, naturally, of Mogen David, whose motto, "when nature needs a little boost..." captivated me from the get-go. Well, it should have been their motto. MD did get a little fancy with all the different flavors of 20/20: give me basic grape - no plum supreme or ... well, whatever you have in stock, but I preferred grape. I'd like one day to tour their vineyard, or their chemical processing plant (I think they may be one and the same).

My MD 20/20 phase was short lived, mainly played out in my early 20s in the Navy and then only when we were sufficiently broke to be priced out of clubs and bars. We could always scrape up enough scratch for a cheap room - can't bring the stuff back to the ship! - and a few bottles of Mogen David's fortified fun ('Tuesday' was an especially good vintage, I recall).

The mall arcades and movies took on an enhanced hue with a few swigs of the grape stuff. Since we couldn't afford bars and clubs - would we be drinking purple turpentine otherwise? - we terrorized the mall denizens instead.

I do remember one horrifying Saturday night around 11:45pm when we realized it was almost midnight and we were out of MD. We staggered across a heavily trafficked six lane highway at full stride, racing to beat the buzzer when Virginia's Sunday blue laws ticked into place, and the drug store booze fridge ("best served chilled") was padlocked until Monday. That would have put a real crimp in our Saturday night. We did make the cut but ended up dropping half the six bottles we purchased in our drunken glee (polishing off the others as we stumbled back toward the mall).

Sometimes we mixed it up and substituted 20/20 with Wild Irish Rose (WIR). WIR was an appropriate acronym as that was precisely the sound reverberating through your head the next day after a night ingesting that putrid shit (WWWWIIIIRRRRRRR!). When our first two choices weren't available, we just kept going down the list: Thunderbird, Night train, etc.

For whatever reason, beer was never considered - not enough bang for the buck, so to speak. We'd save beer for clubs, bars, etc.

Ahh, yes - Good times, indeed.

We were stuck without car, money or confidence in anything. Told time and again that our kind was despised by the townies before we ever set foot on dry land there (we jokingly referred to the town as No-fuck, Virginia). On top of that, we had the mark of the beast, the scarlet letter: our bad haircuts with the telltale taper above the collar, marking us as military. This was 1984 in a town where the younger locals grew their hair long precisely to 'clarify' such things. Some of the more creative among us attempted to wear "civilian" wigs, but that just made you look as desperate as we all felt anyway.

Wandering the highways and byways of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in groups of three, four, five with shitty clothes and pasty complexions borne from months in the bowels of floating gray prisons.

No wonder we became wine-o connoisseurs. Sort of a very low rent East Coast Sideways running on an endless loop, with the Military Circle Mall and its surroundings substituting for northern California wine country.

Yes, revisionist history is a fine thing, whether political or personal. Of course. Just like Sideways. Definitely. Memories should be like cars: you get to trade them in on new ones every so often. The depreciation rates, though, will vary.

Journey to the Center of the Members Only Generation

I've never owned a Steve Perry or Journey album and his voice is just this side of Geddy Lee fingernails-on-the-blackboard spine-twisting agony. But he's also a lead contributor to the soundtrack of the 1980s for me, probably much more than the songs and artists that I actually liked. Anyway, my tastes leaned (and still lean) toward late 70s punk and the first "new" wave. The 80s were kinda lacking in "my" kind of tunes and nothing much emerged again until Nirvana in the early 90s. The 1980s were destitute in this regard, even with a few bright spots along the way (early U2, the LA punk scene).

But when I hear 'Don't Stop Believing', I'm 21, in the Navy, and transported back to the shitty strip clubs and dive bars in Norfolk, VA or running wild through the heart (gut?) of Naples, Italy. Perhaps not everybody's idea of a good time - and in so many ways, not mine either - but I recall those days fondly now.

There was this 'us-versus-them' band-of-brothers vibe that was compelling, even as the nights of jovial revelry were in retrospect pretty pathetic. We acted as though we had been drafted against our will into war, when we'd really just volunteered to live on a big floating airport with a lot of people we discovered we'd rather have never known. Very few ever got the girl - not for free, anyway - we were generally despised by the locals in towns throughout the world, and even fewer of us actually owned a car, forever slaves to public transportation in towns with few options.

Lots of booze and tunes, though.

A bunch of other mediocre but popular 80s artists trigger these same memories - pretty much whatever was stuck on replay in the jukeboxes of the crap watering holes we frequented: Huey Lewis, Styx, Laura Branigan, Pat Benatar, etc.

This same weird melding of bad music and sense-memory is especially strong with Night Ranger/Sister Christian.

Sister Christian will always be James Sprouse.

Where in the world is Jimmy Sprouse now? He was the older, goofy next-door-neighbor-who-lives-alone type with rapidly thinning hair trying in vain to cover his scalp in the desperate wrap-around style obvious to all but those who do it. (Hey, waitaminute - I'm older and live alone! whaterya implying? I'm not goofy, at least, and still have my hair - bettercheckinthemirror...)

Jimmy worked as the intelligence division draftsman in a little crawl space of a room near the ship's foc'sle and lived to watch bad movies and bemoan the younger generation. I never understood why the intelligence division needed a draftsman, and I don't imagine he did either.

Sprouse was frozen forever in time, as seemingly old as the hills to us then but probably 15 years younger than I am now.

Anyway, how is Jimmy Sprouse Sister Christian?

It comes down to a specific moment in time for me. An epiphany. One of those surreal, how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moments in life.

It hit me at a Night Ranger concert in Hampton, VA in 1985.

Scanning the crowd of wack-jobs 'rocking' to their groovy rhythms - Jimmy Sprouse 'jamming' harder than all the rest - scanning the crowd, it hit me dead on.

The question.

The question wasn't literally 'how did I get to this Night Ranger concert?' That much was easy enough: a bunch of others on the ship were going, I had nothing going on, there was an available ticket and beer was to be had before, during and after the show. In other words, a good time, riffing on the "uncool" and their "shitty music."

But that moment, scanning the crowd, with 'Sister Christian' in full swing and seeing Jimmy Sprouse playing air guitar and Dave "Rock Lobster" Ryan nodding to the tune like he was some strung-out jazz musician who had just shot up, I swear everything stopped and the urgency of the real question reverberated through my mind, drowning out everything else: How-the-fuck-did-I-get-here? And then: Find Something Else To Do With Your Life. Now. This place, this life, these people. It wasn't some grand conspiracy - I chose to do it and I could choose to do something else.

I'd met some great people - some fellow travelers, as it were - but this could not continue. The horror was that, yes it very well could. Sprouse was probably at some level thinking the same thing, 16 years earlier, and it did continue for him. Maybe he was, back then, even human. Now he appeared human only at odd moments such as this. What is your life when you can only express some kind of joy at a fucking Night Ranger concert?

Sister Christian took on another level of significance for me in 1998 when I first saw what might be the pivotal scene in Boogie Nights, set at a point in time almost exactly when my epiphany occurred - smack dab in the middle of the 1980s. For the most part the movie is silly, sharply, funny, riffing on 1970s porn and film.

But it takes a serious turn into the 1980s. Dirk Diggler, having become a has-been porn star turned drug addict and dealer, has exactly this same how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here moment, listening to Sister Christian. The camera focuses in on Marky Mark and his expression - well, I think it was actually a pretty fine bit of acting (who'd have thunk it?)


It was eerie. Different circumstances, of course, but the moment was singular. And Sister Christian was playing. He's motoring, for sure.

Watch it and you'll know the place I was at. And in many ways, how I got to where I am.

Where ever that may be.


via videosift.com

The Norfolk Ballet '84 (Broken)

Squatting in the ambiance of stripper perfumed smoke haze,

shot glass run-off, PBR and cellulite unbounded.

***

Journey, Styx and Benatar careen off restroom mirrors,

evaporating into stalls where sickly souls go praying.

***

Echoes of my emptiness tear at my gut this Tuesday,

distilling into drunken numbing Huey Lewis hatred.

***

"Owner of a Lonely Heart" now soundtrack to my musings,

as "Lovely Lisa" takes the pole to creepy stage announcements.

***

I'm lost on Granby/Little Creek as Tuesday ticks to Wednesday,

then stagger out into the dark of early morning summer.

***

I hail a cab back down into my Pier 12 home and office,

tripping down the passageways toward berthing slumber solace.

***

Crawl into my bunk in back and pass out until morning;

rinse, repeat and hope to God this Groundhog's Day stops playing.

***

Some twenty six long years gone by since stumbling into stasis;

still, Pavlov's Dog lives in my ear when certain songs sing to it.

***

Those wretched tunes I just can't stand, they take me back to Clancy's,

when optimism for my fate had not yet died exhausted.

***

I sit here now and contemplate my mindset in those shitholes,

and wonder why - just why the hell - I look on those days fondly.

***

It could just be the booze, or that I was finally free of Everett,

or fantasies of hearts of gold wrapped up in 80's muzak.

***

In the end I think it's probably something a bit more basic:

it was a time when the future held a promise now since broken;

it was a time that I myself was not yet - not quite - broken.

Quite broken -

and facing the wrong direction looking to become whole again.