The Worst Year

Reviewed In This Post: The Walkmen, Living Color, Piedmont Middle School

Temperature in Dushanbe: 96 Fahrenheit / 36 Celsius

I woke up this morning thinking, for some reason, of the second half of my 7th grade year. After a series of conflicts with my father, I moved in with my mother, who had just relocated from Oakland to Piedmont. For those who don't know it, Piedmont is a rich little island of a city in the middle of Oakland where the police blotter in the newspaper prints such horrors as petty theft and vandalism -- all of this just blocks away from some real ghettos. The kids at Piedmont Middle School were rich and privileged, some of them with houses set so far back from the road their white columned porches could barely be seen from the road. There was a girl in my class who never wore the same outfit twice -- ever.

I was not rich, or privileged. We lived in a 2nd-floor apartment on the border with Oakland -- basically a fringe part of Piedmont that should have been in Oakland -- and my mother drove a battered Dodge van that had seen several accidents over the years. I had spent the first half of the year getting my ass kicked for wearing combat boots and military surplus jackets to school, and had slightly changed my style for my Piedmont debut: I wore a red jean jacket that I had tied in knots and thrown in a washing machine with some bleach, so that it came out with pink, peach, red and white splotches all over it. I carried a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad around with me everywhere. I cut my own hair. I was skinny, unearthly-pale, and the things I wanted more than anything in the world were:

1: Fingerless, mesh gloves

2: A drum set

3: little silver skull beads to wear in my hair

4: Dreadlocks

I was, in short, a confused, lonely kid.

I lived about 1/4 of the time in the real world, and the rest of the time in a fantasy world based mostly on the film Some Kind of Wonderful and the two tapes that I owned for my walkman: Living Colour's Vivid and Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation, which I listened to walking to and from school every day. I didn't have any musical taste, and I didn't have any friends to tell me what to like -- just MTV and my own questionable instincts.

When I think of those days, what echoes in my head is the almost unbeatable opening lick from "Cult of Personality." That's the heart of my 7th-grade soundtrack.

At first, the rich children of Piedmont Middle School tried to be decent to me, but I was brought up in a family where overreaction and explosive anger were a daily routine, so after being teased by a particularly popular girl during P.E. I screamed that I wished she would die of diabetes -- a debilitating ailment which, in fact, she had.

Basically, nobody spoke to me for the rest of the year. I had to write her a letter of apology, a punishment that clearly I deserved. I was shunned by everyone. When, months later, they announced my birthday over the loudspeaker one morning and someone said "Happy Birthday" to me in the hallway out of pity, I was so happy that I cried.

My escape was my Walkman. I was a TA for a French class, and the teacher sent me every day to the high school just up the street to run errands. Up there, nobody knew who I was. The giants at the high school called me "Spike," which I though was cool -- what 12-year-old wouldn't? But the best was the long walk between schools, listening to those huge guitar hooks over and over again, hooks that sounded like my own frustration given voice.

Walking down Rudaki this morning listening to The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended To like Me Is Gone, and I am still undecided. Sometimes, though I feel like my musical taste has grown more sophisticated over the years, I still just yearn for that big, angry hook. I'm not done with this album -- I haven't listened to it in its entirety -- but I'm not finding that thing that draws me in. I thought I had, for a moment, when the piano came in stereo raindrops at the beginning of "Wake Up," but then the piano continued in the background of songs following that one, and pretty soon it just started to sound like someone in a studio fucking around with a piano either to cover up the dead space in a song or just because they thought it needed "atmosphere," and my disbelief was not suspended. I kept wanting to switch over to the White Rabbits' Fort Nightly, which has at least some of the punch one needs on a certain type of morning.