1982 (39 page)

Paula Silverman was a very cute brunette girl who could type very quickly. That was impressive. She was one of the stars of typewriting class in Grade 9. But what was even more impressive to me was that she wore very short shorts to school each day. Sometimes she wore those flannel types of shorts that would bunch up and become even shorter short shorts. Paula Silverman was small and had nice tanned legs. Only one floor away but worlds apart from Room 213 and the New Wave crowd and Wendy, there was Paula Silverman in typewriting class. I was always very attracted to Paula Silverman. She was also a year older than me. She was somewhere between Bailey Quarters and Jennifer Marlowe.

You might want to know what exactly Paula looked like. You might be curious as to how I defined “very cute” in Grade 9. But I don’t really have any pictures of Paula handy. And that’s because we didn’t take photos in 1982. Well actually, what I mean to say is, we didn’t take photos of everything in 1982. And that includes Paula and me. Now everyone takes photos of everything. You’ve noticed this, right? Maybe you haven’t because it’s just become so ordinary. Now we all shoot photos of everything because virtually every gadget we own takes photos we can collect or delete or augment or send. So now everyone has become a photographer and everyone is eager to show photos on Facebook. Now people miss experiencing an event because they’re busy taking photos of
experiencing an event. Now people will take photos of entirely inane and uninteresting things because it costs nothing to do so. But that was not the case in 1982. We barely had photographs in 1982. Photos were an occasion and a situation and an aberration. We were too busy doing stuff to take photos. And even if we weren’t too busy, photos usually required too much money and patience.

The 1980s may not have been that long ago, but photographic documentation was a century apart from now. If you wanted to take photos in Grade 9, you would have to start by owning a good camera. Not a camera that was part of your mobile device (we didn’t have those either) but a separate camera camera. For this camera, you would have to buy film. The film might come in rolls of twelve or twenty-four shots, and it was expensive. Then, upon loading the film, you would have to make each photo count, given the expense and the limited number of exposures on your roll. After shooting the roll, you would take the film to a processing shop and pay more money and then wait a couple of weeks to see the photos. You would say things to the guy in the processing shop like, “Will these photos be ready by Wednesday?” And then the guy would say, “No … they won’t be ready for two weeks.”

This is not a joke. Two weeks. Sometimes more. People would have aged by the time their photos were printed from their latest roll of film. That’s how long it took. Men would grow beards in the time it took to develop film and get a set of prints. Then, inevitably, when you finally got the pictures, nine of the twelve photographs you received would be dodgy or blurry or ugly or unusable. So as you can see, it just wasn’t an economically sage adventure for a kid in Grade 9 to be
running around taking photos. Who had the time and money for that whole process? That’s why I can’t show you any shots of Paula Silverman.

But I can tell you that Paula was pretty and she wore makeup and she wore very short shorts. She also chewed gum all the time. Paula chewed gum the way those girls who speak while they’re chewing gum chewed gum. It was a little annoying. But on the other hand, if you ever needed gum, Paula Silverman could supply you. And she was tanned. She was another white girl who always had a tan. Sometimes, she would tan so much she was dark brown. If my mother had been Paula Silverman’s mother, she would have told her to stop tanning because she might become “black.” But Paula wasn’t Iranian, so it was okay to be “black.” And she looked good with her tan.

Paula Silverman helped me learn the ropes when it came to some mutual sexual exploration in Grade 9. By “learn the ropes,” I mean she allowed me to grope her. And she groped back. I don’t know how it began, but about halfway through the school year Paula and I began meeting in a downstairs back lobby under the stairway at Thornlea. Our meetings would take place each day after school. The back stairway was where the rockers and stoners would generally hang out, and there was a giant rock outside the door so it was called the Rock. Paula and I would meet at the Rock at the end of school each day and make out under the stairs. We wouldn’t really say that much to each other. And we weren’t really close friends outside of our daily meeting. But we were both committed to our rendezvous at the Rock. And we didn’t just make out. Paula would unzip my pants and fondle me while I made my way
into her short shorts with my hands. With Paula Silverman, I learned what touching the inside of a girl feels like. This was a tremendous thrill. It went nowhere more than that. But it was genuine excitement.

But it wasn’t enough for Paula. After a few weeks of our daily meetings, she wondered why we weren’t having a relationship. It was a fair question, and she was a nice girl and she deserved an answer. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I couldn’t really tell her I was unavailable because I was interested in an older New Wave girl who looked like Bowie and rarely talked to me. That might seem odd. So I didn’t really give Paula an answer. When Paula asked me if I would consider having sexual intercourse, I said no. I just wasn’t ready for it. In retrospect, I was probably much too scared of the possibility. After a few weeks, devoid of a relationship or intercourse, my dalliances with Paula came to an end. But not before some education was found underneath a stairway at the Rock.

BY THE LATE SPRING
of 1982, I had a new ambition to go with asking Wendy out and becoming New Wave. There was a film I needed to see. This film represented the intersection of two of my greatest interests in Grade 9: sex and Bowie. It was called
Cat People
, and it was definitely considered cool.

I first truly learned about the movie with the release of the
Cat People
soundtrack featuring Bowie’s song “Cat People,” written with producer Giorgio Moroder. It starts with a foreboding slow beat and then breaks into one of Bowie’s most powerful and intense baritone vocal performances ever. When he starts with the haunting first line, it’s as though his voice
is going to burst out of the bottom of your speakers. It was a single that got some play on alternative radio.

I had also learned by the spring of 1982 that
Cat People
was an erotic thriller about a young woman’s sexual awakening turning into horror when she discovers that her urges turn her into a monstrous black leopard. Nastassja Kinski played the role of the erotic leopard girl. She was a fine young actress, and she was regarded as one of the most beautiful people in the world. She’d started acting in her teens and had a relationship with the filmmaker Roman Polanski when she was just fifteen and he was forty-three. She was considered very sexy and was a big screen star. She was especially considered very sexy because the previous year she had appeared naked in a famous Richard Avedon photograph with a giant Burmese python. Kinski and the python were lying together. I’m not sure why lying down with a python was considered so sexy, but it was. First she was seen with a snake, and now she was a cat in
Cat People
.

I wanted desperately to see
Cat People
, to feel older and hear the Bowie music and see a naked Nastassja Kinski. When the movie was first released in April, there was much fanfare about all the sexuality and therefore little chance that any fourteen-year-olds would be able to get in. The film had a Restricted rating in Canada, which meant it was only for people over the age of eighteen. But after it had been out for a while, I convinced Murray to join me in a cunning plan. We would buy tickets to see another film at a multiplex playing
Cat People
and then sneak in to watch it. I became quite obsessed with the idea of seeing
Cat People
.

It was a nervous afternoon when Murray and I hit the Imperial Six on Yonge Street. Murray played it cool. The
Imperial Six was a famous movie theatre that featured six big screens. It was located across from the new Eaton Centre mega-mall. It turned out I had overestimated the dangers of our covert sex-film expedition. When we strategically bought our tickets for another movie, I fully expected the guy at the counter to say, “You boys aren’t planning to sneak into
Cat People
, are you?” No such words were exchanged. The older guy at the counter barely even looked up at us. We dashed into the theatre playing
Cat People
at the appointed time, and I waited to achieve a new sexual awakening. We were in the clear. The theatre darkened. The movie began.

In the end, somewhat disappointingly, the movie wasn’t all about sex. It followed an intense plot line that was decidedly less interesting to me than seeing Nastassja Kinski naked. I don’t really remember loving
Cat People
. Maybe I didn’t fully understand it. But either way, I spent weeks afterwards telling everyone I had seen it. It gave me credibility. And the fact that Murray and I had snuck in was badass. Maybe the best part of the film was when the theme song kicked in. That part included Bowie. There were still some things that were more important than carnal desires.

FOR ALL MY NAÏVETÉ
about sex and girls, when I started Grade 10 in the fall of 1982, things were different. I was older and more experienced. Okay, maybe it had only been three weeks since the Police Picnic, but each new school year was like a restart, and I had become more self-assured. I had a new black briefcase to replace my long-gone Adidas bag. The briefcase was unquestionably more New Wave. I had also acquired updated
pointy black shoes, and I was starting my new band, Tall New Buildings, which featured a drum machine. The drum machine telegraphed that we were a New Wave band and we were cool.

In the fall of 1982, I also started hanging around with a girl at school named Janelle. She was super-smart and did well in classes like science and math. She was also very sweet and played on the Thornlea volleyball team. She and I were both on student council, where I had joined as the head of social events. Janelle was half Asian and very pretty and very grounded. She was a couple of years older than me and was not really very New Wave. But she had a cute haircut like one of the Go-Go’s. She wasn’t really preppy. That was the important thing.

I was still hanging around Room 213, but I didn’t see much of Wendy in the fall. Paula Silverman had been sexy but wanted to move far too quickly for me. Janelle was more patient with all my quirky needs. And she was really interested in my music. I made a mix tape for Janelle so she could become acquainted with more of the cool New Wave stuff I was into. The second side of the tape was all Bowie songs, with little descriptions I’d written for her inside the cassette jacket. Janelle told me she had started playing it on repeat.

12

“LET’S DANCE” – DAVID BOWIE

I
t’s predictable, I suppose. It may not come as a big surprise to you that the most dramatic event in my life in the closing days of 1982 occurred with a Bowie song as the soundtrack. It somehow makes sense for that to happen, right? You might think I’m making this up. I’m not. It did.

I wish I could tell you something else. I wish I could inject more musical variety into this tale of a formative year. I wish I could answer those of you who’ve been thinking, “Look, you wuss, it’s near the end of the book, where’s the Def Leppard already?” Or maybe some of you are wondering why I’ve not given enthusiastic early ’80s star Lionel Richie his due in these pages. In ’82, he had an impressive Pharaoh-like moulded Afro that made him look like a black John Oates. Why haven’t I talked about that? Or maybe I could’ve woven in some tales about Michael Jackson, too—he
was
the King of Pop. But that’s not how it happened. I didn’t gravitate towards Lionel Richie at all back in the day. Bowie provided the playlist for most of my young existence. And that was the case in the middle of
Grade 10. And that was the case following the most dramatic event of my life at the end of 1982.

“HOW ARE YOU GOING
to make sure everybody’s vote gets counted?”

The tone was very dismissive. One of the more conservative older members of the Thornlea Student Association (more commonly known as the TSA) was questioning the merits of my plan to have a big December school dance in the gymnasium that would involve some sort of countdown of the year’s best music. I’d suggested this list would be developed according to an official poll of the student body. It was the third TSA meeting of the fall, and I was making bold promises as the new social director. I was sitting next to Janelle, whose presence was giving me assurance. I had no idea how to execute my plan, but that didn’t affect my passion for it.

“I will personally ensure everyone at school gets a ballot and that we count the votes responsibly,” I said with confidence.

This was bravado. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in Grade 10 now but still one of the younger reps on the TSA, and my experiment was quite audacious. I saw Hussein roll his eyes at the proposal. Hussein had moved into Grade 13 and was even bigger and more intimidating than he’d been the previous year. You may wonder what Grade 13 is. There’s no such thing as Grade 13 now. It probably sounds funny. But I can explain. We had an added school year in Ontario in the 1980s. I’m not sure why. It came after Grade 12 and before post-secondary, and it was mandatory if you intended to go to university. It was some kind of extra lifeline for those who weren’t ready to leave high school, and some kind of torture for those who
were. Hussein was now in Grade 13, and in the TSA meetings he sat on top of a desk rather than in a chair. No one would tell him not to do that, because he was big and wearing his leather jacket. He probably considered my countdown dance a threat to the popularity of his Rock Nite. It didn’t help that I was also the guy who had initiated a new coffee house series with live music called SWé. The name SWé was an acronym for “some wonderful entertainment.” I thought of not telling you what it stood for, because it sounds so twee and makes me sound skinny and sensitive—which I was. But that’s what it stood for. In 1983, Debbie Ngo would make a cool poster for SWé at my request that was like the cover jacket of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” single but said “Let’s SWé” instead. That was one of the lyrics in the song, too, but spelled differently. Smart stuff. It would become my favourite poster throughout high school. But SWé was somehow perceived as competition for Rock Nite—albeit with acoustic guitars. And Hussein didn’t like that, either.