Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (24 page)

No doubt you’ve read about how the Hot New Trend among “with-it” 20-something people is to eschew the rock scene and pretend that they’re swank sophisticates living three or four decades ago—drinking martinis, going to nightclubs, dressing like the late Frank Sinatra (not the women, of course; they’re dressing like the late Dean Martin), voting for Dwight Eisenhower, using words like “eschew,” etc. This makes me wonder: If old things are cool, could
I
become cool again?

I have not felt remotely cool for a long time, thanks largely to the relentless efforts of my teenage son, whose goal in life is to make me feel 3,500 years old. We’ll be in the car, and he’ll say, “You wanna hear my new CD?” And I, flattered that he thinks his old man might like the same music he does, will say “Sure!” So he increases the sound-system volume setting from “4” to “Meteor Impact,” and he puts in a CD by a band with a name like “Pustule,” and the next thing I know gigantic nuclear bass notes have blown out the car windows and activated both the driver- and passenger-side air bags, and I’m writhing on the floor, screaming for mercy with jets of blood spurting three feet from my
ears. My son then ejects the CD, smiling contentedly, knowing he has purchased a winner. On those extremely rare occasions when I
like
one of his CDs, I imagine he destroys it with a blowtorch.

My point is that, for some time, I have viewed myself as being roughly equal, on the Coolness Scale, to Bob Dole. And then, suddenly, at this party, these 20-somethings were playing Bobby Darin, a singer from my youth, an era known as “The Era When There Were a Lot of Singers Named Bobby and One Named Freddy” (Bobby Sherman, Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell, Elvis “Bobby” Presley, and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon).

I KNOW Bobby Darin’s music. Whenever I hear his swinging version of “(Oh My Darlin’) Clementine” I snap my fingers in a happening “jive” manner and sing right along with these immortal lyrics:

(They don’t write them like that anymore. They can’t: They have been medicated.)

I vividly remember when Bobby Darin had a hit record with “Mack the Knife,” which is sometimes referred to as “The Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of 1959,” because it was nearly three minutes long and had weird incomprehensible lyrics involving somebody named “Sukey Tawdry.” I remember going to a record hop—that’s right, an actual
record hop
—in the gymnasium of Harold C. Crittenden Junior High in Armonk, New York, where they played “Mack the Knife” maybe 14 times and we all danced the Jitterbug.

The Jitterbug was a dance wherein you remained in actual, physical contact with your partner—what kids now call “touch-dancing.” I grew up at the tail end of the touch-dancing era; after that, we started doing non-touch dances—the Jerk, the Boogaloo, the Cosine, the Funky Downtown Rutabaga, etc., wherein you strayed several feet from your partner. Later in the ’60s, songs got longer and dance standards
got looser, and you often lost visual contact altogether with your partner, sometimes winding up, days later, in completely different states. This was followed by the disco era, during which you and your partner might touch briefly, but only for the purpose of exchanging narcotics; which in turn was followed by the “mosh pit” concept of dancing, wherein you dance simultaneously with many people, the object being to inflict head injuries on them.

So for decades, the only time you saw touch-dancing was at wedding receptions, when the band—as required by federal wedding-reception law—played “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and guests age 73 and older would hobble onto the floor and do the Fox Trot while younger people gyrated randomly around them.

But now touch-dancing is back, and I’m excited about it, because—ask anybody who has seen me at a wedding reception after the bar opens—I can still do the Jitterbug. I can get out there on the floor and really whirl my partner around. Granted, sometimes my partner winds up face-down in the wedding cake, but that is not the point. The point is that, despite what my son thinks,
maybe I am cool again
. I’m thinking about putting a tube and a half of Brylcreem in my hair and going to a swank nightclub. I’d saunter up to the bar, order a dry martini, and settle back to soak up the scene; then, when a really “swinging” song came on, I’d get to my feet and “wow” the younger generation when I, in a suave and sophisticated manner, threw up on my shoes, because martinis make me sick.

Then I’d go to bed, because I’m 3,500 years old.

V
acation season is approaching, so today I want to issue a Travel Warning to help you avoid a menace that could completely ruin your vacation: bosoms.

This menace was brought to my attention by a recent letter to my newspaper,
The Miami Herald
(motto: “Keep Looking! It’s Somewhere in Your Yard!”). This letter was written by the Reverend Keith A. Marvel of Wilmington, Delaware. He states:

After describing his group’s unsuccessful efforts to protest the $25 parking fine, the Reverend Marvel states: “I hope that the city of
Miami Beach would do something about this ordinance and topless sunbathing. If not, maybe you should warn tourists before they spend their hard-earned money on a trip to Miami.”

First, by way of sincere apology, let me state, on behalf of all of the citizens of Miami and Miami Beach, who have unanimously elected me to speak for them, that the letters in “Keith A. Marvel” can be rearranged to spell “Hark! Evil Meat!”

Let me also state that the Reverend Marvel is correct: There are topless women sunbathers in Miami, although I think it’s a stretch to say they’re “nearly everywhere.” I’ve lived in Miami for 13 years, and if it were infested with topless women, I definitely would have noticed. Also it would be mentioned on the TV news.

It’s not as bad as that. But we do get our topless sunbathers. Most of them are tourists from Europe, which is known for being immoral. Europeans openly smoke cigarettes; they think nothing of toplessness. You cannot turn around in Europe without seeing a marble statue of a topless ancient Greek or Roman goddess the size of a Budweiser Clydesdale, expressing the ancient artistic concept: “I cannot find a marble brassiere in my size.”

So European women often sunbathe topless. European men are also quite exposed. Apparently there was some huge mixup over in Europe, whereby all the eye patches were mislabeled as men’s bathing suits, the result being that European men at the beach often have nothing covering their Euros but a piece of fabric the size of a Cheez-It. Meanwhile, Europeans who injure their eyes are stumbling around with swimming trunks over their heads.

On my fact-finding trips to Miami-area beaches, I’ve noticed that
the Europeans don’t seem to notice that they’re almost naked. But the Americans definitely do. American women are cool about it; they have developed the ability to look at things, such as a man’s Euro region, via a Stealth Glance technique, so that you never actually catch them doing it. (They use a similar technique for scratching.) American men, on the other hand, are as subtle as a dog with its nose in another dog’s butt. When an American man catches sight of a bosom, his head snaps toward it, his eyeballs lock onto it like missile radar, and a loud alarm goes off in his brain, similar to the one in submarine movies that goes “DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!”—except it goes “BOSOM! BOSOM! BOSOM!” As long as the man is within range of the bosom (12 miles) his head will remain pointed toward it and he will be unable to think about anything else; this is the primary cause of freighters running aground.

The point is that if a man, for example the Reverend Marvel, is on the same beach as a bosom, he is physiologically incapable of simply ignoring it. He has to look! And then of course he has to flee. This is why I am issuing the following warning to travelers: IF YOU COME TO THE MIAMI AREA, AND YOU GO TO THE BEACH, THERE IS A CHANCE YOU WILL SEE TOPLESS SUNBATHERS. The Miami tourist bureau requests that you tell everybody you know about this warning and spread it on the Internet. The Orlando tourist bureau has also asked me to warn you that they have a bosom problem there, but the Miami bureau claims that most of the Orlando ones are artificial.

Let me conclude by thanking the Reverend Marvel for alerting the world to this danger. As a token of our appreciation, we will have the people who booted his car executed without trial. And we will make every effort to rid our community of decadent, hedonistic, and degenerate activities. We’ll start with golf.

W
hen I heard that Richard Berry, the man who wrote “Louie Louie,” had died, I said …

Well, I can’t tell you, in a family newspaper, what I said. But it was not a happy remark. It was the remark of a person who realizes he’ll never get to thank somebody for something.

I remember the day I first heard “Louie Louie.” I was outside my house, playing basketball with my friends on a “court” that featured a backboard nailed to a tree next to a geologically challenging surface of dirt and random rocks, which meant that whenever anybody dribbled the ball, it would ricochet off into the woods and down the hill, which meant that our games mostly consisted of arguing about who would go get it.

So we spent a lot of our basketball time listening to a transistor radio perched on a tree stump, tuned to WABC in New York City. (I mean the radio was tuned to WABC; the stump was tuned to WOR.) And one miraculous day in 1963, out of the crappy little transistor speaker came …

Well, you know what it sounds like: This guy just
wailing
away, totally unintelligibly, with this band just
whomping
away behind him in the now-legendary “Louie” rhythm, whomp-whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp-whomp …

And it was just SO cool. It was 500 million times cooler than, for example, Bobby Rydell. It was so cool that I wanted to dance to it right
there on the rocky dirt court, although of course as a 15-year-old boy of that era I would have sawed off both my feet with a nail file before I would have danced in front of my friends.

I loved “Louie Louie” even before I found out that it had dirty words. Actually, it turned out that it
didn’t
have dirty words, but for years we—and when I say “we,” I am referring to the teenagers of that era, and J. Edgar Hoover—were all convinced that it did, which of course just made it cooler. We loved that song with no idea whatsoever what it was about.

But for me the coolest thing about “Louie Louie” was this: I could play it on the guitar. In fact, just about
anybody
could play it, including a reasonably trainable chicken. Three chords, nothing tricky. This is why, when I—like so many teenage boys of that era—became part of a band in a futile attempt to appeal to girls, “Louie Louie” was the first song we learned. We’d whomp away on our cheap, untunable guitars plugged into our Distort-O-Matic amplifiers, and our dogs would hide and our moms would leave the house on unnecessary errands, and we’d wail unintelligibly into our fast-food-drive-thru-intercom-quality public-address system, and when we were finally done playing and the last out-of-tune notes had leaked out of the room, we’d look at each other and say, “Hey! We sound like the Kingsmen!” And the beauty of that song is, we kind of
did
.

I continued playing in bands in college, and many other songs went into and out of our repertoire, but we always played “Louie Louie.” Over the years, musical and cultural critics have offered countless explanations for the song’s enduring appeal, but I would say, based on playing it hundreds of times in front of a wide range of audiences, that the key musical factor is this: Drunk people really like it. My band found that, if large beer-guzzling college-fraternity members became boisterous and decided they wanted to play our instruments, or hit us, or hit us with our instruments, all we had to do was play “Louie Louie,” and they would be inspired to go back to dancing and throwing up on their dates.

Sometimes people got a little TOO inspired. One night we were
playing in a frat house at the University of Pennsylvania, and during “Louie Louie,” an entire sofa—a
large
sofa—came through the front window, which was not open at the time. The crowd did not stop dancing, and we did not stop playing; we kept right on wailing and whomping. That’s the kind of indestructible song “Louie Louie” is. I’m confident that it’s one of the very few songs that would be able to survive a global thermonuclear war (another one is “Wild Thing”).

I’m not defending it as art. I’m not saying that, as a cultural achievement, it is on a par with the
Mona Lisa
, or
Hamlet
. On the other hand, when the
Mona Lisa
or
Hamlet
comes on my car radio, I do not crank the volume way up and wail unintelligibly at my windshield. I still do this for “Louie Louie.”

And for that, Richard Berry, wherever you are: Thanks.

S
o I was at this party, and I wound up at a table where three attractive single women were complaining about—Surprise!—men. Specifically, they were complaining about the pickup lines that had been used on them in a bar a few nights earlier.