I still remember my first heartbreak. I was seventeen years old, and worked in the summer portaging canoes at a tubing place on the shores of the Delaware river. I had just gotten my license, and my parents would let me take the blood red Plymouth Reliant K to work since my father was off from teaching in the summer. I was stationed a few miles down the river with another guy; we would spend time waiting for customers to pull up on shore, then we would load and rack their tubes and canoes. The guy who ran the establishment, our boss, was a stern German who came over to America and ended up buying the tubing place. After work on the weekends we would go to one of the local guy's houses in Upper Black Eddy and listen to DJ Krush and smoke bowls and talk. I would drive home at 20mph.
I fell in love that summer. Her name was Jessie, and she was a punk rock girl from Jersey with a boyfriend who didn't treat her all that well. We worked together at the tubing place. She was short, with short hair, and the sweetest girl I had ever known. We liked a lot of the same emo, SKA and punk bands--MxPx, MU330, Less Than Jake--and I made her mixed-tapes as a token of my affection. She was also a Christian. I found a poem I wrote to her in my archives, dated August 1997, that at the time I felt captured the inebriating excitement of young love before the age of the internet.
August Night
The night is sticky
But shivers run my spine
Crickets sing alone
Yet create perfect harmony
An orchestra under the stars--
A perfect ending to an August night.
Moisture taken in
Heels knock together
Sweat mingles with dew
Mind moves the speed of a dragonfly's wings
Riveted
Relaying a lone scene not soon to be forgotten.
Sleep doesn't come that night
It's much too sticky for sleep.
The crisp air has not smacked me yet.
It was an innocent love, but it wasn't reciprocated. Although we spent the summer working together and occasionally getting together to hang out late night on playgrounds and looking at the stars in farmers' fields, and I knew she had feelings for me, she was loyal to her boyfriend and eventually decided it wasn't right for her to spend time with me in that way. It was my first real broken heart, and it took my breath away. I would drive late at night listening to Led Zeppelin's Achille's Last Stand and wondering how to get out from under the crushing feeling; on occasion I would ride my bike to her house across the river just to see if from the road I could see her in the window.
Because I wasn't a Christian in high school, I had no qualms about drinking, though it was never out of control or anything, and never really on my own. Every few months there would be a buzz about someone's parents going out of town and they were throwing a party. Everything spread through word of mouth, "Are you going to so-and-so's house tonight?" Everyone had house phones; I kept a little book in my wallet of phone numbers; the A-list friends you knew by heart. No cell phones, no GPS. You just found out about things and found your way to them by one way or another. We had the internet, I think, but nobody really spent much time on it. Parties were an analog affair. I was friends with everyone--the "jocks," the skaters, the goth kids, the theater kids. Our star cross-country runner was a thin red-headed Irish kid with alcoholism in his family. I remember at one party he was drinking from a handle of vodka, paused and turn his head to throw up, and then resumed the conversation and drinking as if he was just blowing his nose. He went on to win the state championship that year.
I worked in the summers--cleaning rich people's swimming pools, waiting tables, testing welds in a propane factory--in addition to my regular jobs, and picking up various jobs through a temp agency. Before I started working when I was 16 (in addition to having worked delivering newspapers every morning starting at age 12), we would spend summers at Fannie Chapman, the community pool--making crank calls on the payphone, drinking cans of A-treat and buying Swedish fish for a penny a piece, and exploring in the woods. Occasionally we would get swept up in a "walnut war" where we flung black walnut pods the size of golf balls at each other and would have to take cover behind trees. One time one of the Andriocchio twins got hit straight between the eyes with one and it almost knocked him out cold.
We also played something called "Town Tag" where we would walk into town after school and split up into two teams. You could go into stores and occasionally we would climb up the fire escapes onto the top of the buildings to elude the other team. Afterwards, we would spend a few dollars at Nuts Plus on candy and other things.
I typically walked or biked to school, and it was either a mile or so by way of the street, or I could cut through backyards and across the railroad tracks to shorten my "commute." Occasionally my friends would pick me up on the way. My best friend was a Christian who didn't drink or smoke, but was always looking for something to get into. One time after class we did a drive-by of the school in his blue Camry with a semi-automatic paintball gun and made a mess of things. We were laughing and driving away when we noticed in the rear-view the female janitor (who we had dubbed "Dances With Trash") was jumping in her truck and chasing after us and ended up having a high speed chase, though she never did catch us. I felt bad for Dances With Trash, even years later, as she was probably left to clean up our paintball graffiti. She didn’t deserve that.
In middle school, there would occasionally be fights in the parking lot behind the white paneled Methodist church adjacent to the school. To this day I have never thrown a punch in my entire life and wouldn't even know how to fight, but these were pretty big affairs which, like the parties we would go to, would just spread analog style by word of mouth. People would gather in a circle of bodies and the two parties would go at it with fists.
There was a abandoned railroad station near our house where I still remember meeting Big Ben Williams and some other guys to pore over the centerfolds in a pilfered Playboy from his dad. My parents never taught me about sex--you just kind of pieced together second-hand info from friends and classmates and did your best to figure it out as you went along.
We would follow those same SEPTA R5 lines on the weekends on foot, Stand By Me style, just to have something to do. We walked them as far as we could and told each other stories along the way. We had a rope swing, too, that was in a secret spot in the woods but that a lot of kids knew about, where we would spend time getting air and swimming in the creek. There was a four foot high concrete drainage tunnel that cut under the bypass we would use to cut down the walking time between friends' houses. You would scrape the spine of your back after a while. Late nights on the weekends we would go to Perkins and order bottomless mugs of coffee and smoke packs of Camel Lights at the table, inside. Seems unfathomable to do something like that today....something from another era.
And it was. It's a unique thing as a Gen Xer to straddle between two worlds--knowing what life was like before the ubiquitous use of technology usurped and co-opted and instant-sized everything. The nostalgia of being young was mingled with a time when you were just bored and creative and up for anything to fill time. Everything was in real-time. It wasn't innocent, but it wasn't completely debased either. Time wasn't logged; moments weren't saved, apart from in your mind or with a Kodak point-and-shoot.
It's hard to recapture the suffocation of heartbreak at that age, or the exhilaration of checking voicemails from your friends on the cassette tape after a week of vacation, or the anticipating of picking up your developed film from the photo kiosk where every-picture-counted, or hearing your favorite song on the radio and rushing to hit the stiff "Record" button on the tape deck, or getting a letter from a friend in the mail and taking it to a quiet place out back to read it. The last of the analog eras.
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