Middle school didn’t have the well-demarcated social divisions of high school, but the groups were beginning to splinter. One of the better defined social experiments was what we called the ‘heads’. Like most groups, they were easily distinguished by their fashion sense. They wore jeans, jean jackets, high top Chuck Taylor tennis shoes (black or white), and faded concert T-shirts, usually Rush, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin or some other hard rocker group. Their most distinguishing fashion characteristic was the wallet; an oversize leather wallet (usually decorated with the Harley Davidson emblem) protruding out of a back pocket, a chain running from a ring in one corner to an equally ornate tooled leather belt. In my day, these were the kids that acted out, got bad grades, and smoked in the bathroom. They were the Bad Element.
There were two fine examples of this counter-culture group that rode my bus in eighth grade: David and Sean. At one time, we had played together, riding bikes around the neighborhood, exploring the woods, playing at the elementary school playground. David and I had even been on the same little league baseball team. From about middle school on though, I didn’t have much to do with them. They were in their group, and I in mine.
By eighth grade, they were firmly entrenched in the ‘head’ culture. My knowledge of the drug scene was peripheral at best, but I have solid recollections of these two huddled together at the side of the bus, sniffing something out a what looked to be a baby food jar. I have no idea what it was, but they called it ‘rush’.
Some two years after high school, I got the news from my mother: David was dead. He had committed suicide by hanging himself with an extension from a tree in his front yard. It was a few years after that I learned that Sean was dead as well, killed in Washington D.C. during a drug deal gone bad.
Although this song isn’t directly tied to any specific moment, whenever I hear a Rush song, and this song in particular, I think of David and Sean. There’s a memory I distinctly recall: David had just finished sniffing whatever was in the baby food jar. He leaned back against the bus and I saw he wore a Rush concert T-shirt. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes closed, saying “Man, I’m spinning now!”
Salisbury State College had an unusually long winter term. We finished the fall semester the week before Christmas and the spring semester didn’t start until the second week of February. To fill the time, the college ran a four-week winter term. You could take up to two classes, each one five days a week for one-and-a-half hours each.
Winter term was called (by the students) Party term. Except for classes, the campus was pretty much closed down; the dorms, student center, and cafeteria and other buildings locked up tight. Those students who attended the winter term stayed off campus. Because it was such a small group of people, by the end of the first week, everybody had run into almost everybody else. Parties every night and drunken debauchery ensued.
Although he was only a year behind me in high school, Bruce and I didn’t have much to do with each other until college. When he arrived as a freshman (I was a sophomore), I ran into him at registration and showed him around. We ended up becoming pretty good friends (although it’s now been more than 20 years since I’ve seen or spoken to him).
Bruce already lived off base with two roommates who weren’t attending the Winter term, so I took one of the spots and a guy named whose name I can’t remember (a brother to one of the roommates) took the other. This guy was getting back into college after some time off. He’d been at Salisbury for a year or so, then transferred to the University of Miami, but ran into some “snow” trouble and returned north. He, like my first college roommate Chris, was also on on the lacrosse team. Although the season hadn’t started yet, most of the team was attending Winter term. They got together every morning to workout and on Saturday mornings had a scrimmage.
This guy used to pump himself up for the scrimmage by putting The Blues Brothers album on the stereo and blasting it before he left. His game started at 8:00 a.m. So every Saturday for 4 weeks, Bruce and I were unpleasantly jolted awake around 7:00 a.m. by Rubber Biscuit blaring - and I mean BLARING - through the house. We asked the guy more than once to stop waking us up, but he ignored us. He had a way of turning it around, making us into jerks because all he wanted to do was play the song a few times to get pumped for his game. By the end of the term, I hated this song. And him too.
The term ended, the regular spring semester started, and I moved back into the dorms. Bruce’s roommates returned to the house. The lacrosse guy had been unable to get into the dorms and ended up rooming with his brother and staying in the house with Bruce.
Bruce later told me that the first Saturday of the semester, this guy started up with his Rubber Biscuit ritual. Bruce got out of bed, walked over to the stereo, removed the record, snapped it in half, and went back to bed.
I enjoy the occasional ZZ Top song now, but back when they were really popular I didn’t much care for them.
On New Year’s even 1982, my friend Troy and I were at a New Year’s party in some guy’s basement (he was a friend of Troy’s; I didn’t know him). It was a small crowd, perhaps 20 or 25 people. The stereo was tuned to DC 101, which at the time was a hard rock station. Sharp Dressed Man was hot and - IMO - getting way too much air play. It came on the radio and I wandered over and began changing the station. You would have thought I’d just sprouted another head. The party didn’t some much grind as screech to a halt. Everyone turned to see the idiot who didn’t like ZZ Top. In an almost single voice, they shouted “Put it back!”
Yikes. I quickly complied and high-tailed it away from the stereo in search of safer stomping grounds.
I started college a semester late, having taken six months off for a trip to California, where I lived with my father in Sacramento. In January 1984, I returned to Maryland, and in February I started college at Salisbury State College (now Salisbury State University). I was in the dorms, and my roommate was a guy named Chris, also from Maryland. Chris was a goalie on the lacrosse team and, after being introduced to marijuana in college, had become a huge pot head.
The semester started promising enough, but as the days passed, Chris pretty much stopped going to classes altogether. Once lacrosse practice started in the spring, his days assumed a predictable routine: sleep until around three in the afternoon, quick trip to the chow hall to grab dinner as soon as it opened, then off to lacrosse practice until six or so. After that it was party time with his teammates, then back to the dorm around dawn and finally to sleep.
This cycle continued until about two or three weeks before the end of the semester, when Chris abruptly became cognizant of the fact that he hadn’t been to classes in months. Thereafter ensued a mad scramble, where he visited all his teachers in an effort to work out some way of not receiving a failing grade. He must have reached some agreement, because I one afternoon he came back to the room excited, convinced he’d found the solution and that he’d be able to implement it in the short amount of time remaining and “beat the system”.
Evidently his plan failed to come to fruition, for when I returned to school the following fall, I ran into his former girlfriend, who told me he’d failed out and was now working in a shoe store in a mall. And that was the last I heard of Chris.
Chris fancied himself a music connoisseur. He had a collection of (at the time) eclectic albums, and he wasn’t adverse to playing them at o-dark-thirty in the morning when he finally stumbled in from his all night carousing. On the one hand, Chris introduced me to some musical groups I might not have heard of. On the other, my appreciation for his pre-dawn music expanding efforts was minimal. Many was the time I jumped out of bed and pulled the plug on the stereo, much to his amusement. When stoned, he also had fascination with Crazy Glue, and would spend a considerable amount of time gluing things (shoes, books, keys, you name it…) to the walls and ceiling.
Crack the Sky was one of his favorite groups, and All American Boy one of his favorite songs.
Richard was one of the group of good friends I had in high school, along with Steve, Larry, and Porter. He was six-four, had red hair, and was slightly on the ’stout’ side. When he was a senior, his parents divorced. They both moved away, but rather than pull him out during his senior year, they rented a house for him and his sister (who was a few years older) to live in while he finished the rest of the year. The house was out of our high school jurisdiction, so they bought him a car, a white Buick Skylark. We each would pay him $5 a week in gas to drive us to school. Worked out for him, since it covered his gas and we were on the way anyway.
After high school, he moved out to New Mexico to live with his father. I saw him twice after that: after graduating high school, I lived in California for five months with my father. I drove back to Maryland in December 1983, swinging down through New Mexico to pick up Rich, who came back to visit his mom and sister.
I saw him once more after graduating college. I made the pilgrimage from Maryland to California yet again in 1988, this time accompanied by Porter. New Mexico was on the way (we took highway 10), so we got in touch with him and arranged a visit. He was living with a roommate, working in a restaurant after having dropped out of college. He was pretty heavy into the weed scene, even had a big grow closet in his bedroom. He’d lost a ton of weight too, mainly because he traveled everywhere by bike. He told me of plans to move to Colorado where he had some friends, but I never saw or spoke to him after that, so I don’t know if he followed through.
In high school Rich stood out, not only because he was six-four and had red hair, but because he was into the punk scene. He listened to WHFS, which was the punk station of the day, and wore a pair of black and white checkered Vans. Mild by today’s standards, but it was plenty enough to set him apart. This was one of his favorite songs.
