1988, for the rest of my life

An old friend from high school recently posted this picture on his Facebook page:

That's me, up in the top right hand corner, with the big, bleached, swoopy hair. The photo is from 1988, and I was 16 years old. It's a yearbook shot for a Brockton High School student group we were all in called Next Move. The caption under the photo read:

Next Move is a group that watches cartoons. We watch the Transformers, Loony Toons, and Inspector Gadget. Our all-time favorite yogurt flavor is Raspberry Rhubarb, which has nothing at all to do with the topic, but we felt that it was important enough to put in anyways.
As a subnote here, Next Move also helps free prisoners of conscience, participates in walks for peace and walks for hunger, and supports Amnesty International. We are truly, sincerely socially concerned. And we have nothing better to do in between Certs encounters. - Geoff Lagadec

There are so many things that are amazing about this photo, and it's hard to know where to start. I don't have very many photos of me from high school; not a lot of "proof" about the old days I go on and on about as the bitter old man I am today. It's hard to explain to people what life was like if you were "alternative" before Nirvana, before MTV, before the Internet. When it was dangerous to be gay, to have pink hair, to have a nose ring. You can watch Pretty In Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Breakfast Club over and over and over and you still won't really get it. No one beats Ducky up in the movies.

Part of what's special about this picture is that it includes almost everyone from the Brockton High punk scene in the late '80's. And like a John Hughes movie, it feels like we all represented some little faction of the scene. Second from the left in the top row is Chris, who I recently reconnected with here on Facebook, who was a sharply dressed, Brit Pop, Inspiral Carpets kind of guy. I recently told him that every time I see a pair of penny loafers, I think of him. Second from the right, next to me, was Bob, who was on the Goth side of things, liked Bauhaus and a local band called Holy Cow, and eventually got the job of all jobs working at Allston Beat in the Garage in Harvard Square. In the middle on the left was Alexandra, who was focused on art, politics, and Einstuerzende Neubauten. Next to her was Mo, who was more into hardcore punk, was the first person to dye my hair, and the first person to move to Boston. To the right of Mo is Geoff, who wrote the caption, and whose world view was something short of anarchy, which couldn't have been more cliché for any of us at the time, and more like intellectually absurdist. He leaned toward Bauhaus and Joy Division as well, and had an amazing painting he'd done of Bela Lugosi carrying off a body on the back of the trench coat he wore. We ALL had trench coats or leather motorcycle jackets with some kind of painting on the back. Next to Geoff is Leah and Jason. They were dating then, and they're married now, 20 years later. Jason is the one who posted this picture, and it was from Leah's yearbook. They didn't always have the same haircut, but they might as well have. They were a duo, and lucky to have found each other so soon in life. At the bottom left was another Chris. Chris lived on my bus route, and may have been the one who started it all for me when he approached me on the way to school one day, handed me a dubbed cassette of The Cure's EP, The Walk, and said "check this out. I think you'll like it." Missing from the picture is Shawn, who was the first flaming, openly gay person I had ever met. He had a gigantic Kid And Play-style flat top, carried lunch pails, and wore leopard print creepers. He was an icon.

I was the youngest of the crew, and spanned the end of one generation and the start of another. The era before me was more Anglophile, more post-punk new wave and first generation Goth (as the photo clearly shows), and the era after me was more hardcore punk, straight edge, youth crew, and skateboarding. I was brought up in the first, and ended up the elder statesman of the next. Every one of those people was a mentor to me in some way. Philosophically. Stylistically. Musically.

These are all my generalizations, of course, and caricatures of who these people really were. Which is ironic, because the thing we railed against most was being generalized about or caricatured by the people around us. At the time, we absolutely didn't think we were "punk," and complained loudly when people used that term. We were not punks, or Punks. That was the generation before us; nihilistic, hopeless, determined to tear things down in response to Reagan and Thatcher and the pointlessness of it all. There was some of that in this era, too, but we had the sense that we were trying to do something new, something different, and not contained by the trappings of the wave that came before. There was idealism in this era, even while there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and ridiculousness to it, captured perfectly in Geoff's description of the group. On principle, it shouldn't matter one bit how we looked, and we did not want to be judged by our appearance. That was all the more reason to have an appearance that filtered people out, a sort of pre-selection for those who might be capable of really knowing you for who you were underneath your hair.

It's in this period that the seeking which I think has defined my life really began. It's in this period where I rejected everything and began to reconstruct my life, my person, my belief system. I have spent my entire life asking why, needing explanations and justifications before I accepted anything. And because nothing mattered, because of the nihilism before us, because we were working class and really had nothing but working class-ness to look forward to, everything mattered. If you wanted your life to have meaning, it was up to you to give it that meaning. If you wanted to escape the despair of the generation before, but avoid going down the mainstream path of mediocrity, you had to deconstruct and reconstruct who you were, what you wanted, and what you believed in.