ONE SMALL DAY
Anyone who's known me for a decent amount of time knows I'm a giver. Time, energy, money, attention, advice... If it's at all possible, my beloved and my friends and even my pets will get everything I have to offer without hesitation. What's mine is yours. And it's given gladly.
But problems arise when the situation is reversed, and it's time for me to receive. I have a very very very hard time receiving. Complements for helping a friend, praise for winning a screenplay competition, even a thankful wave from a driver after I let them merge in traffic... all that makes me die a little inside.
The sad truth is, I don't like being thanked or acknowledged or celebrated in any way. It makes me uncomfortable. My wife Suzie hates it when I talk like this, but it's just the way I am: deep down, I don't feel like I deserve to be appreciated by anybody in any way.
The reason this is on my mind is because, once again, my birthday has arrived. Yes, I've survived another trip around the sun, and now I have to pay the piper.
For someone who can't receive, birthdays are the worst! The rheostat that controls my inability to absorb adulation cranks up to eleven when my birthday rolls around. It's such a small thing, just one day out of the year when you're supposed to allow everyone to treat you like royalty. Not me! I just want to curl up in the bathtub with my hands over my ears and my eyes squeezed shut until the day is over.
Every card, every present, every wish for a fun natal day... it kills me. To be fair, once the day gets going, and the birthday wishes start rolling in, I shake off my weirdness and appreciate the fact that anyone gives a flying handshake about me. Still, on the outside I may be smiling, but inside, I feel miserable. Like a friendship incubus who's tricked everyone he knows into thinking he's in any way worth their time and attention. I'd be deliriously happy if someone made birthdays illegal and I never had to think about mine again.
Yet, despite all that hand-wringing, despite all the carping about being acknowledged... there's a secret little part of me, one tiny little smidgen of selfishness, that wishes to God I'd been able to celebrate my birthday in college.
If only Mom and Dad had fired up their baby-making plans a couple of months earlier than they did! Due to the poor timing of their Biblical relations, my birthday fell juuuust outside the end of spring semester exams. That meant I was always at home well before my special day rolled around, instead of reveling in my friends' adulation on campus.
That sucked big-time, because having a birthday in my dorm meant all sorts of fun stuff. Depending on how creative your buddies were, they'd either decorate your door like a Macy's display window, or at the very least scribble dirty sentiments on your dry erase noteboard. Sometimes there were pizza parties. Sometimes there were impromptu get-togethers in the dorm basement. But if you were really lucky, a gaggle of dormmates would snatch you from your room, carry you kicking and screaming over to the Student Union, and gleefully toss you into the fountain. A birthday in Alexander meant fun (if slightly soggy) times.
See, all that I would have appreciated back then, because I hadn't yet hardened myself to receiving loving attention like that from people. In my early college days, I was still a wide-eyed waif who let everyone and everything in without any sort of vetting. My entire existence was about new experiences. So it will always be a huge regret that my natal day was never celebrated by my college friends.
You may ask: "Hey dummy, why didn't you just celebrate a week or two early?" Well, firstly, there's no need for insults. Secondly, to be honest, until I sat down to write this, that had never occurred to me! I mean, it's not like I don't do that in other ways. Suzie and I sometimes have Thanksgiving in July, just so we can enjoy one of our favorite holidays with only friends, thereby avoiding all the turgid family drama. So, yeah, I could have done something like that. Maybe even lied and told everyone my big day was in March. Damn my youthful honesty!
That revelatory idea of celebrating early, though, made me realize... I actually did do that once! Well, sort of. There was this one time where I did come very close to ringing in my birthday while college was in session. It wasn't a party, it wasn't planned, and it wasn't asked for.
But on that spring afternoon I was given a gift that set me on the path to being the person I am today.
My second birthday in 1968. The Curse Of The Bowl Haircut has begun.
When you're a freshman at college, most times your first roommate is picked for you by some faceless committee or, even worse, a soulless computer program. With that level of chance, you're not always guaranteed a good match. So I thank the Lords of Kobol that I got as lucky as I did. My first roommate, Iñigo, was a great guy. Hailing from the exotic metropolis of Madrid, he was going for a masters in tobacco science. Over the course of our one year living together, he introduced me to the joys of sangria, Yaz, and cold pizza. We're still friends to this day.
My friend Nancy also got lucky with her roommate, Charlotte. And since I spent almost all my time with Nancy that first year, by the transitive property, I got roommate-adjacent-lucky with Charlotte as well.
I'd gone through the twelve years of my el-hi education with pretty much the same group of kids. For the most part, we were an unremarkable bunch, all lower- or middle-class suburbanites. We didn't buck the accepted social norms. You'd never see neon-colored hair or Doc Martins in my high school. When it came to the girls I slobbered over in pained silence, they were all about monogrammed pastel sweaters, add-a-bead necklaces, and Jordache jeans. Not a rebellious one among them.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. She sneered at conformity. She sported the first "80s mullet" I'd ever seen in real life, complete with an extra-long blue ponytail. She clad herself in baggy flannel years before the grunge look became a thing. Spending hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup before going out was not something she was going to do. She was witheringly sarcastic, unwilling to suffer fools for even a nanosecond.
I'll freely admit it: I was gaga over Charlotte. She was the most amazing woman I'd ever met. Everything about her was new to me. Her style. Her attitude. Her way of expressing herself. Her "otherness" completely intoxicated me.
Now, I don't want to paint her as being some sort of unapproachable misanthrope or anything like that. Far from it. In fact, once she let you in, there was a warmth and a humor inside her that resonated with me in a way that even many of my male friends hadn't. And there must have been something about me that intrigued her as well. I guess she saw beyond the stringbean physique and bowl haircut and Ocean Pacific shirt, to the nascent weirdo inside me that was champing at the bit to emerge. Despite our differences, we shared enough common ground to make us equals.
After a while, Charlotte and I were doing our own hanging out as a duo. For most of our time as freshmen, we'd have at least one get-together a week. We broke bread at Sadlack's, the counter-culture sandwich shop across the street from the Bell Tower. We perused the bins at Schoolkids Records. We skipped class to drive out to the Crabtree Mall in her Honda Accord. We wandered all over campus at weird hours, talking about life and the world and all that deep "first year college student" stuff.
And thankfully she shut down my clumsy moves. Even though I was painfully attracted to her, she was right in wanting to just hang out as buddies.
My ninth birthday, in 1975. That's me in the middle, holding the most awesome gift ever: the model kit of the Six Million Dollar Man tossing a gorilla!
Eventually, that first glorious year of college was coming to an end. The spring semester exams were barely a week away. In an attempt to clear out some of her belongings before it was time to vacate the dorms, Charlotte asked me if I'd help her take a carload of her non-essential stuff back home. Would I? Didn't she read that first paragraph up there? I'm a giver! Of course I wanted to help!
That Saturday we set out bright and early to make the trip from Raleigh to her home, both of us crammed into the Honda with all her boxes and clothes. It was a pretty easy drive, despite the major arteries not connecting back then. As we transitioned between highways and state roads, we filled the three-hour trip with chit-chat, music, and laughter.
At some point during our various conversations, I think we got onto the subject of birthdays. Not yet a natal-celebration-phobe, I guess I blabbed about my upcoming birthday, and how it fell after exams were over. Sadly, there would be no party for me in either of our dorms.
That must have struck a chord with her, because when we had finished unloading her car, she announced that we were not returning to Raleigh just yet. First, she bought me lunch. Afterwards, we went to her local music store, where she proceeded to buy me a cassette single that I had my eye on. (Go ahead and laugh: it was "The Never Ending Story" by Limahl and Georgio Moroder, if you must know.)
And then she hit me with a stunner: she was taking me to her favorite salon, and I was getting a new haircut.
My hair had been a soupbowl-shaped helmet since I was a little bitty kid. When I hit high school, I'd flirted with the idea of changing it, but there was no way Mom was going to let me experiment with my look, such as it was, so I never gave it any serious thought. Yet here I was, at the end of my first year of college, with the coolest friend I'd ever had, being presented with the option of being stylish for the first time ever.
Feeling my oats, I pulled on my big boy pants and happily hopped into the hairstylist's chair. Forty-five minutes later, I walked out of the salon a new man, flaunting an awesome new 'do. It was glorious, moussed to the heavens and flared in the back. I wasn't a nerdy 70s loser anymore. I was a totally rad 80s he-man.
And my mom absolutely hated it. That haircut was the beginning of my "passive resistance" teenage rebellion against my parents. Making my own decisions about what I wanted for me was something she wasn't prepared for. Who knows how long it would have been before I'd scuttled out from under Mom's mother hen wings, had Charlotte not popped for one simple haircut?
My beautiful Charlotte-gifted 80s coiffure. The Curse Of The Bowl was finally broken. Let the adulthood begin!
Charlotte may have gifted me with an entirely new attitude that day, but in reality, she'd been showering me with gifts since we first met. The gift of acceptance. The gift of laughter. And the best gift of all: the gift of music.
We may have been equals of a sort, but if there was any one aspect in which Charlotte completely eclipsed me, it was music. Every time I dropped by to say hi, the sounds of some new band I'd never heard of, like Echo And The Bunnymen or Throbbing Gristle, were flowing from her corner of the suite. She had the first CD player I'd ever seen in the flesh, a $600 Sharp model that loaded from the front, like a cassette player. In concert with this marvel of musical technology, she had connected a turntable and a boombox with multiple audio inputs. In an era of cheap all-in-one hi-fi setups, her equipment was top of the line. And she used them to good effect all the time.
In that first embryonic year of college, Charlotte turned me on to some great bands and some great music. So, because I'm a giver, I'm using my precious birthday time to give you, the reader, a present. Here in no particular order are the songs and albums Charlotte shared with me that rocked my freshman world.
| THE CRAMPS - "TV Set" | |
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My mom had a wonderful sense of humor. As a kid, I grew up on a steady diet of Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett, and bad punnery. But when I discovered Monty Python and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy in high school, I realized that my humor temperament was destined to grow far beyond the wholesome laughs I had shared with Mom as a kid. Things were going to get edgy. Risque. Twisted.
So imagine my delight when Charlotte introduced me to the darkly humorous psychobilly stylings of The Cramps, via their classic compilation album, Bad Music For Bad People. I mean, the very first song she played for me (with delight in her eyes, I might add), was "TV Set", a cheery little ditty about a guy who's dismembered his lover and stashed her parts all over his house. From there it just gets weirder... and funnier. "Garbageman". "Human Fly". "Goo Goo Muck". Each song is its own little nugget of perverse rock deliciousness. This music is not for everyone, but it was definitely what I was ready for in my early college days. It's safe to say that the seeds from which my warped mindset sprouted were planted in the eager soil of my brain, thanks to this very album. |
BAD MUSIC FOR BAD PEOPLE
Release Date: 1984.02.20 Duration: 31:36 |
| FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD - "Relax (Long Version)" | |
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This one's sort of weird, in that Charlotte didn't bring the band or the song to my attention. "Relax" was Frankie's big hit in the US when I was a senior in high school. It was all over MTV, so I was intimately familiar with both the song and the band.
No, what Charlotte made me aware of was the existence of the 12 inch single. I had honestly never seen any vinyl extended version or remix in any of the record stores I'd been to! So I was dumbfounded when she pulled this sleeve out of her collection. Holy cow, they make "big singles"? How did I not know about this incredible form of music media? And sometimes they feature tunes that aren't on the album proper? Unbelievable! It wasn't long before I had amassed my own small collection of 12 inch singles. Charlotte exposed me to a completely new way of celebrating my music fanhood... as well as spending all my hard-earned money. |
RELAX [12 Inch Single]
Release Date: 1983.10 Duration: 15:54 |
| SCRITTI POLITTI - "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)" | |
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It's been my experience that the friends who are true game changers, the ones that take some aspect of your life or your very being to the next level, usually introduce you to at least one band or musician that you instantly fall in love with. Tom brought me Queen. Daria introduced me to Let's Active. Sammy got me hooked on Prince. Burt knocked me for a loop with R.E.M.. And Charlotte blew my mind with the synth pop genius of Scritti Politti.
She discovered them on an import promo compilation cassette. (It was packaged in a small replica of a British armed forces rations can!) On one of our mall field trips, she popped the tape into her Honda's stereo, and told me to listen. Boy, did I! "Wood Beez" was an unbelievable pop symphony of Green Gartside's silk-smooth vocals, Fred Maher's tumbling percussion, and David Gamson's keyboard virtuosity. I was instantly a fan. Later that summer, when Nancy and I were bumming around Peaches Records And Tapes, I spotted a lone cassette copy of Scritti's second album, Cupid & Psyche '85, sitting on the shelf right in front of us. Before she could react, I snatched it up and ran to the register. That tape spent the next year as an almost permanent resident of my crappy boombox. And four decades later, it's still one of my favorite college-era albums. |
CUPID & PSYCHE '85
Release Date: 1985.06.10 Duration: 44:14 |
| THE ALARM - "68 Guns" | |
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My family wasn't very political. We never talked current events or politics when I was a kid. To this day, I have no idea if my parents even voted! So I entered the big world of college with zero political views or knowledge.
My naivete didn't last long, though. Charlotte had me listen to Declaration, the debut album from Welsh band The Alarm, and within minutes, I was schooled. The album starts with vocalist Mike Peters belting out the lines "Take this song of freedom, put it on and arm yourself for the fight", and it ends with him declaring "Love on this wasteland holds no dominion, I refuse to lay me down". Everything in between is just as powerful, every lyric charged with social scorn and anti-war sentiment. One of the bad side effects of my parents keeping their heads in the sand, is that I missed out on the political pop culture of the 60s and 70s. Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan... I hadn't heard one note of anything they ever recorded. So this whole idea of putting your anger and your hope into rock and roll as The Alarm had done was, to me, completely intoxicating. Listening to Declaration made me feel like I was "aware" for the first time. It produced a visceral reaction in both my gut and heart that is the foundation for the political stance I take now as an adult. Songs like "68 Guns" and "Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke?" still make me want to grab a flag and take to the streets, to try to change the world for the better. |
DECLARATION
Release Date: 1984.02 Duration: 46:05 |
| ULTRAVOX - "One Small Day" | |
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Have you ever had that moment when you hear just the first chord of a song... and you feel your brain rewiring itself?
That's exactly what happened when Charlotte dropped Ultravox's album Lament onto her turntable, and started up the second track. The most triumphant guitar sound I'd ever heard leapt from the speakers and grabbed me by the throat. For the next four and a half minutes, I was transported. Midge Ure's powerful vocals took me someplace sad, but happy. Lost, but found. Despondent, but hopeful. Ultravox's energetic love letter to standing tall in the face of adversity bowled me right over. In the years since, this song has become a sort of personal anthem, a rallying cry that gets me through the tough times. Whenever things get unmanageable, whenever I feel like I'm never going to make it, whenever I think it's pretty much all over... I'll slap on headphones and listen to "One Small Day", several times in a row. It never fails to put the wind back in my sails. And it never fails to put a smile on my face, either, because of where and who it came from. Of all the music that Charlotte brought into my world, this song was the greatest gift of all. |
LAMENT [US Release]
Release Date: 1984.04.06 Duration: 37:30 |
Reading back over my time spent with my distaff buddy, it's obvious I experienced a lot of happiness thanks to her generosity. At one point in my life, being celebrated wasn't a bad thing. It was actually the complete opposite!
So that begs the question: why do I hate being appreciated so much now?
Honestly, I have no idea. This isn't something that happened to me as a child, however. No, this pathological hatred of being praised developed as I got older. Somewhere deep in my psyche, I have created this ephemeral, unreachable definition of "worthiness" that I know I will never reach. I could win an Oscar, cure cancer, and be the first person to walk the surface of Mars, but I would blanch at any and all attempts to congratulate me for my accomplishments to my face.
Of course, the first thing you'd think is: if you don't want any acknowledgment, why are you putting these stories down for others to read? Why are you trying to make movies, for Pete's sake?
Good points! Look, I just want to be creative. I want to string words together in an entertaining way, and hopefully make a living doing it. I'm not looking for red carpets, or paparazzi, or Comic Con panels, or anything like that. In fact, over the four years I've been spinning these yarns, the entire extent of my Q-rating has been the sole letter I received from a reader. (It was from my ex-wife, Pizza Girl. And she was, to put it lightly, not a fan.) All the trappings of celebrity, if I ever make it that far, I will do my best to avoid.
If I can pull that off, then the only uncomfortable thing hanging over my head will be my frigging birthday, that one small day that Suzie loves to celebrate every year. She refuses to let me ignore it! She is adamant in her belief that I'm worth celebrating. And all the while, I'm counting the seconds until the day is over. Yes, it's a stupid way of looking at the situation. It's almost a sickness, really.
But I'm always hopeful that I'll find a cure. Maybe on my next birthday...
Suzie threw me a surprise Spider-Man themed birthday party in 2002. Okay, so maybe birthdays aren't so bad after all...