Young Turks: Annivyrsary 1981

ISSUE #138

She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired. “Spit,” she said, and we did. We pulled and split the wads of swollen gum until they turned into cufflinks, then fastened them to bands of paper we’d wrapped around our wrists.

I’d driven her down to my hometown because the smell of dorms was stagnant. There was no room for love to breathe. Every summer my town holds Steamboat Days, the traveling carnival of Burlington, Iowa. I knew she’d appreciate this orgy of the grotesque—I showed her the game I used to play for hours, a claw machine stuffed not with souvenirs but Zippo lighters emblazoned with pinups whose clothes would vanish when you spun them in the light. We passed the flying swing set where I once watched puke red with strawberry smoothie cascade down to the shoulder of a passerby. We admired the haunted house with mutual wonder, whose mural of painted hell had once filled my nightmares before coagulating into a love for The Funhouse and Iron Maiden that I now got to share with her.

At night, the carnival turned music festival—the only live shows the town ever saw. I’d wait all year for a lineup half-filled with butt rock like Seether and Buckcherry, the other half aging state-fair acts like Poison and Styx. These concerts aside, I thought live music existed only in the movies. Everything comes late to country towns, and experience falls into the yawning cellar of time. I felt stupid when I wizened up to the music I’d missed. Those feelings formed a cement of insecurity that could sometimes leave me dazed, disappearing into all that lost time when I should have been listening to the moment. I was worse when I was young; she caught the brunt of this bad behavior.

The outdoor stage was an old river port running parallel to the ribbon of the Mississippi. The grown ups would show up hours early to set up their lawn chairs as the crowd grew to fill a parking lot that usually sat empty. After the main act had finished their encore, a stage was wheeled out on the lot’s other end, right in front of that faded auditorium, getting ready for an after-hours cover band. The adults, still groggy from the shroud of nostalgia, would usually rip off their drinking wristbands as they shuffled bleary-eyed back to the car. Hers was the brilliant scheme to grab the discarded so we could drink our bourbon-spiked lemonade unnoticed.

Tonight, the band was Sixteen Candles. We left the bathroom and gunned for the beer tent, “Tainted Love” bouncing off the bluffs and into the hot night. At the stage, our laughter dispelled the humid air. We were awash in relief that we weren’t picking fights; it’d been weeks of spinning our petty squabbles from each of our pet issues. Instead, this was time folding in on itself. We started to dance without the weight of memory—to us, these songs were both old and new. They were songs from the debut of MTV, the year of the changing of the guard, glitz rock thrown against Minor Threat and synthpop taking the U.K. This year was music in a liminal space, stuck between analog and the burgeoning digital, when old stars were forced to buy a new keytar.

We danced like we were our parents then, to “Jessie’s Girl,” “Under Pressure,” and “Don’t Your Want Me,” one night of sweat in the Iowan summer as the river breeze kissed the backs of our necks. Follow that river for two hundred miles you might make it forty years back to the past, before our parents had met at all. They all saw Raiders in separate theaters while the hunger strike raged in Northern Ireland and crack was introduced to the United States. Every teenager then is at peak power now, and it doesn't look like they're going to let go.

We woke the next day and got in the car, coffee and aspirin for the stale trip home. As we whirred down a highway that wraps around a bluff, we gasped as we glimpsed that shimmering river—Mother Earth’s bluest vein—not because we'd never seen it before, but because this moment could topple nostalgia. The memory of the cake will never taste better than frosting that's still sitting on the plate—it can’t, because it no longer exists. It was as if the lights came back that day, sky returning from its stormy green. We cleaned the branches from our yard, smiled as we blew out the candles.