Growing Up Punk (Part 1)

This was originally written and posted to MySpace in 2007 soon after I had connected with many friends from my high school days in Florida. I have now reconnected with another friend from that period of my life and I have decided to create this blog to share with her. If others see it and enjoy it then that is great as well.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

One of the things that myspace has done for me is that it has helped me reconnect with friends from the past. In some cases I had not talked with these people in nearly 20 years, and now I am able to find out what they have been up to for all these years. We are able to exchange pictures from the time in life that we shared together. These pictures can be pretty funny now, but they are still great to see and they bring back some great memories.

This however can cause some interesting queries from those other friends on MySpace that only know you in your current state. This is what this blog is all about. I have been asked many times in the last several months the following questions (or some variation of these) based on pictures my older friends have posted:

-          Where you really a punk?

-          What happened to that wild and fun looking guy?

-          Did you really have hair at one time (even if it was short)?

I will do my best to answer these questions and perhaps give some of you a little insight into my childhood. However as anyone who really knows me can attest I can be longwinded… especially when reminiscing.

When I was 7 my parents divorced and I moved with my mother, brother and sister to Nebraska, where I lived a very safe and sheltered life until I was 12. In the summer between my 7^th and 8^th grade years my brother and I moved to Florida to live with my father. He was remarried and we had three young half brothers. We lived in a sub-development on the west side of Tampa called Sugar Creek. Although it was not a very large neighborhood, it became my new universe.  I experienced many new things while living there. The biggest was racial diversity and the unfortunate bigotry that came along with it. 

The little town in Nebraska we had lived in was very white. There were some Native Americans on the nearby reservation, but we seldom actually saw them. So I had no real experience with people of other races. My mother and grandparents had always raised my brother and myself with the belief that the color of someone’s skin made no difference. I will never forget the first day I arrived at the school I was to spend my 8^th and 9^th grade years at. I was sent to the library with all the other new students to be inprocessed and to take some placement tests. I remember trying to talk to some kids who happened to have black skin. It was the first time in my life that I experienced racism…. and it was directed at me for being white.

The second thing I learned quickly was what I will call “materialism.” This might have been more related to my age than to where I was living, but I became painfully aware of it at this time. In Nebraska I had never worried about what I wore. I only cared about my clothes being comfortable and my mother worried about my clothes being clean. In Florida I came under scrutiny for everything I wore. My shoes were not name brand, so I was teased for wearing “hot boxes.” My jeans were probably from K-mart and often a bit too short (I was growing a lot at the time), so I was teased for wearing “high water blue-light specials.” My parents were not willing to help me remedy these fashion faux pas so I was left to deal with these issues in my own way. Finally, I tested well and got into some advanced classes and got good grades in the normal classes I was in. I never realized how unfashionable being a good student could be. I guess when you put all the pieces together I was the quintessential 80’s nerd…. And it sucked.

As I said, Sugarcreek was my universe, and that first summer I met many of the denizens that inhabited this universe. There was a girl named Lisa Lemke who rumor had it would play strip poker (and supposedly do other things as well). She was a very large girl, and I did not know much more about her than that. I was always kind of curious if the rumors were true but luckily I was too shy (or maybe afraid) to find out if they were. There was also a kid we called Tweeby. He was actually pretty cool and we became friends, but his older brother Donnie was a freak. Donnie was pretty small and had some kind of leg problem, so he walked funny. He was quite a bit older then us but always wanted to hang out with us anyways. Donnie always gave me the creeps, and he was kind of a bully on top of it all. Apparently Tweeby caught him doing “unnatural acts” to a vacuum cleaner. We all just did our best to avoid him. Then there was Nugy. I am not really sure what Nugy was. He was in my grade in JR high, but I think he might have been older. He was the number one bully in the neighborhood. No one wanted to fight him, not even kids much larger than him. I suspect it was because he did not feel remorse or pain. I would be surprised if he is still alive today.

The most important person I met that summer though was a kid named Paul Morris. Paul was the perfect example of a latch key kid. His mom never seemed to be home. He also had no siblings, so his house was the perfect parent-free, kid-brother-free environment. Paul and I were a bit slow to become friends, but when school started we had the same science class. I would help him with his homework and eventually we were hanging out all the time. We were both unimpressive white kids with very little cool factor, although Paul was cooler than me.

This was the time of parachute pants (if you have to ask you are too young), izod shirts, MTV, Michael Jackson style jackets and fat, colorful shoelaces. Rap music was the hippest thing, cool kids knew how to break dance and bands like El Debarge ruled the airwaves. Paul and I wanted to be hip, so we hung out with his neighbor Brandon.

Brandon was a year or two older than us. His father was Philippino and his mother was white. This is important because it made him look as if he could have been of African descent with a light complexion. He wore his hair long and it was curly, which he was constantly spraying with activator. His hair alone could have landed him a spot in a Rick James or Morris Day music video. He dressed well and he had a car. He always had some girl in his bedroom. He called Paul and I his homeboys and this probably increased his coolness factor with his other friends who did not have their own homeboys. Plus if you put him next to us it only made his coolness that much more obvious, so Brandon actually liked having us around. However, being someone’s homeboy did not really garner many coolness points for the homeboy himself. So women were not throwing themselves at Paul or my feet.

However, hanging out with Brandon did contribute me becoming a punk.

Wait! That’s what this whole blog was suppose to be about. I warned you….

Soon you will know more of the story…