Big Hair, Law School, Mork and Mindy...Ah, the Eighties

law school grad

For me, the Eighties started as party party party, especially during my years at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. I spent my time ensuring that others would be in the top of the class while I closed down discos and enjoyed live comedy at several venues, including the late, lamented Holy City Zoo, where I saw Dana Carvey before he went on to SNL and massive fame, and Robin Williams, who was at his manic, coke-fueled best.

After I guaduated, I was lost. Having been in school continually from age five to age twenty-four, I had no idea what to do with myself except study. My law degree was my third since I left high school, and I couldn't watch my life go by while I was in school any longer. But I really didn't want to practice law, and took several other jobs: knocked on doors for Citizens for a Better Environment, didn't sell art at Bowles-Hopkins Gallery (though selling was my job I was terrible at it) and was a manager of the Wilbur Hot Springs Health Sanctuary.

After a couple of years, that palled, and I went to Sacramento to open a law practice. I focused on family law and criminal defense, and did that for a number of years.

I was into bicycling, then working out--weightlifting and the like--then martial arts.

Around me, the world was changing. Ronald Reagan gained the White House and continued his heartless policies, which resulted in economic chaos and helpless people living on the streets. I remember walking back to my office from the courthouse on a particularly bitter, windy day. An elderly lady was huddled next to a building. She'd tucked herself and her meager belongings between it and a hedge, trying desperately to find whatever shelter she could.

She was not unusual. I'm not a hater, but I hate Reagan.

Back in Sacramento, I embedded myself in the embrace of my famiy and tried to work out my issues with them. I spent most of the decade and much of the next in psychotherapy with a really nice man who sort of helped me.

What would have helped more was leaving the law, Sacramento, and my family. But I was determined to work things out. Oops. 

Those who know me are aware I have the emotional IQ of a dead salamander. Nevertheless, i continued to try to have relationships...another oops. I did have my first blindfolding and bondage experience, which was great, but the guy involved...yikes. Another wrong choice in a lifetime full of mistakes about men.

one of my mega-cute nieces,
born in the 80s

Were the eighties a good decade for me? No. They were a time of confusion, wrong turns made in life and general futility. 

But some good things happened. There were a couple of beautiful additions to our family. Though I disliked practicing law, I was good at it. I bought my first home, got a dog and a white picket fence.

Life was...okay.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times—the 80s

Sacchi Green

Do I have to remember the 80s? Are you sure? There are years I’d rather remember. In a way, the past is a different country, one we’ve passed through, and can never truly revisit. But why I am I dragging my metaphorical feet about this particular decade? By some measures those years were the best of times for me. Once early in that decade I had a sort of epiphany, a sense that I’d figured out this whole being grown-up deal at last. The business I co-owned in Amherst was doing so well that we opened a second store across the river in Northampton. I was on the board of the local League of Women Voters, and singing with the Hampshire Choral Society. My older son, geeky and somewhat eccentric, found kindred spirits when he got to high school and was thriving, and by mid-decade was studying computer science at UMass with a full scholarship, awarded to the four highest scorers on the SATs in each Congressional district (or at least the four highest scorers who wanted to go to UMass.) Business, civic affairs, music, motherhood—I must have been doing something right, right?

Well, yes and no. Or who knows. It was that last part, motherhood, that showed how false and ephemeral that epiphany was. My younger son, ten years his brother’s junior, was geeky, too, but more than eccentric, and growing even more so as adolescence approached. The best the doctors could do was call it OCD, which was certainly accurate, but far from all that was going on. His very bright mind found extreme and dramatic ways to react to whatever synoptic imbalance was under way. Matters became complicated by a physical injury requiring a brace, a stress fracture of a vertebra due partly to very fast growth. And there was bullying in junior high school, not physical, because he was big and tall, but all the worse because he was afraid he’d be driven to lashing out and injuring his tormentors. School became untenable. We turned to homeschooling. He pretty much aced the GED test, and started taking continuing education courses at UMass, earning a BA degree after ten years. Not so bad, but the process of getting diagnosed and medicated took years, very painful years, and there were times I wasn’t sure he’d survive them. I won’t go into further details, and I really shouldn’t be saying this much, since it’s not just my story. Things are stable now, and finally a new psychiatrist (two older ones had retired) has made a firm diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, unknown in the 80s. If we had known more back then, could we have done more to help him? I’ll never know, and always wonder, whether I should have done more, pushed him harder to adapt socially, something I wasn’t all that good at myself, or whether the support I did give was the best that could be done. In any case, we’ve survived.

An odd side-effect of all this was that I finally started to write in the late 80s, fan-fiction for my son from one of his favorite fantasy worlds, the Elfquest graphic novels about wolf-riding elves descended from immigrants from a distant planet. It wasn’t until 1995 that I ventured into original sf/f writing, but the gears had been set in motion, and they’re still grinding away.

I’ve been forced to think more about the past lately, as I go through stacks of old photographs in my father’s house, helping him (because he knows he won’t be able to stay there much longer) by winnowing out the duplicates, inconsequential shots, shots with heads cut off (my mother was an avid but not very skillful photographer) and various pictures not worth keeping. It’s a painful process, sometimes rewarding, often depressing, and I can’t stand to do it for very long at a time. I’m startled now and then to see myself from the past—maybe I really was in my prime in the 80s! And my kids, at various ages. And my granddaughter, growing so fast, from a baby to an overwhelmingly cute toddler to a self-assured nine-year old who’ll be taller than I am in a couple of years. I can scarcely comprehend that stretch of time, much less the 90s and 80s and 70s—although the 60’s still seem like yesterday, a country I remember vividly and wish I could revisit.

Don’t mind me. Who wouldn’t be somewhat melancholy in an ongoing stretch of snowstorms and bitter cold the way it’s been here lately? Spring will come again, and already I have flower seeds growing under plant lights in my kitchen, as I do every year. Some things can be repeated year after year. And don’t worry about me. I still haven’t really got the hang of being a grown-up, and that’s just fine.

The 80's

Spencer Dryden

The early 80's was one of the most magical times of my life. In April of 1981, I emerged like a butterfly from a cocoon after a terrible first marriage. It was such a relief that in the aftermath I flitted from flower to flower blissfully in love with life.

I normally embrace change with all the enthusiasm of embracing a cactus, but in the wake of an ugly divorce, Madison had suddenly become a very small town. When I was offered an opportunity to move to Minneapolis as part of a joint venture, I leaped at the chance. My part of the property split was a bed, a chair, a desk, a dresser and a television. I didn't need anything more. The first day I woke up in my new bungalow apartment, I wept for joy. In Minneapolis, all I would have to say was that I was divorced. It seemed everyone was divorced in the early '80's, so I never had to explain the circus my life had become before the move.

At age thirty-two I had my first experience of independent adulthood. I started doing things I wanted to do, when I wanted to do them. I learned to ski, I joined a tennis club, and oddly enough, I took up ball room dancing. I don't dance any more, but I loved dancing back then. All great dance music is eight beats and lots of the music then was great partner dancing music. It was a fun, non-threatening way to meet women, which was at the top of my agenda. I loved the feel of a woman following my lead. In ballroom dance, like Swing, a woman has to surrender herself if she wants to dance without falling down. Women who went dancing loved that kind of surrender. Dancing was foreplay. Sometimes, after a night of dancing the leader switched. I loved the transition from leader to follower. In many of my stories, my male MC is a slightly clueless guy who falls under the spell of a sexually assertive woman. I know it's a common male fantasy, but that was my life then. Casual sex  seemed so harmless before AIDS.  In all honesty, I might still be living in that little apartment with just a few sticks of furniture, but life happens while you are making plans.

In the 80's I became a positive motivation junkie, in control of my inner dialogue, censoring all negativity  and full of plans to achieve my lofty goals. I chased rainbows. None of my plans worked out. But sometimes miracles are measured by what doesn't happen. If my plans had succeeded I would have missed the great love of my life, which also had its origin in the 80's. My second wife and I met in the sauna of an exercise area in the building where we both worked. According to her, it was love at first sight. I wasn't the least bit interested in a serious relationship, so it took me nearly the rest of the decade to come to my senses. She waited until I was ready.   She doesn't dance, but that's okay, we've done the dance of life together for twenty-seven years now. I have no interest in changing partners. My six word biography is: Got the girl; forgot the money.

I loved the music of the 80's, MTV, the clothes, the optimism, the big hair, the promise of personal computing. In retrospect I'm a little surprised by how easily  I was seduced by "living in the material world", but as the rock philosopher, Cyndi Lauper said, "Money changes everything". It did.  I never thought of myself as selling out. It was more like buying in. My sixties idealism had become a dead end street. I more or less missed the 70's with my head in my hands trying to work my way though a toxic relationship while earning an MBA. The 80's  was a time to be alive. I traded my love beads for silk ties and grabbed for the brass ring.

The 80's are long gone. I'm not into serious goal planning any more. It's far more important to try to live in the present moment.  I try to follow my heart now. I have a positive outlook most of the time, but it's tempered by the sight of storm clouds on the horizon. I try not to give into the fear, but it's hard to imagine how we are going to avoid Armageddon with a group of people who broadcast the beheading of prisoners while spewing hate. A great dark age could easily befall us.

One of the most memorable thing about the 80's  to me was the hubris-the idea, the utter delusion, that a bunch of famous musicians could "come together as one"-and record a song that would lead to the end of hunger in Africa. We ignored entropy then, that's why the cute little meme of the butterfly effect doesn't work. "But if you just believe, there's no way we can fall."

The 80s Child Works Hard for a Living (or at least watches a lot of TV)

gisellerenarde: i need to blog about the 80s.
  i don't know what to say

Sweet: google the 80's see what you get ..
  maybe something will pop

gisellerenarde: what's a tv show from the 80s?

Sweet: Cosby, ATeam, Cheers, ALF, Knight Rider, Dallas, Whos the Boss

gisellerenarde: i'm getting nostalgic

Sweet: Dukes of Hassard, Full House

gisellerenarde: OMG i hated Full House. Leslie LOVED it.

Sweet: Miami Vice

gisellerenarde: oh yeah

Sweet: THE SIMPSONS

gisellerenarde: LOL premiered in 89. I remember it well...
  I wasn't allowed to watch it when it first came out, but i did anyway

Sweet: Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Dystany, Hill Street Blues, Threes Company , STNG

gisellerenarde: i grew up on threes company. it's one of my earliest memories (although it started in the late 70s i think)

Sweet: 77 to 84

gisellerenarde: yea i looked it up once
  i watched it again maybe 5 years ago and i couldn't believe how terrible it was

Sweet: Taxi, Love Boat

gisellerenarde: actually i dream of jeannie is one of my first memories too
  watching i dream of jeannie at my grandparents' house when they used to take care of me during the day, which was before Leslie was born, which means i was under 2

Sweet: Golden Girls, Airwolf, Wonder Years, Mork and MIndy Knots Landing Fall Guy, Fantasy Island, Night Court, MacGuyver, Murder She Wrote

gisellerenarde: oh murder she wrote
  i told you my mom used to pay us a nickel to brush her hair during murder she wrote

Sweet: hahaha

gisellerenarde: it aired on sundays and sunday was bath night and my mom would get her bath then make that air-popped popcorn with half a cup of melted butter over it. you and she are the only two people in the world who like that grossness

Sweet: Bosom Buddies

gisellerenarde: i don't know what that is

Sweet: Moonlighting

gisellerenarde: you know what i remembered today?

Sweet: what

gisellerenarde: i've told you before that we sometimes spent overnights or a weekend at my grandma's because of my dad

Sweet: yes

gisellerenarde: but today i remembered there was about a month where my mom and my siblings and i lived in my aunt and uncle's basement
  an entire month

Sweet: wow

gisellerenarde: it was a finished basement, but it was just one big room. they lived in a small bungalow. the basement had a pull-out couch. that's where we all slept
  i honestly can't remember how old i was. jane wasn't born yet, so it would have been sometime in the 80s

Sweet: hmmmm

gisellerenarde: i wonder how my mom explained that to people. we just weren't living at our house? but my dad was? for a month?

Sweet: dont know .. ask her

gisellerenarde: my mom doesn't like to talk about the past
  it makes her really uncomfortable

Sweet: wonder where you get it from hahahaha

gisellerenarde: heh no kidding

For Spencer, From the 80s

How Old Will You Be in 1984?

(Worcester Massachusetts 1984)

I’ve got the earphones of my Walkman cassette player clamped down over my ears and I’m tightening the chuck around  a fresh piece of bar stock I’ve been feeding into the engine lathe I run at night.  In the daytime I get contracts for our little machine shop on Prescott St.  At night I run the engine lathe on evening shift.  Not a lot of free time, like having two jobs even though both jobs are in service of the same thing.  Also I don’t take any pay for either job.  Money comes from a communal pot shared with the seven Japanese guys I live with on Ball Ave here in Worcester.  It is September of 1984 and the future has not happened just yet.

I’ve got Bob Dylan and the Band on a cassette tape singing “Oo wee – ride me high.  Tomorrow’s the day my bride is gonna come.  Oh no – are we gonna fly, down in the easy chair.”  God knows what the words are supposed to mean really, but I know what they mean to me.  Someday my wife of two years and counting will arrive in Worcester and join me.  Someday.  We were married in an unusual ceremony in 1982 and have never had sex up to now or even seen each other naked.  Such is my life.

When I get tired of the Dylan tape I’ll wait till I reach the end of machining this piece I’m working on, shut down and switch to a cassette of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” I’m listening to.  Royal Shakespeare Company.  A whole ‘nother level.  All I needed was stability to end my stint of living on the road and suddenly my mind is beginning to blossom with ideas and curiosity.  There is a hunger in me as though trying to make up for six years in a mental deep freeze as I traveled around the country and elsewhere.

Seeing the land, seeing the people, has built up in me a great fascination for the way humanity and the metaphysics of life works.  I have discovered public libraries again.  I am reading again.  I have been reading a book by Peter Malkin called “Eichmann in My Hands” in which he describes his experience in the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.  He guarded Eichmann in a small house in Buenos Aires until they could smuggle him to Israel. They had many private conversations, this Holocaust survivor and the man who killed half of his family in the death camps. 

As I ease the tool post into the spinning bar stock clamped in the spindle, switch on the pump and the steel chips begin to fly under the waterfall of coolant, I think about these things.  A laboring job where you work with your hands is very good for thinking about things.  What is Good? What is Evil?  Am I good?  I like to think I’m good, but maybe what is good is only circumstantial.  Maybe if I had been born in Nazi Germany there are such weaknesses in myself I would have been a war criminal.  But I have this life instead where I am regarded as a good man.  Who is good?  Who is evil?  Or are we only lucky where we are?  Like winning some lottery of the soul?  Maybe the Bible is right after all, may as well accept Jesus as not.  The actual reality of good and evil is so damn murky, maybe God likes simple instead.  Take the plea.  Sign the fire insurance.  Maybe philosophy and nuance gives the God of the Ten Commandments heartburn.

The spindle hums and the chips fly.  I have a job, however unpaid.  We are investing in the future.  Investing in our business.  None of us know yet that the shop will be bought to manufacture small 9mm hand guns, many of which will turn up in crime scenes.  That hasn’t happened yet.  When that time comes I will have moved on with my new wife to New York where I will live a morally neutral life as a photographer.  None of this has happened yet.  Am I good?  Or am I lucky?

The parts I’m making, according to the blueprints, are called “nipples” which made the Japanese guys giggle.  The nipples, and the little platen bars we carve out on a computer guided milling machine are part of the printing mechanism of a totally whacko new invention we received a contract for.  We were starving, literally starving, before this contract landed in my lap for all of us.  We were out of food, out of money, out of credit, nothing but faith, living on ramen noodles all of us.  I came across this company in Connecticut, a kind of hungry little start up company like us, called “Magnetec”.  

They had this invention, patented and everything.  When the guy explained it to me in his executive office it was so weird I understood why he was offering it to little old us.  None of the establishment shops would take a chance on it.  He needed somebody as desperate as he was.  He assured me Exxon and Shell were interested in his invention and they just needed someone to help them get it off the ground.

As the chips fly, the cut reaches its stop and I draw the tool post back, take the engine out of gear and wait for the spindle to slow and stop.  I could just hit the brake pedal down there but I like watching it and I need to swap out the cassette tape.  This Sony personal stereo is amazing.  It's the hot new invention.  My friend Okimoto is letting me use it although using a tape player with a dangly headphone cord is pretty suicidal since it could snag in the spindle and pull my face in there.  I have to be careful is all.  Not much of a face anyway.

King Lear.  I got tired of top 40 radio so now I’m tuning in to Dr. Ruth who, late at night, talks about sex and even says the word right out loud.  She won’t be on for another hour, so it’s King Lear on the heath and storm. 

“Plate sin with gold,” shouts poor old Lear in my ears, “and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.  Arm it in rags and a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.  None does offend, none I say.”

I remove the nipple from the chuck, take a second to admire it and toss it in a box .  Tomorrow I’ll be driving the platen bars way over to this place in Springfield where they do the lapping operation.  Lapping the platen bars, which is kind of like fine industrial sanding, was my idea and it was brilliant and I’m proud of it.  Maybe I could get good at this business.  I wonder if Eichmann felt pride in his ideas and innovations for killing a lot of people efficiently.  It’s not enough to be smart.  If you want to be a good person you have to be lucky too.  I’m lucky that way.

These platen bars, once they’re ready, will be used in this little tiny printing machine which is a component in this other thing that Magnetec has invented and seems to have so much faith in.  What it is, the guy was explaining to me in his office, is this thing that when it’s installed in a gas pump, you’ll be able to use your credit card right there at the gas pump instead of going to see the clerk in the store.  You just feed your card into the reader and after you’re done pumping, the device will bill your card, and spit out the receipt, all automatically by computer.  All standing there at the gas pump.  Yeah.  That’s what he has us making for him, because nobody else would take it on.  Its sounds insane but you never know what might catch on someday.

I feed some bar stock down the pipe, clamp down the chuck with the Allen wrench nice and tight and put the engine in gear.  The spindle whirrs and off I go.

“ . . .you take that of me, my friend, who has the power to seal the accuser’s lips, get thee glass eyes and like the scurvy politician seem to see the things thou dost not . . . “

What will it be like to have sex?  What will it be like to sleep with a woman and share your life with a woman, who I barely know at the moment?  Will we make it?  Will we be happy?  Will we have kids?  Will they be good kids?

Coolant on, tool post, getting it in, chips fly.

It’s 1984.  When I was in high school there was a book of radical essays called “How Old Will You Be in 1984?”   I carried it around without much reading it because I hoped it might fool girls into thinking I was deep.    Now it’s really 1984 and I know how old I am, surprised to be still alive after having had two guns and a knife pulled on me and another occasion when men hunted me in the dark near Houma Louisiana hoping to murder me.  It hasn’t been a boring life so far, which is all I ask.  The boring years are in the next century.  What will be strange will be how much I will be ready to appreciate them.

Times Remembered by J.P. Bowie

Ah, the eighties, the 80’s, that ten year span between the 70’s and the 90’s when I probably did more traveling than at any other time of my life. From the UK to France and Spain, then on an ocean liner to Nassau, to Colombia, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, all around the East Indies, the Bahamas…on and on and on. Boy, was I homesick for California by the time the 80’s drew to a close. But on the plus side I did meet the man who would eventually become my hubby – we just had to get rid of a couple of pesky ex’s along the way.

What I loved about the 80’s were the songs and the movies. Movies that have become classics – Indiana Jones, (where we could all crush on Harrison Ford), The Goonies, Big Trouble in Little China, (where we could all crush on Kurt Russell), Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan, Highlander (there can be only one), Tootsie, Sixteen Candles, Aliens(!), Scarface, Blade Runner (Harrison again), Flashdance, Footloose, Good Morning Vietnam. Oh boy, they just don’t make movies like those anymore!

And the songs. I who was still singing Porter and Gershwin (still love them) woke up to couple of incredible duets, Aretha Franklin and George Michael – I Knew You were Waiting, Babs (we gay guys can call her that) Streisand and Barry Gibb – Guilty. And there was Billy Joel and Springsteen and Bon Jovi and my cuz (not really) David Bowie. Michael Jackson’s Thriller. So much going on…

The 80’s, like all decades that had come before, had its bad times. Assassination attempts on the President, Thatcher and the Pope, plane highjackings, ‘Black Monday’. The scourge of AIDS that took a lot of my friends. Young, vibrant, talented people I should still be friends with today. Yet despite all that, I look back on those times with nostalgia – when we still wrote each other letters, sent invitations by mail, used ‘land lines’ (phones) to call one another - what else was there? I listened to LP’s on my stereo and rented movies to play on my VCR. I watched Dynasty where the women had too much hair and padded shoulders that Tom Brady would envy today.

Good times, bad times, I’ve seen them all, and my dear, I’m still here.

404 E. Spruce St. #1 (A Poem from the Eighties)

By Lisabet Sarai

(January 3, 1980)

We are both
climbing the walls.

After seven days
like animals caged
in this dingy little
basement room
          where at noon
          you still
          leave the lights
          on (yellow bulbs
          bare
          on the ceiling).

We are both
being
extremely polite.

We don't fight.
But you stake a claim
to whatever chair's
in the furthest corner
from where
I am.

And I find excuses
to stay in the shower
a little longer
to give you time
to reclaim the space
I've been calling mine
these seven days.

There is caring
between us,
sharing of words
and smoke and magic,
a liquid communion
of flesh
that leaves us 
awkward and breathless.

That just makes it worse;
we are never sure
where a casual touch
will lead. We need
and fear
the crazy 
conflagration
our bodies kindle.

You sleep.
Alone
at last.
And I
here at your table
ponder this candle-lit
empty stage-set
where you and I
have played so much drama
this week that's passed.

At last
I can find
our separate threads
that tangle themselves
so completely in bed
or in playing Scrabble.
I see our pattern,
         loosely woven.

Two days
and I'll leave.
Your apartment will be
again your own.
Eventually
you'll clean up the roaches,
finish my food,
find the sock
I'll undoubtedly leave
and probably miss me.
And meanwhile my car
with me at the wheel
will be winding the roads,
remembering
your sleepy smell
and the holes in your shirt.

Our time is for learning,
apart or together.
Our armored truce
in this cellar room
has taught me some tricks
to take on the road
till we meet again.