The trailer for the recently released Runaways movie teases me right back to my teenage days as soon as the interior landscape of my SoCal upbringing circa the mid-Seventies splashes on the screen. I remember so well the avocado-colored appliances, beige nubby carpeting, mosaic-tiled lamps and the burnt-orange crockpot that sat out on our kitchen counter. But what takes me there even more is how the film's camera seems to capture the hazy light of young confusion that seems to float like dust bunnies through the air.
I was 15 when the Runaways dropped their "Cherry Bomb" (a name that's become near-and-dear to me. See entry "Barefoot Dancing" 1/4/10). Perfect accompaniment to a time in my life when I didn't understand most of the emotions coursing through my body&brain: anger, fear, bravado, timidity. A life cocktail shaken not stirred. Memories come to me in shards, but mostly wrapped around musical moments: The Cuckoo's Nest, a club in Costa Mesa that was the nexus of the Orange County punk scene, where stories of bathroom sinks ripped off the wall and fights in the parking lot between the mohawked and the cowboys from the bar next door became mythologized. While I wasn't a punk rocker all-out like my friend T, I was both mesmerized by the extreme energy of the music and freaked out by it's power. It seemed capable of blowing a hole right through all those muted avocado and orange color schemes that stood in for well-ordered perfection. All the things that lay underneath that I didn't know how to express, yet knew scared my parents (and me, too, truth be told) seemed there for the living. So while I didn't exactly fly the flag of punk style outright (I was still tussling with a more California hippie look: beads round the ankle and all), I tried in my own way to exert the attitude. The independence. I snuck my boyfriend at the time into my bedroom while my mom was out on a date, and when she came in to get me for school the next morning, and he was there, she called me out into the hallway where I acted completely entitled to having a boy in my bed. Of course when I went back into my room, he'd climbed out our second-floor window, shimmied down a tree and run off. He had not the punk rocker constitution. I hope I broke up with him, though I don't remember.
I really wanted to develop the hard-edge required to say a big fuck-you to...someone...I really didn't even know who. But I was unable to carry through the entire lifestyle. I had no taste for the extreme. I wanted to be liked. I didn't know how to be strident and smile at the same time. I would often look to my friends to be the extreme that I wasn't and would channel my bravery through them and get my thrills vicariously. (A pattern that would carry through well into my adulthood and was only recently shown the door when I realized I'd replicated that you're-the-exciting-one-i-can-hide-behind persona in my marriage. Boy, that didn't work.)
In the winter of 1980, T and I took a trip to NYC. On the plane ride, T couldn't stop crying. She was in mourning for Darby Crash, the lead singer of The Germs, an Orange County punk band that had played the Cuckoo's Nest regularly. He'd overdosed on December 6 and it seemed like our punk rock was dead. The stewardess, seeing her distress, came over and said, "I know, we all loved him, it was such a tragedy." For a minute we believed that someone cared about our mayhem-filled corner of the world. Of course, when she moaned that now there'd be no chance of a Beatles reunion, we realized that she was talking about John Lennon, who'd been shot the day before on December 8. It just seemed to magnify our solo place in the world. (Although I'm sure I would have been stripped of my music credentials had anyone known when I was in the business, but I never felt the same passion for the Beatles that I did for the raw power of the rock underbelly.)
Back then, being the underdog felt vastly preferable to swimming with the rest of the fishies, but of course I realize now that when you make an effort to be different, it can be far from real. Viewed through the lens of hindsight, I now see that all those muted colors and moments gave me something to strain against until I could raise my own voice in the crowd.
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