The problem – and I prefer to see it as a problem, thank you – is that I was the straggler in the family. My siblings were born ten years before I came sliding along, meaning the whole family unit had survived legendary domestic adventures I had missed - a mysterious, Ashley-free decade of experience - and they were all now very, very tired. Too tired to humor a wide-eyed toddler, rummaging through their fascinating relics and asking questions about the Good Old Days. I was simply dismissed with the same reminder: I got here too late.
Amplifying this circumstance was the eventuality that, coincidental or not, my neighborhood chums suffered the same condition. That is, the friends I gravitated toward were also the runts of their respective litters, with much older, teenage brothers and sisters farting in their oatmeal and telling them Santa Claus had died.* We were the freshman class at Hazing University, not only expected to drop and give our parents twenty but to endure nipple twists from our siblings if we didn’t change the channel when they told us to. It seemed the whole world was ruled by these surly, Marlboro-sucking teens - they were everywhere. My pipsqueak friends and I formed a brotherhood of the oppressed, our innocence stomped flat by our pimpled elders, who, having told us for the last time not to touch their goddamn ELO records, regularly jettisoned us across the linoleum.
But abuse was not the only legacy being passed down to we pee-stained juniors. For a sibling old enough to dunk a child’s head in the toilet was a sibling old enough to drive, to smoke, to procure pornography, and to buy comedy LPs with curse words. A teenage sibling had booze hidden in a speaker cabinet and S. Clay Wilson comics under the mattress. And we, the toddlers who could not drive to “the movies” or “ go camping with Doug and Larry – that’s right, there’s no phone there,” had all the time in the world to search the house for illicit goods while they were away. We may not have understood the jokes in those Playboy cartoons, but they were still infinitely more interesting than Little Dot.** Not to mention that speculating about what the dirty teens were up to past curfew was far more enthralling than watching Speed Buggy*** with a fellow seven-year-old.
Which is to say we runts were corrupted early. Infantile delusions were not allowed to flourish in a land of disgruntled high schoolers, eager to harsh an innocent child’s mellow by explaining why Pete’s Dragon sucks. Why bother with that junk - we had missed all the best stuff of childhood. Their issues of MAD and Archie had been far superior to ours. Their Beatles records were the real thing, not this Linda McCartney crap we were listening to. Roger Moore? Please. And naturally, we were too dickless to appreciate the finer cultural experiences in which they now indulged: The backseat grinding, the Everclear, the Styx concerts, The Exorcist.
As my references indicate, this poisoned childhood took place in the 1970s, that glorious, unwashed decade of shag-carpeted Chevy vans and the sideburned doob rollers therein. By this time, the market force that was the almighty, free-spending teenager was in full flower, and the teenage preoccupations with dance moves, showbiz fashions, and emergency skincare were not only the stuff of actual high schoolers but ostensible grownups like Bert Convy. We vulnerable kiddies weren’t the only ones fixated on the denim-vested, roller-discoing teenage lifestyle. All of American popular culture had gone perpetually pubic.
The ten years we had missed were, of course, the 1960s. And the Seventies cultural fixation on forever adolescence resulted, as it always does, from the mass-market cooption of youth culture, turning yesterday’s draft dodgers at the Newport Folk Festival into the feathered-haired dancing queens of the Village Square Shopping Mall. Hand-me-down, Summer of Love detritus littered our living rooms, and the continuous stream of Monkees reruns, Ken Kesey reprints, Vietnam updates, and Jim/Jimi/Janice memorial tie-dies admonished us that our Seventies childhood was really Sixties Lite, the Tab to a Dr. Pepper ten years gone. The Sixties’ psychedelic pageantry, newly repackaged in avocado green, marched into our prepubescent consciousness like a stampede at the Fillmore.
Even in our redneck suburbia in the Deep South, the Sixties brand of youth culture had been force-fed to the kids in shop class. The high school Skeeters and Charlenes of Coonhunt County, who had been adhering to their Sunday School beehives and Patsy Cline classics in defiance of the mud-caked, Woodstock savages up North, were suddenly, by 1970, sporting blow-dried, Joe Namath shags and purchasing Deep Purple 8-tracks.**** The psychedelic teen had finally arrived in Dixie, albeit by muscle car rather than freedom bus.
And so, between the Sixties counterculture spiking the mainstream Kool-Aid and our fascination with Aquarius-bred teenagers at the expense of our own childhood, we were inspired to gorge ourselves on the hooch, weed, sex, and disrespectful rock music of Teenville way ahead of schedule. (No more time for Sesame Street; these vibes aren’t gonna groove themselves.) And thanks to the blueprint provided by popular culture, we knew exactly what tangerine-flaked course to follow: If you were going to roll a joint, you had to do so on a copy of Saucerful of Secrets. Under a Rick Griffin poster. In a dashiki. While watching Barbarella.
I tell you all this as a way to explain myself. Because we’ve been hanging out for a while now, and I’d like for us to know each other better. And you may have been puzzled by my eternal mal-contentment, my brutal and impatient assessment of the modern, my obvious brain cell deficiency, my reflexive flinching to protect my nipples. You may have wondered why I, a Gen-Xer, someone ostensibly of the Clueless and Cobain era, will not shut up about Dorothy Kilgallen. The timeline is all distorted for me, you see. I’m still adrift in that sandalwood fog lingering from the black-lit headshops of yore. I’m still trying to catch up.
Because, during my efforts to grow up too fast by going back in time, to be a Micky Dolenz in a Mac Davis world, to turn on, tune in, and teen up too soon, the modern world chugged along without me. Jonestown, Skylab, Love Canal, BJ and the Bear – it all passed me by. Meanwhile, my ambition to become a ‘60s stoner burnout in the fifth grade did not help me feel any closer to the decade I’d missed. We got here too late. Charles Manson had killed Martin Luther King, Jr., and Yoko broke up the Seattle Seven, all before we were born. As the senior siblings never failed to advise, only those reared in those heady, pre-Altamont years really know where it’s at. Or knew where it was. It was here a minute ago. We might have left it in Oakland, but man, you should have seen it.
A few years ago, I was taking a walk around the block, trying to chase away the clouds of a suffocating, mid-life depression, when an uncomfortable realization occurred to me. “I’m going to be sixty soon.” I moodily pondered the implications of this reality, of life draining away like so much Pennzoil in the passing lane, when I had another flash of insight. A correction. Wait…I wasn’t fifty-eight years old; I was forty-eight! The collision course with sixty had seemed totally feasible in that moment, but I wasn’t there yet. Like a miracle, I had instantly gained another ten years. Huzzah!
So far, I’ve spent that additional decade watching Jack Paar on YouTube.
- A.H.
* On occasion in those days, I did sometimes visit the homes of fellow children who did not have siblings old enough to torture them (or worse, were themselves – shudder! – only-children), but I couldn’t relate to them. They seemed soft, their rooms incubators of pastels and plushies, their parents looking like infants themselves. I felt sorry for them. They asked their parents’ permission to do everything instead of just setting fire to it in secret. And their parents, not yet worn down by raising their precious babies, paid strict attention to everything their wonder children did or said. These kids had it posh, their safe, comfortable lives leaving them unprepared for the news I passed along about Santa Claus.
** In retrospect, I’d have to correct this. Playboy cartoons were mostly drab, while Little Dot was sublimely disturbed.
*** Yes, I will take a shot at Hanna Barbera productions whenever possible. Because the trauma is real.
**** This was the nefarious influence of The Partridge Family, of course, but the true unifying factor that bridged the Mason-Dixon cultural gap was the drugs – the ‘erb, the blow, the airplane glue – the common cause that brings together all religions and creeds into one, communal, stone groove. The segregationist South may not have cared for the love beads of the Berkeley war protesters, but they took to their peyote buttons with gusto.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)