I'm not a big fan of the Purp, but there was this one summer when I was listening a lot to their Greatest Hits cassette in the sweltering non-air conditioned bedroom I shared with my little sister. They had just had their 80's "comeback" and their two 80's songs were also on this hits album. I liked "Hush" and "Perfect Strangers" the best. There was something dark and twisted about the music in this song that fit in with that deep unsettled feeling I was walking around with that summer.
It was 1988, I had just turned 19 years old. I was mostly focused on boys, partying, and hiding out from my concerned mother. I was sort of attending Western CT State University and I was working at the Mall and sometimes at Food Bag - a convenience store that made fried chicken and sold gas.
Food Bag was at an intersection of a few diverse neighborhoods, when I was growing up, Beaver St. in Danbury had low income housing and was the closest thing to "projects" that my town had. In the other direction was a very strongly Portuguese neighborhood and large old Victorian houses that had been converted to apartments and were full of drunk college kids and other people who needed tons of roommates to pay the rent. Food Bag was at the center of all this, the spoke in the wheel. We were so busy all the time that it could get pretty comical.
I got in trouble a few times - once for making crazy faces at the security camera (because I believed nobody looked at it) and another for writing "Turkey Boob" on the sandwich labels instead of "Turkey Breast". But hey, I was a very imaginative person stuck in drudgery, what else was I going to do? We have millions of stories from Food Bag - my brother worked there too for a while. The hours were perfect for a college student and it didn't require a lot of brains, just common sense and a cool head.
Right around this summer I was spending a lot of time with my coworker Dee from Food Bag - we clicked within minutes of meeting each other and were thick as thieves. We would always try to get into bars and be thrown out unceremoniously because she had a slew of older brothers and a lot of people knew who she was. We did find this one place that let us in, so many times we'd drink at her house before loading up a car and going over to North Salem around midnight to go to this place called "Whitney's". Oh man, was that a freakshow.
Danbury is on the border of Brewster, New York, and there are two very different liquor laws between the states. In CT, bars close at 1 on weeknights, 2 on weekends. No booze of any kind is sold after 8pm or on Sundays. In New York, you can buy beer whenever and liquor before 9pm (at least that's how it was in the 80's-90's, being a sober alcoholic, I have no idea what's going on now). Bars were open until 4am EVERY NIGHT. Party animals from CT would say they were going "on a Brewster run" which meant they ran out of beer. We also would close the bar in our town and then a caravan of drunk idiots would go across the border to the first bars we could find to keep it going until 4:00am. Whitney's was one of those bars -- so it didn't get busy until after 1 in the morning. We got there around midnight to secure a stool at the bar and to flirt with the bartender who is the reason we were able to get in there in the first place-- he thought Dee was cute. Some guy used to go there dressed in an opera cape and introduced himself as "Lestat" and he kept asking if I wanted to live forever. I also had a marriage proposal from someone who told me he wanted to make me his "African Queen". Which is hilarious, because I am of German descent. We loved it there, not just for the fact that we could actually GET IN, but because insane stuff kept happening and one thing Dee and I loved was the weird. It seemed like when it was just the two of us, the weirdest stuff happened. That also happened with my future roommate Jenn. I know I'm the common denominator, but I honestly thing it was the chemistry between me and these two friends of mine that attracted bizarre people, conversations, and opportunities.
My mother was none too thrilled with this lifestyle of mine - and I was living at home - so I did a lot of sleeping over at Dee's so my mother wouldn't have to worry waiting for me to come home at 4:30am and also so I wouldn't have to hear it.
At the same time, I was hanging out with Mothra when she wasn't with her boyfriend and somehow we had reconnected with this kid Jay that was a few years younger than us. They rode the same bus in grade school and high school and he always had a wicked huge crush on her. I started flirting with him for the hell of it and next thing I know, I ended up kind of having a bona fide crush on him. It made me feel wrong because he was a senior in high school. He was also one of those guys that was cynical and mocking all the time. I had no business crushin' on him, but I did.
We would talk on the phone late into the night, and I was FRAUGHT with tension. He flirted but wouldn't bust any moves at all. Then one night, it all escalated to a "dare" and he DARED me to walk to his street (which was just about a mile away) and he would meet me on the corner and we would...what? Make out? Yes, make out. And that's what I did. I crawled out my bedroom window in the middle of the night to walk a mile -- I don't remember why I didn't just drive, maybe my car was messed up? -- in the pitch black windy roads of my neighborhood to make out with this twisted high school kid. It didn't ease my crush at all because the kid was a great kisser.
So of course, this song, which was still pretty popular that year, always makes me think of the lengths I went to when I was still so demented I would go so totally out of my way just to kiss a guy:
I still get slight erotic flashbacks when I hear it. Not so much because of Jay, but of how I was so drunk on frustrated lust. I would listen to this song over and over. The album "Whitesnake", Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction" and Deep Purple's greatest hits were the soundtrack to that summer.
There's a P.S. Later that winter things with Jay went south (we never really dated and made out a few times but were more friends than anything MORE than friends, which frustrated me at the time), but not before he, Dee and I went on a 'scavenger hunt' one night driving around taking photos of random people and making up insane stories and ending up throwing a very lacy nightgown on the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of Jay's very Catholic high school. Dee still has the photo of us laughing in front of what looks like lace on a rock - Jay took the photo. Apparently, it was a huge scandal and none of us were caught.
I also went to see Deep Purple, well Guns and Roses really, they opened for Aerosmith and Deep Purple at Giant's Stadium, and my kid is horrified that I left about 3 songs in to the Deep Purple set. I wasn't really there for them. The concert last week was incredible - Steve Morse is a SICK guitar player and Ian Gillen sounds pretty good for an old man, even though he ran out of air a few times, he still could really scream.
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