Autumn 1987

I was young enough that the start of the school year was still exciting. Anything could happen. I'd spent the summer doing yardwork to save up for a Sharp programmable scientific calculator you could program in BASIC, and the summer spent mowing huge lawns, weeding, and hauling wheelbarrows around had left me a short, wiry kid. I was starting the year with no friends but a vague sense that things were going to be better this year. I was taking chemistry, American Studies, Russian, health, advanced algebra, and band.

My high school's band was rivaled only by the football team for sheer uselessness. By my sophomore year, the band had 13 members. All of the students with musical ambition went to the other west side high school, which had an enormous and well-funded program. As a result, our band was a hodgepodge of students whose minds were on other things, studded with a couple big fish in a small pond. The band's drummer ended up being one of Portland's biggest DJs and the drummer for the Dandy Warhols, although he was a mostly silent and often absent presence in class.

I'd stuck with band mostly because the teacher had used every ounce of her charm to keep the flightier members from leaving at the end of the previous year, but had decided to switch to zero period class instead of using one of my normal class periods. This meant that I had to be at school by 7:15 every morning. Given that I stayed up every night as late as I could, reading science fiction or playing with my family's newly-purchased PC, I was generally surly and barely coherent when I stumbled into the cavernous, tiered practice space each morning.

The band had several configurations. We were the pit orchestra for musicals. We were a jazz band, which only performed at assemblies. We were, theoretically, a marching band. And, most prominently and miserably, we were also the pep band, which required us to go to a certain number of our high school's football games and fitfully play excerpts from Sousa marches to accompany our team's inevitable, mechanistic slaughter on the field. Almost all of us hated pep band duty because Portland in the fall is cold, wet, and miserable, our school spirit was lacking, and the students who came to watch the games mocked us and threw pennies at us. Our teacher, who really just wanted to be our friend and have a good time had to get increasingly unpleasant to get us to show up, eventually threatening to fail anyone who skipped a game.

The first game of the year was somewhere between a party and a wake: a decent percentage of the student body showed up, were treated to an utterly hamfisted display of sporting uselessness, and then a DJ from the student body government played a bizarre mixture of top 40 pop and something approaching punk. An indeterminate, tiny percentage of the crowd sneaked away during the game to the asphalt-paved area beneath the bleachers to suck down highly illicit beers, and an even smaller percentage sneaked off to smoke one-hit pipes and expertly-rolled joints. I was too far outside any cliques to know about any of that until much later. It wouldn't have made any difference, because I was deeply threatened by drugs and drug culture, having already lost a couple friends to heroin addiction, but more to the point I was stuck on the bleachers, staring at the clip-on music holder on my clarinet, counting down minutes and waiting for the game to be over, so I could go home.

I'd recently started to befriend one of my fellow students. She was flighty to the point of mania, was short and dark and captured the attention of all the boys who talked to her. At the beginning of the year, she had decided her new name was going to be Ocean, only to decide in the second week of classes it was actually Matisse. I was shy and very tentative about making new friends, but she was enthusiastic and very open with me, so I attached myself to her with a certain kind of vulnerable, intense ferocity.

Even though she lived on the other side of town, she'd come to the game and kept me company, and I met up with her after I'd gotten rid of my clarinet after the game's protracted, inevitable conclusion. The DJ was starting to get warmed up. He'd been going through the staples (Huey Lewis, Steve Winwood) and was gradually warming up (The Outfield, Bruce Springsteen). The two of us talked about our classes, and she kept interjecting about which of the guys wandering by were cute. I could feel the conversation shifting out from under me, and had no idea how to get back onto solid ground.

Just then the DJ put on Violent Femmes' "Add It Up", and the crowd of kids dissolved into a furiously dancing chaos. Flannel and rugby-shirt clad torsos were seemingly everywhere at once, and a few kids even skanked. Or at least that's how I remember it; I'm not sure I started listening to Violent Femmes until later that year, and that seems like a pretty risky choice for a high school party DJ. The only thing I remember with any certain clarity was the shining face of my new friend as she completely abandoned herself to dancing. For a few moments, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.