Visage

Coming back to school the next year, my senior year and a rare fourth year at Interlochen (most people come for their junior and senior year at the most), and I was large and in charge. I knew what I liked, I knew who I was, I knew my friends and they knew me. I was on top of my game and on top of my life in a way I had never been before. Or since – with the possible exception of my last year at Hampshire College. All I needed was a girlfriend. A physical girlfriend. I had lots of intimate relationships with girls – and boys – but none of them were physical. Like anybody else, I wanted to be loved completely for who I was physically as well as mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. Shy beyond reason or words because of past experiences, I was at a severe disadvantage. Terrified of ruining a friendship with inappropriate physical desire, I crammed that desire in a dark corner and tried to lock it away for good, while simultaneously longing for somebody to come along with the golden key that would set it – and me – free. The woman that did that would have to be strong and persistent, and make the first move, and be infinitely patient with me and my extremely fragile sexuality. This is another way in which I had a stereotypical feminine sexuality. Although the rules were changing, the social convention was largely that the guy was the aggressor, initiating contact, and the girl waited patiently for her phone to ring. But there I was, shot down after my first few fumbling attempts, sitting by the silent phone, waiting for it to ring.

And then Tina called.

Although not a particularly aggressive woman, she liked me enough to hang in there and was persistent enough to not take my shyness as rejection. Our courtship has been covered elsewhere, but it came to a head right before Christmas break. We had been set up at a party the night before the three-week break started and left alone and drunk by our impatient friends who just wanted us to hurry up and read the writing that was scrawled in gigantic letters across the wall. YOU LIKE EACH OTHER, STUPIDS, it said, but we were too frightened to read it. The rum helped us make out the letters, and we ended up dancing a private pas-de-deux in a dark studio of the Dance Building.

Being the last night of school before break, the staff of the dorms relaxed their grip a bit. We were supposed to be sealed in our respective dorms, all present and accounted for, by 10pm, but as people had already started leaving, and busses were already shuttling people to the airport for late night or early morning flights home, they left the doors unlocked and turned a blind eye to the comings and goings of their charges. Not smart, perhaps, or even legal, but it was greatly appreciated. It was a tradition to stay up all night the night before a break, and I was only too eager to follow tradition. Tina had a very early shuttle to catch, so I walked her back to her dorm after out duet, held her hand (my heart practically flew like a hummingbird out of the cage of my ribs), and wished her Merry Christmas. We hugged and waved and she got in the van and I went back to find my friends.

Dawn spread slowly across the morning sky, a bottle of crimson syrup knocked over on a black table, and the day began. Bleary and tired, I wished my friends well on their vacations, saw them off, and walked across the highway with a bag of dirty clothes to my house. My trip home was easily the shortest of all my friends, but, as it turned out, we weren’t going to be spending Christmas at home. We were going down to Florida to visit my soon-to-be stepfather’s parents. And the plane left that afternoon. No time for a nap and, in my supercharged adolescent state, no need for one. I did laundry, repacked my bags, and the three of us – me, my mom, and Frank – got in the car and drove to the airport.

The migration south was long and uneventful. I spent most of it watching the snow disappear from the ground 30,000 feet below us and swimming in the delicious memories of Eric and Eva and Bob and Dave and, most especially of all, of Tina. It was a remarkable semester, and I had much to think about. And much more to look forward to.

We got to Florida around midnight, and were met at the airport by Frank’s parents. By now, I had been up for a little over 40 hours, and it was starting to show. We drove for an hour to get to their house, and I was so tired that I started to hallucinate in the back seat of the car, slipping suddenly into the dream state while I was still awake. We pulled up to the house, and I dragged myself and my bag out of the car and into the kitchen. Frank’s parents offered me some fresh orange juice, squeezed from the fruit of their own tree, growing in the back yard. I had never been to Florida and the balmy breezes in the middle of December and fresh oranges growing right outside the window seemed impossibly exotic, so, almost too tired to stand anymore, I said sure, that would be great. Frank’s dad took a bottle out of the refrigerator and wrestled with the cap, which was pretty badly stuck. What we didn’t know was that the orange juice had fermented and, when he finally did pop the top off, the entire bottle exploded all over me. Too tired to laugh (although I was the only one there who didn’t find extreme humor in the situation), I refused the offer of something else, begged to be shown where I was to be sleeping, and crawled into a sleeping back set on couch cushions in the office, sticky and smelling of rotting fruit.

Our time in Florida was pretty good, split about evenly between things that were genuinely fun (Disneyworld and my discovery of how to surreptitiously jam the escalators while just standing on them in a particular way) and things that were only fun with distance and hindsight (the bizarre food Frank’s parents insisted on feeding us – fish neck soup, oatmeal that had been left to cool in the bowl overnight (intentionally), and our big dinner out at their favorite family-style cafeteria). It was probably a stressful trip for Frank and, especially, my mom, who was, after all, the other woman and home wrecker, but I was pretty oblivious to all that, lost in my reveries of young love.

Statistically, the worst place to find cool music is at a record store in a mall, as I discovered from my disastrous attempt to order Synergy’s Sequencer album from Camelot Music at the Cherryland Mall in Traverse City. Catering only to what I call “the yellow line” – or the middle of the middle of the road – mall stores are almost entirely free of anything edgy or cool. But every once in a great while, somebody will order something by mistake and it’ll make its way almost immediately into a cut-out bin, so it’s worth checking out every now and then. Especially if you have no other options. I picked up Ministry’s Twitch for two bucks at a mall in Massachusetts, and I found a couple of cut-out Nektar records in a bin of things that were about to be thrown out at the aforementioned Camelot Music. And, wandering through a mall in Florida on that trip, I accidentally stumbled across the full Visage album. Stunned, I immediately snapped it up.

We got back to Frank’s folks’ house, and I was dying to listen to it, but my mom and Frank were both extremely hesitant to let me play it, not wanting to disturb or alienate his parents with my crazy teen-age music. Frank’s father noticed me studying the album cover and asked about it. I proudly told him a little about the New Romantics that I felt such kinship with and he ridiculed me for it. At his age, having survived dozens of fads and cultural upheavals – from flappers to hippies – he must’ve felt that my devotion to this tiny little self-consciously arty movement was foolish and trivial. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, but his comments stung, and I withdrew from the conversation, saying I hadn’t quite caught up on my sleep and would like to take a nap in the office before dinner. Wish granted, I closed the door, and quietly pulled the speakers into the middle of the room, placed them about a foot apart facing each other, turned the stereo on to its quietest setting – inaudible even across the same room – and lay down with my head between the speakers to hear the faint tinny sounds of Visage. Although it would be a week before I got to hear it properly, I could tell it was an exceptional album, and I was thrilled beyond words to have finally procured it, however unlikely the circumstances were.

Having been born in a club, it’s no surprise to find that the album’s focus is the dance floor, with the first three tracks blending seamlessly into each other to create a non-stop, 12-minute disco mix. One criticism of New Romantics was their pretentious seriousness about the scene, but Visage also showed a refreshing sense of humor on the track Malpaso Man, a song about, unlikely enough, Clint Eastwood that faintly echoed Ennio Morricone’s iconic theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

After Christmas break, Tina and I hesitantly picked up where we left off and, at her instigation of course, officially became boyfriend and girlfriend. She immediately embraced Fade to Grey and we proudly wore the New Romantic label. We couldn’t afford the clothes or the make-up for it, but we internalized its ideals. We were both romantics anyway, and into the hearts and flowers aspect of love (I have a box of love letters from her that – twenty years later – still faintly smells of Opium, her preferred perfume and, not surprisingly, one of my all-time favorite smells).

Those were heady days with Tina, the two of us enveloped in a cocoon of young love. On dance tour, we sat together on the bus, holding hands, both plugged into the same Walkman, listening to Visage and Ultravox and Lene Lovich. She was deeply cynical and guarded around almost everybody but me, and I was just starting to develop the bitterness that would grow into a poisonous choking vine in Chicago the following year. For me, she opened like a flower, and I drank deep of her nectar, profoundly grateful to have found somebody who loved me completely – emotionally and psychologically, but, most important of all for me at that time, physically as well. We were New Romantics in many ways. Musically, sure, but our love allowed us to express our dormant romanticism and optimism with each other in a way we couldn’t with others. In an ugly and scary world, perpetually on the brink of complete annihilation, surrounded by the selfishness of the looking out for #1 attitudes that were burning through the American society of the 80s, Tina and I took refuge in each other. Sitting on the bus, sharing a secret, we held each other close and let the ugliness of the outside world se faner en gris.