Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (4 page)

If Rick is to be trusted—and he always is—bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don’t like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls
are
the show. We’re talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.

As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had plenty of reasons to fear bitch power. But when she came knocking, I had no choice. I bowed and worshiped. Toot toot. Beep beep. But I have to admit, I have no regrets about including the live version of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” I picked the song because it was a slow dance, but I picked the live version because Steven Tyler screams the word “motherfucker” in the second verse (“all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to yooouuuuu!”), and that was just
so
cool. For that one line, I cranked the volume up into the red, hoping it would rile the chaperoning math teachers, not realizing that they were way too stoned to notice. I also knew that “Dream On” came on right after “Off the Wall,” and I decided to exploit this inside knowledge. I innocently chose that moment to ask the beautiful Sarah Farrah Field Hockey to dance, before she or anybody else realized it was Aerosmith slow-dance time. This is one of the most daring things I did in my entire life. But I paid the price. As I held loosely to the long-pined-for waistline of Sarah Farrah Field Hockey and frantically tried to hide my boner, my friends were making faces at me behind her back, trying to make me giggle. While Steven Tyler was dreaming on until his dreams came true, Sarah Farrah Field Hockey was smirking, “What’s so funny?” The horror. The horror.

tape 635

JUNE 1980

C
amp Don Bosco in East Barrington
, New Hampshire, was a Catholic summer camp for boys aged eight to fifteen, run by priests and brothers of the Salesian Order. I was a camper there in the summers of 1980 and 1981. It was in the middle of a pine forest four hours north of Boston, with a lake and grassy dells, far from any other human dwelling. St. John Bosco (1815–1888) was an Italian priest, canonized in 1934, who founded the Salesian Order to bring the gospel to destitute boys.

Almost all the campers were Italian kids from East Boston who also attended Salesian vocational schools. Others, including me, were from the suburbs or other parts of New England. A tiny minority were local country boys who kept to themselves. There were three cabins: St. Pat’s for little kids; Savio for medium kids; Magone for us big kids.

Brother Larry, in charge of Magone, was a gentle soul, always willing to discuss religious problems at the drop of a hat. He walked around for an hour every night after lights-out to make sure nobody was committing self-pollution. He taught me to shoot a rifle; I still have a couple of NRA “Advanced Marksman” certificates in my parents’ attic.

Brother Jim was a biker who’d done time. He was in charge of Savio cabin, which meant scaring the shit out of any Magone kids who tried to pick on Savio kids. There was a rumor he had a switchblade on him.

Brother Jim loved to talk about how Jesus wasn’t a pussy.

“You see the guy crucified up there?” he yelled. “You see him? Are his hands closed? NO! Is he making a fist? NO! What does that mean to you?”

We sat there, cowering.

“It means something to
me.
”

More cowering.

“It means he could have just gotten down off the cross anytime he liked, and come down and WASTED all those Roman gladiator motherfuckers. But he kept his hands OPEN! He let it go! For YOU! And you sit here and look at that dead guy up there and
you don’t even notice!
”

Brother Jim was seriously cool.

Brother Dave, the folksinger, wore a Jesus beard and sandals. At Mass, he strummed an acoustic guitar and sang his original compositions, like “Dare to Be Different.” There was a vague sense that the other brothers did not fully accept him as an equal.

Brother Al was a jovial Polish guy with a Gabe Kaplan mustache. He once literally washed out a kid’s mouth with soap. I saw it happen. Crandall took the Lord’s name in vain, and Brother Al flew off the handle and dragged him to the sink at the back of the cabin with a bar of Irish Spring.

Salesians have their own icons and folklore—when they get mad, they yell, “Mother Cabrini!” They were always telling magical tales about Don Bosco, who had visions, and St. Dominic Savio, a fifteen-year-old who died of consumption because he was sleeping naked to catch cold and do penance for his sins. Sex and death and Italian mystagogy were in the air!

There was a stigma against admitting you were trained as an altar boy, because it meant admitting you dressed up in a cassock and surplice. I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an altar boy back home, so I served two Masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles—it was like being a glam-rock roadie for God. It might have earned me the contempt of my fellow campers, but it gave me a chance to bond with Sister Veronica and Sister Catherine, the nuns who took care of the chapel. While the other guys were riding horses or shooting hoops, I was working the cassock, swishing the surplice. Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I’d stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people’s chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (
I confess to Almighty God
). They’d kneel (
and to you my brothers and sisters
), cast their eyes demurely down (
I have sinned through my own fault
), and stick out their tongues (
in my thoughts and in my words
). Their tongues would shine, reflected in the gold platter, and since the wafer was dry, the girls would maybe lick their lips (
and I ask Blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters
) before they swallowed (
to pray for me to the Lord our God
). It was all I could do not to pass out.

I was a little psycho about religion. My teen malaise found a language in the blood and glory of Catholic angst. All kids lead a secret double life, and this was mine. I slept with Thomas a Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
under my pillow. I idolized St. Rose of Lima, who rubbed raw pepper on her face so her beauty would not be a temptation to the chastity of others. I devoted myself to mastering the underground occult lore of the Catholic hardcore—Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
and Augustine and T-Money Aquinas—the way other kids would devote themselves to D&D or the
Foundation
trilogy. My moral compass was shaped mainly by the Second Vatican Council, plus the episode of
Welcome Back, Kotter
where Arnold Horshack refuses to dissect a frog.

One spring, I even decided to give up evil music for Lent. It meant seven weeks of listening to the radio and wondering which songs were evil and which songs were just
about
evil. I decided the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was okay because it was anti-devil, but the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” was soft on Satan. I gave myself permission to keep cranking Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” because it was so saturated with evil that it amounted to a critique of evil, but not Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which was just plain evil. I made a specially edited tape of
London Calling
to omit the nunfucking. These theological judgments made my head hurt, and I was relieved when Lent was over. On Easter morning, I treated myself to “Walk on the Wild Side.”

My rock heroes were wild-side jaywalkers like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie, guys who smirked at heartbreak through their inch-thick steel shades. They gave me the hope that teenage outcasts could grow up to be something besides corpses or cartoons. Jesus was my Major Tom. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn’t seem so different from Catholicism—the hemlines were just a little higher. Of course, when Madonna hit, she was a one-woman Vatican 3, but at this point I had all the rock-star saints I could handle.

At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like
Good News for Modern Man
. They had groovy titles like
The Word
or
The Way
, and translated the Bible into “contemporary English,” which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, “You son of a bitch!” (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,” which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, “INRI” (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper—the night before Jesus’ death, a death he freely accepted—where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” but these memories could be deceptive.

At Camp Don Bosco, I met another camper who was a Beatles freak, which was like finding gold. Aldo Rettagliatti and I spent hours debating the Paul-is-dead clues and
Abbey Road
(his favorite) vs. the
White Album
(mine). Since we were out in the middle of the woods, with no radio and a load of religious tracts around, we soon got into some Catholic-mystic Beatle talk. We elaborated ideas about the way “Revolution 9” rewrote chapter nine of the Book of Revelation. We took our theory to Brother Larry, but he assured us that the Book of Revelation was too hard for us to interpret, and besides, Jesus didn’t write it, and anyway, everything after
Sgt. Pepper
was crap.

Socially, the campers split into three groups: tough guys, wise guys, and pussies. The pussies spent the summer in constant danger from the tough guys, while the wise guys tried to
nyuk-nyuk-nyuk
their way out of violent situations, mostly by making fun of the pussies. I was a wise guy, except when my inner pussy would slip out from under my cassock and surplice.

Camp Don Bosco was my first male peer group, and it was a shock to learn that boys were, in fact, dipshits. The mystery I’d always thought surrounded tough guys just disappeared. Here’s an actual conversation I heard on the picnic tables outside the canteen that summer:

CRANDALL:
So, how many times have you done it with her?

COLANTINO:
None. She’s a virgin bitch.

CRANDALL:
Virgins are the worst kind! It takes so long to get it!

COLANTINO:
But virgins are the best kind when you do get it.

CRANDALL:
But it takes so long!

Crandall was a fourteen-year-old dork, and sounded like a real idiot bragging about sex, but he was in with the tough guys because his best friend was ringleader Steve Doherty, a sociopathic Scott Baio look-alike. The only kid allowed to give Crandall shit was Doherty’s little brother, who was in St. Pat’s. Spaz was a tiny kid from Dorchester who lost more fights than he won, but he was crazy and would fight
anybody
, so he got the respect normally reserved for the tough guys who spent their leisure time kicking the shit out of Spaz. Spaz wore a scapular around his neck, a string of holy medallions that consecrated him to Mary. Supposedly, if you die wearing one, you go straight to heaven. But one night, Brother Al told us all a cautionary tale about a man who thought he could get away with his sinful ways because he wore the scapular. “He led a very immoral life,” Brother Al told us, pacing the floor after lights-out. “He did everything.” After he died in a car crash, the police found his scapular . . . dangling from a nearby tree!

Mike McGrath was the only tough guy who took a liking to me, and without him, I wouldn’t have lasted a week at Camp Bosco. Mike was from my parish, St. Mary’s, and we’d been confirmed together. His big brother, called “Urko” after some evil gorilla on the
Planet of the Apes
TV series, was one of Milton’s scariest delinquents. Mike was just a joke back home, but at camp he told everybody he was “Big Mac,” and I didn’t blow his cover, so he looked out for me. (“Ape shall never kill ape.”)

Everybody complained that Camp Don Bosco was too far from Boston to pick up our beloved WCOZ. The only radio we got was a local country station, which only Brother Al could stomach. We all missed WCOZ on Sunday nights, which was when the Dr. Demento show aired. But instead of radio, we had Bubba Colantino’s “master blaster” boombox and five tapes in heavy cranktation. Our two biggest albums were “2” and “Zeppelin,” normally listed in reference works as
Led Zeppelin II
and
Led Zeppelin IV
. Some people call the latter “Zoso,” but I never heard it called that at Camp Don Bosco. Damone in
Fast Times
calls it
Led Zeppelin Four
. The Columbia House Record and Tape Club ads listed it as
Runes
. But the guys at camp just said, “Put the Zeppelin on.” (A “Zeppelin” was also a kind of bong that looked like a thermos and held two roaches and filled up with enough smoke to choke an elephant.) When Steve Doherty said, “Put on two,” he meant the album with “Whole Lotta Love.” The three other albums we blasted all summer were
Hi Infidelity
,
Crimes of Passion
, and
Back in Black
—Brother Larry approved of the theology of “Hells Bells.”

The guy with the most Zeppelin tapes was Mullen, the junior counselor in charge of St. Pat’s. I knew him from my grandparents’ parish, St. Andrew’s in Forest Hills. Mullen shaved his head and never said a word. There was a story going around that some lady had offered him a hundred bucks to beat up her son all summer, to toughen the boy up, but that Mullen had turned her down. Nonetheless, all the Magone guys were too scared to touch any St. Pat’s kids because that was Mullen’s cabin. I didn’t understand the tough guys—I thought the whole point was to be tough so you wouldn’t have to be afraid, but it seemed to me that the tough guys were constantly watching for the guys who were just a little tougher. They were busier being scared than I was. It was like
Planet of the Apes
, and I knew I was a chimpanzee who would never pass for a gorilla.

But there’s one memory I have about Steve Doherty that I still wonder about from time to time. We were all standing around the lake after dinner one night, with AC/DC on the box, when Doherty said, “I hate disco people—you know, disco
pants
. But there are some disco
songs
, you know, like ‘Funkytown,’ that rock.” Believe me, nobody else could’ve talked that shit and made it back to the cabin alive. Maybe Doherty was just screwing with us, seeing what he could get away with. (“Ape has killed ape!”) Or maybe he really dug “Funkytown.” I’ll never know, because we all just nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”