Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,4

the face—“do you mean that you think he’s handsome? Or do you mean something else, like he says cute things and he’s funny and that’s why you like him?”

It was clear which choice would make the world start spinning again.

“The second one. The cute things he says. He’s always saying funny things. He’s so funny.” He wasn’t all that funny.

“Okay,” she said. Relieved. A weight lifted. The air in the room began to circulate again. “Okay, hon. When that’s what you mean, you should say a boy is funny. Boys don’t call other boys cute.” The message was delivered with love, but she looked me right in the eyes to make sure it was delivered. She was just trying to protect me, I can see that now.

Different means unique and distinct, but in St. Louis in the 1970s, if you changed the tone up just a little bit, the word became an insult. People in the Midwest are kind to one another, so they won’t say someone is too loud or too quiet or thick in the head or light in the loafers, they’ll just say: “That kid is different.” It can mean a lot of things, and you don’t want to be any of them.

I remember this moment, because it is when I split into two pieces. It was the moment I realized that there would be a self that I could show the world and a self I’d have to keep hidden. If I wanted to be acceptable, if I wanted to spare myself and my family the shame of being different, I’d have to do some work.

I didn’t think about it again for a very long time, but it left behind an ache.

The drug I numbed myself with was the radio. The song we sang along to the most that summer was Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.”

There’s a reason why gay men have a finely tuned sense of irony.

Here’s a fun fact: before it became another of America’s numerous occasions for large groups of young adults to sleep with and/or spit up on one another, Halloween was a popular holiday among children. In St. Louis in the 1970s, the culture had yet to embrace adult cosplay or the concept that kittens could be made sexy; October 31 was a time for kids to collect fistfuls of fun-size Milky Way bars, thank their elders, and nothing more.

Candy notwithstanding, it wasn’t all that hot a holiday for kids, either. If you wanted to go as, say, C-3PO—as I did for three perfectly adequate years in a row—that meant your parents going to the drugstore and buying a $4 box that included a plastic suffocation hazard of a mask sprayed with carcinogenic gold paint, to be worn atop a vomit-repelling synthetic poncho carrying a fresco of scenes from Star Wars. One would go more as the idea of C-3PO than the droid himself. This didn’t satisfy my need for self-expression, so to amp up the realness, I would totter stiffly between houses, robot arms at perfect 90-degree angles, which would slow, and annoy, my neighborhood trick-or-treat group (and reduce my overall candy haul)—but I like to commit to a performance.

By the time I hit third grade, I was ready to take ownership of my Halloween experience. Since I’d seen some on television, by mid-September I had made the firm decision that for Halloween 1980, I would be a punk rocker. There was plenty of room for interpretation here; to anyone who wasn’t a coastal teenager at the turn of the decade, “punk rock” was a catchall term for “anything you didn’t often see.” Sort of spiky hair: punk. Those plastic sunglasses that were essentially one long narrow lens: very punk. One Specials button on an otherwise pristine denim jacket: Mister, you might as well be GG Allin. I began silently taking an inventory of clothing and household items I could use: Could I tear up an old pair of jeans? Snip a sleeve off a shirt? Cut a head hole in a trash bag and cinch it at the waist with a bike lock? My mind reeled with the possibilities, with the danger and responsibility that making a bold personal statement entails. I decided I’d show my family when the whole costume was thoroughly workshopped and realized.

I went down the street to my friend Molly’s house for dinner later that week and told her family of my tentative trick-or-treating plans. Her mom sprang up; “I have just the