I remember once, in I think 1975 or ’76, shaving off just one sideburn and going around like that for a period of time, believing the one sideburn made me a nonconformist — I’m not kidding — and getting into long, serious conversations with girls at parties who would ask me what the lone sideburn ‘meant.’ A lot of the things I remember saying and believing during this period make me literally wince now, to think of it. I remember KISS, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Styx, Jethro Tull, Rush, Deep Purple, and, of course, good old Pink Floyd. I remember BASIC and COBOL. COBOL was what my father’s cost systems hardware ran at his office. He was incredibly knowledgeable about the era’s computers. I remember Sony’s wide pocket transistors and the way that many of the city’s blacks held their radios up to their ear whereas white kids from the suburbs used the optional little earplug, like a CID earbud, which had to be cleaned almost daily or else it got really foul. There was the energy crisis and recession and stagflation, though I cannot remember the order in which these occurred — although I do know the main energy crisis must have happened when I was living back at home after the Lindenhurst College thing, because I got my mother’s tank siphoned out while out partying late at night with old high school friends, which my father was not thrilled about, understandably. I think New York City actually went bankrupt for a while during this period. There was also the 1977 disaster of the State of Illinois’s experiment with making the state sales tax a progressive tax, which I know upset my father a lot but which I neither understood nor cared about at the time. Later, of course, I would understand why making a sales tax progressive is such a terrible idea, and why the resulting chaos more or less cost the governor at the time his job. At the time, though, I don’t remember noticing anything except the unusually terrible crowds and hassle of shopping for the holidays in late ’77. I don’t know if that’s relevant. I doubt anyone outside the state cares very much about this, though there are still some jokes about it among the older wigglers at the REC.
I remember feeling the actual physical feeling of hatred of most commercial rock — such as for disco, which if you were cool you pretty much had to hate, and all rock groups with one-word place names. Boston, Kansas, Chicago, America — I can still feel an almost bodily hatred. And believing that I and maybe one or two friends were among the very, very few people who truly understood what Pink Floyd was trying to say. It’s embarrassing. Most of these almost feel like some other person’s memories. I remember almost none of early childhood, mostly just weird little isolated strobes. The more fragmented the memory is, though, the more it seems to feel authentically mine, which is strange. I wonder if anyone feels as though they’re the same person they seem to remember. It would probably make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn’t even make any sense.
I don’t know if this is enough. I don’t know what anybody else has told you.
Our common word for this kind of nihilist at the time was wastoid.
I remember rooming in a high-rise UIC dorm with a very mod, with-it sophomore from Naperville who also wore sideburns and a leather thong and played the guitar. He saw himself as a nonconformist, and also very unfocused and nihilistic, and deeply into the school’s wastoid drug scene, and drove what I have to admit was a very cool-looking 1972 Firebird that it eventually turned out his parents paid the insurance on. I cannot remember his name, try as I might. UIC stood for the University of Illinois, Chicago Campus, a gigantic urban university. The dorm we roomed in was right on Roosevelt, and our main windows faced a large downtown podiatric clinic — I can’t remember its name, either — which had a huge raised electrified neon sign that rotated on its pole every weekday from 8:00 to 8:00 with the name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668 on one side and on the other a huge colored outline of a human foot — our best guess was a female foot, from the proportions — and I remember that this roommate and I formulated a kind of ritual in which we’d make sure to try to be at the right spot at our windows at 8:00 each night to watch the foot sign go dark and stop rotating when the clinic closed. It always went dark at the same time the clinic’s windows did and we theorized that everything was on one main breaker. The sign’s rotation didn’t stop all at once. It more like slowly wound down, with almost a wheel-of-fortune quality about where it would finally stop. The ritual was that if the sign stopped with the foot facing away, we would go to the UIC library and study, but if it stopped with the foot or any significant part of it facing our windows, we would take it as a ‘sign’ (with the incredibly obvious double entendre) and immediately blow off any homework or supposed responsibility we had and go instead to the Hat, which at that time was the currently hip UIC pub and place to hear bands, and would drink beers and play quarters and tell all the other kids whose parents were paying their tuition about the ritual of the rotating foot in a way that we all appeared nihilistically wastoid and hip. I’m seriously embarrassed to remember things like this. I can remember the podiatrist’s sign and the Hat and what the Hat looked and even smelled like, but I cannot remember this roommate’s name, even though we probably hung out together three or four nights a week that year. The Hat had no relation to Meibeyer’s, which is the main sort of pub for rote examiners here at the REC, and also has a hat motif and an elaborate display-rack of hats, but these are meant to be historical IRS and CPA hats, the hats of serious adults. Meaning the similarity is just a coincidence. There were actually two Hats, as in a franchise — there was the UIC one on Cermak and Western, and another one down in Hyde Park for the more motivated, focused kids at U of Chicago. Everybody at our Hat called the Hyde Park Hat ‘the Yarmulke.’ This roommate was not a bad or evil guy, although he turned out to be able to play only three or four real songs on the guitar, which he played over and over and over, and blatantly rationalized his selling of drugs as a form of social rebellion instead of just pure capitalism, and even at the time I knew he was a total conformist to the late-seventies standards of so-called nonconformity, and sometimes I felt contemptuous of him. I might have despised him a little. As if I was exempt, of course — but this kind of blatant projection and displacement was part of the nihilist hypocrisy of the whole period.
I can remember the ‘Uncola,’ and the way Noxzema commercials always played a big bump-and-grind theme. I seem to remember a lot of wood-pattern designs on things that were not wood, and station wagons with side panels engineered to look like wood. I remember Jimmy Carter addressing the nation in a cardigan, and something about Carter’s brother turning out to be a wastoid and public boob embarrassing the president just by being related to him.