On a Heathrow-JFK flight in 1990, three beers in, The Replacements “Tim” on my mustard yellow Walkman, the neither-here-nor-thereness of 35,000 feet loosening things, a ball point pen and a Spiral notebook spread out in front of me to catch what drops.
The song “Waitress in the Sky” comes on and suddenly I’m looking at the Pan Am stewardess with a sideways grin. Then the lyrics: “Sanitation expert, maintenance engineer, garbage man, janitor, and you, my dear”.
That writing could do this, by association belittle, poetically, was a revelation to me. What if, for instance, the lyrics went, “Marilyns, Mother Theresas, Madonnas, and you, my dear,” what would that say?
The surf mags I pored over got less play. In their place: Henry Miller and Jean Cocteau and Burroughs and Ginsberg and Brautigan and Sarte. The patent-leather red Adidas I sported (‘rocked’ had yet to be coined) soon took on an air of superficiality, as did the logo-bedecked baseball caps and painstakingly mussed hairdo.
A recession, Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth and J. Mascis, Rodney King riots in LA, a proliferation of coffee houses and open-mic nights, shaggy sweaters from thrift stores, an appreciation for the weathered over the shiny, the near-disappearance of cocaine, at least in my little world, and a whole lot of pot in its place—these things helped me to shake my pro surfing dream and open to something new.
