I got my first portable stereo when I was eleven. It was a Christmas present. I called it a boom box, even though it had only one big speaker next to the single tape-deck. Box, surely, but boom was limited. The cassette buttons were on top, as was the volume, but the tuner knob was big and fat on the front, up in the corner. It was silverish and grayish, made entirely of plastic. And I thought it was awesome.
I would walk with my stereo, playing my various cassettes. Around the circle of my neighborhood. All over the campground in Alabama where we kept a trailer at Lake Weiss. Across the elementary school playground behind our house. Looking back, I must’ve been an absolute nuisance to anyone I passed. I was blasting our neighbors with The Beatles, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Duran Duran, Alice Cooper and (God help us) Chicago. My parents, usually very observant and corrective when I did something particularly anti-social, didn’t seem to mind. Maybe they liked being able to hear my stereo, to know I was probably okay, even from a distance.
It was during one of those late afternoon walk-abouts that George Carlin saved me.
Suzy lived up the street. She was older than me by a few years. And by all accounts, she was a “bad girl.” This meant that she smoke cigarettes, even when other people were watching. And she kept time with the local “bad boy” — a tall and lanky long-hair named John. He smoked, too.
I was crossing the playground, boom box in hand, when someone yelled at me. “Hey!”
It was Suzy. She and long-haired John were holding court on the big cast-off tires that sat on their side atop a low mound of sawdust. This was during the heyday of the “recycled industrial scrap” playground, when creosote-coated telephone poles were deemed suitable for balance beam use and massive earth-mover tires were arranged as rubber castles for children.
I started to make for the drainage ditch, the one that seperated my back yard from the edge of the playground, but she called again. And she sounded angry.
“Hey!” So I turned and looked in her direction. That’s when I noticed the others. Four or five more were sitting or leaning around them, smoking. Teenagers, mostly.
I’m not sure why I didn’t run. I was a scrawny kid. Really scrawny. But my flight or flail instinct failed to engage, so I stood there. Waiting.
“What ya got on yer radio?” For all of the reputation that preceded her, she’d never said a word to me, but now she was asking questions. Setting me up for a good and solid mocking, it seemed. And it could’ve gone so wrong.
Instead, I walked on over and told her. “George Carlin,” I said.
“Who’s George Carling?”
I’d only just learned of George Carlin a few weeks earlier. One of our number, one out of the handful of gifted junior high geeks, had seen a special on late-night HBO, then gone the extra mile to borrow his dad’s cassette of Carlin On Campus. Copies were made and distributed. Mine was in my boom box. The tape was cued up to “An Incomplete List Of Impolite Words.”
I pressed play.
“We start out lightly with heck, hell, damn, God damn, bitch,
bastard and crud …”
For about the next hour, I played the whole cassette. Front and back. They all loved it. Why would they not? Turns out that the so-called bad kids dug the same comedy as the geeky kids, and for many of the same reasons. After all, this was more than just entertainment. This was verbal ammunition!
When the “Incomplete List” played through a second time, that was it. The other kids all made their excuses and ambled back to wherever they belonged, some of them mumbling thanks as they went. Suzy didn’t say thanks, but gave me one of those cool kid nods and wandered off. John followed her.
It could’ve turned out much differently. I doubt the same reaction would’ve followed a sharing of the latest Duran Duran. Or Michael Jackson.
So here’s to George Carlin.
Here’s to boom boxes.
Here’s to bootleg tapes.
Here’s to unauthorized crash courses in obscenity.
Most of all, here’s to Suzy and John and all those/us misunderstood kids who were really never as bad as they/we feared or as hopeless as they/we seemed.
