The life change that hit me in 1983 was consequential. I was in my early-30s, a time evoked in songs I rarely listen to anymore. But they show up on my YouTube algorithm and transport me back to days when the last vestiges of youth diminished over a time that now seems like one long, final summer.
Iron Maiden’s “Children of the Damned” cues up, and I’m back in my deep-charcoal Camaro, with its fat Goodriches and custom “Count D” license plate, cruising alone the deserted East Bay shoreline roads where alabaster salt mounds rose as high as Egyptian pyramids.
I’m back in a leather jacket, black jeans, black concert t-shirt, a pair of fingerless leather gloves on the steering wheel.
I'd burned bridges, smoked too much pot and snorted too much coke. I’d dropped out of college, lost my job as an all-purpose laborer, and the halter-topped Led Zeppelin chicks of the 1970s were nowhere to be found. AIDS arrived, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, even for hetero headbangers. Retrenching, I moved in with my grandmother. The role of husband and father was on the horizon, marriage to a woman who wouldn’t know Black Sabbath from Deep Purple.
There was no inkling as I rolled over the crumbling roads, inserting cassettes—W.A.S.P., Quiet Riot, Whitesnake—I still have (most of them won’t play) in the basement. There was an auto wrecking yard at the end of the line, last stop before shimmering glimpses of the bay, and the spires of the San Mateo Bridge. Parking my rod by a tumble-down cyclone fence, I’d walk as near as was allowed to the promontory salt piles harvested from the bay waters. Owned by Leslie Salt, they were like gods of nobody and nothing, destined for shakers and kitchen tables. Only a few stands of eucalyptus, leaves like coins on strings in the reliable afternoon gusts, described the canopied suburbs where Grandma lived, and from which I was escaping. It was beautiful, and no one was out there.
Pulling away I’d toke some pot dealt to me by a friend who still worked at the property management company. Motley Crue’s “Shout at The Devil” comes on, so fresh, their high point and heaviest song. Disco had faded and punk had lost traction to MTV’s corporatizing influence. The raucous New Wave of Metal, British and otherwise, had washed over the landscape, but any sense of rebellion was as burnt out. Notions of challenging societal norms like faith and traditional family with hedonism and the flash-bang glorification of evil were over. Only one ethic remained, one imperative force: it sounded good. It still does.
What also remained was meeting my wife, having kids, and starting a business. Some perma-press slacks and collared shirts from Sears, and a haircut.