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IT’S time to speak a little of the nature of my relationship with my parents during this period, and of the relationships most kids I knew had with their parents. My folks could be strict, even inflexible, but mostly concerning some aspect of my behavior that impinged directly upon them. When it came to what I chose to do outside the house, they had a single word they frequently directed at me. That word was “big” — as in “You’re big,” usually delivered with a kind of verbal shrug.
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“Big” as a concept was just nebulous enough to be meaningless if defined outside the specific context in which it was meant to be applied: Certainly you could be “big” at 4, meaning that you weren’t supposed to blow bubbles in your chocolate milk; you could be “big” at 10, meaning you wrote your own thank-you notes.
But apron strings were untied a lot younger then, and as you grew up it became a word that, when used by your parents in reference to you, signified that as far as they were concerned you were both capable of and responsible for making your own decisions, even if they were stupid ones.
The first time I went to a party, for instance, I made the monumentally stupid decision to sample every type of alcohol available, in immoderate quantities. I returned home, greeted my parents as nonchalantly as I could manage, and threw up all over myself. “Scucciamens,” my father said, not unaffectionately employing a Sicilian insult, as he put me to bed after cleaning me up. “Here’s a pot if you have to puke again. Grab the wall if the room starts to spin.”
“Big” took for granted that things that are now considered taboo to varying degrees (for example, teenage experimentation with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, peculiar music and clothing, and sex, to name them in the order I discovered them) were necessarily the very things with which kids were going to court encounters, and that such encounters weren’t avoidable accidents but had been sought out, preceded by curiosity and that desire I was talking about earlier.
The idea was to let the hormonal fires raging at the core of adolescence consume some of the fuel that fed them, while putting it all in a kind of useful perspective. I remember my mother talking frankly to me about her various drug experiences. “Heroin, ugh,” she told me. “I threw up.” I never tried it.
I’M sure some variation of “big” exists now, but as far as I can tell, the social conditions that defined it when I was 17 no longer obtain among the members of what I shall call, for lack of a better term, the educated middle classes of New York. Things were — let’s face it — different then. I will admit to a degree of geezerdom in declaring that New York in 2007 isn’t nearly as interesting a place as New York in 1980.
For that matter, New York wasn’t even as interesting a place in 1985 as it was in 1980. Despite New York’s reputation then for dangerousness, even lawlessness, nobody walked around saying: “My! What a bankrupt and anarchic city! Raise the drawbridge! Another day, another struggle to survive!”
The city went about its business, and in many ways the place was heady and wide open in ways that just aren’t possible now. It’s not just that huge swaths of town have become wall-to-wall enclaves of the well-to-do, with their attendant intolerance for heterodoxy and disorder. In 1980 there were still the vestigial remains of the various downtown revolutions that had reinvigorated New York’s music and art scenes and kept Manhattan in the position it had occupied since the 1940s as the cultural center of the world.
CBGB hadn’t yet closed (or become a tourist trap); it was then one of the few places where interesting new bands could perform. Max’s Kansas City (for live music) and the Mudd Club (for dancing) were still thriving, as well as lesser-known joints like TR-3 and the Rock Lounge. A generation of New York kids was introduced to reggae at Tramps’s “Mod Mondays.” British bands whose United States record sales numbered in the thousands headlined at clubs like Hurrah and Irving Plaza.
