Binderama60for60

My teenage years were pure John Hughes. Or at least that’s how I’ve come to recall them. The Summer of 1981 had almost every ingredient of an ’80s teen classic, beginning with an outcast with a heart of gold, his new drivers license, and a summer fast approaching.

A little backstory: I was a dweeb in 1981 and for years before. I’d moved along from the middle school superfecta of thick horn rim glasses, braces, acne and b.o. In the few years since, I got contact lenses, lost the braces, acne came and went, not sure about the b.o. But I was still a dweeb.

All this would change in the summer of 1981. It had to. I really needed it to.

1981 was the year of Reagan, Princess Di, “Raiders…,” Valley Girls, MTV, “Jessie’s Girl,” “Endless Love” and Bruce Springsteen. And Doug.

Having received my drivers license on my 16th birthday, I could now pilot the symbol of teen freedom: the family car, a green Buick station wagon.

On the same day I got my license I applied for a job at Roth’s Tysons Corner 5 movie theaters (The word “cineplex” didn’t really apply). The theater was tucked into the downstairs underbelly of Tysons Corner Mall, back when it was a standalone, single-story structure, the largest in the country for a while. The theaters were something of a dump, with five small chambers and screens, dusty old equipment and the sweet putrid smell of sugar, butter and smoke. Roth’s had a reputation providing for sub-standard movie experiences; the projectors were old and barely maintained; the reels of film, after a few weeks in our possession, would mysteriously break, causing long, unplanned intermissions. Upside: the concession stands are open!

By the time summer rolled around, I was fully indoctrinated into the Roth’s culture. I was trained to tear tickets, pour drinks and dispense popcorn, mop any floor including the gum-stuck carpet, and haul the trash to the dumpster in the tunnel under the mall. We all knew the exact time to meet up in the back of a theater for an 80s brand of gratuitous nude scenes. The pockets of my red usher jacket were scorched through with large burn holes from when projectionists would covertly deposit their lit cigarettes there for the amusement of all. I was a PacMan ninja.

In short, I fit in, kinda.

When June rolled around I became unencumbered with school. The summer was officially LIT and Roth’s was my life. June 19, 1981: Opening day of the two biggest summer blockbusters, “Superman II” and “Cannonball Run.” Stanchions lined the corridor from the box office all the way back to Lums at the Magic Pan. More were arranged in hairpin mazes outside in the direction of Woodward & Lothrop. The place was packed. All the popular kids were there, along with a Kennedy or two.

Sometime in July, I shipped off to art school in Pittsburg. Growing up, I never got to experience summer camp; I was simply too well-adjusted (no offense to my older brothers). The Art Institute had recruited at my school in the spring, and my parents were surprisingly game to have me attend. I bunked in a high-rise dorm at Duquesne University along the Monongahela River. The city was still in comeback mode following the end of the Industrial Revolution and fall of the steel business.

Some nights we’d head down to the river and the 10th Street Bridge that crossed into a neighborhood that not even Sal dare venture. There were girls on the bridge too. Bruce Springsteen’s The River had come out a few months earlier, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, those moments on the bridge conjured up many romantic notions in my 16-year-old imagination, none to be realized.

Back the Roth’s in late July, the summer was buzzing brighter than before. There was alcohol. I still only dabbled so I would often pilot the Buick to Georgetown where those with fake IDs could readily procure. There were 2AM pool parties after the late screenings where clothes sometimes came off. There were one-nighter roadtrips to Ocean City. Rick Springfield came to a record store in Tysons and we got his autograph. There were girls. But, like Ducky, I never got the girl, until I almost did.

The Roths tribe scored a half dozen tickets to Bruce Springsteen at the Capital Centre. Nosebleeds. This was when Bruce still looked unshowered and before concert security was very effective. Somehow we ended up crowded into the fifth row on the floor. I was next to Cora, who everybody had a crush on. Now, I was crushed up against her for several hours of a young Springsteen and his spiritually ecstatic musical revival. A sweaty, heady and raucous good time, with a whiff of emergent teenage libido. Of course, nothing came of it. This isn’t a movie after all.

Senior year was around the corner, and I was eager for my debut, not as a dweeb but as whatever is a rung or two higher. I wasn’t done. There was more to do.

That green Buick station wagon? Well one day I told my parents I was going to drive some friends to Kings Dominion. Instead I drove it to National Airport and hopped a plane to New York City to spend a day with Sal and Peter. Boys of a certain under-age could get away with a lot back then, including admission into a sleazy strip club, drinking too much at a steakhouse, getting mugged in Times Square and retreating to Queens where Peter learned his 15-year-old sister was pregnant. I eventually got home that night and stumbled into the house, explaining to my dear sainted Mother that I had gotten sick on a rollercoaster. Then I really did get sick and went to bed.

That wasn’t the first or last time she was likely onto me for being untruthful, but she knew I was a good kid. And, being a high school teacher, she likely recognized that over the summer I had accelerated my ascension up the social ladder where I belonged, or longed to be.

In my recollection, I think this is pretty close to what really happened in the Summer of ’81.

Fist pump!