Party of One by Dave Holmes Read Free Book Online

you would put his headphones back on and resume listening to Twisted Sister or Mötley Crüe or whatever other group of men in bustiers, fishnet stockings, and full faces of L’Oréal products he had been enjoying before he accused you of being gay for holding your books the wrong way.

    *2 No, but really:
Smash Hits
hipped me to the existence of a UK Top 10 hit called “Starting Together” by a young Brit named Su Pollard, who got a two-page spread and a pull-quote: “I used to do tap dance shows for me mum, right there on the lino!” I never did hear her song, but her sassy specs, creative name spelling, and devil-may-care hair spikes convinced me she was the real deal. I wrote her name across the spine of my binder in bold letters: SU POLLARD. In the years since, I have done my research, and it turns out Su Pollard was the star of a family-hour sitcom called
Hi-de-Hi!
and a regular on the morning chat shows. What I did at age thirteen is the equivalent of a British kid today trying to earn credibility by scrawling KELLY RIPA across the cover of a notebook.

When you’re in the middle of your teenage years, all you want to do is be an adult. And in the middle of the 1980s, pop culture seemed to want that for you. Teenagers voluntarily listened to albums by middle-aged and/or bald guys like Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Winwood. The big show on ABC was
Moonlighting,
where Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd—both openly in their thirties—solved crimes and threatened to have sex with each other. In the monologue of the first episode of the 1986–1987 season of
Saturday Night Live,
host Sigourney Weaver brought out playwright Christopher Durang to give a quick, tongue-in-cheek dissertation on the work of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. I will repeat:
there was a playwright on
Saturday Night Live
once.
These were heady times. It felt like American culture wanted me to be thirty-two with a loft in TriBeCa, to read all the books, to be glib.
    I was fifteen in 1986—too young for a proper job, too old to spend all day at the neighborhood pool, just the right age to start plotting an escape. Having left the Candy Store behind for the summer, Ned and I hatched a plan: there was a summer school for artsy kids in St. Louis called the Mark Twain Summer Institute, Mr. Twain being one of Missouri’s prized offspring. You would select a course of study—creative writing, dance, drama, painting, or, for some reason, economics—and spend six weeks of your summer working at it. It was all we wanted to do. (It was
almost
all we wanted to do; I had seen an ad for the Bennington July Program in the back of my parents’
New York Times Magazine.
A summer doing white drugs in Vermont with young Bret Easton Ellises would have been a nonstarter.) I begged my parents to enroll me in the creative writing program for the summer. They did. So did Ned’s. We couldn’t wait.
    We arrived dressed exactly as we would have been on a casual spring Friday at Priory—madras shorts, a sensible Polo—and immediately felt out of place. On the first day of Mark Twain, it was clear: the weird kids were in charge here. These were kids who took dance seriously, kids who had thought their haircuts all the way through. These were boys who could rock a Guess jean with confidence. These were wearers of black trench coats, even in the punishing Missouri humidity. There would be a new social order here.
    The creative writing teacher was a professor at nearby Washington University with a pushbroom of a mustache, and the class was a cross section of a city I’d only seen a sliver of. Black kids from up North. Old-money kids from the Central West End. A girl in a black silk cape and matching lipstick—Tabitha, with a long
i
and the accent on the second syllable. Surely she had been regular-style
Tab
itha when school had let out in May, but here she would be Ta
by
tha.
    And then a boy flounced in, a few minutes late for the first session. A boy with