16 February 2020
Prologue
Being a fourteen-year-old boy was just a horrible thing. Why? Acne, changing schools and losing familiar patterns of interaction with hometown peers stand out. After I left eighth grade, they put me on a bus and sent me 7 miles away to a regional high school. I was thrown into a population where people from my little burg made up maybe 1 in 10 of the school’s population. Who to trust and what to do, God these were seemingly unanswerable questions.
To be a fourteen-year-old boy who had lost forty pounds over the summer between eighth grade and freshman year, to have grown six inches in the same period so that I now stood six feet tall and to have had my braces off after four years of orthodontic torture meant I was lost.
Nothing was the same. The people from my old school just knew me as fat, weird and ugly; the black horn rim glasses did not help. And yes, having looked at my photos from back then and remembered how I behaved, I was stone weird. My hometown contemporaries treated me as they always had, with disdain. People from the new school don’t understand why I ducked every time someone raised their hand. They didn’t know how many times I got punched just for existing back in your old school.
And then there were the teachers who just didn’t like my mouth and my attitude. There was my homeroom teacher who gave me a detention four out of five nights of the week. That was a great number of missed bus runs home. If only I could have shut my mouth and not always needed to have the last word, things might have been so much different. But Ira Riddle did not like my attitude.
Then there was my science teacher. Round Ron. I did not come up with the name. A kid name Hillman whispered in my ear and it stuck forever. Mr. Nixon too did not like my smart-ass nonstop mouth. It did not take long for him to twist my name up from Todd to Toad. And from there it was only a short step of pedagogical sadism to my having my own green chair with a Dymo’d label that said, “The Toad Stool”. If I tried to switch out that chair Round Ron gave me another detention.
But science class was almost bearable because that girl with the black hair, blue eyes and freckles. Always smiling she was always nice to me. She seemed to think I was funny. She treated me like a human being; she didn’t see the baggage of the weight and braces that was stacked up high in my soul. And as all fourteen-year-old boys do, having been shown kindness I developed a crush, a major crush.
One night I had taken a ride with my aunt because she has some business at the town hall in the town where I went to school. I might have been on the weaning end of high. Not sure on that though, but it would have par for the course. I leaned up against the front of my aunt’s big Ford station wagon and just starred up into space as the minutes ticked by. The astral gazing is one clue I was kind of, sort of high. Suddenly someone right next to me said, “What are you doing me?” I almost jumped out of my skin because I didn’t hear her the black-haired girl from science class come up and move next to me as I leaned against the solid metal grill of that Motown built monster family mover. This shock and lack of attention to my surroundings is a second clue I was mildly high.
Sputtering I spewed out that I was waiting for my aunt who was in the municipal building and I didn’t know how long she would be. The blue-eyed girl with the infectious laugh told me she was happy I wasn’t a pervert just hanging out in the park. She volunteered she was walking home from the YMCA.
And then we just talked and talked because my aunt was apparently caught up in a long conversation in the municipal building. We talked about people we knew in common. We talked about books we liked and I promised to give her your copy of Slaughterhouse Five.
We talked about music and I rambled on about the Grateful Dead and she talked about Elton John. In twenty minutes, we had shares lifetimes of personal history. We moved to the back of my aunt’s car so I could smoke a cigarette. Finally, my aunt came out and we said goodbye. She shrugged and said it looked like I had to go. With the heavy metal sound of that station wagon’s doors opening the moment was over. But that 20 minutes has changed the arc of my high school experience.
Truth be told I was madly in love with her in that high school horny puppy dog way. For me she was and the unobtainable image of romance and lust. I can’t minimize the lust angle here. But what unrolled in reality was that we became fast friends. Hell, we had more shared experiences than most couples who dated all the way through high school did. She was with me the night Richard Nixon was unceremoniously booted from the White House. She smoked dope with me and then stomped through muddy fields singing hymns and songs by the Dead and by Elton John. We shared filthy jokes. For four years she was a point of light that kept high school from being hell.
And then we went off to different colleges.
In the summer 1974 I was living at the beach, in Ocean City, NJ. Elton John’s music was everywhere. He had released all those monster singles from Your Song to Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting. A day never went by when you didn’t hear Daniel or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on a jukebox or a radio, or blasting out of a fun arcade. Prep’s pizza at 34thstreet had a pretty decent jukebox; I mean they had Sugar Magnolia by the Dead on it. But if you went in there later in the evening somebody would always play something or maybe more than one something by Elton John.
I had several of Elton’s albums including one well-worn copy of his debut American album, the one with Your Song. I loved that record and I loved Tumbleweed Connection. I had consumed the Kool-Aid and I was a completest for his music. Well, I didn’t buy Friends but nobody did. It was in cut-out bins for a decade marked down to 99 cents for a new copy.
Well, in Ocean City there was a record store that was situated on Asbury, between 9th and 10th Streets on the west side of the street. The records were way over priced but that had an interesting selection. I would always go and check to primarily see what the Dead and the Airplane were doing, and what might have come out from any of the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But when I was in that record emporium I would flip through each and every bin. There were no shorts visits to a record store for me in 1974.
One day as I was going through the bins there were two copies of Empty Sky, an import Elton John album. I asked the guy at the counter about it and he said he had a special deal for imports and what I was holding was Elton’s real first album. I shelled out several days’ worth of pay for that record. Later that night, after I finished my shift on the boardwalk selling ice cream novelties, I ended up at my cousin’s apartment and played the thing end to end on some very fine speakers. To me Empty Sky was awesome. The high point was a song called Skyline Pigeon.
As I listened to the record again and again, I thought of that lass with black hair, blue eyes and freckles, the big fan of Elton. Knowing that I would be going off to the Midwest to university and she to Rutgers I decided to buy her a copy of the rare album and give it to her as a kind of farewell gift. She told me she loved it. In return she gave me later gave me a copy of Aztec’s Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse. I treasure that gift with all my heart. It is one of the few perfect albums I own.
Now on to Rocketman
Sadly, and with shame showing on my face I must admit I have been consuming a great deal of media. Turns out my local public library has an ample supply of Blu-Ray discs of recent releases. In the past week I have watched Stuber (simple and stupid), MIB International (the same), The Art of Racing in the Rain (gag, ugh, ptewe), and last but not least Rocketman.
My expectation of Rocketman was that it would be a biopic of the life of Elton Hercules John. Not so much. Instead it was a treatment for a fantasy Broadway show that has yet to be produced. If you have seen it, tell were those musical numbers designed for anything but Broadway? Rocketman was also a myth. At no point in the movie did the subject of the picture ever move from being framed as the good guy or victim to being the bad guy. As depicted, Elton at his worst was a morally neutral and that occurred only when he married a woman knowing he was gay.
I was a fan back in the day. I read Crawdaddy, and Creem and Rolling Stone from cover to cover. Make no mistake Elton John was a first-class arse, a bastard of the highest order to quite a number of people. People are not just good and not just bad, and Elton was just another person. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film immensely. Those song and dance numbers were amazing. I really enjoyed the music and even the narrative, but it was a fable, a fantasy. The lack of assigning to Elton responsibility for the darker parts of his history bugged me.
When I go to see a movie that impliedly is based on a true story, I kind of, sort of expect more truth. Rocketman is more a Gabriel Garcia Marquez telling of Reg’s tale. Rocketman is magical realism than biopic.
But there was a moment in the film that sent me tripping down the corridors to those days when I, and most everyone else, loved Elton. It was the scene where he goes to see his father, his cold and distanced father. Elton’s old man asks Elton to autograph an album cover, the one pictured above, the one discussed above, Empty Sky. When I saw that LP Cover it me to summer 1977 and one of those moments of odd congruence of events that don’t really happen, but sometimes really do.
In fall 1974 I went Michigan State and the black-haired girl went 60 northeast to Rutgers. We wrote a few letters back and forth. We agreed to catch up at the Christmas holiday. I really don’t remember when it happened that freshman year, or what exactly happened, but this truest friend decided that university was not for her. We got together a couple of times before I returned for my sophomore year. In one of those meetings she let me know, probably because I asked her to play it, she no longer had her copy of Empty Sky.
When I asked what happened the story was murky but she implied some skullduggery that only happens in college had occurred. She told me she had loaned, or maybe he had borrowed, the LP to a guy named Eric. According to her Eric was her Resident Assistant in the dorm. Although she wanted the LP back, she never had retrieved or received it, from him. Hey, I had spent hard earned money on this disc and I was not happy about this.
Several years pass
So, at the end of 1977 I was elected the president of the undergraduates of the MSU Department of Communication. Probably the biggest perk I got out of the election, besides something to put on my grad school application, was that I was given an office to share on the second floor of the new wing of the Kedzie building on MSU’s campus. The office was to be shared but to this day I have no idea who with, they never showed up.
While I didn’t meet my officemate, I did meet were the two hairy freaks that had the office next to mine. One of them was Ron, another exile from the Delaware Valley. He was a graduate student in Communication but he was so very cool. He had worked on South Street in Philly. He had worked at the Trocadero.
The other guy was from New Jersey, just like me. His name was Eric and he too was a graduate student in Communication. Over the weeks we did all the things people do to get to know each other. We talked about the old home country, the Garden State. We talked about favorite books; I think mine by this time was Frank Herbert’s Dune. We all need the spice.
One day in my office got around to music. We talked about the Dead, the Who and eventually got to Elton John. I bragged that I had Elton’s first album and import. Eric told me he owned it too. At that point things began to click in my head. Eric was from New Jersey. He went to Rutgers. He owned a copy of Empty Sky.
I very clearly and unambiguously said, “You don’t own a copy of Empty Sky. You stole it from Kathy and she wants it back.” I believe his response was the ever popular, “How the fuck did you know that?” He just looked at me flummoxed. After a few seconds he offered up that I must be that guy from south Jersey that gave it to her and that he didn’t steal it, he just didn’t have the chance to give it back. Quickly, he made me come into his office while he searched the books on his shelves. Eventually he pulled down one and opened it up and there was her signature, he had bought the book from her.
Eric and I became good friends. My now wife even took a class from him, Com 100 I believe, or as she describes it Mastering Underwater Basket Weaving. To this day she has disdain for what she asserts was my puffball major. Eric and I did the Jersey thing and when Springsteen came and played our 5,500-seat hockey arena we went and saw him. Twice. Two of the greatest concerts ever.
I lost touch with the blue-eyed freckled girl, but life is such that people drift in and drift out of your life and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I still keep up with Dean Eric on Facebook. And my wife loves Aztec Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse as much as I do My wife was a big Elton fan too. When I was in law school we went and saw him. The concert was a great show, Elton still had his voice then. Due to a tip I received in line while waiting at the Ticketmaster outlet in the old downtown Detroit Hudson’s were the closest people in Joe Louis Arena to Elton due to an odd stage configuration.
A copy of a record flashed in a movie reminded me of how many times I have found the world smaller that I thought it ever could be. Two guys shooting the shit 600 miles from home talk about a record and find there are connected by a person they both thought was a wonderful human being. Small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it.
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