90s

Concerning Flannel, Land Lines, and Paper Routes

/ jameswindale / Leave a comment

Do you remember life before the internet?

“First of all, how dare you?!” I demand as I throw away the AARP form that came in the mail.

My daughter didn’t believe me when I told her I had the same haircut as the kid from Stranger Things.

Was there such a time? Of course there was. Obviously the concept of the internet had been around about as long as I have (1982), but in practical terms it wasn’t useful to me until about 1998 when my family got our first PC; a Gateway 2000 complete with a 56K modem. We had dial up internet that had a number we called from the computer and if it was between 5 and 6 PM you could forget about actually getting connected. Then the computer would scream at you in this high-pitched tone until you got online.

There are varying levels of internet that we might take into consideration. My kids don’t really understand that it wasn’t always portable. Back in the old days when I was a newly minted EMT (back when the men were men and the sheep were scared) we had to use a map book to figure out where we were going. GPS wasn’t user friendly and I remember my step-father’s Magellan crapping out on us in the middle of the woods while we were hunting.

For a long time anything social media based had to be accessed from your desktop or laptop (maybe you had this new thing called WiFi?). If you wanted to know what your friend had for dinner you had to call and ask them. This paragraph would seem strange because posting a picture of your meal is only a recent example of how stupid our society has become.

But life before the internet? The first thing that comes to mind from that Halcyon era was how we stole music. First, you had to have a radio, CD player, or turn table with a cassette tape deck. If you had the song you wanted to steal on CD or LP (even another tape) it was easy: play the song on the platform you had and record it onto the tape. If you didn’t things got a little more complicated…

The radio could play a song, but that meant you had to have some idea of when they’d play it. DJ’s weren’t in the business of letting you know they were about to play a song directly but there could be clues. The easiest was if your song was in the Top 10 and you knew where it was, this was just a matter of waiting. If it wasn’t, you were in for a wait.

It would never fail that you’d be away from the stereo long enough for them to start playing it, and you’d have to dive across your bedroom to hit the PLAY/RECORD button. You could also bet on one song melding into another, or the DJ talking over most of the intro or ending, but since you’re stealing the song you can’t really complain. You could call the radio station and request a song, but you never knew when they’d get around to playing it.

Mix tapes were a thing. No playlists on your phone, that’s too easy and you lose all sense of the art that’s involved in stealing a band’s intellectual property. I’ve explained making of a mix tape to my Zoomer partners, and they’ve seemed interested enough, or maybe they were just being polite. It could take hours if you had the music on hand or weeks to wait for tracks on the radio. Burning CDs wasn’t really a thing until the latter half of my high school years and by then we had Napster and that bright shining moment…

Genuine 90s flannel

There was no On Demand, and certainly no streaming of anything. If you wanted to watch a show after it aired you had to make sure you taped it on VHS. This meant searching for a blank tape, or sacrificing the video from your sister’s ballet recital to get that bootlegged copy of Temple of Doom.

Calling someone’s house was another thing. Before mass use of cell phones we had to call our friends on the landline. If your buddy’s mom answered the phone you’d have to make small talk with them “Mom is good, I’ll let her know you asked for her. Could I talk to Bobby please?” If you got up the nerve to call that girl you liked there was a 100% chance her dad or her older brother would pick up the phone and you’d have to talk to them first.

I remember driving to The Cape with my dad in his old Wrangler. No doors, no roof, which isn’t such a big deal considering Jeeps are still a thing. Keep in mind one thing: to paraphrase an Australian cartoon dog “It was the 80s, man!” I was seated up front at an age that I had my own kids safely in booster seats in back. We also ate cherries off a styrofoam tray straight from the grocery store and Big Macs came in a similar container. Not the most environmentally friendly time.

I feel like we spent more time I outside than today’s kids do. We knew where everyone was because they’re was a pile of bikes dumped in someone’s front yard and we just gravitated toward it like moths to a flame. The signal to come home was the street lights and I remember jumping sketchy ramps on my bike built by my friends and cousins.

Summer camp was a big deal, and I’m watching the local school boards shifting toward year-round school with some concern. Granted, they allow for time off in the year, but that might make it harder for summer camps to operate if there is an unreliable flow of kids to fill cabins. Education is important, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like there’s something about taking a dump in the woods that connects us to our origins.

Gaming wasn’t like it is now. We had computers or consoles, but you weren’t going to play with your friend across town, and forget anyone on the other side of the planet. You could do multiplayer with two, maybe four, players if you had the right set up. If your cartridge didn’t play right the first time you had to blow into it like you were giving it CPR and if it didn’t work after that you did it until you felt dizzy or it worked.

I had to learn the Dewey Decimal System, which was how we looked up books in the library. There was no Google, and my dad ordered a complete set of encyclopedias so we could look something up if we needed to. If it wasn’t in there, a trip to the library was in order.

We got our news from TV, radio, or the newspaper. If I was your paperboy I’d fly past your house on my BMX with an arsenal of wrapped up newspapers, the finest muck Fall River, Massachusetts could rake. I’d then chuck it at your front door at the hour of 6AM keeping a kind of mental score based on where it landed. Maybe you’d tip me, maybe not, but I can guarantee that if your tipped well I’d pick a good one for you out of the bundle, fold it nicely and place it out of the rain so you could read your paper without lawn clippings or dog crap on it.

We were happier for sure, as a quick Google search confirms. This might be because there wasn’t really a 24 hour news cycle and no constant habit of doom scrolling. The news came on certain network channels a few times per day and if it made us unhappy or concerned we could turn it off and walk away. Mind you, I was lucky. I was alert and oriented through the 90s (2000s were a slightly different story) and it was bookended by the Soviet Union and terrorism. There wasn’t much to worry about, at least from a young kid to teenage perspective.

MTV really did play music videos, and was in competition with VH1. Music videos as faaaaaar as the eye could see, sometimes with commentary from Beavis and Butthead. Going back a little farther I can confirm that hair bands, those gloriously effeminate, yet somehow manly, rockers were once gracing the screens of America when the most effective weapon the West could muster against the Godless Soviet hoards was Rock & Roll. *drags on an unfiltered Camel from the driver’s seat of an IROC*

We wrote letters, which is probably my favorite niche thing to reflect on. Getting a text or an email is really impersonal, but a letter, hand written by someone specifically to you was a special thing to find in the mail. It meant someone had taken time out of their day to put pen to paper their thoughts and feelings just for you. I had a pen pal in Australia that I kept up with for a number of years, as well as a girl I met at summer camp.

There’s another reason not to change to year-round school. The friendships I made over long, hot New England summers can’t be replicated in short breaks throughout the year. These were kids who lived out of state from me in ever would have met if we weren’t both out of school at the same time. You’d think with all the tech advancements in learning now it would free up more time to actually be a kid, but that’s not the point of education is it?

My novel Just Say Maybe has an awesome example of how to make a mix tape and is a great example of how we survived in the time before the internet.

Continue reading →

Gray Ghosts and Jim Beam

/ jameswindale / 2 Comments

It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m sitting shotgun beside a man I’ve spent most of my life genuinely afraid of. Grampa isn’t much for conversation, at least with me, and I was far short of excited to learn that I’d be spending three days at a fishing camp in Rangeley, Maine with him. I’m going through with it because the alternative is listening to Mom’s ex-boyfriend crying in our garage as he tosses all the junk he’s filled our house with for the last five years. It’s all going into a dumpster in our driveway and it’s the sort of eyesore that draws neighborhood attention.

9/11 is still two years away and it’s the tail end of a decade that was nice to grow up in. Marcy Playground and Fastball are in my CD player, and they’re slowly getting scored by the laser that reads them. My ten-speed is my primary mode of transportation and I’m able to make my way around town easily enough, enjoying getting lost and trying to make sure I get home in time to claim it isn’t dark yet. It’s a pretty idyllic time bridging the gap between teenage youth and actual adult responsibility.

Why was I going on a fishing trip out of nowhere? Maybe Mom wanted to spare me the grief at the house, or maybe she wanted me to spend some time with the man, but I was having trouble reconciling the relationship I had with Grampa and the objective of the adventure. I’d spent most of my life passively avoiding a man that I was about to take a road trip with.

Fishing isn’t even on my radar at this point. Grampa tried to take me when I was younger but it didn’t take. Mostly, I think, because he expected a 6-year-old to be able to sit still for more than three minutes watching a bobber with a skewered, half-drowned worm on a hook. He ties flies with my uncle and they fish together, bitten by the fly fishing bug decades before. It’s their bonding element. Their special club.

Grampa purchased three-day licenses for us and bought a bunch of flies out of the glass-topped counter. “A Gray Ghost,” he pointed out to me; a name that had exactly zero meaning to me at this point. Our cabin faced the lower lake and I’m told that after the power is turned off I’ll have to flush the toilet with a bucket of water. I’m charmed by the simplicity and immediately wonder if there is a way to spend the rest of my life like this. Just disappear and never be heard from again.

Lakewood Camps is place out of time and there are no real roads to get there; somewhere between Kinnebunk-Nowhere and the third moose on the left; the sort of place where they say things like “A’yuh,” or “Ya cahn’t get there from hea.” He calls the lodge from a gas station pay phone to tell them we were twenty miles away and continue on passing buck-shot-riddled yield signs and endless evergreen forests. A retired Maine Game Warden picked us up at the dock and brought us down the length of the Richardson Lakes on a boat to a place called Middle Dam. At 10 p.m. they shut down the power to discourage the sort of loud booze-hounding and substance abuse I’d be doing with fishing buddies a decade later. You didn’t go up there for that.

We started out just below the dam on what’s known as the Rapid River. I received a short lesson in fly casting and could sense the frustration in his tone as he guided me, neglecting his own rod to make sure I was getting the most out of the trip. I didn’t have much in the way of luck, but Grampa’s tone is such that I want to do well in his eyes. I hate to disappoint people, and he is someone I’m genuinely afraid of, so my motivation is peaked.

We move down the river over the next few hours, rock-hopping from boulder to boulder, trying to keep my back cast out of the trees that line the bank behind us. With his trained eye he manages to spot a fish holding on the downstream side of a boulder on the opposite bank. It takes a few attempts, but I manage to drop the Gray Ghost just upstream of the boulder and let it sweep around, pulling slack out of the line just like Grampa told me. The line goes tight and I look on in horror as the rod bends and I feel the line slip back through my fingers.

“Easy,” he breathes. “Keep the pressure on him and gently pull him in on the line.” I do exactly as he says, almost fearing that the net he’s lowering into the water might get swung on me if I lose this fish connected to me through a few feet of line, feathers, and a barbless hook. In one of those wonders of parenthood, he manages to get the fish to slip effortlessly into the net like I knew what the heck I was doing. I take hold of the net and he’s snapping pictures on his SLR and he’s coaching me on the way to lift the rainbow out of the net to get the hero shot. This is easily the biggest fish I’ve ever caught (which isn’t saying much), dwarfing the bluegills I’d spin cast for in the ponds of my childhood. It kicks and squirms out of my hands before I can turn, splashing into the cold water.

I expect a burn. I’m waiting for the cutting remark of failure I’d learned to associate with a man who grew up bitter and angry at the world for the hand that it had dealt him. Turning shamefully to look in his direction I see his smile, the one my daughter will have in another couple decades. “Very good,” he says. I’m relieved. I’ve passed some kind of test and I feel like I’ve done something that counts in his eyes. My feet, encased in hip waders, are dangling in the river and I can feel the cool pull of the water against my ankles. I look at the rod in my hand feeling the weight and the balance with the reel. I’m in the club now.

Later that night the power is shut off as promised, but we’re sitting out in rocking chairs on the front porch of our cabin. The air is cool despite it being August and I’m glad to be wearing the sweatshirt that Gram told me to pack. Our rods are hung up on pegs behind us for easy access in the morning. Between us there is a pair of glasses and a bit of ice marinating in Jim Beam – working-class bourbon and his preferred brand. It’s something I’ve come to associate with him now and there is always a bottle in my own liquor cabinet today. It’s Jim Beam, Gray Ghosts, Brut aftershave, and the Masons that tie me to Grampa.

The layers that make up the man seem to fall away in the midst of this bull session. I realize there is much more to Grampa than I could have understood from my vantage point. He’d been intimidating in my eyes for years, but now he was different. He seemed a whole person, a human, and I was starting to understand him. He puts his glass down after a thoughtful pull and leans back in his rocking chair looking out on the still lake reflecting the stars in the heavens.

“This…” he says with a sigh, and I get it.

James Windale is the author of Twenty-Five at the Lip, Just Say Maybe, and The Delirium, A Zombie Opera of the Great War. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter