35 Years Old

Times of Birth

I’ve been working on other Stacks. Sat back and forth between a nearly perished deckchair and the sturdy iron barstool at my kitchen island, I’ve spent hours recalling the past. These recollections follow me to bed. On Stack haunted nights, as I attempt to keep corpselike, on my back, masked eyes facing the vaulted ceiling, I invariably spiral through a phantasmagoric vortex of hypnagogic memory. The chittering fan above swirls histories throughout Hollywood seasons. In the small hours of this morning, as metallic clatter and schizophrenic musings rang in the alley behind my home, I realized that, thirty-five years ago, our clothes were atrocious. Our clothes weren’t oversized. They were ill-fitting. The 40” waist on the old work pants pilfered from my grandfather and the preferred XXL sized Give Me Convenience or Give me Death tee you might see me wearing if you flip open the original Dork sleeve are entirely unflattering, given my fifteen year measurements.

That slovenly look was already trending its way into my wardrobe at the time of AFI’s first performance at the local amphitheater but what I intuitively chose for that debut fit my frame; the skull print Life’s A Beach shorts were carried over from the ’80s. My small Crow tee shirt was new. The four-parter comic book series was only two issues deep. Any schlocky film adaption seemed an impossibility for such an underground work. Between ’89 and ’92, every Halloween morning I would paint that antihero’s black smile over mine. As my open trench blew through the breezeways of our high school (a layer I’d consistently wear while out of costume), I’d only be asked “are you a clown?”