After a high school friend remarked upon the thirty year anniversary of Ritual de lo habitual last week, I realized that 2020 is the thirty year anniversary of, hands down, the best year of my teenage life. Not that any stretch of being a teenager is wholly trouble-free, but even then I remember feeling like being fifteen in 1990 was pretty great. Was I primed to enjoy it so much by my childhood obsession with Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, an early and perfectly perfect incarnation of the now-ubiquitous teen romance? Maybe. If so, I thank the book for preparing me to not miss a thing.
Thirty years ago, I had goofy friends, and the slightly older ones among them could now drive us places: diners, movies, each other’s houses. We had jobs, in places where we all wanted to be. The local pools, the pizza place with an arcade upstairs, the skate shop, the thrift store; we worked, and then we went to where our friends worked and hung out. We stayed after school for hours together, in the darkroom, rehearsing the school play. On the weekends, we gathered and performed for each other, in bands, at open mics. We spent days and weeks doing things like building skate ramps or setting up rehearsal spaces in garages, and then we spent days and weeks watching each other use them.
That year, thirty years ago, we all got crushes on each other and failed to realize that other people had crushes on us. We drove around en masse, in the beds of pickup trucks, crammed into hatchbacks or the massive back seats of our parents’ old cars. We wore amethysts on chains around our necks, drew on our Chucks, wore holes in our Vans, and kept the local record stores in business. That year, I fell in love for the first time, went to my first major concert, had my first job with responsibilities. I found my taste in music and in people; the people I laughed with then are the people I laugh with now, new friends who feel like old friends and my friends from back then who still crack me up over text. We lay around on each other’s couches, floors, beds, and porches at all hours of the day and night. Listening to Ritual, yes, but that year also gave us Flood, Social Distortion, Goo, Bossanova, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, the Twin Peaks soundtrack, the only song I know of written for a girl with my name, and so much more. At that time, I still had the few close friends of my youth around me, kids who liked me when I was plump and awkward, while I was discovering a new group of punks, theater geeks, skaters, and weirdos to love.
That summer I was fifteen, we spent three weeks with my grandparents in Ontario. The boys who lived across the street were instructed by their mother to entertain me, as a favor to my grandmother. I was right in the middle of their ages, and the older one could drive. They let me swim in their pool, watch Spinal Tap and listen to Queen with them in their basement, and tag along when they went downtown to the annual waterfront carnival and fireworks. I manufactured a crush on the older brother’s best friend, Marco, a kid who looked like he should be in a boy band and was so authentically Italian his foyer contained four kinds of marble and his mother tried to feed us something every time we stopped by to pick him up. In the afternoons, I read on the porch and taped songs off Detroit’s alternative rock station, something we didn’t have on the radio back home. At night, I pulled my grandparents’ kitchen phone through the accordion door and sat on the floor by the dining room table to talk to my friend Jay. I told him all of the nothing I was doing in Ontario and he told me all of the nothing that was happening in Indiana and made me miss it less.
When I watch the lifeguards at our pool, flirting and joking and being stunningly happy in the way that only teenagers at their summer jobs can be, I can’t believe how much time has passed. The year I was fifteen, I was more entirely myself than I can remember feeling during any other single year of my life. So many other years and time periods blur together, but I can remember 1990 so vividly, could tell you what I was doing and whom I was doing it with almost month by month. So many places and faces, so much of the time spent laughing until our sides split and tears ran down our cheeks. We were young enough to still enjoy being ridiculous, old enough to know there wouldn’t be very many more years of jumping off the roofs of sheds into backyard pools or sneaking up onto the roofs of our schools without turning into the sorts of townies we heard cautionary tales about.
Thirty years ago, most of the pain and grief and heartbreak of our teenage lives was still ahead of us. We hadn’t yet broken each other’s hearts, or lost friends to suicides and addictions, hadn’t had to make choices about abortions and marriages. We hadn’t destroyed or lost friendships, made relationship-ending mistakes. We weren’t yet judging each other for our choices to leave or stay, to change or remain the same. All that was still to come, but before it did, we had an amazing year together.