growing up

King of Pain: Always Be?

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 11 Comments

In 1983, I was just about the happiest pup in the play yard.

September 1983

I was a teenager, and everything – almost – was going my way.  In retrospect, it was one of the best years of my life.  I remember one very difficult rite of passage related to losing a good friend to major mistakes (his), but other than that, all of my memories of that year are very positive.  Like all adolescents, a touchstone of my memories is the music.  That year, The Police released Synchronicity.

One of the biggest hits from this album was King of Pain.  I sang it.  I wrote the lyrics.  I drove around town with my friends listening to it.  I hold it as a “Top 10” of my high school years songs.  And I had no more idea what it was about than I knew how to split the atom in my kitchen.

Today of all days, I know what it is about.  I accepted something today at last that I was postponing, postponing mostly due to my desire that it not be true.  Who can say why some things are clear in one interpretation and not in another?  I think it is in the interpretation, but also in the life experience.  I came across a video of another popular music artist singing the song, and in the first listen I got it.  Maybe it’s today.  Maybe it’s that the artist’s gender and age match mine at last.  Maybe I’ll never know.  But listening today, all of the images that for eighteen years have been strange and mysterious suddenly converged into a single, clear message: Futility is painful.

The images in King of Pain are not just about futility.  The images are nearly 100% images of life in its natural state, being exactly where it is “supposed” to be doing exactly what it is “supposed” to do, and yet being unreachable and unable to continue its purpose.

A dead salmon frozen in a waterfall.  A blue whale beached by a spring tide’s ebb.  A king in a position to lead, who is rendered blind.  A piece of cloth, run up a flag pole, whipped about in a wind that won’t stop.  A fossil trapped in a high cliff wall.  A cat unable to come down from a tree I’m sure it joyfully climbed.

This song is a very sad poem about doing everything right and still being in trouble and not knowing what to do next.

I think I’m really very grateful I had no idea what it was about when I was young.  I wouldn’t mind not knowing now.  But there is more…..all is not lost!

Closer to now.

Whenever someone asks what famous person living or dead I’d like to have dinner with, I am never prepared to answer.  Today, I am prepared.  I want to have dinner with Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner.  I want to ask the man who voiced King of Pain where he is now.  It’s not that I don’t think he still understands where he was in 1983; but he’s 60 years old this year and I imagine that after living nearly twice as long now as he had when he first sang his sad and haunting song, he has a new layer of perspective on those images.

Sting, just drop a comment here on the blog, friend.  I’ll email you and set something up.

Growing Up Blind – John Warren (part 2, Junior High)

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 3 Comments

This is part 2 of a 5 part essay for the Essays on a WV Childhood project.  To read part 1, click here.

Growing Up Blind (part 2, Junior High)

The nature of friendships changes between elementary school and junior high school.  In elementary school I was friends with the boys my age who lived in my neighborhood; we played “Kick the Can” and climbed trees and traded comic books.  By junior high, though, friends are generally people who share the same interests.  I was slow to understand this transition and for a period of time in junior high I felt like I didn’t have any friends at all.  (I was also prone to self-pity!)

During this period, I frequently longed for a “best friend” – the kind of ideal companion found in books and movies.  I had a very romanticized perception of this friend in my mind, and frequently envisioned scenarios in which I would suddenly meet this guy and we would just immediately get along perfectly and want to spend every moment together.  I wanted more than just someone who shared my interests:  I wanted an exclusive, one-on-one relationship that would be deep and enduring.  I didn’t have the emotional sophistication to distinguish between the desire for a friend and the desire for something more.

For most of my teenage years I thought I would eventually be the father figure in the same kind of home in which I grew up.  I’d have a wife, some kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs.  For many years I followed the steps I thought I was supposed to take to reach this goal.  My brother always had a girlfriend, so I felt a certain amount of pressure to have one as well.  When I was in junior high I asked a female friend if she wanted to “go” with me, and–voila– we were officially dating.  “Dating” meant we would get each other gifts on birthdays and at Christmas and occasionally go roller skating.  Eventually we broke up; I heard second-hand that she called me “slow.”  I can’t say that I blame her if she was frustrated by the pace of our relationship.  I liked her as a friend, but I was not physically attracted to her.

In the summer of 1983, when I was 15 years old, our church youth group had a discussion about homosexuality.  I don’t remember any details, but it’s one of the only youth group topics significant enough to rate a mention in my journal.  The same year, both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on AIDS.  My parents had a subscription to Newsweek, and I have vague memories of seeing TV news stories about the disease.  Still, those stories were about adult men in San Francisco and New York, people who were far away and barely more real to me than the hobbits I was reading about in The Lord of the Rings.

That summer the first hint of a self-acknowledgement of my sexuality comes in two cryptic journal entries that look something like this:

CB–AZ, LX, YY, VB

“CB” stood for “cute boys” and the initials of the boys I thought were handsome followed the hyphen.  (The initials have been changed to protect the innocent.)  

It was both thrilling and terrifying to put something like this in my journal, even in a form it would be virtually impossible for someone else to decode.

Tomorrow, part 3 of Growing Up Blind – High School.

Image credit: John Warren