Stars In the Hourglass

Before I undertake more silliness; I wanted to write a little about this picture I posted recently:

I remember this picture being taken.  I think it's 1982.  Maybe 1983.  In any event, that's me in the Dr. J high tops.  At the time, I didn't know the sneakers had anything to do with Dr. J.  As a matter of fact, they weren't even my shoes. They were my younger brothers.  I recall that day, my eyes landing on them in our shared bedroom closet and putting them on for a spin.  Why do I remember that?  I don't know; but I do.  That red jacket?  I don't remember too much about that one.  It was not mine.  Probably one of my brother's.  Why I decided to wear it that day with those shoes, is lost to the mists of time.  I also recall exactly what I'm holding.  It's a portable cassette player.  It wasn't a Walkman.  It was some buddy brand.  It had an external speaker, which is what I was listening to as there were no headphones about.  But I had the volume turned way down because Scott's mother was in the other room, watching TV.  She's the one who took the picture, which was really unlike her to do; which is why I probably remember this.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I was listening to two songs in particular on the tape (it was a compilation of some kind).  One was Duran Duran's "Girls On Film."  The other song was Sparks, "Cool Places." I particularly loved the opening of the former.  It was pounding drumbeats layered into the sound of a camera shooting off pictures.  I kept listening to it, over and over. Oh, you know the sound, even though the device that made it probably hasn't been in use for a good thirty years now.  The sound, however, is definitely still around.  It signals "camera" and "picture being taken."

Here's the video, as you might have seen it on MTV at the time in 1981.  There's an uncensored version as well.  This video was quite controversial in its day, I suppose because of all the skin on display; and not neccessarily all the stupidity on display.  I joke; but this video really kind of sums up what the 80's were all about.  

I probably haven't seen this video since it originally aired when MTV actually played music videos.  But I have to confess, it just gave me goosebumps.  Yes, it's stupid and it was actually kind of stupid at the time.  But for me, it represented a kind of fabulousness I aspired to.  Fashion!  Music!  Film! Sumo wrestling!
And now, you're probalby asking yourself: "Who is Scott?"
Scott is the other fellow in the picture.  I can't remember what he's holding.  For some reason I think it's a calculator.  Probably, because if he was working on his math homework, I certainly would have been zero help!  I'm pretty sure there's a pack of cigs laying on the table in front of him.  Mine were probably in that jacket pocket.  So Scott, is no longer with us.  He passed away quite recently.  His full name is Scott E. Gammon.  If you're so invested as to read his obituary, it will come right up in a search.  I'm not going to post it here.  It's a little too "on the nose."  Not that he would care, now.  When he was alive he would've.  But then, whose obiturary is ever posted when they're still alive, outside of General Hospital?  That is to say, he was a very private person.  In fact, he kept his illness so tightly under wraps that most people who knew him, including myself, had zero idea he was even sick.  He died of lung cancer.  
Last September I received a text.  It was from a Massachusetts area code.  It contained a picture of a t-shirt.  On the t-shirt was an a caricature of Esther Rolle as her character from Good Times: Florida Evans.  Beneath the image it said: "Damn! Damn! Damn!"  I wasn't sure of the phone number the text had come from; but I knew the only person on Earth who would've sent me that picture, was Scott.

I should probably explain.  The sit-com, Good Times went into syndication; and in the Boston area, played in the afternoons, five times a week.  So, we would watch it after school.  We both lusted after the pater familias on the show, James Evans, played by John Amos.

Well, at one point in the world of the show, James went off somewhere for work, in construction or something.  When he was to return to Chicago, where they lived, the family was throwing a welcome home party for him.  Florida, for reasons which I've forgotten, goes to the empty apartment for a punch bowl.  I think she gets a phone call, informing her that James has died in an accident.  She hangs up the phone, picks up the bowl and then hurls it to the floor, where it shatters.  This is when she cries, "Damn, damn, damn!"  Scott loved this scene and would often reenact it.  Here it is (and it's actually different from my recollection):

When I saw the image of the t-shirt, I said to myself: "Of course there's a t-shirt." And why wouldn't there be?  It's a Pop-culture prememe that is several things at once.  It's an amazing moment for a sitcom. Unexpected.  It's intense.  But also, it teeters on melodrama; and thus camp.  It clearly resonated with a whole lot of people.  I guess I assumed it was something just Scott and I shared; and it was.  But if it's on t-shirts some near fifty years later, it's now a shared cultural moment.
When I received that image from Scott, I didn't call him.  I'm a bit phone-a-phobic (it's just part of being an introvert). And we'd gotten a tad on the estranged side; which was probably more my fault than his. I did text him back though, asking if it was he that had sent me the message.  I also told him that I wanted to get together with him and go to Kowloon restaurant.  It's in Saugus, Massachusetts, the town we grew up in.  I think it's actually kind of famous.  It's kind of a nexus point for the town and its culture.  Yes, a weird, funky, campy Asian/Polynesian mash-up with not particularly good food and watered down drinks. I even suggested my sister Kate come with us.  I figured he couldn't resist that offer.  He adored her.  But he never responded.  Did I get the Facebook blue thumbs-up?  Maybe.  I'm not sure.  Kowloon was special to me, in regards to Scott, because it was the first restaurant we went to by ourselves, sans parents.  Perhaps our first "grown-up" moment.  I recall paying in cash (bills and coins); and speaking of calculators; Scott producing one so we could figure the tip.  Or did I bring it?  
​Here's the Kowloon in all it's Route 1 glory:

The wall volcano was probably my favorite design element!
I can only see the text with the shirt as his way of telling me something was wrong.  In retrospect.  My first thought was that he had come across it and was as surprised as I was that this in-joke had become an out-joke.  Needless to say, that Kowloon reunion never happened.
Why did he die at such a relatively young age from lung cancer?  I mean, he never did give them up.  I don't know if he ever tried to quit, or cut down.  I don't think he did.  I suspect he may even have been a chain smoker.  But there have been chain smokers who have lived to be a hundred and three.  And there are people younger than Scott was, who never even looked at a cigarette sideways, that were taken away by lung cancer.  Here's something else I remember.  Scott's dad was a smoker.  He too died of lung cancer at a relatively young age.  I remember when he passed away, Scott telling me that one of the last things he said to him was to give up smoking.  Which is ironic, isn't it?  When Scott and I took up the habit at the tender ages of 13 and 14, respectively; it was with a pilfered pack of his dad's Marlboro reds.

As for me with cigarettes, I tried to quit more than once; but I managed to cut it down to a small number.  I finally stopped, altogether, about two years ago.  In Manhattan, of all places; the one place where my glamour clamouring spirit, I would've thought, would've wanted to light up and do a total Fran-Lebowitz-hot-box on the corner of West 23rd and 8th Avenue.  Trust me, I still dream about smoking.  Literally.  I keep thinking about these cigarettes I procured in Canada, where they hide them in a cabinet in the store and then slather the packs with disturbing images of the ravages of smoking.  I thank the heavens they don't sell them here, because I'd probably still be smoking if they did.  They're a brand called Du Maurier (yes, those Du Mauriers).  They were Du Maurier lights, with a recessed filter, just like Parliament, my favorite "go to" American brand.  "I smoke for taste."  That was an old cigarette slogan, and if you've ever been a smoker, you'll get it.

Actually, I think I stopped more out of concern for my teeth than my lungs. My oral rather than respiratory health. So, who says vanity can't be a good thing? 
​Do I worry about my past smoking?  Yes.  Of course I do.  I also worry about all the dry cleaning fluid I absorbed at Camp LeJeune and all the chemical concotions injected into me in the form of vaccinations and the ongoing consumption of pharmaceuticals and of course, let's not forget those delicious micro-plastics...

When Days of Our Lives came into the world on November 8th, 1965, I still had a month our so to go before I came into the world.  The show is still on the air.  I'm still on the air.  When Scott and I used to watch soaps, we did the ABC "Love In the Afternoon" trip.  But sometimes, you'd be channel flipping and you'd come across another show's coming on.  It always seemed to be either Days of Our Lives or The Guiding Light.

Why did so many, if not all, soap operas have these pseudo and not-so-pseudo religious underpinnings to their titles and theme songs?  Particularly when the shows were really all about sinning.  Or was that the point?
Stars are guiding lights, yes?  Is the North Star not the most famous guiding light?  And for all his light and guidance, has it not been because of his followers there's been so much darkness in the world?  How much wrong has been done in his name.  How many snuffed lights?  How much darkness?
We're all stars though, aren't we?  "We are stardust...we are golden..."  I often wonder if we hadn't been toddler/preschoolers; if we'd been born about fifteen years earlier, if Scott and I would've gone to Woodstock if we'd been so predisposed.  I'm not sure.  I mean, we both liked good old fashioned rock enough; but when I see those pictures of all those dirty, scraggly kids literally rolling around in mud, wet blankets and trash (and God knows what else) I get physically uncomfortable. The whole hippy aesthetic didn't appeal to Scott so much.  Now, if Woodstock had been a three day 60's girl-group happening, he would've been there for the opening and closing acts.  To say he adored Diana Ross and the Supremes would be like saying Bambi shits in the woods.  It's simply a given.  Yes, we are all stars; each one of us as compelling as anyone on stage, screen or TV.  Did you know there are more stars than there are grains of sand on our planet?  Well, science assures us there are. Something like 10,000 stars for each grain of sand.  How many grains of sand do you think fall throug the hour glass in that one 30 second clip of the Days opening?  How many in that quantifiable amount?  That amount that could feasibly be counted?  But then how can this be measured if the Universe has no end?  And if it does have points of terminus...what's beyond those points?
Scott's mother took a second picture that very day.  Even more unlike her.  Two pictures of the two of us within an hour?  She was not my biggest fan; particularly at that point in time.  Looking back, I think she thought I was a "bad influence" on her son.  Maybe thought I was to blame for his being gay.  I think steps were taken by several people to separate us.  I mean, we were not casual friends.  We were with each other constantly.  Always.  We were not romantically involved.  We were friends to a point that crossed into siblingship.  We took it for granted until we (and as I said, perhaps others) didn't.  Here's the second picture from that day:

You know, the shine off that  belt buckle has always puzzled me.  Scott's mother was not that short and the camera was properly aimed.  Starshine?  I like to think so.  And when I look at this, I can actually feel that fern behind us.  It was touching my neck.  I felt compelled to look up the symbolic meanings of ferns.  Way more than I ever would've thought; but that's usually the case with anything, really.  Among other things, the fern symbolizes everlasting youth. Hope for the future. Trustworthiness and humility.  This...

Medicinally, perhaps folklorically; I read in my research that fern was used to treat lung hemmorhage.  Don't you think it strange that that would be revealed to me in my first look at the symbolic meanings of the fern?  I do.
The other song I was listening to on that tape was "Cool Places," by Sparks feat. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go's.

This video also kind of sums up the 80's too; but in a differnt way than the glitz and glam of the Duran Duran vid.  The Cool Places clip is the other side of the 80's.  The New Wave side.  The Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink side.  That whole post-modern thing where trash culture was just as good as and a lot more fun than high-culture; or just culture-culture.  It was sardonic.  It was ironic.  It was unironically ironic, I should say.  It was a time when a "cool place" might've been a dumpy pancake shack out on the highway.  Or a dive-bar night club that would let anyone in.  Nobody cared about velvet ropes, VIP rooms and VI-VIP rooms.  The more the merrier!  Because, you know what?  Everybody's got a bomb and we could all die any day, so before we let that happen, let's dance the night away. Dance it away in our vintage outfits that were still not quite vintage because they were only about twenty-five years out of date, thirty tops.  Yes, let's dance in this dump in the moment; not while we film it.  So that it exists as only a memory in our heads, forty years later; when these clothes really will be vintage.
Perhaps those cool places still exist or are about to exist in the orbit of one of those 1,0000000000000000000000000 stars.
I still wanna go to cool places with you.
And after that we'll slip out for a bite, a coffee shop and toast, coffee and juice.
Where's the cool places?

CFR  3/8/24