sagging, so I found the old turquoise suitcase and piled my stash inside. I imagined what it would be like to dress up in a suit and walk around with the suitcase like a businessman. I wanted to paint it black so it seemed less suspicious. The color was odd and kind of garish, like it was announcing itself as a vessel of smut. Even the old 1950s shape of the thing seemed pervy. My family never went on vacations or trips though, so it was a safe and unassuming place.
Joan Jett
I bought the Joan Jett cassette called
Dad charged into my room while I was listening to it and told me to turn it off. Then he ejected the cassette, pulled a bunch of the tape out, and put it on the ground. He lifted his foot high and then stepped on it. He took the cassette box from my hand and looked at the yellow cover art of Joan jumping in the air with her guitar. He said through gritted teeth, “I should just burn this crap.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said, “Sorry.”
“I don’t care for any of this stuff that you listen to,” he said.
He ground his heel into the plastic cassette and into the carpet. The ribbon of the tape surrounded his foot like dead baby snakes.
Dunk Contests
When we were in high school, Maurice and I would sometimes go to my old elementary school and play basketball on its court. We liked it because the hoops were made for little kids and were only eight feet tall. We mimicked our favorite dunkers (Dominique Wilkins, Julius Erving) and had dunk contests. I liked how the nets were made of chain. Each jump shot, each jam, sounded like a slot machine paying out. Once I dunked so hard that the metal backboard lost its screws and crashed to the ground. Those were good times, sweaty and dreamlike.
We played a lot of playground basketball during that time and we started a rivalry with Jeff Jones and Tim Sanders, two of the stars from our school basketball team. We beat them in a game of 2-on-2 once.
I found a book called
The one thing I didn’t like about Maurice at the time was that he was a Lakers fan. My favorite team was the 76ers and I suffered through many postseason heartbreaks around that time. Their championship season in 1983 made up for all of that though. They swept the Lakers in the finals and to celebrate, Mom took me to Burger King.
Echo
Maurice and I found a pile of discarded basketball jerseys at a sporting goods store on Clearwater Avenue. We assumed they were from some small town school that we had never heard of—perhaps a school from Moses Lake or Wenatchee. They said ECHO on the front, with the number underneath. We found the numbers that we thought were the coolest (he was 8, I was 21).
As we rode the bus home (public transportation was new in the Tri-Cities at the time), we decided that we needed a story to go with our new jerseys. Instead of saying “Echo,” we would say it was pronounced “Ee-cho.” It was decided that this was not the name of a school, but rather the name of another planet. A planet that we were from, and a planet where everyone wore Converse shoes, because we had a stout devotion to Chuck Taylors. We thought our enemy planet should be Lovetron, a fictional planet that backboard-shattering basketball star Darryl Dawkins often talked about. On Lovetron, everyone wore Nikes. We refused to wear Nikes. In fact, to this day, I have never worn Nikes.
We called ourselves the Duo of Doom.
Licorice
Maurice and I hung out at this record store in Pasco called the Licorice Donut. We used to buy all our records there. This was when we were really into funk. During the school year we’d even go home for lunch just to watch
Every time we went to the Licorice Donut we’d buy something different. We bought our first hip-hop records there (Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, various Sugar Hill and Def Jam releases) and later we’d have him special order punk rock for us too.
Maurice and I took a Radio/TV class our junior and senior years of high school. It was at the Vocational Center, where kids from other high schools also came to take specialty classes. Our class had a production room where we would record our own raps using the B-side instrumentals. We were supposed to be taping promo spots for the student station. We hung out with these two black kids from Pasco High named Richie Rap and Ronnie Rhyme. Richie dressed like 1984-era Michael Jackson with the red multizippered jacket and black parachute pants (also zippered more than needed) and he always had girls after him because of that. He did well in that regard. He had a nice personality and his rap style was probably the smoothest of all of us. Ronnie was a more awkward guy. He looked too old to be in school and had a slouch. He made the most mistakes with his raps, getting off rhythm, flubbing words, and stepping on others’ lines. We managed to record three or four songs during junior year.
That summer, Maurice and I got a job spinning records at a bowling alley where they had a weekly break- dancing contest. It was strange how being a DJ made it easier to talk to girls. My habit of mixing in New Wave songs with hip-hop eventually cost us the job.
Lionel Live
In 1984, my brother Mark drove Maurice and I across the state to see Lionel Richie at the Tacoma Dome. We had an extra ticket so he went to the show with us, even though he was a stoner and preferred Blue Oyster Cult. Tina Turner opened for him, but it was just before her big comeback and I didn’t really care about her. Even though I had seen a couple of bands in smaller settings, I still consider this my “first big concert.”
About halfway through Lionel’s awesome set, it looked like Mark was about to cry. He was singing along, cheering, and shouting “We love you, Lionel!” between the songs. When Lionel played the old Commodores tune “Brick House” my brother danced the funky chicken. It was like witnessing a religious awakening.
When we got back to Kennewick, Mark wore his Lionel Richie T-shirt unflinchingly. Maybe it was the power of pot, but I’d like to think it was the power of soul.
