1982 (11 page)

“Hey. So, are you going to the Police Picnic?”

I had found the courage to speak to Wendy. Barely. My voice sounded like it was forming words for the first time. But I had spoken. This was no minimal feat. I looked down immediately so I wouldn’t have to look into her eyes for any hint of judgment or rejection. Her beautiful, cool, girl eyes. Bowie eyes. After a few moments, there had been no answer to my question, so I re-asked it a bit louder.

“Yeah, so, are you going to the Police Picnic?”

This time she answered. “No. I wish.”

Wendy looked a bit uninterested in speaking to me. But that’s the way cool people were. And this was progress. We
were having a conversation. I hadn’t planned past this point. I struggled to think of the next line and to make it sound natural. Now I was improvising.

“So, like, you didn’t get tickets?”

Wendy momentarily turned to her locker and then looked back up at me. “No. I wish,” she said again. Then she added, “Talking Heads are playing at it, too.”

I nodded. I didn’t really know much about Talking Heads. But I could tell they were cool from the way Wendy said their name. All I really knew was that they had that song that sounded like it had the word “fuck” in it, but it didn’t actually have the word “fuck” in it. I had been to a house party at Rosanna Dray’s place with some of my Grade 9 friends, and when they played that song, everyone sang “fa fa fa fuck” at the chorus part that sounded like “fuck” even though that wasn’t the lyric.

Wendy was still looking at me. She had not turned away. This was my moment.

“Well, I got tickets. So, maybe … well … do you wanna come to the Police Picnic? Like, with me?”

“Umm. Okay.” Wendy smiled.

Just like that, I had a date. I was going to the Police Picnic with Wendy, the older woman. I would be attending the most anticipated summer concert of the year with a teenagegirl version of Bowie. So maybe our “date” wasn’t exactly a romantic or salacious trip to the drive-in. I couldn’t drive. I was barely fifteen. But the agreement was to meet at Finch subway station and head down to the CNE. That was good enough. I was the king. I called and got tickets. They weren’t cheap by my standards. It didn’t matter.

As the weekend of the concert approached in early August, I did a lot of planning for what I was going to wear. It was a month since I’d asked Wendy to go, but I called her once in July to confirm that she was coming. To tell you “I called her” might sound like an innocuous bit of information. But it isn’t. Calling Wendy was no simple task. These kinds of phone calls were not easy in 1982. We didn’t have text messages or Facebook or IM-ing or DM-ing or BBM-ing in the ’80s. Communicating with someone you liked involved high-stakes exposure and risk. To get in touch with Wendy, I had to call her house. This left me vulnerable on all fronts—to the other residents of her house, and to anyone at my house who might hear me. The chances of being discovered, judged, or ridiculed were massive.

We didn’t have mobile phones in 1982. You probably guessed that. But we also didn’t have any kind of cordless phones at all. Not yet. Not in my house. In other words, telephone receivers were attached to wires that went into a box with a dial pad on it, and that box had wires that came out of it and went directly into the wall underneath the box. The wire that was attached to the telephone receiver was called a “phone cord.” That’s right: phone cord. If you are a teenager today, you may not have ever seen those two words together. But I can assure you that these phone cords once existed. Almost all phones had phone cords in 1982. These cords were usually curly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they were curly so that when people were on the phone they could try to uncurl the phone cord as a game during boring parts of the conversation. That’s what people did. But the point is, the phone cord meant that you couldn’t make a call or answer one just anywhere you
wanted. You had to be near the phone box that the phone cord was attached to in order to speak on the telephone.

By the 1990s, even before everyone had mobiles, many families had multiple telephones in their house or a cordless phone or two that they shared. So, by the ’90s, when there was an incoming phone call, people began saying things like, “I’ll get it and take it into the downstairs family room, Dad!” But this wasn’t possible in my house in 1982. You spoke where the phones were. At our house, we had two primary phones attached to the wall. One was in the main hallway at the top of the stairs. The other was in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Both were in the middle of the house so everyone could hear every phone call that was being made. Both had curly phone cords.

I knew I had to call Wendy to confirm our date at the Police Picnic. To maintain a semblance of privacy when speaking to my dream Bowie girl, and to minimize my exposure and embarrassment, I had to be careful. I had to time my phone call just right so that no snoops in my house heard me
and
so that Wendy would be at home and available to take my call. This was near impossible to do. We didn’t send messages to make appointments for phone calls in the early ’80s. The phone call
was
the message. And also, most people didn’t have answering machines, and there was no such thing as voice mail. So, if the intended target of your phone call was not home or unavailable, messages had to be communicated directly through humans. This was terrifying and fraught with potential pitfalls. The objective was to find the perfect sweet spot when various factors in play would lead me straight to speaking with Wendy. A goal that would prove too difficult to meet.

The first time I tried Wendy, things ended fast. It was in mid-July, and I had waited for an afternoon when no one was home and I could use our upstairs phone. A woman that sounded like Wendy’s mother answered. I panicked. I did the instinctive thing to do when the mother of a girl you’re infatuated with picks up the phone—I hung up. Fortunately, there was also no caller ID on phones in 1982, so you could hang up on someone with impunity. Complete discretion. Wendy’s mother probably thought it was some hooligan playing games. She would never know it was me and that this was no game.

The second time I called—the next day—I crossed my fingers and prayed that Wendy would answer the phone herself. On this occasion, thankfully, it was not her mother’s voice at the other end of the line; instead it was her older brother, Paul, who picked up. I decided not to hang up. Bowie would not have hung up. He probably wouldn’t be intimidated. Besides, Paul was Jila’s friend. He was nice, and I thought he might be an easier conduit to Wendy. It turned out he wasn’t necessarily intent on making things so simple.

“Hello?” he answered, with his older-guy voice. Paul was three years older than me. He was my sister’s age, and he often wore a silver-grey vest over a white shirt at school. He had chest hair that you could see peeking out from the top of the shirt that was underneath his silver-grey vest. The chest hair was an indication that Paul was older. Also, his shirt had puffy sleeves the way pirates have those flowing sleeves. Piratetype white shirts were worn by two kinds of people in the early ’80s: pirates and theatre students. Paul was not a pirate. He was quite theatrical. He dressed like Adam Ant. He also wore form-fitting black pants and boots. And he was cool. Of
course, he was Wendy’s brother, so it only made sense that he was cool.

I cleared my throat and tried to sound very mature as I started to speak to Paul while I fiddled with the curly cord on our phone.

“Oh. Hi, Paul. Um … this is Jian. I’m Jila’s brother, from school? You might remember we’ve met, and … well, anyways, I was wondering if …”

“Yeah”—Paul didn’t even let me finish; he was laughing— “she’s here.”

I suppose my affections for Wendy were more transparent than I’d thought. Paul had somehow discovered I was smitten with his sister. Maybe he had figured this out independently, because he was wiser and older and wearing a pirate shirt with a vest. Or maybe Wendy had told her family about the Police Picnic. Maybe they had laughed about it over Sunday family dinner. Maybe they were laughing at me right now. I could hear Paul chuckling as he put down the receiver and called Wendy’s name. I was convinced I heard a tone in his voice that suggested he knew I was taking his sister to a concert, and that he knew she was two years older than me, and that he knew she was like Bowie and out of my league.

After what seemed like ages, Wendy came on the phone. I was worried that she might cancel on me. Maybe she had only agreed to come to the concert with me as a joke. Maybe she never meant it. Or maybe she had forgotten about our impending date and made other plans for August. I still had my fingers crossed while holding the phone when Wendy began speaking. Then, with one opening line, she made it all okay.

“Hi, Jian! The Police Picnic is going to be rad!”

Wendy sounded like she was actually excited. This was excellent news. Things were still on. My July phone gambit had been a success.

As I’ve suggested, the outfit was important. Always. But it was especially important at cool concerts. I had learned as much. I needed to look really New Wave so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself or, more importantly, embarrass Wendy. On the morning of the Police Picnic, I decided on black pants, pointy ankle boots, a silver belt, and a black, short-sleeved, button-up shirt … and my Adidas bag. I had lots of gel in my hair and it was puffy and feathered like one of the members of Spandau Ballet before they changed their look and became preppy.

I fastidiously packed my Adidas bag with all the essential items I figured I needed for my trip to the Police Picnic with Wendy. I decided to bring my brand new Sony Walkman with portable headphones. Walkmans had only just started to become common in the summer of ’82. I was proud I had one, and I’d already made some mix tapes specifically for my Walkman.

I have jotted down a short list of the items I packed in my Adidas bag that morning:

Sony Walkman with Police mix tape inside

portable headphones

extra mix tapes featuring the Beat and Heaven 17

jean jacket

hair gel