The apartment was a brick behemoth with a ner'do'well terrace up a flight of steps, a Midwestern curio of baby-sitting "side jobs" and quiet alcoholism up the sickly, yellow trimmed grass where not even the cheery facade of the newscasters on the local t.v. stations, whatever the gray hues of their motherly pantsuits and pearls, "could ever get to the bottom of" down the chute of so many fast food wrappers and "bumptious hay-rides" of quik-fix solutions like quarreling in-law's and spilled over pots of "Chef-Boy-R-Dee" Macaroni & Cheese, curdled like our hope for a future in this early 90's Bush-era recession.

But for want of despoiled innocence, we skipped about like imps, shielded from the rottener truth of things that made bitter loners crash dump trucks into animal shelters, particularly on "puppy n' kitty" day with "free goldfish" given to those 12 and under.

Our shameful squalor of hokiness, that no one would see-- was shaded in cool shadow or doused in scorching sunshine that made spoiled kids like us fall into a feathery fatigue where "fighting the inertia" would require "a basic grit" back from some time, years ago. . . . . that we didn't have. To the extent you would look at books and tapes from the late '70s or early '80s, you wondered about "the fate" about "those who got it all together" all those years ago "and what kind of glamorous life they're living today", or even "what they'd tell a young boy like you".

Thin, socially well-adjusted people running along a beach in southern California or having "a gang fight" of honor on the mean streets of New York City in grainy, campy film "that didn't quite correspond to life" one-on-one, looking on old cassettes of "The Police" and "U2" from a whole other world of glory "long faded".

How would I hold up?

I had a feeling, "not very well".

One time, around the age of 10 or 11 I went into a McDonald's and was collecting my tray, making my stodgy, weighty way toward a table when these two kids around my age with malevolent expressions started hurling out insults. I was so tuned-out and self-conscious in my own world, that it never occurred to me that I was attempted to be pulled into the locus of this disturbance.

I looked up. . . . . and they bolted out of the restaurant. And there we were on opposite sides of the glass, making faces and giving the middle-finger in an orgy of wildness and savagery that still leaves me stunned to this day. Maybe our nation's youth was sinking too deep into it's depthless Dominoes/Pepsi/Rebox/Sega Genesis corporate Imperium. . . . . and I knew within myself that with all my scratchy old records and dubbed tapes and "yard-sale goodies" from the '70s that I'd never equal that young, impertinent adrenaline rush in a thousand careless, ahistorical generations.

But that's how it was in those days. . . . . just a lone, disconnected dot.