Party of One Read Online Free Page A

Casey got it.
    By the time he got to #15, I’d have to shower and get ready for Mass, but once a song made it that far up the charts, I’d heard it enough. Plus, if Father Shea did a short enough homily, we’d make it back to the car in time to hear what was #1. A thrilling moment, even during the grim, endless reign of “Bette Davis Eyes.”
    My roller-skating got pretty good with all that practice every Sunday, so I took my act on the road. There was a roller rink a couple towns over, and it cost only a couple bucks to spend a weekend afternoon there. I couldn’t get anyone to go with me, and I could not have cared less. Each week I wore the same thing: maroon rugby shirt with horizontal khaki and navy stripes, blue jeans held up by rainbow suspenders. I requested the same song: “I’m Alive” by ELO, from the
Xanadu
soundtrack, and I skated around and around on my own. Only when the DJ announced the snowball—where one couple skates, and then breaks up and finds new partners, and then two couples become four, and so on, until everyone who has experienced puberty has a skating partner—would I take a crucial break for Bugles and a Mr. PiBB.
I don’t need to be in a couple,
I figured.
I’ve had my
Xanadu
moment and I’m dressed like Mork. To ask for more would be selfish.
    And then in a flash, my brothers were off to college. Dan went to Notre Dame, Steve two years later to Creighton. The timing could not have been better: Dan hit college just in time for the golden age of what we were then calling “college music.” He came back home from his freshman year with a Peaches Records & Tapes crate full of new treasures: the Clash, Squeeze, the Specials and the Pretenders and the English Beat. He caught the wave at the perfect time, and I got to reap the benefits. While he was gone at his summer job selling shirts at Brooks Brothers downtown, I rifled through and listened to messages from another planet: Split Enz’s
True Colours,
XTC’s
Black Sea,
U2’s
Boy.
Fine bands whose best quality was that nobody else at school had ever heard of them.
    Steve had hopped off the soul train by the time he got back from his freshman year; Magic 108 was starting to work some rap songs into their rotation.
Anyone
can rap,
we thought.
That’s not music.
We agreed it was a fad that wouldn’t even make it to 1983. The only thing keeping him in the fold was a young artist out of Minneapolis named Prince, and his protégés The Time. Filthy dirty funk music. Exactly what the country’s Catholic white boys didn’t know they needed.
    When they moved out, cable TV moved in. We didn’t get it for a few years, despite my begging—“Filth! Vulgar! N.O. spells
NO,
” Mom said—but my friend Pete down the street did, and we organized a barter system: he could come to my house and play the video games his parents denied him, and I would be able to spend an equal amount of time sitting in front of MTV at his. I remember the first time we flicked over to that channel together and were greeted with the sexily menacing pleather-and-neon jungle of Total Coelo’s “I Eat Cannibals.” We sat back in slack-jawed satisfaction and didn’t move for months.
    What to the untrained eye looked like vegging out in front of the television was actually me silently plotting a way to crawl inside.
    Looking back, I think my family raised me right. There were probably some lessons about decency and fairness and manners in there somewhere—who can remember?—but the main thing my parents and brothers taught me by example was how to appreciate pop culture and music. I want to thank them and also explain to them that I am their fault.
    At the time of writing, both of my brothers listen to Toby Keith and my parents pretty much exclusively watch Fox News, at the volume level of a My Bloody Valentine concert. It’s heartbreaking, but at least they left me something valuable before they checked out.
    ----

    *1 My mom’s a magnet for boldface names, in