Chronicles of the Dawn Walker 5
Up. I’m in the main house. The heating was too high over night so I wake congested. The Spoiler is already up and doing one of the endless yelling, panting, ahhhhhhh!ing exercise videos. Like many supervillains, The Spoiler is self obsessed. Despite the “manifesting” and wellbeing podcasts, The Spoiler wears a grim mask. Unlike MF Doom’s comic book cool, The Spoiler’s mask resembles the sulky annoyance of a well-slapped arse.
Dressed. Out. It’s cold. I’m in a bad mood.
Last night I finished reading the wonderful “Deep Country” by Neil Ansell. The fella lived alone in a Welsh cottage for five years, no electricity, no running water. The book describes his life getting deeply acquainted and tuned to the natural world around him. A gifted naturalist and a fine writer. I feel like the opposite of him. For the first time in a while, I take my Hidizs AP80 Pro music player and jam the Mermaid M1 IEM’s into my ears. There may be bird song this morn, but I shut it out with Eluvium’s beautiful, melancholic, recursive music. I want to go inward.
My mood and the music triggers a whole body immersion memory: I’m 13 or 14 walking through the corridors of Newcastle’s Gosforth High School, headphones on. My first Walkman, the Sony WM-33, with the little useless graphic equalizer. I bought it with money from a Saturday job at Next clothing. Why I was working at Next was a mystery. I remember walking down Northumberland Street and going into every shop with my CV (what the hell was on it? I had done nowt by this point except clock the arcade game Moon Cresta — a fine achievement for sure but hardly conducive to selling sweaters and trousers).
Next was a “Dresser/casuals” shop and at that point in time, I fancied myself a bit of a goth.
Black clothes, Walkman playing Jesus and Mary Chain or John Peel recorded from the night before. I never fully aligned with any tribes at school, I would pick ’n’ mix like sweets from the Co-Op. A little bit of goth today but I never really pulled the look off. I would ask my gran to buy me black clothes but of course, they were all brand new and clean. I gave off more of a Mime look than Dark Lord of The Nether Realm. Hair was newly spiked and flat-topped as was the alternative fashion then, unless you were a Dresser, in which case the lads would have a sweeping “flick” across the forehead.
I’d imagined the flattop would make me look like Dolf Lundgren in the Rockie film or a character out of one of the endlessly popular 80s American movies depicting1950’s teenagers.
I made two fatal errors. First, I would blow dry it with half a can of the cheapest, nastiest hairspray you could buy. The can was enormous and cost about 80p. The cost to the ozone layer, considerably higher. This, with the blowdrying didn’t achieve the the spiky tough boy flattop I desired — it just turned my head into an adorable, pettable fuzz. This would be bad enough but then I wanted a Californian ocean blonde look. Applying Sun-In would surely do the trick. The result was less sun-kissed surfer, more chemical-spill orange mutant.
Taken as a whole, I looked like Beaker from the Muppets. A moody Beaker in Black.
To be fair to my miserable early teen self, I had just endured three extraordinarily tough years. More abuse and trauma than I would experience ever again. Looking back, I’m amazed at my resilience. I couldn’t handle it now that’s for sure. Mary Chain, played as loud as possible somehow gave me peace through its screaming feedback guitars.
Thanks to music, friends and grandparents, I got through my early teens. I slalomed and crashed through High School like a fledging falling through the branches of a tree.
The goth phase came and went. There was a skater phase (The Stupids. Cargo pants), B-Boy (Def Jam, KRS, knock-off MA1 jackets), Acid House Raver (Phuture and Smiley T’s), Graffiti writer (Eric B and Rakim, RUN DMC T’s), Techno Raver (Prodigy, Stussy long sleeves), Indie Boy (Bowl cut and Polkadots) and on and on…
Never quite nailed the look of any of these tribes, always feeling a bit outside but eventually I subsumed them to become something else — me, I suppose.
Today, I’m rocking Normcore or Dadcore. I walk through the Catskills at dawn, a 49-year old man still not sure of who he is or where he should be, always becoming, never arriving. Still lost inside.
