Summer of ‘77: The Year We Ruled The World
How one steamy summer day in the city defined us
When I heard that Joey had died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve, I flashbacked to our youth, growing up in a New York suburb forty years earlier, when we ruled the world.
I went to his funeral and sat with friends - some I had not seen in decades. Some I did not immediately recognize as they aged so far beyond my memory of their youthful indestructible bodies.
I re-watched Dazed and Confused — the coming-of-age movie that touched on our themes (Sandlot and Stand by Me were our prequels.)
I know, I know, there are a million late-phase Boomers who can say the same. But our summer of ’77 seemed even more outrageous in all our audacious adolescent glory as we discovered and molded ourselves and each other.
We owned the street, much to the neighbors’ chagrin (and eventual plea to the local police). We had fun at the expense of the adult world. And we did it as a collective — not a gang, not destructive (perhaps a bit self-destructive) or violent, but a diverse community within a community.
Boomboxes with all that great music — a Black Sabbath Paranoid cassette tape awoke my rebel phase (goodbye Elton John and Paul Simon — at least for that decade)
Buying a box of Marlboros in a vending machine for 75 cents
Curb-side basketball — no one wanted to guard sweaty, shirtless Pete
Wearing out our sneakers that we used as brakes for our bikes
Son of Sam serial murders lingering in the background
The first Star Wars movie — coolest opening scene ever!
Stolen beers, and there was always someone old enough to buy.
Building forts in the woods — our primitive refuge to house our indulgences.
Nickel and Dime bags.
Moonlight trailblazing — listening to live Led Zeppelin (No Quarter) and knowing which rocks to step on to cross the creek behind Joey’s house
Our first concert: Pink Floyd Animals tour at Madison Square Garden — if I only knew how special that was as a slice of modern music history.
Our first girls — that first real kiss that meant so much more than the spin-the-bottle practice variety. Does she remember it like I do?
And our forging a bond of friendship that we swore would last forever (like a Bruce Springsteen song), and in some mystical way, some really have — and Joey was in the middle of it all.
Here’s the story that I wrote on Joey’s funeral home tribute page — an attempt to re-capture a sense of what we were about:
On a wicked steamy day, Joey and I took a bus across the Tappan Zee Bridge to the Port Authority on 40th Street in Manhattan. We were on a quest to visit our friend Billy in the burn unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (and smuggle in a box of Marlboros for him).
Billy had climbed the electrical tower behind the neighborhood, fried the left half of his body, fell to the ground, and somehow survived, yet he was never destined to grow old.
We had only loose change after paying for bus fare. Oblivious to distance, we walked the 128 blocks uptown. Visiting hours were just ending, so we had to be a bit sneaky (a skill we were perfecting).
We poured ourselves water from his pink plastic pitcher, helped him drink from a straw, gawked at his charred foot stub, left him his smokes, and walked the 128 blocks back to the bus — a 10-mile roundtrip with just enough to split one drink and some smokes (priorities).
I think we both knew that we would never do anything like that again. We just knew it was the right thing to do at the time, a good excuse for an adventure and a sign of respect to our fallen friend.
We didn’t know how that time in our lives would unfold, and we didn’t care because we didn’t have to — we had each other. We had an unspoken code cemented in loyalty and brotherhood and sisterhood.
Goodbye, my friend; see you down the road or on the trail in the moonlight.
“Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun, shine on your crazy diamond” (Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, 1975)
