Hair Metal, Mullets and Masturbation - How I spent 1988

The day a boy gets his first real stiffy is quite, possibly the second greatest day of life (the greatest is the day he realizes what he can do with it). That first week is like a honeymoon with yourself, where you will spend every available minute consummating your marriage to yourself. But it's also a little like doing heroin...you will spend the rest of your life trying to recreate that high (hint: listening to "Talk dirty to me" on repeat, does NOT help).

For me, that all happened in the summer of 1988.

1988 was a special year for me. I got my first "girlfriend", had a mullet, found my Dad's porno stash, all this with Def Leppard and Poison awesomely singing the soundtrack of my horrendously awkward youth. As a result, I will forever associate those songs with the first Summer my baby batter factory was open for business.

Hey - I said open, not that that I had any customers.

What I did have was a Def Leppard t-shirt that I literally wore every fucking day. I wore it so much, I had to peel it off of my yellowed torso every night lest my parents find it, wash it and it not be available for me to wear the next day. If you would have scraped it, you could have made a sculpture from the play-doh like mixture of grease and dead skin cells that gave the shirt it's strange, corn-dog-esque odor.

But because Hair Metal was huge that summer, I was convinced that shirt was the ticket to getting some "sugar poured on me". I'm still not sure exactly what that means, but it sounded like heavy metal sex to me. So on my smelly, scrawny chicken chest it stayed. And "away" is where the girls mostly stayed (I blame my Mom for not letting me have a pair of sweet tore-up jeans or big glam hair - my commitment to the hair metal scene was half-assed at best). I didn't even have a jean jacket. Where was a kid supposed to show off his "Winger" and "Tesla" patches? Fuck!

Anyways, having a heaping pile of porno at your disposal at that age is great, but it's only natural to start longing for a real human (ask anybody you know who plays a lot of World of Warcraft). Why else would Joe Elliot sing so passionately about love biting? It was clear to me then that girls were so awesome that it sucked not to have one (for love biting or sugar pouring or whatever). Other kids were starting to get girlfriends, and you couldn't go to the Middle school dance with an old Playboy magazine.

So began the quest for a girlfriend (and apparently Lita Ford was out of my proverbial leauge). A long and not-so-epic quest which I shall not retell here because it consists mainly of many hours locked in my room listening to Vince Neil croon "Without you" or those fags in Cinderella whine "don't know what you got till it's gone". That's right! Listen up all you stupid training bra wearing bitches! You don't know! Cinderella understands! Kip Winger understands!

I found extraordinary solace in those hair metal ballads the way fat, lonely, middle aged women do in Lifetime movies. Except I didn't stuff my face with Bon-Bons and low self esteem. They comforted me. Soothed me. I was so forlorn, I even started using the heavy stuff. Yes, I'm talking about "More than words" by Extreme. Don't worry, I've made a full recovery from that dark spot in my life.

I eventually got a girlfriend - by brow-beating her into submission just long enough to shut me up dump my one-armed drummer loving ass. At which point, I needed the soothing power of Sebastian Bach singing "I'll remember you" more than ever, or Bret Michaels to remind me that every rose did indeed have it's thorn.

Truer words have seldom been spoken.

I learned a lot that summer. One, that mullets and ripped up jeans as a fashion would quickly give way to Z Cavaricci pants and French cuffed jeans. Second, that the music of Poison, Def Leppard and Motley Crue have near medicinal properties. And lastly, you'll never get dumped by a Playboy magazine.