Messy
Messy: A Tainted Memoir by Ian Gonzales
It all started when I was about 11 years old…
I had a permanent case of bed head, I wore my Grandfather’s throwaway eyeglass frames and a hand-me-down winter coat with the most unique hood you ever did see.
The top of the hood came to a peak, similar to the mountain seen in the Paramount Pictures logo. The colors of the coat were quite unflattering: red, black and yellow. I looked like a damn Cold War Soviet Space Rocket. The kids in the 6th Grade called me Sputnik. This added insult to injury because Grandpa would always talk about “those damned commies” in a rather loud tone. He had a hearing problem and assumed everyone else in the world did as well.
American children develop a fashion sense at a very young age. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, we were bombarded with fashion on TV. I wanted in on the fashion scene. I was willing to wear clothes that I wasn’t really into, just so I could curb the endless verbal assaults. However, my family didn’t have a lot of money, so my clothes came from K Mart and thrift shops. Needless to say, my fashion style was still the subject of much recess mockery.
After the Sputnik debacle, I decided to give up on fashion entirely. I realized I would never escape the taunts, so why bother wearing clothes that didn’t represent me as a person.
I invested 3 weeks worth of allowance in what I thought was a sweet pair of New York Rangers Sweatpants and a Batman # 1 T-Shirt. I loved hockey and comics at the time, so what better clothes to wear than clothes that representmy interests, right?
I bought the Batman shirt at my local comic book store. Actually, I special ordered it because I thought it was so amazing. It was a white, cotton t-shirt with a practically ironed on reproduction of the cover of Batman # 1 in all its 4-color glory. Batman an d Robin were swinging off my 12 year-old McGut. It was so cool.
The sweatpants were problematic, since no K-Mart sweatpants had pockets. However, I wasn’t too concerned, as I never really carried money on me anyway (it always got stolen by Eddie O’Mara and his thugs). The pants were blue, they had a Rangers logo on the right thigh and the word ‘RANGERS” down the right leg. They were totally awesome, to the max! My prepubescent self thought the kids were going to go apeshit and realize how I was.
Stop laughing. Seriously.
They wound up stuffing me in a Good Will bin.
Once I hit high-school, I’d acquired a taste for jeans and slightly less obnoxious t-shirts. Unfortunately, the only jeans I could afford at that tender age were fucking HUGE. It was slightly serendipitous since baggy clothes were in those years, if you weren’t a white kid from suburbia. At that point, about the only thing I had going for me was that I liked the Clash. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to tell anybody this until I was 15.
Sophomore year was the year things started to look up. I got invited to a show at a church in Newark. I got a ride to the show and met some classmates, one of whom was wearing a Clash shirt, “Straight To Hell” I believe. The irony of a catholic school kid wearing a shirt with skulls that said “Straight To Hell” was not lost on me. We struck up a conversation about Combat Rock being the Clash’s least cohesive record. Ever since then, people thought I knew what I was talking about when it came to music. I don’t know much. I just rolled with it.
It seemed, I was in like Flint. Especially since a few weeks later, a bunch of kids in school started wearing baggy jeans, therefore negating my previous fashion faux pas. While I may have been a mess in grammar school, I appeared to have cleaned up my act. Either that, or that, or maturity began to take hold of my peers. I’d like to think it’s the former.
Copyright 2005 Ian Gonzales
