In the Summer of 1984, Los Angeles was overwhelmed with Olympic fever, and I was just overwhelmed. I was turning 13 and sitting on the dirty side of the hurricane we call adolescence. My feelings were exacerbated by a Malibu surfer, Jimmy Ganzer, who had just created a line of eponymous surfwear called Jimmy’z. They made girls’ skirts that were something like a bandana clinging to their hips like innocence and held together with a single band of Velcro.
It was also the year I made new friends—friends outside of the small group of Catholic schoolmates I still love to this day. But even amongst friends, interests diverge. If life is a race that we’re all running, my pacing slightly differed from that of many of my peers back then.
I met “Z” while waiting for the RTD Bus at the mall. We smoked Djarum clove cigarettes while we waited. Clove cigarettes were apparently extra bad for you. Information moved slowly at the dawn of the digital age. All we knew was that cigarettes were a slow death, and clove cigarettes were a kind of suicide pact. Lighting a clove, you can taste the oil on the filter, and it’s incredibly good and addictive. The smoke that follows is harsh, and the cigarettes burn with a strong odor and a crackle that sounds like a campfire. They were transgressive and dangerous, and that was the point.
“Z” and I talked about music. We shared an interest in British New Wave and Punk Rock, both hard and soft music, alienating and inclusive, rebellious and melodic—the perfect soundtrack for the conflicting chaos that defined our adolescence. Much like the contradictions we found in music and life, our friendship would be brief and lifelong. But we did some damage in the space between 1984 and the beginning of high school a year later. We met girls, smoked too many cigarettes, and stole too much alcohol. We escaped out of bedroom windows and explored late in the suburban night. We found ourselves in a bit of trouble for hosting a party in a neighbor’s house they had selfishly left vacant.
A few months after we began these shenanigans, John Hughes released perhaps the seminal Gen X film The Breakfast Club, which began with an epigraph on the screen:
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through
These were lines from the second verse of the David Bowie song, Changes. At the time, Bowie was a high priest in our musical church, and the gospel he preached was one of alienation. It did not matter to us that the song was already old - recorded in 1971. The song felt as real as what we were going through and as elusive as those girls in their Jimmy’z skirts. It was haunting and beautiful and memorable and fleeting. It quietly captured our teenage angst, and we sought meaning in the poetry of Bowie’s lyrics. Bowie himself would later discount the value of any meaning we found in his lyrics, “There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along.” How could a man who wrote so many words say they were meaningless? Maybe he just grew up and was changing too.
Z printed the quote on a dot matrix printer, our way of immortalizing the gospel Bowie preached. For our young readers, these printers were basically computer-driven typewriters that could create type or graphics with a print head that moved violently across the page, striking an ink-soaked ribbon. They would print hundreds of little dots that would form images, like a crude version of a Pointillist painting by Seurat.
I taped this above my bedroom door. This act was among the early shots fired in the adolescent wars in the 1980s between my folks and me. Looking back, I don’t believe our parents or most of our teachers were spitting on us, but 13-year-old me certainly did. Taping Bowie’s declaration to my wall made it my own. It was an admission that I didn’t have it figured out, but a warning that adults didn’t either.
I have listened to that song countless times since then. I still love its sweet resignation—the reminder that there is freedom in acceptance. The world around us will change no matter how much resistance we put up. We must bend with it or break in its wake. The syncopated piano chords and the shuffling of the refrain—a hesitant stuttering “Ch-ch-ch-changes”—remind us of our fragility.
My friend and I found different paths in high school—none better, none worse. He had his adventures, and I had mine. When we met again years later, he was more of a Grateful Dead guy. I had wandered through those years, and in some ways, I still am.
Friendships formed under the immense pressure of adolescence are as valuable as diamonds forged from carbon buried deep beneath the Earth. In a life of constant change, those friendships can ground us and bring us home again.
Bowie’s “Changes” was an anthem of our youth not because it gave us answers but because it gave us permission not to have any. It echoed those awkward and exhilarating days and comforted us in the face of uncertainty.
Today, when I hear that stuttering refrain in some quiet moment, I think about my friend and how much has changed—but those memories remain the same, and maybe that’s the sweetest thing of all.
xAP
Lovely as always. ❤️