I’ve been thinking about this quote I’ve seen going around lately: “Millennials were raised for a world that doesn’t exist.” This hit me hard, and made me take stock of all the disasters this country has dumped on my generation since the minute I became “an adult”: economic collapses, terrorist attacks, two decades-long wars, increasingly volatile weather patterns, a vanishing job market, a parasitic healthcare system, four years of an aspiring fascist for President, and that Netflix show where the dating contestants dress up as horny animals. We’re trapped in this nightmare world boomers built.
I tried to remember the first moment I sensed the doom we’d all be headed for, and what immediately came to mind was my first week of college, which also happened to be the week of an internationally cataclysmic event. I thought about writing about that experience of watching a generation’s future go up in flames and feeling like I’d lost the wide-eyed optimism of my youth, then I realized I already did. I released a zine called WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG earlier this summer in which I tried to write a few personal essays that were spaced out through my life. I figured, since I’m feeling disasterstolgic, I might as well share that dooming-of-age essay in today’s newsletter. You can read it below.
Also: I’ve been working my ass off on some ~*new stuff*~ that I’ll be adding to my store later this month. To make room for that, I’m going to let WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG go out of print for a while soon. So, if you’ve been meaning to pick up a copy, this is your last chance before I pack it up for the foreseeable future. And if you’re saying to yourself, “Hey I wanna be the first to hear about that ~*new stuff*~ AND also I demand discounts on it. How can I get that?” Wow, great question. Paying REPLY ALT subscribers get first notice on everything I sell! Here, I’ll mark down the subscription price:
OK, enjoy the essay. Thanks for putting up with me while I shamelessly self-promote through the End Times. Also, I’ve been banking several tons of interviews and features to run on REPLY ALT over the next two months, mostly related to my forthcoming book, SELLOUT. Coming soon. Thanks for the patience!
THE REVOLUTION SUMMER
Actually I need to pull over and make another stop.
This time it’s in the summer when I turn 18. The Revolution Summer.
My friends and I call it that because that’s what Rites of Spring called it in 1985 and that’s what Reversal of Man called it in 1998 and so that’s what we call it in 2001. It’s those two months after high school ends, right in the sweet spot between the strict confines of adolescence and the soul-crushing grind of the real world. You can feel adulthood waiting for you around the corner so you tell it repeatedly, at each and every chance you get, FUCK YOU. Every reckless day and every carefree night becomes an act of rebellion against the inevitable. You become a walking, talking middle finger to the world.
The soundtrack to these months is Reversal of Man’s Revolution Summer ten-inch which I have recorded onto a cassette and listen to relentlessly in my Grand Am. It’s the perfect kind of music for a group of teenagers hellbent on liberation. Relentlessly loud and deliberately obnoxious. it is to be listened to at full volume or not at all. But even better than the music is the insert that comes with the record which contains an essay—a manifesto, really—about the power of The Revolution Summer and it goes like this:
i’ve lived that perfect summer that everyone writes and sings about and i want nothing more than to go back. i couldn't tell you exactly when or where it ended. somewhere between 113th street and exit 75. i couldn't tell you exactly when my friends all started to move away or where some of them went. i couldn't tell you why some of them stop believing in themselves and each other but it happened, that summer i forgot everything that i ever worried about, school, parents, work, fuck all that. i was too busy swimming until my toes even pruned and laughing so hard i thought I'd throw up or staying up so late we all just lives the next day. we did it all. some of us graduated and some of us dropped out but we were all through with the fat christian guidance counselors and classroom jail cells that smell of a mix between hospitals and two #2 pencils, pep rallies, overcooked pizza, undercooked fries and pledges of allegiance. fuck it all to hell.
Fuck it all to hell. My group of friends lives by this credo. We create our own version of this in 2001 and turn Staten Island into our playground for destruction. Staten Island is an easy place to hate. It’s a foul-smelling land mass inhabited by the loudest, ugliest toughguys on earth. We spend those eight weeks doing the dumbest, most dangerous shit imaginable in the name of Youth! and Freedom!
One afternoon we find two office chairs in a dumpster and spend all day racing them down a giant hill. My shirt looks like Swiss cheese after a while because I’ve picked up road rash from eating shit on the pavement so many times. It becomes a contest to see who can eat shit the hardest and somehow none of us gets seriously injured. It is The Revolution Summer and we are invincible.
Tami and our friend Matt work at an ice cream shop and when their bosses aren’t around we eat so many banana fudge splits that we get belly aches. Sometimes we fill birthday balloons up with whipped cream and set them free in the parking lot. One day Matt takes a shit in a shoebox and hides it in the drop tile ceiling. The customers that come into the shop all make faces like they smell something bad. I’m not sure why he did this and I’m not sure why it’s so funny, but he did and it is.
Our friend Derek works as a sandwich artist at Subway and whenever a customer collects enough stamps on their club card to redeem it for a free sub, he slides it into his pocket. We amass a stack of these cards and they feed us for the whole summer. All we have to do is pretend the names on the cards belong to us. So if anyone asks I am 52-year-old Diane Parcelli and I would like a footlong meatball and cheese please.
Through a stroke of good fortune, we inherit a giant heap of clunky old computer monitors that have big orange stickers on them labeled MARKED FOR DESTRUCTION. One by one, we drop them off of rooftops to hear the noise they make when the vacuums inside them hit the ground and explode like whoooooosh.
Our favorite rainy day activity is making prank calls. We call old people and try to confuse them by asking nonsensical questions like “Is anyone in your home made of butter?” After we badger one old guy for ten minutes he finally says, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can do anything for you.” We burst out laughing and quote this phrase at each other for the rest of the summer. It’s funny because he was right. No adult can do anything for us.
The best prank call we ever pull off though is the time we sit in the parking lot of a shopping center where there’s a tanning salon right next to a discount store. I call the tanning salon and tell the tan lady at the desk that I work in the discount store’s warehouse and I think she’s really cute. “Yeah so how bout I come ovah there and we get lunch or sumthin?” I tell her. She says no thank you many times and then I finally say, “Nah nah I’m on my way ovah.” Then Tami calls the discount store and says, “Um I like work at the tanning salon next door and like there are some heavy boxes and I’m like all by myself here. Can you like send one of your warehouse guys over for like two minutes to help me real quick?” And then we sit in the parking lot and watch as a warehouse guy walks next door and enters the tanning salon. We see the tan lady through the window and she’s shaking her head like no no no thank you NO THANK YOU. We laugh so hard in the car that the windows fog up.
We jump off balconies into swimming pools. We cram into sweaty screamo shows in tiny barns in New Jersey. We are banned from every McDonald’s ball pit in the tri-state area. We steal every Black Flag shirt from Hot Topic, not so much because we need them, but to free them from the hands of an undeserving corporation. It’s a liberation mission.
One day we’re late for a movie and Derek is speeding along Arthur Kill Road. Tami is riding in the passenger seat and I’m in the back. All of a sudden a car turns in front of us at an intersection and we smash into it at full speed. The airbags deploy and when the crashing noises stop Derek asks if everybody’s OK. Tami turns around to look at me and blood is dripping from her nose. I jump out of the car and try to open her door but it is crumpled and jammed shut. I am scrawny and underweight but in that moment I somehow possess enough strength to rip the door open until the metal siding bends. I pull her out and take my shirt off and give it to her to soak up the blood. An ambulance comes and even though Tami feels OK, the EMT tells us we still have to go to the emergency room. She is 17 and that’s the rule for minors, he says. After an hour at the hospital, she is released and later that night we’re on the beach firing bottle rockets at the ocean like nothing happened. It is The Revolution Summer and we are invincible.
In September the summer ends and we all go our separate ways to college. Even though it’s my first week of school and my friends are far away, I’m desperately clinging to the last embers of The Revolution Summer by listening to Reversal of Man at full volume on the drive to class in the morning. Early one Tuesday I’m driving down Hylan Boulevard and there is more traffic than usual and a ton of ambulances are whizzing past me but I don’t think much of it. I just turn up the stereo and drown them out with the soundtrack to The Revolution Summer.
When I get to my first class there are fewer students than there probably should be for the first week of school. I’m sitting next to another freshman named Heather, a blonde sociology major from New Jersey who wears ridiculously low cut jeans which are always showing off her insanely elaborate underwear. I ask Heather what’s going on and where everybody is and she says, “Some plane hit one of the Twin Tower buildings.”
“Oh my god,” I say. “I love it.”
I say this because I don’t yet grasp the severity of the situation. People fuck up royally all the time in New York. Sometimes the Staten Island Ferry captain crashes into the dock or a subway conductor pulls the brake so hard that passengers fall down. The general rule is that as long as no one dies, it’s okay to laugh about it. They’re just those New York things you shake your head about and say, “Only in New York, man.” I figure it’s just one of those minor fuckups, like a plane flew a few feet too low and clipped that little antenna sticking out of the top of one of the buildings or something. Only in New York, man.
The professor never shows up and after fifteen minutes the class disperses in confusion. I start walking toward my friend’s dorm to find out if his class is also cancelled but when I look off in the distance from the top of the hill I can see the Twin Towers across the harbor. It wasn’t the building’s antenna that got clipped. Both of the towers are smoking, right from the center.
I get to my friend’s dorm room on the seventh floor and we have a perfect view of the smoking Twin Towers. We have the news on the TV in the background and it’s on a delay from what we’re watching with our own eyes. The smoke cloud suddenly gets much bigger out the window and my friend says “Holy shit I think the tower just collapsed.” Then 20 seconds later the news woman on TV says “And the tower has just collapsed.”
We all feel the weight of the day but at the same time it still feels like one of those Only In New York Things, Man. In between the seriousness of it all we laugh and make jokes and quote our favorite movies like we normally do. Everything is awful today but somehow it feels like it’s just one bad day, as if everything will be fixed by tomorrow and will go back to normal. None of us realizes yet that this is the event that will shape the rest of our lives. Nobody thinks about the future. Who thinks about the future in college?
After a couple of hours someone in the dorm tells us that the school is accepting blood donations in the main hall. We start walking down the little campus path towards the building and make our little jokes along the way. My pre-paid cell phone rings and it’s Tami. I pick up and make my little jokes to her while I tell her about giving blood.
But she is not making jokes with me like usual. She’s not using the same voice she makes on her prank calls. Her voice is very serious and she says in her serious voice:
“Why are you laughing?”
The way she says it makes me feel I’m in trouble or something. It snaps me out of the juvenile, delusional trance I was in. Why was I laughing? I didn’t know anymore.
Tami’s dad is a captain in the FDNY. He left for work that morning, unsure if he’d come back. He returned the next day unharmed but couldn’t say the same for his engine and ladder company, which lost seven men.
Tami’s dad spends the next year attending funerals, visiting widows, and being presented with medals and awards at various ceremonies. The city renames a street in Brooklyn after his lost men—Seven in Heaven Way. He and I don’t talk about any of it whenever we all eat dinner together though. Mostly we talk about the Yankees or The Beatles. We talk about anything other than what it’s like to pull the remains of your friend out of a pile of rubble. We don’t talk about survivor’s guilt or PTSD. We just say hey how bout them Yanks huh?
New York really sucks after that. There are two cops standing in every subway station in the city, always armed with giant guns and a German Shepherd. They make you open your bag and show them that it’s full of non-terrorist things. We do this because the President spoke to God and God told him this kind of stuff was good for America.
New York was different now. Life was different. And The Revolution Summer was officially over. I didn’t feel invincible anymore and I knew that none of it would ever go back to the way it was.
So if I had to pinpoint the exact moment when The Revolution Summer came to an end, it would be when Tami asked why I was laughing. It felt like I’d been drowning the world out with the volume of my stereo for my entire life, and when I turned the music off, everything suddenly wasn’t so funny anymore.
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