What Was With the Redheads?

Tonight on my way home from work, my back caved-in in the poorly lumbar-supported rental car seat (note to self:  tomorrow, bring some sort of a pad), I was listening for the first time to "Mothership", a Led Zeppelin double-disc I bought recently.  Zep is one of those bands I overdosed on in high school, which - apart from my ex husband's unforgettable performances of "Whole Lotta Love" (that sweet-faced blue-eyed boy would have SHOCKED my mother ...) - I pretty much never listened to again.  Over the past ten years, hearing a scrap of Zeppelin here or there might refresh for me the idea they were an amazing band, but I am slow to respond to my own musical interests, and still luddite enough I like the artifact of recorded media packaged lovingly (heh) by a record company, so it was just this past month I finally Amazon'd my way back to these guys (also on that order - Highway to Hell, and Appetite for Destruction - apparently, I was in a bit of a mood).

Anyway, so No Quarter is echoing and grinding its slow way out of the speakers, the vocals distorted almost as if by being skipped over wavelets on wide, easygoing water, and all I can think to myself is ...  "This is some trippy-assed sh*t."

It often escapes my memory, what a hippie I thought I wanted to be - at least half of me - at least at times.  But for years.  Even in college, chasing around hints of The Shifters or boys who dug the Dead for a minute, I harbored amateur boho fantasies.  But in high school, I probably came much closer.

We had these friends, TEO and I.  The one who had his own apartment in his mom and dad's house ... wait a minute.  Really - all of them did.  The one who made his own party light, hooked to his stereo, and introduced my utterly baffled fifteen-year-old self to the original Hitchhiker's tapes.  The one who played Stairway in his "dungeon" (we didn't think it whatsoever ironic his permanently-nocturnal netherworld was located at the *top* of his family's house).  The one from Cleveland, who still is perhaps the finest Southern Gentleman I've ever met.

All these guys - redheads, too.  Must've been luck - but we had quite the trifecta of sorta nerdy, sorta brilliantly creative, off-the-beaten-path friends  Party Light Douglas Adams was my best friend.  Stairway guy, though, and his Dungeon, were in a way central for all of us.  I was in awe that he could play guitar and sound like the record.  Lord, the things that awe us when we are so innocent.  (If I have no love for the girl I was at 25 ... the bursting affection I feel for fifteen-year-old me is a strange ghost of what I feel for my actual niece; I am almost *protective* of this remembered, wide-eyed, open self I once was.)

There was always a hormonal undercurrent - we were kids - but the fact was, the ways we were learning to be friends in those years was incredibly chaste.  Lying around for hours alone or in little, intimate groups, there was always flirting and excitement - but most of us really didn't act on those things back then.  We would "go to the beach" - just literally half-trip our way through the music we'd listen to, who even needed to actually do drugs.

To be sure, some of our friends were pot heads and we knew it.  We took the amusingly maternal protective attitude toward it only a very young, innocent teenage girl can, and tried to save them, or tried to just get a sort of innocent high off of being friends with real hippies.  Most of the time, these guys didn't actually do anything illicit around us.  They were sweet boys, with habits we didn't entirely share, who took in response to our own attitudes, a somewhat indulgent and incredibly gentle rebellious attitude in response.  Stairway played his guitar.  Party Light played his prodigious album collection.  Southern Gentleman drew, often on his jeans - or ours.  We'd philosophize (and relentlessly crush on Stairway's younger brother).

TEO and I would eye each other from time to time.  "We are Dungeon Women" - it was simultaneously something incredibly innocent, looking at it from thirty years onward - and, at the time, forbidden enough it was deliciously sweet.  Yeah, we weren't doing anything wrong.  But we weren't doing anything wrong in these boys' *apartments* - all alone - and we called one The Dungeon, and we knew what these kids got up to without us.

We also knew they were good guys.  The appeal wasn't Bad Boys.  The appeal was being guardian angels, perhaps saving graces, for wayward ones.  Our own parents, not entirely ignorant that we knew people who smoked pot and other such habits as would have been our own sentences of Dreadful Consequences, never quite went so far as to protect us from them.

Well, after a couple of years, I was told Party Light was no longer an acceptable companion.  But, if I am honest, I'm not sure that was connected to any specific wrongdoing on his part.  Parents are parents, time goes on, and friendships do end.  Even when you are that young.


***


Tonight, listening to the siren song of druggie music - and loving it in the most amusingly wholesome, affectionate way - I remembered how much all this had meant to me, once upon a time.  How pleasurable my high school years were, because of those friends, the right ones, the ones who ("I'm sorry, I don't understand; it's a depressed ... robot ...  ...  Um, what??") introduced me to the right things, the ones who lapsed us into altered states just with music, the ones we used to love, and gave speeches to about being good, and who sometimes didn't need their little brothers around to have us half-dazed in love just because at fifteen being in love is what you do just being out in the world.

Or, as it may be - away from the world.  Completely.  Ensconced in a Dungeon - happily.