I am one of the few Americans to graduate from high school in 1983 without having seen a single John Hughes movie. Still, the first time I sloshed eight or so ounces of undiluted gin into an abandoned glass in Phillip's rec room ("Oh Christ, we're out of mixers again," he howled happily atop the pool table), I understood that he had cobbled together a fantasy that was equal parts F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sixteen Candles. I didn't know where he'd gone to school before transferring sophomore year. Skinny as a flagpole, it was as if he'd stepped from the pages of the wildly popular Preppy Handbook, except his madras patchwork pants and multiple turned-up collars mimicked the outfit the illustrator had selected for the middle-aged preppy dad. What a dork. He steered fairly clear of ridicule by keeping mute.
Then, barely two weeks into our junior year, I began to hear stories about parties at Phillip's, actually parties at 'Boney's'. Pleased to have a ranch house in which to get plastered free of hassle and free of charge every Friday and Saturday night, the football players repaid the scrawny former-nobody in lime-green whale-print pants by giving him a nickname. What it meant was anyone's guess, but Phillip cultivated his new identity. His middle aged Republican togs became garish to the point of drag. He lightened his straw blonde hair to a peculiar lemon. Apropos of nothing he would recite the Wheat Thins commercial in its entirety, the one in which perky, glass-eyed actress Sandy Duncan professed her addiction to the little square crackers. The very same football players who a year earlier would have punished him harshly for such faggotry clapped the Wood Man on the back, urging a repeat performance. He took to carrying a box of Wheat Thins along with his textbooks, insolently snacking in front of the teachers. Who, in the Roman arena of high school, wins the approval of his peers by coming out as a 'character'? Phillip owed his sudden popularity to deep pockets, limitless quantities of booze (if not mixers) and an alcoholic widowed mother who didn't seem to give a shit that a hundred underaged drinkers turned her home into a speakeasy every weekend. Freed from his peers narrow definition of acceptable comport and conduct , Boney turned out to be a pretty lovable guy, even when, hungover and stripped of his Wheat Thins, he flailed miserably through our mandatory gym periods in childish red shorts.
I suppose every high school has its established party house, where photogenic but unscholarly girls are chucked fully dressed into the swimming pool, where the teenage host sports a smoking jacket and a perfectly good watermelon is ruined when someone bores a hole in its rind to administer a fifth of grain alcohol. (That's the John Hughes ideal, isn't it?) What amazes me now is our host's Cinderella story, the first act of it anyway. Back then, the amazing thing, besides the fact that you could get in without an explicit invitation, was that he had cable television. It was always on, always tuned to MTV, then in its infancy and a meager handful of videos in heavy rotation. When I ran out of witty remarks about algebra, Duran Duran's Rio provided a convenient escape hatch from an awkward conversation I'd foolishly started with a disinterested popular male. Phillip cleaved to Devo in the same way generations of drag queens have worshipped Judy. And whenever the Vapors launched into "Turning Japanese," so did we, bobbing around the brown plaid Hide-a-beds, a poor man's version of Gatsby's giddy guests heading for the fountain. Recently, when I chanced upon an episode of VH-1's I Love the 80's at the gym, I about fell off the Stairmaster, as, to a deja vu soundtrack, evidence mounted that just about everything connected with my adolescence looked as ridiculous as A Flock of Seagull's New Wave coiffures. Oddly, I wouldn't be surprised to see Phillip's patchwork madras pants turning up on someone like They Might Be Giant's John Flansburgh...in an ironic, post-modern way, of course.
Okay, so we looked more silly than sophisticated, cruising around in Boat, the white Cadillac convertible Phillip inherited from his grandmother and immediately outfitted with a portable bar he found in an antique store. (The idea of his varsity linebacker buddies voluntarily entering an antique store was a folly on order of our current president quoting lengthy passages from Brideshead Revisited) We had what the Beach Boys so aptly described as fun, fun, fun, cruising the streets of Indianapolis, putting on fey English accents to shout the lyrics to Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" and its vastly underated B-side "Sex Dwarf." Remember when there were B-sides?Of all of us, Phillip is the only member of the Class of '83 who did not have the luxury of dithering about whether or not to attend our twenty-year reunion. His liver got him a couple of years earlier. My mother, who shopped in the antique store he opened a few blocks from school, called with the news. I think of him when I overhear mentions of Wheat Thins or those red plastic inverted flowerpot Devo hats, or, more frequently, an acquaintance who met a gruesome end. This last, while dramatic, is probably not an association Phillip would have courted, not even couched in a smirking Back to School essay for a record company that conveniently anthologized all of our sentimental favorites (except "Sex Dwarf"), thus sparing me the indignity of calling a late night television commercial's 800 number, credit card in hand. Above all, Phillip would have wanted me to refer to him consistently as Boney, which now as then, I can't. Far more than the tacky prom dress, the rags were what made Cinderella such an enduring legend.
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