I recently stumbled across Smashing Pumpkins music video for "1979." The song was released in January, 1996, and by then I just wasn't watching MTV or VH1 any more. I own the two CD "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" album, but had never seen the video. The video shows teenagers doing teenage things in 1979. It is really well done. It reminded me of those GenX days of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I turned 13 years old during the summer of 1979. Billy Corgan, who wrote the song, was 12 years old in the summer of 1979. We were not as old as the 15 to 16 year old kids in the video, but for those with older siblings, or who had older kids in the neighborhood, the scenes made sense. And for those who were 12 and 13 in 1979, not much changed between then and 1982 or 1983. For some reason, I remember 1979 well. That summer was the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years. Over the previous couple of years, I had started getting interested in music. I listened to the radio a lot, and to this day I think the period between around 1978 and 1982 produced some of the best rock and pop music of my life.
My parents divorced in the summer between my 3rd and 4th grades. Neither of my parents made much money. After several years of financial struggle, in 1979, my mom could afford to take me and my soon to be 16 year old brother on a real vacation trip. It would be our first trip to Disney World. This was back when you got a ticket book, with lettered tickets A through E. A tickets were for the least popular rides, and E tickets were for the most popular rides. The ticket book contained a number of lower grade tickets, but only one E ticket. You needed an E ticket to ride Space Mountain. There used to be a colloquial phrase "E Ticket Ride", which referred to a top-notch or exciting experience. We drove all day to Orlando, stayed in a cheap motel in Orlando that night, and spend the day at Disney World. I think we stayed at the same motel that night. The next day we drove to a booming suburb of Orlando called Altamonte Springs. Altamonte Springs is not "on the edge of town" from Orlando, but I thought of Bruce Springsteen's song, and the idea of suburbia. Suburbia is a theme of many of my generation's cultural media. "Valley Girl", "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", and "The Breakfast Club", all depicted GenX suburban life, beyond the "edge of town" which used to refer to lower income areas back when middle class and upper middle class neighborhoods were in town.
My best friend from 3rd grade, and my brother's best friend from 6th grade, who were themselves brothers, had moved to the Orlando area from Jackson Tennessee where we had lived during my 2nd and 3rd grade years. We planned to stay with our friends for three nights as I recall. Then we were going to go to the Kennedy Space Center, then the next day we would drive home. This was mid-August, and school would be starting soon. For both me and my brother, within minutes of reuniting with our old friends (we all had been pen pals of sorts after my parents divorced and we moved to Alabama from Tennessee), the brothers asked us if we smoked pot. I knew about pot, because I was in a grades 7 through 12 high school, and some students in the upper grades would occasionally get busted. And of course, Cheech and Chong were a thing. But the experience for both me and my brother was the potheads we knew were losers. They dropped out, got crappy jobs, etc. My still 12 year old friend (he would turn 13 in a few weeks) was obsessed with pot and pot culture. He unscrewed the top part of his record player so he could lift up the turntable and stash his pot inside the record player. He demonstrated, in a fumbling way, rolling a joint. His older brother was much more skilled. I don't recall ever seeing either boy light a joint, but I do recall watching them roll them.
That evening, at dinner, we learned that Altamonte Springs had grown so fast, they had two shifts at the school for each grade. One group of students went from 7am to 12 noon, then had lunch, then got on the bus and were home by 1pm, the other got on the bus at 11am, went to school, had lunch, then started classes at noon and went until 5pm. To allow for enough hours of instruction, they went to school through the end of June, and started back in mid-August, the Monday after our visit. Of course most students wanted the early shift so they would have all afternoon off. This was the GenX era of two working parents and latchkey kids, or divorced single mother homes where the mom worked full time. These kids had a lot of unsupervised, unobserved free time outside of school. They were "next-level" latchkey, and the proverb "the idle mind is the devil's workshop" certainly applied.
The next day, my friend introduced me to some of his friends, and we wandered over to the school, which was a short walk, and around the neighborhood. We ended up at one boy's house, a classic, one story three bedroom house. His parents were divorced, and his mom worked. It was just him and his mom. The master bedroom was his mom's, he had a bedroom, and there was a spare bedroom. He showed us the spare bedroom, which was on the south facing side. It had sheer curtains which let in most of the blazing August Florida Sun. The floor was covered in plastic planter pots with, well pot plants. And there was an ironing board with a row of potted pot plants. It was a grow room, a term I would not learn for at least fifteen years. My friend shouted "Score!" His friend said "Don't touch them. These are my mom's. She'll kill me if I took any of them." Obviously, his mom was a heavy pot user, and likely dealer. At this point, this place had become a dystopia. These were not the visibly loser 15 year-olds behind the gym counting down the days until they were 16 and could drop out, these were 12 and 13 year-olds who appeared mainstream. I wanted out. Now. Fast.
That evening my brother and I both came to the conclusion we needed to leave the next day. We had planned to possibly stop at some other tourist location if we had time. If I recall, it was an alligator exhibit we had seen a sign for on our drive down, and it was in Jacksonville or some place in northern Florida. So we begged our mom: Let's go to the space center tomorrow. Change the motel reservation. And then we can go to the alligator place, and if needed, spend the night in Jacksonville.
To this day, my memories of that experience are dark. Not the bright August Florida sun, but a filtered, hazy memory. Like an old, faded, yellowed Polaroid. Every memory is gauzy, and claustrophobic. What should have been bright, fun, and idyllic, is instead blurry, frightening, and dystopic.
I never spoke to my then soon to be 13 year old friend again after that trip in 1979. He went from pot to cocaine to heroin. By the time he was 15 he was in rehab. The next few years he was in and out of rehab, got into crazy occult rituals and Satan worship. His family eventually gave up on him and estranged him. I assumed he had probably died of an overdose, or was in prison. I got curious about six months ago and started aggressively searching for him online. I found him. He is married and apparently has a son and a step-daughter. I found his older brother too, and by just look at their Facebook friends, I guessed he is still estranged from his family. I didn't reach out to him. Maybe I should. But he served as a warning to me.
I remember my best friend from college telling me when he was 13 he had a friend who had emigrated to the U.S. from Central America. The boy would spend his summers with his grandparents. My friend flew down and spent a week with him in Central America. He was introduced to marijuana there. He was a year younger than me, so this would have been the summer of 1980. He never smoked it again, it was just a one-off.
Now, 45 years later, I serve in my church's middle school ministry as a small group leader of a dozen now 7th grade boys I have been with since June of 2023. In a few weeks, they will start their summer vacation between their 7th and 8th grade years. Last summer, we did a service event at a local nonprofit that provides rehabilitation for men who are suffering addiction. They run some thrift stores and we worked for several hours sorting donated clothing. The woman who manages the volunteers asked me if I wanted her to give the unfiltered story or the edited version they use for younger volunteers. I told her about my friend who became an addict at about the same age as most of my groups kids, and said "Give them the full version." About six months later, we gently covered the topic of substance abuse in our regular Sunday middle school session. Then I told the boys about my friend. And my high school co-leader told them about a middle school friend he had that started with alcohol and marijuana at 13 and got addicted to stronger drugs, but was now at 16 was sober and following Christ. That was kind of a "Scared Straight!" (another GenX reference) moment for the group.
Despite this, I think I have rose colored glasses on. This is still the thing that happens elsewhere, right? Not in the "Alpharetta Bubble", right? Not in schools where 50% of the kids are from high performing immigrant households, with the pressures to go to the best colleges, right? Probably not. Back in 2016, a local television news organization did an analysis of heroin overdoses in the metro Atlanta area and found they were centered on "The Triangle", the affluent norther suburbs of Atlanta, mostly white male teenagers and young adults, where the pressures to perform in high school alongside highly driven children of immigrants created extreme pressure, leading to the escapism of opioids, and addiction, and overdose, and death.
I have a fellow church middle school leader who is just finishing up with his group of 8th graders, but his youngest is his 9th grade daughter. Her peers are pressuring her to drink alcohol and smoke pot. Her father plans to transfer her to a different school this fall.
No, times have not changed. And as parents, teachers, coaches, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and yes, church youth group leaders, we need to be honest. Some of us, including me, are in denial. We were in denial. No more.
