It was the summer before college. The last summer, I guess, before the rest of my life. I was freshly eighteen and often stoned, chilling in a world that tasted like Rainier cherries and Sprite and air conditioning.
Then came that day in late July--the day my parents cancelled our cable subscription.
"No TV for the rest of summer?!" said my best friend Devin Resnick, who was appalled by this human rights violation. "Dude. No. No, no."
"There's still TV," I insisted, but I was only playing it cool to dull the pain.
"Not any TV worth watching," said Devin, who was lounging on the couch with me, his disgusting sockfeet resting kind of on my lap. He was the only person in the world whose footstink I could ignore. "Man. Sucks to be you. What are you gonna do?"
"Man, it sucks to be both of us," I said, flicking one of his feet. "What are we gonna do all day?"
"Uh, go places?" was what Devin came up with.
"On what wheels?"
Neither of us could drive. Devin, not since he crashed the Corvette his parents had given him for his seventeenth birthday. And me, I'd never had a license, for the simple reason that my parents refused to pay the car insurance rates for a teenage boy.
"It's a racket," my dad declared. "Wait a couple years, when you no longer have the attention span of a gnat."
I pointed out that if I had the attention span of a gnat, I probably wouldn't have gotten into UCLA. Right?
"We just don't want you to get in an accident like Devin," my mom claimed.
"He only broke his wrist."
"What if it was his face?" my dad asked.
"Then the Resnicks would have to pay you a lot to fix it."
"You're just proving my point," said Dad, who was an orthodontist. "That mouth of yours is a masterpiece."
Sure, pat yourself on the back some more, guy.
Yeah, Devin and I were stuck biking around, like we were fourteen-year-old losers. But it wasn't that offensive; we were, after all, still kind of losers. We spent too much time on video games, and very little pursuing the girls who wouldn't date us anyway. We'd never been very cool among our classmates, and now that we'd graduated, it wasn't like the social invites were flooding in.
At least Devin could afford lots of good pot on his endless allowance. But this only made us even less inclined to get off the couch.
Except we probably had to get off the couch, at this point. There was no cable, and we were finally bored of my NES. Get off the couch and go where, though? I lived in the flats of the San Fernando Valley, several blocks north of Ventura Boulevard. In other words, suburbia central. Devin's place was even worse; the Resnicks lived in the winding Encino hills. Every morning, Devin glided down the steep slopes on his eight-speed Schwinn, and showed up at my house dripping sweat. Then he caught rides home with our housekeeper, Berta, because a. it was hot as balls out, and b. the guy would never willingly bike uphill, considering he rode bikes exclusively for adrenaline. His goal for biking was maximum speed; he loved to tailgate vehicles, and zoom around blind corners.
Yeah...maybe you can see how Devin wound up crashing his sports car into the front window of Forever Young Tanning.
"No you didn't," Sherry Resnick kept saying, after he finally got her on the phone from the hospital. My parents were the ones who picked up when he called for help, and we were the ones who took him to the ER, too. "No, you didn't. Stop being dumb, Devin."
It took like five minutes to convince her it wasn't a prank. Did Sherry really not believe a believable thing like her son crashing a Corvette? Or did she just *so* not want to deal with any of it, she was trying to tell the universe "no" over and over again, until she finally accepted that her evening plans were off, and she was about to have to do some serious parenting.
That was Sherry for you. Even though she didn't have a real job, she was pretty much always out of the house. She was supposedly an actress, and had a face to match. But her beauty was generic, a tad flimsy; it wasn't exactly aging like wine, especially not under that helmet of peroxide-blonde hair. She did go to a lot of classes and workshops, and seemed to get lunches with a variety of agents. She just could never get any work, not even with the intervention of Devin's dad, who was a director.
"Because she's not a good actress," Devin wasn't afraid to say. "Like...I love her, but she really just kind of sucks, dude."
Based on what I'd seen of her VHS reel, I had to agree.
Devin's father was both more and less of a mystery. For years, Dave had been living in a condo in Sherman Oaks six days a week--yet he and Sherry claimed to still be married. They'd only admitted they were separating, like, a few months ago. It was pretty weird. We didn't really talk about it.
Not discussing things, by the way? Devin inherited that trait from his father--who couldn't even talk about his job like a normal person. I mean, Dave didn't work much anymore, but when he did, it was as a director and producer of cheap TV movies that ran the gamut from "Cold Hard Bullet" to "Last Roses of Summer." He never talked much about this, dismissing his work as "dumb" and just "crapping out product." And sure, maybe it was to him, but even his own son couldn't tell me what company he worked for, or where they filmed. Devin had never even been on set before. Which was crazy for a director's kid.
"I bet he doesn't want the people he works with to think of him as a dad," Devin had said before, rolling his eyes.
Devin both was and wasn't aware that his dad sorta sucked. Sometimes he would desperately talk up the nice things his dad did (and Dave really did know how to be nice when he wanted to be). Or the nice things he bought. And then he'd give me this sideslanting look that sweated slightly; that said, Just you try and tell me he isn't always what I want him to be.
And I would smile and say, "That's cool, Dev." Or, "That's gonna be fun. Wish I was going to Mammoth this break."
And he'd smile and say, "Dude. You're invited, too. Of course you are."
But I would never enjoy Mammoth as much as Devin enjoyed my regular old house. As much as he claimed to love being unsupervised, I knew deep down he liked that my parents always got home at the right time, and that my mom left us notes with smiley faces, and that Berta came by on a regular schedule.
Plus, there was a pool.
And as of last spring, we actually had the bigger TV, too. Not that it mattered anymore. Five weeks into summer vacation, my mom had discovered that her otherwise upstanding teenage son was watching Cinemax after everyone else had gone to bed. When my dad heard about this, and checked out some of Cinemax's more egregiously pornographic late-night offerings, he suggested to my mom that they dump cable altogether--at least for the rest of summer--because "no one watches it anyway."
"I watch it!" I had protested.
"Well, exactly," said my dad, who then went off on a tear about the smutty dreck they showed on TV nowadays. And said that when he was a teenager he only had underwear catalogues, and it was good enough for him. At this, I stopped arguing and abruptly left, too embarrassed to want to hear any more.
My mom was more merciful, at least in theory. She wrote me a little note--no smiley face this time--explaining why the porn industry bothered her as a feminist. It made me feel agonized with guilt that I'd even been trying to watch the stuff.
Especially since I knew that if I got the chance to watch it again, I would. But for now, I was deprived. Sure, I was eighteen now, but I wasn't about to take a freaking bus to North Hollywood just to humiliate myself by walking into an adult video store, with my actual human face on, and admitting to some clerk that I thought about sex.
So, that was that. We had no porn; we had no televised entertainment, period. The cable service had been cut off yesterday, on the first of August. No more Cinemax, no more HBO, no more MTV. It was an insult, considering this was the one summer where we even had time to watch excessive television. Our teenage lives had plodded by in educational camps, after-school programs, and hours of homework.
To be fair, while my parents had no excuse, I knew the Resnicks were partly just scared that without constant programming, Devin would turn into a delinquent. He'd never even exactly done anything wrong. But when you have the kind of kid who tries to film himself jumping onto a trampoline from the roof, I guess you figure drugs and shit are just a matter of time. And technically, they were right, in that he freaked out right before the SAT, and bought a baggie of Ritalin. I took one, too. I still felt guilty about it, because what if that was the only reason I scored a 1500? As for Devin, he got so jittery on three pills that he demanded emergency permission to leave the room to try and throw them up. It didn't work.
