"Don't You Forget About Me"

Watching "Brats" made me feel things...

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We loved summer. Our friends would shout our names in the street and we’d throw open our windows, jump down the stairs, taking four a time, and we’d race out of the dark into the morning already thick with heat and sugar. Maybe we’d go to the pool or mess around the street or hop subway turnstiles or steal bags of potato chips. Or maybe we’d slip into movie theaters, feeling the cool air on our burned necks because who could afford air conditioning? Temperature control was a luxury. And we’d spread out on the plush seats with our stolen chips and sweat skimming down our backs. We’d pine for Jake, cheer for Ducky, or feel the blackness of Allison in The Breakfast Club was the color of our fragile, desperate hears.

And then James Spader would smoke a cigarette and we wondered why—as kids in the 80s living in Brooklyn—everyone on screen was always white. Was Ohio this way? Illinois? States we’d heard of, had learned in school, but couldn’t imagine their shape beyond the fresh-faced teens on celluloid. But those thoughts were brief back then because we took what we could get.

Although the kids on screen didn’t look like us, they felt like us. They felt deeply, wholly, and completely. We’d never saw ourselves on screen, taken seriously. Mostly we were ignored by our parents, left to our own devices. Now we laugh at the old commercials—it’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are—but back then these were real questions because as young as 10, 11, and 12, my mother had no idea where I was or how I spent twelve hours of the day. As long as I showed up alive at some point, everything was okay.

But I wasn’t okay. I was an adult in a child’s body. I was carrying the weight of my mother’s body on my back when she was too high from the coke and we had to go the emergency room. Again. I was terrified when strange men left notes on our apartment door when she didn’t pay what she owed them. We liked watching your daughter sleep. I was confused sitting for hours in a hotel room in New Jersey while my mother’s husband gambled and they drank piña coladas and I remember fumbling through their backs and pulling out a video tape and the name across the box was John Holmes and I was ten watching a porno, wondering why everyone performed pleasure from what seemed to be pain.

It would take me years to understand most men weren’t built that way.

Still, our bodies were small even though our voices were loud. Bombastic. We were human boom boxes on the street. Our conversations were winding songs where we spoke over, interrupted, interjected, careened, and feel over in laughter. We clutched our stomachs because we felt so hard. Though now I couldn’t remember what made us collapse, what made us laugh, what gave us some joy amidst lives lived in constant pain.

Because ours was a neighborhood that bore no resemblance to the movies we watched on screen and on TV. Our fridges were anemic, our walls were thin, the junk sick were splayed out in parks and behind supermarkets, and the trash was picked up faster than the bodies. We’d seen more dead bodies as children than the whole of our adulthood. We heard our mothers heads smashed into tables and against the walls. We sold our wares on sheets on the sidewalk when we nothing to eat.

When taking the subway into Manhattan felt like visiting a different country, gaining trespass to the lives on teenagers on-screen was what we imagined space travel to be like. Our eyes were saucers, our bodies ached because while we felt like them we also wanted to be them. Even if it was for a little while. Even if it was for the ninety minutes in a cool movie theater and we’d shield our eyes from the sun. Sometimes, we were quiet because we realized we’d have to eventually go home. Back to our real lives.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. My childhood was hard. The 80s and 90s were cruel to anyone who wasn’t straight, white, and Christian. In college, in the early 90s, a friend confided that she slept with her boyfriend and shouted no the whole time. My voice was loud and angry when I confronted him, called him a rapist. And my voice was shamed and silenced by my friends, women, who said I was making a fuss. He was her boyfriend, not a rapist. And her voice was silenced when she said it really wasn’t a big deal. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Maybe she hadn’t said no after all. We returned to our lives and my friend transferred schools after freshman year, and my guy friends chided me.

No one’s hooking up with you, Sulli, if you keep crying rape. Quietly, I whispered no means no. But no one heard me.

And why would they when Jake, the guy we all pined for in Sixteen Candles, made a joke about “violating” his drunk girlfriend while she was passed out. Or when the term “panty raid” was a real thing made famous by Porky’s and Revenge of The Nerds. The movies we loved, held close to our chests, cast a Japanese actor to play a Chinese foreign exchange student because who cares about the difference. Who cares that women were more than panties and pussies and mere objects?

Nostalgia is a funny thing when the movies you loved, the life you desperately wanted, was, in retrospect, a life reflective mired by cruelty, cheap jokes, and unkindness. The feelings were real, the pain was real, the intuitiveness and anxieties were real. Often, we watched whole, complete characters with interior lives living in an archaic exterior world. But we didn’t know this back then, not completely. I only started to see the cracks in the fault when I moved to Long Island and attended a high school that was mostly white and privileged.

It was then that I understood what people thought of Black people, Hispanic people. It was when I watched 90210 and every Black character was introduced with rap music, they were ball players and poverty-stricken gang-bangers that needed to be white-saved—that I knew something was wrong.

It was in college when I was paired with a gay roommate and all the girls on the floor told me it was okay if I wanted to change in their room. Why would I not want to change in my room? I was genuinely confused. Because she could see you naked, they said, eyes rolled. She shouldn’t share a bathroom with us—we’re giving her a free peep-show, they said. You’re brave, they whispered, to live with her. A week after I moved in, my roommate sat on her bed and asked if I wanted her to move out. Why would you do that? I said, rolling my eyes, and we laughed and walked to the cafeteria together. While I didn’t care that she was gay, I was bummed that her wardrobe wasn’t cute enough to borrow and she, in return, expressed grave concern over my taste in music.

How do you not know who Tori Amos is? Liz fucking Phair?

The movies I loved as a child didn’t prepare me for this. No one was of color or gay. Class was the sole divide.

This morning, I watched Brats, a documentary made by Andrew McCarthy, actor, author, and director. The images jettisoned me back to a completely different time and my nostalgia is less about the people in the movies or the life I dreamed of having or the glaring blindspots, the desire was for a world that was physical.

There’s a moment in the documentary where Lea Thompson muses over the 80s. You held records in your hands. You rented video tapes. You could hold and connect with art in a way that’s impossible now. And while the world is infinitely more convenient and filled with unending choice, I do miss the stinginess of my early years. When going to see or rent a movie was an event. When you lingered in the aisles of the record store. When you got lost in a book for hours on the couch when now you find yourself periodically checking your phone, refreshing your screen, playing something in the background because unbeknownst to you, the world has not only become less physical, it’s louder. It’s the childhood voices competing and shouting over the din. It’s the idea that you have so many choices why not exercise them all at once?

I used to pray for quiet. Now, I can’t sleep unless I have white noise or something playing in the background. I hold less and absorb more and I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing.

And while it’s strange to see the people I adored with lines on their faces and grey in their hair, I also marvel over their maturity and sense of calm. While I miss the velocity of youth—we had to move fast and furious to chase after all that possibility—I enjoy their reserve and calm. The introspection. The slowing down. The reflectiveness. The sentimental and the not-so-sentimental education.

I miss being young but I don’t miss who I was when I was young. I miss the movies that were simple but now I watch then and some I still enjoy and some I cringe, but mostly I regard them much like that old Joan Didion quote, “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

Watching this film reminded me to sit with all parts of yourself—the past, the present—even if the parts are messy, riddled with gristle and bone.