A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [25]
Joan Jett
I bought the Joan Jett cassette called Album (I admit I had a crush on her even though I was also scared of her). I listened to it a few times in my room, rocking out on my mushroom chair. At the end of side two was a secret unlisted song that had a chorus where Joan sang the lyrics “You’re a star fucker star fucker star fucker” over and over. There was also a part about a clean pussy and giving head to Steve McQueen, but I didn’t really latch on to those.
Dad charged into my room while I was listening to it and told me to turn it off. Then he ejected the cassette, pulled a bunch of the tape out, and put it on the ground. He lifted his foot high and then stepped on it. He took the cassette box from my hand and looked at the yellow cover art of Joan jumping in the air with her guitar. He said through gritted teeth, “I should just burn this crap.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said, “Sorry.”
“I don’t care for any of this stuff that you listen to,” he said.
He ground his heel into the plastic cassette and into the carpet. The ribbon of the tape surrounded his foot like dead baby snakes.
Dunk Contests
When we were in high school, Maurice and I would sometimes go to my old elementary school and play basketball on its court. We liked it because the hoops were made for little kids and were only eight feet tall. We mimicked our favorite dunkers (Dominique Wilkins, Julius Erving) and had dunk contests. I liked how the nets were made of chain. Each jump shot, each jam, sounded like a slot machine paying out. Once I dunked so hard that the metal backboard lost its screws and crashed to the ground. Those were good times, sweaty and dreamlike.
We played a lot of playground basketball during that time and we started a rivalry with Jeff Jones and Tim Sanders, two of the stars from our school basketball team. We beat them in a game of 2-on-2 once.
I found a book called The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, which was all about playground basketball. It had a section where they talked about all the good courts to play on around the country. Instead of hunting for Bigfoot, I started to dream of this adventure instead. Pulling off the highways to play pickup games in every state, the sun casting our darting shadows. We played until the ball got too slick and then we cooled down with a Slurpee or a Big Gulp.
The one thing I didn’t like about Maurice at the time was that he was a Lakers fan. My favorite team was the 76ers and I suffered through many postseason heartbreaks around that time. Their championship season in 1983 made up for all of that though. They swept the Lakers in the finals and to celebrate, Mom took me to Burger King.
Echo
Maurice and I found a pile of discarded basketball jerseys at a sporting goods store on Clearwater Avenue. We assumed they were from some small town school that we had never heard of—perhaps a school from Moses Lake or Wenatchee. They said ECHO on the front, with the number underneath. We found the numbers that we thought were the coolest (he was 8, I was 21).
As we rode the bus home (public transportation was new in the Tri-Cities at the time), we decided that we needed a story to go with our new jerseys. Instead of saying “Echo,” we would say it was pronounced “Ee-cho.” It was decided that this was not the name of a school, but rather the name of another planet. A planet that we were from, and a planet where everyone wore Converse shoes, because we had a stout devotion to Chuck Taylors. We thought our enemy planet should be Lovetron, a fictional planet that backboard-shattering basketball star Darryl Dawkins often talked about. On Lovetron, everyone wore Nikes. We refused to wear Nikes. In fact, to this day, I have never worn Nikes.
We called ourselves the Duo of Doom.
Licorice
Maurice and I hung out at this record store in Pasco called the Licorice Donut. We used to buy all our records there. This was when we were really into funk. During the school year we’d even go home for lunch just to watch Video Soul on the BET (Black Entertainment