Stroking Billy Squier

Lonely is the Night - Billy Squier (mp3)

I miss the days when concerts were the cornerstone of great urban legend.

Ozzy bit the heads off live bats. Alice Cooper drank human blood. Prince had real live sex with real live fans right there on stage at his concerts. So did KISS. Zappa ate human turds. These are just the ones I remember vividly. I also recall Styx, 2 Live Crew, Motley Crue, and dozens of other bands and performers being mentioned in rumors of concert insanity. There were even rumors of entire audiences falling asleep during Dan Fogelberg concerts!

To this day I can’t say for certain which of these concert stories are complete bullshit and which ones are based in reality, nor do I know which ones were invented locally in Chattanooga and which ones were viral elsewhere and invaded my hometown circle. More importantly, I don’t want to know. I prefer having to use my own common sense to figure it out while cherishing that golden nugget of uncertainty.

Easily the most disturbing -- and therefore most memorable -- concert rumor of my young life revolved around freakishly girly-looking rock star Billy Squier and his extreme gayness. The specific rumor about him, as I remember it, went something like this: He gave other guys blowjobs on the stage during his concert.

First, I need to clarify something. In 1985, adults did not talk to children about homosexuality. Not in the South, anyways. Dad used the word “sissy” on a number of occasions, and in hindsight that word and its context seem obvious, but at the time I just thought it referred to men who sucked at sports, which is to say, guys like me. So even when adults talked about gay men, I didn't quite connect it to the conversations of kids around me.

I don't remember any teachers talking about it, either in positive or negative ways. It was almost as if the entire queer world existed solely for hidden gay adults and teenage conversations. And Billy Squier, the most openly gay rock star ever.

The singular way I knew anything about being gay, about gay people, about gayness, is from talk with my friends and my peers. If this comes across as defensive, it's intended to be, because attending an all-boys school put us on the defensive about this issue from day one, and adults wanted nothing to do with it. Or else adults just didn't hear it. Either way, Gay Was Bad.

Of course Billy Squier didn't blow men on stage during concerts. He isn't even gay.* But I didn't have the Internet. Catastrophic or unbelievable concert moments couldn't be hunted down on YouTube. So if a half-dozen cool dudes who were three years older than me insisted that Billy Squier was some gay queerbag who blew his drummer on the stage, who the hell was I to argue the point?

It may seem ludicrous that I actually believed this could happen. But we were still emerging from the chaos that was the 1970s, a decade that even in my youthful cluelessness symbolized that anything and everything was possible, particularly regarding sex and sexual positions. Further, when one has attended a single Suzanne Vega concert in his whole life, and when one is as totally clueless about sex as I was -- hell, Kurt Cobain was almost dead before I had sex, and my On Base Percentage in the 80s hovered right about .005 -- who was I to say with any authority or knowledge that some rock star would simply not blow another man on stage at a concert?

Somehow the Village People missed me. I mean, I had two of their albums, but they were never a focal point of any conversation about gay men. Can’t explain it, but it’s true. Same with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Don't remember their names coming up much until later. But the Billy Squier stuff, and the stuff about Rod Stewart having to have his stomach pumped? Yup. Those are definitely a part of my pre-teen memories.

I'm glad I went back and listened to Squier's hits. There's nothing earth-shattering in them, but it's comforting to know that "The Stroke" isn't literally about some guy jerking him off, and I get the lyrics to "Lonely is the Night" in ways a virginal naif pre-teen cannot. His music is better than the fate he sealed in my personal history book, and that would be true regardless of his sexual inclinations.

So, from one Billy to another, and speaking for an entire generation of clueless and insensitive bastard teens, I apologize. I can't believe what insensitive and homophobic pricks we were.

But you still shouldn't have filmed the video for "Rock Me Tonite." Talk about stoking the damn fire.



* -- Even as I type these words, having researched it a little to verify what I'd suspected, it's difficult to accept, so deeply has that rumor been ingrained in my memory.

The Drowning Boy

Talk Her Down - Starsailor (mp3)
Everybody Out of the Water - The Wallflowers (mp3)

The following is a true story. There’s a lesson in here somewhere.

On an afternoon in late June, I receive a phone call from a friend’s wife. “Did a boy drown in your school’s lake?” she asks. We call it a lake. It’s not really a lake. It’s an over-large glorified round pool, the kind of overcompensation that makes masculinity and testosterone continue producing at the proper levels for future generations.

“Come again?” I say.

“Like, recently? Did a boy or some kid drown in your lake? Or something like that? I’m just calling you because you’d know if that was true, right?”

She isn’t completely panicked, but she’s definitely fighting fear of a possible truth.

“Um, no. No child or adult has died in or near our lake at any time that I can recall. Certainly not recently,” I say.

“Well that’s what I figured,” she says, clearly relieved. “But Mac got in the car today and told me this story, and I just had to call you to make sure.”

“What story was that?”

“Well, he said that at camp today -- he started robotics camp over there today -- one of the counselors was standing with them before they took their swim tests, and Mac said the counselor told them that the reason they have swim tests is because a boy drowned in the lake.”

My face scrunches up with a mix of disbelief and contemplation, but she can’t see that because I don’t have those new iPhones. “That’s weird,” I say. What I don’t say is that I have trouble accepting the veracity of this entire story. Their son is quite creative. Any part of it could have been generated from his noggin like Simon with his magic chalk.

This theory was encouraged when she went further with stories about shark teeth that had fallen off necklaces and gathered a magic life of their own, biting kids who went in the wrong areas of the pool. Having to convince another adult that shark teeth simply cannot bite without mandibles and muscles and the like often helps chart the appropriate absurdity to a conversation.

“Well, that’s all,” she says. But she’s clearly hanging on for something, some additional comfort or piece of information from me.

“Listen, I’ll ask around just to be sure, but trust me that it’s not true... about the drowning thing, not the shark teeth.”

The next morning, I’m sitting in my office, and my coworker comes in. His son is at a camp here, too, and he’s talking to me about his son swimming yesterday, which immediately gets me thinking about the phone call.

So I tell him my amusing Tale of the Frightened Mom and The Drowning Boy. And something not good happens. He stops me before I’m finished and says, “My son actually said something similar last week.”

“Come again?” I claim that’s what I say because it sounds a lot more professional and mature than “You’re shitting me.”

“He said one of the counselors told him that a kid had drowned in the lake. I just ignored it at the time, because I figured it was one of those spooky stories counselors tell kids to get them to obey rules.”

At this point, what was clearly a fluke, the product of one boy’s flighty imagination, mutated into something more disturbing. Two different campers. Two different camps. Likely two different counselors, both telling tales of children drowning to impressionable minds (and future admission prospects).

So I sent an email relaying precisely this to the head of our camps. Accusing no one of anything. Merely laying out what I had heard as I had heard it. Including the shark teeth. But certainly expressing concern about the potential for serious headaches if the story proved out.

The director, in turn, passed it to three different camp directors and the teacher in charge of our lifeguards. The fire of panic spread quickly from there, with nervous detective work on the part of several people hitting overdrive the next day. By the end of that following day, barely 24 hours after the ruckus first stirred up, it was relayed to me the Closer-To-Real story: Mac, the original firestarter, had overheard two of the adults -- not counselors -- talking in the lunch hall -- not at the lake -- about a boy who had recently drowned in Lake Chickamauga -- not our school’s “lake.”

Just over 36 hours after my first hearing of Mac’s drowning tale, I was writing an email apologizing to all parties involved for stirring up what proved to be a fairly pointless panic.

A month or so later, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m still not sure how I should have done things differently. But I’m also feeling that I didn’t do things quite right, either.

Maybe it’s inevitable to feel that way with false alarms.

But dammit, maybe not.

Thus, I’ve occasionally spent my space-out summertime fiddling with that little Rubik’s Cube of a dilemma.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Isn’t there...?