It began…when? In early 1983? The first time I listened to “American Top 40” in its entirety? It soon became a ritual; it soon became a ritual that required a notebook in which to mark down the songs that had risen and fallen over the week, and all of the new entrants, whether mayfly-lived (Costello’s “Everyday I Write the Book,” never getting past #36) or those just marking the first stage of a long residency.

Or on the day that my cousin Michelle told me about MTV. “It’s this channel where all there is is music—you have to see it.” Well, she could: she was in Connecticut. In Virginia, at my house, we only got two TV stations. For the ‘84 Olympics, my father had to climb on the roof and turn the aerial clockwise so that we could get ABC, which sent the other two stations into a temporary exile of grey static.

In the summers, when I was shipped up to live with my grandmother in Connecticut, there was another world, one of slight abundance. Unseen comics in the newspapers—Crock, Momma, Broom Hilda; more newspapers, too (my grandmother took a morning and an evening paper, which seemed wonderfully civilized). And she had cable television, a variable color-world summoned into being by the TV-top controller with its three rows of punchable numbers and letters. A crunch of a button brought unknown pleasures: WPIX, which ran Star Trek reruns in the afternoons; another station that had Twilight Zone marathons (I knew every episode of each, but only from books—whenever I finally saw an episode, I had to reconcile the idea of it, which I had conjured out of a few stills and a paragraph-long plot synopsis, with what I was watching).

So finally then, MTV. I gorged on MTV as only an 11-year-old savage could. My grandmother didn’t approve of it, and she was right. So mine was a strategy of finding stolen moments: when my grandmother went out to the store to get milk, I could watch 25 solid minutes of MTV. If she was doing laundry, that meant a sporadic (joyous, paranoid, oft-interrupted) quarter hour with the volume barely audible. The hatred I felt when a bad act (anyone old, really; also, Billy Squier) took up some of this time; the joy whenever the new Duran Duran, the new Fixx, the new Eurythmics came on.

It’s the cheapest, most pathetic form of nostalgia to lament the passing of the popular music that was popular when one was 11 years old. I see this all the time in YouTube comments (I’ve thought of doing a Tumblr called YouTube Nostalgia which would be nothing but YouTube laments about how great X was and how Y (often J. Bieber) can’t compare to it). I will only venture that to be young and into pop music in 1983 may have been more fun than at some other times, because in 1983 something—shiny, silly, frivolous—was happily and busily killing off an older music.

I use the phrase older music literally here. The music of my early childhood was meant for older people, I thought: “Aja,” “Heart Hotels,” “Reminiscing,” “Night Moves,” “Islands in the Stream,” “Candy Apple Red” (don’t ask—an awful regional hit that was inescapable if you lived in Virginia) and so on, all songs suggesting the compromises, shadiness and a general inexplicable blues that came with being an adult; these songs always seemed to end with the singer on a dock, drinking and thinking aloud. The music I took hold of, that took hold of me, had none of this baggage. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and was bright and loud. It suggested that life is different somewhere else; it may not be better, but it’s something you don’t know yet, and you might like it. The music of the forbidden cities, of the islands that only exist on television.

I come back to my grandmother. During those summers, she took me and my cousins to church. She had a favorite priest, Father Gill, so we would often follow him on his rounds—he was circuit priest of sorts, and worked three or four small towns on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border. It was on those interminable hot Sunday mornings that I got the scrapings of a religious education. Sitting in the pews, reading and rereading the list of the mass, and silently checking off each milestone: the first reading, the second reading, the possibly-deadly homily (it depended on Father Gill’s mood—if he was effusive, the homilies could drag on for a half hour), the Eucharist (always exciting—it meant the end of the mass was near). There was a fine, humble community in those small churches on those mornings, with the pews often filled, as ours was, with older summer people shepherding their grandchildren.

I don’t miss the sermons. Maybe the poison had already taken by then. The books and the songs had won, in a walk; out of them I would carve whatever I have of a spiritual life. Those church mornings wound up serving as the image of a grey alternative, of a proper life whose ambitions and dreams were confined to smaller spheres.

There were parties then: there was a party, it seemed, to commemorate every weekend, a party to fit every holiday or excuse for one. My parents were still so young—I reached 10 before either of them had reached 29—and they had a great accumulation of friends who they could assemble at whim: work friends (my mother was a middle-school teacher, and most of the faculty came to her parties), stray friends, half-friends, ex-husbands of friends, employers of friends, friends of friends, neighbors. Of the latter, the regulars were the Peters’, from across the way, and the Robinsons, from beyond the wood (Miller, from across the road, never came. All I knew of him was that his house had once been robbed).

Sometimes there was a reason for a big bash (Whitney Peters graduating high school, for instance, inspired a pig roast, with a vat of hush puppies fried out in a barrel in the Peters’ yard, and men gathered around it drinking straight out of bottles of Jack Daniels). Our house swelled with people on Friday and Saturday nights, or any night, really, once school was out in the summer: Eubank, Wingo, Yeary, Franklin, Swortzel, Eggers (I knew all of my mother’s teacher friends only by their last names). There was Kern (an English teacher), who I once saw demonstrating a viewer the size of an index finger which, when brought up to the eye, revealed a kaleidoscope of bawdy pictures and Kehela (a coach), who, once in a state of rather distinguished drunkenness, called out to someone coming across the lawn: “Identify yourself or you will be shot.”

I was always the kid at the party, and I soon learned to adapt, making sure that my mother brought something for me to drink at the houses where the only things in the refrigerator were limes, mixers and bottles of seltzer. I would wander around, watching the somber men smoking their water pipes, the hash piled on a stack of Field and Stream and Shotgun News, and sometimes I would occupy drunks. One evening I sat on the couch with some utterly destroyed man (I had no idea who he was, perhaps a friend of a friend of an ex-husband) and Pete Townshend appeared on the television. This was around the time that the Who broke up, so Townshend was likely promoting It’s Hard or something. The man did a double take upon seeing Townshend’s face, turned to me and, like a second-rate silent film comedian, actually flapped his arms. “Oh my god, he’s so fucking OLD!” he howled, barely able to form his consonants. He was probably 30, Townshend wasn’t yet 40, I was 10, but the statement had implications.

Occasionally there were other kids. One, Ian, was a few years older than me. I desperately hoped for some crumb of attention from him, but the few times he appeared, he just sat sullenly on the lawn and read issues of The Savage Sword of Conan. The younger kids, the whining five or seven year-olds who sometimes accompanied an unhappy mother, were just useless. Then there was Christie, who I was in love with. “The Hardy Boys are so old fashioned, dear. The Three Investigators are much more with it. In the one I just read, a cop says ‘the jig’s up.’ Doesn’t that sound so much more up to date?” She was the daughter of a divorcee, an English teacher. This gave her history. She and I traded mystery novels. Flighty, vaguely witty, bookish and ultimately indifferent to me, she would prove to be the template of the sort of woman who I would obsess over and sometimes date (generally ending in disaster) over the following twenty years.

I wended through the overfilled living room, with the stereo blasting Endless Summer and Silk Degrees, Aja and Hotel California (there would always be someone miming the Don Felder guitar solo on the title track), Rumours and (my father’s precise choice) the second disc of the Beatles’ Red Album. I would pick up pieces of conversation (Yeary: “Did you hear that Marvin Gaye song? ‘Get up, let’s make love tonight?’ Jesus. Nothing in it for the woman of course.”). At other houses, my parents would pack me off at some point, send me up to some room to read; it was often the same guest room where everyone dumped their coats (one night, the hosts got in a vicious fight in the hallway outside, while the party was still raging. It soon devolved into her screaming “my friends!” and her husband screaming back at her “Your friends!”). In the morning after a party at our house, I was usually first up, and found some odd enjoyment in walking through and cataloging the ruin of the previous night—-the empty (and not so empty) plastic cups strewn on the lawn, the cheese platters and baskets full of Ruffles and Fritos which had been left out overnight (sometimes pillaged by a dog).

So I was a child in a place and at a time where no one seemed to have yet reached 40, and lied if they had. The old people, all of the encumbered, respectable lives, were elsewhere, penned up in Connecticut or in Florida, only to be visited at Christmas or on occasional weddings. We, my mother and father and I, and their countless friends, could easily put off the past, could deny its agency, at least for now, in the years of the parties.

Being an adult carries with it a high probability of violence, or that’s how it seemed from the perspective of a neurotic nine-year-old. You cannot blame me. In the months between December 1980 and October 1981, or for much of my ninth year, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment, Pres. Reagan was shot outside of a DC hotel, the Pope was shot in St. Peter’s Square and Anwar Sadat was shot and killed, by his own troops, while reviewing a parade in Cairo (the last killing seemed very Roman; as such, I found it the most fascinating).

So it’s no surprise that I felt that graduating to the adult world (a prospect still far off, but yet now vaguely conceivable) meant opening one’s self up to greater and greater chances of being killed. Perhaps I’d been reading too many murder mysteries and comics, but there was something in the air. I had the sense that violence, as random at it was merciless, was unavoidable, striking at whim. Around this time I read a Time magazine article at my parents’ friends house about some highway spree killer. One detail, that the killer had found a newlywed couple and told them to “kiss their last kiss” before shooting them both, has stayed with me for 30 years now, emblematic of the grubby, miserable and envious baseness of petty human evil.

It didn’t help my fragile sense of the world that my parents were having a terrible spell of luck around this time. They could not catch breaks and seemed utterly at the mercy of things. We drove down to Tennessee to buy a used car. About an hour into the trip back, a tractor-trailer swung into the passing lane and struck our new car, which my father was driving, and sent it spinning across the highway and down into the median. My father wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, of course, but he said later that he just relaxed and rolled with the car as it overturned some four or five times until coming to a stop right-side up. My mother, watching this happen in her rear view mirror, thought she had been made a widow by some asshole truck driver who didn’t even have the courtesy to stop and see if he’d killed someone. The new car was totaled; my father wasn’t hurt in the slightest.

Then there were the deer. My mother hit five or six in the course of as many years, and a number of the collisions totaled her cars. (We went through a lot of cars in this period: a mayfly-lived collection of Datsuns, Volkswagen Rabbits, Fiats). One foggy night my mother and I were driving home and a massive buck suddenly appeared, as if it had been teleported, directly in front of the windscreen. Its length was more than the car’s. We struck it head-on, and it made a whimpering heavy thud, caving in the car’s hood as it expired, its body planing some twenty feet ahead of us, landing in a bloody pool of itself, framed in the narrow arc of our surviving headlight. “The poor deer!” I said. “The car!” my mother cried. At the time, I was so awed by the astonishing killing that I had just witnessed that I felt obligated to serve as the deer’s representative.

A state trooper came by, checked to see if we needed to go to the hospital, then leaned into my mother’s window, acting conspiratorially. “Do you want the carcass?” he asked. “Jesus, no!” said my mother, still a Northerner at heart. So the cop called the rescue squad to give them the good news, and soon enough an ambulance came to bring the deer’s corpse over to the cop’s house. It likely fed his family the following night.