Tracey won’t let me get this poster framed. This is a travesty. She says that she doesn’t like it, but she just doesn’t understand. I found the poster this summer when I was going through my “closet of things that I left behind” at my mother’s house. Everybody has a “closet of things that they left behind” when they move out of their parents’ house. It’s just that some last longer than others. Mine has lasted 30 years.
Anyway, as soon as Tracey said that I couldn’t get it framed, I immediately sent an outrage text to my friend and confident, Chris, who I grew up with.
Chris understood the sacred bond that an American teenage boy from the 1980s might have had with the movie “Lost Boys”. I mean, not only did it have Jamie Gertz in it, but it made Jason Patric cool and had Kiefer Sutherland as the bad guy, and it had both Coreys! It was a Joel Schumacher masterpiece!
And the fact that my wife will not let me get a poster, perfectly preserved from 1987, framed as an emblem of my youth is a travesty.
A TRAVESTY.
You see, the greatest thing about “The Lost Boys” are the circumstances surrounding it for me. Let’s just get a few things out of the way before we jump in. “The Lost Boys” is not a good movie. It’s kind of fun and there are some interesting elements to the whole thing, but as a whole, it’s definitely not a masterpiece. Plus, it started that whole vampires with weird foreheads thing in movies that is so annoying. (I mean, Why do their foreheads change? It makes no sense! See The Lost Boys and its spiritual equivalent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
In 1987, I was fifteen-years old. My brother, Mike, had just graduated from university and had gotten a job as a teacher in Carlsbad, New Mexico. This was, of course, pre-internet, so he had to actually drive from Oklahoma to New Mexico to sign a contract, rent an apartment, and basically get his life set up. It was summertime, so he said to my fifteen-year old self, “Hey, why don’t you roadtrip with me to New Mexico.” It was Oklahoma in the summer. My brothers were my heroes. One of them was asking me to go with him on a road trip. He was cool. It was a dream come true.
The Lost Boys hadn’t come out yet, but the soundtrack had. And one late night on MTV, I heard the greatest song that I had ever heard up to that point…Good Times by INXS and Jimmy Barnes.
This is the musical equivalent of heroin to me. Just inject the joy of this infectious, fun-loving, let’s-go-out-and-party pop song right into my veins, because it is sheer perfection. Every aspect of it.
(Side note: In 2011, I was in a cover band in Shanghai and I convinced them to play this song on a pub crawl, and I will never forget seeing the Australians in the audience go absolutely friggin’ bonkers when they realized what we were playing. They bounced around, non-stop, four the entirety of the four minutes of the song like madmen. There is video of this somewhere on the internet).
I had to know where this song came from, and its origins were traced to the film The Lost Boys, which I had never heard of. I learned it was a vampire movie and that it starred the two Coreys, and that I had to see it. But even better, this song was on the soundtrack!
I rushed to Wal-Mart (the only place to buy cassettes in town) and purchased the cassette. The next day, Mike and I were leaving on our road trip.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven the route from Oklahoma to Carlsbad, New Mexico, but let me tell you, it’s not fun.
You see where the roads get sparse there in the western half of the map? There’s a reason for that. The reason? There’s nothing there! This is the armpit of the United States. Here, I took two random images from Google Maps to show you what the landscape is like:
This is a part of the United States that is so flat and so desolate that you can drive your car with your knees. Which we did. For long stretches of time. We even timed it.
Be that as it may, Mike and I got in his car and drove to New Mexico, and the first thing that we did was put on The Lost Boys soundtrack. And we listened to that thing, non-stop, for the entirety of the journey, mainly playing and replaying Good Times the whole trip.
And during that time, I bonded with my brother, who was several years older than me and who I thought was the coolest man alive. (I know that it may be weird to think that I, Randall P. Girdner, have siblings, but I do…in fact, I have several of them…three brothers, and one sister, who was also my hero and uber-cool in comparison to me). I was only fifteen, but my brother let me drive a great deal of the trip. It was so boring, the drive, but it made for a great story afterward. We made it to New Mexico, got him set up, then drove back home to finish the summer. I started two-a-day football practice soon after and my 9th grade year would begin.
And that was when things started to change (not necessarily in a good way), because adolescence is cruel and there were some not-so-good moments ahead of me after that. It was like this was the last hoorah of my childhood before that creeping feeling of adulthood and all of its trials and tribulations and heartbreak and loneliness started to slip in and twist and pull and deform my brain in unhealthy ways.
But for a glorious few days in 1987, I was cruising through the desolate wastelands of the United States with good music happening and the endless possibilities of the future ahead of me. And it was all due to The Lost Boys.
Maybe Tracey will understand why I want to get the picture framed now. Why it means so much. Why it is a significant touchstone in my life. I will go ask her.
Pause while Randy walks across the house to ask.
She still says no.
Side note: Jimmy Barnes, the guest singer on Good Times, resurfaced in my life a few years ago with the greatest musical cameo in history: