I Remember
Licorice Pizza, 90210, and gravity bongs.
Last week, my husband and I went to a screening of Licorice Pizza, the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Watching it felt like taking a bath in that golden California light, all sun-kissed and groovy. PTA was there, too, and he and the movie’s stars (Alana Haim, 1/3 of Haim, and Cooper Hoffman) answered some questions after the screening.
What they talked about—home, comfort, nostalgia—felt deeply familiar to me—the impulse to go back to places you knew in childhood during a scary time in adulthood, and wanting to celebrate something beautiful that’s gone, because it really was beautiful while it lasted. You know how you sing along to songs that you disdained when you were a teenager, because they were just there in the background when you were going about your business? Like, if Melissa Etheridge comes on when I’m in the car, I am singing at full volume. The Gin Blossoms, Wilson Phillips, goddamn Ace of Base! Watching Licorice Pizza felt like doing that, but in Paul Thomas Anderson’s brain instead of my own. Alana told a story about how her mother had been Paul’s art teacher in school and how she’d been nervous to tell him, but then when she told him, he went into his child’s bedroom and pulled out a painting that he had made with her mother, something he’d held onto for forty years. That’s the vibe. Putting the child of your friend and collaborator in the movie is the vibe. Togetherness, and love, and the things you remember forever.
Do you know the Joe Brainard book I Remember? It’s a memoir, it’s a poem, it’s a list. Just things that he remembers—some facts, some feelings. Here are a few:
I remember that popular boys always had their blue jeans worn down just the right amount.
I remember the chair I used to put my boogers behind.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember after people are gone thinking of things I should have said but didn’t.
Same, Joe, same.
I turned ten in 1990. I had a lip-sync birthday party and I dressed like Joey McIntyre, my first true love. It was the year that Beverly Hills 90210 premiered, which meant that my Wednesday nights would be booked for the next decade. Over those next ten years, I got braces, I had crushes, I started smoking, I had the most gorgeous, magnificent friends. I spent New Year’s Eve of the year 2000 dancing at Don Hill’s, where I had spent years trailing the following actors around while pretending not to: Liv Tyler and Joaquin Phoenix, Liev Schrieber, goddamn Billy Zane, who was such a Billy Zane, lurking with a dangerous scowl. So many more that I’m forgetting—I remember that there are more that I’m forgetting. My oldest child is now 8, which mean he’s a hair away from that crucial decade, when so much is felt and discovered. Time is a motherfucker, is what I’m saying.
Things I remembered about the 90s after writing the book that I wish I could sneak in:
I remember my brother’s friends cutting two-liter soda bottles in half to make gravity bongs in the bathtub.
I remember the words “gravity bong.”
I remember the bottomless cavity in between Donna Martin’s breast implants.
I remember browsing video stores, and the boxes of the movies I never rented, like Griffin Dunne’s head being wound up like a stopwatch on After Hours.
I remember having the patience for Jack Kerouac.
I remember being embarrassed for/by Freddie Prinze Jr. when he had to lip-sync that Barry White song. (Technically, this was the year 2000.)
I remember paying $2.25 for Newport Lights at the newsstand on the corner of 86th and Columbus.
I remember my friend’s parents’ black toilet.
I remember when a boy at a high school party said, “I would like to shake the hand of Mr. Ron Bacardi.”
I could do this all day. Paul Thomas Anderson said something about nostalgia coming back into fashion, or at least not being the dirty word it used to be. I’m in.
What do you remember?
What I’m Reading:
Lily King, Five Tuesdays in Winter: Glorious, perfect stories from a glorious, perfect writer.
Janelle Brown, I’ll Be You: former child-star twins get into trouble into Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and the desert and it’s absolutely delicious. Janelle, like Megan Abbott, is a surgeon of the complex relationships between women. I am gobbling it up.