True Carpathian Black Metal

“I don’t know,” he said, "Probably because my mom posted a thousand pictures of me before I could even talk. Adults are so desperate for attention they’re using their own kids to get it. I’m out.”

This excoriating review of modern parenting was delivered by a fifteen year old with straight white teeth named Garrett. 

He and his friends had been coming to Rock School for about a year. 

Back to him in a second.

We get all kinds here — preteen Swifities learning to make squishy fingers move from G to C9, tech nerds who can’t play but can run a Logic session better than me, plenty of kids who love the look just not the practice — on balance they’re more the same than not. American teenagers doing what they can to ride the line between standing out and blending in. 

Present enrollment stands at four hundred. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little proud. I built this. It’s been twenty years and while I maybe at some point could have would have should have peeled off to do something more lucrative or healthinsurancey, I didn’t. This is my contribution. One kid in a thousand here discovers she’s got a future in music. I’ll take it. 

Anyway it’s a sea of teens and I’m an oarless boat. I do what I can to ride it out until six and then it’s off to the Barbarian where Keith or Janet stretches the Happy Hour for little ole me. Two for one Hazys do not an overachiever make, but I’m pushing fifty and muffling the tinnnitus is the name of the game.

You don’t run an after school rocknroll program without inuring yourself to clatter in every key and tempo. I learned a long time ago how to tune it out without physically covering my ears. Which would hurt their feelings. And anger parents. And decrease enrollment. 

Okay so Garrett. 

A couple months ago this kid started coming in. Not alone. He and his buddies, maybe like five total. They wore the uniform of disaffected youth ubiquitous to every generation since Fast Times. Long bangs, T shirts from bands dead or disbanded. A handful of Spicolis they were, except, not high. Definitely not high. I would know. 

Plenty of kids still rock those white corded headphones. For a few weeks after Christmas a few will sport AirPods given by parents on their first time out. But by February one is inevitably lost so it’s back to the cords.

What got me wondering: One day when I looking in on Julian’s power chords 101 class I saw this kid plugging his phones into something I hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Where do you find a old school walkman in 2024?

I thought it was just one kid, but no, it was their whole crew, pressing play on magnetic tape. 

Man it took me back. Twin Falls circa 1990s. Riding the bus home from O’Leary listening to Oingo Boingo, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure. The feeling of pushing that button on the side of a plastic box only slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes, the tension of the spring resisting the pressure of your finger until it clicked into place and the gears engaged and the world exploded in a confetti of processed trumpets and a frowning backbeat and for a second you watched the knurled plastic wheels spin in the little window and then you looked out, out at the world at the potato fields and sagebrush hurtling by, taking succor for the wounds of your farmy existence from the fact that at least someone somewhere was making life beautiful.

Yeah I saw the walkman. I didn’t say anything at first, just watched for clues over the next few weeks.

But what really blew my mind, what made me single this kid out while he was zipping his electric red Ibanez into its soft case after class, was when I saw him fish a flip phone out of his pocket. 

Irony is one thing, but for most kids that means wearing a Bob Ross t-shirt or acid wash jeans. Adolescent rebellion never progresses into something causing actual inconvenience to its expressor. This was something else.

“Hey, kid!” Kid I called him. I call them all that. They like it. 

He was carrying a skateboard in one hand and his soft case on his back, heading toward the glass front door which was south facing and since the sun was going down the light threw a long shadow behind him in the hallway. The shadow came right up to me and stopped short.

When he turned around I said “Cool guitar,” then “I saw you playing it.” 

He scrutinized me like Is this some kind of joke? One thing about kids is they don’t hide their true feelings, especially when it comes to disdain.

I don’t know why I said the thing about the guitar. Just to get something going. I should have thought it through better but here we are.

“What’s your name?”

“Garrett,” he said, waiting, suspicious.

“Cool,” I said, “Garrett I gotta ask you — that’s a walkman, right?”

His hairless face was framed by the white lines of the headphone cords. I could hear the music thrashing inside them. Something angry and awesome.

“Yeah,” he turned to see if his buddies were waiting for him. He pulled a bud from one ear.

A couple girls squeezed around me in the hall. They were holding hands but they let go and made room for Garrett, passing on either side of him. He didn’t catch the woebegone look the girl on the right shot him. 

I said:

“I wonder where you get the tapes, but since I can see our time is short, I’ll ask, is that really a flip phone? 

This time he snuffed, or chuckled. Either way not an unfriendly sound. I pressed forward:

“Did you get in trouble with your folks?”

He shook his head no.

“They don’t allow you to have a smartphone,” I guessed.

“No actually they really wish I did,” he said, “It would be easier for them.”

“But you don’t want.”

“Nope,” more of that wonderful disdain.

“How do your friends get a hold of you?”

“They call me, or they T9 me.”

T9. Whoa. That was what, ’04? And it was for like a year and then everyone had an iPhone.

“Can you show me?”

Suddenly he smiled. Student has become teacher. The phone appeared like a relic from yore. He flipped it open. I moved closer to watch.

“I’ll text my mom.”

In a blur that begged disbelief he scrolled through the LCD list of names to M. The screen went blank and his fingers jabbed expertly at the keyboard and suddenly he had typed 

1 sec

“She’s outside waiting,” he explained, and snapped the phone shut.

“Not a lot of room for nuance.”

“None needed,” he said. He was itchy to go.

I was getting stupider the longer I talked. It’s a bad habit. 

I thought to back when I was his age, that promise of freedom exploding inside me with all of its mystery and hope and sense that nothing could ever hurt me because I was young and young was everything and I thought of what had changed in thirty years, what havoc gravity hath wrought, sure, but worse, that demon bug of a phone I carried everywhere and peered into in moments of crisis or curiosity but more than anything, boredom, looked to for solace in the form of a little heart given or withheld from some unseen and equally lonely soul hunched over his own screen in his own bar or car or bed or grocery store line or in any still eddy of life’s lonely river where at every moment you could either look up and see the clouds overhead or the always strange and interesting people around or you could make a little rhyme just to see if you could or, you could do what we all have been doing at this late hour of civilization’s long day and bow your head to the little God in your hand and caress his cold face scrolling toward Bethlehem until you slept a walking sleep.

I was so sad. I am so sad. And here was this kid, doing something different. When I asked him why he came out with it. Straight talk no chaser. I’ll repeat.

“My mom posted a thousand pictures of me before I could even talk. It’s bullshit.”

You could tell he felt a great disservice had been done him. An injury to his soul. He was reclaiming his life.

“You’re a cool kid,” I said and immediately regretted. The first rule when talking to fifteen year old boys is to never point out the obvious. They hate that. Mom stuff. They much prefer you come in at an oblique angle.

But I was grateful. I don’t know. It was the first act of true rebellion I think I’ve ever seen in my twenty something years as lord and governor of rock school. I’m not gonna get misty about it but there was something hopeful going on here.

“You got a vibe,” I pronounced. An adequate recovery.

“Anonymity is the new cachet” is what the little buddha said back.

That seemed to button up our heart to heart. He picked up the soft case he’d set beside him and started to press the bud back in his ear.

Hey what are you listening to? I asked first.

“Attila Csihar.”

The look I shot him must have been blank.

“Tormentor? Mayhem?” He was trying to help me. 

“True Carpathian Black Metal,” he said and shook his head, giving up. “You wouldn’t get it.”

Alas. The gulf of generations yawns and all are swallowed.

Garrett turned and I watched him push open the door and then I fished my Raybans out of my shirt pocket and flicked them open and put them on and watched him walk across the parking lot in an orange Idaho sunset to the black SUV his mom was waiting in.

I saw what she was doing. Of course she was.