I’ve been listening to Blondie lately. It’s… getting strange. I keep realizing songs I always knew, that were never written or performed by anyone in particular, were written and performed by someone. The most recent oddity is that I found one of the weird songs — the four songs that keep looping — in GTA3 was by Deborah Harry. She’s everywhere! And I discovered that the song was about cocaine. Which seems about right.
Thing is. I kind of wish there were a search engine for memories. There’s this one tune that keeps coming to mind, that played this one time I was… Well. For context —
In the mid-late ’80s, often my father would pick me up after school then — instead of taking me home, because he didn’t trust me not to accidentally burn down the house — he’d drag me with him to various college libraries, to sit around and amuse myself for six or eight hours a day while he researched things. Occasionally he’d drop me off in the Auburn mall — one of only a couple real malls-as-such in Maine at the time, and close by the Bates campus. Which meant I’d be, you know, eleven years old, stranded in a mall until closing. He’d usually give me ten dollars or so to get some pizza or whatever.
There was a Papa Gino’s at the mall, that I really liked. Their pizza was better than any of the local rural pizza place pizza — faux sicilian and all — and they had root beer! And right across the mall-hall was an arcade. The arcade had stuff like Rolling Thunder and Double Dragon and OutRun (the moving cabinet). You remember when every time you went into an arcade there was something new and amazing and creative. Instead of just light gun games and music games and fighters and racing games. They got all this stuff pretty on-time.
It was pretty special. Especially considering the small town I came from. And right across from a pizza place! So. I have these weird memories of that phase in my life. One of those was a certain day when I was way in the back of the Papa Gino’s, in what was once the smoking section, then was the non-smoking section, then when they got rid of smoking in restaurants (happened a long time ago in Maine), was just a neat little red-brick nook. Atmosphere. Darker. Cozier. And they had the sound system going. Playing… ’80s mall pizza shop stuff.
There was this one piece that kept playing over and over, that was… incredibly depressing. I’ve a vague melody of part of the chorus in my head. And I think the song might have been about children dying. In a sad-sounding ’80s pop female vocal. And I was just sitting there on my own, in a dark room, with this playing at me. I mean, I could have gone elsewhere. It’s just, that’s where I was.
And that song, it’s… in my head. It’s been in my head for maybe close to twenty years now, and I associate it with that arcade, and with Papa Gino’s, and with new NES and SMS and Genesis games that you know absolutely nothing about except what you can read on the back of the box when you ask the Kay-Bee clerk to let you look at it. And that whole era, when you could walk into an arcade and be faced with a Double Dragon or a Rastan. And being left there alone amidst it all.
I don’t know how to track down that song, in practical terms. I just kind of keep hoping I’ll stumble across it somehow, the way I keep stumbling across these things while listening to Blondie. To that extent, I’ve ordered some Cyndi Lauper. Probably not it. Still, same era.
Also, the Goonies NES game — which was never actually released over here for some reason, though it was released in the arcades here — was in the arcade there. And for some reason I was obsessed with that game. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. And there again: Cyndi Lauper.
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