Today’s item about that fabled year in urban culture is part of a joint radio and blog project between WFMU, Michael Gonzales, Serena Kim and the writers at Aural Examination and Invisible Woman. I’ll talk — with my old Bay Area connect Billy Jam — on the respected Jersey City radio station between noon and 3 p.m., EST.

Grab a podcast of the program from WFMU’s website.

Now, it’s hard for a certain segment of America to talk about 1988 without talking about crack. The drug was just cresting in urban popularity, and the culture — especially music — which grew out of that year was as potent as rocks were dangerous. There seemed a symbiotic relationship, as though America’s biggest drug problem was bacteria living in the intestines of hip-hop. New Jack Swing was born of crack culture same as was the tension of that second Public Enemy album and LL Cool J’ s emerging Kangol hats.

At this time I was 21 and in the middle of my first full year at Fresno State, a transfer from Sacramento City College. Fresno then felt incredibly segregated, just very different from the Northern California I knew. (Too much like Ohio.) Black guys on campus were largely looked at a athletic program fodder, even gangly, clumsy types like me. Monthly, campus people would ask if I was on one of the sports teams.

That year might have been the craziest of my life. I loved it as I looked within. The writing was new and fresh. The music and art and such that I took in then fundamentally rocked my world.

My Fresno State roommate, who is the creator behind this blog, spread his thousand-or-so-piece vinyl album collection across our apartment’s dining room. We just gave the room over to it. Nevermind our 16-inch black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears. And my shit — mostly cassettes, and pretty good shit at that — was over in the corner, beneath the Sid Vicious poster. We very rarely opened the curtains.
For the first time, I had access to someone’s full take on rock and roll. Fresh out of Sacramento City College, I missed about 40 percent of my Fresno State classes, just getting lost with my headphones on. We had all of the Beatles and Stones albums and Lou Reed and the Minutemen and Gang of Four and Hüsker_Dü. And I just went apeshit for this new music. This stuff mattered to me at least as much as Too Short and Schoolly D and the radical new rumblings coming out of Los Angeles. It was as though I’d entered a wormhole. We listened to Robert Johnson.

Even this lofty experience could not extract me fully from the world of rock cocaine. I would occassionally head back up to Sactown, mostly to get my jheri curl done.

There was this cat on Freeport Boulevard, the King of Curls, who would fix up my crop on regular occasions. But when I forgot to call ahead and get an appointment on time or whatever, I’d end up in the kitchen of some half-stranger who’d put lye, curlers, etc., in my hair.

One late Saturday morning I had bombed up Hwy 99 in my ‘77 Chrysler LeBaron and landed in some friend of a friends’ kitchen, with my head in her sink.

I just sat there while this woman rolled up my newly straightened hair. She was a mom I’d like to fuck, before. Maybe 32 and certainly old to me. Then. She was hot though.

And it was just one of those situations where your hairdresser is talking. I missed the cool professionalism of the King of Curls, but she was real cool, pretty and gentle. Smelled nice. So I let her ramble on. Her daughter, now that was the real issue. My new curls lady was very unhappy, despite her relatively posh surroundings. If I remember right, the crib was a duplex in the nicer part of Sactown’s south side. And the woman said a word, all drenched in sadness, that I’d never heard before:

“Toss-up,” the mother said. “My baby’s a toss-up.”

I was like, “what the fuck is a toss-up?” And she explained that her daughter was trading sex for crack. She cried a little bit, but never took her frustration out on my scalp. (He remembered, fondly.)

Around when the curlers were mostly out of my head, the daughter came in. She was gorgeous, just bursting with that beautiful Northern California black girl thing that nobody on Earth has yet matched. And she was what we would come to know, in the popular lexicon as a crack ho. Strawberry, to some.
When I think of ‘88, I tend to think of sqandered promise. It’s a drizzly California memory. And I got two-and-a-half hours to Fresno.
But, then in the summer I went and interned at the Boston Globe. Living Colour, up in Cambridge. That’s some shit I can’t forget. Truth is ‘88 was all over the place for me. There was that time interviewing Mayor Ray Flynn on the fly, at an afternoon public park grip-and-grin event. In the middle of our interview, the opening bass notes of “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em” came blasting out of an oversize speaker. Instantly I recognized the rap music as Eric B & Rakim’s first single to the album follow-up to Paid in Full. Literally, it became impossible to pay attention to a word Mayor Flynn was saying. I first tuned him out, then a few seconds declared the interview over.

“I’ve got enough,” I said.

And I’d do it again.

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