Photo by henry perks on Unsplash
Just after the super popular movie The Lost Boys made it to video, nearly a year after it came out in the theaters, my best friend got a karaoke machine for his birthday or Christmas or just because he asked for one. I don’t remember. The Lost Boys soundtrack had blown up in sales, and one song on there really struck us, young boys who dreamed of being older, who talked late into the night during our weekly sleepovers about growing up and partying and scoring with ‘chicks’, a word I would never use now. We were two young boys in the strike zone of puberty who could really only think about a few things at once; girls and football and Super Mario Bros. were our life for two or three years.
The karaoke machine had two microphones, two speakers, and two cassette decks, one for playing the cassette (in this case, The Lost Boys soundtrack) and one for recording those singing along to the music. It was genius, actually. I still don’t know how this technology existed back then, but the little machine had an equalizer, and you could actually turn down the lyrics but keep the background music loud, sing, and record your voices over the top of the drums, bass, and guitar. A feat of modern technology in the late 1980s.
The one song that inspired visions of grandeur and dreams of being teenagers or college-aged, when we could party all night long, was “Good Times,” sung by Jimmy Barnes and Michael Hutchence. Barnes’ voice coursed out of the speakers like he had swallowed a Brillo pad before recording, and Hutchence filled the air with a sexy sound, hard yet soft at the same time, a sultriness. I wanted to be him. Luckily, my friend liked to be the singer with the more ‘manly’ voice because I would have fought to the grave to sing Hutchence’s lyrics in the duet.
We recorded over and over again. He would begin with a guttural yell to match Barnes, and I would follow with a howl, a sexy howl, I believed it to be a sexy howl to match many, many magazines’ pronouncement that Michael Hutchence was the sexiest man in the world — a man who was both masculine and feminine, wrapped up in one body, in one face, and in one voice.
Hutchence had embraced the feminine in his long, curly hair and thick lips and the masculine in his face stubble and his dating of some of the most sought-after women in the world — singers, supermodels. He embraced a submersion into androgyny, and this is what made him sexy. And if I admitted it or not — I saw his sexiness in the way women saw it. I did not want to be with Michael Hutchence. Instead, I wanted to be him, to have the women draped onto me like I saw in videos on MTV and in magazines.
We sang that song 200 times that day, progressively turning down the vocals on the karaoke machine until our voices were the only ones belting out “Gonna have a good time tonight/ rock and roll music gonna play all night.” This singing brought me closer to that man whom women adored, whom I adored for different but not too dissimilar reasons than they did. When someone embraces sexuality, truly grabs a hold of it and kisses it on the world’s stage, it’s hard to look away. It’s hard to not ache for it. At thirteen years old, I kinda knew what it was, but I could not define it like I can now. Gender is fluid in all of us, and if we allow ourselves to see beauty in that fluidity, we will see beauty in everyone.
We sang and we sang, over and over again, until we perfected it enough to listen back to the whole song, Barnes and Hutchence’s voice replaced by ours and the band accompanying us solely. We were proud. Did I feel like Michael Hutchence for an afternoon? Hell yes. I felt older, with real sex appeal, enough to send surging hormones through me, until I looked in the mirror and saw just enough peach fuzz above my upper lip to bring the young boy back to me.
Was it perfect? Nah. How could it be, really? Two boys going through puberty who could barely keep their voices from cracking during normal conversation could not really pull off a full song and hit the notes all the way through.
But that age is so awkward, full of zits and facial hair and cracking voices and social skills; it was full of confusion of self, lost boys on this journey to adulthood, of bildungsroman. We still had enough child in us to walk upstairs with the boombox, put the recording into the tape deck, and play the song for my friend’s mom. Old enough to want the life of a rockstar, but still young enough to want the approval of a parent.
She listened. She nodded. She didn’t say much about the performance except that we “must have worked really hard on it,” and then she ordered Pizza, Pizza from Little Caesars, two square, deep-dish pizzas for the price of one.
Kase Johnstun lives, writes, and runs in Ogden, Utah. His most recent novel, Let the Wild Grasses Grow, was named a Women’s National Book Great Group Read, a Finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and a Reading the West Longlist. You can find it at https://www.torreyhouse.org/let-the-wild-grasses-grow