The song is Van Halen’s “Jump.” It came out the summer of 1984 when I was an awkward, gangly, and watchful eight-year-old. My world was the block where we lived, the kids who lived there and my older brother and sister. Like a Mark Twain novel or one of the cartoons my children now watch, there were no adults that summer. Maybe they were working. Maybe they were inside. But the street and the backyard was ours, and Eddie Van Halen let his guitar scream as we jumped into our pool, all of us skinny, all of us happy, all of us alive - over and over again.
My sister must have been thirteen that year, my brother 11. They seemed like grown-ups to me. My sister burst out her first two-piece bathing suit in 1984, and the neighborhood boys all took notice. They playfully pulled her hair and pushed her into the pool. I waited on the edge of the pool, balancing, but if I hit the water, it was an accident of my own accord, not because someone noticed me enough to see how much I wanted to be pushed in, or noticed.
The boys of Surf Street were all older than me, even older than my sister. Vinny was tall and thin, his skin tanned to a dark brown before school even let out. His light brown hair was long in the back, in the style they wore on Long Island in 1984. He walked with a Danny Zuko swagger before John Travolta ever showcased his own version in “Grease.” Vinny’s smile was a troublemaker’s smile. He was the boy my parents never trusted; a “walking disaster area,” my mother nick-named him because things were always broken in his wake - end-tables, glass vases, my brother’s jaw. Vinny was the reason the movie “Rocky” and all of its sequels were banned in our house. It made the boys roughhouse, and the wear and tear on our home (and my brother) were starting to show. But the door was always open to Vinny, because he was impossible not to love. And so we did.
Eddie was his younger brother, his hair a shock of yellow, and trimmed down to a crew cut each summer so that the tips of the ears that stuck out from the side of his head sunburned into painful blisters. He took longer to tan than his brother, and freckles stood out on his nose. He was quieter, and more gentle, but no less of a trouble-maker. Lumber and appliances were stolen in local stores and fingers were always getting pointed at Eddie, but he was always welcome in our house. He was ours, and we loved him.
Glen lived on the corner, and he was small and dark, and funny and loud. He could flirt at age thirteen, and almost got run over by my father’s car after he let his hand smack at my sister’s pubescent ass. Glen walked the street and into our house like he owned it, and drove my father up the wall with his attitude. He had the great fortune to live at the house where the bus stopped every morning, and as such commanded the front of the line every single school day. I was enveloped in a cloud of hateful jealousy. I wanted that spot. And I liked him.
I secretly, desperately loved every boy who grew up on Surf Street. They were the movie stars that were sparkling, magnificently beautiful, charismatic, and out-of-reach. I had never not known them, they were at my crib-side when I was a baby, never not there, but in that summer, I thought that maybe I could be one of them.
My brother had a boom box that held the coveted Van Halen cassette tape. He put it up against the screen of his bedroom window and when David Lee Roth told us we might as well jump, we did, splashing into the pool with screams of laughter and lightness, into the beautiful unknowable and innocent waters. It was heaven that summer, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t know that Vinny would be murdered by the time I was a senior in high school, or that Eddie would be lost forever, to drugs, to crime, to sadness. We didn’t know that my dad and Glen’s mom Karen would die within months of each other and that our lives would entwine at the same funeral home where we said goodbye first to Vinny, then Dad, then Karen.
I’m one of the moms now, watching carefully as my children navigate our street on the bicycles in their helmets and elbow pads. The kids today are protected in ways that we weren’t as kids. Sometimes I get so caught up in the laundry, the oil changes of the car, in the raising of the children that I forget the little girl I was. I forget that feeling of invincibility, steadily knocked down when the indifferent malice of the real world came to Surf Street. But when Van Halen comes on the radio, I turn it up and open my window, young again, and immortal, surrounded by the ghosts of my childhood, alive again if only for the time it takes to sing “Jump.”
