Year of The Lost Found Walkman

I must have been 12 or 11 when I found it.  A black walkman clone – I think you’re supposed to call it a personal cassette player, you know, if you don’t want to use Sony’s marketing jargon or whatever – seemed to have just materialized on the tennis court one day with an unmarked cassette in it.

It was midsummer, and if I’m saying I was 12, it was 1994, but truth be told, I could have been 13 or 14 or 15 for all I can remember.  I was at camp, like I was every summer, in upstate New York nearby Lake George and for whatever reason, I didn’t have a walkman or a discman, or whatever, and I can’t remember what the weather was like or anything like that .

I remember distinctly, that it was one of those black plastic jobs with the little slit of clear plastic so you could watch the tape heads spin, and it had the auto-reverse which was this nice dealy that would automatically reverse the heads so you could listen to the other side of the cassette without having to eject it and turn it over yourself, and those cheap little plastic headphones that kind of covered your ear and had the little foam that rested between the plastic housing and your ear.

You know, it had the plastic thing that went over your head and messed up your hair.  Wow, those were bad days for headphones.  I popped on the phones and pressed play and heard the distinct voice of Bono screaming “IN THE NAAAAAAAAAME OF LOVE!  ONE MORE IN THE NAME OF LOVE!”

I had no idea what album this was, but I knew they were all U2 songs.  When I was 9 or 10 my Mom bought me this little dark gray Sanyo cassette radio and a copy of Led Zeppelin IV (the one with Stairway) on CD.  I don’t know why she thought I would like Zeppelin, but uh, I did.  That CD was awesome, but the radio itself didn’t have a CD player, so I would have to go to my Dad’s stereo system, which was this super-expensive NAD component system that I broke by hitting the eject button while it was still playing the day he brought it home, and take the time to copy the CD onto a tape.  My Mom was like, “it’ll be fun!”  Well, it was, and I got into the habit of making all of these mixtapes of my Dad’s CDs so we would have cool music to listen to on our frequent car rides from eastern Long Island into Brooklyn to visit all of our relatives. 

I remember listening to these CDs for hours every day with my Dad’s huge, expensive, futuristic-looking over-ear headphone monitors that must have cost hundreds of dollars, and finding songs amongst my Dad’s mix of 80s pop,  70s English rock, and random Time Life compilations of Motown or Big Chill Generation songs.  If I found a song I liked, I would patiently cue it up and copy it to one of those 90 minute Maxell tapes.  I must have made a hundred of those.

In the winter, we would ski at Gore Mountain, which was in the same area of New York that I went to camp, up in the Adirondack Mountains near Lake George, and I always loved the car ride because I would get to show off my handiwork to everyone.   My parents would express amazement at the songs that I would pick, and how they flowed together.  They would ask me how I did it.  Truth be told, it was random, but I knew I couldn’t say that, even at 10, so I told them I just tried to pick songs that had similar beginnings and endings. They bought it.  I had no idea that there was, in pop culture, a romantic element to making mix tapes.  The thought hadn’t dawned on me that teenage guys would make mix tapes for girls that they liked.   I made mix tapes for my parents.  Take that for what you will…

So, I had found this U2 album up at camp, and I had no idea what it was (I found out around 10 years later that it was Rattle and Hum when I bought it for no reason and was instantly teleported back in time), but it was the only music I had, and I really, really began to like it.  That was the album that they made that movie for with like the concert footage from their previous album as well as the recording of new material for the album all over America.  It’s really a great album…  So, I would carry this walkman everywhere I went and just listen to Bono wailing about starvation or Africa or Martin Luther King Jr. to the point where it practically became a sort of soundtrack to my summer.   I began to think of this walkman as mine – although I knew that it must have belonged to someone.

I listened to it constantly, during the day walking to and from activities, hiking in the woods, playing video games, whatever.  At night I would read Stephen King books by tenting my covers and cradling a big, rubber flashlight – the kind with the nipple button that you press in on the bottom – between my head and my shoulder while I scared the ever-living shit out of myself reading about a demon sewer clown that ate kids or an Indian burial ground that brought things back to life, and I would listen to Bono belt out jam after jam at the top of his crazy, 19-octave register.   I mean, this went on for weeks, this constant listening, and somehow, I don’t remember ever changing the batteries (although who would remember something like changing batteries 20 years later?).

Well, I was listening to this tape, as I always did on a bus ride to Great Escape, which was this theme park in the area that was, at that time, basically a smaller, hillbilly-infested version of a Six Flags.  I was probably thinking about all the rides I would hit up that day, or whether I would eat at the barbeque place – which had amazing curly fries, which were rare back then, and root beer, which was like my favorite drink in the world back then, and you couldn’t get it at camp at all.  Either way, I would have been gazing out the window, looking at the beautiful scenery along the highways up there, when this girl next to me tapped my shoulder and asked me, “Excuse me, where did you get that walkman?”

“I found it a few weeks ago.”  I answered her.  Oh man, I knew it…

“Is it playing U2?”  She had an earnest look, a hopeful look.

“Yeah.”

“Um, I think that’s my walkman.”

I knew it was hers the second she tapped me.  I gave it back to her.  I knew I could have denied it, but Bono probably wouldn’t have approved, and it was time to let go of the thing anyway.

I thought she’d be mad at me for not turning her walkman in, but she was just relieved to have it back after thinking it had been lost for good.  I was upset to lose the walkman, but when I got home at the end of the summer, I saw my Dad had bought two new CDs: “Achtung Baby” and “The Joshua Tree”.

A few years later, at the same camp, I was a Counselor-in-Training and I was cleaning a bunk after a bunch of campers had gone home for the year.

In one of the cubbies was a black boombox with an unlabelled cassette already inside.  It was Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning.”  I listened to it constantly…