Each Saturday I do a radio show called Obscure Oldies. Playing music I love is a high point of my week – I’m not great with the board, but I try to keep the sound volume in the green, not the red. Red blows our sound system. When I draw up the playlist, the vast majority of songs I choose were released between 1965 and 1971, most from 1967, oh summer of love, flowers in hair, and dead bodies in riots, dead bodies in Vietnam. In junior high school in 1967, I wasn’t a hippie. With a crew cut, I couldn’t wear flowers in my hair. My nerdiness ensured that I could sing along with Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, “I’m In With the Out Crowd.” I wasn’t even in with them.

Jesus was part of my problem. Every week at church I was told, “You have to put Him first. He only will accept worship. And He did die on a cross for you.” I knew I loved music more than Jesus. Even now I refer to Tommy James as the Lord (which might irritate him, since he is a Christian). Does this mean the Shondells were angels? Though Tommy was my big love, I had many other gods (and being raised in monotheism, I knew trouble would come from that too). Paul Revere and the Raiders. Nancy Sinatra. The DC5. The New Colony 6. Pet Clark. None of them died for me, but they made it possible for me to face Jackson Junior High.

Junior high began badly. Just try putting your jock on backwards in the locker room in front of twenty-five boys. I wasn’t toast. I was burnt toast crumbs. By afternoon it was all around school. Defined by my jock, I knew the next two years there would be bleak. Who would talk to someone like me? I wore white socks. That only proved they were right.

Music, sweet music, the bubblegummier the better, was the one hand I could hold, the umbrella that opened over me when skies rained hot tar. A couple of kids did talk to me: Ron and Chuck. Ron was fat and in my science class. His hair fell across his face like softened toffee. We shared a similar sense of humor. In eighth grade, this meant farting and baldness jokes. Chuck was short and loved music. Pet Clark was his idol, so we were off to a good start.

The three of us became friends. We hung out at the Oakbrook Shopping Centre (perhaps spelling it “centre” made it high-class). We all bought copies of “Get Out Now” by Tommy James and “I Can Take Or Leave Your Lovin’” by Herman’s Hermits at Sears. I didn’t share as much with Ron as with Chuck, possibly because Chuck was more into music and he was raised a strict Protestant, forced every Wednesday to attend some youth group called the Bereans.

Chuck had a strong bubblegum streak, too. In the summer of 1968, we rolled phony cigarettes from elm leaves gathered in my back yard, smoked them when my mother was out. Our breaking voices attempted to harmonize on “1,2,3 Red Light” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Every time I make a move to love you / 1,2,3 red light-light-light-light. Biking down our suburban Illinois streets, freedom came. There were no Terry Prevanders or Jack Katolics to push us into water fountains or call us names, only the click of baseball cards in spokes and WLS and WCFL djs announcing songs on our transistor radios.

When Ron and I were together, we just yukked it up over physical humor, never got too honest. When I was alone with Chuck, he and I blurted out the same truth: “I like boys!” We invented a code language to discuss male anatomy. Balls were oranges. Pubic hair was grass. And, who knows why, we called the penis mother. Mother’s Day took on new meaning.

It was scary and wonderful to talk about our bodies. I didn’t think Jesus was pleased by this, but on we talked, doing some very mild sexual experimentation in the basement of an under-construction house. Too mild for Chuck. I didn’t know that things had progressed further with Ron and Chuck. I was surprised when Chuck admitted they had played strip Monopoly, jealous that they played it without me. Left behind on Baltic, I wondered what they did on Boardwalk.

By 1969, two was definitely cozy company for them, and three a huge crowd. Chuck and I got into a fight a few months after Ron and I got into a fight. About nothing. About everything. I went to high school that September the same way I had entered junior high, alone and nerdy, though my father let me grow my hair a little longer. There was one good thing about junior high: it had ended. High school, twice as long, would’ve seemed twice as bad, had it not been for a few new friends, discovering poetry, and having a teacher who made me think about books instead of just blabbing reports on them.

I still love the 1910 Fruitgum Company and can easily listen to them sing “The Train,” “Bubblegum World,” or “Happy Little Teardrops.” Not “1,2,3 Red Light.” My bike got stolen and the baseball cards have long since gone in the trash. I hardly ever play Monopoly. “Stop the game,” sang the 1910s. The games never stop, but new songs come along, new ways to feel freedom—for me, usually in the garden or when Stan sits beside me on the couch watching an Addams Family rerun. I wish Chuck well, even Ron, but I won’t be including “1,2,3 Red Light” on my playlists.