dave lacrone : blog

When I was about 12 years old I submitted an ad to a feature called "Hello Out There" in a publication called Gifted Children's Monthly. This was basically a newsletter for parents and students classified as "advanced" in some way. I'm not sure the term "gifted" is still in common usage, but my mother was very much into the concept and considered me and all her children to be exceptionally bright and not sufficiently challenged by school. So she was involved in Gifted children's organizations to be sure that the need of smarty pants kids like me were being adequately met in our schools.

I won't address the degree to which my giftedness was or wasn't true because that's another post altogether.

Anyhow, I wrote a nice little bio for "Hello Out There" soliciting pen pals from readers of the newsletter all across the country. I don't remember the exact verbage but it went something like this:

"Hi, I'm Dave and I'm 12 years old. I love playing dungeons and dragons, reading fantasy novels, Star Trek, listening to Led Zeppelin really loud, and writing poetry. I love to write and promise answer every single letter."

They published it about 2 years later.

So needless to say, a dork parade ensued. I got letters every day from kids across the USA who were card-carrying trekkies, 11th level clerics and a smaller assortment of metalheads (which is what we called 'em in those days).

Well, before I knew it I had about 30 or 40 pen pals, most of whom I didn't care one whit about. But you see, I promised to respond the every single letter! So 9th grade for me was spent largely writing letters in my room, experimenting with my literary persona and revealing intimate details of my life to people I'd never meet.

Fortunately I did encounter several very interesting and memorable characters. One girl, let's call her JT, was a committed heavy metal lover. She lived in central Florida, loved Metallica, King Diamond, Exodus, Megadeth etc and was also a talented budding guitar player. She's the first person my age I knew to lose her virginity and I hadn't even met her yet. She learned batik, calligraphy, and all sort of crazy crafty shit I'd never even heard of. We wrote each other letters that were 10, 20, 30 pages long...full of teen angt, rambling poetry, ruminations on the best Jethro Tull song, guitar tablitures, and any number of other ridiculousness.

Her friend, I.S. also became my pen pal and, even though he was a year or two younger, became somewhat of a teenage idol of mine, due to his strength of character, impeccable white trash pedigree, and ability to grow both long hair and a skimpy Kirk-Hammett-esque mustache.

We all corresponded for several years and I finally went up to Volusia County, Fla. to visit them on the Greyhound. I remember little about the experience except hanging out with weirdo metalheads who were way older than us, walking around aimlessly a lot and drinking what would become the first of many tallboys. One girl had converse sneakers witht he Batman logo on them so that puts it about 1989 I suppose.

Other pen pals I had were less important to me, but equally as memorable. There was the girl who I thought was a boy until we had been corresponding for about a year. She had one of those sexually ambiguous names. Of course, as soon as I realized she was female, I developed a pen pal crush on her. Then she became vaguely suicidal in that teenage sort of way and I spent the rest of our writing relationship trying to talk her down off a ledge. She was way too into Rocky Horror anyway and I eventually lost touch.

Others stay with me, too. In fact the impetus for this whole post is an email I recieved the other day from a guy I wrote with for several years back in the 80's. We never became overly close because his politics were extremely right wing. But we still wrote each other for at least a couple years.

The long and short of it is that pen pals have probably become a thing of the past. Blogging is a much more efficient medium, and I definitely see them as related means of expression. Pen palling is way more personal of course. I mean, once I.S. mailed me a letter writen on an entire roll of toilet paper. He wrapped it up, wrote an address and it arrived with about 1.04 postage due.

But blogging is close. Definitely not as special but the same impulse to connect with people drives one to participate. You need a certain amount of anonymity combined with a willingness to be confessional combined with a fearlessness that drives the whole enterprise.

For whatever reason i fell out of touch with all of my pen pals. It makes sense. My closest writing friends JT and IS lost touch when I went to facny college up north and discovered girls, alcohol and punk rock. Others just sort of slipped by the wayside. Teenagers can move on in a way adults cannot.

So, I have lots more stories about pen pals, but I think I've decided to protect their anonymity and my own dignity in keeping it all to myself. These are some of the fondest memories of my adolescence. You see, I've kept every pen pal letter I received from 1987 to about 1993. The pencil on osme letters is fading and soon I will have to decide whether to scan or not to scan.

What does one do with such remnants of youth?