Salon.com > Jamie Allen

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Mon, 15 Apr 2002 20:00:00 +0000

The first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I was sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck in Tampa, Fla. It was the fall of 1991 and I was a washed-up baseball player who had just graduated from college.

My next idea was to become a writer. I played in a band, wrote in my journal and went drinking with my buddies every night. This was on my parents' bill. America was locked in a deepening recession and I was a slacker, in the days before slackerdom became a viable marketing demographic.

There was more missing in my life than a steady job. College had been a great disappointment. All we did was sit around and talk about other times. I listened to Bob Dylan and wished I had been alive in the early 1960s. The Gulf War had stirred things up briefly, but how can you aim your discontent at a video game? I had been bred to believe that I had been born at the wrong time, that nothing happened in my generation and that the last real cultural and artistic revolution was at least 20 years in the past. I was thinking about getting a job in sales.

The stereo system in my friend's pickup was the ultimate. He was the drummer in his own band and he needed sound, loud sound, to surround him at all times.

Tampa’s time

Sat, 27 Jan 2001 21:12:00 +0000

One of the first times I heard the word "nigger" spoken with feeling by an adult, I was at a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football game. This was in 1980 or '81, and Doug Williams was the quarterback and the target of the slur.

He had just thrown a bad pass, which, according to the redneck sitting in the row behind us, warranted punishment that probably included lynching.

"Stupid nigger," he had said.

I felt my face grow hot as my mother turned and stared at the guy until he mumbled an apology.

It turns out that Williams received much worse treatment than that from Tampa fans. After he continued his career elsewhere, eventually leading the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII, he told stories about how he received death threats after Buc losses. Someone even sent him a gift-wrapped present, which, when opened, was revealed to be a rotten watermelon.

Today, Williams claims he harbors no grievances towards Tampa and its citizenry.

"I mean, I got my share of letters from down there," he says on the phone from his home in Ruston, La., "but I think the majority of the people in the stands weren't on the negative side. It's always a small minority that makes the most noise -- a couple of bad apples making it bad for the good ones."

Misty and meat pies

Fri, 09 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

I remember myself at that time as gangly and dim. I was 18, just removed from my first year of college, during which time I played baseball, ate Buffalo wings, drank beer, whispered lies to young women and slept. School? Let me put it this way -- I got a "U" (as in "unsatisfactory") in Typing 101 and the rest of my grades added up to "academic probation," which is the university's way of saying, "Yep, this guy's dim."

So, on the flight to Monroe, La., where I would visit my dad for three weeks, I was filled with a sense of freedom. It was the chance to escape my life for a spell. What I had -- a retreat from school, a comfortable suburban life and a girlfriend I didn't like anymore -- was creative-enough punishment. But Dad saw to it that I'd spend my time steam-cleaning Case machines at his tractor company for eight hours a day at minimum wage, a not-so-subtle hint that if I kept up my study practices, minimum wage is exactly what I'd be earning for the rest of my life.

In other words, the visit was a way to purge myself of my failures and realize my potential. Of course, being dim, I had only a vague understanding of all this.