Opening up his 50th blog with a Bon Jovi lyric, what’s with this guy? As if someone as cool as Ed would type a blog about Bon Jovi, let alone quote their lyrics. I mean, really? Edwin would never write a blog on Bon Jovi… Wait for it… Yes he is!
It was the summer of 1987. My oldest friend came back form California and was living a few blocks away from me. I lived on Hudson really close to Wadsworth which was a block away from where Allen Street started. My friend lived on Mariner which is right off of Allen and probably less than a 10 minute walk away. The neighborhood was multi-cultural, which was a really cool thing that I’ve always been thankful for but it made it hard to make friends when you went against the grain. My friend and I were kind of outcasts. There were bullies all around who wanted to kick our behinds because we were different and we were considered dorks.
What that meant was that most times we hung out it would be at one person’s house or the other. It was summertime and everyone was out. I don’t know if it’s like this in richer neighborhoods or in the burbs but in our neighborhood, everyone was on their porches and the kids if not on the porch were in the street or at the nearby Days Park. No one stayed inside… after all, no one had air conditioning. The best way to stay cool was to be outside and maybe getting a garden hose or fire hydrant going.
When it came to who had the better street, my friend won. His street was more chill and more importantly than that, there were girls there! My block had a few girls, but none that we were interested in nor would be interested in us. So now that we had the spot we needed to bait our hooks. How would we lure them over? We needed some “game” to kick it to the ladies but unfortunately the only kind of game we had was maybe a little Dungeons and Dragons. Teenage girls have no love for wizards and even less love for hobgoblins.
Part of my dorky charm back then was my love for music. I often switched from one genre to the next and due to my youth I didn’t know I could like more than one at one time. By the summer of 1987 I was firmly entrenched in the MTV phase of my life. That means anything they played on MTV was the greatest thing ever. By 1987 new wave was getting pushed aside for hair metal and power ballads. While I know it’s not true now, back then MTV told me those things were way cooler than Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Cars and Howard Jones. I bought in even though they played Poison and Winger videos every 90 minutes or less.
I may not have known how to talk to women but I knew the international language of love; music. So every day that summer I played what I was into that I also knew the ladies would be into: Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. We literally listened to it every single day, sometimes multiple times a day and god bless that Jon Bon Jovi because the girls came over and hung out. It wasn’t that I had some rare copy of the record, I mean it was the highest selling record of 1987, but when two hot guys are pumping Livin on a Prayer, the ladies can’t resist.
To this day I still know the words to most of that album. Plus although it’s not entirely cool to admit it, that’s one of the most important records to me in the course of my life. My friend hooked up with a very pretty girl that summer and I received one of my first real lessons with the women. It was an important summer in my history and Bon Jovi was the soundtrack. I guess the lesson here is that we gotta hold on to what we got… cause it doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. We got each other and that’s a lot, for love… we’ll give it a shot.
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