Getting Over Jack Wagner Read Online Free PDF Page A

is the way to go. I haven’t told either best friend about it. Karl knows there is a book, but not what the book’s about. Maybe I won’t tell anyone until it’s finished.
    Because, for now, I’m thinking this book is a pretty good idea. A valuable social resource, a clever book + music marketing concept. Or, it’s what my elementary school art teacher was trying to warn my mother about after I made Michael Jackson’s head out of papier-mâché. “Eliza has so much creative potential,” she said, sighing. “I just worry about how she’s choosing to harness it.”

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celebrities
    SIDE B
    â€œAll I Need”—Jack Wagner
    â€œI Would Die 4 U”—Prince
    â€œJessie’s Girl”—Rick Springfield
    â€œHungry Like the Wolf”—Duran Duran
    â€œI’m Your Man”—Wham!
    M y first bout of rock-star love struck when I was ten years old. When you’re ten, unlike when you’re twenty-six, having a crush on a rock star doesn’t make you weird. Everybody’s doing it. You’re supposed to be doing it. It’s the grade-five, peer-pressure equivalent of smoking pot or having sex in high school.
    My crush was on Jack Wagner. His rugged blond face coated every inch of my bedroom ceiling, door, and walls. Jack lived a double life: musician by night, soap star by day. At three every afternoon, I watched him as Frisco Jones on General Hospital. Later, when my parents started their nightly round of arguing—Mom’s needly jabs, Dad’s weary dismissals—I locked my bedroom door and plugged my ears with headphones, trying to ignore the word “divorce” that buzzed around me like a gnat.
    â€œDivorce” was the word in garish red letters on pamphlets in the guidance office. “Divorce” was the point of ABC After School Specials and Judy Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World. “Divorce” was what happened to kids whose parents fought too much, like Jenny Sousa’s, whose dad moved to Acapulco to sell baseball caps on a beach. Balled in my bed, I closed my eyes and drowned my worries in the sounds of the greatest mix tape ever made: two sides of back-to-back Jack Wagner’s “All I Need.”
    The beauty of ’80s music was this: rock stars weren’t afraid to speak their feelings. Back then, it wasn’t corny. It wasn’t suspicious. It wasn’t desperate. Men could spill their guts in a flood of synthesizers, cymbals, A-B-A-B rhyme schemes and long notes high as women’s. They were genuinely impassioned as they “brought ships into shore,” “threw away oars,” and “made love out of nothing at all.” Even heartbreak was delivered with a bravado that seems almost comical to me now. As a grown-up, I find that kind of openness terrifying. But in 1984, it was acceptable, even desirable, and it was the way I loved Jack Wagner: with confidence, fearlessness, and a T-shirt bearing a steam-ironed decal of his sultry face.
    â€œWhat’s that?” my mother pounced, the first time she saw it.
    She was sitting at the kitchen table painting her nails a frosty blue from one of the numerous bottles she kept in the refrigerator door, wedged discreetly among the sweet relish and Italian dressing. Very Violet. Magic of Magenta. Her hair was, as usual, sprayed and coiffed into a perfect ball. She was wearing a short-sleeve white sweater with pants and jewelry all in matching teal. My mother is a woman greatly concerned with appearances.
    â€œIt’s Jack,” I said, cool as a cucumber, heading for the back door.
    â€œHold it!” She stood up and stuck one leg out, aiming her blue pump at the door. I think the woman was prepared to physically bar me from being seen in public. “Who?”
    â€œJack Wagner,” I said, and sighed upward so my bangs fanned out, my newest and coolest move. “He’s a rock