Pt. 9 Never Have I Ever? Hold My Coffee!

The Hammer, the Plywood, and the Brother: An Unsupervised 1980s Teen Tale:

Picture this: the 1980s. It was a time when the biggest concerns were whether your Walkman had fresh batteries and if your favorite song would finally play on the radio so you could record it. In our household, things were a bit more... animated, thanks to my brother, who we’ll call “Hammerhead” for reasons that will soon become painfully clear.

It was a typical afternoon. The sun was out, the scent of hung laundry drifted through the air, and the faint sound of a GNR song played in the background. Our mom, a wonder woman who juggled three jobs to keep us afloat, wasn’t home – a common scenario that often led to adventures of precarious safety.

On this particular day, Hammerhead embarked on a DIY project – dismantling the ancient, warped waterbed in the backyard. This relic of ’80s interior design had seen better days, its plywood base more wavy than the hair of a Bon Jovi band member.

My then-boyfriend and now husband, playing the roles of the cautious sibling and future brother-in-law, had warned him earlier, “Dude, that looks dangerous. You’ll get that stuck in the back of your head?” But in true teenage invincibility complex, he mocked the notion of danger – or common sense.

Armed with an old hammer and a level of confidence that no teenager should legally possess, Hammerhead began his attack on the plywood. With each swing, I cringed, waiting for disaster. But like a scene out of a sitcom, I watched as the hammer came down and the reverb bounced it backward. The hammer’s claw decided it was done with plywood and sought a new target – the back of my brother’s head.

Thankfully, the injury was more pride-wounding than anything else. There he stood, the hammer claw tangled in his hair, creating a look that not even the ’80s could label cool. And me? I oscillated between concern and suppressed laughter.

“See, I told you!” I managed to say, between bouts of laughter and checking if he was genuinely okay. But my husband, the true hero, went directly to his aid and saved his mockery for another day.

What unfolded was a mix of amateur first aid and trying to convince him that maybe, just maybe, we had been right about the whole ‘it’s too dangerous’ thing.

Ultimately, the plywood was left as a monument to our unsupervised day. My brother gave us new ammunition for a story that would be retold for years to come. I got the satisfaction of the ‘I told you so’ moment, and my brother gained a newfound respect for the power of tools... and warnings.

This era, without smartphones and the internet, taught us to make our own fun – sometimes at the expense of common sense. And while the ’80s may have been a simpler time, they were never dull, especially with my brothers around.