My parents are, as parents go, fairly cool. I can cite many reasons why they are far, far cooler than YOUR parents, but because this is not meant to be a parent-comparing contest, I shall leave that for another day.
I know that my parents are cool because they let me listen to such amazing music. My dad introduced me to Steely Dan, Elvis Costello, and Was Not Was. My mom...my mom let me listen to "Tommy."
I don't remember the first time I heard it, but I do remember listening to it a LOT. It was my favorite album when I was a kid. She'd put on the tape as she drove me to kindergarten. Mom would be watching the road, and I'd be singing "Tommy can you hear me, can you feel me near you" at the top of my little lungs.
It was in maybe second grade that I understood the album as a whole. Unlike many people I know who had only heard it for the first time when they were in high school or even college, I could understand the story perfectly. The narrative leaps made perfect sense to my weird little 7-year- old mind.
Tommy's parents (note: I always thought that Tommy at this point was maybe a year or two younger than I was) tell Tommy that he doesn't see or hear anything, and that he won't say anything to anyone? And he believes them and takes it literally? Of course! At least that was how my mom explained it.
I was pretty sure that if somebody told me that I couldn't really hear or see anything, I'd be able to rely on my own senses to prove them wrong. "I can see! And I can hear! And I can talk too!" I'd yell. Mom told me that it wasn't just what they said, it was that they told him over and over and over. I wondered if the eyes and ears had a mind of their own. Maybe, if you said anything to anyone too many times, they'd start to believe it no matter what? (I didn't learn about the subconscious mind until years later, of course...)
The idea of Tommy not being able to hear or see anything fascinated me. I particularly liked the song "Amazing Journey", a speculation on what was inside Tommy's head. "Sickness will surely take the mind/where minds can't usually go..." I wanted to be sick that way, too.
(This reminds me now of "Comfortably Numb": "When I was a child, I had a fever...I caught a fleeting glimpse..." But I never listened to "The Wall" until high school.)
I couldn't quite see what was so amazing about the inside of Tommy's head. Then again, I spent a lot of time inside my own head as a kid anyway. I'm sure there were times when you could have taken away my sight and hearing and I wouldn't have noticed because I was too interested in what I was making up inside my own mind.
"The Acid Queen" always puzzled me as a kid; I could never tell what it was about. Of course, back then I didn't know anything about sex or drugs (but apparently quite a bit about rock 'n' roll). I couldn't tell what she was doing to him, and after carefully listening to the lyrics, I concluded that she was turning him into a robot. Why, I wondered, would his dad want to turn him into a robot? I was a little wary of my own parents for a while after that, and for a while one of my major speculations on life was that everybody else was really a robot, and I was the only person who actually existed.
Stuff like this didn't contribute to my social life at all. I don't remember if I told any of my little school friends about my thoughts on robots. Nevertheless, I was pretty damn weird for much of grade school.
I know some people remember childhood as an idyllic time. Maybe it was. I remember it as being incredibly boring; I could never think of anything sufficiently playful to do, and spent most of my time reading or making up elaborate stories in my head. On playdates, I'd try to get the other kids to act them out.
One of things I particularly remember (especially from the second grade on) was the sense of danger. There were a lot of older kids that I was scared of, kids I didn't know that would yell things I didn't understand at me. There were a few kids that would say things like "I want to put my hot dog into your bun" (which they probably learned from their older siblings). This, in the third grade. After I found out what it meant, I was terrified of being raped.
There was always a school bully, of course. These kids seemed to be REALLY dangerous-I was certain they could kill me if they wanted, a fear that was probably a little bit exaggerated in retrospect. There was a kid who carried a broken lighter around and threatened to set me on fire, a kid who followed me home fairly often (and sometimes tried to hit me with things he found in the street)...Scary kids. "Cousin Kevin" kids.
After the incident with the pyro child, I couldn't listen to "Cousin Kevin". What Kevin threatens to do in that song isn't just normal childhood torture, it's genuinely dangerous. Drowning, cigarette burns, glass in your dinner..."school bully" doesn't even begin to sum it up.
"Uncle Ernie" never resonated with me the same way that "Cousin Kevin" did. Steve Knopper summed it up best in the book Kill Your Idols: ""Cousin Kevin," which is about physical and psychological, rather than sexual, child abuse, has the same issue [as "Uncle Ernie"]-but the difference is Kevin comes across as a menacing criminal rather than a lovable uncle." I only understood what Uncle Ernie was doing under Tommy's nightshirt until Mom explained the idea of sexual harassment to me, and even then it didn't seem like such a big deal compared to Kevin.
Basically, the other kids scared me. I wasn't scared of the adults at all-the teachers, principals, policemen. I knew I was safe when they were around; the other kids wouldn't dare try anything under the watchful and punishing eyes of the teachers. It never occurred to me that they might try any of the same things on the teacher that they would on me. (If you're looking for gruesome stories of brutality against teachers, I don't have any; I guess the other kids thought the same way as I did in that respect. Stories of dead teachers always came from Detroit and Pontiac, not Southfield and Farmington Hills.)
It wasn't until middle school that I started to funnel my fear into actual hate. I decided that I wasn't scared of the other kids, I just hated them because they were all the same. Yeah, that was it! Even better, they were scared of me and how incredibly smart and creative I was. I threatened them. I was clearly the superior one.
I don't remember exactly where I picked up that idea. My guess is from Mom, who as I've said before is pretty cool. I'm sure she was trying to comfort me and build up my self-esteem, but it quickly built up into a kind of bitter, resentful megalomania. I was certain that the other kids were incredibly inferior to me, and I looked forward to the day when I would rule the world and be a best-selling science-fiction author, and they would all be living in trailers.
This is why I love the song "Pinball Wizard" so much. It comes at the start of the second part of the album. Tommy has gone through all this crap, losing his father and then seeing someone get shot in front of his eyes, getting tortured by his cousin, sexually molested by his uncle, and having who-knows-what done to him by the Acid Queen. Now he's finally come into his own. He can do something better than ANYONE else, and it's not in spite of his handicap, but because of it. The song is jubilant, an amazed celebration of skill; even the beginning riff is hopeful. At this point, as far as I was concerned, the album could have ended. Tommy was perfectly happy in his own head, and nobody was bugging him around coming out anymore because he could find something to impress them with.
"Go to the Mirror" upset me a lot when I finally thought about it. It's the first song where we really get into Tommy's thoughts. Before, he was basically a "black box"-nothing goes in, nothing comes out, and you have no idea what's going on inside. You could imagine that he's thinking anything you want him to think, and I wanted to think that "Amazing Journey" was right. It validated my own thoughts, in a way; if a deaf, blind kid could be totally happy inside his own head, there was nothing wrong with a seeing, hearing kid retreating either.
Then comes that plaintive, almost pathetic chorus: "See me...feel me...touch me...heal me." Tommy's trying to come out from inside his own head. It's not so nice alone in there after all; he wants to be with the rest of the world. Just like any normal person. If a deaf and blind kid whose only experience with the outside world had been traumatic wanted out so badly, what excuse did a seeing and hearing kid with a normal life have?

I wanted to talk about this with someone. "Smash the Mirror" was my excuse not to. I always thought that the reason for Tommy's mother's anger in "Smash the Mirror" was that she was beginning to think that Tommy wasn't really blind, deaf, or dumb. She really thought that he was just pretending to be-maybe out of spite, to punish her in some weird Freudian way for taking a lover when his father was really still alive, maybe just to gain attention. I didn't want other people to think that I was acting that way.
In retrospect, I think it wasn't scorn or anger I was afraid of, but the possibility that they might actually try to "smash the mirror." I didn't want to be taken outside of my own head. I wanted an excuse to totally retreat like Tommy had. I knew what my mind was like; I was safe there. If I got someone to tell me that I couldn't hear or see or feel, I'd be safe from the Cousin Kevins of the world. They could yell things at me and threaten to burn me up all they liked and I wouldn't care because I'd be safe on my amazing journey inside my head.
The ending of "Tommy" is pretty ambiguous. In the version I know, Tommy starts his own religion, then sets up a "holiday camp" where his followers can become deaf, blind, and dumb like he was in order to gain enlightenment and mad pinball skillz the way he did. They can't handle the lack of stimulation, rebel, and tear down the camp. Listening carefully to the lyrics, I deduced this: Tommy is left in the tattered rubble of his palace, yearning for the contact and admiration of his followers, who only return to worship him once again after he has retreated back into his deaf, dumb, and blind catatonic state.
I liked this ending. "Serves you right," I thought to Tommy, "trying to share what you had inside your head with everyone else. They made fun of (me) you and tried to burn (me) you and didn't understand (me) you; what made you think that they were deserving of the secrets you learned while you were hiding from them? You tried to be kind and magnanimous and treat them better than they treated you, and they just drove you back inside. See how they're worshipping you again-oh wait, you can't see it or hear it and you can't tell them about anything anymore and that's why they love you. They don't know what's going on inside your head anymore-for all they know, you could be thinking about the secrets of the universe. Or sex and picking your nose. But as long as you don't say anything, they'll assume that you're thinking about the secrets of the universe that they'll never know and they'll worship you for it."