Peter Frampton Shows Me the Way

Who can I believe in, I'm kneeling on the floor, There has to be a force, who do I phone?
In 1977, Peter Frampton had a hit song, “Show Me the Way”-and for me it did just that. That first electric whine, fires up my personal time machine, and resurrects a 9 year old me.
I’m in the Summer of Sam, Cypress Hills Brooklyn, with the J train rolling 8 feet from our roof line; neighborhood crime and parental paranoia making a window sill my periscope to the world. Ma and Da, (names as far as possible from “mother” and “father”) are still alive, but I don’t invite them this time.
Well, I can see no reason, You living on your nerves, When someone drops a cup and I submerge…
You can’t tell me the sky wasn’t bluer then; it didn’t matter that you could only see a sliver through the steel. Maybe, like a plain girl with ugly cousins, it was made prettier by comparison with the greasy track. The night sky was a Christmas constellation of streetlamps, and subway signal lights: gold, red and green. This was a cosmos of airplanes, our falling stars the contrail of the Concorde unfurling like a super-sonic party streamer; a miracle to see it, then hear it, a lightening conveyance for rich passengers. And we, the awed, ignorant poor, were grateful for the crumb of a sonic boom. It’d be another 5 years until I saw real stars but that was in Pennsylvania. In Brooklyn, we couldn’t figure why anyone would name a galaxy after a candy bar.
The stars are out and shining, but all I really want to know...
Frampton, my only visitor that summer, was a toothy, tanned British boy with flowing blond hippie hair that he shook out of his eyes when a guitar solo swept him away. He wore denim shirts opened to the waist like a poor man’s Roger Daltry, but with a less menacing brand of sexuality. If the Who is unbridled lust, then Frampton is shy, first kisses at a High School dance. He being 60 and me being 40 once terrified me. But his guitar, with bended notes, wakes up that wondering kid who taps at the window of my jaded soul. 20 countries and 30 years later that window still frames my view of the world and the joyful anticipation that there is so much more to see.
Oh won't you show me the way (everyday)…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al9WmowJ3bQ&feature=fvwrel