Taking a long drag on her cigarette, Vanessa remembered teaching Bee and Heather and Jessica how to blow smoke rings, the way Nana Helen had taught her. It was before she’d met Jason, when it had been the four of them, climbing out her bedroom window and sliding down the drainpipe, quick as cats, and running to the playground. They’d pull cans of beer from the plastic rings of two six-packs and lie back on the spinning roundabout at Candy Cane City while one of the girls—usually Bee jumped off first—pushed them in circles. While it spun, they tried to stand as the platform rotated faster and faster beneath their feet. They’d raise their hands and scream out, then lie down again on the cold steel, and smoke until their throats hurt. This was before Vanessa had sworn off beer and pot, off anything fun but music.
Vanessa passed Bradley Boulevard and resisted the urge to turn right, toward Jason’s house. The invincible Debbie Harry, who surely never had one moment of self-doubt, continued; how did she manage to sound blond? Vanessa guided the Beetle around Chevy Chase Circle, the last mark of Maryland before it became the District. These circles are modeled after London, her father would inform them as they chugged around toward it. Well, jolly fucking fabulous, Vanessa thought now in a mock British accent. She pictured London, Big Ben rising behind the kids in pink Mohawks, safety pins in their noses, that she saw on postcards all over Georgetown.
She’d barely had her license two months, but now she was free of her parents and Ben shuttling her around. Her brother had been so obnoxious when he was the only one who could drive. Vanessa would stand at the top of the stairs, all hope and shimmer in her Gunne Sax shirt with sparkly threads, and jeans, with Bee and Heather and Jessica, each in a version of the same, waiting for Ben to take them anywhere.
“Maybe next time, girls.” Ben would wink, slamming the screen door shut and leaving the four of them stranded at home—what a dick—to read the best parts of Forever out loud in Vanessa’s room again, or to walk over to their friend Ed Brady’s on Primrose to listen to the sound track to Grease. Ed’s father was a senior partner at Arent Fox, and their enormous, expensively decorated house—beginning with the unforgettable zebra-skin rug in the foyer—became famous when it was used as the setting for a party scene in All the President’s Men. The five of them would smoke pot in Ed’s massive bedroom and parade around his bedroom singing, Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity! Later, they’d all hold hands in a line, count to three, and jump into the heated backyard pool.
Then one night Ed took peyote when they weren’t there and he never came back from his trip. His father found him under the hedges by the pool and put him in Psychiatric Institute, on Wisconsin Avenue. Vanessa and her friends hadn’t seen him since, and instead they hung out in far less glorious friends’ homes, soon moving on to the bonfires at Chevy Chase Country Club or the Georgetown bars that Ben frequented, places that were known for not carding. Then Vanessa met Jason, and she’d thought she could leave all the shining stupidity of boring suburbia behind.
They met the night the Tellers played the high school talent show. She and Bee and Jessica had come to watch Heather perform “Both Sides Now,” the only song she knew on the guitar, which she played over and over whenever the four of them were together. Vanessa loved Joni Mitchell, but more the deep, saddened, abandoned Joni Mitchell, not this sweet folksinger who seemed to fly in on a unicorn and dress her songs in lace and fairy romance. The girls all stood and cheered Heather in her peasant skirt, her strawberry-blond hair held back by a roach clip dangling with a yellow feather.
As Heather walked off the stage, strangling her guitar by its neck, the Tellers rose up from below the stage playing hard, and Jessica and Bee looked on in disbelief.
“Yikes,” Jessica said. “What shit!”
But Vanessa liked it. This was not—thank god!—Heather and her tentative fingerpicking. Nor was it her family’s protest music, her father after work setting his briefcase on the landing, shucking his suit as if he were shedding a skin, and putting on his woven Guatemalan shirt and leather sandals. He’d play “If I Had a Hammer” on the record player over and over and over. Vanessa and Ben would dance around the room screaming, I’d sing it in the evenin’. All over this land! as her father balanced his drink on his knee and tapped his thigh. Sharon, holding a glass of wine, would sway from side to side next to him on the couch. Remember, D? she’d say, closing her eyes and waving her arms. The darkest it got was Dylan or Pete Seeger, a glass of whiskey sipped as Sharon banged around in the kitchen fixing dinner. Her father would sing alone, And the boys go into business, And marry and raise a family, And they all get put in boxes, little boxes, all the same. “Ticky tacky, ticky tacky,” he’d arbitrarily say throughout the night.
Ben had his own music too; he’d blasted “Only the Good Die Young” from his bedroom for the past two years. She could hear him singing after dinner, You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd . . . and then his accompanying yeahs, as if Billy Joel had provided some kind of rebel anthem. Dennis would have to come up and tell him, “Ben, come on, enough. Not so loud,” and Vanessa knew this pleased her brother, who was not gonna turn my music down, man. Her brother was ridiculous, yet there was something so lovely about lying on the floor with Ben and listening to “Piano Man” over and over. She’d first heard the song at camp, and the time Ben had played it for her had both ignited her memory of summer campfires—the stillness of the lake the campers learned to canoe on by day, the shadows of the evergreens rising along more distant shores—and seized her heart with what she did not yet know she would always search for in music: brokenness. The visceral feel of ruin. In all its many guises.
Grandpa Sigmund was also an avid music connoisseur, as was Tatti, who worked at a music company as a receptionist three mornings a week when Dennis was little and who, he said, was always trying to get her brother Misha permission to come to the States. Such a beautiful player! she’d still tell them all, shaking her head. Such beautiful music.
Sigmund had tried, and failed spectacularly, to teach Ben and Vanessa about Mahler and Handel and all the Puccini they could bear, but several years back he had also become quite obsessed with disco, which he had little more success in passing on to his grandchildren. Vanessa still had the compilation her grandfather had given her, K-Tel’s Disco Rocket—a selection that actually contained more hits from 1976 than actual disco—stashed away somewhere in a closed box in her closet filled with pet rocks and Rubik’s Cubes and the platform sandals her mother said she couldn’t have because she’d break her ankles in them. She had pitched such a fit over them that Sharon had thrown up her hands and relented. And then, of course—of course!—Vanessa had sprained her goddamned ankle simply walking off a curb in front of the house because her ankles were exactly as weak as her mother claimed, and by the time her ankle had healed, the sandals—tan leather with the sweetest little yellow and red flowers you’d ever seen painted along the sides—were too small. Too small!
Listening to the Tellers allowed Vanessa to momentarily become a different girl from the one who wanted pretty sandals and Barbies and painted nails. After the set was over, Vanessa went up to the stage to wait for Heather, and freckled Jason McFinley in two-tone creepers and blue jeans, dyed green and cuffed at the ankles, was there waiting for his friend George, the drummer, to finish up.
“Hey,” Jason said to Vanessa.
“Hey,” she said. “That was great!”
Jason shrugged. “It was okay, I guess.”
Vanessa was silent.
“You ever go to the Atlantis over in Takoma? They play good music there,” Jason said.
As Heather stood with her guitar and her flush of performer’s pride, Vanessa felt suddenly embarrassed by her friend’s earnest playing. Vanessa shook her head.
“We’re going out to Randall Park. Just me and George”—Jason nodded toward the stage—“and Flaherty.”
Flaherty! For months Vanessa had watched Sean Flaherty Jr. loping through the hallway, his skateb
oard held as tight to his side as her father held his briefcase. Rumor had it Sean’s father was a Republican in the Department of Energy, waiting for Carter to be taken down, but this hadn’t quelled his mystery.
“It’s cool if you want to come with us,” Jason said. “We’re just going to hang out.”
Vanessa tried on an indifferent face. “Sure,” she said, trying not to smile. “I guess so.” She turned to Heather. “I’ll see you guys later, okay?” Why hadn’t she invited Heather along? She had rarely done anything without one of those girls, and as her friend stormed off, Vanessa felt suddenly relieved from the burden of them.
They all got in Sean Flaherty’s pickup, he and George in the front, and Jason and Vanessa in the truck bed with Sean’s skateboard.
Ah, skateboards. Yet another slice of youth culture that, despite its gender-neutral quality, had always been verboten. Period, Vanessa’s father had said. It’s a death wish.
The Goldstein house was perched at the bottom of a long, smooth-hilled street, and day after day she watched kids skateboard down the perfect curve of it: on their feet, on their stomachs, two together, sitting upright and sometimes three and four boys laid out flat on top of one another, the toes of their sneakers dragging and popping up behind them. Vanessa was dying to skateboard, dying to, but Timmy Farrell had broken his collarbone four times, and Dennis had said it was parental negligence on the part of Mary Farrell that she let him keep up with it. Someone should call the friggin’ police, he’d said, and it was true Vanessa had seen Timmy supine in the backseat of his mother’s wood-paneled station wagon on the way to the hospital at least four times. I find out you so much as put one toe on a skateboard and you’ll be in the house all summer. Ride your bike, Van, you love your bike. See the world.
But Vanessa’s blue Schwinn was decidedly not a skateboard, and Ben, content with four square and his kick-the-can-playing friends, always the team player, was of little help in the matter. Then he left the street for the field sports that would consume him, leaving Vanessa perched on the lawn, grabbing her shins, as she watched kids zoom down the hill with unfettered joy, then run back up again, all afternoon and into the evening, until the fireflies started blinking and their mothers called them all home.
They headed out of the school parking lot and Sean sounded his horn, which beeped out “Stand by Your Man.” How ironic. No one so much as tossed back a beer, a stark contrast to her friends, who tipped their heads beneath the keg taps at bonfires or on the porches of out-of-town parents. Once, when her father was traveling on business, her mother, who had a late-night event, had come home unexpectedly early. Everyone made it out, except poor Richie Gonzales, who had been too fucked-up to run and had instead thrown up on himself in the closet where Vanessa had hid him. He’d had to sit in his own puke for hours, until Vanessa was sure her mother was asleep and he could sneak out. Though Ed, in PI, had been a cautionary tale, some of Vanessa’s peers took LSD and peyote and smoked pot on the way to school and during lunch. Some would skip school altogether and go to Great Falls and trip all day in the woods, where, rumor had it, senators disposed of any kind of evidence that would impinge on their re-election, even, it was said, bodies.
As they drove farther into Maryland, Vanessa imagined these guys raised in the dirty living rooms of broken homes, single mothers screaming and throwing bottles at their criminal boyfriends. That’s what had made them them. It’s what necessitated their disenfranchisement, Vanessa thought as Sean played Elvis, loud. When they hit Macarthur Boulevard the truck lurched forward and Jason caught Vanessa in his arms. It was almost summer, and the sky was a deep indigo and they lay back and looked up at the sky as the truck headed out Greensborough Road, where there were no lights, toward Randall Park, which was not really a park at all, but a wide-open field beneath the radio towers of Bethesda, dotted by radio lines and receivers. There, the three of them—Jason, Vanessa, and George—lay in the grass and listened to the Specials: 2 Tone, manic, anarchic fusion. Vanessa giggled, and she and Jason nodded their heads to the ska beat as they watched Sean skate on the rails, until they all decided to go home.
The summer of 1979. Vanessa worked as a camp counselor at Evergreen Hill in Potomac, and after her day of schlepping seven-year-olds—the girls in her cabin were the Squirrels—from the pool to the arts-and-crafts tent to the drama area, Jason picked her up, and despite the astronomical price of gas and the time one had to wait to get it, they would drive either to Fort Reno, where bands played free each Monday all summer long, or into the District, down to the Watergate and along the Potomac. Behind her was Maryland; Virginia was just across the river. And before them was the whole beckoning city. She did not know what had happened before she arrived—Jason had told her countless stories of the destruction of the punk radio station WGTB, the Cramps at Hall of Nations, the Ramones at the Palladium in NYC on New Year’s—but that summer Vanessa experienced d.c. space on E Street, July Fourth at Madam’s Organ, Road to Ruin, and Bad Brains for herself.
The music was inescapably close. It was the opposite of Capital Centre, where Vanessa and her brother had seen David Bowie, a pinprick of moving light, a swath of flesh and gold and glitter. Before she’d gone to local shows, the stadium had been the only place she’d ever seen music played live. Someone passed out these homemade flyers with a photo of Carter, his fist in the air, say, some cartoon speech bubble condemning Madam’s Organ emanating from his mouth, and next thing you knew, you were there, listening to the Insect Surfers and the Slickee Boys. You never knew who was playing until someone put down a piece of tape and said, Don’t cross this line. Here is the stage; here are the people. Everything was so close and everyone was reacting, either running in or getting thrown back. What would it have been like to see Bowie here? It would have been outrageous, Ziggy Stardust parading so unimaginably close, unable to hide behind an alien alter ego, singing so strangely and deeply about all kinds of love.
Shirtless boys slammed into one another, bodies so thin and lanky she could see their blue hearts beating through their chests. There was no way to be separate. This was real protest music, Vanessa thought, remembering her father looking menacingly into his drink, so furious, but Pete Seeger singing “Little Boxes” had sounded so sweet. It did something, and it did it so close to your face. You needed to be straight to understand that. You needed to say no to everything but music. To have purpose. This was what Jason told her, and she believed it now, the way she believed what her grandfather said: No one needs to wait for permission for anything. Vanessa felt those first shows from the back of her throat to the tips of her fingers—the music was here and living in her now, ruining her. For the first time Vanessa believed that D.C. wasn’t simply a generic place for bureaucracy, administrative buildings, and schools and stone monuments; it felt for once that this town had room for more than government.
Sex was not part of a punk education—a lot of the new bands were swearing off it, just as they were drugs—but Vanessa did have sex with Jason. It was July 3. She remembered the date as she’d thought to wait until the Fourth, Independence Day. Because that’s what she’d thought it would be like; it would be throwing your hat into the ring of adulthood. Womanhood. She brought Jason deep into the woods of Evergreen Hill, after her campers had all gone home, and the sex was neither here nor there, she’d thought, as they sneaked out from the forest and into the parking lot, then out onto River Road toward downtown. There was no pain, or fear or blood, as Bee had lectured them all that there would be, merely the disappointment that it had ended before it seemed to truly have begun, and the mad itch of mosquito bites up and down the backs of her arms and thighs.
After, they met Sean and several of their friends, boys who wore black ska hats and skateboarded or wore suspenders without shirts and skateboarded or wore oxford shirts with the sleeves ripped off and skateboarded, downtown. That night they saw the Teen Idles and Bad Brains, and Vanessa stood way in the back watching, alone. She was not one of the boys whipping h
imself into a frenzy, charging behind the band as they played. Don’t hurt yourselves now, someone said into the mike. Ian Ian! His songs were loud and short and fast, but that was all Vanessa got. She was not one of those girls who wanted to play, either. People were going nuts. Later, when Bad Brains came on, H.R., the lead singer, was wild, and he pinned several kids to the floor, screaming into their faces, spit flying. His voice warbled, it screeched and it howled while belting out lyrics about social ills, and free societies, all so rapidly she could hardly make out the words. Vanessa had never seen anything quite like the violence of him; the musical attack was relentless. Yet it also sounded as if it had come from the heart, that it had been cut from it, like with the jagged top of an old tin can.
There had been no pain or fear or blood, it was true, but there had been something else, sadness perhaps. She leaned against the dirty wall and thought of Jason—who was now jumping up and down in front with Sean—rocking on top of her, and it felt as if everything were ending, not beginning. She thought she’d feel the way some of her mother’s friends did who came by over the years and tapped out cigarettes, chatting about their birth control pills and their ex-husbands and their brand-new lovers when they thought Vanessa had not been listening. They had felt so freed by sex, it seemed to her now. But she had felt awkward and crushed and unsure, more childish than before they’d begun.
“Was that okay?” Jason had asked when they were brushing off dirt and slipping back into their underwear.
Vanessa had nodded as she pulled up her jean shorts. Two heart patches—pink and red—were sewn over holes at the crotch. “Yeah,” she said. Why was she choking back tears?
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