The line wasn’t moving. There were rumors of evil: the show was sold out; they’d raised the price from four bucks to twenty; security guards had just sent a guy who wasn’t doing nothing to the hospital; cops were waiting to ambush us. Owen brushed all this off. “You never hear good news when you’re in line for a punk show.”
A single patrol car came up the block, slowing down to a crawl, awestruck local cops looking at the line with bewilderment.
A guy in line yelled, “Goddamn fucking pigs!”
Looking wounded, the Mohawked guy with the swastika on his stump said, with a surprisingly high voice, “Hey, don’t say that. Cops are our friends.”
* * *
—
By the time we got in, we’d missed the opening band, the Minutemen. There was a break before the next band, D.O.A. I kept being derailed by the few women I saw. Each of them radiated a hostility that seemed to be ignited by sexual tension. One with Siouxsie Sioux mascara and facial jewelry would make furious eye contact with me and I would look not just away but away and down. It was like something out of a Tanizaki short story: a woman’s glare could let me know my own inadequacies.
As D.O.A. was taking the stage, I assumed that the moment they started playing, all four thousand people would commence drop-kicking baby animals through plate-glass windows, something I would witness from a headlock administered by some golem in black leather breaking beer bottles rhythmically against my forehead to the polite applause of his friends.
D.O.A. played like they were all trying to catch up to a song running away from them that needed to be played faster and louder and meaner than any human being could manage, but they didn’t care if they died trying. The crowd bubbled and a mosh pit appeared in front of us like a special effects tornado. Owen and I were in a group watching the pit, which swirled with jumping, slamming, pogo-ing kids who inflicted damage on each other in a way that seemed strangely friendly. If someone fell down, two or three people pulled him back up.
I screamed so loud I was instantly hoarse. “Is this normal?”
“Yeah. People are actually pretty nice,” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
“If I lost a contact lens—”
“No, they would not help you. But basically nice.”
Owen launched himself into the pit. He whipped around the center and across the edges, slamming and shoving and then returning without incident. I was jealous. He was happy and sweaty as a hockey player. “Come on out, man, it’s fun.”
Was I the type of person who participated or who lingered at the edges of things, an observer, a creeper?
A new song started. It was faster, angrier, apparently more familiar, because tremors went through the crowd so the spot I was in liquefied. The dance floor now surrounded me, so I was in the pit regardless of whether I wanted to be. Be here now? I had this sense pulsing around me that if I tossed back my head and started slamming around, I would be free of my brain, and hair would shoot down my wrists and across my face, talons grow from my fingertips, toe claws burst out of my high-tops, and my body would belong to the world as I let out a pure moon-shattering howl of lycanthropic ecstasy.
I could participate, I thought, and that made me feel fear, queasy, dark, awful fear. I carefully, slowly walked to the new edge of spectators. My heart rate was as low as ever. My breathing was fine—not excited at all, just observing everyone else get emotional. That narrative voice kicked in. I was paying attention to the catharsis of violence.
There was a short, grinning punk at the fringes of the pit who wasn’t participating, but as bodies flew by, he reached out with a fist or the toe of a boot to kick and punch without the risk of being hurt. When he made particularly good contact, he half fell over, laughing to himself.
Onstage, the singer noticed the mood of the crowd darkening. “The next song is called ‘Unity.’ Not fighting. Unity.” It was slower, with a little ska to it.
Owen shot out of the crowd like a wayward ball bearing, and smacked into me. There was a gash in his forehead, and blood was geysering out of it.
“I’m fine,” he said. Some dick had smashed him across the face with wrist studs.
“Is this normal?”
“I’m fine.”
I pushed ahead of him through the peristaltic crowd, toward the bathroom. It had probably been a serviceable bathroom for the many years of its sovereign existence, but in the last couple hours punks had colonized it and it had fallen. The walls now dripped with fresh graffiti and the toilet seats were smashed and each toilet was overflowing. A guy with a safety pin through his cheek and no pants on was balancing on one of the sinks, testing its shattering weight.
Owen pushed a wad of wet paper towels against his wound, which had left trails of blood across his face. He stood at the sink and tried to take care of himself. One sink away, a spike-haired guy whistled at him in admiration. He then opened his mouth, which was bleeding, to show off a chipped tooth.
Owen nodded politely. “That just happen?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it hurt?”
The guy smiled. “Yeahhhhh!”
Back on the concert floor, Owen held the towels to his head. I was not really having a good time, not because my friend was hurt, but because he was hurt and I wasn’t. I was feeling like a coward. The mood was surly, like the entire room had been promised something they suspected they weren’t actually going to be allowed to have. I was one of them. I hadn’t had an authentic moment yet.
But that was my fault. I wanted to go back to work and tell Rick and Melanie that while they were having a dinner party, I was having an experience. I was going to participate.
On stage, the Dead Kennedys were setting up. They were the only band tonight whose music I knew. The lyrics, when I could understand them, were sarcastic and political, and I assumed they were intelligent because I mostly didn’t understand them. I didn’t know who Pol Pot was, but when I heard “Kill the Poor” or “Chemical Warfare,” it was clear Jello Biafra, the lead singer, was pissed off about something, and so I was pissed off, too.
Owen had told me there was a moment after a song launches when it casts a net over a punk audience, and a feeling of “we’re all in this together” spreads. This wasn’t happening now. There was a lot of talking at microphones, cautious mumbling from Jello toward unknown persons about things we couldn’t understand. The amplification system made every word unintelligible.
They started a song, and maybe eight measures later, stopped. More muttering by Jello. More confusion spreading outward. A guy leapt onstage and stole the microphone, which left Jello clearly unenthusiastic.
To our right, a security guard outfitted in the then impressive Mr. T look of muscle tee, gold chains, and evil patterns shaved into his beard growth, was spinning his baton like nunchuks. He grabbed a skinhead by the back of his leather jacket, pulled him off balance, and ran him through an emergency exit. The guard kicked him in the ass hard enough that the kid became a completely concave figure. The guard slammed the double doors and the frosted glass shattered.
A second later, we could see the bewildered punk outside picking himself up from the asphalt. He was backlit by distant spinning blue lights. None of us registered what that meant yet.
The band was still trying to successfully play a song, in this case the ominously named “Police Truck.” A mysterious crosscurrent ran through the crowd, a ripple away from the stage, the way schools of fish are driven by the approach of sharks. The rear doors, all of them, shattered, the sound drowned out by the band, who were playing what would be the last song of the evening, “Holiday in Cambodia.”
I was starting to become transparent, floating over the room the way I did sometimes at my mother’s house. I was barely here now. I could feel the crowd’s tension ratcheting up, and there were little explosions of anger and fear everywhere, just not coming off of me
.
Fog was billowing through the back doors, like someone had clapped chalk erasers into the crowd. A fire extinguisher, I thought. But people were running away from the vapor, and I thought, “Oh that’s what panic looks like.”
Owen said, “Tear gas.”
“Pardon?”
“Run.”
“Is this normal?”
“Run!”
With the rest of the crowd being driven elsewhere, we slipped alone out the side door the punk kid had been thrown through. I was on the sidewalk, looking back and regarding chaos through the frame of the door—a blur of bodies colliding blindly, trying to escape. Oh, I thought blandly, we have just escaped a riot.
“RUN!” Owen yelled.
I said, “Why?”
Later, Owen would tell the story as if I were dim-witted for considerably longer than I remember it. In any case, he ran away alone because I was busy regarding what he was running away from: a wall of police in full riot gear, body armor and face shields, skull-cracking batons extended over their heads. They were running directly at me.
As a frontier anthropologist, I felt exempt, as if the cops would run right past me. Furthermore, running would suggest I was scared. I thought, and this was critical, that not reacting was a merit badge, a sign of being calm. This was incorrect.
I am lucky Owen was my friend. He darted back, grabbed me, and forced me to run. A block later, we looked backward. The streets were choked with a few dozen police cruisers. There were police wagons lining up and detainees handcuffed beside them. Overhead, incredibly, there were two police helicopters orbiting the block, billion-watt searchlights sweeping the streets with metallic blue rude light for signs of fleeing black leather.
Owen noticed the cop cars were from different jurisdictions. Los Angeles, Wilmington, Long Beach. This was coordinated. The cops had planned this.
How far away was safe? Two blocks away, a catering truck was doing good business selling soft drinks and burritos. We stood in line behind some cops, who chuckled in our direction (the two of us, in boring clothing, had no signs of being punks, so we were harmless).
Owen took the paper towel away from his forehead. “I think it’s stopped bleeding,” he said, and a heartbeat’s worth of blood fountained out of the gash and splattered his shirt. He put pressure back on the wound.
There was an ambulance nearby, and one laconic paramedic was leaning against it. He beckoned Owen with the curl of a finger. Bored, he held a flashlight near the gash, handed over a bandage, and told Owen he needed to go to the emergency room for stitches. The paramedic listed off the injuries he’d had to repair at punk shows: broken bones, caved-in skulls, don’t even get him started on how fragile punks’ noses were.
“Why do they do that to each other?” he asked. Owen and I reacted differently to that. Later, he said he was happy the paramedic hadn’t included him in that “they.” Which was an ironic way, I guess, to say that Owen had just concluded he no longer wanted the reputation of trashing hotel rooms, starting fights, living the rock-and-roll-into-punk life.
I felt the paramedic had tagged me as a dilettante. He was right. I had participated in nothing.
Owen and I walked outside the police lines, to the Saab. A small group of three or four kids walked tentatively toward the sounds of the riot from the opposite direction, the neighborhood. They were local kids attracted by the brilliant lights. They watched the scene—the punks, the cops—as if they were seeing it on television. One of the kids picked up a rock, and heaved it through a store window.
“What the hell?” I yelled. An alarm went off in the store. The kids ran away.
Owen sighed, “Opportunists,” as he and I got into the car. Punks were starting to flee up the sidewalk, past us, and the streets were about to get jammed. I looked at the fleeing local kids, and the wrecked storefront, and thought, “Well, they participated.”
Punks were steaming past us. Engines were starting all around like an amateur Indy 500.
There was a traffic jam. We told each other stories of what had happened. Owen came up with the concept of “story yeast.” It’s the ingredient that, when you add it to your story, makes the details grow. Owen decided he’d stage dived, and the crowd had parted, so he’d landed on his forehead. And I was clueless, a Paul Bowles character, a professor about to be eaten by the tribe he was studying.
There was something else going on while we inched toward the 405. Headlights from approaching cars would illuminate for one second the severe faces of punks crammed into cars, all of them sweaty and grimy in black leather, mouths snarling as they all, too, in their individual boxes, were telling stories. They were driving slowly and carefully, not just because there was a traffic jam, but because they were in Honda Accord sedans clearly not their own.
I saw one person—I can’t swear it was the actual guy with the stump and Mohawk, but it looked like him—driving soberly in a car full of companions, his giant gelled hair flattening against the ceiling of his mother’s station wagon so it pointed to the side like a horse’s tail brushed backward. He looked terrified of getting the car scratched.
The postures and the act and the police breaking up the show were as ritualized as the Main Street Electrical Parade closing down Disneyland on a warm summer night. Here they were, one lane after another, four thousand punks going home, peeling off costumes, showing up to work the next morning promptly so they wouldn’t get fired. Owen took them in with a glance and said, “This is not very punk, not really.”
How complex. I was frustrated for not having slam-danced, but just because you participated didn’t mean you were having a real experience. And there we were on the freeway again, one among many cars coming from all over the Basin, and among us all the stories were being told, the yeast rising. I looked out the window, and saw it at some point, maybe around Manhattan Beach: an old billboard, one panel falling down over a spread of smiling faces, news team jackets tagged with graffiti. At the bottom, I read aloud the familiar slogan: “Auténtica.”
We made a stop at the emergency room at UCLA, where Owen got ten stitches. When we got home, I knew I was going to Rick’s next dinner party.
MEMOIR
RICK DISAPPEARED from work again. He called in sick this time. Even though no one believed him, he didn’t get in trouble. The store wasn’t going to last much longer, and enforcing rules seemed pointless.
Mel rolled up to me quietly and said, after a careful moment, “I’ve heard some unusual rumors about you.”
“Like?”
“I hear you’re nineteen,” she said.
I nodded. I watched her face fall. “Why, how old are you?” I asked her.
“I’m twenty-six.”
I thought “twenty-six” must mean something else. I couldn’t make sense of that.
“How old did you think I was?” she asked.
“Nineteen.”
“Nope.” She wasn’t my age. This meant I wasn’t her age, either. Wasn’t she a dance major—Oh, graduate school! Then I realized that, yes, around the eyes, there was some evidence of desert living. And I understood why she was avoiding me—what twenty-six-year-old wanted a teenager hanging on her?
“When do you turn twenty?”
“Late March.” So it wasn’t like I was even almost-twenty. Mel was looking at a definite teenager.
An hour into my shift, Rick called. He asked to speak to me. I wasn’t sure why.
He whispered, “I’m not really sick, but I just got the worst news. Lolly is in town.”
“I thought she was still at boarding school.”
“Well, so did I, but her mother called me late last night and said that not only was Lolly expelled, but she also got on a plane for the States. She’s looking for me, which means she’s looking for money, and I’m through with just handing her one dollar after the next. I’m staying home today
because she doesn’t know where I live, but she does know the bookstore’s address.”
He paused, as if what he was implying was obvious. I said, “Okay.”
“I want you to listen very carefully. If she comes by, you don’t know where I am, but she should leave a number where she can be reached.”
“What does she look like?”
“I haven’t seen her in a year, so she might have changed, but be on the lookout for a fourteen-year-old girl, overweight, probably wearing too much makeup. She knows how much I hate rock music, so she’ll probably be wearing one of her Pink Floyd T-shirts. She makes a point of eating junk food around me, so she might have a slice of pizza in her hand. Oh, and she doesn’t talk, she whines.”
I spent the rest of the day awaiting this apparition. I was a little excited, and then disappointed when my shift ended and she hadn’t shown up.
When Rick returned the next day, he wore his sunglasses indoors. He pulled me aside—he was just pretending to be sensitive to light, he said—had I seen Lolly? I said I hadn’t. He looked relieved. He thought she’d moved on to San Francisco, where she had other friends to sponge off of.
“So what else? How was your evening of slam-dancing?” he asked. “How do Zen and slam-dancing go together anyway? Is it like being straight and bisexual?”
He was smiling, I could see, but I was still taking this very seriously, and I presented some thin theory that I thought explained both of these things. Rick listened, nodding with what seemed a lot like understanding. He’d taken on the role of my concerned older brother so firmly he’d begun to believe it himself, as if perhaps he’d traveled to the continent on the Grand Tour with my parents and agreed there to chaperone me through difficult thinking.
He told me about a trip he’d once taken to Wales. He’d brought along a copy of Madame Bovary and had finished it at sunset on the side of a hill near a mining town.
“There were tears in my eyes, and it was getting cold, so I stumbled, literally, into this pub, and ordered an ale. I sat down at a table, all alone for a few minutes, calming down. Then the door swept open and a pack of a dozen boys, boys your age, sauntered up to the bar and ordered beers. I was watching them and one of them saw me and there was something in the way I looked that was wrong, like they could smell this otherness on me. In an instant, some strange instinct for self-preservation came over me, and I wasn’t gay anymore. I was just a man on vacation. As soon as I opened my mouth, they were charmed by my accent.
I Will Be Complete Page 25