The Laws of Gravity

by Lisa Ann Gallagher

  I also met Katy that evening. Another Groves alumna, Katy was a pretty strawberry-blonde, who had dated Patrick until just days before. She had a slight limp, having suffered a bout of bone cancer as a teen. She came in, plopped onto the couch beside me wearing a candy striper uniform and red Mary Jane slippers. She had an infectious smile. Katy and Jen were joking about someone named “Precious.” “Precious” was their code name for Jenny, Tony’s girlfriend, and it wasn’t complimentary. Katy confessed that she once called Jenny “Precious” to her face accidentally. “What did she do?” I asked. “Nothing – she thought it was a term of endearment!” Katy laughed. Tony and Precious were in the basement during this conversation.

  That night, and most of the following nights, I found myself fully alive with the thrill of living at No Bev. To find myself thrust in the center of such a large and lively group of people was thrilling. I felt a real rapport with these people. I pushed aside the sting of being tossed out of my home and denied my graduation. I belonged. That sense of acceptance, at that moment, was the greatest feeling I had experienced in my life.

  On Sunday, I found myself alone at No Bev. The roommates had all gone to their parents homes, for dinner and laundry. The calm and reprieve gave me the chance to let everything sink in. So much had happened in the past thirty-six hours. I listened to music and sat on the deck alone with my thoughts and a bag of CornNuts.

  When the sun set, I walked down to the basement and turned on the lights. The photographs tacked to the corkboard presented a merry collage of rowdy, intimate gatherings. These people looked so brave, boisterous and happy. I stared at the pictures, over and over. I longed to see my own photograph on that board and to know the kind of closeness and acceptance they had found with each another.

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

  Kick Out The Jams…

  There were four primary local bands at the crux of the Gravity scene: Alien Nation, The Colors, Just Born and The Mangos. Each band had four members. These sixteen young men, their dates and schoolmates and drug dealers and groupies and fellow musicians encompassed Gravity. Other musical acts around the periphery of our parties included Inside Out and Angry Red Planet – one of the best bands to ever hail from the Motor City. No Bev was that singular place where everyone came, whether to party or hook-up or even for solace in difficult times.

  The band that likely had the largest impact on the entire group was The Mangos. In large part, frontman Eric was responsible for that influence. Eric had the kind of offbeat intelligence and natural daring that everyone responded to, and mimicked. He could invent the term “Gnome Shacks” and the phrase would be quickly adopted by others. Eric and Karen from Inside Out broke up early that summer. Guitarist for The Mangos was Maxwell, Flip was the bass player and Ian (Terese’s boyfriend) the drummer. The Mangos were the most outrageous of the four Gravity groups. They were loud and lumbering, with a tatterdemalion look and a raw, underground sound.

  Alien Nation was the most goth of the quartet of bands. Their lyrics were vaguely morbid and the guitar was bluesy, muffled as though playing through a grave. Tony sang, Kevin played guitar, a rich diabetic from Birmingham named Matt played drums and they had a young kid named Chris playing bass that summer. I never met their original bassist, a guy named Danny or something who quit months before. Tony spent the school months in Ann Arbor, studying philosophy at the University of Michigan. Tony had an acerbic wit, a rather affable underdog quality and a hysterical snorting laugh. He was interested in writing and I invited him to do a piece for Explosion! Days later he turned in a tongue-in-cheek editorial on manners for the punk rock set, including how to mosh with girls in the pit.

  Just Born were similar to The Mangos in spirit but with the added intellect of David, the lead guitarist/lyricist. Lynda broke up with David two weeks after I moved into No Bev and soon he and I became very good buddies. Sad-eyed, balding and obsessed with cult film, great books and killer tunes, Dave was my first really close male confidante. Toni, the singer of Just Born, was a spitfire blond from Hamtramck, infatuated with the stage stylings of David Lee Roth. His onstage flamboyance had earned him the nickname Gaylord. Bassist Gordie looked like John-Boy Walton, but with dyed black hair, a skin condition and a perennial top hat. Damian, an older guy not really into the scene, played drums.

  Then there were The Colors. Patrick was virtually an extra roommate, he was at No Bev so often. Singer Charlie and guitarist Dan were brothers. And guess who The Colors’ bassist was? The sexy motherfucker I used to ogle from the mall bookstore. His name was Scott, he was twenty and the summer I moved to No Bev he had dyed his blond hair bright yellow. He looked like an erotic Big Bird.

  These four bands had connected through the clubs, often performing gigs together. They had dated some of the same gals and bonded, over beer and at No Bev. Many had been featured on the recent Detroit-punk compilation LP “It Came From The Garage” and were enjoying some of their first real success in the music scene as a result of that exposure. We supported our bands, our musicians in every possible. We attended their shows and paid the door fees. We bought their tee-shirts, bumper stickers, records. We talked about them, nonstop and hung their posters in our living room. No Bev was a nonstop promotion machine for Gravity. But they weren’t our only music obsession. There were several punk groups that all of Gravity were obsessed with.

  Most people think the Sex Pistols were the first punk rock band, but you’ll find other schools of thought about the origins of the genre. Clearly, the UK punk phenomenon of ’77 was precipitated by the New York club scene of ‘75-‘76 (when Patti Smith, the Ramones and Television first hit the stage). And, nearly a decade prior, you had two Detroit acts: the MC5 and Iggy & the Stooges. I think those two bands (along with a seminal Detroit punk band called Death) were the true beginning of the punk movement. Some music scholars will credit the garage bands of the early Sixties, like the Kingsmen, Faces and the Kinks, as the roots of punk. But Detroiters love their Detroit heroes and certainly, The Stooges and MC5 held a special place in the hearts of my new acquaintances. But Gravity’s biggest obsession was The Damned.

  The Damned hail from London and were the first punk band to cut an album, 1977’s Damned Damned Damned (predating Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come The Sex Pistols by eight months). I am not going to anthologize the band here. You can look that up online. But the Damned were our arbiters of all things musical and attitudinal. From the offstage antics of guitarist Captain Sensible, to the sinister fashions of Dave Vanian (a former grave digger with a mellifluous voice). Kevin wore a red beret like the Captain. Karen bleached her hair white with a black streak (a negative image of Vanian’s black mane with white skunk stripe). Even the gothic font used on Damned albums was purloined for Gravity usage on posters, etc. Oh, we all loved the Damned. Patrick used to tell a lurid and stomach-churning urban legend that involved Captain Sensible, drummer Rat Scabies, Lemmy Kilmeister from Mötorhead and a carrot.

  Sometimes it seemed as though we were living in a Damned soundtrack. The music played frequently and we often altered the lyrics to Damned songs in honor of certain people, or occasions:

  “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” from Machine Gun Etiquette became “I Just Can’t Be Happy, I’m Dave.” To “Dozen Girls” from Strawberries we would shout above the recorded names of “Patty, Judy and Christine” the names of skanks that Kevin had slept with. To “Curtain Call” (a seventeen-minute gothic opera featured on The Black Album) we would roar, “We’re coming up from the Deep / Gordie sheds his skin!”

  The Mangos often performed The Damned’s “Drinking About My Baby” from The Black Album and everyone wanted to cover “Looking At You”, an MC5 classic covered by The Damned on Machine Gun Etiquette. The Damned had even redone an Iggy tune, “I Feel Alright” on their first album. The musical coincidences felt so … synchronicitous.

  It had been four years since the release of Strawberries, but this was everyone’s favorite Damned album that summe
r. From raucous opening number “Ignite” to the cool, underplayed “Don’t Bother Me” final track, Strawberries was our musical bible that summer. We would turn on the album, wait until the conclusion of side one’s “The Dog” (about “Interview With the Vampire” babyvamp Claudia) and turn the volume up to eleven to hear the distant growls as the song faded out.

  My fave Damned songs: “Melody Lee” from Machine Gun Etiquette and “Life Goes On” from Strawberries.

  The next band we directed our musical lust toward was Chicago quartet Naked Raygun. The Mangos had opened for Naked Raygun six months before. Naked Raygun had released their second LP All Rise that summer but we were all still foaming at the mouth from their previous album Throb Throb which included such great tunes as “Rat Patrol”, the rousing “Only in America” and “Managua.” I remember Patrick being obsessed by the song “My Libido.”

  Lastly, Soul Asylum from Minneapolis made a large impact upon us. They would later hit some big Billboard numbers during the early Nineties, even played at Clinton’s White House but a decade earlier they were much grungier. Their album Made to be Broken is still on my top ten list. They rocked hard and played Detroit frequently. The Colors had opened for them on a recent tour. Soul Asylum’s lyrics seemed prescient and poignant and they had killer harmonies. When I thought about my poet/songwriter days and what I had desired to create, I thought of Soul Asylum’s “Never Really Been” and wished I could have written that.

  There were many bands that influenced and entertained us all, but The Damned, Naked Raygun, Soul Asylum and our Gravity bands provided the essential soundtrack of the summer of 1986. I had the opportunity to see Naked Raygun perform on several occasions and Soul Asylum nearly a dozen occasions. But I didn’t get to see the Damned on stage, during those salad days.

  Paint the Town Red…

  June and early July were a whirlwind. I spent my nights partying at No Bev or seeing concerts with my friends during June and the first weeks of July. There were so many great shows that summer. St Andrews Hall, Hamtramck Pub, the Graystone, Mystery Lounge. The Mangos played a killer set at Play It Again Records in late June in Ann Arbor. I rode with Terese to the show. She and I had gone vintage clothes shopping at Value Village on Outer Drive earlier in the day. I wore a sweet blue-green taffeta dress. I definitely had a different style than the other girls. I remember a lot of sweaters and jeans on them. The only other chick with an eclectic fashion sense was Katy.

  I took photographs that night and, now, I look back at my friends. Eric, shouting and gripping the microphone. Ian, hunched over his drumkit. Flip and Maxwell, a couple of big guys in a narrow corner wallpapered by posters. I see Nancy and Patrick, singing along and Jen, clapping in time with the music. I spy Kevin, beer in hand, with his mouth slack and a lascivious look in his eyes. Terese, smiling as I take her picture. There were dozens crammed into the record shop gig, the walls vibrating with the deafening music.

  After the show, most of the showgoers came to No Bev and partied pretty hard. The Mangos hailed from Rochester Michigan and many of their fans were alumna of Rochester High including Quinn, Heidi, Suzie. I remember a lot of people coming by that night and a lot of mess to clean up the next day. We had a blue beanbag chair in the living room and that night we began to see white popcorn filling leak out of the seams.

  End of June, I was invited by Kevin and Maxwell to join them on a flag ram. That is – a flag-stealing run. The flag ram was inspired by the past winter’s holiday ram which procured the famous Frosty. Allegedly, poor Frosty was pilfered from a random Berkley front yard with plans to return the lawn ornament the following winter (instead he remained in the No Bev basement as long as any of us did). A flag-stealing ram would be so much more… dangerous! Such bad-asses we were… We were drunk on forty-ounces of Budweiser and Mickey’s big mouths and we piled into Maxwell’s car to scope out our marks. This would be the first attempt Kevin made to score with me. I declined. I was friends with Nicole. I couldn’t hook up with someone’s boyfriend.

  Of flags, however, I’m the only person who did score. I got an American flag by climbing onto the roof of the Berkley Post Office. Kevin stole a paltry NBD banner from the nearby National Bank of Detroit. Maxwell was our lookout and too wasted on weed to do more than sit and keep sentry in the car. I kept that flag for years. I displayed the flag over the foot of my bed at No Bev and hung the flag on a wall in another house later. The American flag was my rebel passport, my credentials of cool. I waltzed into No Bev, the flag draped upon my shoulders like Rocky fucking Balboa. I felt my roommates look at me, awed and curious. The mild-mannered little poet stole an American flag? That night, I felt brave, ballsy and mysterious.

  After shows we’d drive over to Denny’s. Open 24 hours, Denny’s had the perfect post-drunk greasy-spoon food and the best coffee. I once made an observation about how the silverware at Denny’s resembled the silverware at No Bev. The innocent comment was met with laughter. “Lisa, where do you think we pinched it from?” murmured Jen. Many of my new pals shared a favorite item: French fries with ranch dressing. We would stay awake late hours, drinking coffee, rehashing the concert or party or ram we had just emerged from. Then, get into our respective cars and head for home and bed.

  The only damper on my spirit as June began to wind down was that I had not found a job. I had no car and no way to look for work, outside of asking others and reading want ads for the local papers. While my housemates read each Sunday’s “Calvin & Hobbes” in the Detroit Free Press, I scanned for secretarial jobs that I could bus to, but nothing was panning out. Finally, the last week of the month, I called my dad. He’d been behind that past year on child support and he was upset that my mother and stepfather had given me the boot. He had earlier offered to help me out with some money until I found work. I called him and confirmed that he could pitch in a couple hundred dollars for rent and groceries. I still hoped Nancy could get me a position soon at Sanders. Relieved, I resumed partying and sleeping in late.

  On the Fourth of July, Alien Nation threw a concert in the No Bev basement. Hundreds of people were invited and the party became a debaucherous mess. The band only played a couple songs. The police were called, there were drunk people passed out in the driveway, the beanbag was massacred on the front lawn. Everyone was wasted. I remember Flip and Maxwell in the kitchen smearing ripe mango in Nancy’s face, as she cried and struggled to get away.

  I was sitting with Terese, Ian and Scott from The Colors. Scott was teasing me after hearing me tell someone “If anyone asks -- I’ll be in the basement.” He kept asking, “Where are you?” or “Are you in the back yard?”, “Are you in your bedroom?”, “I forget – where are you now?” He was being silly and adorable, with his plastic cup full of keg beer and his mirrored aviator sunglasses hiding his drunk eyes.

  Teschendorf and his crew came by. Teschendorf was in his mid-twenties and lived in Royal Oak. He allowed people to stay in rooms, cubbies and corners of his house – on any occasion there were six to ten people in residence. I remember a girl named Julie who slept in a crawl space in his basement that summer. She was a sixteen year old runaway and elated that she had a place to sleep.

  Teschendorf worked for the Humane Society. Jen and Nancy warned me to avoid the hors d’ouevres brought by Teschendorf. They looked innocuous enough – wheat crackers with patè and parsley. Perhaps a bit fancy for this crowd, I thought. Their concept of appetizers was Combos or chili fries from Lafayette Coney. “It’s Alpo” my roommates whispered. Sure enough, the Teschendorf gang brought dog food snacks disguised as snacks and didn’t tell a soul. I saw a few people chow down and blithely rave about them, including Karen from Inside Out.

  About a week later, I went to an Alien Nation show in Birmingham with Sandy and Katy. Kevin played guitar while hopping from foot to foot in a way that reminded me of Rumpelstilskin. Tony sang like a strident, blond Muppet. His fair hair bounced up and down as he held the microphone. Alien Nation was quiet serious about their music
, but sadly, not the best sounding band. Tony wasn’t a great vocalist. In fact, Kevin had a stronger voice. I always felt that Tony sang his heart out and no one ever knew.

  I walked outside after the show and crossed to Birmingham Park. I saw Flip near the swingset, with a few of the Sids. He waved and came to sit with me.

  The Sids, or Apple Sids, were a gang of guys from Birmingham and the surrounding suburbs. Brothers Brett and Blayne left home during their teens. After living on the streets for a while, they rented a house and slowly, like Teschendorf in Royal Oak, began to take in stray boys in similar circumstances. They were all into hardcore punk. They were nicknamed the Apple Sids because supposedly, the boys loved Apple Jacks and, of course, Sid Vicious.

  The Sids would evolve from a group of homeless punks to a semi-serious skinhead set and finally, an outlaw motorcycle gang. They weren’t Straight Edge (drug and alcohol-free) but they did prohibit Nazi emblems, despite their skinhead status. Many of them worked as bouncers at clubs around Detroit. Flip was an honorary member of the group. He had been best friends with Brett since childhood and had befriended many of the fellow Sids members. But Flip continued to live at home and never at the Sids house. Flip would be on the edge of many different groups and cliques but his uniqueness was that he was the sole person who could bond with everyone. Flip didn’t have any acquaintances. If you met him, he was your champion and you felt that he would do nearly anything for you.

  Brett, Blayne, Flip and the Sids wore plaid shirts or white t-shirts, cuffed jeans, leather jackets and boots. Brett was in the local hardcore band The Skraps. Blayne dyed his hair black and worn in a massive Devil’s Lock which jutted over his face in an angry taper. Both brothers were very cute. Brett reminds me of a young Matt Damon. Baby-faced killaz.