“You into the East Bay sound at all?” the punk kid asked.
“I dunno, some of it is good,” I lied, having no idea what he was talking about.
“Well, Operation Ivy, I mean, they don’t count, you know. They’re more like ska.”
“Yeah,” I said, having no idea what he was saying.
“The Dead Kennedys kick all their asses,” the chubbier girl said. “Jello Biafra is like a fucking genius.”
“I don’t know them,” I said.
“You don’t?” the chubby girl asked. “They are like intelligent, you know, they sing about the government and God and everything.”
“That sounds cool,” I said.
“Hey, maybe if you come to the 7 Seconds show, I’ll make you a tape,” the short girl said with a smile.
“Wow, that would be excellent,” I said, still feeling like I was kind of pretending or something.
“Hey, I really like your boots,” the chubby girl said. “Where did you get them?”
“Yeah, me too,” the short girl said. “They look, like, original.”
“They’re my dad’s,” I said.
“Wow,” the chubby one said. “He lets you wear them?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t know I took them.”
“Cool,” the short girl said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, maybe we’ll see you later,” the short girl said. “I’m Katie, by the way.”
“Hi,” I said. “Brian,” I added, kind of shaking her hand weakly. “OK, well, maybe I’ll see you there.” She waved goodbye and the three of them walked off, laughing and joking, and I thought of how I had never really been to a punk show before other than in people’s basements and maybe that might be cool to check out, and I would have to ask Gretchen to see if she would go with me, maybe, and if she said yes, I’d even offer to pay for the gas, because I dunno, it seemed very important to me suddenly.
OK, overnight I had become punk rock. I mean, I was only listening to the Misfits and, well, also now the Ramones, and I had started wearing my dad’s combat boots all the time, even to school, and no one seemed to notice, and I was sitting in the back of my class—first period, Religion—where Bro. Dorbus just kept yammering and yammering about the value of abstinence, and by mistake I closed my eyes and yawned. Well Bro. Dorbus, who was fairly young, a tall man in shiny gray glasses, grabbed an eraser from the chalkboard and whipped it at my fucking head, hitting me square in the mouth. I started coughing, swallowing yellowish dust, my lips stinging, and he came up and hovered over me and said, “This isn’t your bedroom, Mr. Oswald, is it?” like the fucking thought had just occurred to the fucking prick, and without thinking—honestly, without hesitation—I just looked up and said, “Masturbate me,” which was from the Misfits song “Bullet,” in which Glenn Danzig sang, “All the people in the party, masturbate me.” I had no idea what it really meant, but I liked that he said it and so, well, that got me sent straight to the Dean of Discipline.
OK, so I was sitting in the narrow blue hallway outside the Dean’s office and this kid I knew from my Chemistry class, Nick, this tall, skinny guy with a shaved head, slunk down the hall and took a seat beside me, holding the same blue detention note in his hand. He was wearing a pair of those cheap X-ray glasses, the kind you get in the back of a comic book. He took the X-ray specs off, folded them up, put them into his front shirt pocket, and then looked around the office. There was a gold pen lying on the corner of the receptionist’s desk. He nodded, noticing the receptionist wasn’t around, and grabbed the pen, slipping it up his sleeve. I kind of smiled, looking at him. He had a long face and pointy ears like a bat and he was smiling a kind of crazy fake smile, staring straight ahead. Then he kind of looked me over, rubbed his nose, caught sight of my Fiend Club button which was pinned to my belt, and nodded. “Misfits?” he asked me, pointing at the small black-and-white Crimson Ghost button, the only button I owned.
Even sitting down he was real tall, taller than I had noticed before, and he was wearing combat boots too. His head was shaved very short all along the sides up to the middle where he had a few long strands of hair which hung down in his face. It was a Devil-lock, how Glenn Danzig wore his hair. I hadn’t ever noticed it on him before.
“They’re my favorite band,” I said, nodding and meaning it.
“Me too,” he said, smiling. He pointed to the same button under the collar of his dress shirt.
“Cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, are you like into the East Bay sound at all?” I asked, being nervous, trying to remember what the one kid in the mall had asked me. “Like, um, Operation Ivy?”
“Yeah, they’re cool,” he said, nodding. “It’s like ska but more punk.”
“Yeah, I like them but I don’t have any of their stuff,” I said.
“It’s pretty cool. I got most of it on vinyl.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “Cool.”
“So you going to that 7 Seconds show?” I asked—again, trying to think of whatever those punk kids in the mall had said to me.
“Yeah, I dunno. I’d like to, but I don’t know if I have enough cash.”
“Yeah, that’s cool,” I said. “I heard it was supposed to be good.”
“Yeah, their last record was fucking great.”
“Yeah,” I said, lying, having no idea. “It was pretty good.”
“You skate at all?”
“Skate? You mean skateboard?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, I’m OK.”
“Cool,” he said. “Maybe we can skate somewhere sometime.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be cool.”
“Well, I got to get to class. You know, take it easy,” he said, and then he crinkled up the detention slip and just started walking off.
“You’re just gonna walk away?”
“Yeah. I just got thrown out of Spanish so I wouldn’t have to, like, take this test.”
“Cool.”
“Later.”
“Later,” I said and stood up, crinkling up my own blue slip of paper. Something made me start smiling for some reason. I was like this whole new person, not just because of my hair and clothes and not just because of the music I was listening to—people around me were treating me different, some people just coming up and talking to me for no reason. It was kind of fucking weird, you know, how I hadn’t ever noticed it before, that it was all about how you fucking looked. I started to walk away when Bro. Cardy’s office door opened and he waved me in, nodding, “What a surprise, Mr. Oswald, come in, come in.”
Bro. Cardy grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved me past his desk into the small chair. “Why do you keep being sent here?” he asked, taking a seat and folding his long gray hands together atop his desk. His face looked plain and old like a statue sitting in the sunlight there, a white face atop a dark slate uniform. “What is the problem this time?”
I said what I had to say, which was, “We are 138
,”
from the song “We are 138” by the Misfits again, and I didn’t know what 138 we were, but I still said it—“We are 138”—and that was just about the moment Bro. Cardy sighed very heavily and wrote me two Saturday detentions, signing them and handing them to me, shaking his old head and frowning.
As I was walking down the hallway at school a few hours later, I caught sight of Rod, who I hadn’t seen in months because he was in all honors classes now, having decided maybe it was safer with all nerds around him all day. He looked skinnier, more nervous than ever, his eyes darting around the hall for possible attack from any corner. He was walking down the hall and had his head down, peering out of the sides of his eyes, and I stopped him and asked, “Rod, what’s up?” and he shook his head.
“Did you hear about prom?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. I had been thinking about it all week, specifically who the hell I was going to take. I didn’t know anybody. I mean, there was Gretchen, but, well, that seemed kind of out of the question, and, well, Dorie, who I had tried calling a few times but would never answer, so it seemed like here was this momentous occasion again, you know, and, well, there was still nobody for me.
“No, what’s up with it?” I asked.
“You’re never gonna believe this, man. But they’re talking about having separate proms this year.”
“Separate proms? What do you mean? One for juniors and one for seniors? That’s how they always do it, dude.”
“No, man, no. Separate senior proms: one for white kids and one for blacks.”
“What? You got to be kidding me. It’s fucking 1991—who has separate proms? You got to be fucking joking.”
“No. That dude Marcus, the one with the afro on the basketball team, he just made me sign a petition.”
“Why are they gonna have separate proms?” I asked.
“Well, the student council kids, the seniors, can’t agree on the songs, you know, the theme song. It’s fucked up.”
I thought if the pasty-white suburban student council kids couldn’t agree on something, what hope was there for the rest of us? Fucking Christ Jesus.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re juniors,” I said.
“I dunno, I was thinking of maybe going,” he said. “If I could.”
“To the black senior prom?” I asked, and I could see the answer was killing him, his soft black lips turned down. His eyes got very small, and I thought for a moment of all the kids who ever fucked with Rod, not one of them had been white because, even in that messedup school, you know, no white jock was stupid enough to fuck with a black kid, tiny and faggy as he might be.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Maybe you could come too.”
“To the black senior prom? What the hell are you talking about? I wouldn’t fit in with them either.”
He sighed and then nodded and we walked off in separate directions down the hall.
By the end of the day it was all over Brother Rice. Apparently, the story was this: The fucking seniors on student council, which was made up of all geeky, wanna-be politician-types, ran the senior prom. They picked the DJ, the menu, decided on what the theme song would be. So apparently the student council kids, who were almost all white, decided the theme song would be “Wonderful Tonight,” the fucking Eric Clapton song, which had been the fucking senior prom theme like every fucking year. Well, a few of the other kids, seniors too, two black dudes and one Hispanic kid, suggested another song, “Make it Last Forever,” which was a black R&B hit. The two opposing parties brought in their songs, played them for the student council, and the black kids were of course out-numbered and out-voted. The black kids tried to appeal, but the white kids weren’t having it, and so the black seniors said,
Fuck it
.
We’ll have our own prom
, and that was what they planned to do, I guess.
Bill Summers told me all about it after school, standing at his locker, which was right next to mine. He was the junior class representative to the student council, a prep—so white it hurt—in a blue shirt and blue tie, blond hair cut perfectly. After he told me about it all, he looked at me and said, “Isn’t that fucking stupid?” and I said, “I think it’s fucking stupid,” but I didn’t know exactly why.
I wasn’t sure if I thought it was stupid that the white kids would pick some song that had been the theme like eight hundred times already, or if it was stupid that the black kids were so pissed that they were going to go do their own thing, or if it was stupid that the moderator, Mr. Helman, couldn’t think of some other fucking solution. The more I thought about it the more angry and confused I felt. I mean, the white kids had followed the rules. They brought their song in and everyone voted. The black kids had lost, fair and square, so maybe they were just being fucking babies. Or maybe not, I wasn’t sure. I mean, maybe, since the student council kids were all mostly white, the black kids never even had a chance in the first place. I mean, once I thought about it, like if there were all black kids on the fucking student council and one year, one fucking year, I wanted the song to be “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and I knew no matter what there was nothing, not a goddamn thing, I could do to see that happen, I dunno, maybe I would be pissed too. And if that shit happened to me all the time, I mean day after day, with everything—like if every song on the radio was rap or every person in every fucking movie was black, if the whole fucking world was black and staring at me and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it to make it fair, even—well then maybe, maybe, I’d be fucking sick of it after all and say,
Fuck it. Fuck it. The senior prom only happens once and I want it to mean something to me
, and so maybe, maybe, I would want to go out and do my own thing. It still seemed really fucking wrong and sad to me, though, like, well, like all those preppy student council kids had, well, just given up on something.
I said, “Later,” to Bill Summers and decided since I was a junior and the junior prom was still going on fine and it was only the senior prom that was going to be split up, it was not really my fucking problem anyway, because, well, fuck that school.
Like always, I met Gretchen and Kim in the parking lot after school. I got out fifteen minutes earlier than them so I would wait, lying on the hood of the Ford Escort, staring at all the hot Catholic girls in their soft, white, see-through blouses and super-fine flannel skirts as they walked past, while I winked at them, kind of growling. It was hot outside, the very beginning of May, and I had taken off my dress shirt and was sitting in a dirty white T, lying on the hood of the Escort, waiting, the sun beating with white speckles and fuzzy circles onto my bald, shaved head.
OK. Junior prom was indeed coming up quick, and shit, I wanted to go. Why? Because, well, I hadn’t gone to any high school dances yet and after this one there were like only two left for me in my whole high school career ever, and, well, I guess I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else, I guess, that I wasn’t still a dumb quiet kid and a loser. But since I didn’t know any other girls, really—I mean, Dorie would not take my calls and that girl Esme was dating the drummer for Jim’s band, The Morlocks!—I thought about asking Gretchen, but, seriously, just as a friend. To be totally honest, I had no interest in her like that anymore.
OK, so that is a total fucking lie. I think, to be really honest, I wanted her very, very bad again, because I knew she had lost her virginity, which gave her a kind of, well, adult quality I found really fucking hot. I had tried to act like it wasn’t true, but it was. I liked her more than ever.