After school a few days later, I skated to the bus stop and took the bus to the record store on 95th to buy the only other Misfits record I didn’t own by this point,
Earth A.D.
I had saved up enough for it by not really eating anything for lunch all week. I had been living on sugar packets and other condiments spread on pieces of garlic bread, which only cost ten cents. So I was walking up the small concrete steps to the narrow corner record store door and these four or five dudes in black and green bomber jackets—straightedge kids, I could tell right away, big X’s on their shirts and jackets, some with band T-shirts like Minor Threat and D.R.I. and Life Sentence—shoved past me. The last one out, the shortest of the group, with a bald head barely covered in a bent-up gray dock-workers cap, his long, narrow skull-face jutting over a white T, stuck out his hand, blocking the door as I tried to go past. I stopped and looked across his arm over to his face. He kind of squinted at me, looking me down, taking a sip from a red straw jutting out of an enormous fountain drink.
“Who do you run with?” the short, skull-faced guy asked me.
“What?” I asked, leaning in closer to hear him.
“Who do you run with?” he asked again, looking over his shoulder at his chums and then turning back to squint at me again. “Who’s your fucking crew?”
“What?” I asked again.
“Are you a fucking skin or not?”
“No,” I said, patting the shaved top of my head.
“Well, then fuck you,” he said, and flicked his plastic straw at me. It hit me in the forehead, wet with his spit, and then dropped to my feet. I just shrugged, trying to smile, feeling dumb for doing it. “Punk’s dead,” he said, nodding at me. “You’re fucking next.” He pointed his thumb in the air and then turned it down—meaning me, I was going down, I guess. His pals nodded and they all just ambled off, shoving each other and laughing. I just stood there on the record store steps and stared, having no fucking idea what bad business had just happened upon me.
OK, I was going to go to this punk show, my first ever, I guess, and I had my dad’s beautiful black combat boots on, these nice twenty-hole lace-ups, and it was like eight at night, and I started up the stairs and I was taking them by twos because I didn’t want my dad to have time to say anything to stop me, and also I didn’t want him to see my fucking feet. But I guess I wasn’t quick enough and he said, “Hold on a minute, pal,” and I stopped and started back down, and my dad sighed and pulled himself off the couch, staring at me like I was totally fucking crazy, his eyes big and wild, his mouth parted, shaking his head, looking at my feet.
“Are those my jump boots?” he asked. He was still in his blue factory uniform, his glasses foggy and crooked on his face.
“Um, yeah. I think so.”
“You have exactly ten seconds to take those off before I pull them off of you.” I was standing a few steps up from him and we were just about eye to eye. He was still a little taller than me and I just stood there and looked down, not moving.
“I served in those fucking things,” he muttered. “So you can take off those boots or I can take them off of you,” he said again.
“I’ll take good care of them,” I said.
“Ten,” he said, taking a step forward. “Nine. Eight. Seven.”
“I’ll make sure they’re fine,” I said.
“Six. Five. Four.”
“Dad.”
“Three. Two.”
“OK,” I said.
“Take them off.”
“OK,” I said. “OK,” I whispered, sitting down on the stairs, beginning the tremendous procedure of unlacing them.
My dad turned and took a seat back on the couch, watching to make sure I was actually taking them off, and right then, all I could think to save myself from crying was, “
I ain’t no goddamn sonovabitch,”
from the Misfits song, “Where Eagles Dare.”
After about an hour of fucking begging and after getting my boots fucking taken off my feet, I convinced Gretchen to go with me to the first punk show I would ever attend, 7 Seconds. It was one of the most amazing nights of my life, even though we only saw one song and even though some shit started there between some straightedge kids and some punk kids. It didn’t matter though. It was not so much the best night because of the band, right? They were good and loud and kind of funny, and the only song we heard was the cover the little punk girl had mentioned, “99 Red Balloons,” which was like a German hit from the ’80s about nuclear war—I remembered the original video with the weird foreign-looking lady and the balloons and everything, and I guess growing up I had always been kind of freaked out about nuclear war and the song was so happy and poppy that I never even knew it was about that until much later—but when 7 Seconds went into the song, and when the singer, Kevin Seconds, announced “99 Red Balloons,” the whole place went fucking crazy. I guess that was the reason it was like the best, you know? The kids there, or maybe just the feeling of it all, belonging to something like that, maybe.
The Cubby Bear was like a kind of sports bar right across from Wrigley Field ballpark, and it was in the middle of like a kind of yuppie part of town, but when we got to the show there was this huge line of dirty punk kids waiting out front and, I dunno, I got very excited.
But we could not find a spot to park and we didn’t have enough money to pay for parking and to buy tickets, and so after driving around for almost two hours, we finally found a place. We ran off and got in line and by the time we got in, the first two bands had played already and 7 Seconds was almost done with their set, and the place was totally fucking packed. It was all dark wood inside and the tables had been pushed out of the way and it was just lined with kids all punked-out to the max, with their dyed hair and black hoodies and plaid pants and skirts and buttons and patches and safety pins and black motorcycle jackets with band names like Screeching Weasel painted on back. There were a lot of the straightedge skinhead kids there too, most of them shaved bald, with their white T-shirts and black field pants, combat boots laced up high, and X’s magicmarkered on their hands, some even with X’s on the top of their bald heads. Everyone was dancing; all of them shouting and moving in a kind of wide circle around the center of the room. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, I guess.
So I knew the song “99 Red Balloons,” I guess. I mean, like I said, I remembered it from being a kid, and when the singer said the name of the song, the place went fucking nuts, and then the bass player started the familiar bass line, but faster, really pounding it out, then the drums came in, first the high-hat, then the rest of the kit, and kids were going crazy—jumping around, shoving each other, dancing—and then the singer started at it, “Ninety-nine red balloons, floating in the summer sky,” and eventually, when he got to the chorus, “Whoa-oh,” everyone in the crowd sang along—everyone, even Gretchen and me—and I was jumping up and down and, I dunno, kind of feeling like I did when I used to sing in church, being part of something, you know, feeling like I belonged to something, and then it was the chorus again—“Whoa-oh”—and everybody repeated it with him, and I looked up and some kids were moshing by the front of the stage and some of them were the bald skinheads, with their blue and green bomber jackets on, and they were kind of shoving each other and slamming hard into the scrawny punk kids and it was almost the end of the song, and finally some lanky punk kid with a green mohawk shoved a bigger straightedge kid and
wham!
—like that—the straightedge kid hauled off and socked the punk kid in the eye. In a moment, the punk kid’s friend, a little blue-haired fireplug of a girl in a black leather jacket, went up and spat in the straightedge kid’s face. The straightedge kid laughed and spat back, hitting the girl on the forehead. The girl went fucking nuts, lunging at the straightedge kid, and then some other punk kids started getting into it, the punks and skins throwing off their jackets and swinging at each other until the song stopped and the singer, Kevin Seconds, looked up and said, “OK, OK, tonight we walk out of here together, punks and skins, we all walk out of here together,” and I had no idea what he meant but I liked that he had said it. And it fucking worked. The punk kids and skinhead kids kind of relaxed and went back to dancing, without killing each other, and this one fat straightedge kid even helped this one punk girl off the floor and it was a very strange moment for me, I guess.
After the show, Gretchen got in line to buy some merchandise, a T-shirt, I think, and she said, “These guys, this band, they make all of their own stuff.”
“So?” I said.
“So, that’s fucking cool.”
“Why?”
“Because they want to do it themselves, you know, without like record labels and everything telling them what they can say. You know, so like they’re not owned by the corporations. You know, D.I.Y.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “What the fuck does it mean?”
“Do-it-Yourself,” Gretchen said. “It like means they stand for something, you know. They’re not like fucking Guns n’ Roses.”
“Guns n’ Roses stands for shit,” I said.
“What?”
“I dunno. Having fun and everything.”
“You don’t get it,” she said. “These guys, they want you to, like, think.” I looked over at the table full of T-shirts and records and buttons and stickers and thought,
Why haven’t I heard of this shit before?
As we were waiting in the merchandise line, Katie, the very short girl from the mall, ran up to me, hugged me like we were old pals, and said, “I got to go, my mom’s waiting. Here, I made this for you,” and she slipped a mix-tape into my hand, hugging me again and running off. She was like a blur with blue hair. The tape was just a regularlooking cassette, except she had taped a picture of herself on it, a photograph of her as a kid dressed up as like a pink ballerina or fairy, with the words For Brian on the cover, in silver glitter.
“Who was that?” Gretchen asked.
“I dunno. The girl that gave me the flyer.”
“She made you a tape?”
“I guess so,” I said, and slipped it into my pocket, like that, not even knowing what I was in store for, but looking around at everything and feeling very, very strange.
The tape was fucking amazing. I mean, I listened to the tape for days, for fucking weeks, even rewinding the tape over and over to listen and really try to understand the lyrics, you know, and the girl, Katie, who I never saw again, well, she had typed up a track listing with the songs and band names and even some of the lines she must have liked—
Seeing Red
by minor threat “My looks they must threaten you To make you act the way you do”
Think Again
by minor threat “Ignorance, it set your standards. Intelligence, that don’t work in your brain.”
Nazi Punks Fuck Off
by the dead kennedys “You ain’t hardcore cos you spike your hair When a jock still lives inside your head”
We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now
by the dead kennedys “Nigger knockin’ for the master race Still you wear the happy face”
Jock-O-Rama (Invasion of the Beef Patrol)
by the dead kennedys “Jock-O-Rama—Save my soul We’re under the thumb of the Beef Patrol”
—and I kept thinking about that one moment at the show, with all these different kids who weren’t that different and the singer telling them to walk out together. I had been to shows before—you know, Mötley Crüe, Guns n’ Roses, even Metallica, all with Mike, all at stadiums with like thousands of people—but never in a small club like that, and, well, it wasn’t the same, I mean we were all packed in close and singing and dancing and, well, never, never did anyone ever say anything like that, you know, about walking out together. Like I said, I thought about it for weeks, because for some reason it really meant something to me, because, well, I had never thought about it before, but like music, well, maybe it could change some things, like even for me.
The only time Gretchen saw me naked, or almost naked, she laughed at me and said I was built like an eleven-year-old girl. We were in my room in the basement, and she had just about finished shaving my head. She had brought her own clippers over and they had conked out while my head was only halfway done, so she had to use scissors and my dad’s straight razor to finish the rest.
“Gretch, be careful with those, huh?” I said, squirming in the metal folding chair. At the time, I was only in my tighty-whitey underwear and my room was cold because it was in the basement, so I was fucking freezing.
“No problem, ya douche-bag, just relax,” she replied, and as soon as her soft white hands began to touch the delicate hairs along the back of my neck, all I could do was relax. No, that was not true—I began to get a monster-size erection. In the tighty-whitey underwear there was nowhere to hide it, so I jumped up and said, “OK, I’m done,” and she said, “Half your head still has, like, hair on it,” and I said, “That’s fine,” and she looked at me and said, “Look at you. You look like an eleven-year-old girl. Do you ever think about like working out?” and I said, “Well, at least I’m not fat,” which immediately afterwards I knew I should not have said, and she said, “Yeah. Yeah, at least you’re not fat,” and then she left, storming out of my room, running up the stairs, even leaving her black vinyl purse. In a couple of minutes, she knocked on the bedroom door, and right away I said, “I’m sorry,” and she said, “If you ever say something like that to me again, I’ll kick your bitchy little ass.”
“OK,” I said.
“Let me finish cutting your fucking hair,” she said.
“OK.” I took a seat back down in the metal chair, pulling one of my dirty black T-shirts over my crotch. Gretchen turned on the clippers but they were still broken, so she took out the scissors again and began running her small hands through my hair, her fingers gently stroking the skin beside my ear. She worked for a while, singing some cute song I didn’t recognize to herself, but like years later, sitting on some other girl’s couch beginning to make out, I suddenly realized it was “Love Song” by the fucking Cure. Anyway, Gretchen was singing and I could feel her hot breath on my neck and I was trying hard not to get hard but not having much luck with it, and then she took the can of shaving cream sitting on my dresser and squirted some into her palm and began rubbing it along my neck, really slow, laughing, saying, “This smells good, like a man,” and I nodded and laughed too, and then she took my dad’s straight razor and very softly, very carefully, began shaving my neck. In a moment she cut me pretty bad, by accident, and I screamed like a girl, and she shoved me back in the chair and grabbed one of my mom’s white towels and was holding it there to stop the blood, and I said, “Is my fucking head still attached?” and she said, “Uh, yeah. Don’t be such a pussy,” and she kept holding the towel there and I felt around and she slapped my hands away and lifted the towel and leaned close to look, and then she did it. I had my eyes closed, still feeling the sting of the razor cut, and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, I felt Gretchen kiss the back of my neck very gently and say, “See, it’s not so bad at all.”