Punk Like Me (8 page)

oppressive, dark, and frightening. The intensity was almost too much to bear, and I decided it was time to examine my hands and the red and black nails I’d painted the day before, while I wondered what sort of question was coming my way or if I’d survive this day.

Kerry sat back and so did I. Her brow furrowed as she dug into her bag, but when she Þ nally Þ shed out her glasses and put them on, she looked relieved and happy, or at least happier. “Do you know where we’re going?” she asked me with a smirk.

Huh? I was expecting something along the lines of, “Do you know what you’re saying?” or “Do you mean what you’re saying?” or “Okay, Nina, are you a dyke?” not this question, this loaded question that could be either about my street credibility as a punk or anything else.

• 56 •

PUNK LIKE ME

Kerry was smiling wickedly at me, and I narrowed my eyes at her a bit. Now, I’m naive sometimes, and I’m not as quick on the uptake as I should be for a self-confessed smart-ass, but as fucked-up and self-conscious as I can be, I can on occasion read between the lines, and from the glasses Kerry hid behind, to the half-hidden smirk on those soft, full, lips, I knew I was being dared into something, and I had the feeling it was one of those you-tell-me-and-I’ll-tell-you sort of things.

The problem I had, though, was what if it turned out to be an I-tell-you-and-you-tell-me-how-fucked-up-I-am sort of thing? That’s what I was afraid of, and no way was I going to fall for it.

I eased myself back on my bench, then stretched my arms out on either side across it, slid down a bit, crossed my legs, and put on the coolest, toughest mask I had, the one that says, “Yeah, baby, I know it all,” to all and sundry who cared to look, and oh-so-casually inspected the nails of my left hand before I looked up at her, mask on, smirk in place, and with the full illusion of control.

“You know I do,” I answered with a lift of my chin and a smirk of my own. “What about you?” I challenged. “Do you know where we’re going?” I held on to my expression for dear life and tossed that hot potato back. Her turn to kick or receive, baby, kick or receive.

Kerry’s mouth twisted expressively, and she nodded her head in silent acknowledgment of the new game. She twisted on the bench, leaning her back against the wall and bringing her legs up in front of her, to face the window across from us and hugged her knees. She stared out at the passing bay, the deep throb of the boat engines the only sound around us.

“Yeah, I know where we’re going,” she answered Þ nally, solemnly,

“but you can lead if you want to. You know I’ll always follow.” She turned to consider my face, then went back to contemplating the water.

Well well well, she’d gone for the kick and now it was my play.

I contemplated the buckles on my boots for a minute. Seven on each one, and with a black rope lace underneath and a zipper below the whole thing. Beautiful black leather, and the buckles weren’t too shiny. They had a sort of dull gleam, more like pewter, and provided a great contrast. Done with the artistic inspection of my boot, I tried to respond.

“Why don’t we just do what we always do, and go together? No one has to lead, no one has to follow, and we just, you know, get there?”

• 57 •

I suggested. I decided it was time to study the other boot while I waited for her response.

Kerry chuckled lightly. “Yeah, we’ll just get there. Together, right?”

I looked up at her with a slight grin. “Yeah…together.” A new tension developed between us as the eye contact lingered, but I was deÞ nitely not going to suffer another round if I could help it.

There’d been enough of that for one day.

“Hey, who do you think is playing today?” I asked, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, but who cared; it was taking us away from some very new and strange territory.

Kerry gave a soft half laugh as we broke eye contact, and I think she was as relieved as I was—at least for the moment. “Would you believe it’s Dayglo Abortions, and I think they’re opening for Soldiers of Death?”

“Dayglo Abortions? What time do Soldiers of Death go on? You think they’ll do ‘The Ballad of Jimi Hendrix’?” I asked excitedly, and together we started singing the opening riff, which is just like Hendrix’s

“Purple Haze.” “Duh
nah
, duh
nah
, duh
nah
—He’s
dead
!” we shouted joyfully, and laughed.

We spent the rest of the ride quoting and singing lyrics from our favorite songs, but for those of you who want to know, not a one of them was by Dayglo Abortions, since we’d never heard of them before, and by the time we got to Bowling Green Station and the train that would take us to the East Village, neither of us could hardly breathe from laughing so much.

The fare paid, our tokens slid into the turnstiles, we went through, barely making it onto the cars that had just pulled up. We quickly found our seats, across from one another in the empty car, and settled in for the ride. Kerry stretched out on her side, and I did the same on mine.

“Ya know, Hopey,” Kerry started, swinging her legs down off the seat to look at me with a smile, “I love you so much, I’d give up hair spray for you.”

I was startled, but recovered quickly enough. “Yeah, well, I love you so much,” I paused for dramatic effect, “I’d drink it!” I grinned triumphantly. Actually, that wasn’t such a big deal, considering how much hair spray got accidentally swallowed during most applications,

• 58 •

PUNK LIKE ME

but still, it was gross.

“You’d drink it, huh?” she asked. “Well, I love you so much I’d spray it in my face while I’m smoking!”

“Nah, don’t do that,” I admonished, still smiling and swinging my legs down to the ß oor to face her. “You’d ruin your hair,” I joked. “And besides, I love you so much, I wouldn’t let you.” Kerry’s focus seemed to gather inward, and she looked down pensively. Ooh, too far, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

It’s not that I really thought I’d said anything out of line. It was just, anyway, well, I don’t know. Too much, too far, and maybe, scarily, too real.

She stared at the ground a while more and I examined my boots again. They really, truly were such a great pair of boots, maybe I should have gotten two pairs if I was going to wear them so often. I’d heard that this pop-star icon had, like, Þ ve pairs of the same boots for that reason, and if someone, like, that thought it was a good idea, then maybe it really was and—

“Hey, Nina,” Kerry interrupted my important boot reverie, “the guys aren’t here. What’s our excuse today?” and she gave me her best wide-eyed and innocent look, which didn’t fool me at all, but did leave me in the position of having to come up with both an intelligent and nonincriminating answer.

Great. Just great. I Þ gured at this point she had enough on me to say whatever she wanted to whomever she wanted, and there’d be more than a little truth to it, and then people would start to say shit and—fuck it.

I was punk, I was cool, and I never did like bullshit, not then, not ever. I might have been crazy, or stupid, or brave, but I did my best to be as honest as I could despite the trampoline dancers in my gut with what I said and did next.

Leaning back on the bench in my oh-so-casual manner, I stretched my legs and crossed those beautiful boots. Then I lit a cigarette (which, by the way, boyz ’n’ gurlz, was and still is illegal now on any and all forms of NYC public transportation, so don’t try it!) and dragged on it.

Cool, calm, and totally collected, I looked up and arched an eyebrow in self-deprecating mockery at my best friend. “I’d say it’s a case of PLT.” I exhaled at her, and let my hand dangle along the orange plastic bench

• 59 •

backs. I let the smoke rise between us.

“What the fuck is PLT?” Kerry asked with a cocked brow of her own.

“C’mon, Kerry, you know, PLT—Pre-Lesbian Tension.” I took a drag on my cigarette and smirked like I knew all about it. Actually, I really did think I knew at least something, though not all, about it. I’d read a lot about “the gay thing” in some books, I watched PBS and stole my mom’s
Cosmo
magazines from time to time. That had to give me some handle on the psychology of this thing. Besides, one thing I knew and understood instinctively so far was where there was smoke, there was Þ re, one way or another.

“I know you have to be covering this stuff in your health class, Kerry. For Chrissakes, you guys study birth control.” I continued to smoke while I watched Kerry’s reactions, now that I’d basically told her that I knew, really knew, what she, what I, what
we
were really doing here and that I, at least, wasn’t going to lie about it and, on the other hand, I was just so cool, I could dismiss this as just a “sophisticated conversation about normal teenage yearnings,” or some such shit.

“Pre-Lesbian Tension,” Kerry practically muttered under her breath. “Give me a drag of that thing, will you?” and she reached across for my cigarette, which I handed to her. She dragged on it like it held the secret of immortality, her eyes focused or, rather, unfocused, on some point midway between me and the ß oor. She twisted her mouth into a grim smile and exhaled smoke through gritted teeth.

Hmm…PLT. I didn’t know where in my brain that had come from, but it seemed pretty accurate to me at that time. Now too, come to think of it.

“I guess…I think I could do the uptown thing, ya know?” Huh? I changed the smirk on my face to a quizzical look. As far as I knew, we hadn’t changed plans to go up farther than Prince Street.

Kerry looked back at me as if I’d just dropped my mind on the ß oor, then realized that I had misunderstood her. “No, doofus, no, not that,” and she rolled her eyes and stood up. “I mean, you know, uptown!” and she gestured to herself, from the shoulders up.

Oh, okay, I got it, I could go with that, I understood. “Oh, okay, I get it. Yeah, me too, I think,” I responded. I Þ gured it was fair, she admitted something, I would too. “Kissing’s, like, no big deal—people get accidentally kissed all the time, right?” I thought for a second, and,

• 60 •

PUNK LIKE ME

my mind having just translated from “bases”—you know, kissing is Þ rst base, bras and beyond second, that stuff—to city zones, I brought that to its next logical step.

“Well, actually,” I reß ected, “I think maybe I could do the midtown thing, too,” and I gestured between my navel and shoulder blades. “I mean, I don’t know, but, like, it’s just, you know, skin, like an arm, right? So that wouldn’t be too big of a deal, right?”

“Right!” she hurriedly agreed, “yeah, that would be so not a problem, because, well, everyone does it sort of anyway, ’cuz I mean, look at straws and stuff, and that’s just sort of a nip—um, anyway, every girl touches her own boobs every day”—and here she blushed crimson—“I mean, putting her bra on.”

I laughed for about a second, maybe because of Kerry’s discomfort, but then I got what she meant about straws and stuff. My ears grew warm and I stopped laughing. I hadn’t ever really thought that far about it. I mean, I guess, maybe I had, but not really, not so, uh, speciÞ cally.

“But I don’t think I could do the downtown thing. I mean, there’s just no way,” she continued emphatically, shaking her head from side to side and crossing and uncrossing her hands in a warding gesture. I began to nod my head in agreement, I think I might have even been about to agree, but as I looked at her face and actually started to think about what she was implying, my brain suddenly locked like a camera set on “blur,” and I had no idea how or what I really felt or thought.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I was lying, and I wasn’t proud of it if I was.

Then again, I was also feeling a little foolish. I mean, here Kerry had obviously thought about the “whole thing,” whatever that was, and me, what had I been thinking about? Skin? Arms? Kissing? That’s it?

So now, I was not only weird and maybe a fag, I was a stupid fag, too.

It occurred to me that maybe I had better think about this a whole lot more, and I wasn’t sure what any of this meant for me, my personal future, or my friendship with Kerry, never mind anyone else.

I scowled in concentration at my cigarette, as if answers would be written in the falling ash. In fact, I was a little numb—I’d been shocked into thinking about what all of this might mean. It was Þ ne to talk and think in intellectual abstractions, but to feel, I mean really feel, these different things and attempt to actually deÞ ne them and then to really, truly think about what the logical end of the road was to acting on

• 61 •

all of that, well, those things were worlds apart, and I had the less-than-comfortable suspicion that I had a foot on each one as they drifted farther and farther away from each other.

“Hey, we’re here!” Kerry jumped up and announced as the train screeched and slowed into the station. “Dump the frown and let’s get slammin’!” And she grabbed my hand to pull me out through the doors and onto the platform.

As we walked east toward the Bowery (CBGB’s is 315 Bowery, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention), I was overwhelmed with excitement—I was actually going to CB’s for the Þ rst time in my life! It was all I could do to keep myself from practically skipping the rest of the way and dragging Kerry behind me for once.

The streets were Þ lled with interestingly dressed people of all kinds, and art littered every stationary space, from grafÞ ti to ornate spray-paint murals. I felt like one of those orphaned animals that’s saved and then has to be gently reintroduced back to its natural environment.

If this was supposed to be home, I was going to like it.

When we Þ nally crossed the street in front of CB’s, a huge crowd overß owed the sidewalk, and as we made our way through the throng, I was ß oored.

Punks, punks of all kinds—Mohawks, skinheads, helicopter haircuts (back and sides gone, top left to grow wild as weeds), boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls, punk boys and punk girls with punk babies (and I mean toddlers) dressed up in little combat boots—my eyes drank it all in and thirsted for more. All the different types of people that could possibly be represented, and everyone just hanging and waiting to have a good time. A general friendliness pervaded the crowd.