My time in the local punk scene wasn’t very long, maybe three or four years. I mean, that’s maybe the typical lifespan for most people in the punk scene. They have a few youthful glory years before they move onto something else. Something conceivably more adult in nature. Despite fits of theatrical nostalgia, I believe they are content with that lifespan. Some things are best that burn brightly then burn out just as quickly and without additional thought or eulogy.
I could never feel this way. Not that I don’t disdain adulthood in any exceptional sense. I resign myself to adulthood as much as anyone. But my adulthood must share space with a feeling of things left incomplete, of experiences half-encountered or entirely missed, and, more generally, of regret. Regret over what? Fear mainly. Fear of foolishness, stupidity, and the excess of innocence to take any meaningful risk or make any meaningful connection across the scene. I was a youth afraid of every marker of youth. Just as I am an adult afraid of even the most freeing markers of adulthood.
This kept me in a box of my own making, as it still does, where I never went to shows and never worked up the courage to ask for a ride, or to just hang out and talk mindlessly of scene types of things: unsubstantiated gossip, sellouts, edge-breakers, how the “new stuff” is always worse than the “old stuff” regardless of what band we were talking about. It caused me to believe I lacked belonging, and that I was disliked at once for existing and not trying harder to exist. The scene, you might say, was a healthy baby goat, ruined by a fifth leg dangling uselessly from its ass. (I was the mutant fifth leg, is what I’m saying.)
So you can imagine my surprise when I was invited to become accomplice to the creation of a scene legend, sometime in late-2000 or early-2001.
In hindsight it does make some sense. Legends require a collaborative sprawl, making for a comically far-reaching RICO case. And anyway, I was, in rare form, actually in the audience of the show in which the story was concocted. It helped that it was in town. In between sets, we gathered outside the old rec center and bound ourselves to a covenant in which we swore that, should we be asked about what happened that night, we would never waver from our complete fabrication.
The scope for what we would tell in place of the truth, which I don’t remember and is probably not worth remembering, was almost ludicrously vast. The more blatant the contortion of logic and more radical the contradiction between fact and other accounts, the unspoken theory went, the better the chances of the legend’s endurance. Intimidated, I took about a week to fashion my version of events, and a few extra days to tell it with any specificity. As a result, mine may have been the least plausible, not least of all because I was culling my details out of legends from other scenes and my own aspirations, having harbored some feelings, partly copes no doubt, that I’d simply ended up in the wrong place, as if I’d never make the same mistakes with refined aesthetic standards.
Well, anyway, on the off chance that someone sought me out in homeroom for “what happened at the rec center last Saturday,” I sat them down and explained thus:
The originally slated band had cancelled [this was everyone’s prompt], and was replaced by a band that happened to be nearby on its own tour, who [maybe a little too conveniently now that I think about it] could fit in another show. [Now here I was especially risky, choosing to create a composite band rather than use a real one, which I believe others did.] I must say that they stood out. First was by their appearance: a severe, under-slept-looking power trio, whose rhythm section were like heavy-set twins, pale and head-shaven, distinguishable only by their t-shirt choices—the bassist in Most Precious Blood, the drummer in Debbie Gibson. The singer and guitarist was smaller, shrouded in a Middlebury College hoodie, camo-patterned cargo shorts that extended over a plurality of his shins, and red hi-top Vans.
Second was by their sound. It was not based on Sunny Day Real Estate or Lifetime or even Converge. Something about their ferocity seemed extra-musical, with far sparser structures and colder, harder tones; more in keeping, I think, with the prose of Ambrose Bierce or Jim Thompson. [I was probably stretching.] Their lyrics, so far as I could gauge, were not too preoccupied with the issues then most prevalent among the kids from that time: of “losing friends”, “getting drunk”, “hating cops”, “breaking up,” or “getting the attention of Equal Vision’s A&R.” They were more along the lines of “your tendency toward self-harm is neither good nor bad but a logical, almost sensible, extension of living in a society in rapid decline.” Or some such shit. There were a few instances of repeated lines at seemingly improvised intervals that the band sometimes struggled to keep pace with. It often sounded like very angry incantations of “do-re-mi.” In these moments, the singer appeared to be on the verge of convulsions, as if tying to conjure a demon up from the depths and into himself. Or maybe he was trying to case the demon out. [I could alternate these two conjectures given the proper room-reading.]
Maybe four songs into their set, the amps shrieked with feedback, and the singer threw his guitar across the rec hall in frustration, nearly hitting a crowd of kids in Humble Beginnings shirts drinking Cokes covered in paper bags. There was some spillage but luckily no one was hurt. Not that the band would have noticed because they started arguing with each other before evidently breaking up right then and there. Then, they disappeared into the night before anyone called the cops.
When asked for their name, I demurred. I lacked the imagination to think of one that complemented the aesthetic I described. I sort of rotated between Kill-o-ton, Loser Dad, Native Nails, and zero point zero. I did say that they had a demo tape for sale that was initially titled We Have Such Sights to Show You but was crossed out with Guidance Counselor written above it in red Sharpie. Anyway, the recording quality was terrible, like an accidental Merzbow record.
It’s hard to tell just how effective my story was to others; we never traded our versions—or they never traded them with me. My listeners would mostly shrug or say “No shit, huh?” and move on. If at times, though, one would say “Come on, really?” and I’d respond “Yeah, dude, really” and leave it at that. For no story was too poorly rendered if it still managed to conceal the actual, much less important events, the retelling of which in any context would bring dire consequences.
They never said that last part in so many words, but it helped my creative process to think that they had; and having compounded the severity of those consequences every year since, I live in fear of them to this day.