All the Young Punks
I'm four years old. I'm in a hospital in Eugene about to go into surgery. I don't know what for, exactly, and there will be so many over the years that this one won't make much impression on me. Still, I'm scared. Not of the operation itself, or the pain. Surgeries hurt, but they don't hurt you, they help you. I understand this. What I'm scared of is the gas, feeling myself slip away into something that's not at all like sleep. In the mostly-hidden part of my mind (even now I have the sense that my mind is big, and for all its wide open spaces there are also a great many hidden caves and catacombs) I believe that the gas is what it feels like to be dead. So I'm scared.
“Hey,” come look at this,” my dad says. He's looking out my third-floor window with an expression of amusement. My mom and I hurry over. “Look at that,” my dad says, pointing down, but I can already see it. He's a young guy, maybe twenty, though at the time he looks like an adult to me. He wears black combat boots, faded black jeans, a tight t-shirt with a stylized skull on the front (the logo, I learn a decade later, of a tongue-in-cheek horror punk band called The Misfits) and a black leather jacket covered in viciously shining spikes and studs. On top, the piece de resistance: a giant electric blue mohawk that rises a foot from his head. He stands on the sidewalk across the street from the hospital, smoking a cigarette and hunching his shoulders against the rain. At that moment I don't know he's one of a million, an army of teenage pseudo-nihilists affecting disaffection. To me, now, he is unique. He's made himself look like a monster, and it's beautiful. “What's that?” I say, my voice hushed.
“That's a punk rocker,” my dad sneers, and I know what I want to be when I grow up.
Few words in the English language have undergone more radical transformations, meant more things to more people, than the word “punk.” In Shakespeare's time, it referred to a prostitute. Later, it was the term to describe the passive partner in a homosexual liaison, what we today call a “bottom.” A person who's feeling unwell might describe themselves as “feeling a little punk.” In the now-extinct jargon of the carnival freakshow, a deformed fetus in a jar was known as a “pickled punk.” Delinquents of all ages, but especially the younger set, have been called punks long before Dirty Harry. When one behaves in a weak or submissive fashion, one has “punked out,” and the victim of a practical joke, or anyone otherwise made to look foolish, has been “punked.” Down through the ages, whenever people have wanted to express contempt for each other, punk has been the pejorative of choice. No surprise, then, that it should be worn as a badge of honor by the dirtiest, grittiest subculture of the twentieth century, whose music, fashion, art, and ideology was dedicated to exposing the ugliest facets of life, holding them up for the perusal of the masses, and embracing them as their own. To be a member of that subculture, to be a punk, is to exalt the nasty bits, and if there had been a worse word to apply to themselves, they would've found it.
“How many punks does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two. One to do it, and one to say, 'Dude, that's so punk rock.'” I'm meant to laugh, but I absorb it with the gravity of a Zen koan. I'm fourteen, and I'm earnest about everything. My mentor, Anna, winks at me to tell me to lighten up. She's a big girl, tall and broad, three years older than me and eons wiser. She's read every book in existence, and I'm in love with her. She took me under her wing because she saw I had potential, and finally I'm learning punk at the feet of a master. Not what music to listen to (though the music is brilliant, hard, fast stuff by bands like The Dead Kennedys and The Stranglers) or how to dress; Anna doesn't dress like any punk I've ever seen. She scoffs at the leather-and-patches uniform of the other punks in school, preferring to dress in work boots, jeans, and a t-shirt, no logos or brands on any of it, because she refuses to pay for the privilege of making herself a billboard. No, she teaches me about
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history, anthropology, science, literature, art, politics, economics, religion, movies, and whatever else she thinks I need to know. From her I learn how to sew and make my own soap, because it's better to do things for yourself rather than rely on the military-industrial complex. She gives me The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Cat's Cradle, loads me down every day with books, and when I'm not reading, I'm listening. She explains how we've all been conned into lives of quiet desperation, how we've been made fungible commodities, zombies, slaves. To be a punk, she says, is to remain alive and sharp, to resist the machinations of the Powers that Be. “The hippies failed because they were weak and self-indulgent, but not us,” she says, and I nod earnestly.
These days, punk is as dead as jazz. Most of the old punks are still alive, but the movement they created has been co-opted and commoditized, turned into a product line tepid enough to suit mall-faring teenyboppers. Where X-Ray Spex and The Velvet Underground sang about heroin addiction and the evils of consumerism, their descendants sing about high school and heartbreak. The thing is, while punk always seemed nihilistic to outsiders, it was a movement full of hope. Anger too, but anger is a sign that one hasn't succumbed to despair. Maybe that's what finally happened. Punk was still going strong during the Reagan years, but it lost steam as people started to realize that the spirit of the Me Decade would outlast their will to fight, and now, as the whole world flirts with fascism once again, nobody really believes that anything can be changed by music, agitprop, and constructive vandalism.
It's two weeks after my eighteenth birthday, and I'm about to move out of my mother's house. We're both forceful personalities, stubborn and combative, and we've been getting in each other's faces a lot. Now that I'm about to go, the tension is gone and we're amiable again. As I'm packing up my records, she sees the sleeve for my Never Mind the Bollocks LP. “I used to have this one,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” I say. “How come you don't have it anymore?”
“I never really had time to listen to music when I got older,” she says, and what she's not saying is after I was born. My mother was sixteen when I was born, and the albums that were new then are
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my revered classics now. As we drive to my new apartment we talk about music for the first time I can remember. I like Richard Hell and the Voidoids, she doesn't. She likes The Runaways, and I hate them. We both love Blondie, Devo, and The Clash. Her knowledge of the genre is pretty impressive, for a mom, at any rate, and by the time she mentions MC5 I have to ask, “So, were you ever a punk?”
“Oh, I don't think so,” she says. “I never had time to get into much of anything.”
“Still, you raised five kids, that's pretty punk rock.”
“You think so?”
“Fuckin' A.”
“Watch your mouth.”
I smile and make a zipping motion across my lips, but the damage is done, we've bonded again, as...I don't know, not peers, but maybe comrades, each of us engaged in the same war against the world, doing what we have to do to stay in the fight.
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