Punktuation

Punk cleansed rock and roll’s palette only briefly, and was mostly an excuse for brats of all ages to act out, and then to pretend their having acted out was some sort of artistic statement. In music, it gave a second life to a lot of rotten musicians, many of them refugees from glam. All of a sudden, not being able to play very well not only wasn’t a liability, but evidence that your artistic priorities were in order. In one of his books, the British artists' manager Simon Napier-Bell recounts a group of very middle class (which means something very much more rarefied in the UK than here) prospective clients taking care to step in dog shit before visiting him in his white-carpeted office. The more obnoxious you were, the more you were understood to be in touch with The True Spirit of Rock. It made for a lot of really awful music, little of it as awful as the virtuosity-driven prog that had been so popular a couple of years before.

Though I was 29, an age Johnny Rotten specifically excoriated in The Sex Pistols’ "Seventeen", I was one of the non-virtuosic ex-glam types who seized the opportunity to reinvent myself as a punk. I got my hair cut in a Mohawk, dyed it pink, cut up all my clothing and put it back together with safety pins, renounced personal hygiene as the preserve of hippies, whom we punks loathed (it was nonsensical, but so was the popularity of The Clash, if you ask me), and formed a group called The American Lesions, recruiting three fellow ex-glam poseurs clumsy enough on their respective instruments to be able to claim credibly they’d never played them before. I stood at the edge of the stage in my ludicrous coiffure and safety pins and made animal noises, and agents and managers queued up outside the graffiti- and dried puke-covered doors of our dressing rooms, convinced that we were in touch with The True Spirit of Rock. Soon we were on a national tour with Syphilitic Dyscharge.

In the first nine or 10 cities we played, everything went according to plan. We would play horribly, but very loudly. The misshapen, socially inept, and likewise alienated kids who made up our fan base would lovingly flip us the finger and spit at us as we performed, and the anorexic or bulimic ones, along with the self-harmers, would jump up and down like lunatics because they’d read in magazines that they were expected to do so. Meanwhile, a small group of parents would stand outside telling correspondents for the local TV news that punk was the province of perverts and the possessed, and then everyone would go home happy.

At Tacoma's Loose Stool, though, all that went out the window. We came out on stage to discover that the misshapen, socially inept, and otherwise alienated had been shoved aside by snarling bikers and their mamas, or bitches — whatever the applicable expression is. We weren’t 16 bars into our ritual desecration of ELP’s "Pictures at an Exhibition" before their apparent leader swaggered menacingly up to the edge of the bandstand and yanked our bassist's and guitarist's cords out. He said his date — I remember now: his old lady — wanted Santana’s "Evil Ways". I said we didn’t know it. He said if we wanted ever to see the world outside the club again we did.

We did our best, but didn’t manage a very convincing version. He crushed our respective crania like peanut shells and buried us in shallow graves on the edge of the parking lot.

Years before, when I lived on Skyline Drive in Laurel Canyon near the top of the Santa Monica Mountains, I would on a dark night occasionally hike up toward a big radio antenna just below Mulholland Drive and remove all my clothes. It felt exhilarating to be naked beneath the stars. I think I may have masturbated one time, but that wasn’t necessarily part of the experience. No one ever saw me, or at least no one who called the police or asked if I might want to party.

Is it not exhilarating to realize you never know what you're going to find out about me here?

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A Man Who, Beyond the Age of 26, Found Himself On a Bus

Noting a few weeks ago that a Brazilian footballer (we’d say: soccer player) who earns £140,000 per week was spotted riding a public bus to one of his team’s fixtures (we’d say: games), the Guardian (we’d say: a prominent UK newspaper) recalled former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s observation that "a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Thanks, Maggie. I — most of whose bus-riding came well after age 30, never mind 26 — needed that.

My first day at Santa Monica High School — and a wretched, lonely day it was — I somehow missed the Malibu bus, and wound up walking the five miles home. I couldn’t get the New Christy Minstrels’ "Greenback Dollar" out of my head, and must have sung it to myself 100 times over the course of the six-mile trudge. A kindly motorist in a huge Chrysler offered me a ride at one point, the only time I was ever the object of gay predation. I was nearly to Sunset Blvd. by then, though, and so didn’t think it worth the risk.

‘Twas on a Greyhound bus that I had the first major adventure of my adulthood, venturing farther afield alone than ever before, traveling from Santa Monica up to San Mateo during winter break in my sophomore year of college to see a girlfriend. It was terrifying, and of course exhilarating. I attracted an acolyte, a 15-year-old who seemed to regard me, with my Mr. Zigzag badge and long hair, as the embodiment of cool. There were no iPods in those days, nor even Walkmans; I read Richard Wright’s Native Son and felt indignant about American apartheid. Once finally in San Mateo, I took a taxi, for the first time ever, from the bus depot to my motel, my safe arrival at which I celebrated with a spirited wank.

After college, I got (relatively) rich quick; within a year of graduating, I was driving a Porsche. But by age 33, both the Porsche and its very much less glamorous successor, an Austin Marina, were history, and I grumblingly became a regular patron of Los Angeles’s misleadingly named Rapid Transit District buses. There were still no iPods, and only the very rich had Walkmans, but lots of people — none of whom you wanted to spend a lot of time around — had gigantic boomboxes. For a while there, it seemed that I was unable to get on an RTD bus any time of day or night without its being boarded a block or two later by a sociopath with a boombox, whose volume no force on earth was going to make him lower. I’d see the driver sizing him up in his rearview mirror, thinking to himself that it was better that his passengers be disgruntled than his children orphans, and finally shrugging in resignation.

Occasionally, some poor shnook lacking basic survival instincts would try to make himself heard over the awful, distorted noise roaring out of the boombox. Sometimes — the better times — the sociopath wouldn’t give said shnook even the satisfaction of looking at him. Other times, the sociopath would turn down his volume, making clear how very, very much he resented having to do so, and growl, “Ya gah problem?” Whereupon everyone else on the bus, not wishing to be splattered with blood, would frantically grab at the stop-requesting cord.

I have alluded here many times to having gone through a period in my early 30s when I suddenly became irresistible to women. This coincided with my RTD days. I could have asked for no more vivid an affirmation of my new irresistibility than that I was able one afternoon to pick up a young woman on a downtown-bound RTD bus.

When I processed words for San Francisco’s biggest fascist law firm in the mid-1980s, I spent over three hours a day on Golden Gate Transit buses back and forth to Santa Rosa, their northernmost destination. Sociopaths and drunkards rode only the last northbound bus of the day, so I had the pleasure of interacting with them only if I’d worked overtime. It was with someone who was neither conspicuously…off nor intoxicated, though, but a Santana fan, with whom I had the exchange my adrenals most enjoyed. After boarding in Petaluma, he promptly fell asleep, but Carlos and his army of Latin percussionists played on, their annoying high frequencies spilling in profusion from the guy’s Walkman headphones. I tried to work on what I was writing, and tried to work, and tried to work, and finally reached across the aisle to tap the guy awake. Boy, did he take it badly. “Don’t ever touch me, asshole,” he snarled.

“You got it, jerkoff,” I snarled back wittily, “if you’ll just turn down your music.” I realized as it came out of my mouth that jerkoff didn’t constitute the escalation in hostilities to which A Real Man would have aspired. I should have gone with motherfucker; I like to tell myself it was the proximity of a couple of women with whom I regularly exchanged brief pleasantries that made me make the more genteel choice. But I am not so easily duped.

It was my impression that the public buses of London, in which I lived for half of the decade just ended, might have been the most dangerous I’ve ever ridden; you were forever hearing about stabbings on them. I don’t recall being stabbed, but I nearly suffered heatstroke on multiple occasions. The Brits — a people who get pissed (we would say: drunk) at the drop of a hat, even with the full knowledge that they’re very likely to sober up again — take the position that, since it’s sweltering only a few months of the year, why install air-conditioning?

For a while there, though, they were exporting a lot of fab music.

Next time: Terror on the Oahu Public Bus Transportation System! In the meantime, hear my new album already. Facebookers: Subscribe to these little essays here.