Gavin Holder Series

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

It was raining on that night too, the night it happened. I'm not going to say anything about the exact location. A small city, an ugly city, with a lot of boarded-up storefronts and empty old buildings of one kind or another and a lot of homeless young people. There was a thriving underground punk scene in that city, as there was in a lot of American cities back then and as there still is in a few. The punk scene can be very different from one place to another – artsy and silly in one place, radical leftist in another, white power skinheads here and macho meatheads over there. The scene I was part of was kind of a mix, but the emphasis was definitely on hardcore punk, the fastest and most brutal style of punk rock. Hardcore songs can be as short as thirty or forty seconds of sound and fury, stripped-down minimalist noise expressing rage and despair in equal amounts. The same way the London punk subculture terrified England with the specter of Anarchy in the UK back in '76 and '77, the hardcore scene in Los Angeles and DC made America's skin crawl a few years later. It seemed like A Clockwork Orange had come to life, like the kids were turning toward some approaching apocalypse and loving every minute of it.

Then it turned into a lifestyle and a subculture like everything else, and the mainstream world mostly forgot about it. I came into the scene long after its heyday. The guys I knew saw punk hardcore almost like a sacred tradition they had to uphold against a hostile world and pass on to the next generation unchanged. Today's punks probably still do.

The hardcore scene back then was known for its violence, much of it random and nihilistic but some of it tribal. Punk kids against longhairs. Nazi punks versus anarchist punks. Straightedge and hardline puritans versus old school punks who liked to drink and do drugs. We didn't expect any trouble that night, though. All the bands that were playing were traditional hardcore, including my own band, Chaos Factor. There was no reason for a clash with the straightedge crews, so nobody was worried. The mood in the squat where I lived was easygoing and casual, partly because of the new girl – Jackie Cole.

Back then we were squatting in an abandoned mental hospital. Local legend said it was haunted of course, although I never saw anything to make me think that was true. It was definitely creepy, with the peeling paint and the old graffiti and the electroshock tables and padded rooms. Most people were scared of the place, which meant they tended to stay away from it. Our little community of homeless punks had it all to ourselves except for the occasional ghost hunter or urban explorer, and they were easy enough to frighten away because that’s what they came there for in the first place.

Jackie had showed up at the hospital one day with no possessions except a backpack and a charming smile, but she had made herself part of the scene as soon as she walked in the door and called out “Hey guys!”.

Almost everybody liked her, partly because they wanted to sleep with her (I never met anyone who didn't, male or female) and partly because she made herself useful immediately by covering up the black mold that had infested some of the walls and sweeping some of the broken glass out of the dark corners of the rooms we slept in. And then there was the fact that she always laughed at your jokes whether they were funny or not, and always found little ways of making you feel good about yourself. It never occurred to me back then how much power that can give you over somebody, how much they can learn to need the good feelings you give them.

We had barely spoken, but I had half a crush on her already by that night – the night it happened. So did Popov Pete, and he was the one she was flirting with that evening. I was lacing up my stolen Doc Martens and checking my little bleached mohawk in the broken mirror we had up on a windowsill. Dave Dawson came over, tucked a sheathed knife into my belt, and clapped me on the back.

“What's up with that, Dave? I'm not gonna need that. And anyway, pulling a knife is a p***y move.”

Dave only grinned his gap-toothed grin. In any scene you can think of, there's always one guy who is more trouble than he's worth. Except when things get so bad that you need someone bad enough to cope with it, and then he's worth all the trouble he causes. In this case I wasn’t at all sure whether Dave was likely to get me out of more trouble than he got me into.

Kelley, the bassist of my band, wandered into the squat and waved at the rest of us, clearly impressed with himself for knowing such a crew of bohemian degenerates. He wasn't actually just the bassist, though. More like our patron. A trust-fund punk kid with enough money to buy equipment and an apartment to keep it in, Kelley could just barely play the bass and yet was absolutely indispensible. Not even punk rock can escape the money.

“Hi, Kelley!” called Jackie with a wave of her hand and a smile. He smiled back at her, earning a hostile look from Popov Pete. Pete was our drummer, but he kept his drum kit at Kelley's place. Not an advantageous position in a courtship situation. If he got into it with Kelley over their mutual lust for Jackie Cole, he could potentially lose the only safe storage space he had any access to. That meant he was largely restricted to passive-aggressive gestures, which Kelley could mostly choose not to notice in the first place.

“What time does the show start?” Kelley asked me.

“Some time around six,” I said. “Devil's Fury is on first, then Dogbone and then Abstract Alchemist and then us. I put up a bunch of fliers earlier today. Same little cartoon guys as the last one.”

“Abstract Alchemist, seriously? What a buch of f*****g posers.”

As a poser of epic proportions, Kelley naturally had a lot of opinions about posers. Specifically, he thought anyone who did anything different from traditional 1980-style hardcore punk was nothing but a poser, and even some of those bands were probably posers too. You had to work very hard to not be a poser in Kelley's opinion.

“They're not so bad,” I said. “Post-punk meets hardcore. It fits in I guess.”

Kelley snorted in disgust, and we spent a little while working out the set list for the evening's show. We had songs about getting drunk and songs about getting into fistfights, songs about being depressed and songs about bad jobs and asshole bosses. No love songs or even songs about s*x. Those topics weren't punk enough.

Once the set list had been worked out, we all started to wander out to Kelley's van in a light, cold drizzle to get our free ride to the show. I don't think I even spoke with Jackie on the way over there, she was too busy playing Pete and Kelley off against each other for her own amusement – smiling and joking with one until the other got visibly irritated, and then switching, resting her hand on an arm for a few moments, brushing her hair out of her eyes strategically. It caused the boys some discomfort, but it was basically innocent.

She was fun to be around, and I enjoyed her presence without joining in what I saw as the undignified pursuit of her. I noticed her radiance, the life she gave our little group, but I never thought of claiming any for myself. It was always that way. I never believed in the possibility that she would choose me among all her options, and so I never even tried to get anywhere with her. I'm a good-looking guy, and there were always women who were interested. It wasn't that. It probably had more to do with her background. She was a homeless runaway just like me, but she gave the impression that she came from money, that she had seen more of the world and understood more about the world than everybody around her and was above it all in some casual, nonjudgmental way. She would laugh at the things I didn't get and put her hand on my arm like I was only acting ignorant to amuse her, and I would melt in some weird combination of pride and shame.

I don't know if the other guys even noticed that or would have cared if they had, but to me trying to sleep with her would have been like some scruffy little greaser asking out the homecoming queen. I put her on a pedestal, in other words, and that never works out for anybody.

The van pulled up to the club where the show was being held, a low structure off the highway and far away from any neighbors who might complain about the noise or the fights. The place was called The Freehold and it hosted all-ages punk shows for a five-dollar cover charge. You could drink alcohol if you were over 21, but if you were under that age your hand was marked with a big X in red or black.

This was standard practice all over the country for all-ages shows, and all it did was tell the bartenders not to serve you alcohol. Then the straightedge punks started to get the X tattooed on, a symbol of their rejection of drinking, taking drugs or having casual s*x. Doing any of those forbidden things was known as “losing your edge,” and was generally interpreted as an unforgivable betrayal if you had ever been part of the straightedge scene. I didn't see the point in it all myself, but people can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned – or at least that's how I thought back then.

There was a guy at the club when I came in, standing at the bar and ordering a Schlitz. His name was Sam, and at one point he had the nickname Sammy the Straightedge because he was one of the only straightedge guys who would hang out on friendly terms with punks from outside that scene. Fraternization led to temptation, and Sammy lost his edge by getting drunk with us one night. This made him Public Enemy Number One for a while among the straightedge guys, and one of their bands even wrote a song about him called Sammy Was a Straightedge. The lyrics went something like this:

We were on the right track

But you stabbed us in the back!

(Sammy was a straightedge, once upon a time...)

Standing on a ledge

You've lost your edge!

(You're no friend of mine!)

“Hey, Sammy,” I said. “How's it going?”

“Alright man, alright. Planning to get good and f****d up, no matter what these assholes think.”

“I'm with you. Don't worry though, Sammy, they're not gonna come out here tonight.”

“I'm not so sure. Bianca's been telling everyone that Mike Croop is planning to f**k me up because I lost my edge. f*****g Nazi asshole.”

Mike Croop was not a literal Nazi. If anything he was probably on the left politically. But he was a fanatical control-freak when it came to the X, absolutely convinced of the superior righteousness of the straightedge lifestyle. The thing I could never work out about it all was how they justified being into punk rock. It isn’t like the Ramones or the s*x Pistols or any of those early punk bands were puritanical.

“f**k 'em all,” I said. “And Mike Croop especially. Now let's get drunk.”

I couldn't order a beer, because I was only 20 – the black X on my hand was no tattoo, just a warning to the bartender not to sell me anything stronger than a Coke – but I did have a little bottle of Smirnoff in my front jeans pocket. I never performed without a bottle of vodka, partly because I usually tried to be at least a little bit drunk at all times, and partly because there was no way to realistically sing punk hardcore songs without some sort of anesthetic. (Don't ask me how the straightedge guys did it, because to this day I have no idea.)

I slipped my little bottle out discreetly but repeatedly as the night went on, reaching the stage of being pleasantly tipsy during the Devil's Fury show, mildly intoxicated for Dogbone and genuinely confused for Abstract Alchemist. By the time Chaos Factor went on stage I was seeing double, and sometimes triple when I turned my head too quickly.

This sometimes led me to forget our lyrics, at which point I would just start screaming incoherently, but no one minded. It was all just part of the punk rock experience. As we were performing, I noticed Jackie in the mosh pit with the guys, holding her own as if she was born to be there. I was suitably impressed. I noticed her talking to some woman a few minutes later, someone older who looked like she didn’t really belong there. And then she slipped out before we finished, to go hang out in the parking lot with some of the guys. When the show ended I stumbled out after her, perhaps with the vague intention of getting a conversation started or perhaps only to spend some time in her general vicinity.

It was just starting to really rain when I got out there, and the rain got steadily fiercer as the minutes went on – but by that time it was far too late to run back inside. As I slammed the heavy doors of the club open in drunken enthusiasm, my eyes were drawn to movement in the middle of the parking lot. At first it looked like a flock of birds hovering over an open trashbag. I guess that's the picture my eyes created for a moment as my brain tried to interpret what it was seeing – but it was actually something much worse than that.