Maybe I Shouldn’t Be In The Pit Before My Neurosurgery Appointment

There’s a peculiar loping gait with which this utterly grimy fellow, head to toe in dust and dirt and with an outrageously split-dyed mass of hair, black on one side, dirty blonde on the other, stalks the gravel floor in front of the stage at the Little Darlin’.

As Tear Dungeon take the stage in all-white wife beaters and gimp masks, low bass rumbling, this guy is methodically plodding from one side of the stage to the other, in the pit.

I’m not sure if he’s dancing, marching or presenting.

His left arm raised, his right bundled under himself, perpendicular to the floor, bent at the waist, he trundles across the floor, back and forth, and back again. Like a panther stalking its prey, or the fentanyl fold made manifest, on guard duty.

I am standing carefully back three rows in the crowd, which is attentively and cautiously gathered outside the pit. I clutch an empty pint glass in my left hand (against my left leg, thinking this is a really stupid place to hold a pint glass if these guys start slam dancing).

When Tear Dungeon start to play, doom chords, thrumming bass, random dudes around me perk up and stare into the middle distance, contemplating the music, then around themselves, scanning for others who are about to partake in a ritual I haven’t seen in a long time.

“Don’t worry,” my friend Chad says, “they don’t really slam dance at these shows.”

And yet, here we are.

These guys, these young guys, dirt punks and crusties, they have an abandon with which they are slam dancing, and it’s either this side to side marching gait, flinging one arm up and around to signal or scan for prey. Or it’s throwing themselves at you, flinging arms and kicking legs and dead eyes.

They’re the show equivalent of a 5 year old holding one hand over his eyes and the other punching wildly at you. “If I can’t see you I’m not in trouble with Mom!”

The lead dude in Tear Dungeon, Andrew, has his gimp mask mouth unzipped wide and he’s pouring fake blood out of a White Claw can into his mouth, then spitting the concoction into sprayed mist over the ruddy pit of ritualists.

It used to be, if you were in the pit, you’d help other folks up if they fell down, or watch out for girls and bad actors. These guys are throwing arms and legs and fists and feet.

The pit would start restlessly, then spin with abandon, then break down again.

These guys had alert but fogged eyes.

I knew I was gonna get hurt from the start, the question was how.

I shouldn’t be this close to young people.

I have degenerative disc disease and an impinged nerve and a torn tendon in my rotator cuff and bursitis and arthritis.

I am a walking advertisement for Voltaren.

I’d already hurt myself trying to scale a 2 and 1/2 foot rock wall getting from the parking lot to the club. The dude who tried to help me down just threw his hands up, muttered “Jesus” to himself and walked away.

And then it happened. One lone incel with a death wish. He threw himself at me before I had a chance to get my guard up. An unfamiliar shock rose up my left side, from my hand through my shoulder to my neck. A lightning bolt of pain.

Two minutes later, I was sitting inside at a table, nursing a pint of Fireman’s 4, and making a grocery list on the Notes app on my phone.

I shouldn’t go to rock shows anymore, I tell myself.

I am not the hipster I used to be.

And yeah I get it, I’m not even that old. I’m 55, which I am told is the new 35.

But sometimes, it feels like my get up and go has got up and went, as Pete Seeger said.

Someone wrote me that my comments about aging were insulting in the face of their considerably older and more serious ailments.

I get it. I am writing about my own concerns, however, so I can’t speak for everyone else, and it’s certainly not a contest, this chronicled morass of aging decrepitude.

What I can tell you, though, is that slam dancing looks very different than it did when I was a young punk (and I was not a punk, but I was certainly young).

Sunday all-ages nights at First Avenue would often devolve into a spinning mass of bodies hurling through black space, usually to Ministry’s Stigmata or, at the end of the night, Fiesta, by The Pogues.

Not punk, exactly, more a midwestern post-punk flea market of proto-goth 16 year olds. With accompanying sidewalk sale afterwards.

Sometimes we danced to the Violent Femmes. Sometimes it was They Might Be Giants.

Another State Of Mind this was not.

I knew when Chad invited me to see Tear Dungeon that I might be crossing some sort of Rubicon, as while my modern tastes run to Waylon Jennings and Leonard Cohen, his veers straight into Cancer Christ and The Locust.

“You might get some blood on you,” he said to me as we stood there in the dust, and the band sound-checked.

“This is a new shirt,” I responded.

He just smiled at me.

I moved another imaginary row of people back.

I am determined not to be defined by age or by health.

But I am also much more careful than I used to be.

I am sitting here now looking at the neurosurgeon’s phone number, wondering if my referral was processed.

I told another friend this weekend that I couldn’t go to the Springsteen movie, as my current back issue prevents me from sitting for more than an hour or so at any given time.

Meanwhile, here I am at a rock show.

At least they let you stand upright during a rock show (one of the few painless positions I can be in at the moment).

The other option is to lay on my back.

But this is not a Sigur Ros show.

I must opt for standing.

Or nursing my nerve pain with a beer.

I went last night, briefly, to see my friend Scrappy Jud Newcomb, at C Boys, a neighborhood soul, R&B and roots bar from the mind of Steve Wertheimer, who owns the Continental Club.

I can get my culture still, but in smaller doses.

I assume after we get through whatever surgery or procedures await me, I will be back in action.

This is a cruelly imposed vacation from being in public for long periods of time.

But perhaps it is also for the best.

When I quit drinking for a long period, I stopped going out, pretty much entirely.

It wasn’t great for me socially, but it was incredible for me psychologically.

You learn a lot about yourself if you’re only hanging out with yourself.

But it is also not a sustainable strategy.

I find myself more and more tentatively rejoining the world outside.

I don’t think I’ll be at rock shows 5 nights a week, like I did for so many years.

But I do think, neurosurgery aside, that getting out of my head and getting out in public is keeping me young.

Or at least young-ish.

This isn’t so much about my current medical condition, as annoying to me as it is.

It’s more about how stupid I can be sometimes.

It’s about how a two and a half foot tall rock wall can be daunting.

And about how getting out of the house is important.

And about a band I saw on Sunday night.

However, I think I’ll skip the pit next time.

Nick Tangborn here - it’s Are You Experienced.

You can reach me at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co

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