Weird Kids by the Dumpster

“We were the fucking social outcasts, we were the people nobody wanted to be, doing things nobody wanted to do, and that nobody understood—listening to music, dressing, hairstyles, everything, nobody got it! We were the weirdos. We were the freaks.” —Jeff Grosso

I want to talk about the flyer because the flyer is where the self I recognize today begins.

There was a life-changing moment in my dreary, mixed up teenage existence when I was loitering in a record store, browsing the flyers (doing the thing you did before the internet flattened all mystery) and I spied one with a political collage and ransom-note Xerox-type lettering, promoting a completely different record store that sold nothing but punk records. I looked at it and felt the specific click that happens maybe a handful of times in a lifetime, when you understand that a door exists where maybe a second ago there was only a wall.

The thing is, you had to really want it back then. A lot of people under thirty may not fully register this, but back in the eighties and nineties punk records were hard to find, and you couldn’t just download them into existence. If you were desperate enough, you’d buy a copy of Maximum Rock N Roll, flip through the ads, fold cash into an envelope and mail it to a PO box in a state you'd never visit—then you waited 2 months, 4 months, and sometimes forever, the money simply disappearing into a puff of smoke. It was an insular, undisciplined world, and I was intrigued. Even then I knew there was something under the surface that I understood to be dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the music. And I was horny for it.

This record store (called The Hindenburg!) turned out to be nothing but a slapdash, two-story storage room accessible via an alley behind a book store. The too-cool-for-school clerk (not getting paid, but doing it for the love of the game) would ignore you, or treat you like you took a shit on the floor if you dared to actually buy something. Gatekeeping and contempt were simply the price of admission, and it was glamorous. Like something was being protected.

Then I found out they had shows there. No permits, no liquor license, no bouncers checking fake IDs at the door, because you paid what you could—five dollars, three dollars, sometimes just the spare change in your pocket, and that was the whole transaction. Nobody was asking any questions or telling you how to act, and this feels, for a while, like the only pure, sincere thing happening in this rough city otherwise organized around corrupt politics, low-grade violence and dry summers.

Obviously there were scene fights and factions—people who hated each other over differences in taste. The K Records kids, doing their riot-grrrl thing, very serious about feminism and Bikini Kill, cardigans and zines and a studied fragility that read as its own kind of arrogance. The straight edge hardcore kids, humorless the way only the truly unwavering can be humorless, and unpredictably violent. The non-racist skinheads, also unpredictably violent but menacingly stylish about it: wife beaters, skinny suspenders, flat caps and cuffed jeans. The naive, bleach-blonde Green Day kids from the suburbs, who had about even odds of getting kicked into the gutter. The crusties, with an ever-present can of cheap beer and clothes salvaged from the apocalypse, and the skater kids, primitive, permanently sunburned, treating the whole scene as a background soundtrack to something more extreme playing in their own heads.

For a little over a decade, improbably, this lunacy worked. 1992 to 2005. Thirteen years of amps buzzing through a wooden floor that was never engineered for the weight of forty people, kids stacked on the stairwell because the room had long since stopped being a room and morphed into a breathing body, sweaty, overcrowded, feral, alive.

Then it ended the way these things always end: with neighboring businesses being vindictive about having a bunch of weird looking kids hanging around and drinking beer by the dumpsters in a grimy alley. Bureaucratic. Anticlimactic.

By 2001 half the kids I used to see stacked on that stairwell had moved on to other things. We called it “selling out” when it happened to someone else. But what we never understood, and what took me another fifteen years to understand, was that this counterculture wasn’t a place you get to keep. It’s not a fixed population but a temporary lease, signed by fucked up kids who didn’t know yet that they were fucked up, and broken by every single one of us—usually right around the time we started wanting something as small and devastating as dental insurance.