He saw only clasping hands and rolling eyes, peering up out of the red chowder. The third boat, filled with old and crippled men, was swamped by a male isopod the size of a VW Beetle with dozens of frenzied females boring into its bleeding exoskeleton.
When there were no more men in the water, the surges gradually subsided. The water around him was a thick, steaming stew of gutted isopods and human limbs. The rowboat turned and slowly, jerkily drifted to shore. Joe looked up and saw Lorna and Aunt Meg and Grandma Amelia on the sand, dragging the rowboat in by its dragging painter.
When he slipped off the boat in the shallows, he staggered, but Lorna came down and caught him. She led him out of the water, but pulled on him when he tried to sink to the rocky shore to rest.
The women were waiting for the conclusion of the festival. All the young ladies of childbearing age stood in a line, their somber eyes glazed with instinctual need. This, too, was a vital part of the catch, and the life of Quiet Island.
They waited with their eyedroppers and buckets, for the men to come home.
WASTED ON THE YOUNG
My neighbors all hate and fear the kids who hang out in our complex, but I treat them with respect, because I know what they’re about. Where others see wasted potential and wanton self-destruction, I see the essence of orphaned, aborted youth, striving—without love, hope or a voice—to express itself. I see what they could become, given half a chance, and the right moment.
This one kid, he used to tag everything in the complex with a Magic Marker—the same cryptic logo as on all his textbooks, his skateboard, plans for a tattoo. This criminal mastermind got caught tagging the laundry room by a ninety-year old Hungarian widow. He tagged her face and stuffed her in a dryer, ransacked her house and ran off to LA.
It’s tough to be young. A lot of people forget, but I remember what it was like.
They go to the old sauna room in the clubhouse to smoke out after school. Complaints have been filed at the homeowner’s meetings, but nobody really cares. Their parents are glad they’re out of the house, and the other residents work all day and watch TV all night. They must see me watching them from my balcony, but they know I won’t narc. They can trust me.
I’m lurking at the clubhouse door as three of them stumble out, coughing and giggly and red-eyed—not that the shitty Mexican grass they smoke could get a fly high, but a child’s imagination is a powerful tool.
They don’t handle surprises very well. One buttons up and coolly walks away, another doubles over laughing, and the third tries to leap over the kiddie pool, but comes down well short of the edge, wallowing in icy, leaf-swirling water.
“Hey,” I say, “be cool. I just want to talk.”
The laughing kid drops into a lounge chair to catch his breath. His friends call him Rayray. His mom is an obese Mormon drunk whose last boyfriend totaled her Tercel in the gravel pit across the street. Before he discovered grass, Rayray was a demon for burning pentagrams and anarchy symbols into lawns and breaking into cars, though he never could get the stereos out without destroying them. Tell me society’s not better off with Rayray too stoned to break into your house and shit in your sink.
The cool kid is Ali—permanent scowl, eyes too big for his shaved Charlie Brown head. His dad was a big-time slumlord until his wife divorced him and broke up his tenement empire, and they washed up here. A dropout, Ali is always wandering the complex. He listens but never talks into his cell phone, waiting for kids in letterman’s jackets who pull up at the corner in fancy cars, but never pick him up.
I brace him before he can slip out the gate. “Hey man. . . are you selling?”
Ali glares at his sneakers, gritting his teeth. “Why you pushing my shit in, man? I gotta go home. . .” It’s not insolence, but fear. Eye contact with the wrong adult can turn kids to stone, or worse, into adults.
The wet kid shakes like a dog. I don’t know him, but he’s always underfoot. I think he lives in one of the big houses down the street.
Ali goes for the gate, but I block him with my arm. “Come on, be a good neighbor. I got fifty.”
Rayray keeps going, “Dude,” and the wet kid goes, “No way,” like chickens clucking. I show them money.
Ali and I go into the sauna. He shows me the crumbly tumbleweed he peddles, and I give him cash for five dime bags. He looks at me long and hard now, like he has a choice. I pocket it and ask if he’s got anything else.
“I don’t do coke,” he sneers.
“None of that, man. Psychedelics. Acid, mushrooms, mescaline, or Ecstasy, but only as a last resort.”
He shakes his head and packs a bowl in a torpedo-shaped sneaker pipe. He mumbles, “I don’t like to see shit that’s not real,” but as he lights up, I can see the intrigue smoldering in his lacquered black eyes.
Jesus, all I want is to show these kids something that’s real. “You’ve never tried it, though.”
He shrugs, blows out the smoke.
“You go to the Sports Arena parking lot for any good jam band show, you can get hooked up, wholesale.”
Ali slips past me. “So go do it, old man.”
I let him get halfway out the door. “You guys want to come with?”
“Told you, I don’t mess with that.”
“You might not like it, but you know people who do. Sell it to your friends in the nice cars. Take the profit and buy yourself some real weed. Move out on your own.”
He looks at me again, the suspicious, sneaky stare intensified so it feels like a magnifying glass beaming the sun in my eyes. He never saw me as a threat before. He’d be an idiot to trust someone his father’s age, even a customer.
“Like you got anything better to do,” I urge, but he just walks off.
Later, I try to look surprised when I find them waiting by my car.
People dismiss kids today because they want to be famous for nothing, but I credit them with learning what they’ve been taught. There’s nothing left that’s worth doing, and those who get the most attention do nothing. The only talent worth having is the ability to endure and feed the fascination of the public eye. Everything else, they know, is bullshit.
They won’t admit it, but they’re excited. They rank the classic rock station blaring Blue Oyster Cult as we get on the freeway, so I put in Public Enemy—Fear Of A Black Planet. The little Philistines have never heard of them, but it makes them respect me a little.
I pack a bowl with some White Widow from Sonoma, palming Ali’s brown Mex crap out the window. I light it and pass it around. Wet Kid goes catatonic. Rayray laughs at his own nose. Ali grows psychotically silent. I try to tap him.
I ask if he plays any instruments. He goes into a speedy spiel about his mad DJ skills. Actually playing music, he rules, is “fruity.”
“I can respect the turntable as a form of expression,” I interrupt, “but you have to respect history. Once upon a time, kids just like you actually composed and played real music. Who do you think made those records, the fucking Pilgrims?”
They trade disgusted faces, debating whose turn it is to change grandpa’s diaper. My fit of pique passes, and I see I’ve pushed too far, but that’s how you learn. These kids are feral orphans, scavenging the ruins of a moribund culture. They can’t read the sacred writings, speak for themselves, or make the big machines work. They are perfect.
•
We park behind the shuttered Tower Records across from the Sports Arena and go shopping in the big lot. Tonight’s event is a reggae festival, but legions of deadhead refugees parade through the tailgate parties to reconvene as a pharmaceutical swap meet. Most are older than me, but some are younger and dumber than Wet Kid.
I buy a sheet of blue Ganesh blotter and some Bicycle microdots from a Japanese deadhead who sawed off a finger the day Garcia died, and a vial of red Dodo Nectar from a hilarious fat girl in a clown suit. Ali and Rayray come back with a dozen blue ecstasy tablets and a bag of dried-out Ecuadoran mushrooms. I test them, and judge them bunk.
; Ali sulks. Rayray eats the mushrooms, anyway. Wet Kid wants to go home. I offer them tabs, but they don’t like my condition. “You have to take them now.”
Ali goes, “Fuck that. I don’t want to drop now. I’m fucking pissed.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“How much?”
“Free, but you have to come with me.”
Not for the first time, Ali sizes me up as a pervert. “Where you want to go?”
“I want to show you something real. Totally underground. It’s much more than a show, more than music. It’s a real live, old school happening.”
“What the fuck is a Happening?”
I offer them each a tab. “Eat this and I’ll show you.”
It starts to work before we get there. The Ganesh is pure pharmaceutical-grade LSD, no strychnine or speed, but it comes on very physically; subtly at first, ghostly sensations like fine, dry sand sprinkling down your spine, tingles of phantom limbs you never knew you had, then rushes and feverish chills as the body lights up and awakens to a new kind of sentience.
Wet Kid watches his neon brain rotating four feet above his head. Rayray cowers and screams at every car that passes by. Ali is talking nonstop in a teeth-gritting mumble nobody is supposed to hear. He goes, “Mom didn’t leave, Dad wouldn’t let her, but he showed her no respect. He made her wear her burkha so nobody could see how he beat her, and he wouldn’t let her leave, so she set herself on fire. When she was too ugly to look at, and she had no fingers to cook and clean, he let her go home. . .”
I turn around in my seat and pass him the pipe. “You’re going to like this.”
We’re cruising the industrial district, weaving the spell of anticipation, and it’s a strong one. A half hour passes before Ali realizes we’re driving in aimless, looping circles around the same block of warehouses. “Do you even know where you’re going, dude?”
“Sure. We’re going to the happening.”
“Where is it, then?”
We pull up to a stop sign. The passenger door flies open and RayRay is jerked out into the street.
A gun invades the car, nickel-plated cyclops eye glaring at me from a long, locked arm in a ragged Army jacket. “Get out of the fucking car!” it screams. “Get out, or I will shoot you dead, motherfucker!”
Wet Kid bawls like a colicky baby. Rayray shrieks and tries to get up, but another carjacker sits on him and snugs a hood over his head, zip-ties his hands behind his back. Ali just sits and stares at the carjackers like he’s waiting for them to finish telling a lame joke.
We all get pulled out of the car, and there are hoods and zip-tie cuffs for each of us. My hood smells like meth-sweat, smoke, tooth decay and a bit of blood. I wonder if I’ve worn this one before.
I hear someone get in my car and peel out, and feel hands push me to the step rail on the back of a delivery truck. I drag myself in before they can shove me. The kids are heaved in on top of me. The door slams with a gnash of heavy steel teeth. I think Wet Kid resisted, because someone hits him and he redoubles his crying, moaning, “Bad trip,” over and over.
Bad trip.
I don’t believe there is such a thing. If you take drugs for pleasure, but you end up scared shitless after learning something unspeakably real about yourself and the world, isn’t that the greatest gift a trip can give?
We settle down in a pile of hostages, some terrified, others giggling and goofing on the experience. Rayray and Wet Kid are crying, but Ali hisses, “Shut up, you fuckheads. This is the happening.” I’m so proud I could hug him.
A few minutes later, the truck beeps and backs into a loading bay, and the door slides up. As we stumble out of the truck, mishandled like third-rate freight, they hack our cuffs with box cutters and rip off our hoods.
We blink in a blitzkrieg of fog, white noise screamers and strobe lights. Howling ushers herd us through the blinding gauntlet, and into the electric darkness of the auditorium.
It used to be a union hall, but they rented it out for punk shows, when I was Ali’s age. They closed it down after the last show, the big one we all remember.
It was just supposed to be another dumb show, but it became the perfect deconstruction and obliteration of bullshit conventions like the barrier between performer and audience.
The audience was abducted off the street an hour before showtime, rounded up and led onto a school bus with the windows blacked out. The bus meandered around town, kidnapping unsuspecting heads until it was full, then dropped them at the union hall to witness a show that would blow their minds and spoil all other entertainment for them, forever.
There were no lawsuits or arrests, but the union bolted on its lease, and the building stood empty. A bunch of us who were at the show chipped in to buy it.
Our revolution passed unnoticed, but almost every year, whenever the collective psyche demands it, it happens again. There are no flyers, no ads in the Reader, because everybody who gets it just knows. Over the years, only the abduction methods have changed; construction roadblocks, window-washing bums, fake cops, a bogus Veteran’s Day parade. Most who were at that first show still come out, though our numbers are dwindling.
Only a handful of newbies are in the crowd tonight, recruited by veterans like me or snatched up in an audience raid, so there are never more than a hundred. Most of them act cool, but a few clueless jackasses hoot and push as the crowd files in, anxious to start moshing.
The hall fills in pretty quick. The crowd hangs back from the stage, where a couple graying geezers in faded tour t-shirts set up the gear. Rayray notes the absence of turntables with disdain, but is intrigued by the old Moog synthesizer with patch cords like an antique telephone switchboard. Ali stares at each person in the crowd one at a time. I’ve lost track of Wet Kid.
I’m starting to come on hard. Shiny chrome waves of euphoria detach me from my ego, and I have to fight my way back. Most of us vets still take whatever they were on the night of the last show, cranky crystal meth and black blotter laced with rat poison, to relive the experience as fundamentalist gospel. Others have wisely given up drugs, but the intense grins on their faces betray the force of the flashback. Every lost sensation is unlocked and made new by bearing witness. I prefer to experiment, to get close to the kids I bring, to see it anew through their eyes.
Every underground scene dies a long slow death as the tourists close in, until nothing’s left but posers ogling each other over the bleached remains. If we could, we’d huddle over our secret like Freemasons, but we must risk the fate of every cult phenomenon that pop culture has hijacked and raped, and seek out new blood. We must, or the scene will devour itself.
I don’t need to look at my watch when the naked man in the ski mask comes out onto the stage to thunderous applause. He picks up a bullhorn and launches into a furious tirade in Japanese, Spanish and bits of English so mangled by squealing feedback that nobody understands a word. The crowd is hushed, but for a lone catcall, instantly squelched, from the gallery. Ali poses for a painting. Rayray gets in my face and moans, “Where’s the fucking band?”
On cue, the masked emcee holds up the gun.
“There was this experimental noise band,” I tell him. “Hot underground shit, fifteen years ago. They invented the whole audience abduction gig. A doomsday cult followed them around Japan, and they say two kids died in Europe, just from the sound. Well, when they played here, they sucked. The crowd hated them, so they fucked with us. Stood still for ten minutes at a time, shouted shit about America and our town, and how we were all faggots. So the crowd pulled them off the stage and clobbered them. We were going to storm the stage and loot their gear when the singer came out with a gun.”
For the first time, Ali looks interested. “And then what happened?”
“Watch.”
The emcee stomps out to the levee of monitors at the front of the stage and waves the gun at the crowd, shrieking at the top of his lungs. The crowd parts under the gaze of the barrel like cockroaches in a spotlight, bu
t ejects a hapless emo kid with a faux-hawk. He tries to blend in, but a shield wall of locked arms elbows him into the open.
The emcee levels the gun at him and points at the drum kit. The kid gets lifted and passed up to the stage by a raging sea of hands. Looking at everything but the gun, he awkwardly shuffles behind the drums and sits on the stool. The emcee squawks nonsense at the new drummer, who just looks blankly at the floor.
The emcee cuffs him with the gun, opening a red rip in his cheek and closing one eye. Screaming curses, the kid picks up the sticks and, like a retarded mechanical monkey, tries to play. The emcee hoots approvingly and charges back downstage.
The next one doesn’t wait to be hit, but jumps onstage and picks up the guitar. He actually knows how to belt out a few punk chords, and he launches into a crude but spunky solo.
The emcee shoots him in the foot. The crowd goes wild.
Funny, how the guitarists always do that, and always get shot. If Ali notices that the guitarist is Wet Kid, he gives no sign.
The emcee looks for someone to man the clunky keyboard. Jumping up with his right arm in a Nazi salute, screaming, “Pick me pick me pick me, motherfucker!” Rayray is elected, and crowd-surfs onto the stage.
The bassist is an indigo-haired girl of about nineteen. She sobs and tries to bolt, but this always happens, too. The emcee hooks her by the throat and slams her into a wall of amps covered in kanji graffiti, makes her kiss the gun. The taste of metal and a whisper in her ear turn her into a puppet. When she straps on the bass, smeared mascara tears twinkle on her blank face like black ice.
Front and center, the emcee stands frozen with his back to the ritually enraged audience. He lifts his arms high like a conductor, a victim directing his own firing squad, the terrorized band watching every drop of sweat on his naked body for a cue or a clue.
A single, delicious whimper escapes the bassist. The drummer bites his lip like he’s simultaneously trying to plan an escape and the greatest impromptu drum solo since John Bonham. Rayray fidgets and grins and throws up fake gang signs at the crowd, looking for his friends in the darkened hall. He doesn’t even notice Wet Kid bleeding on the stage, a few feet from him.
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