Growing Up Punk (Part 2)

Finishing up my repost for Michelle

 

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To quickly recap the last blog, I was a less than cool JR High student living in Florida trying to find an identity for myself amongst the icons of an era that included huge hair, gel bracelets and Debbie Deb. Bottled water was something uppity rich people drank, VCRs came in two formats (VHS and Beta), Atari was the ultimate gaming system, you could still buy new 8-track players (although they were starting to disappear) and MTV actually played music videos.

It is this last point that is the most relevant to this blog. You see when MTV first started out there were a limited number of videos for them to play. So they had to play what they had, even if it wasn’t necessarily mainstream. Because of this America’s youth was subjected to videos by bands like Adam and the Ants, The Clash and Devo. These bands had very unique styles that definitely were not mainstream. It was these videos and the music that were to affect Paul and I and help us find an identity for ourselves.

I do not know why but we started to think of ourselves as punks. Maybe it was because we liked the music, or perhaps it was because for some reason we thought that punks were tough and we wanted other people to think we were tough. Possibly it was just because we did not want to be caught up in the rap scene. However, without wheels of our own we were still just Brandon’s homeboys even if we did dress odd compared to them.

One of the things that we would do with Brandon was to go to dance clubs. The rides to these dance clubs were always adventures. Brandon had an old white Monte Carlo, which he thought was the coolest car of all time. Paul and I would usually be in the back (some cooler friend or girl would be up front), and if there was a conversation going on up front we would have never known. He played his music so loud that it was hard to understand the lyrics, but due to the amount of times he played the same songs I did learn them, and these lyrics will forever be etched (or perhaps chiseled) into my memory. Debbie Deb’s “Look Out Weekends” is the most clear these twenty some years later (look out weekends, cause here I come… because weekends were made for fun… fun… fun).

One of these dance clubs was called Skyfeathers. This club had three different dance floors. One played the normal top forty dance mix standards, the second was a room full or mirrors and mats where cool people like Brandon could break and pop and watch themselves the whole time, and the third was the floor that Paul and I eventually lived on. The entire floor of the dance area was a giant British flag. They played Adam and the Ants, Devo and so much more. It was here that we found the opportunity to practice being punk.

Tenth grade brought a lot of changes for Paul and I. Tenth grade was the start of High School in the Tampa Bay area at that time. The High School we were supposed to attend was called King. This school did not have a very good reputation and for this reason I decided I did not want to go there. I found out that I could get permission to attend other high schools if I signed up for programs not offered at King. One of these programs was JROTC. In reality the idea of a punk rocker military cadet is really pretty inconceivable. However, I was only a high school student and I was only part of it to be able to attend a better school. So it was that I went to Brandon High School (no relation to our designated driver to Skyfeathers) and Paul attended King High School, but we were still best friends.

I do not know if high school is still the same today as it was in the 80s, but Brandon High School was all about cliques. There were the jocks, the preps, the metal heads, etc. In between classes and at lunch we would meet up with other members of our cliques at our designated spot. The designated spot for the punks or wavers or whatever our clique was called was just outside the library on a bench. I do remember there being some discussions about how we were not a clique because that would be conforming (and we were definitely non-conformists). It was here that I met Charlotte, Lavonia and Michelle (Charlotte and Lavonia are two of my current friends on MySpace) as well as many other kids who liked similar music to me.

It was also during this time that I started trying to wear my hair like the lead singer from A Flock of Seagulls. In my attempt to recreate this look I used Aquanet. Aquanet was rumored to be hair spray, but I really believe it was just a combustible that the inventor discovered would also hold hair in place. The fact that it worked was very important because had two pieces of hair made contact unexpectedly you may well have looked like Michael Jackson in that Pepsi commercial were he caught on fire. Aquanet came in many different potencies, and I used Super-Extra-Hold to get the effect I was after.

To accomplish this look I would wet my hair and then bend over so that my head was upside down. I then brushed the sides of my head using gravity as an assistant to get the hair on the sides of my head to be spiky. Applying the Aquanet and blow drying (all while still upside down) ensured that my hair stayed spiky and was capable of putting out an eye of anyone who got too near to me. I believe that this combination of Aquanet fumes and standing for long periods of time with my head upside down is the reason that I never felt the need to take any drugs.

While I was meeting new people at BHS, Paul was also making new connections at King High School. These friends told him about concerts that they attended in Ybor City (The historic Cuban district of Tampa). Soon we started going to see these hardcore shows as well. Initially we still had no car and we would get Paul’s mom to drop us off… but around the corner where no one would see us.

Hardcore was kind of the progression of Punk into a harder, faster form of music. It was at these concerts that we first encountered skinheads. While punks were non-conformists espousing anarchy, many skinheads were fascists espousing racist beliefs. While I enjoyed the concerts I had a hard time dealing with the racist skins.

Eventually, due to issues I had with my step mother I decided to move back with my mother, by this time she was living in Arizona. It was a hard decision to leave all of my friends, who I had become much closer with than my family at this point in my life, but looking back I know I made the right decision. I was grounded all the time for one reason or another. I was no longer an “A” student. My parents in an attempt to punish me had made me start attending King High School. I resisted by ditching school every day.

My mother live in a town called Roll in Arizona. If you ever find yourself on interstate 8 between Gila Bend and Yuma you might notice a small mountain with a big “A” on it. This was for my new school which was called Antelope Union High School. While Brandon had an enrollment of almost 4000 students while I attended class there (and this was just for three grades), Antelope was right at 300 students (70 in my graduating class).

My first day of class I went to school in my normal blue jeans, combat boots and concert t-shirt. By this time I wore my hair rather short and spiky. I also had on a jeans jacket that Paul and I had heavily modified. One sleeve had been bleached and then dyed red, the back sported a drawing off the cover of one of GBH’s albums (a hardcore band). There were studs on the back and in the sleeves, as well as a white leather patch that said “Psycho” on the non-red sleeve. Psycho was also the name of a band, but I am sure that no one who saw the jacket thought it was a band name. As I walked out of the counselor’s office with my class schedule two girls walked by. At first I thought they smiled at me, but then I realized that they were laughing.

There were also cliques at Antelope, although not nearly as pronounced as they were at Brandon. However there was no clique that could be classified as punk or alternative. I would like to say that I was confident enough in who I was not to change in order to fit in, but the truth was that over time I did change. I think that my friends at Antelope would say that I always went to the beat of my own drum, but I definitely mellowed out in many ways. I continued to listen to the same music, and I even went to two very poorly attended hardcore concerts in Yuma, but my days as a punk were pretty much over. Even when I went to college and had the opportunity to be what we punks called “part of the scene” I chose not to. I use to tell myself it was because I did not want to deal with skinheads, and that was true, but I think it was more because that part of my life was over.

When I first made contact with my old friends from Florida I found myself thinking about that time in my life. I wondered what my old friends would think of me now. Had I sold out? Had I become everything that we were supposedly against in my youth? Had I become my parents?!?

I originally thought that the answer to all those questions was yes, and in a way it is, but in many ways I have never changed. Yes, I own an SUV and I work in corporate America, but I still do not like to be forced to conform and shoved into a neat box. I tend to push the limits of what polite society would consider to be normal. I think the most important thing though is that I am happy with what I have become and where my life is headed. I feel like I am mostly in control of my destiny and in reality I think that is what punk was about to me back in high school. It was a way for me to establish an identity for myself, and to show everyone that I was not willing to be confined in anyone’s predefined box except for the box that I defined for myself. I guess I am back to where I started before I started listening to punk music. I like sci-fi, fantasy, anything medieval, and computers. All these things are pretty geeky. The difference is that now I am comfortable with, and have no desire to change the fact that I am a geek…. But I do listen to cool music.

Growing Up Punk (Part 1)

This was originally written and posted to MySpace in 2007 soon after I had connected with many friends from my high school days in Florida. I have now reconnected with another friend from that period of my life and I have decided to create this blog to share with her. If others see it and enjoy it then that is great as well.

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One of the things that myspace has done for me is that it has helped me reconnect with friends from the past. In some cases I had not talked with these people in nearly 20 years, and now I am able to find out what they have been up to for all these years. We are able to exchange pictures from the time in life that we shared together. These pictures can be pretty funny now, but they are still great to see and they bring back some great memories.

This however can cause some interesting queries from those other friends on MySpace that only know you in your current state. This is what this blog is all about. I have been asked many times in the last several months the following questions (or some variation of these) based on pictures my older friends have posted:

-          Where you really a punk?

-          What happened to that wild and fun looking guy?

-          Did you really have hair at one time (even if it was short)?

I will do my best to answer these questions and perhaps give some of you a little insight into my childhood. However as anyone who really knows me can attest I can be longwinded… especially when reminiscing.

When I was 7 my parents divorced and I moved with my mother, brother and sister to Nebraska, where I lived a very safe and sheltered life until I was 12. In the summer between my 7^th and 8^th grade years my brother and I moved to Florida to live with my father. He was remarried and we had three young half brothers. We lived in a sub-development on the west side of Tampa called Sugar Creek. Although it was not a very large neighborhood, it became my new universe.  I experienced many new things while living there. The biggest was racial diversity and the unfortunate bigotry that came along with it. 

The little town in Nebraska we had lived in was very white. There were some Native Americans on the nearby reservation, but we seldom actually saw them. So I had no real experience with people of other races. My mother and grandparents had always raised my brother and myself with the belief that the color of someone’s skin made no difference. I will never forget the first day I arrived at the school I was to spend my 8^th and 9^th grade years at. I was sent to the library with all the other new students to be inprocessed and to take some placement tests. I remember trying to talk to some kids who happened to have black skin. It was the first time in my life that I experienced racism…. and it was directed at me for being white.

The second thing I learned quickly was what I will call “materialism.” This might have been more related to my age than to where I was living, but I became painfully aware of it at this time. In Nebraska I had never worried about what I wore. I only cared about my clothes being comfortable and my mother worried about my clothes being clean. In Florida I came under scrutiny for everything I wore. My shoes were not name brand, so I was teased for wearing “hot boxes.” My jeans were probably from K-mart and often a bit too short (I was growing a lot at the time), so I was teased for wearing “high water blue-light specials.” My parents were not willing to help me remedy these fashion faux pas so I was left to deal with these issues in my own way. Finally, I tested well and got into some advanced classes and got good grades in the normal classes I was in. I never realized how unfashionable being a good student could be. I guess when you put all the pieces together I was the quintessential 80’s nerd…. And it sucked.

As I said, Sugarcreek was my universe, and that first summer I met many of the denizens that inhabited this universe. There was a girl named Lisa Lemke who rumor had it would play strip poker (and supposedly do other things as well). She was a very large girl, and I did not know much more about her than that. I was always kind of curious if the rumors were true but luckily I was too shy (or maybe afraid) to find out if they were. There was also a kid we called Tweeby. He was actually pretty cool and we became friends, but his older brother Donnie was a freak. Donnie was pretty small and had some kind of leg problem, so he walked funny. He was quite a bit older then us but always wanted to hang out with us anyways. Donnie always gave me the creeps, and he was kind of a bully on top of it all. Apparently Tweeby caught him doing “unnatural acts” to a vacuum cleaner. We all just did our best to avoid him. Then there was Nugy. I am not really sure what Nugy was. He was in my grade in JR high, but I think he might have been older. He was the number one bully in the neighborhood. No one wanted to fight him, not even kids much larger than him. I suspect it was because he did not feel remorse or pain. I would be surprised if he is still alive today.

The most important person I met that summer though was a kid named Paul Morris. Paul was the perfect example of a latch key kid. His mom never seemed to be home. He also had no siblings, so his house was the perfect parent-free, kid-brother-free environment. Paul and I were a bit slow to become friends, but when school started we had the same science class. I would help him with his homework and eventually we were hanging out all the time. We were both unimpressive white kids with very little cool factor, although Paul was cooler than me.

This was the time of parachute pants (if you have to ask you are too young), izod shirts, MTV, Michael Jackson style jackets and fat, colorful shoelaces. Rap music was the hippest thing, cool kids knew how to break dance and bands like El Debarge ruled the airwaves. Paul and I wanted to be hip, so we hung out with his neighbor Brandon.

Brandon was a year or two older than us. His father was Philippino and his mother was white. This is important because it made him look as if he could have been of African descent with a light complexion. He wore his hair long and it was curly, which he was constantly spraying with activator. His hair alone could have landed him a spot in a Rick James or Morris Day music video. He dressed well and he had a car. He always had some girl in his bedroom. He called Paul and I his homeboys and this probably increased his coolness factor with his other friends who did not have their own homeboys. Plus if you put him next to us it only made his coolness that much more obvious, so Brandon actually liked having us around. However, being someone’s homeboy did not really garner many coolness points for the homeboy himself. So women were not throwing themselves at Paul or my feet.

However, hanging out with Brandon did contribute me becoming a punk.

Wait! That’s what this whole blog was suppose to be about. I warned you….

Soon you will know more of the story…