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.