Though I tried, and I mean really tried, I could not escape my immediate surroundings. No matter where I went I was where I didn’t want to be and if you think you have problems, try living where you can’t stand to be. In those surroundings there were always the most unwholesome people. Men with striped leggings, women with cowboy boots and terrible skirts, kids who were punctured and scribbled upon, busy bodies trying to recruit me for their self esteem, musicians playing 70s hits for the hundred millionth time, and so forth. And in these immediate surroundings, through the fundamental process of sensitization, I developed an aversion to art. Also, I realized that art was essential human behavior so that I had to conclude that I was averse to people in general and living people in particular. And the closer they were to me the more averse I was. But what did I expect? Having recently done some research into the family tree I discovered that my great great grand mother was a prairie dog. Don’t ask me how that worked! I can only imagine that my furry arms and my unibrow as well as my propensity for digging holes, and my prodigious fangs come from my great great granny. Supposedly, she lived in the era of Sitting Bull and was in fact owned by a minion of that great chief. Evidently, my great great grandfather was an indian hunter of some repute and during a relatively non-eventful raid one summer evening he returned with my grandmother. Several weeks later they were married by a priest who was known for taking a nip now and then. I don’t have the strength to say any more about my great great grand parents and the origin of my line. I do know this though. Since I chewed off a fan’s finger at a show the other night I’ve been more popular than ever. I’ll bet my great great granny would be proud though confused about that. She would never understand my job. I hardly understand it. Several months ago I was recruited into a rock band based on nothing but my looks. I couldn’t sing or play any instruments. I could snarl and spit and when I chewed a hole in my microphone my band mates fell in love with me. They are all girls although one of them might have been something else. They’re not nice like girls are supposed to be and that’s why they are fairly popular on the punk/goth circuit which comprises a fairly narrow range of misbehaving trolls with nothing worthwhile to say. My girls, as I call them, are known for the way they dress and act more than anything they sing or play. I said that I can’t play or sing but neither can they. Listening to us is right near unbearable. In fact I’ve noticed that lots of fans seem to be wearing ear covers or have their ears stuffed with gum or cotton when we play. You really have to wonder about the state of the world when people go to see a band that they don’t want to hear. And that’ s putting it mildly. I think normal people would rather listen to a rip saw cutting a piece of glass than listen to us. When we’re “playing” I’ll look out into the crowd and see them doing all sorts of things like punching each other on the nose and spitting in each other’s faces. They do jump around a lot and swing their bodies to and fro like maniacs which is fine with me since it looks painful and I like the idea of anyone who would be stupid enough to pay for a ticket to see us being in pain. In fact, the name of our band is Pain. Well, last night we were playing in a huge industrial basement where nearly 1200 people had shown up. They were a dirty, disaffected crowd with no sense of anything like dignity or purpose and I longed to see them destroy themselves. As we stood there droning on and on with meaningless notes and spastic rhythms I felt some sort of atavistic nerve pining in my body. I wanted to jump out into the crowd and start chewing people to pieces. The desire grew and grew until I couldn’t stand it anymore whereupon I turned my guitar up full blast to induce a constant feedback screech and then laid it down on the stage floor so it could just play itself. The crowd seemed to enjoy this very much which made me want to destroy them even more. I climbed off the stage and grabbed the first punk I could get my hands on then chewed off his hand and threw it out into the audience. The kids went wild and the dude whose arm I chewed off held his stump up into the air for everyone to see. I couldn’t believe that people were so joyous about such bad behavior. People were holding up their arms for me to chew off and there was a rush to the front of the room which pushed me into the stage. Once I was pinned to the stage by the pressure of the crowd I began gnawing away at those who were pushing me. It was a gory mess which I will have the good taste not to describe. But it did not bother anyone. They were delighted by the mayhem and it was so clear that they loved anything that evoked misery. I don’t know how many kids I tore through but I’m sure the janitor at the venue was one bummed out muther when he came on duty. The next day I read in the paper all about the slaughter that had taken place at our show. “Fans of Pain left in Pain” said the headline. “What crap!” I thought. Those kids loved it. It gave them something to talk about while they sat in their parent’s basements trying to figure out how to microwave eggs. Later on that same day I found myself sitting in a park wondering about the nature of human behavior. “What was driving these kids to self destructive behavior? What was the point of hurting yourself?” Our typical fan had about five pounds of iron pronged through their flesh, half a gallon of ink scorched onto their skin, hair styled to look like a toilet scrubbing brush from a third world prison, and clothing so over layered and cumbersome Harry Houdini couldn’t get out of them. I mean Jesus Christ, why not just get to the point and kill yourself!
I really couldn’t wrap my head around the modern American child. Was it the prairie dog in me that prevented me from seeing some reason behind this human activity? Was I missing something that was obvious to everyone else? I just didn’t know. Nor could I understand why it bothered me so much. Several nights later we were playing a show in an old industrial building that had been converted into a music hall/grooming parlour. I had never even heard of a grooming parlour before. Well, evidently, a grooming parlour was a little place you could go to be made instantly more hideous. It was amazing. You go into the grooming parlour, drop 100 dollars, and come out looking like a troll. They would actually stain some of your front teeth with an indelible ink so as to make it look like you’d had your teeth knocked out. They would irritate you eyes so that they turned red and exuded a snot colored slime. They even had a process whereby they could immediately induce raging acme throughout your face and neck. That night, during a break between sets I went through the audience and picked out people who’d obviously been in the grooming parlour. I brought them up onto the stage and in front of the seething crowd asked them why they went to the grooming parlour. They all stood there with their mouths hanging open showing their ink stained teeth. I asked them why they wanted to look so horrible and again they just stood there. The audience had settled down somewhat and as I asked various questions a few hisses and boos came forth. I couldn’t get so much as a peep from my subjects so I methodically tore off their heads and threw them out into the audience. The kids loved it and began to toss the heads around like they were retarded volley ball players. What a flaming mess! The thing that bothered me though was that I really did want to find out what drove those kids to the extremes of behavior they achieved. It bothered me because by simply wanting to know the answer to that question implied that I had some interest in those kids when in fact all I could do was loath them. Well, after that night’s show, after the heads and bodies were taken home as trophies, after I’d had a strong shot of whiskey, I found myself sitting on the park bench again. I sat with my furry head hanging down while I thought about my great great granny. Imagine a life where all you did was dig holes in the desert, sleep, and eat. Of course you were hunted relentlessly by things that came out of the blue. I guess you didn’t have time to realize that you had no purpose on earth. Did you? I’m not sure. But these kids. These kids have all the time in the world for realizing that they have no purpose on earth whether or not that is a reasonable conclusion. To me, they certainly seemed to have no purpose other than to be frankly obnoxious in every respect and, I guess, strictly speaking, that is some sort of purpose. I was sitting there thinking those things when I heard someone come up behind me. I turned around and recognized a small gaggle of misanthropes from our show. One of them said they would like to have my autograph, which struck me as very quaint and unusual coming from one of their type, and I said that I would give them my autograph if they would answer a few questions for me. They all turned and ran so I jumped over the back of the bench and went after them. It took about ten seconds to have one of them face down on the ground. I shouted out for the others to come back with the threat that I would devour the one I’d captured if they didn’t. One of them came back. It was a girl with a broken bottle tattooed onto her forehead and a spoon through her nose where a bone would have been if she’d been at least as normal as an African tribesman. “I just want to ask you a few questions.” The girl stood there with her mouth hanging open displaying some recently groomed teeth which looked like they’d been blasted by an exploding ink pen. “I want you to tell me why you like to look so ugly and miserable.”
“We don’t look ugly and we don’t want to be like everyone else.” She said.
“Like everyone else?”
“Like everyone else.”
“But you do look like everyone else. You look like this kid on the ground and all those kids who just ran away. You look like those thousand other kids who were at the concert tonight. You look like the tens of thousands of other kids who are at the other mindless, boring ass concerts.”
“We’re different.”
“No you’re not.”
“What’s different about you?”
“Well, I’ve been to a grooming parlor. Most people haven’t.”
“Most people don’t want to spend money to look uglier.”
Just then two wary girls walked by sort of skirting away from where I held the kid down near the sidewalk. They were quintessential yuppie girls dressed in expensive clothing. The girl nodded toward them and said, “They spent money to look uglier.” I looked at the girls and noted their giant handbags, their knee boots, and the mish-mash of colors. I couldn’t really disagree with what the punk girl had said. The kid whose face I was holding down into the grass was blubbering and I asked, “So you want an autograph?”
The girl said yes and so I tore off the head of the kid on the ground and handed it to her. “Here’s a trophy. It’s even better.”
The girl took the head and said, “Umm, that was my boyfriend.”
“Oops.” I said.”
” He just went to a grooming parlor too! And look at him now! He’ll be so pissed!”
“He’ll BE so pissed? I think his days of being pissed are over!”
“He’s not going to believe this happened to him!”
“What on earth are you talking about? He’s not going to believe anything anymore.”
“He’s probably a vampire now. That or a zombie.”
“No he’s not.”
“I can’t believe it! We just went to the grooming parlor tonight!”
“Well, god damn it!” I said. “I just don’t see how he’s any worse off now! I mean look at him! His mouth is hanging open just like it always did. His face is still pale as a dead fish and pockmarked with god knows what scourge. He looks like hell just like he always did! What’s the difference?”
“Well, for one, he can’t dance at the Pain concerts anymore.”
“Dance! I’ve never seen any of you dancing! You look like you’re all being electrocuted or shot with a machine gun. Good god what are you talking about! Dancing!”
“What would you call dancing then?’
I took the head from her and tossed it into the bushes. Then I put my arms around her and began humming an old ballad. I pulled her along in some almost forgotten dance steps and felt her head fall against my chest. “Now this is dancing.” I said gently. I thought she was an incredibly smooth dancer until I heard that she was snoring. “God damn it!” I said. I held her away from me and shook her. “What happened?” She mumbled, “Last thing I remember was I getting bored to death.” I just didn’t know what to say. She stood there for a minute staring blankly with her mouth hanging open. “Can you at least,” I asked, “not have your mouth hanging open all the time.” She told me that she learned to keep her mouth open so that she could breath better and so that her filed down, ink stained teeth, and her forked, pierced tongue were better shown off. It was just so horrible that she had an answer to everything. And such horrible answers! But somehow I couldn’t clamp them down as patently wrong. Just then four black dudes came walking up with their pants hanging down off their asses and giant pajama like clothing draping over their upper bodies. I pointed at them and said, “Look, they’re doing the same thing. What is wrong with you kids?” And then to the black dudes themselves, “What is wrong with you guys? Why can’t you properly wear those pants? Why are you wearing ugly looking pajamas in public? I wouldn’t even where those pajamas in front of the cartoons on TV. Aren’t you embarrassed?” I said all that fully expecting that they would attack me and allow me to tear their heads off which I wanted to do out of pure blind frustration. Incredibly, they were Gangbangers of the Lord and all they did was to whip out very colorful bibles to wave in my face as they made imbrications on my soul. I turned away from the dudes and I asked the girl to come with me which she did with her mouth hanging open again. “Where are we going?” She asked. I told her I wanted to bring her to a bar where we could sit for a few minutes and have a drink and think. “I don’t drink.” She said to which I replied, “Just come with me.” I suppose she wouldn’t have but I was after all a member of Pain which was worshipped by her type. Even just walking along I wanted to excoriate her for worshipping a band but I kept my mouth shut. We walked down some dreary streets where the public was very neatly kept at bay by architectural device and the lights were tuned to illuminate bad thoughts. We walked for several blocks listening to the strange birds that sang at night and were known to no one. Lights were burning up in high rise office buildings and I thought about the business that was transpiring there. What if everything I thought about everything was entirely wrong? What if there was actually a good reason for the behavior that I observed in those kids? What if there was still some groundhog or prairie dog part of my brain that mediated my thoughts in such a way that I just couldn’t connect to the human psychology? I felt uncomfortable as we walked along. I didn’t like doubt or hesitation. I didn’t like wondering about what I thought. Nor did I like layers of thought under which other layers waited to rebound when uncovered thus taking one unawares. I liked a clear horizon and now I was hemmed in by fog. I asked the girl why she went to the grooming parlor. She shut her mouth for a moment as if she had to hold in some thoughts and sum them up then said, “I go to the grooming parlor to change myself.” I put my hands behind my back and clasped them together feeling a fleck of sensibility finally coming out. “So you want to change yourself? I can understand that in the general sense of curiosity, as in making a change in yourself to see what happens. But what about the original you? What was wrong with that? Could it have been worse than what you are now?”
“Well, it could have been that I was worse than I am now.”
“Well how?”
“Well, when I was 14 my mom and dad left me at home alone. It was the first time they’d left me alone and so I found the keys to their Ford Fiesta which I was always dying to drive but my dad said he would let me drive only over his dead body and that I wouldn’t be driving until I was at least 18 because I was so reckless. Well, I went out and used chalk to mark exactly where the tires were in the driveway so that I could park in the exact same spot when I came back and then started the car and took off. I went over to my friend Jean’s house and beeped the horn in her drive way. Jean came running out and asked me how I got the car. I just told her to get in and that we were going over to the pool so we could drive by where Tony Monsupia was being a life guard and drive back and forth so he could see that I wasn’t a little punk girl without a car. Well on the way to the pool I went through a stop sign and sort of hit another car which tore my door and the side of the car off and made both of the tires flat on my side. I was shaking so bad that I thought I could puke and all I could think of was to get away. The guy that we hit got out of his car which had steam coming out of the hood. While he was standing there we took off although we couldn’t go very fast because of the flat tires. I was worried that the guy got our license number because he was looking at us when we drove away but believe it or not he didn’t get our license number. Well we got to my house and I parked the car exactly where it was parked before. Jean got out and told me that she had to go home which made me mad because that wasn’t being a very good friend to leave me when the going got rough. I really though I was going to die while I walked around in the drive way looking at the car and trying to decide what to say. I had about four more hours to figure something out before my parents came home and I was just walking around the car when suddenly there came my mom and dad! I couldn’t believe my eyes! They pulled up in front of the house and my dad got out and said, “God damn it! I forgot my wallet! We were half way their and I forgot my wallet!” And then my mom shouted out the window, “Not that he needs it since we’re just going to the Wren’s house. Since when do you need a license to go to a barbeque?” My father said, “You should never drive a car with out your license! Even to a barbeque!” Well he was just about at the door when he looked at the Fiesta. The destroyed side was away from him so I didn’t think he could be seeing anything that would give me away. But he must have seen something because he stopped, had a funny look on his face, and then started walking toward the Fiesta. “Dad!” I shouted. “I lost your wallet in the toilet!” I don’t know why I said it. I just had to say something but it didn’t stop him. When I looked at the Fiesta I noticed that it was leaning to the side. He walked around to the destroyed side and it looked like his head was going to explode. “What in the god damn hell! Did you drive this car?! What did you do to this car!” He came running around the back of the car like he was going to kill me and fell down where some oil must have leaked out or something. He bumped his head on the fender and broke his ankle. You wouldn’t believe how mad he was. Well once he was pretty nailed down into his hospital bed I told him what happened and told him that the dude didn’t get my license number because no police ever showed up but he didn’t believe me. He thought I killed some people or something so he had one of his shady friends from where he works come get the Fiesta and take it to one of those car squishing places where they squashed it into a three foot by three foot cube. Then he had the cube brought back to the house and put in the back of the garage. Well, believe it or not, when I turned 15 he gave me that car for my birthday present. He said, “As soon as you fix this car I’ll help you get your drivers license and not a second sooner.” And that’s about it.”
I was totally absorbed by her story and forgot that we were heading to a bar. But when she said the last sentence the spell was broken. “What’s about it?” I asked.
“That’s about it.” She repeated.
“I don’t understand. What has any of that got to do with you being a dumb assed goth kid now. You think you were a worse person when your dad gave you a squashed car for your birthday? I don’t see any logical connection there.”
“Well, what it means, is that now that I’ve put all this work into the way I look, why would I want to be hidden in a car where no one could see me!”
I really wanted to pull out my hair. Talking to these kids was just like watching them on the dance floor! They just didn’t make any sense. I sent the girl away with a kick in the ass. But I couldn’t let it go. I wanted a conclusion to my quest for understanding the kids. I had a suspicion that they were driven by a fundamental knowledge of worthlessness. That they hated themselves so much because they had a notion that they were special while at the same time knowing in their hearts they were nothing. These countervailing ideas tore at them and caused them to destroy themselves around the edges. I was coming very close to pitching a new idea to my band mates. I was going to suggest that we start throwing concerts where instead of playing we just summarily kill everyone who comes through the door. There was no doubt in my mind that we would have sold out every show. I imagined it would be a relief. I imagined it would give me pleasure. One night I decided that I was going to tell my band mates that we needed to implement my new idea but before I could they told me that I was kicked out of the band. They said I smelled bad and that they’d been thinking about kicking me out of the band from the moment I joined up. They said they’d been discussing it every night, trying to decide why I liked to smell bad. They said they’d even asked me about it on numerous occasions and my answers were short of the mark. I had no idea. I had no idea!
