The best punk shows are like paying cover to get beaten up for four continuous and glorious hours, better than any leathertongued S&M dungeon.
As I gazed at my bleachscarred carpet surrounded by bled 40s of lukewarm Colt 45—eternal hangover of the shitfaced mind, head throbbing like a war-drum and contemplating how the rays of the sun pierced the side of my Miller High Life in amberial glow like the windows of St. Peter’s carve the Pieta through the day’s shifting shadow and light—I knew I desperately needed to get out of the house. Touch asphalt. Burn gasoline. Make my mecca to the land of glass and concrete.
My days rotted with supermarket ennui. Lancing the monstrous boils of ice bags bloated with water. Washing the flesh off my hands, polishing bone. Niceties with the customers. The miasma of dead fish strangling my nostrils. Being bourgeoise. Restocking.
The shows make it all worth it; it gives a license for disorder. You can, in fact, contra Flaubert, be both violent and original in life and art. All it takes is a MetroCard. I took my older buddy James along, who nodded sternly but genuinely to the P.A. destruction doled out in three-minute increments; I’m young enough to throw myself into the slaughterhouse and feel alright the next morning at work, a coarse minimum of sleep rattling my halogenated skull. I’d copped a Lucky 13 (shot of Kentucky Gentleman with a Narragansett tallboy) and walked around, getting a peep at the gear, seeing what everyone else was wearing—the usual pre-show marginalia. Seeing crust-punk patch-jeans and bondage pants, combat boots and battle jackets felt quaint and nostalgic. I even saw a kid with Xs on her hands. More people looked like East Bay Ray than Jello Biafra. We dressed like normies and acted like beasts.
Opening the Dionysian rites were GORF with a lineup ripped straight from the high school I teach at, had my kids been mainlining Black Flag and Coca-Cola’s. Like all great punk bands they were young and loud and pissed-off and truly mutilated my eardrums with a blisteringly double-timed cover of the Descendents’ “Myage”, the lead singer meatgrinding his vocal chords into the mic with raw sexual frustration that I keenly, vividly, painfully remember when I was fourteen myself, down to the fact that I’d carved “I wanna be stereotyped/and I wanna be classified” from “Suburban Home” into the side of my first pedalboard looping into feedback psychosis from all the earsplitting pawnshop fuzz and distortion pedals teenage me could afford. Their amphetamine-fast set verged on audial blitzkrieg; I couldn’t’ve asked for a better way to start the night.
The white-hot flash immolation of secondhand Nikons furnished a coroner’s camera for the St. Vitus’ Dance-cum-crime scene as I whirled flailed and pinballed madly against everyone, sometimes getting flung out to the fringes of the pit and apologetically carcrashing into a group of innocent bystanders, spinning around Black Cat’s checkerboard floors in an anarchic game of chess, heartrate mated with every revolution, lashed through a washing machine cycle moshpit of indiscriminate flesh—a desexing, deracinating amalgam. My awful nearsightedness only affirmed this as I had to hastily stash my glasses right before any outbreak of a mosh, the stigmatism melting discernible persons into general blobs into each other, singular entities definable only by how one’s bodies crushed the other.
You don’t think in terms of binaries or pluralities but in bodies. Everyone’s fair game to get massacred.
Unfortunately James and I had stepped out on D.M.V. for cocktails elsewhere— flaneuring the streets, watching as people waited in line for entrance to a myriad of artificial hells and chemical heavens; cop cars flashing around us in ghostly bursts of red and blue and passing through as if we were apparitions; damning fragments of conversation burrowing into us like earwigs and the city swarming with faces like maggots in a corpse, pulsating dead-alive—and only caught the last two songs of Saafeway as a result. (Though I appreciated the latter’s growling feral “Born To Be Wild” cover, plus the novelty of a telephone receiver as mic).
Once Buko Buko took the stage it was pure dessert, halo-halo1ing the wretched masses into true Bacchic frenzy and murdering the crowd so hard it’d put Ferdinand Marcos2 out of office. I’d met Bec, their frontwoman, floating around during the previous sets, flamboyantly dressed in all-pink harajuku kamikaze against a sea of muted regularity, pink wig thrashing about in defiance of drab. This is what defined Buko Buko against the other bands: they didn’t take themselves seriously a damn bit. And it was a damn good time because of it.
Sour gummies flew and fake blood spurted from the stage in aesthetic revolt as Bec shrieked like a banshee, hammering her eyebleedingly green bass and throwing herself into the pit, slam-dancing with us hoi polloi in a whirlpool of flesh reeking of body spray and cheap cologne, the miasma like a thousand boy’s locker rooms with a top note of stale weed. The music itself was trapped somewhere between CBGB’s and Studio 54, the band laying down some dance punk in sick, sleazy groove before wielding guttural power chords grinning chrome like a chainsaw in a slasher flick. Once “Spaghetti Time” hit the band lobbed yellow pool noodles at us like javelins and the pit turned abattoir with red beach-ball inflatables bouncing brutally across the expanse, soundtracked by frantic trombone blasts of ska-punk annihilation. We opened our mouths like baby chicks for mama bird as a band member spooled spaghetti out, graciously feeding us in a corporal work of grimy mercy. Candy-colored bacchanalia.
Once the show ended an odd sense of spiritual renewal, a lightness of being washed over me like a clean sweat. A feeling of slight levitation. At this point I’d leaked out what alcohol I’d had in my system, and hadn’t slicked a tab of acid or pinched a gram of coke or puffed a joint or even sniffed wet paint so whatever feeling that burned incandescently yet softly within me was an organic ecstasy.
It was simply the communion of persons—an interesting phrase, considering my Catholic background; I’d even gone to confession prior to the show. I could go on and on and construct a whole treatise on the heavy parallelism between Dionysian mystery cults and Christianity; perhaps reference Iggy Pop’s remarks on how the seventies scene was like the early Church; extrapolate on D.C.’s own James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly’s skyscraper-melting mysticism in conversation with the city’s own nihilistic psychogeography. But I won’t. It simply boils down to a need for equal parts of structure and violence, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Destruction and creation.
When I need God I go to church; when I need an exorcism I go to the Black Cat. Fifteen bucks for four bands. Cheap, grimy catharsis. Get home at 3 A.M. Opening shift in the seafood department. Three hours of sleep. Body warped and wracked with bruises. Everything sore. The mind dull. Your personality contorted to bland politeness.
It feels good to be in your twenties and shiftless like this. Another weekend well-wasted and I’ll be back to waste the next one.
1 Filipino for “mix-mix,” a popular dessert from the Philippines.
2 Former president of the Philippines, infamous for carrying out a thousand extrajudicial killings under his rule.
-- Donovan Reyes is the part-time poète maudit of gen-Z and a full-time dilettante renting out the brutalist architecture of his skull. He also makes gig posters @ https://zeroxdmv.univer.se/. If you see him in the pit, show him some love and give him a shove.
