When I was handed the diploma that formally ended my academic obligations in San Diego I started running and never looked back. The only thing was that I was running in circles. We were standing on the football field that had been built for the World Fair style event called the Panama-California Exposition that also birthed the museums of Balboa Park that had been used in Citizen Kane. I don’t know the exact size of a High School Football lap but I’m pretty sure I did six of them.
I wasn’t particularly interested in going to college at that point but I was absolutely ready to get out of San Diego. Ironically my home town was the same kind of Youth Culture Mecca for kids as far flung as Chicago and Japan that Providence and Fort Thunder would become for me. I didn’t know anything about The Locust or any of the Gravity Records bands at this point outside of one of my Junior High crushes living on the same block of Golden Hills and once mentioning that the corner house was filled with “rockstar” looking guys.
I didn’t have any particular attraction to the San Francisco Bay Area either, my Physics Teacher just knew somebody in admissions at SFSU and called in a favor as I had missed the application deadline. Francois and I had been essentially friend married ever since his mother wanted to leave the country before his earlier graduation and had asked my parents if he could just come live at my house. In this sense my childhood bedroom in my parents home was essentially my “first punk house” as it was where I began living with friends and collaboratively building custom realities.
Once I had a specific destination Francois was unquestionably going to be tagging along and also brought along his previous best friend Jonas and eventually a fourth friend Chris Pearce. Another friend’s mother knew somebody who ran a kind of guest house near the UC Berkeley campus and happened to have a vacancy in a single basement room. It was decided that the three of us would share the room as a stopgap measure until we found something more permanent.
Our new landlord Wally was a portly man with a white beard who spent most of his days lounging in a hammock and eating watermelons, he was so fond of the fruit that he had bought a small watermelon patch. I never thought of it at the time but he basically looked like Santa Claus on an extended tropical vacation. Francois and I had started to experiment with baking in the basement kitchen and one day offered him some of a pineapple upside down cake:
“Oh that sounds really good but I probably shouldn’t, I just ate three entire watermelons.”
Because there was a surplus of watermelons we unsuccessfully tried to use them to barter access to the pledge week fraternity parties surrounding the nearby campus. Everybody thought we were joking, asked us if it was a special watermelon (it wasn’t) and generally wanted nothing to do with us. We made it into some of the co-ops but defensively rotated our social awkwardness into often confrontational pretensions. At an easy going hippy party I commandeered the bass from the living room jam band and played the one riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man until they kicked us out.
I didn’t drink, Francois didn’t drink much and Chris and Jonas were more natural at social functions but couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of mine and Francois’s aggressive asshole energy. We spent all our time trying to go to parties and meet people but at the same time did everything we could to push everybody away. In retrospect it seems frustratingly obvious like driving onto the freeway in the wrong direction but at the time I literally didn’t know any better.
Wally took stock of the situation, realized we weren’t going anywhere and found somebody to pawn us off on. I don’t have a full list of the professions that Mark was a miserable failure at but it definitely included landlord, home restorer and most likely contractor. I’ve been trying to pin point the exact location of the house we moved into but too much of the neighborhood has changed: it has either become a loft building or a parking lot for Berkeley Bowl West and was tucked into the side streets just north and west of Ashby and San Pablo.
The house had formerly served as an artisanal workshop for constructing traditional Japanese shoji screens and for this reason had them on all of the windows along with other picturesque minor improvements from these former tenants. I never saw any records as to how long ago this had been but the house had fallen into extreme disrepair in the interim. The south side was bordered by a tow yard for abandoned or illegally parked cars.
It wasn’t so much a bad neighborhood at that time as it was an empty one.
We still really wanted to make friends and continued to act like we didn’t want anybody to be friends with us. The best way to describe it was that we were feral: we invented strange, violently sadistic games and wandered the neighborhood looking for abandoned buildings to break into or broken things to break more. We could walk down the train tracks to the earliest version of the Emeryville Shopping Center and scam our way into movies by calling the theater and pretending to be a manager from another branch calling in tickets for his employees. Under this deception Francois casually inquired whether the screenings of the Eddie Murphy and Martin Short film Life were too crowded:
“Don’t worry about it. I’d rather have an employee coming to watch it than some thug anyway!”
This level of casual racism was par for the course in cities like Oakland and Chicago in the last few years before September 11th. It hasn’t exactly changed but people like movie theater managers have become less brazenly open about it. At the time such sentiments were barely considered problematic.
The one method that worked for getting friends was going down to San Diego and retrieving them. While visiting for a holiday we ran into Lil Four while she was working at an obnoxious cigar cafe. I had met her before when a girl at my high school brought her as a triple date to a school dance while she was in a skinhead phase. She complained that her bosses were assholes so we suggested she quit her job and come to live in the Bay Area with us. She agreed.
At this point in time Lil Four was clued into the San Diego Spock-Rock scene – mostly referred to as emo. She introduced me to The Makeup, The Thrones and in a roundabout way even Lightning Bolt because I first read about them in a Load Records insert that came with her Men’s Recovery Project record. She and I would go into San Francisco and hang around the Muddy Waters coffee shop hoping to meet people who looked. cool and fashionable. She developed a crush on this beautiful boy named Rex who was in a band called The Audience so we would awkwardly and obviously stalk him around the Mission but never actually saw his band.
Lil Four clicked naturally into our almost ritualistic system of defensive meanness. She eventually did find a boyfriend at a 924 Gilman show, a punk rock boy with bright pink hair named Gabe, and she would bring him home for me and Francois to bully. The house had a dart board when we moved in but we eschewed the traditional method of playing in favor of running around the house and throwing them at each other.
This was the kind of thing we called a “game” but now that I’m actually writing it down it really wasn’t. We were just throwing tiny pointed projectiles at each other in the hope that it would break the skin and cause the other person to feel pain and bleed. We all got hit a few times in the hand, shoulder and back area but miraculously nobody lost an eye or took a dart to the spine and ended up paralyzed.
The nearby Berkeley Marina was home to a frisbee golf course and one day we found a forgotten frisbee and brought it home. The game we built around couldn’t have been further from the mellow pot smoker’s sport if we had gone for that on purpose. Our street never had a single car so we stood around it in a loose circle. Each person would toss the frisbee toward the next person in the circle who would attempt to hit it out of the air with an axe. If they succeeded they would pass the axe and then toss the frisbee to the next person.
If you missed the frisbee all of the other players would run up and punch you.
I was going to segue from that description into an explanation of how we specifically used this game to abuse Gabe but I feel like I need to stop here and say something about all this. I’ve never actually written any of this down, I’ve told these stories a few times over the years and looked back at them while browsing the memory pile but this is the first time I’ve actually held these recollections at enough of an arm’s length to allow my more mature eyes to actually focus on them.
Generally when I write about my past self I can to some degree identify with my prior actions and motivations – at least to the degree where even if something was irrational I can say “I understand why I felt and behaved like that”. This is the first time that I’ve found myself in complete and utter disbelief. Like let’s say I spent an entire night desperately trying to inject an increasingly bloody shot of cocaine. I’d hope that I wouldn’t find myself doing the same thing now but at least I understand that I was trying to get an intravenous cocaine rush.
This is the first time that having finally written the shit down I really do need to take a moment to say “what in the fuck was wrong with us?” Why would we look at a frisbee and think of this unwieldy and wantonly cruel game out of all the things in the world? There was only one axe, half the play time was spent walking over to pass the axe along. I haven’t even got into the ways that we weaponized this game against Gabe.
For the people who actually lived in the house we would toss the frisbee to each other so that we could more or less actually hit it. Occasionally we missed and would get punched but for the most part it was a friendly game of frisbee tossing and axe hitting. Once Gabe was in the circle we would give him one awkward toss after another so that we could all punch him, over and over. I realize that it probably sounds like this entire game was invented as an elaborate excuse to punch Gabe but it wasn’t. We had played it without him and hardly anybody ever got punched.
So the bigger question is once we did play the game as a pretext for punching Gabe why did he continue to play with us? Why did Lil Four start dating and presumably having sex with this guy if she was only going to be an accessory to her housemates abusing him over and over? I remember Francois getting frustrated with Gabe’s bike always being right inside the entrance to the house so one day he took it and threw it into the bushes. Gabe complained that Francois was being an asshole and Lil Four got angry and yelled at him:
“Hey! Don’t say that about my roommate!”
A simple explanation would be that Francois and I were acting out of sexual frustration and I’m going to add a couple details that would seem to support that theory but I don’t actually think that that was the case. Francois was really into painting at the time: he painted nude female figures representing the four seasons on the four walls of his room. He painted an image of Lil Four’s breasts on a skateboard surrounded by passionflowers. They were very nice breasts, it was a very appealing painting.
Before Gabe was in the picture Lil Four and I had ended up sleep cuddling on a single occasion. I can’t remember what the reason behind this was, maybe Lil Four invited me to come sleep cuddle because she wanted to sleep cuddle. Anyway I was working a lot of hours at Metro Publishing at the time. I spent a lot of time with copy machines – flipping through the pages of books and copying them one at a time while my hips were held tight against the machine and I could feel it’s vibrations as it made each successive copy.
When Lil Four and I sleep cuddled I had a dream that her body was a copy machine and for lack of a better word I groped her. It wasn’t that big of a deal – we just decided not to try sleep cuddling again. It’s not like I would get a hard-on at work while I was holding my hips against the copy machines, I’m just trying to explain that there was something vaguely erotic about copy machines to me at the time.
All of this is going to fly in the face of the next point that I am going to make which is this: there is no chance that either Francois or me wanted to fuck Lil Four on any level at that point in time. We viewed each other like siblings, however strange and complex our relationships were this fact and essential separation was true. Maybe deep in my dream I wanted to fuck the abstract idea of a copy machine but I didn’t want to fuck Lil Four. Maybe in his constant painting Francois wanted to fuck an abstract and idealized concept of the female nude but he didn’t want to fuck Lil Four.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that if one or all of us had been abusing Gabe out of a misplaced sense of sexual frustration then it would have been abstracted sexual frustration. This is the most I have ever written about sex in any of these pieces and the only reason that I feel comfortable doing it is that the things that I’m writing about aren’t really sex at all. We used the frisbee-axe game as an elaborate pretense to keep punching Gabe, he continued to come over and play the game to get punched and Lil Four essentially gaslit him that all of this behavior was appropriate and normal.
Socially we were all behaving like a feral kitten that needs to be fed and protected but hisses, scratches and bites anything that attempts to feed and protect it. Or rather me, Francois and Lil Four were behaving like that. Gabe was behaving like the baby monkeys in the experiment that cling to a fake mother made of barbed wire because it’s the only way to get fed.
I intended to write a lot more about the house and our other awkward attempts to make friends in this piece but I ended up getting sidetracked by my intense, visceral reaction to our past behavior. Anyway we hated our weird pathetic landlord Mark and we told him no when he tried to raise our rent and one day he tore our roof off because he found some cheap laborers to help him and then didn’t put a new one on and it started to rain.
He kept a bunch of rotting scrap lumber in the backyard and would come fuck around with it with the heavy equipment vehicle called a Bobcat and just generally pretend that he was going to improve something he owned instead of just watching it get shittier and more broken. We locked him out of the backyard and he called the police on us and the police came and told us that if we were his tenants he wasn’t allowed to come there without giving us at least twenty four hour notice.
He used to come knock on the back door to complain that we smashed everything with an axe or that we wouldn’t let him raise our rent or he had just been digging through our trash and wanted to chastise us for throwing something away. When the whole thing had mostly run it’s course Chris painted the words “DIE MARK” in big black letters on the side of the house and the very next day I heard a familiar knock on the back door:
“What is the meaning of Die Mark?”
I took German in High School. You can probably imagine exactly what I told him.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 