Saturday Dad

Setting out to go from Santa Barbara to Alaska with no money, no car. Frame pack, tent, sleeping bag. Some friends to stay with on the way, dumpster diving skills pretty good, not worried about food. First ride hitchhiking is from a punk driving a pickup. I’m with my boyfriend but he won’t figure in this story; I just wanted to mention it so no one gets worried that something bad happens to me because of the hitchhiking. Nothing bad happened other than being subjected to the driver’s choice of music for 6 hours. He put on a tape of NOFX; it was their new album, he said, and at first I was interested because he was super excited about it and I’d never heard them before, but after a few tracks I hoped never to hear them again. He played the tape over and over and everything about it—its bounciness, the whiny vocals—drove me out of my mind. I was way into punk at the time and hated anything that could be described as “pop punk,” or whatever. I had Standards. I also loved the English working class dancehall influenced youth subculture—the whole Jamaican/British confluence, in terms of the music, the attitude—had enormous appeal and I wanted to be a part of it, somehow, but never quite figured out how. I tried to appropriate a Rude Boy aesthetic, but it wasn’t just a fashion I could cop. I learned that the hard way a couple of times when other punks mistook me for a Nazi skinhead. I found that I couldn’t effectively explain that the thing that had turned me on to the look in the first place was the gorgeous queer art film by Bruce LaBruce called No Skin off My Ass that I, as an aspiring pervert, had been watching since high school. I loved the way No Skin off my Ass used art to turn everything upside down and basically fetishized skinheads …it was a way of getting on top, so to speak, of the oppressor. If you can pervert it, you can own it. But I couldn’t easily explain that to the casual onlooker, especially not the time I got surrounded by 6 punks with knives at 2 a.m. in an empty subway station in Prague and had to be rescued by a friend who was able to convince them I was anti-racist. I had learned a lesson—don’t look like a Nazi skinhead if you don’t want people to think you’re a Nazi skinhead—and after that I started tempering my easily-misinterpreted haircut with artfully ripped shirts from overtly pacifist and anti-fascist or emo punk bands like Crimpshrine or Rites of Spring, and eventually even traded my lace-up boots for vans.

That reminds me of how few years later I had this roommate named Rick, but we’ll call him Prick, who had this whole schtick going with which to seduce women—and it worked—where he would invent a personality, a story, none of it true, adapting it to the victim at hand. Like for a while there was this goth girl he was trying to impress so he pretended to be a Dark Poet and one day he was reading his so-called Dark Poetry out loud to her in the living room and I heard him and recognized the lyrics to a Crimpshrine song—I had the album upstairs—but he was pretending it was his own poetry and saying shit like “yeah I was pretty depressed when I wrote this one.” I guess he thought the songs were poetic yet obscure enough that he wouldn’t get caught lifting them and he was, almost, right. Prick also pretended he was from England and sported a fake English accent to go with his greasy shoulder length dyed-black hair—trying to look like Danzig or Robert Smith or something—I guess because there were a lot of goth girls at the clubs he went to. This would all have been pretty funny except that it actually worked and the girls he got to sleep with, as a reward for being the world’s biggest phony, were very beautiful and probably hella Dark Poets in their own right. This might make you think that the world is truly unfair and that in life there is no justice, but please remember that sometimes the nice guy who doesn’t pretend to write poetry or even really write poetry gets the girl—just ask my husband James.

But back to the hitchhiking trip: I had Punk Integrity and hated sell outs and bands who tried to write hits and at first I hated NOFX because the vocals were so grating and their songs were very catchy which was suspect in itself and put me on my guard.

But then again, their songs were very catchy. By the time we got dumped in Berkeley, I was a fan. So much for Integrity. I gotta get ahold of that album, I said, I can’t believe how feminist some of those lyrics are! When it came to punk music there was the real shit that meant something and the poser shit that didn’t. There were the political bands and the gutter punk bands. There were the emo bands and the feminist bands, and there were the bands comprised of macho, misogynistic cretins. Actually, “Misogynistic Cretins” would make a good name for a band.

In Berkeley we went straight to the pizza place where a friend of a friend worked. This guy was in a band I loved but then he started another band and sold out, the biggest fucking let down that year—and made money and lame videos for MTV. But right then he still worked at the pizza place and we were hungry. We hung out for a while, fishing half eaten slices from paying customers out of the trash and going to town with the free parmesan and crushed red pepper. It was good. Eventually the manager came over and told us we had to leave but by then we were full.

Lotsa people have a beef with NOFX and there were some accusations against the singer, Fat Mike, maybe some of them valid, I don’t know, but I do know that Fat Mike came out as not entirely straight and started cross-dressing in mid-life which reminds me of Bomber, another guy I knew who was into cross-dressing and eventually came out as gay but was closeted for a long time. He was the drummer for a band from the fancy town near mine called Montecito. The town was called Montecito, I mean—the band was called Rich Kids On LSD or RKL for short and I wasn’t into them but they had a song about my boyfriend at the time, Ted Townsend, which was nice, because he was a great person and they had the sense to appreciate him. The song was called “Ded Ted’s,” and was about hanging out at Ted’s mom’s house—she was the kind of mom who opens the house to all the ratty kids and a lot of Ted’s friends needed a place like that. She was cool and so was Ted. His friends called him Ded Ted because he had a degenerative spinal disease that the doctors said would kill him young and it did. I went with him once to visit Bomber after Bomber had moved to SF and we stayed with Bomber’s mom in her house while Bomber stayed outside in his van shooting up with his young Latino boyfriend. He was just starting to come out to his friends at the time, which was a big turnaround for him, but eventually he OD’d and died. Heroin destroyed or ended the lives of many people I knew, some close to me, some very privileged. Clearly being privileged or growing up in Montecito protects you from nothing, certainly not from yourself. Sometimes I look at my own kid who is growing up with so much, so much opportunity and advantage and zest for life …and worry.

NOFX have really pissed a lot of people off and it’s true that their sound is grating and nasal and I still can’t stand too much of them but on the other hand their melodies are very melodious. My husband James loves them. When I met James I liked him right away because he told jokes which were funny but did it so quietly you almost didn’t know he was doing it. On one of our first dates he got drunk and tried to tell me some jokes but couldn’t quite remember them so he pulled out his …phone where he had them written down and read them to me. I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain that this was not the same thing at all as just telling a joke straight off the cuff but he kept reading them to me and chuckling to himself which was totally uncool and completely endearing. I didn’t know it yet but this super mild-mannered dude who did not put himself forward or remember his own jokes had played drums in several punk bands as a youngster. He was, as it turned out, hardcore. Well, almost. He does not have as much Integrity as I do and we recently got into an argument about whether Rancid deserved to be called sell-outs—not until after their second album, he insists, but he played in some good punk bands and ripped on the drums, which, I don’t think I have to mention but would like to—is super hot.

Nowadays we just listen to our hardcore in the car on the way to pick up our son from his fancy private school. We cruise through the ritzy neighborhoods and sing along with the windows down. It’s pretty ridiculous but feels fucking great.

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Here’s a video of James being a middle-aged dad who hears NOFX through the window while hanging out in the backyard on a Saturday:

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photo by Tema Stauffer

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