Punk As Public, Punks As Texts: Some of This Is True

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PUNK AS PUBLIC, PUNKS AS TEXTS: SOME OF THIS IS TRUE

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Janette Platana 2014 English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program September 2014

ABSTRACT

Punk as Public, Punks as Texts: Some Of This Is True

Janette Platana

This thesis is an attempt to explore the role that musical texts played in the development of a public by writing a work of fiction and then applying to it a critical exegesis. Part One, the literary text Some Of This Is True, (re-)creates and remembers punk in its iteration in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the late 1970s. Part two, the critical exegesis, examines how the theories of public formation outlined in Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics can partially explain the creation and behaviour of publics, but not entirely. Similarly Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of carnival helps explain punk, but not entirely. Some gaps can be filled partly with theory borrowed from art history that reveals useful links between punk and Continental art movements; Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia fills other gaps. Literature fills the rest.

Keywords: Publics, Counterpublics, Punk, Carnival, Heterotopia, Creative Writing, Punk Girls, Punk Women

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Hugh Hodges for his humour and goodwill, erudition and creativity, which first allowed and then helped form this two-fold artistic and academic project in such a way that neither component was sacrificed to the other. I would also like to thank Professor Joanne Findon, whose mentorship was to me a compassionate and rigorous training in how to be an artist and academic at the same time. I would like to thank Professors Sally Chivers and Suzanne Bailey for serving as members of my thesis committee: they were both simultaneously brilliant and kind. Thank you to Professor Zailig Pollock for early inspiration and encouragement, and for not despairing of me. I would like to thank my colleagues Leif Einarson, and especially Naveera Ahmed, whose support and encouragement was unwavering. I am always grateful to my colleagues Joe Davies, Kate Story and Ryan Kerr. Finally, I would like to acknowledge how much I owe to Roz Platana, Nick Strummer Shepherd and Bill Shepherd for the sacrifices they made while I pursued this work.

This writing is dedicated to the memory of Joe Strummer, and to the memory of bpNichol, as always, to whom I owe so much. !

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Abstract ii Acknowledgement iii Table of Contents iv

Preface 1 Part One: Some Of This Is True 2 You Know What They Say 3 None Of This Happened, But All Of It Is True 4 Truer Than True 9 True As History 12 Historically True 15 True Story 17 True Fiction 23 True Facts 26 True To Life 30 True As Anything 39 True For True 48 Still True 50 Really Real, Really True 54 True Enough 58 More Of The Truth 64 This Is Also True 65 If It Feels True 67 It’s True 72 True 77 The Part That’s Really, Really True 86 As Much Of The Truth As You Will Get 88 This Part Is All True 88 If It’s True For Her Is It True For Me? 93 Things I Wish Weren’t True 96 The Truth Hurts 100

Part Two: Critical Exegesis Introduction 104 Punk as Public 109 Punk as Art Theory 118 Punk as Carnival 120 Punk as Heterotopia 128 Conclusion 133

End Note 135

Bibliography 136

Discography 142

PREFACE

My project is to make a work of art in language about punk in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1979, to see if writing it might be a legitimate way to engage with Public Texts theory. Some Of This Is True is the first 100 or so pages of the resulting literary text and its writing was the major task of this thesis. Following Some Of This is a critical exegesis. The structure of the Public Texts program at Trent University is such that, before undertaking the literary task, I studied theory relating to publics and public texts and punk, including that of Michael Warner whose work seems central to Public Text theory, Mikhail Bakhtin who punk theorists draw upon to explain punk, and Michel Foucault, whose theories seemed to offer me new insight about punk and, ultimately, about my own writing. When it was time to write the literary text, I tried to put theory aside as much as I could. (Which was, of course, not entirely). Reading the literary text after its writing, however, I turned my attention to the way the text draws on and explores theoretical concepts; so, the critical exegesis engages with theory as it performs in the literary text. The title Some Of This Is True is from “London Calling”, a 1979 song by Joe Strummer of punk and post-punk band, The Clash. The line Strummer sings is “I was there too — and do you know what they said? Well some of it was true”. Like the characters in my literary text, I was there, too: in Regina in 1979. The punks of that public knew we were not in London; we were one of the “faraway towns” to which the singer calls. “London Calling” was a densely narrated dystopian review of political events and social circumstances of its time, a critique of power and its relation to the band and to the band's public, and a galvanizing call for political action. The chapter headings in Some Of This ask the reader to think about the relationships and differences between truth, lies and storytelling. As I did the storytelling, as I wrote Some Of This Is True, I imagined that my imagined reader had been there, too. I imagined her asking me if some of it were true. I would tell her that even if none of this happened, all of it is true.

Some Of This Is True

You Know What They Say

Everyone knows the real year start of the year is in September. New Year’s Eve is just some stupid night for babysitting.

The guy from my dad’s work offers to let me sit his kids. He lives in the cul-de-sac and is in Sales and so he makes way more money than my dad ever did. All the guys in

Sales do. Maybe he feels guilty about it. Maybe that’s why he offers to let me babysit.

The truth is, I’ve never babysat before, but Salesguy doesn’t know that. He only knows that the guy he worked with who died has a kid who lives down the block and the kid is sixteen and is a girl. That, plus that, plus that, equals babysitter. Me.

He’s part right. I’m old enough to babysit, but too young to go out to The Old Gold

Disco or some bar, so fuck it: I’ll babysit.

I think, though, that Salesguy expected me to look more like a girl when he came to the back door of his house to let me in. Maybe. The truth is, I don’t know what he was thinking. People are always looking at me weird. At school, at church, at the movies. I’m not loud, I don’t make out in public, I don’t even hold hands with anyone. Still, I feel like there are eyeball tracks running up and down either side of my spine like tire marks.

Salesguy has the inside door open but just stands there, looking at me through the glass. My jacket is open and the soles of my runners start sticking to the snow while he looks and looks. I shift from sole to sole. I have all my records with me, wrapped in a folded blanket, and I hold them like I’m protecting them, but really, it’s to keep warm.

Minus 32 Centigrade is 25 below, so start of the New Year or not, December thirty first,

1978 in Regina, Saskatchewan is cold.

None of This Happened, But All of It is True

Salesguy finally opens the door. He says to his wife, “This is, uh...” and trails off, so I say, “Hi.” She blinks. They leave around nine but their kids are already in bed.

The whole time they’re gone, I don’t even look in the kids’ rooms. Instead, I listen to music on the stereo in the rumpus room in their basement, squeezing the padded headphones to my ears so it will be even louder. God, it must be great to be in Sales. It’s a Pioneer component stereo. I am getting a crick in my neck because from hunching over the covers so they're all I see while I listen. From the cover of Horses Patti Smith sees me seeing her and she sees me back. She’s got one eye that looks at me and one eye that doesn’t quite, like she can see two places at once. She sees me and she is seeing herself at the same time, and it’s like she’s saying This is how to look at yourself.

I know she’s a woman. Of course I know she’s a woman. It’s her moustache that makes everyone so mad at her, I guess. It really shows. My mom uses Neet. But if you can tear your eyes away Patti Smith’s moustache, there’s a lot more to look at. Like, she dresses like a guy. A punk New Wave guy.

I knew all about Patti Smith before I bought Horses because I saw the Candy Slice skit on Saturday Night Live with my mom. Candy Slice burped and pissed herself on stage. It’s just, when I went out and bought Horses from the guy at Music Plus — that’s the record store where it’s always so dark inside that you feel like a light bulb is getting screwed directly into your eye hole when you go back outside — the English guy at

Music Plus, he seemed to really like Patti Smith, and was not grossed out by her and her moustache, or by me for buying the record.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Really, I don’t really know what he thought. Probably he thought, Who’s this guy? Ha ha. That’s a joke on me because I am totally flat like Patti

Smith.

He put a thick plastic sleeve over the album and said, This is great. I love this.

She’s a poet. And I figured, if he could tell Patti Smith was a girl, a woman, even though she doesn’t look like one, then maybe. ... maybe something. I don’t know what. Maybe somebody would mistake me for girl, would maybe figure out I am a girl, even though I don’t even want to look like Sandy Olsson or Betty Rizzo from Grease, or like Stephanie or Annette What’s-her-name from Saturday Night Fever.

My cousin has to take me out with him on weekend nights, and last summer I ended up seeing Grease, like, thirteen times. And Saturday Night Fever once. Every

Saturday night, I would sit in the in the front seat between my cousin and some girlfriend, and we’d go to the drive-in and after he paid we would find a spot and park.

When he was hanging the speaker on the lip of the driver’s window and rolling it up, my cousin would look across me at the girlfriend and say, “May I offer you some refreshment?” wiggling his eyebrows. “Some popcorn? Liquorice All-Sorts? A soft drink?” digging into his pocket for his wallet to show he’s loaded. He works at the potash mine near Rocanville, and comes up on the weekends to help my mom. Supposedly.

The drive-in girlfriend always said okay and my cousin would shove a couple of dollars at me without looking at me and without taking his eyes off her. “Get yourself something,” he’d say to me. “Take your time.”

I’d get the popcorn and drinks and then stand outside the snack bar eating all the popcorn and drinking one of the drinks while the jumping hot dog and the juggling bag

of popcorn thing was on and the Coming Soons were on and then the start of the movie, waiting for it to get full dark.

I like finding the car in the dark. I figured out after seeing Grease for the third or fifth time that if I got back to the car too early, my cousin and the girlfriend would still be in the backseat, so I’d wait until the movie had actually started and played a bit. Then I’d wade through the fumes of snack bar exhaust and between the parked cars and waves of

We made out. Under the dock. We stayed out. Till ten o’clock that comes out of the speakers like a thick smell.

I’d wait for my cousin and his date to get finished in the back seat, watching

Grease and thinking, Well, I'm not Sandy and I’m not Frenchy so I guess I must be Rizzo.

But that’s not exactly right either.

The time the second movie was Saturday Night Fever I threw up into my shirt. I caught the bright Orange Crush and the yellow popcorn as it fountained out of me in my shirt front so it wouldn’t get on the car seats or the floor.

“Oh, you poor little thing,” said the girlfriend, “Here, honey. I have some Kleenex in my purse.”

“Poor little pig is more like it. Pee-yew,” my cousin said, unrolling his window. His mouth smiled at the girlfriend. “Get out,” he added to me, reaching over the front seat for the door handle in the back.

I got out carefully, cradling the puddle in my shirtfront, and poured it onto the gravel. From all the speakers hanging from all the car windows all around me came the voice of the guy in Saturday Night Fever saying to Annette: “Are you proud of yourself,

Annette? Is that what you wanted? Good. Now you're a cunt.” So I spent a little time on my hands and knees in the gravel throwing up some more.

My cousin’s date got out of the car and hunched down in front of me. Her white tube top was bright as a blank movie screen in the dark. She held some bunched-up

Kleenex out toward me and said, “You alright, honey?” but before I could answer she whispered, “It’s not always like that” and I know she meant what Tony’s friends were doing with Annette in the back seat while Tony drove them around in the car with them doing it to her, Annette going No no no and her nostrils big as a pig’s and her eyes are big as a cow’s, and the size of them made me barf and I did because out of the hundreds of drive-in speakers in the car windows or still hanging on the posts comes that high- pitched Bee Gee voice going More than a WOOman! More than a woman to meeee...

What isn’t more than a woman to him? Everything?

Crap. I didn’t hear any of it, my favourite album, going round and round thinking about the drive-in. The record is making that noise when the needle is stuck at the end of the record, hitting the end of the spiral scratch, bouncing off, hitting it again. I guess I’ve known it in my ear for a while. I watch it bounce. It goes crap crap crap.

Crap. I didn’t hear any of it, my favourite album, going round and round thinking about the drive-in. Crap. I didn’t hear any of it, my favourite album, going round and round thinking about the drive-in. Just kneeling over the turntable, watching the needle plow the bright black spiral into the blacker black of record.

I carefully lift the needle off the record then the record off the spindle, using only the flats of my fingers on the record’s edge.

I sort my albums. What to listen to next? How to wash away the taste of Saturday

Night Fever? I’ve got The Clash UK by The Clash. It cost me fifteen dollars because it’s an import. The guy at Music Plus said I should listen to it before Give ‘em Enough Rope.

I’ve got 45s: “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen” and “Pretty Vacant” by

The Sex Pistols but I’ve played the A-sides so much they sound all scratchy. I’ve got

Eddie Money’s Eddie Money. I thought it would be more like Patti Smith because he looks like her. Same with Rocket to Russia. Joey Ramone and Patti Smith look kind of alike.

There’s Patti Smith again. I bought Wave the same time I bought Horses. I like

“So You Want to Be (a Rock 'n' Roll Star)”. I like the brackets in the song’s name. I like when she says This is the era where. Everybody. Creates. Most of the song, it sounds like she’s sarcastic, but on this part it sounds like she’s telling you.

My mom liked Patti Smith when we saw her on Saturday Night Live. That was after we moved the hospital bed into the living room. We still watch TV in there. In fact, the living room is just like always, except that the armchair got moved into the spare room, so there would be room in the living room for the hospital bed. It’s pretty cool, because we can crank the head of the bed up to watch, and everything else we like on

TV, only now we watch it in bed.

Which is all the time. For my mom. Now. She hasn’t really got out of bed since

Halloween, and my cousin is going to move in when he gets laid off at the mine. My mom might have asked him to. I think she did.

I can’t check, because she doesn’t always feel like talking, and when she does, she mostly wants to give me all this important advice she’s got for me, like, “You can bleach

or you can use Neet. Neet’s better.” Or, “Virgins can’t use tampons.” Or, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Advice like that.

Crap. It’s 2 a.m. It’s still New Year’s Eve. Salesguy and his wife are back.

Mrs. Salesguy is coming down the stairs. Her husband, Mr. Salesguy, is standing behind her and they watch as I start gathering up my albums. It takes way too long. I put all the records into their covers and then I put the album covers into the plastic jackets they came in and I keep my head down to get it done faster but I think I hear or see him say to her, “See? What'd I tell you?” and I can’t help looking up and I see she has her ear turned to him but her eyes turned to me and when I pass them on the stairs.

I have my jacket on over my white buttoned-up men’s shirt, just like the one Patti

Smith and Lenny Kaye and Joey Ramone wear. I shove my feet into my sneakers and my skinny black necktie is on the outside of the blanket-wrapped package of records but I leave it that way because Salesguy is sliding a blue five-dollar bill between my fingers and the records and I don’t do up my sneakers I just want to get out of here and it’s so cold out walking home it makes my eyes water like crazy it’s so cold it's not tears though

I’m not crying I’m not crying I'm not crying it’s just really cold.

Truer Than True

It really is a new year, but nothing is different. I’m still skinny and flat chested and

I don’t get asked out. I go to school at the one beside the all-girl’s school, but we’re both

Catholic schools. Mine is co-ed, and we don’t have uniforms, but in a way we do. Like, for girls, you are supposed to as pretty as possible, which means curling your hair with a curling iron and plucking your eyebrows and nice dresses or tight, tight Jordache jeans, and waiting or hoping to get asked out. So you know you did it right.

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For guys, I don’t know what the look is exactly. Horny, I guess. As for me, I go to school and I come home and listen to music and take care of my mom. When I listen to records, it’s like I can be part of a different world.

There’s maybe two other kids at school, two guys that might be into punk rock.

They are too ugly to be anything else, and I have seen them at Music Plus. Last week, I was going through the Imports section and they came in. I kept my head down so they wouldn’t see me, but I heard them talking, and I heard them say there’s going to be a punk band playing a concert at the Protestant high school close to ours. I think I was supposed to hear them. I’m going to go.

One of the guys is at my school and in my grade but none of our classes are the same. He came to school one day last year wearing a blanket and what looked like nothing under it, and I overheard him say to someone who asked that he was doing it to show support for the prisoners at Long Kesh. I had to read up on it at the library.

This year, he just dresses punk and is ugly. Not that you are a punk automatically just for being ugly. It’s more like if you are ugly already and don’t want to do anything about it, and if you are into punk, then the ugly isn’t ugly, it’s punk.

Not that you are a punk automatically just for being ugly. It’s more like if you are ugly already and don’t want to do anything about it, and if you are into punk, then the ugly isn’t ugly, it’s punk.

Like, there are these two girls who are friends. And one of them is skinny as a stick, like me: knobby elbows and knees and stick-out collar bones and no boobs. And her friend is the one whose mom made her dress like Heidi for all of elementary school, including the braids and the embroidered apron. Then when we got to high school, these

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two girls went and got jobs at Shopper’s Drug Mart in Cosmetics. When I was in

Shoppers getting my mom’s prescription filled this one time, I had to pay for it at the

Cosmetics Counter and the girl, Sherri, pretended she didn’t even know me. I said, “Hi,

Sherri!” in this weird surprised voice, and she said to an invisible thing over my shoulder,

“Hello. Can I help you?” Her eyebrows were plucked to one line of hairs arching way above each eye, and her eyeshadow was like peacock feathers. Her eyes looked huge.

And the one who used to be dressed up like the Swiss milk maid was waiting on someone else behind the cosmetics counter, and she had giant hair that was perfectly feathered out to the sides and she had lost a bunch of weight and was no longer fat.

It’s like they had gone pretty. Like they had made it — crossed over to the other side. And I was still on the ugly side.

I didn’t care, But what it meant now was that there were two fewer girls on whatever side I am on. And even though I wasn’t going to do stuff to get pretty like they had, it suddenly came clear to me that it really is about doing particular things to your eyebrows and hair and body, and what happens if you don’t. You just stay you.

The guy who dressed up for the Long Kesh protesters has gone punk, and he stayed ugly, only now it makes sense. And the truth is, he is not even that ugly.

And the photographs in the ‘zines that come with the Import Albums I buy have pictures of girls and guys that are sometimes so bad to look at that you can’t. There is a girl with a brush cut in the middle and kitty ears on the sides, and she is fat and wears fishnet tops. The guys are so skinny their chests go inward. They’re ugly on purpose, like they’re trying to be. You know they didn’t buy those outfits like that.

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Some of the girls look like ugly guys, like me. And some of them are boyfriends and girlfriends, you can tell. So they like each other that way, too.

I don’t think any of that could happen here. Not at my school.

But I am going to that concert at the Protestant school next week. It’s during the day time, at lunch, and I will probably get detention. But I’m going. If those two ugly guys from my school are going, then I’m going, too.

I’ve never been inside a Protestant school.

True as History

When I walk into the front doors of Campbell Collegiate and start down the hall to the gym. First thing, I notice there are no crosses on the walls.

Bristol board posters in the hallway say, “New Wave Day! Lunch Hour Dance!

Come One, Come Pogo!”

Hurry. Empty halls. I’m wearing bowling shoes I stole from the bowling alley.

Everybody knows the brother of the bass player for Supertramp is a math teacher at Campbell, so this band is probably from England too. What’s coming out of the gym sounds like the imports I bought for twelve dollars each: This Year’s Model and Give ‘em

Enough Rope, or maybe The Clash UK. I can’t really tell the difference between

“Complete Control” and “Safe European Home”, but the album makes me want to pee my pants every time I hear Joe Strummer sing the words “Jesus control!” Can you be

Catholic and still be a punk?

The gym doors are closed. No. One steel door slams open against the painted concrete block wall, letting the dark out into hallway. It lets out the sound of drums and

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guitars and singing but I can’t make out the words and then three girls suddenly squeeze out like they're a cork coming out of a bottle. They pop out in a clump, a cluster, a bunch, stuck to each other at the shoulder and at the arm.

Are they from my school? No. They hate me anyway. This is how you tell: their arms are crossed tight under their boobs so they can push them up higher but pretend it’s just coincidence. Their chins are touching their chests but their eyes are looking up from under their eyebrow-pencil eyebrows. One of them has a curling iron burn on the side of her forehead like a fuzzybear caterpillar. Six eyes cut sidewise at me, then at back to each other, then back at me. Really quickly. They’re mad. They don’t approve. They don’t like the music in the gym, and they don’t like a bunch of other things and they want somebody to know. They do not approve.

They morse-code each other with their eyeliner eyelids until they decide which one of them’s going to say something to me then the nearest one unslacks her mouth but before anything comes out I slide past into them through the doors.

I’m inside with the dark and the music. The guitar solo is like a skunk smell and I am all of a sudden another skunk in love with it: I follow it sliding along the gym wall with steps fast and small because holy crap it's not one of those stairway to heaven solos that only go in one direction: this one zigzags and I take a step sudden almost jump half up the steps to the stage before I get myself to stop.

The singer is all angles through the solo. There’s a pile of naked mannequin bodies on the stage, bald and smooth, and a bunch of old black and white TVs tuned to snow.

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The guitar player is close to this side of the gym, one step from the stairs on the stage. He is as beautiful as a girl. His chest is skinny as Bristol board and his jacket hangs off his shoulders that are so wide it looks like he forgot to take the hanger out before he put the jacket on. He has Neapolitan ice cream skin and Bachelor Button flower eyes.

Girl face, man body. Man body, girl face.

He looks up. All of a sudden. I must have got too close to the stage, like I was going to cross into the light of the flickering TVs. Eyes blue and wide, lashes so thick they outline them like makeup. He’s like a great big blonde farmer’s daughter farmhand punk. I wonder if you can look like that and be a punk guy. God he looks happy.

I take one step down, back into the dark. Stick myself to the wall like Boo Radley behind Jem’s door. We watched it in English after we read the book.

The solo’s done. The singer yanks the mike to his face — Oh what a life of luxury! I don't own a car so it doesn't own me. He makes the tee of that don't and that doesn't so sharp and pointy it becomes part of the next word — Doane tone acar. Dozzen tone me. He must be from England! He has short dark hair — short hair! — and he’s skinny and he’s pale.

He sounds even more English on the chorus. Living living living living living in pover-tay-AY ! Oy’m as happy as Oy. Deserve. To BAY!

It must be real punk.

It’s so great! It’s so loud! I feel like yelling, like I’m filled up with helium. I jump away from the wall and I open my mouth but what comes out is “Ow!” because a male teacher with white stripes up the leg of his track pants darts past me up the stairs and rips across the stage pulls the thing out of the amp.

"&!

The guitar player doesn’t get it right away and he keeps on playing even though there’s no sound coming out of his guitar. He looks at, tilting the guitar, tilting his head, then he takes hold of the end of the chord thing and follows it to his amp like he's Wile E.

Coyote following the burning fuse to the bundle of Acme dynamite. When he gets to the amp he plugs his guitar back in and whips back to the front but now the principal is up there and he's got the mike away from the singer and they’re yelling at each other. The drummer is standing up behind the drums with a stick in each hand like melted sixguns but he looks scared.

The singer gets the mike back from the Principal and yells, “This is the best form of birth control I know. This song is called Getting Head, Giving Head. One two three four!” Shit. When he yells he’s got a no-accent voice. Shit. They’re not from England

True.

“We’re called The Extroverts!”

I am never going to see a real punk band.

“Come see us this Monday night at The Schnitzelhaus!”

False.

Historically True

Monday night, My cousin lets me out at 1326 Hamilton Street and drives off. The red tail lights stay in sight for a long time. Some bikers go by, driving really slow.

Because it’s winter time, their motorcycles standing between two hay bales, tied upright in the back of their half-ton. Bikers always look at you scary. It’s good to look back a

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little, but not a lot. I usually pretend I see somebody down the street, and then wave to them and then walk a few steps toward them.

1326 Hamilton Street is a Hungarian “Family Restaurant”. This can’t be right. It’s

Monday night, and there is a Closed sign in the door. But just as I start walking toward a bus stop, I see the sign that says to go around back of The Schnitzelhaus. The sign looks like a hostage note: all different lettering styles and words cut out and pasted back down at shitty angles like the kidnappers are in too much of a hurry or worried about the tied- up baby to lay the letters in a straight row.

In back there is a garage, or a slaughterhouse. It’s a barn. It’s a warehouse for teeny tiny, uh, wares.

A guy with a cigarette comes out of the building. I recognize him. He was at

Campbell. With The Extroverts, because he’s too old for high school. He’s got a very small pointy nose and his voice seems to come out the top of it, but in a nice way, when he says, “You here to see The Extroverts?” with a smile on his face likes it’s normal for me to be here.

I say really fast, “I’m just waiting for my friends.” He doesn’t ask how old I am.

“Three bucks,” he says, and he sells me a ticket that has ‘The Extroverts’ and

‘B.Y.O.B., O.K.?’ on it. I’ve never heard of that other band, but I am glad I got the right place for The Extroverts.

The pointy-nosed guy says in his confusingly kind, coming-out-of-the-top-of-his- nose voice, “You might want to come back a little later. Around ten.” Ten o’clock is late for a Monday night. But I buy my ticket. When I don’t say anything back, he goes back inside.

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When you’re a teenager, January first isn’t really the start of the New Year. And when you’re a punk in Regina, The Schnitzelhaus isn’t a Hungarian Family Restaurant called The Schnitzelhaus. The Schnitzelhaus is an ugly building behind The

Schnitzelhaus, where being ugly is what get’s you in.

True Story

Next day at school it’s like I’ve got an invisible badge on my uniform. Kids from school who I never noticed before or who don’t know me are — it’s like we see each other in infrared. We look at each other from the edges of our eyes, recognizing each other: you were there last night. I saw you.

This one guy nods at me. I’ve noticed him before, because his head has an odd shape and his hair follows it. Now I realize that if he pushes his hair up, instead of smearing it down over his forehead, he looks like a punk, like how he looked last night at

The Schnitz.

I’ve got an idea. Close to the sink in the can, I can see myself only from the waist up. Our school uniform for the girls is kilt and a white dress shirt and a dark tie. My hair is in a pixie cut, like it has been since I was 10 or something. I rub the bar of soap on my hands until I make a paste, then use it spike my hair up all over my head.

Now I look great. The school shirt and kilt is good, too. The girls at school and at the all-girls school next door, Marian — all the girls who are disco — they must have to go through a complete transformation for Wednesday Night Disco Night at The Sandman

Inn on Albert Street.

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A person could go to the The Schnitzelhaus in just their school uniform if they have some handsoap in their hair. The Extroverts are going to be playing there every

Monday.

I feel brave and scared when I go back into the hallway.

On the way to my locker, people whisper bomb me with the same old shit:

“Lezzie,” because I am flat and don’t have a boyfriend, “Flatso” because I am flat,

“Plateau” because I am flat, “Runway” because I am flat, and now “Punker”. I wasn’t trying to look pretty, but being a lesbo and being flat and being a punk are not the same.

The way they way they want you to feel when they say it is the same, though: “Whatever you are, I wouldn't want to be it.” That’s the same. “Flat. Lesbo. Punk. Glad I’m not you.” I get it.

I don’t talk to people at school very much. It’s weird being looked at, but I’m used to ignoring what they say to me.

At lunch, a girl from Grade 10 comes over and talks to me. She has a big bust, and so everyone says she is a slut. She stands by my locker and says, in a kind of mad way, “Do you wanna come over after school and listen to records?”

“Okay,” I say. Why is she talking to me? We’re not even in the same grade. She looks older, because of her bust. I look younger because of mine. She must be 16 already.

She doesn’t know that because I got accelerated, I am too. Sixteen.

“My house is — ”

“Across the street,” I finish for her.

"*!

I know who she is. Her other brother, Nye, was at The Schnitzelhaus last night and I recognized him from before he graduated last year, when I was in Grade 11. He danced with his head down. He used to go to our school, last year.

After school, their house is not at all like mine. There are books everywhere, and it looks like their mom is running a business out of their kitchen. She’s on the phone when we walk in.

“It’s De Young! De Young, for Chrissake, not De Jong, like Erica.”

There are orange NDP lawn signs in a stack on the floor.

“Let’s go downstairs,” the girl, Nellie, says. I wonder what the name Nellie is short for. There’s no Saint Nellie.

I risk everything: “What’s your name short for?”

“Huh?”

“Lucie is for Sainte-Lucie.” That’s me. “What’s Nellie short for?”

“McClung.”

Wow. She is so grumpy.

But the rumpus room. The rumpus room. It’s like heaven.

There are posters up all over the walls: The Ramones, The Clash, Buzzcocks,

Blondie, The Jam, The Damned.

“Wow,” I say, and my mouth doesn’t close after I say it.

Halfway up the wood panelled wall — not the cement wall — there’s a little rail, and there are albums displayed on it, as if they’re posters, too. I keep mine in a stack beside the hifi. This is better. All the records I want to buy from Music Plus, they’re right here in front of me. Never Mind The Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols by The Sex Pistols. I've

#+!

always wondered what that other band, The Bollocks, think about that. Gang of Four. I bet they’re from China. An album called Lust for Life by a very happy kind of ugly woman with wet hair and jug ears and nice eyes but — nope, it’s just Iggy Pop. It says so in the yellow border. Iggy, Ziggy. Maybe he sounds like that douche, David Bowie.

There’s X-Ray Spex, Germ Free Adolescents, and one by The Cramps. I don’t know if that one looks very punk. It’s more Tales from the Crypt. The girl on it looks like me, though, but if I had long hair instead of a pixie cut.

Also, there are guitars. An acoustic one with a string for a strap and an electric one.

“Do you play the guitar?” I ask.

“No way,” says Nellie, and looks even madder. Then I notice that her eyebrows look mad when she’s not, because they’re still mad when she smiles very large and says:

“I’m the drummer.”

She goes and sits behind the drum kit that’s over by the deep freeze. I’m still just looking around, just looking at the one wall covered in record albums. There’s the drum kit wall and a wall with a door to another room and the deep freeze, but off in one corner there's wood panelling and a carpet and a hifi and bookshelves like a little living room.

Nellie roars or squeals in this crazy English accent voice, “Little girls should be seen and not heard. But Oi think oh bondage! Up yours! One two three four?” and starts drumming like mad.

She is amazing. She plays and plays, and I get she’s playing the whole song, but there’s no rest of the band. She kind of yell-hums really loud during one part, then she

#"!

sings the “Oh bondage! Up yours! “Oh bondage! No more! Oh bondage! Up yours! Oh bondage! No more!” over and over again, still drumming.

My cousin has an 8-track with Wipe Out on it by The Surfaris and I’ve heard it.

Quite a lot. So I know good drumming when I hear it. I figured my cousin would like

The Ramones if he liked The Surfaris. He didn’t.

Nellie is still drumming and she’s really good. She is amazing. But after a while, I don’t know what to look at. Like, you can only watch a person playing drums by themselves for a certain amount of time.

I make myself get really interested in a poster for a punk rock movie called The

Punk Rock Movie and a band called The Slits and The Slits girl has eyebrows like

Nellie’s.

“Hey!” yells Nellie at my back, and I turn around. Her eyebrows are permanently mad looking because they go up at the outsides, but I get now why she looks that way.

“This one’s by The Mo-dettes. It’s called Foolish Girl.”

She keeps going with her drums-only concert, singing in a way I can’t really make out except on the chorus. She sings along with her drumming which is weird. But hard to do, I guess.

I need to look at something so I look at the album covers that the Greenbergs have stuck up like they are posters. The Cramps one for “All Women are Bad” has four women on it, but I’m pretty sure two of them are not women. One of the men does not know how to stand in open-toe heels. I really carefully unstick the album from the wall with my fingernails only. There’s no record inside, but there is picture that I am not sure

I’m supposed to see. It’s one of the guitar players holding a microphone at her crotch and

##!

the guy singer is on his hands in knees in front of her. She’s holding him by the hair at the top of his head with hand, and holding her mike straight out mouth with the other.

Actually, she’s holding the mike into the guy’s mouth. He’s wearing pants but no shirt and a pair of high heels. No more peeking inside the covers. I really don’t think I was supposed to see that. It was a photograph like they were in private only it must be on a stage because of the microphone. I really don’t think I was supposed to see that. I kind of can’t stop looking. I put it back, press the album cover with the picture inside back against the concrete. There’s doubled over electrical tape holding it in place and the stick is mostly gone. I have to just put it down on the bookshelf.

The bookshelves are down really low. I take a look. There’s all the stuff you’d expect, Shakespeare and stuff, but also some books that aren’t even in English, I realize.

You have to tilt your head to the other side to read the title.

I’m just making out the title of one little white paperback book, “The Communist

Manifesto”, when Nellie quits drumming and says, “Put some clothes on, you knob, we’ve got company. Mom needs another NDP campaign stuffer”

I turn my head and there’s Nellie’s older brother, the one who graduated last year, coming out of the door of what is obviously his bedroom. I can see the corner of a rumpled bed through the open door. It’s got cowboy sheets on it. I’m not sure why Nellie called him a knob. He’s not naked. He has clothes on. Gotch, anyway. At least. Just.

That’s all. Nye Greenberg sleeps in his gotch and nothing else.

He goes back into his room and closes the door behind him but the smell of boy- bedroom stays, as does the image of his y-front underwear, navy with white. You can tell that they aren’t new. My face is hot, and my heart is beating fast.

#$!

“Come on,” says Nellie, coming out from behind the drums, starting to go upstairs, “Before the a-holy Saint Nye flashes us again, the pervert.”

But I want to stay. See, her brother looked at me before he went back in his room.

And he looked like he was embarrassed. By me seeing him. And I want to tell him I wasn’t.

Embarrassed.

Because I think I just found out the answer to the question, “What's the opposite of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever?”

True Fiction

A month later, and we’re on Nye’s bed listening to Iggy Pop.

Nellie’s mom’s not home yet, but when she comes home, Nellie and I will stuff envelopes and then go driving around with her to put lawn signs up in the neighbourhood. Vote Simon DeJong, Regina East.

Like most Mondays, we keep our school uniforms on because after dropping pamphlets in peoples’ mailboxes Nellie and I will get dropped off at Music Plus then walk to The Schnitzelhaus for The Extroverts. Our school uniforms work really well for going to either place. We don’t stand out. Even though we might look weird to everyone else, all of a sudden it’s like nobody is looking at you at all. You’re invisible, and you have this kind of privacy even though you’re in public. People look the other way.

Nellie carries a dog collar around with her, and eyeliner. I stick my hair up with toothpaste and do my tie up tighter. Nellie gets rid of hers, unbuttons her blouse. A

#%!

couple of times she’s worn a black bra under her white shirt. I love Monday nights at The

Schnitz.

In Nye’s room Nellie gets up off the bed and goes into the rumpus room where the hifi is, and puts on with Lust for Life again. It’s already dark out even though it’s not even five thirty. The window in Nye’s bedroom is one of those little, high-up basement windows, and it’s dirty, to boot. The streetlight comes on outside, but it doesn’t help much. Nellie switches on the light on Nye’s desk. She aims it away from where he had it pointed so the Mickey Mouse puppet hanging by its own string so there isn’t the shadow of a hanged Mickey Mouse on the wall.

“Fucking Nye is so weird,” she says getting back onto the bed with me, and rolling in close to me because the mattress has a sag in it. I roll in, too, onto my stomach, bury my face in Nye’s pillow. I can’t stand it. As soon as she says her brother’s name, everything in me seems to tighten, like I’m filling up, like my skin is too small. Nye’s pillow has the cowboy pillow case on, and it smells of him.

I’m on my stomach, and Nellie is beside me. I’m breathing Nye in from his pillow, my hands underneath it to smash it to my face. The record goes to Sixteen. I guess

Nellie is just letting it go instead of getting up to put Lust for Life on again. Her hand instead is at the bottom of my school skirt, at the hem, where she is lightly scratching the top of my legs through my tights. This song is pretty long. By the time Some Weird Sin starts Nellie has her fingers in the waistband of my tights under my skirt and her tongue in my ear. Does it mean I’m a lezzie if I am thinking of her brother Nye when she pushes my tights and my gotch down to my knees and I move my legs apart so she can do what she does?

#&!

I must love it, because we do it nearly every day after school. Before her mom and Nye get back from the campaign office and before her dad gets back from the

University where he is a professor. When we are in private.

Never, never has Nellie tried to get me to do it back to her. I don’t know if I would. She wears eye make up and has longer hair than mine and her boobs are bigger than mine. I don’t want to touch them or suck their tips the way she does mine after she finishes and turns me over onto my back. Maybe I will this time. I know she would like it.

With her fingers on the buttons of my school shirt and my tights and panties around one ankle because I kicked around so much, I’m thinking I could at least kiss her back because she is kissing my mouth, and my face, and my neck and I don’t wear a bra because my mom said I don’t really need one, but my boobs sit there like a couple of single-scoop ice creams on my chest waiting for Nellie.

And there’s Nye in the doorway. And his finger is in front of his lips and Nellie’s face is down on me and Nye closes the door. I can’t tell what he looked like. Maybe sorry for catching us in private, and kind of sad because he loves his sister. But he didn’t stop looking when he was shutting the door. I close my eyes. I wish I were a lesbian, for

Nellie.

But I’m not.

I am the passenger. A la la la la lalala la.

I arch up toward her.

#'!

True Facts

The Greenbergs have been feeding me supper every night for like, a month or

more. These people talk and talk all through supper, about everything. Except hockey.

And church. They don’t go to church. They talk about “the campaign” and “Ed” and

“Simon” and get Nellie and I to talk about what we are doing at school because the dad,

Nathan, is an English professor and is quite bossy about making sure you know what

you’ve read. I tell him I like poetry and he asks me what poetry I like as though he is

going to laugh at me, but when I tell him archy and mehitabel and ee cummings he

doesn’t bother to start laughing and instead we just talk.

The problem is that when I get home to my mom it’s sometimes really late, and

all I do is check the note from the VON nurse and maybe kiss my mom before I go to bed

in my room.

When I open up the kitchen door, my cousin is in the kitchen cutting a store-

bought birthday cake with our bread knife. There are paper plates.

Instead of Happy Birthday, he sings at me, I’d rather see you dead, little girl,

than to be with another man. You better keep your head, little girl, or you won’t know

where I am. You better run for you life if you can, little girl. Hide your head in the sand,

little girl. Catch you with another man, that’s the end. Little girl. He’s cutting the cake

and putting a slice on a plate and licking the knife and his fingers and sticking a candle in

the piece of cake and looking at me while he sings it. It’s The Beatles.

He lights the birthday candle using a Bic he flicks. He had it in the ass pocket of

his Jordache jeans. It’s not my mom’s birthday, and mine isn’t until the end of February.

#(!

“Happy Birthday to me,” says my cousin, disco-bumping the door from the kitchen with his hip so that it opens into the hall. I follow him, and I have a smile on my face by the time we get to my mom’s bed in the living room.

“Hi,” I say to her, and kiss her. She’s having an okay day, but doesn’t say anything back.

My cousin, Robert, which my mom and I say in French, says, “It’s my birthday,

Auntie. I’m twenty-one.”

I don’t think he is twenty-one. I think he’s maybe twenty-four or -five. I don’t want to fight about it right now.

My mom looks like she’s trying to make her face look happy and interested. She can’t completely control how it looks, but I know what her grimaces are supposed to mean.

I put a plastic fork into her fist. Because her wrist is kind of permanently turned in, she can feed herself perfectly well if I raise her elbow up for her.

When the phone rings in the kitchen and my cousin goes to answer it I practically start crying I am so glad.

“Hey mom, I am sorry I’m so late,” I say. “Remember my new friend I told you about, Nellie Greenberg? And how we are working on the campaign to elect Simon

DeJong?”

To my complete surprise, my mom nods. MS is like that. Like, one minute it seems like she can’t talk or stop her head from wagging, and the next it’s like, “Hey, want to go the Golden Mile?” where we used to go to shop. The last time we went, I got her a wheel chair from the mall and pushed her around in it. She loved it. At first. Then

#)!

she, or I, noticed how many people there were in wheel chairs, and how many of them were way too young, like her. More than you would think. You can tell which ones have

MS because they don’t have grey hair. That time at Golden Mile, it was like we suddenly realized there were people with MS all over the place. It’s like when somebody points out to you that it’s Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones singing backups on You’re So Vain, that’s all you ever hear after that when you listen to the song. Once you find out about

MS, it’s everywhere.

Then, you find out there’s more MS in Saskatchewan than anywhere else in

Canada. In North America. On the planet. Nobody knows why. I know they used to test chemical weapons in Manitoba. I think maybe they sprayed us with MS.

I look at my mom again to see if it was a real nod. She looks back at me, nods again. Like, go on, she seems to be saying.

I don’t know if I should say sorry for being home late all the time. Or tell her about why I’m late.

“The Greenbergs are really into politics,” I start. “The mom is an NDPer full- time, and Nye and Nellie help all the time. Or during elections.”

I say, “The dad is a university professor. They’re from Winnipeg.”

I know all about Winnipeg because we had a play about The Winnipeg General

Strike come to our school. They did it in the gym, in costumes, with the actors, who were grown-ups, right on the floor, not on the stage. They just walked around the students where we were sitting on the floor, and yelled over our heads, or sometimes right at us.

Then they came and did a play about the Estevan Coal Miners Strike. That was at

St. Matthew’s, my elementary school.

#*!

They used cap guns and some kind of smoke and the lights were off in the gym, and we would twist around in our spots on the gym floor to watch them running toward the picket line and the company store. And it was a musical.

There’s my mom, looking at me, waiting.

“The NDP is not just for farmers any more,” I say, realizing I know quite a lot from listening to Janet Greenberg— that’s Nellie’s and Nye’s mom — when she’s at the door trying to get someone to take a law sign.

“Even though we don’t have a class system in Canada, there are still rich and poor. Simon DeJong wants the poor to have what the rich have always had. Simon

DeJong wants to make sure Joe Clark’s Conservatives don’t take away Medicare. Simon

DeJong wants to tell Trudeau.”

The light that was in my mom’s face for a minute has gone out. Sometimes that means she’s having pain. Or maybe she doesn’t want to hear me say something about

Trudeau. He’s French, like we are. I get the cake plate and fork out of the way, and help her drink water through the straw. There’s always a cup beside her bed. The nurse who comes a couple times a week tells me I’m doing a good job, but I’m not sure.

I want to say to someone, “It’s because of Tommy Douglas and the CCF that we have Medicare.” I say it to my mom, for conversation.

“Tommy the Commie,” says my cousin from the doorway. I guess he’s off the phone.

But I know we have the bed and stuff, and that the nurse who used to come before my cousin said we didn’t need her, because of Medicare.

$+!

Before I can say anything back, he says to me, “Hey, I moved your stuff into the guestroom. I have to sleep in your room because you’ve got a bigger bed.”

He looks at me for a long minute but I don’t say anything back.

“You’re hardly around, anyway,” he adds.

That’s that. That’s how he moved in.

True to Life

Nellie’s mom Janet makes a cake for me on my real birthday, February 26. Now that my cousin lives at our house, I can be out until late. I mean, he’s there to take care of my mom, and I can come home whenever I want. Janet invites me to stay for dinner,

Nellie tells her I’m already staying to sleep over, we eat dinner — hamburgers and salad

— and they all sing Happy Birthday to me, Janet, Nellie and the dad, Nathan.

After dinner, I do dishes with Nellie and her mom. The two of us dry, and the dad puts the dishes away. Nye comes in from outside while we’re doing dishes. He moves as though there is no movement to it all. He’s tall and super skinny and you expect that he would make clicky noises like a geometry compass but he doesn’t. He kind of glides.

“Whose birthday?” he says, coming over to the kitchen counter and pickup up cake with his hand.

“Lucie’s. Say happy birthday. Have some real food, Nye,” says his mom.

“Happy Birthday. I ate at school.” He means the university, where he goes. He eats the cake out of his fist, leaning against the counter, but he’s really nice.

“We’re coming downstairs in a minute to make a party for Lucie in the rumpus room, so don’t bogart the stereo, okay?” That’s Janet, to Nye.

$"!

“Oooh! Socialist Sing-Along Time!” he says, sarcastic, but nice, too. Smiling.

Nathan, the dad, laughs. I don’t quite get the joke. Nellie and her mom both grin.

I watch Nye go down to where his bedroom is. I like – I love – the way he walks down the stairs. He turns his feet kind of sideways because they are too big for the stairs.

I can see his shoulder blades move under his white shirt. He keeps his head ducked a little, to not hit it on the ceiling going downstairs. His dark brown hair is short, but it makes a little point at that back, right in the middle of his neck, that points down into his collar. He doesn’t wear a t-shirt or undershirt under his shirt.

“It’s nice you could spend your birthday with us, Lucie,” Janet says. “Are you sure it’s okay with your mom? How’s she doing?”

Mrs. Greenberg is always so nice to me. She doesn’t ask very many questions, which is the best part.

“My cousin Robert is staying in tonight,” I tell her. “So she won’t be alone.”

“Robert,” says Nellie, repeating it the French way I do. “Ro-bear.”

Mrs. Greenberg — Janet — says, “What about your birthday? Won’t your mom miss it?”

“We did something this morning while I gave her her bath.”

Shit. I didn’t mean to say that.

“While she was having a bath.”

What I mean is, my mom held onto my neck with both arms while I leaned her forward to sponge her back, and she held on extra long, and I said, “You know it’s my birthday, right? I’m seventeen?”

$#!

And I put my cheek to her mouth so she could kiss and I told her, “I love you all the time, mom.”

“Well, you two are done here,” that’s Janet, talking to me and Nellie. “Why’d don’t you go get ready? Your dad and I will be down in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” says Nellie. “Come on.”

Get ready? I’m sleeping over, even though it’s a Monday night. Nellie and I are going to sleep in her room upstairs, in the twin beds in her room. We didn’t ... do anything private after school today because Nellie’s dad was already home when we got here. He was working on the furnace. And because Nellie’s room is across the hall from her parents’, there won’t be anything private happening tonight, either.

In her bedroom, Nellie lays out a pair of pyjamas on her bed.

“Did you bring pyjamas?” she asks me. I brought a nightgown.

“Nye’s such a pig, did you know?”

What?

“Yeah, like there are girls all over him. He’s got girlfriends all over the place. I would really pity any girl who likes him.”

I wasn’t thinking about it, but as soon as she says it, I feel sick.

I lay my nightgown out on the other of the beds.

“No Extroverts tonight, ‘cause of their thing on Friday. Too bad. Want to change?”

Change? I only brought the nightgown and my toothbrush, because we have school the next day.

$$!

She’s taking off her uniform, and putting on jeans and a grey kangaroo sweatshirt.

I turn a bit, so she can undress.

“You can wear something of mine,” she says, noticing. But I can’t, because she’s quite a bit bigger than I am, even though she’s younger.

She gets called a slut because of her big tits and I get called a dyke because I’m so flat. They couldn’t be more wrong.

In the basement, Nye has his bedroom door closed. Nellie wants to play drums. I am starting to play the guitar a little bit. I am terrible, but it’s fun and loud and Nellie doesn’t seem to care how bad I am.

“Just strum,” she yells from behind the kit, not stopping. “Just follow me.”

I do, and I change chords twice. Maybe I’m getting good.

“Sing!” shouts Nellie.

I shake my head.

“Come on, sing! You sound like Elvis Costello! Come on!”

I don’t. I play my three chords. Down down down, all six strings at a strum.

Nye whips opens the door of his room and sticks his head out.

I stop playing but Nellie goes to the end of the song. Actually, I’m not sure what song she was playing, but she plays it out and then stops.

“Thanks for turning it down,” Nye says. “I’m trying to write a paper, here.”

“What a douchebag,” says Nellie. “How the fuck can you turn drums down?”

But she gets out from behind the drums — drum kit, drum kit, drum kit, she taught me how to call it that — anyway, so I start to go upstairs.

$%!

“No, we don’t have to go.” She grabs my hand and says, “It’s my house, too, you know. Come on. Let’s listen to some albums”. She pulls me over toward the chesterfield.

I go with her, but I pull my hand away.

Nye still has his head out the door of his room. The sound of the insides of my thighs swishing against each other feels very loud when I walk past him. Nellie is pulling me by the hand.

I sit on the chesterfield and I look at Nye looking at me, and I look at Nellie looking at me looking at Nye.

“Don’t you have to go write a manifesto or something?” she says to her brother.

Nye looks over at her, like he’s considering.

I don’t want to stop looking at him ever. He’s barefoot. He shifts from foot not closing the door. His button-down shirt is smooth but not ironed and it’s tucked in. The length of his leg from crotch to knee is a very long line. Just past the knees there are ripholes through both legs of his jeans and my brain sees me biting there.

“What do you want to listen to?” That’s Nellie. She’s talking to me so I turn my face toward her but my eyes don’t come off Nye and I say, “Uh... .”

“Hey,” says Nellie, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Hey, what do you want to hear? Joe Jackson? The Beat? Marianne Faithfull? Broken English?” She knows

I love that album.

I must have looked away. The door to Nye’s room is closed. At The

Schnitzelhaus, when I’ve watched Nye and everybody dancing, doing the pogo or whatever, he always seems like he’s moving really slowly. Everyone else is slam

$&!

dancing, but it seems that he is hardly moving at all. But it doesn’t make him look weird, only better.

All of my underwear feels tight. My bra feels like two sizes too small.

Nellie sets the needle down on Side Two. She sits down on the chesterfield so she is squeezed in between me and the arm rest, between me and the closed door to Nye’s room. We listen to The Ballad of Lucy Jordan. What's The Hurry? Working Class Hero, just sitting there, just looking straight ahead or down at the album covers. Nellie puts her hand on my knee and I leave it but then pretend I have to scratch and cross my legs to do it.

When Why’d Ya Do It? comes on the record, Nellie gets up. Marianne Faithfull goes, “I had my balls and my brain. Put into a vice. And twisted around. For a whole fucking week” and I can feel it where I would feel it if I had balls. I get one look at her brother, and I’m suddenly aware of how the elastic of my underwear around the tops of my legs feels too tight.

On the record Marianne Faithfull goes, “Why'd ya do what she said, why'd you let her suck your cock?” and Nellie drags the needle right off the record.

I know somehow that Nye’s door is open and so when I look he’s there, his shirt untucked and his hair combed wet. I get a whiff of Listerine or some other mouthwash, and I think he must have swallowed it. He’s going to have to come out of his doorway, into the dark of the room where Nellie and I are.

“Nellie, for god’s sake be careful or you’ll wreck the stylus.”

That’s Nathan, flicking on the lights at the top of the stairs and coming down into the rumpus room. He goes down the stairs a little sideways, like Nye.

$'!

Whatever had been about to happen just before the parents came down clings to me and Nellie and Nye like we’re Saran wrapped together. Janet and Nathan don’t even notice. They just plow on like this is how they do all their birthdays.

Nye comes the rest of the way out of his room now, keeping his head down, not looking at Nellie. Or at me.

That’s okay. I can see Nye with my eyes shut. I can see him with my eyes open and the Greenbergs trying to make a birthday party out of nothing for me.

Nye keeps on not looking at me. I look at the rip in his pants leg, and the skin that shows through. I look at his wrist where it comes out of the cuff of his white shirt, the skin lightly covered with hair, and then I make my face go back to normal really quickly because I can feel him see me look at his wrist like that.

Janet and Nathan are putting the chips and the pop out, the chips in a spread-out paper napkin lining a bowl. Pop in glasses. I hope they don’t have presents for me. They can’t have presents for me. Janet only made the cake from a mix after she got home and found out it’s my birthday today.

“Come on, Lucie. You get to play The Game,” Nathan says, squatting over by the low-down bookshelf and pulling out a book. A dictionary.

Here’s the weird thing. We start playing “Dictionary”, where you have to guess or fake the meaning for a word, and even though they’re all really good at it, it’s really fun.

I’m not bad. But you can tell this is something they’ve done a lot.

Nellie stops seeming so mad at Nye, and Nye acts normal to everybody, even me.

He is totally normal with his parents, and he laughs a lot. They all do.

He won’t look at me.

$(!

We stop playing “Dictionary” after the word “defenestration”. Nye and Nellie both yelled out, “of Prague sixteen eighteen!” at exactly the same time and Janet laughed and clapped and Nathan roared like it was a big win.

Then Janet puts on a record called The Original Talking Union with the Almanac

Singers & Other Union Songs with Pete Seeger and Chorus.

This is terrible. This is the worst thing yet. It sounds like Tommy Hunter and

Stomping Tom Connors all rolled into one or worse.

Nathan plays along on the acoustic guitar with one foot up on the arm of the chesterfield. I don’t know why he doesn’t lengthen the strap. The guitar is up really high under his armpits and he has to hunch his shoulders up to play it. I can’t tell if he’s any good because he fiddles at the strings with his finger tips all deedly-dee and it’s too embarrassing to watch.

When Nellie and Nye start singing along with Janet and Nathan and the Almanac

Singers and Pete Singer and Chorus, I can’t believe it. They sing really loudly and completely without being embarrassed. When they sing, they all look away like they are looking at hills off in the distance.

I don’t know where to look. Nye and Nellie sound like hippies. Their parents sound like, like, I don’t know what. All of sudden, Nathan and Janet, who I know are

Scottish because Nathan still has an accent, they all of a sudden sound like Johnny and

June Carter Cash. I saw Johnny Cash and the Carter Family at the Sask Centre of the Arts twice with my mom before she had to quit work.

Nathan puts on a record called The Asch Recordings by Woody Guthrie and it gets even worse. Janet gets out an autoharp.

$)!

I must look like I don’t know how to belong, because Nye comes over and squats down next to where I’m sitting on the chesterfield.

“How do you like being part of the Greenberg Socialist Sing-Along?” he says, holding one hand up to the side of his mouth like no one can see that he’s telling me a secret. “They think punks are just folkies with Mohawks.”

For some unknown reason I press my hands together like I’m going to pray like the Virgin Mary then I jam them down between my legs like I’ve got to pee or something. I wish I didn’t, but if I take my hands out now it will be worse.

“Here,” he says, getting a picture from somewhere in the record albums.

It’s Woody Guthrie playing his guitar, and there’s a badge on it that says, “This machine kills fascists.”

“Joe Strummer has the same thing on his guitar,” I say. I used the second Nye was getting the picture to get my hands out of my crotch.

“Different guitar, same message,” says Nye, nodding. He takes the picture back, carefully.

When the record is over, Nye lifts the needle off. He puts his hands on his hips and looks at Janet and Nathan Greenberg.

“Mum, Da,” he says, “Time for bed. Go on now.”

It’s really like Nathan and Janet have turned into the kids. As they run — I mean it, run — up the stairs, Janet taps Nathan on the bum with her hand and he says something between “wheee” and “oooh”.

Nellie makes a retching sound.

“Have fun!” Nye calls after them.

$*!

The door to the upstairs closes behind them.

True As Anything

It’s me and Nye and Nellie and I am suddenly afraid. Once, when the daughter of my mom’s work friend was coming over with her mom, and she and I were supposed to

“play” together, like we’re little kids or something, my cousin Robert asked if he could stick around and watch.

“Watch what?” I asked. He put his two fingers in a vee up to his face like he was doing a peace sign and then he pushed his tongue into the vee and laughed. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I hated the way he laughed and that I laughed too, like I didn’t know what else to do. He had to go out to do a delivery before my mom’s friend and her daughter, Paula, showed up, but when Paula turned out be kind of okay I told her about it, and she explained, “Hmmmm. He thinks we’re going to eat each out and he wants to watch.”

I called my cousin an asshole, but this girl Paula just said, “Hmmmm,” again. I haven’t seen her for a while, since my mom stopped working. Paula’s mom still works at

Sears.

Listen, all this stuff goes through my head so fast. Like, I am here, but I am also remembering, at the same time. I can remember things from different times, and be in one place, and the things can be from different times. Like, I can remember something last week, and last year, and yesterday, and when I was little, and still be standing in the

Greenberg’s rumpus room in my school uniform over my too-tight underwear and Nellie

%+!

standing with her foot touching the back of my foot, her hand at the back of me, just where the waist of my kilt is.

Nye is holding a tissue paper wrapped record album.

“Happy seventeen,” he says to me, holding it out.

“D’you buy that in your bedroom?” That’s Nellie.

“Thanks,” I say, taking it and tearing the paper. It’s The Subhumans EP.

“They were at The Schnitzelhaus that first night, remember?”

I remember. How come he remembers I was there?

“They’re going to be at the Student Union on Friday. With The Extroverts.”

“Can we come?” That’s Nellie, again.

“No, you’re underage,” says Nye.

“So what? We go to The Schnitz all the time. You’re the Vice-president of the

Student Union. You can get us in.”

“Yeah, and if I do, I get the Union closed down.”

“Ha. I’ll wear a peephole bra like Siouxsie Sioux. Then I’ll get in.”

“No one wants to look at your tits, Nellie. And you can’t buy bondage gear in

Regina.”

Nye is looking at me, and I am looking at him.

Nellie looks at me but I pretend not to notice.

“How would you know, Mr. Nice Guy?” That’s Nellie.

Nothing.

“Hey, Nye? Hey Nice Guy Nye? How would you fucking know?”

Nye still doesn’t saying anything.

%"!

“Hey, ya douchebag? How would you know?”

I say, “Let’s listen to The Great Canadian Gold Rush, okay? It’s on soon.”

It’s a radio show I usually have to listen to on the car radio in the driveway. We don’t get FM on our radio in the kitchen, so I sit in the car with the engine off and the radio on. I know the Greenbergs get FM on their stereo.

“You’re such a fucking dink, Nye.” Nellie’s voice is down to one of those whispers you do when your throat is strangled tight not to cry.

“Come on,” I say. I want Nellie to not be, to not feel, I don’t know. Mad at me.

“Why don’t you go write some propaganda for the NDP, Nye you Nice Guy.”

“Come on,” I say, “It’s starting.”

I figure out how to get the stereo turned to radio and the dial is already on CBC and Terry David Mulligan or someone is saying, “We had a chance to talk to Nicky

Headon and Paul Simonon, the bassist and the drummer for the group — ”

Nye says, “Holy shit. It’s The Clash. Turn it up,” and gets up he’s going to do it, going to turn it up himself, but I’m already up.

Nellie uses the split second Nye’s bum is off the sofa to slide over really fast, taking up the space where he had been sitting, and leaving me only a little bit between her and the arm rest. Nye slides over onto the other cushion. She’s not quite in the middle. So I have to decide.

It’s only about two steps to the chesterfield, but I have to pass Nye to take them, and I suddenly remember my cousin saying, “Mmm mmm. That one walks like it’s got a broken hip,” about some girl whose walk he liked, and I can’t seem to walk normally back to the chesterfield.

%#!

I figure out the middle of the space on the other side of Nellie and sit down and

Nye moves over to make room for me.

On the radio Terry David Mulligan is saying, “Stephen, you were talking earlier with their frontman, Joe Strummer, about what’s happening in London with the National

Front and the British Movement, how they are a real threat right now, and how bands like

The Clash — ”

Nye looks absolutely like he doesn’t care where he sits as he kind of drapes his arm along the back of the chesterfield behind me and he straightens his legs out toward the light made by the radio dial inside the open hifi lid. Like he’s just relaxing beside where I’m sitting. Not close, but lined up so that his leg and mine are like railroad tracks.

Nellie won’t move over.

“That’s right Terry. The National Front and the British Movement are radical racists, they are extreme right wing parties and — ”

I am holding my whole body tight, and when I relax one centimetre the whole side of my leg presses against the whole length of Nye’s leg.

“Now some people, some rock critics, are saying the bands are using these things, terrorism and racism, as mere fodder for their songs, that they’re looking for something to hang their hats on.”

I can tell how tight Nye is holding himself because his leg doesn’t press back. But on the back of the chesterfield his hand drops between me and Nellie. I can see it. I can see his wrist.

“Well, I've been over there and I've seen it. These are neo-Nazis, basically the to- the-death enemy of the punk movement, and they mean business. The have the means to

%$!

do violence and they do it. Politicians, their politicians, talk about keep England pure for

Englishman, and racial purity. Some people say it sounds a little too much like Hitler —

”

Nellie jumps up. Before she can say anything, Nye says, “Shhh,” putting his finger to his mouth and leaning forward. “Hold on.”

And she does. Like, this bad thing is going on, but The Clash are on the radio.

And I want to hear it. And Nye does, too. And so does Nellie.

When Terry David Mulligan and the other guy started talking about neo-Nazis it’s like Nellie and Nye got flash-frozen.

I know about Nazis and Hitler and concentration camps because of Time Life

Magazine Inside the Third Reich Special Edition. I’m thinking of the Diary of Anne

Frank and photographs of skeletons in striped pyjamas in the bunk beds of the concentration camps. I’m thinking of that poem “Never Shall I Forget” in Night by Elie

Weisel and how Nathan gave the right way to say his name so I wouldn’t be saying Ellie

Weasel.

I’m thinking these things and I am also listening to the radio.

Terry David Mulligan: “So just before we ask them, before we run your interview with the drummer and the bassist for The Clash, let me ask you one question. Is North

America ready for punk?”

Other guy: “Oh, yeah. We’re ready for it. We’ve been ready for ages.” You can tell he is smiling when he says, from the way his voice is. He says it again.

“We’ve been ready for it for ages.”

%%!

“Let's hear what The Clash had to say, then, or at least Nicky Headon and Paul

Simonon.”

Nellie’s standing, Nye and I are sitting. Both of us, we’re looking at Nellie. Her eyes go from me to Nye, Nye to me.

Nellie takes one weird half-step sideways, toward the stairs. All I have to do is get up and go with her.

I am breathing, but high in my chest, and too fast. Nye is still, still, still against me.

All I have to do is get up and go with Nellie, upstairs, to her room.

On the radio, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon, talk very softly in these voices fully of air, like every word floats on a smoke ring. Totally not what you’d expect. “I fink the cops are laughing at them. The gangs all fighting each other and the cops are laughing because they’re fighting each other, not what they should be, not fighting what should fall and — ”

All I have to do is get up and follow her.

One hand, one finger of my one hand, it moves a bit. A twitch. I just barely touch

Nye, on his wrist. Below the cuff. Not on his hand. On his wrist. But his breathing stops.

I killed him.

“I fucking hate you, Nye,” Nellie says. She says, “I. Hate. Both of you.”

She’s pounding up the stairs and saying “Fucking breeders” like a choke to cover crying. “I hope you’ve got some rubbers, you bastards.”

I am feeling like two people or maybe more. I want to go after Nellie. I want to hear what’s on the radio. I want to stop pretending I’m not touching Nye, who is still, and

%&!

has that stillness all around him, like he always does, like he is moving in slow motion even though he’s not.

On the radio Topper says, “There’s just us, now, with Sid dead and that.”

Radio: “But can punk work here? I mean, all your imagery is urban inner city —”

Paul: “It’s like that in the States, as well.”

Radio: “But Canada is — we’re what you call low-density. Big cities here are miles, kilometres, apart. Most kids are still living in —what about someone living in

Alert Bay, they’re living in, I mean, what about someone in Wawa, or Come-by-

Chance— ”

Nye does not move. He’s looking at me. Not hard, but not looking away. The hair on his head is mostly short, but the front of it arches out and down from his forehead, a dark brown triangle. He’s looking at me from under it and so I just put my hand into the rip hole of his jeans up to my wrist and let rest it there. Oh my god his skin is warm and there is soft hair and I reach up further.

We kiss a couple of times, with dry lips. Nye barely moves. I feel his leg under my hand, how it’s hot, and hard with bone and muscle, and how under the soft hair his skin is soft and smooth as Nellie’s. It’s weird how my hand wants to feel more of him, hard softness, smooth and not smoothness. My hand loves the way he feels, the surprise of hard under soft, changing as I reach up. Nye remembers to breathe suddenly but I think I may have hurt him because he flinches. He rolls into me. Pulls me half on top of him. Better kissing now. His shirt is open. More hair, soft and springy, dark. His chest is hard and boney. Not like Nellie’s. Not like mine. I don’t understand why when I touch

%'!

him it feels so good to me. I get my hands inside his shirt and touch with just the tips of my fingers, like he’s a message in braille and I’m blind.

He likes it, I think. Somehow, my shirt has been pulled out of the top of my kilt.

Nye undoes my top button. I’ve got a bra on, one that I bought with my own money. It opens in the front with a little plastic clip. “Wait.” That’s me.

I go up the stairs as the radio is saying: “What about people listening to punk in, uh, Moose Jaw, or somewhere like that? I mean, somewhere in the middle of nothing and nowhere — ”

I turn out the lights at the switch at the top of the stairs and flip the hook into the eye of the lock and by the time I get back Nye’s turned off the light beside the sofa and is leaning back with one arm across the back of the couch, his legs sticking out but one crossed over the other, stretched out, all casual and relaxed like he doesn’t care. His uncrosses them pretty fast though when I stop to lean with one hand on the edge of the hifi to keep my balance while I take my tights and panties off in one pull. My naked legs are white in the light from the radio in the dark of the room.

Slow Nye isn’t slow at all now. I get across the room to him in one white legged step, two, but he’s already got his jeans and underwear pushed down past his knees by the time I land with one knee on either side of him and then he has one hand in between us under my kilt but only for a second because now I am the one who is slow, very slow now, now still.

Neither of us moves. I am holding myself up a little, just a little, my hands on

Nye’s shoulders like I always touch him like that. Topper and Paul and the radio guy.

%(!

Their light, airy, feathery, floating voices. A sound is in Nye’s throat and when I open my eyes, his are shut.

Way way below where words usually are, the word virgin appears and disappears, what I’ve done in private with Nellie is there and gone, and below those things I know that if I let even a thought about my cousin in, it would only be how it’s not him here.

I think of the moment just before you make yourself grab the wire to see if the electric fence is turned on and the next when you realize it is but you hold onto it because if you hold hard enough and you don’t get electrocuted if you hold tight enough the electricity runs through you to the wire and I move with it hurting just a little and then that’s gone, too. A sigh settles out of me and then I am holding Nye with the inside of me. He moves like he wants me off him but is holding me onto him, his fingers digging in hard and his thumbs in the joint where my legs meet my hips so it almost hurts. I hold and hold and press him down, rise up and press him down and down until at last he holds still, except for rolling the back of his head from side to side on the back of the chesterfield, eyes shut tight and holding his breath but I don’t stop, I don’t stop, and what always happens with Nellie in private happens, but this is different, a different kind of private.

After I can hear something besides my own breathing, I hear Nye’s breathing then

Topper’s voice, saying on the radio, “It’s up to people, like, who are sitting, like, where you said.”

Nye underneath me seems even taller like his muscles have collapsed so his legs seem even longer. He’s stretched out under me as though he thinks we’re done. His eyes are still closed. I somehow know without planning it how to make him press himself

%)!

back against the chesterfield back again, sudden, and how to make him raise himself up and me with him. He leans way back as I lift the hem of my skirt up to my waist and keep it lifted up there like that. My shirt is open and so is my bra and he looks and looks and sometimes he looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes.

From the top of the stairs comes the sound of the door knob being shaken.

Nellie’s voice comes: “I know what you’re doing down there.” It’s a whisper, like she’s got her mouth pressed right to the door crack, but a whisper yell so we can hear, and we can both hear she’s been crying.

“I locked it. I locked it,” I say with my mouth to Nye’s ear at exactly the same time Nye says, “Don’t stop,” then it’s like we are eating ice cream from each others’ mouths, and the sounds coming from my mouth go right into him or the other way around.

The hook in the eye of the lock rattles. When we stop, finally, Joe Jackson is on the radio, “Is she really going out with him?” and it’s like Nellie put it on.

True For True

I want to ask, “Did you like it? Was that alright? Did I do it okay?”

I want to ask, “Do you do this with all Nellie’s friends?” or maybe “Do you and

Nellie usually take turns?” but I don’t. It’s like there’s this horrible soundtrack in my head of my cousin’s voice: “A little eatin’ ain’t cheatin’,” he said once when there was a different girl in the back seat at the drive-in for the first movie than for the second, and he looked at me like I could be next when he said it.

What I don’t want to ask Nye is, “Do you like me?”

%*!

“I like how you don’t care what people think,” Nye says. I am still sitting on top of him, my skirt down over both of us. He is kind of pulling the ends of my hair with his fingertips, all over my head. He’s wrong. I do care. But he’s right. I don’t. I don’t care enough to get a Farrah Fawcett haircut with wings like the other girls at school. I could, but I don’t.

“I like how your best friend is a dyke and you don’t care what people think.”

That’s the word at school they use for me and Nellie. One of them.

“I like that you like me,” he says, and his smile is a question.

He looks like the best parts of the Ramones all put together, but with a face more like Joe Strummer’s. But not the teeth. And not any one whole Ramone, either, but just the best parts of each one of them. It takes a while to notice how good looking he is. He has a long straight nose and it’s sharp against my cheekbone. I have my eyes closed and when he kisses them I am surprised. So I open them. We kiss more, first soft, then hard enough that our teeth knock together, and my shirt and bra are on the floor now and Nye kicks them away into the puddle of clothes that are his jeans and his gotch and we’re lying down and Nye whispers, “Are you on the pill?” but it’s too late and I want to ask,

“Does this mean you’re my boyfriend? Does this mean I’m not a virgin?”

I shake my head no but our mouths are so hard together it’s like he is, too.

It’s like if we stop, if it gets to be tomorrow, we will have to figure out what comes next.

What comes next is that Nellie and I ignore each other at school the next day, which is not hard because we are in different grades. But it’s hard. Like, we are kind of

&+!

each others’ only friend, and we are pulled together like those magnets that are the same so that when we get close we are forced away.

It’s much worse if everyone at school thinks Nellie and I hate each other. By

Wednesday I say, “Want to sit together at lunch?” and on Thursday she says, “I don’t care about you and Nye. And I’m going to see The Subhumans at the Union tomorrow night. So you might as well come over after school. Don’t worry. I’m not interested.”

And on Friday when someone calls us lezzies again Nellie says, “Fuck off, she’s my brother’s girlfriend” but I don’t necessarily think that that’s true.

I went to their house after school on Wednesday and Thursday. Nye was there every time. Now it hurts when I walk and stings every time I go to the can. I love that.

Still True

I’m sitting at a table in the corridor outside the Union collecting tickets for The

Subhumans concert inside and I’m wearing fishnet stockings with holes in them and my school skirt and a white undershirt and no one has asked me how old I am. Nye and I walked over together in the cold.

He’s sitting on the edge of the table drinking a Canadian.

The Union is full but the band hasn’t started yet. Nye introduces me to people – the pointy-nosed guy from The Schnitzelhaus, whose name is Mike, and Eddie Lester with the bachelor button eyes from The Extroverts, who are the warm-up act for The

Subhumans: “This is Lucie,” is all Nye says. Like, what is he going to say? “This is Lucy who I have sex with?” Eddie Lester says, “Hi, Lucy.” Pointy-nosed Mike says, “How you doing.”

&"!

Nye says my name “Lucy”, like it’s English, which is fine with me.

This is actually a fundraiser for the NDP, and the NDP badge I’m using to pin my undershirt strap to my bra strap gets a nod or two. People give their ticket or buy one from me and put extra money in the jar beside the Simon DeJong pamphlets that Nye wrote for NDP Campus Youth.

Music is starting from inside but it’s just the band tuning up and Nye gets low and says to me, “I’m really sorry you can’t come in. I’ll come out right after they start. Want a beer?”

He’s joking, because that would be against the law.

We’re going to kiss, when Nye stops because he sees something over my shoulder.

I turn around and there’s a redheaded woman with straight-up hair and black cat- eye make-up walking with her arm tight around the neck of a girl with the same make-up and an outfit like my school uniform on punk nights only the dress shirt is all ripped and safety pinned so that you can see that under it all she’s got on a bondage bustier made from black hockey tape and it’s Nellie.

Before Nye can say anything, the redhaired woman, who has safety pins in her ears and is as tall as Nye and is holding Nellie by the wrist with her long fingers says,

“Well, well. Aneurin Greenberg. Nice Guy Nye.”

Nye says, “Nellie’s too young for you, Kaye.”

Kaye says, “Nope. I’m younger than you, so Nellie’s just the right age for me.

How old’s your little piece there?”

&#!

I’m watching Nellie closely to see if she likes this. She puts her arm around

Kaye’s waist. Kaye is looking Nye in the eye when she picks up Nellie’s hand and puts it on her own bum, on Kaye’s bum. Kaye wears tight jeans and a belt and there is a safety pin pinned right across the fly of her jeans.

“I’m sorry, Nellie.” That’s me.

“Fuck off.” That’s Nellie.

“Don’t be like that, Nellie.” That’s Nye.

“You fuck off too.”

“Two, please,” says Kaye, and puts a five dollar bill and a two dollar bill on the table in front of me. A two-dollar bill is a whore’s bill. “Put the change in your jar.”

“Nellie can’t come in.”

“You could get her in. Why don’t you just get her in, Nye?”

“Because she’s underage, is why.”

“Not for fucking, I’m not.”

“Nellie, you’re really crude, you know that?”

“I don’t see you saying no to a bit of jail tail.”

“Shut up Nellie.” That’s still Nye.

“I’m not jailbait,” I say. “I’m too young to drink but I’m not jailbait.”

Nellie whips around at me: “He’ll fuck you but he won’t get you into his own

Student Union. Some fucking boyfriend.”

“Don’t be like that.”

&$!

Nye just puts one hand, just the fingertips, onto her shoulder to move her. He kind of moves her, not pushing, just moves her, but she whips her shoulder back like she’s been shoved.

“Like what?” Nellie says. She’s let go of Kaye, who is kind of standing back.

Nellie shoves Nye with both hands against his chest. “Like what? Like what?” she says, each one a shove and a backstep by Nye. “Like some fucking girlfriend stealer? A cheat?”

“Like a jealous twat,” says Nye, shoving her back, but one-handed, fingers only, like he’s being careful.

Nellie’s tall redhaired girlfriend laughs in a way only half mean and says, “Poor

Nice Guy Nye. Leg-fucking all the Marian girls but too nice to ask for tit for tat. You knew all your friends were getting it when you were being to nice to ask, didn’t you Nye?

The whole time you were being nice?”

She’s not asking it.

“You’re the jealous twat, Nye.” Nellie shoves Nye extra hard, but he stops stepping backward, so she wallops him in the shoulder.

I’m watching Nye. His eyes have gone big, but he’s just taking it. Just standing there.

“Going to Star Wars a hundred times and wondering why no one wanted to put out for Luke Skywalker and his big shiny light saber.”

Holy crap, what’s going on with Nye’s face?

“You knew everybody was getting more than you, didn’t you? I mean, I got more pussy in high school than you did, Nye.” That’s Kaye.

&%!

“Yeah, ya jealous twat,” says Nellie, and then she makes a fist and punches Nye in the balls.

I’ve never seen anyone get punched in the nuts before. Kicked, maybe. But not punched.

Nye goes right down to the floor. I can tell she tried not to punch him that hard, not as hard as she could. Like, she probably knows how hard you can do that so you don’t kill the other person.

Inside the Union Hall, the band starts with a blast.

Nellie and Kaye go into the Union. Nellie looks back once, and she looks like she is going to cry, actually. Obviously, it doesn’t take a really hard punch for it to hurt a lot.

Nye is bent over, and I don’t say anything when I go over to help him. It’s too loud to say anything, and he’s making some bad noises.

After a while, he sits up, gasping, but he’s breathing. When he looks at me finally he manages to smile and says, “I let her do that.”

“You let somebody punch you in the ‘nads?”

He winces. “I let Nellie punch me in the ‘nads. But only cuz she’s my sister.”

I say, “Wow, you are nice.”

I can tell it hurts, even though he laughs, because of the way he lets me kiss him a long time.

Really Real, Really True

There’s really no point in me not going into the Student Union Hall. It’s about as big as someone’s rumpus room and the band plays right on the floor, not on a stage, and

&&!

by the time I push my way to the front, the singer of The Subhumans has his shirt off and he’s shiny with sweat and fat like a larva. “We don’t care. What you say,” he yell-sings, bending forward so far into the crowd that the sweat from his fat shoulders and arm smears mine, and the whole crowd yells back, “Fuck you!”

By the time he does it again I’m ready with “Fuck you!” like everybody else, and

I almost give myself whiplash from it. Everybody just swarms up and down in front of the stage. We’re upright because we’re packed together so tight and girls and guys and me and everyone jump as high as we can to shout, “Fuck you!” back at the Subhuman guy every time, right on time. I am squashed in next to Nye. He gets one arm around me because it’s so tightpacked. But lots of people are kind of propping each other up. We’re careful. “We don’t care. What you say.”

“Fuck you.”

I don’t give a shit what they are singing about. I hate everything that I hate, and I hate feeling like something is the matter all the time.

There’s no space between songs at all. The drummer counts One-Two-Three-Four but there’s no difference in the speed of the songs and by the time the band quits playing

I’m covered in the singer’s sweat and my own and other peoples’, too. Nye’s got his hand around my arm but it’s just because we’re going outside, out the back door, and it’s cold because it’s March and everybody’s breath and cigarette smoke puffs out clouds and there’s steam coming off us, off any place where we have bare skin showing, it’s that cold out and we are that hot and sweaty from dancing. The steam rises white against the dark night.

&'!

Somebody hands me a beer and I drink from the stubby neck and I’m so thirsty it tastes great.

The Subhumans guys come out.

Kaye’s with them, and I see Nye looking around for Nellie. I say to him, “I’ll wait here,” and he goes in.

With Kaye is a guy and girl who kind of look alike. I met them outside the Union.

Doug and Shannon. I didn’t know you could be in love and still be punks. More people are coming outside to stand under the light in the parking lot, their punk clothes under their parkas, fishnet stockings inside winter boots, like that will work. There’s a guy in farmer overalls, and people call him Bubba. Weird. A guy called Bilbo like from The

Hobbit. A guy from my school, looking so different I didn’t recognize him, at first. The one who blacked his face for the IRA.

The Subhumans singer is just in his underwear vest. He must have got really hot while he was singing because he is still letting off clouds of steam and it’s freezing out.

His belly sticks out like he's pregnant, but it's nice, like you might want to pat it.

“Fucking Regina is the only place worth stopping on the prairies,” he says. “Only fucking punks between Vancouver and Toronto. Plus you gotta stop somewhere to take a piss before Winnipeg.” He laughs.

“I love that song, “Slave to My Dick,” says some guy, to the Subhuman. “It’s great, man.”

Someone else says, “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love.

We just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery.” Pause pause. “Gang of Four. Anthrax.”

&(!

“Yeah, so profound. Like, we don’t even own our own sexuality, because capitalism commodifies it, and you don’t even know why you want to fuck.”

“I know why,” someone else says, and there’s laughter.

Kaye is beside me, standing close enough so I can keep warm, without it being too obvious. I am freezing. She’s smoking.

“So,” she says to me, jetting smoke up past her face by sticking her bottom lip out, “You’re on the cock.” Puff. Stream. Puff. You sure you’re not a lesbian? Not even a little bit?”

I don’t say anything back. She doesn’t sound mean but if she says “on the cock” to me one more time I will die.

“Well, if you’re on the cock, you’re on the cock. You can’t help it. You can’t help wanting what you want. You’re cute though,” she adds. “You ever get off the cock, you give me a call.”

Nye’s back with Nellie, and they don’t seem mad at each other. Nellie’s got

Nye’s parka on.

“How’re your nuts, there, Well Nye?” asks Kaye.

“Sore,” says Nye.

“Maybe little Joan Jett here’ll kiss ‘em better for you,” says Kaye, jutting her chin in my direction. My hair is curly and Joan Jett’s isn’t, but Kaye’s right. How it’s not that

I’m pretty, but you can get used to it.

“Come snuggle,” she says to Nellie, who hands Nye his parka and goes and gets inside Kaye’s parka with her. They kiss on the lips, and then Nellie turns her head and

&)!

Nellie looks hard at me and Nye. She looks like she is not ready to be nice, but she looks so happy, somehow, anyway.

True Enough

There’s a different kind of rhythm now even though Nye and I don’t act all boyfriend and girlfriend. I still hang around at their house with Nellie after school. We do home work. We help Janet with the Simon DeJong campaign. Nye comes home late.

Janet, Nathan, and Nellie go to bed.

Nye and I lock the door at the top of the basement stairs. We listen to The

Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers and the Talking Heads and The Circle Jerks. Not so much the Sex Pistols, because with Sid being dead it’s weird. Afterward maybe, but not during.

For afterward, there’s Elvis Costello and The Attractions. He did the second Rock

Against Racism, where Rock Against Sexism was, too. Then Gang of Four for during again and yeah, I listen to lyrics even while we’re doing our private stuff.

I bet everybody does. I hear the words to songs while I am doing stuff I don’t want to put words to. It might be not exactly right to be sitting up on top of Nye while listening to “Natural’s Not In It” is on the record player, but the song’s the right length and the beat is perfect to make slow Nye go so fast he gets embarrassed and laughs. He turns his head away holding on to me and I like to make him turn it back.

I’m on the pill, now. The doctor didn’t even ask why.

&*!

I go home late every night, afterward. I wash up in the laundry sink in the

Greenberg’s basement, then Nye walks with me in the dark, in the snow. Bye. Kiss. Cold.

Kills Bye.

Home.

I hardly see my cousin anymore, or my mom when she’s awake.

Nye spends a lot of time at the Student Union. He’s doing NDP stuff, and they are having a guy from BC called Svend Robinson to come give a talk. Nye says, “He is the best man I have ever seen.”

We’re pretty busy with Simon DeJong’s campaign after school most days, so that’s fine.

I’m not pregnant, so that’s good. Everyone knows the pill doesn’t work for the first month so I guess I’m lucky. At least it’s free to get the pill. You have to go to North

Dakota to get an abortion. And it’s expensive.

Nellie and I play our instruments together after school now, because, well, she has

Kaye to you know with, but Kaye goes to University like Nye and has stuff at night. We are trying to play Elvis Costello, but, (a) neither of us plays keyboards, and, (b) I can’t do the guitar parts although Nellie can do the drums pretty well. She is really, really good.

When Nellie says Kaye is a piano player and is going to join our band I’m not surprised, and I don’t mind. Kaye’s actually really nice to me. We can rehearse on

Saturdays.

First practice, we spend the whole time talking about what we’re going to call the band.

“The Lips.”

'+!

“Ew.”

“The Slits.”

“Done.”

“The Gash. Like The Clash.”

“Yeah, I get it. No.”

“The Cramps, The Curse, The Rag. The Rags.”

“Done, done, done. Too ... kotexy.”

“The Vadge.”

“Come on.”

“Cuz we’re from Regina. Vagina. The Vadge.”

“Yeah, I get it. I get it. Why do you have to be so ... Why do you have to make it about that, all the time?”

“It’s not me. I’m not the one saying that women are just life support systems for cunts.”

Kaye kills me. She’s funny and horrible. I actually heard that line come out of my cousin’s mouth, but it’s different when she says it. It makes him and anyone like him sound stupid, not ... powerful?

“Okay. The Cunts. Let’s just call ourselves The Cunts, then.”

“No way. You know who’s going to come see us if we call ourselves The Cunts?

Dirty old pervs. Lucie’s cousin.”

“So what? It’s what people think. In private, if not in public.”

In public, too. It’s the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever that’s stuck in the 8- track player of my mom’s car but the same idea is stuck in everybody’s soundtrack. Oh! I

'"!

just figured out the The Bee Gees really mean More than a cuh-unt when they say More than a woooman. I’m not going to say that to Kaye, though. She’d never shut up about it.

“How about The Reginas?”

“Please.”

“The Lipstick Stains.”

“The Lipsticks Smears.”

“The Smears.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“I like it.”

“Done.”

Next time I am in Nye’s bed waiting for him to come home from The Union, I think, “I am not a see-you-en-tee in private. Maybe at the drive-in, maybe at school, but not in private.”

I hate thinking about it, about my mom’s advice, “It’s different for girls. For girls, sex is emotional. For boys, it’s physical.”

I hate thinking about it because, like most of the stuff my mom said, it’s true, but also not true. At the same time.

The emotional part is thinking about what would happen if Nye treated me like a see-you-en-tee.

After we saw the movie “The Tin Drum” at the downtown Public Library, we bought packages of Pop Rocks candy and Nye and I poured them into each other’s belly

'#!

buttons and then used spit to make them pop and that’s how we ate them. They pop on wet skin. The more you lick them the more they pop and keep popping.

The emotional part, for girls, is that you’re supposed to not like it. Even if you do, you kind of have to pretend you don’t, or the private you will get made public. And then you are a bunch of wadded-up kleenex. A see-you-en-tee.

Like, once you become private, you are public, you are only public, like you have no more privacy anymore, ever. You are public property, and anybody can say anything about you that they want.

I can’t help but feel there would be no end of trouble if anyone knew. Not about the Pop Rocks, not about not being a virgin, not about Nellie, not about Nye. The trouble would be if anyone were to find out how much I like it. Love it. All of it.

I can hear Nye coming down the stairs. Good. I don’t want to think about this anymore.

He’s grinning at me while he strips in his bedroom, from toque, mitts, scarf, parka, t-shirt, jeans, gotch, still cold because he didn’t bother to take his winter stuff off before coming down stairs, his face still red from being outside, cold as he comes into the warm bed, his chest against me cold and goosebumpy and nipply and fantastic, his arms and shoulders cold under my hands, his legs cold on mine, his cold face on my chest, hot where his breath makes my neck damp, and, of course, hot where we meet, my feet and heels on his cold, cold back.

,-./!01234!!

'$!

Turns out Kaye is also a guitar player, a very good guitar player, and she brings some kid, some guy with an afro and a lisp to play keyboards with us, so now I’m the singer who plays only a little guitar.

I can do that. Kaye puts masking tape on the back of the guitar neck with the finger tabs for the chords and I can do it. I can play guitar and sing, if I don’t think about the guitar too much.

Kaye shows me how to do a bar chord G on the third fret and an F sharp which is an E minor on the second fret and an E on the first fret and all of a sudden I want Nye to be my dog and Nellie wants Kaye to be her dog and Kaye wants Nellie to be her dog and maybe Nellie wants me to be her dog and we sound great. I don't sound like Iggy when I sing it but, man, do I ever sound like I want what I want. We are so fucking happy the first time we play Now I Want to Be Your Dog all the way through that we start jump around, Nellie and I with our school uniform skirts and sock feet jumping on the rumpus room floor, going “Aaaaaaaaaaa! Aaaaaah!” and sounding completely retarded. We do it again fast. I mean, we play it fast, faster than on the record. It sounds amazing.

We don’t have a P.A. system or a mike, so I have to sing over the drums and guitar and the weird kid Kaye has brought along with what he calls his “electric piano”.

His name is Terry and he has a nicer voice than I do. I’m not sure this is going to work out.

But I love singing. I used to sing in the choir when my mom was well and my dad was alive and we went to church. There used to be folk mass at our church on Saturday nights at 5:30, so people could get communion and be home in time for Hockey Night in

Canada.

'%!

I loved singing with everybody singing, and three chord songs that go along with the bass and the drums sound like we’re all together and it feels the same. Nellie says I sing like Elvis Costello. I know I do. I try to. Not the way he makes the word shapes, like he’s sticking his bottom jaw out really far so you know he’s making fun of himself or of this year’s girl, but singing like a guitar. Singing like Elvis Costello means more breath than even Iggy Pop. Non-stop breath, like a current.

When Kaye sings, it sounds like a kazoo. And Nellie sounds all high-up and breathy like her kazoo is shut. But I sound huge. I stand with my feet apart like I’m on a tectonic plate.

“You don’t sound like Elvis Costello, but you sing like him.”

Nellie gets it. Sometimes when it’s just me and her, she asks me to sing for her.

What is it about her, that she can sit and listen to me and look at me while I sing, and she looks like she loves it, and I am not embarrassed? It’s as private as what I do with Nye. It feels as secret, and as good. A bit like the electrical fence feeling: holding the wire even when the electrical current is on and flowing, and the feeling of singing is holding the wire tighter and continuing to sing, instead of pulling away.

More of the Truth

May 22, 1979. The NDP wins more seats than they ever have in history. Simon

DeJong is going to Ottawa.

Hurray!

May 29. Nye Greenberg is going to Ottawa. To work for Simon DeJong. In

Ottawa.

'&!

Fuck.

June 1, and the whole Greenberg family is going to Ottawa. As soon as the school year is over so Nellie won’t miss anything. Janet’s got some job with the NDP Caucus,

Nathan is going to be on a sabbatical whatever the fuck that is maybe it’s Jewish. Fuck fuck fuck.

And me? What am I going to do?

Nellie’s sixteen and I’m seventeen. What exactly are we supposed to do? I will graduate from high school and so what? I have to take care of my mom. Nellie will go to school in Ottawa and maybe she can go to her Grad with some girl.

Kaye and The Smears? I quit.

I’m going to graduate from high school and then I’m going to work at Sears and take care of my mom. She’s sick with something else now, but Lorna who she used to work with, Paula’s mom, can get me a job like Paula’s in Catalogue Orders.

I talk to Nye on the phone. He’s living in a co-op. Not just until his parents move there, but forever. What’s a co-op? Is it like a commune? Is it full of hippies and hippie girls?

He says, “If you move here, you can live with Nellie and my mom and dad.”

I think and think about what that’s supposed to mean until I’m sick of it.

This is Also True!

In Catalogue Orders, you can’t listen to music because you can’t hear the radio, no matter how loud it’s turned up. You’d need a miniature drive-in speaker, one so small you could put could shove it in your own ear hole. But then you’d need the miniature

''!

speaker to be plugged into some miniature private record player otherwise you’d have to listen to CKCK and John Wells Reports on the Roughriders because that’s what the

Catalogue Orders radio, which you can’t hear, is permanently tuned to.

Paula and I stand in front of a slanted trough in front of the rack of pneumatic tubes that like they are the pipes of a pipe organ and we are going to play. The pipes are clear and the canisters are clear. Clear dirty scratchy plastic, kind of yellow because everybody in here smokes non-stop. Paula smokes.

Stand at the trough in front of the noisy pipes. Soon, a sucking sound and then one of the pipes poops a canister into the trough and then Paula or I pop it open and take out the paper with the order on it for a something from the catalogue and then we take a cart and walk through the warehouse until we find the thing to fill the order.

That’s how Paula shops for shoes. She opens up the shoe boxes every time she is filling a catalogue order, and if they are nice, she gets a pair with her Employee Discount.

We both make more than minimum wage, but she makes even more than I do because she’s been here longer. She makes almost four dollars an hour.

Because my cousin’s job is to drive around making deliveries, he can usually pick me up. I hate driving past The Schnitzelhaus and past Music Plus. I can’t go back, yet.

Sometimes I just take the bus. When we drive past the University or the Greenberg’s, I look out the window in the other direction.

Somebody at school, somebody who still goes to The Schnitz, tells me The Clash are playing in Edmonton at the end of the month. I don’t have a car and I have to work and there’s no way to get tickets.

They might as well be playing on the moon.

'(!

Besides, my mom’s not getting any better.

If It Feels True

Nye is gone and I can't stand to look at Nellie. I wish she would just go. She left a note in my locker saying Nathan and Janet want to come to my grad. No no no. Paula keeps inviting me to parties. Actually, she says, “Do you and your cousin want to come to a party?” There’s a bush party on the weekend of my grad, and since my mom can’t come to grad, I might as well go with Paula. So I do.

It turns out the party is actually on someone’s farm just this side of Grand

Coullee. When we get there are stereo speakers propped in the open windows of the house, pointed at the side-yard fire pit that is a cut-down oil drum sunk in the ground with seats torn out of old cars and trucks in a circle around it. There is also a broken down sofa and a couple of old arm chairs. It looks like they moved the living room furniture outside. Wow. I wonder who lives here.

Most of the people at this bush party are just normal, some version of rock and roll, or a bit greaser, I guess. I mean, nobody is disco, at any rate.

I heard that Son of Sam only hunted people who were disco. I am not sure why

I’m thinking of serial killers right this moment. I think I might be scared.

“I am an anar-chist! I am the anti-christ! Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it! I want to destroy! Passerby!”

There’s no music coming out of the stereo speakers, and this guy is not singing, he’s yelling it at the people sitting in the circle. He squeals it like he’s making fun of it, making fun of punk, and it occurs to me that he — or maybe the morning stoners — don’t know that it’s a song by The Sex Pistols.

')!

We are sitting around the empty fire pit, plastered to the circle of broken-down car seats. It’s like nobody can stand up because we’re so stoned, and even the ones who have beers aren’t drinking them. It’s weird to be this high this early in the day. I should be at work. I should be at home. I should be at my own Grad.

We’re supposed to be here all weekend, but I made Paula promise to drive me home later tonight. She has her parents’ car, a wood-panelled station wagon.

The guy in the middle of the circle is older, maybe twenty-five or forty, but it’s hard to tell because of his beard and moustache. His hair is parted in the middle and goes straight down on either side of his face, sloping past either side of his busy beard, to his chin. Most of us are teenagers. Some a bit punk like me, but not many. Nobody who I used to know from The Schnitzelhaus, and nobody from my school is here. Would be here.

The beard guy dances around, scuffs a few steps left, then right, up on his toes, oddly lightfooted in his unlaced Kodiaks, then raises both arms in the air, a bottle of Boh in each fist, and goes, “Wooooohoo!” His eyes are squinted shut with his smile.

Nobody says ‘Woooohoo!’ back. They’re just looking at him. He looks around through his squint for a minute, then chugs one Boh and then holy crap the other, does this gross belch and then puts his knuckles of both fists together in front of his belt buckle, like a muscle man or Bill Bixby as Dr. David Banner as The Incredible Hulk. He goes “Grrrr” and some white foamy shit comes out of the corners of his smile and stays there in the little triangle where the beard and moustache meet.

'*!

I get that he’s doing a Kung Fu thing, but he looks more like a Barrel-Full-of-

Monkeys monkey. Paula and I smoked a lot of pot coming out here in her dad’s car. I wonder if everybody is going to kind of look like an ape to me this weekend.

The guy chucks the beer bottles into the oil drum camp fire. Then he drags the back of his hand across his handlebar moustache, goes Aaaah really loudly, and laughs like he made a good joke. Not just that he made a good joke, but that everybody laughed at his joke, although no one did. He looks like one happy dude.

He starts shuffle-dancing around the circle, yelling at people with this smile on his face, and laughing too much, saying, “What colour are you, baby? What’s colour is your religion?”

Being stoned this early makes me feel like it is already night time even though it’s still daylight. But I also get that this guy is batshit.

His hair is like a hay stack. All one length, smoothed down the sides of his head.

Actually, it looks like the hat that Robinson Crusoe is wearing in the book of it that I’ve got. Robinson Crusoe’s hat looks like a hairy umbrella that’s partly open, stuck down on over his head. His beard is this bird’s nest. Just like this guy’s.

The sound of someone putting the needle on a record comes out of the speakers.

“Are you blue? Blue is the Virgin Mary, right? We know that, right? Cuz of the colour of her gown is the colour of the sky. And her mantle —that’s her shawl, right? — it’s white for what? What, babies? For the clouds, man, the clouds!”

He’s shaking his arms up at the sky.

Hurry up with some music. Please.

(+!

Uh oh. Maybe it’s because I’m so stoned. The music coming out of the speakers sounds like. Shit. It’s Creedence Clearwater Revival. My cousin has a life size poster of

John Fogerty on the wall in what used to be my bedroom, right beside my full length mirror.

Now the guy is looking right at me while he sings it, sings along with CCR:

Tambourines and elephants. Are playing in the band. A-won’t you take a ride. On the flying spoon? Doot do doo.

I don’t know where to look. The hairy beard guy has foam in his moustache at the corners of his mouth. Now he’s looking at Paula. I can’t seem to get up off the car backseat we’re sitting on.

“Hey, Paula,” I say to Paula. “Can I have the car keys?”

She doesn’t say anything back. “Paula, can I have the keys?”

Paula’s smiling up at the bearded guy who’s dancing around and yelling over

CCR: “Blue is for Mary, the Mother of Jesus the Son. Red is for Joseph Smith the

Mormon.”

He says it like “more-mun” to make it rhyme with “Jesus the Son”. What’s red about the Mormons?

The song goes to “Hoid it Through the Grapevine”. That’s how it sounds when John

Fogerty sings it. Not like The Slits, the way they do it. Or Marvin Gaye.

“Paula, gimme the keys.”

When the guy circles back to us and holds out what looks like a palmful of dried- up mushrooms, Paula takes some and says, “Thanks, Carter”, and the guy holds the open bagful out toward me.

("!

“I have to go the can,” I say, shaking my head, as if that’s a way of saying, “No thank you”.

I do. Have to go the can.

“Hey Paula, come with me to the can.”

Paula puts the palmful of dried stuff in her mouth, smiles big at him, smiles at me.

Chews with a smile and says, “Mmmm.”

“Peyote,” says the guy.

Now Crosby Stills Nash and Young is coming out of the speakers. I see Neil

Young’s monkey face in my brain. Monkey facial hair sideburns, monkey jaw, crazy monkey eyes. The song gets to Well there’s a rooooooooose in a fisted glove…

Even Paula must know that he means that the guys should take some girl's hand –

– and that they, the girls, aren’t really who he’s talking to, they’re what he’s talking about. Some of the girls are singing along, Love the one you’re with! Love the one you’re with! Love the one you’re with! just like they’re on the record.

“Paula,” I say.

“I left the keys in the ignition,” she says, turning her head and face toward me, but not !

I really do have to pee, but I also just need to get the fuck away from this guy and this music. Something is happening, and it’s not just the beer and the pot. I feel like I am a helium balloon. I feel like I am barely able to hold on to the string and I know that when I can’t hold on any longer, when I let go, it’s not going to be the balloon that floats away, it’s going to be me.

(#!

I wish the Greenbergs had never happened. I feel like the guy Charly in Flowers for Algernon. It would have been better if I had just never known what it could be like.

It’s True

We parked in the yard at the front of the house and yeah, the keys are still there in the ignition. Did she lock the doors? Just for a sec, I think my life is over but then the car door opens when I pull the handle and it’s not.

I open up the door to the passenger’s side, my side, and slide across the seat for the keys.

When I notice my cousin pulling into the yard in my mom’s car I keep sliding, right down onto the floor of Paula’s dad’s woody, my head under the steering wheel, my bum on the brake pedal and my face pressed onto the cracked vinyl seat.

I think I might pee my pants, I’m so wigged out. What’s he doing here?

I hear the engine of his car — my car — turn off. I hear the car door open and slam shut. I hear or don’t hear but imagine him walking past the car I’m in. I hear the ticking sound a car engine makes when it’s cooling. I hear the ticking stop.

I have to go to the bathroom.

I wish I hadn’t smoked so much pot. I wish I hadn’t drunk a beer.

I wish I had never met Nellie or Nye. That I had never gone to The Schnitzelhaus, that I’d never been naked in Nye’s room.

If my cousin looked in the window of the station wagon and saw me now, I feel like he would know I’m not a virgin anymore.

($!

I decide it’s safe to get out of the car and least go pee. I have to. I don’t want to go in my pants, on the floor of the car. I’ll just do that and then I’ll get back in the car and hide. Maybe I’ll find a blanket or something to hide under. And I’ll lock myself in and stay there all night if I have to, until Paula comes. Or maybe I’ll leave without her.

Maybe I’ll go home.

My mom.

Open the car door, slide onto the ground, crouched.

There’s an old outhouse near the barn. I just need to stay away from my cousin.

I can hear music from the firepit again. I need to see where my cousin is.

Saxophones mostly, but not like X-Ray Specs. The music gets louder around the side where the firepit is and there’s the haystack-for-hair hippie guy dancing around and at the same time telling some of the guys to get some wood, “Let’s get this bonfire lit!” and he’s moving to the music, and he shouts, “Get on the Coal Train! Get on the Coal

Train! It’s the Coal Train! It’s the Coal Train! It’s the Johncoal Train!”

The sun has started to go down. This music is hard to listen to. I wait for the hippie guy — Carter? Is that his name? — I can still hear him over the saxophone, and I wait for him to say “The colour of a Coal Train is black”, but he doesn’t. The noise the saxophones make makes the hair on my arms go up. I’m wearing a kangaroo jacket and it’s not quite the end of June and I’m covered in goosebumps.

From this distance I can hear the Carter directing the guys who have firewood — nope, they’re fence poles, six or ten feet long, for bobwire — and they’re sticking them into the fire pit in a big teepee shape. I get a whiff of the gasoline that they’re going to use to get it going.

(%!

I see Paula go into the summer kitchen door of the house. Maybe she’s going in there to find me where she thinks she’ll find me using the bathroom.

I wish I knew where my cousin was.

It’s probably safest if I stay here, stuck against the side of the house. I can see the cars in the yard, and I can see the fire pit, and if I put my head around the corner of the house I can see into the kitchen and fuck and shit my cousin just went up the porch.

Oh that saxophone sound is very bad. It makes me think of frightened animals, of piglets and calves that know where their mothers are being taken, and know what’s happening to them, the mama cows and pigs, will happen to them next.

Get to the other side. Out here, past the windbreak of trees around the farmhouse, the wind that’s always scalping the prairie and the farmers’ fields is a horizontal guillotine. The wind cuts through you, but the sound of those saxophones is like that, too.

It slices horizontally through your ears, cuts your head off, but you’re still listening, hearing, with a different part of you.

The outhouse door almost comes off its hinges when I open it and see the two seater crowned with twin halos of buzzing flies.

I’m just going to go in the grass. I pull my jeans down and lean my bum against the barn, but I get this sudden horrible idea like someone might be in the barn itself, looking out at a knot hole at where I am about to go pee and I scootch around, squatting, until I am lower in the foxtail and gramma grass squatting really low so I won’t pee on my pantlegs or my own feet and that’s what I’m doing, still watching the farm house, the porch to the summer kitchen, when I see that someone comes out and it’s my cousin.

(&!

The Carter guy is with him. Their heads are together. They do this handslap like they’re from Shaft or something. Two stupid white guys who I am sure Shaft would call honkies.

But my cousin gets into the car and drives away, backing all the way out of the yard and down the road to the highway, driving with one arm over the back of the carseat, so he never even sees me hiding there in the grass.

I stay there in the tall grass listening to the saxophone music which just keeps going because no one is taking it off, least of all the Carter guy because here he comes toward the barn and he’s got a Mexican blanket over one arm and he’s leading Paula by the hand with the other.

Guess he’s going to love the one he’s with.

If I lie down flat they won’t see me.

But they do.

“Hi, Lucie,” says Paula, holding the guy’s hand.

“Want some peyote?”

That’s the hairy guy, squatting down with me and taking my hand and pressing it into the palm.

So I eat it, and they go into the barn.

It’s not so bad here in the tall grass. I could go back to the firepit or I could go to the car and sleep. I’m pretty sleepy.

The music from the saxophones is still going, it goes in waves that rock me like I am on a ship and when I close my eyes the rocking sound really is the sound of waves, waves against the side of a ship, great rollers, pulling the ship down into the troughs of

('!

the storm, and it’s pretty bad, tossing us where we lie on our sides, each of us chained to the next man. We have been at sea so long that those who were going to die from retching have already died, their bodies slid overboard, and another in his place. Young boys from the women’s deck in here now with the men, crying like children. Their crying, and the clunk of manacles against wood, and the exploding of waves against the side of the ship and across the deck over head, the whip of one of the slavers coming down on the floor of the deck where he uses it to coax a woman to kneeling, the voices in languages not my own, calling out to each other, it all starts to sound like music, it is music and when I open my eyes again it’s because Paula and that guy are making so much noise having sex in the barn that I can hear them over the sound of the sax that is still going.

It’s because they are right there on the other side of the barn board, inside the barn, the big cracks showing me Paula there on her back on the Mexican blanket or partly on her back because the Carter guy, who is quite short, has her heels hooked over his shoulders and his pants are around his knees. He’s doing stuff to Paula and she’s yelling.

Carter digs around inside his gotch and when he looks down to do it Paula throws one hand up beside her head and spreads her hair out really quickly beside her face and uses the other hand to pop open her front-close bra like it’s the top of a pop can and then she starts making the noises again, even louder, like she’s in the back seat of Tony’s car with

Tony’s stupid friend in Saturday Night Fever.

You know what? It’s only, like, 10 miles back to Regina. I can walk it. I bet I can catch a ride before Pinkie Road.

((!

But I don’t. Somewhere when the road back turns into 13th Avenue a Greyhound stops and lets me on like they do at most small towns where there’s no station for the bus.

True

A week of nine to five at Sears. My first week of being a working class hero. I don’t even bother to look at the calendar. I know this Friday is June 29th and The Clash are playing at The Kinsmen Field House in Edmonton which is on the moon 500 miles or so to the north and west.

Paula’s schedule isn’t the same as mine until Thursday, and on Thursday she acts like nothing happened at the bush party.

After our shift she follows me out into the parking lot where my cousin is waiting for me in the car. Paula’s tall with a flat bum like she’s on her back too much and really big breasts, so my cousin had his eyes on them when he said to me, “Get in back.”

He looks at her shirtfront and turns the music up loud: “My blood runs cold! My memory has just been sold! My angel is the centerfold!”

Paula is leaning down, shouting into the open driver’s window toward my cousin.

I see her mouth moving, but I can’t hear until my cousin punches the radio button. Then she’s yelling, “— tomorrow night in Edmonton?”

Then, more normal, “Do you wanna go?”

My cousin frowns. “I don’t do that punk shit.”

“I’ll go,” I yelp from the back seat.

Paula looks confused but says, “Okay. We have to get the 10:30 bus.” She steps back from the car and does a little fingertip wave.

My cousin turns the music up again and we pull onto Albert Street.

()!

At home, he parks so close to the garage that I have to walk behind the car to get to the house. He’s already opening his door and getting out, and he meets me behind the car. Grabbing my arms above the elbows, he says, “Gotcha!” like it’s a game. He gets his face in close to mine and hisses, “What do you think you’re up to?” He jerks his arms in around me and my feet leave the ground. My breath leaves my lungs in an ugly grunt.

“Your fucking problem,” he says, “is you’re always trying to be different.”

Drop.

“Don’t even think of fucking going.”

But I do.

Come out of your cupboards, you boys and girls. That’s me.

Next morning, I go to my boss and say, “I’ve got to leave at ten for the doctor’s.”

“No way, José,” my boss says, not raising his head. His scalp and hair are the same colour. “You know you change shifts 24 hours in advance. Besides,” he says, looking at me over the tops of his glasses, keeping his chins pressed into his neck, “Paula already used that excuse.” He stares at my head for a long while, until I unclip my i.d. badge, put in on the counter and say, “Alright. I quit.” He frowns deeper in surprise.

By 10:20 a.m., I’m in a Greyhound seat beside Paula. She has a mickey of

Southern Comfort. She wants to talk about my cousin. The ride is ten and a half hours long.

“What’s he like?”

“A jerk,” I say. “Exactly like a jerk. He listens to shitty music and doesn’t smoke dope.”

“I like his car,” she says.

(*!

“Uh huh.” It’s my mom’s car, but I don’t tell her.

“We went driving around last night,” she offers.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We went to Wascana Park and drank some beers and then we went back to your place.” She giggles. “I gave him a blow job.”

I already know this.

“Why’d you do that to your hair?” Paula says.

“I don’t know. Felt like it.”

“Your cousin is cool,” she says.

I say, “He doesn’t like punk.”

“Neither do I,” she says.

“Why’d you buy tickets?” I ask.

“I didn’t.” My heart skips a beat. “I stole them from my brother’s girlfriend. She’s going to shit.”

I hate this girl. I feel sorry for her brother. But I’m glad I’m going.

“So, let’s get drunk!” she says.

“No thanks,” I say, turning my face into the seat, shutting my eyes.!

When we come out of the evening and into the Kinsmen Field House, people are mostly sitting in their seats. I drag Paula with me up front to the stage. I look back, and everyone in the Kinsmen House is draining down the aisle toward us. It’s like we’re in a bathtub, and Paula and I are the plug that’s just got pulled.

The hall goes black, then the lights come up on treble chops. Twelve.

)+!

There he is. Feet planted together, right leg jerking with each chop like he’s trying to stomp change out of a hole in his pocket. Pointy-toed Docs, one buckle across. Black jeans, pink socks, black shoes.

Cowboy shirt with the sleeves sawn off, white star in a red circle on the black t- shirt underneath. I can play guitar like that. Down down down strum. All six strings at once.

When the bass comes in, it rolls up like a hearse.

I nail the first line like I’m part of the band.

Paula thrusts her mouth to my ear and screams, “Oh my god I want to fuck him.”

I’m thinking, “I want to be him.”

The ice age comes in on the chorus, and the sun is zooming in, and he lives by the river, and then I’m back in again, right on time, every time.

The bass line starts to roll up the end of the song, and a rooster crows.

Last night, after my cousin and Paula dropped me off, I sat on a kitchen chair beside my mom’s bed in the living room. The hospital bed didn’t leave room for a couch.

I turned her onto her side, made sure her arm wasn’t stuck underneath. I watched Love

Boat, put Vaseline on her lips. I ate some soup, then watched MASH, holding her hand.

She didn’t wake up, or come to, or whatever it’s called, when I kissed her forehead and checked her IV. We called it the living room even though she was dying in it. Not everyone who has MS gets cancer, too. But we did.

A guitar string hammers Morse Code short short short long long long short short short; just like on the record. Ess oh ess. Ess oh ess.

)"!

My mom’s hair hasn’t grown back. When she was allowed to come home, nobody expected her to last more than a few weeks. My cousin was still working at his job when he moved in to help out.

I hold my mom’s hand, listen to her breathing and mine, and think, “What a knob.

It’s not about going. It’s about coming back.”

Darkness. Then the spy-movie guitar riff, and a single spotlight spot picks him out. He grabs the neck of his guitar with hand, peels it off over his head. There is a big white question mark painted on the back of it. He raises it high and, without looking, hurls it into the dark behind him. A roadie catches it. He grabs the mike, growls,

“Driiiiiiive.” Boomboom. “Drive.” Boomboom.

When I hear my cousin come in the back door, I turn the TV up. Even so, I can hear his voice, and then a laugh in reply. After a while, I go down the dark hallway toward the bathroom. I have to pass my cousin’s room, my old room.

The door to my cousin’s room is open. They’re not in there. I walk down the hallway. The light from the TV in the living room flickers on the walls so that it’s all underwater blue. Everything feels slow as I get closer to my room. The door is open and what I see first Paula's dirty footsoles. Her toes are curled under, and she’s rocking forth and back. Her bum is covered by her skirt, but she has no shirt on. She’s got her arms on the bed, hands in fists, and he’s holding her head down in place.

My cousin’s eyes are aimed at me so I stop, and figure out too late that he isn’t seeing me. Then he is.

)#!

Joe Strummer knee-drops to the stage, falls forward and grinds the side of his face into the floor. He holds the mike down. Voice raw with something more than half grief, he tells it: “My baby drove up in a brand new Cadillaaaac! Yes she did!”

Beside me, Paula is still screaming. “I wanna fuck him! I wanna fuck him!”

“Why don’t you just fuck everyone then, you fucking idiot!” I bawl at her, in her face, hurting my throat. She opens and closes her mouth, all happy, like I've said something nice. She holds her fisted hands out, both thumbs up, waist height, leaning back like she's that greaser from Happy Days before back to the stage and starts to pogo.

She hasn’t heard me at all.

His eyes fasten onto me. He locks his elbows, ramming his hands into my old bedspread. He is pumping so fast that his chin points at me — you, you, you — with each thrust.

I try to stop looking, try to make my feet move. I want to go back to my mom, but when my feet do start moving, they take me down the hall to the bathroom. I go in and lock the door, slide down with my back against it, onto the cold tile.

I sit there for a long time. I run a bath but don’t get in it. I’m glad the TV is on loud.

After I figure they’ve gone, I open the door. The hallway is dark. It’s quiet.

In the living room, I find out why: for some reason my asshole cousin has turned the TV off.

Also, my mom’s not breathing.

Joe Strummer is on his hands and knees, circling the mike. He puts his mouth close so his lips are touching it. “Baby baby won’t you hear my plea?”

)$!

Her IV is still in place. For a long time I sit in the dark living room. Her face looks calm. I bolt the front door and the back door, hoping that bastard will stay out all night.

I get into my mom’s bed with her, stay there all night.

In the morning, the house is cold. My mom is cold. Even though I know she can’t feel it, I tuck the blankets in around her arms and legs. The bones, bone-thin.

In the bathroom, I use scissors to get my hair short all over, then a safety razor on the sides to get down to the skin. It makes me look more like my mom.

He stays low on the stage. I can almost touch his mohawk. His left arm is jack- knifed, choking the mike stand. When he whips himself up to standing, the sweat from his face and hair splashes my fingertips.

He leaps for the mike. “She ain’t coming back!”

Squeezed upright beside me, Paula is danced up and down by the press of the crowd.

“She ain’t never coming back!”

I am happy. I wish I could raise myself up higher so Joe could see my Brigade

Rosse shirt. I bob my head so hard it hurts my neck.

I know I am not Joe Strummer. He is the frontman of the only band that matters, and I am a teenage girl from Saskatchewan.

The stage edge cuts under my arms as I reach. The drummer calls, “One two three four!” Drums and bass crash into each other. Feedback cuts above our heads like a bullwhip, and lasts as long as the pain of that might. The drummer plays like he’s sprinting on the spot.

)%!

Joe Strummer turns his head to listen to something, mouths “What the fuck?”

Nods at what he hears – was it Cincinnati? — then nods at the bass player, who is all long legs, leather, and biceps.

The pressure of the crowd is too much. I push back, use my elbows.

Instead of more room, I suddenly have less. I am vised between bodies that piston up and down, squeezing me off the ground. Paula is five or six people away. I reach my hand to her. She’s yelling straight up into the air. My breath is pressed from me. My arms are on the stage, but my vision is going funny.

“Hey hey,” cries Joe, then, clang buzz scrack. The music grinds to a halt.

“Fucking nuthouse, innit? Shut it off.”

I think the music has stopped, but I could be going unconscious, or into a dying dream, because Joe Strummer and a roadie each have one of my arms. They are scraping me over the edge of the stage, my ribs a xylophone. My studded belt catches on the stage edge, and for a second I am stuck. Scrape of metal fly, kneecaps, shins. Then over, and I am beached on stage.

I try to stumble up, get my feet and knees under me. A hand is on my arm. I reach up.

I have hold of Joe Strummer’s forearm. He looks right into my eyes. Doesn’t smile, just looks. His eyes are narrowed, soft at the corners. His mouth is opened slightly, jaw relaxed. I can see the tip of his tongue.

He’s busy, that’s all. Saving people, I think.

Then he smiles, showing shark teeth.

)&!

The drummer counts in Clampdown again. The ones who have been hauled to safety onto the stage, stranded punks like me, start to dance, heads banging, washed by feedback.

Joe Strummer smiles maybe at the white star on my red shirt, maybe at my straight leg jeans, at my hair, I don’t know what. He pulls me to standing, puts one hand on either side of my head where the skin is still smooth from last night, draws my head toward his, ducks his so that my forehead and his touch, resting together; keeps his hands on the sides of my head and shrugs his shoulders so I know to put my hands up, too. I wonder what it must look like from the audience, what we look like with our foreheads together and our mohawks touching. I let my thumb and finger trace the outside edge of his ear from its pointed tip, down to the lobe. The subsonic growl rhyme that should come next in the song doesn’t, because Joe Strummer is whispering instead, whispering and whispering to me only, so that his breath dries the sweat from our skin. He rolls his forehead against mine and whispers and breathes and what he says is so low that I already know it will take me years to figure it out. For a moment, he lets his cheek rest in my open palm.

Then everything drops out.

Kick snare kick snare kick snare kick snare kick snare kick snare kick snare kick.

Joe’s hands let go of me and and he leaps to the mike. “What are ya gonna do now?”

I can breath now, I can take a breath. So I do. And then I take another.

)'!

The Part That’s Really, Really True

In the Green Room, all the skinny prairie punks are getting their hair cut and getting stoned with the only band that makes them feel like they matter.

We followed the fat roadie who caught the guitar out of the dark through the tunnels of the Kinsmen Centre, and ended up backstage where Joe Strummer was giving people haircuts. People line up to sit in one of the office chairs on wheels that Joe braces with the ridged sole of his pointy-toed one-buckle Doc Marten monk. He switches on the razor, saying, “Number four? Three? One?” Everybody gets a One.

I get as close to him as I can while he’s cutting hair. I want to talk about politics, and ask him about Nicaragua and The Sandinistas. He talks the whole time he’s cutting hair. Sam Cooke. Alan Ginsberg. Gene Pitney. Daniel Ortega. Exene Cervenka. I know who she is. Nye had one of their albums, X, with an X on fire on the front of it. X. Nye.

Tears hurt, did you know? They squeeze your eyes shut.

The razor switches off. “What’ll it be, mate? Short back and sides?’ Swick swick, little scissors in his hand.

Joe Strummer is really short. Not as short as me, but short. And muscley. He has the perfect shape of a small perfect man. He looks tall on stage, but he’s not.

He’s also fairly stinky, having got all sweaty during the concert.

“I’m a girl.”

What a fucking thing to say.

“Yeah, thas right,” says Joe Strummer.!

I stand pretty close, thinking he might remember what had just happened back there. He looks back, then with his eyes still on mine, he turns on the razor and some guy

)(!

slides into the chair. Joe Strummer stands there with the razor an inch above the guy’s already nicked scalp. He says to me, “Yer a girl. 's alright.”

And goes back to cutting hair.

Paul Simonon the bass player and the guitar player Mick Jones are smoking big joints on a couch with two old men Rastas. The drummer, Topper, is even smaller than

Joe Strummer and is sitting on a kitchen chair by himself, changing his shoes. His mouth is a crooked down line. A crooked down line. A crooked line down. Anyone lived in anyhow town.

Girls and guys are floating around the dressing room. More than haircuts, they want to flirt with the bass player. One boy, who is more beautiful with his shirt off than I am, sits down on the arm of the sofa, trying to put his hand inside Paul Simonon’s shirt.

Paul Simonon patiently lightly brushes his hand away over and over again as though it were a fly, or the hand of a little kid trying to find candy in their dad’s pocket, and

Simonon keeps talking to the old Rastaman, nodding and agreeing and moving the little hand.

The boy undoes Paul Simonon’s shirt all the way. There is a tattoo of a cowboy gun high up on Paul Simonon’s chest, the long barrel of the gun perfectly parallel with the collar bone, and the beautiful boy just wants to pet it. I would, too. Finally, Paul

Simonon takes the boy’s hand, tucks it into his armpit, under the gun tattoo, trapping the boy’s hand there with his arm, but carefully, like he’s live-trapped a hummingbird.

The beautiful boy finds a way to sit down on the sofa without pulling his hand out. Tucks his head onto the bass player’s shoulder, closes his eyes, makes like he’s asleep. I think he does go to sleep.

))!

Some English guy in a suit tells me I can ride in the limo to go back to the hotel after the band is finished in the Green Room. I’m seventeen, and I tell him I’m eighteen, but I know I look more like fifteen because I’m so flat.

I get stoned just breathing the air of that room.

When we got to the hotel, I couldn’t find anyone, at first.

Down the corridor, Kosmo Vinyl, the dink from the Green Room, opens a door to one of the hotel rooms with a key that he throws onto the bed. He waves me to come.

The bed itself is kind of made. I can hear the sound of the shower from behind the door to the can.

There’s a crump of stiff denim on the floor. There’s a shoe in the middle of it, a pointy-toed one-buckle, with a pink sock inside it. There are pills on the dresser and on the bedside table, in their bottles and spilling out.

So pilled up that I rattle.

It’s five a.m. Joe Strummer is having a shower. I’m in his room.

The water stops.

As Much of The Truth as You Will Get

What happened next? What happened next? Everything. Nothing. None of your business.

This Part is All True

I get on a city bus because The Clash are going to Vancouver next. I think about finding The Subhuman’s singer, Gerry Hannah, and the girlfriend he had with him, Ann

)*!

Hansen, who said I could stay with her in Squamish if I ever wanted to get the fuck out of

Regina.

I think about going to Nicaragua, and fighting with the Sandinistas. I think about my mom’s cousin the nun in Managua. About how my mom said, “If you ever need help when you’re travelling, you can go to a convent and the Sisters will take care of you.”

What kind of travelling did she think I was going to do?

I think about Paula, but only for a sec. Last time I saw her was through the open door of a hotel room down the hallway from Joe Strummer’s room, after he explained to me that we wouldn’t be having sex because he didn’t think that’s what I had come for and I could sleep on the floor but not on the bed, because, he said, his back was fucking sore from pulling people over the footlights.

I get off the city bus on the outskirts of Edmonton because of what the driver said: “You’ve been on this bus the whole route, girlie. Or, uh, kid. I turn around here.

You going back, or you getting off?”

So there I was with my thumb out on the Yellowhead. But I was mostly walking.

Between semis, which I avoided by pulling my thumb in and walking with my hands in my pockets and my head down, I heard what I always heard on the prairie: first the fucking wind, so loud you can’t hear anything else, then under that, meadowlarks from their nests on the ground in the pastures; then insects whirring like they were winding themselves up; then the tall grasses rubbing against each other, dry and hushing as skin under sheets, then the sound of my own heart, and then I remember that my mother’s heart stopped, and so I switch to the sound of the gravel beneath my Doc

Martens, and when I sob it sounds like the barking of a small dog with a cold.

*+!

Now I feel like shit, but I don’t pray. I’m not that kind of Catholic, even though my mom is. I am the kind of Catholic that can say all the response parts of the mass without thinking, and watch people stand up and sit down in the pews, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, lining up, looking holy, being rubber dickheads all through the week. Catholic is like that. Not just a religion, but also a thick almost invisible layer between you and the rest of the world.

When I get to the truck stop, the guys who look at me from the tables and the counter stools – guys with cowboy hats, or baseball caps, or stripes of white skin edged with dirt where it meets the sunburned red skin of their foreheads; their belt buckles are giant and they wear cowboy boots and I think that Alberta is like the Texas of Canada — these guys who are staring at me remind me that they look at me like I’m a girl. That’s what they see. They see my punk hair, but they look at my shirt and the rips in it, and they look really, really mad because I look like a girl, still.

Even the waitress, who says, “Honey, don’t you want to use the Ladies?” — even she sees me as a girl.

When the guy with granny glasses and long hair sits down on the stool next to mine at the counter, I think to myself, “Fucking hippie”, but he smiles right away like he’s about to start laughing at a joke I’ve made, like we have a joke together. He takes a big slurp of coffee and looks right at me and sings this Beatles song I know from my mom’s albums: I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man! You better run for your life if you can, little girl! Catch you with another man, that’s the end!

Little girl!

*"!

He’s got eye contact with me the whole time, so I can’t look away, even though

I’m so embarrassed I can feel my spine want to arch.

I know this song and I hate it, and I’m about to hate this guy, too, when he shows a grin and he says, “You hitching? Need a ride?”

Over his shoulder, I see that all the cowboys and truckers hate him as much as they hate me. He is kind of gross, but he’s friendly, and he flopped the keys to a Chevy

Impala onto the counter when he came in.

“Where are you heading?” I ask him.

“Saskatchewan,” he says.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Saskatchewan!” he says again, and he laughs like it’s a really good joke.

“Can I get a ride?”

Instead of answering, he shoves a toastful of yolk into his mouth, swallows without chewing, and sings, Low. Ri. Duh. Is a little hiya. He paws a fistful of change from his pocket, openhands it onto the table top. Low. Ri. Duh. Drives a little slow-uh.

Wipes his eggy lips and mouth hair with the back of his hand, wipes the hand really carefully with the napkin sings, Low. Ri. Duh. Is a real go-ah.

Scoops up the keys to the Impala, singing, Take a little trip, take a little trip, take a little trip with meeeeeee…Reet deedeedee! Deet dee dee deedee.

God. I wish I could hate that song.

But I follow him.

I swear I've never met him before, but he's familiar-looking. There's a book on the front seat where I'm supposed to sit. It's square, instead of rectangular like books are, and

*#!

has a spirograph thing on the cover. I move it over on the seat, so it's on the seat between us. The spirograph is drawn over a picture of an empty chair. What gets me is how cheap the book looks. Like a comic. It’s called “Remember Be Here Now”, and the guy says to me, “Hey, Squeaky, do you know Baba Ram Dass?”

I shake my head no.

“The guru?”

“Be here now, man,” says the guy says, “Be here now.”

And I think, “I’m not a man. Or squeaky.” But I don’t say anything.

When he gets in behind the wheel and I see him from the side, he looks even more familiar. He's rough looking except for the nose: very delicate and straight, no bump on the bridge, but kind of too small for his face, or something.

His face is quite a bit darker where he needs to shave, and his hair is short, above his ears, but like he cut it himself, like it used to be longer, all one length. It’s parted in the middle and straight as straw.

Where have I seen him before? I can’t get into bars because I’m too young.

Sometimes I drive around with my cousin Robert when he’s working. When he does his delivery business he always parks away from the house or office building where he’s picking up or dropping off, so I don't ever actually see any customers.

It’s my mom's car, a Ford Thunderbird. When Robert got her to sign the ownership over, I remember he whispered, “Shoulda bought a Caddy,” on a big, pained inhale, like it really hurt him to slum in a ’73 T-bird. It was supposed to be for me.

*$!

I know where I’ve seen this guy before, only he used to have a big beard and long hair. He’s cut his hair. Himself, it looks. With a hammer or by bending it over the edge of a countertop and sawing it with a brick. But he’s kept the moustache.

It's Carter.

If It’s True For Her Is It True for Me?

Paula’s stoned, but not enough so that she doesn’t understand she’s supposed to like this. She smiles and nods at the guy singing. He’s kind of cute, with his smiling eyes and his handlebar moustache. He comes in close and says quietly, just to her, “Go inside and get the tea from my old lady. Her name’s Heidi.” He winks at her.

Paula goes.

In the kitchen, Heidi is all long and crocheted: long for the skirt and the hair and the eyelashes and the fringes at the bottom of her crochet halter top. On the kitchen table is a tray of white styrofoam cups. Paula stands in the doorway, waiting for Heidi to notice her.

God, they smoked a lot in the car coming out, the bong going back and forth, the water in the bong bubbling along with Peter Tosh. Len’ me some paperrr. Len’ me some fye-er..

Heidi is stirring something, and even though it smells horrible, Paula suddenly feels the inside of her mouth absorb all its own spit, then just as suddenly fill with saliva.

She is so hungry.

“Hey, little cat,” Heidi says, and Paula knows she means cat as in I’m supercool groovy, but she actually sounds like she thinks Paula really is a cat. A kitty.

*%!

“Hey,” says Paula. “Hey can I have some of that soup?”

“Sure. It’s mushroom tea.”

“Oh. I probably shouldn’t have any then. I just took some with Carter.” It’s not exactly true, but what the hell.

“Oh, Carter! He just loves to give people dried Shiitakes and tell them it’s peyote!”

Heidi is laughing, shaking her head to herself and laughing, stirring the soup pot, her gypsy earrings swinging, and Paula hears their tinny tambourine sound. How can earrings be so loud? God she’s hungry. Tinkle tinkle ting.

Then Paula opens her eyes and thinks shit because Heidi has somehow crossed the kitchen right past her and is kissing the guy in the doorway.

It’s supposed to be a hello kiss-hug, one of those ones to show that you’re very open and loving, but the guy moves his mouth from Heidi’s cheek to her mouth and keeps it there, shoving. He has one hand on the back of her neck, and the other has reached all the way across her back and under her armpit to the front and is snaking up inside her crochet halter top, but it’s a long reach, and he can’t get up to her boobs without bending his knees and that’s how Heidi ducks out of it. She laughs a shaky laugh and says, “Hey, Bear, I’m glad to see you, too, hey.”

She backs up and says to Paula, “Do you know Bear, honey? What did you say your name was?”

Paula wants Bear to look at her but he’s got his eyes on Heidi.

It’s like Paula’s not there, but Heidi looks like she’s doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind, so Paula says, “My name’s Paula,” and Bear turns his head to her.

*&!

He gives Paula a long look, and she stands there giving it back, really feeling now that this guy is very sexy. His mouth opens to say something, maybe about doing it three- way with Heidi, when Carter walks in from the back.

“Ro-bear, my main man!” he says, and Paula gets why she thought his name was

Bear. She’s heard that name before. He looks French, even, with his dark eyes and hair and now he’s even sexier. Voolay voo cooshay avec mwa? Ce swa? Voolay voo cooshay avec mwa?

Carter is talking to Robear with their heads close, Bear giving Carter some baggies, and then they turn their backs to go out the door of the summer kitchen.

Paula watches them go, and Heidi says, “Carter and I don’t own each other, but he still wouldn’t like it if — ”

“Who’s that guy who was just here? Talking to Carter?” Paula says.

Heidi looks at her for the first time seeing her and says, “I know you… You’re friends with that girl. Bear’s cousin. The punkrock.”

“No I’m not,” says Paula, fast, but she knows Heidi means the skinny chick from work she’s been hanging around with. Lucie.

“Yeah, you are. She is one unhappy looking mini-mama. Like, she’s real sad looking all the time, like she just finished crying.”

“Like you should talk,” thinks Paula, and goes out to find him, that guy, the one with the French name, Lucie’s cousin. She’d really like to find him.

What happens though is that Carter comes back in, asks Heidi why she’s always fucking crying, and says to Paula, “Wanna git it on?” laughing, his eyes squeezed shut with laughing, his hair and beard looking like fresh cut straw.

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Paula says yes mostly to piss off Heidi.

Anyway, she knows how to find him, now, that sexy Frenchman, Robear. He’s the cousin who’s moved in with the girl who is the daughter of the lady her mom used to work with at Sears. That punkrock, Lucie, and her mom.

Things I Wish Weren’t True

Carter starts the car. “Under My Thumb” by Streetheart comes on because the radio is on and it’s always on the radio. I guess even Carter is sick of it. He puts an eight- track tape into the eight-track player. One tattoo on his right forearm, the only tattoo on him, at least that I can see: a dumb looking face with crossed googly eyes and steam coming out of the ears and a cloud exploding the hard hat so it goes up like a geyser.

“Slow Ride” comes on. The tattoo probably used to be red, but right now the only colour I could call it would be Sick Pink.

It's a long song. On the choruses, Carter closes his eyes and sings along in a creepy falsetto, shaking his head and beard back and forth. When he takes his hands off the wheel to do an airguitar solo (on the world's tiniest guitar, I think, about the size of his belt buckle, and down there at the same level), I touch the steering wheel with my left hand to steady us. It's a straight road, to wherever we are going. Carter pumps the gas pedal along with the kick drum. When he's done, he takes the wheel back.

I start to wonder exactly where we are going. He said he was going to

Saskatchewan, and we crossed at Lloyd. He said he was coming from Saskatchewan, and when I think of it now, it only makes sense if he was driving in a big circle.

Then the sign for P.A. makes me think of something else.

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There is a maximum security prison called The Pen, the Prince Albert

Penitentiary. But now I'm thinking that it's actually called the Saskatchewan Penitentiary.

I am kind of remembering that, remembering my cousin correcting me, saying it is the

Saskatchewan Penitentiary, not the Prince Albert Penitentiary.

Saskatchewan is what they call the prison near Edmonton. Fort Saskatchewan.

After Foghat is Ram Jam for “Black Betty” and then Golden Earring and then it’s dark when we get close to the Pen and Carter seems to suddenly develop an itch that covers his entire body. He can’t scratch everywhere all at once because his right hand is on the wheel, but his left is down around his left ankle for so long I imagine a bleeding crater that he must be opening up in the skin.

“I been drivin’ all night, my hands wet on the wheel, drr-dirtin-drdr-drdr, drr.”

Carter has to rewind the Golden Earring eight-track each time so he can play it over and over and each time he goes too far forward, then too far back, then too far forward, and he curses “fuck!” every time.

The imaginary crater in his ankle is now so deep he can take his hand away from it, and to my … to my … nothing, when his hand comes up holding a knife, I have no feeling at all. Just a kind of dullness, and a strong desire to look away, out the window, at the passing night.

I imagine wolves out there, and other creatures I don’t know the names of, that walk upright and slobber from their jackal jaws.

“Radar lo-ove. Radar lo-ove.”

Carter says nothing, is saying nothing, and the song is coming to an end. I wait for him to press rewind on the 8-track.

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But he does something else. He’s digging inside the top of his boot, the left one, with his left hand, steering with the right, hunched over the wheel, and when he straightens he passes the thing from his left hand to his right, and holds it straight up, gripping it and steering, still.

I made it,” he says, sounding zoned-out, “I made it in The Pen from the leg off a bunk. A shiv. A shank.”

“A shiv?” I think. “That’s short for what? Is shiv an English word?” Thinking thoughts I wonder why I’m thinking. Like, why am I not thinking, “How the fuck do I get out of here?”

Up ahead I see a gas station: the pumps, and the building beside it, a ranch house that is the restaurant. The yellow bug lights are hooded by where the roof juts out over the house. Their light, and the red neon “Open” in the window make the place look warm and safe.

“Wow that’s a great knife what a knife that’s beautiful oh wow you made it yourself can I see it can I hold it,” and I have it out of his hand and in mine and I as far away from him as I can get it, on the seat beside my right thigh, near the door.

“I have to pee,” I tell him, and in his sleep-driving way, Carter veers the car toward the right shoulder.

“Not yet,” I say, and he veers back.

“Okay. Now,” I say. “Turn into the gas station. Just pull up. Okay, stop.”

He does.

“I’ll be right back.”

**!

I wonder when he will wake up, even though he is already awake, in a way. The engine is idling, like him.

In the restaurant-house, there is a lady behind the counter in a waitress uniform. I can see into the kitchen part: there’s no cook. Just her.

“I,” I say to her. That’s all. That’s all I can manage. My legs start to buckle, and I feel the cold window glass of the door on my back. As I slide down, my shirt slides up, and I go down pretty quietly but not straight. My knees shift to the side and I land tilted, with the knife loose in my hand, cupped palm-up in my stupid lap. I’m looking at her, and my eyes and mouth are open, but I can’t speak.

“Please help,” I wish at her.

Through the glass behind me, something makes her look sharp, and she reaches beneath the Formica counter. She doesn’t come out with a shot gun. She just touches something under the counter and the lights go out. All except for the neon sign hanging from two chains in the window. It flashes. Dark. Flash.

From outside, the sound of a car door slams.

“Go into the bathroom,” she says to me, looking out the dark window. “Go inside and lock the door. It’s past the bedroom. There’s a folded-up stepladder in the bathtub.

Go out the bathroom window. My car is behind the granary. It’s a burgundy ’98 and the tank is full and the keys are in it. I been waiting for my ex to come after me all this time and now some stupid bastard — ”

She cuts off, starts pulling the blinds down over the windows, and shoving tables at the same time. She gets one in front of the doorway.

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“Go,” she hisses, turning to look full at me. The “Hi! My Name Is” plastic badge on her right chest says “Tanya”. Her eyes are blue. Either they are really blue or the flashing Open sign makes them look that way or something about me sees them blue.

“Go,” she repeats.

I go.

The bathtub is filled with plastic flowers. I think, “So customers will forget that it’s the lady’s actual private bathroom”. There is a crocheted toilet seat cover, and a doll whose legs are jammed in a toilet roll covered by a crocheted Fentex ballgown skirt looks at me from on top the toilet tank.

Under all the flowers, when I stick my arm in and swish my hand around, is the stepladder, just like she said. It’s wood, and it’s folded flat, lying there hidden and waiting. I know without thinking that she has thought all this through more than once.

Maybe tried it. Maybe had to do it.

I can hear Tanya moving in the dark restaurant, and hear a loud, metal bolt go home, once, and another one, a split second before I hear the sound of a closed door being banged and shaken and bashed and kicked and “Open up! Open up!” in Carter’s voice.

“The signs says you’re friggin’ Open!”

The Truth Hurts

It was the sound that had come after the breaking glass that fucked me up.

I fishbellied head-first over the windowsill kicking the step ladder back into the tub behind me, not much noise because of the padding of plastic flowers.

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The glass breaking or being broken, not one blow but many, he must be using something, heavy, not the propane tank from the side of the house? What if it’s full?

The woman Tanya not making any sound, but not coming into the bathroom either.

The moon is in the dirty frame of a small window high on the shed wall, a fingernail paring in a velvet-lined box.

No. It was rattling. the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy. that ee cummings poem, why is she thinking of that now? She? Who is thinking? Who is she?

Poetry kills outside noise.

For a moment everything is terribly silent inside the shed, the world.

anyone lived in a pretty how town, and what i want to know is how do you like your blue eyed girl Mister Death

Don’t listen to the sounds coming from inside the restaurant now. He is smashing things. She is screaming.

The car is where she said. The key is in the ignition. I have to drive through the parking lot of her house that is a gas station. Carter’s car is there in the parking lot. My hands on the wheel know to turn the car north, not south, going back the way we came because Carter won’t think of that. I drive watching for lights in the rear view mirror.

The radio is on, was on when I started the car. My hand reaches out like it’s someone else’s hand to twist the dial, and one of those late night CBC voices comes on and the car air is filling up with sound, a few human noises at a time, moving in on swift, eddying currents. The noises don’t settle on the bottom; they stay in the air like bright sediment. It doesn't get thicker, it's not in layers, but there is more and more of it, and the

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car is filling and filled with it, and I am as well, and it is just the way it is, now. From now on. Some voice is going “hoo, hoo, hoo” and there is a sound of blows on something, something soft and yielding, not hollow, not metal, not wood. Mostly they're mouth noises: buzzing and drumming and lip pops, but deep voiced, like sage grouse booming.

I drive and I drive, crying along with the radio and it sounds okay, and when it’s over the voice on the radio says, “The Four Horsemen are bpNichol, Rafael Barreto

Rivera, Steve McCaffery and Paul Dutton. I’m Robert Weaver and you’re listening to

Anthology”, and I have somehow turned east and am driving past a sign that says

Plunkett and I am pretty sure they’re dead now, that they’re both dead, the woman named

Hi I’m Tanya and my mom.

I have some money left in my pocket from my last pay at Sears, Olds 98 and a full tank of tears.

End of Some of This is True

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Part Two: CRITICICAL EXEGESIS

INTRODUCTION

Writing punk from the outside, I found that theoretical publics were identifiable, but they seemed to lack energy and significance; writing punk from inside the punks public1, through fictionalized recreation of memory, I found both more energy, and space for theory to emerge.

Writing about creative writing that I wrote is not necessarily a format that fits into the academic structure of Public Texts. My process and commitment was to study public text theory, knowing that I would be obliged to somehow put aside what I had learned of

Warner, Bakhtin and Foucault while I wrote the literary text if I were to avoid a prescriptive tone in my fiction. The work of these theorists was instrumental in revealing to me the nature of punk as simultaneously a public, an iteration of carnival, and a portable, placeless site of resistance to normative hegemony. However, my felt

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1 Warner notes that a public can’t be looked in the eye (7). He likely has in mind his notion of publics as a social fiction, which cannot be pointed at, or counted. My literary fiction is concerned with individual punks, whom I sometimes tried to depict at the moment of interaction with text, or at the sharp edge of the margin between art and life. Punk is a public, punks are the constituents of that public. I use the term punks public, and will use it in the following pages, rather than punk public, to try to keep this in my own purview.

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recollections of the relationships, experiences and events which are the true underpinnings of this story could not, I found, be adequately described or explained by deploying theory, by looking at punk from outside of it. I do not intend to discredit the role of theoretical texts in the dissemination of ideas, but rather to focus on intersections where ideas from theory were manifest in the cultural products about those ideas.

Punk rock was a musical style: a text. The resistant practices of punk rock music were integrated by punks in their aesthetic response to that music and those practices in self-reflexive textual production. This is punk’s defining ethos, known now as Do-It-

Yourself, or DIY . The origins or first utterance of this term cannot be authenticated; as with other terms that contribute to the mythopoesis of punk and other publics, retrospective application is rampant. But with the DIY acronym co-opted by the self- grooming and home-renovation industries, perhaps a more accurate way to characterize the punk ethos and aesthetic might be Anyone-Can-Do-This, Go-Do-This, or If-We-Can-

Do-This-So-Can-You (but the acronyms become unwieldy). In punk, DIY and all that it implies was fully integrated and expressed by punks as fashion and other aesthetic responses, including body decoration, ‘zine production, visual art products, and sometimes mere stances.2 I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s distinctions of taste (what we like) as acts of social positioning (why we like it) as outlined in Distinction¸ to focus on the individual member of the public who makes a text distinct — who gives it distinction that makes it matter — by interacting with it. It is the interaction of the individual with the text as a unit of social or cultural currency that gives significance to that text. In the

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2 Writing in 1978, Isabelle Anscombe and Dike Blair provided text to accompany Bayley Roberta’s photos of the punk scene. The cover of the book reads “Punk: It’s about doing something and getting off your ass / saying something /seeing what a shitty place this is and what a / Jam place it could be.” (Anscombe et. al, Punk)

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textual circulation of punk, aesthetic responses were interactions by punks with the punk text that produced other reflexively circulating texts.

Some — but not all — of the characteristics of punk that I note here are also the characteristics of publics, according to Michael Warner. However, Warner’s publics and the counterpublics that orbit them don’t fully capture how texts were produced and circulated within punk.

Other theorists add pieces to the puzzle. Greil Marcus writes of punk as having its origins in formal art theory.3 Punk gets bothered by a search for origins, and art theory which seems to be at work in punk is sometimes blamed for its emergence. But punk is antithetical to formal theory, and perhaps even to the notion of traceable roots. Peter

Jones and others write convincingly of punk as a reification of carnival, a deployment of the grotesque to invert, but ultimately restore, hegemony.4 The absence of the performer- spectator relationship in punk is reminiscent of Bakhtinian carnival. A lot of punk looks like carnival, but not all of punk.

So, theory alone failed to capture for me what it felt like to be a punk in the punk public. I wanted to write about punk from the inside, where Bakhtin was not known but somehow carnival was felt, where Warner was unwritten, but texts and publics were sniffing each other out like skunks in love. When it was time to write the literary text, I set for myself the task of trying to write it in such a way that it would perform or demonstrate or enact or portray something about punk that public text theory alone did not. Writing the literary text, I was aware when aesthetic expression of theories was

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3 See Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. 4 See Jones, Peter. “ '70s British Punk as Bakhtinian Carnival.” See also Hermann, Andrew F. “Never Mind the Scholar, Here's the Old Punk” and Hoy, Mikita. “Bakhtin and Popular Culture” and Langman, Lauren. “Punk, Porn and Resistance: Carnivalization and Body in Popular Culture.”

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nascent and possible, and I often chose to consciously follow those images or impressions. I was able to watch theory perform in the text, and looked forward to narrating those moments in this exegesis.

What was most compelling to me about public text theory was that it offered a way to examine the intersection of texts with the public; writing Some Of This with an eye to both contributing to theory and toward reifying punk, I found that what I wanted to explore and portray was the moment of conation 5 when the participant of a public was

“found” by the public-seeking text, and when the moment became interaction with the text through reflexive circulation, which I sometimes term “aesthetic response”.

Therefore, I focused on aspects of public text theory that I hope can be said to be enriched by literary representation: the moment when a public-seeking text finds an individual; the moment that meeting becomes interactive; the form the interaction takes, and the ricochet of reflexive circulation that follows.

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&! According to Artosi, Pieri and Sartor, Gottfried Liebniz drew upon the Hobbesian notion of “conatus” (meaning endeavour, or striving) to draw a parallel in jurisprudence to what he observed in the laws of nature. This was part of Liebniz’s project of seeking correspondence between physical and moral domains. For natural philosophers like Liebniz, conatus is a two-fold notion carrying both a physical and moral sense. Quoting a letter from Liebniz to Antoine Arnauld: “the will or conatus to act”. It is a philosophical term that has tried to find footing in psychology since Spinoza but it stinks of free will and the soul, and is currently uncomfortable cognitive-behavioural pattern of applied psychology. Nevertheless, “Conation” is defined by Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Comprehensive International Dictionary (1977) as “the aspect of mental process directed by change and including impulse, desire, volition and striving” and by the Living Webster Encyclopedia Dictionary of the English Language (1980) as “one of the three modes, together with cognition and affection, of mental function; a conscious effort to carry out seemingly volitional acts”. Conation lies between cognition and behaviour. For example: the butterfly collector, lying on her back in the tall grass, observes a specimen, say Papilio nitra, as it flits past. She recognizes it as the rare dark form of the Anise Swallowtail, the negative of its print, if you will. That is the moment of cognition. Rising and taking up her net, she captures the Swallowtail: this is behaviour. In between the two is an impulse or will or desire that motivates, and that results in the action. This is conation. Thought seems to cancel or slow conation. Some butterflies elude capture. This is how I am using the term.

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A public can't be looked in the eye, and so I chose to focus on a few punks of the punks public of 1979 Regina. (I use the term punks public, and will use it in the following pages, rather than punk public, to try to keep this in my own purview.) In Some

Of This Is True, I wrote to portray the time before the text and the individual meet, the time before the public is formed; I wrote to portray the moment of interaction with the text, when the response to the text is made and begets a response in return, setting up the cycle of reflexivity as the public comes into formation. I wrote to portray what the feeling before the public was, what the feeling was during, and after. To provide contrast that would support the differences of these states, I wrote what not being part of, or not participating in that public, felt like.

To structure the literary text, I focused on individual punks. When they crossed a threshold, I had to write about what was on either side of the threshold. Finding the threshold of punk and crossing over it into the punks public, and belonging there, mattered to the characters in Some Of This Is True. In writing the threshold moments of punk, I found something that functioned like Foucauldian heterotopia, particularly a heterotopia of crisis or deviation. I will say more on heterotopias in the following pages, and about why I think characterizing punk as a heterotopia makes some sense.

These points of theory provide a framework for discussing the critical and aesthetic influences under which I wrote, and some explanation of the purpose behind many stylistic decisions.

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Punk as Public

Some Of This is a text about the circulation of texts within a particular public. It is a public-seeking text, seeking to elicit recursive circulation of texts as a form of interaction.

The issue for me may be that I wanted to portray a public-seeking text by writing a public-seeking text. Punk was text, punk was a public, punks of the punks public were interactively circulating texts. When punk is looked at from the outside, all of this is somewhat true.

In Warner’s models of counterpublics, he describes interacting individuals who interact with texts by projecting themselves into indistinct masses which make up imagined publics which the individual or individuals seek to join as virtuous members, worthy of belonging. In the end, this is a performer-spectator relationship, and is different from what was going on with punk.

Trying to write about a public from within it, whether that position is reconstituted from memory or remembered into fiction, revealed some limits to the usefulness of Warner’s model for this project. In Publics and Counterpublics, Warner acknowledges the slippery nature of publics, calling them “queer creatures” (7). In a bit of his own slippage, he confers upon texts and their immediacy in our age of instant production-and-reproduction the status of a life form that has something like agency:

“Texts cross one’s path in their endless search for a public of one kind or another” (7).

With this statement Warner anthropomorphizes the public-seeking text. This is how publics look when viewed from the outside; they look like consumer groups, with texts as commodities for publics. The reflexivity of texts that Warner puts forth as public- defining seems to rest on the target of the texts: on a projected, imagined audience out

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there somewhere, already in existence. The model suggests that, if counterpublics successfully conform to a norm, they will be accepted into the prevailing public.

I have the same complaint of Warner’s anthropomorphized public-seeking, public-forming text that David Bell does, when he writes that it “neglects that people make publics too, through their use of texts” (618). However, Warner’s characterization of the public-seeking text nudged my focus toward the individual punk in a public of punks allowed me to notice what might be distinct about how texts circulated in punk: they were so very remarkably what Bell calls “interactable” (617).

In punk, interaction with the text was not limited to consumption, acquisition, or dependent upon acceptance by an imagined, projected public. Punk was a performative culture. A punk did punk. I argue that punks did punk not to be accepted into a prevailing, normative public, but rather to stay out of it. Punks were not constituents of a counterpublic hoping to “norm into” a public, either by becoming more normal, or by expanding the prevailing definition of normal. Punk was a public, but not one seeking acceptance by a greater prevailing public.

This is distinctly different from the way Warner describes a performative counterpublic, the ladies of Casa Susanna, in Publics and Counterpublics. The 1950s era ladies were a drag counterpublic that performed in American suburban rumpus rooms, photographing them themselves while so doing. Of the ladies, Warner writes “The more strangers, the greater the glamour.” He writes of an “absent mass media” for which the ladies perform (13). The ladies of Casa Susanna interacted with a projected social fiction, an imagined public, by performing for it as their imagined audience. They generated texts or cultural products — photo images of themselves and each other — and projected them

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by imagining their acceptance into a greater, elsewhere public, and so make their texts seek to belong to that public. I reckon this to be the case, for they were not mimicking drag (they were drag queens, after all) but were rather mimicking drag queens with access to a larger audience of strangers, an audience beyond the walls of Casa Susanna.

Nancy Fraser also notes the lurking impulse toward normative assimilation in

Warner’s model of publics. In “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere” she addresses the

“idealized character” of publics in public text theory that I struggle with when reading

Warner. Fraser is responding obliquely to Warner via Jürgen Habermas when she writes,

“The concept of the public sphere was developed not simply to understand communication flows but to contribute a normative political theory of democracy” (7); this is the normative leaning present in Warner’s characterization of publics that I resist.

Fraser continues, “By appealing to the standard of inclusive communication among peers the theory was able to criticize existing, power-skewed processes of publicity. By exposing unjustified exclusions and disparities, the theory was able to motivate its addressees to try to overcome them” (25). Overcoming exclusions and disparities by replacing them with inclusion and similarities is normativity.

Nancy Fraser criticizes Warner’s (and Habermas’s) characterization of the public sphere here and elsewhere from her political-intellectual ground of seeking “to overcome the unnecessary and unproductive opposition between two different understandings of justice” (qtd. in Hrubek 879) and does so by challenging and reframing the relation of the counterpublic to the public. She seems to see the Warnerian public and counterpublic model as one in which the counterpublic seeks acceptance, inclusion, and, ultimately, assimilation, as do I.

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Catherine Squires offers some ways of characterizing publics that do not assume aspirations of inclusion into a wider public. In discussing co-existing publics which operate “in reaction to the exclusionary politics of dominant public spheres” she notes that the importance of “the move away from the ideal of a single public sphere … is that it allows recognition of the public struggles and political innovations of marginalized groups outside traditional or state-sanctioned public spaces and mainstream discourses”

(447). This seems different from a public (or even a counterpublic) that projects itself, in imagination, into an imagined wider public. Rather, it seems to affirm the claim of marginalized individuals in a marginalized public to operate away from the wider public, without regard for the imagined wider public’s acceptance.

Squires speaks to the traditional vagueness with which the term counterpublics is deployed suggesting that a criteria of countering assumes an imagined mainstream

(wider,) public sphere awaits. Her main goal is to be put aside the idea of a public that exists to counter another, in order “to examine the variations to provide a richer vocabulary for enable and inspire comparisons across [co-existing] public spheres as well as to allow for more in-depth, nuanced investigations of the variations within a particular public sphere (448). She uses enclave as a noun and as a verb, suggesting a public can enclave itself in order to hide “counterhegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive or avoid sanctions, while internally producing lively debate and planning” (449). That is, she calls for the investigation of a public to focus on the interior of that public, and to legitimate the activities of that public, in the context of its own existence, rather than in contrast, or counter, to any other public, particularly one which eschews co-existence for hierarchy.

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Punk interaction with punk texts was not intended to be a display of worthiness to belong to, or be praised by, a projected, imagined audience. Punks gave punk texts meaning through a form of interaction we now call Do-It-Yourself or DIY, an ethos of cultural production that resists virtuosity as a measure of virtue, or value, or worthiness.

This ethos insisted that punks make punk texts, but not that they make them with the hope of having them accepted by a wider audience. Punk was not aiming to expand the main stream. Indeed, acceptance by a non-local (projected) mainstream audience or corporate distribution system may be the antithesis of punk.6 Isabelle Anscombe wrote of punk that “it must be willing to reject itself as it becomes established” (qtd. in Marcus

197). Certainly, punk musicians who became adept at playing their instruments, or bands that achieved mainstream acceptance or signed to non-independent record labels found themselves rejected by the punks of the punks public.

My argument is that, when reading Warner, punk looks like a public because many things look like a public when reading Warner. He says, “Publics have become an essential fact of the social landscape” and that “simple common sense” allows us to recognize a public and its symbiotic relationship to its text(s) (8). These are sweeping statements. There is a danger, then, of deciding that punk is a public and nothing more. It compels one to say that punk is a public because it meets many of Warner's criteria for a public: it was 1) self organized; 2) a relation among strangers; 3) its address of public speech was both personal and impersonal; 4) it was constituted through mere attention; 5) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6 See Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud in Berger, pages 140-44, and Andrew F. Hermann for accounts of this trend from 1977 to 2012. See also Rimbaud’s Shibboleth: My Revolting Life, and liner notes from Stations of The Crass: “White Punks on Hope” and “Punk is Dead”. The Clash narrated this pressure in song after song; part of my interest in the band, and their suitability to the project of this thesis, is Strummer's awareness of the something at work which we can now call a text-seeking public, or a public- forming text, or, more broadly, a public. But that is another thesis entirely.

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it was a space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse; 6) it acted historically according to the temporality of their circulation; and 7) was poetic world making (67 -

118). However, I find punk troubles Warner's fifth point. It does so because, in punk,

DIY is the dominant form of interaction with the text. If punk is a public, it does not conform.

DIY scuffs the boundary between spectator and performer. It alters or bends

Warner's criteria of reflexive circulation of discourse. This scuffing of the line between performer and spectator is made possible by a resistance to the idea that virtuosity is a prerequisite for value, of worthiness to belong to a public of performers playing to spectators. He accounts for the wide range of contexts in which he claims the form of a public can be recognized by noting, “[T]he form must be embedded in the background and self-understanding of its participants in order to work” (9).

He is suggesting that a public must exist for a public to form. This centralizes the judging outer public whose acceptance is sought, and the terms are those of professionalization: is the amateur polished enough to be considered for membership into the professional association or line-up? Can the fan become the famous? No. It is a binary relationship, and if it fails, some other flaws in Warner may be revealed. He employs binaries elsewhere in his argument, in a list he provides, somewhat in passing, when writing of bodily sensations: “pleasure and pain, shame and display, appetite and purgation ... come to be felt, in the same way, as privacy” (23). In a book about publics,

Warner has listed binaries that are somehow not only opposites of each other, but also opposed to of the feeling of publicness.

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I introduce privacy here with some trepidation, for it is not the project of this thesis to define privacy as the opposite of publicness or of publicity or exposure. To make room for punk as a public, albeit one that does not seek Warner’s normative assimilation,

I offer an alternative to the display that Warner seems to be placing opposite to shame. I argue that in punk, the opposite of shame was belonging, or inclusion, or belonging.

Inside punk, the It that you were to Do Yourself was make something, do something, perform something, as a way of responding to texts, and to do so without an expectation for virtuosity from yourself or from those who were expected to make texts in response.

This tight circle of self-reflexivity characterized punk and signalled belonging to it.

I understand Warner's project as one ultimately of inclusion of inclusion — a subsumation into the greater, larger or more general publics as achieved by projection, dependent upon virtuosity for acceptance. But punks claimed the right to belong or to be included in a public of text-making without having to be virtuoso. Belonging by virtue of expertise was pushed aside. This was done without imagining a public of professionals or experts that would affirm the virtuosity of a circulated text and confer upon it the virtue of belonging to the projected public. Because of this, punk, from inside it, felt strangely private.

The strangely private – or perhaps I should say separate – feeling of punk may come from the suspension of the need to be virtuoso in text-making. That suspension was achieved in punk by trying to take the category of virtuoso out of the mix. Virtuoso is a rank determined by a projected public, imagined to be looking at outsiders who want in.

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I have argued that DIY is a rejection of the hierarchical category of virtuoso, and that this rejection of an expert-nonexpert paradigm signals entry into the punks public, of inclusion, of belonging.

That which is private and shameful has a history of being displayed in punk. Punk was a public that included that which was shameful outside of punk: absence of virtuosity or disregard for the category of professional.

In a performer-spectator paradigm, the absence of virtuosity is shameful. That which is shameful is not valuable; it is not worthy of belonging; it is not acceptable.

Virtuosity is valuable, and not shameful; it is acceptable. In the DIY of punk, however, what would be shameful – the absence of virtuosity – was not considered shameful and belonging was conferred by mere doing. The DIY ethos of punk seemed to remove the aspiration to expertise from the category of worthiness to belong. DIY took away the measure of virtuosity as a standard of acceptability, as a standard of measuring the worthiness to belong (virtue, or value). If this does not make shame disappear – as a category, if not as a feeling – it does at least, I hope, problematize the position Warner puts shame in relation to display, as though to display that which is shameful might negate shame.

DIY made the punks of the punks public into makers-without-shame of texts sans virtuosity. There was virtue without virtuosity. Although the making of texts in response to texts qualifies punk as a public, I don’t think that the immediate, non-virtuoso, aesthetic response (potentially in different media, or in stance alone) is the form of interaction Warner intended to confer upon the public-seeking, public-forming text.

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Warner’s model does not fully capture the non-valourized, non-valourizing nature of reflexive circulation of the subversive and oppositional punk text or punk public.

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Punk as Art Theory

Inside DIY, the virtue of belonging, without virtuosity, was not equivalent to amateur or unskilled or incompetent; these were not categories, as they belong to a hierarchy whose pinnacle is virtuosity. DIY was a demand or claim by punks that the texts they circulated in works of art -- language, graphic, dress, or performance -- be non- virtuoso and accepted.

That is, punk should not be taken as an inversion of low-high distinction; DIY did not seek to merely reverse virtue and virtuosity. Dada and Situationism did seek this reversal, however, and Greil Marcus claims these as the roots of punk. He links these earlier movements to the emergence of punk, tracing the path of art theory texts from the

Continent to UK art schools where they were circulated to individuals who would interact with them in punk as punks. Marcus quotes Henri Lefebvre: “Dada smashes the world, but the pieces are fine” (191), and goes on to use Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine as an example of Dada that paralleled the DIY of punk, saying that in Dada, art was art if the artist said so, not if the exhibition curators considered it virtuoso -- expert -- and therefore worthy of belonging in the exhibition. This interaction is punk in that anybody could have done it themselves, not just Duchamp, because virtuosity was not necessary to make it and claim the right to exhibit it (190 - 244). Punk’s relationship to the texts of the state- run art schools of the UK in the 1970s was not hidden, but it was not necessarily known to punks. When Marcus writes, “[T]he formal dada theory that art could be made out of anything matched the formal punk theory that anyone could make art” (199) he is correct, but there was no formal punk theory.

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There was, however, Sideburns,7 an early ‘zine (made by fans for fans, circulated by hand at events and included in album covers), with a one-page drawing of the places on a guitar neck to put your fingers in order to play the chords A, E and G, and which bore the instructions: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.”

The diagram is titled “Play’in [sic] in the band. First and last in a series.” This was not a call for musical virtuosity.

Using Dada’s own “formal” theory, it’s not art if the maker does not intend it to be art. The punks of punk who learned three chords and formed a band were reflexively circulating texts in a specific way, but not in a way that was specifically art and might not be called art unless looked at retrospectively, with knowledge of Dada theory that punks in punk may not have had.

In punk, DIY was almost instantaneous response of interaction with the text.

Punks were punk because they wore punk-style fashions that they made, listened to punk rock music and made punk rock music; they circulated texts self-reflexively through embodied DIY, integrating counter-normative or resistant practices in every form of aesthetic response. Sometimes that just meant standing there looking ugly, refusing the self-grooming heteronormativity of the mainstream. And sometimes that ugliness gets punk compared to Bakhtin’s carnival.

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7 See Endnote.

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Punk as Carnival

The bifurcated structure of my project with its critical and creative components of equal emphasis allowed me to hold in my imagination the things I knew of publics as I wrote Some Of This Is True. I used a conative lens to focus on moments of intersection between texts and punks. That is, I looked for the conative moments of interaction, the moment when the text which seeks a public finds the participants of that public. Because punks in punk interacted with the texts of punk in many physical, non-print ways, it is tempting to characterize the interactable DIY of punk as something that made punks themselves the recursively circulating texts of punk. This embodied interactable impulse that evokes and provokes further interaction is familiar to readers of Bakhtin on carnival, wherein carnival is the non-textual recursive interaction of bodies as texts.

In Some Of This Is True I have tried to portray the moments that evince the highly interactable, performative relationship between punks and punk texts. I will argue that these precise moments are like carnival. Bakhtin's carnivalistic or carnivalesque has gone beyond a way of understanding Rabelais’s Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel. Hebdige and others8 frame counter-hegemonic movements, youth sub-cultures and countercultures as iterations of carnival. Peter Jones goes so far as to say that punk was a reincarnation of carnival. In “Anarchy in the UK: '70s British Punk as Bakhtinian Carnival” he declares his project to be that of “locating punk within the carnival tradition ... to redefine and redeem its many subversive features, and in addition, to open up the discourse on punk which in general sees it as an episode in the history of British pop music, a youth sub- cultural phenomenon, or as a manifestation of postmodernism” (26). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

8 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. See also Mikita Hoy's “Bakhtin and Popular Culture” and Lauren Langman's “Punk, Porn and Resistance”.

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Both punk and carnival can be looked at as theory about reflexively circulating texts that seek publics whose participants generate reflexively circulating texts, etc. In punk this gets called DIY. It is at the heart of carnival with its absent — or more precisely, non-existent — footlights. Bakhtin writes in Rabelais and His World “In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators” (20). Punk is so much like carnival in so many ways; it is seductive to say, like Jones and Hebdige and others, that punk was its reification. However, there is a crucial distinction: it is not the case that punk did not know footlights. In punk, the row of footlights between fan and famous, player and professional, was recognised, analysed, despised. Rather, punks smashed the footlights, and dragged each over the jagged shards. The footlights were acknowledged, and destroyed.

Seeking carnival in the punk movement (which is not the same as seeking the carnivalesque) Jones writes that “irreverence, dissent and symbolic resistance” (25) were expressed by punks, and not only in their music but also in behaviour, and dress, including clothing, hairstyle and make up, and focuses particularly on the central position of the grotesque body of carnival in punk: “The grotesque body is central to the carnival.

It is the popular resource, the nexus and embodiment of a set of “negative” oppositional values such as disorder, filth, unrestrained pleasure and ugliness” (32). I tried to show in

Some Of This Is True that awareness of one’s ugliness relative to that of the normative hierarchy was a felt thing, and that, if deployed rather than normativized (by grooming), mere ugliness was resistive. I tried to show the moment in which the ugly (in feeling or in fact) Lucie recognizes, in the smug-self-satisfied smirks of the successfully normative

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that she is already in a different public, the one that is inside the gymnasium with The

Extroverts. All she has done at this point is look at album covers and liners and lyrics, heard music, seen Patti Smith seeing her androgynous self and seeing Lucie back. Lucie has interacted with text, and perhaps her sense of herself that results is what changes her.

She does not conceal herself; she does not seek normative assimilation. Jones calls on

Renate Lachman to focus on the centrality of challenging concealedness of the body and body’s insides: “By contrast, carnival semiotics allows the inner realm to enter eccentrically into the outside world and vice versa: it stages the penetration of the outside into the bodily insides as a spectacle. The boundary marking the division between the body’s insides and outside is suspended through the two movements of protruding and penetrating.”

(qtd. in Jones 32).

Jones aligns punk with carnival as described by Bakhtin, centralizing the grotesque punk body in his argument.

The carnival mask is reified in punk makeup and piercings. Jones offers this as an example of “the essence of the grotesque” (33) in punk. I add that the “fragmented bricolage and a carnivalesque double movement of penetration and protrusion” (33) of punk, seen in the slashed clothing that exposed flesh, the facial piercings, the mannerist use of zips and safety pins that closed no openings, and in underwear or porn gear worn on the outside, were, in punk, markers of inclusion. Outside of punk, they would normally be shameful, or at least meant to be relegated to the private. Inside punk, the grotesque was not shameful; it was an act of resistance to heterosexist normativity and its grooming demands.

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In this formulation, punks may be themselves considered to be the texts that recursively circulated in punk. Certainly, revealing the portrayal of carnival in the carnivalesque text Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin reifies the performative interactability of the body in carnival. The body is an instrument that takes less than even the knowledge of three guitar chords to play, to make into a text that is an interactive and interactable response to a public that seeks it and which it seeks. This is the same in punk: the punk’s body circulated reflexively with texts which were embodied by the punks of punk, and in this 20th century iteration the smashing of the footlights between the spectator and the performer gets called DIY. Bakhtin could be writing of punk, not just carnival, when he says that it “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank” (R&W

10).

Regarding Bakhtin's “hierarchical rank”, I would like to again use virtuosity to capture the idea of the highest rank in the hierarchy, and as the only ranking whose result is belonging to, or being included in, Warner's projected elsewhere public of expert virtuosos. In carnival, and in punk, suspension of hierarchical rank and liberation from established order are what is sought, not inclusion in a heretofore excluding order of rank.

DIY blurred and broke the boundary between performer and spectator, by claiming the right to do so and insisting on it as the criteria for membership in the punk public. In punk, there are no footlights; or rather, punk does not acknowledge footlights.

The demand for virtuosity does acknowledge footlights, and is the criteria for position on the stage rather than in the audience. Tara Brabazon writes, “Because of the DIY ethos, there was little separation between performers and fans. This was encouraged through

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confronting and provoking the audience. Riotous stage invasions [by the spectators], spitting and shouting, were part of the punk spectacle” (167). This is where DIY could be amended or expanded to include “I could do that myself”, or “Me and my mates, we could do that ourselves and we do, so quit showing off like you’re any different from us.”

Brabazon’s use of the term “stage invasion” is retrospective, and another way punks shattered the footlights was by inviting the spectators over them: The Clash and other bands were known for insisting that crew members pull spectators onto stage; band members did so too. Crowd surfing, in which the performer falls or jumps off the stage to be borne aloft (or mauled) by the spectators, is the interaction in the other direction.

(Proto punk Iggy Pop is captured on film stepping off the stage and walking on the hands of spectators in the 1970 documentary Midsummer Rock.)

In punk, the absence of footlights was not necessarily symbolic. In Dostoevsky’s

Poetics (Theory and History of Literature) Bakhtin writes that “the primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king (DP 124). If the king is the performer privileged to hold the stage by right of virtuoso skill, he is dethroned by having his place taken by the non-virtuoso who was only a moment ago the spectator, achieved by removing the defining boundary between performer and spectator.

I argue that Warner's model of an interactive public encompasses the rank of virtuoso as a projected public to which one aspires to belong, but that the words of

Bakhtin, in characterizing carnival, reify punk: “the basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, aspire to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life” (R&W 7).

Punk does not mean incompetent; it does not aspire to the sphere of virtuosity: punk is

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the margin, the sharp (stage) edge, between “art and life”. This is possible when artmaking is a human right and a social endeavour, rather than a professionalized and commodifying competition for audience-as-market-share, for some buying public “out there”. Rather than consumerism, it is producerism.

In Some Of This Is True, I tried to portray the idea of doing punk as in living on this borderline such that the aspiration to the sphere of art is not in the mix. The aspiration is absent from carnival, not because the sphere of unattainable expertise exists, but because the hierarchical rank that includes this sphere (of virtuosity) is suspended. I tried to write the feeling of punk, free of the established order and able to be on a borderline between art and life. It is a feeling state, and Bakhtin writes that during carnival time, “the essence of carnival is vividly felt by its participants” (R&W 7): it was this vividness of feeling that I tried to write. So to play punk, as a musician, was not to play music badly or to play bad music, but rather to play punk music; good and bad as ranks in a hierarchy were suspended and replaced by a rank of punk, in which the carnival feeling was the driver.

Bakhtin autopsied carnival in order to theorize that the repertoire of expressive forms deployed there were also at play in the novels of Rabelais. Bakhtin revealed that

Gargantua and Pantagruel was a carnivalesque text that portrayed a carnivalesque public. But Some Of This Is True is not carnivalesque, although that which might be carnival in punk carnival is depicted in it. That is, I have tried to portray punk’s carnival spirit, as well as what Johnson cites as punk’s carnivalisesque strategies: “egalitarianism, alterity, heady misalliances and assaults on propriety and convention” (34). I have tried to portray punks as people who felt punk vividly, as though, while it lasted, there were no

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public outside it (Bakhtin 7) — or, at least, none worthy interacting with, bodily, grotesquely, transgressively, in the way of carnival.

Some Of This is not carnivalesque in form or theme. Some grotesque punk bodies are portrayed in the text, and resistance to normativity is portrayed (I hope!), but I wrote a literary text in an attempt to allow readers to encounter characters engaged in non-textual expression of interactivity within the text of punk, and tried to portray those characters with their own authentic voices and complex reactions.

In punk, punks were recursively circulating carnivalesque texts. My fictional literary text is not carnivalesque, but it portrays punks recursively circulating text, interacting with musical text via the body, with the punk body in fashion and stance, in resistant, non-normative ugliness.

In “Bakhtin and Popular Culture” Mikita Hoy writes of texts in punk: “But their meaning is still a textual meaning, their dialogism a textual dialogism. In the place of the powerful, social polyglossia of the real carnival, all we can observe instead is the “lonely carnival of reading” (Ann Jefferson qtd. in Hoy) (781).

A text, whether or not that text circulates reflexively in a public-seeking, public- forming way, is too lonely to be called carnival. Punks did punk or did carnival in punk.

Punk was not a lonely carnival. The presence of the body and its joy and suffering makes such a reading absurd. In Regina in 1979, punks felt viscerally and vitally.

Some of This is a text about punk and about punk texts. Is it a punk text? Although it is not a carnivalesque literary text, Some of This depicts the vividness of feeling that characterized punk and carnival. But it may be that that vividness of feeling is due not to

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the carnival quality of punk, but to something else; and that something else may be the heterotopia Michel Foucault theorizes.

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Punk as Heterotopia

The year before Foucault published “Des Espaces Autres / Of Other Spaces”

(EA/OS) in an architectural journal, Architecture / Mouvement / Continuité, he outlined the notion of heterotopia in his preface to Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things), and spoke of heterotopias in a radio interview. Peter Johnson’s “Unravelling Foucault’s different spaces” details the path Foucault took from looking at textual spaces in the literature of Borges and Blanchot, to the more familiar notion of heterotopias as architectural spaces.

Through a close reading of Foucault via Johnson, and then of EA/OS, I will address the architectural heterotopia and the textual heterotopia. I will argue that punk, as a text, had characteristics of a heterotopia and that my literary text, Some Of This Is True, portrays heterotopias as a strategy to depict the heterotopic quality of punk itself. I have written a literary text about the heterotopia of punk, and in my story I have portrayed this heterotopia and those identifiable as textual and architectural.

Some Of This Is True names and locates the actual geographic locations and buildings that were architectural heterotopias in Regina in 1979. The Schnitzelhaus on

Regina’s Hamilton Street was an architectural space and was programmed for a time by

Mike Burns, manager of The Extroverts. The bands he brought in were part of the text around which our punk public formed. The Schnitz was a real, architectural, heterotopic space, as was The University of Regina Student Union Building when a punk band, usually from the west coast, played there.

The scenes in which Lucie plays music with Nellie or with Nellie and the The

Smears are portrayals of the heterotopia of punk, of inventive interaction with texts, in

"#)!

which, like carnival, hierarchy of rank is suspended. This took place, as punk, wherever and whenever a punk or punks did DIY. Necessarily embodied, as in carnival, it was a social text that spoke: “I do not intend to conserve the status quo”. And this could happen anywhere.

For example, in Some Of This Is True, the moment when Lucie is about to enter the heterotopia of the high school gymnasium where The Extroverts are playing (and yes, the gym is a heterotopia more fixed than a public), she briefly passes through the non- heterotopic, the non-tolerated, hierarchical moment when the three girls, smug with their self-satisfied successful achievement of normativity, reject her with only a look.

In contrast are the glances she shares with other punks at school when they recognize each other from having been at The Schnitzelhaus the night before constitute the kind or portable heterotopia that was punk: stunningly intangible, it was interaction that amounted to the formation of a punks public.

These moments of eye contact, charged with ricocheting recognition of the self in the image of the other, are examples of the mirror's “placeless place” of which Foucault writes: “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (4).

Discussing Foucault’s radio interview about the concept of heterotopia, Johnson remarks on his emphasis on the mirror as an example of placeless heterotopia: “In particular, his opening illustrations of the concept refer to various children’s imaginative games, mentioning tents and dens in gardens as well as all the games played on or under

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the covers of the parents’ bed. The children’s inventive play produces a different space that at the same time mirrors what is around them” (76). Foucault gives the mirror — a thing that is occupied by an image of the gazer that can be recognized, rendering it a place — the characteristic of being about to pass through a virtual point. Does the mirror move, or does the heterotopia? Does the heterotopia move because it is textual and dislodged from time, and strangely placeless?

The heterotopia of punk existed when punks did punk together: in a club, in a record store, at a gig, yes; but also enclosed and enclaved by shared listening, shared DIY interaction like playing music together without being virtuoso; perhaps even in momentary and transient moments of eye contact, moments of recognition of self, not unlike the moment in the mirror. The look of recognition Lucie shares with (a photograph of) Patti Smith when, in Salesguy’s basement, she experiences recognition of herself when being sucked into the eye of Mapplethorpe’s photo of Patti Smith is a depiction of punk heterotopia and the textual heterotopia. This kind of inventive play produced by the imagination or by the memory is like the fort or den and tent making of children’s play. It could have occurred anywhere, but, for Lucie, it occurred in punk, because of punk.

Johnson is citing Marc Augé when he writes: “‘Space’ is much more abstract than

‘place’. The former term can refer to an area, a distance and, significantly in relation to

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, a temporal period (the space of two days). The latter, more tangible term refers to an event or a history, whether mythical or real” (qtd. in

Johnson 76-77). Punk was both a public and a text: you were a punk if you responded to the text of punk by doing a punk text yourself. In this way, punk was “poetic world- making” (Warner 114). Certainly, a “mythical event” seems to signal that we are in the

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realm of story. Writing a story happens in a place, and the writer sets the story in a place.

A story is read in a place. It takes time to read. Johnson writes, “Texts are like museums and mausoleums in that they “endeavour to accumulate and protect all time in one space”

(79). In story, all sorts of hierarchies are suspended, including those of time and place.

Sometimes the heterotopia depicted in Some Of This Is True is a result of the fact that this text is a story. Lucie ends her heterosexuality virginity with Nye, in the

Greenberg’s basement. It could have happened elsewhere. Foucault would call it a heterotopia, particularly one of “crisis”. Foucault writes: “For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the ‘honeymoon trip’ which was an ancestral theme. The young woman’s deflowering could take place ‘nowhere’ and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers” (5). I would like to qualify the term crisis here, for if “defloration” is a crisis it is a crisis inside heterosexist normativity, but not necessarily in punk or in Some Of This Is True. In the story, itself the depiction of the heterotopia of punk, this scene is a threshold moment that occurs at the border of

Lucie’s entry into the punks public. This is a heterotopic moment which is also a textual heterotopia in Some Of This Is True. In my literary text, I tried to portray or delimit textual spaces that I hope are as heterotopic as Foucault’s most intense example of a heterotopia, the heterotopia par excellence: the ship at sea. Johnson describes Foucault’s ship as “a space that seems to incorporate all the essential disruptive ingredients of heterotopia both within itself and in relation to other spaces. It is a richly ambivalent vessel with disruptive features that are described in exactly the same way as the dislocating effect of the mirror: ‘a placeless place’” (80). Foucault describes it as “the

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greatest reserve of the imagination” and without a ship, “dreams dry up” (6). I am trying to load on to the ship the dream of story, of literature.

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Conclusion

Writing punk from the outside, I found that theoretical publics were identifiable, but they seemed to lack energy and significance; writing punk from inside the punks public, through fictionalized recreation of memory, I found both more energy, and space for theory to emerge.

Punk was a public, and there were in it aspects of carnival, but these are categories fluid enough to carry great reserves of imagination. The excellent metaphor of the ship is useful to me as an artist and as a theorist as I critique my own public text. As

Johnson says, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia “provides a rich and intense metaphor”

(81); that’s because Foucault’s concept is a little story, and, as such can yield much theory.

If punk can be said to have some of the features of a heterotopia (and I hope that my light sketch of these features is sufficient), it is ultimately of secondary interest to my project: what I really hope is that the literary text captures the sensation of being on the ship of fools that was punk.

In writing a punks public, it was not the grotesqueness of punks or their capacity to generate discursively circulating texts that captured me, it was their captivity: arguably voluntary and inarguably temporary as it was, punk was heterotopic in that the placeless place of it was surrounded by ever-retreating horizons. The moveable heterotopia of punk delayed arrival at the port of normativity.

I met my own expectations, and am satisfied that story (writing it, reading it) can indeed yield theory; with educated eyes I was able to not only spot the theory within the

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story, but also, as a writer I hope I was able to expand even minutely the boundaries of the theoretical concepts I observed.

In Some Of This Is True I tried to vividly portray what theory explains: that publics exist, that the punks public may be characterized by a carnivalesque DIY ethos, and that it may be heterotopic, resisting the arrival of the horizon. Writing from inside punk, the punks public I knew felt like a holding and held space, a threshold that retreated like the ever-renewing horizons that encompass a ship at sea. My literary heterotopias reify this, I hope.

Above all, I wanted to write what it feels like to be found by a seeking text, and to interact with that text by generating text. I have said that the feeling of punk may come from the suspension of the need to be virtuoso in text-making, by taking away the rank of virtuoso. I have said virtuoso is a rank that is imagined as being projected from without by an imagined public looking in. I have tried to write what being a punk in the punks public of Regina in 1979 felt like from inside of it, and conclude that, as a writer, this goal is better served by a literary than by a non-literary text.

But perhaps, rather than perpetuate the binaries I learned to trouble, I might be allowed to acknowledge the great capacity of both literary and non-literary texts to carry great reserves of imagination, and to conclude that writing is enriched by both. In this way, there is no need to trade adventure for espionage, and one can keep one’s berth on the ship that sails between perpetually renewing horizons.

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END NOTE

Sideburns, No. 1, p. 2. !

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DISCOGRAPHY

The Beatles. “Run For Your Life.” Rubber Soul. Lennon/McCartney. EMI, 1965. Vinyl

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The Bee Gees. “More Than a Woman.” Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie

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The Buzzcocks. Spiral Scratch. New Hormones, 1977. Vinyl EP.

---. Another Music in a Different Kitchen. United Artists, 1978.

---. Love Bites. United Artists, 1978. Vinyl LP.

The Clash. “Complete Control.” The Clash. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones. CBS, 1977.

Vinyl LP.

---. “London Calling.” London Calling. CBS, 1979.

---. Give ‘em Enough Rope. CBS, 1978.

Coltrane, John. “Sun Ship.” Sun Ship. Impulse, 1971. Vinyl LP.

Costello, Elvis. My Aim Is True. Columbia, 1977. Vinyl LP.

---. This Year’s Model. Radar / Columbia, 1978. Vinyl LP.

---. Armed Forces. Radar / Columbian, 1979. Vinyl LP.

The Cramps. Gravest Hits. Illegal / I.R.S., 1979. Vinyl EP.

Crass. Stations of the Crass. Crass Records, 1979. Vinyl LP.

Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” Cosmo’s Factory.

Norman Whitfield and Barret Strong. Fantasy, 1970. Vinyl LP.

---. “Looking Out My Back Door.” Cosmo’s Factory. John Fogerty. Fantasy, 1970. Vinyl

LP.

Stills, Stephen. “Love the One You’re With.” Stephen Stills. Atlantic, 1970. Vinyl LP.

"%#!

Streetheart. “Under My Thumb.” Under My Thumb. Jagger/Richards. Vinyl EP, Atlantic,

1979.

The Extroverts. “Living in Poverty.” Living in Poverty / Political Animals. Brent Caron,

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1979, live performance; 1980, 45 rpm.

Faithfull, Marianne. “Brain Drain.” Broken English. Island, 1979. Vinyl LP.

---. “Why’d Ya Do It?” Broken English. Island, 1979. Vinyl LP.

Gang of Four. “Love Like Anthrax.” Damaged Goods. Fast Product, 1978. 7” Vinyl.

Gaye, Marvin. “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” In the Groove. Norman Whitfield and

Barret Strong. Tarnia, 1968. Vinyl LP.

Jackson, Joe. “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Look Sharp. A & M, 1978. Vinyl

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The Jam. In the City. Polydor, 1977. Vinyl LP.

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Money, Eddie. Eddie Money. Columbia, 1977. Vinyl LP.

The Mo-dettes. “Foolish Girl.” Foolish Girl / White Mice. Kate Korris, Jane Crockford,

Julie Miles-Kingston, Ramona Carlier. Mode Records, 1979.

Newton-John, Olivia and John Travolta. “Summer Nights.” Grease: The Original

Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. RSO, Polydor,

1978. Vinyl LP.

Pop, Iggy. Lust for Life. RCA, 1977. Vinyl LP.

The Raincoats. The Raincoats. Rough Trade, 1979. Vinyl LP.

"%$!

Ram Jam. “Black Betty.” Ram Jam. Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. Epic, 1977. Vinyl

LP.

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The Subhumans. untitled EP. Quintessence Records, 1979. Vinyl EP.

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