Punks

Thursday was one of those days that seemed like it would be massively productive but then turned out to be nearly completely useless. I woke up in time to go to Physics class but didn't; instead I watched The Price Is Right while eating breakfast with Chris, and then I trudged over to PG&E where I dolled out my life savings to avoid having our power and gas disconnected that day. I settled down in Kresge Engineering Library to finish my math homework, but then Chris Spitzer showed up. The sky was full of helocopters and fear, by the way. Hey, he said. I'll miss my meeting if you skip your homework. Okay, I said. Let's go get ice cream. We went down to Telegraph and ate our frozen yogurt, sat in the sun, in the midst of a thousand angry faces. I gotta go to my meeting now. Hey, that's not part of the deal! oh well. (It wouldn't be the last time he'd betray me.) I went back to Kresge and worked some more on my homework but then I gave up and went home, didn't go to class or turn in what I had done.

Julie came home full of fire. Yelling and spitting and fear and fire. But then it was time to go. Chris and I pulled out our bikes into the wild night and took off down Shattuck under the fog and the full moon, riding the wind, flying through traffic, between cars, dashing over sidewalks and through parking lots, southbound, down Shattuck. Locked our bikes together around a No Parking sign somewhere near Oakland and entered the Starry Plough. Big Dipper. Hamburger.

Waiting for my burger, a rotund little man, looking canonically Greek, came up to me. He reached up and grasped my shoulder firmly in a friendly greeting. "Hey Aaron," he said. "It's been a long time." "Hey," I replied. "But I'm not Aaron. Aaron's over there." And I pointed over towards the stage where Aaron sat conversing with some friends. "Oh, you look just like him!" Somewhat flattered to be confused with the evening's celebrity I considered our asserted similarity. Aaron stood tall and self-assured, once-dark hair bleached yellow, a long, strong, friendly face with large features, wearing a plain t-shirt, plain pants with a single small hole near a knee, plain red knapsack, white beat-up Nike's. Big feet, but not as large as he'd have you believe. It was a little hard to believe that inside this muscular and polished friendly thirty-something lives Aaron Cometbus, the insecure, wildly sentimental, perennially introspective, maybe even a little whiney Berkeley street punk.

(Pinhead Gunpowder's (or, really, a proper, definite, noun, as they say, "We are The Pinhead Gunpowder Band") drummer is none other than the well known zine writer Aaron Cometbus, and this was to be their first show in more than four years. (Although they apparently played once at Gilman street under another name in the interim) Chris explained: "They're a band for the fun of being a band, not for giving shows.")

After the show was over I had a good conversation with Joel. That's "Joel T. Xxxxxx, Attorney at Law." He graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley and works for the California Public Utility Comission. He's been busy lately to say the least, but still finds time to come to punk rock shows, when he's not in court or at meetings dealing with the current energy crisis. CPUC is at its busiest. I knew that Joel was a lawyer. When Jackson introduced us he had told me that this crazy guy in the mosh pit is a lawyer. So after this show I went up to Joel and told him I was interested in applying to Boalt. He gave me his card, offered to talk. In the meantime he told me about life at University of Chicago ("Narrowly intelligent -- I liked the latter but not the former.") which he attended for more than four years but never graduated. After not graduating he called up an old friend of his who had become and is still the dean of Boalt Hall School of Law. He applied and was admitted. He lived at the I-House because there he would be guaranteed a single, and found that the inhabitants, mainly graduate students, were on the whole quite passionate about their area of study, but somewhat reluctant to talk about such to outsiders; Joel enjoyed prompting them to do so, and hearing about their many collective interests. I got the impression that he was a bit of a loner at the time. One day he heard a song on the radio by Pansy Division and was inspired to go to a punk show. That song -- he told me the name of it but I don't remember -- he credits as being the song that changed his life. He returned to the same venue (Gilman?) for punk shows thereafter, and soon found that he had friends in the other punks, people who would stand up for him. Between bands he took photos and he'd bring prints to the bandmembers and others he photographed. In this way he made friends and became a friend of many. Now punk rock is a part of his life.

Chris and I took shared a table by the stage with some other folks. It was one of very few tables remaining. The Starry Plough staff had shooed most of the gathered out in order to let them in again, one by one, to collect five dollars from each and verify an age of twenty-one. Chris and I stayed inside, me waiting for my hamburger and Chris pretending to wait for food too. It was a great scheme. In fact, the big red stripe saying "Age 21 in 2001" and Chris using a United States Passport for identification distracted the money-collector sufficiently that he somehow neglected to take Chris's $5. I got my hamburger and Chris and I took that table, where we also found a complete yet neglected order of fries. Things were looking better and better. We sat at out little table, the only table, in the very front, shared a Guinness, ate our fries, and watched the first band. Chris spied Jackson et al just yards away. "The rival tribe has arrived," he warned.

After the first band, Chris left briefly to call Julie. Aaron took our table away, making room for the growing throng. I had a strong sense of awaiting a special treat, as we waited with growing anticipation. Then at last, their vocalist announced slowly, "We are The Pinhead Gunpowder Band."

After the show Chris and I sat on the stage as the crowd dispersed. We were both happy. I sought out Aaron to ask for him to sign a copy of Issue #47. "I'm glad you like it," he said. "You know," Aaron started to say, before being interrupted by a friend passing by. Then he wrote the first part of his signature with a black sharpie I had brought for this purpose. "You know," he began again, but paused again and went back and filled in some parts of his signature. Satisfied, "You know, there are a bunch of people here who were in this issue," Aaron explained somewhat distractedly, "But I'm not going to point them out."

Chris and I gathered up our belongings and sought out our bikes. "Chris, we should have asked him what `Ride the wohl whip?' means!" "Oh yeah! I bet that's his most frequently asked question. It's not too late. He's probably over there somewhere." But we decided not to ask. We got on our bikes and cycled home side by side through the empty streets. I think we were both immensely satisfied with the evening. When we got home we couldn't find Julie. Not in the living room, not in her room... Then I found her, sound asleep, in Chris's bed. How cute.