Illustration Credit: Aaron Cooper
Note from the informational ether: “Nosedive” is a collection of essays and narrative prose written by Ben Lee over the course of a year prior to his death. Per his will, I am posting these on his behalf with no changes made to his original text. He’s not that Ben Lee. He’s also fictional.
Part 1: Is Suicide Punk?
Chapter 3
We used to live for the shows, but the effect wore off eventually like the fading hum of drunkenness after puking into a toilet for an hour straight. Bars we got into with fake IDs and a wink from the doorman aged with us, counterculture in their youth only to become lesser affairs – caught in immobile strip malls where a parent could take their kids to a chain restaurant before an all ages show and peacefully get home by midnight.
It’s not a punk show unless someone ends up in the hospital not because of a fight or abuse but because of their own jubilation, hanging from the rafters and falling to the floor, jumping headfirst into the crowd with the faith of a Christseeker giving themselves to God; snapping tibias in the mosh pit and coming back next week for more.
One night when I was 16, I broke my arm against the stage and the club owners called an ambulance. The paramedic chased me through the club while the punks cheered for me to get away. Out of breath and pissed off, he asked me why I was running from him.
“I’m here to watch the show,” I laughed.
He stood next to me cross-armed for the rest of the set then pulled me into the monster anus of the ambulance. Snow was in the air but had not yet fallen. As if to hold its place until crystals pirouetted to the ground, skunk-scent encroached. I rubbed the knob where my bone almost pushed through the skin.
It was the best night of my life, and claiming something is the best night of one’s life is punk as long as it’s true. Punk is truth and truth is punk as long as one’s truth isn’t that they’re a piece of shit capitalist asshole. This time it’s true. I spent a year in a cast after the bone didn’t heal right, so the doctors had to rebreak it and try again – persistence for all it’s worth.
Basement shows remained great. Whether or not the band was good on any given night was beside the point. Everything seems equally good or bad packed into a small room with twenty other kids taking residence inside three amplifiers. Our ears buzzed by the end of the night anyway and would continue buzzing for the next few days. If I planned on living much longer, I’d have to start wearing a hearing aid by the age of 52, which is super not punk and I don’t even have to explain why.
How many years after college does it begin to feel weird showing up in a teenager’s basement while her parents are out of town? Zero years. It feels weird before then. It feels weird as soon as it’s gross to make out with the oldest girl at the show. For me, that was half a semester into my junior year in college. So the goalpost moves – how many years after high school does it begin to feel weird? A little over two and a half.
The college bands only played in bars, but like I said, the bars sold out.
By the time the thing with my nose occurred, I was already half out on shows, but the nose thing got me all the way out for the following reasons:
- Everyone stared.
Okay, it was just the one thing, but one must understand that I didn’t get into the scene to attract attention. I’ve written in zines since I was fourteen, starting with this weird thing a guy from the internet named Tim Death would put out called “Pool Party Magazine”. Some dude he knew would piece together the thing as twenty pages of collages he would scan and turn into the mag. That’s not really a completely original way to do things, but it looked cool so it was cool. I wrote under a pen name then and still do. It doesn’t need to be about me.
So when Biscuit called me to see if I wanted to go to a show, I said no.
“You want to see this band,” he said.
“Because they’re good or because they suck?” I asked.
Biscuit had this tendency to hate most bands. He also had this tendency to hate-watch bands and boo them between songs. It hasn’t been uncommon in our long friendship to go to a show with him and come out with the shit beaten out of us – even for the kindest of crowds. I love the guy, but he’s always brought the worst out of everyone, and that’s not exactly punk.
The flip side of this is I never trust anyone more than him when he says a band is good. For a band to be good, they have to be actually good. They have to be blow-your-mind good, although not necessary immediately. Some bands he figures out as a grower that would become everyone’s favorite with enough listens. Point is, if Biscuit said something was good, it was. And that was the end of it.
“They don’t suck,” he said, which meant they were good. He didn’t fuck with average bands.
I took to covering the horrific hole in my face with a handkerchief like some kind of time traveling asshole who decided to check out the dust bowl for some damn reason. People still stared because I looked stupid, but it wasn’t the same. Nobody looked into me trying to figure out what went wrong with my face.
We showed up late. This was a good idea if we didn’t want to get kicked out before the headliner went on, which had happened a time or two before. The show was at a hot dog restaurant, and to say it was packed is to not understand the dynamics of seeing a band at a place that serves the world’s worst category of food, but it was packed.
And we pushed through grease that dangled in front of us like doorway beads. We pushed through assholes standing at the bar. We ordered the cheapest beer, not to seem cool but because we were poor and even this, we couldn’t afford.
The headliner slinked onto the stage dressed like they just came from pissing themselves in a gutter. Before the night ended, the drummer would puke into a bucket on stage, drop the beat, pick it back up and keep going. She already had throw up in her hair and puking into that bucket only added more.
“I’m Stinkbug,” the frontman said, stroking his guitar like he was petting the head of a docile lion. “Back there is Stinkbug. We’re called Stinkbug and The Stinkbugs. Let’s go.”
What followed was noise, glorious and obscene. Stinkbug screamed into the microphone, slamming power chords while Stinkbug alternated between creating empty space for Stinkbug’s screams and filling in the place that larger bands would have filled with bass or a second guitar or harmonies. At the moments I least expected, Stinkbug pulled off a guitar riff that hinted at skill beyond what he displayed otherwise, hinting at an excess of bullshit he restrained himself from partaking in. And even rarer were the times Stinkbug would scream into her mic from behind her snow fort drumkit.
A band this good is not served in writing. Music exists so words don’t have to. So I’ll just say how it made me feel, and that was hopeful. I didn’t mosh or dance. I didn’t move. I didn’t drink my beer, which grew warm in its container against my hand until Biscuit yanked it from me and drank it himself. I didn’t do anything but watch and listen and look like a fucking idiot.
Stinkbug and the Stinkbugs stepped off stage after their last song, and together they manipulated a folding table into its optimal form like it was cheap metal origami. From boxes next to the stage, they pulled band merch that was mostly blank t-shirts and hats they wrote on with marker. All their albums were from blank tapes and burnt CDs. If they could afford real shit, this wasn’t punk. If they couldn’t, this was the most punk.
I bought one of everything, and as I turned around, I heard gagging and a splat.
“Oh god,” Stinkbug gasped. “I’m going to be sick.”
“What do you mean you’re ‘going’ to be sick?” Stinkbug laughed. “You threw up on this bastard’s ass.”
They meant me.
Stinkbug toppled herself over the table and fell on the ground right into her puke puddle. She pulled herself up by using my clothes as handholds for her fists and treating me like the world’s worst ladder.
“Let me clean that” she slurred.
Stinkbug wouldn’t stop howling behind us.
The drummer ripped my handkerchief from my face and used it to wipe the vomit from my pants. She didn’t notice my nose until she tried to tie the handkerchief back around my face and her mouth opened wide to mimic my nose.
“Holy shit!” she gasped. “Stinkbug, check this out!”
Stinkbug joined us and clapped when he saw me.
“Holy shit!” he yelled. “Holy shit!”
Together they wouldn’t stop yelling “Holy shit!” and pointing at my face.
“He’s the guy!” Stinkbug said, finally saying anything else.
“I can’t believe it!” Stinkbug laughed. “I’m starstruck. What the fuck, right?”
“You have to come get fucked up with us,” Stinkbug said, grabbing me with her throw up-caked hands and pulling me toward the door.
Biscuit made no move to help me. What a dick.
“Aren’t you already fucked up?” I asked but immediately moved on to my real question before she could answer. “Who do you think I am?”
“You’re Gun Show Guy!” Stinkbug and Stinkbug answered in near-unison.
“My sister is going to lose her mind,” Stinkbug added.
Writing about parties is frankly boring. I’m not going to do that. What I will say is Biscuit and I drove them back to a decomposing house east of all the suburbs, and in the morning, I met Allison, my biggest fan.