Godzilla As a Disco King

Riding in the back of a slow-moving pickup truck, I was sitting atop the open tailgate, dangling my feet over the end, dragging my toes along the road ribboning out behind me. Of course, dragging my feet along the rough concrete would mess up my shoes, but that wasn’t the first thing on my mind. We were rounding the corner in a suburban neighborhood away from our drummer, Mark’s place and toward our rehearsal space. We rehearsed in our bassist’s garage every night. His parents didn’t like the noise. They especially didn’t like me cursing into the microphone. I’m sure his neighbors didn’t either, but I didn’t care. I was 16 and oblivious to their complaints.

That afternoon, in the back of that pickup truck, I was contemplating the lyrics I’d been writing for that band. We called the band Broken Chains of Segregation, BCS for short. I wanted to write words for kids like me, kids whose parents had split up, kids whose first stepdad had been a nightmare, kids who loved this world more than life itself but couldn’t find much of a reason to stay here. I wanted to write words my peers could relate to, words that would mean something to them, that would move them to feel something regardless of what our music sounded like. I wanted to write lyrics about love and alienation and politics and disappointment. The wind blew softly against my cheeks. I flipped my hair out of my eyes, and I felt an overwhelming sense of identification with all the lost children of my generation.

In January, a year and a half earlier, I’d ran away with my friend, Kevin, to live across the street from the Park Lee housing projects at Kevin’s uncle’s place. My other friend, Shannon, had stayed in touch with my mom to let her know I was okay, maybe not safe, but okay. Having got sober already herself at her boyfriend’s behest, she’d been urging me to quit drinking and doing drugs as well.

Those nights I spent on the streets with Kevin were the scariest of my life. It was March, and when we ran away, it was so cold, I was afraid we might freeze to death. We’d been drunk when we’d left my mom’s home. We hadn’t put much thought into what we were doing. Kevin had called his mom and told her he’d been arrested for acid that night. We’d each dropped a hit, but it never kicked in. We must have got ripped off. Kevin’s mom sent the police out to check up on him. Since Kevin was already on probation, we didn’t want to take a chance on having a cop find us in our intoxicated states. Even if that intoxication was only alcohol. We were underage after all. We packed some bags, threw on our leather jackets and snuck out under the cover of night.

We hiked to some construction site and set up camp. We built a fire, but neither of us being outdoorsmen, it didn’t burn very well. The following morning, we got in touch with a friend of ours who owned a car. He drove us out to Kevin’s uncle’s place down on Jeff Davis Highway across from the Park Lee apartments on the way from Richmond to Petersburg. I stayed out there for only a couple more nights. I don’t know how long Kevin stayed. I got clean shortly after that and lost touch with him.

A year and a half later, I spent every night in our band’s bassist’s garage, going through the set list we had yet to perform live for anybody other than a handful of four or five of our friends. Eventually, we wound up showcasing our music for the closest thing to a Richmond scenester we knew. In the fashion of contemporary hardcore dancing, he moved like Godzilla as a disco king. He thought we were good. We could be playing any number of local clubs, he told us. We were exhilarated.

After playing all our songs and working out some new ones, we’d all head down to the James River where we’d take off our clothes and swim naked beneath the moonlight. Boys and girls together, our only rule was nothing sexual could happen while we were naked in public in our little group. The nudity wasn’t meant to be enticing. It was our way of accepting our burgeoning bodies. The first night we did it, Mark, two of our female friends and I sat in a circle having normal conversations about our social insecurities. It was invigorating.

The inspiration for spending every night of that summer naked came from this one guy a couple of our crew knew. He was a community college student who was a little older than us and slightly overweight. To learn how to accept his body as he imagined it looked to others, he brought another friend of ours with him to the local mall one afternoon. Our other friend waited out front in a beat-up, old pick-up truck. This guy snuck into the mall’s bathroom, took off all his clothes, threw the bathroom door open, shouted—Woo-hoo! and ran the length of the food court in the nude. We were impressed.

That summer, after my mom’s second divorce, she and I moved into a new home. The place looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since the 1970s. I peeled wallpaper off the kitchen walls while listening to my brand new GBH CD—Church of the Truly Warped.

Right before my mom and I moved into that place, I was standing in the music room of our old home. Mark was up there with me. So was my best friend, Shawn. Back then, Shawn drove me everywhere. He wasn’t my chauffeur. We were simply inseparable. Neither Mark nor I had our licenses yet. We were old enough to drive. Something simply held each of us back from taking that step. I’m sure the reasons for each of us were different. I told Shawn it was because not having a license was my last excuse for not asking girls out on dates. It was me trying to hold onto the innocence of my childhood for a little while longer. Today, I don’t think that was true at all.

My music room was a single room with a wall of mirrors on the second floor of a modern home. The room was all mine. I set up my massive component stereo system in it. The three walls that weren’t mirrored were covered in posters of punk rock and heavy metal bands—Sex Pistols, Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, The Ramones.

I was manically spouting off to Mark what I pictured BCS being. “I want this band to be us, man. But I want it to be us totally free. So, we can do whatever we want to do. So, we can be whoever we want to be. And I want to show everybody else on this planet they can do that, too. They can do whatever they want. They can be whoever they want. Nothing holds us back, man. Nothing holds us back other than the lies we’re fed, the lies we’ve learned, the lies we’ve inherited and the lies we tell ourselves. I mean, it’s a lie we can’t do whatever we want to do. It’s a lie we can’t be whoever we want to be. It’s a lie we’re not free. Don’t believe them when they tell you you’re not free. I’m free, man. And so are you. That’s what BCS is. It’s our chance to be free, to be exactly who we are. It’s our way to show this world we figured out what it takes to be ourselves. And they can figure that out, too. Every kid, every adult, every person on this planet. Because that’s what it’s all about. To be yourself honestly. It’s just nobody sees that yet. But we can show them, man. That’s our job. With this band, with BCS, we can show them what it takes to be free…”

~ ~ ~

“Remember, you’re free. Nobody can tell you what to do. Nobody can tell you how to be. You are you, yourself, your own person. So, Everybody Dance Now!” I shouted. Matt, BCS’s guitarist, played the first few notes of C&C Music Factory’s classic Gonna Make You Sweat. With a four count on the high hat, we broke into our first song of the evening.

The church basement we were performing in became a churning, swirling mass of sweaty teenagers’ arms and hands and heads and legs and feet. In the darkness, the mostly high school audience appeared as a single body, an undulating wave rolling in and out. The ocean of youths roared closer to where we stood on the floor. Then, they poured away again before they could crash into us and scatter our equipment across the cheap, laminate flooring. I leaped up and down, rocked back and forth, shouted and screamed above the crunching guitar, chugging bass and smashing drums, “1, 2, 3… Try to make a slave of me. When will they ever see? I’ll still remain free.”

This particular show was a benefit for my high school chapter of Amnesty International. All the proceeds were going to that organization, which would then funnel the money out to help the greater cause. I can’t remember how much money we made that night. Broken Chains of Segregation was the headliner. Usually, all our proceeds went into a band fund, which we then held onto for recording dates, stickers and other merchandise. We funded two albums that way. Mark, the most trustworthy in our opinion, kept all the money in cash in an envelope in his closet.

Having joined Amnesty International at the end of my junior year of high school, I’d organized this show. Back then, we always called our music performances “shows” not “concerts.” Concerts were for rock stars, which none of us wanted to be. Food Not Bombs had a table set up at this show, too. It was staffed by the vocalist for Richmond’s biggest punk band of the era, Avail. After we played, I asked him what he thought of us. He’d never heard us before. He thought we were good, but he was only listening to country back then. I walked away disheartened. Avail was on the same East Bay record label Green Day had graduated from. I wonder if he had any idea what his approval would have meant to me. Instead, he was busy informing the suburban kids about the needs of the homeless in the city.

We played hard. We played fast. The crowd was whipped into a frenzy. Those kids were starting to rip the place apart. A police officer who had been hired by the church to work security for the show approached me between songs. Towering over me in his hat and uniform, he rested his hands on his gun belt and shouted above the din the high school audience was making, “You need to tell these kids to calm down. Or else I’m going to have to pull the plug.”

As he walked away, I stared in disbelief. I started pacing circles around our makeshift stage. “All right…” I said into the microphone. “We all have to calm down. Otherwise, they’re going to cut us off.” I was afraid the audience wouldn’t get to hear everything we’d come to perform for them that night. Nothing was more important to me than that those kids heard us, our music, our words.

“But you told us we were free!” somebody shouted back at me from the darkness in the distance. A snicker rippled through the crowd. I turned red beneath the muted lights shining down on me. I was reminded of how at a house show we’d played a couple weeks before, I’d become so aware of my feet and the way I was standing. I couldn’t help imagining how I must have looked to anybody who was watching. All I could see was me looking foolish.

That night when I got home, as I lay down to sleep, I reflected on the rage those kids had unleashed to the noise we were making, and I imagined what it would be like to perform for audiences like that every night. I pictured myself standing on progressively larger and larger stages witnessing progressively larger and larger versions of the violence the police officer had asked me to please calm down earlier that night. I couldn’t calm those kids down. Once the music started, the audience had a life entirely its own. The audience decided when it would stop. The audience decided how far things would go. The reality of the situation wore me out.

Ever since I was a little kid, all I’d ever wanted to be was a rock star. I’d spent over a decade prancing around living rooms and bedrooms, pretending I was inspiring and inciting audiences. Now, I’d had a taste of what that stardom might mean, and I didn’t like its flavor. There was already a kid who called himself our biggest fan. He was disappointed when he met me. He didn’t think I looked punk enough to be BCS’s lead singer. I didn’t like the responsibility my newfound local fame had bestowed upon me. I didn’t want to be the center of attention.

I wanted to retreat and forget any of this had ever happened. I didn’t want to have ever started a band. I didn’t want anybody to have ever seen me perform. I didn’t want to have fans who knew who I was when I didn’t know them. I wrapped a pillow around my head. In the darkness, I wanted the world to be quiet again forever. Like it was right then.

~ ~ ~

The night of my high school graduation, I had other things on my mind. I was broken up with Diana, the girl I’d been dating since the end of junior year, and my heart felt as if a herd of elephants were trampling upon it. Diana had had another boyfriend back home in Minneapolis the whole time we’d been dating. It had become too much for me to bear. I gave her an ultimatum: Do you want to be with him, or do you want to be with me? She chose him. They had a history together, which she’d explained to me the first night we’d ever hung out alone when she was babysitting her neighbors’ kids. That’s why I never called her my girlfriend. We weren’t “going out.” We were only dating.

My dad and grandmother were in town from California, and Broken Chains of Segregation had a show to play. I invited the two of them into the city of Richmond to watch us perform. They’d never seen me on stage in any capacity, neither in a band nor in a play. I was excited to reveal to them how powerful our live shows were.

Waiting for the two of them to arrive, I kept putting off when we’d start. Every other band on the bill performed before us. My dad and grandmother never made it to that abandoned warehouse. It was probably for the best. There was a DIY aesthetic to that night that neither of their suburban sensibilities would have appreciated. Decrepit art installations adorned the walls. A hand-painted banner hung on the bricks behind Mark. My dad admitted he turned around because he figured he had to be in the wrong neighborhood. The whole area looked a little dodgy to him. It was the same neighborhood where I’d spent the past three years of my life. I lied and told him he must have been in the East End while we were playing in the West End. He looked relieved.

When we did start playing, I was already upset about my dad not showing up. To make matters worse, the whole place emptied out before we took the stage. The city of Richmond had recently instituted an 11pm 18-and-under curfew. We didn’t go onstage until 11:03. The following week somebody reminded me about the curfew. That made sense out of why nobody wanted to see us when we’d always been popular before. But the damage had been done. I was hurt and enraged. I didn’t have a girlfriend, and neither family nor fans wanted to see my band perform that night.

After that show, I argued with the empty air inside my car. I begged the lonely night to tell me why nobody cared about my band anymore, to explain to me what I’d done wrong to make it so Diana had never been able to be my girlfriend and to tell me where my dad had been that whole night. Nobody answered. All the excitement of the past couple years of playing in bands crystallized into an icy shard sticking straight into my heart. I didn’t want anything to do with Richmond, Virginia or its hardcore scene anymore. I didn’t want to play in dead end punk bands in some nowhere town. That night, I went to bed dejected.

I woke up late the following morning. My dad and grandmother were already at my mom’s, sitting out on the back porch with the rest of my family. The mail had arrived. I had an acceptance letter waiting for me from a small liberal arts college in Maryland I’d already ruled out as a place I’d go to school. I didn’t want to leave Richmond. There was nothing for me in the world beyond my own little hardcore scene. Besides, my band had two records coming out that year on two different labels. If I even went to school, I was going to stay in Richmond and go to VCU. But after the night before, with depression still rattling around my mind, I told my family I was going to accept that offer to start school in Maryland in the fall. That’s exactly what I did. I never even sent the DATs to either of those labels to produce those two records. I was so ready to leave my entire life behind.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his memoir, Disorder: An Avant-Garde Memoir of Psychosis, Healing & Love