Like a Snake Tripping on LSD
The conundrum we faced as freshmen in college in 1996 was that on the same April weekend Morphine was playing in Philadelphia while Fugazi was playing in Richmond. Each city was about the same distance away from us in Maryland, and a group of us wanted to see both shows. Since we had a free place to stay in Richmond at my mom’s home, I convinced our little group to make the trek south for Fugazi. However, my main motivation wasn’t ease or comfort. It was that Fugazi was my favorite band, and I’d never seen them live.
They’d only played in Richmond once before since I’d started listening to them in high school, and I’d been visiting my dad in California at the time. Mark, the drummer for the band I played in, told me this story. Apparently, during the show some kid got up on top of the crowd. It was the nineties. Everybody wanted to crowd surf. Fugazi, however, was famous for stopping their shows whenever slam dancing started. They claimed it was too dangerous, and they didn’t approve of the tough guy posturing. But before the band could admonish the kid for taking such a dangerous leap, security threw him out.
Ian MacKaye, Fugazi’s founder, shouted at the security guards, “Hey! That kid didn’t come here to see you. He came to see us. And we didn’t ask him to leave. Why don’t you go outside and kindly ask him to come back in?” When security refused, Ian said, “Oh, you don’t want to? Okay, I’ll do it myself, then.”
The singer set his guitar aside. He went outside, brought the kid back, stepped on stage and announced, “Normally, we don’t condone this at our shows, but tonight, why don’t you all just go ahead and…” He made hardcore punk’s famous “circle pit” motion with his index finger. The band launched into one of their wildest pieces. My friends and the other kids tore that club apart. They’d been waiting for forever to let loose to Fugazi’s carefully curated rage. Three songs in, the club manager pulled the plug on the show.
The afternoon of that Fugazi show I saw was a beautiful spring day. The band was playing outside at Shafer Court in the heart of VCU’s burgeoning campus. This was before the university bought up all of West Grace Street in Richmond. There were only a few buildings surrounding Shafer Court at the time and a little raised brick stage where some shows would take place throughout the spring and summer.
My high school friends were happy to see me, and I was happy to see them. Innocence still united us. I introduced them to the kids I’d brought down from Maryland. We all found a spot not too far back in the crowd with a good view of the stage.
One of the opening bands, the Young Pioneers, were a punk rock supergroup composed of members from Born Against and other nineties hardcore acts. That they’d formed in Richmond proved what one of my college friends eventually said to me about the city I grew up in, “Richmond is where punk rockers go to die.” My college friends thought the Young Pioneers were great. They kept chattering on and on about them. I enjoyed the show, but I couldn’t see what they were talking about yet. In some ways, I was deliberately naive.
When Fugazi started playing, I was enraptured. The band began by hammering a cacophonous symphony from out their instruments. With a quick roll off the snare, the noise rapidly transformed into the lead track of their most recent album. I swayed in place, tapped my hands against my chest and sang along to the lyrics I already knew. The day was bright. The light was right. Ian MacKaye leaped and moved as if he were a skater skimming across the surface of an empty concrete swimming pool. Guy Picciotto, Fugazi’s other vocalist/guitarist, glided in place like a snake tripping on LSD. I realized this group of men formed my all-time favorite band. And I lost myself in the moment.
The air was perfect. I was staring at the brick edge of a building in the distance behind the band when they started playing their song Suggestion. Mouthing the lyrics, I moved along with the subtle groove. There was a blonde woman standing on stage behind the group. Somebody told me later she’d been the singer of the band Spitboy once upon a time. As the music plodded onward, on stage-right, Ian motioned to the woman behind them as if inviting her to come up to the microphone and sing the next verse’s lyrics. She shook her head, No, a few times. But when Ian himself finally started to sing himself, the woman walked to the front of the stage with purpose. She took the mic from Fugazi’s singer, and she finished the line with a shout.
Her rage coupled with Fugazi’s lyrics woke me in a way I’d never been awakened before. My mind floated off my neck and out my head to hover in the air above the rest of the showgoers. I saw the world more clearly than I’d ever seen it before. Colors were crisp and bright. The air’s oxygen felt real to me. My whole body was breathing.
When the show finished, as my college friends and I were walking back to our cars down the block from Shafer Court, I still didn’t want to set my feet back on the ground. I wanted to feel that way for forever. Every word directed at me was a command pulling me back to the earth. I’d been searching for that sensation for years. I wouldn’t let it go. I was reading a lot of Zen texts back then, and I was certain what I’d discovered was the same thing the monks felt when they became enlightened.
~ ~ ~
I’d been kicked out my first semester of college for drugs, but the school had allowed me to return in the spring. I took summer courses full-time to catch up with my class. It turned out I wound up doing four straight semesters that way with no real break. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but over the years, I’ve felt I may have overdone it. I don’t think I handled the stress very well. By the end of my sophomore year, I was a wreck.
That first summer there, though, I spent so much time in my dorm room writing, studying and making a single mixtape. The overall concept of the mix was one of physical dissolution leading to spiritual redemption. It was based on the acid trip that had led to me being removed from school the previous fall, but it would have been told conceptually. Even though, I had a concrete storyline built out of old blues tunes, Bob Dylan albums, some Elton John songs and even The Moody Blues. It was the story of a young man’s bitter heartbreak leading to homelessness and eventually, enlightenment.
I sat alone studying day and night. For, unlike so many of my peers who were happily discovering it all for the first time, I’d already given up drinking and drugs for what I prayed would be the rest of my life. It wasn’t, but that’s another story entirely. I listened to drafts of my mix over and over again, and I began writing my first short story. I never intended it to be, but that story wound up being my first exploration of the unconscious mind. It took over two years to complete. With it, I developed a style where I removed all the definite articles to create something resembling a surrealist painting. As I drew linguistic frames of solitary pictures, I imagined the world flowing around and melting into itself. Panes of images crashed into one another as my imaginary existence came to be out of nothing.
Even though I’d been influenced by Salvador Dali’s paintings, the exploration of my own unconscious mind came to be haphazardly. There were no outside influences other than the eternal presence of suggestion. An older friend of mine in Richmond had first introduced me to the ideas of Carl Jung. He mentioned there were theoretical divisions of the mind unable to be registered in waking life. That intrigued me. I believed I’d accessed those regions in sleep, meditation and perhaps even dream-like attempts at poetry. Art immediately became the visible key for unlocking secret mental doors, a vehicle for sailing into uncharted spiritual territory. I unhitched the cleat and delved deeper into hidden realities.
~ ~ ~
When I returned to school for my senior year, I had nowhere to live. I’d never bothered finding an apartment before I left, and I hadn’t been back long enough to get a place at the end of the summer. All my friends had already moved in together, and nobody had saved a space for me. I hadn’t expected them to. It was the first time I’d ever been responsible for my own housing, and I’d failed at the task. I wound up discovering two guys on the edge of my social circle who had an open room in their place. I took it. It wound up being the living room, separated from the rest of the house by a sheet hanging in the doorway, but it worked out perfectly for me that year.
There was no landline in that house, and since this was a year or two before cell phones took off, I had to use a payphone down the block for any calls I wanted to make. As far as getting ahold of me went, you had to leave a message with the switchboard at school. I didn’t mind. I figured nobody needed to reach me anyway. Although, I didn’t know Rob and Jon, the guys I moved in with, all that well at the time, they wound up being two of the four people I moved up to Boston with a year later.
We threw parties every few months. Even though I wasn’t drinking, my bedroom became the de facto dance floor. I’d throw my mattress up against the wall, move the speakers from my old high school stereo system in from the kitchen, and our school would rage and rage to the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest until everybody passed out. Most nights, we cooked family-style dinners together in the kitchen while listening to Charles Mingus or the Velvet Underground. We’d sit on the decrepit living room couch and eat our pasta while discussing philosophy and literature.
Even though we were all scheduled to graduate at the end of that year, Rob and Jon were both older than me. Rob only by a year. Jon, on the other hand, had taken time off before joining us at that school. He’d lived out west during those years, somewhere like Arizona maybe. At 21, his 23 years of age still sounded like they were light years away from where I was at.
I still remember eating dinner with the two of them that first night I moved in. It was warm out. Instead of sitting on the living room couch, we sat on the back porch. Since the house was on a corner, the back porch was nothing more than a small, fenced-in enclosure surrounded on three sides by sidewalk and street. That little patio was where I listened to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid on vinyl one afternoon, and I realized how much deeper a record’s grooves sounded than a CD’s laser scan. That first night we ate dinner out there, we were reminiscing about the few times we’d met over our years at that school. Jon said, “You know, Michael, you were still a kid the last time you and I really hung out. Sometime over the past couple years, you’ve turned into a man.”
We were out on that patio as well when I brought this freshman girl, Maria, over for dinner one night. All four of us were studying philosophy—Jon, Rob, Maria and me. Maria started talking about her belief in the Trinity and Jesus. Jon rolled his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this then?” he asked. “You know, philosophy corrupts the youth,” he said.
Maria stole a quick glance in what I thought was my general direction. “Well, I wouldn’t mind a little corruption of the flesh,” she said.
But Jon leaned in closer to the three of us sitting still at that little table. He put his hand on Maria’s arm, and he said, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about your flesh, my dear.” Maria shivered. Her face blanched. She drew back from Jon as if he were a snake. I laughed.
I often stayed up all night that year. I’d write through the darkest hours. As the sun rose cool and crisp, I’d walk down to the docks. Purple turned to gold, and I’d watch the world come to life. Shop owners swept up in front of their stores. Deliveries were made. Businessmen drank their coffees.
I sat down in a spot where a plaque told me Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte had landed. Roots had affected me considerably as a child. I’d watched the masters try to break Kunta Kinte’s spirit on ABC. They tried convincing him his name was Toby, and I cried. With boats dotting the horizon, the Chesapeake Bay stretched out before me. That was when I came up with the idea that I wanted to sail around the world. I had an older friend in town who had done that same thing. He inspired me.
When I graduated, I got a job in a used boat parts store where I hoped somebody would teach me the basics of sailing. There were people willing to teach me, but I never learned. I wound up ripping a hernia into my groin lifting a sail onto the racks over my head. I believed that hernia was a symbol. It was my struggle with the angels. I hadn’t been able to keep myself out of the strip clubs in Baltimore from the moment I’d graduated college. Their siren song sang to me every day and all through the night. I was sober, but I couldn’t control myself. I’d sit around reading Kant to keep my mind on the sublime, but once darkness fell, I’d wind up in my car driving 45 minutes to spend every dime I had. I had to get as far away from Baltimore as I could. Like when the Biblical patriarch, Jacob, had spent all night wrestling the angel only to have the angel reach out and touch his inner thigh so he couldn’t lift him anymore, my hernia represented that struggle with myself.
From Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.’s memoir, Disorder, available here.
