ACID HALLOWEEN AT THE VATS

An excerpt from my 1993 one-man show, "Alien Soul."

In high school everyone was a doctor's daughter and a cruel elitist bitch.   Suntanned horse girls with muscular swim team legs and cropped hair, bursting with some kind of rude moneyed health and lurching around gracelessly in expensive sportswear; vapid ballerina snots who always stood in first position with eyes of wide resigned terror like frozen gazelles; a couple of lumpy straight-A poetic types with sensible shoes and fragile emotions like tragic Victorian ninnies, and then the Mill Valley Middle school girls I was talking about who since eighth grade had all gotten primer-grey Camaros and pregnancies and were all doing coke to get through PE. I tried to fit in with the rich girls for awhile but then I started hitting on this boy that one of the other girls liked, and was unceremoniously driven out of the elite front-lawn clique like a diseased yak, overnight. No technological advance on the infobahn spreads incriminating propaganda faster than a social lynch mob of 15-year-old girls whacked to the tits on hormones and unfocused rage and the weird power that comes from those "Lord of the Flies" level ostracizations.

That's when punk rock saved my life. I did an overnight 180. Up is down.  Right is Wrong.  I got my hair shaved off and started dealing drugs and the lousier and ruder and stupider I became and the more baking soda I cut into the speed and the more I sneered at people and told them to fuck off, the more people thought I was really cool, because high school is the place that the insecurities you will carry with you for the rest of your life are germinated and watered, and that's the place you learn to love people who treat you like shit. I was pretty much just a poseur, but everybody in the punk scene was too fucked up to notice each other's tragic personality flaws, so it was like one big dysfunctional family .  Punk rock was beer and acid and acrylic ski sweaters from Sears and pissing in the alleys on Broadway and drinking blue cream soda out of Windex bottles and Vespas P 200E's and all-night conversations on crystal meth about God. My girlfriend worked at a Fotomat that had a can set out for Jerry's muscular dystrophy kids which became our amphetamine fund.  I had some great learning experiences on acid, like crashing my mom's car and getting an SAT score that implied that I was foreign.  But the best experience came from a little piece of paper with a picture of Saturn on it that I took on Halloween at the Vats, the abandoned Hamms brewery that was the city's main punk squat, next to a club called the A-Hole.

I walked up the steps to the Vats and every one of the fifty punks who hung off the stairs like rude ivy had their faces tattooed like Queequeg from Moby Dick and the ink on their necks was melding together into one big hostile tapestry.

 A huge bulldyke in a Nun's habit was beating up our friend the clubfoot heroin dealer and she was doing it in prismic slow-mo. . .both of their eyes were blue jello, the punches seemed to come from mintues away and they were slipping like skate partners Twyla Tharpishly in what appeared to be a 4 inch pink mud made of beer, jism, piss, blood and industrial cleanser.

The floor was indented with huge dry bathtubs that were twenty feet long and 12 feet deep.  That's where the beer used to live, except on this Halloween there were some skinheads who had been thrown down there by their friends, who were now throwing garbage and skateboards at them, and yelling at them to ramp out.

I stepped onto a tarp made of hefty bags that I realized was covered with human shit. Everything echoed off the tiled walls like an underwater volcano that echoed into a laser point and bored a little hole in my scalp where I sat, tinily, and was a distant observer of the whole mess.

Everything seemed to have this kind of wonderful geometry . Everything suddenly divided up Escher-esquely into these little sharp lovely angles that all fit together and we were like "Woah! You can reduce everything down to chemicals and math. Everything fits the way it already is on purpose, all the time, and nothing is ever out of place, it's all a perfect equation, you can't do anything but fit in your place.”

Unfortunatly, I only felt like I really fit in the world was when I was on acid.  The rest of the time I felt like a drunk in a grandmother's tea shop, being told I didn't belong there.

Around 7AM the next morning, I was getting on a city bus to go home and get yelled at by my parents. It was cold and there was a dirty fog and I ran into a homeless black guy and a woman with one leg. I must have been looking pretty pathetic, so they got me stoned. Maybe that reactivated the acid.  I was sitting on that bus and looking out the window at the bleak city atmosphere like a cold grey eraser, watching hotel signs move by damp and sooty, my glands felt swollen just looking at them, ashtrays and wet carpet and neon pulsing like a fresh wound in the air at 7am in the cold ....suddenly I hear this heartbeat that is mine and something louder at the same time ,in my body, in me. I'm not on the bus, I'm in the sky, in an electric blue sky with cumulous clouds peachy and abundant, and there's Jesus himself, stiff, standing straight up, moving through the air above me like a statue. His sunrise-colored heart is outside of his chest and it's beating thuh-thmp, thuh-thmp like a roomful of kettle drums in unison. And Jesus flew by and there I was back on the bus.

HAPPY ALL-HALLOWS EVE, MY CHILDREN! BWAHAHAHAHA.

CintraW@gmail.com

Photograph by Tim Boxell from the short film, “Las Appassionadas.”