Originally published in Verbicide issue #18

Last Friday I went to Boston to go see this band The Drowning with my buddy Harvey. Harvey is perhaps the only person in America equally obsessed with both Morrissey and Andrew “Dice” Clay. He’s also the only emo kid I know who goes through a can of Kodiak a day. It’s gotta be tough being a sensitive redneck, or whatever the hell it is that Harvey is.

The Drowning was basically just another in a long queue of bands trying to be the next Stone Roses, according to the Phoenix music critic, who was generally an asshole but usually right when it came to pointing out what music sucked. At least it would be a chance to get out of mom’s house for a bit. One show’s the same as another, as far as I’m concerned — people just want to be seen liking this band or that. Whatever. Anyway, all the good bands are broken up or dead.

Harvey had just gotten out of the mental institution where his parents sent him after he put $700 on his mom’s credit card for a full back tattoo of a rearview mirror in which was reflected the image of The Dice and over which hung a pair of fuzzy dice. I think there had also been a scroll with Old English lettering that said “Carpe Dice,” or some such thing. (I had suggested Trent Reznor’s and The Dice’s — and maybe keep Lincoln’s and Washington’s — faces on Mt. Rushmore. But no dice, if you’ll pardon the pun.) When his mom found out, he slashed his wrists and ate a bottle of advils.

It happens.

Whatever. He’s cool now. Everyone’s depressed when they’re fifteen, and I’m sure that being placed in an environment where he was surrounded by sociopathic freaks was somehow good for him. Harvey said there was a guy in the institution who’d hollowed out the body of a parakeet and fucked it, but I don’t know if I believe him. Apparently the guy had anally raped a nine-year-old girl when he was twelve, but the dude only got put in the mental hospital because he was from a really rich Jewish family. Probably just the institutional equivalent of an urban myth, anyway.

Not that I was a masterpiece of having it together. I was a bit older, but I’d managed to consecutively fail out of Carnegie-Mellon and then some stupid school in Arizona, and was now living with the ‘rents, putting in a few hours a week putting up drywall with Dad, but generally spending most of my time playing Minesweeper and reading all the books about the Civil War that, for some reason, we had around. There was a lot of carnage in that war. Their idea of a MASH unit back then was a guy with a cigar and a handsaw and maybe some whiskey for you if you were lucky. It was pretty gruesome, but it was also pretty boring.

Like I said, it would be good to get out of the house for a change.
The train ride was okay, but I could not figure out the subways for the life of me. The trains never came, or they came but going the wrong direction; I kept ending up on the wrong side of the tracks at these suburb stations with no cross-over where I’d have to go back up and cross the street and pay my token again. Sometimes I’d get so frustrated I’d just hop on anything that came by, which only added to my lostness. Somewhere along the line, I’d surfaced at a grocers and bought a lemon for the vitamin C and was carrying it with me. Only I didn’t want to eat it, because it was too yellow. It was so yellow. It brightened the dingy humid tunnels. It was a beautiful fruit; it was my only friend in the world. Me and the lemon, navigating the subways together. I bet I’d be the only kid at the show with a lemon. Maybe it would get me laid.

Finally, after wasting about ten tokens, I got on the right track. The train was coming right as I got to the turnstile, and just my luck, I had no tokens left. I had to hurry; there was a token machine, so I grabbed a bill and stuffed it in. Great, it was a twenty! Now I had like five thousand dollars worth of subway tokens, and when was I going to be in Boston again? Probably never.

I missed the train anyway, and the next train took forever coming.
Finally though, it got there and I made my connection with only a slightly aggravating wait. Two stops later I emerged, surprised to find it was still light out. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even six yet. I’d arrived in Boston at two-thirty, so I’d only been riding the subway for about three hours. Lemme tell you, it seemed a whole lot longer than that! I’d been afraid I was going to miss the show. As it was, I had a couple more hours to kill. The Drowning wasn’t supposed to go on until eleven, but there were about a trillion opening bands and Harvey had wanted us to get there before they started so he could catch the sound check and see if he could get his picture taken with the band.
Harvey has an entire photo album of pictures of him with his favorite rock stars. It’s the first thing he shows you when you meet him, especially if you’re a girl. I think it’s kind of corny, and they probably do, too, but he manages to bang out (to use his phrase) if not a surprising number of hot chicks, at least a number of surprisingly hot chicks. He’s handsome in a way, though, and even if I think he’s a bit phony, he certainly doesn’t — so I guess that helps.

I’m just the opposite. I have decent features, I guess, but I’m not really all that striking and any time I open my mouth to talk to a girl I feel like just about the fakest bastard on the planet. So I seem to get nothing but fag hags and fat girls who wanna fall in love with me.
The club was called The Dark Horse and was supposedly less than a block from the subway stop on Atwood. I figured I’d figure out where it was and then wander about for a bit. It turned out to be about a block and a half, but it was easy enough to spot by the sign with the equine version of a hellhound staring fiery-eyed down on the street.

“Hello, hellhound,” I said, which struck me as funny for some reason.
I walked on, deciding to continue in a straight line to avoid the possibility of getting lost. Boston was about what I expected — streets and stores and people, just like any other place. Just great.
Eventually, I found a deli and figured I ought to go in and get something to eat. I walked up to the counter and looked at the menu board, but nothing really seemed appealing, and I started to feel like a creep just standing there trying to decide what to order, so I went back outside.

What a boring city.

I was sick of walking, so I took a seat on the back of someone’s pickup. Boy did I amuse myself. I could just go ahead and plop my ass down on a truck that wasn’t mine, because as much as people would like to believe, “wasn’t mine” was not really a property of their vehicle. You would like to think so, of course, but that category was reserved for such things as “black” and “having corny rims.”

But I got down off the vehicle pretty shortly anyway, because even if they were wrong, I didn’t really want to get into any kind of confrontation with someone. I guess I was pretty yellow.

And speaking of yellow…eventually, I got sick of holding onto that lemon and figured I’d eat it, especially since I never got that sandwich. My fingernails weren’t long enough to break the rind, so I got fed up and just took a bite, skin and all. Boy was it sour! Too sour. Its sourness was akin to its yellowness in a lot of ways, I thought. In a sense, the sourness was like looking straight into a bright light. Biting a sour lemon and trying to look right into a light bulb — they both made you squinch. Somehow that seemed pretty profound, and I was proud of myself for inventing a new word to properly accompany my magnificent discovery — squinch.

I walked about, mulling over squinch, feeling the way that college professors and poets and such must feel quite regularly. It was pretty lame, but it killed the time.

I tried taking another bite of the lemon, but realized I didn’t really want it anymore and threw it into the gutter. I felt rotten. It had been so perfect and yellow; it had been my only friend. And now, there it was, mangled and tossed aside. Depressed, I hurried back towards the club. It was about time for sound check anyway.

When I arrived, Harvey was nowhere to be found. There were a few diehard groupies but none of them Harvey. I wandered around the Hellhound, or whatever the place was called. The Drowning was starting to unload their equipment. The lead singer looked just Morrissey but shorter — a Mini-Moz.

I bought a beer and wandered intermittently between the bar area and the stage until the first opening band came on, but still no Harvey. I didn’t even want to find out how much they would suck. I had no desire to stand around by myself and listen to a group I didn’t like and hadn’t even heard of. I mean, even when I see someone I like, I usually get bored after a few songs. As far as I’m concerned, going to a show is pretty much just a matter of standing around looking at a bunch of guys just standing around playing their instruments. How much fun is that? No fun at all. I mean I guess if you go see Gwar or Kiss or something at least you get blood and fireworks and crap. With most of these indie bands, it’s just like zzzzz… I guess I’m just not into standing still for that long.

So I figured I’d wander around for a while and come back at ten for The Drowning and hopefully Harvey would be there by then.
I found a place called Ida No’s, where I paid four dollars for a Budweiser. I sat in the corner, listening to G n’ R’s “Night Train” and Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” two not bad songs that I wondered if some clever fool had intentionally played back-to-back on the jukebox. Eventually, I started to feel conspicuous, having nothing to do but look variously at the scant patrons.

I left and sat at a bus stop, lamenting the lemon and all the money I’d spent. Why hadn’t I stayed home? This whole trip was a stupid idea.
I pondered wandering some more to kill time before The Drowning went on, but it was cold and I was sick of walking around, so I headed back to the club. Hopefully Harvey would be there by now.

Only somehow coming out of Ida’s I’d managed to get completely turned around and started walking west instead of south. I wasn’t even on the same street, but oblivious I didn’t notice my error until many blocks later, when the road started going steeply downhill. Cursing my idiocy and my bad luck alternately with the cold, I retraced my path back to the bar. By the time I made it back to Ida No’s I was freezing, and when I got back to the show, I found myself just in time for the second encore. Everyone in the crowd was emoed-out in tight pants and untucked dress shirts or tight ironic t-shirts, the boys with long swept and sculpted bangs and the girls with short Betty Page bangs — both dyed black. The only ones who didn’t look like idiots were me and the bouncers. The song I heard wasn’t too bad, though.
I didn’t see Harvey in the crowd, but he found me on the way out. It seems that he’d had his own fiasco getting there. He told me he’d just missed the bus to Boston, and had had to wait four hours for the next one, and had only gotten to see the last half hour of the concert. On top of that, while he was waiting for the second bus to arrive, he’d gone over to the bar across the street and spent the all the money he’d set aside for the return ticket getting drunk. I needed to lend him thirty-five dollars, or he’d have to give a blowjob to the gay guy who’d been buying him drinks all night to get the money. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he maybe secretly did want to suck the guy’s dick, but I acquiesced and told Harvey I’d get the money out of the ATM at the bus station. He promised me several times that he’d definitely pay me back (which he wouldn’t), and we headed off to the bus station, which was in the opposite direction from my T stop.

I gave Harvey the $40 from the machine and saw him off — the extra five was more because I didn’t want to deal with getting change than because of Harvey’s entreaties about a ride from the station. The end of a night of fun. I headed off, hoping to find a sub-stop nearer than the Hellhound.

But damn it if I didn’t get lost again. I swear I have the worst sense of direction. Somehow, I managed to find myself in a section entirely devoid of almost anything at all. I was walking under bridges and past barbwire-topped walls with god knows what behind them. I had no idea where the fuck I was.

Eventually, I spotted fluorescent lights in the distance, and after passing a few used tire shops and garages and a mattress factory, arrived at a ghetto mini-mart. The place — to my amusement/amazement called Circle L — was open, but the guy behind the counter barely spoke English and his directions made no sense to me. I pretended to understand and headed off in the direction he had generally been gesturing. I figured I’d just keep walking that general direction aiming for more and more populated streets and eventually I’d find the T or someone who could point me there.

It was pretty dead this time of night, well after last call, and it was kind of creepy to see these wide streets so empty, devoid entirely of either pedestrian or auto traffic. I was feeling hopeless about ever getting out of this damned city, when I saw a fat Asian girl standing on the sidewalk ahead. Maybe she would know where the nearest T stop was. But before I could find out, she asked me if I knew where the Hope Youth Shelter was. It was supposed to be at this intersection but she wasn’t sure which side of the street it was on. The girl looked like she might have been a bit retarded, so I told her I’d help her find it.
I looked around and saw a sign on a nearby building: “Hope Youth Shelter — Enter Through Alleyway.” I told the girl to follow me into this alley here, and immediately realized how creepy it must have sounded. I pointed to the sign. The girl read it stutteringly aloud and went around front anyway.

Frustrated, I turned down the alley — and behold! At the end of the alley was a lit sign for the T. For the first time this whole godforsaken night, I’d actually managed to get lucky. I just had to ride the T out to the end of the line, and then catch the last train back home. I’d planned this part of the shit out. I was home free.

Except that I wasn’t. Halfway there, in the middle of the alleyway, a mugger in a hooded sweatshirt popped out from the shadows and made like Mark McGwire across my back with a length of pipe. The force of the impact dropped me instantly and I bloodied my lip on the pavement. He stepped on my neck and reached down to grab for my wallet.

“Don’t try anything, scum,” he muttered, though there wasn’t much for me to try. He lowered his face to mine, while he reached for me wallet. It was an ugly face, with one eye that didn’t seem to open all the way and a sharp white man’s nose on his black face.

“Ooh, you nasty fuck! You shat yourself, you scum!” The mugger tucked my wallet into his pocket.

I couldn’t feel a thing.

I saw him rear back to kick me and tried to curl into a ball, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move at all! I was paralyzed! I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.

The mugger kicked me a few times, and then spat on me for good measure. I was numb to the blows, but I could feel the spittle creeping slug-like down my cheek. The man gave me a final kick, knocking my head into a pool of brackish slimewater. Sputtering and wanting to retch, I lifted my head and watched him run off.

My head collapsed back into the water. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to move my arms to push myself up, but nothing below my neck seemed to work. I was going to die of asphyxiation in a three-inch deep puddle. There was nothing I could do. The muscles in my neck could hold me up from asphyxiation only seconds at a time. I tried to scream for help, but was only able to produce a rasping groan. Out of some macabre fascination, I decided to count the times my rapidly weakening body was able to pull its head out of the mire. The ninth time was the last.

By morning, my body was frozen stiff and I looked so awful that the prep cook who found me there threw up the bagel he’d just eaten at the sight of my face. The police were called and I was taken away. Since my wallet with all my identification had been taken, it took them over a week to identify my body and get in contact with my parents. Mom almost passed out when she saw me in the police morgue.

Boy, that’s the last time I ever go see a show with Harvey.