They Were All My Friends. And They Died.

Allie Marini

Sixteen: waist-length braided pigtails, threaded Atlantic Blue. Manic Panic ribbons wrapping up my face. Friendless at school– too odd for the Gifted kids, too many A’s to hang with the stoners. No car to go off campus at lunchtime, even the benches for outcasts denied me space. My Walkman and the top of a banyan tree in the courtyard, constant friends. Mammoth Records, Kill Rock Stars, Brilliant! Records, SubPop, SpinArt!, Taang! My headphones sealed out the clatter of the hallways. Weekends, shows at the Edge in Ft. Lauderdale. Dad drops me off and picks me up when I call from the payphone around the corner. I meet up with no one and know only the fumbling kisses of the teenage boys I lock eyes with around the pool tables, or smoking on the landings of the upper floors. Their flannel shirts damp with the South Florida humidity, riddled with the smoky, sweaty smell of live music and spilled beer. Histories gleaned from the boys who work at Uncle Sam’s Records and Echo Records. Shit jobs that made their opinions gospel. The bitter flavor of coffee, black for affectation, the proper pronunciation of espresso: The Mudhouse, Hot Moon, The Nocturnal Café. Cafes littered with books it seemed important to read, playing music it was important to hear. “Into. The. Future.” 120 Minutes every Sunday night, insomniac or over-caffienated, the music is my friend.

Square peg, round hole. I walk laps around the track in P.E., unsneakered. Doc Martened feet will cost me a grade; I don’t care, my headphones block out the catcalls of the jocks who think blue hair means blow job.  Each quarter mile breaks the leather in, softer, pulls blisters out of my skin, builds the calluses. Thundering chords and bass lines punctuate my boot falls on hot Florida asphalt. How can I understand grunge in a place where it’s always sunny? Rachel, torn fishnets and cutoffs earning her detention, runs the punkzine Psycho Times. On her way to withdraw from Nova, slips me a cassette: Sonic Youth, Flipper, Nirvana, Thatcher on Acid, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat. Her handwriting is messy; I can barely tell one band from another. Three months later everybody smells like teen spirit and unwashed hair from hats we don’t need in perpetual 85 degree weather.

Chords, like friends, those scratchy vinyls mailed in brown paper from the farthest corner away. Rain, darkness, what that must be like, where the pretensions of fashion are based on the demands of weather. Through the murky crackle of blown out earphones, not the kind you tuck inside your ear canal, the ones worn like mittens __ Chord, chord, jangle, sonic boom, like the H-bomb dropped inside, between the convoluted machinations of the unspooling cassette and the overtaxed wiring of the headphones. There. Rachel’s smile was like a middle finger in the center of her face. How fitting, she slipped me that tape before leaving the high school she would never be welcome at; door prize, you didn’t win but here’s something to pacify you anyway.

The cheerleaders in Pearl Jam shirts, designer combat boots from Nine West; somehow WHORE gets scrawled on my locker each of the four years I walk these halls. Weekends are for the kinetic pulse of moshpits; I learn how to take a hit and throw elbows, ride the crowd like a primordial surfer, choke down fear and dive off the edge of the stage before security can catch me, hoping their arms will open up before the pavement rises high enough to meet me. Nose broken, reshaped to give my face character. Miscalculations of my youthful hope, shorts torn from groping fingers, the irony of being violated by strangers while onstage he sings Sex Type Thing. Looking for the yellow laced boots to help, the way a suedehead can nod and suddenly there’s a pack on him, sticky fingers now bloody lips. Learn to shout oi! from the music. This is knowledge useful on the streets and in classes, gleaned from lyrics and listening. Grateful not to have a car, these bus rides are study time. The Cure teaches me the rudiments of Camus.

There are the deaths, rolling out like a black carpet from hell: So what if you don’t remember where you were? I remember where I was. My loss no less valid. They were no less mine for not having met them. Loss, more than their disembodied voices, haunts my headphones. Died in attics and bathtubs, in the backs of tour buses, forgotten in addictions, or worse__ natural causes, how unglamorous. Cancer, heroin, madness– like finding the opening lines of Howl in Rolling Stone. Dorm rooms as claustrophobic as the classrooms I tolerated in high school: still Florida, still banyan trees to climb, still more at home inside my stereo than at a party. He sang Hallelujah and dove into the Spider River. Netted three days later, dolphin in the tuna net, only blue polish on his toes, mojo pin fell to the silt and sediment on the bottom of the river’s floor.

Today: technology, how lazy it makes me, any song, any time, one click away. News breaks and folds faster behind the tubes and wires, headlines burst and fade as quickly as fireworks. Ash falls, hyperlinks to obituaries best left untouched by the forward momentum of this strange new world. Jim Carroll lived to be 60. That’s longer than anyone—himself included—would have bet. One more man not to meet. But a softer world if he is alive.  A friend, where the streets are all lined with so many strangers.  No lockers, dorms or classrooms. Walking track without a coach timing my laps; my headphones are so different now.  Tiny buds nestling down the coils of my ears. A Zune, smaller than a pack of gum, hundreds of albums at my disposal. So many songs, and none sound as urgent anymore.  Pink hair, pulled back, punky professional. Whispers of the friendless teenager tucked behind my ears, escapees of adult responsibilities. Clings to those friends. Songs.