SmokeLong Quarterly

We are at the hardcore show at the punk club in Salem. It is all ages; we stand in the back. The band is spectacular and we regret forgetting earplugs. We wear black, and we have comfortable shoes. We nod to the screaming beat and we will feel this in our necks tomorrow.

The band is called Gaytheist and they are absolutely monstrous. The lead singer looks like he just drove over from his accounting job – middle aged, receding hair, and literally suspenders, if you can believe it. But he’s wrangled his singing voice into a perfect hardcore falsetto, total control over every squeal. And then between songs when he works the crowd? We realize this is just his voice-voice: he speaks classic nasal pansy-sass, somebody’s gay uncle who bought property in the Castro in the 90s and hasn’t realized he’s rich now. And then he fucking SCREAMS these lyrics about Satanism! Yes. He is the only right old person to be.

You are losing it, and he presides, he couldn’t be happier for you little punks, he is raising you himself here in this old ballroom on the ferocious conviction that, unlike his younger self, you won’t get beat up in the parking lot between sets for sounding queer.

You are the mosh pit. When we were you, the pit was inward motion, like a punch – boys shoulder-checking to a central point and bouncing back off, radiating aggression. But your pit is a round table, and no one’s trying to win: you and all your genders just run madly in a circle. You take off your shirts and lean gleefully into your friends’ momentum. It’s musical chairs! On molly! With no chairs!

When you fall down, you pick each other up. In fact you race to do it. Many teenaged arms reaching down and yanking you vertical, hard and enthusiastic, excited to show one another that you know the code of the pit. Ah, yes. This we remember: so much of being your age was proving we knew how things work.

You own the pit now and we get to watch you. You are centrifugal force; we line the walls to keep them standing for you, against the sound that pours out of the amps and smacks flatly into the ceiling. You are skin and hair and sneakers. You jump from a standing position till your feet are shoulder height, till the fist of catharsis seizes you and throws you to the floor. Sometimes you stand in front of us back here, waiting and breathing and bobbing your head, and then the rush of kids is too much and you must bolt ecstatically back to their midst, while we stay.

I want to leap up too. I want to run and growl and push against your t-shirt. I want to be one of the hands that reaches when you fall, to prove I am there for you and also that I know, I know the code, I belong here too, I still have impulse and elation and sex and rage and incommunicable, jaw-clenching, desperate earnest subterranean needs to move.

Do you look at us and wonder – what does it feel like to have a body that just won’t join? Can we change so much that we can actually resist bashing everything that’s in us against a stranger’s skin? At what age – we wonder for you in the din, wistful, benevolent – at what age will your feet start to stick to the floor?