Charles Bukowski, �The Movie: Barfly�
One of the other dive bars in the area has been running their version of �punk night.� I�ve been going to these over the last three weeks. They put a sign on the door, and the doorman plays the bouncer character from the punk club in Martin Scorsese�s After Hours, letting people in on familiarity and dress alone.
I sat next to him for a while the first night I went, and every time he turned away a fratboy or guy wearing a tie, he would turn to me and grin.
�Sometimes I love this job,� he said.
And the setting is quite like the sets from the movie Barfly, though I haven�t seen anybody fight with the bartender or come out of the bathroom saying �twenty bucks for that kind of head is outrageous!� To make up for this, I started saying it as an introduction.
Oh, by the way, if you haven�t seen Barfly, you have no idea what the hell I�m talking about. That�s what you get for being so uncultured.
Their punk night version basically revolves around cheap shitty beer and two DJ�s that trade off playing classic punk. They play lots of things like Black Flag, Angry Somoans, Adolescents, D.R.I., D.O.A., G.B.H., and dozens of other bands from the eighties who had a three-letter acronym for a name.
So I�m in the middle of telling somebody I just met that twenty bucks for that kind of head is outrageous, when I heard the opening refrains of a song that I recognized.
As a matter of fact, they were playing my band.
I have no idea how I�m supposed to feel about this.
They were playing �I�m Not From Berkeley� from my first band, Preachers That Lie. (Yes, we were one of those three letter bands.) PTL was an interesting case, because we were nothing but dumb kids who decided we wanted to start a band. Since none of us had any musical training, it was fortunate that we liked punk, because we could call ourselves a band and didn�t have to have any talent.
It was also fortunate because we formed at a time when San Jose didn�t have many bands, and kids hadn�t yet realized it wasn�t hard to start one. At the time, the only bands in the area were The Faction, who were punk rock superstars AND older, and therefore unapproachable. The only other band in the area that were near our age group had such enormous egos that we soon became more popular than they were, simply because we were approachable.
I�ve heard the demo tapes from this period. We were not good. But we were friendly, and I think people looked past how much we sucked because we were all such nice guys. We started getting requests to play parties all over the south bay, and we played every one of them that we could.
We began to get better musically as a group, but after our first guitarist quit, we found ourselves without a place to practice. The bass player and myself lived in four-plex apartments with our parents, so our homes were out of the question. The singer had a stay-at-home mom, so we couldn�t go there either. But our new guitarist lived in a house with a garage, and his parents were gone during the day, which was probably one of the reasons we brought him in.
During one of these practices, we went outside to pretend we knew how to smoke, and were surprised by two skater kids who were hanging around outside. They rolled up, asking if we were the ones playing inside.
�Man, you guys rip!� they said when we acknowledged that it was us making all that racket. �I mean you totally tear!� I asked if we also fold and spindle, and did we in fact, mutilate? They said that we, in fact, did.
The next week when we arrived at the practice house, the two skaters were already there, practicing skater moves on the curb. They asked if they could come in to watch us play.
We didn�t see why they couldn�t but when we asked the guitarist, he said he �didn�t want those fucking kids in his house.�
Okay, let me amend my first statement. Most of us were nice guys. Our guitarist was kind of an asshole.
We went back outside and apologized to the �kids,� who were in fact, perhaps two years younger than us. They were disappointed, but asked if it would be OK to skate outside and listen. We said it was fine.
For two months we played in the garage of this house, until the neighbors got sick of us thrashing inside while two kids tore up the concrete curbs outside and started calling the cops with regularity. We found new places to practice.
The two skater kids eventually became professional skateboarders, with their own boards being released, dozens of international contests won, and each gathering hundreds of thousands of dollars in endorsements.
In the meantime, I�m wondering how I�m going to make my next car insurance payment. The way I see it, we were their trainers, providing a soundtrack to their exercises.
I think I deserve a cut.
