New York City

New York is a Fuck You City. Everyone, everywhere is saying Fuck You. All of the street signs and billboards and even the STOP signs are saying Fuck You to anyone who can read. And everything a New Yorker says can be translated in some language into a Fuck You of some sort. It is, I suppose, the perfect place for punk. It's the perfect place for anyone who hates everyone. We come into the city around midday and start feeding on the paranoia and claustraphobia and general mental illness of a place where people kill each other every day just to watch themselves on the evening news at night. The concrete closes you in when you drive down the Westside Highway as you pass the burned out corpses of abandoned cars and you believe in your secret heart that every young man in a dirty tank-top is sporting a loaded pistol and waiting for you to turn your back. Everything feels surreal and dangerous. We cut off the highway and turn in onto the city streets where the cars are all stopped and people are screaming in every language and everybody is giving everybody else the finger and we understand everything perfectly. It's a hundred million degrees outside and people are melting down into primordial reptiles. Everyone's baring their teeth and hissing threats and violent invitations. Every car on the street is sooty and scratched and dented and nobody gives a fuck if you hit them or kill them for that matter. We finally get to the club and it's really just an abandoned brownstone by a gushing sewer pipe. The smell of fermenting shit hangs all over the sidewalk. Across the street is a building with a dumpster in front and workmen are using a crane to take garbage out of the dumpster and put it into a third floor window. Dave and I look at this for a good five minutes to see if it's for real. Then Dave shrugs and says, "I guess the first two floors were already full." The doors to the club are wide open, so I stop the van and walk inside to find a handful of teenagers sitting around the first floor foyer. But no-one is sitting with anyone else. It's like they've never met and they don't want to talk to each other. I stand in a conspicuous place and say, "Uh, I'm with the Dirtbombs. We're supposed to play here today. Uh, who's in charge around here?" And no-one answers. There's no sound, just the whoosh of cars outside and the constant New York honk-honk barging in through the open door. And suddenly I realize the fabulous truth: There is no-one in charge here. These people are real live anarchists and this place is a free-for-all. It's just an empty building where people squat and sometimes bands play. And maybe other things happen. Who knows? Then some skinny girl looks vaguely my way and says, "The bands play downstairs." But is she talking to me or not? I can't tell. And "downstairs" is really just a hole in the floor that someone has stuck a rusting spiral stairway into. So I climb down the stairs and yes, there is a basement - with broken cinderblock chips and dark shadows hidden in filth and stinking puddles of brown water. I am breathing in more cold cement dust than air. In one corner a fire extinguisher is lying dead on its side over a pile of oily rags. The walls are layered in decades of swear words spray painted over each other. At the far end is a piece of flat cement with some broken speakers and lights. "That," I'm thinking, "is the stage." I walk back up to the street and find William trying to park the van. Finally he just puts it up on the sidewalk and gets out.

"They don't actually have laws in this city, do they?" he asks.

"Not as far as I can tell," I reply. And then "Hey man, you've gotta see the room we're playing."

"Why? Does it have a decent PA?" William asks.

"Uh, actually, no. I don't think anyone in there can even spell PA," I answer.

So we load in our equipment and people start hanging out downstairs instead of upstairs. And I guess that means it's time for us to play. The crowd is about fifty people or so - all picture perfect punks. God, I wonder where they get their clothes. Because these aren't the trendy mall punks we found in Vermont. No, these people really live in dumpsters and pierce their tongues with safety pins. And so from the minute I hit my first power chord, there is an unspoken agreement to outpunk the punks. BAM! We're off on screeching tires through our songs. It's a drag race to the finish and everybody is yelling "fuck you fuck you fuckin' fuck" and I've already pretty much given up trying to play our songs. I'm just hitting chords really fast and yelling as loud as I can to be heard.Ê William is just yelling and taunting people and swearing. We're doing everything we can to offend these people. And man, this crowd is liking it. They're yelling insults and bullshit and everybody's getting the finger for something or other. We're ripping at full break-your-neck speed as I lean back to twist the volume knob on my amplifier from 9 to 10. The so-called "stage lights" are having little grand mal siezures and flickering bright and dim. The end of the set finds me lying in cement dust cradling my guitar and feeding back a single singing whine. Then I turn the sound knob to zero and the sound goes dead. See ya. Siyonara. Adios. Goodbye. Show's over. The kids start crowding around William at the foot of the stage and asking him for tapes as the guitarist for the next band sets up his rig. He plugs his power chord into an outlet and POW! the lights go out. Someone in the back of the room says, "Fuck, it's dark." We're suddenly lost and stumbling in an underground cave. My hands are touching dirt and wet rusted pipes and maybe old cigarette butts as I try to find my way out. Then someone fires up a butane lighter and I get some bearings. It looks like the whole building is dark and the show is over. But William - superhero William who can fix anything - William takes charge and starts running his fingers along all of the exposed wires and hanging outlet boxes. He follows every line and socket until he finds the main fuse box for the building. Then, against all good judgement, he twists around backwards and unwinds wild to punch the fuse box full force. And as if by magic, the lights are on again. I'm looking at William wide-eyed and he says oh-so-casual, "I figured it was just a short." And hell yes, the building comes back to life and the next band sets up their gear. A young white guy with dreadlocks rolls up to the front door on a bicycle carrying bags of groceries snatched from the neighborhood dumspters and the squaters begin a squater's feast. The next band starts playing and they are pure punk-o-rama. Every song is twenty seconds long and they're all about how the singer hates everybody. People are pushing and pulling on each other's clothes down front. They're holding on and kicking each other with their combat boots. William and I hang back and watch. In a dark corner, a middle-aged homeless man shares a forty ounce bottle of beer with a young girl sporting neon yellow hair. He kisses her tenderly on her shoulder. I think he was aiming for her face. The man beside me is holding a tape recorder in the palm of his hand. Claims to be recording bootlegs for a pirate radio station he runs. I wonder if there is any tape in his recorder. I wonder if he is insane. Some guy passes out at the foot of the stage and people leave him alone. Anarchy reigns. The singer starts thrashing around the stage wildly until blood comes out of his nose. He's smacked himself with the microphone and is bleeding all over the himself. But he doesn't seem to care. Was this intentional? Then he runs over to his bass player and wacks him in the eye with the same mic. And this is definitely not planned, because the bass player stops playing and falls backwards against his speaker cabinet. He can't even stand up. He's completely staggered. When the singer finally gets the microphone to his mouth, the bass player can only say, "My...eye..." There is mayhem on stage. The singer's mouth is covered in blood. He's screaming through the blood. What the fuck is this all about? What's the point? The band gets off stage after playing thirty or forty songs in a half hour. And I'm not quite sure why I watched them. They're replaced by a a group of young girls - really young - teenagers, maybe...maybe. The singer is an anorexic anemic who just yells "Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!" into the microphone. But nobody takes her up on it. Her skin is sickly white and covered in oily black snaky tattoos. She looks like she's never eaten food. The bass player is just a child with Cindy Brady hair and an oversized T-shirt that says "SUCK." And I can't even look at this girl. I mean, I feel like a dirty pedophile just for reading her T-shirt. Because without the shirt and the guitar she'd look like any other little suburban girl - just a kid. She should be at a slumber party. What is she doing here? But we have to leave before they finish. So I don't get a chance to ask.

We spend the night at a friend's apartment in Jersey where William stays up all night puking in the bathroom.