The Gangs All Hair The Gangs All Hair Blame it ...
Blame it on French class, blame it on conceit, or (and this is probably closest to the truth) blame it on March's being the classic month of histrionic aggression, inertia and failure. It's a great time for all kinds of break-ups. Believe me, I have earned the right to call March by its birth name: Mars, the god of fights. There's no warrior poetry or golden anything here, for March is Mars in his clammy, hormone-addled incarnation: the blood-thirsty, Ginsu-wielding teen cretin who has a hard-on in one fist and his sister's maimed kitten in the other. Early spring is the time to be obnoxious and inarticulate. Blame it on the deity who rules your reptile brain.
Mars, 1987: Late afternoon in the attic of the drummer's parents' house. If you were in a hair-metal cover band, you prayed for this rehearsal space (sprawling, isolated, somewhat neglected New England farm house belonging to an affluent, invisible couple), without knowing that it will be the venue and co-star of many key nightmares you will endure over the course of your life. Two Amityville Horror-style half-moon windows, jaundiced with nicotine, were the only source of rheumy late-winter light. The floor was littered with cigarette butts, fried amps, Hostess wrappers and trampled hunks of pink fiberglass insulation. Of course the attic was an oven, and it always held the aroma of that teen cretin god sixteen hours into a hit of strychnine.
On this particular day, the stink has been unsuccessfully masked with a cloud of Drakkar Noir. We're playing someone's party tonight. I am the female lead singer with small hair and a weight/attitude problem, on charity loan from a rival metal band that broke up when the bassist died. Lameness on my part will not be tolerated. To make matters worse, I am in the process of no longer fucking the lead guitarist. The last time we played out (my house, when my parents were somewhere else), it was kind of lame: I forgot the opening lyrics to a Ratt dirge, put down a full bottle of Captain Morgan and sulked openly while the lead guitarist made eyes and half-hearted guitar hero poses at his bat-faced ex.
Join me now, six minutes into tonight's set. I'll show them lame. Sour-stomached from eating all of the hostess' Dexatrim and drunker than a road whore, I spy the bat-faced ex, who is getting a gynecological exam stage right. Space and time stuttered, and when I caught up, I pressed my chin against my chest and saw the front row staggering back, eyebrows raised in collective embarrassment. Did I actually do something or did I just think it?
The lead guitarist bends over me, pale face apoplectic, and starts screaming over the din, so my question is answered. Apparently I had kicked the bat-faced ex in the jaw, and the show, not to mention my career, ended when I drilled myself, neck first, into the drum kit.
Much later, late morning, in the back of someone's car, I got hit with it for the first time. Shivering and hot in my long, red spandex coat, my nostrils and hair singed, everything damp and smelling of ass, just inexplicably not right?what is spring if not the stink of being born? Of coming to? When it wafted in the other day, I was loitering on my balcony, slumped on one of my plastic chairs?and I gagged. For the past 16 years, spring announces itself to me through my nose, and it's never good.
Of course, summer has its moments of olfactory overload, but the smells of summer are so cheerily obvious and overwrought, just naming them feels like I'm mouthing a Bryan Adams song. Coppertone, soft blacktop, lilac, charred meat: sometimes when I don't play that old six-string I never owned, I don't think about you and don't wonder what went wrong.
Come to think of it, by the summer of 1987, I was living in a Bryan Adams song, kind of as an antidote to my earlier life as Mars. My hair, which was making a slow recovery and starting to get huge and honey-colored, was always filled with highway wind. I had snorted and worried off most of the baby fat I had been juggling over the course of the spring. When I wasn't in my car or burning pizzas for a living, I was working on my very first tan. I played tennis, dutifully wore my pearls, and allowed my grandmother to smooth my hair and wipe dirt off my face with her spittle-soaked thumb. Pictures of me from this period show a 17-year-old girl who is radiant and perhaps completely insane. I was trying to be normal, and it was working.
By late August I had a tremendous secret: I was happy. I didn't know it until the aforementioned lead guitarist saw me at the mall and grudgingly complimented my appearance. I smiled graciously, and he backed away. In the parking lot, I realized I was over him. And without knowing it, he had delivered me my walking papers. Once I left for school, I never really returned to that hometown again.