In conversations after class, I learned that her name was Emily, that she was, like me, a first-year day student rather than a boarder; in fact, she lived practically across the street from the school. And she confirmed my suspicions that she was into punk. The details are hazy now, but she was or had recently been in an emo band and was or had recently been dating an older guy in a ska group, or maybe it was the other way around. She seemed like she’d arrived from a different planet. Why hadn’t I met her before? Presumably because she was off doing cool shit.
Emily liked the Dead Kennedys (whose perfect song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” Nick and I immediately adopted as our anthem and mantra) but also a host of local and semilocal bands I hadn’t known existed, ones fronted by skinny guys with quavering voices playing violent guitar riffs and, in varying proportions, screaming their guts out. Thursday, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day, countless more local and lesser variations: These were the Jersey and New York emo bands that I soon adopted as mine. It was Thursday most of all, with their heavy riffs and oblique lyrics that seemed to conflate breakups with world historical events (“That’s how it was on the first day / We saw Paris in flames”), who captured my heart and mind. Their sound was harsh enough to repel normal people, but they were also sensitive and pretentious, like me. I found their songs, and those of the other bands, on online pirate sites, searched for their CDs at the Princeton Record Exchange and traded them with Nick to burn and make mixes.
I hung out with Emily in the improv group, but she remained a mysterious, aspirational figure, one foot always out the door. I survived the school year, barely, and retreated to the Jersey Shore, where my family spent the summer. When I discovered the punk shop on the boardwalk my emo education accelerated rapidly. I spent hours there, memorizing band names, album art, song titles. The guys behind the counter were gruff know-it-alls in the proud Jersey tradition immortalized by Clerks, sneering when I asked them what record they were playing. (I knew it was Sunny Day Real Estate, I just didn’t know which album!) By the end of the summer, I was conversant in lineages of scenes and subgenres, hardcore and SoCal punk and ska, some metal occasionally thrown in (it was the age of Slipknot too, after all). I’d found my place the way that I usually did—by studying.
The shows, once Nick and I started going to them that fall, were something different entirely. I had been to a handful of concerts at that point, but they hadn’t demanded participation in the way that punk shows did. At the first Thursday show I attended, at Club Krome in South Amboy, it became clear to me that being a member of the audience was a role of similar, if not equal, import to being on the stage. You sweated onto your neighbors, shoved and shoulder-checked in the pit or stood guard around the edges of it, screamed the words, ridiculous as they might be, as though you’d written them. The joy was in giving one’s sense of self—mine so unformed and yet already so bruised—to the crowd and not thinking about who you were or what you were supposed to be. In my black T-shirts and jeans, my bland haircut and styleless wire-frame glasses, I wanted, essentially, to disappear.