YOU'RE WRONG 

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

As with so much of the California scene, no one there seemed to have the historical perspective to see themselves not as a cure for society's ills, but merely one of its more vulgar products.

--Marco Vassi in The Stoned Apocalypse

"I think length is really over-rated," says Suzanne.

"I agree." answers Lali, taking a slug from the 40 ouncer. "Width is much more important. Short and wide, that's the best.

Glad that I have at least half the requirements, I probe further.... er... ask another question.

"What about curved ones?" I ask. "Isn't that the same as width."

"Oh no," says Suzanne, "curved ones hurt. It's like being poked in the side."

Lali nods in agreement.

I peer through the leaves of the bushes. We're behind them, sitting in a triangle. In the dirt. We're hiding from the cops. In Berkeley, they arrest for drinking. We can't bring the bottle into the Gilman warehouse. They forbid it. They'd excommunicate us.

Here we are. Sitting on the ground, in the bushes, hopefully hidden from passers-by, talking about penises. The girl consensus is that a kind of stubby pyramid is the most fun.

I forget who's playing at Gilman. ARTLESS shows were fun, but the club itself is too staid and conservative. They banned The Insaints and The Diesel Queens. There's a rumor that they'll ban NO FX. I don't know why.

Back in the bushes, we discuss penises. Although they're a favorite topic of mine, I want to ask about California, more particularly San Francisco/Berkeley. I'm trying to make sense of the place. Though I have friends here, I feel uneasy. Somehow, I'm an outsider, a guest in a foreign church. Welcome, but with the knowledge that I'm not a true believer. I don't really understand Berkeley, San Francisco, The West Coast. I want a unifying principle. I want to slash through the mysteries with Occam's razor until I get to the kernel of truth. Instead, we talk about penises.

A few days later, Uncle Timmy takes me to a Giants game. If I can't develop a theory for this city, maybe I can develop one for baseball.

Candlestick Park is in Hunter's Point, a black neighborhood. It's a day game-- and warm. Tim buys us for field level seats. Hawkers hawk hot dogs and peanuts. No beer in the stands. They do, however, sell tacos and burritos. The crowd is white. The hawkers are white-- even the burrito hawkers. A couple of Orientals and a Hispanic or two... Wait! There's a Negro. The San Francisco Giants are a National League team. That's part of my theory.

A couple of cities have teams in both leagues. NY has The Yankees and The Mets. Chicago has The White Sox and The Cubs. The Bay area has Oakland and The Giants. Common to all these teams is the nature of the fans. The National League team has mostly white, suburban jockish fans. American League fans are more mixed. Negroes, Hispanics, White Trash, intellectuals, you name it. National League fans are homogenized-- as if any minute they're going to do the wave. The American League crowd is rowdy, uncontrolled. There are fights.

I don't know if these characteristics are true throughout the leagues. (Send letters of confirmation-- or dispute.) It's a preliminary theory. I like it. It helps me explain the differences between New York and San Francisco.

Part of it is the roughness, the rowdiness, the mix. How often will a New Yorker say "Have a nice day!"? Since I've been in San Francisco I've seen arguments, but not one fist fight. At Gilman, there are one or two ethnic types, and maybe a Negro-- not more. In San Francisco, even the bums are white. (Imagine being stopped on the street and asked for money-- or even followed-- by a white guy. In San Francisco, a guy, carrying a pizza box, follows me for blocks. A loony, he rants about invasions and how nobody wants to be his friend-- just because he came from Canada. I don't get it.)

At first blanche, San Francisco is America's National League team; New York, the American Leaguer.

It's a start. A good metaphor. But like most, it's too simple and doesn't go far enough. There are other things that need explaining.

Part of it is the unawareness that San Franciscans have about the world-- and humankind in general. New Yorkers think the world revolves around the city. Bay Area folks think the world IS the city.

Their morality, their view of right and wrong. It's such a shared view-- based on the culture-- that it's inconceivable to think any other way. In New York, when cultures clash, we have a sense of how the others think, even if they're wrong. In the Bay Area, there is only one way of thinking.

The notion of family is very important on The Coast. One belongs or one doesn't, and, as in any family, there are no identifications or passwords. You are known simply by your own face.

--Marco Vassi in The Stoned Apocalypse

-- Mis-read by me from Bay Area Jewish

Resource Guide

Maybe it's that no one is born here. They move from other places. People who come here are lost, angry, alienated-- not necessarily from society, but from themselves.

Marty Sprouse told me that San Franciscans change their names when they move to the city. Vegetables, trees, other people's names, anything; new residents pick a word, as an identity, and drop their old name. They have to merge with the city. They loose their old connections and become part of a new whole. Like joining a cult, the city becomes their new family. They get tattooed or pierced. It's a ritual that marks initiation into the group-- like circumcision marks initiation into Judaism.

As new initiates, the people here spend their time practicing smiling, cooking tofu, being liberal. They have to abandon their social heritage and play completely new roles. It's no coincidence that Hollywood is on the West Coast. You have to act to live here.

It's Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year. My stomach rumbles. I've got a headache from coffee withdrawal. I'm fasting. No food or liquid for twenty-four hours. I've done it every year since I was eight. It helps me feel connected to the past. It lets me participate in a 5000 year old culture. Of course, like all cultures, it's got it's good points and bad points-- but it's my culture. I am not an isolated individual. I'm part of a group with roots in the past and progress (finally!) towards the future.

"I still don't get it." says a girl at the MRR house. She's shaved the sides of her head. Scattered dreadlocks poke out from her head at odd angles.

"All that religion and culture stuff." she continues. "Can't you stand on your own? Can't you be an individual, a unique person."

"I can," I tell her, "but I'd rather feel some connection to others. To a common history. I'm not alone and alienated when I have this kind of connection."

She shakes her head. "I just don't get it. You're supposed to be so iconoclastic."

Since she's an attractive young woman, I ask her name.

"Parsley," she tells me.

The bay area has a culture of hipness, that, like Gilman Street, is so concerned with itself, it develops strict rules of self-preservation. What's logical in other cultures, doesn't make sense here. There are new rules. Those who come from other places must loose the old rules and adopt the new. That's why I misread the Jewish paper. Although 70% of Bay area Jews don't have Christmas trees, the reverse would not surprised me. Jews here can easily stop being Jews-- and start being San Franciscan.

A thread of cruelty runs through the superficial nicety. It's illegal to feed the poor on public property in San Francisco. The mayor instructs the cops to confiscate shopping carts the bums use to transport cans to the recycling center.

Even good cities can have bad mayors. G-d knows that New York had to suffer years with Ed Koch. We may even get someone worse in November. I won't blame a city for its mayor.

But here, the cruelty is subtler. More insidious. The right-wing mayor gets a big chunk of the homovote, for example. How could that happen?

"You warned me about the conformity before I moved here," says Larry Bob, "but you didn't warn me about the gay conservatives."

Sure, they're in NY too. Pagan, the councilman from the Lower East Side, is one of them. But he yells and makes no pretence at niceness. He's a GAY CONSERVATIVE. In San Francisco, gay conservatives would never call themselves that. They fly the multi-colored homoflag from their windows. They march in the liberation marches. They vote for the mayor.

There's a special smiley-faced rudeness that I've never seen anywhere else. Behind the nonchalant flirts, the "have a nice days," the "far-out dudes," there's a casual hostility to anyone not a part of the culture.

--Mark Twain

In most cities, neighborhoods change block by block. You can easily step from a rich neighborhood into a poor one. From a White neighborhood into a black one. In San Francisco, not only the rich/poor neighborhoods vary according to the block, but so does the weather.

The Mission, where the poorer folks (and lotsa punks) live is sunny and warm. The rich folks suffer through a cold fog. It's as if the rich San Franciscans could remain rich, because they paid the guilt penalty in weather.

Most of San Francisco is cold during the summer. It doesn't follow the rules of other cities. People on the street wear heavy clothes to insulate them from the cold outside. People who live here wear each other to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.

I'm at this homozine convention. Charles, the cool Oriental guy from the binet, invited me. Larry Bob is there. Tom Jennings is there too. This is where The Bucked Tooth Varmits play. (I wrote about these lesbo-goddesses last month.) Also here, is this guy. I don't know his name, but he keeps looking at me.

Thinking it's my ego projection, I don't say anything. Tom turns to me.

"He's looking at you." says Tom.

"What's his name?" I ask.

Tom tells me. Later I get his phone number. In a respectable amount of time, I call him. He agrees to meet me at a coffee house in the nice-n-sleazy part of town. Over coffee, I ask him what homosexuals do in San Francisco.

"Well," he says, "there's this ninety nine cent video fest."

"Let's go," I say. We do. Admission is three dollars.

"I thought you said it was ninety nine cents." I say.

"That's just the name of the place," he says, "It costs three dollars to get in."

There's a bar in front, a stage in back, and a row of highschool gym-like bleachers in between. A man dressed in an evening gown, wearing a Vanna White wig, shimmies around the room. She carries a cardboard wheel with a pointer. Audience members choose among different video styles: Lesbian Love, The AIDS Crisis, A Sex Celebration and the enticing BOMB! The videos are not very thrilling. One is of a one man show about a gay's pal who died of AIDS. Later the guy-- in real life-- died.

[Note: It's odd how homos worked so hard to get psychiatrists to reclassify homosexuality so it wouldn't be a disease. Now they're working to make it one again.

In Los Angeles, the homobaths have signs prohibiting "unsafe sex acts." These acts are: "any sex where the penis enters the mouth or anus-- with or without a condom." Yep, the homobaths, themselves, are bringing back sodomy laws. What did Larry-Bob say about the gay conservatives? On this coast, gay is conservative.]

After the videos, the disco starts. My host wants to stay. I'm for getting out, but as the guest, I follow his lead. Besides, I paid three dollars!

We sit on the bleachers, watching the disco crowd. There's a colored guy, with a shaved head, dressed in a brown suit. He stands there, swaying to the music.

"He used to be a transvestite," says my host. "I don't know what happened to him. He's been around forever-- a big pain in the butt."

We watch some more dancing. Occasionally, the DJs play a Sex Pistols song-- or The Clash. The dancers keep their distance from one another, each in a private disco world.

By now, the bald guy has shed his suit. He wears tights underneath a one piece girl's bathing suit. It has a flower print on it.

"The fewer clothes he wears," says my host, "the more he looks like a woman."

We both laugh. I lean back, slipping my arm around him. It really is like the bleachers in high school.

The bald guy comes over and starts dancing right in front of us. S/he looks at me, then s/he looks at him. S/he keeps looking at him as she puts her foot between us and wiggles it to make some space.

"Jeez!" says my new friend, "What a pain! Why doesn't he...she... go somewhere else."

The Negro hears and goes back into the crowd. We listen to some more industrial music. I'm nearly at the breaking point. Then, s/he comes back.

Ignoring me, s/he stations him/erself right in front of my partner. He looks heavenward for help. The Negro's hips sway. His/er arms twirl. S/he puts a foot on either side of the guy's body almost stepping on my hand. I take my arm down.

Then s/he sways back and forth, pelvis moving closer and closer to his face. I'm ready to jump in and save the poor guy. He doesn't want to be saved.

His hands wrap around the pelvis of the gyrating creature. His face rubs into its crotch. The dancer reaches between the guy's legs and strokes hard, up and down. He finds the dancer's crotch. I find the door.

I leave. Run out. Go back to the safety of my 55 year old cousin who likes classical music. During that walk, I run into the white guy carrying the box of pizza. He's still explaining how nobody likes him because he's a Canadian and not a San Franciscan. Now I understand. Maybe he's not so crazy.

ENDNOTES:

--> Belated thanks dept: I think I forgot to thank Sheryl Schroeder for her letter, cartoons and Shelf Life zine. It's a fine personal zine in a much different vein from the one you're reading now. She sent it to me so long ago. I don't know if you can still get one. If you wanna try, write her at: 1631 Santa Rosa Ave, Santa Barbara CA 93101

--->Hustle of the month dept: An outfit called The Local Music Store (PO Box 426, Dun Loring VA 22027) sends out promo packs for their service. They're a distributor that concentrates on indie music only. There are others, but these guys have a difference: YOU PAY THEM! Yep, they'll distribute your record-- and give you "Preferred regional, chainstore and local placement." But you have to do more than just give them records. You have to pay them a "service fee" of $150. Let's see how long they stay in business!!

-->Badguys of the Month Dept: The form letter opens ominously with: Dear Friend of Police Officers, Then comes a story about something

heartbreaking that happened in Virginia recently...

Of course, the letter doesn't mention three important points.

Point 1: The parolee had ALREADY served ten years in jail for a previous crime. A lot of good THAT did.

Point 2: This country has a higher percentage of jailbirds than any other country in the world. Jails MAKE criminals. These retards want more of 'em!

Point 3: If the ten year old girl weren't innocent, would that have made any difference?

You can write: The National Association of Police Organizations, Inc, 750 First Street NE, (935), Washington DC 20002. They'll send you literature-- and a nice business reply envelope.

-->Goodguys of the Month dept: GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME HEAD is how the poster starts. Then it calls to "either remove all laws regulating economics and victimless 'crimes' or show more concern for our welfare by giving us government sponsored sexual gratification." Now THOSE are demands I could live with! The poster is sponsored by The YOUTH DECADENCE CAMPAIGN. Unfortunately there's no address on it.

--> Dumb punk rumors dept: With Bad Religion signing to Atlantic, the rumors have been flying. They were before. B.R.'s former label, Epitaph, have done their best to straighten them out. I'll help. Epitaph is an indy! They're NOT owned by Sony or any other major label. They're good guys. They help lots of zines with their ads. Nobody owns 'em but 'em.

--> Those who enjoyed the NOTHING BUT RECORD REVIEWS "dog" tape by THE HATERS might want to do something to help. Some SOUNDGARDEN folks formed ANOTHER group calling itself Hater. SOUNDGARDEN's major label has already told the real Haters to go fuck themselves. Typical of the majors-- but when the shoe is on the other foot-- go ask NEGATIVELAND about U2. Ah well, the name of the next HATERS LP: SOUNDGARDENS!

--> Truth in Advertising dept: I picked up a calendar of homolistings. My favorite, listed under politics, was a group called: Fat is a lesbian issue.

--> Last column, I forgot to mention that the name of the band with the stripper on stage and the goat-fucking video. They're JERRY & THE BASTARD MAKERS. They're from New Orleans. You can get the tape and all kinds of other stuff by sending money to the band c/o Taj Cardona, 6053 Wingate Dr., New Orleans LA 70122.

--> Credit where its due dept.: Mercury records put out a "cassette single" called KROSSWORDS. It's an interview of REDD KROSS done by Thurston Moore. (They do slur Henry Rollins' name, though-- was it done electronically?) Thurston plays pieces of RK songs from way back when they were a punk band. He also unashamedly says "oh wow" a lot. It's amazing a major would put this out. It's almost worth buying!

--> Further credit dept: Thanks to the ARTLESS show goer who gave (lent?) me the Marco Vassi book I quoted above. Marco Vassi married Annie Sprinkle before he died of AIDS. He was a 60's pioneer who explored all aspects of sexuality. The Stoned Apocalypse is his autobiography.

--> Even the badguys deserve credit dept: You can find out how stupid the righties and lefties are by reading each others' papers. A right wing pro-censorship group called Accuracy in Academia, posted some interesting news. They report the following:

--> Thanks to Jesse, who sent me the leaflet from the URINATION LIBERATION FRONT (PO Box 674, Ashland OR 97520). They are fighting a current effort by girls to get boys to sit down to piss. Ostensibly for cleanliness, these folks think that the girls have a more onerous agenda. They urge everyone to stand up for their rights.

--> Plugging myself dept: I need a cover for the next issue of NOTHING BUT RECORD REVIEWS. Be creative, make one and send it to me (address below) on an 8 1/2 x 11 page. Black and white only. The winning entry in this cover contest will actually be on the cover of the next issue. Plus, you'll get a free 1/2 page ad for anything you want to advertise. Some deal, huh?

--> More news about girls dept: I saw Huggie Bear in NYC and they were actually pretty good. I didn't get a chance to talk with them though, so I don't know what they're like as people. There are two boys in the band so I can't see how they'd qualify as a Riot Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl band. Homocore is more like it, I'd say. I also saw a bit of the Mudwimmin set in San Francisco. I had to leave early, though, 'cause I had no way of getting back to my cousin's house after midnight. What I saw was really loud and noisy and way too cool to be feminist.

--> If I owe you something in the mail, please be patient. I've been away for 6 weeks. It'll take me eight more to catch up. I'm still open to mail, though. (Someone sent me another porno vid!! Great! Send me more-- especially home made!!) As usual you can write me at PO Box 137, Prince Street Sta, NYC 10012. I've got a new e-mail address, though. Contact me on the Internet at: Mykel@wps.com. See ya, buckaroos.

-end-

back to "You're Wrong Index"