RED LETTER DAYS
by Roger Pinnell
(excerpt)

V-Day 1980
           
           Late at night on Valentine’s Day, I scan the sweltering room, late at night on Valentine’s Day, impatience in my veins.
           “For Christ’s sake, where are The Xterminators?”
           Bristling fuzz covers male and female heads alike. A short girl in a trenchcoat grins and passes me a tiny brown bottle labeled C Street Adult Arcade. A flood in my head, then the tide rushes out. Heat and energy, distilled and combusting, a nuclear reactor. This is better than any stupid heart-shaped candy, or any date.
            I nod to people I know only by name or reputation--Gary Vitalis, Jake, Cindy Arson--the whole swarm of Technicolor characters who seem to sparkle strangely in here. Name yourself, name your poison. A battery of sounds, a torrent of new faces.
            Still on edge, I stare at the static red pattern of the obsolete wallpaper--the last trace, I’ve heard, of a big band nightspot that once occupied this space.
            I’m a fly slamming into a windowpane, trying to shoot through--something stops me cold, but I can’t see what it is. I feel a raw scraping tension in my bones, and no violent outburst or screaming match can purge it from inside me.
            When the band finally comes on, the bass player’s lanky frame shoots up above the crowd, despite the fact that the stage of the Skeleton Club rises maybe three inches above the dance floor. In black shop-teacher glasses, he reminds me of a peroxide-crazy Roy Orbison after three days in the trunk of a car. I could swear the first number is the theme from The Munsters, but it bleeds abruptly into a chorus of “I wanna kill TV/ Kill TV mentality!” I soak up the flood of adrenaline; I like it. I try to avoid the only person I really know, the girl from my old school I caught a ride with. I think back to San Diego when it was all hot white driveways and distorted jingles from a speaker bolted to an ice cream truck.
            8-Eyed Spy from New York comes on last. I can barely see the faces of the band. A voice in the crowd shouts at the singer, “Is that a black bra?”
           “No, they’re black tits!” she says deadpan, into the mike. Against the back wall, the hippie soundman looks nervous.

Jack O'Lantern Style
           
           "It was your idea to be an abortion," a girl with a shish-kebab torso tells me.
           “Who knew an abortion would smell so much like Domino’s Pizza?” Fetus blood trickles through my hair and down my neck. Red blotches splatter the old Levis covered in flesh-colored lumps, the pants I’ve worn to every messy night shift at the latex mask factory. I manhandle the wire hanger, twisting it until the hook sticks out from my neck. The two skinny girls shake the last drops from cans marked “Heinz Tomato Sauce” and giggle. The empty cans roll down the driveway.
           "I love your new fall colors," Valentín tells me, appearing suddenly at my side.
           “Hey, how’ve you been?”
           “I’m fine, but the party’s getting ugly,” he says, nodding toward the manicured lawn. A stream of bodies now evacuates the house, pouring out onto the front walk of this otherwise placid suburban home. Instead of making my entrance, I watch the tension reaching an arc on the lawn. I spot M. Rude’s angular jaw clenched tight over a blue bandana, worn railroad style. Older and huskier than me, he stares down three guys with frizzy surfer hair. His stare contains a spite as tightly focused as a scalding sunspot through a magnifying glass.
           “I just might have to jump in there in a second," says Valentín, as we watch the hostilities unfold. Valentín is short. His hair is black and even shorter, but holds an undefeated waviness. A guy who goes by Jarhead stands close behind, his face lit up Jack O’Lantern style with the same smirk he always wears.
           "Who are those guys?" I ask.
           "Aw, same old shit. Surfers are the rednecks of San Diego," Valentín tells me. “Their own brother’s throwing a Halloween party, but they don’t approve of the types he invited." I strain my neck to see. We hear thuds and cracks against skin, against concrete. From the doorstep, a matronly woman’s shadow, its hair singed by a porch light, pleads with us all to break it up, to just leave, please. But we linger in front of the house, like foreign bodies in a bloodstream.
           "Come on, they're callin' the cops," yells the shish-kabob girl. The scuffle has ended, but now shrill voices cajole and bicker over where to go now. “We gotta go!" The crowd scatters slowly, lighting cigarettes and laughing.

Pawn Shop, Christmas Eve

           “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, the magi departed for their own country by a different way.”
           I sit in a cushioned pew alongside my family, feeling cramped. How many Christmas Eves have I sat through this exact charade, watching successive rounds of teenage girls in white robes and gold tinsel halos? Every year the same rituals, more hollow than the year before. God only knows when that band will play another gig. “Family obligations,” I think, “fuck.”
           “You’ve gotta be kidding. You’re going to church on Christmas Eve, when we’re playing a show?” Dexter had badgered me on the phone, his British indignation flaring up. “My first gig with The Injections, no less.”
           “And as each angel lights the flame at the end of your aisle, and one candle lights the next, please be mindful to keep the flame away from any paper goods, so we can all safely enjoy this wondrous--”
           At long last, I pinch the flame of my slippery candle with wet fingertips; the wick gives off a slight, defeated sizzle. People hug and chatter and clog the aisles, but I head straight to the parking lot.
            Ike’s Pawnshop isn’t one, really. The space is a bare-knuckle art gallery named, odds are, for the previous business at this address. Tonight the walls are devoid of photos or paintings; I see only a string of Christmas lights at a haphazard angle just below the name “Injections” spray-painted on the gallery wall.
           “You missed our set?” Dexter asks me.
           “The whole goddamn thing.” I say. Valentín swerves toward me with some sort of cocktail.
           “And where’ve you been?” he says.
           “Don’t ask,” I tell him. “Is that a martini?”
           “He missed our show because he was at church,” Dexter answers.
           “This was our Christmas Mass.” Valentín tells me, with a staccato laugh, a sedated Woody Woodpecker. “And you still don’t you have drink in your hand? I prefer gin when it comes to martinis.” I gaze through drifting creases of cigarette smoke at the crowd, who are clearly primed with quarts of beer and, no doubt, a few black beauties. Chuko Tony hovers in the corner like a smiling Mexican rottweiler. That Jarhead guy pops out of a gap in the wall, holding an upside-down bowling trophy on his head and yelling “Hey Lady!” in a Jerry Lewis voice. The asinine grin hasn’t left his face. My eyes bob and weave from crucifixes to iron crosses, all seeming to tug stubbornly at the throats they hang from. I feel a blast furnace of body heat in here, the heat given off by bodies sweating in small, enclosed spaces.
           “Christmas is Xmas for a lot of us, I guess,” I tell Valentín absently. Dexter spins one record after another in the corner, the songs all short bursts, propelling themselves to the end so they can start again, like the distorted jingle of an ice cream truck.