This is the Static Age

I didn’t want to be a Green Day kid

“Hey, hey, it’s the static age… Well, this is how the west was won”

I didn’t know who she was, but she told me her name was Michelle. She was a friend of Teddy’s. He gave her my phone number because she was nervous about making friends in a new school. She told me that she liked Teddy and that maybe she’d like me. The first day of ninth grade felt like being thrown into a reality show I didn’t want to be on– poor managerial decisions made led to contracts signed under duress. I didn’t know anyone outside of the little group of friends I had from elementary school, and everyone else felt like Saved by the Bell: The New Class (1993)– strange and terrifying. I knew there would be girls, and while this idea was tantalizing it was more like seeing a painfully inaccessible item on the first screen of a Legend of Zelda (1986) game. Even if it appeared to be obtainable, the methodology of its retrieval was esoteric, buried in some issue of Nintendo Power (1988-2007) I didn’t have; dull, aching frustration. Michelle’s phone call was the first screen of the game. Michelle was the item.

There was a familiar distance between boys and girls in eighth grade. No resonant feelings of ill-will or persistent antagonism– boys and girls were simply on different planes of existence, living in alternate realities like nearby countries with a vaguely shared culture and little cross-talk. Then, one night, as summer approached, OJ Simpson was accused of killing two people and after refusing surrender to the LAPD, led police on a slow-speed car chase while threatening suicide. This felt important for reasons that were not immediately evident. It was important because the television said it was important. Without deliberate coordination, or so it had seemed, our entire class converged on a single residence to watch, and for the rest of the summer boys and girls were suddenly friends. The television brought us together.

And even if Teddy once suggested my exclusion from a spin-the-bottle game as a way to coax the reluctant opposing team into participation, he still deemed me cool enough for an introduction to a friendly girl. Michelle was short and heavily freckled, with long, stringy brown hair and a thick, raspy voice that would have been considered an asset during Lindsay Lohan’s tiny window of unironic fame, but in the fall of 1994 a little girl who sounded like a dedicated smoker seemed bizarre and alienating. Our phone call was awkward even in its brevity. She was excited to meet me, she said. If you’re anything like Teddy… a sentence that didn’t need finishing; an idea she allowed a natural death. The conclusion, to her, was obvious. I found her at her locker the next day. We never spoke again.

And even if it wasn’t as easy as it seemed; even if I were only on the first screen of a legendary adventure; even if Michelle only served as a proof of concept, I had seen the master sword. I knew it was there. I couldn’t unsee it.

I knew I had to get a girlfriend.

***

The final weeks of summer brought with it the emergence of Green Day as the first post-Nirvana alternative rock supergroup. Kurt Cobain’s suicide drove a bloody wedge through the 1990s, but as the chatter around it began to subside– tear stains wiped clean, razor blade scratches obscured by long sleeves, mascara reapplied– Green Day was there to carry the culture in a different direction. Green Day was a breath of fresh air that served as a counterpoint to Kurt Cobain’s self-obsessed, death bed murk. While Nirvana dwelled miserably on the meaninglessness of American life, Green Day reveled in it– the modern suburbanite teenager sat around smoking pot and jerking off, and it’s okay to masturbate.

For those who didn’t experience the ascendancy of Green Day firsthand, their breakthrough album Dookie (1994) became saddled with baggage difficult to explain. Dookie remains an excellent record that’s aged incredibly well, but the quality of the music did not matter only one year after the album’s release; one year later, Green Day was hated by the same teenagers who’d been blasting Dookie on Sony boomboxes across lazy summer afternoons. With their major label debut, released only eight weeks before Nirvana’s abrupt departure, Green Day went from playing tiny neighborhood VFW halls to selling out suburban hockey arenas. The excitement over Dookie cannot be overstated; Dookie was a phenomenon. Dookie introduced a sound that simply did not exist in popular music; Green Day tore down what was left after Nirvana and rebuilt the landscape in their own irreverent image.

In the tiny window of time between the collapse of hair metal and the reemergence of punk rock, it simply did not occur to teenagers that music could be fun. For teenagers at the time, music was understood as serious business. Music was grim catharsis for emotional trauma; music dwelled miserably. Music was something you survived, not something you enjoyed. Music was supposed to be anything but fun which was the prevailing vibe that extended beyond even Cobain’s personal misanthropy: Pearl Jam had songs about suicide and incest. Stone Temple Pilots had songs about rape. Nine Inch Nails had an entire album about self destruction. Music wasn’t supposed to be fun, was the idea, but after things got too heavy too quickly– all it took was one crack of a shotgun– popular music needed the equivalent of a Reversal card in Uno; a shot in the arm; a whiff of airplane glue. We needed cheap thrills for suburban kids. We needed fun.

The triviality of pop-punk, with a strong emphasis on the prefix, was perfect. For miserable mainstream rockers, Green Day was a gentle introduction to the light-hearted nature of punk rock as a whole. Before Green Day the genre had been on life support throughout the decisively not punk Reagan 80s. Punk rock served as the dingy counterculture to Reagan’s smiling, corporate Morning in America. It didn’t match the decadent optimism of big things getting bigger; it was cursed to survive in the shadows. By the dawn of the new decade, punk was so underground that it was thought of as a relic. Something that was dead and gone, like Freddy Krueger at the end of every Elm Street film; not unlike remembering a beloved, defunct television series that had a good run: fond memories with a definitive ending. Punk was thought of as an interesting bit of history; a genre that produced some great records like Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977) and Damned Damned Damned (1977) but went the way of the disco duck. Green Day managed to change punk’s irrelevant perception overnight with their highly accessible, radio friendly Dookie.

Aesthetically, Green Day was overwhelmingly non-threatening. That wasn’t unusual in the underground punk scene with bands like Screeching Weasel and The Queers treating a rejection of rock’s overt masculinity as a strength. However, this flew in the face of what mainstream kids raised on Axl Rose and Metallica were used to: hard music played by tough guys. Teenagers wanted rockstars who looked dangerous. Even Kurt Cobain, who championed the underdog, was still a guy who liked shooting guns and shooting heroin in equal measure. Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, with his diminutive build, baby face, and bright blue hair made Cobain look like the strong silent type. Musically, pop-punk was becoming passé as quickly as it gained ground: Green Day opened the door for other punk bands to get mainstream exposure, like The Offspring and Rancid, whose rougher, harder-edged sound made Green Day seem soft by comparison. A picture of Sesame Street’s Ernie taken in a mosh pit adorned the back cover of Dookie upon initial release, which was initially meant to be ironic but symbolically represented the band’s emerging reputation: punk rock for kids. Pre-teens gravitated to the harmless, boyish Green Day in droves but older teenagers weren’t going to be caught dead liking a kiddie band. Green Day became kryptonite for the image conscious teen.

When a teenager gravitates toward music to identify with, the music itself is only part of the equation. What matters more to the self-obsessed teen is the commercial image wrapped around the music. The persona you can steal and claim as your own while striking poses in the bathroom mirror with a face full of Ace Frehley cold cream, fantasizing about the person you wish you were on sleepless nights while visions of Gene Simmons dance in your head. Teenagers chose the bands they liked based on how those bands made them feel about themselves; how they wanted to feel about themselves; how they appeared to others. Teenagers didn’t want to identify with the effeminate, punk-rock-for-babies Green Day. They didn’t want to be a Green Day kid.

They wanted something harder.

***

Her name was Christine and she had scribbled her phone number on a tiny piece of ripped out notebook paper before getting off the school bus. She said we needed to talk– specifically to talk privately. I was to call her later. This was the first time a girl had wanted to talk to me; intentionally sought me for conversation; appreciated my emerging wit and occasional humor. She liked me: to an unknowable degree, I conceded, but had liked me to some degree, I was certain. I landed a solid right jab and was setting things up for a big left hook. I held the scrap of notebook paper in my hand and examined the writing on it: carefree and airy; the distinctly bubbled letters of a teenage girl; the digits of her phone number, which I had quickly memorized. I silently dissected the conversation immediately preceding her decision that privacy was a necessity for further interaction: the correct language used; sentences structured in the proper order; words punched in at an admirable pace and with a pleasing inflection. I did something right, that much was clear, and had gotten to the next screen of the game– with a quick uppercut I put Glass Joe on his back and was on to Von Kaiser. Momentum reverberating throughout my body; finally on a winning streak; finally ready to conquer the world.

I thought about that phone call for the rest of the day.

The most memorable day of my childhood was one where I went to Toys R Us with my mother and grandmother; I was able to pick out two toys. This was momentous for reasons that shouldn’t need explaining. I decided my best plan of attack was to get both a physical toy (an action figure according to toy industry marketing; a doll according to my grandmother) and a video game. I had been obsessed with video games since my father brought home a Sears Video Arcade II, an Atari 2600 clone sold through Sears, one night in 1984– very likely on bargain basement clearance. He bought with it an arcade’s worth of games. The Atari 2600 provided an experience like nothing else at the time. No longer was the television one-way; the television could be interactive. The cold, alienating static of its empty channel three had now found purpose. These experiences were primitive. The Atari relied on imagination more than it did on graphics; it was up to the player to imagine the square blocks littering the screen as heroes and monsters. The player’s imagination was an explicit component of the Atari’s magic– it wasn’t about what you were seeing on screen but how you wanted to see it.

Seeing commercials for the Nintendo Entertainment System, buried inside half-hour toy commercials posing as Saturday-morning cartoons, was a transformative experience at five years old. It was mystifying and important for reasons that were immediate and felt urgent. The initial release of the Nintendo Entertainment System came packaged with a plastic, mechanical robot that (somehow) interacted with the television, and a light gun that was used to (somehow) shoot graphics on screen in a self-explanatory game called Duck Hunt (1985). At this point, I had been to enough roller-rink birthday parties to have become well acquainted with their meager roller-rink arcade. I was in love with the dual screen experience of Punch Out (1984), the gorgeous vector graphics of Star Wars (1983), and the frustratingly addictive handlebar controls of Paperboy (1985). Even at five years old, I understood that the arcade contained luxury experiences not able to be replicated in the home. I just figured I was stuck with my boring Atari 2600, forever plugging away at Asteroids (1981) and Space Invaders (1980), until I saw commercials for the Nintendo Entertainment System and was introduced to Nintendo’s robot “ROB.” A robot was something that didn’t exist in the arcade. A robot felt like it existed beyond the arcade. The commercials featuring ROB were evasive in their presentation. Like the gorgeous artwork on Atari game boxes, they were meant to ignite the imagination with possibility rather than deliver concrete details, discoveries left to be made by the daring. ROB seemed to move as commands were entered through the gamepad; the television reflected in its dead eyes. After seeing enough of these ads buried inside half-hour toy commercials, I knew I had to get an NES; I had to get ROB.

I probably played ROB’s compatible pack-in game Gyromite (1985) once on Christmas morning. ROB moved at a glacial pace, even for a world that wouldn’t know the slowest of dial-up Internet connections for another long decade. ROB was a slog to set up; playing Gyromite wasn’t fun. Duck Hunt was only slightly better– the gun was accurate and the game was responsive– but by the time any player figures out they can’t shoot the dog, Duck Hunt has run its course. Of course, the pack-in games weren’t the point– they only existed to get the NES on store shelves and in living rooms. What I had gotten was a tech demo: a proof of concept. Within the same week, my father took me back to Toys R Us and we came home with Kung-Fu (1985)– a game that impressed us with its arcade action. The only game I finished with my father, back when we still spent time together. Some of my fondest memories growing up were playing Kung-Fu in our living room. Sometimes people move on and go their separate ways even while living in the same house.

But beyond any Christmas or birthday, family vacation or school play, it was the trip to Toys R Us with my mother and grandmother, where I got to pick out two toys, that was the most memorable of my childhood: I started with Optimus Prime. I had been familiar with Optimus from having watched hundreds of hours of Transformers (1984-1987). Any kid exposed to even a few minutes of Transformers will walk away wanting to own the iconic Optimus Prime. With the disguised robot in hand, I perused Nintendo’s black-box collection, inspecting screen shots with a critical eye– already reeling from mistakes made; misguided choices and game paks collecting dust. Donkey Kong Jr. Math (1986) had seemed like a worthy compromise for a mom reluctant to buy a new game on a non-holiday. It had math in the title; it was part of the “Education Series”; it was a math game and game was half of that equation. Edutainment; fun while learning: it was none of these things. I had another misfire with Wrecking Crew (1985), a puzzle game disguised as an action game, and with Donkey Kong (1986), an arcade classic whose only goal was the accumulation of points—bragging rights for the loveless. Something that already felt meaningless to me. I wanted more. I wanted adventure.

The future will sometimes have a gravity that can be felt in the present. When something looms heavily enough– something world-changing– its shockwaves are felt in reverse. Static, single-screen games, classics like Donkey Kong, where the game’s entire world is trapped inside one dead frame, were considered obsolete before their replacement had fully materialized. The next step in gaming evolution– the howling monolith on the surface of the moon– was so momentous that it generated a gravitational pull of its own. I believe it were these forces that drew me to Super Mario Bros. (1985) that night at Toys R Us, with my mother and grandmother, where I was able to pick out two toys. The most memorable day of my childhood; the night that changed my perception of everything that came before and after. The events that unfolded that night in my living room– with my father by my side; one last ride for the old boys– blew my mind and altered my worldview. Super Mario Bros. wasn’t static. It scrolled. It felt alive.

A scrolling screen created a rich, immersive world for Super Mario Bros. with forests and caves; dungeons, fire, and ice. This alone would have made Super Mario Bros. stand out from its comparatively lifeless black-box peers. As a no frills, straight-line, stomp-and-jump sprint through the Mushroom Kingdom, it still would have been considered an innovative, medium-defining title– razor sharp physics, and controls tuned to surgical precision. Even if it were only a perfected version of its early blueprint, Pac-Land (1984), it still would have been a monolithic achievement– relative simplicity wouldn’t have prevented Super Mario Bros. from becoming a classic. However, Super Mario Bros. aspired to be more: its beauty isn’t in its twitch-perfect controls but the sense of exploration it imposes upon the player– the feeling that the world extends beyond what it’s willing to admit. This hidden depth makes Super Mario Bros. come to life. Delicately, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto gives the player room to believe these discoveries are their own even as the game silently nudges toward them. Super Mario Bros. teaches you the basics in its first level– functionally an in-game tutorial– before showing its hand and teaching its real lesson: the world is bigger than the rules you thought you knew.

That night, with my father by my side and Optimus Prime in my lap, I experienced the single greatest moment I’ve ever had playing video games: the second level of Super Mario Bros. By the second level, I had the objectives down and the mechanics internalized– the rock-breaking ability of powered-up Mario, the left-to-right stomp rhythm of the gameplay. By then, I assumed I’d seen everything Super Mario Bros. had to offer. The game had no further tricks up its sleeve, or so I must have believed, until I noticed something curious. Something that felt wrong. Something that looked like a glitch; like the game’s world had cracked open. It looked like Mario could break his way up to the top of the screen– the narrow strip with the score and stats—and from there slip beyond the game’s natural borders and run off the screen into the unknown. A discovery that felt like breaking the game. My discovery: I discovered something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Something only found with a keen eye and ingenuity; my arrogance to defy boundaries; my will to push beyond the infinite.

The most exciting moments in a video game depend on the illusion that what’s happening is unique to you– that it hasn’t been meticulously written and programmed; that every inch of digital space hasn’t been documented and accounted for; that every outcome hasn’t been lived a thousand times over. Authenticity is the illusion, and when it’s flawlessly executed, a game transcends the mundane and becomes something beautiful: where the exploration feels real and the experience feels uniquely yours. If I close my eyes, I can still feel glimpses and flashes of what I felt that night in my chest and stomach; in my whole body, if I allow my mind to wander for long enough. What I felt that night, I haven’t felt since: Mario running across the top of the screen with the boldness of Lewis and Clark pushing west. The arrogance of slipping the surly bonds of Earth and pushing into deep space– into the orbit of Jupiter– touching the face of God. I wasn’t exploring an unfolding, prewritten world; I was creating that world in real time. This is how the west was won. True adventure. This is Shigeru Miyamoto’s masterstroke.

I thought about Christine’s phone call for the rest of the day. I had done something right on the school bus, and whatever it was needed to be duplicated with refinement. I’d made it past the first level– functionally an in-game tutorial– and internalized the mechanics and fundamentals. I dodged Glass Joe’s glacially slow haymaker with grace and aplomb, peppering him with counterpunch lefts and rights, before a Start-button uppercut– thrown at the exact right moment– put him on his back. Now I was on to my first real challenge: a private phone call with a girl who had gotten a taste of my personality and demanded more. I had to rise to this occasion and smash through to a first date proposition– given at the exact right moment– to put Christine on her back. Slowly and methodically, I needed to reverse-engineer a perfect moment. Standing in my garage, clutching my family’s portable phone, I imagined Doc Louis rubbing my shoulders and giving me last-minute advice: stick and move, kid, stick and move. With confidence and from memory, I dialed Christine’s phone number.

She told me she knew I liked Green Day. She liked Green Day too and she liked that we had it in common. Even if Green Day was a year away from their dubious punk-rock-for-kids reputation, I still didn’t want to be known as the kind of guy whose favorite band was Green Day. I didn’t want to be a Green Day kid. The band, although producing two underground masterpieces before their mainstream breakthrough Dookie, wasn’t cool in the way I wanted to be seen as cool. Green Day played whiny songs about nervous boys longing for female attention like the pathetic, pleading “Don’t Leave Me” or the rejected ponderings of “Why Do You Want Him?” Green Day played music for awkward, lonely boys whose only desire was for female validation– unlike me. These weren’t songs for me, they were songs for uncool boys who would stare across the room at girls in class– at the library, on the school bus– while too hopelessly inept to approach them, much less figure out how to structure their sentences in the proper order or punch in words at an admirable pace and with a pleasing inflection. Uncool boys who were stuck on the first screen of the game, suffering Glass Joe’s French heckling. Now you know who the 1 in his 1–99 record was, and it was some loser Green Day fan who can’t even talk to girls, much less get their phone numbers. Much less be standing in his garage, at 7:30 p.m. on a school night, imagining Doc Louis in his corner, mixing it up with a real, live girl. No, Green Day was for babies; Green Day was for dateless losers; Green Day was for virgins.

I didn’t want to be a Green Day kid.

I wanted to be a Misfits kid. I’d bought my first Misfits CD the year prior after hearing Metallica and Guns N’ Roses cover their songs– an endorsement so overwhelming that no kid in 1993 needed any further evidence. These songs were like nothing I’d heard before: hard-driving guitars and no wasted motion; no frills; all action. They got to the point with the surgical precision of a chainsaw– guitars pounded like jackhammers over an obliterating bassline. After learning that the enigmatic Glenn Danzig was their singer– blowing up that same year with his MTV hit “Mother”– a Misfits album became an easy purchase on a weekend trip to Tower Records.

You never forget the moments you fall in love. These moments, when excised and distilled, run only in fragmented seconds; milliseconds so intense they last a thousand hours in time-dilated alternate dimensions, two-thousand light years away– these are the moments that stay for a lifetime; these moments no one knows.

When “Bullet” hit my Discman, on the way to my grandmother’s on Christmas Eve, I fell in love with The Misfits. Like a spear impaling a lightning bolt, chills rocketed through my body with vicious immediacy. “Bullet,” track three on their self-titled collection, Misfits (1986), was like nothing I heard before. What starts as a poem about the Kennedy assassination shouted over an obliterating bassline in the sonic foreground ends as a sex fantasy about Jacqueline Kennedy. There is no chorus; there is no interlude or reprieve: “Bullet” is a brutal straight line of sex and death which would become a recurring theme of Danzig’s work. I probably listened to “Bullet” thirty times in a row thinking I had found the band’s standout track… and when I finally got to the rest of the album, I don’t think I listened to anything else for an entire month.

A staple of the 1980’s suburban experience was the outlaw independent video store– existing at a time before the rules were written; before video rentals were codified and sanitized by corporations like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. The independent video store was the wild west of media distribution; a strip mall experience that seemed dangerous. Where you could rent Disney cartoons and low-budget porn movies, oppositional forces in clamshell boxes, sitting twenty feet from summer blockbusters and off-label snuff films– all at the same time; all at the same store. A kid on a Friday night could walk out with Batman (1989), Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988), and Wrestlemania V (1989) and have the greatest weekend of his life. But even if the independent video store was a haven for children’s entertainment, there comes a point where kids don’t want to feel like kids.

I didn’t want to feel like a kid.

I wanted something harder, and even if my parents strictly forbade me from renting anything a puppy’s sneeze above PG-13, my attention would inevitably drift to the store’s horror section. But as much as I yearned for the vicious sequences contained on those tapes– just as I yearned for Suzanne Somers’ bouncing, braless tits watching Three’s Company (1977–1984) –the dull, aching frustration of not being able to watch the actual movies became secondary to the pleasure of studying their gorgeous VHS box covers. Box art that lit my imagination ablaze with impromptu, on-the-spot fan fiction. My own stories and made-up mythology drawn from images like the knife impaling Jason Voorhees’s bleeding hockey mask or a scowling, decisively humorless Freddy Krueger peering around a corner in hell; the terrifying, scalpel-wielding, black-eyed surgeon on the clamshell of Faces of Death II (1981), a movie so intense it carried several warning labels. I examined those boxes with a reverence typically reserved for religious iconography, studying them with a silent, art gallery-like etiquette, letting the images do what the movies themselves never got the chance: rewrite my idea of what the real world could be. With its death tapes and porno, the video store felt real in a way that the television did not; real in a way that even premium cable channels, with their after-hours, R-rated dalliances, did not. The video store spoke to the hidden adult world; the degenerate and depraved adult world. The hidden adult world that adults lie to kids about; the hidden adult world that adults maybe lie to themselves about being part of. The video store was a kid’s first experience with the darker layers of reality, and it was mesmerizing… and once I became old enough to start renting those tapes, from black-and-white monster movies to bloodbath slashers and Egyptian blood feasts, I learned what reality looked like in the dark.

I wanted Christine to know that The Misfits wrote songs about cool, old horror movies. I was a Misfits kid, not a Green Day kid– not whiny, loveless Billie Joe Armstrong but Glenn Danzig and his cryptic old band, so cloaked in mystery that even Henry Rollins thought they “only played on Halloween.” I wanted her to know that Glenn was like me– the kind of guy so obsessed with those old movies he’d make transformative art in their name, like “Horror Business,” which juxtaposes the movie Psycho (1960) with Sid Vicious stabbing his girlfriend to death in a motel bathroom– reality replicating fiction– or imagining New York City’s heroin-addicted homeless as real-life zombies in “Night of the Living Dead”– reality understood through the lens of fiction; through the lens of horror; through the lens of fantasy; through the dead eye of the television.

Glenn Danzig understood that in the age of mass media, the line between fiction and reality– between real life and the television– was nearly impossible to locate, let alone decipher. This is the prevailing message of The Misfits’ first album, Danzig’s magnum opus Static Age (1997), recorded in the late seventies and released decades later, a record so thematically unified that it may as well be considered a concept album: we are living in the “static age”; we understand reality through the blue light of the screen. “Bullet,” the song that made me fall in love with the band, was recorded for Static Age and finds its context here. John F. Kennedy, with his Hollywood good looks and Camelot mythology, was the first TV president; his very existence turned politics into cinema, reality into fantasy, governance into pop culture. The Marilyn Monroe affair tightened the knot– politics becoming Hollywood gossip, the dead eye of the television and the name of God spoken in equal measure. Kennedy ended up with as cinematic an end as any blockbuster could offer: a public execution caught on film, replayed, consumed, mythologized, and covered to death by the media.

I wanted Christine to know that The Misfits weren’t just writing songs about old horror movies– they were writing songs about me. To understand The Misfits is to understand that Glenn’s songs weren’t about Frankenstein or Godzilla. They were about the viewer– the kid watching from the carpet; the awkward, lonely boy in the dark. Glenn’s songs were about himself; he was the real misfit. “Teenagers from Mars” wasn’t actually about Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) so much as it was the notebook scribblings of a horny sixteen-year-old in math class; a power fantasy written by the powerless. The only thing “Where Eagles Dare” had in common with Where Eagles Dare (1968) was the title– the song was about Glenn’s frustration with women; his fascination and disgust with promiscuity. “Astro Zombies” wasn’t about The Astro-Zombies (1968), but about Glenn’s anger; like the evil Dr. DeMarco, Glenn wanted to blow up the whole world, to “exterminate: this whole fuckin’ place…”

I wanted Christine to know that The Misfits weren’t just writing songs about horror movies– they were writing about us. They were writing about being a teenager and everything that came with it: every bit of triumph and every little tragedy, every desire and every daydream. We were the real misfits, awkward and lonely; desperate for connection; desperate for each other. The Misfits were writing songs about every uncool kid who wanted to talk to girls and didn’t know how; for every kid who lost themselves in fantasy. The Misfits were writing songs about me; I was the real misfit. This is Glenn Danzig’s masterstroke.

I wanted Christine to know these things about me. That I liked thinking about art; true art; suburban art; underground art; punk rock art. That I was Mario at the top of the screen, running top speed into the unknown; into the dark corner of the video store, exploring drive-in splatter fests on VHS. That I had access to layers of reality: hidden reality, teenage reality, adult reality. A reality kids didn’t know. That I could show her these things, both beautiful and dark– true adventure with my keen eye and ingenuity; my will to push beyond the infinite; together we could touch the face of God. That our future had a gravity felt in our present; omnipresent forces pulling us together; stick and move, kid, stick and move. About to knock Von Kaiser the fuck out on my way to Piston Honda; we’ll take your weak resistance and throw it in your face; momentum reverberating throughout my body; we need no introduction for mass annihilation.

I finally had the master sword; finally ready to conquer the world.

Our phone call was awkward even in its brevity. She told me she knew I was going to the Green Day concert and was wondering if I could help her find tickets. She had been asking around because the guy she liked wanted to go. He was older and tall, she told me. He had a car and was in a band, she explained. She thought maybe they could go to the concert together– maybe it could be a first date.

At some point between getting that scrap of paper and this very moment, there had been a critical miscalculation. Clumsy and overconfident, I’d gotten caught with a stiff shot. Having mistimed Glass Joe’s glacially slow haymaker, I was hit hard; head slumped, hands down, body purple. Doc Louis nowhere to be found. Up against the ropes, I scrambled for my next move; scrambled for a movie or TV show that mapped out this exact situation with the exact right thing to say. There had to be a strategy guide or Nintendo Power code; an item I missed; the right brick to break at the top of the screen. I needed the correct language: sentences structured in the proper order; words punched in at an admirable pace with a pleasing inflection. What did Jack Tripper say when he wanted to fuck the shit out of Suzanne Somers’ bouncing, braless tits?

I told her I didn’t know anyone with extra tickets. She said it was okay. That she’d keep looking. She hoped it would work out, she told me. She really liked him, she explained.

I scrambled for something to say; eating punches; gloves dangling; mouth agape.

I wished her luck and hung up.

I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch! You’d better think about it, baby!

Why did she want him?