Ode to the Punk Kids

We carry the cold weight of armor and are instructed to call it cloth.

NOTE: this piece contains my personal recollections that include situations that, while not graphic, might be triggering to some.

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I’m sitting in the lobby of a seventy-three-floor hotel. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. There is a transient safety to the motion of this space, like how violence is displayed in a movie without compelling us to act.

At the core, this might be what’s wrong with the world.

I’m sitting with someone that I’ve known since the first day of homeroom in ninth grade. He’s always been a part of my life but has recently become my person.

We’re watching people come and go through the high-ceilinged atrium. Hotel lobbies have always been a springboard for my fiction and personal stories, for conversations and memories. The air smells like carpet cleaner and brewed coffee. There is an electrical charge of possibility in the geometric simplicity of this transient hub.

“I don’t like to be around people very much, but I’m interested in people. This is a problem.”

“I feel the same way,” I say.

I tally a rough estimate of how many hours I’ve spent watching the world through hotel lobbies, and the film in my mind is an endless stream of images, feelings, locations.

Photo by runnyrem on Unsplash

The autumn that followed the summer my period started in the closet bathroom of a horse stable, my grandfather announced that I would be accompanying him and my grandmother on a long drive to Canada to source experimental drugs for Alzheimer’s Disease.

It would take a few decades for me to appreciate the irony of those drug runs being brainstormed by a man who was diametrically opposed to state-sponsored medicine.

Several things happened in the summer between my being in private, religious, middle school, and public high school that led me to identify as a little street punk. I hadn’t worked out my flavor yet and proving my worth, being accepted by a faction, was more complicated than pledging a fraternity.

I’d paid some dues on the top floor of a parking garage when I was supposed to be working on a non-existent project at the main branch of the downtown library. I’d puffed a Pal-Mal unfiltered cigarette. I did not gag or throw up. It wasn’t painful.

I’ve got this, I thought.

The transformation from an evangelical schoolgirl to a worldly, cynical, full-functioning member of the alternative underground required a drastic costume change. I had to work slowly by making tiny changes to keep my family from shutting down the whole operation, like how the nation doesn’t realize it’s in recession until the Federal Reserve declares it so. Small changes gained momentum with time.

A white Vision Street Wear sweatshirt with its distinct logo served two purposes:

1. It was white so it wouldn’t force a dark arts invention like black, a color that hinted at satanism. I’d pushed black too fast in my first stage and ended up with a new, Biblical therapist who worked in the conversion school of mental health.

2. Skateboarding was a physical activity, not a gateway to the Olympics like snowboarding would become, but Christians, mainly boys, rolled around on boards. My father could balance the unseemliness of the sport with the relative, societal acceptance of skateboarding as a legitimate activity.

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I sat in the backseat of my grandfather’s big Lincoln and listened to a Suicidal Tendencies cassette on repeat through the foam-padded ears of my knock-off Walkman.

We skirted NYC on the drive road toward Canada, barely missing a collision on the George Washington Bridge. The pull of the city tugged me like a leash. If I could just get there, I thought, I’d find music and books and people who understood the weird dark underpinning of my almost-teenaged self.

It was early afternoon when we settled into our shared hotel room on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. My grandfather immediately went for a walk to create space from my smart mouth and my grandmother’s increasingly growing confusion.

Let it be known that a self-righteous, smart, argumentative pre-teen is the last caregiver you want for someone in the middle stages of dementia. Their joy is arguing with reality. Give one the chance to legitimately battle with someone’s non-ordinary reality and it’s on.

Nana and I argued until my grandfather returned to the hotel room. At that point, he either sent me out to cool off or I proclaimed that I was leaving and never coming back. Either way, I went to take my own walk.

Maybe my grandfather genuinely believed that I wouldn’t leave the hotel complex, or maybe at that point, he didn’t care if I ever came back. He’d been given the job of raising me and his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s just at the point where he should have had the freedom to plunder the spoils of his business success. Nana and I were two mouthy albatrosses stretched around his respected neck. Without us, he’d be living an eternal luau in Honolulu.

But his first act while reviewing my grandmother’s brain scans was to go in search of a second opinion — and a third and a fourth — at the top hospitals in the country. And then he created our community’s first Alzheimer’s Association which eventually merged into the national organization.

Maybe his love language was acts of service.

Photo by Chris Carzoli on Unsplash

I sat for a while in the vast hotel lobby. I watched the elevator doors open and close. I watched the revolving door spin at the entrance. As people walked past with their luggage and their families, I imagined the freedom they had to come and go, how they must shape their days with the ability to do anything at all.

I didn’t know yet that adults trapped themselves with the immensity of their freedoms. I didn’t realize that few adults were truly free.

I didn’t realize that freedom was a mental construct.

I knew that people hurt one another. I knew that people died or that they left. For all the potential dangers that consumed me and made my stomach cramp — the rapture occurring and me not being saved, car accidents with my father when he raged, the Bermuda Triangle, nuclear war — I was over-saturated, like the ground in a downpour. If anything else seeped in, I’d spill over.

I marched toward the revolving door at the entrance to the hotel and I walked out.

I followed a path that stretched beside a waterway in front of the building. I was busy creating an alternate reality in my mind, one filled with intrigue and longing. It would be a very long time before I learned to be careful with what I drew with words because they often appeared, for good or bad, in my reality.

Maybe I haven’t actually learned that lesson yet, but my intentions are purer.

“You look like New York City,” a man said. He spoke with a thick, Eastern European accent.

“Me?” I glanced around to see who he was speaking to.

The man traveled with four other men on the path beside the water, but we were otherwise alone.

There was an underlying glee to his statement like he’d received confirmation of a myth. I’d hear the same tone a few years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when I handed a cigarette to a porter on the night train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The porter shuffled into pose and said, “Camel: boots, cigarette, I’m a man.”

The man beside the water smiled and said, “You are very American. Can we take a photograph?”

This was disappointing to me because I was hoping to appear mysterious and like something other.

“Sure,” I said.

Each man took turns having an individual photo snapped with me, the waterway behind us, my Vision sweatshirt standing out in bold. It just seemed like what people did when they were politely asked a question that required minimal output from the participant. They complied within their ability. A photo seemed like an easy ask.

The man doing the talking for the group handed the camera to another man so he could have his own turn.

He stood beside me.

I smiled for the camera.

He placed his arm around me.

He reached around my shoulders and grabbed hold of my right breast.

The camera clicked.

Even with the flood of years between who I am now and the little me in an oversized white sweatshirt who stood on a concrete outcropping of the Niagara, I remember the second I wasted wondering if I was allowed to react. Beneath the rebellious exterior was a girl who had been programmed to take it, to not cause a scene, to be nice, to accept whatever was coming because I had brought it all on myself.

There was a part of me that felt the punishment matched whatever law I had broken by daydreaming freedom.

All of this flashed through my mind before the part of me that had been kicked by, tumbled over, and often narrowly escaped the possible dangers of a horse went into full drive.

I ducked out from beneath the stranger’s arms, and I ran. I never looked back to see if he followed. I just ran until my shoes hit the thin carpet of the revolving door, the relative safety of the hotel lobby.

I found my seat beside the escalators and caught my breath as I watched people pass.

I don’t recall watching the water tumble over the sharp cliffs of Niagara Falls. I remember being yelled at in French as we asked for directions in Quebec.

I don’t recollect if we were able to source new medicine for my grandmother.

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By the time we returned home to the hills of South Carolina, I’d filed the boob grab in a sealed container in the architecture of my brain as normal and deserved, the same as the hundred other small violations that I’d experienced before Niagara Falls in my short life.

As a young girl, the gradual accumulation of unwanted experiences were minuscule changes that gained momentum with time, like a national recession. Habituated by threats, I learned how to inhabit my adult world of larger intimidations, to accept them as normal, to feel unworthy of basic safety.

As my counterculture-obsessed teenage brain ordered and categorized the world around me, I was left wondering why, if people were not to be generally trusted, I still craved to be near them and accepted by them. I simultaneously did not care, and very much did care what other people thought of me.

I wanted to please them, and I also wished they’d fuck off.

I wore more black clothing. My father ripped band posters off my walls. It was as if I was transforming my lived experiences into outward vision.

I launched into public school and learned on the first day that the thing I’d really been longing for was a tribe, the empowerment of belonging to a group. The universe dropped gifts of people, freaks and artists and misfits, one by one like ragged, beautiful, wildflower bouquets in my hands. If we couldn’t figure the world out together, at least we’d craft it with whimsy.

Many of them are still my people today.

I’m thinking about this as I sit beside one in the lobby of the seventy-three-floor hotel.

“You thought I was pretty that first day you saw me in homeroom?”

“No, I knew you were. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he says.

At the time we all weren’t aware of the wisdom to be gained in shared experience, our early losses, abuse, chaos — but we understood that there is safety in like-minded togetherness, in sharing an uncommon narrative, in consciously living our stories.

We wore the stories on our skin, in our choice of clothing, in our music, in the constant striving to be something other. But in the quest to be different, we were bound together by a similarity of outlook that gave us a new vantage on the comings and goings of life. If the normal, traditional world felt incongruent, we could spin the glass and see it in a different way.

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The word itself: story.

There are two schools of thought on the etymology of the word story or storey to denote the floors of a building. We can trace the word in this context to 1400. I’m going with the Medieval Latin theory where historia, a picture/story, was used to describe the rows of windows that held art and sculpture on buildings, each floor depicting a narrative.

The broken mirrors on the lobby wall of the abandoned hotel flickered with candlelight. The once opulent chairs were broken, the upholstery torn by knives and time.

It was a rite of passage to break into this vacant building, to explore the empty rooms. We imaged ghosts we’d meet there and each of us returned from exploring (or breaking and entering depending on how you look at it) with another chapter added to the legend and stories that became the mythology of a place that had lost its meaning and use.

There was an opulent fullness to the emptiness.

Eventually, the building would be refurbished and revived, transformed into a luxury brand. But during my high school years, it stood like a phantom. It was ours to explore. My family had radio towers on the top story of the building, and I wore that knowledge as a point of pride as if the presence of the towers gave me full permission to trespass.

My grandfather spoke of the weird number of birds that he found on the rooftop when he ventured there to inspect the towers. Other buildings of similar vastness were vacant in the area, but this one was different. It had once been filled with people coming and going, with mysterious visitors like Amelia Earhart.

How many stories had people deposited in that place? As we roamed the empty hallways, we looked for traces of them.

From the street, following the join of the L-shaped building, the sections stretched like arms that embraced the front plaza. Looking up at a third-floor window, one could see the outline of a shadow, the apparition of a person standing just behind the drapes.

Glass crunched beneath the soles of my boots. I crossed the black and white deco floor and entered the empty ballroom.

I was in search of a souvenir, something small enough to put in my pocket, but crucial enough to be packed with significance. The key chains etched with the hotel’s former credentials had disappeared into the pockets of trespassers before me.

I used the toe of my boot to move a pile of debris and dust in a corner of the vast room.

A glass prism slid into the slanted streetlight slicing the floor between the torn curtains of the long, third-floor window.

I picked the crystal up by the metal hook that once secured it to a wall sconce. The prism absorbed the shadowy light and reflected bars of color against my black shirt.

Grit crunched beneath my feet as I walked to the window, the glass twirling between my fingers.

The refractions contained worlds, so many varieties of potential light.

And if anyone stood on the plaza below the window, they would have mistaken me for a ghost.

I’m sitting in the lobby of a seventy-three-floor hotel. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. There is a transient safety to the motion of this space, like how violence is displayed in a movie without compelling us to act.

For all the attention we give the surface of things, there are closed rooms everywhere waiting for our exploration. Our communities on the surface of society would do well to note the workings of those that exist on the fringes.

In our quest for success and individualism, the stories we’re fed about competition and progress, we’ve forgotten the necessity of a familiar container to share our stories. I found that tribe of likeness in people that couldn’t appear more different from the hegemony of prominent aesthetics.

We are daily wearing our stories.

Most of us carry the cold weight of armor and are instructed to call it cloth.

Somewhere in the world, there is a snapshot of me and a stranger with his hand cupped around my right breast. I’m wearing an oversized, white Vision sweatshirt. My hair is cut short in a bob that falls over my eye. Seconds later I will sprint across concrete to the safety of a hotel lobby.

“Thank you,” I say, glancing up at the high ceilings echoing with the sound of a distant vacuum.

“For what?”

Within days of telling my person about the Niagara Falls story, a replica of the Vision sweatshirt arrived in my mailbox.

“For getting me. For always letting me be who I am. For thinking I’m beautiful but not using it as an excuse to get what you want. For never making excuses for who you are. For waiting for permission.”

“Is there any other way to be?”

There shouldn’t be, but there is.

And as one more kid bucks the system, we move closer to a world of shared stories, safety, and strength, transforming our armor into art.

Until that day, I’ll watch the people moving through hotel lobbies and I will imagine my way into the worlds I long for. Long corridors and sealed-up rooms, my words and stories, individualism and non-conformity, the hegemony of shared experiences — we’re all the same, it’s all the same. And yet, it’s not.

There’s a raging punk kid inside all of us, a prism capturing light and shadow.

Small, personal acts of quiet rebellion gain momentum over time. For recession or peace? That’s for you to find out.

And also because I said so.