He grinned, he groaned, he wandered, if somewhat tentatively, into the buzzing luminescence of that smell-thrilled temple of forbidden coital madness called, “THE GIRLS GYM.” Rubbing his sweaty palms against his tattered OFFICIAL MULTI-COLORED OZZY OSBOURNE ON TOUR T-Shirt, he took a deep slash of his can of piss-warm Busch—the drip, drip, drip of far off showers beckoning him towards madness, exaggerated pyro-images of desire, longing and cannibalistic virgin sacrifice.
Resting his suddenly throbbing head against the grey coolness of a locker, sweet perfumes misting out from its musky confines assaulted his senses, eyes shut tightly, his ears desperately sought out the slightest out of place echo. He took a few more swigs of beer, a few deep breaths that boarded on sighs, and suddenly heard it—a muted echo at first, then, a second or two later, a definite, discernible beat.
His legs were moving long before his brain realized it and as he rounded corner after corner the sound began to get much more recognizable. The synapses in his head were beginning to click one after another registering one word, one all important word—METAL!
Like a manic rat caught in a simple maze he quickly rounded what he desperately hoped was the last corner and saw her:
STANDING there, smack in the middle of the gym floor, a set of rings swaying above her head. Fused to the side of her head was a magnificently gaudy ghettoblaster. She was oblivious to her surrounding and somehow righteously so.
SHE was short, had long, real long blonde hair; was wearing an outrageously tight pair of 501s and an OFFICIAL MUTLI-COLORED JUDAS PRIEST SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE TOUR T-Shirt that chummily highlighted her small breasts.
Calmly, coolly, he put his Busch into his back pocket, images of Matt Dillon in Rumble Fish and the Priest’s Love Bites screaming through his head like some new, fantastic designer drug; collected all the gremlins of cool he’d invented earlier that day and sidled up to her like some scared pagan genuflecting to a stone idol. From the blaster the sound distracted him, if only for a moment. But what sounds he thought, they were without a doubt metal but weren’t wishy washy, or wimped-out, they were cold, hard and hit the mind like a rush of amyl nitrate. He liked it like nothing he’d heard in quite some time. And he hadn’t the slightest idea of who it was and because he was COOL and he knew all the best jams it was beginning to really bug him.
After what seemed like an eternity the tape ended. The girl’s eyes snapped open and were the deep green color of sin. His eyes still clouded from thinking spoke up, then so did he, “Cash jams, man!”
“Oh yeah. Who’re you, dude?” she replied, her voice as soft and low as the purring of some great jungle cat padding its way through a silent, moist antediluvian twilight.
“Uhh...who’s the band...sounds pretty cash,” he replied, the courage of teenage surging through his veins with all the repressions of inadequacy and rage that were his young soul.
“Oh, uh, they’re called, Hüsker Du, this is their new record, it’s called, Flip Your Wig, real cash ain’t it?”
“Ain’t that punk faggot crap?”
“Naw, it used to be called punk faggot crap and hardcore, but now we call it metalcore ’cause that’s a cooler word.”
He stared at her for awhile. She flipped the tape over, her eyes never leaving his, advancing it a way. “Listen to this,” she said like the spider to the fly, like the Lion to the Christian, like the horny rock critic to his shy date, “it’s called ‘The Wit And The Wisdom’.”
Noise washed over him in sheer auditory-orgone stimulating delight. And it didn’t stop, even as he turned from the girl and walked away like some newly hipped acolyte in a deep-time fix of heebie-jeebie awareness, it just entered his veins and bivouacked. He heard a low, mean laugh from behind him as he made his way out of the gym and to, to, to the record store to buy Flip Your Wig by Hüsker Du. As he ordered the record he was seized with the gift of tongues and knew at last what Hüsker Du meant, it meant, it was Danish for “do you remember,” and he did, he did.
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