A few Saturdays ago, and two days after the most profound separation of my adult life—and I guess necessarily my entire life before that––I went to see Home Is Where perform their new record, The Whaler, at Elsewhere. In Zone One, which is the sort of industrial low-ceilinged first-floor room at the venue that reminds me not only of the basement of my youth but also every basement—in the small Adirondack college town where I read Kripke and everyone I knew was addicted to Xanax—in which some guys from my political philosophy class would host their friends’ and friends’ friends’ mostly shitty psych rock and pseudo-shoegaze bands and I would leave a few dollars on the stairs for a warm High Life tallboy. I loved those basements. I loved those shitty guys and their shitty bands.
It was already afternoon when the publicist emailed me with a reconfirmation of my guest list spots, and I was busy trying to distract myself from the noxious, vacuum-suck void that attends major heartbreak. I’d forgotten about the show, which I had agreed to attend weeks earlier, when the circumstances of my life looked considerably different and I didn’t have to weigh whether a few minor chords and a plaintive refrain could send me spiraling unsavably against a night in. I knew I wanted to go out, and had wrangled a group of friends, many of whom were strangers to each other, into some agenda of barhopping. But, I reasoned, the show was early, and it might be nice to sweat a little, dance a little, before rejoining what Denis Johnson once called the spectacular fandango / of emergencies that strum the heart with neon. The last time I’d had alcohol, any alcohol, was the night before our last night together. It had been the fourth of July and I was trying not to cry while we watched gunpowder convert to light energy over the bay, Jason Aldean squealing through the speakers of some topless Jeep on the shore. His parents and their rich friends sat in beach chairs next to us, unable to see the pain on my cheeks in the dark. It was wine I’d had, a gated-community white, the bottles of which all told probably cost more than enough to cover my flight home. A few weeks before, Palehound had played a song at a friend’s birthday house show, called “Independence Day,” about breaking up on the fourth of July. Watching them pluck the strings of their guitar from across the room I felt the heavy, sickly lead of prophesy dissolving. Even if I could it would kill me to look back, they sang, their voice high-altitude thin, I don’t want to see the other path. It was like learning too late that I had already, long before, swallowed the poison, slow-acting as it was.
But now I was arriving at the industrial margin of East Williamsburg and the night was humid and thick with Flushing’s row of clubs, bass thuds stifled behind brick. We let Hector, the publicist, buy us tequila, before disappearing into the crowd. I hadn’t exactly known what to expect, I’ve been to countless emo shows of all subgenres and geographies, pedal tones and amp enhancements, and I told my friend, unfamiliar with the band, it would probably be a lot of dudes. I was, in spirit but not definition, wrong. The crowd was basically all trans. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room with so many other transmasc guys, all like, 5’4 to 5’7, Jewish, covered in tattoos, the same wire-frame glasses as me. Onstage, Brandon, the singer, tossing her long curls over her shoulder and the strap of her bachelorette sash (which read “SLAY QUEEN”) remarked how cool it was, how special, and I felt like I was a part of something enormous and infinitely possible.
The last show where I entered a pit like that, where everyone is singing every word and some people are crying and you leave having fallen in love with twelve other people you’ll never see again, was Wednesday, at Music Hall of Williamsburg. Wednesday is, and I am proud to be on the record saying it, the best new band making music right now. “God make me good, but not quite yet,” Karly screams in the final verse of “Bull Believer,” their usual grand finale, when everyone surges together in anticipation of her howling outro, we could all scream with her, she said, and we did (drunken laughter, violence after, as on “Bath County”), like possessed funeral mourners, vultures, scavengers—FINISH HIM—and it was so beautiful.
I just want to forget my body at the same time that I’m reminded of it, what it can do, where its edges are, and aren’t. This is why I go to punk shows, to remember how it feels to be touched and hurt and pummeled and thrown around and to lose a certain control but remember how my body and my sense of touch aren’t private they’re shared and communal and unalone. I guess it’s corny to acknowledge, but of course a double-kick breakdown feels like an exorcism, a transubstantiation of kinetic energy. And even under sustained threat of injury, we’re all surrendering to a social contract of protection. It’s strange, but I seldom feel safer than in this environment of practiced violence, even with all its dangerous improvised choreographies. Once my glasses were broken at Tigers Jaw, I twisted my ankle at Joyce Manor, I bit my tongue so hard I bled at Origami Angel. These were minor concessions. The recompense is rapture.
Brandon sang, and we all sang with her:
Climbing trees older than anyone alive
We braid our intestines together
Spitting teeth into each other’s mouths
Back and forth until we make a smile
Until we make a smile.
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