She drove off and we walked the length of a long line of people waiting to get inside. It looked to be maybe one-third EOB guys—all guys—trying not to look self-conscious in their suits, one-third old-school punks in the usual leather, plaid bondage pants, and assorted paraphernalia, and one-third shaggy-haired emo-adjacent kids in black T-shirts and jeans, like me. We finally found the end of the line, wrapped all the way around the back of the building.

“Doors were at seven and it’s eight-fifteen, so I sure fucking hope we’re not missing Class of ’36,” Thomas said.

“It shouldn’t be that hard to get people in,” I said.

A raccoon-eyed girl in a leather jacket turned around.

“Some EOB jackass threw a smoke bomb before anyone even went on,” she said. “So everybody had to leave and come back in. And now they’re doing, like, cavity searches, I guess.”

“Fucking fascists,” Thomas said, though the security response sounded reasonable enough to me. He took a Swiss Army knife out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket and contemplated it.

“Why did you bring that?” I said.

“Open stuff,” he mumbled. He crouched down next to a shrub on the side of the building and clawed at the mulch below, then dropped his knife in the hole and covered it back up.

“Like fifty people just watched you do that,” I said.

“Punk is trust,” he said.

We inched forward. I wished I had a cigarette—wished I smoked cigarettes. This was what they had been designed for, looking cool while waiting for things. Word was you could buy them, no questions asked, at the kiosk in Palmer Square as long as you were sure that no one from school was around. Though he’d never said it, my guess was that cigarettes were even lower in Thomas’s moral hierarchy than alcohol or drugs or sex because the pose-to-effect ratio was so high. Per Minor Threat: I. JUST. THOUGHT. IT. LOOKED COOL.

Thomas shadowboxed next to me.

“What, is, the, holdup?” he said, punctuating the last word with a knockout punch.

“Class of ’36 kind of sucks anyway,” I said. They were, again per the Internet, third-tier Rancid knockoffs, with lots of “oi oi ois” and rousing shit about the Spanish Civil War.

“They’re better than standing around looking at a closed fucking auto parts shop,” Thomas said.

A couple of minutes later, a chant went up in the crowd: “EOB. LET US IN. EOB. TEAR IT DOWN. EOB. FUCK YOUR LIFE.” Despite the infamy of the band, and the implied threat of their chanted lyrics, this didn’t strike me as a crowd that was going to start a riot, at least not right away. But the recitation gained force, and, sudden as the opening of a traffic bottleneck when the wrecked car is finally towed, we were moving swiftly toward the door.