I didn’t make and distribute more flyers and I didn’t recruit other classmates for the Pallbearers Club. I was satisfied with a club of two. Most every Saturday morning Mercy picked me up and we helped with services at the funeral home. Mr. Stephens tolerated her photography if she showed up early and adhered to his pre-ceremony-photos-only policy. After, we hit McDonald’s or Super Sub (never Nick’s Roast Beef, which was the main hangout area of Beverly High School students), and we drove around listening to and talking about music. She dubbed more tapes for me; never mixes, always full albums. Ramones, Bad Religion, Black Flag, the Slits, Dead Kennedys, the Damned, Blondie, Bad Brains, Patti Smith, the Minutemen, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, Fishbone, Mission of Burma, Joy Division, and many more. I liked some bands better than others, but every band was daring, challenging, and unlike anything played on local radio or MTV. This music was a new prism through which I viewed the world; a thrilling secret, and for the first time in my life I was in the know. Chords vibrated on a wavelength that fused me to the music and together we were bigger than a shouted chorus and together we were as small as a promise and for those two-to-three glorious minutes of song duration, we were the same. That was not to say I’d found where I belonged, whatever that meant. Compared to the spandex and pyrotechnics of rock and hair-metal bands I previously worshipped, punk was honest and real (not that there wasn’t any posing going on, myself included). The scene was still unattainable to skinny old me, but a different kind of unattainable. Music was performed and made by gods, after all, but I had new ones now. Hüsker Dü remained my favorite and I quickly burned through their catalog, their early hardcore records were as thrilling and revolutionary as their mutation into melodic/outsider post-punk and power pop. In an extra notebook at home, I filled pages writing out the lyrics to their double-album Zen Arcade as I listened, pretending the loose concept about a kid who ran away from home and into an even scarier world was about me. In the song “Newest Industry” I found a truly cathartic expression of my dying-in-a-nuclear-war fears and flash-of-atomic-light-nightmares I collected throughout the terrible and terrifying ’80s. Of course, as cursed as I was, the band had already broken up in December 1987.

What are you hinting at?