My Fourteen Moments in Metal

1. “It was theatrical, lots of smoke. I thought I was going to be trampled, but I had a good time,” my mom says, reviewing the Kiss concert my ten-year-old brother Bill had talked her into attending with him. It’s late Saturday night, and Bill has already hidden his concert paraphernalia from me, the pesky little sister.

2. I finally get my first look at Kiss when I’m waiting for my third-grade teacher to start class that Monday, and Frankie Buscarello shoves a fan magazine under my nose. I stare at the four men in their platform boots and white makeup, and decide Kiss is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. They’re not quite heavy metal, sure, but I’m a short, chubby girl with a bowl haircut, and this is Phoenix in 1978.

   I am absolutely oblivious to the sexual element of Kiss. I’m armed only with the patchy knowledge I’ve culled from a cartoon book that gave me the impression sex is one simple motion, an insertion much like putting a plug into an outlet. I haven’t connected the idea of sex to the idea of music at all. When Paul Stanly sings, “You pull the trigger of my love gun,” I assume he’s singing about the rapid-fire machine gun which the rhythm of the song suggests.
   Chelsea Maxwell comes over to my desk, and the three of us look over these metal images of long-haired men wearing tight spandex. I am still young enough to be a bit spooked by Gene Simmons with those demons on his feet, long boots made of dragon scales with the glowing red eyes just above spiky teeth that make up the soles of the boots.

   I decide that Simmons’s tongue is disgusting. I don’t notice the chest hair, or the way the spandex hugs their crotches. Chelsea and I pick our future husbands from the photo, then we flip the page and do the same thing with the other bands. It’s a pretty good indication of my future predilections: I choose the mildest member of Kiss, the drummer who looks like a cat, and the cowboy from the Village People.

3. I am twelve, and my brother Joe is eleven. My mom drops us off at the defunct Legend City amusement park to see Def Leppard’s Pyromania tour. This is the pre-metal, preteen era, a brief moment when I still weigh more than my brother and can carry him on my shoulders. We watch Joe

Elliot and the boys swing their long hair around and wail on the guitar solos. This concert is just as fun as what we’ve been doing at home, sneaking out of the house at 2 a.m. and getting Slurpees.

   We cruise past locked-down roller coasters and carnival game stands. We know we’re onto something dangerous when we see six long-haired guys get shoved into a paddy wagon. The cops and their prisoners look at us, probably thinking we’re just a couple of cute little kids with concert T-shirts down to our knees, but we’re more hip to the twisted adult world than they’d ever expect. We’ve been getting our education at the arthouse movie theater. We know all about that guy the Hell’s Angels killed at Altamont. We know about LSD from watching Easy Rider. Transexuals, satanic cults, SM — we know way too much. Parents bar us from their homes. Hippie teachers love us. My mother decides we need to move to a new neighborhood.

4. The heavy-metal dress code seems perfect to a twelve-year-old future lesbian: a black T-shirt with some gothic axe on it, Levis, Chuck Taylors. I walk into my first Ozzy concert wearing the sleeveless black shirt covered in tiny white skulls, the shirt I bought at the head shop so I could also buy a bong with my school-clothes money. Michele, my buddy from the eighth grade basketball team, wears her Detroit Tigers baseball T-shirt. The rest of the metalhead women are in cheek-grazing short skirts, fishnet stockings, low-cut blouses, high-heeled boots.

   The men’s sexuality I can handle. Many are shirtless, living out some Dukes of Hazzard/Davy Crockett fantasy with their knee-high moccasin boots with bandanas tied to them. But the women, when they smile, when they swing their hips, when the guys yell, “Show us your tits,” and they do it — it’s like a blinding glare comes off them. I can’t look.

   We are purists, my friend Michele and I. We are there for the music. We don’t yet have to think about how our bodies might look in those little skirts. We sit with our feet on the chairs in front of us and nod to the beat while the others whirl around us, their bodies all flash and swing, coupled then repelled, then coupled again, a woman’s thigh wrapped around the man with his hand on her ass, another woman whirling out of reach. I love only what the music does to my body, the power-chord triplets that make my heart thump, and the wailing lead guitar solos that go and go, louder and louder, higher and higher, until my whole torso whips back and forth and I scream into the thunder of it all.

5. I get a reputation at my junior high — as a girl whose mom will drive her to heavy-metal shows. I get a free ticket to an early Motley Crue show from Kristy Krimner, who wears a chain belt and satin pants that hug her skinny ass like a second skin. It’s 1983. Shout at the Devil hasn’t even hit the charts, so we’re all packed into this trade-show hall in a Phoenix suburb. It’s so hot that everyone just strips. I finally understand a staple metal gesture that’s right up there with the devil-horn fingers and the swaying cigarette lighters during slow songs: the shirt-whirling thing. This tall guy whips his T-shirt off and we stand under his half-naked body in a pose of worship as he spins that shirt around and around and cools us like a human fan.

   Soon Kristy and I are packed tight up front, two feet from Vince Neil, and something beautiful happens to my body. Vince wails and swings and rages in this total genderfuck masculine she-male mode, sprayed wild blonde hair and pink lip gloss, hair everywhere and sweat, chest hair, underarm hair and biceps, sweat, styled hair, tight, tight pants around his tight little ass, cock and balls tight up front, hair wild and everywhere.

6. I’m a freshman when I get a call from Kristy Krimner. I’m about to settle into my usual Friday night routine of reading some thick book, and this time I’m about to crack open Shogun.

   “It’s Friday — let’s party!” Kristy shouts. She’s been smoking since she was eight and has a voice that scares the shit out of everyone. I’ve never been to a party before. The next thing I know, I’m at Patty Simms’s house, the epicenter of rocker-girl culture at the base of North Mountain Park. Patty’s bathroom is covered with a volcano overflow of fingernail polish and lip gloss and lotion with lipsticks and mascara bottles stuck in the dried goo. Every inch of her bedroom wall is covered with Ozzy and Judas Priest and The Scorpions and AC/DC, and every inch of her floor is covered with mounds of clean and half-clean miniskirts and tank tops and little chain belts.

   This is my big chance to finally be understood. But something is terribly wrong. Everyone is perched on these mounds of clothes drinking Cokes, decked out in their leopard skin and black spandex. But they’re listening to Rick Springfield. I try to change the station but they just laugh at me, dancing and singing along.

   “Come on,” I say, “I don’t want to hang out all night listening to ‘Jesse’s Girl’.”

   “Don’t worry,” they say. “Don’t worry about that.”

   When Kristy’s boyfriend Buck arrives I begin to understand. Buck is twenty-two and can get us anything we want.

7. I’m squished into the back seat of Buck’s Camaro with Patty and some other chick. “Lick It Up” blasts from the car stereo. The mountain park roads have snaky twists and we take them fast. My heart pumps hard as the wind whips through the car. Buck’s hands pound on the T-top of the Camaro and at first this is fine, “Lick it up , thump, thump, thump…” but then I realize it’s both of his hands up there, and my eyes trace those hands down his body and back to the steering wheel. Buck is driving with his knees.

   We screech around corners and hit a party full of Jack Daniels, screaming guitars, fat joints cruising around like small airplanes, and lots of older guys, real man-sized men with razor stubble and chest hair.

   When we get back to Patty’s and sit on our mounds of scattered clothing, Kristy tells me I need to start wearing makeup or I’m never going to get a good fuck.

   “You are going to love it,” she rasps at me. “It hurts that first time, but after that you are going to want it all the time.”

   The girls agree that I also need to do something new with my hair. Then they surround me. I am being attacked by six rocker girls wearing only T-shirts and underwear and little nighties, and they’ve got their hands full of hair goo. I resist until my body goes limp like I’ve just been tickled too long. It’s an ultimate gangbang scalp massage,

all these girls climbing all over me with their bodies tight against mine, breath in my ear, as we roll around in a big pile of leopard-print tank tops.

   The next day I read some book on adolescent sexuality which says I can sleep with as many girls as I want as long as I’m still a healthy experimental minor, but as soon as I hit eighteen, I have to stop licking clit or I’ll become a major menace to society. I haven’t even kissed a girl. I stop saying “gay” every time I dislike something, and start saying “lame” instead.

8. I go to high school wearing my T-shirt from the Ozzy concert with Metallica as the opener. Wealthy kids in pink polo shirts come at me like a horror movie: blob-sized wads of squirming, infant gerbils. One pinkie with a mouthful of metal swings out of his ugly pack to shove a face close to mine, “Are you a rocker?” He gives a mock devil’s-horn sign with his fingers, a fake head bang. “Rock on.”

9. Two kids in football jerseys come knocking on our door. Skinny Pete — who will, years later, become a skinhead — stands in our yard trying to sic these guys on my brother Bill. Unfortunately for Pete, the football guys get bored and leave in their cars. Bill decides to chase Pete, and his weapon of choice becomes the one he’s learned to play "Crazy Train" and "Paranoid" on. Bill carries the black guitar over his head with two hands, like it’s an axe and he’s a rocker Elmer Fudd chasing Pete all the way down our street.

10. I am fourteen when Bill drops out of school. To pay rent on his own apartment, he finds a job at Pioneer Fried Chicken. Vodka with orange juice is my drink of choice, and there’s plenty of it over at Bill’s apartment, which he shares with the Pioneer Chicken manager, John Johnson.

   I bring my friend Crystal, who likes to spend the night at my house and give me backrubs while simultaneously recounting her sexual adventures with men. Apparently, she’s been fucking for years. I’ve still never been kissed. I want to kiss her, of course, but that possibility arises at the worst possible moment, after we’ve been partying at Bill’s and jamming out to some Judas Priest. I find myself in the apartment above Bill’s, in bed with Ernie, a stocky twenty-two-year-old with long, blonde hair. He says, “Can’t we get your friend in here too? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

   The next morning I find a small spot of blood on my underwear. I’ve already read that some girls get that the first time and some don’t.

   It’s all gone way too fast. I take refuge in classic rock, deciding Led Zeppelin is more my speed. I find a redhead boyfriend who sends me roses in class and picks me up in his parents’ station wagon so we can ditch class, go out to the desert and do all kinds of making out — without fucking — all to the sound of Robert Plant blasting from the portable cassette player.

11. My retreat into classic rock is confirmed: I attend a Dio concert. Ronny James Dio yells something like, “We’re all going to party with the devil in hell!” I look at the people around me poking their devil-horn fingers in the air. Some of them are those pink preppy kids who used to hassle me. They wear the T-shirts of the hair bands who are developing a more pop sound and image: Twisted Sister, Stryper, Dokken, Cinderella. I take another look, and head back to my car in middle of the first set.

12. Meanwhile, the girls from North Mountain Park are just beginning their speed metal divergence. My goodbye to them comes in the form of an all-night crystal meth session. I hate the taste of burning chemicals snaking down my

throat, but everyone waves me off and tells me to just snort a water chaser, which is almost as bad as snorting the meth itself. I get a frantic burst of energy that matches the music for the night, the relentless hyperspeed of Metallica and Slayer.

   The next afternoon I’m hung over and meth-dead in the back of a white pickup in 110-degree weather, sparks of sun glinting off the truck fenders. We all head out to the river to go tubing. Riding for an hour across the desert, I realize I don’t know any of the three girls in the back of the truck with me. Where did they come from? Did I know them last night? I look across a landscape of dirt and dinky shrubs. Where the hell are we?

13. I don’t get back to anything that feels like metal until much, much later. I buy a Pixies cassette in 1988 and play it over and over until the fall of 1990, when I finally hear Nirvana at the Motorsports show in Seattle. I’m twenty, in college in Olympia, Washington. Nevermind hasn’t come out yet, and Dave Grohl is at the show, trying to decide if he wants to become the drummer for the band. I go with some girls who work with me at a Xeroxing shop. Christina, the Spaniard, somehow gets blood all over her white dress but no one can figure out whose blood it is. Mary tries to put a contact lens in while rocked back and forth by the crowd, using a small piece of metal for a mirror.

   I don’t care about the mishaps, because I’ve fallen in love. I’ve adapted to the raw beats of punk but always secretly missed the melody of metal. And here is Nirvana: punk’s rapid beating coupled with soaring hooks that climb and climb and then take a caesura just short of that cliché metal whine. The kids at Motorsports are wearing jeans and t-shirts just like the pre-Reagan era, the good old days before all the parents got divorced and kids in pink polo shirts started hassling all the poor kids. These guys in Nirvana, they are here for us other kids, not to showboat and spray us with glitter, but to bear down and play it hard and simple.

   I sweat and slam my body into a mass of other kids feeling the same thing at the same time. If someone falls, three guys pick him up, brush him off, and push him back into the mosh pit. I’ve been waiting years for this.

14. Three months later, I find a brother figure to cause trouble with on the Olympia scene, Raad, a Texas boy with a goatee. One night Raad and I make a narrow escape from a show at the Capitol Theater, sliding down a light pole to escape a security guard who is in middle of asking us, “What are you — in high school?”

   We ditch him and sneak into an easier show, a local speed-metal act. We just knock on the back door and someone opens it. The speed-metal mosh pit is so different from the anarchy of the other shows we go to. The metalheads are following each other in a tight circle, fists rising and falling with measured strides. It does feel like high school again. These are Olympia’s versions of the guys from my old metal scene, same straggly hair, same zits.

   There are a few girls here too, and the end of the night is so blurred in my memory — lots of tequila shots — and at some point I pull an Ernie and arrange for some girl to come home with Raad and me.

   The scene is far from perfect: Raad passed out in the hall, me stopping in the middle of everything to clean his puke off his coat and put him on the airport shuttle he’s about to miss, the girl a flighty sort who leaves rings and scarves all over my room but never calls again. But for a moment — with this girl, in my dorm bed under a small square of moonlight from the window, her soft, creamy skin — this, too, is something I’ve been waiting years for.
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