Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

He smiled and nodded: I was in his good graces for now. I’d gotten pretty good at tiptoeing around his moods, but he could still be unpredictable. This time I got away without a scratch.

Lizzy picked me up around eight, and we headed up the I-5 into L.A., inhaling the fossil fuel stench of street and air, blasting a Screamin’ Sirens song. We sang along, and talked about how ska was more intersectional than punk, and then wondered what the modern equivalent of a band like the Sex Pistols would be. Maybe Green Day? Maybe Nirvana? We didn’t like either of those bands: they were definitely the slick, mainstream face of punk. As traffic thickened around us, brake lights occasionally flaring red like an ephemeral river of blood, I wondered whether there were any flecks of evidence left in the back of Lizzy’s station wagon. But I didn’t ask. It was nice to have a conversation that never once touched on the topics of men or murder.

I hadn’t been to a backyard party before, though I’d heard a lot about them from people we knew in the scene. Lizzy had scored a flyer from somebody at Peer Records. I touched its uneven edges and took in the sketchy, Xeroxed graphics of headless mannequins and skulls. Letters and words cut from magazines spelled out the evening lineup: GRAPE APE x CHE MART x XICANISTAS x BRAT PUNXXX. The address was on a narrow street off Whittier in East L.A. I glanced at the flyer again as we cruised for parking, and wondered if we’d need to show IDs to get in. I had a really shitty fake ID that I’d never used, tucked into the inner pocket of my craziest plaid pants. It was still warm outside, so we left our jackets in the trunk and did a final outfit check. Lizzy readjusted the skinny black suspenders over my Grape Ape T-shirt, the one with an aerial view of the Machine stamped with the word “STOLEN.” I held up a mirror so she could darken the mascara rings around her eyes. She had on a ripped-up, glittery ’60s dress and Docs.

“We look amazing. We are total babes,” Lizzy said in her best Valley Girl accent. We giggled before joining the clot of kids waiting to pay the bouncer. The venue was on a nondescript row of single-story family homes, slightly faded and cracked around the edges. There was no way to know what kind of backyard lurked behind these facades, but I couldn’t imagine it was very big. Two dollars and we were inside, walking down a long cement passageway that smelled faintly like beer, until we emerged into an enormous open space. Nobody in my neighborhood had a backyard like this, with a sound system on one end and a perfectly modified gazebo for selling booze on the other. A few little kids peeked out the windows of neighbors’ houses and waved. If we’d been in Irvine, somebody would have definitely called the police by now. Here, the promoters had rigged up a huge bank of lights, their whirling beams visible from the street.

Some of the lights illuminated the stage, which was in a corner of the yard covered by a canvas shade structure. There was no formal bandstand; the musicians played on the same level as the audience, sometimes indistinguishable from it. Brat Punxxx thrashed and howled and shoved the hurtling bodies who swirled past in the mosh pit. That was the final shock for me, after the size of the yard and lack of cops. At Irvine Meadows, the mosh pit was a tiny spot near the front of the venue. Here, the mosh pit was the venue. There were chairs and spots to stand still around the edges of the action, but I could tell right away that nobody stayed there for long.

We went to the bar to get some beer, listening to the girls behind us move fluidly between Spanish and English, talking about how the Xicanistas had started their own zine. Finally I got up the nerve to say something.

“I’m so excited for the Xicanistas! I’ve never seen them.”

One of the girls gave me a weird look. “Where you from?”

Suddenly, I could hear my suburban white girl accent clearly. I’d come to this backyard party in East L.A. from my middle-class Jewish family in our freshly painted neighborhood and I felt like an interloper.

Lizzy jumped in quickly with a vague answer. “Down south?”

“Where… like Santa Ana? Long Beach?”

I didn’t see the point in lying. “Irvine.”

Now all three of the girls were looking at us dubiously. “Irvine? You got punk rockers down there?”

“Some. Not much. We came because we love Grape Ape. I have all their EPs.” I sounded so stupid. I thought about my dad scoffing at the goyim and wondered if I was like that to these girls, right now. Wasn’t gringo another way of saying goy ?

Then one of the girls cracked a smile. “My cousin lives in Irvine. He says it’s totally dead down there.” Her eyeliner was as thick as Lizzy’s.

“It’s the worst.” I shook my head.

Another girl threaded thumbs through the belt loops on her jeans. “What did you think of ‘See the Bitches’?” She was talking about the newest Grape Ape song, which was only available on a compilation from this tiny riot grrl label called Fuck Your Diet.

“I love that song.” It was true. I had listened to it over and over again, rewinding the tape so much on my Walkman that I worried it would snap. “Also, the bass sounds really good now that they have Patty G. playing with them. I’m glad she’s doing something since Team Smash broke up.”

The girl whose cousin lived in Irvine nodded vigorously. “I know, right? I’m Flaca, and this is Elba and Mitch.”

“I like your dress.” Lizzy gestured at Flaca’s modified cocktail dress, as black as her eyeliner, covered in safety pins and patches. She’d added a bunch of studs to a cracked vinyl belt around her waist, and it did look objectively great. “I’m Lizzy, and this is Beth.”

I was about to ask Mitch if she knew whether Fuck Your Diet had any new albums coming out when a familiar voice boomed over the cement yard.

“HOLA CHICAS! LET’S SEE THE CUNTS IN THE FRONT! I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT THE BOYS ARE DOING!”

We put our beers down and raced toward the mosh pit carousel, bouncing between each other, smashing and laughing. Glorious Garcia ripped into her first song, swinging one foot up on the amplifiers. When her voice rose, her face contorted with ecstasy and rage. My scream almost shredded my throat because it was the new song, the one I had been yelling in my head and out loud for the past two weeks.

We were all singing along, chasing each other in a thickening circle. It was like Glorious Garcia’s voice turned my heart into a fist that could punch through my ribcage and smash everything wrong in the world. I ran toward the biggest guy I could see and rammed my shoulder into his chest. He pushed back, and I stumbled into Flaca, who shoved me into another guy. His arm was thick and bare and covered in tattoos; when he thumped it into my side, the pain shot like sunlight through my bones. I ran hard into two bodies of indeterminate gender, going blind with the chaos of our movement, each hit reminding me that I was alive. I could survive anything. The harder I charged, the more certain I was that I would not fall.