MC5 Part II of ???

Click for Part I of this series.
I drove to work at McDonald’s and back, getting stoned and listening to the MC5 every day. I was still a “gold-star lesbian”, the spring I was 19 in 2003. I was in a long-distance relationship with a 17-year-old girl in Denver who I met at a Le Tigre show in Portland. She was the first/only femme I ever dated. We were radical feminists together, cataloguers of riot grrrl and girl-fronted bands. I liked sharing shoes with her but I hated when she put makeup on me and said I was pretty. I had just figured out that if I wore skirts and fishnet tights, the butches and trans guys in my group of friends looked at me differently than when I was wearing ragged camo pants and flannel shirts. (Later that summer, I came up with this slogan: Maybe I’m Not a Feminist, Maybe I’m Just a Slob). I was equally comfortable both ways, as long as I was stoned and carrying a pipe in my bag to smoke in the alley between bands at the shows Victoria, Slim Volume, and I went to regularly all that season. I don’t remember ever being worried about smoking weed out in the open in that alley, behind the warehouse-type venue which was then called No Exit (at another time it was called Praxis). I remember seeing Scream Club, The King Cobra, The Gossip, Veronica Lipstick, Gravy Train!!!, The Quails, Aisler’s Set, these fucking awesome feminine bands (I am not claiming they are necessarily all feminist or women-based, just that they were feminine rather than masculine in sound). The flipside of my life was working at McDonald’s and listening to the MC5 in the car. The continuity was that I was always stoned. I felt more feminine and more masculine than I ever had before, at the same time. I felt the universe expanding inside of me, in synchronism with the universe expanding outside of me.

I distinctly remember thinking that Megan, my girlfriend, wouldn’t like the MC5. She had a college radio show called Testosterone Detox. I was listening to “Rocket Reducer No. 62”: After some good tokes and a 6 pack, we can sock ‘em out for you til you’re flat on your back/I got to keep it up cause I’m a natural man, I’m a born hell raiser and I don’t give a damn/I’m the man for you baby, yes I am for you baby. WHY WAS THIS SUDDENLY SO HOT TO ME? I’d been listening to Corin Tucker scream Stay Away for years. Men were exotic. I’d never personally known any men, not men in the MC5 sense. In high school I had an online relationship with an adult male (see earlier blog post), and Cree and I were friends with a few gay boys. One week, a kid we called “Little Jay,” because he was younger than the established “Jay” at our queer youth support group (however, he was taller), rode around in the backseat of our car while Cree and I got stoned in the front. Little Jay passed us bags of dry sugar-cereal from Costco. And we realized that we could barely hear, or understand initially, what he was saying: our ears were so attuned to girl voices that the lower register of boy voices were literally inaudible to us. We thought that was hilarious.

I am trying really hard to remember what precisely this epiphany about men was. I remember exactly where I was when I had it - driving up Harrison towards Division - and I remember what it felt like - it felt like a fucking joyful epiphany. But what exactly was it? Honestly I think it was something about how I wouldn’t have to try so hard with men as I did with women. Because a man would want to fuck me merely by the merit of my having a pussy. And that doesn’t sound like such a fabulous realization to me anymore.

I’d been fantasizing about dick for some time. I hadn’t had a reciprocal sexual relationship yet. My first two girlfriends only wanted to fuck me and my third girlfriend only wanted me to fuck her. We all had fun and I’m happy for all of them knowing what they were into at that time, but none of these arrangements were exactly what I wanted. I very much wanted an equal partnership - everyone I’d dated was either older or younger. I also hadn’t dated another stoner or mind-expanding-drug user (I did mushrooms several times between 2001 and 2003 and ecstasy once; we never could find acid). I wanted someone else bringing weed into the relationship, and I knew the MC5 would. The MC5 would get me wasted and fuck me but because rock and roll had the highest religious ethics, because Fred Sonic Smith loved Patti Smith, they would also completely respect my genius and they would never ask me to be pretty.

During this time I was also falling asleep listening to Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine and also falling in love with Slim Volume. We went on a road trip to Denver to go to my girlfriend’s Ladyfest Out West and to see the southwest for the first time (we live here now, 12 years later). I forgot to bring The MC5 CD. Slim Volume said he brought the Mooney Suzuki, which was almost the same. I disagreed then but I almost agree now. Slim Volume made out with a girl whose boyfriend was at the WTO Protests and her busybody butch roommate told her she better not sleep with him. We left those girls in Denver and drove around the big American West.

“The MC5 Made Me Straight”* part I

*ps. don’t worry I’m still queer.

(PART I of I don't know how many)

I was watching videos my husband made in at The Evergreen State College the summer that he was 20. I was 21. Suddenly I could go to shows at bars, but he still couldn’t. When our best friend Victoria (see like every other post on this blog) and I went to the MC5 Tribute Show, Slim Volume stayed home and watched Dances with Wolves and drank Vermouth because it was the only booze we had around the house. Looking back on this 11 years later, I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t buy him some beer before we took off for Seattle.

After watching a few hilarious videos he made with classmates, I found the video I’d been curious about for years - a short documentary about me. In most of it I am wearing an American Flag bikini, except for when I am wearing my unbelievably frumpy McDonald’s uniform. I was training to become a shift manager at McDonald’s that summer, my fourth year working for the corporation (the following spring, just before my final evaluation to become a manager, by the sleazy regional supervisor, I quit). In some shots, I am wearing the American Flag bikini as well as sporting a mustache of black mascara on my blond upper lip hairs. In the shots where I have the mustache, I inexplicably also am not wearing my glasses (please remember this was 2004, long before cars wore fake mustaches). The film opens with me driving a car - as all good documentaries ought to - and telling a story about when Victoria and I saw the MC5, which must have been just a few days earlier. “They were like, does everybody know what time it is? And I was like, everybody knows what fucking time it is!” (it was Time to Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker.)

Then “Kick out the Jams” fills in the title sequence. I lead a tour of my parents lakeside property where I grew up - my little sister and her boyfriend are buying it now; my parents moved to Texas - describing it as “a nice place to grow up...there is a lot of...yard.” I was stoned a lot then, as I may have mentioned previously. I was stoned always, then. My hair is long and black with several inches of light brown roots. The film ends with me taking out the garbage and talking about how I moved out into that apartment complex with my BFF Cree when I was 18 and she was two weeks from being 18 - 20 days before our high school graduation. The surprise extra scene, after the credits, is me telling our roommate, James, a story that I do not now remember happening:

“I was at some reststop in Eastern Washington, and this girl had her skirt stuck in her panties. I thought about not telling her, because that would be hilarious. Then I decided to be a nice person and I was like” - here my voice drops  to a growled whisper - “‘Dude, your skirt is stuck in your panties.’” 

Then I giggle with the sweetest smile on my face. James is smoking weed out of the frame, but you hear a choked nasal laugh escape as he tries to hold his breath. I watched that part over and over, marveling about how I still don’t remember that happening, and I don’t remember telling the story, but also about the way I was making myself laugh. I was making myself laugh the way that a boy wants to make a girl laugh. 

*****

I was getting stoned with Victoria in her dorm. The first time she met Slim Volume, when he and I moved in together as roommates, she borrowed his Andrew WK CD so that she could be the loudest person in her dorm building at The Evergreen State College. When we were getting stoned in Victoria’s room, we mostly listened to Belle and Sebastian and Bratmobile (at my house, we mostly listened to The Need and Tracy + The Plastics). She had just brought home the MC5’s greatest hits CD. I got really excited about it because I knew it was Patti Smith’s beloved’s band [I was obsessed w/Patti Smith and I’ll write about that someday]. Fred Sonic Smith. I thought he was really ugly from the pictures I’d seen of him in Patti Smith’s books. Later I would come to believe he was the hottest man ever photographed. I recognized one song, “Kick Out the Jams”, because it was on I Shot Andy Warhol, which was then and continues to be one of my all-time favorite movies. 

Victoria let me borrow the CD and eventually she just gave it to me, because I was so stoked on it and she wasn’t as much. She recently reminded me that we actually traded and I gave her Glass Candy's first CD, but I didn't remember that until we talked about it.

Slim Volume and I weren’t in a romantic relationship yet, but we were roommates. He was opening at Starbucks and I was closing at McDonald’s and our paths rarely crossed. I left him a handwritten note taped to the front door: HAVE YOU HEARD THE MC5!?!?!!?