The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (7 page)

It was the culture. Rock stars were open about their liaisons with underage groupies, and forty-something Woody Allen had cast underage Mariel Hemingway as his love interest in his film
Manhattan
(1977). In 1978, Louis Malle released
Pretty Baby
, in which a then-eleven-year-old and sometimes unclothed Brooke Shields played a prostitute. (Two years earlier, Playboy Press had published nude photographs by the aptly named Gary Gross of a painted, vamping Shields at the age of ten in a book titled
Sugar and Spice
. In 1978, British photographer David Hamilton published
Young Girl
, a collection of prettily prurient photographs of half-undressed pubescent girls; as Hamilton’s stock-in-trade for years, these images were everywhere as posters and books. On February 1, 1978, forty-four-year-old film director Roman Polanski decided to skip bail and headed for France after being charged with raping a thirteen-year-old girl he had plied with champagne and Quaaludes. (His implied excuse was that everyone was doing it.) Some defended him on the grounds that the girl looked fourteen.

In 1978, former beauty queen and right-wing demagogue Anita Bryant was crusading against basic rights for gay men by portraying them as child molesters, among other things. In California, Bryant’s campaign led to the Briggs Initiative on the state ballot on November 6, 1978, which would have banned queer people from working as teachers. Thanks to a groundswell of gay men coming out to their friends, family, and co-workers and great organizing work, the Briggs Initiative lost, a final victory for San Francisco supervisor and statewide organizer Harvey Milk in a year when people of
color, women, and gay men pressed hard for their rights. The first annual Take Back the Night march of feminists against pornography—pro- and anti-porn feminism was one of the debates of the times—took place the same month.

It was a violent time, and there were so many kinds of violence to choose from. On October 11, members of the Bay Area’s Synanon cult nearly killed a lawyer helping some former members by putting a rattlesnake in his mailbox. On November 18, the mass murder–suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of 918 members of the San Francisco cult, the Peoples Temple, constituted the largest single violent loss of American civilian lives before 9/11. And on November 27, a disgruntled and deranged former policeman assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Milk in the same City Hall where the cloned vegetal menaces of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
loaded trucks with proliferating alien pods. The horror movie would be released on December 20 that year.

Another 1978 ballot included a much more famous proposition, known then as the Jarvis-Gann Act, now as Proposition 13 (the initiative that froze property taxes and required a supermajority to vote in tax increases; the measure began to starve California’s educational system, libraries, and other county and city services). That one won on June 6, bringing on the beginning of the taxpayer revolts of the past three decades and the beginning of the end of a half-century of economic leveling. Proposition 13 was the narrow wedge of the economic violence that would weaken public institutions, undermine social safety nets, and bring back dire poverty on a grand scale over the next few decades. During the 1970s, the long movement toward economic democratization went into reverse so that, by 2010, the United States would return to the level of economic disparity of 1928: 23 percent of the nation’s wealth would be concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of its population.

The same ruthlessness of capital brought about, after several years of resistance, the August 4, 1977, eviction of the elderly Asian residents of the International Hotel in downtown San Francisco, amid huge throngs, violence, ladders, mounted police, and dismay. The eviction was carried out by the police at the behest of a developer intent upon building something
more lucrative on the site, a project that never came to fruition. The low-income residential I-Hotel had housed a gallery and some activist organizations, as well as those vulnerable seniors. It had been a key location for the Asian-American rights movements of the decade, which paralleled the indigenous rights movement launched at Alcatraz in 1969; the Chicano movement tied to Cesar Chavez’s organization of farmworkers from the early 1960s onward; and, of course, the African-American insurgency that was the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966. Financial district expansion had already devoured the rest of Manilatown, and urban renewal had gutted the neighborhoods of two other low-income communities just before—the African-American Western Addition/Fillmore in the 1960s and the South of Market area, full of retired waterfront workers during the 1970s. The space in which to be decently poor was drying up, and a few years hence, in the age of Reagan, the armies of the homeless would begin to march through the city streets.

Maybe 1978 was when the 1960s ended and the 1980s began. Maybe there were no 1970s. Even punk rock, arguably the decade’s most original offering, died a little when the Sex Pistols broke up in January of 1978, after the Winterland hatefest that was their final concert. Winterland was around the corner from the Peoples Temple, the site of Jim Jones’s cult before he led his devotees on a paranoid flight to Guyana that culminated, ten months later, in drinking all that cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. One of San Francisco’s leading punk venues, the Mabuhay Gardens, was just around the corner from the International Hotel. It was all pretty tied together, like some kind of macramé of conspiracy, paranoia, and decline. Mostly it was a bleak landscape in which the dying experiments were easier to spot than the embryonic new forms that would matter immensely during the 1980s and after.

AVENGERS

Working all night as an extra, I carried a big green gherkin-like papier-mâché pod in the City Hall scene of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, though if I made it into the movie, it was only for a flickering second. Around the same time, I started hanging out at the Mabuhay Gardens—or Mab, as
it was sometimes called—though I didn’t find out what the Tagalog word
mabuhay
meant until much later. I went to shows at the Peoples Temple when it turned into a punk venue after all its former parishioners were dead or scattered. I didn’t get it about the International Hotel until long afterward, though I remember the hotel, the protests, and then the hole in the ground where it had been. I saw the Sex Pistols’s last show on a rainy night when country music fans had been whipped up into a fury against punks and came to spit and hurl projectiles, back in that divisive, intolerant era when punks hated disco and country right back—but I didn’t know what a historic and final moment it would be.

Punk wasn’t defined yet. Or rather it was defined in opposition. It was anti-rock, for starters. It was exceedingly anti-hippie and anti-disco too. It wasn’t yet cool. In 1977 no one knew what it meant to be a punk yet, though the short dyed hair, chains, safety pins, and shredded clothing were catching on. It was a moment that belonged to outsiders; but by the early 1980s when California punk had become hardcore, and hardcore was dominated by macho L.A. bands like Agent Orange and Black Flag, it was all about insiders, mostly male insiders. What began as the slam dancing of geeks and girls turned into the mosh pit that only the most rugged could safely venture into. “Different like everybody else,” was my epithet for a lot of it, and I moved on. But there was a glorious moment when no one knew what was going on, and what was happening seemed utterly new. A revolution opens up possibilities and dismantles existing authority and is usually followed up by the assembling of new authority. Punk rock followed this mode. Maybe the 1960s did too, with the wave of authoritarian cults that followed.

Punk was in some ways a retro movement. We wore clothes from the 1950s—tight clothes, narrow-legged jeans, motorcycle jackets, slicked-back hair, eyeliner, spike heels (in contrast to the platform shoes that were everywhere then)—and went for an aesthetic of the lean, the sharp, the spare, the straight, the antithesis of all the fuzzy floral flowing abundance around us, as though we wanted to go back twenty years and then take the other fork in the road, the one that didn’t lead to hippies and long drum solos and stadium rock and all the fuzzy, fake, feel-good sentiment of the
1970s. We wore a lot of black back when no one else did, unless you were an old Catholic widow or a Swedish film director. Death was everywhere: in high art, like Linda Montano’s 1977 piece,
Mitchell’s Death
, for her late husband; in pop culture, like Bruce Conner’s photographs of De Detroit of UXA wrapped up like a mummy at the Mab, mourning the drug-overdose death of her boyfriend; and in the news of assassinations, murders, and massacres.

It was an era when cities themselves were dying (a famous
New York Post
headline of 1975 read, “Ford to NY: Drop Dead”), or rather, the old industrial cities and their blue-collar jobs were vanishing, crime was spiking, and a new kind of bland white-collar metropolis was being born in the ruins. Deindustrialization and the ruinous, partly abandoned cities were the landscape of punk.

Punks tried out wearing trash bags tailored with safety pins. And the hair—the aesthetic was with Huysmans and against nature. It was amusing in later years to see young punks try hard to be nonchalant while sporting twelve-inch-high mohawks in five different colors. They had dyed, shaved, and put powerful fixatives in their hair—some used actual glue—and then pretended they couldn’t be bothered with their appearance. Against nature—nature had become the moral standard of the previous generation, which went back to the earth, went braless, went for all that Indian cotton and faded embroidered organic-looking stuff. We liked plastic. Or rather, plastic expressed us, and we didn’t necessarily like it or ourselves. If the hippies had had insincere naturalness—all those neck rubs and ethnic appropriations—we had earnest artifice. Think of it as clippers shearing away all the luxuriant fringes and foliage, the occluding moss and dangling tendrils of the post-hippie aesthetic. Style was a statement of ideology as well as aesthetics; punk was profoundly reactive, and the failures and excesses of the post-hippie era gave us plenty to react against.

If the 1960s and early 1970s had been about the removal of barriers—around segregated institutions, around activities like sex, and around emotions—the late 1970s were the reckoning. What had been let loose was not all peace, love, and happiness (which, incidentally, became the charming name of a 1980s Bay Area punk band, better known as PLH).
A cascade of angst, fury, and violence had been let loose. “Ask not what you can do for your country,” shouted Penelope Houston of the Avengers, one of San Francisco’s first punk bands, “but what your country’s been doing to you.” Looking back thirty years later, I see how much punk was of its time as well as against it. After all, violence and negativity were all around us, and the task was to name it and then maybe tame it. And it did get tamed, one way and another. Some punk turned into hardcore; some punks turned into the activists that made the overlooked 1980s a radical decade to rival the 1960s (and improve upon it, a lot, when it came to internal politics).

DEVOLUTION

Punk rock was born in the ruins, the ruins of industrial America, but also the ruins of the utopian hubris of the 1960s, which was self-destructing pretty spectacularly then. Synanon, for example, had started in Southern California in the late 1950s as a drug rehabilitation program. Rather than cycle people through, however, it acquired members and kept them. Members played “the game,” in which people confronted each other about their weaknesses and told each other harsh truths or just nasty opinions. Perhaps that was the origin of the counterculture notion that all truth was a gift, that to say even the ugliest thing was to be honest, a virtue aligned with naturalness and authenticity. (I just want to share with you that your body is really repulsive to me; I hope you’re grateful I’m so honest.) By the 1970s, Synanon had become a cult.

In 1976, cult leader Chuck Dederich decided that all men in Synanon should have vasectomies; female members were, according to some reports, coerced to have abortions. In 1977 the vasectomies became mandatory for all men, except for Dederich, and hundreds underwent the procedure. Violence was already institutionalized there. For example, the minors the state sent them to reform were placed in “punk squads” and beaten for infractions. (The word
punk
originally meant either a sort of jailhouse concubine or a juvenile delinquent; Synanon was not reflecting the contemporary music scene.) An arsenal built up. Perhaps Synanon’s most durable legacy is all the brutal boot camps for reforming or subduing teenagers around the
country, along with Dederich’s slogan: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The leader of what had begun as a drug rehab program began drinking, and things got crazier.

Richard Nixon’s paranoia was legendary, but it was everywhere in the 1970s. Dederich said:

Our religious posture is: Don’t mess with us—you can get killed dead, literally dead. We will make the rules. I see nothing frightening about it. . . . I am quite willing to break some lawyer’s legs and next break his wife’s legs and threaten to cut their child’s arm off. That is the end of that lawyer. That is a very satisfactory, humane way of transmitting information. . . . I really do want an ear in a glass of alcohol on my desk.

People who left the cult were sometimes beaten up. One came home to find his dog had been hung. Lawyer Paul Morantz had helped some members leave and get their children out, a task he knew was so dangerous he asked the state attorney general for protection. When he came home from that meeting, he reached into the mailbox attached to his front door and was bitten by a rattlesnake that had had its rattles removed. It took eighteen vials of antivenom to save his life.