finite + flammable

My armchair punk rock enthusiasm was insatiable, but limited to what I could glean from scouring the liner notes of cassettes and CDs I either bought or, in my juvenile ignorance, stole. My parents would knock on the door and peek their heads in: “Are you doing your homework?” I was. I sat Indian style on the floor listening to Crass, surrounded by album inserts, mapping out the genealogy of the Dischord family tree.

We had a party.

One night, me and my brother stayed up late to watch a Jason movie. It included a sex scene between two teenagers in a tent. I couldn’t stop replaying it in my mind. Easy, I thought. I’ll just write the tent scene like I made it up myself, or even lie and say I experienced it firsthand. I'll give the stories to the girls as a gift.

I realized that the next issue, to top myself, would have to include something fantastic, something worthy of the behemoth my zine had become, something that would set alt.zines ablaze. And all I could come up with was posing nude on the cover. That's it. That's all I had. It would be a tasteful nude, of course, that's the only kind I do, with the corner of the kitchen table, piled high with cut-and-paste supplies that I long ago had abandoned for Quark Xpress, coupled with my hand to strategically hide my genitalia.

To my surprise, after all that paging, she had no plans for dinner. Sure, I said. By that time I was thinking "I am having a New York experience," and in fact many times in subsequent years I would recognize from earlier that afternoon the queasy sense of being assigned a non-monetary but definite value.

As they brought the van around front I sat on the ticket counter and Joel asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, like after college. I told him I didn’t know. He told me about how he lived in New York briefly after college, and he had a female friend, and she was really smart, and also she had worked as a stripper in New York, if I could believe that. 'I want to be a union organizer maybe,' I said.

I dunked the water on myself from a gallon jug like I was in a trashy Duran Duran video and of everything I took off, I kept my combat boots on, because it was a look. I just took those contact sheets to the copy shop and made myself some pages with cutouts so I could write on them. I thought I wanted him forever. I can’t believe I ever sent anyone a 72-page letter. I can’t believe he didn’t call the police and report me as insane.

I was crazy for The Tori Spelling Experience. I thought that they would go places, maybe. At the least I wanted to write about them. I tried summing up their magic — "Remember watching Beverly Hills 90210? Remember that virgin Donna Martin? The Tori Spelling Experience are gonna remind you of the very first time you heard that unforgettable 90210 guitar riff."