Before the pits and the scream-alongs, there was the shop on the Ocean City boardwalk with the punk CDs and records in the back. The main part of the store was so Jersey Shore generic, with its Day-Glo boogie boards and hermit crabs in chicken wire cages, that I don’t know how I knew to go in. But behind the beach kitsch a repository of knowledge and history awaited: Misfits, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Brains T-shirts folded logo-out on the back wall; crates of CDs labeled “Hardcore and Punk,” “Emo,” and “Indie”; pins and patches and other assorted band merch on top of a plexiglass counter, the inner shelves of which contained pipes and rolling papers. As a metaphor for a suburban aesthetic awakening, it was, perhaps, a little on the nose—enter through the gift shop, discover the revolution.
This was in 2001, the summer after my freshman year of high school. At the time it felt like—and, after 25 years of further experience, remains—the tail end of the worst year of my life. The previous fall, I’d started at a prestigious prep school, imagining I’d quickly find a coterie of book-loving freaks with whom to debate the origins of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, I got bullied relentlessly by Phish-loving thugs in Polo shirts. Knowledge of Nantucket and sundry brands of lacrosse gear were crucial forms of currency that I did not possess. Look, we’re all rich here, I wanted to say to them. Why don’t we talk about Dostoevsky like aristocrats of the spirit? But I didn’t actually say that, or much of anything. It turned out these were just the regular kinds of aristocrats, the ones with bottomless confidence in their bad taste and inherited stores of casual cruelty.
I was a snob, obviously. But it didn’t make ostracism, or my baffled disappointment at the way of the world, hurt any less. I got great grades for lack of anything better to do and tried my best not to cry in class too often.
Nick, a friend since sixth grade, had made the leap to the new school with me, and we grew close over our shared unhappiness. We overlapped in our love of the era’s alt-rock alpha dogs—the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Sonic Youth (less popular, but obviously cooler for it), Radiohead and Blur if we were feeling a bit thinky, and Rage Against the Machine for raging against the machine. We were punk literate—our school Ethernet connection brought us information about the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and a quiet boy from our previous school had loaned me a startlingly abrasive Minor Threat record—but punk felt to us like a historical phenomenon rather than a living thing.
Nick was also a gifted athlete, while I barely made the freshman soccer team. So in search of something resembling an identity, I signed up to join a mask improvisation troupe, the pet project of an ambitious new drama teacher, who was purportedly bringing avant-garde methods from “the city.” On the first day, we did movement exercises while wearing a set of thickly impastoed masks with exaggerated features, “finding our characters,” in his earnest phrasing, by lurching around the stage and interacting with one another in silly voices. To my surprise, I found myself lifted out of the self-consciousness and depression that had been weighing me down since the start of the school year. No one was giving me shit for being weird. In fact, the director was egging me on, encouraging me to go further with the hunching and muttering. I was, shockingly, having fun.
For a game in which we had to do interviews in character, I was paired with a petite, wiry girl in a white tank top and plaid pants covered in zippers, her hair half-dyed neon green. It was clear right away that she was a natural at this, shifty and kinetic in her movements, clever and surprising with her responses. I cracked up helplessly as she riffed in a French accent about a pressing need to acquire a quantity of space lasers. The group learned quickly that, whatever scenario she was in, everyone else was going to have to be the straight man.
In conversations after class, I learned that her name was Emily, that she was, like me, a first-year day student rather than a boarder; in fact, she lived practically across the street from the school. And she confirmed my suspicions that she was into punk. The details are hazy now, but she was or had recently been in an emo band and was or had recently been dating an older guy in a ska group, or maybe it was the other way around. She seemed like she’d arrived from a different planet. Why hadn’t I met her before? Presumably because she was off doing cool shit.
Emily liked the Dead Kennedys (whose perfect song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” Nick and I immediately adopted as our anthem and mantra) but also a host of local and semilocal bands I hadn’t known existed, ones fronted by skinny guys with quavering voices playing violent guitar riffs and, in varying proportions, screaming their guts out. Thursday, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day, countless more local and lesser variations: These were the Jersey and New York emo bands that I soon adopted as mine. It was Thursday most of all, with their heavy riffs and oblique lyrics that seemed to conflate breakups with world historical events (“That’s how it was on the first day / We saw Paris in flames”), who captured my heart and mind. Their sound was harsh enough to repel normal people, but they were also sensitive and pretentious, like me. I found their songs, and those of the other bands, on online pirate sites, searched for their CDs at the Princeton Record Exchange and traded them with Nick to burn and make mixes.
I hung out with Emily in the improv group, but she remained a mysterious, aspirational figure, one foot always out the door. I survived the school year, barely, and retreated to the Jersey Shore, where my family spent the summer. When I discovered the punk shop on the boardwalk my emo education accelerated rapidly. I spent hours there, memorizing band names, album art, song titles. The guys behind the counter were gruff know-it-alls in the proud Jersey tradition immortalized by Clerks, sneering when I asked them what record they were playing. (I knew it was Sunny Day Real Estate, I just didn’t know which album!) By the end of the summer, I was conversant in lineages of scenes and subgenres, hardcore and SoCal punk and ska, some metal occasionally thrown in (it was the age of Slipknot too, after all). I’d found my place the way that I usually did—by studying.
The shows, once Nick and I started going to them that fall, were something different entirely. I had been to a handful of concerts at that point, but they hadn’t demanded participation in the way that punk shows did. At the first Thursday show I attended, at Club Krome in South Amboy, it became clear to me that being a member of the audience was a role of similar, if not equal, import to being on the stage. You sweated onto your neighbors, shoved and shoulder-checked in the pit or stood guard around the edges of it, screamed the words, ridiculous as they might be, as though you’d written them. The joy was in giving one’s sense of self—mine so unformed and yet already so bruised—to the crowd and not thinking about who you were or what you were supposed to be. In my black T-shirts and jeans, my bland haircut and styleless wire-frame glasses, I wanted, essentially, to disappear.
Maybe that’s why, when I think about all the nights I spent in those places, I have trouble actually picturing myself in them. Punk, dating at least back to the Sex Pistols in London and the Ramones in New York, was as much about style as it was about the actual music. Even in the relatively benighted early 2000s, in an emo and hardcore scene that was at times priggishly concerned with “authenticity,” the varieties of punk spectacle were on fantastic display: mohawks and metal-studded leather, denim jackets with all manner of paraphernalia safety-pinned and ironed onto them, bondage pants and torn-up shirts and every kind of face piercing. My low-key look was the norm for the bands I was into, the better to emphasize the quotidian, everydude nature of songs about heartbreak and female duplicity. But with retrospective logic, I see a connection I wasn’t able to make or enact between the joy I found in my improv performances and the performative potential of being a kid at a punk show, the transformation that a change of clothes, a tilting of attitude, could have made.
Emily brought her dramatic energy to the shows, thrashing her skinny way through the crowds in her surrealist thrift-store getups, crowd-surfing and stage diving and taking elbows to the face with theatrical aplomb. I envied the way she was at home in these situations, legit in a way that I never felt. I think what it would have required was a leap—or at least a hop—into the artificial or the fantastical, one that I wouldn’t let myself make. If I had, a different form of transcendence might have been possible; I might have become someone else. As it was, I loved being among the punks and earned my little battle scars and stories. But I never fully entered the story, never found my part.
In the years that followed, I directed my energy toward writing, a fundamentally inward-facing pursuit, though it does require a persona—armor—to do it well. I fell in and out of love with Emily, who fell in and out of love with other people, other personas. We both fell out of love with emo, though I’d like to think I’ve heroically carried its spirit of hysterical, wounded masculinity into my adulthood and marriage. In December, in Brooklyn, at a sold-out hometown show for Geese, a band whose youth and attitude carries trace but detectable amounts of emo in its DNA, I found myself the old man in a sea of ecstatic teenagers, silently chiding them for their too-choreographed moshing and for taking videos of themselves in the pit. In the morning, I watched the videos they’d posted. They looked amazing. I wasn’t in any of them.