Ernie and I became best friends because we could both derive hours of undiminished amusement from bathroom humor. We became friends in a rather roundabout fashion; we met through our mutual friend The Lip at the end of our freshman year in college and disliked each other on sight, and whenever we had to spend time together, we greeted one another with the biggest, fakest old heeeeeey-how’s-it-goooooings possible, but behind Ernie’s back I complained to The Lip, “Ugh, what a flake,” and behind my back Ernie groused to The Lip, “A bit of a bitch, don’t you think?” When we came back to school the next year, we ran into each other at a party, and we discovered that we had many interests in common, like crushing on stupid and unsuitable boys, eating entire jars of olives, listening to the same Smiths and Talking Heads songs over and over, behaving tactlessly, and exhibiting a complete lack of coordination. We both derived simple and sincere joy from acting like raving idiots, and we whiled away many a happy lunch hour flicking garbanzo beans at each other while humming “The William Tell Overture.” So it follows that we became best friends, in part because I don’t think anybody else really wanted to sit with us at meals, but we stayed best friends because neither of us saw anything odd about composing skits about other people’s butts and recording them on an ancient tape recorder while drinking gin-and-tonics and giving ourselves pedicures.

Ernie’s little sister introduced us to the punk band The Queers a few years ago, and naturally we loved them, because they wrote a song called “Help! I Can’t Stop Farting.” The Queers sound like a cross between The Ramones and The Beach Boys, seasoned with a dash of Van Halen, and most of their lyrics celebrated the joys of avoiding the world (“I Hate Everything”), chilling in the basement with a case of “the breakfast of champions” (“I Only Drink Bud”) and a like-minded female (“Punk-Rock Girl”), and fulminating against Deadheads (“I Don’t Wanna Be A Granolahead”) while surreptitiously giving someone’s little sister the eye (“Ursula Finally Has Tits”). We liked the clumsy sentiment of “Fuck The World (I’m Hanging Out With You Tonight)” and the rank immaturity of “Noodlebrain” and “Hi Mom It’s Me,” and if we happened to dislike one of the songs, we only had to wait a minute and a half for the next one to come along. I forget which one of us spotted the upcoming Queers show in Time Out New York a couple of weeks ago, but we marked our calendars immediately for a road trip to Maxwell’s in Hoboken.

The Couch Baron and I had gone to a Queers show a few years previously, and we had spent the majority of the show cowering in the back near the bar, watching in delighted terror as the mosh pit coughed up seventeen-year-old after leather-clad-and-safety-pinned seventeen-year-old to coast along on a sea of upraised middle fingers before crashing to earth. Ordinarily, I dislike crowds, and the sweaty cattle-car ambiance of live shows frequently irritates me, but the crowd at the Queers show gave off a strangely familiar vibe, one of cranky but essentially good-natured flailing about and hollering for no particular reason, and I couldn’t wait for them to come back. Last Saturday, the big night arrived, and Ernie and the Couch Baron and I gathered at my apartment to change into Doc Martens and undertake the trek to the PATH station. As we walked across town, the conversation turned, as it so often does, to hilarious public wind-breaking incidents in our pasts; on the PATH, we entertained our fellow passengers with embarrassing sex stories. We rediscovered how much we love saying the word “queef.” We got off the train. Our fellow passengers gave us funny looks, except for the drunk girl whose two friends had to hold her up, and she probably would have too if her eyes hadn’t rolled all the way back in her head. Ernie noted the presence of a viscous string of drool dripping down from Drunk Girl’s mouth, and as other, more polite people averted their eyes from Drunk Girl, the three of us stared at her openly, the better to wage dollar bets on whether or not she would speeyack before exiting the station. “She has really patient friends,” the Couch Baron remarked. “She has really bumming friends,” I corrected him. The real journey to Maxwell’s began. We always decide to walk because we think we have some time to kill, but we always forget exactly how long the walk is, and every time, somebody says, “Damn, could I get any sicker of walking?” and someone else says, “Word. I wish I hadn’t worn new shoes,” and someone else entirely observes that we can’t have much farther to walk, and everyone looks up at a street sign and realizes that we still have eight long-ass blocks to go, all of which have frat boys in backwards white hats spilling out of bars and either leering at us or knocking us out of the way so they can pee on a parked car, and sure enough, the same thing happened this time, even though we distracted ourselves by compiling The List Of Times That One Of Our Friends Hurled Really Dramatically In The Next Room Right After We Yelled “Hey, Are You Okay In There,” Thus Employing Brilliant Comic Timing Despite Feeling Like Crap, followed by The “We Interrupt This Make-Out Session To Bring You A Really Embarrassing Chunk-Blowing” List, and we had just gotten started on Top Ten Projectile Vomits Of The Millennium when we arrived at the club. (Miraculously, the hurried stuffing-in of earplugs in order to weather the sonic storm of opening band The Pillage People did not occasion a similarly disgusting and puerile discussion of earwax.)

Again, we clung to the bar. Well, the Couch Baron and I clung to the bar; Ernie sat on a stool and made disparaging comments about The Pillage People, all of which they deserved. “I know punk is sort of supposed to suck and everything, but really,” she said. The Pillage People played their rapid, energetic, thoroughly horrible set and departed the stage. “That was, um, short,” I said to the bartender, and he nodded, and I said, “I don’t hear too many complaints about that,” and the bartender said, “Not from me you don’t,” and then I felt sort of mean about cracking on The Pillage People, which I admitted to the bartender, who said that he had heard someone say I was really mean earlier that night, and Ernie leaned over and said, “Gee, go figure,” and I said, “Like, ha ha. Not.” I hoped that the chit-chat would lead to free beers for one or all of us, but it didn’t, I guess because we didn’t work the bra-less look in a Rancid tank top like certain false-eyelashed blondes I might mention who got at least two Rolling Rocks on the house. Harumph. Anyhow, while One Man Army got set up, a man with a hearing aid pushed his way up to the bar and ordered a drink. “Wow,” we all said, figuring him for someone’s father, and while I don’t see a reason on earth why a sixty-five-year-old man in tweeds can’t dig the punk scene, you’d think he’d have twigged to the fact that the hearing aid could probably stay home. And the toupee, too. One Man Army started thrashing around; they could actually play their instruments and sing, which made a refreshing change from The Pillage People, but all their songs sounded the same. Enter Generation Z: three kids, not more than fourteen years old, short, skinny, faces untouched by a Mach 3, hair twisted up into spikes with shaving cream, and utterly adorable in spite of the hardware they had in their earlobes. We all squealed, “Awww, look at the widdle punky-poos!” They stared at us like we’d just gotten off the Shady Acres shuttle. One of them called me “lady.” “‘Lady’? What do I look like?” I grumbled, and asked Ernie, “Do their parents know where they are? Do they have parents?” “Oh, you know how that goes,” she said. “Timmy says, ëI’m at Joey’s,’ and Joey says, ëI’m at Billy’s,’ and Billy says ëI’m at Timmy’s.’” I laughed, but I never would have thought of that as a kid, which explains why I had no life as a kid.

The room started to get more crowded. We felt old. Nobody else had Docs and jeans on; all the “kids” wore Vans and cargo pants. Ernie and I tried not to yawn, and then we yawned anyway. Moments before we metamorphosed into the Fuddy Duddy Patrol, the Queers took the stage. I didn’t know all the songs, but I knew a lot of them, and I hopped around in one spot and sang along – ancient, but happy, and one little Betty kept looking over at me and tonguing her lip barbell in disgust at my horrendous singing voice, but I didn’t care – and The Queers ripped through their customary thirty songs in under an hour (they don’t stop between songs), and they played “Ursula Finally Has Tits,” and Ernie and the Couch Baron and I howled, “Our attention’s undivided / Dammit, we’re excited!” and stepped on one another’s toes. Up front, all the boys jumped up and down and pumped their middle fingers, and one of the widdle punky-poos sailed up through the pit and whacked his foot on one of the lights and disappeared, and a few minutes later he resurfaces and surfed up to the front, and I knew that later, back at Timmy’s house, he’d shotgun a Pixie Stick and say, “Dude, did you see how long I stayed up? That ruled, man,” and I forgave him for calling me “lady.”

The lights came up. We filed out past No-Bra-Barella, talking to the bartender while her breasts rested on the bar, and I rolled my eyes and thought mean thoughts. “Are cargo pants supposed to be that tight?” I asked Ernie. Ernie said, “Huh?” We trooped back across Hoboken to the PATH, and we made fun of other people, and we made fun of someone’s car, and we made fun of the PATH, and for variety we made fun of each other. At the station, a train pulled up just as we got there, which never ever ever happens. “Woo hoo!” we all said. We rode along and made fun of various people, things, and ad campaigns some more. The Couch Baron got off at 9th Street. Across from us, a couple snoozed as we griped about how much we had to do the next day. The train pulled in at 33rd Street, and we got off and prepared to troop back across town, but just as we got off the train, a guy in a neighboring car burst out of the train just in front of us and puked up something that looked vaguely like pizza, and the guy’s friends stopped and waited for him to finish puking with these “oh, man, that is nast-eeee” faces on, and Ernie and I shuddered and said out loud, “Oh, man, that is nast-eeee,” and we walked over to my apartment, and Ernie caught a cab and I went to bed.

My point? None. Okay, try this. I’ve had a lot of work lately, and I’ve plowed through it, but I don’t spend a lot of time hanging out anymore, or talking trash while snacking, or bouncing around in the middle of loud music, because I don’t have time. I like my work, and I actually like working hard, because it makes fun more, well, fun, and these days, I like my fun pretty mindless. I don’t know the first thing about punk’s history or musicology or anything like that, but the message seems pretty simple to me: drink beer, avoid work, and tell other people to shut up. Hey, what a coincidence – three of my favorite activities.

Check out a Queers gig near you.

Attend an all-ages nightm – I mean, “show.”

Poot!

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