Allan MacDonell - Punk Elegies: True Tales of Death Trip Kids, Wrongful Sex, and Trial by Angel Dust

PRAISE FOR PUNK ELEGIES

Set in the glittering ruins of late-seventies Hollywood, MacDonells coming-of-age tale tracks the rise and folly of LA punk. Searing, comic, and self-immolating, Elegies ultimately becomes a love letter to lost time.

Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation

PRAISE FOR PRISONER OF X

A luridly entertaining memoirMacDonell strives to balance the sleaze with dry wit and genteel wordplayand often strikes gold.

Rolling Stone

Entertainingas former Hustler editor MacDonells memoir makes clear, the porn mag exists in its own alternate universe.

Spin

Hours of guilty pleasure that pass like secondsIndulge before the restraining orders pull this great book off store shelves.

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Beautiful You

MacDonell gives us a keen, witty, and unflinching look inside his psyche, without resorting to money shots.

Mike Seely, Seattle Weekly News

Scabrous, cleverly funny new memoirMacDonell lays the whack-off industry bareall thats missing is a scratch-and-sniff centerfold.

BlackBook

The first must-read book on porn.

Luke Ford, author of A History of X:
100 Years of Sex in Film and XXX-Communicated

This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2015 by Allan MacDonell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

Set in Minion

ePub ISBN: 978-1940207629

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

MacDonell, Allan.
Punk elegies : true tales of death trip kids , wrongful sex , and trial by angel dust / Allan MacDonell.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1940207612

1. MacDonell, Allan. 2. Punk rock musicCaliforniaLos AngelesBiography. 3. Punk cultureUnited StatesBiography. 4. Subculture (United States). 5. Los Angeles (Calif.)Social life and customs20th century. 6. Music and youth. I. Title.

HQ796 .M33 2015
306/.10973dc23

To everyone who was there.
To the ones who remember it like I remember.
To anyone who remembers something else.
And to everybody who didn't make it through.

Contents

I ll start in the dirt, on my back, bleeding from my face, and staring at the hot California sky from the bottom of a shallow ditch. I am nine years old. This is a long time ago. It would take forever to stop and count all the intervening years. The front spokes of my Sting-Ray bicycle spin up above my face, passing in a whir, ten at a time. The handlebars are twisted in the dry soil beneath my shoulders.

A tinny transistor radio is propped in the shade beneath a slab of sandstone. The raw beats of 96 Tears by Question Mark and the Mysterians are shaking the radio to pieces.

Youre gonna cry / Youre gonna cry, cry, cry

A eucalyptus breeze gives a scent of medicine to the clouds crossing high above the ditch. Knuckles scraped, this boys hand reaches up, pulls a piece of doctored cotton out of the yellow sky, and holds it to his nose. I breathe in the mentholated rush.

I can tell you exactly how I came to be crashed beneath the pulsating sun.

My every busted intention and perverted ambition trace back to this dusty trench. Youll see. The wayward carnal ignorance, the signpost overdoses, the hostile campaign for world conquest, the scorched-earth emergence where I stand steely and hollowed out as the sun stumbles toward the first shaky dawn of the rest of my lifeIll connect the dots. Its all plotted out by forces and choices as innocent as a childs whims.

For starters, nine years old, I am not alone out in the burned-lawn suburb of Covina, California. Three of us have met up at our neighborhood barthe rec room of a bachelors starter house.

A skinny, redheaded tomboy whose cop dad dropped his Harley under an eighteen-wheeler and is on perpetual disability has joined me for drinks, along with a pensive, creepy kid whose older sister is the fattest girl in the entire school.

Richards sister is so far outside the accepted weight norms that the regular kids taunt Richard for being related to her. The bus stop mockers wag their asses and chant: Regina waddles when she walks; she gobbles when she talks. Regina waddles when she walks; she gobbles when she talks.

The brother needed a drink.

Try this one. I wiped tears from my eyes and extended a bottle of bourbon. Id developed a partiality to the stuff, but Richard declined.

It burns. He didnt like the way any of it tasted: vodka, gin, schnapps, even beer, they were all too much for him.

Redheaded Deena snapped the bottle from my hands. She was a year behind mein third gradebut we were the same age. Id skipped second grade, and was now the youngest kid in fourth. Like me, Deena had an advanced appreciation for all the flavors of the bar.

Right around here, a respectable narrator might clarify how, at age nine, Deena and I had found one another and discovered our shared passion. A responsible writer might point to the developmental blunders, family failures, and systemic breakdowns that had turned two scrawny kids in a parched, sixties housing tract into cocktail party prodigies.

Lets agree not to go all sappy with the spoon-feeding? How many times do I need to say early sixties? The signs were everywhere.

A plaque on the back mirror of Mr. Kirbys bar showed a parrot sipping a tropical drink: It must be five oclock somewhere, said the parrot. It was closer to 3:30, but Deena and I were, as previously noted, prodigies. An early start was in our natures.

Her red hair and her angularity in a California of soft blondes and round brunettes werent what made Deena different. Fury set her apart. Something had pissed her off, probably in the past five years or so. Her nine-year-olds rage lived in her clenched twiggy fists, in the smashed front teeth of her Chiclets sneer, in her sore-looking freckles, and in her yellow eyes, squinting behind a triangle of orange hair pulled down to conceal them.

Deena took a brave slug from the bourbon, and thrust the fifth back at me. I want the bottle with the bat, she gasped. Give me the bottle with the bat.

Be careful! Richard put his hand on Deenas pink, freckled forearm. Dont drink too fast.

Deena jerked her arm from Richards grasp. We dont have all day, queer bait.

She was starting to relax, though too late for Richards feelings. Deena had violated our tacit agreement not to use any of the pet names our classmates hurled at usqueer bait, rotten crotch, scab face, and the name they had for me. Richard took some distance, sitting alone at Mr. Kirbys kitchen table, keeping watch on the driveway while Deena and I topped off with Mr. Kirbys Bacardi.

The rum did, in fact, burn going down, just like the bourbon and anything else worth drinking. But these fluids had a trick of expanding outward from the stomach, as if some fictional being, some spirit or genie, had breathed happiness into you. It was like you were sharing the same air as the kids in the Mickey Mouse Club, like Annette Funicello was blowing on your skin, like you had inhaled the life that you saw on TV or driving through some rich neighborhood.