Drunk Diaries 2: Sober at the Punk Show

Two months into my sobriety, I still wasn’t feeling the meetings but I had no other options. I resolved to stick with the meetings until I found another program or process; I had tried to quit too many times with my own ideas to know they wouldn’t work.

Found this flyer at Metallipromo. It’s from a 1988 show at the club where I later worked throughout the ‘90s, when it was called the Chameleon. Used without permission but tons of gratitude. This is what the internet looked like in its early days: a bunch of obsessive weirdos sharing their collections and knowledge with everyone.

I had what I now call “Goldilocks Problems.” I had a “problem” with every meeting I attended. This meeting’s too hot, this meeting’s too cold—this meeting is full of yuppies, everyone at this meeting talks about God all the time, this meeting is full of recovering heroin addicts and I was mostly a drunk. There was always some aspect of a meeting for which I decided I didn’t belong with those people.

I ran into F—, a former doorman from Haight Street at a meeting. We’d known each other socially since ‘96, not really close but always glad to see each other. He told me he had four months, which seemed insane to me at two.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I told him. “There’s a lot of talk about prayer and meditation and whatever. I had a whole life of that. It’s not for me.”

“I got a meeting for you,” he said.

He told me about a men’s meeting on Valencia Street.

The Stag Meeting

“Stag”¹ meetings are a tradition in my 12-step group. Aside from everything else, a lot of men will not talk about their feelings in front of women, and we need to do that. I’ve been to all kinds of these: stoic conservatives who complain about their families and jobs then praise God at the end of the share, emotionally mushy crews who reveal innermost doubts and regrets, and predominately gay men’s meetings that swing from hilarious to dark at each share. It can look like any facet of the damaged male psyche. In Goldilocks terms, they either never talk about their feelings or it’s all they talk about.

And then, sometimes, there is a crew of idiots like the one I found that Tuesday. They were loud, all the time. They had face, hand, and neck tattoos (back when that was unusual and usually a sign of gang life or doing hard time). Most jarring was that they heckled each other’s shares—this is extremely taboo at 99% of meetings.

There were a number of guys I recognized from the punk scene and working nightclubs for years. These were the problem guys you always had to kick out at some point. One guy I had 86’d from the Chameleon for stealing tips off the bar. One guy I was pretty sure was in one of the punk bands that broke big on MTV in the ‘90s—he said he had 7 years sober—my first thought was fuck you, you’re cured, you don’t need to be here, you’re just showing off.

These guys were fucking around. I had no idea how this meeting was making any of them better.

The Dayglo Abortions

The Dayglo Abortions are a Canadian hardcore band I was really into in the ‘80s, when I was new to the scene. A lot of punks back then didn’t like them for their sometimes metal-riffing guitar licks. And the metalheads didn’t like them, for reasons unknown to me, but maybe they were just too silly? But they had an album cover of Nancy and Ronnie eating a fetus on a plate. I bought it and was in right away.

Not the same cover as I mentioned, but it’s pretty gross. This one is funnier. A hamster being held at gunpoint. There was a lot of weird shit like this in the punk scene in the ‘80s.

They had played in San Francisco at a bar three months before I turned 21 and didn’t come back to San Francisco for 12 years², when they announced a show at the CW Saloon.

Problem: I was newly sober. How do I go to a punk show without drinking?

I went, and felt weird right when I walked to the door. The CW Saloon is like any neighborhood bar with a room right next to it for bands. There’s a long bar to the right, and a merch table on the left, and ahead and around the corner is a low stage, perfect for a 100-person punk show.

The smell hit me and I wanted a drink. There’s a way punk shows used to smell, and maybe they still do somewhere, that’s like old socks and hotboxed cigarettes and maybe this is just me, but I often smell this cheap sauce that used to come with the Chef Boy-ar-dee pizza kits in the ‘70s. Sense memories are very strong triggers for addicts and alcoholics—it can be your ex’s perfume, motorcycle exhaust, or just the Pavlovian sound of a can opening that makes your whole body ready for the treat that’s about to come, and this craving, for an alcoholic is of panicky, running-out-of-breath-underwater importance.

I have no nostalgic affection for this garbage. This is why I thought I didn’t like pizza until I went to a birthday party at Pizza Hut. My oldest sister loved it, though.

I’d been in the room for only moments and I wanted to either drink or bail out. What I know now from thousands of stories, is that had I given in, punk shows would become a relapse trigger. I would end up going to a lot of punk shows and drinking. There’s a subconscious drive in struggling alcoholics to engage in situations in which we “get” to drink. If you’re a “normie” this may make no sense to you but it will sound familiar as you probably have a person like this in your life.

I looked around for anyone I knew. The punks I knew who liked this band lived in the East Bay, and they rarely ever crossed the bridge for a show. The music nerds I knew in San Francisco weren’t into this era of punk or this band anymore³. I kept looking, and saw two guys from the stag meeting: one, a pudgy traditional skinhead (these are the non-racist types, who will go out of your way to tell you they are the original version) and the other I can best describe as a cigar-store Henry Rollins statue. They were a welcome sight. I approached.

I got right in their space and realized I had no idea how to signal that I was in the secret club. So imagine someone coming up to you at a punk show and just stopping in front of your face without saying anything. At the least it’s awkward and at its worst, it’s a threat.

“What’s up, dude?” Not Henry asked.

“I saw you on Tuesday, at the thing,” I said. Best I could do.

“Oh,” he said, getting it. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said, and I think my voice cracked like Peter Brady in the studio.

“Well, just hang out with us, and you’ll be fine.”

That was it. I was “in.” I didn’t have to explain myself further. We didn’t exchange names. They didn’t care. I was one of them. I wanted to quit drinking and I wanted to see this Canadian hardcore band and that was good enough to be included.

The band went on and mayhem ensued by the stage. We watched the show from off-center, with a good view of the band and the crowd at the front.

I don’t want to get distracted by the politics of stage diving here, but in my opinion, there is a weight limit (far below mine) for who should be doing it. You should be, by most estimations, catchable. If you’re still small enough and young enough to try insane skateboard tricks, you’re probably fine. But my point is, we saw a guy much too old and with a body-by-Coors physique jump off the stage that wasn’t really high enough, but get a respectable amount of air and land on a solitary guy who looked like he was smacked out of his brains on black tar, and crumple him like a stringless marionette. I saw the whole thing develop in slow motion. No one died, people untangled the human mess, and the band never missed a beat.

The three of us laughed our asses off, because it’s either what we would have done or what would have happened to us⁴ had we been wasted.

The band finished their set after playing everything we wanted to hear from Feed Us a Fetus and Here Today, Guano Tomorrow, and a few other assorted records. I made it. I went the whole show without a drink and guess what? NO ONE FUCKING CARED. There’s a weird thing common to alcoholics that we think people will judge us for not having a drink, when the opposite is true—everyone’s sick of seeing us loaded and they just wish for once, that we not drink.

Not Henry slapped my shoulder.

“Be there on Tuesday,” he said, and took off, skinhead mini-me in tow.

It was the first time I used the program the way it was meant: stop isolating and reach out when you feel weird. That’s not a step but it’s a main principle. I still didn’t buy into all the steps and the sponsors and whatnot, but it was the first time I understood what it could be for me.

1. A stag is a male deer without a mating partner. At some point in the English language, it became a term for attending a function without a date. “Going stag” And then it became used in “stag party,” which I think, but am not sure, came before “bachelor party.” And then came “stag films” which were 8mm pre-porn era films to be shown at stag parties. And now, the term is only still living in recovery circles.

2. I could be wrong about this. It would have been really easy for them to come to town and not to know about it. There were so many bands playing then, it was really easy to miss your favorites.

3. Almost every music nerd had a hardcore phase. They left and don’t go back. And this band had come in the era of “crossover” hardcore, which is another story and I think it left a bad stink on the band.

4. A schlemiel is someone who stage dives without being caught. A schlimazel is the guy he lands on.