a phone booth outside a drugstore, and I slowed down. I thought about calling Kevin and having him come pick me up, but he was working tonight.
That’s when a poster taped to the glass booth wall caught my eye. It was handwritten on top of being mimeographed, so the words were barely legible, but the photo in the middle was clear. A girl was wearing a leather miniskirt with a man’s shirt and tie. Her hair was slicked back and she was leering at the camera, half-smiling, as though she had a secret she couldn’t wait to tell everyone. Dotted around the edges of the poster were more photos, showing men with long hair, sunglasses, and zippered jackets, smoking cigarettes and flipping off the camera.
It took me a minute to decipher the text below the photo:
THE PRUDES! With CREEPS IN TOYLAND and DAMNED REVERENDS. Saturday, July 2. $3. No age limit, kiddies!
The address was on Valencia Street.
I glanced back over my shoulder. Peter was nowhere in sight, but the crowd of men on Castro Street had only gotten deeper. Everyone was milling around, going in and out of restaurants and bars, talking and laughing.
I turned back to the poster. That girl, in the center. There was something about the way she sneered at the camera. I could’ve stood there staring at her for the rest of the night.
Or… I could go to the show. It was only a few blocks over.
It was a ridiculous idea. Except, the longer I stood there, the less ridiculous it seemed.
I could just walk over and check it out. I didn’t have to go inside.
I pulled the rubber bands off the bottoms of my braids and combed out my long hair with my fingers as I walked. When I’d made it two blocks east, I realized I hadn’t seen any obviously gay guys in a while. There were more girls on the street now, too, and soon I spotted a straight couple coming out of a corner store, laughing as they tried to hold hands and juggle an armful of brown paper bags at the same time. I guess I’d left the gay area of the city behind.
Before long, I found the address from the poster. There was a line outside the door of the club—if club is the right word for an old industrial building with blacked-out windows and run-down bars on either side.
Before I could lose my nerve, I slid in the back of the line. A pair of girls in purple lipstick, short skirts, and stiletto boots were waiting in front of me. I felt underdressed in my T-shirt and jeans, but at least I didn’t have my little-girl hair anymore.
No one seemed to notice how I looked, though. In fact, no one glanced at me twice, not even the bouncer who took my three dollars and silently jammed his thumb toward the loud music spilling out from the dark, humid hallway behind him.
“I can’t believe this city finally has a punk scene!” a guy shouted as I followed the short-skirted girls inside.
So that’s what this was. A punk show. All I knew about this kind of music was that there was a punk band named the Sex Pistols. A guy at St. John’s got suspended for two weeks because he wore a T-shirt with their name on it under his uniform, and the gym teacher saw him changing out of it in the locker room. Peter said they were a band in England, and that people liked them because they cursed a lot.
I doubted the Sex Pistols were in this grimy club tonight, but maybe there’d be other bands who cursed a lot. That idea was surprisingly appealing.
By the time I’d made it halfway down the narrow hall, music was already pumping out from the main room up ahead. I couldn’t make out any of the words well enough to tell if the band was cursing, but I did know it was completely different from any music I’d ever heard. The radio stations I listened to played Donna Summer or the Bee Gees or KC and the Sunshine Band—disco love songs, mostly. But the music tonight wasn’t anything like disco.