town a few weeks before me, and I moved into Jhymnâs place. He had a band with his girlfriend that tried to sound like Sonic Youth, but then they broke upâboth the couple and the band, as often happensâand she moved out, so it was just the two of us, in a few thousand square feet. Every evening I would shower in the makeshift bathroom, dry myself off, and stand naked in a window, towel around my neck, the freeway rushing by in the distance. A breeze, or what passed for one, would curl up my crotch and chest. No one was around for miles. Nothing nearby but a grim-looking Churchâs Fried Chicken. God knows what that apartment would be worth today.
I donât really remember what we did on the weekends, except for the one night when Jhymn and a couple of his friends were tripping. I wasnât, so I drove. Jhymnâs idea was to go where skinheads hung out and spray-paint ABBA all over the place. Then someone else had to one-up him somehow, flashed on a terrible New York band huge among the more hammerheaded precincts of Hardcore USA, searched for a long stretch of unmarked concrete wall, looked in both directions for skinheads, and quickly sprayed I BUTTFU CKED AGNOSTIC FRONT in letters three feet high.
Thatâs how crazy things got in Atlanta.
There were moments of horrible loneliness that summer, especially after Sooyoung left. One night, as I was calling home from a pay phone in a deserted strip mall, the line went dead, and suddenly my head was in my arms, hard up against the brick wall, and I found myself sobbing so loudly that it echoed. When I returned to the loft, Jhymn poked his head from the curtains cordoning off his room, then quickly withdrew it.
Huh. Heâd never done that before.
Then certain noises started, which gradually assumed a rhythm, sometimes accompanied by mumbling, and a different voice, one in a higher register, began its own mumbling and sighing, too.
After a long, bad day, after blubbering loudly and wiping off snot onto the back of my hand and steadying myself just enough to drive home and get upstairs to the hot, dog-smelling loft to bury myself under the sheet atop my mattress on the floor, thereâs my roommate sucking and fucking twenty yards away in a loft that lacked any walls.
It lasted a very long time, and she went into baby talk right as it ended. After thatâand only thenâwas there silence. I looked up into the dark and thought,
Well, at least tomorrow wonât be worse.
I left Atlanta with a terrific tan, since this was before anyone wore sunscreen, and with my arms and chest ropy with muscle from all that physical work. Back at school, Martha finally gave in, and she and I stayed together, off and on, for three years. Bitch Magnet outgrew most of the songs from that summer pretty quickly. But down there in a city where we didnât fit in and where no one was paying any attention, we became a real band. We sounded, and acted, like a real band, and started to think of ourselves as one, too. In Atlanta there was nothing else on which to base an identityâno other friends, no classes, no jobs worth talking about. It was the first part of the answer, if anyone asked us what we were doing there. We were finally a band, and being in a band was central to how I saw myself and my place in the world. This is a chapter with a happy ending.
Life Is Painful. Love, Bitch Magnet
S ooyoung drove and I rode shotgun, sneakers on the dashboard, my seat reclined as far as it could against the wall of guitars and amps in the backseat of my momâs blue Toyota Camry, as we listened to a tape Iâd made from a bunch of new 7âs and compilation tracks: Green River, Rapeman, Honor Role, and Spacemen 3âs seventeen-minute-long cover of the 13th Floor Elevatorsâ âRollercoaster,â which no one else in Bitch Magnet liked at all. It was late August of 1988. We were on our way to our first show in Boston and savoring the last
I donât really remember what we did on the weekends, except for the one night when Jhymn and a couple of his friends were tripping. I wasnât, so I drove. Jhymnâs idea was to go where skinheads hung out and spray-paint ABBA all over the place. Then someone else had to one-up him somehow, flashed on a terrible New York band huge among the more hammerheaded precincts of Hardcore USA, searched for a long stretch of unmarked concrete wall, looked in both directions for skinheads, and quickly sprayed I BUTTFU CKED AGNOSTIC FRONT in letters three feet high.
Thatâs how crazy things got in Atlanta.
There were moments of horrible loneliness that summer, especially after Sooyoung left. One night, as I was calling home from a pay phone in a deserted strip mall, the line went dead, and suddenly my head was in my arms, hard up against the brick wall, and I found myself sobbing so loudly that it echoed. When I returned to the loft, Jhymn poked his head from the curtains cordoning off his room, then quickly withdrew it.
Huh. Heâd never done that before.
Then certain noises started, which gradually assumed a rhythm, sometimes accompanied by mumbling, and a different voice, one in a higher register, began its own mumbling and sighing, too.
After a long, bad day, after blubbering loudly and wiping off snot onto the back of my hand and steadying myself just enough to drive home and get upstairs to the hot, dog-smelling loft to bury myself under the sheet atop my mattress on the floor, thereâs my roommate sucking and fucking twenty yards away in a loft that lacked any walls.
It lasted a very long time, and she went into baby talk right as it ended. After thatâand only thenâwas there silence. I looked up into the dark and thought,
Well, at least tomorrow wonât be worse.
I left Atlanta with a terrific tan, since this was before anyone wore sunscreen, and with my arms and chest ropy with muscle from all that physical work. Back at school, Martha finally gave in, and she and I stayed together, off and on, for three years. Bitch Magnet outgrew most of the songs from that summer pretty quickly. But down there in a city where we didnât fit in and where no one was paying any attention, we became a real band. We sounded, and acted, like a real band, and started to think of ourselves as one, too. In Atlanta there was nothing else on which to base an identityâno other friends, no classes, no jobs worth talking about. It was the first part of the answer, if anyone asked us what we were doing there. We were finally a band, and being in a band was central to how I saw myself and my place in the world. This is a chapter with a happy ending.
Life Is Painful. Love, Bitch Magnet
S ooyoung drove and I rode shotgun, sneakers on the dashboard, my seat reclined as far as it could against the wall of guitars and amps in the backseat of my momâs blue Toyota Camry, as we listened to a tape Iâd made from a bunch of new 7âs and compilation tracks: Green River, Rapeman, Honor Role, and Spacemen 3âs seventeen-minute-long cover of the 13th Floor Elevatorsâ âRollercoaster,â which no one else in Bitch Magnet liked at all. It was late August of 1988. We were on our way to our first show in Boston and savoring the last
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