The van broke down outside of Las Cruces. Rachel and I hitched a ride with a trucker, snapshots of his happy wife and kids pinned to the visor, and had the van towed into town. This was 1986, no cellphones, no easy roadside assistance.
The VW shop owner let us sleep in the yard at night, but we weren’t allowed on the premises during working hours. “Think of the optics,” he’d said. “Three young kids like you.”
We lounged on the New Mexico State University campus instead, found an impossible green lawn in the desert, its trees and benches surrounded by cinderblock Army barracks transformed into student housing, and talked about Anna Karenina.
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for her?” I asked. “Because I don’t. Not really. I mean, I was happy when she threw herself in front of that train.”
Rachel had washed her hair in the gas station sink while we waited for the tow. Her curls now lighter than air. “You have to understand their historical moment,” she explained. “There was nothing for her to do.”
“She could get a job.”
“Trust me.” Rachel took out her compact mirror and liquid eyeliner and touched up the thick black lines around her eyes. “She was trapped. All women were.”
“I’m free and I’m a woman.”
“Are you though?” Cliff asked. “Free?”
“Women were totally subjugated back then. Couldn’t own property. Couldn’t get divorced. The law was against them.”
“There must have been something she could do,” I said. “Some way out.”
“The only way out,” Cliff said, “is death.”
“I’m done with this conversation.” Rachel snapped the case shut. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rachel was right, of course. I didn’t know anything. Back then, I thought individual will was stronger than societal forces, that if a person tried hard enough, worked hard enough, they would make it. I believed in the American dream so deeply I didn’t even know I was dreaming.
“Your hair is nasty.” Cliff was twisting my blonde mop into clumps. “It’s like my hands are covered in Crisco.” He wrapped a chunk around his finger.
“Not so rough,” I said.
“You want cool hair or not?”
A teenager with a stiff Mohawk, suspenders, and Doc Martens approached us. His cheeks were red and cherubic. Pinchable. “You guys like hardcore?” he asked, a flyer for a show in someone’s garage in his outstretched hand.
Although we’d been listening to a cassette of Dwight Yoakum’s recently released Guitars, Cadillacs, on repeat, we didn’t tell him that. We said, sure, we love hardcore. Punk’s not dead, you know. See you there.
We dumpstered behind a Mexican restaurant for dinner, two Styrofoam containers of beans and meat, and for dessert, Cliff’s mom’s AmEx bought a bottle of tequila. We sat in the VW lot picking out Yoakum’s honky-tonk songs on guitar and taking shots. Cliff doled out pills.
“Quaaludes,” he said. “The real shit too. From Mexico.”
“From your mom’s medicine cabinet, you mean,” I said.
“Thanks, Mom, for funding our trip.” Cliff spread his arms wide to encompass the busted cars, rusted engines, piles of tires.
A rabbit emerged from behind a burnt-out Bug and stood on its haunches facing us, arms in a boxing pose like a kangaroo. I’d never seen such a creature before, muscular and lean, with yellow incisors and mangy fur, ears erect and sharp as weapons, the edges burnt orange from the setting sun.
Jimmy Carter had a famous run-in with a swamp rabbit in 1979. Editorials and late-night television hosts cast the president as an ineffectual wimp afraid of bunnies. If Carter couldn’t fight off Thumper, how could he free the hostages in Iran? How could he win the Cold War? What would Brezhnev think?
After seeing that hare in New Mexico, I knew Carter’s fear was justified. It was a monster. I yelled shoo and go home, waving my hands in what I hoped was an intimidating way.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.
“Could be rabid.”
“Doubtful.”
“What if it attacks us, like in that Monty Python movie?” I mimicked being jumped by a killer rabbit, screamed and flailed and grabbed at my throat. I spun in a circle and slammed the invisible animal to the ground in a display of dominance, fist raised high in victory.
“You’re spilling Robin everywhere,” Cliff said, and I sat back down. Silenced.
“I thought it was funny, Rob,” Rachel said. “History of the World, right?”
“That’s Mel Brooks.”
“Life of Brian.”
“That’s Jesus.”
“Holy Grail?”
“Bingo!”
We passed the tequila around and watched the darkening sky. The ludes kicked in. I felt a jolt of euphoria and a shift in consciousness, one notch deeper down the well.
“I feel like getting dressed up tonight,” Cliff said.
“You’ve only got like two shirts.”
“I mean like a girl.”
“Ooh,” I said. “My black mini-skirt will fit you. It’s that stretchy material.”
“And you can wear your t-shirt,” Rachel added. “It’s unisex.”
“And make-up,” Cliff said. “I want to wear make-up.”
The three of us returned to the van, where the light was better. Rachel got out her make-up kit and painted Cliff’s eyes with black liner and shadow, lips bright red. There wasn’t much we could do with his hair, since it was so short and greasy, but we managed to fasten a yellow plastic barrette in it.
He shrieked at his image in the rearview, declared himself radical.
“Like Bowie,” I said.
We consulted our gas station map and made our way to the punk show. A pregnant cat stretched on a doorstep; hazy clouds obscured a dim half-moon. A man in white bell-bottoms and a cowboy hat passed us riding a child’s banana-seat bike. He rang his bell, shouted howdy do. We got lost a few times, and by the time we arrived, we were wasted.
“Oh, god,” I said as we approached the garage. “They’re playing The Circle Jerks.”
“Group Sex! Group Sex!” Cliff careened through a chain-link fence and into the backyard, running for the mosh pit.
I liked slam-dancing, if it wasn’t violent. A safe pit’s a school of fish, bodies pushing each other away and being pushed in return. Someone might brush against your breast accidentally, and it’s okay if there’s no grabbing or groping, no man squeezing your tit like he owns it.
Not that pit, though, not that music. There were no girls in it, just a gaggle of skinheads spinning in hyped-up skank circles, boots stomping on the concrete, flannel shirts flying around their waists.
“They should have an orgy and get it over with,” I said.
“Seriously.” Rachel handed me the tequila and I took a swig. “Group sex indeed.”
The song ended and the band launched into “Destroy the Handicapped” by Bay Area hardcore band Fang, whose singer would strangle his girlfriend while zonked out on heroin a few years later. Sid and Nancy re-dux, only much less famous.
A kid wearing Bay City Rollers pants approached us. “Cool hair.” He nodded in my direction.
“Fuck off,” I said, and he spat, called me a bitch, and walked away.
Rachel and I posed with our clove cigarettes and tequila. We leaned on each other, swaying. The ludes peaked. I felt loose-limbed and rubbery, the garage distant, telescoped and lit up by Christmas lights.
The song’s chorus changed. Destroy the handicapped, offensive enough as it is, morphed into destroy the faggot. Destroy the faggot.
Destroy the faggot registered in our cloudy brains.
“Shit,” Rachel said.
Cliff came tearing out of the garage, a few rangy boys grabbing at his shirt. But not too many. Most were still elbowing each other in the pit. I threw the tequila bottle at them, but it fell a few feet in front of me, not even breaking, and we hightailed it out of there.
“Those assholes,” Rachel said when we stopped to rest on a curb a few blocks away. The desert night had turned cold. A boarded-up adobe house crouched low to the ground across the street, busted lawnmower in the middle of its dirt yard.
“I hate boys,” I said.
“Yeah, but guys?” Cliff said. “When they were pushing my face in the concrete, one of them had a hard-on.”
Cliff’s barrette was missing, his lip bleeding.
“Told you,” I said to Rachel.
“Closet cases.”
“Pressed it against my back.”
I rested my head on the scrub between street and sidewalk. My bones liquid. “Can we sleep here?”
A dog barked; a car alarm sounded.
“Miles to go before sleep.” Cliff pulled me to my feet.
We trudged to the van and examined Cliff for damage. He had scrapes on his cheek and lips but was otherwise unscathed. We washed our make-up off with a garden hose and flopped on the foam mattress, Cliff in the middle, Rach and I on either side. We burrowed under the scratchy blanket.
“I’m seeing quadruple,” Rachel said. “I might puke.”
Cliff stretched his arms over his head. “I felt pretty tonight,” he said.
“You were gorgeous.”
“Totally free.”
“Fuck those punks. Music’s lame anyway. Too short, too fast.”
“Too angry.”
“Stupid. Mean.”
“Tiny dicks.”
I flung my leg over Cliff’s waist and felt his hard-on. I didn’t know if he had it because of us or the hardcore boys or the ludes. Or for no reason at all.
I asked if we were a happy or unhappy family. If we were the same as everyone or different. No one answered. Rachel snored, then Cliff snored. I listened for the rabbit at the door.