CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY 1 with Janet Duckworth fromtheI [hesekids! were morenaive, lesshiptowhat thel fashionwas— ' ..-x*.— .... ........ f If twoHollywoodpunks] would knock intoeach! J £ _ 8 lother they’dlaughand help eachother up. If twokidsfrom! 8$^ ' ' . v %* '•.■tv- ¥ 5 " Huntington!Beach! ...... K , * • ••v. didit, they’doftenwind upsluggingthe; (crapout of eachother ! HUNTINGTON Beach is a prefab community. It was created that way, as an escape from the evils of the city. Basically, there was no Huntington Beach before the ’60s— the trees that were planted have yet to grow to full height, and the paint and plaster have yet to chip on the tract homes. The lure of Huntington Beach was that it was an economical way to move into a nice, big house for a low investment. There were plenty of business opportunities in neighboring Irving, a huge MacDonnell-Douglas aircraft industry was opening, and to many people it was worth hours of commuter driving on a trafficjammed freeway just to be able to live in a safe fortress. I say fortress because it is possible to drive down many typical streets in Huntington and see nothing but miles and miles of sterile block-wall fences. Then, suddenly, breaking the monotony of those boundaries, is a wall that is different—it has swastikas spray- painted on it, names like China White, the Crowd, Social Distortion, True Sons of Liberty. Something is out of kilter here. The perfect suburban dream has doubled back on itself. “ I have it in my hand,” says Officer Richard Long of the Newport Beach Police Department’s juvenile division, “ a five-inch-long solid stainless steel pipe. It’s been drilled down the center, filled with lead and capped at one end. And it’s got three inch-long spikes down one side that stick through your fingers when you hold it in your fist. It’s used for punching someone in the face.” DA VE (an alias) wakes up. H e ’s groggy, it ’s already noon, and he feels totally burned out. Then he looks at his hand— there are a few small cuts on it. He scratches his scalp — it ’s easy since his head is almost completely bald except fo r the thin strip o f hair running down the center, the part that he will grease to stand up when he goes out to a concert. He looks at his boots lying next to the bed, the ones with the red and blue bandanas tied around them and the one or two chains he got from girlfriend Tracy. H e ’s trying to remember what he did last night. Oh yeah, he had gone to this concert with Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. Black Flag— those guys were from Redondo Beach, they were about the best band to go see because he knew all his friends would be there. And he had gotten some black beauties from a friend, and they went to this other friend ’s van, borrowed from an older brother, who was a stupid hippie surfer. So they got to drink some beer and snort some black beauties in the van, and after awhile Dave fe lt good and ready to smash something— he always fe lt real aggressive, and it was cool to say everything was fucked. Well, it was.. . Huntington Beach sucked, his parents were stupid, he could ask them fo r anything and they’d say “ sure,” they didn’t care. Yeah, his mom got a little freaked out when she saw his mohawk, but he told her how that was what Darby was doing, all the kids were doing it, and she said, “ Well, okay, i f it makes you happy. ” Dave guessed his mom was all right, she was gonna buy him that cool leather jacket fo r Christmas. His father he didn’t even know, seems like all his father did was work and sleep, or maybe watch football or something, but sometimes it seemed as i f his father wasn’t even there. But then Dave could care less about his stupid parents. He didn’t care about anything. He just wanted to do speed and drink beer and get loaded and fu ck things up. ’Course when it started in H.B. it was different. Dave first got into the music by going to parties at Jimmy Trash’s house, where Jimmy’s band the Crowd and the Flyboys would play. THE Crowd was the first “ punk” band in Huntington. Jimmy Trash has always been a big, physical, aggressive kind of kid, and he used to be a top-notch surfer, member of the Edison High Surf Team. Tall, handsome, he personifies the California surfer, but Jimmy and his brothers have always wanted to be different from the middle class norm. Right before punk, on the tail end of the glitter period, Jimmy dyed his hair flaming red, shocking those groups of jocks and kids whose idea of high fashion was OPs. A few called him fag, but Jimmy quickly informed them that if they didn’t like it they could fuck off. At that point fun was the main objective. Politics did not enter into it— yes, the Pistols were singing about anarchy, and the English punk revolution was born out of lower-class youth’s despair at a life of enforced labor at low wages. But how are you going to relate to that in sunny Huntington? “ This is the coolest spot in the world, man,” as Jimmy put it. “ There’s no problems down here, it’s nothing like Hollywood.” In fact, the original Huntington punks, Jimmy and his 15 friends, really had no idea what was going on in Hollywood. While people at the Masque were strictly copying English fashion with black-leather spiked wrist-bands and spiky haircuts in various shades of crazy color, the kids in H.B. were getting “ skinnys” (skinhead haircuts) and getting bright dayglo clothes out of thrift stores. The point was to be as “ goofy and crazy” as possible, though in a year this would radically change. IT’S the summer of ’78. As usual in beach communities, it’s a big party summer for the kids. Jimmy and his friends are going to see how many of their friends they can get into punk rock. As for the parents, they don’t care, they are just glad that their kids are into something like music instead of doing things like slashing car tires, which Jimmy had done when he was a little kid of 13 and allowed to hang out with the seniors because he was one of the better surfers. 40
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