A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [32]
The Palace
That summer, after graduation, I started to hang out at this place called the Bingo Palace. A couple of my friends actually worked there, calling out numbers and letters to the weeknight gatherings of oldsters. I thought it was a cool job and I was a little jealous. But the coolest thing about the Palace was the Friday night all-ages dances. After the brutal breakup with Pam, I decided that I had had enough self-pity and disgust. I was finally feeling confident about who I was, and besides that, it was a good place to show off my fashion sense.
About a hundred or more pimply minors would go there every week, and it wasn’t just Kennewick kids. You’d see the Richland punkers and preppies and the Pasco jocks and break-dancers hanging out too. The dance floor used to be a skating rink, so it was pretty big. Around the perimeter of that was a carpeted area with four big mushroom-shaped seats where each clique claimed their space. The far back corner was where all the New Wave kids hung out, stuffing their trench coats under the mushroom and filling the air with clove smoke. Since the different cliques of people didn’t mingle, there were never any fights. But many of the jocks and a lot of the Wavers were weekly regulars and they would sometimes exchange dirty looks or sarcastic comments. The DJ would have to play a wide mix of music to please everyone there. Whenever songs by Love and Rockets or ABC came on, the floor would belong to the Wavers. Then Def Leppard would signal the return of the jocks and everyone else. Sometimes the DJ would slip in Anita Baker or that love song from Footloose and the floor would fill with anxious and nervous slow dancers.
The Friday night dances became the highlight of my week. I met many of my longtime friends at the Palace that year and I discovered a love for dancing. I even thought to myself: Dancing is my life! I live to dance! Maybe dressing up and dancing to my favorite songs was as close as I would come to being a pop star, so I went for it, and I felt euphoric afterward. I was starting to really feel myself physically in the world, self-conscious in a good way. Living in the moments of music. I remember being at the Palace and thinking about how sad it would have been to be somewhere else. All those people at home. All the people at work. Anyone, anywhere else but here—I felt sorry for them.
Water Softeners
I didn’t have a job for a couple of months and I was starting to run out of money. I had a pretty large collection of records (in milk crates) and cassettes (in fruit boxes) and I felt a voracious need to buy music. A friend gave me a tip on a job where all you had to do was call people on the phone. I didn’t realize at the time how painfully monotonous it was going to be.
I was cold-calling people from a photocopied list, trying to sell them some kind of water softener system. I wasn’t even sure what it did but I was assured that it made taking a shower feel like wet heaven.
A couple of weeks into the job, I called in to take a night off. Instead of just faking a sickness, I told them that my dad had a stroke. They called my house the next day and found out it wasn’t true.
Neon Vomit
My new friend Terry and I were goofing around one day and I showed him some poetry that I’d been writing. But I never called it poetry back then. They were simply called “pieces.” I had seen Henry Rollins do some of his spoken word on a TV show called IRS Records’ The Cutting Edge. He read “Family Man” and I thought it was the most hilariously uncomfortable thing ever. That was the sort of prototype I was working with. Terry liked these pieces of mine and so we decided we would turn them into songs and record them.
Our first “album” of punk rock songs was recorded on a cassette player in his bedroom and bathroom. Just Terry and me. We decided to call ourselves Neon Vomit. He was good at creating some heavy riffs based on my smallest suggestions (usually just me saying, Can you do something like this