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By Root 893 0

Romulus and Remus of American punk. It didn’t occur to me until then that my skipping the band’s set after the first song or two might have been noted as a shade insulting, given that I had rapturized Patti and looked as if I were giving her regular openers the brush-off. It wasn’t that I was a significant presence in the room but that the funky birth canal of CBGB’s was so tubular it didn’t take binocular vision to spot a regular beating an exit. Patti’s request was also an allusion to the fact that I usually stationed myself at the back. This was a pattern that began in grade school, when we were seated alphabetically and I nearly always ended up against the back wall, helping forge an identity of being the classic wise guy in the last row, the classroom’s color commentator. And it continued with my comradeship with Pauline, who, as mentioned before, favored the last row of the screening room, the film projector’s beam raying directly above our heads. But this hanging-back business was more than precedence and habit. It betrayed my reluctance, my fear of getting too close to anybody or anything; my preference for maintaining detachment, distance, for avoiding involvement and allowing myself a quick escape route from wherever I found myself. I wanted to take everything in, from safe afar, through a panoramic lens. But that night I did as Patti beckoned and positioned myself closer to the stage for Television’s second set.

It took them forever to tune up, but then it always took them forever to tune up, bent over their guitars like car mechanics over a tricky transmission. Then Verlaine, relatively satisfied, would nod, their name would be announced to scattered applause, the lights would come up, and Tom would open with a little joke. It was always the same little joke, the same lame little icebreaker. It was about asking a flower seller on the street about buying some flowers for his sweetie and the seller giving him one rude brush-off after another before squawking: “Listen, pal, stop bothering me—can’cha see I’m trying to sell these flowers?” It was not a joke that got funnier in the retelling, and the fondness Verlaine held for it would always be inexplicable, like so much else about him. He was and would remain an unbreakable code. After the punch line died a small, swift death came the siren-whine of guitar as Television began “Fire Engine,” a cover of a 13th Floor Elevators song whose cover-appeal was also elusive, so Tinkertoy was its construction, no matter how gussied up the guitar attack. Up close was better than the back, but I still wasn’t getting the gnostic gospel message. But at some point in the set, perhaps it was “Venus de Milo,” perhaps it was the gorgeous “Judy” (which the band never recorded, a sin, a crime, though it has surfaced on bootlegs, like a plaintive cry retrieved from the ruins of Atlantis), Verlaine lifted his face to the light, eyelids closed, and I could see that he was beautiful, the light striking his Antonin Artaud cheekbones like a close-up in The Passion of Joan of Arc. (One of Patti’s favorites, and I could see now how Verlaine was Artaud to her Falconetti, not a comparison that rose naturally from seeing them hold hands like sweethearts between sets at the rear of CBGB’s.) The imploring death rattle that was his normal singing voice didn’t matter, because it was meant to sound constricted, his eyelids fluttering like exaggerated REM sleep or pained rapture. As the songs became longer and the virtuoso soloing of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd wove intricately, passionately upward in a double helix without spiraling off course and descending into doodling, as drummer Billy Ficca kept jazzy order in the backseat (instead of pounding rhythm like a heavy-metal humpster), I felt a religious conversion coming on without quite being sold, despite the bravura finish (the first of many bravura finishes) of “Marquee Moon,” which planted the summit flag on the set. Because although there was dynamic dissonance to Television’s performing and the discordant jabs that testified to the influence