4 Stars
Finding a place.
The one thing in all LA, I love the purple sky at night.
All the zeitgeist of the early eighties in Los Angeles and the changing punk scene, and while there's a definite warning bell of the skinhead coup, it's not the primary focus. I went in expecting crazy stories--I got them, but there's this real deceptive undertow of emotion that builds and builds around Rockets, a young teenage boy living on the streets of LA and trying to figure out his place and what to do, and I got pulled under. By the end, I just felt...heartsore.
"Why was it hard to watch me?" I ask. "you never said."
He thinks about it all the way down to the sidewalk.
"Because it felt like someone should be stopping you," he says finally, "and nobody was."
The story is told from Rockets' viewpoint and you get this front and center seat to street life and what the characters wanted, what they were willing to sacrifice to have it, but there's the growing question in Rockets' mind about why. It shows issues of race, sexual orientation, and policing and not in heavy-handed ways, but as a part of the daily fracas of Rockets' life.
"But it's so blatant," Tim says. "The police don't notice?"
"What they really notice is a black dude north of the Santa Monica Freeway, period," Blitzer says. "A lot more than a white daddy, comma, looking for a pink boy."
"Pink?" David says.
Time echoes it, and there's that fuckin silence again, like after "How old," it's stale as hail on the Yukon trail.
"Fuck all of you! I've got pubic hair! Here! Look!"
Rockets is a young, gay male trying to navigate life with no resources aside from general group goodwill. A group that revolved around the punk scene, how they looked out for each other and did the best they could with what little they had. Not going to give more backstory because reading the unveiling is a big part of the punch in this one.
Waiting's basically wanting, there's only one letter difference, you can't be waiting without wanting the wait to be over. So when you're waiting you're controlled by wanting, and wanting's what controls everything.
Punk. The primal scream I can relate to, but there is so much beyond rage that never fit for me. I don't have that destructive force in me, the hermit dissociated always appealed more. So much of life was a train I didn't want to get on; I never believed in Willoughby, a dream stop. Nonexistent. Even so, the references and the language are compelling. There's a cadence to the storytelling and it gets stronger at times, just pulling you along.
I love this story like I love LA: All the fun parts, the wild parts, the broken parts.
Let you see, what you wouldn't, the woman's face first seeing me, soft warm breath, sudden in-drawn deep, "How old are you, boy, how could, who would, who did this to you, tell me."
"I did."
More beloved quotes that didn't make the cut above:
"But I don't trip on it too hard now, how the Go-Gos are number one from sea to slimy sea when Darby said they've got no lyrics, they've got nothing, they're going nowhere, how it's maybe morning in America to Reagan, but midnight in Hollywood to me, and I can't get there from here."
"Somehow the freeway part is what makes it feel possible, make's it real, that unbroken pavement so no map's necessary, unwinding like a licorice whip to I-want-Candyland, pine trees, rivers, grizzlies, a thousand fuckin miles, my country tis of fuckin thee, and the you-are-here is just a bus ride away."
Darby said.
You know what's fun? You take like ten hits of acid, drink a six-pack of beer, and you go to the Santa Monica pier, there's a bridge there that goes nowhere, 'cause their suppose to lower it for boats, and you can go out on the end and jump off, right? And you can swim, and it's so great 'cause it's dark, you know, and you can just swim and it doesn't matter if you live or die or anything, just swim and swim, and you feel the fish nibbling at your feet."
"It's football jock who last year saw us on the street and yelled and spit, and now they've got their number-one crops and their motor boots and their bandanas, and they're punk rockers, a different breed of mommy's little monster though, with mommies to go back to, mommies and Mustangs and anarchy posters over their soft beds."
And trends are for terminal morons, I don't follow them at all, like for example last year's top-drawer trend, the one before ska was being bisexual. Which on-fire fags like Tony the Hustler were down for completely, because they were first ready, able, and more than willing dudes who came to mind to all these clueless vals and surf boys who wanted in on the latest. Though what I heard from those in the two-way know was double your pleasure in theory, double your trouble in practice.
"Shhhh!" Tim says. "We don't want to wake them."
"Why not? It's your fuckin room. And anyways what the--"
"It's not our room," David says. "The phone in our room's avocado. This one's harvest."
If this didn't take you back...
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