“The MC5 Made Me Straight”* part I

*ps. don’t worry I’m still queer.

(PART I of I don't know how many)

I was watching videos my husband made in at The Evergreen State College the summer that he was 20. I was 21. Suddenly I could go to shows at bars, but he still couldn’t. When our best friend Victoria (see like every other post on this blog) and I went to the MC5 Tribute Show, Slim Volume stayed home and watched Dances with Wolves and drank Vermouth because it was the only booze we had around the house. Looking back on this 11 years later, I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t buy him some beer before we took off for Seattle.

After watching a few hilarious videos he made with classmates, I found the video I’d been curious about for years - a short documentary about me. In most of it I am wearing an American Flag bikini, except for when I am wearing my unbelievably frumpy McDonald’s uniform. I was training to become a shift manager at McDonald’s that summer, my fourth year working for the corporation (the following spring, just before my final evaluation to become a manager, by the sleazy regional supervisor, I quit). In some shots, I am wearing the American Flag bikini as well as sporting a mustache of black mascara on my blond upper lip hairs. In the shots where I have the mustache, I inexplicably also am not wearing my glasses (please remember this was 2004, long before cars wore fake mustaches). The film opens with me driving a car - as all good documentaries ought to - and telling a story about when Victoria and I saw the MC5, which must have been just a few days earlier. “They were like, does everybody know what time it is? And I was like, everybody knows what fucking time it is!” (it was Time to Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker.)

Then “Kick out the Jams” fills in the title sequence. I lead a tour of my parents lakeside property where I grew up - my little sister and her boyfriend are buying it now; my parents moved to Texas - describing it as “a nice place to grow up...there is a lot of...yard.” I was stoned a lot then, as I may have mentioned previously. I was stoned always, then. My hair is long and black with several inches of light brown roots. The film ends with me taking out the garbage and talking about how I moved out into that apartment complex with my BFF Cree when I was 18 and she was two weeks from being 18 - 20 days before our high school graduation. The surprise extra scene, after the credits, is me telling our roommate, James, a story that I do not now remember happening:

“I was at some reststop in Eastern Washington, and this girl had her skirt stuck in her panties. I thought about not telling her, because that would be hilarious. Then I decided to be a nice person and I was like” - here my voice drops  to a growled whisper - “‘Dude, your skirt is stuck in your panties.’” 

Then I giggle with the sweetest smile on my face. James is smoking weed out of the frame, but you hear a choked nasal laugh escape as he tries to hold his breath. I watched that part over and over, marveling about how I still don’t remember that happening, and I don’t remember telling the story, but also about the way I was making myself laugh. I was making myself laugh the way that a boy wants to make a girl laugh. 

*****

I was getting stoned with Victoria in her dorm. The first time she met Slim Volume, when he and I moved in together as roommates, she borrowed his Andrew WK CD so that she could be the loudest person in her dorm building at The Evergreen State College. When we were getting stoned in Victoria’s room, we mostly listened to Belle and Sebastian and Bratmobile (at my house, we mostly listened to The Need and Tracy + The Plastics). She had just brought home the MC5’s greatest hits CD. I got really excited about it because I knew it was Patti Smith’s beloved’s band [I was obsessed w/Patti Smith and I’ll write about that someday]. Fred Sonic Smith. I thought he was really ugly from the pictures I’d seen of him in Patti Smith’s books. Later I would come to believe he was the hottest man ever photographed. I recognized one song, “Kick Out the Jams”, because it was on I Shot Andy Warhol, which was then and continues to be one of my all-time favorite movies. 

Victoria let me borrow the CD and eventually she just gave it to me, because I was so stoked on it and she wasn’t as much. She recently reminded me that we actually traded and I gave her Glass Candy's first CD, but I didn't remember that until we talked about it.

Slim Volume and I weren’t in a romantic relationship yet, but we were roommates. He was opening at Starbucks and I was closing at McDonald’s and our paths rarely crossed. I left him a handwritten note taped to the front door: HAVE YOU HEARD THE MC5!?!?!!?