It was wednesday night and I was drunk again. Another night at the Hot Club, Philly's premier punk venue. I'd come to Philly to study Sociology at Temple University. Instead I was studying what I always did. Rock and Roll and where to get the best draft beer. Some might see a problem. Fuck that. I saw only opportunity. The inherent optimism of the drunk. That grand sense of well-being. Existential dilemmas cured by means other than crass consumption and mindless repetitive “purposeful” behavior. To me, there seemed to be three answers to existential despair. The bar, the mall, or church. The mall made me want to puke. As a student of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard it was beneath my alcoholic bohemian dignity. There has to be a better way to avoid thinking about death than shopping all the time. I was my father’s son, and so suspicious of the church. I was the first generation NOT to be an altar boy. To my father the priests were hypocrites who came to the door asking his pious mother for money when she could barely put food on the table. Besides, I figured all the real saints were in the bar drinking anyway.

A couple of my best buds were in the city’s first and best punk band. They called themselves The Autistics. The name became available when David Byrne re-christened his bunch the “Talking Heads”. We were all hanging out backstage drinking beer after the sound check. There was some up and coming New York band there that was headlining, Fuck if I can remember who is was. New York bands were almost never from New York anyway. Richard Hell was from from Kentucky. The Dead Boys were from Cleveland. Go figure. The Autistics were all from Philly except the bass player Johnny, and he was from right across the bridge in Camden. Johnny was a dead ringer for a slightly healthier Sid Vicious and that’s no shit. He played bass like Sid too. Barely. He had a girlfriend who was a ringer for a slightly prettier Nancy Spungeon. They dressed just like Sid and Nancy and when you saw them walking down the street together it was almost spooky.

When I first met Johnny he and Debbie were living in a closet on Pine St. No shit, a closet. Some drugged out art student punks had let them move in rent free. The closet was long and narrow, like 12 feet deep and 4 feet wide. They had a tiny cot and all their clothes in there. Somehow they sleep on that cot together. I used to stop by to cop some Black Beauties from one of “art students” once in a while. The scene was always like this: Black and white tv with a test pattern showing, set on permanent vertical roll, the screen sprayed with translucent green dayglow paint. One of the lunatic young women throwing red or green paint for splatter effects on some new punk tee-shirts they’d silkscreened from an original design at the Philadelphia College of Art.

Johnny and I were talking in the crowded “dressing room” when a couple of Jersey girls came in uninvited. Don’t ask me how I knew they were Jersey girls. You just know. If you lived in Philly back then it was so obvious it was funny. The hair. The clothes. The look. Stuck in glam. Fascinated by punk, but not quite knowing how to do it.

As the girls came in Johnny asked them who the fuck they were. They told him to fuck off and he whipped out the switchblade he always kept close to hand. Told THEM to fuck off. They called him an asshole and left. These girls were some hard little bitches, so it shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to me a month later when I ran into a friend who told me Johnny was in ICU at Cooper Medical in Camden.

Johnny had a penchant for pulling knives. Hell, we all did. A few weeks earlier after a show at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby me and John were standing in an alley passing a quart of Ballantine Ale back and forth in a brown bag. Somebody yelled “punk rock faggots” and we looked up to see a 69 Malibu with four guys stopped at the entrance of the alley. We never said a word. I broke the bottle against a brick wall and pulled it out of the bag in my right hand. Johnny flipped his blade and we were both walking quickly straight toward the car. I think one of us said” c’mon motherfuckers”. We heard a squeal of tires and the car sped away. I always worried about John in the back of mind. I think it was like a movie to him, like he didn’t know it was real. Me, I’d had my head busted enough times in life to know it was real. Very fuckin’ real.

Johnny would live. The doctors said he could ”probably” learn to walk again. With therapy his speech might approach normal. The cops knew the guys who did it were probably from Jersey. All John could remember from the day it happened was that there were two guys came to his door one of whom said “you like to pull knives on people asshole?” Two guys. One baseball bat. That was all he remembered. The girl had apparently left the dressing room and asked around. Found out who the guy was from the band that looked like Sid Vicious. Once you have a name the rest is easy. Johnny was still in rehab the last I heard of him and don’t know if he ever did come back to Philly. Or play the bass again.

Truth of the matter is that a lot of the best punk shows I ever saw ended with a puddle of blood of the dancehall floor. Think of it as one of the peculiarities of art.

"...the truth is only known by guttersnipes" -Joe Strummer