PUBLIC ANIMAL

   I was still in high school but met a couple named Donny and Anna who were adults compared to me and had a comfortable domestic scene in a rented house. They were into grunge before it had a name, wished they lived in Seattle, and played all that stuff constantly. I guess they liked the fact that I played music and let me hang around. We were pretty inseparable for a few years, and when we weren’t staying up til dawn at their place, I would help Donny with one of his schemes to scare up rent money. One time he had bought a set of stencils and some cans of yellow spraypaint and we went door to door asking people if they’d like their house address stenciled at the end of their driveway for five dollars. We made $65 and I thought Donny was a genius. So did Anna until he blew all the money on dumb stuff.

  One day this guy John rolled up to Donny’s house in his VW Bug and sprayed us all with water. He had rigged up the windshield wiper fluid as a sort of water pistol by bending the nozzle and clamping the other side so the pressure was stronger. It was amazing. We immediately piled in his car to drive around asking people for directions and soaking them, giggling all the way.

   Donny didn’t play music, but would regularly grab my acoustic guitar and play random notes, strum discordantly, detune all the strings and tune them back randomly while strumming, and generally go apeshit to irritate me, but I fooled him by liking it. When I passed out on his couch he would haze me by taking a drag off a cigarette and carefully exhaling through a soapy bubble wand, blowing a bubble smoke bomb in my direction. This would be his entertainment for the rest of the night. Anna would often be in bed through all of this because she was responsible and had to work in the morning.

   Donny stopped by my house and recognized my mom’s boyfriend because they had been in shop class together in high school. It was kind of awkward and I tried to get him out of there but he thought it was funny. We went in my room and he said “Hey I think we need to see this show tonight. This guy seems crazy and rolls around in broken glass and stuff” and showed me an article in a magazine. I had no idea who it was or what the band sounded like, but later on we went to Club Spacefish to see GG Allin. The show was like going to a Halloween haunted house where a guy dressed like leatherface chases you around with a chainsaw, except it was real and there was a chance this guy would actually kill you. GG chased the entire audience out to the club by hurling feces as us, and since we were outside, he came outside too, naked and covered in blood, hurling barstools into the street. A cop happened to be driving by and it was all over. They took him to jail, and since he was naked and they didn't want to touch him, they covered him with the drum carpet from the stage, upon which a thousand beers and cigarettes had been spilled. He did the perp walk draped in it. When I got home it had been on the news and my mom was very concerned.