The Ramones

The Ramones

Hallandale’s Button South just east of I-95 was a showcase for the odd, bizarre and off-color in 1984. On a summer Sunday night (in Florida it’s always summer, so it might have been spring, fall or winter, I don’t remember) at six-thirty, I was a member of the second party on line for the Ramones gig there. With me was my fourteen-year-old son, Peter, and his friend, Mike (I think that was his name).

Peter was into the Ramones that year. He dressed in grunge style, flannel shirts. I don’t recall what material his pants were made of because he never liked blue jeans. I, on the other hand, wore them whenever I could.  Peter felt out of place at his high school, Taravella in Coral Springs. We lived in the next town over, Tamarac, a community of retirees and blue-collar neighborhoods of construction workers and others who built and served the older generations who’d come from up north to live in age-segregated subdivisions, my parents among them.

When it was planned and built, Taravella was intended only for Coral Springs kids, those sporting LaCoste alligators on short-sleeved, finely woven cotton knit shirts, kids living in suburban houses with two-car garages and two parents. Peter lived with me, his newly divorced mom in a small house with no garage, just a blue-collar carport, although his dad, an artist, was often around toting a sad face.  

As our only child, Peter was doted upon by both of us. We didn’t spoil him with things, with toys and fancy clothes or trendy teen accessories (whatever might have been objects of the moment, like today’s Ipods, MP3 players, WIIs and the like), but we indulged him in his interests, especially his creative ones, because, like I said, his dad is an artist and I’m a writer. Peter chose a third form of art. Why? I often wondered.  In defiance of us, as an act of rebellion? From his childhood drawings, visual art didn’t seem to be his strong suit, but his writing was always extraordinary.

I took his avoidance of developing his writing talents, at least back then, as anger with me for asking his father to leave our home. But maybe I’m too egocentric. After all, this story is about him, not me. (Right?)

With his first Bar Mitzvah gift, one hundred dollars from my uncle Davey, my mother’s twin brother, Peter bought a guitar. He’d had piano lessons for a year only, when he was eight and we’d first arrived in Florida, but he was pretty much self-taught as a guitarist. He was drawn toward Alternative music, especially punk, another sign of his break from the mainstream, and an expression, surely, of his inner anger.  

So, back on line outside the Button South. It was hot. The boys talked to each other. I may have smoked a couple of cigarettes while waiting. I still smoked back then. I shifted somewhat uncomfortably and impatiently from one foot to another for an hour or two until the doors opened, thinking why I had let Peter talk me into coming so early for a late show. Eventually we and the long line of people behind us rushed into the dark, air-conditioned lobby. There, a guy behind a table patted down T-shirts and tapes displayed on a banquet table. Signs on the bathroom doors stated no drugs were allowed. If you went out during the performance, you wouldn’t be readmitted (it being assumed you’d go outside to score or partake of drugs).  But those were the days when you could still smoke in restaurants and bars.

The concert stage was in a large room with a huge empty floor between it and the actual bar, which held a scatter of high-top tables and chairs under individual high-beam spotlights, like stars in a black heaven. The boys ran to the stage, and virtually glued themselves, standing, to the four-foot wall, with their heads peeping over the top as if for a front-row vantage point. I installed myself at a high-top table under the starlight. I pulled out a book I had brought for the occasion and began to read as the room began to fill up, mostly with a crowd of twenty-something young men.

Music from an invisible source suddenly pounded the room. Not the Ramones, but something primitive, bass-driven, deafening. My chest felt the vibrations. I thought I was having a heart attack. (Sorry this is so much about me . . . but wait.) I ran out of the room, to the lobby where the T-shirt Man was folding shirts on a table.

“Do you feel that?”

“What?”

“The pounding – in your chest.”

He shrugged and turned to a guy who wanted to buy a T-shirt. The vibrations hadn’t traveled from the bar to the lobby. My chest didn’t hurt here. OK, I could live with the vibrations, at least knowing I wasn’t having a heart attack. I went back inside to my book and my Coke.

The boys were still glued to the front of the stage. I could just make out their heads through the crowd filling the now-occupied space between us when a twenty-something guy approached me.

“You don’t look very happy here,” he said. How perceptive of you, I thought. A forty-something woman reading a book at a punk-rock concert.

I smiled.

“Good book?”

“A mystery.”

“Sure,” he said. “Have fun.” He saluted me with a raised beer bottle.

For a moment, the din of DJ-spun music stopped, and Joey Ramone stepped out onstage, sucking the juice from half an orange. Tall, mop-haired, Joey flung the orange peel out to the audience, and Peter jumped for it – and caught it.

The concert we had come to hear began. Guitars and drums dazzled in rapid-fire rhythms that provoked flight-driven slam dancing, from audience to stage and back again. Bodies were hurled upward and thrown helter-skelter heedless of injury across the room. The music was relentless, frenzied. Testosterone dominated the room. Who wasn’t immune to the muscle intensity, like the spell of a shaman, the perfume of brawn, the weighty drug of masterfulness, the energy of individual might and supremacy.

Later that night, drained and exhausted, we arrived home after safely delivering Mike to his parents. Before he went to sleep, Peter left Joey Ramone’s orange peel on the kitchen counter. A little while later, I picked it up gingerly and plopped it into a plastic sandwich bag and placed it in the freezer, where it remained for years. My son’s induction into manhood, a talisman even more meaningful than his bar mitzah.