Slam Dancing at the Dead Milkmen Show in the Nyabinghi Dance Hall, 199two
Claudine Moreau
Steel toed boots were a prerequisite
to get in the door, & JC, the doorman,
wouldn’t let you in otherwise.
The ‘Milk Men opened with Dean’s Dream
& we all got high on the adrenaline
of the mosh pit’s studded leather jackets,
& ripped Black Flag t-shirts.
It was shoulders colliding, arms
at right angles, low but wide, chopping.
Oh, the beautiful straight edge kids!
I remember Darin going
into near convulsions
during Bitchin’ Camaro, splintering
the air with two giant black X’s
he wrote on the back of his hands.
I watched his Irish
red hair–shaved up the back & sides–
the remaining floppy mohawk
a strange window shade
over his right green eye.
Slam dancing at the ‘Binghy
was a whole crowd tango,
at its core, a ritual, or maybe
it was more experimental laboratory.
The first time I fell
in love with a woman
happened during Punk Rock Girl–
when a circle pit opened,
all 5 feet 11 inches
of Mary Marra went in ska skanking.
I followed, so transfixed
by her big black army boots,
& long tattooed arms.
I left the ‘Binghy with a bloody
nose and bruised shins.
Later my mother would say
That’s not dancing, that’s just
people running into each other!
But we understood the scuffs & scrapes
were badges of honor.
Scientists discover the rules,
the fundamental forces that govern
our universe
[called The Standard Model of Physics]
by smashing subatomic particles together
in large circular devices called colliders.
They analyze the outputs:
TeV [teraelectron volt] energies & angles,
muons & neutrinos, annihilations of matter & antimatter,
the God particle & the strange quark.
There are rules to slam dancing, too.
But, It wouldn’t be punk rock
to write them down.
The output of our aggression
created a new physics inside of us–
During the ‘Milkmen show
I learned the primordial rule of slam dancing:
knocked down onto the sticky
beer and cigarette-butted floor,
the chaotic churn of arms & legs, leather, sweat, & boots,
became a single organism whose hands
reached down for me. I felt my body become
increasingly weightless, defying
conventional physics, universal law of gravitation,
my body levitating above the highest
liberty spiked head of hair. I was like a saint in rapture.
