Ginger and Edgar were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the post-Calvinist variety. They didn’t believe in predestination, but they behaved as if it were revealed truth. Every deviation from the straight and narrow was presumed a fatal wrong turn on the one road to salvation. An oft-cited maxim was “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” albeit with a certain irony, since as belt spankers they never used an actual rod. With similar irony, they would say, “Children should be seen and not heard.” Of course they expected Pam to be able to hold up her end of a dinner-table conversation. Maybe they should have had an extra child to practice on.
She went to public school and never had much homework. She liked to play with boys. At age nine she discovered Dungeons and Dragons. At twelve, she made up an outer-space-themed role-playing game that earned her $2,000 when her father licensed it to Atari in her name. But puberty was unkind to her. Her reddish hair made pimples and freckles stand out. Her friends went from talking swords and sorcery to planning careers in the U.S. Army Rangers, where they would acquire aluminum crossbows that kill silently. Her awakening critical faculties showed her a world of strictures where she had expected freedoms. The 1970s had suggested that in maturity she would enjoy communal solidarity and LSD. The 1980s coalesced from a haze of competition and AIDS. Between her childhood and her adolescence lay a generation gap.
She resolved to become a retro hippie earth mother. She began with a feminine school-sponsored extracurricular activity, modern dance. The teacher who ran it spent her time correcting papers. Her pupils stood outside the crash-bar doors of the gym, sharing cigarettes. Nothing was taught. At the year-end performance, Pam wore a black bodysuit and tights and crawled onstage to the sound of Leo Kottke playing “Eight Miles High” on a twelve-string. She was supposed to stare at the floor, but she peeked up to see whether her parents were moved. They were reading paperbacks.
At age thirteen she discovered a higher-stakes role-playing game. Her character: drunken punk in a crumbling, segregated, crack-saturated city.
She embarked on adventures at bars downtown. Bouncers let her into hardcore punk shows for free. She had a faceless West Virginia driver’s license that said she was nineteen, so their asses were covered in case of a raid, and that’s all they cared about. Grown men with jobs and money bought her drinks until the harsh light of last call or the restroom revealed that she was too young even for cocaine. To kill time until the Metro started running, she left clubs in the company of boys who said they had drugs. She would smoke crystal meth or crack with them and deploy the energy boost in walking home.
Mostly she was meeting boys she couldn’t stand, seeing bands she didn’t like. She was so tired all the time that if she didn’t like the band that was onstage, she could put her head down on a table and sleep.
The band she loved was called Minor Threat. They laid claim to the “straight edge,” foreswearing all substances and casual sex. Before going out to trade petting for a rush, she would draw Xs on the backs of her hands with black marker to signify her belonging to the straight-edge movement. She was well-read enough to know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. She had seen what the striving for integrity had done to her father and mother. Dependence on a job supplying the troops had turned them into warmongering fascists, and hearing them say “I love you” made her sick. In contrast, Minor Threat’s integrity thrilled her, and she would have given anything to hear their singer, Ian MacKaye, say “I love you.” But she stood face-to-face with him only once, and she offered him sex. For self-evident reasons, she thought it was the most valuable thing she possessed. When he ignored her, she realized her mistake. Sex is not scarce. Girls with sex are like the stars of the sky.
By teaching her to value originality, the punk movement led her to the realm of art. How she longed to try hard and eventually to be known for making something the likes of which had never existed!
The summer before tenth grade she founded a band of her own, the Slinkies. Since practicing in a garage would have required asking someone’s parents to move the car, they used their bedrooms. Rehearsal was a quiet affair, if not in the opinion of their families.
At the Slinkies’ first and final gig, on a Sunday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Bethesda, they plugged into the previous band’s equipment. None of them knew what a monitor was for. Pam couldn’t hear her guitar after the drums came in, so she turned up its volume knob. It still didn’t play audibly, so she cranked her amplifier. She sang as loud as she could and couldn’t hear that either. The bassist crouched by her amp, trying to hear herself, and it must have been feeding back like a motherfucker, but nobody onstage could make out what she was playing, not even her. Into the clattering tornado of sound, Pam chanted her doggerel about sabotage in the voice of a tone-deaf auctioneer. The room emptied fast, except for two boys in black dusters who stayed through all three songs and said the Slinkies were a dead ringer for late-period Germs. That was not what she wanted to hear. The Germs’ singer, Darby Crash, had killed himself in 1980, so by implication their sound was not avant-garde.
GINGER AND EDGAR WERE DIGNIFIED PEOPLE, NOT EASILY INDUCED TO YELL. BUT WHEN she would stumble in at five thirty in the morning on a weekday, having misplaced her skirt, her father couldn’t help but intuit that she would be skipping school, and it made him crazy. Her mother yelled at her, starting when her father went to work and ending when she left for school. At times when no one else was yelling, she missed it, so she yelled instead. For two years, there were no conversations in the household that didn’t involve yelling.
Her father developed an unfortunate habit of threatening to throw her out. Her mother would remonstrate, and he would relent. To make the mixed message complete, she would imply that her defense of her daughter betrayed excess motherly love, because in truth she deserved to be thrown out. The threat didn’t seem harsh to either parent. Neither of them meant it seriously, though they expected her to move out when she reached eighteen. WASP culture had arisen in the poverty of desolate feudal places. Intergenerational solidarity had been impracticable in Anglo-Saxony, where brides required dowries and younger sons wandered off to settle distant territories like so many beavers. Pam’s grandparents, who were alive when she was little, lived in Florida and Arizona. The Florida ones gave her ten dollars every Christmas to spend as she chose. The Arizona ones had an Airstream travel trailer with a bumper sticker that read, WE’RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE.
She didn’t apply to colleges. Instead she told her parents, in her junior year of high school, that she was going to New York to train as an artist.
She didn’t say what medium, just “artist.” She asked for her Atari money from when she was twelve. It had been earning stagflation-style interest and was, she calculated, sufficient to establish her in an apartment in Manhattan. The money was held in her name as Series EE Savings Bonds. Her parents, being no stupider than their daughter, kept the bonds in a safe-deposit box and wouldn’t say which bank. They said the money was earmarked for her education. There was disagreement as to the true nature of education. The yelling in the house attained exceptional duration and pitch.
The upshot was that in September 1986, as her senior year was officially starting, Pam marched down to the Greyhound station—on foot, because she had only the seventy dollars she’d earned by selling her father’s audio receiver and VCR to a pawn shop—and boarded a bus to Port Authority.
From her seat on the smelly bus, the sight of the towers of Manhattan from the cloverleaf above the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel was the most exciting event of her life, definitely including all her experiences of sex, music, nature, and drugs combined.
She emerged to the sidewalk at Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Street wisdom acquired in downtown D.C. told her it was not a place she needed to be spending time. She saw whores with recently hit faces. She walked east. To a mind unschooled in construction techniques, the city seemed carved from the living rock. Sheer cliff faces surrounded her on every side. Cave dwellings teemed with fairies,