My first full semester in State College was the fall of ’94. My first real
girlfriend in State College was Kelly McCabe.
She grew up in the Philly suburb Lansdale, a twenty-minute drive from
Cheltenham (though when I visited her on holiday breaks, I would do so from
Gulph Mills, where my family moved that fall). Kelly’s interest in the arts was
photography— she snapped this picture of me sitting by a tree in one of the
quad areas around North Halls, where we lived. We had both chosen to live in
North Halls— it was the hip dorm, the artists’ dorm, and the queer dorm. Kelly
was 5’4 (average girl’s height), chunky, and cherubic, with blonde hair and
blue eyes. I used to liken her (drolly) to a Dutch milk-maid. I soon found a
way of annoying the entire North Halls community— when I wasn’t sitting in my
room (322 Holmes) writing songs (which also requires one to open one’s mouth
and sing, often in a fumbling fashion), I was in the Holmes basement pounding
on the piano. The windows would’ve been open from both rooms. Where academic
discipline was concerned in ’94, I didn’t have much; that came later. Most of
my discipline went into writing songs, and I was certainly working as hard as
any other PSU freshman, just on my own unique tangent.
The fall of ’94 was an
interesting time for rock music— Kurt Cobain was gone, and it looked like Billy
Corgan and Courtney Love might move in to take his place; Amer-Indie was still
ploughing away, and all the new Amer-Indie crap was always circulating around
North Halls; and we were the first on campus to take heed of what “Brit-Pop”
was. Plenty of the North Halls indie brats would laugh at me and my music—
especially when I took out my Les Paul and played lead guitar. For those kids,
the code-word for actual, substantial musical talent was “classic rock.” I
laughed at them right back. But because I knew and could play tons of Velvets
songs (for instance), I’d wind up hanging with them too.
One pleasant surprise was that
North Halls lived up to its reputation— it was a little, circumscribed world. I
was always bemused by what East Halls was in relation to us— visiting East
Halls was like visiting Kentucky.
It was all football, jocks, Long Island
tanning salon bitches and sleaze. The “circumscribed world” quality is what
North and East Halls shared. Many of the other dorms, like West and South
Halls, had a miscellaneous, grab-bag quality. All the dorms had the same food—
and oh what food it was. I don’t mean that completely ironically. The standard
meat-and-potatoes American fare was spiced up with Mexican, Italian, and
(occasionally) French imports; and everybody, even the indie brats, loved the ice-cream
machines. I, in the fall of ’94, happened to be a fastidious vegetarian freak
(which I’m not anymore); and my food tastes were obscure in the extreme. But I
didn’t starve.
What Kelly captured in this shot
was my stance before the world in ’94— I was punkishly determined to be a rock
musician at all costs. By the spring of ’95, I’d broadened enough to have
literary and theater aspirations, and was writing poems and plays. If only the
Outlaws (Outlaw Playwrights) would produce one of my one-acts— that’s what I
wanted. All in the context of taking classes and doing homework like everyone
else. Was I a bit much? Certainly; I even looked younger than my age. But North
Halls was the right place at the right time for me, and us.
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One exciting aspect of living in
North Halls was the dinners— not the food but the “meat market” aspect of
Warnock Commons, and how far different residents would go to make themselves
not only attractive but conspicuous at these meals. What could happen at dinner
was always a perpetual highlight of each of our days— not just who sat with
whom, but dialogues initiated and trysts worked towards. On a tangent, though
our dorm rooms were sardine-can small and cramped (leading to the endless
grossness of sex-in-front-of-your-roommate, or, even worse and inversely, their
sex in front of you), Warnock Commons was very deluxe— within an hour of
dinner’s conclusion, the snack bar opened and stayed open until ten or eleven.
The group I fell into with Kelly McCabe instantly was punkish— a rough crowd
for conformists or anyone not on our particular wavelength. One night in the
fall of ’95 (by which time Kelly had abandoned North Halls and we’d lost track
of her), my friend Jeremy and I decided to satisfy one of our punkish impulses
and show up at Warnock Commons in drag (I wasn’t wearing a beard and mustache
then and could still pull this off). We wimped out from doing this at dinner;
it was too major a commitment, even for us.
We settled for the compromise of
showing up at the snack bar in drag. Our friend Becca set us up with clothes—
Becca, like Jeremy, was from the Pittsburgh
area, and Becca and Jeremy had briefly gone out too. Patrick and Sam vibe.
Nothing much happened at the snack bar; it turns out, we moseyed in and moseyed
out. But I’d at least proven to myself that I could take certain
exhibitionistic plunges. One paradigmatic change which shook North Halls in the
fall of ’95 was a full-scale “hippie invasion.” Suddenly, North Halls was not
only artists and queers but Phish-fixated, Frisbee throwing, shroom-imbibing
suburban hippie types. They all lived in unisex Leete Hall (Holmes was all male
and Runkle, all female) and were always hanging out outside— they were
difficult to avoid. Sometimes, I’d write songs in the Leete basement as well as
Holmes, and one of the hippie girls from the Philly ‘burbs would come down and
smoke me up (or smoke me out, as they say on the west coast). As I found out
years later, a good amount of the weed around North Halls (and all over the
east coast) was laced— leading to the odd vista of suburbanite, day-tripping,
middle-class hippies tripped out on PCP for years at a time.
North Halls being what it was,
the artists and queers and hippies all wound up getting high together— though
the hippies weren’t punkish enough to dress in drag. Our lives were no longer
unmolested by authorities— Becca and Mandee (who me and my friends had dubbed
“North Girl” or “Cure Girl” in ’94, though she more resembled Hope Sandoval,
and who joined our circle in ’95) got busted for pot possession and had to
appear in court. I noticed then (and later experiences in New York and Philly proved this true) that I
have a natural aptitude for evading authority, and not getting nailed for my
transgressions. Becca and I were funny that semester— we slept in the same bed
number of times (both before and after the authorities at PSU separated her
from Mandee and she was forced back to Runkle) without hooking up; whereas
Mandee and I hit each other and ran. Most of us were being decadent about our
academic work (and in the early Aughts I did harsh penance for this)— Jeremy
wasn’t. He was always up shit’s creek if he went out too much, and he wouldn’t
get high. We repeated our drag trick a few times (once on Halloween, if I
remember correctly), and I learned the vagaries of walking around in pumps. Girls:
is it really worth it?
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State College in the Nineties had
quirks, and North Halls had quirks too. You’d think we wouldn’t go to frat
parties, but we did. The rules for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights were
pretty laissez faire and, where parties were concerned, anything was fair game.
Frat parties were never that much fun for me personally. I developed a taste
for hard alcohol fast in State College, rather
than beer. Of course, you couldn’t get a Jack n’ Coke at a PSU frat party; you
could only hit the keg like everyone else. They’d almost always have Bob Marley
and the Wailers blasting, or an alterna-covers band set up in the living room
(by the time I left State College even I’d
played a few frats). We usually didn’t stay long. In State
College, lots of people lived in raunchy, ugly high-rise apartment
buildings and complexes, which made the small town seem semi-urban; the parties
in these domiciles were bizarre, too. The apartments tended to be little more
than studio size— and they’d try to do the whole “kegger” set-up in them. Our
main priority was usually to find someone to share their weed with us, if we
weren’t carrying ourselves. Stoned or not, party-hopping in the dead of winter
in State College was onerous; we had to face the long-ass walk back, late at
night and stoned or drunk, to North Halls. We usually stopped at Ye Olde
College Diner (known to everyone in SC as just “the Diner”) first, which was
open all night, and where we’d get coffee to warm and sober up. Thankfully, the
dorms did have central heating.
On Sundays, we were generally
zombies; and few North Halls residents could get excited about football games.
Many of us got through our years in State College
without ever making it to a PSU game. The big campus chant (“We are/ Penn State!”)
never made it up to North Halls. As has been mentioned elsewhere, we lived in
exquisite ignorance of Joe Paterno and everything he represented, in our own
alternate universe. As winter turned to spring, North Halls turned scenic—
beyond being the most individualistic of the dorms, it was also the smallest (three
halls), and the quads were large and green. You could sit outside in March and
April and enjoy yourself. As spring sprung, there were all kinds of festivals
and mini-festivals, official and unofficial, around North Halls, too, including
Northstock, which was usually held on the converted basketball courts and which
featured some import bands and some musicians (like myself) who also lived in
North Halls. None of the other dorms had anything like Northstock, to my
knowledge; and if you decided to light up outside (which we did), the
authorities might kindly decide not to notice. In fact, State
College in spring and summer was a fantastic place to get stoned
in peace— the quaint sections of the town and campus (like North Halls) could
become beatific with the right weed around; and it was unlikely that anything
would come along to make you paranoid. To get caught out, you’d have to be
blatantly profligate (which Becca and Mandee, unfortunately, were); a
reasonable amount of discretion could always save the day.
It also became difficult, in
North Halls during the spring months, to maintain any kind of academic
discipline (by spring ’96, I’d managed to establish a low maintenance level of
such discipline, barring courses in my major); everyone wanted to be outside.
For some reason, the spring of ’96 was particularly intense, partly because
North Halls suddenly had a line in to getting as much pot as we wanted, and
many of us were being more promiscuous than usual. The energy had real
fertility and hopefulness in it, and it was difficult not to feel hopeful then.
It was a brief moment of peace which little intruded upon.
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Indie State College was a real
place. From the spring of ’96 forward, I dwelt in it at least part of the time
(until I left State College in late ’98). The
rules were the rules— to gain entrance into the charmed circles, certain
prerequisites had to be met. Obviously, you had to pledge allegiance to indie
rock music, to at least some extent, and not just the local stuff. Folkways in
these circles deemed most commercial (corporate) rock music detritus; however,
the Alternative Revolution had created a context in which indie bands like
Sonic Youth could be signed to major labels and maintain credibility, so by the
mid-Nineties in State College opinions were
fluid on that level. Holding on to vinyl and having a vinyl record player was
an inestimable advantage; and vinyl was not only hip but cheap. State College
was tiny enough that all the charmed circle indie kids would be listening to
the same records at the same time— and one facet of the State
College indie scene I appreciated, and which wasn’t replicated in
other cities’ scenes, was a scholarly attitude towards the history of rock
music. It wasn’t conservative, but preservative; and it meant you could be just
as au currant with the Chocolate Watch Band or Love’s second album with Orange
Skies on it as with Spiritualized or Guided by Voices.
Some tastes particular to State
College I didn’t share, like Robyn Hitchcock and shoe-gazer bands; but the
State College guys would sit and bullshit with you for hours on end if you had
half-decent musical tastes. Although I liked Guided by Voices, for a long time
my major hinge to these guys was Big Star and Nick Drake. The Big Star
discourses, especially, went round and round in a million circles, and I
carried them to NYC and Philly and straight into 2013. State
College hipster-ism wasn’t extreme; and you could still like the
Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, etc. These guys were scholars— they would consider anything.
What was frowned upon (unusually) was just listening to your friends and your
friends’ bands; people with catholic tastes actually got along better, which
was perfect for me. Like many scholars, these guys weren’t necessarily
ambitious— they weren’t on a quest for world domination. They could be
clannish— you couldn’t push your way into the circles. In many ways, they were
quaint, like the nicer bits of State College
itself. The White Lodge, where many Amer-Indie bands passed through, was also
quaint; set on the edge of a forest with a highway running on the other side of
it. The way the White Lodge was run influenced the Philly Free
School shows at the
Highwire— there was free booze around a good part of the time, and the vibe was
warm and congenial.
What influenced State College
indie even more was that the scene produced no conquering heroes on a national
or international level; which meant that, even if it didn’t have that high a
profile, social climbing was kept to a minimum. What I remember most distinctly
are the records I borrowed to try and get into, having caught and internalized
the scholar’s curiosity— I couldn’t get into late-era Byrds or Gram Parsons, or
Richard Thompson; but I acquired a taste for Pulp and solo Brian Eno which I’ve
never lost. State College indie was so mellow
I was stunned by the Machiavellian gymnastics in other scenes I saw later on.
If I did cross swords with the State College
indie crowd, it was for this reason— the players were extraordinarily
intelligent, bordering on brilliant, but semi-comatose nonetheless. They were
not only pot-heads but acid trippers, and I tripped with them. I learned: you
haven’t been frightened until you’ve heard Pink Moon on acid. The creepy
underbelly of State College’s quaintness revealed
itself when I tripped— and the indie crews, despite their low-key brilliance,
could be creepish. Maybe that’s why I stuck to 3rd/Sister Lovers and
Pink Moon so much in State College— that dark underbelly was my favorite part
of the town, and scene.
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The story of me and the Outlaw
Playwrights is another funny one; and, oddly enough, it begins with music. In
the fall of ’94, many of the theater department queen bees were living in North
Halls. The first mini-festival I played was backing up my friend Jason Liebman;
he was playing his songs on an acoustic, and I was playing lead on my Les Paul
behind him, in a converted North Halls lounge in Warnock Commons. In dramatic,
diva-like fashion, one of the theater girls draped herself over a chair and
made eyes at us. When the set was over, she gave us a rap— not only about the
theater department, but about what Outlaw Playwrights was. Jason didn’t seem
interested but, having some theater experience, my ears perked up. Outlaw
Playwrights did seem to be one of the few hinges the theater department had to
reaching a wider public than just theater majors— every Thursday night at
eleven p.m., they put up a student or graduate student written one-act play, in
a context open to the general public, down in the bowels of the theater
building near North Halls, in a black box theater space.
The problem was, I thought I
could go and be inconspicuous; I was wrong. Maybe because everyone from North
Halls knew me for my music; maybe because I’d done Carnegie Mellon Pre-College
for drama in the summer of ’92, and one of my fellow pre-college students was
now in the PSU drama department, and thus some kind of rep preceded me; I felt
gawked and pawed at instantly. The first time I went to Outlaws in late ’94, I
got awful butterflies. This quickly became a tradition— for my four years in State College, I couldn’t descend into those theater
building bowels without feeling like I’d just been struck by a polo mallet.
Without wanting to be smarmy or obvious, Outlaws was always a very dramatic
experience for me. As of early ’95, I was feverishly writing one-acts; but
Outlaws was clannish— I still wasn’t socially connected enough to get my plays
up there. In late ’95, I managed to get Nick Dobson’s (my gang called him “Nick
Bloke”) play, called The Gut, up; that was a decent first step; but it wasn’t
until (literally) my twenty-first birthday in ’97 that one of my one-acts went
up.
Luckily, ‘97/’98 saw a kind of
regime change. “Outlaws, the Next Generation” was much more germane to me than
the original crew, who were immersed in a good amount of pride and prejudice
just because I wasn’t actually a theater major. By ’99, I was in New York, and they’d
produced four of my one-acts, usually unthinkable for anyone but a theater
major. It’s also true that, by late ’98 when I left State College, I was in good
standing enough with the theater kids to be invited to their parties, which
were at a huge tangent to State College indie
parties. Theater parties at PSU were like little staged plays themselves;
different arranged scenes and interactions played themselves out. If one of the
major divas decided to “shotgun” you, it was an event. The theater kids had odd
taste in music, too, like Soul Coughing. I could go to their parties, but I
never got particularly comfortable with them; the unease element never changed.
Getting stoned with them was a surreal experience, for that reason— I knew it
couldn’t be that comfortable. Perhaps it was because, as I sensed, they weren’t
that comfortable with themselves. I still don’t know why they couldn’t get
loose, especially the first gen theater crew, who, from what I saw, lived their
lives as if they were staged by Ionesco. Slightly creepy.
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The poem Le Chat Noir from my
book Posit is about an actual black cat. Few in America would remember what the
original Le Chat Noir (“The Black Cat”) was— a hotspot in decadent 1890s Paris,
where denizens like Toulouse-Lautrec would indulge in absinthe, opium, and
filthily erogenous, transgressive sexual intercourse, straight or queer. Of all
the places in America to replicate the richly sleazy vibe of Le Chat Noir,
State College, Pennsylvania would not seem to be high on the list— most would
say New Orleans or San Francisco (among others) first. I wasn’t able to visit
New Orleans or San Francisco in the late Nineties; maybe they did have their
own Le Chat Noir replicant. But, oddly, State College in the Nineties did also
have its own Le Chat Noir— it was called, simply enough, the Coffee Cellar, and
to descend into the Cellar (it was below street level, adjacent a tacky
take-out pizza joint) was to submerge yourself in a subterranean realm where
there were no limits or bounds, no bottom. Of course, there was a major
difference between the Cellar and Le Chat Noir— the Cellar served coffee,
rather than booze. But, importantly, the Cellar was tolerant of substances
brought in; in other words, you could smoke whatever you wanted to over your
coffee; and it didn’t even have to be in the black-painted, mirror-laden
bathroom that you did so.
Needless to say, the sexual
raunch at the Cellar was also intense— mostly because the less green of the
teenage townie girls made it their home away from home. Many of them considered
themselves “Goth” or “vampires”— they smoked clove cigarettes and wore fetish
boutique clothing. I myself liked to wear black leather pants and a Celtic
Cross at the time. People had different ways of passing time at the Cellar—
because we were often stoned, time tended to pass strangely. There was an
acoustic piano, some kind of quiz-game machine, and a little stage where
artists occasionally performed. I spent most of my time writing— during the
fall of ’98, I was spewing out an attempt to meld poetry and theater, which was
later compressed into a one-act called Mortuary Puppies and produced by the
Outlaws in ’99 while I was in New York. It was a strange place to fall in love,
but I did fall in love with someone at the Cellar. Not all of the townie girls,
including the Goths and vampires, were bitches— and many of the scenes started
at the Cellar were continued elsewhere. As the fall of ’98 progressed, things
at the Cellar got looser and looser— not only were there heroin rings created
and oriented around the place, acid and E were easy to find, too.
As is worth mentioning, the place
was dimly lit (even during daylight hours, owing to its windowless place below
street level, though the front glass façade let in some light), had low ceilings
and amounted to a long, narrow strip; regulars like myself usually sat towards
the back. The little stage wasn’t closed off; there were tables on it. The
strip was long enough that if you lit a joint at the book, the staff wouldn’t
necessarily be able to smell the smoke at the front. Not that they’d care if
they did smell the smoke. The black-out bathroom could be a trip when you were
stoned; it was large and spacy for the long, narrow room, and couples often
went into it to hook up— the effect was half Poe, half Sixties London. I was
once tripping balls enough to get caught in there for half an hour, not knowing
or being able to remember where I was. If there was a deficit in comparison
with the original Le Chat Noir, it was that the Cellar closed early, at ten or
eleven, and there were no bohemian bars in State College.
The bar scene, in fact, was as pure Paterno as it could be. If we adjourned
elsewhere, it was to someone’s flat, or house; many of which were equipped to
extend the nights well into the morning hours.
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The center of State College
proper consisted of two parallel streets, College and Beaver (Ave.), both of
which were comprised of strips of restaurants, bars, book and record stores,
knick-knack/paraphernalia places, and, at the far end of College Ave. near South Halls,
McLanahan’s, the great all-purpose semi-supermarket outlet for PSU students.
The side streets running perpendicular to College and Beaver were more of the
same, with an emphasis on bars and pricier eateries. The Coffee Cellar was also
on one of these side streets. As has been mentioned, the bar scene in Nineties
State College was stagnant; hang-out places for jocks, would-be jocks, and
middle-of-the-road types. Away from the two-street strips, State
College was structured very much like a typical American suburb;
street after street of middle-class consonant houses; that was the surface
layer. But many of the middle-class consonant houses amounted to boarding
houses for PSU students and young State College
residents, including townies— and they (myself included by ’98) tended to live
in clusters. House-party culture in late Nineties State College depended on
these clusters— for months or years, a house could establish itself
(occasionally an apartment worked too) as a happening party venue, and receive
the elite of the State College hipsters and bohemians every time it opened its
doors.
The most fortuitous house-strip
was always West College Ave., where the houses were capacious enough to
comfortably hold a hundred guests and a band. When I first began to attend
these parties in ’95, they weren’t particularly elaborate; possibly a keg or
band, just people hanging out. By ’98, a new baroque era of State College house
parties had set in— often there’d be a nitrous tank, which meant free (or
cheap) whippets; and, in ’98, you could get not only pot at these soirees but
imported hash and opium. The pace at these parties was usually leisurely—
people would wander in and out. The social mores were not particularly rigid in
these contexts either— even though the indie kids and townies tended to
dominate the action. On West
College, sometimes you’d
see indie kids, jocks, and middle-of-the-roaders together— there were
crossroads involving music and drugs where everyone could and did converge. One
of the biggest Madame Verdurin salon/ house party locales was run by two guys who
weren’t particularly indie kids— it was colloquially known as “Bob n’ Rob’s.”
In ’98, their house parties were the biggest, and most lavish. Everyone went,
and met, and mingled, and I knew the truth even then— for the indie kids to get
the drugs (especially pot and hash) they wanted, they had to “play the game”
just like everyone else. Bob n’ Rob imposed their version of Machiavellian
politics on the indie crowd, and the indie crowd just had to accept it.
So, we all endured the middling
music being played and the kegged out ambience, and even the Guided by Voices
acolytes stood in the big lines with smiles on their faces. Truth be told, it
wasn’t that squeamish— the Bob n’ Rob set-up wasn’t all Dave Mathews Band and
sports trivia. There was, in those days, a specific kind of ska-listening State
College hipster who walked a fine line between indie snobbery and the broad
interests (including sports and beer) of an Everyman; Bob n’ Rob were
archetypal examples. They were hybrids. I got in line and drank the beer. For
me, quite honestly, it was more about gawking at Rob’s girlfriend, who I was
half in love with. On good nights, we could migrate from Bob n’ Rob’s to
something else going on. House parties weren’t particularly tight in State College in those days— there would always be some
middle-of-the-roaders around. It was to our credit that, among us, no one cared
that much, or played possum about it.
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