Zuccotti Park is an expanse of granite benches and a few granite tables, dotted by trees. There are sleeping bags on the ground, rectangles of cardboard, coats, a guitar left on a bench that reads, “This guitar kills cops.” People at tables have laptops open in front of them. At the lower end of the park, a patchwork quilt of signs has been laid carefully on the ground, like a tapestry of voices. A naked woman wearing only panties stands at the sidewalk. There is something written on her chest about “the naked truth.” I don’t remember exactly because I didn’t want to stare. She is holding up a sign that says, “I didn’t say look, I said listen.”

On one side of the park, a general assembly is being held. A large crowd sits in a circle, maybe a couple of hundred strong. Because the police has disallowed the use of bullhorns, the crowd repeats, in unison, the statements made by each speaker, so that they can be heard. At the front of the park, a few people stand holding up signs so they can be seen by the passing buses of tourists and the choked traffic of Broadway. They are joined by a man playing a drum, energetically, and a guitarist whose yellow guitar strap reads, “Police line, do not cross.” An impromptu, lively dance breaks out beside another man playing the guitar. Members of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra gather, playing horns, drums, and a clarinet. They launch into a rendition of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” A march on Wall St. is scheduled for 3:30. On time, a man rushes into the park yelling, “March in five minutes!” I join the march, a boisterous affair chanting and singing to the accompaniment of the marching band.

Many of the people present are counterculture types, with matted hair and dirty faces. Some you can smell as they pass by. But I am in no way put off. These used to be my people — the anarchists, dreamers, and travelers — when I was a volunteer for Food Not Bombs for several years. But I don’t talk to anyone, except for the “vibe watcher” who flits by with a bouncy smile to ask how I am doing. There are other types in the park as well, who are part of this effort to Occupy Wall Street. There are lawyers in suits and ties there to lend their expertise. There are students and other mainstream-looking folks whose professions — or lack thereof — I cannot guess. A well-dressed woman in trendy sandals and short, well-coiffed gray hair joins the march, delighted. She carries a sign picked up off the ground that says, “Castrate the bull.” It is decorated with an illustration of a bull with his testicles cut off and left bleeding on the ground.

This is my second visit to Zuccotti Park to support this effort. I would do more, but I am so exhausted all the time that I can only offer up scraps of my time. I am so disgusted with the state of affairs in the world that I can’t tolerate standing idly by. Parasites who speculate on Wall St. and produce nothing of value get rich by placing cynical bets on the misery of others. Wall St. is not, as we are led to believe, a barometer of the health of the real economy in which actual goods and services are produced, it is a parasitic structure built around gambling on the future perceived value of stocks and commodities. As long as greed fuels speculators to place larger and larger bets, the face value of stocks continues to increase (regardless of the actual value of the companies and goods that the stocks and commodities are meant to represent) until the bubble is no longer sustainable, and it bursts. The speculators take home the profits they have amassed along the way, and the unwary small investors watch as the real worth of their savings dwindle. An economy based on gambling is not and will never be sustainable. More importantly, since it does not produce, it cannot create real wealth that can lift anyone’s boat except its own.

As a result, economic inequality is soaring. Poverty is rising. And the very-wealthy few are getting richer — and make no mistake, their wealth is amassed at the expense of the many.

The grubby encampment in Zuccotti Park may seem like a counter-culture carnival or — less charitably — a congregation of wingnuts, but it is a truly heroic effort to call attention to a fundamental issue that is keeping — and further burying — the majority in poverty while enriching a tiny minority.

Check out Occupy Wall Street’s website, and articles in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Guardian. (There are many more if you search Google news.) For background on the financial system, read this excellent and simply stated article: The Financial Economy and the Real Economy.

When Kurt Cobain died, I was devastated. The man had been whispering his tortured pain into my ear, and I had listened intently, but I had not thought of him, not specifically, as an actual person: he was, to me, the disembodied beauty of his work. I had never seen Nirvana live, and now he was dead. I vowed I would never be so stupid and careless again.

When I read that Green Day would be playing Lollapalooza in Houston, I was dying to see them in person. All I knew about how they might have looked were the tiny black and white photos in Dookie’s cassette insert. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity — to see them at last after I had heard them so thoroughly and clearly for weeks — but I had no idea that I would be carried away by a tidal wave.

Bill and I joined the expectant crowd fidgeting at the front of the stage in the huge, muddy field that was Houston’s Raceway Park. Thousands of amped-up, sweaty-faced teenage boys were thronged before the stage, vibrating with anticipation. Tibetan monks came out and blessed the stage, in a ceremony that was stirring and somber. One of the members of the Beastie Boys came out with them briefly, and the crowd surged in his presence, which should have been a clue as to what was about to break forth. The instant the first note hit, a churning mosh pit broke out. Bill, who was a weary veteran of a Dead Kennedys show or two, had to pull me bodily out of the melee, like dragging a drowning victim from the ocean. At a slightly safer distance, I watched Green Day on that enormous stage: three skinny, snarling boys making a huge, intoxicating sound. Billie Joe was right there. Right. There. Shhh, I’m whispering. He was right there, yelling “Fuck you!” Yesss, I love you too. I mean, fuck you! Punk fucking rock. I forgot to breathe.

Loving Green Day was refreshing and uncomplicated, like a summer rainstorm. If Kurt Cobain had been an itimidating, gloomy poet, Billie Joe was the kid I had grown up with, the one who liked to turn the hose on me when we were running around in the garden, to make me shriek. He had a maniacal glint in his eye, but he was ferocious in the same way that a kitten is ferocious: he hissed and spit menacingly, but he was the fluffiest, cutest spitting thing in the whole world.

A day at a concert is one of those rare days in which you are fully present, when the air is bright and brimming with infectious joy. Every other day is one of fretful anticipation, of wondering what to do with yourself, what you should tackle next, whether you should work on a painting or go to the store for some orange flavored seltzer, and actually pondering this as if it were a meaningful question that has a difficult answer. A day at Houston Raceway Park is not an easy day. It’s very very hot, and there are huge crowds. The ground is mushy with mud. You want some water but the vendors are so far away and the lines are so long. There are golf carts speeding by on the edges of the crowd, carrying crew members and band members, and you wonder if you might perchance see the members of Green Day trundling by, and then you wonder why that should matter to you. You are not a disrespectful, fawning sort of fan, so why would you care if you saw them outside of their element, which is on the stage? And yet, you do care, and it feels embarrassing and small-minded.

Once Green Day have finished playing their set, then the rest of the day is one of remembering what it was like for that moment, that special instant that lasted an hour and that you want to now recapture forever. Even now, as I am writing this, I can remember how hot and damp it was, how blindingly sunny, and how exhausting. I can remember the other bands I saw — L7, Nick Cave, and Shonen Knife — and that I was so tired i didn’t stay for the headlining band, which was the Smashing Pumpkins. Shonen Knife was great: three Japanese women playing Ramones-inspired power pop with incredibly silly lyrics. They were on the second stage, so the crowd was smaller and thinner, but no less enthusiastic. When the band asked for requests, everyone wanted the same song: “Bison.” (”He’s got a right to live although he’s very very ill-shaped…”) But mostly I remember Green Day, with a precision that is seared in my brain because it was so special. Every song was a cut gem, as translucent and mouth-popping as hard candy. Bursts of blue sapphires and red rubies and green emeralds showered the sky. They were the same songs I knew by heart and loved so dearly, only bigger, louder, and straight from the three boys of Green Day in their skinny and manic flesh.

Billie Joe had blue hair and was wearing cut-off Dickies that looked like they had been lopped off with a pen knife, exposing his little knobby knees. Tre’s hair was green, held in place with little-girl barrettes, and Mike was wiry and manic. But the antics at a Green Day concert were The Billie Joe Show. He was full of cackling glee, laughing at all of us idiots gawking at him. He dangled a booger out of his nose, then snorted it back up. He lobbed a gob of spit into the air and then proudly caught it back again, with a glint in his eye. He went up to the amp and created a feedback loop, played a crazy riff for a few seconds and then said, “Sorry, I just had a testosterone attack.” He led the crowd in a brief rendition of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” then he laughed at us for buying into a sing-along of such a stupid song. He dared all the “fucking hippies” in the crowd to throw their Birkenstocks up onto the stage. He dedicated a song to a guy in the crowd, whom he pointed out, wearing a black shirt. The song was “Chump.” He called another guy up on stage to play guitar, but the guy had no clue so he sent him packing. He smashed the microphone against the floor on his hands and knees, banging it over and over until it was destroyed.

There was method in Billie Joe’s adrenaline-fueled madness. It was hard to say what it was, exactly, because it moved at a thousand miles an hour, shifting from idiocy to destruction to delighted laughter, but his performance appeared to be calibrated, in spite of the apparent chaos. There was a strange genius in his stage presence, which on the surface was a lot of joyful mischief. It was intentionally transformative. Spitting and snarling are punk rock staples, but it was different coming from him. There was no hate in his anger, only a self-deprecating but sharp sense of finely-tuned disgust. All of his fuck yous only made the crowd love him more.

I was a little confused by his antics and wondered if I was exactly getting the point (I turned to Bill and said, “Are they gonna play another song?”), but I was mesmerized by this strange little man giving every ounce of himself, down to his snot and spit. I knew he was doing it for me, for all of us who stood in awe in that huge field, holding our breaths. He gave us everything: his spit, snot, and stupid jokes; his skinny little body; his heartfelt and wondrous music; his boyish voice; his very dignity. (It’s no coincidence he penned the line, “I’m losing what’s left of my dignity, a small price I’ll pay to see that you’re happy.”) Take it all, it’s all for you. Thank you, Billie Joe, from the pit of my little heart. You don’t know how happy it’s made me.

Fluke, a punk zine that has been continually published for the last twenty years, has just put out its 20th anniversary issue. One of the features of this issue is a ten-page interview with Green Day’s Jason White, who was one of Fluke Zine’s original founders.

Jason is an unassuming guy. He’s kind of bashful about being interviewed by an old friend, for a zine he himself worked on in its early days. But that’s what makes this interview great. It’s conducted between friends, by an interviewer who knows Jason’s earliest history with punk rock (the two met when Jason was 14), and who is also aware — how could he not be? — about Jason’s current world traveling, among superstars of rock and roll. We get Jason’s stories about playing at the Grammys, and meeting the Rolling Stones and Tom Waits, but also his account of his first band, which he played in in the seventh grade, and of the shows he saw as a kid in Little Rock, including Green Day. “That was a great show and obviously it made some kind of impression on me.” He tells about meeting Aaron Cometbus in Memphis in 1991, when Jason’s band was supposed to open for Green Day, but Green Day didn’t show up until after the show was over. Aaron was traveling with Green Day, and Jason was thrilled because he was such a big fan of Aaron’s band, Crimpshrine. Jason and Aaron later became roommates, and that was how Jason came to play in Pinhead Gunpowder. At the time, Billie only remembered him as “That guy we met in Memphis who played us that cover of [Crimpshrine’s] ‘Easy Answers’” He said, “He can sing, let’s get him to try out.”

There’s lots more: how Jeff Matika came to join the band, what it’s like to play with Green Day in front of tens of thousands, what backstage is like at a Green Day concert — “not a bunch of fucking around and getting drunk or bullshitting with people; we have a job to do and we’re there to do it.” Plus Jason’s early experiences and the bands he was in before joining Green Day as tour guitarist. All in an easygoing, flowing style. It’s the next best thing to sitting down and chatting with Jason yourself.

You can order a copy of Fluke #9 by sending $4 cash to Fluke Fanzine, PO Box 24957, Tempe, AZ 85285. You’ll be glad you did. More info: Fluke Fanzine.

The first time I saw Green Day live was at Lollapalooza in 1994. The sound boomed over the vast, muddy field of Houston’s Raceway Park. The songs were the same ones I loved so completely, just bigger, and — oh! — straight from the boys of Green Day in their skinny and manic flesh. Every song was a gem, as translucent and mouth-popping as hard candy. Bursts of blue sapphires and red rubies and green emeralds showered the sky.

Billie Joe had a crazy, maniacal glint in his eye, but he was ferocious in the same way that a stray kitten is ferocious: it hisses menacingly if you get too close, baring its sharp little teeth, but it’s the fluffiest, cutest hissing thing in the whole world. No matter how much spit and how many fuck-yous Billie Joe lobbed into the air, you couldn’t not love him to pieces.

In the middle of “Paper Lanterns,” Billie Joe started up a sideshow of his own. He dangled a booger out of his nose until it was about two feet long, then snorted it back up. He went up to the amp and created a feedback loop, played a crazy riff for a few seconds and then said, “Sorry, I just had a testosterone attack.” He led the crowd in a rendition of “We’re not gonna take it,” then he laughed at us for buying into a sing-along of such a stupid song. He called up a guy onto the stage to play guitar, but the guy had no clue so he sent him packing. He smashed the microphone against the floor on his hands and knees, banging it over and over until it was destroyed.

I was a little confused by his antics and wondered if I was exactly getting the point (I turned to Bill and said, “Are they gonna play another song?”), but I was mesmerized by this strange little man giving every ounce of himself, down to his snot and spit. I could feel that the clowning around was done out of love. He was doing it for me, for all of us who stood in awe in that huge field, holding our breaths. He was giving us everything: his spit, snot, and stupid jokes, his skinny little body, his music, his voice, his dignity. (It’s no coincidence he wrote the line, “I’m losing what’s left of my dignity, a small price I’ll pay to see that you’re happy.”) Take it, he was saying, it’s all for you. Thank you, Billie Joe, from the pit of my little heart. You don’t know how happy it’s made me.

When I taught Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie to ninth graders, they could not understand how a character like Laura could be so terrified of social encounters and so completely unable to bring herself to act. But I could understand perfectly, because I felt frozen in place myself. What I never understood were the descriptions of human interactions, in books, that didn’t reference the disquieting otherness of other people, their constantly shifting focus and changeability, and how intrusive and alarming it feels. Other people are like the patches of light that flicker on the ceiling when the sunlight filters through the trees outside: constantly in motion and impossible to grasp. The difference is that unlike the patches of light, other people can see you, and you must not be caught staring. It took me years to realize that this is not a universal experience, that not everyone dreads having to speak to another person or be part of a conversation. But I feel on the spot, caught with nowhere to run. I have nothing to say, nothing waiting to roll off my tongue, except maybe to express annoyance, or anger. But that is the last thing I should allow to slip out. I’m stuck trying to be pleasant, and, since I have nothing to say, trying to arrange my expression into a faint, benign smile. If I speak, I might trip up the flow of conversation by saying something that falls flat, or worse, I might unknowingly utter an unintended insult that goes splat on the floor, where everyone looks at it, aghast.

When I willed myself to walk out of suburban New Jersey to join the teeming life on the streets of Manhattan and the scruffy scene that surrounded [the community center that will not be named], I had also willed myself to make the conscious decision that I would set aside the feeling of uneasiness I had about being around other people, and I would act from a perspective of curiosity and acceptance of whomever I came across. I spoke to strangers in the park, people at train stations, homeless men who came out to Food Not Bombs. I didn’t initiate conversations, but if someone talked to me, I would listen and respond, rather than looking for an excuse to get away.

I was in the park eating my lunch when a man in coveralls and a grizzled beard stopped and asked me where I was from. I am from Italy, and he was from Croatia. He asked me if I watched soccer, and then if I watched the matches with my boyfriend. I said no, with my father. We spoke briefly about soccer, he told me about Croatia, and then I finished my falafel sandwich and got up to leave. He became agitated, urged me to stay, and, as I was walking away, he called out, “I love you!” I didn’t find this encounter creepy, as one might expect. It was, to me, only a reminder of how many are alone and yearning. I wondered whether I attracted the lonely and desperate because my own aloneness was written all over my face.

The park was a different place when I was there with Food Not Bombs, with a purpose. The people who made the park their home were used to us, but many of them thought we were a bit kooky. Why are you doing this? Are you religious? Is it for school credit? Actually, we’re against organized religion, and no, we get no school credit. Saying “We want to help people,” sounded self-important and condescending, so we would say it was a social occasion, a chance to get together with our friends. Or we explained that Food Not Bombs has a political message, that food is a right and should not be wasted but reclaimed when it has been needlessly discarded. We all sat there together: the punks, the homeless, and the hapless, with our paper cups of soup. When a fight started to break out between two men, and one man simply said to the other, “You stay here and fight, and I’ll just walk away.”

A man came up to us and asked if we wanted “works.” I had no idea what that meant. Caroline, who was 16, said, “We don’t have jobs, but we’re not looking for work.” The man just stared, uncomprehending. Then William stepped in and said, “Needles. He’s asking if we want needles.” To shoot up heroin. “Ohhh. No thanks,” we said, smiling politely, “we’re good.”

William was one of the Food Not Bombs volunteers, and he was himself homeless. We met him in the park. He was a very smart and articulate man, and an artist, but he heard voices that told him terrible things. He believed aliens were real and that he had seen them, and that they had warned him. About what I’m not sure. It pained him that I was indifferent to the warning. Most nights he took the bus to the shelter on Ward Island, and every morning he walked over 100 blocks back down to the Lower East Side. He had cultivated a friendly, unthreatening manner, with kind of a sing-song delivery to his voice, but whenever I ran into him on the street, and I saw him before he had seen me, the painful, angry scowl he wore on his face was frightening.

The last I heard of him, someone from the anarchist scene had bought him a bus ticket to Florida.

Listening to music is like looking into another world, one that is brighter, hyper-real, more energetic and heady. It’s a world you want to step right into, like Alice stepping through the looking glass. But when the song ends, it evanesces. You can capture a moment of magic, you can sing along, which makes you feel a little included, and then the song ends. All you can do is put on another song. Or listen to the same one, obsessively, over and over. When I first heard Dookie in 1994, I only knew Green Day through their songs, and it was as if they inhabited that world, the one conjured up by the songs. It wasn’t about the lyrics for me, which were descriptive of their actual lives, but the music itself, which created, all on its own, a feeling of wonder. I wanted to be in that world, but it wasn’t a real place. It was only a feeling.

What do you de every day? Wash the dishes, go to the store. Curl up at home with your sweetie. Talk about art and politics. Watch TV. Read. Those are the things I did with my days when I first heard Green Day. I didn’t have a boring life. I was interested in ideas and art and politics. But I didn’t have the kind of heady experience that was hinted at in the music I loved. And I didn’t have the kind of uncompromising beliefs that the punk rock scene, which I had learned about through Green Day, held so dear. I was more cerebral and less excited.

I had been sort of mystified as to what Green Day was about when I first started listening to them. I don’t think I trusted my own judgment, which told me they were musically wonderful and had emotional depth. But I also knew that theirs were simple, bold melodies, and that their lyrics were about being barely-grown kids, with confused wishes and yearnings that unfolded in late nights spent drinking and smoking weed. Not really the stuff of awe and wonder. Because I had an avid, insatiable curiosity about Green Day, I read every article that came out, but when I did I found out that the rest of the world seemed to see them as mugging cartoon characters, sticky bubble gum for addled teenagers. I wondered exactly why their music spoke to me as poignantly as it did.

But there was something else in the articles, besides the condescending outlook of the authors. There were Green Day’s own words, quoted, which stood as a counterpoint to the music critics’ detachment and ennui. Even though no one seemed to want to listen, the guys in the band talked about where they came from, the scene that spawned them, which was both uncompromisingly serious about its core values but also extravagantly silly, and even loving.

I didn’t know, before I heard Green Day, that there could be anything so pure and perfect, so grubby and improbably inspirational. And I was awed by the spirit that had allowed it to flourish, within the scene that believed so fiercely in being direct and honest. I too wanted to believe that there was a kind of goodness, a stalwart set of values that are both headily idealistic and giddily fun. What was there in my life that I could change to become like this wonderful new world that I had only read about, and listened to in the songs I loved so much? Green Day was like the boy you have a crush on because he is so brash and confident and beautiful. You don’t just wish you could be with him while you gaze at him hopefully from a distance, you want to be him. Hearing Green Day’s songs filled me with a terrible yearning. But I didn’t know what to do with it, where to put these feelings of vague wishes and a desire for a transformation of some kind.

The punks at [the community center that will not be named] didn’t care about Green Day one way or the other. The people who booked the shows were only interested in bands with a political message, so Green Day was irrelevant to them. When a sloppy, funny non-political punk band played at the center, Nate sneered that they sucked. I found the band drunkenly funny and charming, and much more listenable than the dreary, angry sameness of hardcore, but this band was not political, therefore they sucked. While cutting up vegetables and washing up pots and pans for Food Not Bombs, we had to listen to Assück: guys growling unintelligibly against a barrage of raging noise, their guttural screams emerging as if from a grave. (We had discussions as to whether their name should be pronounced ass-sook or ass-suck. I still don’t know the answer, and it’s tearing me up….) Bands like these were okay to see live, for their pure rage, but listening to them while washing dishes…?

I had my own favorite mix tape, which I liked to listen to while walking across the Williamsburg Bridge (on the bridge no one can hear you singing along, off key), but I was too self-conscious to play it around the other volunteers at the center. It had all my favorite bands: Green Day, Screeching Weasel, The Pist, the Descendents, the Mr. T Experience, Pinhead Gunpowder. None of them were hardcore bands, with the exception of The Pist, whose name is pretty self-descriptive. But The Pist has some melody to go with their gruff vocals. They even have the occasional guitar break. Screeching Weasel is snarling, but with a funny, sardonic wit. And the Mr. T Experience is sweeter than candy. I had discovered all of these bands after I had become interested in Green Day, so that even if I had been willing to defend my choices to some of the more humorless punks, I felt like a Johnny-come-lately. Even the Descendents, which had been around since my youth, I had only known about since my interest in Green Day.

I don’t know if I was more self-conscious about liking bands like The Pist, that are so out of my timid and frumpy character, or geeky pop punk bands like the Mr. T Experience, that are just so goofy, and also would appear to be out of character for me, since I tend to come off as serious and morose. And Green Day? Alas, there isn’t any context, it seems, in which liking the bright melodies of Green Day, favored by mainstream teens and suburban housewives, is not fraught with embarrassing contradictions and sheepish admissions.

I appreciate music with a kick, even an assault, but it has to have at least a beat of some sort. Sal, who had blue dreads and flesh-tunnel earlobe piercings, caught me bobbing my head to a tape of Aus Rotten while we were making soup for Food Not Bombs. It had been a spontaneous, unselfconscious reaction to the song. I laughed and said, “Shhh, don’t tell anyone. I’m a secret punk.”

Aus Rotten had played a benefit for Food Not Bombs and had attracted such a large crowd that they had raised $1000. Since Food Not Bombs spent almost no money — nearly all the food we used was donated or dumpstered — $1000 was a large amount of money. Aus Rotten was one of the hardcore shows that I helped clean up after, as a FNB volunteer. And… Jesus! The place looked like it had been hit by a punk rock tornado. There was a used maxipad stuck to the floor, and a gob of spit or clear throw-up so big that Caroline said, “It looks like a fish.” The rule was that everyone had to clean up his or her own vomit, but there had been such a crush of people that it was impossible to find whoever had been responsible.

I didn’t usually volunteer at the hardcore shows. I felt like an interloper, among the aggressively attired punks, all in black with dreads or mohawks, and black bandannas around their necks. The one time I was taking money at the door with another volunteer, a guy came up and took a swing at him, in the tiny alcove that was the center’s entryway. I tried to restrain the guy, putting my arms around his waist from the back, but since I didn’t have his arms it was totally ineffectual. Brawls were not my area of expertise. When several people came from inside the center to help, I handed another volunteer the wad of cash I was holding and went upstairs. I was done doing door, for good.

The well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey were exactly like the suburban neighborhoods in the books I had read as a kid, at the American school in Brazil, when I had thought that neighborhoods like these were only a literary convention. Nothing in real life could be so picture-perfect. Shady sidewalks were laid out under huge, leafy trees. Gleaming brand-new cars rolled peacefully, and infrequently, along the quiet streets. Every house was pristine and tidy, many with shiny brass numerals on the door and a lawn too green to be nature’s doing. There were never any people outside, except for the occasional crew of gardeners, and me, with my parents, taking daily strolls in the afternoons through the eerie, silent loveliness, the bright fallen leaves of early fall scattered on the ground.

I had left my home and my small but contented life in Houston because my chronic exhaustion had become so overwhelming that I could no longer work, not even part time at a stationery store, which had been my last job. I had become frazzled and lost, too weary to cope with the day-to-day. Reluctantly, I had made the decision to move in with my parents in New Jersey. The house was lovely and still, with lace curtains in the windows and glowing antique furniture. Every afternoon at four o’clock we had tea and cookies, sitting at the dining room table.

When we had lived in Italy, going out for a stroll after tea-time meant seeing our acquaintances out strolling as well, walking the length of the city’s central avenue back and forth, offering polite hellos to passersby. In the New Jersey suburbs, walking was an experience in unreality. We stopped to look at the leaves on shrubs and commented on their shininess.

Other than my parents, and my sister who came up from Pennsylvania on most weekends, I didn’t speak to anyone, unless you count saying “Thank you” to the clerk at Walgreen’s. On Halloween, three rambunctious teenage boys came to the door. They asked for all the leftover candy, reasoning that no one else was going to come around to beg for treats at this late hour (about 8 o’clock). I gave them handfuls of candy, wishing that they would take me away with them, to share jokes and laugh in the warm Halloween night.

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There’ wasn’t a lot for me to do at the house. I crocheted little critters and made drawings of my mother’s silver pitchers and salt shakers, while I watched CNN for hours and became increasingly disgusted at its insistence on reporting the fatuous and pointless while the majority of the people in the world struggled in silence. In 1997 the top news story was the death of Princess Diana. The coverage was incessant. There were also reports on the birth of septuplets and the suicide deaths of the members of a cult. Meanwhile, back at the Planet Earth ranch, three billion people lived in desperate poverty. Twenty thousand died every day from lack of food. Ten thousand of them were children. Why were these people not on the news? Could anyone have argued that they were less important than the members of a suicide cult?

On the rare occasion that chronic poverty got any news coverage, it was to show the pitiful, sad faces of hungry children, in reports no more insightful than the late-night commercials that showed Sally Struthers close to tears over the wide-eyed children with dirty faces who would thrive for only the price of a daily cup of coffee.

I knew intuitively that a problem this large had to be systemic. There couldn’t be three billion people who just needed to try harder, as the conservative rhetoric would have had the public believe. That point of view was clearly absurd. But in the mainstream media, there was no meaningful alternative rhetoric. Even to those who cared, it was merely sad and regrettable that so many were suffering. Hand-wringers argued that perhaps poverty could be conquered with aid and development. But as shameful as it was that there wasn’t more aid being offered, I knew that couldn’t be the solution to a problem so vast and far-reaching. There had to be an underlying flaw in the system, but at the time I didn’t know what it was.

I didn’t want to become angry and despondent. These were the precise feelings I was trying desperately to get away from. My chronic exhaustion had left me so out of sorts that I took on the fucked up facts of the world as a personal affront. So I tried another tack, that of acceptance, and I found that I still cared about injustice but found it easier to acknowledge, intellectually rather than with a stabbing pain to the abdomen. The darkly cynical movie title “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” became a kind of mantra.

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I knew about [the community center that will not be named] from reading about it in MaximumRocknRoll, which I devoured monthly. (After discovering Green Day, I had become enthralled with the punk scene that had spawned the band.) I knew that the community center had punk rock shows, and that it was some sort of anarchist-ish space. I had never known any anarchists except through reading about them in the grubby newsprint pages of MaximumRocknRoll, but I was so disgusted with the political bullshit in the mainstream media and the terrible suffering of the billions who were cast aside and exploited that I was sold on anarchism’s heady ideals of uncompromising social justice.

After almost a year of daily strolls through the quiet suburban streets, and my mother’s Italian cooking and crisp, clean sheets, I felt almost human, just maybe ready to take a step out into the world. I called [the community center that will not be named] and got a recording with a rundown of upcoming events. The voice alone, of an earnest, young guy, was like a beacon calling to me from across the staticky hum of the phone line.

The commuter train from New Jersey to Manhattan was only a block away from the house. I went down to [the community center that will not be named], and I looked at the building, which was a shabby Lower East Side tenement on a grimy street. There were posters and band flyers taped up haphazardly in the dim doorway alcove, and some illegible graffiti scrawled on the brickwork. The building looked like a squat, which it had been until just a few weeks earlier. There was supposed to be some sort of Kung Fu film festival going on, but there were no signs of life. The center didn’t have a window on its storefront. I didn’t dare try the door.

When I called again, I got a live person, and I asked her about volunteering. She seemed slightly annoyed, thinking I was angling to get into the Saturday punk shows for free, but she told me that Food Not Bombs cooked on Sundays at noon and served food in a nearby park around 3 o’clock, and I could just show up, whenever I wanted.

I went out to the park on the following Sunday, slightly anxious about stepping into this scruffy scene of outcasts and righteous misfits that I had only read about, but hopeful about the new world of possibilities that it might, perhaps, entail. It had recently stopped raining, and, as I was walking up out of the subway, the clouds looked like a painting, brushed on in thick strokes in a pinkish, glowing yellow. By the time I arrived at the edge of the park, only minutes later, they had turned hot pink and looked a little cheesy. It would be lovely if there were a scene like this one to fill one with wonder every day, to tinge one’s vague hopes with an air of new beginnings.

At the Northwest corner of the park, there were two quiet, slightly grubby girls, sitting on a bench beside a shopping cart festooned with an askew, hand-painted banner spattered with some drips of soup. On it, the words “Food Not Bombs” were painted around FNB’s carrot-in-a-fist logo. In the cart there was a large white bucket of vegetable soup, and a large pot with mounds of gluey white rice in it. Anarchists and sundry punk types don’t do fake-friendly social niceties, so the girls were direct, almost brusque. They asked me if I wanted some food, which looked a bit dubious to me, so I declined, trying not to look like I thought their food looked dubious, and probably failing. I said that I was there to volunteer, and they nodded. I sat down on the bench, wondering what to talk about. I was wearing a dirty green sweater and torn up canvas sneakers, but I felt a bit overdressed. I knew enough not to wear any labels or brand-name shoes. I had covered up the logo on my floppy shoulder bag with a band-aid, which was perhaps a bit too cute, a slight faux pas. “Does your purse have a boo-boo?” one of the girls asked.

When I’m in an expectant mood, and I’m walking around humming anxiously to myself, I notice that most of the people I come across seem downtrodden and bitter, trudging along the street with expressions of grim determination. I suppose I look that way most of the time myself. Some of the homeless people who lived in the park during the day were churlish and angry, as I most certainly would be if I were homeless, but others seemed tickled and amused by this band of scruffy layabouts who showed up weekly with soup. I called out to a passing homeless man, “Would you like some soup?” He lit up. “I wanna get married!” he shouted. I had baked a batch of vegan peanut butter cookies and decorated them by criss-crossing them with the tines of a fork, the way peanut butter cookies are traditionally marked. This added touch was a big hit in the park: the cookies were just like grandma used to make.

The homeless people had a lot of stories — some were wacky, most were just true and heartbreaking. A skinny blonde woman with crazy hair and garish lipstick, who twitched in the way that some drug addicts do (though I was not familiar enough with drugs to know what caused that exactly) shared her beauty tips. Since she couldn’t afford dental work, she said she glued press-on nails on her teeth. “They look really good,” she assured us, though she was not wearing them at the moment. There were three Eastern European men in woolen caps who told us they had been required to take workfare jobs in exchange for their public assistance. They cleaned up the streets in Midtown, but they couldn’t afford to eat at any of the establishments there, so they had to skip lunch. In spite of working, they were still homeless.

Stella was a tiny slip of a girl, with long black hair and a rare smile that only now and then crept over her face. She said she had figured out that the way to walk down the street without being bothered by lewd men was to look angry all the time. She laughed at this and then quickly recomposed her face into a scowl. Tia played guitar in an all-girl punk band. She was tiny as well. She wore an enormous drab-green coat with fake fur around the hood that her small frame drowned in. She worked as a bike messenger. When a car had hit her, she had jumped up off her bike and snarled at the guy, “You hit me. Gimme fifty bucks!” He had been so startled that he had stammered, “I only have forty.” She had snapped back, “I’ll take it.” She told this story cackling, and showed us the large bruise on her thigh.

The squatters who stopped by from the nearby buildings, where Stella also lived, all seemed to have nicknames. One guy with wild reddish-blond dreadlocks, some decorated with metal nuts (as in nuts and bolts), introduced himself as Cheese. Tia leaned over to me and said, laughing, “His name is Cheese!” There was also Pastrami, who later brought us crates of vegetables every week on his bike, and Turnip, who had just come back from Amsterdam, where he had been arrested for squatting. Turnip had a thick red beard like a Viking and a shaved head, except for a sliver of red hair on top, which he wore in a little ponytail. His black lace-up boots had duct tape wrapped around the toes.

When we returned the Food Not Bombs cart to [the community center that will not be named], I got a look inside this church of shabbiness, urban grime, and genuine edginess and iconoclasm (rather than the painfully contrived edginess and iconoclasm that I had known in my previous life as a pretentious artist). It was utterly quiet, and dim. The hallway was spattered with graffiti and band stickers, reminders of the delightful hell that broke loose here every Saturday, when the punks took over the space. The bathroom was nothing but a leaky toilet on a plywood floor and a door that didn’t close completely. The large, main room had no windows. The only furnishings were two low benches, a small red child’s chair with fading paint, and a stack of plastic lawn chairs. An art exhibit had been put up over walls so crusty no paint job could have hoped to cover up the holes and lumps. The kitchen was in the back: it contained a blackened stove, an industrial slop sink, a fridge covered in grimy political and band stickers, and wooden counters made out of planks. It smelled like a cellar, of rotten potatoes and mildew, and a whiff of some kind of lemony cleaner. Scrawled on the wall was “Nate Rules!” And in smaller letters, “… with an iron fist.” I was enthralled. Everything was perfect.

I helped wash up the pots and buckets in the grimy sink. I would have liked to stay in this grubby place with these taciturn girls, but I didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to intrude. A scowling man with Einstein hair had joined them, and they sat in the empty main room, talking. I returned to the leafy and silent New Jersey suburbs.

From the beginning, what I loved about Green Day’s music is that it’s so obvious. It’s so catchy and sweet and kickass, and right in your face — but lovingly, without knocking you down with a barrage of angry sound — that even nine year olds can appreciate it and fall in love with it. It’s one of the great qualities, of Dookie in particular, that made sophisticates turn up their noses at it.

Yet I was a jaded sophisticate myself when I first heard Green Day, in 1994, just not about music. You could say I was a pompous snob. I had been to art school, and was at the time steeped deeply in the art world. Bill had recently been an artist-in-residence at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, along with twelve other artists, and the current and former fellowship recipients were the people we knew. Jenny had a shock of disheveled, angrily bleached hair and wore white pancake make up and heavy kohl. Her art was to be on TV. Meaning that she herself sought out opportunities to be on TV, to share in the more debased aspect of the culture. She would order scores of items on the home shopping network just so that her voice would be broadcast (which was only done for big buyers) and later return everything. She landed a spot on a Jerry Springer type show, where her story was that she was engaged but still having sex with her ex — none of which was true. It was incisive commentary on being both a voyeur of the spectacle but also a participant. She was someone who, simultaneously, had an ironic detachment from the circus she willingly stepped into, but also was a player, and by doing so she shed light on the fact that we all participate, every time we turn on the set and watch the angry mobs of Springer audiences and guests tear at one another, or marvel at the tacky items showcased on the home shopping network. Her boyfriend, Jeff, lived in a storefront where he also ran an art gallery. One of his gallery’s shows consisted of the apartment contents, found in the garbage, of an elderly person who had recently died. There were bottles and bottles of pills, and sad little ceramic figurines with chipped bases. It was about the transient quality of the objects that make up a life. Seeing it was an experience both shamelessly voyeuristic and touchingly forlorn.

When Jeff exhibited one of his own artworks at an established gallery, it was a piece of driftwood, on which he had desultorily glued some scant glitter and a short length of masking tape, which hung languidly. It may be hard to explain why Bill and I were both in love with this object. Visual art is primarily about the physical reality of materials, and this dumb, ridiculously and carelessly decorated hunk of driftwood was scrupulously honest about its origins, and was therefore both unassuming and bold. Unassuming because it was so ugly and stupid, bold because it dared to be so ugly and stupid. This is the sort of thing I thought about and found inspiring.

I didn’t believe in things I couldn’t see, like God or spirituality, or telling signs and meaningful coincidences. Art was a great comfort to me because it was visible. Everything about it was strictly on display. Even the meaning that one might glean from art, which some might consider to be a hidden meaning, had been rendered visible, by making the idea into a real physical object. (Conceptual art was in that same realm for me, not exactly visible but nevertheless within my grasp.) I didn’t consider the meaning of a work of art to be hidden — at least it wasn’t hidden to me after spending so much of my time studying art. Still, the comfort that one can get from looking at works of art is a cool, detached comfort. You don’t see people in modern art museums dancing for joy or yelling with excitement, or weeping. Even works made with passionate intensity will elicit a cool comment like, “Hmmm, those are some impassioned brushstrokes right there.” Visual art, especially modern art, doesn’t extend itself to give you any warm fuzzies.

But I yearned for warm fuzzies. I wanted something transcendent, that would blow me away and rid me of all my cultured opinions, or at least set them aside for a moment of wonder. There was always music of course, but not only did I not understand music (you can’t see it!), but most of what was played on the radio was insipid and uninteresting. I loved Nirvana, but I couldn’t embrace Kurt Cobain’s tortured poetry because, let’s face it, I just wasn’t all that tortured. It took Green Day, with its unfairly maligned bubblegum poppyness and overwhelming manic energy, to shake me out of my rarefied slumber. With Green Day, there was no need for me to critique, mull anything over, or even form opinions. It was pure delight, like taking a swallow of iced lemonade on a hot day. I wouldn’t have imagined that the transcendence I was looking for would come from three scruffy boys with an album called poop, but there it was. I heard Green Day and nothing was ever the same again.

I haven’t been an avid follower of Cometbus, but I read my first issues of the zine in the early 90s. What I remember about those issues is Aaron’s fearlessness in his travels with no resources and little money, wandering strange cities without a safety net and sleeping outside, under bridges and in tucked away doorways. The same Aaron Cometbus comes across in #54. Despite the luxurious accommodations, it’s a story about a guy who enjoys the sheer discovery of travel, who lives to meander through unexplored territory, and who offers sharp insights on everything he sees and everything he reminisces or muses about. Not unexpectedly, and not unpleasantly, most of Cometbus #54 is ultimately about Aaron. Like all his writing, it’s deeply personal.

Those looking for juicy tidbits about Green Day may or may not come away disappointed. There’s plenty about Green Day, but the guys come across as how they seem anyway. Billie Joe is sweet, unassuming, and sometimes sullen. Mike is high strung, kind, and funny. Tre is a tragic figure of sorts, desperately zany without being able to be genuinely funny, but always, uncompromisingly honest, to the point of obnoxiousness. The poignant reminiscences about the early days of the band, including Aaron’s memories of first drummer Al, with whom he was close, are in some respects more telling than the current characterizations. Which makes sense, because Aaron, as roadie and confidant, was closer to the guys back then. Now he is marveling at his first class accommodations and the bizarre intrusion of overzealous photographers, excitable fans, body guards, and promoters.

Aaron is the everyman, witnessing the grandness of the Green Day megastar experience with puzzled bemusement. You can see him shaking his head, for instance at the body guard who, shockingly, may or may not have been a mercenary contractor in Iraq. He is like one of us might be if we were in those rarefied circumstances, wondering at our own presence poolside at the band’s hotel, wandering through the rooms and hallways backstage in the cavernous arenas. But he’s also not, because first of all he is genuinely a close friend of the guys in the band, and secondly because his point of reference is always deep inside the DIY scene, which he still inhabits. (Witness the zine that he still publishes himself after more than 20 years, when he is likely in the position to secure a profitable publishing deal.)

Green Day’s jump to a major label, which Aaron was adamantly opposed to at the time, is still an issue to be mulled over. Ultimately, Green Day’s continued drive and creativity, when many of their contemporaries simply stopped being creative, justifies the decision, it seems, to Aaron, as does the need to jump ship when a situation, like Green Day’s popularity outgrowing the confines of the scene, becomes so dysfunctional that it’s unbearable. But then there are the unsung heroes, the punks who worked, generally for no pay, to nurture bands like Green Day when they were little raggedy punk rock outfits, and who were painted in the mainstream press, with the success of Dookie, as clueless, snide whiners when they reacted with hurt and outrage at Green Day’s decision.

The story Aaron tells of the band’s and his own history is a complex one, made up of loyalty and friendship, but also alienation and hurt feelings, ending (?) with rapprochement and a warm embrace (a kiss, actually). It has to do with growing up and growing older and as such it’s a universal story, but one that takes place under very particular circumstances. Most of us don’t have old friends who went on to become megastars, but most everyone has had the bittersweet experience of looking back at one’s old friendships and finding a jumble of emotions, from love to resentment and recrimination, to acceptance, and back again to love.

More on Cometbus #54:
Fluke Zine
Let’s Get Hurt
Larry Livermore (More)
Green Day Mind

I don’t come from a musical family. When my dad was in kindergarten he sang so badly that the nuns told him not to sing. He got bored and went home.

I sing almost as badly, but when I was a kid, singing was the only way I could keep myself from throwing up on car trips. I was maybe four years old when I fell asleep in the car after eating a charred toasted-ham-and-cheese sandwich, and woke up as I was vomiting slimes of cheese and blackened bits of bread all over the front of my pretty dress. I never slept in the car again. Instead, I sang my little tuneless heart out, with throat-splitting gusto, along with my sister, who is also a terrible singer.

We sang tunes from the Mary Poppins Disney movie, in Italian, and the hits from an Italian children’s singing festival called Lo Zecchino D’Oro. (The Gold Coin. Or, as Bill dubbed it years later, The Golden Zucchini.) We sang Italian mountain songs that my mom had learned when she was living in the Alps during World War II.(“Up there, on the Matterhorn, there are the rocks. They are mattresses for us, the Alpini. And if I am pale, like an old rag, I don’t want any doctors, only jugs of wine.” The Alpini are Italy’s special force of mountain soldiers.) We sang dreary religious hymns that we had learned from the nuns (some in Latin), with as much somber fervor and gravitas two little girls with squeaky, off-key voices could muster. I don’t know how my parents put up with it, except that I guess it was preferable to having to stop every so often so I could puke in the flowering weeds alongside Italy’s picturesque country roads.

****************

By the time I was twelve, I knew that some bands were cool and others were not, and that I couldn’t tell which was which. On the school bus to the American school in Italy, there were heated discussions on the merits of Blue Oyster Cult or Elton John. They were all unknown quantities to me. Our family had a scant record collection, that we listened to on an old, huge, staticky turntable: a few singles by Nat King Cole and Domenico Modugno (who sang “Volare”), and the 60s jingle of a hair products company, a freebie that had come with my mom’s hair spray. It had a mod and stylish vibe — it was my favorite grown up record. On the bus, I could only identify the songs by an Italian comedy duo, Cochi and Renato, that the other kids sang with altered lyrics to celebrate or excoriate people on the bus. (Weird Al is not any funnier than the average kid in junior high, and never as personally biting.) If people asked me what kind of music I liked, I just didn’t know what to say. (”I like that hairspray jingle?”) There was so much judgment in aligning yourself with a band. It was like claiming your identity. I only knew that some songs could grab you, like the plaintive soulfulness of Mary Magdalen’s songs in Jesus Christ Superstar, one of the few albums I owned and loved, but I wasn’t sure if it was okay to like Mary Magdalen’s wailing. (I had gone into the Italian record store and asked for “Il disco di Gesu Cristo,” which is something like asking for “The record of Christ our Savior.” My mom was mortified. Why hadn’t I broken out my flawless Americanese?)

****************

Music was to me like a distant uncle, someone who visited occasionally and brought with him an intoxicating wind of possibilities from faraway places. Listening to a song, even singing it, only left me with a feeling of longing and loss. It was never mine to hold onto, because there was an unknown quality about it that I would never be able to grasp. I couldn’t adequately duplicate the melodies when I tried to utter them from my throat — they came out ugly and distorted — in part because I just didn’t have the ear to hear them correctly in first place. But I could hear enough to know that I was mangling the songs I belted out with such gusto. I had so little aptitude for music that it just wasn’t mine to have and hold onto. I loved music but it didn’t love me back, not enough to explain itself to me so that it felt mine.

****************

When I was in the twelfth grade, I went to boarding school on New Hampshire. There was a pub in town called Ault’s, which served pizza and sodas to the students. Ault’s had an air of shabbiness and seediness but was completely safe and unthreatening. It closed at 10 p.m., which was the school’s curfew. Gruff townies would turn up, sometimes with deer carcasses strapped to the hoods of their cars, and bought us sodas, which they called tonics. The jukebox played Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Janis Joplin, and Joni Mitchell, which was an inspiring soundtrack to be steeped in, among the grizzled townies, the worldly (as they seemed to me) prep-school girls in Indian print skirts, and the boys in gold-button blazers playing arcade games, all in the dim red lights of the pub. But I didn’t know the songs, couldn’t identify the bands. The distant uncle that was music had only become more alluring and magical, and ever more removed.

My then-boyfriend was a fan of Rush. Whenever I was, clandestinely, in his room, their music washed over me with no sense of recognition whatsoever on my part. Even today I would not be able to identify a Rush song if I heard one. Worse, when I was left to man the dial on the radio back at the girls’ dorm, I was hopelessly lost. I didn’t recognize anything that came up on the dial, because I wasn’t clued in, and I knew that most choices would be the wrong ones and would bring out groans and eye rolls. Panicked, I found something soft and mellow and left the dial on that, hoping for the best. “At least this is mellow,” I said. Giselle looked up at me with her smear of red lipstick and smoky eyelids and said dryly, “This is something I would listen to as the dentist’s office.” I had picked the Muzak station.

********************

Having your life saved by rock and roll was an appealing romantic notion, but rock and roll wasn’t extending itself to save me from anything. It was miles away from me. It held me at a distance, possibly in contempt.

******************

When I was in college, Bill, my then-boyfriend, had the Dead Kennedys albums, and, unlike anything I had heard before, they pulled me in. They held a powerful fascination. But I couldn’t have said why. The Dead Kennedys seemed so angry and bitter, and I was too caught up trying to be what I thought I was supposed to be to realize how angry I was too. I went about my life fretfully, always late with assignments, stumbling to classes. I was a misfit and outsider too, like the punks, but a misfit in a floppy velvet beret with a ribbon on it, worn over a perpetual expression of self-doubt. I thought I was supposed to be dutiful and quiet, and I looked the part to anyone who wasn’t paying close attention. The Dead Kennedys were my secret, improbably perfect soundtrack. I was a stealth punk.

In 2004, I had brought back to Staten Island a few pieces from a life I had left abruptly in Houston almost ten years earlier, and among them was the 7 inch “I Wanna be Billie Joe” by the band Wat Tyler. The record has nothing to do with Billie Joe, other than the cover art, which is a photo of Billie looking silly in his trademark way. I put the record sleeve up on my living room wall, as a quirky joke.

My Green Day obsession, which had been a force of nature ten years before, had long since subsided, but seeing that image on my wall, day in and day out, was all it took to bring it raging back. I started out tentatively, looking up Green Day on the internet. There wasn’t a lot going on in the summer of 2004, other than the vague stirrings of a new upcoming album that was supposed to be unprecedentedly great. The anticipation slowly rose. A single was released. Green Day was coming to NYC to coincide with the album’s release. They would be playing at Irving Plaza, a venue so small I had no idea how I could possibly get a ticket. I didn’t even try, not knowing where to begin trying.

But then, a ray of hope. They would be playing a free outdoor concert, near City Hall. I signed up online and got a confirmation number, but I wasn’t sure it would be enough to gain admission, so I called and was told — incorrectly as it turned out — that I had to wait in line at the record store that was giving out wristbands to be assured a spot. I had no history of waiting in line for concert tickets. Other than small punk shows, I hated concerts. Too much angling and shoving and noise, all to see mediocre mainstream bands. But this was Green Day. And Green Day was to me a miracle and wonder. So I headed out to the record store, also by City Hall, impossibly early. It was late at night and there was no one in sight. Mike and I went to a bar, where the beer tasted of sparkle and magic because it was expectant beer, waiting for Green Day. Then we wandered around some, ate some Indian food, sat in City Hall park, and then Mike went home while I waited till morning by riding the Staten Island ferry back and forth once. I picked up a copy of the New York Times and went back to wait in line, where a few early stragglers, teenagers being dropped off by their parents in suburban SUV’s, had begun to gather.

There were two girls sitting on the sidewalk beside me who had sat to wait for tickets to see Jessica Simpson. They were serial concert goers who liked the ritual of concert lines. They had copies of the as-yet-unreleased American Idiot CD and talked about finding out what stores were illegally selling it by browsing online forums. Another girl said she had bought tickets to Green Day at Irving Plaza on ebay. These people knew all kinds of secrets I had not dreamed could be available by the mere click of a mouse. I didn’t talk to them — I was the weird lady with the New York Times — but eavesdropped on this new realm of possibilities. I would look up the online forums when I got home. Little did I know one of them would become my online home for the next year (not for the special secrets but for the goofy and hilarious camaraderie, which like so many other things, turned out badly).

The show was mesmerizing, of course. The new Billie Joe, now fit and lean, decked out in snazzy black with a gleaming studded belt, was a startling surprise. In the last photos I had seen him in he had grown fat. Now he was a dynamo. The new songs were dazzling (though it was disconcerting not to know the words). A girl shoved me out of her way, three times before I shoved her back. It seemed the fans had not changed since the Dookie days. But I was newly, rather, once again, head over heels.

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