When I was a teenager, some of my older friends had their own apartments. One apartment in particular sat squarely at the junction of several big roads. This apartment became our party space. Crazy things went on there.
But not nearly as crazy as the goings on at the other party house, exactly kitty corner from us on the junction. I’m talking about the rocker house.
While we were smoking, drinking and grooving to Steppenwolf or maybe The Specials, the dudes across the street were dangling scrawny limbs out their front windows, shaking their hair to Motorhead and Judas Priest.
There was no competition. They were so hardcore. We looked at them with scorn. Long after we went to bed, woke up in the morning and went to school, those dudes would be stumbling around on their hair of the dog. No one could tell if they were rocking on the night before, or the night to come.
You could pass by at, say, noon on a Tuesday and see half-clad rockers on their front porch… harder than Keith Richard, dirtier than Ozzy. They would yell and shake their stringy hair at you, or raise a ragged toast.
As friendly as we were, none of my friends at the mod house even thought about venturing across the street to join the rockers’ shenanigans. Ever.
Now the rocker house is gentrified. Stripped, re-painted. Nothing but ghosts (and I’m sure there are some real ones) hints at the all-out noise, filth and decrepitude that lived there for probably a decade.
It's astonishing that there wasn't a rumble in the street.