Life happens. You do a few things in the first few years of your life and later in life memories flood in at the most unexpected times. But if it hadn’t have been for the dissolving of my marriage, I’d still be in the burbs right now mowing a manicured lawn and being trapped in a marriage with someone that really never loved me to begin with. After all those years later, I’ve tried my best to piece some things together from a time when I was a rebellious, creative kid who only later got mixed up in this system, which I’ve also broken away from for the most part; at least the rat race, consumerism, competition, rising the corporate wrung parts. With that being said, I’m more grateful than ever, because I get a chance to relive those memories as a better person.
Subcultures are beautiful. For years, I had taken a reprieve from being among the different and diverse “weirdoes” of the underground. But just because I said goodbye for a few years didn’t mean it disappeared. It’s not like quantum physics where you are not able to observe something therefore it just doesn’t exist.
The counter-culture went on without me and now I have the opportunity to experience it again, even though I’m in middle age. And it’s even more welcoming and wonderful than ever. Find a “bad” part of town where the PTA moms, Karens and Kens won’t go and you can easily find a thriving counter-culture. Dive bars, tattoo parlors, dispensaries, head shops, strip clubs, kava bars, local cafes, art galleries, food halls, and markets thrive despite big corporations and corporatism (or simply “capitalism” which I think is different from free markets, depending on who is reading this).
It’s where freedom, creativity, art, music, and autonomy still live no matter how long you have been away from it. We’ve been here, welcome back after all these years.
Most of my late teens and early twenties I was under the heavy influence of alcohol, which is really the only acceptable drug for the working class, as long as you can still function and get back to work on Monday. I have this incredible ability to randomly remember parts of blackouts from over two decades ago. It will come in flashes or something will trigger it and then what’s left of a memory will flood in. But as you become older and more knowledgeable I think it’s good to again re-experience things having a working knowledge of life in general. You have a better appreciation for them, things have more flavor and the experience is more satisfying. When you were young, you always had your eye on getting somewhere, rushing toward some inevitable end: a good job, house, car, credit, only to find that when you got there you missed out on a lot of things. In many ways that’s a result of the current system we find ourselves in, where we’ve gotta try to claw our way to the top, getting degrees, credentials, and everything to maintain some sort of standard of living for ourselves. The ‘Merikan Dream turned out to be bullshit, and most that try to live a life today mostly just work thru it with maybe a few hours a week to spend being creative, having a little bit of leisure time, and having a second to breath before working to support ourselves again, all the while the unit of money that we use dissolves further, becomes more useless, and the socialist policies that promised a safety net force us to work just that much longer, dangling that hopefulness that we too can be free if we just put in our time as a slave on the plantation for just a little bit longer, that is if we don’t die of a heart attack or stress first.
So, my friends, having said that, I feel like each one of these memories I share and get to relive in the present day has been a gift handed to me from a divine force, the simulation, VALIS, chaos, or whatever you believe is at work.
On this particular occasion, I’m not sure what exactly triggered it, but I had a memory of a coffee shop in the “bad part” of town that was open 24 hours a day. It only took cash so we always had to go to an ATM first and pull out what little cash we had in the bank account to get a coffee and a snack there. And you have to remember this is right before people started becoming slaves to their smart phones so you couldn’t just look something up to find out where it was. There was also no photo evidence of anything before the early 2000s other than if you were lucky enough to have one of your friends carry around a film camera, but even then you weren’t going to waste precious rolls of film taking pics of your food or specific locations of your hangouts. At the time you felt like those memories would never fade and they’d be fine. Doing a quick search years later, I found the name of this place called---Common Grounds.
In earlier parts of our stories, Nick was always there hanging out with me, getting us into some sort of trouble. Eventually, we just sort of stopped hanging out. Things got to be a bit much, as he continued to create problems for himself. And maybe that was a result of his upbringing, but I don’t think so. His family appeared perfectly normal, and it was him that seemed to be the outlier. Maybe it was his longing to stay in this subculture that I only have respect for and get to experience years later; his desire to fuck things up just to watch them burn. Who knows, maybe some people are just inherently self destructive, and that’s how Nick was. It didn’t help that I started seeing his ex-girlfriend Jessie though. Although he never seemed mad about it, and friends sometimes went out with each other’s girlfriends, I think it probably hit him pretty hard and for that I’m sorry about. And that “clawing your way to the top” part I mentioned about the system, I think Nick tried to find easy ways out like selling dope or hustling without having to get a steady job. For that, I can kind of get that to some extent he was a victim of society. Years later I did reunite with him after he had spent several years on the road doing meth, but that’s another story for another time.
I remember it fell on a weekend when I had one of these drills that the military made me go to. We always said it was only “One weekend a month, two weeks in the summer” and then America’s finest would open up doors for middle-class and poor rural kids and help them get out of their small towns, at least that was what they claimed anyway. It turned out they only left you with mental problems, alcoholism, PTSD, and only one transferable skill in real life which was survival and the ability to be in the most fucked up of situations and environments. But after a few years when we got written orders to go to into a shithole warzone, it was more like, “One weekend a month – One tour in Iraq.” During one of these drill weekends, they allowed us to take the evening off but we had to report back the next day. There was a lot going on in my life at that time, I had just started college, and Wendi, one of my high school girlfriends dumped me so I had been hanging out with some old buddies, all except for Nick. I remember Jessie showed me this place, Common Grounds, and I can remember having a flip phone where you were still charged per text message and minute by the phone company. I can remember getting a bill that was almost as thick as a phone book and my parents were pissed. The area near the coffee shop was rich in goth history. It was a typical underground hangout. You had metal, gothic, and industrial bands that would play at the nearby bars, but not far from there most of the gothic music scene happened at The Chamber and Phantasy nightclubs. Nearby there was a costume shop where most goths would get cool stuff for outfits. This was before Hot Topic commercialized a style that was meant to be un-commercialized. There was also bicycle shop, where the owner built bikes out of various spare parts, chains, gears, spokes, wheels, and I can remember walking by and thinking how cool it was.
Common Grounds was everything that the sub-culture was, from the resident schitzo that hung out there and swore at you on the way in, to the cash only policy, local art on the walls, and the clientele that frequented there after a metal show. The coffee wasn’t particularly memorable only in that I remember getting something strong that would keep me up later because I had to return to military drill the next day.
Over 17 years later, the place and area still exist. I just so happen to live nearby. I decided to go back there. My motorcycle was like a time machine and I was riding back in time. Up until just recently they only took cash, some of the same paint is still on the walls, and they still serve semi-memorable coffee but my tolerance for caffeine has decreased, and having long been discharged from the military and gotten through college, it’s like looking at the place through a better lense. I’m lucky enough for it still to be there and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon. The clientele is still the same. I sat there for an hour or so watching some gamers bring in a desktop computer, some freaks huddle together in a dark corner near the pinball machines in the back, and the bathroom is probably the most tagged and stickered I’ve ever seen it, with some initials probably still there from when I originally came there.
One of the staples of the counter-culture is still standing the test of time after all these years. It was there when I was fucking around in the burbs playin house, it was there when I went off to kill people and almost got myself killed in some shithole, it was there when I spent decades clawing my way up the corporate latter, and it was there when I ran my car off the road when I was drunk off my ass in yet another black out.
I stood up from that chair by the window and returned the empty coffee cup to the front counter. It was a little harder to get up, not being a spring chicken anymore, but the place invited me to it, like some inevitable divine force. As I was walking out, the belt on my leather motorcycle jacket squeaked, and I could almost hear the walls whispering to me – Welcome back, we’ve missed you. JW