The Shaggy Club
At fourteen Shaggy became a punk. At seventeen she left home. She became a DJ, den mother, and Dear Abby to the Dallas teenage underground. And then it was time to go back home.
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Shaggy steps quietly toward her room near the back of the house. The walls are covered with posters of British punk bands like U2 and Gang of Four. The furniture is a mélange of whatever the roommates have been able to wrangle from garage sales or their parents: a scratched end table here, a turquoise vinyl dining room chair there. In Shaggy’s room there are posters tacked on posters. Beside her bed is a nightstand bearing a Bible, pictures of her father and grandmother, and a photo of a punk band called Lords of the New Church. Shaggy has to be quiet even in her room because Royce sleeps in a big walk-in closet off the foot of her bed. He’s always coming home a couple of hours after Shaggy goes to sleep, jumping up and down on her bed to wake her up, giving her the latest gossip about what’s happening at the Twilite Room and on the street. Last night he came in, drunk, to relate his latest adventure. After a long night out, he and a Mesquite cowgirl-punk named Daze robbed a flagpole and divided the booty: she got the Texas flag, he got the Stars and Striped. He’s sleeping underneath them now, while Shaggy pulls on a pair of hightop basketball shoes that were autographed by the UK Subs. They’re men’s size tens. Shaggy has a trim figure, but she has enormous feet and stands nearly six feet tall. Her hair varies. It’s usually dark blond, and sometimes she makes it stand on end, as if by static electricity. Other times, she combs is neatly and flat to the side, like a boy’s. Today it just looks slept on.
“Do you know why we named this the Bill House?” she half-whispers, sitting at her vanity to run a brush experimentally through her hair. “One day we were all sitting out on the front porch, which we do a lot because it’s a nice porch to sit on, and someone said, ‘This house needs a name!’ And this boy named Ernie said, out of nowhere, ‘Bill!’ And it stuck.” She stands up, ties a black bandanna around her ankle, and slaps the thighs of her jeans, as if she expects dust to fly from them. She has to be at work at Sound Warehouse Records and Video by twelve-thirty, so a quick decision is made about breakfast: Chinese.
“My home life was kind of difficult,” she says a few minutes later, wrapping a spongy Chinese pancake around some mooshi pork at the New Big Wong. “More difficult than most people my age have to go through. My dad’s disabled, you know, and so basically I’m more independent than most people. It just made more sense for me to go ahead and get out and get started early, because I’m going to have to do it anyway.”
When Shaggy moved out of her parents’ house in May, a drama played itself out on the front lawn. Tensions had been boiling between them for weeks; at one point her mother threatened to put her in a mental institution. As Shaggy carried armloads of her things out to Diana’s yellow Datsun, her mother screamed, “You’re not taking that out of this house!” And Shaggy screamed back, “Fine! I don’t want any of it! I don’t ever want to set foot in this house again! I hate you!” For her first two weeks in the Bill House, Shaggy slept on a lawn chair, until she saved enough money to buy a bed at a garage sale for $40.
Ever since Shaggy had become a punk, her mother had worried that she was on drugs, getting in trouble, turning out bad. That worry turned into fear and then into anger. Over the next three years things got worse and worse between them. Shaggy had found something in the punk scene—a sense of camaraderie, of freedom, of belonging—that she had never felt before and desperately needed. When she was out till two in the morning with Diana or her friend Naneen, trying to get into the Hot Klüb, standing around with her friends all punked out and talking, she was happy. Her mother saw something else, though. To her the punk stuff seemed violent, jarring, and she imagined the worst about the world her daughter had embraced.
“All three of her sons hadn’t turned out like, you know, perfect kids,” Shaggy says. “ I was her only hope at perfection, at the cheerleader and the straight-A student. But that just wasn’t me.”
Her parents’ house was suffocating her. It had fallen into disrepair and neglect; the kitchen stove stopped working and never got fixed, so everybody ate fast food out. And the house was jammed with years’ worth of stuff Shaggy’s parents refused to throw away: newspapers, coupons, receipts, trash, clutter. Each room had paths you had to walk through. Shaggy’s friends—the few she ever allowed to see the inside of her house—were appalled and couldn’t believe she could live like that. One told her she would have given up if it had been her.
“My mother and I went up and down, back and forth, vicious, vicious, vicious,” Shaggy says. “ I tried to make her understand. I would literally sit down and say, ‘Mother, I want to talk to you. I don’t want to fight with you anymore. I want to tell you the absolute truth about where I’m coming from.’ And she’d just be like, ‘Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!’
“But for the whole time, I never lost respect for my mother. I got angry with her. I thought I’d never be able to forgive her. But I did. I’ve always felt like she and I had a lot in common. She used to run around with musicians and stuff when she was young. I think that’s what scared her most, is she saw that in me. She was just afraid for me. Things are a lot better now. She came to the Bill House one day, and she started bringing me things. She was the first parental unit out of all those people to come to the house. I think she started to miss me.”
Talking about her parents so much is starting to depress her, so she moves on to other things, to Royce and Diana, her “absolute favorite people in the world,” and to the different kinds of punks in Dallas. They have a whole breakdown of classes: the skate punks, who like hard-core punk music and skull tattoos and big, wide skateboards; the posers, kids who like the fashion and affect British accents but don’t have a clue about anything; the new wavers, friendly kids who hang out at On the Air and are pretty cool but not really political; original punks, who were around when it all started in the seventies and should have outgrown it but haven’t, even though some of them are in their thirties now; the peace punks, who, like Shaggy, listen to positive bands like U2 and the Alarm and try to get along with everybody; and then there’s the Pinky’s crowd. They’re the punk equivalent of high school socialites. They get their name from Pinky’s, a ritzy, chic boutique across the street from On the Air that sells stylish new wave designs at absurdly high prices. The Pinky’s crowd shops there, whipping out their fathers’ Visa cards whenever they see something in the window they like. “I definitely don’t dig that kind of crowd,” Shaggy says. Otherwise, Shaggy doesn’t align herself with any one group; she wants to speak to them all. As she says that, she realizes she is almost late for work. There are people wandering the streets who need to buy some records.
August
The GOP convention is coming to Dallas in one week, and everybody’s talking about it. During the Democratic one in San Francisco, police arrested scores of rampaging punks on TV every day, so the hard-core punks in Dallas feel almost obligated to cause trouble. They always think they’re behind what’s going on in the punk scenes out in California anyway. In 1984, being a punk against Reagan is extremely fashionable.
KNON, which is plastered with bumper stickers and posters that say things like “Reagan-Bush ‘84, Nuclear-War ‘85,” is coordinating communications for some of the protest groups banding together in the August heat, and meanwhile Shaggy has had the owner of the Twilite Room on The Pajama Party, urging the Dallas punks not to get talked into doing anything dumb. A Rock Against Reagan punk concert is scheduled for next weekend; there’s talk that the Dead Kennedys will be coming down from New York to do the show.
Things are happening at the Bill House too. After Jennifer drove off for good, taking her Audi and the only checkbook in the house with her, a twenty-year-old skate punk named Jenny moved in to share a room with Diana. Jenny and Diana were like best friends at first, but that went downhill fast when it turned out that Jenny liked to live in a clean house. Diana isn’t that concerned about housekeeping, and besides, she bridles at any form of discipline or authority. So since the morning when Jenny woke Diana up at eight demanding that she sweep the floor, roommate relations have soured. Shaggy and Jenny get along great, though. After so many scrungy, irresponsible roommates, it’s nice to have one who enjoys a living room that’s free of spilled beer. Shaggy is changing. She’s not as tense and tough as she was when she moved in a few months ago, and she’s looking a lot straighter too. She cooks meat loaf, she mops the floors, she shakes out the welcome mat. More and more, she’s getting into turning the Bill House into a home.
On this particular Sunday night, though, Shaggy is tipsy. She’s leaning against a pillar at the 8.0. Bar, after drinking exactly one and one-third Tom Collinses. Since she rarely drinks, the small amount of gin has a dramatic effect on her. Her eyes seem in soft focus, like the eyes of models in Penthouse. If you knew Shaggy only over the radio, you’d never guess this was her: she looks like . . . a woman. Her short hair is neatly styled, brushed carefully to one side. Her lips have lipstick on them. She’s wearing a conservatively cut, gray, knee-length dress, panty hose, and high heels. She looks more like 25 than 17, which is how she got in without being asked for her ID.
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