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.
(Page 3 of 6)
The 8.0. is crowded; it’s Sunday Night A-Go-Go, and people are dancing to a band called the Fact. The lead singer, a thin, blond, brown-eyed guy named Steve Powell, is singing “A Hard Day’s Night.” Shaggy is in love with him. She decides that she always has, and always will, love him. As she decides that, she sways slightly. She leans against her pillar, points her index finger to her heart, and says, “Ouch,” just like ET. The sad part is that Powell’s girlfriend is only ten feet away, running the band’s sound board. Shaggy thinks they may be getting married, which arouses in her a resigned, bittersweet melancholy, complicated by the fact that she has barely even met Steve Powell. He’s her only real local-band crush. She gets hysterically melancholy when Mike Peters of the Alarm comes to Dallas, or Bono of U2.
A guy Shaggy know weaves his way through the 8.0. crowd and stops by her side, relating his latest woes concerning his girlfriend. Shaggy, who has been drifting just a little, suddenly gets crystal clear.
“Don’t give up!” she says passionately. “You never know. There was this guy that I thought I’d never see again—he stole my heart. And he stole my bass too. No, really! He really stole my bass. We were going out, and he like gave me his class ring and everything, and then I heard he was seeing this girl. And after a while he had this girl, his new girlfriend, call me up and ask for the ring back. Can you believe the unbelievable gall? So that was it. I said I’m never seeing or talking to this jerko guy again.”
As if troubled by the memory, she sips one of the remaining thirds of her Tom Collins through a skinny red straw and looks up to glance at the Fact.
“And anyway, one day, out of the blue, I called him. And I’ve talked to him since then, and today he came by Sound Warehouse and filled out an application, and now we might be working together. So you see? You never know.”
Apparently convinced, her lovesick friend heads back to the bar. Steve Powell is singing, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a girl like you.”
“I’ve never really had a real boyfriend that really added up to anything,” Shaggy says, filling in the details about the guy who broke her heart. He was a senior from Mesquite High School when she met him in line at the Rocky Horror Picture Show; she was a freshman at Hillcrest. Her parents wouldn’t let her date back then, so all they managed in the two months they saw each other were some stolen kisses by the Asteroids machine at a Preston Royal video arcade. Since then, the closest thing she’s had to a boyfriend is two sort-of dates with a British guitarist named Rob, who came through Dallas twice with a San Francisco band named Toxic Reasons. There are also a few guys who call her all the time at her show. One, an Italian kid named John Valenti, sent money off to someplace so a star could officially be named after Shaggy. So far, though, the Italian boy is just a voice on the phone.
“Sometimes I’ll wonder, gaw, I’ve never really had like a boyfriend, and I wonder why,” Shaggy says. “And then I remember, hey, I’m only seventeen.”
An hour later she catches a ride back to the Bill House. As she gets out of the car, she’s a little unsteady on her heels. It may be because of the Bill House spectacle. At two-fifteen on a Monday morning, it’s lit up like the World’s Fair. Punk music is blaring from Shaggy’s ancient component stereo, and the living room, which can be seen from the street, is a mass of gesturing, yelling punks. A skater, meanwhile, is riding up and down the sidewalk along the relative quiet of Cole Avenue, his tennis shoes flat against his oversized skateboard. He’s one of the kids from the skate pad down the street. They keep to themselves a lot. Some skaters wear combat boots and shave their heads and read Thrasher magazine and climb on speakers at the Twilite Room so they can jump on the heads of unsuspecting, dancing Pinky’s types. But you’d never suspect that of this kid. He surfs along above the concrete, gliding in and out of the shadows the trees throw against the ground and back into the electric-blue haze of the city streetlights. He looks spooky, thoughtful, phantomlike. Shaggy thinks his name is Ari.
Someone comes out of the Bill House and clues Shaggy in on a controversy brewing inside. Ernie, a New Orleans kid who once actually lived in England, has painted a sign that reads, “No Skate Punks Allowed,” and taped it to the Bill House door. He was mad because he went to a skater party last week and the skaters had hung up their own sign, which read something like “No New Wavers” or “ No Posers.” Since the Bill House is overwhelmingly pro-skate, it’s an argument between Ernie and everybody else. Everyone expects Shaggy to come in and referee.
Even though she’s the youngest of the roommates, younger than almost everybody that hangs around, her stature as a radio star, along with her maturity and her solidity, has made her something of a den mother at the Bill House. She’s not really in the mood to fulfill the role tonight, though; she’s a little bit drunk, and she’s still feeling deliciously tragic about the singer at the 8.0. She feels happy because things are going right for her.
For one, she’s getting along better with her mother than she has in her whole life. They went out for barbecue at the Easy Way a couple of weeks ago and had a nice, long talk. They told each other they never meant those things they said last spring. It was a mother-to-daughter talk, but it also felt like they were both grown-ups. They talked about their problems, what they could do to help each other. The next time Shaggy’s mother came over, she was carrying a sack of groceries. She also brought Shaggy a desk, even though she keeps trying to talk her into moving back home. But there’s no way—Shaggy is having the best summer or her life. She never realized how miserable she was at home until she moved out.
Diana, who has been getting more and more hard-core these days and becoming more and more like the skaters, storms out of the house, furious. “I hate everybody in there, Nancy,” she says to Shaggy. “Except you, and sometimes Royce.” After a couple of fruitless protests, Shaggy agrees to go inside. But she’s not happy about it. Shaggy loves Diana as a friend, but Diana is beginning to drive her nuts as a roommate. That wild, careless, impetuous streak that makes Diana so fun to hang out with can be a severe pain when it comes to cleaning up the kitchen. And besides, some of the skaters Diana has been bringing into the Bill House just don’t get along well with people.
Almost as soon as Shaggy gets in the door, the noise level from the house goes down. It gets so calm, you can hear the sounds Ari’s skateboard makes as he takes another pass down the sidewalk out front. He keeps his eyes on the sidewalk, watching the oncoming cracks, and the wheels of his skateboard go ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-CHUNK, ka-CHUNK, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.
September
Diana is unbelievable. Like a lot of hard-core Dallas skaters, she got herself arrested during the GOP convention. Fed up with four days of boredom in 109-degree heat, fenced off from the action hundreds of yards away, and with almost no attention from TV camera crews, the punks took a frolicking rampage through downtown the day before everything ended. Their chief offense: playing with people’s food at a ritzy Plaza of the Americas restaurant.
During the protest, Diana met some peace punks from Austin. After she got out of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, she decided Austin was the place for her, and she asked a friend to help her move down there so she could go to Austin Community College and be with her new friends. Just like that. Now she’s living with about a dozen other punks in something called the Twelfth Street House, two hundred miles south of Bill.
While Diana was getting arrested, Shaggy was taking a different approach to protesting. She was standing on some steps outside the convention center, reading out loud from her Bible, mainly anti-materialistic verses from the New Testament. The Republicans were pretty cool about it; some of them even stopped and listened for a while. Shaggy and Diana had been growing apart practically from the day they moved in together. It was great early on; once, at the drop of a hat they took a bus to Austin to see a show by the UK Subs. After four days of drinking beer and getting no sleep at all, they were driving back to Oak Cliff at dawn in Diana’s Datsun on a Sunday morning, with the sun bright and yellow through the buildings downtown and not a living thing in sight. They looked awful, with makeup all over them, their eyes red and puffy, and yet it felt like a perfect moment in life. They agreed that it was the funnest thing they’d ever done and that they were each other’s best friends in the whole world.
But more and more these days, Shaggy is cooling out, calming down from the days last spring when she had beat her fist against the lockers at Hillcrest if someone looked at her funny. Now that Diana is gone and Shaggy has started classes in the predominantly minority North Dallas High School across the street, the Bill House is running more smoothly. It may stay that way if Royce doesn’t do the wrong thing. He’s been thinking about moving into an apartment with Jennifer, the girl from New Orleans, so he can save some money. That would bum Shaggy out—just too many changes at once. Royce has been hanging out these days at the Starck Club downtown; it’s an icy-cool disco with valet parking and a $10 cover, and it makes the Twilite Room look like a Texaco men’s room. You can get in free if you know someone, and Royce is becoming the kind of person who knows someone in places like that.
Just after nine on a warm Saturday night in September, Shaggy calls me.
“What are you doing exactly right at this moment?” she demands. “What? A TV dinner? But I have baked chicken! I have baked potatoes! Open the oven, take it out, open your kitchen door, throw it on the lawn, and come over, okay?”
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