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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Twenty minutes later at the Bill House, there’s a surprise on the living room floor. It’s Diana, sorting through some record albums, looking for any that might be hers. She’s up from Austin for a pretrial hearing about the protest and is staying in her old room with Jenny. Since she’s been in Austin, she’s gotten a radical haircut. Not one of those $50 cuts some Pinky’s kids get at sleek Oak Lawn salons—hers looks like somebody did it with a crude pair of shears, in an alcoholic stupor. It’s shaved so close to her skull on both sides and around the back that you can make out the marks of the teeth from the shears. “I think Nancy is in the kitchen,” Diana says.
It’s not Shaggy in the kitchen; it’s Daze, the punk from Mesquite who helped Royce steal those flags. She’s blond, rather stoutly built, with a ragged, wide mohawk and a black leather jacket dripping chains and bright buttons slung over her shoulder. She’s holding a can of Old Milwaukee in one hand and stirring a pot on the stove with another.
“Hi,” she says. “Want a taste? It’s a Bill House feast. I came in, and Nancy just said, ‘Daze, c’mere, make sure this doesn’t burn while I go and take a shower.’” She goes back to her task, rolling the spoon around and around with what seems to be tremendous concentration. Daze is wearing a pair of painted Converse All Star tennis shoes; one of them has a spur attached. “I left the other one in a cowboy,” she says.
Royce strolls in wearing a courageous mismatch of Salvation Army store plaids and polyesters. It’s one of his looks. A twisted ribbon of blond hair sprays down into his face like freesia, but he makes no effort to brush it away.
“Hey, Royce,” Daze says, “has the cat been fed?”
“The cat’s dead,” Royce says cryptically, seconds before a furry gray kitten skittles up and nuzzles innocently against his shoe.
Out in the living room, Jenny is looking through records and grinding her teeth at the prissy-pop Depeche Mode album someone has put on. She’s pretty, with striking blue eyes and movie-star lips. When she walks into the kitchen, something more appropriately hard-core is blasting from the stereo. She pulls a fork from the drawer and, dodging Daze’s proprietary spoon, spikes a chunk of potato. “Oh!” she yells, waving at her half-open mouth and rushing to check the oven. Two layers of an angel food cake are inside; it’s for two friends of hers due in by car tonight from Meridian, Mississippi. Since Jenny works weekdays as a secretary, Saturdays are like holidays to her, and she’s in a good mood. She’s wearing a tight white tank top and faded-away jeans that are slit across the back of the left thigh. White cotton strings dangle from the split like angel hair, fluttering with every step she takes.
“Nancy, come eat your chicken!” Jenny yells down the hall. “We’ve already eaten your potatoes!”
The bathroom door down the hall opens, and Shaggy bounds out, wrapped in a beach towel. “Hi!” she says, slapping her forehead to say, yeah, I’m stupid, I’m late, I’m running behind, people are stealing my potatoes. She looks lanky and awkward, walking on the balls of her bare feet and pushing her wet hair back off her forehead. It doesn’t help matters when Royce runs after her, whooping and nipping at her towel with his fingertips, chasing her into her bedroom. From the kitchen you can hear them laughing and screaming and then talking in their language, in which they drop their jaws, expose their bottom rows of teeth, and talk with a British accent, so that everything comes out like “finnah-finnah.”
“You know what I love?” Diana is saying in the living room. “I love coming into town and taking the house over.” She changes the record and puts on ultimate hard core by the Vandals—a punk version of the theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s an instant hit. Everybody runs into the living room and starts slam-square dancing. Jenny’s wearing a pair of bright red cowboy boots she bought this morning at a garage sale for $1.50, and she’s stomping them joyfully on the hardwood floor, in time to the music.
After a while, when things calm down and a relatively sedate Meat Joy album is playing, everybody sits around listening to Diana talk about Austin. The punks are real divided there, she says, compared with the friendly partyers in Dallas. “Sometimes I’d rather be at a small scene,” she says, “like in Dallas, where everybody has more fun.” She tugs distractedly at her oversized T-shirt, which bears the warning, “Cause for Alarm.”
Shaggy comes in from her room, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her hair still wet and spiky. She switches the subject to something depressing: school. She’s been going to North Dallas High right across the street for three weeks now, and though it’s cooler in some ways than Hillcrest was, in others it’s the same old boring waste of time. And now Shaggy can just sleep in if she feels like it on school mornings, since there’s no mother around to kick her butt out of bed. She’s been doing that a lot. She’s also been asking people’s advice about whether she should drop out, get a GED, and go to college later. With school, Sound Warehouse, and The Pajama Party, she barely has time to eat anymore, an she’s always run-down and tired.
A little while later, Shaggy sets up dinner for two on a round table out on the porch, under a bare hundred-watt bulb. There’s a tablecloth, a fresh stick of butter on a dish, mismatched silverware, plastic Chanello’s Pizza cups, and paper towels folded up carefully beneath the knives and spoons. It’s an oddly domestic scene; the punks who skate by forty feet away regard it as if it’s a mirage or some kind of elaborate joke. Shaggy sits down and tries to start eating but keeps getting interrupted by phone calls.
“That was Mr. John Spath,” she says, rushing back to the table after her third call. “He’s like a kid who brings me records to play on the show, and he’s real cool, ‘cause he’s nothing but just a kid at heart.”
She sits down, forks up a chunk of potato, and draws it toward her mouth. Before it gets there, Diana swoops out on the porch, stopping a few inches from Shaggy’s raised fork. “Wait!” she screams. “What’s that?”
“Potatoes.”
Diana looks at the laden fork, her mouth open, and stares at the potatoes, willing them into her mouth. When Shaggy gives her the bite, she says, “Where’s the chicken?”
“You want chicken?”
Diana nods, her mouth wide open.
“A simple ‘Arf’ will do,” Shaggy says, sending the bit of chicken home.
“You’re a god, Nancy,” Diana says, bounding back inside.
There’s a breeze on the porch, a yellow moon is coming up over the soccer field across the street, and the chicken and potatoes are delicious. Diana goes off on an errand, and Jenny strolls out to test her boots; they make gratifying clunks on the porch and look like bright red lipsticks against the weathered boards. “A lot has happened out here in front of the house,” Shaggy says.
“One day,” she recalls, thinking back on the blasé destructo attitude of past Bill House regulars, “I went out on the porch, and I saw that all of these glasses I had bought when we first moved in were all over the porch, and people were just sitting there looking at them, and they’d been there for like two days. And I go, ‘You know, it would be really nice if, when everybody goes back inside, you would just pick up one glass and take it to the kitchen.’ And they all looked at me like I was crazy. They had this impression that I was being their mother or something, scolding them, and I just got really fed up. And all of a sudden—the straw that broke the camel’s back—I saw that one of my glasses had been tipped over and was broken. And I flew into a rage and started picking up the glasses and throwing them on the sidewalk, going, ‘Okay, we’ll see how many glasses we can break. Let’s break all of them, and then nobody can drink anything!’ And they were like, ‘Nancy, what’s your problem? If you wouldn’t gripe at us so much about keeping the house clean, then maybe we’d do it.’ And I’m like, ‘Naa, don’t give me that.’ And at that moment, I realized that this was like my subconscious saying all those things, and I was really saying them to my parents. Which is almost psychotic, you know?”
She sips her milk and gets quiet for a while, like she always does when she talks about her parents. Then she dabs at her lips with a paper towel and smiles. “It just goes to show,” she says, “that no matter how bad things get, they can always get better.”
Things don’t stay quiet for long. People are starting to come by with records for The Pajama Party. A party’s going on at the skate pad down the street, and now and then it overflows and spills into the Bill House. In the kitchen Jenny is wailing with despair because her angel food cake looks like an old mattress. Shaggy gets keyed up and frantic, pitching albums into a white laundry basket, tossing boring ‘45’s away through the house, as if they were Frisbees. In less than half an hour, Shaggy will be live.
October
Royce is gone. He moved into Jennifer’s place, and it looks like they may be moving together to her old hometown, New Orleans. Royce is tired of his job driving a Slush Puppies truck and dreams of becoming a famous hairstylist on the Bayou. It didn’t bother Shaggy too much when Diana moved away, but Royce is her last connection with the early days of the Bill House, with the best summer and happiest time of her life. And anyway, Royce has been running around with a real trendy crowd this last month or so, going to the Starck Club all the time. His new friends are the ultrahip, ultrafashion-conscious, recreational-drug-oriented crowd that Shaggy has never taken to, just a shade or two away from the unbearable, squealing Pinky’s punks. Shaggy and Royce hardly ever go out like they used to, when they’d ramble around town from Tango to the Twilite Room, acting like outrageous twins.
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