A story

I went to see The Clash with my girlfriend and her friends in the early 1980s. It was an odd occasion because her friends were Deadheads taking a break from following Mr. Garcia and his pals from venue to venue and they happened to drop in on S who convinced them to drive up to Montreal to see this show. I met them there.

The Clash weren't big enough to fill the Forum so the show was at a smaller arena somewhere; I can't remember which and Google doesn't know either. S's Deadhead friends stood out like a bunch of Shriners at an orgy so we ditched them. They, being the mellow types they were, sat way back where it was comfortable. S and I pushed towards the front. We got within sixty feet.

The Clash were not an accomplished band. Even by the loose standards of punk they were sloppy, inept musicians. That bothered S a lot less than it bothered me.

The crowd were rough. Montreal crowds almost always are and I spent a fair amount of time fending people off. It was worse in front of us and you could see women getting badly hurt and then pushing there way out past us in tears.

At one point, the crowd in front of us seemed to magically part. There were two guys coming through. One of the was a typical Clash fan. The other was a bouncer. The bouncer was much bigger than than the fan. He was blond, really muscular and he had the Clash fan by the shirt and was walking him backwards toward the exit. Their eyes were locked and the Clash fan was terrified. I'd guess he had good reason to be.

I was working as a bouncer in bar downtown myself at the time. I can say I never took anyone out and beat them but some of my colleagues did. This skinny little Clash fan was just the sort to get it too. He wasn't a real threat to anybody. As someone I was reading a few years ago said, big burly bikers are never victims of road rage. When people decide to do violence to others it is never as much an impassioned reaction as it is later made out to be. This kid had bugged the bouncer I am sure but the decision to scare and probably hurt him was the bouncer being a jerk. He'd picked an easy victim and he was walking him out to hurt him.

If the bouncer had been on the up and up, he would have taken the kid off to the side of the stage and the security people would have taken him away and sat him in a room until it was over. By rights, we should have stopped what was about to happen. There were more than enough of us there. I probably had a fifty-fifty chance of stopping it all by myself. Nobody did anything. Punks aren't exactly overflowing with a sense of civic responsibility.

The odd thing was S's reaction. She wanted sex so badly after seeing that that she insisted on leaving right then to do it. It  as a major achievement even to get her out the door. As we headed out, I had this horrible vision of coming across the poor punk lying on the ground with his teeth all over the pavement. We didn't. They must have headed the other way.

When we finished, the concert was over. We came back to a rapidly emptying parking lot. S's Deadhead friends were sitting in their van listening to a tape of the concert. They taped every Grateful Dead show they ever saw and I guess they thought that was why you went to concerts.

I was staying in Montreal so I said my goodbyes and got out of there. One image really stuck with me. There was a guy with a Mohawk standing on a street corner where I walked past on my way to the Metro. He had a home-printed T-shirt on. It said, "I hate you too."

No, that doesn't have anything to do with anything. It just struck me. It stuck with me more than the sex itself even though it was the kind of sex you could make a good porn scene out of. We did it in a fenced-in playground connected to a house across the street. I think it was a home-based daycare.

S had a good time. Too good really and I spent a lot of time worrying that she was making so much noise we would get caught. She seemed to want to get caught. She was right out of control and that's normally a good thing.

The problem was that I had nothing to do with her being out of control. And it  wasn't like watching Cary Grant or even porn with a woman and having her get heated up afterward. What we'd seen was nasty bit of inhuman cruelty. Even if the bouncer let that kid off lightly, he really scared him and did so in sadistic way.

And my girlfriend got so turned on by that she couldn't even think straight anymore. A better man would have turned her down.