My grandma Delia hadn’t been expecting us, so her short hair was a troll doll mess, she didn’t have her eyebrows drawn on, and she wasn’t wearing any lipstick, but I figured she’d be home, being as it was a Sunday evening and she was seventy-five.

“Mi’ja!” She looked confused and surprised when she opened the door and saw me there with the other Spitwomen all in mostly black, dirty jean shorts over leggings, boots or heavy Doc Martin shoes, tattoos, and faded tank tops.

Spitboy had been playing a series of shows in the LA area, including a big festival in Long Beach, and we were on our way back to the Bay Area. I couldn’t drive past my grandma’s East LA freeway exit without stopping, and I wanted the Spitwomen to meet her. A tough old broad, my grandma Delia speaks with an accent, speaks and cusses in both English and Spanish, and was born and raised in the United States after her parents came from Mexico during the revolution in 1918. In her own, proud to be American, culturally Mexican, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-I-can-make-up-my-own-mind way, she was and is a feminist too.

I gave her a big hug in the doorway and explained that we had been playing music in the area and that we were on our way home. Her house was just off the freeway in Lincoln Heights. As we turned onto Workman Street, I had pointed out General Hospital where I was born and explained that this was East LA, the place my family is from.  Both Paula and Adrienne grew up in the Bay Area, San Jose and Pleasanton, a sort of conservative bay area suburb. Karin went to high school and college in the mid-west, but had lived all over, even Europe where her parents lived when she was born because her dad worked for Boeing.

“Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

“No grandma, we can’t stay long. I just wanted you to meet everyone.”

“Come in, come in.” She opened the door wider so we could all pass by. “Where are my manners.”

The Spitwomen  lingered on the porch behind me, uncharacteristically quiet, even Adrienne who always smiled and introduced herself to everyone anywhere we went. Once we made our way inside the house and once someone shut the heavy metal screen door behind her, Karin scanned the room.  The way her eyes fell over every item made me aware of just how many nick nacks, photographs, and wall hangings lined my grandma’s small combined living room-dining room, including the one that said, “Home is where you can scratch where it itches.” Adrienne stood in faux leather pants with her hands clasped in front of her, and Paula smiled shyly.

“Grandma, this is Karin.” I pointed at Karin. “She plays guitar in the band. This is Adrienne; she sings, and Paula plays bass.”

“Hello, please sit down,” grandma said, for all three of them had filed around behind the coffee table in front of the couch. I could tell that Grandma Delia didn’t know what else to say.

They sat down on grandma’s couch; Karin on one edge, her head near the macrame plant hanger with the peace lily spilling out of it. She looked like she felt out of place, and I thought about a discussion that we had a couple of different times driving to shows. It was a discussion about my family, or really just a series of questions.

“You and your brother and your sister all have different fathers?” Karin would asked when the subject of siblings came up.

“Yes, we each have a different father.” I’d say, not sure why the question made me uncomfortable. Karin, Paula, and Adrienne’s parents were all still married, maybe not all happily, but Karin’s parents were actually very nice and not dysfunctional at all, the kind of family that owned an Audie and a commuter car, had straight teeth, and didn’t lose their tempers.

When she’d push me on this topic, I’d explain,” “My mom married my dad when she got pregnant with me in high school, but left him when I was eight months old because he abused her.”

This was something I figured that she’d understand since we had written a song about domestic violence.  

“She got together with my brother’s dad who helped her leave my dad, but they never married and were only together for a couple of years. Later, my mom married my sister’s dad and had my sister.”

Since we didn’t think marriage was cool, I added that my mom was no longer married to my sister’s dad, or anyone else, that she had sworn off marriage forever.

I followed grandma who wore what she called a pair of joggers and a faded cat sweatshirt to the kitchen, so we could chat a minute and because no one else seemed to have anything to say. When it was warm she always wore a house dress.

“How are you, grandma?” I asked once were in the kitchen.

“I’m fine; you know, getting older everyday.” She ran her finger through her hair and smiled. Her nails looked freshly manicured, oval shaped and bright red.

She handed me two glasses filled with water so I could help her carry them, one of narrow ribbed glass and the other of tin, the kind from the seventies, each in the set painted a different color and designed to keep your kool-aid really cold.

The Spitwomen were still sitting quietly when my grandma and I got back into the front room and handed each of the Spitwomen a glass of water. Karin was still looking around the room her nose in the air; Paula, who always wore her short hair in a ponytail, looked as if she were trying to think of something to say, and Adrienne was sitting with her hands folded in her faux leather lap.

“Sit down, mi’ja,” grandma motioned to her chair, beside which sat her basket of embroidery projects. I could see that she was working on a design of a Mexican woman carrying a jug of water on her shoulder.

I sat down, and each of the Spitwomen took a sip of her water and set her glass down on the coffee table without saying a word. They were never this quiet, ever. I didn’t know what to do. Grandma read my anxiety and tried to fill the awkward silence herself.

“You girls must be tired, driving all that way.”

They all nodded.

“You see that picture there,” she said, pointing to a black metal shelf by the door, “That’s Michelle’s mom and dad when they were in high school.”

I winced when she called me Michelle because they never called me that; they only ever called me Todd.

“They were at a dance. Your mom looks so pretty, don’t you think so, mi’ja.”

I always thought she looked much older than sixteen or seventeen with her hair in a sort of a ratted, late-sixties, beehive bun. And my dad, short, dark skin with thick black hair; I looked like him with my hair cropped close to my head the way I was wearing it then, a sort of Mia Farrow, Rosemary’s baby haircut.  

I nodded at my grandma and smiled, but I felt sad. I didn’t know what to say now either and that just made it worse.

Stopping had not been a good idea at all. We should have stayed on the I-5. I should not have suggested that we veer off into the second largest Mexican city in the world. I had made everyone uncomfortable, and now I was outside of my body, seeing my adored grandma and her shabby East LA home, (which I had always found tidy and comforting) her nick nacks, which they probably called tchotchkes, and all her family photos of Mexicans, and now myself through different eyes, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Reading my piece “Does Your Mom Play Drums?” in the San Francisco Listen To Your Mother show on Mother’s Day was unbelievably fun. Many of my friends came out to see me read and paid money to do it, even when they can listen to me speak for free anytime. Even though I couldn’t see their faces from the bright stage lights shining in my eyes, my husband and son, who are featured in the piece were there, and my mom drove two and a half hours to be there too.

You have probably read the piece here, but now you can watch the performance for free. I don’t remember who it was, but before we all went on stage that night, someone told all the readers to really take it all in when we were up there, and you can see me do just that in the video at the very end — really being in the moment, savoring it. I’m glad I did.

***LTYM joins with our national video sponsor The Partnership at Drugfree.org in preventing ½ a million teens from abusing prescription drugs.

P.S. Please share!

“SPITBOY are the best girl band around. They piss all over every Riot Girl band I can think of. They’ve got more power in their dirty little fingernails than Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna and Kat Bjelland put together… Tonight, these four women, sweaty and angry, but also (between songs) witty and endearing–have stolen my heart… Spitboy are uniquely inspiring, not only for their awesome bile, but also for their straightforwardness. They hate sexism, not men. They know exactly what they’re talking about and how to articulate their righteous aggression.”

—From Melody Maker April 10, 1993

   London, England

   “Live!” review by Lucy Sweet                           

We weren’t trying to piss on riot grrrl bands. But we did understand that the comparison, or being labeled a riot girl band, wasn’t going away and neither was what had now become rivalry between female punk bands who ultimately had the same mission: to speak out against sexism. It would have been easier to say we were a riot girrl band, but we had formed Spitboy in the Bay Area during the early days of their movement. And we stood for just about everything they did, only we didn’t want to be called girls.

It happened in Washington DC, an already strange city, which added to the days angst.  After getting lost on one way streets and roundabouts, we found our way to the venue we were scheduled to play that day, a sort of loft space storefront on a swanky tree lined street with Victorian architecture, a strange place to play after playing church basements and Elks Lodges in the mid-west.

I followed Adrienne out of the van, staying at the heels of her clunky boots, as I often did during times like these.  Adrienne was outgoing and became even more so when in doubt; whereas, I tended toward standoffishness. We weren’t playing with any riot girl bands that day, but members of Bikini Kill and the guys from Nation of Ulysses who they were all hanging around with were there for the show. Punk bands from the bay area, where every other band wanted to play, or played as often as they could, were a draw, and women came out when Spitboy played. Bikini Kill and their friends had come out to see us play, to see what we were all about.

Adrienne marched up to the door of the venue looking for the guy who had set up the show to find out where we should load in. I figured I could get past the intimidating moments of meeting new people, new scenesters, faster if I hung with Adrienne while she went around, smiling wide, her straight-toothed smile, her blue eyes sparkling, introducing herself to people, laughing easily, shaking people’s hands, and hugging those who wanted a hug. I stopped at shaking hands. I didn’t want people I didn’t know hugging me or touching me, men in particular, no matter how much they liked Spitboy, and not when I was already feeling tense about being on riot grrrl territory.

Like riot grrrl, hugs had become a sore subject too. Earlier in the tour, on our way out of some city, this guy, a friend of our tour contact had offered to give us all hugs. Apparently, I was the only one in the band who found this creepy.

“Everyone tells me that I give the best hugs. Do you want a hug?” the young man said, holding his arms out, waiting for one of us to step in. He was a pale-faced, chubby dude, not fat, just a little husky, the kind of punk guy who was probably vegetarian who rarely ate vegetables and who subsisted on mainly cheese and bread and beer or soda.

“Sure, I’ll have a hug.” Adrienne smiled wide and stepped forward.

I took a step back and looked toward our dented blue van.

“You do give the best hugs.’ Adrienne turned to Karin who was standing at her side. “Karin, you have to get one of his hugs.”

Karin stepped forward and let this guy hug her, hugging him back.

I could see the guy’s face as he hugged Karin, his head over her shoulder, his eyes scrunching with the squeeze of his arms, his goofy smile.

“Okay, I’ll have one too,” Paula said.

 I stepped to the side to avoid his line of vision once he opened his eyes.

“Thank you,” Paula said, once he released her. She smiled a real smile, her freckles dancing about.

I looked down at the ground, to where the asphalt met the dirt on the side of the road. I could feel all eyes on me.

“Do you want a hug too?” Huggy Bear Boy smiled and stepped in my direction.

“No, I don’t,” I said before he got too close. “Thank you,” I added.

Huggy Bear Boy stopped his forward lumber, and there was an awkward silence as he lowered his arms, like two long animal balloons out of air.

In the van, I felt like I had to explain myself, as if our ‘body is mine’ motto didn’t extend to fans.

“But he was nice,” Adrienne said.

Karin and Paula were in the front seat waving at Huggy Bear Boy and his friend as we drove away. I waved and forced a smile because I didn’t want to look like a total asshole.

“That was probably the most action that guy’s gotten in days, maybe ever,” I said once we had driven a block or so.

“Todd,” Karin said, shocked but she laughed anyway because she knew it was probably true.

Even though I didn’t want to be hugged by fans, unless I felt some kind of real connection, like after a conversation, I was oddly confident in other ways, and I didn’t usually get nervous before playing live, but I was nervous the night we played in front of members of Bikini Kill and Nation of Ulysses. In short, I was intimidated. Then a tall guy came up to me before we took to the stage ( which wasn’t a stage at all, just a piece of the floor in the back of the venue, opposite the glare from the front windows) to ask if we required the men in the crowd to stand in the back of the room, like they were told to do during a Bikini Kill set. I couldn’t believe my ears, but I now had someplace to direct my angst.

At my drumset, sitting on the stool, I pulled my backup vocal mic up to my mouth, “Before we play, we’d just like to say that we don’t expect men to stand in the back of the room. We’re not a riot girl band.”

All the air sucked right out of the room as soon as I said it. Mouths dropped open and silent. It was as if someone turned off the sound.

Being the hot headed one, I had nominated myself to say something first about what we realized had become an elephant in the room, but I had chosen my words poorly, spoke too soon, shat where I ate. But there it was out in the open, we were a female punk band in 1992, but we were not a riot grrl band. And it was probably best for the rest of the band that I had been the one to say it, the one who would became the most hated Spitwoman of just about every riot girl thereafter because I was the scrappy one, the only one who didn’t grow up middle-class, the non-white one; I had thicker skin.  But they backed me up; Spitboy was great this way. We did sometimes discuss possible approaches and reactions to familiar crowd responses, but we never shut anyone in the band down who felt passionate about about a something, and when one of us spoke first on a topic, there was always room for another of us to chime in and add her two cents. In this case, Adrienne stepped into recover some sense of decorum.

“Please don’t block a woman’s view; don’t stand in front of someone who is shorter than you are. Just use common sense.”

I appreciated Adrienne’s attempt to soften the blow of my comment, but my hands and knees, which started to shake the second the words, “We’re not a riot girl band,” came out of my mouth and I saw the stunned looks on people’ faces, wouldn’t stop. We knew that this one comment, saying this one thing that we had discussed with one another privately, in public, would forever alter our relationship with one of the most influential women’s movements in the punk rock scene nationwide. Still we had discussed it, and we, Spitboy (even before boys in the DC crowd came up to us and thanked us after the show) had made the deliberate decision not take a separatist stance. It was true, we hated sexism; we didn’t hate men, and neither did Bikini Kill, really.  Though if we could go back and do it over again we would have gone about it, I would have gone about it a bit differently, but not much, not much differently.

MCG and her son LM after the show

When I was playing drums in a punk band, rocking out in a tank top and no bra, or just a bra and no tank top, I didn’t imagine my favorite performance would be with my ten- year-old son.

For three years, Luis Manuel played piano in his school’s variety show. In fifth grade, he decided to play guitar. Guitar was way cooler. He had taught himself to play guitar in like three months, you know, on youtube: chords, notes, picking, everything. He was going to play a rock song for the variety show; Sean was going to play with him. They began practicing three months before auditions because they didn’t want to suck and they had girls to impress.

Then Luis heard a rumor that Sean wasn’t going to play with him.  When he heard it again, I suggested he find a third person for his act just in case, but he said maybe Sean was just too busy to practice. Then two days before the audition, only two weeks before the actual show, Sean admitted that he was going to be in a dance act with his popular friends instead.

A dance act? Who in the hell would rather do synchronized dance moves like some boy band over playing actual music? It occurred to me that for fifth graders this variety show had more to do with showcasing your friends than actual talent.

 “Do you want to be in their dance act?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “No, I want to play guitar.”

I was relieved.

In tears the night before the auditions, Luis sat on the couch with his Les Paul.

“Maybe, I won’t do it,” he said.

I took a deep breath to hide my panic; then I told him to play every song he knew. I would help him decide which sounded best. He played “Float On” which needed another guitar, The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” sounded good, but the picking needed work, and the Weezer song had one really hard chord. When he played Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” we both knew it was the one.

Then it hit me. Luis’ participation in this event had become our family’s way of not being totally invisible. I worked full-time and made an effort to be involved, volunteering in the classroom and going on field trips when I could, but I was not part of the blonde moms’ crowd, the stay-at-home moms’ crowd, or an attending member of the PTA. I was the Chicana with chest tattoos married to a dark-skinned Mexican with an accent. I wasn’t going to let some fucking dance routine, keep my son from changing his mind about performing in that show. Besides, I knew he wanted to.

“I just wish I had someone to play with.” He looked dejected.

“You know, I can play that song on drums in my sleep.” I tried sounding nonchalant. But it was true, anyone who played rock drums in the 90’s had learned to play that song, had wanted to rock as hard as Dave Grohl.

“You want to play with me?” he made a face.

 “Look, I know you don’t think it’s cool to be in an act with your mom, but the auditions are tomorrow; there’s no one else.”

“Okay, “ he said, sounding the way you do when you know you’re totally out of options.

I wanted to hug him, jump off the couch, plan our outfits, and gush about how fun it was going to be, but I restrained myself.

 “What if someone teases me?”

“Just say this: “Does your mom play drums?”

Still nervous that he was going to be teased for being in a band with his mom, I knew I had to tone it down, wear a loose fitting tank top and a bra, and no flashy make-up. I did put on red lipstick called “Rocker” before leaving the house. I wanted to stand out from the PTA moms and help my son show his friends what real and inspired talent looked like. Getting on stage and playing the drums in front of the entire school without lipstick wouldn’t achieve that. 

 “Next, we have Luis Manuel Peralta playing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” the MC on other side of the curtain read from the intro we wrote,  “and no, that’s not his mom on drums.” I heard loud laughter, the curtain lurched open, and Luis launched into one of most recognizable chord progressions in rock and roll, drawing whoops and cheers from the crowd. Then I came in on drums, careful not to hit the snare as hard as I could or move my head wildly as I had in my band Spitboy. 

Like we practiced to combat nerves and to help us stay together, we made eye contact across the stage, mother and son. I nodded as we made the transition from the intro to the soft part that follows, and by the time we got to the distinctive chorus, da, da, da diga, diga, diga, da,da,da, the crowd was roaring. Luis looked up from his guitar, and I saw his anxiety slip away. Then as we wound down for the big finish, Luis locked eyes with me and smiled wide like he did when I nursed him as a baby. The crowd went wild and Luis’ girlfriend swooned in her chair; his friends in the dance act jumped to their feet and clapped; my husband stood at the front of the stage with the camera grinning, and lots of other husbands rehearsed what they’d say as they approached me afterwards. And me and my son punctuated the end of the song, hitting each beat together, ba, ba, ba.

This piece was written specially for submission for the cast of Listen To Your Mother, of which I was member with thirteen other women who told their stories too. Special thanks to all my LTYM sister — what a great adventure!

http://prettyboldblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/the-spitboy-rule-part-i/

Spitboy: European Tour 1993
Top: MCG Paula Hibb Rines, Pete The Roadie
Middle: Jon Hiltz, Nolde, Erich (merch and drivers)
Bottom: Karin Gembus and Adrienne Droogas                                                                                      

Boyfriends on tour in Europe did change the dynamic, but it never changed what we had on stage every night. People often commented on our live performances and the way we connected with one another and the audience. It probably helped that we all wrote lyrics. Adrienne always sang lead and if she were singing lead on a song that I wrote, I would sing with her. This sort of collaboration worked the same way with songs written by Karin, Paula, and later Dominique. Jon Hiltz said that we were the most positive, supportive band he ever met. His experience in his own band had apparently been somewhat fraught, but I could see how difficult it could be to get along on tour with some people, away from the comforts of home, the stress of the long drives, the fatigue, and the close quarters.  Though it came somewhat naturally for Spitboy to make an effort and not  take one another for granted and to accept certain quirks we hadn’t noticed at home — Paula was moody at times; Karin was very good at getting her own needs met, I was probably, at times, too stand offish and needy, and Adrienne loved to socialize so much that she had trouble getting to certain band duties like helping tear down equipment and selling merchandise. Accepting these quirks was the right the thing to do and never affected our live performances. On the other hand, if being in a band is like a marriage, and trust me it is, then playing live is the sex, which would make playing live easy, the pay off, the place where we might even be able to fake it. Plenty of dysfunctional people in dysfunctional relationships have sex are able to connect this this way in order to satisfy this one need, only this wasn’t the case with Spitboy. Spitboy never faked it. We genuinely liked one another, admired one another in many ways too.

Karin, our guitar player, was the subject of such admiration during and after our first show in France. It happened about mid-way through a sluggish, we’re-tired-after-touring-all-week-with-Citizen Fish-and-we-just-got-off-the-ferry set of songs, a guy started shouted something from the crowd, something like, “Enlevez vos blouses! Enlevez vos blouses,” meaning take off your shirts!  As soon as he said it, a woman standing at the front of the low stage began waving her hands wildly and yelling to us in English, wanting to tell us what he had said, but Karin being fluent in French since college had understood it herself. And instead of launching into the next song, she stepped up to her microphone and calmly, almost politely, cussed the guy out in his own language. For a second, the room went almost totally silent. Then it erupted into a loud volley of cheering and laughter, especially by the women in the crowd. No one had been expecting anything like that at all.

In part, it was this sort of admiration of one another and all that each was capable of that caused us to make the no-boyfriends-on-tour rule in the first place. I know I never wanted divided loyalties to interfere with or change any of it. But after the first US tour, we were never able to fully abide by the boyfriend rule, though it was there in the back our minds, reminding us to not pick at the quirks, to remain united, to make the most of each quick stop in a different city, and in the case of Europe, sometimes, a different country each day. Together we played to five hundred people in Rome, walked over the spooky, beautiful Charles Bridge in Prague, gazed up at the Gaudi Museum in Barcelona after dark, and ate pizza fresh out of a backyard brick oven overlooking an olive farm in Toscano, Italy. I never felt alone or divided on days like that, and I wasn’t.

Spitboy: US Tour 1992
Right before playing in a barn somewhere in Michigan, I think.

Spitboy had a rule. No boyfriends on tour. It was a good rule, but it turns out there were ways around it.

We didn’t take anyone with us on our first tour, boyfriends or otherwise. That may have been a mistake, but we wanted to prove that we could do it all: write our own songs, play our own instruments, and drive the van, navigate the interstates with a map, unload our own equipment, and change our own tires (and in only a matter of minutes). Paula, our bass player, even fixed the van when it broke down. She spent hours and hours with her head in the engine in Missoula, Montana, oil on her face and up to the tattoo on her freckled shoulder. I sat in the van (the engines could only be accessed from inside the van) with her handing her tools for as long as I could stand it, not quite sure what she was so grumpy about, not realizing at first that she felt the way I did whenever we finished a set and young women would come to tell us how much we meant to them, and I was stuck tearing down my drums and getting them out of the way of the next band, while the others basked in the praise.

I think it was Paula’s dad who taught her to work on cars when she expressed an interest, and her know-how made it possible for us to get across the US and back without spending what money we made on shows and merchandise on van repairs more than twice. We did have to get the blue van repaired in Wyoming. For some reason, we always broke down in Wyoming; Wyoming was Spitboy’s Bermuda Triangle.

Touring all on our own with no roadies, without anyone who wasn’t in the band to help drive that first time around was hard, but it was important for us to know that we could. We were one of the only all female punk bands playing straight forward hardcore, no jangly chords, reverb, or feminine harmonies for us, just the driving sounds of chunky bar chords, thumping bass lines, rapid fire drum beats, and Adrienne’s warbly growl. And being women who spent a lot of time together even when we weren’t touring, our menstrual cycles had synced up. It got to where we’d each start our period within a day a day or so of the other. We got to a show in Minot North Dakota just before the first band was about to take the stage, which made the show’s promoter really nervous, but with three of us on our periods at the same time, we had to stop every twenty or thirty minutes at a different dirty roadside gas station bathroom on our already long drive from Chicago or wherever we were coming from. We apologized to the nervous promoter and told him the truth — three out of the four of us were on our period and we had to stop a lot. He didn’t need to hear anymore, “That’s okay,” he said, waving his hand in the air boyishly. He’d probably never heard that excuse from a band before. Having someone who else to worry about driving on these days might have made things easier. I know I wasn’t a steady or efficient driver while suffering from a bad case of cramps.

The long late night drives to a city too far to make it to without leaving right after the show the night before — those were the worse without a roadie. Having one more person to share driving shifts would have just been a smart and safe thing to do. Instead, one of us would drive, another would try to stay awake and navigate, while two of us slept in our sleeping bags on the futon on the loft built behind the middle row of seats for that purpose. I had the ability to wake up after four or so terrible hours of sleep, stumble into whatever gas station we had stopped  at,  buy a cup of the worst coffee in America and some water, take a no-doze, and get back in the van and drive. Once back on the interstate, I’d listen to whatever CD’s I wanted to, sing along quietly, and keep my eyes peeled for weird construction cones, potholes, wild animals, and cops. The driving part never bothered me much; it was the fatigue the next morning. Trying to get back to sleep after driving four or so hours straight and trying to get back to sleep once the sun was up and the rest of the band one-by-one with it.

The no-boyfriends-on-tour rule went out the van window on our European tour in 1993. We had no choice but to bring a lot of people, a whole entourage. First off, we had to hire drivers because none of us had driver’s licenses to drive over seas, and since Paula was now dating the best, most well-renown roadies in the punk scene, Pete the Roadie, we had to bring him too. And we brought Jon Hiltz,Born Against drummer, who Karin had always had a shine for, to help sell merchandise.  While logical to break no-boyfriends-on-tour rule for the European tour, the rule itself made even more sense. With Paula off with Pete, and Karin snogging with Jon in the dark on long drive, things felt a little less unified — men did change things — some had a person that was just her own and others didn’t. I didn’t. And Adrienne didn’t either.

Aaron Elliott, Mr. Cometbus, told me that that my band Bitch Fight should stop saying we were from San Francisco and say we were from Tuolumne instead. I was eighteen and Aaron Elliott, the drummer of Crimpshine  and East Bay scenester was my boyfriend. Aaron was the rare guy who thought it was cool to date a girl drummer, someone like him, but not, all at the same time. I was taken with his long-armed, pointy-kneed, awkward drumming style, full lips, and bleach blond hair, and I let him pursue me until I was ready to break up with the mysterious, oft-distant, stage-hand boyfriend who said he was Italian, even though his mom and sister looked distinctly Mexican. Aaron liked my brown skin and thought it was cool that I was from a small town, a fact that Bitch Fight hoped to put behind us, and we weren’t really from Tuolumne once Elka Zolot jointed the band.

I had moved to San Francisco  from Tuolumne in 1987, just two weeks after I graduated, left town with my band mates Nicole Lopez and Sue Ann Carney, seeking to make a name for the band we started in high school and to attend City College. The band, Bitch Fight, was appropriately named for our constant bickering, petty jealousies, and our gender, as there were not many women playing punk rock, and we knew that, and felt it was worth pointing out.

Having grown up in Berkeley, Aaron Elliot had a sort of a romantic or idealized notion of what it meant to grow up in small town, and he never tried  to understand why the Tuolumne Bitch Fight girls didn’t want to claim it. He was right that it made us different,  made us who we were even, but there were plenty of things he did not understand. He definitely did not understand, and I didn’t know how to explain to him what it was like to be a minority, a person of color in a small town, a place that had tried to grind me down.

Sure, Aaron was different too, nerdy, awkward, and punk rock, but the punk rock part, that was just an attitude, ripped jeans, and weird shit tied to his wrists, things he could take off. And his attitude represented a major flaw common in the Bay Area punk scene. People of color in punk were often viewed as the white versions of who we really were. My last name was Gonzales, but I didn’t speak with an accent, the black kids in the scene didn’t act “ghetto,” and” scenesters like Eric Yee  didn’t substitute an ‘L’ sound for an ‘R’ sound, all facts that were commented on with the following “compliment” — you’re the whitest Mexican/Black guy/Asian that I’ve ever met (shout out to Kendon Smith).

And while I wasn’t at all able to articulate my feelings, my annoyance with Aaron’s opinion about what I should claim and how, I did know that growing up brown in a sea of whiteness, on welfare, being poor, the instability, and the shame, that it was all still too close. But I get it now, what Aaron meant about thinking Nicole, Sue, and I should claim Tuolumne even though he never tried  to understand why we didn’t want to.

But Aaron Elliot’s directive about what I should claim, no matter how misdirected and naive it was at the time is something I never forgot. Long after I stopped reading his love letters, hoping to run into him somewhere unexpectedly, listening to Crimpshrine, and long after playing drums and writing lyrics for Spitboy and Instant-Girl, touring Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the United States twice, going back to college, getting married, and having a son, Aaron’s ideas about my small town made some sense to me.

Ten years after Instant-Girl, Spitboy’s offshoot band, played its last show, and once settled into my tenure track teaching position, I wrote two personal essays about growing up in Tuolumne. I wrote “Blondes Have More Fun,” and “Queen of Chlorine” and then Aaron’s words came to me. He had wanted Bitch Fight to claim Tuolumne, and we never did, but there I was writing a somewhat humorous memoir about the most painful, trying, and agonizing years of my life, and the town I sort of pretended I wasn’t from for so long — there I was claiming it.
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