And She Sat on the Floor ...
February 14, 2021
She sat on the floor. Cross-legged on the floor at the Electric Banana nightclub. Nobody does this, I could tell the minute she did it and despite the fact that I’d never been there before. This Banana was well known in Pittsburgh as a punk rock club, a dive, a “joint,” and not a lecture at the NYU theater department for god’s sake, from whence she’d undoubtedly learned such behavior. I cringed to see it. She beckoned me to join her and I said, “I don’t sit on the floor”.
She just shrugged.
It was my fault I guess. I invited her, Alex. It was something I’d been wanting to do for many months: see a local punk band play at the Electric Banana, a name, a place I’d seen plastered up on flyers throughout Oakland, and heard rumors about while at Pitt, and of course from the unseen yet all knowing voices emanating from college radio station, WRCT, which broadcast not from Pitt, but from Carnegie Mellon University just up the road. WRCT was teaching me about punk rock, because there was nobody else up to the task. There I would finally hear Gang of Four, Wire, Joy Division, and often local bands, like the legendary SLAG.
So I picked Alex up for our Banana date. We parked far enough away from the club so we weren’t right in front of the place, which is the cool way to do it, and walked, clad as we were in black a short distance to the club. I was in my new black leather motorcycle jacket, and Alex in a black leather blazer type thing, past groups of also black clad folks who lined the Banana’s sidewalk, gauntlet-like, huddled around cigarettes and cans of beer. We coolly did not stare, or glance, just aimed for the front door, which beckoned us beneath a garish yellow banana sign that simply read “Rock and Roll.” I pulled on the Electric Banana’s door and was troubled to find it was locked. I pulled again and it seemed to be chained shut and the glass painted black. I could hear music playing inside so I was confused. I continued rattling the door. A girl who had half of her head shaved bald yelled over, “not the door!” followed by the snickering of others. She waved a cigarette toward a side alley lined with dumpsters and reeking of beer and piss. “Down the alley,” she said. This was the true and appropriate entrance to the club and if we knew anything we’d have known that, basically rule #1 of getting in and not looking like an idiot. But we failed, and we were forced to walk the walk of shame. Suddenly I was very aware of Alex behind me, redheaded, red haired and preppy if you will, for there was indeed a lavender I-Zod shirt poking out beneath her jacket, the collar turned up, and some weird ballet type shoes on her feet. I became very self conscious and anxious all of the sudden, and had thoughts of aborting this whole Banana mission.
Alex was originally from my high school past, a past that never had too much to do with her, or she with me. She was in a clique, the Preps, short for “preppy” due to their upper middle class social status and choices of clothing which included I-Zod shirts in pastel colors with the collars flipped up in the back. For my part, I was most decidedly not preppy; ie: un-preppy — as intentionally the opposite of preppy as I could get it. I didn’t necessarily hate preppies mind you, I too was of upper middle class parents and knew many preps and was friends with plenty of them. But the pinks and teals of Izods with the flipped up collars made me somewhat ill to see and hurt my eyes and spoke of things I hated back then: lack of imagination and desire for conformity — things I believed I stood for against in high school. My own clothes spoke of this, consisting of a ROCK iron-on t-shirt underneath an omnipresent, never-to-be-removed jeans jacket. Acceptable rock shirts at the time were: Pink Floyd, The Who, Yes, The Doors and Led Zeppelin - that’s about it. Not even the Rolling Stones nor the Beatles made the cut for me. Jeans jacket? Never. To. Be. Removed. Under any circumstances or weather conditions. Hotter than hell? I sweated it out. Freezing cold? I wore a coat on top of it. Any school rules about wearing jackets, if there were such rules, and there probably were in the punitive days of public schools, did not get followed. The jeans jacket would stay on until it frayed off my body in ribbons of soft white threads. Which it did. And was still worn after that, holes in the elbows, disintegrating cuffs. All the better. Anti-preppy. Rock shirts, and long hair. ROCK long hair. Un-preppy.
We of the Rock garb were not a “clique” either. There were others who dressed like me, but honestly, most of us weren’t even friends due to their shirt content, ie: embracing of the Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Boston shirt, factions that I did not approve of. The occasional Black Sabbath or Aerosmith shirt afforded some crossover, some nods in the halls and that kind of thing, but we didn’t have a clique. I was not a hippy, nor a prep, not an egghead, brain, honor student, stoner, smoker, cutter, greaser, jock, or teacher’s pet. Just a guy with long hair and the correct Rock shirts and a jeans jacket. I had stoner friends, and greaser friends and I had preppy friends and they were fine people. I was attracted to preppy girls if one caught my eye, which Alex did not do in those days.
But in the early days of college, Alex came home to Pittsburgh after a stint at NYC Dance School. I ran into her as she visited home. A whole opposites attract kind of thing happened and we decided to have a bit of a fling for the summer. She was a classic dance type, lithe, nimble, slender; and I was the opposite, heavy, hairy and awkward. I was still dressed pretty much the same way I’d always dressed but had replaced the disintegrated jeans jacket with a classic black leather motorcycle jacket that I had purchased in New York while perusing Canal Street looking for a replacement jeans jacket actually, and found the leather instead. Time to upgrade, I thought, and made a mental note to buy a motorcycle some day to go with it.
For Alex, living in New York and attending dance school had obviously influenced her style. She somehow appeared more dramatic and urban then I remembered, and had a confidence that added quite a flair to her appearance. We flirted and seemed to enjoy our oppositeness, and when we finally pounced upon each other in bed, a strange and powerful chemical pheromone type reaction occurred. Where did it come from? We didn’t know. We shrugged it off. I put great stock in chemicals and pheromones and didn’t fuck with them when they were calling the shots.
But honestly, since Alex had been living in NYC she should have known about clubs and going out and rock lifestyle and whatnot, and she should have known better than to sit on the god damn floor of the Electric Banana. I can only imagine there was very little floor sitting going on at clubs in NYC. Maybe in a crowded poetry reading at some coffee shop, but at CBGBs? I doubted it. So where that impulse came from I am not sure.
So we had to walk the walk of shame with the punks jeering at us down the piss and garbage alleyway and just inside that true false door, the guy, the big Banana, sat perched on a stool, sunglasses on his face, gut bulging out from a velour shirt, cigar hanging from his lips. He took our money and we were finally in. To perhaps the biggest letdown imaginable.
I hadn’t been sure what I’d find inside, but ... it was a dingy, cold and small, and the smell from the alley continued to permeate. It was dark, unorganized, and undecorated, with a broken down looking bar on one side, and foul, garish carpeting everywhere, even on the walls. There were a few nonsensical flyers stapled haphazardly about, and broken furniture strewn at random. There were people huddled in groups, some at the bar drinking out of clear plastic cups, others lining the walls, or sitting atop the crappy tables and chairs in the place. And there was me trailing a red haired siren of a girl announcing our uncool and virgin presences. Look! Two dumb ass tourists who didn’t know how to use the door or what the fuck they are doing. They are dressed wrong of course, especially the girl, and are out of place and must be slumming. Slumming. What could be worse?
I fought through my misgivings and self consciousness went to the bar and bought us two beers in plastic cups, each one costing $5 from an oddly friendly barmaid lady who seemed like she’d just been out back pinning clothes on a clothesline, while serving $5 beers to slummers.
I looked around. Other then the few tables dotting the edges of the room with people sitting on them, were some broken banquet room chairs with slashed vinyl and missing hardware — ie: nowhere to sit. Nowhere to slither away in the dimness and melt into a chair and wait for the music. Or, if luck had been with us, maybe more even un-cooler slummers would come in and and draw attention away from us. But that did not happen.
So it was just to stand. Stand with Alex, red haired and preppy girl and hope something happened. We shuffled and looked around. She tried to put her arm around my waist while I stared into my beer.
Then, mercifully the taped music stopped and a group of the most astonishing looking women, each dressed in some dramatic tough-assed but casual fashion, took to the stage, picked up a motley collection of scarred and ragtag instruments and began to aggressively play a very disjointed music. It was a music of amplified sticks being dropped onto a hard, pattering surface; of the scraping of cans and strings down a driveway, a whirl of chaotic sounds that quickly spiraled into a dust devil of a song. A song with singing, with drums, with electric guitars. Every aspect was fascinating, the shrill singing, the chugging guitars, the pounding voodoo style drums was mesmerizing to me, and I felt the blood rush to my head. This is it! I thought in amazement. I know this music. It sounds exactly right to me. I am finally here! Home!
And then she sat on the floor.
Right there on the floor as the Indigents played at the Electric Banana. The Indigents people! That’s right. I saw them. I was lucky enough to have seen one of their last shows before they disbanded and went their separate ways. Dumb luck on my part really. Didn’t know I was going to see the Indigents. Thought I was going to see SLAG, a band who’s very sarcastic and darkly electric music I’d heard often on WRCT. I saw the flyers plastered up everywhere with the word “SLAG” and their Pittsburgh steel mill logo in silhouette. Electric Banana. Thursday night. SLAG. Didn’t say anything about an opening band. No mention of the Indigents, another WRCT staple I’d heard mentioned often. I was beside myself with happiness.
I’m not flexible enough to sit on the floor, and if I did get down there, I most certainly would not have been able to get back up, not without a lot of huffing and grabbing at things and knocking things over. I’m not a ground sitter. Don’t do it at picnics, nor parades, nor gymnasium presentations or whatever. I need a chair, or a rock or a bench or something. But Alex was at ease on the floor, crosslegged, a position that even in my most spry and flexible days I could not assume. I shook my head. She was down there and had put on some wire frame type glasses and was kind of squinting up at the band through the people who now stood in front of her. My head was jammed with negative, self-conscious thoughts, the primary of which was how to disown Alex. How to detach my presence from hers and feign no knowledge of a person who would do such a thing in such a place. She looked up at me and smiled, and I could only glare at her as to say, “Who are you anyway?”
I took some steps away, backed away from her toward the back of the room. The Indigents chugged on, and I put my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket and let the sounds wash over me like waves that propelled me farther back, past the bar and toward the wall, where a few other black leather clad guys stood slouching and smoking cigarettes and nodding their heads to the music. Without looking or saying anything, they shuffled slightly apart and made a space for me to lean, and I melted into the wall, while the image of Alex on the floor receded from my view. And I let the noise fill my head.