old punk

by Tamim Khalanj

I MET STEPHEN before one of his band’s shows in New York City. I felt like I already knew him; for the previous few months he’d been emailing me his tour diaries, which in turn I published for a segment on a small-time blog while he was on the road. The blog was an unpaid second “job,” my passion project. I thought even if I didn’t have direction, art could give my life some purpose.

I was fresh out of college, and the recognition that my degree didn’t mean anything wasn’t the revelation it was to my peers. I had known I would never use my economics degree. I had wanted to study art, but I did something practical as a sort of last-ditch effort to improve my relationship with my father, an engineer who only believed in the utilitarian; anything that didn’t guarantee livelihood was not to be seriously engaged with. My mother was supportive of my interest in music and writing but still encouraged what she called a “practical” degree I could “fall back on” should I need to.

I got a job as a staff writer at a health and wellness magazine. I hated it. I was a twenty-one-year-old fat brown Arab girl in an office full of blond white women whose hobby was teaching Pilates. A job was just a paycheck, and it would enable me to do what I wanted—write and make things I was proud of—without having to stake my ability to feed myself on something I felt fed my soul.

I loved music but knew I was never meant to make it. Still, I wanted to be around it. I had been reading Lester Bangs, Richard Hell, Jack Kerouac—I thought I can do that. I can string together words in ways that make meaning out of the banality of life, I can reflect, I can show. I felt like an artist who didn’t know what my art was, then I found it: writing.

Stephen’s writing was funny and smart; he made references to strange artists and niche ‘80s movies I loved, and I started listening to his music. I thought he was talented. I’d seen his band before we became intertwined, but I hadn’t met him and didn’t know what he looked like—he was always the only one in the band to punctuate his normal outfit with a homemade mask that looked reptilian and buglike.

After three months of email correspondence, he was back in New York City for his band’s homecoming show. He emailed me, “You’re on the list! I’m excited to meet you!” I was broke, naive, and like twenty-two so this all seemed like a big deal—I didn’t yet understand that no one wants to go to a noise show on a Tuesday night.

The venue was a glorified dive bar and an unusually large space for New York City. It was dotted with middle-aged men, and he had to be one of them. It was the first time I got an idea of his age. Eventually we picked each other out by staring too long and mirroring each other’s shifty questioning body language. The one other time I had seen him perform, he lay limp over the amp like a swatted fly. He carried that same hunched-over energy off stage.

I had no idea how old Stephen was. I just knew he was at least a decade older than me, but youth makes you blind to time, and old men in art are never their age. He could have been a very athletic and nimble sixty-year-old. He also could have been a thirty-year-old whose years of heroin use had leathered his skin and punctured his looks. Trying to accurately guess their age gets worse when you whittle down the artists to just the punks—they’ve dedicated themselves to eternal immaturity and are so emotionally stunted that the only way you’ll get through is by assuming the lowest age possible.

I was used to artists. Both my mother and older sister worked in art galleries. I spent a lot of time there, at openings, hanging out with their artists. Contemporary art is often a scam—at first I thought I was too young or stupid to understand what the possible genius or even meaning was behind a photo of a lazy boy pasted onto a cut open garbage bag. These openings were insufferable and stuffy, the artists horrible to interact with. You can’t just tell an artist you “like” their painting, you have to be taken aback by the subtle symbolism, the undertext that explains the human condition, or whatever other bullshit. Music isn’t like that. It’s good enough to just like the song or the energy a band has on stage.

But the galleries are where I learned that, most of the time, the more intriguing or interesting the art was, the more dull the artists were as individuals. I thought Stephen’s music, his art, was intriguing. I liked the music. I wouldn’t have given Stephen this much credit, even during my infatuation, but I’m always reminded of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a book as controversial as Lolita, but was otherwise, by his own admission, a dull man with no personality.

Stephen felt different, like there wasn’t a tradeoff between talent and personality. I thought his wrinkled eyes were from lives lived and wisdom gained. His body was covered in an erratic collection of tattoos done by famous (to me) punk friends. He wore good shitty T-shirts from Goodwill and nondescript jeans.

After the night we met, we continued to hang out at two bars—the one where we met and one named after Handsome Dick Manitoba. I’d ask anything I could think of—a lot of the time it felt like I was administering a personality questionnaire—“Did you go to the Mannequin Pussy show last week?” “How often do you visit your mom in California?” “How long have you lived in Bushwick?”—and he would talk but never asked me anything. I would run out of things to say, and it felt like the inside of my body was sweating. I had never felt this way and couldn’t tell if it was good or bad—maybe this is what it meant to “have butterflies.” I’d wipe away the condensation on my glass until he’d take a break from staring blankly at the wall, physically perk up, pull down the collar of his shirt, and say, “Oh! Look! I have a tattoo of a panther.” He’d rise up and down with no discernible rhythm, like someone was always kicking his chair.

He vacillated between being affectionate and being withholding—we had agreed to not watch a Marvel movie I had no interest in until he was back from tour. When the agreed-upon day came, I texted him asking him for details of the plan. “Just looked and there aren’t any tickets. I’ll see you another time!” He hadn’t bothered planning the movie or any alternative; he didn’t apologize, either. The brief intimacy of waiting for someone was pulled out from underneath me completely callously. This withholding behavior made me obsessive. When I get like this, I become consumed by thought loops that suck me in like black holes, and I can think of very little else. Should I text him a meme? Should I ask if he’s mad at me? Should I try to compensate for whatever error I’ve committed to cause this? Is he behaving like this because I’ve gained weight or had unsightly hair on my face or because he caught an angle of me that erased any of my beauty? I didn’t know what it was, I never know what it is, but that type of behavior still makes me obsessive. It feels familiar and the cliché is that it’s related to my father.

He doesn’t like me the way he likes my other four siblings. He invites my siblings to meet him on his business trips, he calls them regularly, he sends them money during the holidays. If my sister were to say “I hate olives,” and I said the same things word for word a few minutes later, my dad would turn it into a fight. “Why are you negative? Why do you say you dislike an important food in your culture? Why do you disrespect your father who likes olives?” These seemingly benign things would turn into huge arguments. They only ended because my mom and siblings would intervene. A forced reconciliation always followed. My dad would sit down next to me, but he wouldn’t say, he’s never said, “I love you”. The closest I’ve gotten is “I don’t hate any of my children.” But my dad did love me when I was a child—he took extra care to buy me gifts when he’d go on his endless business trips, he’d buy me the impractical sparkly sandals my mom had said no to, he’d call me halawa, the Arabic word for sweetie.

All displays of affection completely disappeared by the time I was eleven. I don’t remember how the end started, and I still don’t know why. But when the care stopped I thought it would come back, and it took me two decades to let that hope die. When I think about the shape his disinterest or disdain in me ended up taking, it must have started with my weight, comments about how I look better when I’m smaller, chastising me at meals for the normal amount I was eating or for the dish I’d order at a restaurant. I’d feel embarrassed for existing like this, my dad would see the sadness and lighten up, call me cute, buy me a gift but these were conciliatory, apology gifts for the way he had and would behave. The older I got, the bigger the chasm between the treatment my siblings and I endured became. It wasn’t subtle. People were confused, thought maybe I was from a different marriage. But I was the middle child, and we all share the same face, versions of my father’s. My siblings would split their holiday money with me, they’d try to redirect his attention when he started picking on me. My mother tried to make up the difference, and she became both parents to me.

When Stephen would disappear, I felt eleven years old again. I’d spend hours thinking about how I could have fucked it up and even longer hoping he wasn’t gone for good. But he always came back, so I called him a good man instead of a cruel one.

He took me to a John Waters standup special on Christmas Eve, then he ignored me until my birthday passed in early January. No response to my texts or to my birthday invite. He didn’t reappear until after my birthday party, because the event would have required him to show he cared through his presence or a gift.

Whenever he reappeared, I’d pretend to hesitate, but we knew it was for show, some postured dignity. I would always give in. He texted me a week after my birthday. “Come to my show tonight. I want to see you. I’ll put you on the list.” I showed up with some nail polish for him, his nails were always chipped and looked like the walls of an abandoned building. He had a basket of nail polish and I wanted to add to it to show him I thought about him even in his absence and maybe force him to do the same.

He seemed genuinely happy to see me, excited even. It seemed like he perked up when I got there. I was in layers of lace body suits, fishnet tights, and layered sheer shirts given some modesty by their obfuscation of fabric. He got me a drink, and we flirted. He told me he was happy to see me, it meant a lot to him that I had come. He told me my hoop earrings were neat and reached to touch them as an excuse to brush his fingers on my neck.

And then he turned, became distant, like he didn’t want me there and was put off by the fact I was. The night soured. I don’t know what happened but he walked away while I was getting another drink—by the time I got back, he was clear across the venue surrounded by busted groupies for a failed band I didn’t think could have fans. He kept touching their hair and giving me one-word responses if I tried to talk to him during those moments when they had scattered.

This not-relationship should have been over several times, but he had a fucking bat signal. If he felt me slipping away he’d text out of the blue, “I thought I saw you lying face down at the tattoo shop! I was so excited! But it wasn’t you.”

These were his half-baked attempts at rekindling our “romance.” We’d meet up at what I thought was our bar, but that was just a bar where he didn’t have to pay for my drinks. Months into our hanging out, Stephen’s friend mentioned in passing that Stephen drank there for free. The routine was the same. He’d sit down with a beer and tell me, “I’m going on tour for two months.”

“Where are you going?”

“South America with my old band. It’s shitty pop-punk but we’re still big down there. They pay us a lot of money. The drugs there are good, too.”

I’d look down at the table and try to conceal that I felt dejected. We’d talk for a little and then he’d say he had to go. He’d get up, finish his drink, and gently tug one of my earlobes twice, kiss me on the forehead or hug me with the tightness of someone who knew they wouldn’t see you for a long time or even ever. It was both touching and weird as shit, like your uncle saying goodbye.

My friends would say he’s a piece of shit and I’d respond, “If he was he would have tried to fuck me by now but he’s been very respectful. The last time I saw him, he kissed me on the forehead.” They’d groan and make a bleh, gagging face because—yeah, why is a twenty-two-year-old being kissed on the forehead by a fifty-year-old man who she’s not not dating?

The longer it took for us to fuck, the more special I thought this was to him. Afterwards, I was embarrassed to have ever thought that. He was just a weird old man who needed to think of me as being virginal until he made me not. The that this wasn’t true, didn’t matter.

The transition from handholding and forehead kisses to fucking was not smooth. He had been back from the latest tour for some time, and the routine that had been established over a year started to reestablish itself. We were at a coffee shop and he said, “Let’s go to my apartment, I want to show you this zine I made when I was living next to the Butthole Surfers.” I was managing a band, and they were going to open for Gibby Haynes in a few weeks, which was a big moment for us. I texted the news to the band and jumped off the bench too eagerly to go to his apartment and see the zine.

His apartment was small and filled like a hoarder’s den with 35mm film from album covers of Courtney Love, posters he’d inherited from a relative who had been in Charles Bronson’s movies, original Velvet Underground concert posters, test pressing records from Richard Hell, and boxes of undeveloped film. There were open half-packed suitcases, and I wondered where he was going this time, why he hadn’t given me the usual tour spiel, when he pointed at the mess and said, “My son is home for the summer from college.”

I’m uneasy but it’s also our first time hanging out in the daylight, I just found out about a child my age, and I’m about to fuck someone completely sober. I can’t tell if it’s normal butterfly nerves or something in my body saying I don’t want to do this—I figure if I really don’t want to, there will be an obvious sign. My skull will echo with sirens and red lights.

He was on the couch and said, “Is this the point in the date where we make out?” I didn’t know how to answer with words. Truthfully, I didn’t want to make out with Stephen. I wanted to skip through his feigned tenderness. I didn’t feel the impulse to kiss him as foreplay to sex. I knew it would be when I tasted him and the dollar store sparkling water he drinks to stave off alcohol until the sun sets. Making out would be when I learned how much shittier still he would become, when I felt how deep the pit he would dig in my stomach was. It’s when I knew he’s not an artist whose time hasn’t come but a man who used his “art” to shirk maturity and adult responsibility. It’s when I could feel the oppressive presence of secrets time was already revealing—a child he hasn’t told me about, later a secret girlfriend who’s somehow younger than me. It’s when I knew the ending is both near and bad.

This unwanted knowledge was why I wished we had skipped the kissing and gone straight to the next part. He took my shirt off and marveled at my body. I was self-conscious, in that I have always been acutely aware of the way I am not the traditional image of beauty. I’m too fat, too short, too brown, too curly haired.

But he admired my body so intensely I felt beautiful. He said my pudgy flesh reminded him of Venus, and he appreciated the way the only bones he could feel were my kneecaps. It was several fifty-year-old men later that I realized the novelty was simply my youth.

He was my first old man but I thought this was normal—this is what adulthood looks like, this is what a life lived does to the body, this is why a man Stephen’s age could appreciate someone like me. But when he took off his pants, I was finally surprised—twice. The first shock was that he wasn’t wearing underwear. He was walking around underwear-less in corduroy pants in the middle of summer. The second shock was a hoop piercing on the part of his penis in between where his shaft connected to his balls.

We fooled around and then started fucking. I don’t know what exactly went on. It was a general prodding sensation, the stucco-popcorn ceiling, the dinky, inappropriately small light, a tube of something that looks like the dollar soap my grandmother keeps in her bathroom, something I don’t know if he’s put in me. The sex is occasionally being snapped out of, disassociating thanks to a term of endearment “my dear” that seems out of place during this act of impersonal vulgarity. One that he had never used when we had our clothes on.

I either faked having an orgasm or I just didn’t have one—I’m on too many antidepressants for it to happen and don’t remember which method I was using at the time. But he came, he always did for the last months of our time together. The whole production would have made me laugh if I hadn’t been struggling to understand what was going on.

He was convulsing on the bed holding me with one arm and spouting gibberish for minutes. It was a mixture between speaking in tongues and skeet bopping. For a second I thought he was possibly speaking Yiddish.

Afterward we lay there, and in our nakedness I felt like I could finally tell him about the last few months. How my mother had suddenly fallen sick, that I had become her caretaker, that I had quit my job to look after her, that I might be in New Jersey for a few months so she could do experimental radiation treatment. I didn’t know it then, but I was telling him that she was dying.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. “I remember feeling very lost when my father died. I was very productive, though. I made a lot of art.” What the fuck? But I said thanks and kissed his shoulder.

We continued to hang out for the months after that, though it was less urgent on my end—not because I’d adapted or he’d become better but because my life, my time, and my brain were consumed by mother’s sickness. I guess I’d also taken for granted that at his age and having lost his father, he would finally extend me unequivocal kindness and care in the relative sense that he could muster. I had mistakenly, even stupidly, assumed that kindness was coming.

The last time I saw Stephen during our year or two (I do not have the emotional wherewithal to revisit the timeline) of on-and-off not-not dating was a few months after the conversation about Mom. I had just come back from her funeral. I didn’t tell him that she had died before we met that day. I didn’t want to text about it and didn’t want him to think I needed much from him, although that’s what I wanted. When I told him, he said the things you read in Hallmark cards, gave me his condolences, said he would think of my family. He said that he would pray for us, which is cruel considering he doesn’t believe in god.

A week later he “broke up” with me over text.

Hey lady.

After therapy today i think i’m gonna take a little break from dating.

But i am thinking of you and your rough month and I send good vibrations.

X

About the author:

Tamim Khalanj is a Palestinian-American writer who lives (and will die) in New York City. Her work has been featured in Mid Cult, Another Chicago Magazine, Byline, Nylon, Bustle, Mini Mag, Shadowbanned Magazine, and more. She is on Instagram, PI.FYI, and has a website.