July 4 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of the podcast looks at how the budget bill and intensifying police-state tactics from ICE around the country are combining to repeat history in ways that tilt us closer to dictatorship—though there are still so many ways to take action. I promise the goal is not to terrify you! It’s to let you see where we’re at and what you can do.

You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

I’ve written a short essay for MSNBC about the concentration camp in the Everglades, which went up Saturday. It has a lot of my immediate thoughts on where the country is going. You can read it here.

It’s been a hell of a week for everybody. So today, rather than tell you an unnerving story from my weird childhood or write any more about the concentration-camp tendency swamping the country right now, I want to share a lighter moment from my teen years that happened at a Washington, DC, record store. It might be useful to keep in mind as we think about how to move forward.

***

I left West Virginia in August 1985, heading three hundred miles due east to start college in DC. There were no plans for any family member but me to pay for school, and I hadn’t yet realized that even with scholarships and financial aid, it would be impossible. The first semester of my freshman year at Georgetown, I started out on work-study, clocking in for one job at fifteen or twenty hours a week.

By my third year away from home, my hair had grown almost to my waist, and my clothes were various shades of black. I was just realizing that, even with grants and loans, I probably wasn’t going to make it.

Still almost as naive as the day I’d left home, I haunted record stores. Long before iPods and streaming music, I wandered the aisles listening to what was playing and seeing what was new.

The first time I stopped into Kemp Mill Records toward the river end of Wisconsin Avenue, I went in looking for cheap blank tapes. The store was a throwback even then: a long narrow box of brick and wood covered in a thin veneer of dust and grit.

One of the clerks was chatty. When I bought blank cassettes, he offered to make a bootleg Dylan tape for me. I left him one of the tapes and came back for it a week later. But when I got home and starting listening, though it took me a while to realize what was going on, it turned out to be just a recording of the guy from the store, playing and singing.

I wound up friends with that guy. So when I realized that to have any hope of staying in school involved a second paycheck, the store was the first place I thought of.

Just as the spring semester started up, the only place I applied was Kemp Mill. By the end of January, I began working with the Dylan fan. Clerks started at $3.75 an hour.

Overnight, I became a member of a little community. But my lack of sophistication—which I could hide behind books and writing on campus—made itself more obvious at my new job.

The store drew people unlike those in my classes: straight-edge punks, teenage Latino metalheads, Madonna club boys, and streetcorner kids who drummed go-go beats outside on empty plastic buckets. It seemed like anything could happen.

Toward the end of my first day at work, I was standing by the cash register when a man my father’s age stopped on his way out the door. He asked for directions to the nearest raw bar. Having never heard the phrase, I assumed he meant a strip club.

I was nineteen but looked younger. That a normal-looking person twice my age would ask me such a question without embarrassment seemed shocking.

Furious, I wanted to shame him, but remembered I needed the paycheck from my new job. Glaring and answering in measured tones that only the self-righteous can wield, I sent him more than a mile up Wisconsin Avenue to Good Guys, the lone strip club I knew of in the District. He seemed oblivious to my anger and wandered off in the direction I was pointing.

For weeks afterward, I was angry that my poverty had kept me from telling him what I really thought of him. Eventually, I mentioned it to one of my co-workers, who told me what a raw bar actually was. Mortified by my mistake, I eventually got over it. My outrage became a standing joke between us.

I’ve always been a smartass and irreverent, and it’s easy to get in verbal showdowns that I don’t necessarily intend to happen. But for the last thirty-seven years, the woman from the Truth Coming out of Her Well painting occasionally appears in the back of my mind, except it’s the Raw Bar Guy, returning to ask why I sent him to a strip club. He comes to mind most often when I start feeling that “how dare you” sense of outrage.

***

Right now, just about every decent person in the country is bruised and stunned by the cruelty of not only the current governing powers but also many of our neighbors. It’s easy to be mad, or disgusted over every human foible from the last decade, especially right now.

Monday, I’ll go back to being my cantankerous self. But this holiday weekend, whenever I find myself irritated or wanting to punch somebody, I’m going to try to cut my fellow grieving Americans a break: the guy who stands next to the grocery cart to shop and blocks the whole aisle, AI churners, political sloganeers who never seem to take action, the folks ready to revolt and poasting [sic] their planned crimes online, and the seemingly willful misunderstanders who aren’t yet cognizant of my obvious genius.

After all, it’s a holiday. Which makes me think of a single that came out only a few months before I started at the record store. Hey, baby, it’s the Fourth of July.

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