Читать книгу Wake Up and Smell The Beer - Jon Longhi - Страница 5

That sleazy house on the corner, like a curve in a river of heavy karma, lost lives, and strange stories—that old house still filled with the leftover radiation of its past inhabitants— was the perfect place to exorcise myself through controlled acts of madness. I'd searched long and hard and even crossed the continent to find the perfect place to go insane. I wanted to fall apart, to go to pieces like some pagan orgy of irresponsibility, the ultimate slack, the snapping of the elastic that had held me so tight with real world tension through all the years of backaches and migraines back east, all the pains of reality would be washed away in a bath of drugs and moral decay. I would come out the other side purified and a better human being. These methods worked for me. I had moved from the east to feed some strange hungers.

Over the course of the late '80s me and a group of my old college friends moved out to San Francisco. We were all members of a punk rock art scene on the East Coast and had divided our time between Philadelphia and D.C. The group came together when we were all going to school at the University of Delaware for a variety of literary and artistic degrees. From the beginning we shared a special magnetism which expressed itself in paintings, poems, music, and a general madness of living. Within a couple of years after graduation all of us got restless. We shared a formless yearning, a pang for something different. It was time to make the big leap.

New York City was the preferred relocation destination, but none of us could come up with the money. Manhattan's a vampire on your wallet. So we went west. Fate pushed us to the Pacific.

I moved to San Francisco with Dada Trash and a guy named Joe who ended up hanging himself in Boston two years later. Joe just couldn't take being out west, and going back east was the equivalent of surrender. But for me and Dada Trash, San Francisco was the opening of a new life.