Police On My Back (And In My Garage)

Though only halfway through the summer and still over a month before classes start up, it is only a matter of time before “Back to School” signs begin appearing in the windows of local retailers and the weight of our academic careers will be heavy upon students once more.

But this weight was never entirely lifted in the first place. No matter how far we distance ourselves from Harvard, summer vacation could never exist without that which it is decidedly not: schoolwork, books, responsibility.

This symbiosis was much more visible back in grade school when the difference between school and the holidays was more pronounced. When the classrooms had been stripped of their posters and the last of the lunchroom trays had been cleared, that was the true beginning of summer. Each year after I received my final report card, I’d close the door on academia and only two thoughts competed for attention in my young brain: the fact that I'd somehow aced Algebra, and the sneaking (yet perennially inaccurate) suspicion that this would be the year I finally filled out my tankini. Ahead of me lay nothing but two months of unstructured time in which to but scrape my knees, freckle my nose, and lust after whatever three-named hunk was starring in that year's summer blockbuster.

Summer, was like, totally awesome.

As my teenage years wore on however, math became more difficult, my tankini remained topographically uninspired, and summers got rapidly less awesome. PSAT prep books replaced those salty Judy Blume novels from the local library, and lemonade stands, once plentiful on my block, were suddenly in short supply.

More troubling, however, was losing the benevolent criminal activity associated with my early teenage years. Bumming cigarettes lost its appeal once my friends and I could legally purchase them; standby activities like sneaking out and skinny-dipping went extinct as kids went off to science camps and spent their summers abroad.

Fortunately, one sacred summer pastime remained constant throughout our formative years, which we would defend at all costs: attending outdoor summer concerts. A rite of passage that was inevitably the highlight of our vacation, the outdoor concert was an activity that ushered my friends and me simultaneously into summer and post-adolescence.

Much like the pubescent years we were enduring, summer concerts were more about the journey than the destination. Headliners, therefore, were irrelevant. No sooner had the Warped Tour been posted than we donned rubber bracelets and piled into the hatchback of whichever friend had most recently learned to drive. Once we got there, we were a lot more concerned with the contents of our illicit “water” bottles than we were with the musical styling of Blink-182. By this token, I regularly made the trek to see some of the worst college-rock bills on the summer-touring circuit.

This summer however, the live music scene has been seriously looking up. Not only have the bills been improved, but even the locations are noticeably more desirable than the grimy tailgates of my youth. Beside the standby parks and fairgrounds, this city’s bridges, rooftops, even its pools have been transformed to host a slew of performers from the up-and-coming (Rodrigo y Gabriella at the Central Park SummerStage) to the timeless standard (Sonic Youth in Brooklyn’s McCarran Pool). And, most recently, an obscure local punk band performed in my own garage.

I currently reside in a former Firehouse in Jersey City. At 38 Mercer Street stands the Fire Station #4, the former home of friends who recently abandoned it for green, clam-infested Maine. Their cavernous dwelling has been entrusted to the care of we, the housemates. Between the five of us, there is a pile of Public Enemy cassette tapes and a diabetic cat but barely a stick of furniture.

Recently, fellow Firehouse dweller and local-access television celebrity Jayne Freeman asked me if I would be opposed to throwing a punk rock concert in the old engine garage. Blessed with such an ideal living situation and cursed with an inner early teen that refuses to embrace the onset of my 20s, I only asked: “Do you need help carrying in the beer?”

We decided on a headlining band that Jayne had discovered while playing with her kids in the park. (Yes, that’s right, I live in a crazy, empty fire station in the company of my housemate's two small children.) We cleared the garage of broken athletic equipment and age-old recycling and stashed the stroller upstairs (after we used it to cart in a case of Brooklyn Lager, of course). After considering the important factors of noise pollution and bedtime, we set doors to open at the admittedly un-rock n’ roll time of 7 p.m. On the plus side, we figured this gave us at least an hour before the cops showed up.

"PG Punk Show!" Proclaimed our e-vites, "Starring local punk band The Impulse! Bring your moms! Bring your kids! Bring your inner Joe Strummer!"

And they did. No sooner had the garage door flown open than there was a motley crew of pigtailed children, hipster mommies, local skate rats, and young urban professionals standing outside. With the first three-note power chord the most literal breed of garage punk radiated down the block to willing onlookers and disgruntled residents alike. The band’s amicably misfit music and lyrics did well as a rallying cry to cause:

“And I run. And I hide. And I run. And I hide.
And I run, and I hide, and I run, and I hide,
And I run and I hide, and I run and I hide... ALRIGHT!”

The cops showed up within an hour. I was virtually deaf for the next four days and relations with the neighbors were, for a few days, delicate. But the summer concert spirit of carefree irreverence and youthful dereliction survived. We successfully instilled in the children an appreciation for punk music and misbehaving, and from the cruel crush of core requirements, adulthood, and the appropriately fleshed-out tankini, I would happily continue to run and hide.



Nayeli E. Rodriguez ’10 is a Crimson arts editor in Currier House.