ARTICLES

Hellish Purity

For Girls Who Can Say No

By James McCoy

I was in line at the grocery store. The magazines were in my face: "Look Great Naked!"; "Advanced Lovers Only... So hot you'll burn a hole through the bed"; "23 Erotic Ways to Make Sex With Him Sweeter." And those were the women's magazines. But one headline called to me with a small, still voice; that was the article that I read. "Girls Who Can Say No." Girls who can say "no"? That was the first time I heard about the movement called "straight-edge." Apparently, the girls in it dress like punks, they listen to punk rock music, but they say "no" to drugs, alcohol, smoking and promiscuous sex. They make these vows for life. Their motto is "Never Surrender."

On-line (the internet this time) I searched for more on "straight-edge." It seems like the whole movement started with a punk rock band called Minor Threat. Between 1981 and 1983 they recorded 26 songs in an Arlington, Virginia studio. I got a hold of their Complete Discography.

The first song, "Filler," didn't surprise me at all; it was filled with rock's usual knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment: Your brain is clay/ What's going on/ You picked up a bible/And now you're gone. But a song called "Straight Edge" surprised me: I'm a person just like you/But I've got better things to do ... [Than] snort white s--t up my nose/Pass out at the shows/I don't even think about speed/That's something I don't need.... An anti-drug message!

What straight-edge lacks in speed as a drug, however, it seems to make up for in its music. The drumming was faster than a shrew mouse's heartbeat and the words collided into each other like a 12-car collision. I'm a person just like you/But I've got better things to do/Than sit around and smoke dope/'Cause I know I can cope... Always gonna keep in touch/never want to use a crutch/I've got the straight edge. Even more surprising was "Out of Step (with the world):" Don't smoke/Don't drink/Don't f--k/At least I can f--ing think.

A Polish priest, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, once told me that every human being must have a creed, code and cult. Believing, obeying and worshipping a higher power are more essential to the life of man than eating, drinking and breathing. If it's not the Nicene Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Catholic worship, it will be something else. Seventeen years later, I met a young woman named Samantha, a student at UCSD, who hadn't even been born when "Straight-edge" was recorded. She had kept her virginity, had used neither drugs nor alcohol nor cigarettes because of this fad -- or is it more of a code and a credo, a whole way of life? And when one commits to a way of life -- for life -- the support of other like-minded believers is essential. A demanding life also requires ritual reinforcement. That's where "cult" (in the good sense of the word) comes in.

Maybe straight-edge was just another cult, in the bad sense of the word, and therefore hardly worth evangelizing; but maybe straight-edge was not a cult but a culture, and therefore ripe for evangelization. Straight-edge could be a way wide open to the Church, after she had toppled a few idols along the way first. Culture or cult, I needed to observe the straight-edge scene. I made plans to go to a straight-edge concert.

The Showcase Theater is on South Main in Corona. It sidles away from the 99 cent store which boasts being "open 9 to 9, 9 days a week." Inside, the theater looks as if it was originally designed for summer stock, for serious plays with small casts and poignant musicals by Stephen Sondheim. One Friday in February, the house was being brought down, but it wasn't exactly by a heart-rending rendition of "Send In the Clowns."

"Blaah! Blaah blaah blaah! blaah": I listen to entire sets performed by bands with names like Cast In Stone, Bleeding Through, and God's Iron Tooth, and I can't make out a single word. The vowels and consonant change, but the song remains the same -- unintelligible. "Ow! Yow yow rotch ya yow! Yow, lo-ow!" The various lead vocalists -- all men -- saw through their lyrics, holding the mike horizontally in front of their faces. The Spirit may be blowing here, but I had a feeling it was going to be hard to hear Him.

"It's kind of loud," Mary says, "A lot of people wear earplugs." Mary (not her real name), 30, is my guide for the evening. With her blue eyes, white smile and ginger hair pulled back in a ponytail she could've been a model for a Norman Rockwell painting. I met Mary through a straight-edge women's website, identifying myself as a Catholic journalist and giving her my rave scene story (see Feb. Mission) to read.

To our right is the mosh pit where the young men dance. From time to time the music reaches critical mass and discharges a quantum of energy into the mosh pit. Then the young men run around in a ring. Their arms and legs flail as they dance, either catching or repelling other arms and legs spinning in different directions. Then the rondo ends as suddenly as it began.

"People might hurt each other," explains Mary, "but they don't mean to be mean." Occasionally a young woman will also dance in the mosh pit. Mary once accidentally got a black eye that way.

Above the mosh pit is a balcony. People stand there with the stolid immobility of spectators at a lynching. They're not even rocking in place. You couldn't rock to this beat, anyway; it's too fast.

The dancers are breaking further and further out of the mosh pit with each successive wave. The theater has no alcohol license, so such high spirits can't be attributed to alcoholic spirits on site. From time to time a lead singer will proffer his microphone to one of the young men who infallibly sings the lyrics. So lots of people here must know the words to the songs. Requests are called out: "Play some Excessive Force!" Finally things get so hot that when a lead singer takes a slug of water and sprays it out, I watch to see whether it evaporates before it hits the stage.

One lead singer begins his set by first licking his microphone stand. Later he dedicates a song to "all the straight-edge kids." The audience response is hearty, but hardly unanimous. So not everybody here is straight-edge.

During a break between bands setting up, I talk to Mary, her half-sister ("call me Li'l Sis") and Sasha about being straight-edge. "The only two straight-edge girls I hang out with are my sister and Sasha," says Li'l Sis, 18, who's known "as the straight-edge girl in Monrovia." Although her friends in high school "were all on tranquilizers" yet "people's moms don't like me because I'm straight-edge.... It kind of bothers me that people judge." Li'l Sis is wearing jeans, a black top not quite sheer enough to see through and a pendant around her neck saying, "Till the day I die, Straight-edge." Li'l Sis says, "the years pass and people change, but I'm staying true to my ways."

Sasha, 23, has a tattoo of an X on the back of her hand. The X symbolizes abstinence; it used to be straight-edgers wore Xs the way leopards wear spots. Nowadays, says Mary, "it's not that big a deal anymore." The girls still wear Xs out of an evangelical fervor, for example, when they go to a punk rock concert where people are not straight-edge. "When we went to Warped Tour," says Mary, "we Xed out." They were made fun of also.

Be good, Mark Twain once said, and you will be lonesome. "It sounds like straight-edge can be a lonely way of life," I said. "It's not really lonely," Li'l Sis replied, "because it's the right thing for me."

Mary, Sasha and Li'l Sis take up their positions near the stage again. I stand further back, behind six girls. One lead singer, an exemplar of muscular straight-edginess, ironically dedicates his song to a girl in high school who rejected him because "I didn't shove brewskies and smoke the f--ing dank." He has an X on his hand, tattoos on his muscle-bound arms and huge pirate earrings. The girls in front of me gaze at him. "I once admired strength," he says at another point, "now it don't mean a f--ing thing to me."

Another band comes on, sounding just like all the others. But then: "We're a Christian band," says the lead singer, a short, scrawny, red-haired guy who has taken off his shirt revealing a huge red tattoo on his belly saying, "DISCIPLE." This witness is greeted by a loud and friendly "Yeah!" from some in the audience. "We're just like you guys," he goes on, "we found a way out of all this mess. So I challenge you guys just to look into the truth."

This band stirs up the most reaction in the mosh pit. Fellows are literally flying around in it now. After that band's set is over, Sasha bumps into me, literally. It seems to be her standard friendly greeting.

"What did you think about that band saying it was Christian, to look into it?" I ask.

"I don't mind it," Sasha says, "I like it. If you can respect me for my beliefs, I can respect you for yours."

"I like going to church," says Mary, joining us, "I don't like the people at church. Most of the people I met at church are really closed-minded." Mary and Li'l Sis were first raised as Lutherans, then as non-denominational Christians.

But then the last band came on and I was gravel in a sink disposal again and the music was hellish and the singing demoniac.

The show over, and the good-byes made, the parking lot seemed as silent as a field after a heavy snow. My ears are ringing as I drive the I-15 home. I think back to what Li'l Sis told me when we were alone. "When I went to a private school, I partied; when I went to public school, I cleaned up." She has been straight-edge since February 9, 1998.

Li'l Sis said that her parents still pray before meals. They raised her to wait until she was in love and she was married. She waited until she was in love. Now she waits again. "Straight-edge keeps you pure," she said. "I haven't found him yet, but I'm gonna wait for him, because, I don't know...."

Her dad has had cancer twice: no sooner did the one go into remission than the other flared forth. Once upon a time, Li'l Sis was so active in her church that she did missionary outreach. No more. She doesn't believe in Christianity any more.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Basically, from birth religion has been crammed down my throat.... Basically every time I get into religion this big ball of shit gets dropped on me." Tears burned her face.

"Are you angry at God?" I asked.

"Yeah," Li'l Sis said. "And I'm mad at my dad. I believe in God, but it's not the God my dad believes in or my mom believes in...."

As I entered my apartment and shut the door, I thought about whether straight-edge were a way for the Church or not. There were points of light; there were shadows, too. When Li'l Sis had wept, I thought: "it isn't the straight-edge scene that's a path for the Church; it's the person, each person who's straight-edge: Li'l Sis, Mary, Sasha, the guy with "DISCIPLE" tattooed on his stomach.... They're all paths for the Church." As Pope John Paul II wrote, "The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about man and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption.... On this way leading from Christ to man, on this way in which Christ unites himself with each man, nobody can halt the Church.... We are speaking of each man on this planet... Each man in all the unrepeatable reality of what he is and what he does, of his intellect and will, of his conscience and heart ... he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself."

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