In 1993, with Urban Graffiti still only a germ of an idea bouncing about my brain, one of the few writers I had even told about it was a friend and fellow micro-press publisher (Streetcar Editions w/ Robyn Gillam), Daniel Jones. He said he had just penned a short story about his punk days in Toronto and would I like to consider it. As it worked out, his short story, “1978”, an early version of his novel of the same name, was Urban Graffiti’s first accepted submission, and set the tone for the litzine for years.
To coincide with the reprint of Daniel Jones novel, 1978, by Three O’Clock Press featuring a Don Pyle photograph of Rojer and Rabies in front of the Horseshoe Tavern, in 1978 – Urban Graffiti is pleased to reprint Daniel Jones’ short story from UG#1.
~•~
Kim screamed at Jacky: “Suck your own pussy! Go fist yourself, you fucking dyke!”
Kim filled her mouth with beer, and then she spat it in Jacky’s face. She threw the bottle at Jacky’s head. The bottle missed and smashed against the wall. Beer and bits of broken glass splashed onto Jacky’s spiked hair and ran down the front of her torn leather jacket.
Jacky sat on the floor with her back against the wall, staring at the cover of a Stooges album. Her lips were parted, as if she were reading what was written there.
“You’re just a fucking clit-teaser,” Kim screamed. She slapped Jacky in the face with the palm of her hand. Jacky did not move. Kim had on straight-legged, tight black pants that she had made by cutting a wedge from the legs of an old pair of bell-bottoms and closing the legs up again with safety pins. She was wearing black, pointed-toe boots. She kicked Jacky in the chest with the toe of her boot. Without looking up, Jacky reached for a package of cigarettes on the floor beside her, took out a cigarette, and lit it.
“Goddamn fucking clit-teaser!” Kim screamed. She punched the wall with her fist, then ran across the room, punching walls and people, whatever got in her way.
James stood beside the turntable talking to a woman with a greasy, black mohican and a safety pin pierced through her nostril. She had a black leather dog collar around her neck. Kim ran up to James and punched him in the chest. She shoved the woman with the dog collar back against the wall. The woman ignored Kim. James placed his hands on Kim’s shoulders and pushed her across the room. Kim bounced off the wall, turned, punched the wall, then kicked it, and ran into the kitchen.
James turned back to the woman in the dog collar. The name “Steve” was printed on the front of her T-shirt.
“Hey, Steve,” James said.
“My name isn’t Steve,” the woman said.
“So who’s Steve?” James said.
“Are you some kind of fucking moron?” the woman said. “Steve is the bass player in Teenage Head. Everyone knows that. I sucked his cock.”
“Far out,” James said. “You want to suck mine?”
“Suck it yourself,” the woman said. “You fucking hippie.”
James changed the record on the turntable. The woman flopped down on the floor beside a guy in a black overcoat. He called himself Mr. Shit. He was cooking some heroin on a silver spoon with his disposable lighter. The woman watched him. Mr. Shit told her to hold the spoon, and he rolled up the sleeve of his coat. He took a safety pin and jabbed it into his forearm. Then he tried to pour the contents of the spoon over the hole in his arm. Most of the heroin ran down his arm and onto the floor.
~•~
This was in my flat on Howland Avenue. There were twenty or thirty people standing in the living room or sprawled about on the floor, and another twenty in the kitchen. Most of them I had never seen before. The floors were covered in cigarette butts and empty beer bottles.
It was my flat, but I shared it with James and Kim and Jacky. Jacky had left home a few months before with nothing but her guitar. Her father was an alcoholic, and he had taken to punching her around. I let her have the bedroom, and I moved into the small room behind the kitchen. Then Jacky’s lover, Kim, had moved in. Jacky had told me that she was not sure she was a lesbian. She thought maybe it was a phase she was going through. She thought probably she was asexual. She just wanted to play her guitar.
Kim wanted a serious relationship. After she moved in with Jacky, Jacky would not have sex with her. They fought all the time.
James was a friend of Kim’s. She had met him at a Viletones show at the Isabella. James was in his early thirties, more than ten years older than Kim. He pretended to be gay, but he was not. He had long hair that reached past his shoulders. He worked in theatre, he said. He had started coming around to the flat every night. Then he moved his stuff in inside a grocery cart, mostly records from the sixties and a few pieces of clothing. He slept on the sofa in the living room. He spent all of his time on the phone, buying and selling drugs.
~•~
James sat on the floor beside Jacky. Jacky was still staring at the cover of the Stooges album and would not talk to James. In his hand, he had a paperback copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. He was explaining to Jacky about existentialism.
“Meaning has no meaning,” James said.
Jacky slid the record out of the cover and tossed the cover across the room. She pressed her cigarette against the surface of the record until the end burned through to the other side. Then she did it again.
“Iggy Pop is dead,” Jacky said.
I had given Jacky some valium earlier in the evening. James had given her some speed. Mr. Shit had offered to shoot her up, but Jacky was already too far out of it by then.
Someone took the record off the turntable and smashed it on the floor. Another record was placed on the turntable, and the volume on the stereo was turned up as high as it would go. “I wanna be a Nazi,” Mickey de Sadist sang. It was Mickey who had put the record on. He was wearing a leather jacket, black sunglasses, and a T-shirt that had “Kill” printed on it in black felt-tip pen. He and the other two members of The Forgotten Rebels stood watching their record spin round and round on the turntable. It had just been released that day. Empty beer bottles rattled against the wooden floor.
Kim was pogoing with James. James was bouncing up and down so high his head nearly hit the ceiling. He was wearing a pair of plastic kids’ sunglasses with plastic lime-green frames. The glasses fell off James’s nose, and Kim jumped up and down on them until they were broken. The needle jumped back and forth across the record.
Two ballet dancers lived in the flat upstairs. James had offered them some benzedrine and some acid, but they were not interested. They had been hammering on the floor above for hours. Now they were at the door of my flat threatening to call the police.
Kim screamed at one of the dancers: “Finger your own clit, you bitch. You bull-dyke. Suck the shit out of my asshole, you mother’s cunt. Eat my used tampons, bitch.”
Mr. Shit was moving towards the dancers, holding the burning end of his cigarette in the air. He got as far as the doorway, but his heavy, black Dr. Martens boots had come untied, and he fell head first into the wall. “Fucken ‘ell,” he said, as he slumped to the floor. He had not had the British accent before.
~•~
Earlier in the evening, my band had played its first, and probably its last, gig at the Turning Point on Bloor Street. We called the band Cerebral Paisley. Mickey had casually dropped a hint in a bar a few nights before that we could open for The Forgotten Rebels, who were opening for Teenage Head. We were not listed on the poster.
I did the vocals, and Jacky played guitar. We had a bass player, but I had not seen her around for a while, and she did not have a phone. Kid Dead played drums. His name was really Preston.
The first two songs had gone well. I had the lyrics printed out on a piece of paper. Jacky kept forgetting to change chords and played both songs in the same chord. No one seemed to notice. James and Kim were pogoing in front of the stage. Mr. Shit threw himself against the walls and the guitar speakers and crashed into tables. Everyone else was crowded around the bar in the back of the club, watching the hockey game on the television.
Halfway into our third song, Jacky broke a string on her guitar. She stopped playing. I turned around and yelled at her to keep playing. Jacky stared at the broken string on her guitar. Then she unstrapped the guitar and grabbed it by the neck and smashed the guitar down on the stage and walked off. The guitar was still plugged into the amp, and the noise was terrible. Kid continued to bang on his drums. He screamed out the lyrics of the song:
Your fucking American imperialism
Is just another trend.
Your fucking commie socialism
Is coming to an end.
Fuck you, Fuckface.
And fuck your Nazi mother.
Fuck you, Fuckface.
I’m fucking spewing in your gutter.
Kid stood up from behind his drum kit. He continued to hammer the snare drum with his stick. “You fucking make me sick!” he screamed. He threw his drumsticks onto the stage. He picked up his bottle of beer by the neck and broke it against the wall. With the jagged edge, he sliced up his arms. He sat down and picked up his drumsticks. Blood poured down his arms and onto the surface of his snare drum. Then he fell over onto the stage. He was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
He had finished the song. Three songs were all we knew how to play. I knew then that, at nineteen, my career as a rock star was finished.
Mr. Shit and several of his friends followed us back to my flat. Jacky dragged her guitar along the street by the broken string. “Kid’s a fucking adolescent asshole,” she said. We decided not to go to the hospital. That had been several hours ago.
~•~
The flat was nearly empty. Mr. Shit lay on the floor against the wall where he had fallen. Kim and James stood beside him lighting matches and throwing them down upon him. The matches burned his hands and the cloth of his overcoat and then were extinguished. Mr. Shit didn’t move.
“The fucking asshole’s fucking dead,” Kim said. She kicked him in the side with her boot.
“I don’t want any fucking corpses in my living room,” James said.
James unzipped his pants and took his penis in his hand. He began to piss. The piss soaked Mr. Shit’s overcoat and formed a pool beside him on the floor. He opened one eye, and then closed it again.
~•~
I must have passed out. I was lying naked across my mattress. Pieces of sun forced their way through the tears in the green plastic bags I had stapled over the windows. There was blood on my pillow. I looked up, and there was more blood smeared on the wall near the light switch.
James ran into the room. He hit me with a wet kitchen mop. “I fucked Jacky,” James said. “I fucked her and then I stuck it up her ass.”
James jumped up onto the bed and continued to hit me with the mop. The strings of the mop were red with blood. Drops of stale beer and shards of glass rained down on my head. James was naked. His penis was shriveled in the cold and stuck out over my face.
“Then I fucked Kim, too,” James shouted. He ran out of the room. I could hear him in the kitchen, mopping the floor.
Kim walked in, wearing my bathrobe. She was naked underneath the bathrobe, except for the dog collar around her neck that had been wearing the night before. “James fucked me,” Kim said. “He sucked my pussy.” She took a drink from the bottle of beer she was holding. “You got any aspirin?”
I sat up in bed. “Where’s Jacky?” I said.
“I fisted her up the ass,” Kim said. “The bitch was so drunk she didn’t even notice. James fucked her up the ass, too.”
The light from the window hurt my eyes. “Where’s Jacky?” I said again.
“Fucking clit-teaser,” Kim said. She drained her beer. “The stupid cunt slashed her wrists with a broken beer bottle. There was blood everywhere.”
“What did you do?” I said.
“James was fucking me,” Kim said. “The stupid bitch tried to wake you up, but you were passed out. There was blood everwhere.”
“Where did Jacky go?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Kim said. “I kicked the cunt out the door. She came back later with her wrists stitched. She hitch-hiked to the hospital. The guy driving the car raped her.”
“Where is Jacky now?” I said.
“She left,” Kim said.
I looked around for something to drink.
“Jacky’s just a fag hag,” Kim said.
I found a nearly full bottle of beer and swallowed some. Kim started to pace the room. Then she screamed:
“Jacky is a fucking fag hag!”
I had no idea what she meant.
Daniel Jones was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1959. He died by his own hand in Toronto on Valentine’s Eve, 1994. In between, he worked as a dishwasher, cook, caretaker, editor, and writer. He left behind several volumes of highly acclaimed and controversial fiction and poetry. His work continues to appear in several magazines and anthologies, the most recent of which include Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McLelland & Stewart, 1998) and Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts (Rush Hour Revisions, 1998).
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