Chris Tanner
Hello new friends, strangers, and those whom I should remember the name of by now but can’t quite seem to, preoccupied as my brain always is with whatever bubbles, broils or just rots inside it–for example, this ensuing nonsense.
At the tail end of January, I went to a show at La Voyeur, beckoned out of Hardcore Retirement by a friend in my class, a drummer of one of the bands. I was shocked to see, for the first time in years, La Voyeur going hard.
When I was younger, I had come here every weekend that I could, shows being the only place I could be myself and feel accepted and make friends. And in this spirit my body attempted, one last time and too late, to thrash like I had used to, to impress this new, current stock of Greeners I’ve found myself amongst .. I kept this up about 10 minutes before I sprained my ACL, limping to the back of the crowd to be nursed like an old frail dog by my girlfriend. Maybe my friend should’ve left me in the old folks home.
However, like anyone suddenly confirmed a senior citizen, this made me reflect on my past.
Also like the elderly, it gave me an urge to tell a long rambling story.
I’ve lived in Olympia far too long.
For the purposes of this recollecting, you may as well consider me one of the trees facing F-lot. One who has long been stuck there, transplanted unwillingly a decade ago, and has seen generations of Greeners come and go. One that has passed jealous judgment on all of them–for fucking in their cars, for goofing off, for not having to care–for being certain of their own rightness in a world where nothing seems certain or right. And all of that time, mid-oath (that nobody can hear—I’m a tree, remember?), perhaps wishing I could uproot myself and join, that I was really there, that I was really here—and all the while being literally part of this place and never noticing.
Recently I have finally uprooted myself, beginning to attend school here after over 10 years of living in the shadow of Evergreen. But prior to that time, the one thing that got me out, the one place where I felt accepted at all in this town was shows at La Voyeur. What follows are stories of a particular twinkish street urchin I came to know in the din of Pre-Covid shows, blearily typed out mid-hangover about 8 years ago, adapted as best I can from the language of a younger me. Things all long since past, arguably dead now.
4th Ave, late 2017.
A place of casually accepted sin alongside shrewish, puritanical anger.
Also a place of grandiose and wonderful absurdity, maybe for the same reasons.
The place where all skater kids and runaways with nicknames like “Roxie” and “Brick” ended up after the 90s were over and they no longer got roles in movies.
A place that, if wandered through drunk, and you have a soul left for it, no matter how hateful, you’ll make some friend, for however many minutes that lasts.
The night finds me skipping my community college English class (at SPS, this being 2 college dropouts ago), instead going to La Voyeur for a show. I couldn’t tell you what bands were playing, what arrangement of drunk teenagers were noisemaking, but the me of 8 years ago DID see fit to preserve this memory.
Across the sands of time, through a foggy sea of self-medicating cheap vodka I can picture that night, and that other me in it. Apparently I was “standing there, all of a foot away from a guy that looked like a Stormtrooper sent forward in time screaming with the force of holy war and just bloodshed amplified a thousand times and slamming distorted hatefuck noise through my flesh like invisible ocean waves.” And apparently, this made me move some, interact with strangers the only way I rightly felt empowered to: smashing into them.
And somewhere in that night, I see something new, something pure in the way only impure children can be. I see a boy of maybe 17 with a slight figure and the sides of his hair buzzed, wearing a black trenchcoat about 7 sizes too big for him and somehow pulling it off. I see, I soon learn, Raven.
Some people fit in so conspicuously well in a place that it’s hard to tell whether they were created by that place or vice versa. For all I know, downtown Olympia could all be one massive hallucination of this boy. I wouldn’t be able to tell any different.
Neither the me that exists now or the one that did however many years and lost braincells ago could tell you exactly what the first words exchanged between us that night were, but we can both tell you the moment that cemented his being remembered. It was the same moment I, for the first time, saw someone with real balls in this town.
An hour or two has passed since the beginning of the show. Raven came here with a handful of other people, all leathered up sons of suburbia ready to show their attorney dads what little rebels they are. Raven, however, is just some kid off the streets. To my isolated brain, desperate for any kind of brutal sincerity, he WAS the streets.
He’s all of 100 lbs soaking wet. I will later learn he has a hole in his heart, owed to a birth defect—a literal bleeding heart. And despite that, he could give a fuck. I smash him round and round and pick him up by the shoulders like I’m trying to imitate that scene from Titanic as violently and homosexually as possible.
Just as is still true now, La Voyuer, is a restaurant in front, bar in the middle, and a stage at the very back. The stage is still at the back of something like a subway tunnel covered in local paintings, light eaten up by blackpainted walls and ceiling–and glittering in the dark on these a galaxy of tags, stickers of bands, the youths of strangers.
The first set ends. Half-dead, I drag myself out of the cave for glasses of water, including one for my new friend, who comes to meet me in the tunnel between the bar and the stage on my return.
Olympia, as it often does, produces a roughly 20something, vaguely trustifarian shaped human. This one is carrying an overpriced sandwich, courtesy of the house. They soon bump into Raven, and that sandwich meets his water, also courtesy of the house.
Making the bold decision to be miffed at getting bumped at a hardcore show, they tell him to buy them another fucking one, you fuck.
I’m walking right behind Raven and I barely hear any of that. But what I do hear, and see, in the form of shards of plate splattering like an IED around my boots, is that his response was to bump them again, this time intentionally, hard enough to bring that sandwich and the thing it was on down to the ground.
We continue on past them outside, with Raven yelling, back into the tunnel as he passes into a dining area full of people, “TRY SOMETHING, YOU C*&T.” A sound strategy as it turns out, because calling the bluff of people around here with threats of actual confrontation tends to get nothing more than pissed off expressions and grumbling in return.
This, for someone who has been stuck inside—some shack out in the woods, in their own head, in a society they don’t understand—is a liberating thing to see. I expressed this liberation by laughing my fucking ass off, continuing to follow him outside, crinkling bits of sandwich and shattered plate underfoot, however followed by grumblings we were.
It was at that moment that I decided, officially, that we were friends.
On a totally unrelated and magical note, this group of rowdy teenagers and I suddenly ended up, somehow, in possession of about 2 sixpacks of Natty Daddy, being led to Raven’s usual hiding spot: at the bus stop across the street, he leads me to his temple. It lies above a shop on the main drag, a staircase around on the side leading up to the crest of the hill the building is submerged in, leading us to a gentle gravelly crest covered completely in bottlecaps, empties, tags signifying love and memory and youth. A rubbish bin of trash nostalgia from lives that play out against the backdrop of dirty, cheerful Oly in the forms of tags and cute little doodles graffiti’d on walls, in stomped out cigarette butts and lingering scents and condom wrappers.
We sit on some cinderblocks facing the view of downtown, drinking and shouting over this place that has changed so much and so little.
I get more acquainted with the friends of Raven that have been around, they finally entering into the foreground of my crush-stricken eyes. This includes the two punks who would manage to get a DUI later that night, 3rd one they’d earned that month, and the big fat one whose birthday it was and who told me to fuck off when I started bumping into him in the pit.
Hop-rich, sickly sweet foam flows. Youth does one of the things it does best and enjoys the cheapest booze money and a valid ID can buy, it still being a special occasion rather than a daily chore, a coping mechanism.
I hear a bit of Raven’s backstory. He is indeed a proper street kid, with a real Olympic-Dickensian street kid musk to him. He grew up in group homes and in and out of rehab. He later tells me that he’s originally from Salem, Oregon, but dropped out and hit the Greyhounds of America for a good long while when he was 15 or 16. He landed in downtown Oly, and immediately fell in love with it.
Which was interesting to hear, because on the one hand, it brought to mind the mixture of envy and leering pity I felt for him. He’s free and has roamed much of the land, for lack of anything or anyone to keep him tied down, and any home aside from the one whatever home it is I found him in that night. On the other, it was one of the few times I could pretty well tell where he emerged, because I’d seen Salem, the year before, to see the eclipse. And the image of that city flashes through my mind as he tells his story, and it’s an image of suffering of suffering. Of the playground downtown turning into a tweaker resettlement camp with chained-shut portapotties on the one hand, and the park near the state-worker suburbs being perfectly maintained as if by Apartheid on the other. Of haves and have nots, of those who pretend to care not actually having any fucks to give. And so the existence of this creature makes sense to me.
Chemically prepared for further bludgeoning, we return to the show. The latter half is a culmination of everything that led to that point.
Even more teenage rowdyboys show up, all staunch individualists dressed exactly the same.
Losing myself, I go all out, perhaps hearing later through hushed whispers behind my back I shoved someone’s date.
(As I read this years later I marvel at what advantage someone sufficiently young, drunk and incapable of giving a shit can take of a society terrified of confrontation—not that I would now know.)
At some point during the heavier songs, I pick up Raven by the shoulders and swing him round like a flimsy wrecking ball against others. I notice a few seconds after he ends up running off, and I follow.
He collapses against the pavement wall outside and tells me I’ve managed to pop his shoulder.
I feel terrible and apologize and he tells me to shut up and not fucking bother.
In retrospect I think this is both his stubborn pride showing, not lingering on his fragility but instead shouting out, and also because we were literally friends from smashing into each other like lunatics in the first place.
I sit out there for a few seconds, feeding him booze and babysitting him. And then we return, for a time– until the hour strikes that once more we are magically spirited away, once more marking some laundromat’s earthen roof our own with spilled suds, piss, memories.
Raven and I are once more fucking with each other, drinking, remembering things. And once more there’s a crowd around, a bigger one now in fact, including an old, formerly friend of mine from a prior attempt at college, and many more random punks.
At some point, probably sometime I was talking shit and madness on a level out of proportion with my scruffy innocent nerd appearance, Raven looked at me.
“Chris, did you know you’re fucking cute?”
My response, staring back into his eyes, takes a few seconds to formulate, being carried as it was by synapses like phonelines half bogged in floodmarsh with liquor and shocked stiff with the suddenness of any other human being seeing something in me.
But when the signal managed to make it from my head to my arms and legs, it consisted of pinning him down, kissing him deeply and pouring beer down this throat, in front of everyone.
I notice little of the reaction, a wide-eyed look from the aforementioned friend, varied laughs and silent looks from the punk crowd. I see it in flashes and all it does is make me enjoy myself that much more for, in my own feral and needful way, outpunking the punks.
There would be one or two other times that I hung out with Raven.
These would include him describing how he got shot in the ass, and, at my urging, dropping trow to show us the little .22 pinhole some inches away from the base of his spine. He would explain the occasion: how, midway through fucking a sheriff’s daughter, said sheriff got home, taking aim with a little plinker he kept on him and getting Raven in the ass as said ass majestically lept out the bedroom window.
This would include walking by one of those old manholes covered with arcane symbolism, being threatened with a beating from him for stepping on it—having it explained to me that those are ritual markings, real bad juju. (Which fits comfortably with the fact that this was the era of the Great Olympia Cat Mutilator, in retrospect.)
These fleeting moments would also include visiting the freewall, finding myself enchanted by the monolithic tapestry of brightly colored 11th grade manifestos, memories of lost childhoods all painted on top of each other and suffocating each other out—like tears in rain, like a snake shedding its skin into new all new forms forever, ever discarding the old. And even if 99% of them just boil down to “I WAS HERE!” shouted in shades of black and red, they were, in fact, there.
It would include, a year or two from that original meeting, running into him again.
He had gotten older—had aged faster physically than the intervening time would suggest, in fact.
He had just gotten out of rehab, again. He had a new nickname, which I think I won’t repeat here, and a hat that had permanently been sown to his head since the friend of his who gave him it, one of the few people he’d ever felt close to, committed suicide. He talked about how he saw a big chunk of meth on the pavement the day before but had the strength to just grind it into the dirt instead of fiending.
He would say he hadn’t had a proper meal in two days and, buying him nachos at the Reef which still existed in those days, he would prove that fact with how quickly he demolished them.I would feel simultaneously happy to see him and sad at what the world had so fast to one so beautiful, what he had done to himself at its beckoning.
But, that also was years ago.
I wrote in my original piece on these events that, “in the time following those nights they achieved, in comparison with everything else in my life, the status of folk legend.”
Still true.
The La Voyeur that I knew then is gone. My friend is probably also gone. The me that existed then was gone, and I do my best with my scheming and desperate attempts at building a respectable life to bury him. Nothing that was ever can be again.
But, at least it was.
