There is no end to the trouble in the world. Humans are trouble, and we aren't stopping anytime soon. We will do as we have always done, emotions annulling the logic, the warm, tawdry Caribbean currents taking over the cool industrious North Atlantic waters, temperatures rising, panties moistening, fists balling, the summertime of Humanity; sticky, turgid, violent, sexual summer, all the exchanges of fluid, the mapped veins of physicality twisting through the warm climates, exploding, an ejaculate of gummy feelings and caveman grunts. Cities brace themselves for murder, childbirth, and crimes of other passions. Even the prudish can smell it: that mix of sunscreen, Margaritas, and hormones, lurid and faintly sour, like sweat on dirty sheets.
When the UK Subs played a July show, sometime in '85 or '86, in Washington, D.C., they seemed blissfully aware of the seasons. Spring, we know, is all about propagation, the seasonal equivalent of an Osmond, all giggly and proper; summer is more like a Hilton, filming its leather clad, lollipop boot-knocking and broadcasting it on WDCA to freak out the straight and narrow minded (sidebar: how boring must Pentecostal sex be? No "harder, baby", just "quickly before Jesus turns back around"). The setting was perfect, the stars aligned, chakras aligned, the feng shui...fenged. Let us kick off the Summer of Glove, shall we?
The first inkling of trouble came when I felt overwhelmingly as though that parking meter was eying me. What, you mechanical motherfucker, you got a problem with my hair? I will tear your vaguely Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind head off. And that was on the walk to get in line. I had my leather on, obviously, it being armor for my nerdiness, and Elmer's Glue in my fuchsia mohawk, full of Rush and Mickey's Big Mouths and adrenalin, wiry, psychopathic clown. We got closer to the front of the line and I heard the speed-freak jabbering, the yappy-dog yammering of the skinheads, the slurred belligerence of the hammered, all waiting for the adrenal cue, the starting gun of mayhem.
The band didn't even get a chance to properly warm up. The temperature rose, skyrocket-like, the maniacal beat drove the frenzy. The city never had a chance. We spilled onto F St., a gangly, be-spiked swirling Chaos, cops shouting at us to remain orderly, OBEY, you..you freaks! But the gate had been left open, the lunatics free of the asylum walls, run, Mr. Smith, the freaks have the capital.
The crowd exploded, destroying a cop car, kicking a mailbox over, more toppled parking aliens, Chaos, mayhem, burst piping of Democracy's infrastructure, freedom, albeit brief, wholesale anarchic release. The cops were temporarily routed. But that would end swiftly when the massive, 8 wheel, Chevrolet armored riot truck arrived...
And so the termination, the ejaculation, and the Lexan shields appear, the rubber bullets, the hoses. And everyone is calmer, the adrenalin subsides, wet, sticky, redolent with the smell of the spent energy. It was a show spilled into the street, inside-out Hardcore, art-life identity theft, sweet, honest Chaos. We left, no lingering feeling of having lost out on our ticket price, sated, for the moment, ready to slip into the sex-coma on the sweaty, dirty sheets. Release.
Summer approved, smiling in that infuriatingly crazed way, sweaty, sticky, and unrepentant.
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