The queue was hideously slow, but none of us minded. We had beer, a flask, and some chemicals Yael had hidden in the many pockets of her American
army jacket. You have to have lots of pockets in our rebellious little
subculture, 'cos there's so much shit you have to carry around. Markers in red and green for your hair and black for everything else,
Zippo lighters to set shit on fire and light your cigarettes, keys for opening doors and scraping things up, mascara for those
Clockwork Orange moments,
liquid paper for writing on stuff and sniffing, guitar strings and picks just because you never know, and of course cigarettes, drink and drugs. Lotsa pockets. Of course, since most of us wore skin-tight spiderweb-ripped jeans, or shiny vinyl, or camouflage tights, we hardly had room in our pockets to carry our
mandatory ID cards. So it was, like, a good thing Yael always wore that jacket.
(We wouldn't have carried the cards anyway - we hated the government, hated numbers, hated anything that labelled us, hated everything that required membership. We liked to be able to make up our own names as the situation demanded. I think Peter used to have a business card with his name and the profession, "
Assassin", on it, but he was the only
card carrier in the group.)
We were in line for an hour or so, because this was a real club, not one of those dinky kibbutz discos or any wankers' club with lots of coloured lights and fucking mirrorballs, or laser shows even. No, this was a real club for real punks. It could hold hundreds of people, had industrial strength smoke machines and a couple of flicker lights, and it was built strong for mass moshing. It was the shit, or rather, the dog's bollocks as we liked to say and thought we sounded cool saying. We waited, and compared hair, and my fucked-up Mohawk was nowhere near as cool as the dangerously spiked porcupine quills some of the guys had on their heads, but it still felt like we were all part of the same movement, like we could have taken out the government then and there. (When you think about it, it's probably true. There's only a hundred and twenty of them, after all, and they were old and fat, and we were young and hungry. I figure we could have taken them down easily. Besides, we all had work boots and leather jackets and some of us had spray painted our shirts with Day-Glo shit so we looked like a bunch of walking lightsticks, and they wore Italian moccasins and suits. No contest.) And there was scattered fighting in line, mostly guys jumping their mates from behind and people blowing off steam, because this was Israel's biggest and coolest fucking export band and the only ones who still admitted that they were Israeli, and every punk, Goth, and New Waver in the fucking country was excited to see them in their first local concert in years.
Eventually we did get in, and watched the nation's premier counterculture music historian play uncensored versions of rock videos on a huge projection screen for about an hour - I remember "Girls on Film" with nudity, and "Nice and Sleazy" with artistic scratched-up black and white nudity, and some naff Adam Ant video. Not much else.
And the lights went all the way down, and smoke came out like dragon's breath, and tiny, weak lights limned the bass player, who was not traditionally sexy but was every punk's wet dream nonetheless, wearing some kind of white dress with a train about five miles long, and everybody's favourite toadlike little guitarist following behind her, holding up the train and leering, and all of us vocally reminding him that Israel welcomes her rebellious idols by calling them faggots and throwing beer cans at them. The smoke billowed and the white cloth flowed and the guitars began to screech like mechanical saws and the rest of the evening - most of the decade, in fact - was a total blur.