Another One Rides the Cometbus

I was thirteen when I saw the blurb in the back of a magazine, just a few lines wedged alongside a black-and-white photo of a Xeroxed and slightly pained-looking face. I had just crossed to the winning side of a sweet babysitting deal that had netted me six dollars in exchange for two hours spent eating refrigerated Twinkies while babykins slept upstairs. So I tucked a wrinkled dollar bill into an envelope and sent away for what the tiny blurb described as a "zine," from California, put out by some guy named Aaron Cometbus.

I had all but forgotten about it when, two weeks later, a slim manila envelope showed up in the mailbox, stuffed between Kiplinger's Personal Finance and You May Have Already Won a Million Dollars! My name and address were printed in messy, block letter Sharpie, and inside the envelope were 110 handwritten, photocopied pages, stapled together into a miniature magazine about the size of a package of pre-sliced ham. This was Cometbus: it was tiny and homemade, and it clanged into my life like an emergency, all sirens blaring.

Let me back up. I had just started 8th grade in a mid-sized town in northeastern Wisconsin. Our house was halfway between a cemetery and a prison, and aside from the occasional sit-in my friends and I organized in the middle school cafeteria, life was pretty uneventful. We'd pass notes in science class—updating, Wikipedia-style, the story of Jason and Sarah's attempt to have sex in the woods near Green Isle Park. (According to our sources, it "didn't work.") On weekends we'd slink around Godfather's Pizza in the mostly abandoned strip mall near my house, trying out crude stand-up routines on the surly clerks behind the counter. The late summer days rolled forward like the wheels of a combine. In the muggy afternoons we'd toss pennies into the dried-up fountain at the mall, or lie on the living room carpet with our eyes closed, listening to the low bellow of the paper mill across the river.

But then, every once in a while, apropos of almost nothing, a feeling would bloom in my chest. I'd be sitting on my bed, listening to a rock song, and a flame would swirl up and go skittering along the length of my bones: there was something else out there. I felt it. Something sparkly, concentrated, dazzling. Things were supposed to glow. Things were supposed to—I don't know—happen. It had only been a couple of years since I'd shown up at school wearing a green sweat suit with dinosaurs emblazoned on it in puffy paint (a major strategic error, but that's another story), and already childhood was fading out of view. I was halfway down the muddy footpath between being a kid and . . . something else. What? Glory? Beauty? Heat death, said the days. Orthodontia, said my mother.

But now, there it was, exploding out from the pages of Cometbus #24: that something else. To be sure, it was something I'd glimpsed maybe once or twice before. I'd seen it when I visited my musician cousin in pre-Giuliani New York, his girlfriend's skeleton collection taking up an entire room of their apartment. I'd sniffed it at the punk shows I snuck out to see at the condemned theater downtown, where shadowy 20-year-olds draped themselves on the rotting velvet staircase. And it sounds sort of crazy to say that the heavy wooden door between my daily existence and the largeness of life itself was thrust open forever by a photocopied magazine. But there it is.

Adulthood, Cometbus-style, had normal adult stuff in it—jobs, responsibilities, relationships—but, the magazine seemed to exclaim, That's incidental to the mad glee of being around to experience any of it at all. Adulthood was bizarre and silly and unhinged, and lots could be accomplished, with style, for next to nothing. That issue was filled with rambling prose pieces about bathrooms in L.A., reviews of cereal brands, and aggressive surrealism—weird S&M photos pasted next to an interview with a guy named Mickey Creep, fashion models photocopied to inscrutability and given speech bubbles full of hieroglyphics. There were cooking tips, sewing tips, scary comic strips, slang glossaries, and a profile of "that bearded guy at Rasputin's."

And then there were how-to guides, like "25 Fun Things to Do for Free," which included hanging around junk yards and enjoying the "post-apocalyptic beyond-Thunderdome atmosphere," auditing random classes at Berkeley, and the somewhat less likely (but according to the penciled star next to it, my thirteen-year-old self's favorite), "Pretend everyone is a bloodsucking freak chasing after you and run from them screaming." There was an advice column called "Ask Kent"—with a photo of a cheerful 9-year-old (Kent, presumably)—and questions like, "Where do biology teachers get those weird things in jars?", "Where is the heartland?", and "Are any of the famous musicians behind bars in jail bands?"

A story called "The Night I Almost Met Darby Crash" (the Germs front man who started doing music when he was kicked out of college for "antisocial behavior") begins, "Me and my sort-of ex-girlfriend Linda were having this contest to see who was more punk, and she thought she had it all wrapped up when she started hanging out with Nancy the Jewish lesbian skinhead." There was an interview with Mark Hosler, of the '80s experimental rock band Negativland, in which he mentions (attention rock historians!) some new outtakes he has of "Casey Kasem saying really nasty things about U2" and describes his plan to make a "really horrendous home stereo version of 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.' "

This was a magazine put out by adults, real live people supporting themselves, paying rent, driving around—probably, I imagined, in '69 Chevy Malibus—adults for whom the unruly world was something to adore, something to fall in love with over and over again. Cometbus knew that anyone, anywhere, could have a story, a lesson, a warning—it loved hobos and dreamers, autodidacts and trespassers. Granted, the "adults" who wrote for and were written about in Cometbus were probably 19. Maybe 22. But to me they seemed like wise angels, otherworldly creatures who had something to teach me about how to navigate the dense, stuffy world.

The themes and capers that surfaced again and again—hanging around dumpsters, talking with strangers about their bands/road trips/conspiracy theories, having people tell you things you're not sure are true, having people tell you things you're sure are not true—had something in common. Call it a dumpster ethos, salvaging trash and finding it beautiful. Cometbus—its writers, its readers—loved the ugly, the weird, and even the things that never happen at all (the writer, after all, never did meet Darby Crash). In Cometbus-land, every story, no matter how bizarre, depressing, or outrageous, was told with pride and finesse, because even when bad things happen—and if you live with any sense of adventure, bad things are bound to happen—you can use them to tell one hell of a story.

There's a tiny coda at the end of issue #24 called "Every Town is a Lousy Town." It's an anonymous account of one woman's exquisitely bad month abroad—from Customs on, she says, "clouds of ill consequence were firmly fixed to my body." Within days she was frostbitten and broke; the highlight of Austria, she writes with gallows humor, was "attempting suicide in my cold hotel room." By the end of the trip, she says, she's lost her health, her mind, and her money, and when she finally returns home in a state of exhaustion and shock, she finds that many people didn't even know she'd been gone.

And it's true—many people don't know we're gone, or here, or anywhere, and there's nothing we can do except tell our stories when we get back. After my Cometbus epiphany, eighth grade continued, Efren punched out the cafeteria window, I toted around a raggedy leather bowling bag—but I wasn't the person I'd been, and I'd probably never be her again. My insides had exploded; the inkling I'd had about possibilities had bloomed into a Rorschach splotch coating my whole worldview. I had something to look forward to, and even better, I had partners out there in the universe, even if we didn't know each other yet, even if we never would. Cometbus opened a world to me that I'd only peeked at through the slats of someone else's fence. It showed me that what was waiting on the other side of childhood was a cabinet of curiosity and delight—found love letters, seedy musicians, toothless sages, curried rice—and it helped me put one foot inside.

Now, more than a decade later, I'm unquestionably an adult, and I've hit my head on the real world a few times. During college, it was easy to live out Cometbus's vagabond bohemian dream: I befriended a guy who lived in a closet in the hallway of my freshman dorm. I ate cast-off mangoes from the farmers' market in downtown Boston. I stayed out all night scouring the neighborhood for discarded furniture and listened in rapt attention when a friend described how he had scaled the 200-foot Citgo sign that rises up over the Charles River.

But then, sometime in my early twenties, my daily life began to teeter uncomfortably close to the fringe, and security and routine seemed less like conventions to be resisted than comforts rapidly receding from my grasp. After college, I moved home for a while and, for the first time in my life, felt completely at sea. My friends went off to get Master's degrees in Central European history; I got a job at the perfume counter of a local department store. On my breaks, I'd go into the supply room and find props to create dioramas for the perfume displays. For Escape perfume, I created a desert jail scene, using bronzing powder from the make-up counter for sand. For Contradiction, I put together a miniature bondage scene, wrapping the perfume in dampened tissue paper, twisted into gauzy strips. I thought they looked great. I was asked to leave a few days later.

I found another job as an "agent" for a local watercolorist who wanted to increase the sales of her lithographs. She employed me to drive around town and persuade galleries to carry her work—and also to accompany her to the country club for fruit compote and club sandwiches. Most of the galleries specialized in paintings of Green Bay Packers in various triumphant poses; when I set a lithograph of St. Mark's cathedral on the counter, they looked at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. I pictured myself living in the closet of a freshman dorm for the rest of my life, surviving on soggy egg salad sandwiches and bowls of gelatinous fruit. I watched my peers move into stable jobs and stable lives, and the mainstream started to look pretty good.

But even as I bounced from misstep to mistake, I carted (a now-pretty-shabby-looking) Cometbus around with me and kept its ideals in the back of my mind—ideals that, over time, had less to do with off-the-grid-bohemianism and more to do, simply, with an underlying spirit of self-determination. (During a buttoned-down job interview downtown, it dawned on me that wearing a yellow acrylic sweater with appliqued daisies and the words "April Showers Bring May Flowers" embroidered on the sleeve might not be the most effective way to demonstrate my creativity.)

A few months ago, I gave up the security of a full-time job to freelance as a writer. While my family carefully reviewed the various shortcomings of this plan, the tattered magazine still sitting on my bookshelf gave me, at least in part, the courage to actually do it. And in a way, being a writer is more in the spirit of the magazine than adopting a lipstick found in the back of a taxicab ever was: my job is to go into the world, to listen and watch, and to assess everything I see on its own terms.

When I was thirteen, I thought what Cometbus did was show me that the world held something specific, and that all I had to do was search out those particular treasures, hidden in its folds. But I think what it really did was offer a point of view—about possibility and wonder, and even about love. The world, after all, is always the same: it holds as much magic or drudgery as we see from our vantage point. And maybe adulthood is simply that—that realization. From start to finish, it cost me a dollar—not quite like finding it in a dumpster, but awfully close.

First published in Before the Mortgage: Real Stories of Brazen Loves, Broken Leases, and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood. (Simon & Schuster, April 2005)

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