I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone - Softcover

Kuehnert, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416562699 ISBN 13: 9781416562696

Publisher: MTV Books, 2008

Synopsis

A raw, edgy, emotional novel about growing up punk and living to tell.

The Clash. Social Distortion. Dead Kennedys. Patti Smith. The Ramones.

Punk rock is in Emily Black's blood. Her mother, Louisa, hit the road to follow the incendiary music scene when Emily was four months old and never came back. Now Emily's all grown up with a punk band of her own, determined to find the tune that will bring her mother home. Because if Louisa really is following the music, shouldn't it lead her right back to Emily?

About this title

About the Author:

Stephanie Kuehnert got her start writing bad poetry about unrequited love and razor blades in eighth grade. In high school, she discovered punk rock and produced several D.I.Y. feminist zines. She received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and lives in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Ballads of Surburbia and I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. Learn more at StephanieKuehnert.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Rock Gods

Altars. Saviors. Rock 'n' roll. I braved my fear of spiders, dust plumes as thick as L.A. smog, and the stench of dog piss that the last owner of the house had let permeate the basement to tirelessly search my father's record collection for my next holy grail. Sitting on that cold, dirty, painted cement floor in my blue jeans, with the Wisconsin winter creeping through the tired walls and windows of our house, I dug through crates of albums, feeling their perfect square edges poke between my fingers. The slap of plastic dust cover against plastic dust cover was so satisfying, but the best moment came when I found the record I wanted, slipped it out of its paper jacket and onto the record player. The needle skipped and skittered for a few seconds until it found its groove, the first chord scratching its way through the speakers, a catchy chorus reverberating in my ears. Earthquakes. Rock gods.

Music was in my blood. My mother left me with my father when I was four months old so she could follow the beginnings of punk rock around the country. Detroit. New York. L.A. We never heard from her again. Neither of us was resentful. She had her reasons. At least that's what I told myself.

Two months after she disappeared, my dad moved us from our tiny apartment in Chicago to Carlisle, Wisconsin, the small farming town fifteen miles beyond the Illinois border where he and my mother had grown up. When we first returned to the land of lush fields, acres of corn, and barns that sat fat and yawning at the ends of dirt roads, people talked. It was just that kind of place, a small, tight-knit community; any deviation from the norm was grounds for discussion.

Before areas were incorporated, when land was simply land, Carlisle was born of a general store that farmers flocked to from miles away. Back then, the men talked about their work while picking up seed and parts for aging equipment. Their wives came for cloth and the foods they could not raise themselves. They exchanged advice about family matters and gossiped about the other women who had asked them for advice.

As the years passed, the government bought up land to build roads, and corporations turned family farms into giant factory farms. People moved closer together, and from the general store sprung a main street scattered with businesses. Two miles away a food-processing plant opened. The sprawling community shrunk into a town made up of the farms that remained nearby and the former farming families who took jobs at the plant or opened storefronts. Side streets attached themselves to Main Street in a neat grid near the center of town, but farther out, roads meandered around fields. From above, the layout of Carlisle looked like straight hair -- parted in the middle by Main Street -- suddenly gone curly at the ends.

But everyone still knew one another. Everyone still gathered in front of the store or at the tavern to talk. No modernization would ever change that.

I don't want you thinking I'm from some completely backwoods town, though. I grew up with all the modern comforts: indoor plumbing, cable TV. What set Carlisle apart from urban areas was the way everyone clung to history. Not like this-war-started-on-this-date history, more like where-was-your-grandfather-during-the-blizzard-of-1921 history. From snippets of conversation, I knew who I was, who my family was, and how we fit into town lore. The most popular topic from the time I came to Carlisle until the day I left was the high school football team. The second most common topic was the people who didn't seem to care about normal things like football, the people who just weren't quite right.

Like Paula Collins, whose parents had both perished in a barn fire when she was sixteen. She inherited all the money they'd squirreled away and the land they lived on, and she never left, never married, never rebuilt that barn. Or Norma Lisbon, who was well on her way to being the town drunk even before her son, Eric, killed himself. After Eric died, her husband stopped speaking, became a total mute, and Norma was drunk, disorderly, and doing something gossip-worthy nearly every day.

Or like my family...

My parents, Michael Black and Louisa Carson, had created quite a scene in 1974, when they sped out of town on my father's motorcycle. As a teenager, I walked into many discussions about it at the local gas station and grocery store, but my favorite version, the only one I took as gospel, was the one my mother's best friend, Molly Parker, told me.

It was an unusually warm day in April when Michael and Louisa fled, Louisa's eighteenth birthday, and she made sure all of Carlisle knew that she was an adult and finally free to leave the tiny town that had smothered her with old-fashioned morals. My father concentrated on the drive, thinking the only way to save the girl he loved from all the anger that ate away at her heart was to help her escape. His black leather jacket and wild, coffee-colored curls made him look so dark he almost blended in with the road, which was appropriate because before Michael Black was seen in the company of Louisa Carson, no one in Carlisle had ever noticed him. As she had since she arrived in the town at the age of ten, the pretty but untamed doctor's daughter, Louisa, was the one causing the ruckus. Burning down Main Street on the back of his Harley, she held on to Michael with one arm, her bleached-blond hair tangling like corn silk in the wind as she turned dangerously in her seat to shout obscenities and shake her fist at Carlisle. Outside of Carlisle Groceries and Meats, a crowd of middle-aged women doing their weekly shopping and work-worn men picking up packs of smokes on their way to the job gathered to gawk at the spectacle. Louisa tugged off her black high heels and whipped one through the window of the grocery store, the other against the Old Style sign that flickered above the doorway of JT's Tavern. With that final act of aggression, she wrapped both arms around my father's chest and never looked back.

So, when my father returned almost three years later in a blue Chevy Impala with me, Emily Diana Black, asleep in the backseat, everyone had questions. They contemplated why he'd returned alone, wearing a wedding ring and carrying a milk-skinned baby with a shock of hair as dark as her last name, and blazing, green eyes that left no doubt she was Louisa's. They theorized about why Louisa had left him and wondered if I would end up as wild as she had been.

Molly overheard one of the many conversations in Carlisle Groceries and Meats soon after our return. As Molly put little jars of baby food into her basket, Mrs. Jones, wife of the store owner, openly discussed the situation with her customer, Sarah Fawcett. "Well, Michael had some of those hippie tendencies. That's probably how he ended up with that woman," she stated frankly, pushing the paper bag with Sarah's things across the counter to her.

"Oh, I remember," Sarah agreed. "Long hair, and that bike, of course."

"Yes." Old Mrs. Jones tightly clamped her thin, pasty lips together to give a dramatic moment of pause before she shared her vast knowledge. As one of the most well-known people in Carlisle, she considered herself the authority on every topic. "Michael was from a good family. Not a rich family like hers," she added snidely, "but the Blacks have lived around here forever. I don't know what he saw in that girl, but I'm sure she was a terrible wife, which'll drive even the gentlest man to his wit's end eventually."

Sarah nodded enthusiastically: at the time she was a young wife, seven months pregnant, and wished to prove she had the moral fiber that others from her generation, such as Louisa, lacked.

Molly emerged from the aisle and headed angrily toward the counter. Mrs. Jones continued, "I'm sure three years drained the rebellion from him..." When Molly slammed her basket down, Mrs. Jones paused and stared at her from wrinkly eye sockets, then finished her sentence. "Now he's back to raise his daughter right."

That was the consensus of the town. When my dad took work at the plant, people seemed to remember that he was the quiet son of a respected farmer, so they disregarded any of his remaining eccentricities, such as never removing his wedding ring, and the talk simmered down to a whisper until I reached my high school years.

My dad and I lived in a house that was big but cheap, weathered but solid, old but transformed by the rock 'n' roll energy that he and I breathed. My dad raised me on music. Our living room was a temple, plastered with posters of Bowie and the Rolling Stones. A framed, signed Beatles record hung over the stereo, which was our altar in the center of the room. A photograph of my mother sat on the left speaker, and an ever-changing stack of records on the right. My dad's taste ran the gamut, from classical to blues to punk to folk. Even into his forties, he amazed me by discovering the best underground bands before I did. Three records never left that stack on the speaker: one each by Johnny Cash, Leadbelly, and the Clash. The basement held crates and crates of other records, and as I grew older, that became the place I ran to immediately after dinner.

I knelt on that cold cement floor, dust clouds poofing up around me as I flipped faster and faster through the albums. "There has to be something good in here. Don't tell me it's all folk crap," I complained, craving noisy guitars the way other nine-year-olds hungered for candy.

"That's rock, too, Emily," my father chided from behind me, looking slightly disappointed that I wasn't finding nearly as much satisfaction in his old record collection as he did. His dark eyes drank in every album cover, mouth twitching with a memory, a line that wanted to be hummed, or words in the record's defense that would have been wasted on me.

"No, it's not noisy enough," I replied. I wanted something that you could feel in your throat when you played it loud, something that churned through your stomach and shook you to the tips of your toes. Something that scraped out your insides and made you want to dance without them. Just as ...

About this edition

• Publisher: MTV Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416562699
• ISBN 13: 9781416562696
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352