A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Neon Vomit

My new friend Terry and I were goofing around one day and I showed him some poetry that I’d been writing. But I never called it poetry back then. They were simply called “pieces.” I had seen Henry Rollins do some of his spoken word on a TV show called IRS Records’ The Cutting Edge. He read “Family Man” and I thought it was the most hilariously uncomfortable thing ever. That was the sort of prototype I was working with. Terry liked these pieces of mine and so we decided we would turn them into songs and record them.

Our first “album” of punk rock songs was recorded on a cassette player in his bedroom and bathroom. Just Terry and me. We decided to call ourselves Neon Vomit. He was good at creating some heavy riffs based on my smallest suggestions (usually just me saying, Can you do something like this—and then imitating a guitar part with my clenched mouth), and then I would yell the lyrics in my best Rollins imitation. There were no drums, but sometimes we would bang on the toilet seat for percussion. Among the first songs we recorded was a sarcastic putdown of Doug, one of the more snooty guys in our little circle of community college New Wavers. It was called “Gee, Doug, You’re So Funny” (chorus: “Gee, Doug, you’re so funny / You make me want to vomit!”). Terry and I made a few tapes and passed them around the campus of Columbia Basin College and it was soon the center of a rivalry as heated as West Coast versus East Coast hip-hop.

In a classic double-cross moment, Doug somehow talked Terry into playing guitar for him on a song that he wrote called “Kevin, You’re Such a Fag.” I admit that it was a pretty catchy song, especially with the cool drum machine they must have borrowed from someone.

Even though it was fun to record the Neon Vomit songs, I still wanted to sing (not just yell) in a band that would actually play shows. My friend Len played keyboards and wanted to form a more traditional New Wave band—with expensive haircuts, high-fashion clothes, poetic lyrics, and a sexy name.

I was writing more and more songs as Len tried to find a guitarist and a drummer. My lyrics started to sound a little less like Henry Rollins and more like a Prince protégé. It was an embarrassing mix of those two influences, with some Cure and Scritti Politti blended in. A classic case of some journals I should have burned a long time ago. Thankfully, nothing ever came of it.