Gail Burp, a rising alt-music star and wife of Dynamite Chicks singer Molly Mix, is agonizing over what to wear when she wants to honor a fallen punk friend at a nearby cemetery. Looking through her closet as she is in the throes of mourning brings back more feelings and memories than she bargained for.

This story is featured in my collection of short stories entitled Short Songs, featuring characters from The Rise and Fall of Skye Wright series.

     Gail did not think that her old two story victorian house in North Berkeley was all that big or elegant, but most of her friends had other opinions.
     Perhaps it was the walk-in closet.
     She went past her brand new and brand new-ish formal wear to look through her band shirts.
     She wanted to do right by her old friend Scritch.
     She only found out about her crazy stage-diving disaster area of a friend’s passing recently, when one of her bandmates happened to mention it.
     “Scritch died,” said her guitarist Farout.
     “Really?”
     Farout had given Gail a look. “Are you really surprised?’
     “Mmm… I guess not.”
     Scritch had been a scene regular ever since Gail had been a teenage runaway going to the Gilman Club every weekend. He had never been part of her main crew, but she had seen him often enough and had been around him enough to consider him a club friend, up until the fag bashing showdown.
     A gang of baldies had confronted Gail and her dyke gang outside of Gilman, talking all kinds of trash and moving around them as if they were getting ready to attack. Gail and her friends stood their ground, talking back and daring them to try something in an attempt to get them to back down. Gail remembered how her and her friend were not going to back down, even though they were outnumbered, even though they knew there was a good chance they could get seriously hurt.
     Everything changed when Scritch and a group of his friends walked up, bumping and pushing the baldies out of the way to join Gail and her gang, letting them know they were going to have more than enough people to fight if they wanted to start trouble. It was enough for them to back down, even though they made threats about coming back around with reinforcements.
     Scritch told Gail that when he saw they were getting harassed, he gathered up a group of punks to help them out.
     That’s when Gail and Scritch became really good friends. He had crossed the line from being just a familiar club scenester to being a true comrade, and they grew ever closer after that night.
     She felt her face getting warm, thinking about him, now that he was gone.
     She heard the bedroom door creak open.
     “You gonna go visit your friend?”
     Gail turned around. Molly had just gotten out of the shower, and her short black hair was sticking straight up from a fresh coat of hair gel.
     “Yeah. Just tryin’ to decide what to wear,” said Gail as she turned back to her wardrobe.
     “You always do that. Agonizing over which band shirt to wear when we go to a show.”
     Gail held up her old Germs t-shirt. “You knew Scritch?”
     Molly shrugged. “I remember him from shows and parties. He ran around with a pretty rowdy crowd that I wasn’t down with. I know Skye and her scary friend Casey knew him pretty well.”
     “Yeah, that gang liked to hang with rough trade”
     Molly leaned against the door frame. “How did he die?”
     Gail mimed injecting herself in the arm.
     Molly stood straight. “Jesus. Not another one!”
     “Right?”
     “It’s a fuckin’ epidemic.”
     Gail took off her shirt and put on her Germs t-shirt. “I gotta visit his place at least once. It won’t sit with me right until I do.”
     “You want me to come along?
     “Ain’tchoo got a recording session at Butt Fork Studio?”’
     Molly waved a hand. “It’s all good. I can bail for something really important.”
     Gail crossed her arms as she thought about it. “Naw. don’t ditch. You gotta see that through. Besides, I think it’s somethin’ I gotta do on my own.”
     “You sure?”
     Gail nodded as she turned to Molly. “I hope you understand.”
     “I do.”
     Gail walked up to Molly, giving her a long kiss and then wrapping her arms around her.
     “Didn’t they have a memorial for him?” asked Molly as Gail let her go.
     “No. He died three weeks ago, and I only found out about him a few days ago.”
     “No one told you?”
     “No one knew. He was staying with his girlfriend Crease when he overdosed. That crazy bitch didn’t tell anyone. She even had him buried an’ didn’t tell no one.”
     “No shit?”
     “I think Skye and Miranda want to kick her ass now.”
     “They gonna to beat her up?”
     “Naw. They jus’ wanna. But I don’t think they’ll go that far”
     Molly chatted with Gail for a few more minutes before she grabbed her own clothes and took off for her recording session.
     Looking around her walk-in closet, she remembered feeling somewhat embarrassed when she had to make room in her voluminous closet for her new wife Molly. She had to put some of her own clothes and accessories in storage in order to make space for Molly’s wardrobe.
     She wondered how it all reflected on her, as her solo career kept climbing and she was raking in more and more money and she kept getting crowded more often by industry people trying to push her towards mainstream success.
     She looked at herself in the full-length closet mirror. She had carefully spiked up her bleached white hair. Carefully touching her hair, she took a good look at her face, and wondered if she looked too gaunt.
     Gaining at least a little more weight was one of her goals, but she was still struggling to pack on a few extra pounds, even with the extra food she had been adding to her diet.
     It was odd for her, how she was considered a rock and roll eye candy, to the extent that her managers had convinced her to hide her relationship with Molly, before they had gotten married, on the advice that revealing she was no longer taken would hurt her career since it was, apparently, common knowledge that most of her fans had a raging crush on her.
     Looking at herself in the mirror again, she facetiously thought that her fans were taking too many drugs. She wondered how so many people could possibly lust after someone who was so skinny.
     Looking away from the mirror, she pushed another lingering shame out of the way. It did not matter to her how many times Molly told her it was no big deal. She could not summon any other regret from her wild punk past that surpassed the shame of having hid her coupling with Molly for the sake of her career.
     She wondered if she would ever be able to live it down.
     Turning back to her wardrobe, her closet was crowded, not so much because of her new gear but because of her older garments and accessories. She simply could not bear to part with many of her old band shirts, such as her nearly gray Operation Ivy shirt that was so faded and worn any other person would have tossed it out or have turned it into a back patch. Then there was her old pair of black jeans which had also faded to an indistinct gray color. It still had its forest of safety pins, desperately holding the old, faded, and frayed pants together as best they could.
     Then there were her large array of shoes and boots. Her new Doc Martens, her old Doc Martens, her Doc Marten soles, her chucks, her creepers, her old army boots and her Red Wing shoes that she had bought when she was in her old gang the Lower Haight Danger Dykes, also known as The Double D’s.
     Her thoughts drifted back to those Lower Haight days when she was a rowdy teenager. Her and her friends would often make their way to the much more colorful and busy Upper Haight to mess with tourists and make fun of the gutter punks who would congregate and spare change along that stretch of Haight Street. She remembered how rude and obnoxious they were, wearing army jackets and flannel shirts to make themselves look more intimidating while yelling, swearing, and acting out in overt attempts to push people’s buttons.
     Gail could only cringe at some of the memories, how obnoxious and rude they were, oftentimes to people who did not deserve it. Occasionally they would mess with gutter punks who were harassing and hustling people, and once in a blue moon they would face down overly aggressive panhandlers, especially if they were harassing women. But usually they were just out for kicks, swearing loudly and acting crazy to intimidate and shock civilians and tourists.
     She thought about her gang members like Freakums, with her chubby cheeks that belied her rough punk exterior, her ever limp mohawk hanging down one side of her face or the other since she rarely had the time or money to spike her mohawk straight up for maximum punk effect. And then there was Skilly, the tall and gaunt woman who always used too much black eye shadow which made her look quite deanged with her short, always-spiked bright red hair. She always wore skimpy clothes that showed off her sinewy body, and despite being the most diminutive member of their gang, she always managed to be the most threatening looking, the one that really scared people.
     Then there was Teddy, the stocky and wide one with a bulldog face who always stood behind them, the large and burly presence who never took off her faded olive green army jacket, grimacing behind the rest of the gang as a bulldozer back up, a presence to give others second thoughts about trying to throw down.
     She wondered where they all were, where they had gone and what had happened to them. The only one she was still in contact with was Freakums, who had gone back to using her name Julie, and who had nested with her partner in a roomy apartment in the Castro. Of everyone who had been in her gang, she always thought she would be the last one to sell out.
     She picked up her old, worn Doc Marten boots. She had not even bothered to replace the frayed shoelaces.
     She decided she was going to wear them to the cemetery.
     Putting them aside, she recalled how The Double D’s got a humbling dose of reality when they ran into Skye’s mob, The Crusties, back in their underage clubbing days. The first time she met Skye at a raucous punk club she saw her break a rowdy boy’s nose, cracking him with one lightning fast punch that made a sickening noise and sent the spike-haired tough guy reeling back to retreat with his frightened gang.
     That’s when Gail realized that her and her friends were not the kind of gang that could stand up to such a group of punks, that Skye and her friends Casey, Lori, and their other friends were the kind of rock and rollers who got into real fights, the kind where there was a chance someone could end up in an ambulance.
     Gail never told Skye that story, how it brought her and her friends down to Earth, forcing them rethink what they were doing.
     She glanced at her formal wear, though that collection of clothes was not especially formal. She only saw it as fancy clothes because they were so far away from the frayed jeans and band shirts she was perpetually wearing.
     She had her old pantsuit, the one she reluctantly bought when she was looking for real work, something that paid better than the starvation wages of retail and restaurant jobs. She had bought it years ago, with the help of her more civilian-learned office worker cousin Jessica, back when Hop skivvy was still a club band. It was the first band she ever played in that had musicians that were just responsible enough to keep the act going. She remembered Xan insisting that they practice, even when there were band members who hadn’t shown up, just to get in as much practice time in as possible to keep them sharp and polished. She remembered Vicksy running around town, hitting up every venue for shows, trying to keep the band active. She especially remembered how caught up she got with Xan, when he insisted that they play balls and ovaries to the wall, as he put it, even if the club they were playing in that night was half full, even if the crowd was just made up of their friends and musicians from the other bands. Xan had convinced her to have faith that word of mouth, even from small club crowds, could help spur the band on.
     When their crowds started getting bigger and they were making actual money from their first record, Gail sought better paying work. She remembered the excitement and chills she got from believing in the band, going out of her way to try and make herself look as civilian as possible for job interviews in offices and high rise company lobbies in order to make more money to support the band.
     Gail never got the chance to get such a job. She had only worn her first piece of serious corporate-wear to a few awkward interviews before the band started making enough money from record sales to keep them going without any added extra income.
     She looked over her other sets of normal clothes, or “normie” clothes as she called them, the ones she wore to polite family gatherings, which were very far and few between. She remembered how Tandasil had prodded her to keep some plain clothes around for things such as court appearances or overly uptight corporate events, sage music business advice she had gotten from the tall and slim band manager even though she was not her band manager at the time.
     She wondered if she should wear something normal, or formal, when going to visit her friend who met the same fate as too many of her fellow rock and rollers, that she should respect the solemnity and gravity of the moment with proper clothes.
     Gail winced as she felt a wave of self-disgust wash over her.
     Scritch would not want to see her wearing anything formal or plain. He would want to see her, to see the real Gail, the one who was about as rough around the edges as they came. He would want to see her looking like she was about to go to a crazy punk show.
     She took off her Germs shirt and dragged out her Fea shirt and her ripped up pair of black jeans. She was going to wear her old Doc Martens, the ones she would not mind getting dirty and scuffed.
     Dressing up would just be disrespectful.