What Is This Burning?
Photograph by Uri Korn, 1992
Many years ago, in Washington D.C., there was a bar and nightclub called d.c. space.
A grotty little place at the corner of 7th and E, occupying the first two floors of an ancient brick building. Everyone just called it “space.” I’m not sure, but I think the name was inspired by the Sun Ra song “Space Is the Place.” He played there a bunch, back in the seventies, when I was still a kid.
I first encountered d.c. space in 1987, when I was sixteen. Back then the neighborhood was pretty grim, with copy shops and other low-rent ventures sandwiched between boarded-up department stores. The commercial strip a few blocks away on F Street was downmarket and louche. Further north, in one of those weird little greenspaces, I’d sometimes see clutches of skinny boys in glittery skirts and makeup, waiting under streetlamps for nervous johns to show.
The city wasn’t doing so hot then. Thirty years before, Washington had become the first major majority-Black city in the U.S. Now, the pervasive sense of neglect was widely perceived to be Congress’ little way of expressing its feelings on the matter. In addition to the city’s well-deserved reputation for gun violence, the Water and Sewer Authority issued multiple boil notices, and regular garbage pickup was briefly suspended. Amidst the general stress and sometimes chaos of life outside, d.c. space felt like a refuge. It gave a certain kind of person the sense there was a place they belonged.
I was one of them. I’d never been much good at fitting in, not since my mother died suddenly, I was four. Only eight months later, my father remarried a woman who resembled her, except for being fairly abusive. On the whole, my childhood wasn’t that great. By the time I’d reached high school—an elite all-boys academy so corrosive I won’t even name it—I felt like a disease. Even among my few friends I was an outsider, a placeholder until someone better came along.
But it was a chance interaction at that prep school that, in its roundabout way, led me to d.c. space in the first place. I didn’t know it, though. All I knew was that the first time I stepped onto space’s hex-tiled floor, I fell through a trapdoor and into a color-saturated world of downtown artists, poets, dancers, punks and hustlers and straight-up freaks. I felt an intense jolt of homecoming, and I resolved to find a way to belong there myself. The following year I got a job as a bar back, washing plates and glasses like a demon and hoisting 160-pound kegs of beer up from the musty basement. I was seventeen years old, and I felt like the luckiest person on earth.
Still, nothing—not even the drugs and alcohol I consumed on a regular basis—could silence the dark currents of anxiety inside. I’d reached the very epicenter of the punk scene, and yet I couldn’t escape the sense that I was an imposter. Until that one night in 1989, the night Fugazi ripped through the songs that would become their first album, Repeater, only a few feet in front of me on space’s tiny wooden stage.
2. It was a “secret show,” not posted on the calendar, no flyers, word of mouth only.
Still, it seemed like everyone I knew was there: roommates, bandmates, the intimidating older punks whose approval I not-so-secretly craved. Fugazi had long since outgrown the tiny performance room, which had a posted capacity of ninety-nine. Tonight it was packed to easily twice that.
D.C. already had its share of great bands, but there’d never been anything like Fugazi. Their agility—the sinews of dub and African music running through their DNA—gave them a sound unlike any run-of-the-mill punk band. They sang about gun violence and the AIDS crisis, not what they’d like to do with girls. Being at those early shows was like standing near a lightning strike, so close you could smell the ozone. Everything I wanted was happening, not in London or New York but right here, all around me. All I had to do was reach out and grab it. Could I?
It didn’t seem likely. I was kind of a major fuckup at this point, dropping acid on a weekly basis, getting in minor scrapes with the law. And so while I’d actually met Fugazi, I wasn’t the likeliest hanger-on for the most visible straightedge band on the planet.
Two years before, in 1987, I’d stood transfixed as the band played one of their very first shows here. I was struck by the complete lack of artifice; no lights, no schtick, just an almost eerie spaciousness alternating with gut-wrenching force. But something hadn’t totally gelled. Even now, by the time of the secret show, Fugazi still hadn’t made a record that lived up to their promise. Tonight was supposed to be a test run, a live rehearsal as they prepared to head back into the studio. As it turned out, the album that resulted would become their first defining statement. But no one, not even the band themselves, knew it at the time. Anything might happen, including the possibility that no recording studio could ever capture their fire.
We waited, all of us packed together, the walls running slick with condensation. The anticipation was electric, but a different current vibrated through me: An anxiety so acute it was almost physically painful. Clutched tight in the room’s embrace I felt the sneaking suspicion that sooner or later I’d be exposed as a fake. When I felt this way, which was most of the time, I’d turn to alcohol, or weed, or anything else that might protect me from a feeling so intimate I feared it might annihilate me. I had this night, too, sneaking down to the dirt-floor storeroom to get high with the cook.
Now, as I stood waiting for the show to begin, I had a sudden idea. At the edge of the tiny wooden stage was an unused service bar. Behind it, against the wall, were stout built-in shelves just large enough to hold a person. As Fugazi emerged from the back staircase and the room erupted in cheers, I scrambled behind the bar and wedged myself against the wall, stage right. Here, just a few feet from Ian MacKaye’s Marshall, I could be both the watcher and the watched: The perfect solution for a boy longing to unclench his arms from around his chest but who didn’t know how.
The band took the stage and plugged in. As they did, a familiar rising feeling began to lift the room. I don’t remember any words passing between performers and audience, though they must have. “We’re Fugazi, from Washington, D.C.,” Ian would say even at hometown shows, generating a guaranteed cheer. Now he pressed his fingers to the strings to begin the snaky drone that starts “Turnover,” and with this the thrill coursing through the room found its release. The tick of Brendan’s hi-hat, the probing arpeggios of Joe’s bass, and then the band kicked in like a rockslide. The room exploded into motion and suddenly I felt myself constricted by a press of joy. The power of the music, of 200 people jammed close together, the blunt force of 100-Watt tube amps blasting me and it was no longer the alcohol or the drugs carrying me. In this moment what I slipped into was utter, blessed sobriety.
The band unrolled the album in a blur that night: no pauses and no breaks. Some of the songs I’d already heard; others were new, and shocking in their sonic playfulness. I watched stunned as “Brendan #1” stuttered into life before me: a sinuous grid of guitars twisting over a tribal rhythm, the notion of everything I thought “punk rock” was supposed to be exploding into vivid Technicolor. In my memory, Ian and Guy dance face to face for a long moment, noses nearly touching before they drop back to wrench impossible-sounding shards of feedback from their amps. A few songs later, it was “Sieve-Fisted Find” that brought my heart back to my throat, Brendan driving the band into a gallop like a gazelle bounding across the savanna.
When I think back to my time in the D.C. scene, it’s this night that stands above all the others.
Held in the crush of the music, my sense of myself as an outsider began to melt. In its place came another feeling, the notion that I might be accepted not for what I did, but merely because I was. Every last one of us, I’d wager, had learned far too young that the world didn’t really work like we’d been told it did. What nights like this promised was that there might be no Before and no After; that the past was wiped clean and the future didn’t exist. There was nothing but the invitation—the demand—to make something of the moment. To show up.
I didn’t come here by accident. While there could have been any number of paths that brought me to d.c. space’s door, there was only one that did. It was a chance interaction a couple of years before, with a woman I barely knew. She wasn’t one of the older punks or the torched-out downtown artists propping up space’s bar; she wasn’t even a friend. She was a teacher at my high school. But without her, I might never have made it.
d.c. space by Alice Hoachlander, 1979
3. It was my sophomore year at that awful prep school. I was fifteen. Though I’d picked up the bass—even found a band to play with—I couldn’t escape the sense that my carefully knotted necktie was choking me to death.
In the second semester of that year I was assigned to Janet Kneipp’s English Lit class. Ms. Kneipp was already at retirement age, a trim and self-contained woman under a grey flounce of hair. Because she was new to the school, and perhaps because she was a woman, her classroom was located in an arid and windowless room underneath a stairwell.
Literature was a subject I’d once reveled in. Now I doodled in the margins of my notebooks, dreaming of flying, or getting high, or any other escape I could imagine. And so while it was clear Ms. Kneipp was a deep feeler, a lover of words and their alchemical magic, I half-listened at best through her lectures.
I didn’t think Ms. Kneipp took much notice of me. But one afternoon, after the bell rang and I rose to trudge to my next class, she asked me to stay behind. Certain I was about to be chewed out, I frantically rehearsed an excuse as to why my recent essays were so shoddy. Instead, she asked me to sit me down beside her desk. She looked me full in the face and then, seeming to weigh her words carefully, she said: “You don’t belong here.”
Everything stopped. She went on, her voice quiet but level: “You need to get out of here. You need to find some place you can be yourself. Not here.”
I don’t remember what I did, whether I nodded my head or said “okay” or just sat in silence. But I’ll never forget what she told me next.
“I have hepatitis. I’m going to die soon.”
For a long moment, I didn’t breathe. I’d wondered why her eyes looked yellowish and rheumy; now I knew. I swallowed hard.
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t ask me to do it for her or to tell anyone, or not tell anyone, about what she’d said to me. For all my struggles to be seen—by my classmates, by my father, by anyone—it was this stranger who, with a few well-chosen words, pierced me to my core.
She was right, of course. I longed for rescue, but the truth I hadn’t yet faced was that no one was coming. My father was not interested in saving me. My stepmother was not interested in saving me. It was up to me.
And so I resolved to do it myself. When I went to my parents and told them what I wanted to do they dug in, hard. Later, to my great shame, I’d learn about the strings my father had pulled to get me into that school in the first place. The hopes he’d pinned on my straightening up, becoming less sensitive, more like the person I was supposed to be but wasn’t.
The rest of that year I worked my ass off, writing heartfelt application essays and pulling my grades up from their near-terminal nosedive. And it worked. The next year I started over at a new school where I’d already made a couple of friends. It felt like I’d barely escaped with my life.
I remember only one other interaction with Ms. Kneipp. A few weeks after she’d pulled me aside, she was reading aloud to the class. It was a passage from John Keats, the 19th-century poet who died young and bed-bound after an agonizing struggle with tuberculosis. He’d spent his final year writing indelible verse about his own impending death.
As she read, some of the class shuffled uncomfortably in their chairs; others tuned out or doodled. Ms. Kneipp’s eyes were on the open book in her hand, and it seemed like I was the only one who saw the tears trickling silently down her cheeks.
I sat stock-still. I thought of my own mother and what the final week of her life might have felt like, before she’d died of encephalitis from a random mosquito bite. It probably wouldn’t have killed her, I’d been told, but for a previous bout of hepatitis.
Ms. Kneipp left the school not long after that. I never saw her again or thanked her for what she did. I never even told anyone about it. But a few weeks ago, a guy I went to that awful prep school with texted me out of the blue. As it happened, I’d been sifting through my few memories of Ms. Kneipp. When I asked my friend if he remembered her, he wrote back immediately:
“ME TOO!!! She completely changed my life. So gentle and caring. Made me a reader. She was my salvation.”
My friend eventually worked up the gumption to leave the school, just like I did. Now he’s an artist, making beautiful large-scale paintings. And I finally see what Ms. Kneipp really was: A sleeper agent.
It’s only now—I am fifty-one years old—that I can grasp what that single, brief interaction gave me. Had I stayed at that school where I so clearly didn’t belong I would have stayed an outsider, looking through the window at the people who’d made good their escape. The ones who became artists and musicians because they knew they had to. I would have grown more and more desperate until only one way out remained. And I can’t tell you I wouldn’t have taken it.
The neighborhood around d.c. space has changed in the last thirty years. The liquor store’s still there, of course; you can’t get rid of those. But the place specializing in flashy wingtips and crocodile loafers has closed up shop, as has d.c. space itself. It became a Starbucks for a while; now it’s a former Starbucks. But if fewer and fewer people remember what it was and what it meant, I’m not one of them. I can’t forget what I felt that night, jammed up against the wall, as the music dripped through my body like liquid phosphorous, burning me free.