The Birth of Bitch King: Beginning

chaos beginning community digress she-bang naming riot grrrl zines riverside underground do it yourself issue #1 stuff

Fifteen years old. Angsty as hell. Headphones blasting, coloring my world like a low budget music video. Dark clothes, no smiles. A vague feeling like I am searching … bored with waiting. Knowing something is missing. The Number One bus farts exhaust into the heart of my sprawling desert suburban hometown of Riverside, California. I get off at the Downtown terminal, pass the historic Fox Theater, and walk the two landscaped blocks over to the Main Street Mall, an open air promenade that includes the City Hall and the Courthouse on one end and the Mission Inn and the Raincross Convention Center on the other, passing the families that have come to check out the California Museum of Photography, the Riverside Art Museum, or the Riverside Municipal Auditorium. I like to wander downtown, drawing stares from the local yuppie suburbanites, taking a circuitous path past Spanky’s, a punk rock dive bar not fifty feet from the courthouse. Spanky’s: the premier place to see and be seen by the local artists, poets, and musicians who congregate to chain-smoke and look bored. I have to stop and say hello to a few of the gutter punk squatters who spend all day waiting for dark. I keep moving: my destination is A Primary, an independent record store catering to angsty, subculture youth like me. Local post-punk music bounces off the massive collage of posters on the walls and assaults every angular indie kid who walks in the door. I usually browse through endless piles of flyers advertising local music shows, find homemade demos put on consignment by local bands, and pick up the latest copy of Mean Street, a local underground music magazine. But today I actually have money in my pocket and want to buy some new records (maybe that new Fugazi record I heard the other day). I notice a rack with photocopied booklets piled up. I walk over, pick one up and look at the cover: “Poetry by Drew Blood.” Hmmm. I flip it open and read—poetry about gay sex and alienation and oppression! Standing there with my mouth open, I read the entire thing. The back cover reveals that the author is from Riverside, and the booklet only costs three dollars. Of course I buy it. The revolution begins. From then on, I take the Number One to any of the local underground record stores (Mad Platter, CD World, Sounds Like, Cheap Guy) and search through the magazine racks for local writing. Riverside has a strong local subculture—zines like The River Bottom Monkey and independent publishers like Budget Press are widely circulated among and appreciated by the local kids. These zines and chapbooks are only a couple of bucks or many times free—and they are my first access to writing that seems totally unrepressed, like in the Angry Thoreauan. I love poetry and literature, and am well-versed in the canon of “greats,” but the canon feels so far from where I am, what I see, what I do every day. It seems unreal writing created by unreal writers, unlike this writing—right-here, right-now writing; people more free than me proclaiming their sexuality and their politics; their voices so close, like they are confessing to me, screaming their innermost. Raised by a strict, religious parent, I have to guard my words and thoughts, except in my journal or with my friends. But now I know of an entire network of self-publishing people, people who speak out—and that network isn’t in Los Angeles or New York, but in Riverside.