“What are you doing here?”

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was sitting on one of several benches on the ninth floor landing of the New York Graduate Center, which doubled as a lobby for the philosophy department. Dave Stein had just come out of the elevator and was surprised to see me.

“I could ask you the same thing.” Dave’s appearances in the department had diminished significantly over the last few months since he’d started dating his current girlfriend, whom we’d nicknamed “Spleen,” as he’d reported that after an enthusiastic bout of lovemaking she’d said it felt like her spleen had been dislodged.  

“I’ve got to set up the stuff for the social.” Every Wednesday, the philosophy program hosted a colloquium that brought in speakers, and as the duly elected graduate student representative to the Executive Committee at the time, Dave was responsible for organizing the post-talk wine-and-cheese social. He seemed unenthused.

“Well, I’m waiting for Mercer. He’s picking up tickets for the Slayer show at Roseland Ballroom.” I shifted myself into a lounging position, as I might be there for a while and the bench had no back.

“Are you staying for the talk?” Stein was in no hurry to get wine-and-cheesing.

“I haven’t decided yet.” My colloquium attendance was spotty. “Who is it?”

“Davidson.” He meant Donald Davidson, a Big Shot in our discipline. “He’s presenting that paper he published a few years ago: ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’.”

“Sounds rocking.” Davidson was a good catch, but I had a lot of drinking and pot-smoking to do that evening and thought I might get an early start (after my business with Mercer was concluded, of course).

“Well, I’d better get to it.” Stein shuffled off to the common room with a desultory air. I felt bad for him.

A few minutes later, there was a ding! and the elevator doors opened. It was Mercer.

“Yo, yo, yo!” I struggled getting up, as my right foot had fallen asleep. “Did you get ‘em?”

He smiled and held up two tickets. “You owe me 20 bucks.”

I dug around in my pockets and handed him a few crumpled bills, in return for which he gave me one of the tickets. “Are you going to stick around for Davidson’s talk?”

“Dunno.” Mercer plopped down on the bench next to me. Tall, rail thin, with a shaved head and a laid back affect, he was wearing jeans, Doc Martens and a ragged Biohazard t-shirt and had a cigarette behind one ear. “How about you?”

“Eh.” Though I’d intended to leave once I had my ticket, inertia was creeping in. “I feel guilty about leaving Stein alone…with them.”

Aside from our small group – Mike Mercer, Dave Stein, Harvey Martin, Matt Sheen, me and a few others – the NYGC graduate philosophy program was more reminiscent of the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer than of cool twenty-somethings living the good life in New York City in the early 1990s.

“No one forced him to run for that stupid office. He knew what it entailed.” Mike could be pitiless sometimes.

“C’mon, the poor guy has to put up with Laurie Barnes.” Greasy, pimply, and alternatively bossy and ingratiating, Laurie had deputized herself as a kind of oily “ambassador to the stars,” meaning she always showed up for talks involving famous people in order to hog their attention at the wine-and-cheeses. Davidson was about as famous as you could get in philosophy, while still being alive.

Mercer shrugged and got up. “I gotta’ use the John.” Headed to the bathroom down the hall.

I was thinking about how to appeal to his better nature, when Stein suddenly reappeared, wearing a frilly apron and clutching a bottle of White Zinfandel in one hand and a paring knife in the other. He was seething.

“Barnes?” I already knew the answer. “You didn’t stab her did you?” Between the knife and the dangerous look on his face, I was concerned.

“Do I buy the wine for these damned things? Do I?!” He brandished the bottle at me. “And if I did, would I buy White Zinfandel?!”

“No and no?” I wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Oh, David, surely you could have found something better, given the occasion.” Stein did a fair Barnes imitation. “God, I hate that girl.”

I made sympathetic noises.

“And then…,” David was waving the knife around now, “she starts messing with my shit. Moving chairs; rearranging furniture; handling every freaking piece of cheese with her bare hands.”

Lisa was one to obsessively pick at her abundant zits. I shuddered and silently promised myself I’d never eat cheese in the department again.

“She’s like a rancid little goblin hopped up on Crystal Meth!” Stein’s voice had been getting steadily louder as the conversation went on.

“What?” Mercer had emerged from the bathroom down the hall and caught the last bit of our exchange.

“Crystal Meth!” I yelled at him.

Mike headed back towards us. “I thought you were talking about that Barnes chick, but then I heard something about Sarabeth.”

“Who the fuck is Sarabeth?” Stein was still fuming.

“Not Sarabeth, Crystal Meth!” I shouted at Mercer.

“Crystal Meth?” Mike looked confused.

Ding! The elevator doors opened.

“CRYSTAL METH!!!” Dave and I screamed at the top of our lungs, at which moment Douglas Leakey (one of our professors) emerged from the elevator with Donald Davidson in tow.

“What the hell is going on?!” Leakey glared at us, while Davidson just stood there blinking and looking bewildered. 

“Er, nothing, just…uh…discussing our evening plans.” Mercer and I slid into the elevator behind the two professors as they disembarked. I repeatedly jabbed the “Lobby” button, willing the doors to close quickly. As they shut, I saw Stein slump and head back to the common room, and the last thing I heard was Leakey saying: “Just a couple of vagrants, Donald. They wander in off the street sometimes.”

___

O’Malley’s Bar on West 52nd was one of a thousand Irish bars in New York City at the time. It was also across the street from Roseland Ballroom, where Mercer and I were seeing Slayer, so when the big night came, he and I met at the dilapidated watering hole for a pre-show drink. We’d sat next to the jukebox but discovered it had no heavy metal, so Mike just played Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” over and over again. The assorted winos and derelicts who comprised O’Malley’s clientele that evening didn’t seem to notice.

“You gonna’ come up front this time?” Mercer looked at me and took a long draught of his beer.

“Nope. I’m hanging out in the back with the old geezers like always.” This would be the third Slayer concert I’d gone to with Mike. He liked to mosh. I did not. 

“You’re missing one of the most important parts of the experience.” Mercer lit a cigarette and waved it at me. “Moshing is thrash. Thrash is moshing. The two are inseparable. Conceptually entwined.” A little philosophy goes a long way, and Mike had a lot of it.

“If it means not getting clotheslined, elbowed, punched, kicked, stampeded, or sweated on, I’m happy to have a partial experience.” I lit a cigarette of my own. “I find it more amusing to watch people beat the crap out of each other than to get beaten up myself.”

“Moshing isn’t ‘beating the crap out of people’,” Mike corrected me, blowing smoke up at the ceiling. “It’s a kind of ritual dance. I’d even call it ‘communal’.” He was being philosophical again.

“Whatever you say. Just leave me out of it.” I finished my beer and signaled the bartender for another one.

We sat quietly for a while, drinking and smoking, when I caught a pungent whiff of marijuana. 

“Do you smell that?” I leaned towards Mercer and whispered. “Someone is smoking a spliff in here.”

Though marijuana possession was pretty small beans in New York City, brazenly smoking it inside of a bar would almost certainly land you in jail.

“Now that you mention it, I do.” Mike looked around. “Wonder who it is?”

I carefully scanned the room. There were any number of shady looking people in the place, but I couldn’t see anyone puffing on a doobie.

“Uh…” Mercer was looking at me with a funny expression.

“What?” I wondered if my survey of the room had been incomplete.

He leaned over and whispered in my ear. “It’s you, idiot.”

I looked down at my hand and saw the joint, which by this point had been smoked down to a near-roach. I spent a stunned second or two staring at it, before hastily dropping it on the floor and mashing it with my foot.

“I rolled a few joints for the concert and put them in my cigarette case.” I smiled at Mike weakly. “Must have pulled one out by mistake.” 

Mercer snorted and looked around. “Fortunately, it seems that no one here in wino-land gives a shit, but I suggest we go, nonetheless. You can pay the bill.” He rose from his seat and headed for the door.

“Yeah, right.” I hurried after him, stopping at the bar to drop off a wrinkled twenty dollar bill and after a second thought, another ten. The bartender, who was staring bleary eyed at a flickering TV, didn’t even notice.

___

Roseland Ballroom was the place to see rock shows back in the day: large enough to attract real acts, but small enough that wherever you were inside the place, the stage wasn’t far away. And like all of these “theaterish” venues in New York City at the time, Roseland had a bar that stretched across the back, so you could drink and smoke your way through whatever band you were seeing. After you’d been to a concert in this kind of place, you never wanted to set foot in an arena or stadium again. It’s too bad that so many of them – Roseland included – have shut down.

Once inside, Mercer headed to the front of the ballroom after one last futile effort to get me to join him. I watched him disappear into the crowd and then retreated to the bar where I ordered a double Scotch on the rocks and lit a cigarette. It wasn’t long before I’d befriended two middle aged guys, one sporting a Black Sabbath t-shirt and the other decked out in Judas Priest garb. Though I was a good deal younger than them, my faded, three-quarter sleeve Saxon shirt communicated that I was a kindred spirit: one who liked thrash, but not enough to get too involved. Pretty soon, there was a whole group of us, and we were toasting each other’s health, with round after round of shots and joints being passed around. (No one gave a shit if you smoked weed in Roseland.)

The old geezers and I carried on like this throughout the opening act, about which I remember nothing – some minor Thrash band I’d never heard of – but once Slayer got going, I wanted to see what kind of mayhem the moshers were getting up to, so I bid the guys farewell. From where we were standing, things looked especially violent, even for a Slayer show, so I promised myself I’d only get close enough to see what was going on without getting pulled in myself.

As I approached the back edge of the mosh pit, I noticed a tiny girl in Birkenstocks with fuzzy socks, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a paisley babushka on her head. She caught my attention because her attire and general affect were so wildly at odds with the setting. That and she was screaming in the face of an enormous, hulking brute with a shaved head. I moved closer.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” The girl was hopping up and down with rage. Hulking Guy just stood there with a mild expression on his face.

“How can you wear something like that?!” She pointed a finger at him. “We’re in New York City in 1992, not Birmingham Alabama in 1963.” She was sputtering now and showering the guy with spittle.

I couldn’t understand what had enraged the hippie chick so much. The guy seemed normal enough … for a Slayer concert. He was wearing jeans and a Cirith Ungol t-shirt, with the obligatory spiked wristbands. I slowly walked a semi-circle around them, and once I got behind him, I saw what had pissed the girl off. He had a sticker pasted to the back of his neck which read: “The White Race: Help Us Preserve It!”

She continued screaming, though by now whatever she was saying was incomprehensible. She howled and screeched and gesticulated, and for a second it looked like she was going to slap him. I braced myself, sure that at any minute he would snap and beat the shit out of her. I looked around to see if there were any cops in the place. There weren’t.

But nothing happened. The hippie chick went on ranting and raving, but Hulking Guy’s benign countenance remained unchanged. At one point, he even smiled, after which she seemed to lose steam, her invective quieting to an incoherent muttering. Failing to get any sort of reaction, she finally stalked off in a huff. The guy stared at her as she left, shrugged to himself, and then disappeared into the mosh pit. Having satisfied my curiosity and not eager to encounter any more skinheads or incensed hippies, I returned to the bar.

___

After the show was over, I realized there would be no chance of finding Mercer in the theater, so I headed outside to wait for him. I looked around, but there were so many people pouring out of Roseland that it was impossible to focus on any spot long enough to make anything out. A commotion involving an ambulance with flashing lights fifty yards or so down the sidewalk caught my attention, so I made my way towards it.

Mercer was propped up on a stretcher with several paramedics clustered around him. Two of them were setting his left leg into a brace, while another was starting an IV. He was chatting with them animatedly.

“Yo, yo, yo!” I patted Mercer on the shoulder. “What happened to you?”

“Broken leg.” He didn’t seem too concerned about it.

“A little more detail, perhaps?” Mercer could be annoyingly terse.

“The first encore…” He drifted off and slumped back, smiling as if remembering a lovely dream. Whatever meds they were giving him had kicked in.

“And…?” I wondered whether I was going to have to coax him through this story, one sentence at a time.

“When they dropped the first beat on “Hell Awaits…” he trailed off and looked misty again.

“Yes?” By that point in the concert, I was more than several sheets to the wind and my memory was hazy.

“There was this enormous surge in the crowd…”

I’d had enough of prompting him, so I just waited quietly.

“And I was crushed against the steel railing in front.”

“So, your leg got broken in the – what was it you called it? – ‘ritual communal dance’?” I remembered our conversation in O’Malley’s before the show.

Mike sat up, newly energized. “Yes! It was so loud that no one could hear me screaming, so I also got trampled a little after I fell, but eventually, several kind brothers carried me out, and one of them told the venue to call an ambulance. And here I am!”

I thought about the guy with the sticker on his neck. “Several kind brothers. Right.”

“I told you, the mosh pit is all about helping each other out.” Mike was drifting off again. “It’s like a big happy family.”

“That’s one word for it.” I watched the paramedics lift Mercer’s stretcher onto a gurney and load him into the ambulance. He’d be spending the night in some wretched city hospital, with a bunch of overdosing junkies and stabbing victims, while I’d be having a nice, post-concert nightcap in my apartment. Being an old geezer – in spirit even if not in age – had its benefits.