Glitter Saints by Robin Brown

Author:Robin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MAGNOLIA PEARL, LLC
Published: 2024-05-09T21:49:01+00:00

⁂

So many weekends, Kelly and I, along with Jennifer and other ragtag kids, would pool together whatever money we could find to see music: AC/DC and Fleetwood Mac at the coliseum in San Antonio, Iggy Pop, Blondie, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. We’d go to the rodeo and see George Strait, have makeshift picnics at free symphony concerts in the park, and sneak into punk clubs to watch Wendy O. Williams with her duct-taped nipples and whipped cream and chainsaws.

Each concert had a whole different vibe. I lost myself in observing what people wore and how they moved. I absorbed all the accessories, from lip rings or tattoos to kicker cowboy boots scuffed from farm work. It was a dazzling, loud circus of influences and textures. I didn’t have Mom or Dad in my ear challenging my self-expression and my right to wear what I wanted. So I tried it all on.

Besides the shows, I spent whatever cash I’d earned—cleaning people’s garages and fish tanks and birdcages—at the thrift store. From infancy, I’d crawled around on the dirty floors beneath thrift-store racks, reaching up to those cast-off cottons and dust-bunny velvets like they were mobiles over my crib. It was as much my home as anything. Ten bucks was a fortune; with it, I could assemble an entire wardrobe. Men’s thrashed 501 jeans and Converse tennis shoes. Loose-fitting metal band T-shirts and vintage dresses with moth-eaten holes in them. Combat boots and flannel shirts. Hand-crocheted bikinis, suede platforms, and chunky, bamboo flip-flops with toe socks. Black fishnets and black lipstick and black fingernail polish.

For the first time, I could be a kid. I wasn’t gonna screw that up by trying to have fun the way a lot of teenagers do, with alcohol and drugs. Teenagers want to pretend they’re adults, but most of the adults I knew were fucked up and shuttered down. I didn’t wanna inhabit that world; that shit was entirely too familiar, and anyway, those substances just made me sick to my soul.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.