THE BOOMER BIBLE
SECOND PREFACE
The package was wrapped in old burlap and smelled of rotten hay. It was tied up with four knotted-together railroad bandannas that disintegrated under my fingertips when I tried to loosen them. The fabric that had been crumpled inside the faded brown knots still glowed red, like artificially preserved flowers. And inside the burlap bag was the object I had spent almost three years looking for—not one, but two manuscripts of the fabled Boomer Bible. At times over the many months of my search, I had almost given up hope of ever finding it, and even when I held it in my hands I almost couldn't believe that it really did exist.
That day, I promised myself that I would see it published, even if I never made a nickel out of it, because here was proof that the punks of Punk City had done what the stories said they had. It was all true. A bunch of born losers had tried to write it all down the way they saw it and heard it from the Baby Boomers.
Before I go any further, I should tell you that I'm not pretending to be any kind of a hero. I'm a free-lance journalist by trade, and when you're on your own you have to find your own stories. Sometimes you scoop everybody, sometimes you get taken in: I'd be the first to tell you I'm not proud of the UFO paperback, and I wish I could unpublish it for the sake of my credibility about this work. But I can't undo what's been done, and so you'll just have to believe me or not. But Eliot Naughton should learn the same lesson: he can't unwrite the Boomer Bible by wishing it away, and he'd do everyone a favor if he'd quit trying to deny its existence.
The truth is, I'd heard about it for years, little snatches of conversation, hints from people who might or might not know, that kind of thing. I've always hung out in the wrong kinds of bars, all the way from the Combat Zone in Boston to the Sunset Strip in L.A., and if you frequented places like that you'd find there are still punks out there, jangling their heavy metal jewelry, painting their identities on with stage makeup, and pretending as much as they can that the bus never left town without them a dozen years ago. I happened to be in one of those bars on a rainy night in 1987. The city was Cleveland, and the hour was late, and, yes, I had been drinking. A sixteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth and earrings made of razor blades told me that if I was really a journalist, I should buy her a beer because she knew a story worth a million dollars. I bought her the beer because I'm a sucker for wild stories—not because I believed her—but she proceeded to tell me things she couldn't have made up. Most tantalizing about her account was the sensation it gave me that she was repeating exact words memorized from some other source. I still have the dictaphone tape I made that night, and her nasal singsong twang still gives me chills when I hear it speak, muffled and slurred under the clatter of beer mugs:
…was February and snow had fallen throughout the evening, a light white cover let softening the sounds and edges of the street. The tire tracks of the bikes, the footsteps of the punks were etched in the whiteness with the clarity of pure terror, and the silencing snow so muffled the voice of the Duke's challenger that I wondered for a moment if I had imagined it. But as everyone looked one to another, searching for the source of the voice, four masked men dressed in black stepped out of the [indecipherable] doorway and crossed the street through the snow, silent as wraiths… "Downcount the seconds, Hammerhead," the voice said. "You don't 'a many left…" The Duke roared and swung his weapon above his head… "Who're you?" he demanded of [indecipherable]… "The last voice you'll 'ear," came the reply. With that, the Duke bellowed and ran toward his opponent, twirling the hammer about his great round head so quickly that it glittered like a halo. When he fell upon the punks' new [indecipherable], though, he was as cold and efficient as ever, looking for openings and avoiding mistakes. For perhaps a minute, they both bobbed and weaved like prizefighters, feinting and waiting for some instant of advantage. Then the Duke struck, a short terrible blow directed straight down upon the head of his shorter opponent, and a gasp rose from the punks as if squeezed from them by the force of the hammerstroke…
I don't know how long she could have continued like this, but I blew it. I interrupted her to ask a question, because I was gripped by an eerie conviction that I had heard the story before, or dreamed it, or… who knows? I had to hear where she got it, where it came from.
"It's talked about in the Boomer Bible too," she told me, as if that explained everything.
"What's that?" I asked her.
"It's a book the ka punks wrote," she said. "They wrote everything down, the way they heard it from the Boomers, and the way they lived it on South Street." Without pause, she slipped back into her singsong cadence, someone else's words: "Then they shredded the pages and gave them to the winds of the Delaware with the body of the dead king. And when the words come together again, the ka punks will return to tell their story. But as long as the queen sleeps, a thousand silent voices will churn above us in the air, windblown, restless, like smoke from the Shuteye Train…" She broke off, saw her beer mug sitting on the table, and drained it. Then she looked at me as if I had been the last to speak.
I tried to restart her on the story she'd been telling me about the Duke, but she shook her head and said, "It's not there now. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It's not from the Bible anyway. It's the ka song of the Greatwing Gypsy, beloved of the queen."
I bought her more beers, which was a dicey thing because she wouldn't talk without beer, and she couldn't handle it, either. I managed to glean from her that the "ka punks" had lived in Philadelphia for a time and then had gone away. The very last I got from her is still on the tape, a slurred reel of names unwinding as she fell asleep:
KinesisApesNamesGodsLiesGypsiesMesopamamiansGreeks1Greeks2Barbs ChristiansBubitesGiantsSplorersSpicsFrogsBritsKrautsYanksBeaks…
I made sure that her friends would drive her home and then I left the bar and Cleveland. When I returned to the same bar some months later to speak with her again, no one remembered her. But that's the way it's been ever since she first started me on my search. Many times I gave it up. I told myself there were no "ka punks," there was no Boomer Bible, but as soon as I had resigned myself to failure, something else would happen to rekindle my interest.
For example, I had just given up for the second or third time when a sweaty bookkeeper drinking late in some Holiday Inn bar outside Chicago called me a "dirty Boomer" and when I asked what he meant by that exactly, he replied, "You twelve. One dash four."
"The Boomer Bible," I said out loud.
"You think it doesn't exist, don't you?" he asked, echoing my last conscious thoughts on the subject. "Well, you're full of shit. They wrote it down. Just the way they heard it. Somebody had to." We talked until the bar closed. He looked too young to be a Boomer, and after his initial outburst he was reluctant to say more, but I kept after him until he eased slowly into his story. Back in 1981, he had been enrolled in a small business college in Philadelphia. In the single most courageous act of his life, he had visited South Street in response to an ad on his dormitory bulletin board. The ad offered free drinks all night to anyone who would consent to be interviewed about topics of "general knowledge." The interviews would take place in a South Street punk bar called the Razor Café.
He got drunker as he told it, which seemed to be a pattern with the ones who thought they knew, a kind of drowning sadness that might be the cause of their delusions or the reason they possessed their few frail straws of "information." It was impossible to tell. But he had been sad then too, the way he told it, and although he was afraid to go to Punk City, he went in the hope that something remarkable would happen. He described a city within a city, an armed camp where every face was covered with mask or makeup, and every belt held weapons. He was "interviewed" by three punks who asked their questions from a list and painfully wrote down his answers in a crabbed shorthand. They prodded him to tell them what he knew about history, books, movies, religion, science, his upbringing, his views about life. They were polite, utterly distant, and persistently clumsy with paper and pencil. But once, a fight broke out at a nearby table, and he was terrified by the speed at which blades flashed into view under the blue barroom light.
"Then she came in," my bookkeeper said, and I recognized the look in his big damp eyes. It was adoration. "She's dead now," he added in a whisper. "You won't believe me. No one ever does. But there are women… well, have you ever just known the first time you saw one that you'd do anything…?
I just looked at him. I hadn't, and he saw that I hadn't. He gulped more of his drink and went on. "She came to my table. She leaned over me. She had eye makeup on one eye. Just one eye. She was wearing a leather thing… below… and she didn't have any… top." Then he added hurriedly, "But it wasn't just that. She looked at me. Women never look at me. She said that what I was doing was a big help. 'We're writing it all down,' she said. 'It's time.'"
He looked at me miserably. "When she left, I stared after her until I could breathe again. So did the punks. They all looked like I felt, just… sick with wanting her. They said her name was Alice Hate. I never saw her again. I would have died for her. I never thought I'd be willing to die for anyone…"
Then he leaned close to me, buddies in a bar. "They say," he whispered, "that the punks will come back someday. Alice Hate too."
We stared at each other. Gently, I asked, "Who's they?"
He stared at me uncomprehendingly. "It's a crock of shit," he barked suddenly. "She's dead. I can feel it in here." He tapped his breast pocket. "I've got to go," he said, getting to his feet.
"One last thing," I asked. "That quote. How did you get it? Have you ever seen the Boomer Bible?" And then the bastard smiled at me, a Cheshire-cat-I-know-something-you-don't-know grin that pissed me off almost as much as my discovery that he'd left me with the tab.
And that's the way it went. Of course I went to Philadelphia, and everybody everywhere said they'd never heard of the punks of South Street. But how can you tell in a big city? Maybe everybody you talk to just got there yesterday. Maybe there are things they don't want you to know. The police were no help, but cops never like talking about things they can't control and don't understand. I checked the newspapers, all four years worth, and I found one mention of punks in connection with a prominent writer from New York, but he wouldn't return my calls or letters. I got his address and went there to see him, but no one answered the doorbell. It was on my way out of the city, though, that I went to the men's room at Grand Central Station in New York and found something interesting. Underneath a string of four-letter-word graffiti, I saw a neat red inscription: "Rules.11.1-4."
When I checked the Cleveland girl's dictaphone tape, I almost missed it, but the second time through I heard it:
MallitesMainlinersBroadStreetersRationalizationsBandsBoutsDoubtsRulesBeliefsAngels…
I stayed in New York for a full week, looking (I admit it) in dirty men's rooms all over the city for more quotes. It was at the Port Authority bus terminal that I found the next one. Under a scratched-in couplet that read "Fix your stroke, Do coke," someone had written in a wild red hand: "Angels.8.2." By then, I had transcribed the names of the books from the tape, and I felt vaguely stunned. Was I creating my own mystery, my own chain of misunderstood coincidences? Or was it really possible that an unpublished book was floating around in the damaged minds of sad people? I left the Port Authority still musing over my puzzle, and it was only some minutes later that I remembered the need for caution. The streets were dimly lighted and I started feeling nervous, as if I was being followed. I heard a very slight jingle, like keys in a pocket. Then I heard footsteps, chuckles, more footsteps. I was being stalked. Trying to remain casual, I turned the first corner I came to and walked into a blind alley. When I whirled in panic the entrance was blocked. There were three of them, kids with knives. They were smiling. I saw the open jean jacket of the leader, a washboard stomach with crossed slash scars on his white skin. And it's a funny thing, but the thought that popped into my head just then was that I wasn't ever going to see the Boomer Bible, as if that were somehow more important than my fear of death.
It seemed like an hour went by. I just stood there. I felt my knees trying to buckle. Why didn't they just rush me and get it over with? I wanted to offer them my wallet but I couldn't speak. I opened my mouth to address the leader, but just as the first sound came from my dry throat, his eyes suddenly filled with fear and he backed off a step, as if he'd been struck in the face. And then all three of them turned and ran like hell. A surge of exhilaration galvanized my vocal cords. I wanted to yell after the retreating muggers, and I heard myself shouting, "Angels! Chapter eight! Verse two, you [expletive deleted] sons of bitches!" And I still didn't know if I really heard it, but I would swear on any Bible you believe in that a voice behind my back whispered, "Rules eleven. One dash four." I was so petrified by this that I could not turn around. I stood there for five full minutes, a potbellied statue in an alley, until I remembered that there might be other muggers out there, too. I never did look back as I walked out of that alley.
It was three weeks later that the package arrived at my home in San Francisco, addressed to me in block print letters. At six in the morning I heard a loud knock at my apartment door, and when I opened it, the burlap bundle was just sitting there waiting. There was no return address and no postmark. As soon as I saw what it contained, I called building security. It's supposed to be impossible for anyone to get past the lobby door without being buzzed through, and everyone who enters the lobby is photographed by security cameras. But the guard on duty said no one had been in or out on his shift, which started at four A.M. I mention these matters only because I did make an effort to determine how the package was delivered, including canvassing my neighbors to find out if they'd heard or seen anything unusual, but I must report that it remains a mystery, no matter how many suspicions that raises.
The manuscripts were in poor to fair condition. The one on top was in much the better repair, which was fortunate because it contained the intercolumn reference reproduced in this volume. It was legible throughout, although there were many water stains, and some small animal had chewed a chunk out of the upper right-hand corner, which just missed damaging the text all the way from Kinesis through Psongs. It appeared to be a computer printout: the serrations left by tractor feed strips were still evident despite the weather damage.
The other manuscript was in truly tragic condition. It had been handwritten on high-quality parchment, with full and quite elaborate illumination. But now it was a ruin. Many of the pages were merely fragments, between 50 and 80 percent destroyed, as if by rot. This manuscript also lacked the intercolumn reference, and its inclusion in the package suggested to me that it was a genuine historic artifact, perhaps one of the original copies employed by the punk community in its own public rites and ceremonies. Sadly, though, it could no longer be read as a text of the Boomer Bible. I set it aside for safekeeping, where it remains to this day, along with other documentation of my search that cannot yet be disclosed without danger to certain living individuals.
The computer-printed manuscript was in no danger of being further damaged by reading, and so I sat down at once to work my way through it. I had read about a dozen pages when the phone rang. A male voice at the other end spoke to me in a tone of breathless excitement.
"You have it, don't you?"
By now I was past being surprised. "Yes," I told the caller.
"You don't have to read it consecutively," he continued. "You can, but it's not necessary to start that way. And you may want to ignore the intercolumn reference the first time you read any passage. You can go back to that later."
"Have you read it?" I asked.
He chuckled. "No. I can't wait." Then he turned grave. "You have to get it published as soon as possible. They've already found the trove, and they're trying to suppress it. You're the only one who can keep them from getting away with it."
He dodged all the rest of my questions but the last one: "Are you a punk?"
He laughed out loud. "No," he told me. "But I'm ready to start any time."
It was a pattern that was to recur over a period of a week or more. I read and I fielded phone calls from a staggering variety of callers, representing all ages, both sexes, and dozens of different ethnic and national origins. They always knew that I had the Boomer Bible, and they always had a reading tip they wanted to pass on. An old lady told me in a solemn whisper that it was okay to laugh—which I had already figured out for myself. A young man with a strong Hispanic accent begged me not to ignore the intercolumn reference. A retired priest suggested I pay close attention to the readings specified in the Table of Harrier Days. Not one of them had actually read or even seen the Boomer Bible. None would tell me how they had learned of it in the first place—or how they'd known to call me.
When I'd finished my first reading, I knew that it had to be published. Some sizable but invisible group of people were waiting for it, and they were counting on me not to let them down. What were they waiting for? The Boomer Bible was by no means the answer to all questions. It was repetitive, inconsistent, often inaccurate, mercurial and capricious in its viewpoints, frequently nasty, loaded with imprecise lowest-common-denominator language, and sometimes outright offensive—even to me.
And yet it excited me. The punks who had written it (and I no longer doubted the punk origins of the work) believed that the very largest philosophical questions ever conceived were everybody's business, and they were unafraid to jeer at the ivory tower intellects they thought had answered those questions wrong. The book made me feel important and powerful, and that was a unique feeling for somebody who had lived on the tattered edges of self-respect since adolescence. I also understood why a lot of people would oppose publication of the book on any grounds. It laughs too hard at things nobody is supposed to laugh at, which is the worst crime possible in a society that has lost its sense of humor about everything important.
I inquired about the discovery of the "trove" mentioned by my first caller. Initially, everyone I talked to in Philadelphia denied there was such a thing. When I finally found the man in charge of the excavation, he informed me that it would take years to sort things out, and the publication of the findings was years away, if it ever occurred at all. I asked specifically whether a Boomer Bible had been found. There was a pause—too long a pause, in my opinion—and then the academic on the other end of the line said, "I haven't seen anything like that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go."
He asked me no questions. He had no mysteries to solve? No information deficits to fill in? He knew everything he needed to know already? Of course. He was a scholar. It was his job to make up a truth that fit his universe, whether the facts he had fit his universe or not. My next call was to a publisher.
The result of my actions appears as you see here. Contrary to Professor Naughton's devilishly clever deconstruction of the facts, the bulk of the evidence suggests that punk writers wrote the Boomer Bible. And while there remain many unanswered questions about who they were, where they came from, and where they went, they have left a record of an inquiry that no one else seems interested in making: Where and how do we learn to believe again in the future, with hope and faith in the meaning of our own existence? For this unforgivable sin, they are deemed "deviant," and their work is adjudged "contemptible." Maybe that will be your opinion too after you've read the Boomer Bible. That is your right. But I at least believe you should have the chance to make up your own mind about that, provided you can look past Eliot Naughton's preemptive and scornful bias. The things we don't dare talk about or write about or think about are the things that will do us in. The punks seem to have known that instinctively. But then, as Eliot Naughton has pointed out, they had the advantage of starting their quest as semiliterates, which probably saved their minds from the proper Harvard education Eliot seems to regard as a necessary writing credential. In closing, I will state that I have received no compensation for the Boomer Bible manuscript. I will also admit to knowing more than I have said, which you should know to expect from the author of a UFO invasion book. Dismiss me all you like. Believe Eliot Naughton all you like. But read the Boomer Bible. It was written for you, and it is yours to do with as you will. I have done what was asked of me. Yanks.153.14.
— Frank Frelinger · San Francisco, CA · April 1991
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