What's a Punk?

Punks hang out in Harvard Square, but don't call them punks.

"Punks? What are Punks?"

This, coming from a girl of 14, dressed in leather boots and a denim jacket, singing bits of Kate Bush songs in between pats at her razorback hair.

"I don't have to carry a flag. I don't have to sent out any messages."

A woman passes by in a pair of phosphorescent Reebox. The girl lets out a squeal and grabs her girlfriend by the arm.

"You see that Day-Glo? That's fucking great!"

She turns to me.

"You ever see Day-Glo that loud, or what?"

For the girl and her friend, the shoes are an event. They fall about each other, laugh and shiver, hold one another. When they've finished they bum Djakarta cigarettes from a nearby skinhead. The girl turns back to me, looking bored. Her eyes, brown and indolent, hover above and beyond, taking in the passersby, the shopfronts, the traffic, her friends.

"I used to be a Mod," she begins.

"But I couldn't handle the limitations. When you're a Mod you're not supposed to have any emotions. Now I'm a Quaker. They're feeling people. When you're a Quaker you can't hate anybody."

I ask her what she's into.

"Oh," she says, "I don't know. Sixties culture. Hard Core. I like the Dead a lot."

"You mean the Dead Kennedys?"

"God no. The Grateful Dead."

Her heroes are Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, the prince and princess of the avant-garde underworld. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, Warhol and Sedgwick comprise but one pair of a cult-worshipped court of legendary hearts handed the scepter and deposed just as quietly by generations of kids searching casually for heroes. I ask her why she likes Warhol.

"Well," she says. "I don't like him, as a person. He used other people as his objects, and I don't get into that. But I like his art. I think his art's cool."

Why does she like Sedgwick?

"Oh," she says, popping her gum, "she was just fabulous. She had a lot of energy. Edie knew what she wanted out of life and went for it. She wouldn't have had it any other way."

Across the Square two kids with spiked hair slap each other in the face, playfully. A skinhead behind me taps me on the shoulder.

"Hey. You heard Stranglehold? They're great. You should listen to Stranglehold."

I tell him I haven't heard them and ask him what he thinks of the Anti-Nowhere League, an older band.

"They're pretty funny," he says, growing quiet. I tell him about the time I saw a kid hurt himself doing a stage dive in New Orleans. Stage diving involves jumping head first from a concert stage onto a crowded dance floor. The skinhead laughs, not cruelly.

"In Boston," he tells me, hands in his lap, "if a kid gets up to take a stage dive, the punks clear the floor."

I laugh, too.

"It's the truth," he says.

I believe him.

A boy in a Mohawk sails through Mass. Ave. traffic on a skateboard. His T-shirt reads "Arm the Poor," and Paul Weller comes calling from the belly of a boom box.

Oh, like paper caught in wind

I glide up street--I glide down street

Oh, and it won't let you go

Till you finally come to rest

And someone picks you up

Up street--down street

And puts you in the bin

I turn back to the skinhead and ask him if he thinks the great punk bands are dead.

He considers it thoroughly, nods his head.

"Yeah. I guess. The Pistols, The Clash. They're all gone. Punk isn't what it used to be."

I ask him what he thinks it is today, how it's changed.

"I don't know," he says. "People are down and out, I suppose. Life isn't peachy keen and wonderful. Punk is for people who do and don't think. It's for kids who find total American life boring. I suppose it's motivated by the same things that motivate everything else--greed and lust and all that. I don't know. This is life in the Cynical Eighties. Maybe it hasn't changed at all."

I turn back to the girl in the denim jacket, the girl who used to be a Mod but now considers herself a Quaker, the girl who admires Edie Sedgwick and gets turned on by Day-Glo running shoes.

"My Dad turned me on to punk when I was 10," she says. "He was a hippie in the Sixties and got arrested in Harvard Square on a narcotics charge when he was 19. Why don't you talk to that kid over there? He looks pretty lonely."