Skummy earned his punk rock name long before I met him. His friend’s 3-year-old son had discovered him hungover and sacked out in the living room, and announced, “Dad, there’s a scummy man asleep on the couch under a scummy blanket!” Forever after he was known as Skummyman — Skummy for short.
I was a few months divorced from my first husband and studying for my master’s in social work when I met Skummy at a punk rock show. My husband had left me for my friend. Twice betrayed, I seethed with an underground fury. Surely it had always been there, quashed by the good girl I’d consistently aimed to be. I paid attention in high school, got good grades, didn’t drink till a year after I was legal (and even then, rarely) and was a virgin until I was 20. Even as a fully fledged adult, I rarely drank, did my best to return library books on time and fully invested in my master’s program.
Something needed to break out. And I was gonna let it.
I bought a bass guitar and started learning how to play, bleached my dark brown hair platinum blond and joined a punk band with three lovable goofballs. I was 29; they were all much younger, two not even old enough to be in the bars where we played.
I didn’t expect to fall for Skummy when I stopped by his place a few years later to borrow his leather punch and add some studs to my bass strap. He was living in a dilapidated storefront, his concrete floor cluttered with cardboard boxes, scrap electronics and a towering pile of salvaged wood. He had a toilet and sink, and a hotplate for warming up cans of beans or soup. No tub. No shower. Remarkably, Skummyman never stank.
What I remember is how calm it felt in that space with him. And even though I knew better than to date a drinking man, I wanted to go back, to soak up more of that calm. I took the leather punch home with me so I would have an excuse to return.
He was 47 to my 33, a little bit taller than my 5 feet 8, but so skinny it made him look even taller. He had jack-o’-lantern teeth, and he wasn’t ashamed of them. He was Portland, Maine’s punk rock guitar god, and he leaned back when he played, eyes closed, as if he were channeling the notes from some place beyond himself. A southpaw, he played his guitar upside-down, every note articulated despite the speed of his fingers. His riffs didn’t seem to fit the music, and yet they did. He took them all the way out beyond anything sensical, and then, just when it seemed he was never coming back, he’d reel it back in.
The punk rock kids stood at the edge of the stage pumping their fists and shouting along to “King of Skum” or “Down Em Up,” or they stomped in circles in the mosh pit, elbowing each other gleefully, reaching down into the mass to pull the fallen back up from the beer-slick floor. They reminded me of a pile of puppies — nihilistic puppies in combat boots and chains.
I revelled in this world where anger was exulted instead of verboten. There was a freedom there, and joy. The dark side of life was embraced, as it should be, because when we shun it, we confine ourselves to a thin existence.
One night, as Skummy and I were making out on a sidewalk grate at the edge of town, I found myself with a full bladder. I was wearing a silky ocean-blue minidress and — daring for me — no underwear. The area was deserted, and it occurred to me that I could just let go. So I did. At the sound of my urine hitting the dead leaves and detritus below, Skummy looked at me, and I watched his face as it slowly dawned on him what was happening, and we laughed and laughed.
Skummy had no formal education beyond high school, but he made his own electric guitars, and a bass for one of his bandmates. He built a bass stand for me, with a graceful, curving spine, naming for me the three kinds of wood he’d made it from. He scribbled notes in a tattered old GE manual, constructing tube amps from scratch. And he could fix just about anything.
When I needed a new vehicle, Skummy convinced me to buy a vintage car. I was leery; I needed something reliable. But he told me he could be my repairman. What was sexier than that?
We started perusing the classifieds. At the bottom of someone’s driveway, on the way to look at another old classic farther on, we passed a sleek, sexy and magnificently large black ’62 Buick LeSabre with a “For sale” sign on its windshield. We talked to the owner, and Skummy checked under the hood. We took it for a spin, and he pronounced the car sound.
The car was a being. I got plates that said GRRR. In that car, I felt like the woman I’d never been allowed to be. That most women aren’t allowed to be. Powerful.
Skummyman fixed the LeSabre for me when it needed fixing. He even built me a trash can/tissue box holder out of the scrap wood he hoarded. It fit over the hump between the seats and never tipped. It was a beautiful thing, made with love.
I drove that car till the engine blew — that was more than Skummy could fix.
***
Almost a quarter-century later, in early 2024, I was scrolling Facebook in the cozy little house I share with my second husband when I learned that Skummy was in the hospital. His emphysema was so bad he’d lost consciousness and had been put on a ventilator. He briefly rallied, and his many friends, fans and loved ones all hoped for the best. I wanted to see him. But several years earlier, he’d moved from Portland to western Massachusetts, and his hospital was too far away.
When he died two weeks later, the depth of my grief took me by surprise. We’d been together less than a year, more than two decades ago, and although there was no bitterness between us, contact was minimal.
A few days after his death, still heavy with sadness, it occurred to me that I needed to gather my memories so I could fill myself up with him. If he were no longer going to be in the world, then I needed him to at least live in me. I pulled out my photo album, the bass stand he made for me and the studded leather guitar strap that had started it all.
***
I’m fortunate to have a husband who doesn’t begrudge me my past loves. He kindly offered to scan all my Skummy photos for me. One set reminded me of a party I’d hosted at my tiny apartment with the members of my band, some of their friends and Skummy. In one shot, Skummy is straddled on the arms of my Naugahyde chair, one hand gripping a beer, the other having unzipped and pulled his jeans down just far enough to see, scrawled in Magic Marker on his tighty-whities, “PROPERTY OF LUNDEN.” He has a big grin on his face.
For most of the year we were together, he lived happily in his place and I in mine, but when his water pipe sprung a leak and his landlord was nowhere to be found, I advised him to call the fire department. That proved to be a mistake. The firefighters deemed it an illegal unit, and he was evicted. He had nowhere to go, and I felt like it was my fault. I told him he could stay with me in my too-small apartment until he found someplace else to live.
He enthusiastically set to being a good househusband. That first day I returned from work to a tidied apartment, but, with sadness in his eyes, Skummy led me to the bathroom to show me that he’d broken my glass paperweight, which had split in two when he rinsed it in hot water. Now it opened like a geode, revealing the rough topography at its core. “It’s all right,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm. And it was. I still keep that split paperweight on my desk. Now and then I open it up to remind myself what’s inside.
***
It was sweet for a while, living together. Once, we bought a big package of chicken thighs at the downtown discount grocery and baked them all, just to eat the skins. (We saved the meat for a more serious meal some other night.) Another time, when I was feeling down, Skummy told me he knew just the treatment, and he led me to the back of the nearby Korean grocery, where several broken-down boxes leaned against the wall. He pulled one out, reconstructed it and set it upside-down on the pavement. “There,” he said. “Jump on that.” He caught a photo of me mid-air, grinning.
After a couple of months of cohabitation, however, it was beginning to feel like my small apartment was getting smaller. I loved him and tried to imagine a life together. He’d need to quit drinking, and I wanted him to get a job, one equal to his talents. But Skummy was feral. I couldn’t change him. And really, I didn’t want to. By his example something in me had been set free.
But I couldn’t stay with him either. A few weeks after he moved out, I ended it.
***
I wish I could have driven to the hospital to see him one last time. There, in that impeccably sanitised room where he was hooked up to so many beeping machines, I would’ve held his hand and said, “You are my favourite ex-boyfriend.” And he would’ve smiled at the humour of it, looked at me with love in his eyes, maybe given my hand a little squeeze.
***
Is it possible for a good girl to stand in her power? A good girl is sugar and spice and everything nice. She’s obedient. Polite. And doesn’t take up too much space. So no. I don’t think it is possible for a good girl to stand in her power. Instead, she is constricted. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I think back to my pre-punk times.
Skummy once gave me a little button with the image of a bee wearing a crown and, curved around the edges, lettering spelling out “Queen Bee.” At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this a diss or a compliment? One look at his warm smile, though, and I knew what he meant. I was a woman coming into my power, and he respected that. To him, that made me hot.
I’m not afraid of my power anymore. I don’t squelch it down. I live in it and from it. And I have punk rock and Skummy to thank for that.
***
The boyfriend after him became my husband, Frank, and we’ve been together for more than two decades. I don’t go out to punk rock shows much anymore — we’re in bed by the time the bands are tuning up. But just the other night The Queers came to town, and I pulled on a black-and-red maxi-dress and met up with Pete, one of my old bandmates. On a chain around my neck hung a small black vial containing some of Skummy’s ashes.
Pete and I wove through the crowd to get close to the stage, and as soon as Joe Queer launched into “Tamara Is a Punk,” a mosh pit broke out and the crowd pulled back to open up a circle of space. Someone jumped up onto the stage and leapt into the arms of the crowd, and I was laughing and singing and pumping my fist in the air the way I learned to do — liberated. Again. Still.
Jennifer Lunden is the award-winning author of “American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life.” She’s working on a memoir about her coming-of-age as a thirtysomething punk rocker.
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