When I briefly attended college in Columbia, Missouri, ten years ago, I fell in with a group of townies who called themselves D.L. Punks, the initials standing for Desperate Living, the title of John Waters’s gritty and murderous 1978 fairy tale. The “punk” part wasn’t what it means today: no bondage pants made with sweatshop labor and purchased at the mall, no $100 Mohawks, no pierced eyebrows, no hardcore music, no Food Not Bombs meetings. To us punk meant a sort of Dumpster-dived glamour, a scrounged-together existence somewhere between industrious (build-your-own-furniture nights, where we took apart chairs and tables and made them into more dangerous items) and medicated (BYOR stand-up improv nights where the R meant Robitussin).
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We carried photocopied Punk Passports we’d made, which allowed us to “participate in punk events/activities,” “roam streets freely in a punkish air,” and “attend punk council meetings.” On the backs we kept track of our individual “punk points.” I started with minus one for keeping my zines in pristine condition and ended up with plus one for having taped a local band off the college radio station back when I still lived in the college dorms. I still have my Punk Passport, which I’m sure is grounds for revocation.
Waters began with his “early negative artistic influences.” He said, “All young people need someone bad to look up to.” Amen. For him, the holy trinity was the Wicked Witch of the West, the murderous child in The Bad Seed, and Captain Hook. “I prayed to them every night,” he said.
But now, he said, “nobody shoplifts anymore. It seems old hat. What they do is dropping. Now, that’s not mopping. Mopping is when drag queens just smash a window and steal a Valentino dress and run. Dropping is when you go to the worst thrift shop and buy the ugliest, stained, out-of-fashion thing and then sneak into Gucci and put it on the hanger and put it in the window and take a picture and run. I think it’s great. I don’t even know if it’s illegal. It’s kind of making a donation. It’s shoplifting in reverse. Women fume in the high-fashion world when they see their window has been ruined by a stained maternity outfit.”
