In high school I was a geek who got beat up a lot, until I got into Tae Kwon Do and became a geek who beat up the people who tried to beat me up, which was an improvement but not as much of one as I'd hoped. Violence is like that.

(Years later I'd learn about real violence, the kind which leads to shattered bones and bullet holes and brains turned to mush; that doesn't much help anything either, though it makes for some great dinner conversations.)

So anyway, while I was busy being a geek, sitting around bitching with all the other geeks, there were these people who weren't geeks but still treated us with, well, some normal human respect. I liked them, except they dressed a little too weird for me. The hair, especially. The multicolored hair. Scared me in a way.

A couple of years later, in college, I got to be pretty good friends with some of these people. Went to shows. Started wearing combat boots with my civvies. Next thing I knew, I had a Mohawk and was a real, live, fuck you hardcore punk. Or at least I thought I was; I went to the shows and had the right attitudes and liked hanging around with other punks. What else did I need?

There were these people in Muddy's Java Cafe we called death-rockers. I thought their clothes were cool but they were too damn mopey for my taste. Damn, they had some cool music too, though. Started listening to it. A lot of it.

Fast-forward to England, 1990-92.

You know, like, the motherland.

I was in heaven when I got my orders there. And right away I found out two things: a) you really, really, really have to prove yourself to the London scene when you've got an American accent and a GI haircut, and b) they wanted to categorize me anyway, not just the accent.

Something had changed between the time I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers the last time the Peppers were cool (say, about '88) and the time I stepped off the plane at RAF Mildenhall dressed in black from the collar of my leather jacket to the tips of my combat boots. I didn't listen to hardcore any more. I hardly even liked the stuff, though now and then I'd blast the Exploited and the Dead Kennedys at ear-shattering volume just for old times' sake. I played a whole hell of a lot of Sisters and Siouxsie and Bauhaus and Concrete Blonde.

I'd become a Goth without knowing it.

A memory, probably from November 1990: sitting on the steps of a fountain not too far from King's Cross, a good-sized mixed crowd of punks, Goths, and ravers, passing around bottles of wine. I was (drunkenly) expounding on the differences between being a punk in America and a punk in England. I gestured to the guy next to me, with his two-foot-high, fire-engine-red Mohawk, his ripped yellow denim jacket, his scuffed Docs and tattered Royal Army camouflage pants showing fishnets underneath. "Like you, f'rinstance --"

He cut me off. "I'm not a bleedin' punk, mate, I'm a bleedin' Gothic. Can't you see the bleedin' t-shirt?"

(I swear he did.)

Yeah, okay, so he had a Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt on underneath. Um ... okay, excuse me. Sorry. Is it really all that important?

[bug-eyed stare]

Remember, too, that this wasn't all that good a time to be a Goth. The Sisters were lying low. The Banshees' Superstition ... eh. (Though the tour, which I saw at the T&CToo, in Kentish Town, was fantastic. Largely due to the fact that they concentrated on stuff from Peepshow.) Most of the other '80's groups were dead or nearly so, and there wasn't going to be any romantic revival from the grave. Switchblade Symphony, Rosetta Stone, The Shroud et al weren't even names in my vocabulary yet.

Yeah, I have to thank Mick Mercer, I suppose. Sonafabitch codified everything I didn't quite know was there, real as it was, and fed it to me in a mass-produced form just absolutely right for American me. Not that I think the book's pitched at an American audience, mind, but damn if it didn't work just fine that way.

Right. And show me a Goth who doesn't -- even if only in some deep, dark, secret way -- see his books as the writings of a mad but undeniably endearing prophet.

Product of environment, that's me. I took it in, thought about it, decided if a Goth was what I'd become a Goth was what I'd be. At the time, you may recall, the consensus was that Goth was dying a long, slow, romantic, wasting death. Which I thought was pretty damned silly, and still do, and fortunately the events of the years between then and now seem to have borne out my optimism.

Optmism. Heh. Like Eeyore's variety, I might add. (OOGC)

Now it is, really, truly, another millennium, and Goth is still here: as a musical style, as a fashion, as a generally rather pleasant way to live. We surface in the public consciousness every once in a while, usually not in a good way ... and it can be very unpleasant while that's going on. (I live in Colorado now. I know this firsthand.) Rarely, the attention's good, when someone sells a bunch of albums and we get to experience that local-kid-made-good vicarious pride.

But usually it swims along under the surface, doing its thing, unobtrusive and cautious and surviving while other musicocultural movements come and go -- and when they go, they go hard, from top of the charts to laughingstock in a matter of weeks. I like our way better: run silent, run deep. It ensures that we'll still be here years from now, that generations will have it around.

Because it deserves to go on.

So, that's what I have to say on the subject. E-mail me if you have any comments; I'm interested to hear everyone's life story.