Scott C. Holstad

No, Phoenix was the Silver Dollar Bomb!

I met people everywhere I went traveling around the continent and I was like a damn magnet, attracting many to me despite working hard to be anti-social while I simultaneously repelled quite a few too, content to hate me while I was pleased to return the vibe.

While on my way from Atlanta to Los Angeles, I decided to stop off in Phoenix for a bit. Had some contacts, distant friends, a couple of publishers there and an artist friend from Tennessee was having a show in a Scottsdale gallery while some friends in a band signed to a 4-record deal with huge label were doing a concert out there and I’d heard people were traveling not only from Tucson and Flagstaff but also from Albuquerque, Dallas and Houston to see them – I’d been giving writing lessons to the fucking lead singer! – and there were some clubs I wanted to check out, blah, blah, blah. shit, seemed I’d be busier in Phoenix than while on the Sunset Strip, Long Beach or Hollywood and that was damned crazy.

Turned out Phoenix was the damn bomb. One experience that led to that assessment was like this:

I used to meet funky people at an Atlanta club called The Masquerade, a 3 in 1 deal – Heaven, Hell and Purgatory – while I ended up partying with a lot of the bands playing in Heaven, most over from Europe, as I got hammered with Front 242, Alien Sex Fiend, KMFDM and others, I really got my fix down in Hell, with its perfect presence, total darkness, cold stone slab floor, brick walls, chain link fence by the bar, surreal Japanese flicks flickering off the ceiling, people grinding to an industrial edge, where I once dropped a tab and watched David Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1, which fucked me up more beautifully than Eraserhead ever did.

But that’s not the point, right?

So, I found myself in this grimy industrialized hidden part of downtown Phoenix at a new place called The Silver Dollar Club, which couldn’t match The Masquerade or many other established clubs, but they were trying. I mean shit, they somehow got Skinny Puppy down there from Vancouver and I was surprised to run into Sisters Of Mercy’s Andrew Eldrich there, looking conspicuous in trying to look inconspicuous. You know what I mean.

I also met this groovy chick growing out a carbonite hard-edged mohawk, artistically drawn eyebrows like Siouxsie and also like this chick back in Knoxville, a chain attached from two of her 11 earrings through one of her two nose rings down her chest, divided into two so both fiercely erect pierced nipples could join the parade, but not stopping there, the reunified thin chain traveled south visiting her studded navel while this time I didn’t make the mistake I’d made with the one in Knoxville – when this girl also bragged about her chain controlling her clit ring, I didn’t take her fucking word for it, dammit!  Simply said, “Prove it.”

She was wearing a short tight leather skirt, which complimented her chain mail-motif top. The place was dark and packed and people were dancing, and after doing a couple of quick lines, we moved out into the middle of the dance floor where we clutched tightly as she grabbed my hand and discretely guided into under her hiked hem where I was delighted to find little but exactly what she’d bragged on and while I was feeling around to get the feel, I found myself flicking, twirling, rubbing round and round with wild rhythm matched by a booming bpm beat making everything/one throb harder and I went faster and hotter and wilder and she grasped my face, her tongue forcing its way between my buzzed lips, and she thrust at me, grunted hard and then nearly collapsed as my hand felt a gush like fucking Niagara Falls and I held her up, her body convulsing, and I eventually maneuvered us over to wall, then outside into breathable air once she said she could walk again and goddamn, turns out they were right about Phoenix becoming hip. 

I had to get over to Los Angeles the next day, which seemed disappointing to both of us, and despite some passionate good-bye kisses, later I realized I never got her name but I didn’t wash her fragrance off for days after, thinking it the sweetest scent I’d ever captured.