Track 13: Home in Hurricane Country by Asha Dore
Right before I flew to Pensacola to see Laura Jane Grace play at the Handlebar for the first time in twenty years, my tattoo artist in Seattle completed the outline of a Florida snake bird that covers my lower right calf, a cover up of a cityscape tattoo I drew with my ex-boyfriend when we were both eighteen. The snake bird is called an anhinga. The anhinga has always seemed punk rock compared to other birds because it’s born on the edge of a river or swamp, and when it’s old enough to leave the nest, it falls straight into the water. Unlike other birds, anhingas don’t have the chance to bop around on land figuring out how to lift off like their parents. They either swim, fly, or drown. If they swim, they catch food by spearing fish with their beaks. The world these birds experience seems infinitely brutal. If they survive, it seems, they really earn it.
I didn't plan to start the anhinga tattoo right before I went back to my hometown. I'd been removing the old tattoo for years, and the trip to see Laura Jane Grace perform happened on an exciting whim: My old friends were available to meet in our hometown to revisit the polipunk community that saved our lives as much as it devastated us, and bonus: our favorite band from high school was planning to play a show in the Handlebar, our old haunt with the tiny stage and the same venue where we saw Laura Jane Grace with Against Me! so many times.
Back then, I lived with a boyfriend in the famed Pensacola punk house, 309, paying $40 per month for a tiny room with a twin bed and wood paneled walls covered in wheat pasted antiwar flyers, cut outs from zines, and spray painted tags. My ex-boyfriend and I worked at fast food restaurants like Subway and Sbarro's pizza, and when we were off work, we hitchhiked around Florida, skateboarding and painting graffiti murals together. We were idealists, believing in community, art, and shared responsibility, believing we could face anything – as long as we did it together. We weren’t the only ones in Pensacola who felt a renewed sense of home at 309 and the other adjacent punk houses. The folks in the Pensacola punk community shared these ideals, and they had for decades before we arrived.
The Pensacola punk community emerged in the 1970s in response to racism, misogyny, and homophobia in the Deep South. Despite Pensacola’s location on the bottom of the bible belt, despite the hurricanes and conservative politics, and despite the slow economy on the Florida panhandle, the community has survived and thrived, creating collaborative living and artistic spaces, music venues, bookstores, cafes, restaurants, and providing safe spaces for people who might call themselves misfits or marginalized: Folks who were queer and trans when it was illegal and even more dangerous than it is now to be out in the Deep South, people who lost their families, their parents, their children, or their livelihoods, folks who, for one reason or another, needed community.
I found this community at an open mic night at Van Gogh’s, a café right across the street from the train tracks near downtown Pensacola. I was fifteen, and my dad had just passed away unexpectedly. I went to school and worked full time to support my younger brother and my mother, who struggled with substance abuse and mental illness. I saw the open mic as an exciting way to avoid the demands of my mom’s house. I had no idea what I’d find there.
The night of the open mic, the café was warm and filled with old, comfortable couches and low lights. Van Gogh’s sold cheap coffee drinks made with grocery store chocolate syrup and homemade vegan treats. The open mic featured some of my high school friends playing folk music, poets, storytellers, and people singing and playing plastic bucket drums. I was just another high school kid, but the people at the café were welcoming and kind. They introduced themselves and asked me my name. They invited me to hang my art on the walls. The next week, I walked across the graffiti bridge to a tiny, little known beach, where I watched Against Me! play plastic bucket drums and sing songs with teens and young adults in the community. Even though we were strangers, the music made us feel like a family sitting around the fire. The minute I was old enough to move out of my mom’s house, I moved into a house with friends near the train tracks and the café.
For almost a year, my housemates and I folded ourselves into the community, carving a space where we could feel a sense of belonging. At the end of that year, many of my friends went away to college. That’s when I met my ex-boyfriend. He had just been evicted from an apartment in Tallahassee for partying too loud and skateboarding inside.
My ex-boyfriend and I moved into the central punk house, 309, and took up jobs at fast food restaurants. We skated and painted graffiti. We saw Against Me! together, too, at a venue called The Handlebar. It was one of my favorite bands at the time, not least because when they played, the venues often erupted in a rough, folk punk sing-a-long, and the band members often invited random people from the audience on stage. It felt like there was no barrier between the people on stage and the people on the ground, yet another approximation of family.
When the sing-a-long started at my last Against Me! show twenty years ago, I stepped back to the side of the room and watched my ex sing on stage with a group of hugging, crying, thrilled misfits, all coming together in this wild, beautiful moment. It felt the kind of home we'd all lost or run away from.
Even though this phase of my life felt lonely and aimless, I trusted the connection I had with my distant friends and current boyfriend. Even if our art or politics were idealistic or misguided, I told myself our connection was stronger because we had to work so hard to survive.
Soon after that show, my ex and I collaborated on a line drawing of a cityscape under a night sky with big, elementary school stars. Underneath the city, we wrote the words, Home is where the ground meets the sky, which really means: The ground doesn’t really meet the sky anywhere except right where you are standing. Your home is you – or it can be.
When my ex and I finished our drawing, our mutual friend tattooed it on my leg. When Hurricane Ivan wrecked Pensacola later that year, my ex-boyfriend and I escaped together, driving five hours through the torrential rain on the eve of the storm. We joined a bigger peaceful punk community in Midtown Atlanta. We found better jobs and leaned into a stasis for a while. We grew apart and broke up largely due to my increased focus on classes at Georgia State University and landing a dream job at the time - waiting tables at a fancy vegetarian restaurant. My ex wanted to keep doing what he had been doing before I met him: skating and painting and working gig jobs. I didn’t begrudge him of that. I was even grateful to him for staying beside me during one of my most difficult years, a year when my friends had left, when I had no family, a year when I felt more alone than I’d ever felt.
Two months after our breakup, my roommates had a house party while I was waiting tables. When I came home, I went straight to bed, locking the door to keep any drunk stragglers from accidentally barging in, mistaking my room for the bathroom. At some point that night, my ex convinced my roommate to unlock my bedroom door well after I had gone to bed.
The story goes as one might expect: He didn’t stop when I tried to stop him, it was the early aughts, and I questioned myself in a way that seems embarrassingly cliché these days: I wasn’t sure it was assault because we had dated in the past.
The next day, I confronted my ex. He apologized, blaming the booze, claiming a black out. I believed him and shoveled it into a quaint corner of myself, much as I had the pain and surprise of my dad’s death a few years before. It wasn’t the right choice to compartmentalize, but it was how I knew to survive.
A few weeks after the first assault, it happened again while I was sleeping. When I confronted my ex, he denied it, trying to wash the event away. So, I followed the rhetoric I had learned during my time in the polipunk community. I outed him to our friends in Atlanta and Pensacola and to the women I knew he was dating.
Most people didn't believe me.
I fled. I left Atlanta. I focused on college and work. I built a new family and a life, buried my experience, and did not return to my hometown, Atlanta, or the deep south for over a decade. When I did return, I stayed away from all the familiar places. I didn’t want to face my mistakes. I didn’t want to think about how the way I fled may have put other women at risk.
By the time I was thirty, I lived on the West Coast with my children. One afternoon, I sat with a group of writers at café in Portland, Oregon, and a woman walked up to me. Seeing her, made the past I’d cut myself off from collide with the person I’d become. The woman approached me in the middle of the room. She didn’t take me to the corner or whisper or hide. She announced her name – one of the women my ex was dating when I called him out and subsequently left Atlanta. She apologized.
In that moment, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I heard myself thank her, stared at her, listened to her while she described what my ex had done to her and other women in the community. She blamed herself just as I had blamed myself. I heard myself admitting my mistakes to her. I heard myself talking about things I learned from the whole experience, how I’d tried, since then, to be more wholehearted with the people I care about, and to stay, even if things were confusing or hard. Before I said it out loud, I didn’t really know any of that was true.
The next day, I scheduled my first of a dozen tattoo removal appointments.
Five years later, nearly on a whim, I decided to travel to Pensacola see Laura Jane Grace performing both her new music and songs from Against Me! at the same venue where I had seen her two decades before in Pensacola. By that time, the charge from those past haunts had reduced to a hum. I am a single working mom of three kids. The family I built had survived surgeries, difficult diagnoses, loss, the pandemic, and the mundane tragedies and thrilling successes of everyday life. By the time I decided to fly back to Pensacola, I didn’t really think about the assault, the loss of my community, or the way it felt when those beautiful, naïve ideals I gripped so hard shattered. I could barely remember the way it felt to realize that what I believed in was so much more fragile than I expected.
Laura Jane Grace has an Against Me! song called “Tonight We’re Gonna Give it 35%” that starts with this scene, Just by looking at them / my heart is anywhere but here / and how tired I was / from the past couple weeks / from the past couple years / well it hit me all at once. The lyrics are a stunning fit to almost any kind of nostalgia – especially the devastating kind, the kind of nostalgia you wish you could forget, the kind that slams into you like a derailed train right in the middle of town or like the beak of a predator bird like a sudden spear through body of a totally harmonious, unsuspecting fish.
This time, at the punk show, twenty years had passed, and my friends and I were all quieter, more settled, older. Nobody rushed the stage. Nobody pissed on the sidewalk outside or screamed in each other’s face for some random offense. Pensacola had changed, too, as all cities do. The downtown is sleeker. The café across the train tracks that used to be filled with mismatched thrift store chairs and sofas is now somewhat upscale, painted in greys and blacks, modern, and filled with monstera plants.
Before the show, I connected with the community organizers, folks who never left Pensacola, folks who stuck with the sinking panhandle through hurricanes and war protests and the pandemic, holding space for misfits, homeless kids, and anyone who needed home, rest, and community. The folks who stayed in Pensacola made a museum of the history of punk in that area, and it’s on display at 309, the house where I lived with my ex, though I was grateful to discover that no pictures of us ended up on the walls. The walls were covered with photographs and dates, flyers from war protest and folk punk shows, newspaper clips: the beautiful detritus of so many lives and so much astonishing hope.
I walked through the 309 punk museum, tracing decades of these lives. I marveled at the way the community came together and rebuilt itself over and over, the way we were taught to rebuild our own houses after a hurricane hit.
At the punk show, my friends and I stood in front at the Handlebar, singing along with Laura Jane Grace, dancing, and even moshing - embarrassingly and gently - with other Pensacola punks, most of us now moms and dads.
Toward the end, I stepped to the side, watching my friends hold each other and sing along to music we’ve been sharing for twenty years. At the end of “Tonight We’re Gonna Give It 35%,” Laura Jane sings, If you had told me about all this when I was fifteen, I never would have believed it.
When I was fifteen, I believed that family had everything to do with staying together, that healing had everything to do with atonement and reckoning. I believed that my dad’s death sent a cannonball through our family, and my mom’s substance abuse and refusal to reckon with it wrecked whatever family we had left. I believed that family as I had known it was therefore no longer accessible to me, especially after my attempts to hodge-podge a family of punk kids failed so abysmally. I believed for many years that the real harm from my ex’s assault was the way the community turned away from me when I said what he did out loud. “I can get over the physical stuff,” I used to claim, “but I really miss my friends.”
Over the years, I blamed myself for his assault. I wondered if I should have kept it to myself. I blamed my choice to participate in a counterculture community. I blamed myself for not helping my mom get better, for moving out the minute I could. Later, I blamed myself for whatever my ex may have done to other women. I blamed myself for not fighting harder to out him, to use a legal system that frightened me to stop him. I blamed myself for leaving the punk community, too, for no longer contributing and supporting people who needed it as much as I did when I was a teenager.
Standing in The Handlebar, watching my friends, I felt the weight of twenty years of mistakes and luck and missteps and pure awe. On stage, this incredible musician continued to perform and create music, as she had been doing for decades. Even though she went through a great deal in her own punk community twenty years before, as she outlines in her memoir, Tranny, she still returns to Florida to play songs, old and new. She still sings songs about uniting on the fringes. When she sings these songs, huge groups of strangers still hold each other and sing along. It’s not an overstatement to call these moments wholehearted, stunning miracles.
Of course, those gorgeous songs with friends and strangers aren’t a stand in for atonement from the specific individuals who do violent things. They don’t resolve grief, trauma, or assault. But for me, that night, coming back to a place that I associated with violence and destruction was transformed into returning to something that felt more like a home than my body or the community ever had. If you’re looking closely, you can see it on the walls of the 309 museum: it’s history. It’s shared memories of heartbreak and intimacy and distance and a very specific and unusual kind of prosperity.
Asha Dore’s work has been found in Business Insider, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, and The Rumpus. Find more at AshaDore.net and WritingTruth.Substack.com. Asha is the EIC of Parley Lit and runs Totally Biased Reviews, a literary interview podcast.
