“Love’s Secret Domain,” Coil (Love’s Secret Domain, 1991)

Only a little bit because: it’s twenty years old this summer, and then ten years ago this summer, I somehow saw them, so it was mostly accidentally that I was in New York at all then, and taking in this scene and wondering if I deserved it: a slab of sheet metal rippling behind two skinny boys in only underwear — and bloodied from the neck down — that were very memorably brought out on stage at the end of their performance, and all the while, with a few reverent exceptions, the crowd ignored them, dripped their lace in their beers. It was my first brush of what made me stop going out to these things (foreshadowing: the music scene bottomed out, and instead of making more and better, people just started knitting yarn into their hair). I couldn’t walk out when I had the chance to be turned on to whatever the five most obsessive people in the room were still standing there waiting for. So I stayed to the end, and I went off after to Limelight with the rest, retreated to the chapel where they sell fancy soap now, and probably threw my cheek into my shoulder anyway when the DJ inevitably went for this.

But the real story is what minimally prepared me: friendship books. Some of the girls I was writing to had gone pro. They had printed their own custom address labels from this company everyone seemed to know about without asking. Instead of kittens and rainbows, in the upper corner they’d ask the printer to put in high-contrast b&w photos tore from what I imagined must be a secret repository I’d get called into eventually but was actually just Propaganda magazine, and beside those, where you might put your name and address, lyrics and your name and the pen-name of the girl you wrote to that you loved and wanted to be the most. These would get pasted into handmade paper booklets, stapled and glued, and you’d pass them on in your letters. Inside, each page was claimed by a different person you could choose to write to, too, sending off a blind introduction to them based on how much of yourself you saw in their pseudonym and the bands they scribbled around their name and address — in black puffy paint, with glitter smooshed in, or photocopies of Tarot cards, or little hearts and pentagrams. Front 242 (glitter star) Current 93 (lipstick kiss) (swirl of blood red nail polish) Neubauten. This one girl’s pen-name is long lost to me, but I woke up today almost feeling the groove of that too-deep way she bore into her notebook paper, could smell and pass a little leftover judgment on the unsuitable ballpoint she used to etch every “thee” and “ov.” Tiger Beat crossed w/ ceremonial magic and carried out quietly under your desk in study hall. It made all the strobes and stage blood, the handmade packaging and secret codes, even over-populated with boys as it was, just seem like our idea.