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  KIM BALDWIN

  “A riveting novel of suspense seems to be a very overworked phrase.

  However, it is extremely apt when discussing Kim Baldwin’s [ Hunter’s Pursuit]. An exciting page turner [features] Katarzyna Demetrious, a bounty hunter…with a million dollar price on her head. Look for this excellent novel of suspense…” – R. Lynne Watson, MegaScene g

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  “…her characters seem fully capable of walking away from the particulars of whodunit and engaging the reader in other aspects of their lives.” – Lambda Book Report g

  GUN BROOKE

  “Course of Action is a romance…populated with a host of captivating and amiable characters. The glimpses into the lifestyles of the rich and beautiful people are rather like guilty pleasures.…[A] most satisfying and entertaining reading experience.” – Arlene Germain, reviewer for the Lambda Book Report and the Midwest Book Review g

  JANE FLETCHER

  “The Walls of Westernfort is not only a highly engaging and fast-paced adventure novel, it provides the reader with an interesting framework for examining the same questions of loyalty, faith, family and love that

  [the characters] must face.” – M. J. Lowe, Midwest Book Review g

  RADCLY fFE

  “…well-honed storytelling skills…solid prose and sure-handedness of the narrative…” – Elizabeth Flynn , Lambda Book Report

  “…well-plotted…lovely romance...I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough!” – Ann Bannon , author of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles Visit us at www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  PUNK LIKE ME

  by

  JD GLASS

  2006

  PUNK LIKE ME

  © 2006 BY JD GLASS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  ISBN 1-933110-40-6

  THIS TRADE PAPERBACK ORIGINAL IS PUBLISHED BY

  BOLD STROKES BOOKS, INC.,

  NEW YORK, USA

  FIRST EDITION: JUSTICE HOUSE PUBLISHING 2004

  SECOND EDITION: BOLD STROKES BOOKS 2006

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES, AND

  INCIDENTS ARE THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR

  ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, BUSINESS ESTABLISHMENTS, EVENTS, OR LOCALES

  IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.

  THIS BOOK, OR PARTS THEREOF, MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY

  FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2005939244

  CREDITS

  EDITORS: SHELLEY THRASHER AND STACIA SEAMAN

  PRODUCTION DESIGN: STACIA SEAMAN

  COVER PHOTO BY EMMA SHEAHAN HARMON

  COVER DESIGN BY SHERI ([email protected]) Acknowledgments

  I want to publicly thank my beautiful Shane for putting up with me and the long hours of “Huh? Oh yeah, I heard you…um…could you repeat that?” and supplying me with tea, chicken soup, and dinner so that I wouldn’t have to leave my keyboard. Cousin Heather, I would have never walked this road if it weren’t for you—I owe you. Ah, music, and the people who play it…yes. Thanks. For everything I’ll ever be.

  I’d also like to thank Shelley for showing me that editing could be fun and of course Radclyffe, for her enthusiastic support.

  Dedication

  For all of us who’ve been there

  and keep it going on

  PUNK LIKE ME

  CHAPTER ONE:

  START IT UP!

  Yeah, okay, I come off as tough, and I like that. I’m only about Þ ve foot seven inches, but I know how to handle myself in just about any situation, and if not, I know where to Þ nd backup.

  I’m Nina, and I write the lyrics and guitar for Adam’s Rib, even though Stephie, my bud, does most of the lead vocals. ’Sokay with me, I don’t worry much about it.

  Like I told you before, I’m not too tall and I’m not too short. I like to keep in shape, so I dance and do martial arts and stuff—healthy in wind and limb, just like they say about horses.

  My hair’s black—well, okay, it’s really red-brown, but I make it shiny raven black, and I’ve got a bloodred streak running down the center length of it.

  I’m not just any old punk; I’ve got to be myself. My hair is long, and I mean really long, down the back and top. I’ve got the sides shaved (to the skin, yeah!) to the top of my ears. Then it’s a straight-up tight buzz for about another two inches before we hit the top where it runs down my back. I love the smooth skin, I love the fuzz, and I love the don’t-fuck-with-me attitude I give with this mop.

  I might sound like an egomaniac and that’s okay—I’m not one really. It’s just that I really, really like my hair—and I’m not the Þ rst to ever feel like that.

  My eyes are blue, though they can look a little gray sometimes, and my mom used to tell me that I have a nice smile, but moms are supposed to say things like that, as well as other things such as, “When are you going to settle down?” or “That’s not a real job,” and “I could introduce you to this nice young man…” Okay, there, time to tune that

  • 11 •

  JD GLASS

  one out.

  Yeah, let me get this over with right now. I’m gay. Not confused, not experimenting, not bi (although I think Keanu Reeves is great), and not a phase. Gay. Gee-aye-wye. If that’s a problem, get out now, ’cuz I don’t deal with ’phobes too well.

  In case you were wondering, I don’t have a “type.” What attracts me to someone is a very individual thing, so I might date a short brunette or a tall blonde or whatever. It’s really about personality for me, the tilt of the head, tone of voice, you know, stuff like that. But—and this is a secret between you and me—green eyes kill me.

  So help me, I’m fascinated; I just can’t help it. Present me with someone with green eyes, and I mean deep, dark forest green, not light new grass, and I can get lost looking at them, looking into them, trying to Þ nd, well, I don’t know. But it’s my fatal ß aw.

  Good thing they’re sort of rare, right?

  So here we are, the four of us, hanging out and getting ready to play our Þ rst real gig. Stephie looks like she’s ready to puke, and I have to stop the Jerkster, also known as Jeremy, also our bassist, from sucking down any more beers before he actually pukes on the stage.

  Not that it would hurt the stage, though. There are burn spots, holes, and dried splotches of what could be anything from booze to blood on the nasty green carpet that covers the back half of the stage.

  My brother and some of our friends are taking bets as to whether or not the wood is stained with blood or dirt, although a faction is guessing roach carcasses.

  There’s something about being at CBGB’s that makes you want to shake your head in wonder—and the rest of you in fear.

  Now if you’ve never heard of CBGB’s, which is located at 315

  Bowery Place right on the edge of the East Village (and that’s New York City, y’all), then you’ve never heard of rock ’n’ roll, at least not here in the good ole US of A.

  From Blondie, to Talking Heads, Joan Jett in her Runaways daze and the Police, John Mellencamp when he used to be John Cougar, Tom Petty, and the Indigo Girls, everyone has played there, stomped, sweated, dreamed, and poured it all out on that stage.

  The scrawl of grafÞ ti’s everywhere—on the walls of the stage, the base of it, all along the stairwell, and, of course, every inch of the

  • 12 •

  PUNK LIKE ME

  bathroom that isn’t painted black, the rock ’n’ roll version of hand-and footprints in cement—everyone leaving their mark.

  You might have guessed by now
(if you didn’t know already) that CBGB’s is sort of an icon in and of itself on the rock ’n’ roll landscape, and it honestly never occurred to us that it’s one hell of an arrogant thing to make this the site for the Þ rst inß iction of our material on the public.

  Tucked up against a wall off to the side of the stage, I Þ nally get a chance to sit back and wait for a while with my friend, Trace—short for

  “Tracy,” of course—who’s coming on to me. This is a little unusual—

  not that she’s coming on to someone, she’s come on to lots and lots of people—it’s just that she’s coming on to me. Not that I really mind, of course—I know she’s just showing off and I’m okay with that.

  Trace is absolutely beautiful, tall and slender, almost elÞ n (but incredibly strong), with long wavy black hair and eyes the color of steel, a shade of gray like I’ve never seen before or since. I love her as a friend, and I think maybe a little something more, too. She has this incredible appeal for me, but Trace is scary, too, in a lot of ways, to a lot of people. Ask anyone.

  When you’re with her, Trace leaves you with the feeling that if she were a ß ame you’d be a suicidal moth, and pretty darn happy to burn, too.

  Tonight, during my little break from Jerks—um, Jeremy—Trace is seducing me into one of those moments of torture and righteousness where you kick yourself later, sometimes years later, for being so good and darned noble. She knows, because she’s been checking up on me for the last several hours, I’ve been a little achy and feverish all day (hey—the ß u does not stop for gigs, and gigs do not stop for the ß u. Them’s the rules, and that’s the way I play), and she’s damned and determined to make me feel better—any way she can. Darn that chivalrous stuff, anyway!

  I suppose I forgot to mention, Trace and I live together. No, not in that eternally bonded way, or even as roomies. I live in a three-ß oor brownstone apartment building, one apartment per ß oor. Two friends and I share the top ß oor, Trace lives on the second, and the mom of one of my roomies (a nice guy we call “Cap,” short for “Captain,” ’cuz he can be a little bossy, ya know?) lives on the Þ rst ß oor.

  • 13 •

  JD GLASS

  Since we’re all pretty tight with one another, we have an open-door policy between the second and third ß oors (Cap’s mom can’t climb stairs very well—lucky for us), and it really is anyone’s guess as to who’ll stay where—third or second ß oor—on any given night. Okay, well, maybe that part only applies to me, but you get the idea. We’re one big fucked-up family.

  So, like I told you before, I’m sitting there, Þ nally able to take a bit of a break before we go on stage for the Þ rst time, and Trace has decided to be Florence Nightingale and the Rock of Gibraltar simultaneously, with a very healthy, and I mean very healthy Mae West and Tallulah Bankhead thrown in.

  Somehow, she has her arms around my shoulders, her legs wrapped over and around mine, and when I lean my head back against her shoulder because she’s petting it, she strokes my neck oh so very lightly with her Þ ngertips. “You okay, baby?” she’s whispering into my ear, her voice a honeyed whiskey. Then she nuzzles baby-soft lips into my neck. That feels so amazingly good, I just groan in reply.

  Suddenly, she grabs my hips with surprising strength of purpose and pulls me tightly against her just as she starts to nip, nibble, and lick the sensitive skin of my neck. I open my eyes in surprise. I’m tired and nervous and feverish, and I know my temperature’s running high, because wherever Trace’s body meets mine I burn, and everything else is lonely cold.

  I close my eyes again. “Oh, what the hell,” I think as I stretch my legs out farther along the bench, “might as well enjoy this while it lasts,” and I settle my back into her warmth while I enjoy the patterns her lips have begun to leave on my throat.

  Trace starts to massage my hip with one hand, while the other dangles between my thighs, sometimes resting on one, perilously close and not close enough to the restless situation she’s creating in my already unstable body.

  “Damn!” I hear Jerkster say to no one in particular. “We’re not even on yet, and she’s already got chicks all over her. How the hell does she do it?”

  Nicky, I mean Nico (we’d all started calling him that in the last year), my younger and only brother, answers, “She’s got some mojo. I don’t even have to introduce my girlfriends to her—they all go for her right away.”

  • 14 •

  PUNK LIKE ME

  Trace has got her tongue in my ear so it’s kinda hard to think, but I just realized—this is deÞ nitely a far ways away from my last visit to CBGB’s.

  • 15 •

  • 16 •

  PUNK LIKE ME

  CHAPTER TWO:

  YOU SAY IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY

  So the real story starts back when my best friend Kerry and I, and a whole slew of our friends, had gone to the Carter boys’

  annual “Everyone’s Birthday in July” party right off the boardwalk in a place called South Beach, a popular destination for New York City dwellers in the forties and Þ fties, but now a semi-abandoned beach (except for the occasional National Parks people or whatever they are, who inspected it whenever a bonÞ re got too out of hand).

  Now, at this point in life, I wasn’t too tall, being just about Þ ve foot three inches as a junior in high school (yep, it’s true, I was one of those late bloomers), and Kerry, with her dirty-blond hair and cat green eyes, was even shorter as a sophomore. In grammar school, she’d been Nicky’s classmate, and of course I knew who she was and all that, but we weren’t what you could call close.

  Somewhere, though, between junior high and high school, we’d just started to click, and by freshman year we were an inseparable duo, despite the fact that she went to Tottenville, the local public high school, and I went to a place nicknamed “The Hill”—an all-girls’ prep school run by nuns—that was great academically, but sucked socially.

  Freshmen had to take Latin and self-defense/judo, for Chrissakes.

  Hmm…maybe the judo was because of the uniform? I dunno. Besides, I’d Þ gured out a loophole in the student handbook (yeah, we had one of those—and we had a test in it every year, too, just in case we forgot something or the nuns added something new). Anyway, I changed into jeans or army pants and my favorite pair of boots before I left school every day, so it wasn’t really an issue for me anymore.

  But still, the fact that I did better in judo than in Latin—not to mention my ability to Þ nd loopholes in that dumb rule book—might

  • 17 •

  JD GLASS

  have been a good indication as to why I was always in trouble—so often, in fact, that I’d met my other best friend, Samantha, on one of the many afternoons when I was on detention that Þ rst year of high school.

  A year ahead of me, she became, among other things, my detention partner.

  But I digress. Back to the party in South Beach, which, by the way, if you had good eyes, good binoculars, and an even better imagination you could see Coney Island from. This party was for the forty-some-odd percent of our friends who had July birth dates—it allowed us to have one massive gathering instead of having to coordinate and reschedule Þ fteen conß icting ones. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, brought something from dips to drinks, and we had plenty of everything. We also experimented making our own drink concoctions. At the annual Halloween party in the fall (and the Þ rst one I’d ever been to—Carter boys’ party, that is), we’d made something we named the Thing That Came and Stayed because no matter how much of that Hi-C orange-colored stuff we drank, spilled, and were afraid to offer to the sea because of toxicity, it never disappeared. We Þ nally used it to put out the bonÞ re in the backyard.

  The beach party was no different. The Þ re was lit, the Son of Thing That Came and Stayed was born (purple Hi-C this time), and we were dancing and laughing ’round the Þ re to “Planet Claire” and “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s.

  Now you might be surprised, all those kids
and alcohol (together again, Þ lm at eleven!), but ya know, none of us did drugs then (me and Nicky never will, knock wood), and there was only one guy who took it too far. Even though his name was Rob, we called him “Chuck” or “Yack,” not only to prevent confusion with Robbie from the comic book store Universe where we all hung out (and they were cousins, by the by) but because it was also the level he drank to. But we were too young to know he had a problem, and our ride home was dryer than twelve days in the Sahara and keeping it that way so he could shove sixteen of us—no joke—into a ’76 Dodge Dart.

  The weather was warm, the sky was clear, and our blood was Þ lled with wild, wild joy.

  I had invited Samantha to the party, along with Nicky, Kerry, and me—people were always inviting fresh faces to the group, which gave

  • 18 •

  PUNK LIKE ME

  it its wildly eclectic nature—and she and I hadn’t really seen each other since school had ended for the summer. Samantha had been having a really rough year—her father had passed away that spring—and I guess she wasn’t feeling very social.

  Not that I blamed her, though. It’s just that she was so withdrawn, and after almost a month of “space,” I thought that maybe she could have a little fun, hang out a little, get out into the world a bit, and I wanted her to meet my bro and my buds. Besides, she had a July birthday, too, and I had bought her a little present.

  Nicky and I had been there a little while, mixing and mingling about, chatting with friends, dancing, drinking a little, and the sun hadn’t truly gone down yet. It lay about a third of the way above the horizon, casting gorgeous shadows and reliefs everywhere it chose to, and every now and again, I’d glance back across the beach to the parking lot to see who else was joining our party.