I wanted to tell you about Jenny Stax, and all the things I know about her. This meditation regards a time before I was in what I’d call now Part II, which basically means I think I’ve learned probably all that I will, having seen the extremes of everything. But before I crossed this demarcation line from Part I, which I am sure happened though I have no idea when, I spent a night on a motel floor with Jenny Stax. It was 2003, a year that felt merciless even though we never had it that good again, and I was the youngest kid on a coast-to-coast pop-punk tour. And since it was my first one I knew nothing about fate and how it crossed people like mine and Jenny’s paths. I wasn’t even curious about it yet. I was too busy watching the country roll past our windshield like I’d been birthed inside an old folk song. Still believing in the scales. Still sure we’d all started out behind the same gate, and there was nothing random about luck.

By the time she came into my life, Jenny Stax was in some later phase that I know I’ll never achieve. Life is like that for people like me - people attracted to those who can let go, who can find the edge, who can dance through life without fear of tomorrow - but can’t do it themselves. Those midnight natives appear before losers with eyes like mine. They know they possess something money and practice can’t buy: Freedom. And as a sixteen-year-old in Bruce Springsteenland with very Catholic parents, that freedom swept across me like I’d found some lost gospel; I just didn’t know you were allowed to live completely in “the now”, and on the surface, that lifestyle looked very sexy to me.

Of course, I’ve met people like Jenny Stax since then, but like I said I was a kid, everything was brand new and seemed extremely final. That pop-punk tour was the very first time I was away from my parents for more than a week. My favorite band had invited me out as their merch guy - the person who sits at a table while the band plays and sells their t-shirts, but also has to entertain, has to listen to kids in city after city tell you why they love the band, tell you why their parents suck, why their last boyfriend broke up with them. And you have to listen to a group of girls argue over whose turn it is to hook up with what member of the band, and what “base” they’re going to this time; and then you send those girls to the bus, or, if the bus is already at groupie capacity, you make up a reason why they can’t. And if you’re like me and everything makes you sad then you become very good at lying. You tell them they’re beautiful but “so and so” now has a girlfriend back home. Or, “Of course he remembers you from last time, but he’s just not feeling good tonight.” And then the looks on their faces when a girl who flirted a backstage pass out of someone, or was in the middle of her “fifteen minutes” on an MTV reality show, pushes right through the herd to spend an hour in the bass player’s unholy bunk. Well, it’s unbearable. You see something pure get cut far beyond what the market should demand.

But that’s just background. Jenny Stax was a few years older than me and had just been chased out of Salt Lake City. We didn’t have street kids on the east coast back then. Oxycontin was still a few years away so poverty was a tight-knit community and no kids had been shunned from the tribe yet. But once you got past the midwest and hit Colorado they started to appear, turned out to the streets by something far more dangerous than opioids; their crime was religion. Actually, it was their lack of religion. If you got caught naked with your boyfriend it was an infraction against the Mormon Church. If you got caught with drugs it was an infraction against the Mormon Church. But those sins wouldn’t get you kicked out of the Mormon Church. No, Jenny Stax broke the one rule which got her tossed out at seventeen without any clean clothes or money. Jenny Stax committed the high crime of telling her parents she didn’t believe in the Mormon Church.

Now, I said the street kids start in Colorado because tucked up in those mountains is where the scripture of a religion less than two hundred years old takes its hold. But the disciples are few and far between there. It’s a liberal state that’s not kind to child abandonment and polygamy; parents are forced to figure it out with a belt or backhand. But their devotion to the scripture grows within the gated communities the closer you get to Salt Lake, hidden away like Sasquatch villages free of the public eye, and before you know it, you’re on their land. They own it like a reservation. They aren’t interested in the 21st Century. It’s The Church or nothing at all. And in a brood of twelve or thirteen, you’re bound to get one that asks questions. And I don’t care who you pledge allegiance to - from the United States government, to the Khmer Rouge, or to the first Sultan of Arabia - one thing power cannot allow is curiosity. So from that patch of desert in the four corners all the way to Los Angeles, the forsaken roll down the hills to the interstates, and you can bet that any kid you see holding a sign by an exit ramp, or coming up to you in a gas station looking for money, was baptized Mormon, and has now been released into an unforgiving world with no tools and no faith.

Jenny Stax was one of the godless street kids haunting Los Angeles. The first time she came into my life was in 2002 at The Trocadero on Sunset. I wasn’t a merch guy at that point, I was just another hanger-on in the scene trying to fit in. Because, get this - I was sixteen, 3,000 miles from home, in my very first bar, in Los Angeles no less, and it all seemed totally normal. I’m always in awe when I look back on it because my parents were so lame and protective that I can’t believe they let me do it. On Christmas break of my junior year, they drove me to the airport and I flew to Los Angeles to stay with Mathew Mancher, the owner of Quick Stop Records, a man they’d never met, who I’d only met once before, but I’d done him a solid a few months earlier at a show in New Jersey and he’d returned the favor by inviting me to stay with him in California for a few days. The real kicker though was the very first Quick Stop Records showcase was going to fall right in the middle of my trip, and Mathew was going to put my name on the guest list. I guess when I told my parents about the invite and asked, “How could you say no to something like this?” they really couldn’t; it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to any sixteen-year-old.

But a hanger-on is what I was. I took up a spot in the periphery. At The Trocadero that night for the big showcase, I shook hands with all my favorite bands. And after Mathew did the introductions I faded to the back, behind him, a kid handed the keys with nothing to say. But I could be forgiven for being so boring - I was watching a scene in its infancy that would soon grow up to sell out the biggest stadiums in the world, and I knew it. I knew I was witnessing history. See, I’m never one of those who looks back and says, “I didn’t know what was happening.” I always know. But nostalgia is heartbreaking whether your finger is on the pulse or not. Because something great so rarely happens, but the decline is basically infinite.

Jenny Stax was there that night too. She came in barefoot with one high heel in her hand. She had brown hair that was cut short and a puka shell necklace hung loosely under her throat and somehow the white of her necklace and her hair color and eyes all made for something very striking and elegant. At least I thought so. No one else seemed to care. She went right up to Mathew who was already rolling his eyes like whatever was about to come out of her mouth had already been said a hundred times before. He didn’t even have a chance to say, “Hey.”

“My car got towed. All my clothes. My toothbrush. My whole life was in there. Everything.” Then she started sobbing. “I just can’t get ahead. Every time I have some money saved …”

We had been a pretty big group. Mathew and his sister Leah (co-owner of Quick Stop Records) were surrounded by, like, six unsigned bands trying to get their attention, plus there was me, writers for AbsolutePunk.net, and at least three other randoms with zines and clothing companies looking for a taste of the action or approval from the siblings with the Midas touch. But none of that mattered to Jenny. She charged right into our circle and blew it apart like a human stink bomb, sweating out miswired craziness, ending all conversations mid-sentence. I kind of walked away, because Mathew seemed embarrassed and Jenny kept crying and hyperventilating and pretty much everyone in the whole club was staring by that point. Eventually, Mathew took out his wallet and handed her some money. Maybe just to get her to leave him alone. After the show he said to me, “She’s lived in that car for three years. I guess she’s going to stay with us tonight.”

I don’t know how Jenny survived in a car for three years. If you’ve been to Los Angeles you can really appreciate the horror someone, especially a young girl, must go through living at the mercy of the streets. She came back with us that night. Mathew said, “This is Scott” to her but aside from a formal, “Oh, yeah, hey,” that was it. We got home late, after a diner, and a little tour down Hollywood Boulevard. Jenny tried to follow Mathew upstairs, I guess to pay back his generosity, but he said it was all right and she didn’t owe him anything. So she went to the couch and flopped down face first. Long into the night, I heard her weeping and trying to bury it in a cushion but I couldn’t ignore it. It synced up with the second hand of the clock. I listened to it come through the dark like there was some rare animal in there I’d been hunting my whole life. Because I had that condition back then. I was very attracted to people I thought I could save. Luckily, I grew out of that when I realized no one could be saved, but that’s a story I’m not ready to write. 

The next time I saw Jenny a year had passed, it was 2003 and I was officially a merch guy. The opening band of that Quick Stop showcase was now selling lots of tickets. Finding a person you can pay $100 a day to work seventeen hours and trust to hold all your cash is almost impossible, so I got the call. Somehow this all lined up with spring break and only missing ten days of my senior year. I promised my parents I wouldn’t do any heroin and then I was on a plane heading west again.

Two days later I was walking out of The Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, holding a box of t-shirts in my hands and suddenly she was right in front of my face, crying. “Hey, kid,” she said, dragging a finger under each of her eyes and smearing wet liner around them like a sad lemur. “Where’s the after party?”

The band came out behind me and saw the lines in Jenny’s distraught forehead and under her eyes and I heard “Oh Jesus, here we go,” and of course I hoped she hadn’t heard them. Because what if she wasn’t dramatic? What if she just loved the music and life is really that bad to some people? She went right to the singer - a dude named Jimmy Red, but obviously, that wasn’t going to happen. The winner of Ms. New Mexico was there that night. Jimmy Red was the singer of the headlining band. Such were the times. So she took the hint and started telling the guitar player, Tom, how “dope” his guitar solo was, but he had a girlfriend back home and besides it was all getting so pathetic. This continued all the way down the totem pole until, finally, she hit the lowest rung: me. The guarantee. I was used to it by then. It happened in every city. Bands all say they “love” their fans, but you can’t get near a band unless you’re going to give at least one of them a blowjob, and after you do they call you a “groupie,” and once you’re labeled a “groupie,” well, that’s it. Then you can’t be trusted and your intentions are never innocent. And forget about anyone in the band ever dating you; you’re damaged goods and your only crime was thinking those lyrics came from a pure heart.

But the merch guy was always your ticket in. What he demanded usually depended on how popular his band was.

Quite a paradox for the female fans of the “safe” scene.

But I didn’t have a price, and like I said, I’d grown accustomed to the lure of my title. Mushrooms were my thing back then and I became known on the circuit and in the chatrooms as some kind of therapist. Which meant I had the job of walking girls from the van or a motel to awaiting cabs, crying girls, happy girls, girls swearing they were going to come back with their boyfriend and “shoot every motherfucker in this motel,” nice girls who’d “never done this before,” girls named Skarlitt with names of dudes from Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory written on napkins, girls who never thought of me as a human, but some kind of brother-martian who only existed to listen to their bullshit and give them a meaningful hug. And that’s exactly what I did. I felt the pain of everyone.

And Jenny knew that. But she wasn’t there for a hug. If she was in Albuquerque she was there because there was nowhere else to go. No one with a parachute goes to Albuquerque. I didn’t make her beg. I didn’t ask how she’d ended up 800 miles from Los Angeles. I told her she could be my date to whatever happened that night so she followed me into the van and then somehow a whole night went by and the next thing I remember was all of us in a motel room somewhere outside of Phoenix.

I can’t stress this enough - there is an accepted hierarchy on tour. It is not degrading, it does not warrant outrage, no one’s feelings are hurt. You know exactly what you are getting into when you sell your life to rock n’ roll. That Jenny had to spend her night with me in order to have a roof over her head really sucked for her, and I knew it. I was cooler than anyone in the crowd, but barring any cosmic connection, I was never to get laid before everyone who’d been on stage that night. That includes guitar techs and tour managers.

So there we were - 2 A.M. and my sleeping bag taking up most of the floor. I’d been wearing a trucker hat for a week because that’s what we did in the aughts, and she took it off my head and put it on hers. And it looked so much better on her. And she looked so much better than the other three girls who were asleep in the room. And because I was still a virgin I didn’t kiss her. We got into the sleeping bag and lay face to face. Like literally one inch apart. And I didn’t do anything except stare at her like an idiot. “Oh my God, forget it,” she said.

I thought I was being very noble at that moment. I thought girls couldn’t possibly know what they wanted if it was me they wanted. And I thought it would have been mean of me to make a move on Jenny. Because wouldn’t it prove that I was just like everyone else? That I expected something and no good deed was free? Obviously, that was the worst move and she just felt more rejection. In her head, even the merch guy, the dork, the virgin, didn’t want her. And then she was out of the sleeping bag and out of the room and I was following her across the parking lot, saying, “Jenny, come on, come back, look at this place.” Dogs or coyotes broke off from a pack and ran at us one by one. All limping in some painful way. Yelping and nipping at our hands. Looking for food. I tried to pet one and it jerked its head back, put its tail between its legs, and shot off out of reach like I was going to take a swing.

Jenny kept ignoring my pleas and opened the fence to the in-ground pool. Then her shirt came off. Then her hands unbuttoned her jeans and started working them down her legs. She stopped at the edge of the deep end, bent over to get her thong off, and dove into the pool.

I stood there, her clothes that I’d picked up draped over my arm, waiting to see what happened next. But then I thought of the bands’ faces the next day when I would tell them about this if nothing happened. And what would I ever write about if I kept standing on the sidelines? But the thing I knew for sure was Jenny would go completely haywire if she surfaced and I was standing there unaffected by her show. So I dropped her clothes, stripped mine, and jumped in the pool like I was entering some portal or a bullfight where I was naked and whatever was coming would either kill me or make me a hero.

But neither happened. Jenny surfaced and seemed surprised to see me in the pool with her. Then she laughed and said, “Well, why not?” Later on, we dragged two lawn chairs behind the motel and sat on a hill looking over a Denny’s in the valley. She talked about what seemed like everything on earth, and even a few things man hadn’t discovered yet.

“I guess we should go in,” I said eventually. “Hopefully no one stole our sleeping bag.”

She traced the neon sign of the Denny’s and said, “I wish I could teleport, but every time I try I shit myself.”

I woke up alone in the sleeping bag, my trucker hat gone and a Sharpie heart on my arm with a big J in the middle. There was no note, no wet towels, but I was sure I hadn’t imagined it all because I’d purposely left my wallet in a place where she’d have to move it to get to her bag, and I’d left the cash sticking out in a way she couldn’t miss, and when I checked the money was gone, and I was very glad for that.

We drove out of town and of course, no one even asked about Jenny, and I didn’t tell them anything about her. I knew I’d never see her again, but what’s surprising to me now is how I’ve never forgotten her. Not after everything else - the infinite road I’ve kept crawling down, the girls who’ve blessed me with nights and years, the wars they called endless that have now ended, the dogs, the cities, the friends, no, I’ve always kept Jenny close. It’s the wind mostly, I think, that keeps her face coming back. The way it blew out west on that whole tour. The way it took sand and tucked it deep up in our mouths and into our eyes even when we closed them tight. The same wind that followed us home and took the leaves off trees back east. The wind I can hear right now on this first cold fall night. Like an all-encompassing yet invisible butterfly, wrapping you up, pushing you forward, always there but you can’t hold it in your hand, can’t draw it, can’t taste it. But it’s there. And it will always remind me of her because even now I can’t prove that she ever really existed. And if she did I’m pretty sure she’s dead because when I tune into the Universe I don’t feel her anymore. But I think - soon, very soon it won’t matter. I can see her tent on the great campground of a different desert. A slow wind moving dust to cover her up. But her flag climbs high above the storm. Any color but white.