My big butch dyke cousin, Mimi, used to babysit me. Mimi was the best kind of lesbian cousin a young boy could have, she was crazy (dressed me up as Gene Simmons for halloween and when a neighborhood lady gave me what Mimi thought was a bad treat she said, "Now I'll show you what trick means" and splattered the woman's house with pomegranates), she was fun (Mimi was on a softball team with others from the factory where she worked and let me be the ballboy to all the lesbo sluggers), and Mimi was a punk rocker.
Mimi gave me records as gifts when I was a kid. Perhaps because she was trying to tell me something, or maybe because she saw me order Meat Loaf's
Bat Out Of Hell from the BMG tape club (wtf?). Either way, I owe a lot of what I love to her.
Truth be told, she wasn't the best influence. She gave me a dyed-red mohawk in 5th grade cause she thought it'd be funny (I got suspended from school) that my dad dragged me into a hair salon to get cut off (when I yelled "fuck you" at him, he punched me in the face so hard that my head bounced off the glass window and
back into his hand). She gave me the Velvet Underground's
White Light/White Heat LP before I was a teenager (I remember listening to "Sister Ray" on headphones in my room and wondering what the fuck was going on). She also pushed a bottle of rush under my nose once and said, "take a big wiff" and laughed with all her friend as I got dizzy and stumbled around the room (I think this is when mom pulled the plug on Mimi babysitting me).
It was a fucked up time. The only rewarding parts of my youth were spent in front of Mimi's record collection, listening to her albums as I dubbed them onto cassettes. I'd sit there for hours, in my own world, with her headphones on, recording and listening.
When she showed me the Ramones section I felt at home. "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue!", "Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat", "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" (my sister was in a mental institution and I used to sing this to her), "We're A Happy Family", etc.
All those songs were commenting on my life in a completely cavalier way. There was so much shit that I was scared to talk about, and they were chanting it. Out loud! It was the most unsettling I'd ever heard. These dorky dudes in leather jackets were so ridiculous, yet such a welcome sort of ridiculous in my young life. Years before I knew what a youth counselor was I had Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy.
The Ramones helped me lighten up. They are also the dawn of when I started taking things seriously. Those dubbed cassettes from Mimi's record collection were the birthplace for so many great things in my life.
