He was a star, bleeding swagger and attitude all over that stage. He was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, with his spiky hair, Danelectro longhorn bass, and signature mohair sweater. There, standing right in front of me, was Howie Pyro. I got into Max’s-nobody checked IDs back then-and The Blessed hit the stage. The other band listed on the flyer was The Blessed. The flyer for the show said, “Hardcore Halloween.” That was the first time I’d seen the word hardcore used anywhere outside of pornography. On drives home from the city in my mother’s car, we’d pass thigh-high-boot hookers working Park Avenue South, and a cool crowd hanging out in front of Max’s Kansas City, and I’d think, “That’s where I wanna be.” The scene outside seemed as exciting as what was going on inside-and you could be part of it.Ĭheetah Chrome, from the Dead Boys, was gonna play there, and I had to go. Dee Dee Ramone moved there in the late ’70s and would cop drugs at my junior high. There weren’t many legends from Whitestone. He was something of a living legend in the city now, crashing in the back of shops like Manic Panic and Trash and Vaudeville. Rumor had it he got his name from setting fires to the garages in the back of the Garden Apartments off Utopia Parkway when he was a little kid. A couple older girls in the neighborhood went down to CBGB to see the Ramones and came back raving about some cool guy named Howie Pyro. They had big anthems like Kiss, played real fast, and, better yet, they were from Queens and wore cool leather jackets like the Fonz. My drugs were adrenaline and testosterone. They figured you killed your girlfriend, you’re a homosexual and a junkie. If you were a punk, you got beat up by everyone. Well, I was a card-carrying member of the Kiss Army, so I got my ass kicked a lot. In Queens, if you liked Kiss, you got beat up by the guys who liked Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath-even the Grateful Dead. I caught glimpses of it on school trips, taking the train in with my mother to go see the circus, and going to my first-ever concert, Kiss, at Madison Square Garden. But New York, New York, the Big Apple, had the magic. At least on Halloween, the place got covered in shaving cream and eggs, and the kids went berserk in a way they don’t anymore. Kids hung out in schoolyards at night, blasting Led Zeppelin from boom boxes. There wasn’t much going on in Whitestone.

When I was a kid, the city might as well have been on another planet.

It took at least two and a half hours to get there by public transportation. In the late 1970s, Whitestone, Queens, seemed a million miles away from anything real and fun, even though it was only 30 minutes from Manhattan by car.

Ed roth rat fink