The Gentleman's Club isn't a club—it's a living room inside a tiny three-bedroom apartment near the university, and the three young guys who live there forgot to pay the electricity bill. An enormous canvas banner sponsored by antiwar and antiracism group A.N.S.W.E.R. soaked up little cesspools of spilled beer. Anime cycling posters and map-like drawings adorned the walls. A hookah took up residency in the kitchen; a drum kit, xylophone, and unicycle found homes in the living room. Bicycles in various states of utility littered the joint—the three residents run a sort of informal bicycle co-op out of their apartment, where they build and fix friends' bikes for free.
We huddled together basking in the flickering tea lights and propane lantern like giggly street urchins, bright-eyed and cold-handed, and the place felt less cave of squalor than den of romance. Boys discussed what tattoos they'd like to someday get; a cute girl in a parka over flowered long johns over black fishnets with black ballet shoes chatted quietly with her flowy beskirted compatriot in bright plastic beaded necklaces.
Johnston's songs included a wanderlust-slash-animal rights ditty and a tall tale about robbing a bank, then going home to feed the cat and make a smoothie. The audience was invited to sing and/or play along on any of the instruments in the house. At one point show organizer and Gentleman's Club resident Tommy, a student and former Food Not Bombs volunteer, offered a mason jar filled with peppercorns to the small gathering; the young lady with whom I was sharing an overstuffed velour chair took it and shook it, creating a beat for us to clap along to.
Part of being punk—besides making, breaking and taking—is romanticizing minutiae, promoting an inbred culture where the individuals involved in a community are made famous simply for talking about one another. Johnston bookended each tune with some little story or other: how the first time his buddy made falafel he almost burned the house down; the way another friend's toenails fell out after waking from six months of a self-imposed 24-hour sleeping pattern; a tale of a character who kicked over, then spit on, a supposedly cursed tombstone and watched his life fall to shit. And we all smiled and clapped and quietly cheered, because it was sweet and nostalgic, even if the obviously well-bred among us sporting for-real haircuts, expensive glasses or clothing made in sweatshops might have some distance from his reality. You do all sorts of cute naïve things when you're trying to figure out how to live off the normative social grid, Johnston rhapsodized, such as trying to get NOFX to play in your town for free and learning how to make "mistakes, mix tapes and vegan chocolate cakes." And, really, it doesn't matter if the events in a narrative aren't all that interesting, as long as you're good at talking about them.