Primus Sucks! by Audrey Ednalino In high school I thought I was punk rock with a capital P. But that was all in my head, my own little punk rock fallacy. Reality: I was mostly known for being pathetically inept when it came to the opposite sex. To this day I'm not quite clear whether I was the real dork or if the guys I obsessed over were dorkier than me. Boy, did I pine over the biggest posers. One boy in particular, Francis, comes to mind. I had this love-hate thing when it came to him. Either I thought he was The Shit, or I just thought of him as shit. Basically, Francis was this guy who I thought was pretty cool, and I wanted to get the opportunity to get to know him, but it just never happened. Maybe all my memories are tinged with bitterness, but that's just too bad, isn't it? Anyhow, initially I noticed Francis because when you live in a place like Bakersfield, finding other Asian faces is pretty much a novelty. And to find someone at my high school that didn't listen to jock rock or cheesy radio music was even more rare. Francis and I went to the same school from junior high up through high school, but we never really had a reason to talk to one another. Not even when we had the same classes senior year, or were on the staff of the school paper the same semester. It's almost as if we did everything within our abilities to avoid each other. I remember Francis as this lanky Korean skate rat with bangs he always had to push out of his eyes. When we were 15, Francis was the drummer in some band that went by the acronym O:RTK. I later found that this stood for Operation: Right To Know. (Francis was a big government/alien conspiracy theorist.) One of my friends who had French class with Francis told me that he used to write poems about necrophilia in her notebook. In high school he morphed into a "punker than thou" cynic who hung out with a mix of thuggish, gutter dirt punks and hip-hop skater boys. He used to mob through the school parking lot with his friends Ryan and Wes, in his silver pick-up. Francis came off as being really cool in his aloofness and indolence. (I later deduced that this really meant he was a bitch, pure and simple.)

For my fifteenth birthday, one of my best friends scored two tickets to see Primus perform at Cal State Fresno. Somehow she ended up not going to the concert with me, and instead Francis was the one who got the other ticket. My parents drove the two of us up to the show. Naive as I was, I figured it would be a great starting point for me to finally get to know Francis, even though I had a feeling it would be excruciatingly painful. I was right. Once we arrived at the concert, Francis ditched my ass. He was sickly sweet to my parents, but to me the only thing he said was, "Yes," when I offered him a piece of gum. So on the drive home from Fresno, Francis fell asleep on my shoulder. Since I was really pissed out at finding how much of an ass he was, and so my parents wouldn't reprimand me for being so malicious, I pretended to fall asleep. In the midst of my "slumber," I pushed Francis' big-ass head off of me, and into his passenger side window. And the next day I told all of my friends that when Francis fell asleep on my shoulder, I could smell what kind of shampoo he used. Only nancy boys use Finesse. Then during senior year, Francis ended up in three of my Honors classes. As the year dragged on towards graduation, I found out more things about him from his friends (mutual friends), confirming my suspicions that he probably wasn't worth being my friend anyhow. Listening to dope music and clowning on preps is all well and fine, but acting cracked out (like you're on some evil shit) is another thing. After graduation, Francis went off to UC Santa Barbara and I eventually ended up at UCLA; last summer I transferred to UC Berkeley. Last fall, while shopping at Amoeba on Telegraph Avenue, I spied a familiar form from a distance. He had piercings and seemed more emaciated than in high school, maybe from too much Prozac or meth, but it was definitely Francis. Turns out, he transferred too. I didn't bother trying to rock the fake, "Ohmigod! Francis, is that you!?" routine, because I knew he wouldn't reciprocate that kind of reaction towards me. But to redeem myself from all this pettiness, I'd actually like to lay his memory to rest, seeing as we're both adults now, and re-living high school is futile anyhow. To tell the truth, trying to describe my weird non-relationship with Francis, or how odd he was (or still is), is a pretty hard task. I suppose it's more of a thing that needs to be experienced; I'm sure everyone has their own "Francis" haunting them. But my obsessions aren't so off the wall anymore. I think my tastes have improved, to say the least... can anyone say, "DJ ho?"

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