When your brother constructs a costume shaped like an enormous Foot and asks you to wear it onstage at his punk concert way up in Boise, you agree because you love him. But as you pass through the portal in the graffitied alleyway to the pocket-sized backstage, you remember you’re an introverted forty-five-year-old classical pianist who’s never been to a punk concert in her life. As you don your foam-and-chicken-wire livery, crowded next to others playing The Egg, The Ice Cream Cone, and The Flower, you notice they are better looking and more than a decade younger than you. When your brother presents each of these Objects onstage, they mug and roar and strut before heading into the audience to dance; when it’s your turn, you adopt a deer-in-the-footlights persona, then flee into the colliding crowd.
You hop around as instructed while strangers press their hands into your flesh-colored fabric and foam. They press your arch, the toes over your head. You’re 6½ feet tall with red polka-dot nails, and they’re annoyed you’re blocking their view. Picking on you. Laughing behind your back. As you dance with The Egg and The Ice Cream Cone, you realize the two foods are longtime friends. You are a stranger, an interloper, a bare foot on the dinner table. Your costume hides your boring middle-aged self, but everyone can tell you don’t belong. Soul stubbed and snubbed, you withdraw to the back of the crowd.
You continue to move, though, toes that can’t stop tapping. The music heats up, intensifies, steams you in your foam-and-wire cage. Someone starts a mosh pit in front of the stage, and The Flower appears with The Egg in the thick of it, and The Ice Cream Cone’s headpiece flies off and bounces like a beach ball on the crowd’s fingertips. Once, while attempting to mosh at a high school dance, you lost your shoe and it never turned up, and you limped around the cafeteria floor until your mom took you home. Now you’re a perimenopausal woman sweating like a little piggy, wearing a likeness of your exposed and awkward teenage foot, and moreover your hands are in here with the rest of you, so if someone pushes you over you could land on your face and break your nose, I’ve fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up, trampled to death by post-Millennials.
But, see: the other Objects ricochet off each other and off the drumbeats and the sound of the unlikely saxophone, and underneath it all is a pulse like grounded lightning, and you understand pulse, and actually everyone understands pulse, carries rhythm in their blood like a relentless jumping flame. And gradually the music fans in the room become no longer they, but just maybe us. So you find your way into the center of the crowd and the punks enfold you, and The Foot is no impediment after all, but a means of transformation maybe, and you’re not a misfit, but a fit maybe, and as someone starts spinning you in circles, you remember your cousin talking about the joy of mosh pits back in 1994, about loving people and kicking them with combat boots and getting kicked, so you run into people, not too hard, just enough so they know you love them, and all that YouTube cardio pays off, because even when the air feels like water in your lungs and your balance disappears, you’re the opposite of dying, and when the Foot’s toes curl heavily downward they are curling in pleasure, because you are more than yourself now, you’re a Punk Rock Foot, and you sweat and stink and jump to the cymbals and the bass and the guitar gone absolutely insane, and see! A red mountain moves through the crowd, and it’s your brother The Rainbow, the grand finale, a monument to joy, and the crowd loves it, and him, and you. And what would your whole damned life have been if you had ever once known what it could be?
