A Splinter Faction of the Lunatic Fringe*

A story about love, punk rock, and how a parasocial attachment strangely turned into a real encounter between two flawed, breathing people.

This past weekend I went to San Francisco with two friends from high school to see a reunion show by one of my favorite punk bands from when we were growing up in New York City. Alice Donut, now grey-haired and gloriously unsoftened, played their 1992 record The Untidy Suicides of Your Degenerate Children in its entirety, song by song, while a room full of aging punks like me sang along to every word. It was wonderful and cathartic, the kind of night where time collapses and you’re suddenly sixteen again, but wiser, and still alive.

To celebrate, I’m dusting off this unpublished story I wrote a few years ago after spending an evening wandering around Durham, North Carolina with the band’s singer, Tomas Antona. I think it’s a strange and beautiful love story.

Breaking Through the Glass (2023)

Shot awake in a hotel room at 2:30 in the morning. My body still vibrating from the dream. I’m lucid for just a moment, lying in bed but still somewhere else, hovering between the past and the present.

I’m sixteen years old again, in my teenage bedroom, looking out the twelfth-story window from my loft bed down at the intersection of 96th Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. The glass reflects back my face, superimposed over the red and green glow of the streetlights. I raise my fists and bang against it. And just like the 80s MTV Take On Me video I grew up watching, for a split second, I swear the glass ripples. Like I could push through to the other side. Like I could cross over into some other version of reality where the people who mattered saw me.

But the glass stays solid. I wake up in a dark hotel room in Greensboro, North Carolina, heart pounding, staring at the ceiling.

The night comes back into focus: I was in downtown Durham, walking through the quiet streets with Tomas Antona, the singer from Alice Donut. We were swapping stories, laughing, the conversation loose and unspooling in unexpected directions. It was uncanny, this sensation of being with someone whose voice had once been the background noise of my life, the narrator of my most private teenage thoughts. Now he was here, walking next to me, telling me about his kids, who were sixteen and twenty. And I realized: when I was sixteen, I was listening to him.

And not just listening. I was absorbing.

When I was sixteen at those Alice Donut shows, Tom always wore this black trench coat he had painted himself, covered in multicolored psychedelic patterns and strange little characters. On stage he held the microphone in this particular way, almost crooked in his fist, and he’d leer at the crowd and slip into this twisted punk-rock preacher character, going off on tangents between songs. He was eerily charismatic. I found him very attractive. I had this sense that he understood something about the world, and about me, that other people didn’t. I wanted him to be my friend.

I wrote him a letter.

Alice Donut wasn’t like the other punk bands I was into. Their songs weren’t hard or angry –they were surreal, twisted, sometimes funny, but underneath there was something raw and wounded. Lyrics about heartbreak, family tragedy, love gone wrong. His voice felt like an inside joke and an incantation at the same time.

Maybe that’s why I wanted him to see me.

I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. I know I poured myself into it, spinning some wild, fantastical story about my life in the style of an Alice Donut song, or maybe a Tom Robbins novel. I wanted him to recognize something of himself in my words.

Weeks passed. Then one day, I came home and there it was: a letter. The return address: Antona.

I tore it open, hands shaking.

But all it said was something like: Thanks for writing. We have a new album coming out. We’re going on tour in the Midwest.

I must have read it fifty times. Searching for something. Some hidden meaning. Some sign he had actually seen me.

But it was basically just a form letter. And I was still sixteen. Still staring at my reflection in the glass.

Lying in this hotel room in 2023, I have a buried memory rise to the skin.

I remember lying in my bedroom at night at sixteen, having imaginary conversations with Tom Antona. In my mind he was the embodiment of what I wanted to be like: confident, strange, unafraid of his own darkness. In my fantasy we’d meet at a diner on Avenue A. We’d sit in a booth and he’d be so curious about my life. I would tell him what it was like to watch my father slowly die, hooked up to Frankenstein machines in a hospital room. I’d tell him about being raised by parents who hated each other and bounced me back and forth between their apartments like two superpowers battling over a tiny island in the Cold War. He would listen. Really listen. And I would feel seen. Understood.

Lying in this North Carolina hotel room in my forty-eight-year-old body, another memory rises.

I’m back in that teenage bedroom, alone, playing the album Mule over and over when the loneliness got too big. There’s a line in “Mrs. Hayes”—

“My small comfort when I go / When I go / You’ll be rotting in a home / A breathing corpse.”

Except that’s not what I heard as a kid.

What I heard was:

“My small comfort when I go / When I go / You’ll be rotting in a home / With greeting cards.”

And I saw it clearly: the image of a lonely old man in some antiseptic nursing home, surrounded by Hallmark cards from people who barely remembered him. It lodged inside me. Maybe because I had been that kid, visiting my frail grandmother in a miserable nursing home in Queens, watching her sit alone with a forced smile beneath a wall of forgotten messages.

The way art does that. Finds you where you already are.

It’s 3 AM, and the memory is real again, so real I can feel it in my hands, the bass in my lap, my fingers plucking the same four notes over and over in the dim light of my room.

There’s a moment on Mule, between “Mrs. Hayes” and “Roaches in the Sink,” where all the music stops and Tom just screams:

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”

And suddenly, lying in this strange bed in North Carolina, I’m there again, sixteen, in that room, screaming back at the record.

And then there are all the parts of me:

• The sixteen-year-old, fists clenched, screaming NO!
  
  

• The older white-bearded part, watching, asking the others to step back.
  
  

• The part that holds the pen, writing it down.
  
  

• And finally, the part that sees it all, watching with a deep kind of curiosity and compassion.
  

And I cry, alone in the dark, holding that 16 year old kid who felt so alone and torn up by the world. Just for a few minutes.

And then I keep writing.

When we make art, we never know how it’s going to go into the world.

I think about this as I sit across from Tom in a bar in Durham, telling him about growing up in Manhattan, about my father dying, about the Cold War between my parents. And he listens. Closely. Actually listens.

And I realize, all these years later, I am living out my teenage fantasy.

I am sitting across from Tomas Antona, telling him my story. And he is listening –not as an idol, not as a projection, but as another human being. Reciprocal. Real.

This is what we search for.

When we’re young and desperate for connection. When we’re older and still carrying pieces of that desperate kid inside us. When we scream at records in our bedrooms. When we write letters to our idols. When we hold onto the voices that carried us through.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get to reach through the glass.

And someone reaches back.

*The title “A Splinter Faction of the Lunatic Fringe” is half a random line from this song that I’ve always loved.

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