The Silver Screen was walking distance downhill from our Buckhead neighborhood, and Todd and I were pretty much free to come and go as we pleased. Once we’d hit puberty, Todd wasted no time. Like a redheaded Orpheus piercing the veil between worlds, intent on charming the shadows with song, he’d descended, and he returned for me. He led me back, and introduced me to a group of music-obsessed, lovably foulmouthed folks. They sized me up and took me in. They were the new wave queer underground.

Todd and I walked to and from the Silver Screen in the wee hours of countless, balmy Atlanta weekends, slipping in and out of our families’ unlocked houses as drunken partiers whizzed by in Camaros and Chevelles. We spent long weeks at Northside High School, eagerly anticipating those Friday and Saturday nights; in those hothouse times, we would come to know ourselves by what the new wave queer underground saw in us and expected of us.

This was my kind of clique, thick with gender-bending children of absentee parents, fledglings from broken homes who’d figured out how to turn negatives into positives, how to make high-octane fuel of their hypercritical adolescent hate. Some, like Todd and me, were still in the bloom of adolescence, while others were young adults re-inventing themselves on a weekly basis. I loved my regal drama queens, razor-tongued girls, country punks and broody soft boys. The combined voices were a symphony of variations on the Georgia drawl; some accents molasses thick, revealing shotgun-shack roots, some mild as May, tipping us off to private school weekdays. My favorites were the erudite junior Tennessee Williamses and Eudora Weltys, whipsmart and condescending in their meticulously arranged AmVets duds, testing the patience of the stoic waitstaff at the Majestic Diner. This was badassery of a new kind, and I was captivated.

Before we could drive, Todd and I crammed into many a backseat, heading to midtown, or then-funky Virginia Highlands, counting the days until we could get our licenses and haul ass. We tested wings bequeathed to us by hormones and DNA; Todd, who’d been overweight and shy in our childhood, jumped on the Silver Screen stage to play Riff Raff, and became popular; I soon picked up a bass and started gigging immediately, losing my virginity in a hot, tar paper-lined attic.

Some undergrounders, like me, were the spawn of exhausted, former flower-child single moms. These moms' laissez faire “trust in the universe,” plus unforgiving work schedules and/or willful blindness, meant they let their kids twist in the wind. A few moms, despite seeming “cool” until our adolescence, freaked out when our hormones kicked in, and they were more than ready for us to get our stinky, pimply, sex-glazed selves out of the house, where perhaps the world would kick our asses in a way they could not. None of us, however, felt like victims of “benign neglect,” at least not consciously. We were free. Frequently scared, but free. We pretended we were orphans, or that we’d been stolen by the Faeries, like children in Celtic folktales. The Fae loved us so, they’d taken us from distracted parents and spirited us away to … 688.

That would be the 688 Club, at 688 Spring St. in Midtown Atlanta. This punk-new wave mecca provided enough wattage to make everyone look like stars, and enough old-beer stank on the befouled floor to remind us we were still earthbound.

Of course I didn’t register how charmed a time it was, how lucky we were to run amok on the ever-widening streets of pre-AIDS and pre-Olympics 1980s Atlanta. More often than not, my new peers and I affected a studied sense of being put upon; we were kids in the shadow of punk, after all. Lucky was not cool. But lucky is what we were. And while most assumed the lives we created were better than the lives we came from, this was not always so. Time, as ever, would tell.