THE HIGH DESERT

A sometimes bitter and brittle, always heartfelt memoir of growing up as a Black punk rocker in rural California.

“Apple Valley, California, like most of small town America, sucks.” So writes Spooner in this probing graphic memoir. The high desert of the title is a place where “you can count on dirt, desolation, and despair.” As the author reveals, you can also count on the anomie that leads some kids to drugs, some to suicide, some to neo-Nazism. His White mother, “raising a black son on her own,” coped as best she could to protect the young man. There was plenty of harm to face, with an absence of role models and plenty of reasons to keep one’s head down to avoid the inevitable high school bullying. Spooner found solace in punk rock and its accouterments—mohawk haircut, combat boots, etc.—all of which only drew more attention to him. There weren’t many role models in punk, either, for a young man of color, even though bands like Black Flag had “two tone” and minority members—all good reason to found a punk band of his own. Spooner is a discerning student of his own past and the movement he joined. As he notes, punk was steeped in politics, especially of the intersectional sort that rejected racism, sexism, homophobia, and Reagan-era retrograde culture. “Punk positioned me to listen,” he writes. A sojourn in New York to visit his father, an award-winning professional bodybuilder from St. Lucia, occasioned an encounter with even more political punks, to say nothing of Joey Ramone, and helped him launch a number of zines as well as a record label. “This is what punk inspired,” he writes at the close of his eloquent latter-day rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City.

A lively, inspirational tale that will point young readers toward art, music, and resistance of their own.