So you’re goth. That’s exactly what he said. It wasn’t a question or anything, he just looked around my bedroom upstairs and said it. He didn’t bother looking through my records — not even when I offered. He just decided I was goth. What an asshole.
At least he’s gone now and I can sit here in peace in the little room and listen to Dear Prudence and all the Siouxsie and the Banshees I want and know for sure that I am not goth. What does he know anyway? He lives in that shitty town that’s barely a city and is friends with my cousin Stephen who is a year older and here visiting. At least, thank God, they are not staying with us.
I do have to see him again on Sunday. My mother has invited him and Stephen for dinner. I can’t decide whether to put on extra black eyeliner and mope about like some caricature or to simply not speak. Either way, this guy clearly knows nothing about who is a goth and who isn’t. My hair isn’t even black and I don’t cut school and go hang out downtown at the Lancaster Building or on the pedestrian mall. When I cut school I go downtown and hang out at the library or the botanical gardens and I read.
I close my eyes and sway my head to the music. What goth would do that? I really can’t support anyone who believes in those kind of labels.
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Image: Siouxsie Sioux, IN Fashion magazine, May 1989. Photograph by Drew Carolan.
Welcome to the Little Room is a series of 250-word re-imagined vignettes from my ’80s youth with a focus on music and style. It appears weekly on periodicult.com.
