The Solid Body of a Dream Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
Writing this fic put me in the weird position of trying to research an era I lived through and places I've actually been, just about when I would have been there. My family moved to Long Island right before I started high school, and it did not take me long to discover a. the city, b. the Village, and c. the Long Island Railroad, which would get me there. I walked around the Village for years, absorbing everything and wanting to stay. I loved the Antique Boutique but didn't actually have the balls to wear most of the clothes. I bought books and sometimes comics at Forbidden Planet, and later I discovered a comic shop on Bleeker Street that dedicated googling tells me was called Village Comics (and which is now closed). I remember it being upstairs. I bought cassette tapes at the giant Tower Records on Broadway, lined up for but did not actually get to see Paul Young when he did an appearance in (I think) 1985, and once my sister and I ran into an actress from "General Hospital" there. Her character was called Lou, but I cannot for the life of me remember the actress' name. I remember her being a little taken aback at our excitement, a little shy, but pretty gracious, considering. I'm not sure my attitude towards seeing famous people in normal-person places has changed all that much, except now I'm more aware of how awkward this can be for the famous person in question.
I never made it as far east as what was then Alphabet City, but at the time it was run-down and I didn't know what there was to see. But there was Manic Panic (the hair color people, back when they had an actual store) and the egg store that only sold eggs on Thursdays, and if I'd known about them, who knows, I might have trekked a little farther east.
I have very nostalgia-colored memories of the East Village. Some of that nostalgia no doubt seeped into the fic, and I spent a lot of time while I was writing it worrying that I wasn't doing the time and the place justice, because I can't help but look at it from the perspective of the acceptably-alternative middle-class suburban teenager that I was.
(My experience of the Lower East Side, conversely, is a milk-kosher restaurant called Ratner's, which had delicious blintzes and sadly closed in 2004, guys selling knockoff Rolexes from card tables on the sidewalk, and the weird weight of Jewish-American immigrant history. There's no awareness of music history there.)
I discovered new wave in the mid-80s - hands up for 92.7, WLIR - we called it "progressive" or "new music", and I acquired the most scattershot and shallow appreciation of punk. I definitely know more bands now than I did then, but that isn't saying much. I had to do some reading to find out more bands that Jensen would have heard and seen, and then I had to figure out where they were all from, on the off-chance some were west coast bands. (He would not have voluntarily listened to much California punk, even after he and Danneel and JJ moved to San Francisco. He was very loyal to his coast.)
I didn't bother to go down to New York to location scout, because so much of the Village and the Lower East Side that Jensen knew is gone. The East Village has been excessively gentrified, and probably no one who might have lived there in the early 80s can afford to live there now. Tower closed in 2006. Bleeker Bob's closed in 2013. The Antique Boutique moved to Brooklyn. CBGB's has been a high end menswear boutique for a few years already, and Joey Ramone might well still be spinning in his grave. You can drop a lot of money on designer clothes in the same spot he and Richard Hell and Blondie played to drinking crowds. The store kept some of the graffiti. There's also a CBGB's restaurant in Newark Airport, and from pictures it doesn't look at all like any of the photos I found of the bar in its heyday, even allowing for the fact that it's an airport restaurant in New Jersey and not a grungy club in New York's Lower East Side.
Speaking of, this is the t-shirt Jared finds for Jensen in the store.
I had the hardest time thinking up band names. Gory Alice, the name, came from the Belly album Aurora Gory Alice and the fact that Alona is always going to look like some version of Alice in Wonderland in my head. I think it sounds more like a name for a metal band than a punk band. There were a few all-girl punk bands in the late 70s and early 80s - the Slits, the Raincoats - although I don't think there were very many, and I'd hazard a guess they suffered way more misogyny than I've put in the fic. I mentioned there's some rose-colored nostalgia, didn't I? If I was writing from the girls' POV it would be a different story.
Jared's band was originally called Pitcher - there was supposed to be a joke in there about pitchers and catchers, ie tops and bottoms - but I was never married to it and when dear-tiger gently suggested I change it, I listened. Their albums are Too Pretty for the City (the title was Chad's idea), The Krays, Cracks in the Pavement, and Left at the End of the Line, which was a live album. I have no idea what they sound like, but for a while I described them to myself as what the Ramones might have been if they were cuter and more commercial. Make of that what you will. The Pits and Gory Alice are mostly fast and loud. The Pits occasionally stray into experimental territory, as long as the experiment can be played at ear-splitting volume, while Gory Alice is more straightforward rock&roll.
The name of Danneel's zine, Doom Pastry, is taken from the game Cupcake Mania, which is like Candy Crush except you're working with pastries. Some of the levels have baked good on a timer, and if the timer runs down you fail that level, and you get a little message that a doom pastry exploded. The picture of Edie Sedgwick on the cover of one of the issues of the zine was copied from a copy of the poster for Ciao! Manhattan, Edie's last movie. She died of an overdose in California in 1971, but she lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York for at least part of the time she was a Warhol superstar in the 60s. She was white on white/so blonde on blonde is from a poem in Patti Smith's book Seventh Heaven, published the year after Edie died. I found the poem online, which is good because the Boston Public Library did not have the book. Mediocre, BPL.
Pretty much everything I know about zines I learned from the Nanowrimo forums last November. Occasionally I cheat a little and use the forums to ask questions for my bigbangs.
The Chelsea Hotel's significant claim to fame, at the time the fic takes place, is that Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in Room 100 in 1978. (I googled to find out what room it was, because I really did need that particular detail to be correct.) I have no idea if people used to (or still do) make pilgrimages to that room, but I figure Alona already has a weird fascination with the place, and if you're a morbid punk rocker and/or Sex Pistols fan - or just a weird music tourist - it might be something you'd do.
In 1980 Patti Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, dissolved the Patti Smith Group, and moved to Detroit. I imagine a lot of her fans were upset, as happens when someone whose work you love gives it up. I think she kept writing poetry and she did start recording music again, but in the 80s she was living in Detroit and being a wife and mother.
In early May, 1980, the artist Francis Hines wrapped the arch in Washington Square Park in 8,000 yards of white polyester. It stayed that way for about a week before being unwrapped. I pushed it up by a month for the sake of the fic, so I had a reason to mention Jensen checking it out. I was trying to root the fic in actual events, and giant public art is something that would have absolutely caught Jensen's eye. If he took any pictures of the arch, they didn't make it into the shoebox.
Because of the time and place where the fic is set, Jensen would have known several guys who died of complications from AIDS, and he would have had the opportunity to attend several funerals, for Danneel's friends and acquaintences if not for his own. Speaking of actual historical events.... I'd like to thank tamalinn for reassuring me it was ok if Tom Welling was the guy I chose to kill off. (I felt bad about it.) But while it had to make an appearance, I didn't want to give it an excess of attention, because it's not what the fic's about. I don't know how much overlap there was between the punk scene and the gay community, but if you were to ask Jensen where he fit, what tribe he belonged to, it was with the boys and girls drinking and smoking and jumping along to punk bands at CBGB's, and not with the gay men whose friends and lovers were so decimated by government indifference. Tom's obituary, by the way, said he died of pneumonia. No one died of AIDS in those days. It was always something else. It was always explained in code.
I couldn't resist making Hayley Atwell the girl who befriends Jensen after hitting him in the face. Her tendency to accidentally beat up stunt men and her own costars is one of the things I find really endearing about her. That and her ability to fall asleep anywhere, in apparently any position. If you recognized her, you should have recognized her friends Chris and Sebastian as well. :D Chris' Red Sox jersey should be a dead giveaway.
If you read my bang last year, you should also perhaps recognize the all-hours bookstore Jared mentions in the epilogue. The dog would've been glad to see them, but the dog is glad to see everyone.
The senior thesis show at Cooper Union really is open to the public for a few weeks after the students put it up. I don't know if it was open to the public back in 1980, but for the sake of Jensen being able to make his friends go see his final project, I decided it was.
Some of the photos JJ finds in the shoebox in the beginning of the fic are inspired by actual photos taken at CBGB's by a guy named David Godlis, who I discovered when I found his Kickstarter. It had already closed, but he'd succeeded in funding a book of photos from his punk days.
The movie about the Krays that Jensen mentions in the beginning of the fic is Legend, with Tom Hardy playing both twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. How Jared's cousin learned about them and why he thought that would be a good name for his band, I have no idea.
There are apparently still apartments in the East Village with bathtubs in the kitchens. Nice apartments, too. Well, it's the East Village of the new millennium. They're all nice apartments. (By which I mean they're all hideously expensive.)
Kevin is watching the Brier (aka the Tim Hortons Brier), which is a Canadian men's curling championship, because I am apparently incapable of writing a contemporary bigbang without sticking curling in there somewhere. And Kevin's Canadian, so it actually fits. I don't think curling was well-known enough in the early 80s to be broadcast on TV in New York City - I mean, this was before the days of cable and streaming and twenty million dedicated sports channels - so I just assumed Kevin had fiddled with Jensen's TV enough to get a Canadian channel, or a channel far enough upstate that might show it. Handwave, handwave. :D
I actually googled "what does it feel like to try cocaine for the first time", because I figured mid-80s, New York club scene, pretty people doing coke, someone's going to offer Jensen a line. He's not a druggie by any definition, but at that point he's kind of losing his sense of who he really is - and he's trying to make Danneel happy - and snorting coke off the back of Stephen Amell's hand seems like a good idea. One of the commenters on Quora said it had kind of a chemical, Play-Doh-y taste, so I went with that. Which, by the way, yuck.
East River Park, where Adrianne makes everyone play softball, is now John V Lindsay East River Park. Nowadays you need to reserve a ball field, but I have no idea if you had to in 1980.
I lived on Long Island for thirteen years all told, and I've never been to Coney Island. Any mistakes or anachronisms about the gang's trip to Coney are my own fault. Steve pukes on the Cyclone as the most subtle easter egg possible, but if you remember the scene right before Bucky falls off the train in Captain America: the First Avenger ("Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?"), you'll know where the idea came from.
In fact, any mistakes or anachronisms in general are my fault, and I take full responsibility for the weirdness and the wrongness. I did have someone vet the fic for historical and locational accuracy - one of the women in my writing group grew up on the Lower East Side and would have overlapped the end of Jensen's time there - but there's still some handwaving and some poetic license and some stuff I didn't research, or just didn't research enough.
The title of the fic comes from "The Salvation of Rock", a poem by Patti Smith (of course :D ) that appears in her book Early Works 1971-1979. The full line is "Rock, like sculpture, is the solid body of a dream". I had a very hard time with the title, because I wanted to reference Patti's work but Jensen is way more familiar with her than I am. I know one song - "Because the Night", because that's probably the one song of hers everyone knows, if they know anything she's done - and aside from the poem about Edie Sedgwick, which I only know because I've had a low-level obsession with Edie since I was in high school, I know approximately none of her poetry. I was saved by the Coop in Harvard Square, which had two of her books and didn't care that I skimmed both of them to find something appropriate.
Because it was so important that Jensen's New York story start when he's twenty-one and Jared's seventeen, I decided I needed everyone else to age down the same number of years. This makes Adrianne and Alona sixteen - they're both a year younger than Jared in real life, so they're a year younger than he is in the fic. Both girls are still in school, and if you're wondering why Alona's living with a college student and a grown-ass adult, it's because her parents, brother, aunt, cousin, and grandmother all live in grandma's little apartment in Brighton Beach, and that's too many people in too small a space for her. Brighton Beach is full of Russian emigrés and has been for a long time, and in this fic, that means Alona's grandma.
(Originally Jared was sixteen and Jensen was twenty, but I just. could. not. write that smut. But my first bigbang idea stalled out because I couldn't figure out what the plot was, and I really wanted to write this one, so I made everyone a year older, it actually worked, and here we are.)
Making everyone the same comparative ages that they are in real life messed with my plans for Aldis and Osric, because they'd both be so young. Aldis was going to be a graffiti artist who Danneel discovered for her boss' gallery - this was the age of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, when graffiti artists could get their work hung in galleries and bought by collectors - and Osric only ever made one appearance, wearing a bad wig and sunglasses in one of the photos in Jensen's shoebox. He was Joey Ramone for Halloween. :D Paradoxically, considering my absolute (and absolutely ridiculous) dedication to the age thing, I made Jensen and Danneel parents much younger than they are in reality.
Once upon a time this was an original fic bunny about a gay boy in New York in the late 70s/early 80s, his introduction to punk, and the boy he loved. This is almost that story. I never knew how that story ended, altho to be fair for a long time I didn't know how this one ended either. And now that it's done, I'm not sure it could have ended any other way.
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
Writing this fic put me in the weird position of trying to research an era I lived through and places I've actually been, just about when I would have been there. My family moved to Long Island right before I started high school, and it did not take me long to discover a. the city, b. the Village, and c. the Long Island Railroad, which would get me there. I walked around the Village for years, absorbing everything and wanting to stay. I loved the Antique Boutique but didn't actually have the balls to wear most of the clothes. I bought books and sometimes comics at Forbidden Planet, and later I discovered a comic shop on Bleeker Street that dedicated googling tells me was called Village Comics (and which is now closed). I remember it being upstairs. I bought cassette tapes at the giant Tower Records on Broadway, lined up for but did not actually get to see Paul Young when he did an appearance in (I think) 1985, and once my sister and I ran into an actress from "General Hospital" there. Her character was called Lou, but I cannot for the life of me remember the actress' name. I remember her being a little taken aback at our excitement, a little shy, but pretty gracious, considering. I'm not sure my attitude towards seeing famous people in normal-person places has changed all that much, except now I'm more aware of how awkward this can be for the famous person in question.
I never made it as far east as what was then Alphabet City, but at the time it was run-down and I didn't know what there was to see. But there was Manic Panic (the hair color people, back when they had an actual store) and the egg store that only sold eggs on Thursdays, and if I'd known about them, who knows, I might have trekked a little farther east.
I have very nostalgia-colored memories of the East Village. Some of that nostalgia no doubt seeped into the fic, and I spent a lot of time while I was writing it worrying that I wasn't doing the time and the place justice, because I can't help but look at it from the perspective of the acceptably-alternative middle-class suburban teenager that I was.
(My experience of the Lower East Side, conversely, is a milk-kosher restaurant called Ratner's, which had delicious blintzes and sadly closed in 2004, guys selling knockoff Rolexes from card tables on the sidewalk, and the weird weight of Jewish-American immigrant history. There's no awareness of music history there.)
I discovered new wave in the mid-80s - hands up for 92.7, WLIR - we called it "progressive" or "new music", and I acquired the most scattershot and shallow appreciation of punk. I definitely know more bands now than I did then, but that isn't saying much. I had to do some reading to find out more bands that Jensen would have heard and seen, and then I had to figure out where they were all from, on the off-chance some were west coast bands. (He would not have voluntarily listened to much California punk, even after he and Danneel and JJ moved to San Francisco. He was very loyal to his coast.)
I didn't bother to go down to New York to location scout, because so much of the Village and the Lower East Side that Jensen knew is gone. The East Village has been excessively gentrified, and probably no one who might have lived there in the early 80s can afford to live there now. Tower closed in 2006. Bleeker Bob's closed in 2013. The Antique Boutique moved to Brooklyn. CBGB's has been a high end menswear boutique for a few years already, and Joey Ramone might well still be spinning in his grave. You can drop a lot of money on designer clothes in the same spot he and Richard Hell and Blondie played to drinking crowds. The store kept some of the graffiti. There's also a CBGB's restaurant in Newark Airport, and from pictures it doesn't look at all like any of the photos I found of the bar in its heyday, even allowing for the fact that it's an airport restaurant in New Jersey and not a grungy club in New York's Lower East Side.
Speaking of, this is the t-shirt Jared finds for Jensen in the store.
I had the hardest time thinking up band names. Gory Alice, the name, came from the Belly album Aurora Gory Alice and the fact that Alona is always going to look like some version of Alice in Wonderland in my head. I think it sounds more like a name for a metal band than a punk band. There were a few all-girl punk bands in the late 70s and early 80s - the Slits, the Raincoats - although I don't think there were very many, and I'd hazard a guess they suffered way more misogyny than I've put in the fic. I mentioned there's some rose-colored nostalgia, didn't I? If I was writing from the girls' POV it would be a different story.
Jared's band was originally called Pitcher - there was supposed to be a joke in there about pitchers and catchers, ie tops and bottoms - but I was never married to it and when dear-tiger gently suggested I change it, I listened. Their albums are Too Pretty for the City (the title was Chad's idea), The Krays, Cracks in the Pavement, and Left at the End of the Line, which was a live album. I have no idea what they sound like, but for a while I described them to myself as what the Ramones might have been if they were cuter and more commercial. Make of that what you will. The Pits and Gory Alice are mostly fast and loud. The Pits occasionally stray into experimental territory, as long as the experiment can be played at ear-splitting volume, while Gory Alice is more straightforward rock&roll.
The name of Danneel's zine, Doom Pastry, is taken from the game Cupcake Mania, which is like Candy Crush except you're working with pastries. Some of the levels have baked good on a timer, and if the timer runs down you fail that level, and you get a little message that a doom pastry exploded. The picture of Edie Sedgwick on the cover of one of the issues of the zine was copied from a copy of the poster for Ciao! Manhattan, Edie's last movie. She died of an overdose in California in 1971, but she lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York for at least part of the time she was a Warhol superstar in the 60s. She was white on white/so blonde on blonde is from a poem in Patti Smith's book Seventh Heaven, published the year after Edie died. I found the poem online, which is good because the Boston Public Library did not have the book. Mediocre, BPL.
Pretty much everything I know about zines I learned from the Nanowrimo forums last November. Occasionally I cheat a little and use the forums to ask questions for my bigbangs.
The Chelsea Hotel's significant claim to fame, at the time the fic takes place, is that Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in Room 100 in 1978. (I googled to find out what room it was, because I really did need that particular detail to be correct.) I have no idea if people used to (or still do) make pilgrimages to that room, but I figure Alona already has a weird fascination with the place, and if you're a morbid punk rocker and/or Sex Pistols fan - or just a weird music tourist - it might be something you'd do.
In 1980 Patti Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, dissolved the Patti Smith Group, and moved to Detroit. I imagine a lot of her fans were upset, as happens when someone whose work you love gives it up. I think she kept writing poetry and she did start recording music again, but in the 80s she was living in Detroit and being a wife and mother.
In early May, 1980, the artist Francis Hines wrapped the arch in Washington Square Park in 8,000 yards of white polyester. It stayed that way for about a week before being unwrapped. I pushed it up by a month for the sake of the fic, so I had a reason to mention Jensen checking it out. I was trying to root the fic in actual events, and giant public art is something that would have absolutely caught Jensen's eye. If he took any pictures of the arch, they didn't make it into the shoebox.
Because of the time and place where the fic is set, Jensen would have known several guys who died of complications from AIDS, and he would have had the opportunity to attend several funerals, for Danneel's friends and acquaintences if not for his own. Speaking of actual historical events.... I'd like to thank tamalinn for reassuring me it was ok if Tom Welling was the guy I chose to kill off. (I felt bad about it.) But while it had to make an appearance, I didn't want to give it an excess of attention, because it's not what the fic's about. I don't know how much overlap there was between the punk scene and the gay community, but if you were to ask Jensen where he fit, what tribe he belonged to, it was with the boys and girls drinking and smoking and jumping along to punk bands at CBGB's, and not with the gay men whose friends and lovers were so decimated by government indifference. Tom's obituary, by the way, said he died of pneumonia. No one died of AIDS in those days. It was always something else. It was always explained in code.
I couldn't resist making Hayley Atwell the girl who befriends Jensen after hitting him in the face. Her tendency to accidentally beat up stunt men and her own costars is one of the things I find really endearing about her. That and her ability to fall asleep anywhere, in apparently any position. If you recognized her, you should have recognized her friends Chris and Sebastian as well. :D Chris' Red Sox jersey should be a dead giveaway.
If you read my bang last year, you should also perhaps recognize the all-hours bookstore Jared mentions in the epilogue. The dog would've been glad to see them, but the dog is glad to see everyone.
The senior thesis show at Cooper Union really is open to the public for a few weeks after the students put it up. I don't know if it was open to the public back in 1980, but for the sake of Jensen being able to make his friends go see his final project, I decided it was.
Some of the photos JJ finds in the shoebox in the beginning of the fic are inspired by actual photos taken at CBGB's by a guy named David Godlis, who I discovered when I found his Kickstarter. It had already closed, but he'd succeeded in funding a book of photos from his punk days.
The movie about the Krays that Jensen mentions in the beginning of the fic is Legend, with Tom Hardy playing both twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. How Jared's cousin learned about them and why he thought that would be a good name for his band, I have no idea.
There are apparently still apartments in the East Village with bathtubs in the kitchens. Nice apartments, too. Well, it's the East Village of the new millennium. They're all nice apartments. (By which I mean they're all hideously expensive.)
Kevin is watching the Brier (aka the Tim Hortons Brier), which is a Canadian men's curling championship, because I am apparently incapable of writing a contemporary bigbang without sticking curling in there somewhere. And Kevin's Canadian, so it actually fits. I don't think curling was well-known enough in the early 80s to be broadcast on TV in New York City - I mean, this was before the days of cable and streaming and twenty million dedicated sports channels - so I just assumed Kevin had fiddled with Jensen's TV enough to get a Canadian channel, or a channel far enough upstate that might show it. Handwave, handwave. :D
I actually googled "what does it feel like to try cocaine for the first time", because I figured mid-80s, New York club scene, pretty people doing coke, someone's going to offer Jensen a line. He's not a druggie by any definition, but at that point he's kind of losing his sense of who he really is - and he's trying to make Danneel happy - and snorting coke off the back of Stephen Amell's hand seems like a good idea. One of the commenters on Quora said it had kind of a chemical, Play-Doh-y taste, so I went with that. Which, by the way, yuck.
East River Park, where Adrianne makes everyone play softball, is now John V Lindsay East River Park. Nowadays you need to reserve a ball field, but I have no idea if you had to in 1980.
I lived on Long Island for thirteen years all told, and I've never been to Coney Island. Any mistakes or anachronisms about the gang's trip to Coney are my own fault. Steve pukes on the Cyclone as the most subtle easter egg possible, but if you remember the scene right before Bucky falls off the train in Captain America: the First Avenger ("Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?"), you'll know where the idea came from.
In fact, any mistakes or anachronisms in general are my fault, and I take full responsibility for the weirdness and the wrongness. I did have someone vet the fic for historical and locational accuracy - one of the women in my writing group grew up on the Lower East Side and would have overlapped the end of Jensen's time there - but there's still some handwaving and some poetic license and some stuff I didn't research, or just didn't research enough.
The title of the fic comes from "The Salvation of Rock", a poem by Patti Smith (of course :D ) that appears in her book Early Works 1971-1979. The full line is "Rock, like sculpture, is the solid body of a dream". I had a very hard time with the title, because I wanted to reference Patti's work but Jensen is way more familiar with her than I am. I know one song - "Because the Night", because that's probably the one song of hers everyone knows, if they know anything she's done - and aside from the poem about Edie Sedgwick, which I only know because I've had a low-level obsession with Edie since I was in high school, I know approximately none of her poetry. I was saved by the Coop in Harvard Square, which had two of her books and didn't care that I skimmed both of them to find something appropriate.
Because it was so important that Jensen's New York story start when he's twenty-one and Jared's seventeen, I decided I needed everyone else to age down the same number of years. This makes Adrianne and Alona sixteen - they're both a year younger than Jared in real life, so they're a year younger than he is in the fic. Both girls are still in school, and if you're wondering why Alona's living with a college student and a grown-ass adult, it's because her parents, brother, aunt, cousin, and grandmother all live in grandma's little apartment in Brighton Beach, and that's too many people in too small a space for her. Brighton Beach is full of Russian emigrés and has been for a long time, and in this fic, that means Alona's grandma.
(Originally Jared was sixteen and Jensen was twenty, but I just. could. not. write that smut. But my first bigbang idea stalled out because I couldn't figure out what the plot was, and I really wanted to write this one, so I made everyone a year older, it actually worked, and here we are.)
Making everyone the same comparative ages that they are in real life messed with my plans for Aldis and Osric, because they'd both be so young. Aldis was going to be a graffiti artist who Danneel discovered for her boss' gallery - this was the age of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, when graffiti artists could get their work hung in galleries and bought by collectors - and Osric only ever made one appearance, wearing a bad wig and sunglasses in one of the photos in Jensen's shoebox. He was Joey Ramone for Halloween. :D Paradoxically, considering my absolute (and absolutely ridiculous) dedication to the age thing, I made Jensen and Danneel parents much younger than they are in reality.
Once upon a time this was an original fic bunny about a gay boy in New York in the late 70s/early 80s, his introduction to punk, and the boy he loved. This is almost that story. I never knew how that story ended, altho to be fair for a long time I didn't know how this one ended either. And now that it's done, I'm not sure it could have ended any other way.