Featured Essay: Their Band Saved My Life: Double Nickles on the Dime, Mental Health, and My Punk Rock Salvation

by Ryan J. Novak

I once let a kid who had been kicked out of his house live with me and my family, and he tried to steal my underwear. Okay, that’s a lot up front, let me backup for just a second. It will be quick, and then I’ll tell you how it all led me to The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and how D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley saved my life. Here we go: I started high school in the fall of 1993 and went through all the usual anxiety for all the same reasons everyone does at that age, like a new building, feeling like I had to prove myself again, knowing I would once again be “Jen’s little brother” (my older sister was a high school legend), and oh yeah, girls; especially girls. Girls who could drive and wouldn’t have time for me and my awkwardness, gawkiness, bad skinness, and net-negative charm…ness. I only had one thing going for me, and that’s being funny. It was my only currency, the beginning and end of assets, and it led me to hanging out with a group of older guys (meaning they were juniors and seniors) because they too were funny. I felt cooler and accepted hanging out with them. In that group was the guy who ended up needing a place to live because he got kicked out of his house. Me being the big-hearted person I was, I talked to my mom, and we took him in. What followed was six months and a lot of stuff that can be best summarized as I went from feeling like I was a part of the group and to being more like I was the annoying little brother they only hung out with out of obligation. The kid who moved in with my family clearly didn’t like me but did like having a place to live. In time it was obvious I wasn’t wanted around. 

One day after school, my mom told me she was going to ask him to leave but would say exactly why she had come to the decision, and I didn’t ask. She talked to him when he got home later that afternoon. He was, as best as I can remember, polite to my mom and said he understood but then immediately went upstairs and started packing. As I watched him pack, I knew that as soon as he was out of the house that I would no longer be friends with those guys. I attempted, as he was packing, to be friendly. I apologized that he had to leave and said I didn’t know what my mom’s problem was. He was quiet, almost sheepish, and wouldn’t make any eye contact as he quickly mumbled that it was “alright.” I gave him space, not wanting to bother him and left to play basketball, at which point he promptly started stealing everything of mine he could get into his bags, including, yes, my underwear. My mom went upstairs to talk to him and found that he had my underwear, a couple of pairs of jeans, some shirts, my phone (with built-in answering machine which was peak 1993 phone technology!), CD’s, and a few of my movies. She took all of my things from him and sat at my desk while he packed the rest of his things, watching each item as it was shoved in one of his duffel bags. When I saw him for the first time at school the following Monday, I smiled and said hi, and he responded “fuck you, faggot” and kept walking. In the coming weeks, I got called “faggot” and “pussy” and sometimes “pussy faggot” because variety is the spice of life. I was born with a left eyelid that does not open all the way, and even after surgery in the 4th grade still does not fully open, giving me a sleepy appearance to most people. Thom Yorke of Radiohead also has this but wasn’t hanging around my hometown in SouthWest Missouri at the time to make it seem somewhat cool. The kid would often mimic my eyelid and ask me if I was “retarded.” If he’d known I was Jewish, he might have had a fourth insult, but as it was, he was working with a limited pool of options to bully and intimidate me. After he ran through his insults in every combination he could come up with, he started occasionally shoulder-checking me or pushing me if we crossed paths, using the busy hallway to establish plausible deniability if I ever worked up the nerve to report him, which I never did. One time he told me he would “fucking kill me” if I ever looked at him again. I started having to take convoluted, long routes to get to my classes to avoid him as much as possible. My mom later told me she asked him to leave because he had run up hundreds of dollars on our phone bill making calls to a 1-900 sex line number, which isn’t important at all to the story, but I add it here because fuck him. 

My expectations as to how the rest of the guys would react was spot on. Nearly everyone of them either completely ignored me, made fun of me as I passed in the halls, or would also threaten me. Only one guy from the group continued being nice to me, always saying hi, and seeing how I was doing (shout out to Jared, who’s a real one, as they say). This also meant I now didn’t have any friends. The transition to high school is rough for most people, but it’s even harder when you not only don’t have friends, but people are actively making fun of you and threatening you daily. I was afraid to even try to make connections with anyone else because I assumed everyone knew what happened and would see my attempts as sad and desperate because my former friends didn’t want anything to do with me. On top of it, I had to go home where my abusive step-dad was, a tobacco-chewing redneck who worked for the sheriff’s department. I was bullied at school and bullied at home.I thought about dying a lot. 

In loneliness and isolation and fear, with no place that felt safe, I turned to the one place where I was: my music collection. I spent long hours sitting in my papasan chair (those half moon looking chairs that sat on a little cone-shaped pedestal that were huge in the early-to-mid nineties) in front of my stereo with my headphones on, burying myself in rage so I wouldn’t cry. I started not being able to sleep, my anxiety fully out of control at this point, and would stay up late at night watching MTV. One night I saw a video from the Rollins Band for the song “Low Self Esteem” off of their End of the Silence album. The lyrics spoke to everything I was feeling and that weekend, I asked my mom to drive me to some music stores in Joplin, MO, an hour from my hometown. I bought everything I could get by the Rollins Band: The End of the Silence, Life Time, Hard Volume, and the Do It and Turned On EPs. The clerk saw my stack and asked “You a Flag fan too or just Rollins?” I didn’t know what he meant but didn’t want to appear stupid. “Oh yeah, man. Love Flag. I need to get some more… What’s your favorite?” Phew! Nice save, Novak. I ended up leaving with Damaged, The First Four Years, and My War and only later realized I bought the most obvious Black Flag albums that a Flag fan, such as myself, would have definitely already owned.

Black Flag was my anger and frustration fully realized. I was afraid every day of my life: afraid to make eye contact at school and be called a pussy and shoved and afraid to speak in my home and be called mouthy and get shoved. Black Flag gave me an outlet for the fear and frustration that was bottled up in me. I wasn’t a violent person by any means, so all I could do was scream-along to “Nervous Breakdown,” “I’ve Had It,” “Rise Above,” “Padded Cell,” “Damaged I,” and “My War.” I couldn’t fight back against the kid who lived with us for six months and then tried to steal my underwear, but you can bet I had a problem with him! I even repurposed the lyrics to “Police Story” off Damage, to be about my shitty, abusive step-dad, the sheriff’s deputy, a job he was fired from when they discovered he hid a felony conviction from his youth, which isn’t important to this story, but I include here because fuck him. In my room, angry and alone, with Black Flag blasting into my ears, I was a live wire, cracking with an energy that had no other place to go, brimming with a rage that would slink away each morning as the meak kid who starred at the ground as he walked the halls, afraid that looking up might mean having to defend myself at school, a process I had to repeat at home. I beat myself up at night for being a coward. I felt like the cover image of Rollins smashing his fist into a mirror, punching at myself because I couldn’t punch the people who tormented me. I hated every day of my life, but at least through Flag, I felt like I had at least someone who understood. 

I was starting to play those albums into the ground and needed something more. Inside the copy of Damaged was the mailer for SST Records. I went back to the record store and asked the same guy which albums to buy, dropping all pretense of being hip to any of it. Among his suggestions were Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and Land Speed Record; The Descendents’ Milo Goes to College and I Don’t Want to Grow Up, and Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and What Makes a Man Start Fires. I thanked him, went home, and ordered every album he recommended. It was the first time I’d felt happy or excited about anything in months. 

A few weeks later, a large padded envelope with all the CDs showed up. I listened to them all but kept returning to Minutemen the most, especially Double Nickels. Black Flag had given me an outlet for all the rage I felt, a musical catharsis. The Minutemen were different. I didn’t feel angry listening to them but instead felt a peace I had not known in months. They were punk rock as an attitude and not as an aesthetic (Watt and D. Boon wore flannel shirts, like I did) or a style (they had ballads, satirical songs, jazzy jams, funk, and even acid rock). Listening to them was an enjoyable experience that didn’t make me want to punch walls that I could pretend were that kid or my step-dad. I still felt all the same things: the anger was there, the frustration was there, and the fear was definitely there, but my room and my records were a safe place. No one could hurt me there. Minutemen helped me find safety. 

In the song “History Lesson - Part II,” D. Boon sang “Our band could be your life.” I read somewhere that the next line “Real names be proof” was D. Boon and Watt demystifying themselves to their audience. Punk had become my safe haven and a place I’ve returned to throughout my life, but at 15, to me, The Sex Pistols and Ramones, from different countries and had completely different aesthetics, both looked almost like aliens, so far removed from anything or anyone I had ever seen. Even the members of Black Flag, decked out in jeans and t-shirts or Rollins black gym shorts, projected a toughness I desperately wished I could embody but never could. Minutemen, on the contrary, looked like guys I would have been friends with, looking so very normal in their flannel shirts, so very human. As Mike Watt later said “People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs – our band could be your life! You could be us, this could be you.” Maybe all punks were aliens from different planets. I felt every day, like I didn’t belong anywhere. I wanted to escape my life. I didn’t want to die but just to disappear to someplace new where that kid and my step-dad weren’t and where I would be accepted and maybe even liked. Where all my awkwardness, gawkiness, bad skin, and everything else didn’t define me to anyone. I wanted to escape in the backseat of The Minutemen’s van on the album cover with Watt driving the van at exactly 55 miles per hour on Highway 10, like I was the backseat passenger requesting different tapes be played on the stereo as we were off to a new adventure. A silly dream that I would only realize months later when I met my friend Chris and we bonded over comic books and music and horror movies, and I would end up in the backseat of his 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass on so many road trips I failed to yell “shotgun” fast enough to procure the front seat, taking the backseat, while one of our considerably shorter friends enjoyed the leg room of the front. 

At a time when I felt like I was drowning in my own depression, with my increased panic attacks cutting off my air and being too afraid to tell my mom that I was being constantly insulted and threatened by the same kid we’d given a home to for six months or let her know that the man she had married was doing the same thing to me when I was home, Minutemen’s Double Nickels felt like a life vest that pulled me up from the depths. I loved Black Flag (their ubiquitous logo is still my only tattoo) but felt like I couldn’t match their intensity or toughness. Mike Watt and D. Boon, those self-proclaimed “corn dogs” in their flannel shirts, felt more my speed and showed me that punk wasn’t a look but an attitude. I too was a “fucking corndog” who just wanted to pogo. I was weird, I was annoying, I was scared, and I was intimidated by life and those who sniffed out and exploited my weakness to make themselves feel strong, but in punk rock, I was no longer without a community. There were other weirdos, other aliens out there like me, probably also being called “faggot” and “pussy” by someone who was only big on the outside but very, very small in every other way. 

Even now at 46, with my original CD copy sadly long gone, I can put my clear-vinyl reissue on my turntable and sit back in the comfy chair in my office with my giant headphones and close my eyes and remember so vividly being 15 years old, stupid and scared, and seeing my step-dad, a kid I tried to help, and just the whole fucking world coming down on me like a tidal wave that would no doubt crush me with its weight and fury, and Double Nickels being a reminder from D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurly that I was going to be okay and that I wasn’t alone it the world. It saved me and made me feel bold, even if it was just on the inside, while I remained outwardly terrified, and gave me that sense of tomorrow I’ll be stronger and braver and nothing will ever scare me again. I was free to be just another fucking corndog; free to crank my music and pogo.

Ryan Novak is a high school English teacher in Arizona’s East Valley. When he’s not grading essays and battling student apathy, he’s spending time with his wife and their cat and rabbit, writing about music, going to concerts (occasionally on school nights), and collecting way too many records, much to his wife’s chagrin and the shrinking available storage space of his office. He can be found on most social media platforms under TheEdJewCator (Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky).