There was a building on the northside outskirts of my hometown, a typical structure for the locale, haphazardly constructed, its roof low in pitch, its exterior a beige peaked stucco with curious pink undertones, that had housed almost every type of club: biker, kicker, stripper, swinger, regular and gay.

Every Texas town of five thousand or more has such a building, beige or grey, I suppose.

This one had a blacked out picture window, just slightly off centered, that betrayed a more homogenized origin.

“It used to be a cafe back when I would visit your Aunt Ida during the summer,” my mother told me. “They had really good breakfast.”

Be that as it may, none of its more contemporary iterations seemed particularly successful from the look of the parking lot, which was never even half full, though, admittedly, I rarely got out that way. Aside from oilfield supply and scrap yards there was nothing there and no reason for me to.

No good reason, anyway.

But that changed (from my perspective, anyway) when the student program director from our college radio station gave me a couple of tickets to an “invitation only” punk rock concert at the Mint Lounge.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

He told me and then added, “no rednecks.”

Well, naturally, I was offended.

” Duh. Why’re you telling me that?”

“I’m telling everybody that. No fights. No shit. These guys are already having enough trouble with the cops opening the club as it is.”

I shrugged it off and got my best friend Dana to go with me.

When we pulled up nothing much about the place had changed except the stucco was now a faint mint green and the parking lot was marginally full. I found a spot in the back of the lot where we could see the main driveway and the one off the side street.

Dana lit a joint and I cracked the window. The air was heavy with caliche dust and the muddled staccato thud of the bass and kick of the drums. Neither of us had been to a punk concert before.

A bronze colored pickup on stilts barreled into the parking lot. We recognized it immediately. The driver pulled into the spot next to me, his radio blaring Rush’s Temples of Syrinx. Our friend Joey, hopped down from the passenger seat. He wore a Sammy Hagar concert t-shirt and faded Wranglers. I rolled the window down.

“Hey, ladies,” he swaggered. “You gonna share that?”

“We share if you share,” Dana said.

Joey lifted his t-shirt so that we glimpsed his toned torso as he reached into the waistband of his Wranglers and fished out a plastic baggie folded many times over. Pinching the corner between his thumb and forefinger, he held the baggie up to his boyish face framed with blonde feathered hair.

“Redhaired sinse,” he boasted with a toothy smile.

“Y’all hop in,” I said.

Non Compos Mentis or NCM as they were more commonly known were a first wave punk band from Dallas, Texas. A tight, raucous trio, that didn’t give the finger to melody, innovation or musicianship, i.e., surgical blade new-wave before there was such a thing.
NCM was one of the few “brave” punk bands to play Odessa, Texas, a notoriously tough (redneck) west Texas enclave of just over 100,000, which also happened to be my hometown.