By S.G. Brown
Photographer, Poet, Author, and Studio Ghost
Preface –
For a long time, I often joked that I was working on my memoirs—recording my life in one long, continuous volume, tracing every existential crisis up to the present. But life and memory don’t adhere to structure.
I have outlived the expectations I set for myself. Twenty-nine seemed like a joke at nineteen, just as eighteen did at sixteen. The stories I’ve told—at parties, to friends, and to strangers—have blended and evolved over the years, shifting with time and recollection.
With Where Are the Freaks Now, I want to document the moments that have shaped me—not in chronological order, but as they exist in my memory. Life isn’t neatly serialized, and neither is this series.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
Where Are All the Freaks Now?
Part 1: Angst, Loss, and Grunge.
Before buying my first MP3 player from a classmate in late junior high—stolen and filled with ’80s hair metal and other assorted garbage—I was given a Sony Walkman by my father, along with a box of cassettes donated by my uncles. Most of the tapes were classic country, though oddly enough. At the very bottom of the box, I found two cassettes that would change the course of my young life.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall was my first real rock album. I would sit alone on the bus, listening to those tapes over and over, finding darkness in its self-reflective lyrics that mirrored my own feelings of dread and insecurity. That summer, I must have played that album a hundred times as I rode my bike back and forth along the highway, visiting my friends.
That summer was filled with a few firsts, my first drag of a stolen cigarette, first sip of strong liquor, my disastrous first encounter with marijuana. But above all, one experience stands out. One afternoon, while we were gathering in the woods around a stolen bottle of beer, surrounded by the thick green canopy of the Big Thicket, my friend’s older sister pulled me aside. She handed me her earbuds, and for a moment, there was silence. Then out of that silence came the first notes of Nirvana’s Come As You Are.
I remember that moment perfectly, the way the instrumentals rose and fell, the solemn lyrics, the warm beer we sipped as the sun sank below the trees. That song—that album, which I later bought on CD after upgrading from my Walkman—opened a door for me. Grunge became my escape, my way of expressing the innermost worries that I couldn’t say out loud, I could thrash around my room and in the woods, shouting along to the lyrics of each song, free to express my anger and frustration without judgement. In time I found other bands, expanded my tastes into Riot Grrl Punk, 80s hardcore, and proto-punk classics like The Stooges. It all went back to her, and that day in the woods, what did she see in me that made her share her music with me, how could she have known such a quiet boy harbored an ocean of dark emotion? I never found an answer, and Id never get the chance to ask.
I remember my last interaction with her as clearly as the first time she introduced me to Nirvana. It was in my early twenties—I had arrived at a big-box store for a job interview, proudly wearing my punk attitude (literally) on my sleeves, meeting authority with disgust and ridicule. As I browsed the CD aisle, casually tossing every Pearl Jam album beneath the racks, a familiar voice called my name. Then, arms wrapped tightly around me in a hug.
It was her.
She excitedly told me about her husband and daughter, catching me up on the years that had passed. Just before walking away, she turned on her heels and asked if I wanted her signed Nirvana poster, the same one that had hung in her room all these years. I turned the offer down and said that she should save it for her daughter one day. We hugged, and parted ways.
Days later, her brother called to tell me of her passing, she had taken her own life.
To this day, when I hear a Nirvana song on the radio or dive back into their albums, I am transported to those woods—the sting of sweat in my eyes, the goosebumps on my arms as the instrumentals rose and fell, the lyrics that defined my teens:
“Come as you are, as you were, as I wanted you to be.”
What a gift it was to have known her.