The punkers laughed . . . lunatics howling in a grotesque parody of fun. : Saturday Night at a Freak Show

An old man walked into a Denny’s one Saturday night and could not believe his eyes. Young people were wearing lipstick and eye shadow. Some had spiked and bleached-white hairdos, others had ribbons in hair that was tightened into a dozen different clumps. One wore a dress. And they were all boys.

“What the hell?” the old man said, looking around. “Is there a costume party?”

The waitress shook her head no as she led the old man to a booth.

“Then why are they dressed that way?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said with a bored sigh. “They’re just punk-rockers. Does it matter why?”

It was the Denny’s just off Topanga Canyon Boulevard, two blocks north of Ventura Boulevard. In the morning, it is packed with blue-collar workers digging into their ham and eggs and with white-collar workers grabbing quick cups of coffee before running with the hours to quitting time.

Even by Denny’s standards, it is an unspectacular coffee shop, tucked behind a service station near an on-ramp to the freeway. There is nothing to recommend it as a window on the world of the weird.

Except on Saturday night.

At the height of the weekend, the place turns into a freak show. I don’t know why. The people at Denny’s don’t know why.

It is like cosmic vibrations have drawn the punkers and their camp followers to a middle-American haven where the inhabitants would be shocked the most by young males grinning out from behind slashes of glowing China-red lipstick and thick false eyelashes.

They were inside the place and they were outside the place, clogging the walkway to the front entrance, alternately shrill and hostile, creating an atmosphere that was vaguely unsettling.

I was there for late coffee at the end of one of those kinds of days when nothing comes easy. You struggle for what you get, but what you get is never enough. Nothing sings. Nothing scans. Nothing makes any sense.

All I wanted to do was stare out the window and watch the world go by. Instead I got the freaks.

I’ve seen punkers before: in their clubs bashing their brains out by hurling themselves at one another in fits of violence they call dancing. Hanging around high school campuses looking for trouble. Strung out and drifting aimlessly, like flotsam on a flood tide going nowhere.

Punkers are part of the contemporary scene in Southern California, the way film celebrities are part of the scene, demanding attention, competing through cosmetics for a place on center stage.

But why Denny’s?

The old man, sitting not too far away, asked the question of anyone who would listen, including someone who appeared to be the manager and was busy just trying to get the punkers to sit down and shut up.

All he got in response was what amounted to a variation of the shrug.

Then the old man leaned out into the aisle, turned to look behind him and asked one of the punkers what they were doing there.

The person he asked was one of those whose hair was gathered in clumps all over his head, with a small ribbon tied in a bow to each clump. He sat in a booth with three other punkers and, when the old man questioned him, he just laughed.

It was a pointless kind of laughter, without root and without motivation, and soon he was joined by others at the booth, one of whom shrieked in a range of decibels that hurt the ears.

Their reaction puzzled the old man even more.

“What the hell did I say that was so funny?” he demanded.

The punkers laughed even louder, caught up in their own strange fantasies, removed from reality by the nature of their response, lunatics howling in a grotesque parody of fun.

The old man shook his head and settled back. They were more than generations apart. They were cultures apart. They spoke different languages, they observed from different angles, they perceived on different levels.

I know that each age has its variation of the punker rebellion. Youth pushes, dares, outrages and challenges through music, dress and point of view.

Change through cultural assault is inherent in the species, an element of the rites of passage that alters the shape and structure of society. The young, like it or not, set the beat and we march to it.

And yet, knowing that, I still find the presence of punkers disquieting. They seem a caricature of change, an extreme to the edge of the abyss where clown-like figures laugh without joy and dance without feeling.

Do they mirror what the world has become? Have we, at last, gone too far?

“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” the old man said, finishing his sandwich and walking toward the cash register. “I’ll be damned if it isn’t.”

The old man left, and soon the four punkers in the booth left.

And I sat there by the window, staring out into the night. Nothing scanned. Nothing sang. Nothing made any sense.