For you’ll always have hypersensitive eyes, all your life you’ll be wearing shades each time you’ll reach to daylight, whatever the weather – that will gain you a reputation as a poser and an arrogant snob. That might be true, though the chain of causality there wouldn’t be so linear that it would always be put in your discredit. Since you’ll give up quickly the prescription tainted glasses you’ll be supposed to hang from your early ovoid vision frames (you’ll turn short-sighted at 14), too easy to lose or to break, you’ll spend your life hunting for the next cool pair of shades you’ll inevitably need after having broken or lost the previous one… According to the time, location and your economical situation, it will be either an agreeable ritual of slightly vain yet pragmatic consummation, or a real pain in the ass. It will never be possible to keep these shades more than a few months, so an expensive model will be forever out of question, but cheap ones would be damageable because of the fragility of your sinuses, and unlikely to fit, because of the unusual shape of the base of your nose… You’ll always wonder if there are other people out there who ever put so much time and energy into purchasing sunglasses, but you and Lux Interior!
Each time you’ll see the Cramps on stage – and you’ll try to do that as much as possible –, you’ll feel that Lux’s famous monologue about wearing shades after dark will be personally addressed to you – it would usually include a line about how it’s not enough to be real cool and that you also have to wear them in museums… That you’ll do, also in class sometimes, as much as a student than as a teacher, when an allergy fit will inflame your eyes to the edge of crying blood (people if front of you will hate you for this, however you’ll apologise for your condition, and they’ll tell about your alleged vampire fetish too – but they’ll ask you to put them back when you’ll show them your purulent eyes), also in brightly lit supermarkets (immediately spotted and followed by a security agent for some reason), on stage to face the spotlights and still be able to see something while playing music, or dancing…
You’ll often claim and brilliantly demonstrate that the Cramps were not a rock band but a conceptual art enterprise camouflaged as a rock band, staging expanded media performances largely exceeding the regular elements of the theoretical performing sphere and conjuring up different layers of reality. You’ll put in favour of your demonstration that in any Cramps concert, there is always a smaller crowd of slightly more aged audience, wearing Maos better than regular death rock / psychobilly regalia and carefully keeping away from the mosh pit – they would be the real audience (you’ll be in the mosh pit, for you’ll always want to belong everywhere and never chose a side, and your steel-toe aircraft carrier technician boots will be meant for this). The last time you’ll see the Cramps, they’ll be at the acme of their art. They’ll gather an ‘audience’ – actually a key element of the show – of otherwise incompatible rock tribes and start with pissing them off with a quite bad opening band, before a too long break.
Then they’ll launch an impeccable one-hour set of fierce classics bringing the people to utter frenzy, until Lux starts to dismantle the unusually big amp walls, piles them in the middle on the stage, ties them up with the very long cables of the many microphones that happen to be there, hanging them in front of the speakers and causing a huge feedback sonic hurricane that covers the band that stops playing but keeps miming – and the audience will be so excited that you’ll all keep dancing lengthily to the pure mayhem in an ultimate informal cathartic experience (you’ll love the mosh pit and the mosh pit will love you, and it will cause you some trouble, like that morning when you’ll come to class to realise that you can’t speak to your students, since you’ll have a broken jaw after Iggy Pop’s concert the previous night, and you’ll be too high to notice before, ending up at the hospital a little bit too late).
You’ll have eye surgery when your short-sightedness will stabilise around 30, not that it will improve much your condition, but it will preserve you from the uncomfortable use of glasses or contact lenses. You’ll chose the cheaper option and use blades instead of laser, and you’ll bring your photo camera to ask the nurse it she would take photos of what you’ll like to believe will be the re-enactment of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou’s eye slicing scene. She’ll refuse, but while you’ll feel the pressure of the surgeon’s blade on your eyeball as you look at it piercing your cornea – you’ll opt for local anaesthesia –, you’ll be innerly singing Debaser by Pixies.
When Lux Interior will die, you’ll know that you’ve entered the Age of Orphanhood.
