A Cometbus Omnibus

Gradually, the zine (and the lettering) grew into a more reader-friendly size. The record/band/interview punk-rock zine formula was abandoned. Aaron and his contributors started writing about neglected subjects like hanging out, eating sugar-laden cereals and drinking large amounts of coffee. The revolving title settled down on Cometbus. And Cometbus became something special. Other zines have readers; Cometbus has followers. One fan dreamed his house was burning down and all he thought to save was his Cometbus collection; another is rumored to have named her child after Aaron. A lonely young woman headlined her personal ad in an alt-weekly "Cometbus Punkrock Love." And there is no shortage of buyers on eBay eager to cough up $10 or $20 a pop for ratty out-of-print back issues. Cometbus is possibly the most beloved zine ever.

It's not too hard to see why Cometbus inspires such cult-like devotion. It's filled with the inspired goofiness of the best of punk rock culture. The writing is always sharp and concise, frequently brilliant and never pretentious. Beneath the gentle, self-deprecating humor, there is a sense of universal truth. But Cometbus doesn't hit you over the head with deeper meanings or get smug when you miss them. It is informal ethnography at an Oakland punk-rock group house, an understated On the Waterfront in an all-night coffee shop, a non-self-aware On the Road on caffeine instead of Benzedrine. You don't need a funny haircut or an MFA to love Cometbus.

To mark the twin milestones of Cometbus' (more or less) 50th issue and (more or less) 20th anniversary, Last Gasp has published a mammoth omnibus of Cometbus: Despite Everything (608 pages, $14.95). The pleasingly bulky volume collects the cream of Cometbus' first 20 years: some 600 facsimile pages of what longtime contributor Peter Montgomery describes as "streetscapes, awkward situations, alternative lifestyles...sleepless nights, and coffee." It's a must for anyone who can appreciate good writing.

Most of Cometbus' lively roster of contributors are well represented in Despite Everything. Several installments of Mike Hersh's beloved column "Cereal News" report the latest goings-on in the grocery store breakfast aisle circa 1986. "Cap'n Crunch took off his hat," Mike breathlessly reports, "and he's bald!" "Ask Kent" wrestles with questions both trivial and profound. From the punk-rock hotbed of Arcata, CA, come Skrub's dispatches telling of bums, struggling writers and late-night donut shops. And from an unnamed suburban town comes longtime Cometbus associate Paul's account of a truly sublime scavenger hunt. Things quickly got wonderfully out of hand as punks rampaged through the area in search of toilet pucks (10 points), bruises (20 points) and Pinto emblems (50 points). Highlights include one team stealing a school bell while classes were in session (50 points) while three others got new tattoos (50 points). Paul had no choice but "declaring everyone LOSERS for taking part in such a ludicrous farce."

Another prominent feature of Cometbus is Aaron's fascination with found papers: the half-baked rants, semicoherent letters and demented fliers littering urban streets and filling the "left-behind masters" boxes in copy shops. As a veteran copy-shop employee, dedicated street wanderer and longtime Berkeley resident, Aaron has no shortage of prime examples of this folk literature to reproduce here. But the prize of his collection is a stash scored from the "kook file" of the Washington state governor in the early 60s. Aaron proudly reprints the best of what he calls a "treasure trove of Kennedy-era cranks, crackpots, and would-be assassins." There's even a response. To a John Birch sympathizer and self-described "Student of Education," the governor suggested "some further self-education on your part is advisable" and enclosed a recommended reading list inviting further correspondence "if, after studying the contents of the recommended publications, you still hold the same opinions expressed in your recent letter."

But the real heart of Cometbus is Aaron's writing?the most popular issues are the ones he writes himself. The topic most closely associated with the zine is travel. As Cometbus fan Rachel R. puts it, "Aaron's a punk rock gypsy. I'm so jealous." Aaron likes nothing better than a long bus ride to some obscure, unfashionable city. When he gets there, he wanders through the streets, perhaps running into someone he knows or seeing some of the local street characters in action. He'll swing by a library to do a little reading, and spend endless hours in diners, writing and drinking alarming quantities of coffee. "I like being in bus stations and parks and just out in the street talking to old people, little kids, characters of a million places," he writes. Sometimes, he'll set up shop in town for months. Aaron has published issues of Cometbus during residencies seemingly everywhere from Benecia, CA, to Richmond, VA. Or he might be on the next bus, hoping the driver buys his story that his ticket only looks like it expired last year.

Unlike other travel writers, Aaron's trips aren't filled with the extremes of experience. Out watching "old men with no teeth carrying cases of cheap beer and walking their three legged dogs" in Richmond, getting stranded in Ithaca ("I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere but there were no holes") or checking out junk shops in Minneapolis ("Unfortunately it was 4:00 and the place had closed at 2:00. Ooops"), Aaron crafts evocative essays and concise vignettes that read almost like prose poems, filled with gentle, goofy humor and a sense of the universal. He can distill more experience and truth from a weekend trip to Des Moines on a forged Greyhound ticket than a bevy of postcollege backpackers can get with an entire year of unlimited air travel.

But also good is the material that comes from closer to home. Aaron's keen eye, gentle humor and deft style serve him equally well in writing about the punker side of life in and around Berkeley. Whether retracing the footsteps of the Symbionese Liberation Army's Berkeley days, telling the story of the city's underground press of the 60s and 70s or merely writing about hanging out, working in coffee shops or drifting through the rubble of the East Bay's industrial past, the results are equally sublime. Cometbus is peppered with memorable lines like, "Youthful exuberance and idealism is the perfect soundtrack for a vanful of washed up degenerates out for a night of crime," or "The only bad thing about having a girlfriend with lots of tattoos is that you can recognize her arm sticking out from under the sheets of someone else's bed."

One of Aaron's most inspired pieces is "Punk Rock Love Is...," a half-list/half-narrative tale of love among the mohawked. Punk rock love, Aaron writes, is "...her giving you 10 rolls of duct tape for your birthday" and "...thinking how she is maybe even better than the Ramones." It's an incredibly touching and well-crafted bit of writing. Its appeal transcended the Cometbus cult, reaching the offices of Harper's. As Aaron recounts in what he calls "the story of how I blew my big break," they wanted it for the "Readings" section. With a few changes. But after a few weeks of negotiations conducted from a phone booth in a BART station (the punk-rock house phone being disconnected), Aaron pulled the plug. The "few changes" meant cutting out half the piece, leaving it little more than "a goddamned shopping list." Aaron was not unreasonable. He understood why they wanted to leave out the one about "...fucking behind the dumpster down the street from the show." But other changes were absolutely out. He told the editor, "You can't have her sneaking out of the house unless you have her beating up skinheads too... One without the other and you've lost the whole point."

In one of his rare interviews, Aaron said, "With a really great band?it's the soundtrack to people's lives. And that's what I want to do with writing. You want to have it the soundtrack to their life." Now, with this publication, even people far removed from the zine ghetto?yes, even Harper's subscribers?can start to live their lives to the gentle yet frenetically seductive rhythms of Cometbus.