Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the valium and the Strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.

Someone peeled back the surface of our town, and the whole country saw what was underneath. By Easter 1980 we were creepier than Amityville.

I have a theory about suburbs,” Grace mused. “...it all happens here, all the great crimes, kept hidden until they’re too loud to contain. Quiet perversions, quite substance abuse, quiet violence, quiet art. We just don’t hear about it until something big happens. You mark my words – in one of those houses down there is a man with a needle in his arm, fucking a dog whilst composing the greatest poetry since Homer.

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I’d rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini’s water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity.

Suburbs are getting suburbs at this point.

They were free to be what they wanted to be, and what they wanted to be was nothing.