Avenue D: The Tankboy's Ride

 
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By Peter M. Ball © 2007

Peter is a perpetual student and occasional writer. He lives in Brisbane with a fiancé, two cats and a never-ending thesis.

This author resides in the Antipodes


 

Early AM, Sunday morning, sitting in the café watching the edge kids and the buildings. Everything tall and dark. Imposing shadows, the smell of coffee, sharp pins sticking through patches on the couch. The tank kids out in force tonight, glitter coated combat vehicles crashing through the post-revelry gridlock. You’re thinking about Pandora, a story she told you echoing through your head.

You’ve heard about the first tankboy, yeah? The guy from Oregon, almost sixteen years old. Not really young, but young-ish. Still on the edge of legal definitions. This kid flirts with the edge through his youth, a big fan of those retro-hall-of-fame styles. Has a real hard-on for the second round of Entropy Rock, the whole retro-deadboy craziness. ‘Cept there’s no deadboys left in Oregon anymore, no deadboys anywhere since 2019, so he’s got nowhere to hang. No Crew to run with. Nothing but this surplus Warsaw tank his grandfather left him in the will, a real back-vault item. Old-school hardware, at least 80% authentic, the real thing.

So there’s this kid, a tank, and no scene. No scene and this love of the retro-movements, DIY philosophy included. So he goes for a start-up, grass roots, building the following. Does this tank up in deadboy brandings, lots of black and anarchy and rust spots. Sound chips the entire thing so that it acts like a speaker cone, vibrating like the biggest fucker of a sound system you’ve ever seen. You know how the deadboy purists get on a roll about the bass sound? Well that sound ain’t nothing until you’ve heard it coming off a sixty-two ton steel soviet weapon of destruction. You put your ear up to the cannon and the bass is fired through your head like a nitro shot, heavy and hard and jagged as a motherfucker.

That’s where all this got started, all the tankboys and tankgirls. Of course, their machines got mass produced, turned out once the new scene took hold. Different metals mostly, too much plastic and not enough grunt. The sound quality, in the low end ‘specially, just goes to hell. The only way to get the real thing is to go old school, find yourself an authentic weapon of war. Otherwise there’s no point, you’re just the faded fragment of some retro-edger’s wet dream.

You can hear the story in replay, word for word, the purist scorn in her voice. The tanks scream down the Avenue, bombs and bass notes echoing off the buildings and the neon. You watch them go, drink your coffee, think to yourself: Rock’n’roll motherfuckers. Rock and Roll.

 

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