Teenage Refuge

G kids, artsy kids, crusty kids. The kids your mother warned you about. Skaters, metal heads and pot heads, skins and straights. Teenage renegades. Freaks, geeks, boozers, and losers. The outcasts. One would think that there is no such place that would harbor such a variety of lost, adolescent souls. But in this life, full of gusty winds and rocky shores, a safe harbor is necessary for survival. And so the souls congregate under the roof of the Phoenix Theater, completely ignorant yet totally aware of the wide variety of beings sharing their space.

So gather round, boys and girls. Step right up and take a seat. The couches are more comfortable than the stiff ones at home, you notice, open to any and all characters. Tagged, ripped, and torn, these couches and yourself have a lot more in common than you think. Nothing but used sofas, passed up for those new pleather reclining arm chairs, plucked from the dumpster, and situated at their new home, the Phoenix.

You sit on the squishy cushions, squeezed between your favorite buddies, and you listen to the ambience. Back and forth, back and forth, skaters and bikers move like pendulums from ramp to ramp, dragging their wheels across the worn wooden floors, creating a monotonous, kerthunking beat to every word that’s said. Boards and bikes create a heartbeat that pumps sweet life into the building.

And it’s true, the building is full of life; life is coming out of the cracks, seeping under the doors and out of the floorboards. The Phoenix is like an organism itself, a firebird that quite literally rose from the ashes, after being set on fire twice in its lifetime. The different rooms and components to the place are like different body parts, each one with a definitive purpose, each one just as necessary as the next.

One could say that the mouth of the Phoenix is the stage. You study it now, looking past the skaters and up at the black backdrop aligned with huge light blue and pink pillars designed for a posh opera house. During shows, those on the stage sing, scream, laugh, and let their creative juices flow from the mouth and to the open ears of the crowd. Inside the audience music is not only heard, but felt too, buzzing against every cell in one’s body. Each person doesn’t just have ears, but they are ears: they together have become a mass who thrive to hear the creativity spilling from that beautiful mouth, the stage, and each step of the mosh like a beating drum, monotonous like the skateboards’ beat that took place in the same spot just hours before.

Behind the stage there is a practice room intended for jam sessions. The walls, of course, are tagged with signatures and notes left from bands that had graced the room before you got there, marking their slot in the Phoenix’s history. The floors and walls are composed of cold concrete, the air smells stale, and the ceiling is covered with flimsy pipes. None of this matters, though, because the only matter of importance is the music you create from those strings, through that chord, and out of the amplifier. Music, like air, is vital. When seated in the close quarters of the practice room, there is more music in the air than oxygen – and so we’ve discovered our architectural lung.

Out of the jamming room, up the stone steps and a little to the left, you can find yourself a chipped wooden ladder. Few have climbed up the thing, as it is said to lead to haunted rooms, but some know better. The ladders continue their way up, as you pass creepy dark hideaways, anything once visible now covered by perpetual shadow. These rooms are like the back of your mind, where dark secrets lie behind corners and under the ladder rungs. Although rarely visited and for the most part ignored, both the secret rooms and your secret thoughts are part of what makes a person whole, and so it is with the Phoenix.

Down again, into the main building, past the stage and the skaters and the familiar faces sitting on abandoned seats, up a ramp and to the right, and you’re in the lobby. You are greeted by another set of couches, and you sit down, sink in, and observe. You can see that every inch of the place is written on, painted, sprayed and scratched. Its walls, like the rest of the building, are chaotic, beautiful, and intricate murals or oranges, greens, blues and reds, swirling together, forming words and creatures, memorials and designs. A shiny black piano in the lefthand corner beckons to you; its familiar feeling keys are almost like home to your fingertips. There is a large opening straight ahead, like a window to the stage and pit, the ledge just wide enough for a group of teenage onlookers to stop and watch a jam session or small show. The top is worn from so many doing so, for it is a perfect perch. The lobby, truly the eyes of the Phoenix, has seen countless ledgends, from Harry Houdini to Primus to Metallica. All have been viewed from far away, if one would choose, because the lobby intuits your need for invisible observation.

In the Phoenix there is not a wall that is uncovered from bursts of color, an overwhelming amount of art at every turn. The outside of the building is rather bland: it is covered in a thick layer of robins egg blue paint, adorned with metal benches and ragamuffins, sprinkled with a kid playing an instrument here and there. The place’s outer skin is not nearly as alluring as its inside, where all of the ingenuity and talent is splattered on the walls, in no particular pattern or fashion. Every wall is covered from top to bottom in paint layered over more paint, a 3D mural in constant flux. Just like you and me, the Phoenix is continuously changing, from opera house to movie theater to rock music venue, so it has seen countless visionaries and musical duds. The Phoenix is wise, if it is possible for a building to be so. The wisest in Petaluma, one could say, because its edges are raw and its intentions true. The building is judged by its outer skin, not seen for its wondrous insides and ideals, unless you take the time to get to know it.

Those of us who have done so have found home and refuge in the theater. If the Phoenix is built like a being, then the kids who go there are surely its soul, and it mirrors the life we give it.