This wave is loud and abrasive, music and feeling. What began as ripples in the form of a magazine and a small group of bands in a grimy East Village club is now a movement grabbing America and the world by force. 

Across the country, somewhere in a middle school in Berkeley, California, there is a kid documenting his own chapter of this new movement: stapling together scraps of paper, forming dispatches from ground zero, interviewing, assessing, and spreading the word. This movement, richly countercultural and angrily anti-establishment, is punk rock, and this middle schooler is Aaron Cometbus.

Cometbus was as much a documenter of punk in Berkeley as he was a part of it. He was a drummer in several bands, including Crimpshrine, and an active figure at 924 Gilman Street, the alternative music locus of the East Bay. He was also an early roadie and occasional drummer for the then-budding band Green Day. Though he hails from the West Coast, Aaron has resided in New York for over 20 years. 

Cometbus is a writer for PM Press, which owns Autumn Leaves Used Bookstore under Ramsey Kanaan, co-founder of PM, who Collegetown interviewed last year. Though Cometbus’s association with punk rock is undeniable, he has been a writer of a lot more than just the East Bay scene in which he grew up. This past Saturday, Cometbus presented 6 new books at Autumn Leaves Bookstore.

I do, however, remember the first time I bought one. It was a sweltering July Sunday, crystal clear blue sky. I was rummaging through the covers of a bookstore in Brooklyn called Troubled Sleep. Having nearly given up on finding anything, I made my way to the front, where a mysterious woman, drawn in black and white, stared back at me. Above her head in all caps was written: COMETBUS #59. Close by was another book, Downtown Local, its cover showing two mischievous kids scaling a water tower. In a rush to leave, I chose to buy both off of cover alone. These books were by Aaron Cometbus—the black and white woman, a 59^th issue of his zine, and the vagrant children, a collection of vignettes.
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On the subway there I decide reading something by Cometbus would be tacky, so I bring Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich’s rather depressing story about trying to live off of the American minimum wage only leaves me with a sinking feeling. Tackiness would’ve been better. I arrive and it’s nearly eight, dark and raining. I’m early, and the only other people in Purity are a big group, laughing and talking louder than I can think.

Aaron enters not a minute later than he said he would. He was right: taller than expected with dyed blonde spiked hair. Tall enough that he naturally sits sideways so there is room for me and him in one booth. Aaron settles in and gets mint tea. I order a cup of decaf and a cheeseburger, medium. Aaron: burger, no cheese, very well-done.

Having recently joined PM Press, Aaron has been reissuing and rereading his old work. I ask if this process is taxing. Aaron doesn’t think so. “You would think it would be a nightmare. You'd think you would read your own old self and be horrified,” he tells me. “That does happen and then you just don’t reissue that stuff.” His goal, he says, is to pick up the stuff that’s good and maybe even turn it into something new. He imagines that “if you could just do that for your life, you would be so pleased.” 

Downtown Local, one of his new books, is a collection of vignettes new and old to prove that New York is still as vibrant as it ever was. “There’s this proliferation of books that just want to talk about how the life of the city has gone and sapped and it’s over and you missed it,” he tells me. “And I have found the opposite.” Downtown Local is about New York, but it’s also about people and the strange and absurd ways they exist.

If Cometbus’ work is anything, it’s honest. In a short scene in Downtown Local, Aaron sits at a diner and observes the world around him. There’s an old professor with big headphones entrenched in his work and a waiter who’s rude yet motherly at the same time. The array of passing characters that spark the worlds Aaron creates are just people. Cometbus documents real people as they actually are, their vividness coming from life itself. “You’re trying to make these characters and you’re trying to imbue them with life.” He explains real people are weird, even impossible. “They’re at war with themselves,” he says. They have “these different qualities that no human could have, and yet we all do.”

Aaron is as methodical in speech as he is in writing. He speaks slowly, taking time in between words to let his thoughts linger in the air around him. When asked, Aaron offers no advice. Instead, Aaron brings up Bay Area punk photographer Murray Bowles, whose recently reissued book of photographs Aaron wrote the introduction for. “He was this older figure. He was always around, and the last fucking thing he would do was give you advice.” Aaron would like to emulate his fellow documenter of the East Bay punk scene, and not be another old person “dispensing questionable wisdom.” Aaron does say that people are down on perfectionism, and that there’s no point in aiming low. He insists, however, that this is not advice.

Much of Cometbus’ work is reflective. His book In China with Green Day?!! is a depiction of Aaron’s old friends Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool, and Mike Dirnt, who also happen to be the members of the incredibly popular band, Green Day. But it is really less about the band and more about a feeling of loss and conflict: Aaron seems to spend more time wandering the streets of South East Asia, observing the world around him and thinking about the past than he spends with the band the book is supposedly about. The provocative drummer Tre Cool exists alongside the eccentric Japanese cafe owner, the guy selling fake Green Day merch, and a security guy who probably just wants to go home. Everyone is equally vivid and equally placed in Aaron’s world. 

Conflict is central in Cometbus’ work. “It can be conflict between different people and it can also be conflict within these individuals,” Aaron explains. How can someone be “lovable” but also a “raging asshole?” According to Aaron, just because they are. 

Humor comes up a lot, usually without Cometbus doing very much. The humor in his work is that which already exists in the world, like a gaggle of old people giving an insane-looking Cometbus directions in a language he can’t decipher or a cafe owner who falls asleep on his job. When I ask about his approach, Cometbus quickly states he has none. 

As Aaron and I enjoy our burgers, our conversation goes in various directions. I talk about some of my own writing and projects for the mag. Then we talk New York diners and whether or not getting handed an unprompted check is a sure sign you should leave. We briefly discuss the collection Cometbus gave to Cornell that opened to the public in 2016, which includes a vast array of fliers, zines, posters, articles, and other materials related to the punk movement that he had accumulated over decades spent in the scene. Aaron encourages anyone to check it out, mentioning that he goes at least once a year, nostalgic for what feels to him like his childhood bedroom. Then I bring up the underground scene today. 

I want to know if Aaron is following anything new. But he admits he isn’t focused on what’s new in writing or music these days: “I'm a little more focused on the world that I was born into rather than exactly what's happening now.” He says he likes to discover, then gain perspective. He dreads the idea of being a “has-been” who was “there for two years and is writing their memoir.” Aaron is fond of things that are made to last, and whatever is going on right now might be a distraction if it’s not built to stay. A newly renovated squat-turned-community-center called ABC No Rio, which is set to finish reconstruction next year, is by far more exciting to him than any new music or upcoming writing.

Aaron and I finish our food, and I run out of questions to ask. I thank him for everything, and he leaves. After lingering a bit, I start home. The subway platform is quiet. I imagine that if Aaron is catching the same train as me, it wouldn’t be hard to spot him—with the blondness and the height and everything. But he’s not there. 

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There are only other people whom I look at just a little bit closer, trying to observe them, imagining them all as characters in a complex story. The world is more fun when every person you meet, every passerby, is not just a stranger or a threat. Then I picture the world as I often do, thinking about what it once was: how people change and stay the same. Other things happened in 1981, the year Aaron put out his first zine. 

MTV aired for the first time with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the British new wave band The Buggles; Bob Marley tragically died of melanoma; the first six men were diagnosed with what later was known as AIDS; and Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Thirteen-year-old Aaron probably didn’t imagine he would still be scrapping together dispatches 44 years later in a world exceedingly different but just as complicated and fucked up. But real life, like Aaron’s stories, often leaves you without clear answers. No guiding path to look to. Just observation. Just absurdity. These thoughts rumble in my mind like the approaching F train. As I step on, I stare down at my copy of Nickel and Dimed—regretting not bringing a Cometbus.