I was a late bloomer when it came to understanding the relief that music can bring to one’s sad and confused life. I was so pissed off and fed up that punk rock was practically begging me to come and find it, but it took me thirty years.

I don’t come from a musical family. When my dad was in kindergarten he sang so badly that the nuns told him not to sing. He got bored and went home.

I sang a lot in my early childhood, because it was the only way I could stop myself from throwing up on car trips on Italy’s winding roads. When I was maybe four years old, I fell asleep in the car after eating a burnt toasted ham and cheese sandwich, and woke up as I was vomiting cheese and blackened bits of bread all over the front of my pretty dress. I never slept in the car again. I stuck with my and my sister’s tuneless harmonizing, at loud volume because only then was I fairly certain not to puke. My mom had taught us Italian mountain songs that she had learned while hiding out in the Alps during World War II. My favorite mountain song went: “Up there, on the Matterhorn, there are stones. They are mattresses for us, the Alpini. And if I am pale, like an old rag, I don’t want any doctors, only jugs of sour wine.” (The Alpini are Italy’s special force of mountain soldiers.) My young repertoire ranged from Italian mountain songs to tunes from the Mary Poppins Disney movie, in Italian, to my favorites from a yearly children’s singing festival called Lo Zecchino D’Oro. (The Gold Coin. Or, as my boyfriend Bill, years later, dubbed it, The Golden Zucchini.)

Our family’s record collection, besides the Zecchino D’Oro 45s and the Italian soundtrack to Mary Poppins, consisted of a few singles by Nat King Cole and Domenico Modugno (who sang “Volare”), and the 60s jingle of a hair products company, a freebie that had come with my mom’s hair spray. (It was kind of mod and stylish.)

In the fifth grade, I was in love with the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. (My mom was embarrassed when I went into the record store and asked for “Il disco di Gesu Cristo” — akin to asking for “The record of Christ our Savior”) But for the most part I had no idea what music I was supposed to like. I only knew that some songs could grab you, like the plaintive soulfulness of Mary Magdalen’s songs in JCS. In junior high, some bands were cool and others were not, and I couldn’t tell which was which.

When I was in high school, there was disco, which as far as I could tell had something to do with John Travolta’s muscular dancing prowess and gritty dreams. I could appreciate what was appealing about, uh, John Travolta, but the monotonous dance beat and the stupid lyrics of disco were mystifying. And then there was the Dukes of Hazzard aesthetic of rock and roll. Greasy guys with long beards sang about their cheating hearts, rode Harleys, and drank a lot of Jack Daniels. If as a teenager you’re supposed to find some kind of personal communion and a release for your angst in popular music, ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd weren’t doing it for me any more than le freak, ces’t chic.

I had a brief, stormy love for the Dead Kennedys in college. Bill, my then boyfriend, had their albums, and they had a powerful fascination for me. But I couldn’t have said why, and I certainly wouldn’t have admitted to it. They seemed so angry and bitter, and I was too caught up trying to be what I thought I was supposed to be to realize how angry I was too. If I had told anyone I liked the Dead Kennedys, it would have only sounded like an outrageous lie, like I was trying to make myself look cool when it was so hopelessly untrue. I went about my life fretfully, always late with assignments, and fearful that I would be uncovered as the fraud that I was for painting myself as studious. I hated school and I hated everything. The Dead Kennedys were my secret soundtrack. I was a stealth punk.

But I couldn’t exactly embrace the Dead Kennedys, or any punk band. They didn’t fit into my world. I was a misfit and outsider too, but a misfit in a floppy velvet beret with a big black ribbon on it, worn over a hangdog expression of self-doubt. Having your life saved by rock and roll was and is an appealing romantic notion, but rock and roll wasn’t extending itself to save me from anything. It was miles away from me. It held me at a distance, possibly in contempt.

When I was thirty, I saw a band on TV one night. There was something about them that was startling and perfect. They had the rawness and aggression of the Dead Kennedys, but with delicious, happy melodies, and there was an underlying sweetness and generosity about them that pulled you in instead of putting you off. They were a trio of scruffy little boys with loud guitars and a dizzying amount of energy. The band was called Green Day. They had just released an album called Dookie.

Loving Green Day, and I loved them with a goofy grin on my face and bits of drool hanging from my mouth, was one more way in which I was an alien in my own world. At the time, Bill was an artist-in-residence at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The tragically-hip artist types we hung out with only listened to difficult and off-putting music that sounded like pianos crashing down the stairs. (And onto people’s heads, apparently, which would explain the agonized screams.) Our two closest friends, also artists, were not so pretentious, but they were grownups. Green Day was sticky bubble gum to them. I was alone with my undying love and devotion.

It was impossible to explain why this album called Dookie, whose cover was decorated with cartoon drawings of dogs throwing poop, spoke to me and deeply touched me, like nothing else I had come across in my thirty years. (Back then, I didn’t know that “dookie” was shit. I thought it might have something to do with “nookie.” Alas, it was even more embarrassing and confusing than I knew.)

I would go down to the bookstore and scour the shelves for magazines with Green Day’s name on the cover, and whenever I found one I clutched it to my chest like a holy relic. But if the clerk pointed to Green Day’s picture on the cover and made some comment, something like, “Wow, these guys are goofy looking huh?” (which actually happened), I acted like I had no idea what she was talking about. I’m a fan of uh, Jewel. Yeah. Shut up.

I didn’t see other Green Day fans in the flesh until I went to Lollapalooza. Thousands of amped-up, sweaty-faced teenage boys, as far as the eye could see, were thronged before the stage, vibrating with anticipation. The instant the first note hit, a churning mosh pit broke out. Bill, who was a weary veteran of a Dead Kennedys show or two, had to pull me bodily out of the melee, like dragging a drowning victim from the ocean. At a slightly safer distance, I watched Green Day on that enormous stage: three skinny boys making a huge, intoxicating sound. Billie Joe was right there. Right. There. Shhh, I’m whispering. He was right there, yelling “Fuck you!” Yesss, I love you too. I mean, fuck you! Punk fucking rock. I forgot to breathe.

I went to see a lot of other bands after that, at scuzzy little clubs with graffiti on the walls and beer spilled on the floor, where Green Day would have played a few years earlier, and, oh, I might have seen them if only I had known they existed. Other punk bands had some of the same magic as Green Day, and going to shows was like a suspension of reality for a few hours of wonder, but none of them were pure love like Green Day.

I started reading punk zines, like MaximumRocknRoll, and I instantly loved them, with all their messy seams showing and their chaotic stupidity and brilliance all hanging out like dirty, filthy laundry happily flapping out on the line, unwashed. I started to understand why punk rock elicited such glazed-eyed love.

I had read about MaximumRocknRoll in an article about Green Day in Rolling Stone. Once I picked up my first copy at the local record store (who knew, it was right there all along), I read every grungy issue crowded with words and smudged photos, from cover to cover, including the ads and all the music reviews for records I would never buy. “This record is catchy, but it’s way too vanilla for my taste. I like a little bit of piss on my ice cream.” “These guys turned the gain up to eleven and covered the amp in snot, vomit, and broken glass.” Everything in the zine was written with humor, righteousness and love. Except when it came to Green Day, whom I loved with all my overflowing heart and MRR hated with a contemptuous and seething passion.

But my new-found love of punk rock only made my day-to-day more confusing than ever. Everything that was not punk rock seemed pale and disappointing to me, at best, or fake, smug and dishonest. Punk rock was full of heady ideals, but what could I do with them except guard them as a secret treasure? It was hard enough dealing with the bullshit without a growing chasm of differing perception and values between myself and the everyday I had to exist in.

I was working at a greeting card and stationery store, after having left my gift-shop job at the museum for an upscale store that was frequented by the same snooty shoppers. Whenever I walked into the store, after having just blasted The Pist in my car (the band that penned the timeless line “customers are total shit”), I felt like killing the ladies who complained to me that the invitations they were looking for had to be periwinkle, not robin’s-egg-blue like the ones that only someone as benighted as I was would think to show them.

After ringing up every purchase, I would say “Thank you” on autopilot, and wonder when I would slip up and say “Fuck you” instead. I actually did that once, when a customer had thrown me over the edge of my fragile composure. But I didn’t get fired. The store owner was a cool, offbeat woman, a former scholar who had given up her Ph.D. program because of her health, and had opened up a store to keep busy. Her reaction when we clerks had an altercation with self-important, entitled customers was to tell them, “If you’re going to harass my employees, I don’t need your business.” She was punk rock.