Find the podcast version of this post here.
Blind people do many things sighted people think we shouldn’t. Or, more accurately, we do many things sighted people believe, in abject horror, put us and others at imminent risk of death. We ride bikes alone. We hike mountain ridges alone. We surf. One of us climbed Mount Everest.
And sure, I, personally, have not done any of those things. I’m using the royal “we.” The very royal “we.” The divinely-appointed, despotic “we.”
But I have, in our grand tradition, done my fair share of things sighted people would at least deem inadvisable. Chief among them is the considerable time I spent in mosh pits at punk shows as a teenager and twenty-something.
I learned a lot from these experiences, and I now present my six most important pieces of advice for blind and low-vision people who want to mosh, and perhaps, cause some sighted people deep concern.
A quick note: currently, I am nearly completely blind. There is almost nothing I can use my vision for. And that’s in the “good” eye. The other eye is prosthetic, which isn’t good for anything except popping it out and absolutely terrifying people who didn’t know I have a prosthetic eye. But at the point in my life I was regularly going to these concerts, I had some useable vision. A very small amount. My prescription was a hefty +15, and it got me nowhere near 20/20. If you’re unfamiliar with these numbers, basically picture a guy with two snow globes on his face. Plus, he has a prosthesis, so one snow globe is decorative.
The subject of glasses brings me to my first piece of advice.
1. Put Your Glasses Away
Store them in a safe place. Like in a hard case in a zipped or buttoned pocket, or in a coat you can stash somewhere. There are simply too many ways for them to go flying.
I learned this one the hard way. I attended my first concert as a 14-year-old. It featured the extremely poppy punk band, New Found Glory. Nobody told me what to expect. The band came out. Everyone screamed. They started playing “Understatement,” an emphatically not understated song. The music was louder than anything I’d ever heard. Anything anyone had ever heard, I suspected. I was possibly about to acquire a new disability.
Immediately, the tightly-packed people around me started slamming into each other. Then, in a slow, surging wave, they closed in around me so tightly that all I could do was try to stay on my feet and pray I didn’t end up in the suffocating middle of an immovable mound of humans on the floor. Fifteen seconds or so later, the wave relented, and the people around me went back to pushing each other. This cycle repeated until I figured out this is just how it goes.
I was so caught up in learning this new collective behavior that I wasn’t thinking about my glasses. I don’t know how it happened. All of a sudden, they were just gone.
“Uh…” I thought as people continued shoving me in every direction, “Um…” What could I do? I had no answer. So I decided to forget about it for the time being.
The venue was small and I was near the front. The stage was not far off the ground. A few minutes later, between songs, I heard the front man, Jordan Pundik, say, “did someone lose their glasses?”
“No way,” I thought.
Pundik grabbed the glasses off the stage.
“These are huge!” He put them on. “Whoa! I can’t see shit through these.” He took them off and held them up. “Whose are these?”
There were instantly pretenders. Hands went up all over the crowd. He didn’t know what to do at first. Fortunately for me, his music was trendy at my school, and a couple dozen of us turned up that night. Also fortunately for me (in this instance, not in the instance of, for example, asking girls out) the snow globes were uniquely recognizable, even from a distance. I put my hand up, and many other hands pointed in my direction. Pundik got the message. A few seconds later, someone put them in my palm. They weren’t even damaged. It was a miracle.
Subconsciously, I took the wrong lesson from this, as 14-year-olds will. Probably, I assumed, nothing bad would ever happen to my glasses because they were more or less invincible. Possibly magic. I wore them in many more mosh pits. For a long time, they stayed on my nose, confirming the invincibility theory.
But I lost them again at the show of an Italian ska-punk band called Persiana Jones. I recovered them … when I stepped on them. I bent down among all the jumping and kicking feet to grab them. A lens was missing, the other was thoroughly scratched, and the frame was badly bent. They were done.
Did I change my behavior? Nope. But not long after, at an Anti-Flag show, another pair simply disappeared never to be heard from again. I finally started taking the necessary precautions, and you should too.
2. Learn Martial Arts
I am not kidding. It’s seriously helpful to understand in detail how and why a human body does or does not stay on its feet. Martial arts also teach you how to resist being moved when you can, how to stay upright when you can’t, and, under certain conditions, how to take down an entire group of obnoxious, drunk men with a single maneuver.
Once, at a Real McKenzies concert, about eight or ten jackasses decided to move in a sort of mobile group hug around the pit. They were a blob, laughing and yelling as they took people out left and right. Their collective weight made the force of their movement impossible to resist. The crowd was mad. Screaming at them, shoving them, flipping them off. The blob was violating the spirit of the pit, having fun at the expense of everyone else’s.
The first few times they crashed into my section of the crowd, I stopped, planted my feet, put two hands on them, and push back. Others around me did too. But eventually I noticed the blob was relying on us to slow their wild momentum. So, what if we took a different approach?
In third grade, I started wrestling. So from the age of eight, I was regularly training in the art of blindly finding ways to throw people on the ground. I waited for the next time the blob came my way. I was in exactly the right place. I heard and felt them tottering just past me on the left. I joined the hug, wrapping my arms around a couple guys. I took a big step with my left leg, hooking it around the front of the blob. Fortunately for me (in this instance, not in the instance of, for example, asking girls out), I was an exceptionally lanky teenager. I crouched a bit and planted my foot so far around the front guy that my leg was behind both his left ankle and right knee. Then I threw the whole group hard in the direction they were already moving.
“OH NO! AAAAAAAHHHHH!” they yelled as most of them tripped over each other and went down in a dogpile. I managed to get my foot out of there and stay on my feet. People cheered and clapped me on the back. It was the crowning achievement of my moshing career.
3. Tall, Blind People, Be Ready for Crowd-Surfers
Tall people are important fixtures in the pit. We are ladders to the second level. Not everyone wants to go up there though. The floor is not exactly finished. You never know when it’s going to give out, or how quickly it will drop you. The people who go up there typically have an underdeveloped fear of danger and pain. So they are not the most thoughtful or careful with their human ladders. If you’re both tall and blind, you will have no warning they’re coming. They will just start climbing you like a monkey, and it will be up to you to stay standing long enough for them to find the support they need and get moving. Unless of course you aren’t interested in helping them and drop them like a rock. But that would be a breach of a mosh-pit-tall-person’s duties. Do that around me, and I might have to give you the jackass-blob treatment.
My advice? Work on your core strength. Once, at a Rancid show, a girl next to me grabbed my shoulder and pushed down. Most times, this indicates I and another tall person on her other side are supposed to crouch a little so she can get enough leverage to push herself up and lay back on top of the crowd as we lift her legs.
But that was not what she wanted. There was no guy on the other side. She wanted me to do a full squat so she could jump up and perch her whole self on my one shoulder. I didn’t see it coming. My knees gave way and I sat on the ground hard, both of our weight falling on my spine. Somehow, I didn’t get hurt. I scrambled to my feet and tried again. Ready this time, it was no problem.
As she floated away, I felt a fabric strap hook around my neck. Then, several pounds of something pulled the strap taught. I grabbed at my neck, and found she had horseshoed me with her purse, not wanting to have it while surfing. I would have to find her when the show ended. But I have advice for locating sighted people in a crowd later, so we’ll come back to Purse Girl.
4. If You Must Smoke, Be Very Careful
I should note here that smoking is bad for your health and you should never do it. It doesn’t feel good or make you look cool or help people with confidence or serve as a coping mechanism. There are no upsides to address if you want to stop someone smoking. No, smokers are bad people who make bad decisions because of their innate badness, and we should viciously shame them accordingly.
Now that that’s out of the way, I used to smoke. Lots of people at punk shows smoke. But lighting cigarettes as a blind person can be difficult. The initial trick is touching the end of the unlit cigarette to the very top of the side of the lighter, just underneath where the flame comes out. Then move the lighter ever-so-slightly down and backward. Light, and inhale. It takes practice and you will ruin a few by lighting them somewhere other than the tip, but you’ll get it.
Two safety warnings. The first is for when you’re bumming a smoke off someone rather than removing one from the box where the cigarettes are neatly packed and facing the same direction. You MUST touch the end of the cigarette you’re going to put in your mouth to make sure it is the end you are supposed to be putting in your mouth. If it’s not you will suck loose tobacco and bits of various carcinogens straight down your throat while burning the filter to a crisp. Those things burn faster than you’d expect, let me tell you.
Second, be careful where you’re holding that thing. People are too close together at these shows. You can casually burn a hole in your friend’s T-shirt if you’re not paying attention. Learn from my mistakes.
5. Make Your Sighted Friends Get You Free Souvenirs
At smaller venues, bands will hand out guitar picks, set lists, and more to fans at the end of a show. This process is just not accessible. The only solution I have is to ask a sighted friend to get up there, be aggressive, and split the spoils.
The one time I got something on my own came down to luck and is therefore not repeatable. I was standing near the stage after a Toasters show when a drumstick hit me in the face. I knew immediately what happened. There are some things you can easily identify without vision when they hit you in the face. A foot-long, wooden stick is one of them. It fell on the ground, and the person next to me bent down to grab it.
“Um, no,” I thought. “Did that stick hit you in the face? No. It’s mine!”
Luckily, the stick bounced off my foot and clattered loudly on the floor, so I knew where it was and stepped on it hard. The other souvenir hunter silently stood up and walked away, acknowledging I had registered a legitimate claim.
6. Use Your White Cane as a Beacon for Sighted People
The show’s over, and you’ve been in the pit for about an hour. You have moved who knows how far from where you and your friends started. And your friends could be anywhere.
There is a simple solution. Remember, for sighted people, a several-foot-long, reflective, bright white stick is very visible. I just untie my cane from my belt, unfold it, snap the pieces into place, and hoist it high.
This trick is helpful in many scenarios. Have you ever stood around with a sighted person while they’re on the phone with another sighted person trying to find each other in a crowd? It’s so boring.
“Okay, if you’re facing the wall with all the doors, I’m between the bathroom sign and the big pillar. No, sorry, the other pillar. The gray one. You see three bathroom signs? Okay, uh… Oh, wait, actually just look for Sy’s cane. Yeah, he’s holding it up. He's waving it around a lot. Seems like he’s frustrated with us. Okay now he’s spinning it like he’s a helicopter, and I’m afraid he’s gonna hit someone. Now he’s, uh, pretending to fish for people in the crowd. He’s shouting ‘No, you can’t walk away! I’m reeling you in!” at some strangers. You see us? Good, please hurry.”
So back to Purse Girl. The show ended. She didn’t know where I was, or that I’m blind. But no matter. I clipped the strap of the purse to the elastic chord that comes out of the top of most white canes, and lifted it so the purse was 5 feet or so above the crowd.
She found me quickly, and realized what had happened. It was a blind person she had sat on and ridden like an elevator. And then that blind person had held her bag in a mosh pit for half an hour.
The revelation was, to her, hilarious and delightful. She told me, as people at punk shows often did, how cool it was that I was there. And she thanked me profusely. Very profusely. She was in fact so happy about the whole thing that she said there was an, um… let’s call it an activity she would engage in if she was not exclusively attracted to women. Having no idea how to respond, I was thankful when my brother showed up and relieved me of the need.
Conclusion
Now you have the tools you need to defy sighted people’s expectations through moshing. And isn’t it good to know you can shift perspectives about disability by joyfully screaming along to music and slamming your entire body into a crowd of people? Changing minds can be fun. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. Just tell sighted people that “we” mosh. I won’t hold it against you.