Persistence of Vision

Johnny Dodge is still alive.

The Punk City of my devise had multiple heroes and prominent characters, but only one closely identified with New Jersey. That was Johnny Dodge, born as Sam Dealey in Pineville, NJ, under straitened circumstances. We had the motorhead bent in common, and yet he wasn’t me. He took shape as a composite of blue collar guys I’d met and worked with in my home state. I’m sure if people looked for a template, they’d come to see Johnny Dodge as my own permutation of Bruce Springsteen. An obvious speculation perhaps but false. I got the look of him from this guy, who became a star just as I was fleshing out my main characters in the Southern Street saga. Happened across this video yesterday. I’d forgotten about, but it’s a perfect introduction of Johnny Dodge, the punk writer star of South Street.

Unlike H.S. dropout Springsteen, Billy Idol was a major in 

philosophy at Sussex University before turning punk musician.

He’s five years younger than I am, when Punk City was gestating in the months before the Winter War, he would still have been a teenager. And Billy Idol was definitely a punk, not a Seventies rocker like Bruce.

The South Street artist Gypsy Jackknife did a rendering from life:

He was everywhere in the saga of Punk City…

He participated in the Punk Debates that established the Rules of Punk Writing.

From the Bouts of Bouts in the Punk Testament

He was the first punk to be interviewed by ‘New Journalist’ Boz Baker as fringe media began sniffing around the secretive punk writer phenomenon.

Baker gets to see him perform at the Razor Café.

No outsiders know the extent of punk activities in the darkest hours of night. This from an account by punk writer wannabe Insect Brain…

He was there throughout, including the final deadly night of the Punk City Massacre, undertake by federal agents under the cover of the May 13 bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia:

Johnny Dodge helped write The Boomer Bible for the year it took to complete, and he signed the Epistle Dedicatory on April 19, 1981 (the same day St. Nuke and Alice Hate were murdered after the signing ceremony by Johnny Stamp)…

But Pubk City soldiered on through two more I’ll-fated kings and then a fourth, the surprising King Gypsy, who was one of the principal targets of the May 13 massacre conspiracy by Feds who were determined to acquire the punks’ quantum computing technology (still a federal black op obsession to this day). Only scraps of what happened on that night have so far been recovered by fringe archaeologist Mark Frelinger, who has conducted extensive excavations underneath Headhouse Square’s buried New Market Mall. These are all fragmentary accounts. The referenced “Snakeman” was Johnny Dodge…

The story was not over then. It’s not over now. Johnny Dodge is still alive. According to punk legend, he has established a realm called New Punk City and is lying in wait for a return to life in the open air. There is website that is collecting useful educational materials for the future. Undercover sources like the South Street Irregulars claim Johnny Dodge is still active and may have neen joined by the orphaned ward he fostered during a clandestine stint in the Pine Barrens years ago. Nobody knows anything for sure.

Click the pic for a taste of Quantum 19.

Is there more? Of course there’s more. But patience is its own reward…