The List at Pool Bar: Being Wanted in 1991

By Andy — 2026-08-09 — Literary News

The doorman had the clipboard. He had the stamp, the rubber kind, the purple ink that cost a band five dollars per person if you weren't quick with David's sweating hand and a practiced press.

That was the economy of 1991 at Pool Bar, a basement venue not far from Bleecker and Broadway. Fifteen-year-old James Spooner walked up to the entrance with something most people don't remember mattering much when they were young: he was on the list. His essay in Literary Hub traces the weight of that moment—not the weight of authority or cool, but the weight of being invited. Someone onstage wanted him inside.

This matters because Black punks in 1991 were not a given thing, despite what the history books now make it seem. Spooner would go on to make a documentary called *Afro-Punk* in 2003 interviewing a hundred Black kids scattered across the country, each one of them finding a genre their neighborhood told them didn't belong to them. But before that film, before the festival that grew out of it, there was just this: a kid in a basement, holding a name on a piece of paper.

What strikes you reading this essay is how granular Spooner gets about belonging. Not abstract belonging. Real belonging—the kind that lives in panic, in the racing heart, in the three seconds where you wonder if the doorman forgot your name.

New York was brutal in those years. Spooner's forthcoming memoir *It Starts with Anger*, published by Pantheon in August 2026, is about escaping extremist racism in Southern California only to land in a city crushing under AIDS, crack, and racial tensions so raw the Crown Heights riots were still recent memory. The punk scene itself was overwhelmingly white. Being Black in that room was not a liability exactly, but it wasn't nothing either.

The genius of the essay is that it doesn't sentimentalize this. He doesn't make it a victory lap. Instead, he watches his own teenage self try to game the system with David, stealing stamps, before catching himself with his own invitation. The doorman stamps him. He goes downstairs. "Five bucks; who are you here to see?" continues behind him.

This is how movements start, sometimes. Not with a manifesto. With someone checking a list.