In October 1991, The Workman Publishing Company of New York, NY, released for sale a fat paperback volume called The Boomer Bible. The work appeared under my byline, although two separately attributed prefaces described its origins in different terms, suggesting that it may have been created by a mysterious cultlike community of ‘punk writers.’ The content of the book further confused the issue: depending on how one interpreted its three testaments, authorship of The Boomer Bible could be ascribed to the punks or to the disciples of one ‘Harry,’ a self-proclaimed anti-messiah and international drug czar. The publisher compounded the confusion by refusing to copyright the book as either fiction or nonfiction, preferring to equivocate with an ambiguous ‘humor’ listing that shed no additional light but did manage to misdirect critics in interesting ways.
The truth—if the word has any meaning in this case—is even more confusing. My byline was itself a fiction, of course, a means of circumventing the mysteries by simply folding them into the work. I agreed to the charade because behind the second preface’s pseudonymous byline stood a real reporter who was investigating the punk phenomenon at considerable personal risk. ‘Frank Frelinger’ thought it important to provide readers with some hint of the truth without disclosing his identity, and I found his reasons compelling.
        In the eight years since publication of The Boomer Bible, my own interest in the story has grown, fed by the unusual events described above and by a burgeoning cottage industry of ‘punk research.’ For reasons that should become clear in this book, the corps of researchers has come to include social anthropologists, literary and fine arts scholars, computer technologists, physicists, parapsychologists, archaeologists, New Age devotees, private detectives, and the inevitable legion of amateur sleuths.
        Has the truth been uncovered by eight years of effort? If the answer must be definitive, then the answer is no. Various ‘truths’ have been proposed, but each of these tends to contradict the others, and none can claim absolute authority because no single research perspective has yet had access to all the extant materials. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the nature of the truth about the punks seems to depend upon who is looking at them. Technologists favor technological explanations, occultists occult explanations, literary scholars literary explanations, and so on.
        Thus, I must report the mystery remains. Why, then, is there any value in publishing a book on the subject and, in particular, this book as it has been compiled from controversial extant manuscripts?
        There is, in the first place, a considerable appeal in unsolved mysteries. When these exist in the realm of real life, the course of the investigation tends to unfold over an extended period of time, sometimes in innumerable works. How many books have been written, for example, about the Great Pyramid, the Shroud of Turin, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the disappearance of Amelia Earhardt, and the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis? In most cases, the final chapter of such books summarizes a theory meant to be persuasive, even if the tone in which it is presented can be anything from tentative to triumphant. Individual theories may be attractive, but viewed from a broader perspective they do not entirely account for the popularity of this vein of literature. In fact, truly conclusive theories are the enemy of audience interest because an indisputable solution writes ‘finis’ to the story.
        This suggests that a major part of the appeal of an enduring mystery consists in its identity as a story, an identity that is somewhat at odds with the fiction writer’s definition of that term. Consider, for example, that the real-life mystery’s longevity depends upon the audience’s willing suspension not of disbelief but its opposite. When belief is finally accorded to a particular line through the field of evidence, the attraction diminishes, just as it does when the killer is unmasked in an Agatha Christie novel. It can never again be read with quite the same degree of eager suspense. In comparison, Atlantis is a story that sprawls beyond the fiction writer’s ‘line.’ Because it keeps changing with each new perspective that is added to the sum, and ultimately there can be no meaningful separation between the original events (whatever they were) and the accumulating layers of interpretation, speculation, and imagination. Thus, Atlantis is a story that is still being written, still unfolding, still being created with each new writer and each new reader. Sadly, though, we are rarely given the chance to gain any kind of unified glimpse of this larger story. We are condemned to experience it in serial form, as individual books are published, with very little in the way of hints about ‘our story thus far.’
        The punk writer phenomenon is, in its very opaqueness, an opportunity to obtain just such a glimpse of a story that refuses to crystallize around a single line. One looks in vain for incontestable facts, irrefutable theories, and uncontradicted solutions. Yet the timeframe in which the available evidence has been amassed is highly compressed, enabling us to observe the unfolding of the larger story more easily than we can with Atlantis or the Great Pyramid.
        It may be, of course, that next year or the year after, new evidence will also dissipate the mystery of the punk writers of South Street. But such an outcome is unlikely unless the available materials are more widely shared and the current theories are permitted to do battle with one another across disciplines. The degree of specialization, fragmentation, and secrecy in the current research effort has been extreme to this point, and it is my hope that the admittedly controversial materials compiled in this book will prod the recalcitrant gatekeepers of the so-called ‘Cream King Trove’ to share their treasures more openly with the general public. There are few mysteries that do not benefit as much from the occasional floodlight as from the more usual line of spotlights.
        If the arguments in favor of publishing a book about the punk writer phenomenon are valid, then why hasn’t one been published by one or more of the professional researchers in the field? It is true that several of them speak darkly of the danger of doing so, and there is cause for concern in the deaths that are circumstantially connected to the research effort, but even paranoia is not universally shared by punk devotees. Articles and essays have existed for years in draft form, never submitted for publication, and several full-length books have been outlined, written (as this volume should demonstrate), and even printed without reaching the shelves of bookstores. If fear were the only inhibiting factor, the silence would be more complete. Thus, there must be some other reason for the lack of publicity surrounding a subject that has been so determinedly pursued by so many different constituencies.
        Conspiracy theories are tempting but (with sincere apologies to my colleague Frank Frelinger) peculiarly difficult to prove. I am inclined to consider more prosaic reasons for this unbroken but not undisturbed silence. And there is a likely candidate. It is that the punk story does not lend itself easily, particularly in a first approach, to any single line. One could pick from among dozens—the literary history of the rise and fall of the punk–writing movement; the dark fairy tale of a daemonic troupe called the Shuteye Train; the pagan myth of the cult of the ka; the tragedy of St. Nuke the King; the star-crossed romance of St. Nuke the man and Alice Hate the erotic demi-goddess; the heroic myth of Johnny Dodge, strong right arm of four flawed kings; the allegorical fable of a punk messiah called Doctor Dream who may have come and gone in the twilight realm between dream and reality; the military chronicle of one gang warring against many in a monstrous underworld of drugs and urban decay; the science fiction saga of a breakthrough technology and its protean impact on a community; the conspiracy thriller of a deep-cover federal sting operation gone murderously wrong; the hardboiled detective story of the quest to recover the lost treasures of Punk City; the scientific odyssey of the continuing attempt to divine the meaning of those treasures; the philosophical riddle of a documented urban subculture that sprang (apparently) from nothing and returned (apparently) to a state so close to nothing that it cannot be proven beyond doubt to have existed; and perhaps an infinity of others, ranging from epistolary autobiographies and surreal ‘coming of age’ narratives to stillborn journalistic ‘exposés’ and scholarly analyses of individual cultural artifacts. Yet to choose any one of these as the primary focus so distorts the whole that even the preferred perspective is rendered meaningless. In some unfathomable sense, the punk writer phenomenon seems to contain all stories or none. This, I believe, rather than any nefarious plot, explains the high incidence of aborted publishing attempts.
        And so, it would appear, someone must have the courage to be first and, if need be, play the fool for those who will rise to refute his heresies. It is in this context that I offer this incomplete and frequently frustrating documentation of the punk writer phenomenon, despite the many reservations I have about the facts, the evidence, and the theories put forward in the pages following. Spilt Ink consists of three separate books, each representing an individual point of view based on the limited access each writer/compiler has had to source materials and manuscripts. Not surprisingly, the viewpoints and inferences differ, sometimes to the point of total disagreement. Such disagreements notwithstanding, I salute Messrs. Davey, Naughton, Frelinger, and all the others who have dared to delve into the mysteries of South Street. It is my hope that readers of Spilt Ink will join in the salute when they start to comprehend the size and complexity of the puzzle. And if the three different perspectives on punk presented here provoke more questions than they do answers, readers may take some solace from the fact that  ‘Volume 2’ of Spilt Ink is already being planned. Until then, I believe we may all profit by pondering the elusive moment of beginning.