Free Death Grip by Matt Samet

“turf.” It all felt slowed and unreal, like some terrible dream. The white glare of a streetlight painted us in a surreal glaze.
    â€œI don’t care about turf, you stupid motherfucker!” he said. “Now give me your skateboards!”
    None of us were older than fourteen and we were a gaggle of whitebread wimps; this guy was eighteen or older, a veteran of the streets. We began backing away just as he brought the pipe down on tall, skinny Owen’s head hard enough to shatter the plastic. Owen dropped his board and we fled east through the parking lot, looking back over our shoulders as the metalhead followed, knife hand pumping beside him, eyes flashing. When we reached a cross street, I looked back again to see that he’d returned to the lot to inspect Owen’s skateboard. The guy had gotten what he came for, in that Albuquerque way.
    I still replay that incident—and the others—in my head. Four of us with skateboards: If we were “real” men, why didn’t we just gang up and clobber the guy? Instead of standing there like a useless clod, I picture teenage me raising my pink Alva skateboard, raking the trucks across his face, staving in his flaring nostrils with a jab of the board’s tail, and then taking up his knife and exsanguinating him. He lies on the pavement, the PVC pipe clutched to his chest, holding his other hand to a burbling, hissing neck wound. He’s fucked with the wrong guy—the guy who will not be a victim. The guy who claims personal power and who chooses fight, not flight. In the days that followed, I replayed the scene that way so many times, I began to feel like I had committed a murder. Feeling sharp pangs of guilt, I’d check the papers to see if a body had turned up or the police were looking for suspects.
    But it didn’t happen that way, not that time and not the others. Not ever, because I’d been raised not to fight; I’d been raised to flee.
    *   *   *
    H alfway through freshman year, I transferred to Highland High, a public, inner-city high school where most of Albuquerque’s core punk-rock kids attended and where, rumor had it, you could dress however you wanted, smoke cigarettes out front, and skate all over the surrounding streets. By then I was a full-bore wannabe punk rocker with a safety pin in my left ear, black combat boots, a long dark-blue trench coat, and a gelled-up Mohawk. To the back of the coat, I’d pinned a bit of T-shirt I’d cut away: cover art for the punk outfit Charged GBH’s album City Baby’s Revenge . It showed a baby wearing a spiked collar and with blood dripping from his mouth who’d taken a hatchet to rats and hung his stuffed-dog toy from a noose in the nursery. I couldn’t have stood out more conspicuously. I was a one-man lightning rod at Highland. I’d emigrated with friend and fellow Academy expatriate Jeff, our transfer part of what he, nearly a quarter-century later in an e-mail, would eloquently recall as a “kamikaze brothers’ pact,” our hopeful launch into a “bitchin’ new punk-rock adventure at the cool kids’ school” as we left behind the Academy bubble.
    Bitchin’.
    Mistake. Highland was prison brutal, the halls echoing with the catcalls of the toughs, the rules, boundaries, and allegiances not immediately clear to us newcomers.
    Bitchin’.
    That first morning I came in through the northeast entrance in my trench coat and “turd-burglar” sweat pants, which had ripped along the seat and which I’d safety-pinned back together, though you could still see my skivvies. I had no idea that each doorway and hall belonged to a certain clique, and that it was best to be selective about where you entered. The halls were jammed, dimly lit, a flood of backs and faces and arms and legs, teeming, vari-ethnic cadres, and booming shouts—a florid chaos so unlike the quiet, orderly