Free Death Grip by Matt Samet Page A

Academy.
    â€œSee that little motherfucker?” I heard someone say behind me as I punted through the door, eyes glued to the linoleum. “The one with the Mohawk? I’m gonna kick his ass!” The laughter rolled as he and his crew watched me shuffle by.
    Bitchin’.
    I continued along to the principal’s office to get my student ID. The first thing the principal told me, noticing the Charged GBH cutout on the back of my coat, was, “We don’t dress that way at Highland. Don’t wear that to school tomorrow.”
    Bitchin’.
    I’m not sure how many days passed before I stopped showing up, but it was no more than a week and change. A mutual friend of Jeff and mine, Josh, shared two classes with me. We all knew each other from skating at the Four Hills ditch, a smooth-sided concrete sluice in the foothills. Josh let me piggyback on his locker and showed me around school, but there was only so much he could do. Even when I was given an assigned locker, I kept my books in a duffel bag. I lugged the bag from class to class, wary of being in one spot, at the locker, in the halls. I would hold my bladder for as long as I could, terrified of heading solo into the bathrooms—the things you do during your first month at a penitentiary.
    â€œI, too, remember feeling that initial fear and shock when we arrived,” Jeff wrote in his e-mail, “almost like we’d just landed in prison. Right away it made quaint the little pranky, play-punk stuff we did at the Academy, like slam dancing in the auxiliary gym to a ghetto blaster.” The difference was, Jeff endured while I gave up. Those four times getting jumped coupled with Highland’s charged, cusp-of-violence atmosphere had conjured in me a critical mass of anxiety—a sick, nauseated bolus that coiled somewhere below my heart. Hypervigilant, scanning for threats, uncomfortable everywhere but home, I’d even taken to carrying a weapon, a butterfly knife with duct-taped handles. I could, in the safety of my own or a friend’s house, whip it out and click-click-click the blade into place with a hoodlum’s flourish of hand. But the likelihood of me stabbing anyone was less than zero. If confronted, I’d surely bobble the knife and see it plunged into my Adam’s apple.
    Lunchtime was the worst, as I knew almost nobody, didn’t want to wander with Jeff and the other punk kids off campus into the sleazy hinterlands near Central Avenue (old Route 66), and was unable to brave the cafeteria. During that hour the various tribes would break off to occupy dominions across the campus, and as fights erupted—seemingly a daily occurrence—the hordes sprinted to encircle and enthusiastically jeer each drubbing. I’d try to find some inconspicuous corner of lawn where I could choke down a sandwich, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing, slouched against my duffel bag, sidestepping the scuffles: a walking mark. The last straw was what I perceived as another hallway threat—this from the biggest, meanest punk-rock kid at school. I’d been heading to class with Jeff and thought I’d heard the guy say something menacing about my safety-pin earring, but it’s doubtful he was even talking about (or to) me, or maybe it was just a compliment. By then I was barely sleeping, locked in a dizzy gray-black fog that smudged day into night. I wanted to be a real punk rocker but didn’t have the chops to survive at the “cool school.” My perceptions were skewed; the bitchin’ punk-rock adventure had become psychological torture.
    My parents had always hated the punk-rock thing, and now I get it. I see kids today with black leather jackets and Mohawks, purple hair and Goth eye shadow, tattoos and piercings, and I feel for them. My folks dreaded being in public with me: the comments (“I’d never let my kid have hair like that,” “Look at that little faggot,” “Is