Because the suicide pact in Bergenfield seemed to be a symptom of something larger, a metaphor for something more universal, I moved on from there to other towns. For almost two years I spent my time reading thrash magazines, seeing shows, and hanging out with “burnouts” and “dirtbags” as well as kids who slip through such labels….
From the beginning, I decided I didn’t want to dwell too much on the negatives. I wanted to understand how alienated kids survived, as well as how they were defeated. How did they maintain their humanity against what I now felt were impossible odds? I wondered. What keeps young people together when the world they are told to trust no longer seems to work?
What motivates them to be decent human beings when nobody seems to respect them or take them seriously? …
Joe’s1 been up for more than a day already. He’s fried, his clothes are getting crusty, and he points to his armpits and says he smells (he doesn’t). He’s broke, he misses his girlfriend. He says he can’t make it without someone. His girlfriend dumped him last year. He’s gone out with other girls, but it’s not the same. And he knows he can’t win in this town. He’s got a bad name. What’s the use. He’s tried it at least six times. Once he gashed at his vein with an Army knife he picked up in Times Square. He strokes the scars.
Tonight, he says, he’s going to a Bible study class. Some girl he met invited him. Shows me a God pamphlet, inspirational literature. He doesn’t want anyone to know about this, though. He thought the Jesus girl was nice. He’s meeting her at seven. Bobby comes back in the room with Nicky, looking for cigarettes.
Later in the living room Joe teases Doreen. Poking at her, he gets rough. Bobby monitors him: Calm down, Joe. We are just sitting around playing music, smoking cigarettes. Fooling around. Did you see those Jesus freaks down at Cooper’s Pond the other day? Randy laughs. Nicky tells Joe to forget it. Jesus chicks won’t just go with you; you have to date them for a long time, pretend you’re serious about them. They don’t fuck you right away: It’s not worth the bother.
Suicide comes up again. Joan and Susie have razor scars. The guys make Susie show me her freshly bandaged wrists. I look at her. She’s such a beautiful girl. She’s sitting there with her boyfriend, Randy, just fooling around. I ask her quietly: Why are you doing this? She smiles at me seductively. She doesn’t say anything. What the fuck is this, erotic? Kicks? Romantic? I feel cold panic.
Nicky slashed his wrists when his old girlfriend moved out of state. His scars are much older. I motion to him about Susie. Discreetly he says: It’s best just to ignore it, don’t pay too much attention. Throughout the afternoon I try every trick I know to get Susie to talk to me. She won’t. She’s shy, quiet; she’s all inside herself.
And I really don’t want to push too hard. The kids say they’re already going nuts from all the suicide-prevention stuff. You can’t panic. But I have to figure out if this is a cult, a fad, a hobby, or something I’m supposed to report to the police. I’m afraid to leave.
I wonder, do they know the difference between vertical and horizontal cuts? Don’t their parents, their teachers, the cops, and neighbors see this shit going on? Maybe they feel as confused as I do. Maybe this is why they didn’t see it coming here, and in the other towns. You can’t exactly go around strip-searching teenagers to see if they have slash wounds….
After the suicide pact, parents complained that the kids really did need somewhere to go when school let out. The after-school activities were limited to academics, sports, or organized school clubs. Even with part-time after-school jobs, a number of the town’s young people did not find the conventional activities offered by the town particularly intriguing.
But according to established adult reasoning, if you didn’t get absorbed into the legitimate, established routine of social activity, you’d be left to burn out on street corners, killing time, getting wasted. It was impossible for anyone to imagine any autonomous activity that nonconforming youth en masse might enjoy that would not be self-destructive, potentially criminal, or meaningless.
Parents understood that the lack of “anything to do” often led to drug and alcohol abuse. Such concerns were aired at the volatile meeting in the auditorium of Bergenfield High School. It was agreed that the kids’ complaint of “no place to go” had to be taken seriously. Ten years ago, in any suburban town, teenagers’ complaints of “nothing to do” would have been met with adult annoyance. But not anymore.
In Bergenfield, teenage boredom could no longer be dismissed as the whining of spoiled suburban kids. Experts now claimed that national rates of teenage suicide were higher in suburbs and rural areas because of teen isolation and boredom. In Bergenfield, adults articulated the fact that many local kids did hang out on street corners and in parks looking for drugs because things at home weren’t too good.
Youngsters have always been cautioned by adults that the devil would make good use of their idle hands. But now they understood something else: boredom led to drugs, and boredom could kill. Yet it was taken for granted that if you refused to be colonized, if you ventured beyond the boundaries circumscribed by adults, you were “looking for trouble.” But in reality, it was adult organization of young people’s social reality over the last few hundred years that had created this miserable situation: one’s youth as wasted years. Being wasted and getting wasted. Adults often wasted kids’ time with meaningless activities, warehousing them in school; kids in turn wasted their own time on drugs. Just to have something to do.
So by now whenever kids hang out, congregating in some unstructured setting, adults read dangerousness. Even if young people are talking about serious things, working out plans for the future, discussing life, jobs, adults just assume they are getting wasted. They are….
For the duration of my stay, in almost every encounter, the outcast members of Bergenfield’s youth population would tell me these things: The cops are dicks, the school blows, the jocks suck, Billy Milano (lead singer of now defunct S.O.D.—Stormtroopers of Death) was from a nearby town, and Iron Maiden had dedicated “Wasted Years” to the Burress sisters the last time the band played Jersey. These were their cultural badges of honor, unknown to the adults.
Like many suburban towns, Bergenfield is occupationally mixed. Blue-collar aristocrats may make more money than college professors, and so one’s local class identity is unclear. Schools claim to track kids in terms of “ability,” and cliques are determined by subculture, style, participation, and refusal.
Because the myth of a democratized mass makes class lines in the suburbs of the United States so ambiguous to begin with, differences in status become the critical lines of demarcation. And in the mostly white, mainly Christian town of Bergenfield, where there are neither very rich nor very poor people, this sports thing became an important criterion for determining “who’s who” among the young people.
The girls played this out, too, as they always have, deriving their status by involvement in school (as cheerleaders, in clubs, in the classroom). And just as important, by the boys they hung around with. They were defined by who they were, by what they wore, by where they were seen, and with whom.
Like any other “Other,” the kids at the bottom, who everybody here simply called burnouts, were actually a conglomerate of several cliques— serious druggies, Deadheads, dirtbags, skinheads, metalheads, thrashers, and punks. Some were good students, from “good” families with money and prestige. In any other setting all of these people might have been bitter rivals, or at least very separate cliques. But here, thanks to the adults and the primacy of sports, they were all lumped together—united by virtue of a common enemy, the jocks….
For a bored, ignored, lonely kid, drug oblivion may offer immediate comfort; purpose and adventure in the place of everyday ennui. But soon it has a life of its own—at a psychic and a social level, the focus of your life becomes getting high (or well as some people describe it). Ironically, the whole miserable process often begins as a positive act of self-preservation.
Both the dirts and the burnt may understand how