I'm not in prison

because the c-store didn’t have cameras. Or maybe it did, and the fuckers didn’t work. It was 1986, and all that was just starting to come in, so it could have gone either way. Cold little Big Brother eye, or blank human stare.

I’ll never know. Jimmy and Dean came through the west door three beats later, heading for the back, where the beer coolers were. Dean was new to the Valley, a shitkicker from some small Texas town. But he was angry as the rest of us, maybe for better reasons. He sported a lot of shiners. Jimmy was the youngest after me, the guy who usually puked, had this buzz-oppositional disorder, contemplating his navel if we dropped acid, everyone else bouncing off the ceiling. Then I’d score some weed from my mom and he’d go apeshit after two hits.

I called them Jimmy-Dean. They were trying to prove something. Looking back I realize it was to themselves.

I just wanted some smokes. That meant I got to play decoy. Not that I was some hard-case. Just poor, rebelling against Hamburger Helper, not parents with actual expectations. A mom my friends who weren’t thought way cool. Bored and broke and dropping classes like they were molten, A-average or no. Counselor gave this blank look when I went to him, wanting to know could they switch my teachers back, because this new guy had turned algebra that had made sense into Chinese scribbles on an overhead projector while he read a newspaper. Counselor looked at me like I didn’t have a clue what planet I was on, said, “You get good grades, have good attendance, you’re smart. Figure it out. I’ve got kids stabbing each other, kids sniffing glue in the john, girls hooking out of the parking lot at lunch…”

The lowest common denominator strikes again.

I saw in his eyes that nobody cared. You were supposed to follow the script and get with the program. My middle-class friends with their mohawks and dreadlocks and torn t-shirts, their eyeliner and combat boots, they had something real to rebel against after all.

Jimmy-Dean came up behind me as I paid for a carton of Camels. You could do that at fifteen back then, not get carded. The paper-punch handles of the suitcases creaked in their hands. I hoped they got Bud this time and not fucking Old Milwaukee.

Something in the eyes of the clerk as I took my smokes and Jimmy-Dean came to a stop and in a thunderous voice that was the voice of every pissed-off disillusioned teenager everywhere said, “FUCK YOU,” and sped out the doors with the beer. Clerk looked at me like I’d raped his little sister. He knew I knew, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it, no way to prove it. I didn’t look like them. No hair gel, no safety pins, no tats. Just a kid who came in half a dozen steps ahead of the real punks. But he knew, and a certainty loomed up behind the anger and frustration in his gaze, back in the shadows where truth hung out. My friends were assholes, it said. Then it asked a question:

What did that make me?

I didn’t understand it then, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the back of the mirror. And there I was.

SR