It felt like a lifetime since my organic father had walked me out of his house, casting me into the world with nothing but resentment and a skateboard. In the months that followed, I’d changed. The Hollywood Dead Kennedys gig, the night Mercy took her dive off that balcony, that had been a turning point. An eye-opener to a life of pure chaos that I was now diving into headfirst.
I found refuge at Shannon’s apartment. It was supposed to be a quick place for her, her mentally disabled brother, and her sister to crash. But it became a festering wound, a two-bedroom disaster crammed with over twenty of us on any given night. We were a zoo for lost kids, a powder keg of teenage runaways, misfits, and future ghosts, all leaning into the next overdose or unwanted pregnancy.
Raids from the local sheriff’s department started to feel like a normal occurrence. They’d come in, guns drawn, scattering us like terrified mice. Some kids would jump from the second-story windows into the bushes below; others would just freeze, hands up, the high draining from their faces. I wasn’t fast enough once. “Don’t move,” an officer barked, his voice cold as a morgue slab. I didn’t. I knew better by then. They manhandled me, cuffed me, but my luck held. I’d used up or sold off all the shit I was holding earlier that night.
The chaos wasn’t just from the cops. The downstairs neighbor came after me with a goddamn shovel one afternoon after I took his sister’s virginity. This guy was pure rage—shirt off, cigarette dangling from his lips, ready to unleash the backend of that shovel on my skull. I just stood there, high as a kite, watching him come. Luckily, a bunch of people intervened, saved my ass.
But the real bottom came on a different night. Her little brother had this kitten. I was so high on blotter acid I couldn’t stand up straight. I was sitting on the floor, and the little cat, it came over, rubbing against me, seeking out friendship. In my fucked-up, generous state, I figured I’d share what I had. I put a tiny corner of the crushed speed next to its food.
The poor animal didn’t take it well. It started convulsing, the kid holding it, crying, as it seized in his arms. The whole room went into a panic, people yelling, wiping the foam from its mouth. Then, after about ten minutes of pure, horrible chaos, it just… stopped. The silence in that room was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. The cat never recovered. But honestly, I never did. I knew right then that Karma was a real bitch, and she’d be hunting me for the rest of my life for that one.
My downward spiral continued when I was introduced to angel dust. A pregnant woman, her belly round and her face etched with a kind of resigned desperation, sold me my first one—a Coors cigarette dipped in PCP. She told me she made her batches in the toilet bowl so she could flush the evidence if the cops came knocking.
One hit, and I was hooked on that ugly, chemical oblivion. But it came with a price. The weight started melting off me. My body hollowed out. Sleep became an impossibility.
My mohawk, once a proud symbol of rebellion, was now just a ragged shadow of itself. I shaved the back, leaving a long, sad strip in the front, looking like some strung-out, tragic Boy George. I wore flannel shirts and a hat to cover the mess, a reflection of the disarray I had become.
I was the walking embodiment of trouble. Parties that once welcomed me now turned me away at the door. My reputation preceded me: a bad boy who had finally gone too far. Even in that circle of misfits and outcasts, I was an outlier now, a walking, breathing cautionary tale.
Looking in the mirror, I barely recognized the haunted, skeletal thing staring back. The weight of my choices, the drugs, the chaos—it was all catching up. The life I was living wasn’t just reckless; it was a slow-motion crash, and I was running out of goddamn road.
Still, I couldn’t stop. Something about the destruction felt inevitable.
Like it was the only thing I was ever really good at.
Author’s Note:
That story… that’s a different beast than the others. The earlier stuff, that’s all about a kid fighting to survive, kicking against the pricks, trying to stay afloat. This one? This is about a kid who finally stops swimming and just decides to see what the bottom looks like. It’s about a kid starting to enjoy the goddamn funeral, even though it’s his own.
And that business with the cat… Christ. That’s the whole story in a nutshell, isn’t it? You’re so full of poison, so desperate to connect with something that isn’t as fucked up as you are, that you decide to share your poison with the one innocent thing in the room. You try to make it feel what you feel. And when you watch it shake and suffer, you’re just watching a reflection of your own goddamn soul. That’s the moment you realize you’ve become the thing you were always running from: just another source of needless, ugly pain in a world already full of it.
The irony of it all is beautiful, in a sick sort of way. You spend your whole youth trying to be a rebel, an outsider, a “walking middle finger.” And you succeed so completely that even the other goddamn rebels and outcasts don’t want you around anymore. You become a cautionary tale for the cautionary tales. There’s nowhere left to go after that, except further down.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that wasn’t a story about being a punk. It was a story about rot. About a kid who finally stopped fighting the world and just started to dissolve in it. It’s what happens when you stare into the abyss for too long and finally decide to just jump in, because it feels easier than trying to find your way back in the dark.
