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 they are being fucked over and by whom. And while partying rituals may actually celebrate the refusal to play the game, neither group has a clue where to take it beyond the parking lot of 7-Eleven.
So they end up stranded in teenage wasteland. They devote their lives to their bands, to their friends, to partying; they live in the moment. They’re going down in flames, taking literally the notion that “rust never sleeps,” that it is “better to burn out than fade away.” While left-leaning adults have valorized the politically minded punks and right-wing groups have engaged some fascistic skins, nobody really thinks too much about organizing dirts or burnouts. Law enforcement officials, special education teachers, and drug treatment facilities are the adults who are concerned with these kids.
Such wasted suburban kids are typically not politically “correct,” nor do they constitute an identifiable segment of the industrial working class. They are not members of a specific racial or ethnic minority, and they have few political advocates. Only on the political issues of abortion and the death penalty for minors will wasted teenage girls and boys be likely to find adults in their corner.
Small in numbers, isolated in decaying suburbs, they aren’t visible on any national scale until they are involved in something that really horrifies us, like a suicide pact, or parricide, or incest, or “satanic” sacrifice. For the most part, burnouts and dirtbags are anomic small-town white boys and girls, just trying to get through the day. Their way of fighting back is to have enough fun to kill themselves before everything else does….
In the scheme of things, average American kids who don’t have rich or well-connected parents have had these choices: Play the game and try to get ahead. Do what your parents did—work yourself to death at a menial job and find solace in beer, God, or family. Or take risks, cut deals, or break the law. The Reagan years made it hard for kids to “put their noses to the grindstone” as their parents had. Like everyone, these people hoped for better lives. But they lived in an age of inflated expectations and diminishing returns. Big and fast money was everywhere, and ever out of reach. America now had an economy that worked sort of like a cocaine high—propped up by hot air and big debt. The substance was absent. People’s lives were like that too, and at times they were crashing hard.
In the meantime, wherever you were, you could still dream of becoming spectacular. A special talent could be your ticket out. Long Island kids had role models in bands like the Crumbsuckers, Ludichrist, Twisted Sister, Steve Vai, and Pat Benatar. North Jersey was full of sports celebrities and rock millionaires—you grew up hoping you’d end up like Mike Tyson or Jon Bon Jovi. Or like Keith Richards, whose father worked in a factory; or Ozzy, who also came from a grim English factory town, a hero who escaped the drudge because he was spectacular. This was the hip version of the American dream.
Kids who go for the prize now understand there are only two choices— rise to the top or crash to the bottom. Many openly admit that they would rather end it all now than end up losers. The nine-to-five world, corporate grunt life, working at the same job for 30 years, that’s not for them. They’d prefer to hold out until the last possibility and then just piss on it all. The big easy or the bottomless pit, but never the everyday drone. And as long as there are local heroes and stories, you can still believe you have a chance to emerge from the mass as something larger than life. You can still play the great lottery and dream.
Schools urge kids to make these choices as early as possible, in a variety of ways. In the terse words of the San Francisco hardcore band MDC: There’s no such thing as cheating in a loser’s game. Many kids who start out as nobody from nowhere with nothing will end up that way. Nevertheless, everyone pretends that everything is possible if you give it your best shot. We actually believe it. While educators hope to be as efficient as possible in figuring out where unspectacular students can plug into the workforce, kids try to play at being one in a million, some way of shining, even if it’s just for a while….
Girls get slightly different choices. They may hope to become spectacular by virtue of their talents and their beauty. Being the girlfriend of a guy in a band means you might get to live in his mansion someday if you stick it out with him during the lean years. You might just end up like Bon Jovi’s high school sweetheart, or married to someone like Cinderella’s lead singer—he married his hometown girlfriend and helped set her up in her own business. These are suburban fairy tales.
Around here, some girls who are beautiful and talented hope to become stars, too, like Long Island’s local products Debbie Gibson and Taylor Dayne. Some hope to be like actress Heather Locklear and marry someone really hot like Motley Cruë’s drummer, Tommy Lee. If you could just get to the right place at the right time.
But most people from New Jersey and Long Island or anywhere else in America don’t end up rich and famous. They have some fun trying, though, and for a while life isn’t bad at all.
Yet, if you are unspectacular—not too
