Never Punk

Approximately three months of my high school freshman year were spent dating a junior who had a car, listened to Led Zeppelin, and encouraged me to cut class for morning trips to McDonald’s. His family had much less money than mine. He referred to his father as his “old man.” He lived with his old man in a small, vinyl-sided house, and his brother lived with their mother about eight blocks away in an equally small, clapboard-sided house. His life was messy. Everything was messy with his friends, too, and there were hours of driving to this or that person’s house to pick up people, drop them off, find someone who could buy alcohol. All of them were already having sex. His friends knew I wouldn’t last long—inexperienced, sheltered, and slumming as I was—and they didn’t bother talking to me. I quickly found this world disappointing, but I also thought of it as the gritty “real” world.

So, by the beginning of my sophomore year, I was already disillusioned with a significant segment of the experiences I had marked out as real life when Mr. Hobbes took our English class to the school library for an exercise locating books using the card catalog. We were given titles to find while Mr. Hobbes gazed out the second-story windows, down onto the small groups of students traversing the front lawn toward the parking lot, the initial task when cutting class. I believe that surely he fixed his eyes on the punk kids, resplendent and slouching under the weight of heavy boots and studded jackets, chains running every which way, and safety pins lined up in unexpectedly tidy rows along the seams and rips in their jeans; they seemed to attend school largely for the pleasure of leaving it without permission. Mr. Hobbes was weary of high school instruction long before us; I remember his of lack starch—a doughy form in rumpled clothing with worn-in lesson plans.