All American Horror of the 21st Century

Wasted on the Young. Cody Goodfellow-1

WASTED ON THE YOUNG

by Cody Goodfellow

My neighbors all hate and fear the kids who hang out in our complex, but I treat them with respect, because I know what they’re about. Where others see wasted potential and wanton self-destruction, I see the essence of orphaned, aborted youth, striving—without love, hope or a voice—to express itself. I see what they could become, given half a chance, and the right moment.

This one kid, he used to tag everything in the complex with a Magic Marker—the same cryptic logo as on all his textbooks, his skateboard, plans for a tattoo. This criminal mastermind got caught tagging the laundry room by a ninety year old Hungarian widow. He tagged her face and stuffed her in a dryer, ransacked her house and ran off to LA.

It’s tough to be young. A lot of people forget, but I remember what it was like.

They go to the old sauna room in the clubhouse to smoke out after school. Complaints have been filed at the homeowners’ meetings, but nobody really cares. Their parents are glad they’re out of the house, and the other residents work all day and watch TV all night. They must see me watching them from my balcony, but they know I won’t narc. They can trust me.

I’m lurking at the clubhouse door as three of them stumble out, coughing and giggly and red-eyed—not that the shitty Mexican grass they smoke could get a fly high, but a child’s imagination is a powerful tool.

They don’t handle surprises very well. One buttons up and coolly walks away, another doubles over laughing, and the third tries to leap over the kiddie pool, but comes down well short of the edge, wallowing in icy, leaf-swirling water.

“Hey,” I say, “be cool. I just want to talk.”

The laughing kid drops into a lounge chair to catch his breath. His friends call him Rayray. His mom is an obese Mormon drunk whose last boyfriend totaled her Tercel in the gravel pit across the street. Before he discovered grass, Rayray was a demon for burning pentagrams and anarchy symbols into the lawns and breaking into cars, though he never could get the stereos out without destroying them. Tell me society’s not better off with Rayray too stoned to break into your house and s**t in your sink.

The cool kid is Ali—Bedouin scowl, scary Arab eyes too big for his shaved Charlie Brown head. His dad was a big-time slumlord until his wife divorced him and broke up his tenement empire, and they washed up here. A dropout, Ali is always wandering the complex. He listens but never talks into his cell phone, waiting for kids in letterman’s jackets who pull up at the corner in fancy cars, but never pick him up.

I brace him before he can slip out the gate. “Hey man ... are you selling?”

Ali glares at his sneakers, gritting his teeth. “Why you pushing my s**t in, man? I gotta go home ...” It’s not insolence, but fear. Eye contact with the wrong adult can turn kids to stone, or worse, into adults.

The wet kid shakes like a dog. I don’t know him, but he’s always underfoot. I think he lives in one of the big houses down the street.

Ali goes for the gate, but I block him with my arm. “Come on, be a good neighbor. I got fifty.”

Rayray keeps going, “Dude,” and the wet kid goes, “No way,” like chickens clucking. I show them money.

Ali and I go into the sauna. He shows me the crumbly tumbleweed he peddles, and I give him cash for five dime bags. He looks at me long and hard now, like he has a choice. I pocket it and ask if he’s got anything else.

“I don’t do coke,” he sneers.

“None of that, man. Psychedelics. Acid, mushrooms, mescaline, or Ecstasy, but only as a last resort.”

He shakes his head and packs a bowl in a torpedo-shaped sneaker pipe. He mumbles, “I don’t like to see s**t that’s not real,” but as he lights up, I can see the intrigue smoldering in his lacquered black eyes.

Jesus, all I want is to show these kids something that’s real. “You’ve never tried it, though.”

He shrugs, blows out the smoke.

“You go to the Sports Arena parking lot for any good jam band show, you can get hooked up, wholesale.”

Ali slips past me. “So go do it, old man.”

I let him get halfway out the door. “You guys want to come with?”

“Told you, I don’t mess with that.”

“You might not like it, but you know people who do. Sell it to your friends in the nice cars. Take the profit and buy yourself some real weed. Move out on your own.”

He looks at me again, the suspicious, sneaky stare intensified so it feels like a magnifying glass beaming the sun in my eyes. He never saw me as a threat before. He’d be an i***t to trust someone his father’s age, even a customer.

“Like you got anything better to do,” I urge, but he just walks off. I have to look surprised when I find them waiting by my car.

* * *

People dismiss kids today because they want to be famous for nothing, but I credit them with learning what they’ve been taught. There’s nothing left that’s worth doing, and those who get the most attention do nothing. The only talent worth having is the ability to endure and feed the fascination of the public eye. Everything else, they know, is bullshit.

They won’t admit it, but they’re excited. They rank the classic rock station blaring Blue Oyster Cult as we get on the freeway, so I put in a Public Enemy disk—Fear Of A Black Planet. The little Philistines have never heard of them, but it makes them respect me a little.

I pack a bowl with some White Widow from Sonoma, palming Ali’s brown Mex crap out the window. I light it and pass it around. Wet Kid goes catatonic. Rayray laughs at his own nose. Ali grows psychotically silent. I try to tap him.

I ask if he plays any instruments. He goes into a speedy spiel about his mad DJ skills.

Actually playing music, he rules, is “fruity.”

“I can respect turntablism as a form of expression,” I interrupt, “but you have to respect history. Once upon a time, kids just like you actually composed and played real music. Who do you think made those records, the f*****g Pilgrims?”

They trade disgusted faces, debating whose turn it is to change grandpa’s diaper. My fit of pique passes, and I see I’ve pushed too far, but that’s how you learn. These kids are feral orphans, scavenging the ruins of a moribund culture. They can’t read the sacred writings, speak for themselves, or make the big machines work. They are perfect.

* * *

We park behind the shuttered Tower Records across from the Sports Arena and go shopping in the big lot. Tonight’s event is a reggae festival, but legions of Deadhead refugees parade through the tailgate parties to reconvene as a pharmaceutical swap meet. Most are older than me, but some are younger and dumber than Wet Kid.

I buy a sheet of blue Ganesh blotter and some Bicycle microdots from a Japanese Deadhead who sawed off a finger the day Garcia died, and a vial of red Dodo Nectar from a hilarious fat girl in a clown suit. Ali and Rayray come back with a dozen blue ecstasy tablets and a bag of dried-out Ecuadorian mushrooms. I test them, and judge them bunk.

Ali sulks. Rayray eats the mushrooms, anyway. Wet Kid wants to go home. I offer them tabs, but they don’t like my condition. “You have to take them now.”

Ali goes, “f**k that. I don’t want to drop now. I’m f*****g pissed.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“How much?”

“Free, but you have to come with me.”

Not for the first time, Ali sizes me up as a pervert. “Where you want to go?”

“I want to show you something real. Totally underground. It’s much more than a show, more than music. It’s a real live, old school happening.”

“What the f**k is a happening?”

I offer them each a tab. “Eat this and I’ll show you.”

* * *

It starts to work before we get there. The Ganesh is pure pharmaceutical-grade LSD, no strychnine or speed, but it comes on very physically; subtly at first, ghostly sensations like fine, dry sand sprinkling down your spine, tingles of phantom limbs you never knew you had, then rushes and feverish chills as the body lights up and awakens to a new kind of sentience.

Wet Kid watches his neon brain rotating four feet above his head. Rayray cowers and screams at every car that passes by. Ali is talking nonstop in a teeth-gritting mumble nobody is supposed to hear. He goes, “Mom didn’t leave, Dad wouldn’t let her, but he showed her no respect. He made her wear her burkha so nobody could see how he beat her, and he wouldn’t let her leave, so she set herself on fire. When she was too ugly to look at, and she had no fingers to cook and clean, he let her go home ...”

I turn around in my seat and pass him the pipe. “You’re going to like this.”

We’re cruising the industrial district, weaving the spell of anticipation, and it’s a strong one. A half hour passes before Ali realizes we’re driving in aimless, looping circles around the same block of warehouses. “Do you even know where you’re going, dude?”

“Sure. We’re going to the happening.”

“Where is it, then?”

We pull up to a stop sign. The passenger door flies open and RayRay is jerked out into the street.

A gun invades the car, nickel-plated cyclops eye glaring at me from a long, locked arm in a ragged Army jacket. “Get out of the f*****g car!” it screams. “Get out, or I will shoot you dead, motherfucker!”

Wet Kid bawls like a colicky baby. Rayray shrieks and tries to get up, but another carjacker sits on him and snugs a hood over his head, zip-ties his hands behind his back. Ali just sits and stares at the carjackers like he’s waiting for them to finish telling a lame joke.

We all get pulled out of the car, and there are hoods and zip-tie cuffs for each of us. My hood smells like meth-sweat, smoke, tooth decay and a bit of blood. I wonder if I’ve worn this one before.

I hear someone get in my car and peel out, and feel hands push me to the step rail on the back of a delivery truck. I drag myself in before they can shove me. The kids are heaved in on top of me. The door slams with a gnash of heavy steel teeth. I think Wet Kid resisted, because someone hits him and he redoubles his crying, moaning, “Bad trip,” over and over.

Bad trip.

I don’t believe there is such a thing. If you take drugs for pleasure, but you end up scared shitless after learning something unspeakably real about yourself and the world, isn’t that the greatest gift a trip can give?

We settle down in a pile of hostages, some terrified, others giggling and goofing on the experience. Rayray and Wet Kid are crying, but Ali hisses, “Shut up, you fuckheads. This is the happening.” I’m so proud I could hug him.

A few minutes later, the truck beeps and backs into a loading bay, and the door slides up. As we stumble out of the truck, mishandled like third-rate freight, they hack our cuffs with box cutters and rip off our hoods.

We blink in a blitzkrieg of fog, white noise screamers and strobe lights. Howling ushers herd us through the blinding gauntlet, and into the electric darkness of the auditorium.

It used to be a union hall, but they rented it out for punk shows, when I was Ali’s age. They closed it down after the last show, the big one we all remember.

It was just supposed to be another dumb show, but it became the perfect deconstruction and obliteration of bullshit conventions like the barrier between performer and audience.

The audience was abducted off the street an hour before showtime, rounded up and led onto a school bus with the windows blacked out. The bus meandered around town, kidnapping unsuspecting heads until it was full, then dropped them at the union hall to witness a show that would blow their minds and spoil all other entertainment for them, forever.

There were no lawsuits or arrests, but the union bolted on its lease, and the building stood empty. A bunch of us who were at the show chipped in to buy it.