Survivor's Guilt

This is really long, pretty damn emotional, and perhaps more information than you would like to hear. You have been forewarned.

“And well, I've been thinking things, thinking things that I just hope aren't true. Like maybe you don't choose punk rock, because punk rock chooses you."

            -from "Picking Sides" by Wingnut Dishwashers Union

Idolatry is alive and well among the punks. Growing up punk my walls were decorated with posters and pictures of Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, Dee Dee Ramone, and countless other dead rock stars. I used to watch SLC Punk, and imagine myself running around Utah and causing chaos, because there wasn't much else to do in my “suburban prison.” The problem is that when you look up to heroin addicts and suicidal psychopaths, who also happen to play guitar, you get a warped view of your place in the world. Drugs and death are glory, and all your energy goes towards them and causing anarchy. You stand in opposition to safety and all forms of responsibility, especially responsibility for your own life, or at least that's what happened to me.

[I walked into Johnny's old apartment. This would be the last time I walked into these white washed walls. The room was lit for a hangover, lights off, shades down. The room was barren save for a coffee table covered in old rigs and dead soldiers and his mattress on the ground with a crumpled blanket near the bottom. Everything else in the apartment was gone. The guitars, books, furniture, video games, computers, all decorated the shelves of pawn shops or second hand stores. Carroll had just been shipped off to jail for the next two years. Ryan laid in a box buried somewhere in Lakeview. All that was left was a coffee table, Johnny, and his mattress.]

"I'll drink myself to death or at least I'll drink myself to sleep. Chain smoke my way through the gaps in between my aspirations and my apathy."

            - from "Whiskey is My Kind of Lullabye" by Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains

I actively pursued death for the first two years of high school. A mix of depression and nihilism had made me the perfect storm of a teenage self-casualty. Kurt Cobain ended his suicide note with these words from Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than fade away." If these words are true, as I believed them to be in my youth, then I wasn't just burning out, I was a fucking inferno consuming everything in my path, sparing no values, hopes, or aspirations in my life. I did every and any drug offered to me, and it wasn't uncommon to find me lying passed out on the floor of someone's house, muttering in my sleep. I didn't want to be alive, and I made sure everyone damn well knew it, not only in my actions, but in my words, as I guaranteed everyone within earshot that by the time I was eighteen I would be a corpse. And I lived like that for almost two years.

[I could hear Johnny in the bathroom hacking up violently the entire contents of his stomach. He was dope sick as usual. Suddenly there was a flush, and he exited. Johnny looked half dead already, his eyes were barely open and hollow. He had lost a lot of weight in the last couple months and it showed. A torn and stained G.G. Allen shirt was draped over his body, and his jeans were tied tightly around his waist with a shoelace. His arms were black and blue covered in holes. "Hey kid," he said, now looking at me, "you keep staring at me like that, and I'm gonna start thinking you wanna fuck."]

"I was so wasted! I was so fucked up! I was so screwed up! I was so jacked up! I couldn't get any higher than that."

            -from "Wasted," by Circle Jerks

The first time I got arrested I was sixteen. They almost sent me to a mental institution to be put on suicide watch. I had been drinking quite a bit, (my BAL was .28, a little over three times the legal limit, and upon hearing this I threw my arms in the air and screamed "HiGH SCOOORE!"), and happened to run my mouth to a cop about how they might as well shoot me, because I was going to kill myself that night. Instead of being commited, in no small thanks to my father, a former cop himself and card caring member of the Fraternal Order of Police, I just got stuck into therapy for a while, and grounded for three months. Eight months later, the second time I was arrested, this time for shop lifting, I got stuck with a $200 fine, a ban from Macy's for two years, and a week's grounding. Two months after that, the third, and I'm proud to say final, time I was arrested, there were no consequences. The cops in East Cleveland had better things to worry about than a few kids getting high on the street, and my parents had given up.

[Growing up, Johnny was my hero. He took me under his wing when I was twelve and he was fourteen, and gave me a burnt copy Black Flag's "Damaged" one of my favorite albums of all time, a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. However, it wasn't just the departing of knowledge, but also the departing of substances as if they were candy. Johnny was a drug addict to his core to be honest. When he smoked pot, he'd smoke an eighth a day. When he popped pills, he'd go through a script of eighty oxys in a week. When he snorted coke, he'd do an eightball in an afternoon. And when he shot heroin, well, he never came back.]

"Have you ever had a dream that your favorite baby's drowning, and you grab him by his sweater sleeve and pull him up to the ground and you can hear the water slosh inside his tiny gut push his belly up and down, but he can't cough the water up."

            -from "My Mom," by Kimya Dawson

After the third time I got arrested, my parents sat me down outside. I was sure that they were going to murder me, after three arrests in barely a year, but they didn't kill me, or ground me, or do anything really. We just sat there and talked. They asked me if I was going to drop out of high school, because it certainly seemed like it. I just sat there, frozen. Truth be told, I wanted to drop out. I wanted to never show up to school again, move out, and live out my downward spiral to “joyful” oblivion and eventually death. Yet, I was stopped by one thing, my mother's face. Have you ever looked someone who's heart you broke in the eyes? Was it your own mother? The woman who raised me, who wanted nothing but the best for me, who had cradled me in her arms as a baby and imagined what could come of me, now looked at her son, and her heart shattered. I can't imagine what was running through her mind, maybe it was memories of carrying her sixteen-year-old son out of a police station because he couldn't walk, or the tip from a "concerned friend" that I was snorting painkillers, or perhaps it was my older cousin and his path which ended in a Kentucky prison.

"No," I barely murmured, a little shy and a lot choked up, "no, I'm going to graduate."

[Johnny and I sat in his dark apartment. We were drinking Papst Blue Ribbon, and Johnny got ready to push off. A cigarette hung from his lips and flapped as he talked. "So, I'm being evicted." He dumped the last bit of dope from his vial into a spoon. "Like I got til the end tomorrow to move out." He moved his lighter under the spoon, making the dope and water bubble. "Can you believe that shit? I got one day, a single fuckin' day, to move all my earthly belongings outta here." He tore the cotton filter out of his cigarette with his teeth, and placed a bit of it into his concoction. "Like look around, I don't own a lot, but still, fuck!" He placed the needle into the cotton and pulled in the now liquid heroin into his rig. "Like I don't got no where to go anymore! What the fuck am I suppos- hold up." He tied off his arm with a bandanna, and started tapping out a vein. "There it is-anyways like da fuck am I supposed to do?!"]

"No one needs to tell me, how to get (get get) down. But won't someone tell me, how to get back up?"

            -from "First Song," by Ramshakle Glory

A month later, I started my junior year of high school. It wasn't hard to get my shit together, and I quickly brought my grades up from C's and D's to A's and B's simply by doing homework for once. I stopped being constantly on some substance or another, and started to live like I was going to be alive for longer than a few more months. The depression that had launched me on this voyage of self-destruction, however, remained as strong as ever. I was staying alive not for myself, but others. My parents, my friends, my teachers, they're the ones who wanted to see me stay alive and make something of myself, not me. I had to learn to be okay with myself, before anything really changed, and that was much harder than simply getting my life together. Happiness came slowly as I learned not to hate myself. Ironically the self-destruction in response to my depression had only worsened it, but by getting my life together it became easier to live. Over the next few years, I slowly gained control over my depression. It was an uphill battle, and it is something I still struggle with to this day, but eventually, depression no longer controlled my life. It seemed I had finally escaped, but things are rarely that easy.

[He jabbed the syringe into his arm. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. This shit...thisssss shhhit..it's the fucking shit hahahaha. But uhhhh what was I saying? heh heh. Oh yeaaa fucking my fucking landlord fuck-face-piece-a-shit-cocksucker is putting me out on the fucking streets! Fucking TOOL OF THE FUCKING BOURGEO-ZEEeeeeeee!" He nodded off for a bit. I shook him, and told him I was going to go. What I didn't tell him, but I couldn't be around this anymore. I couldn't see him like this. "Huh? What? Oh, yea-yea-yea-yeah for sure my dude...Wait kid, before...before..." His eyes closed, his body went limp, and then he snapped backlike a rubber band. "ba-FOre you go can I ask you for aaaa...ummm a fucking what's it fuckin' called...Shit, wait." He sipped his beer, stood up, and tried to straighten himself out. “A fucking favor? That's the fucking word. God damn this shit is something fuckin' else. Anyways can I get like twenty bucks? Just so I can get some food tomorrow, you know?" I knew he wasn't going to buy food with it, but I gave it to him anyways. I felt compelled to give him something, because I had the feeling that I wouldn't get another chance. "Thank you dude! Hahahaha fuck yeah. I'm gonna eat tomorrow heh heh heh. Shit..." He nodded off, and I never saw him again.]

"I went to about five funerals this year, and I felt so empty that I couldn't even shed a tear."

            -from "5 Funerals," by Bomb the Music Industry!

My cumulative GPA at the end of high school was a 2.82, despite not falling below a 3.3 after my sophomore year. It kept me out of a lot of colleges, and prevented me from getting quite a few scholarships here at OU. And despite my life changes, most of my friends I had made over the years had not ended up the same. Over the next few years eight of my friends died, a few were incarcerated, and countless others dropped out, became junkies, or worse. The causes of death were as expected, mostly suicides and ODs. It's weird, but after the first two or three people died, I started to just expect it. I contemplated which of my friend's funerals I would be attending next. Death became an empty word, simply meaning that I wouldn't see someone again, usually after they had already fallen off the face of the earth. It's hard to call it a tragedy when someone who only sits in their basement and shoots dope dies, because it's just so predictable and you come to expect it. And sometimes I think that they were already dead, just waiting for their heart to stop.

[A couple weeks later, I got a phone call from a mutual friend of Johnny and me. "Yo David, it's Mikey. What's up mah dude? Yeah, no shit? Cool, cool, but I got some bad news. You hear Johnny got picked up a few days ago? Nah? He got busted with a bit of dope. A half g I think. Well yesterday me and Carroll's mom we went up, and bailed him out, and he was sober. Yeah for real. I know it's been like two years since I saw him not all doped out. Anyways Carroll's mom keeps asking him to move into her house and get sober, like permanently, and Johnny's just like 'Maybe later, I got some shit to do.' Then today...they found him. He's-he's gone man. He...uh...he slit his wrists behind a CVS. Yeah, I think everyone kinda did. For sure it's this Thursday. Yeah I think his mom and dad are coming too."]

"If you don't die young, you're going to live too long"

            -from "Bonus Oceans," by Jeff Rosenstock.

The question became not why did so-and-so die, but rather why did I survive. Why is it that people, some of whom were more cautious and sober than me back in the day, end up where they did when I escaped almost unscathed? Why am I alive, and he isn't? The simple answer, it seems, would be that I turned around when they didn't, but that doesn't give me any relief. Sometimes, I feel as if I shouldn't have been able to turn around, as if I should be buried with everyone else. It would be so much easier to have died than to have to watch everyone else die. That's not to say I wish I was dead, but simply that dying, is much easier than staying live. But I didn't choose the easy way, and I worked through my issues, and am now almost a productive, if incredibly radical, member of society.

Kurt Cobain ended his suicide note with these words from Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than fade away." I ended up not burning out, and I just might have faded away, but I like it better this way.