A Bunch of Fucking Punk Kids
James stared himself down in the mirror posing with a little snarl. Seeing himself affecting a look he flipped himself off with one hand and then the other doing a little dance. The dance became a series of head banging moves. Moving more and more erratically he started slamming into the walls. He hopped up on the toilet and started strumming a fake guitar with a neck at least the length of a bass, tho he was strumming it loose in full, raw strumming motion. If it was a bass it'd be making muddy and muffled scratching in the midst of each true note. Probably the amp would push it out in a bright distortion. Probably he hadn't bought a bass amp, but had borrowed some friend—who incidentally had a bit of money—'s guitar amp and was currently blowing the speakers out. He slammed himself off the back wall and went to jump the toilet still holding the fake bass. His foot got caught on the edge of the sink and he went down hard. On the floor, in a fetal ball the snarl came back and soon he started laughing, blood coming from his nose and little gash on his cheek which must of hit the counter on the way down. He started kicking his legs out with the rhythm of the song he wasn't playing but still strumming away at, just laughing.
Jen and Andrea weren't any sort of fucking sluts. But they had adopted the term to refer to each other. They fucking hated punk girl sluts who were buying shit from the fashion punk store in the mall and cozying up on the guys in the band. They were whores who didn't give a shit about the lifestyle, but liked playing makeup and liked fucking dirty guys who treated their dicks like guitars. At least, as consolation, the guys were fucking retarded and neither of the friends wanted much of anything to do with them. The boys who came to the shows, who weren't all fucking showy, just there in jeans or whatever, no totally overly produce rips and tears. Just guys. They were fine unless they were the kind to get drunk and turn into a real asshole. But mostly Jen and Andrea just liked to hang out and listen to the music and hang around the gutters fucking with people. Neither of them came from nice homes or anything either. That was the thing that bugged them probably the most was when people—like the sluts—were just running daddies money down the gutter. They—the sluts—didn't come to the scene in the way you're supposed to. There was a fun in it that anybody could behind, they were agreed on that. Being a freak and fucking with normal folks. That's just good fun. But the gutter was a specific thing and not something you should put on like a gay as shit plaid skirt—that's way too fucking short—and perfectly factory ripped tights. The gutter was just where you ended up when you left something shittier behind and decided there was a way you had to do things. It meant begging for a bit of money. It meant flophouses and it meant traveling. It meant all that, but that wasn't how you got there. You got there because there was a way you had to live for you that whoever it was was keeping you from. For Andrea it was this bullshit border South 'being a lady' that had all her life put her in the way of assholes, had made her subject to taunts and flirtations that rode up close on her and wouldn't leave her alone. She had to split her house first because of some shit she doesn't talk about. And then free of the house, she got that it was the whole bullshit city and then the whole bullshit state. She made it out west where that shit didn't fly and even if there were still the straight versus the gutter, at least there was some sort of pervasive sense that you were a person and could find ourself somewhere outside of the bounds of things and still continue being one. She met Jen from here and she was just a fucking doll, already on the street for years. For her it was a mom that was too fucked up on much of anything to figure out the up and the down of having a kid. Things changed in the home sitch all the time and almost never for the better. So leaving wasn't that much different and the gutter at least meant she was in a bit more control of the ups and the downs. They were pals in some serious way. And they weren't going to fuck it up for anything.
