1990's alternative "slackerdom" was a strange brew. It was something that could not be quantified, mapped, or adequately defined like so much amorphous Jello whose color was an ashen gray like the leavings of a stubbed-out cigarette. "Postmodern", "post-belief", that to lift yourself out of this haze would take "that much" heroism which was a laughable proposition, like "The Lone Ranger" trying to break up a gang of Hells Angels who then proceeded "to have their way with him". It underscored the fact that there was basically "no right or wrong" anymore, just force. . . . . either applied bluntly or strings pulled from afar by unseen capitalist masters, criminals, or lobbies that had no name. A decent into cynicism seemed to be "the answer" for a lot of young people.

And here I was ambling along my new liberal arts alternative school as a 7th grader with a $90 pair of Nike basketball shoes. . . . . thinking they would give me "authenticity". On television you had all those "Be Like Mike" ads where a black man with a bald, shaved dome and a hint of a mustache took a refreshing guzzle of Gatorade or Pepsi products with a comical "Ahhh!" and grinned with his giant teeth and full, thick lips that probably made most audiences feel "a little uneasy", like they were being dwarfed by a Zulu warrior in a grass skirt who bounded through the air with a prowess that was almost inhuman to the civilized European mind. A racial expression, a culture soul he could not understand, "the other" that was so strange. Yet this "alternative" community as "an other" he could but relate to no more, wondering if he at all came from "the same family tree" other than by region, he felt so alienated and "in culture shock" by his surroundings.

Here was "the student lounge" on his first day of school in the bleak winter of '94, and he was desperate to make "a good impression" around this circle of slackers. Perhaps "too squarely in the moment" with anxiety as they leaned back with the ennui of "too many drugs" like the princes of pot, he was hardly "cutting a dashing figure".

Here be "the three fools":

    One, a boy with a grunge-rocker's haircut like a cut-rate "River Phoenix" who had a tendency to act as petulant as Kurt Cobain's acidy stomach ulcer underneath his rich kid's designer ball cap.

    Another, a vaguely skinhead-looking cretin who walked around with a green parachutist's jacket and spoke in a gravelly voice as he stared on with a blank, wolfish look.

    And the last, a misfit with a perpetually addled, goofy expression and a black bowl cut who wandered around like "Igor".

It represented the ultimate marginality of man-- the glaze-eyed, prodding, pushing, doodling, aimless, FALLENESS of the human condition. These kids all played instruments, and their ultimate hero was Les Claypool of "Primus". . . . . a whacked-out, working-class weirdo who spoke in a vaguely retarded voice like the San Francisco Bay Area's version of Forrest Gump, or maybe "Robert Crumb"-- the alternative cartoonist.

It was like some of the exhibits at our very own "St. Louis City Museum". . . . . one, an ode to the campiest of 1950's fakeness, where you had a woman who looks like the tour guide to the halls of progress smiling and ushering the way to "the future", which was actually a ham sandwich as a pudgy, freckled little boy in overalls and a crew-cut drinks from a wholesome class of milk. Or there was "The Corndog Corner" featuring a Cowgirl from circa 1947 riding on a bucking specimen with a saddle and a hat held out in revelry. You had the feeling that we were looking far too deep into the dank basement of someone's mind. Or even Robert Crumb's attic and his blind followers who worshipped him or those "Dead-Heads" who followed "The Grateful Dead" relentlessly from festival field to festival field like pop-eyed orphans of the post-atomic age, with fractals and pot and smoking rat shit as Sartre puffed on his pipe with warm approval.

This was a strange place that your parents or "the good and decent" of society never told you about. . . . . a strange netherworld where an 8th grader might open up a peppermint tin of joints and flash it around in the area like "an outlaw", and down here you knew that you were not going "to act like Dudley Do-Right" and turn him in to the authorities. It was the cynicism of the drug war when illicit substances were as ubiquitous as downloaded music would be a couple of years down the line because the state of man is fallen and sleazy. When you're in a P.O.W. camp all sorts of degraded, questionable things go on when you weren't exactly "going to come out the same person". It was the futility of all authority, when you were led along by "peer pressure" instead.

The fact about this $90 pair of basketball shoes is that it didn't "confer me" with anything. If you can afford them, you're not "hungry enough" to practice relentlessly as "a force of nature".

It was like in the Metallica "sing-a-long" section in the live concerts when the ornery frontman would get down with the audience for crowd participation, the Mexico City lot were 10 times as guttural and raucous than their American counterparts. You had an image of a gangbanger dashing through the street with a stolen jacket after stabbing a rival in a cantina.

Or you had a big, loud 20-something hollering outside a concert, his arms in the air and his face shaking with emotion as he paces back and forth in pent-up ecstasy. Perhaps to mollify him, you second that with a half-hearted cheer which he doesn't seem to notice.

Like Muhammad Ali running on the adrenaline of excitement after he beat a man up in a boxing match, the crowd cheering and whooping and the fighter making pronouncements for the camera. Unstoppable, unquenchable, like a man who runs seven miles every day before breakfast but isn't very bright as he compulsively mouths off like "a black man in command". This could be street preaching or the political pulpit, but it was never the most subtle or reasoned of thinking.

It was like a black Jehovah's Witness grandma coming up to a deli and wanting her cold sandwich microwaved, and then holding the bread up to her cheek to determine if it was warm enough and other looniness we were supposed "to politely overlook".

Or a black Muslim working out at a jungle gym, doing chin-up's because he couldn't afford "whitey's gym".

If you were magically 21 years old instead of 12 you could go to a strip club with the other seedy guys and wave money in the air as a blonde stripper shook her G-stringed ass in your face. Or check into a cheap motel and pick up a prostitute, doing meth together before going at it at the flower-print bed. Or fly a drug plane full of cocaine past customs, flying 30 feet above the ocean on a moonless night toward the mainland. But what it all seemed to come down to was a short, hairy, pot-bellied man in his early '40s-- built like a woodchuck with a brown mustache, jeans, and sunglasses packing a handgun as he talked to his middle-man, "Pedro", in a hotel bar. The threat of incarceration was imminent, as black-clad S.W.A.T. team officers burst through the door and handcuffed "Mr. Mustache" to the ground on his belly as he swore gutturally with the basest and flat-minded of epithets.

One time, "the three fools" and I were wandering around the soccer fields in Forest Park when one lightly shoved me and tripped me over another one who was waiting on the ground behind me on his hands and knees, making me the butt of their joke-- the fact that I wasn't "one of them".

Their little outfit might as well have been called "The Circle Jerks".

(-- No pun intended)

This is when life is but a sickly, corkscrew feeling in your gut and that you want to get off the amusement park ride for a while "and go home". Such, such were the days.

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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

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(Rheeee of Crickets)

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