Carson High: A Day in the Life of a Punk in the Class of 2001

Story by Jon Christensen, Photos by Kit Miller

The alarm woke Jason Hadwick at quarter to 6. He got up from his single bed in his messy crowded room. His model airplanes were suspended from the ceiling as if they were dive-bombing his head.

The fish tanks gurgled. He put on a black T-shirt, baggy shorts, and black leather boots with a circled A, the symbol for anarchy, scrawled in white ink on the sides.

Photo by Kit Miller

He left his chains in his room. He couldn't wear the bicycle chains and metal links that hung suspended between his back and front pockets in a long loop below his right knee. It was against the rules at Carson High School now.

That was OK. The chains were too heavy to wear all day anyway. He could still wear the three earrings and two metal necklaces that identified him as a punk.

These were the essential outer signs of his identity, along with his friends, the cigarettes he smoked, the music he listened to, and his maroon 1966 Mustang, with a stock 289 engine. Not that Jason was willing to be pinned down. Far from it. In fact, these were also the outer signs of his own inner struggle not to be pinned down at 16 years old, just when he was old enough to really savor his freedom.

The sun was just coming up over Carson City. Jason went to the living room in the three-bedroom house where he lives with his mother and father. He turned on the TV and watched cartoons.

This was his routine. His dad, Jim, got up and made coffee. His mom, Andrea, showered. Jason ate a bowl of Cheerios. He talked with his parents for a few minutes about the day ahead. He said he would be home for dinner.

Jason pulled his car out of the garage and rumbled off down the quiet street.

He is proud of the car. He puts everything he earns working weekends at a car wash into the Mustang.

Howard Stern was on the radio talking about pleasuring himself as Jason pulled into a Seven-Eleven on the way to his friend Mike's house. He bought a can of Red Bull energy drink and a packet of Liquid Energy, a powder additive for the drink. It was better than coffee, he thought, more jolt and less edge. That's what he liked, mellow energy.

That's why he smoked. Marlboro Menthol was his brand. Most kids don't like menthol. And that way fewer kids bummed cigarettes from him.

Jason had tried to quit. But he didn't like himself when he stopped smoking. He got mean. And Jason didn't want to have any enemies. He wanted to get along with everybody.

Sometimes it wasn't easy. Lately things were really on edge at school. In the last two days there had been fights in the park. Someone had written, "Everyone will die on the 21st" on the wall of the bathroom by the track.

This was the day, but Jason wasn't afraid.

He pulled in to a gravel driveway and parked next to the rundown duplex where his best friend Mike shares a small bedroom and kitchen with his mother. Mike opened the door with bleary eyes and a smile. He was dressed in a black T-shirt with a white skull with a Mohawk and the words "Exploited" on the front and "Punks Not Dead" on the back. Jason sat on the bed. He watched Japanese cartoons and smoked a cigarette while Mike put on his shoes, one held together with black tape.

On the way to school they talked about their friends and the rumors drifting around campus. When they got there, the parking lot was crawling with cops.

"Look at these guys," said Jason. "Something must be going on."

Jason saw the cop who had followed him home one day this spring and searched his car and room. That was right after their friend Russell was given an early release from school for pointing a cocked finger at other kids during an assembly. Somebody had reported them for talking about how easy it was to build a pipe bomb.

It was true. He knew how to make a pipe bomb. They had made one and blown it up at the firing range. That didn't mean they wanted to blow up the school.

Jason liked school. Besides, you had to get through school if you didn't want to end up at a dead-end, minimum wage job in a fast-food joint. Jason wanted to go to college and become a cinematographer, like his uncle, or maybe an astronomer.

But what he wanted most of all right now was just to be himself and be with his friends. Sure his friends looked weird. With spiked and colored hair and jewelry in their pierced ears, noses, lips, tongues, and who knows where else. People were afraid of them at first, Jason thought, but they were nice after you got to know them.

People called them the smokers. And they wore it like a badge of pride. They gathered across the street from the school at the entrance to Mills Park. They smoked before school and at every break between classes.

They were a motley crew shuffling in the dust beside a drainage ditch. Even here they divided into their small groups. The punks on the edge by the road. The stoners and hippies a little deeper in the park. They were all freaks. Whatever.

They were the outsiders. Inside the school were the others, the jocks, the preps, the richies, and the Mexicans. Sometimes the jocks and Mexicans would shout at them as they drove by in the morning. "Dirt heads! Losers!" But not this morning. Maybe because of the cops.

"When I'm God, everybody dies," said the Marilyn Manson T-shirt that Jason's friend James, a boy with a bright blue spiky Mohawk, was wearing. Another kid passed by with a swastika inside a red circle with a slash through it on the back of his T-shirt.

"I'm against racism," said James. "Screw you all!" he shouted to no one in particular. "You all suck."

The smokers bummed cigarettes from each other and puffed away. A kid passed around a water bottle filled with orange juice. They sipped and laughed. Mike traded Playstation games with another kid. "That's a phat game," he said.

Jason declined the juice. He had a nice power drink nicotine buzz going. The sun was starting to warm the morning. It was time for another day of high school. A few minutes before 8, Jason slid across the dewy grass on the front lawn on way to his first class.

Today would be a lame day. Jason couldn't wait for it to be over. He wanted to go to the school photo lab to pick up a photograph he made that got honorable mention in a statewide contest. But other than that today was mostly baby-sitting classes. It was Friday, a B day in his schedule. On the alternate A days he took algebra, English, and photography. Today he had P.E. for slackers in the morning and astronomy in the afternoon. The only good class was history in the late morning.

P.E. was usually fun. The teacher made them walk half a mile, two laps around the track. Then they got to go to the park to play volleyball or kick around a hacky sack. But not today, the teacher announced. It would be a mile around the track and then a video about grizzly bears. The students groaned. While the teacher took attendance, a girl wrote "This class sucks," on the blackboard and quickly erased it.

Photo by Kit Miller

Outside the ROTC kids practiced drills at one end of the field. While another class ran around the track in gym clothes, Jason's class walked in their street clothes.

Jason talked with a friend who was having romance trouble. "He says we're having sex and we're not!" she said. "I thought you were going to break up," Jason said. He told her that she was a fun girl and not to worry. They raced each other to the finish line.

During the grizzly video kids cracked jokes and talked about cars and TV shows and getting drunk. They watched the clock and counted the minutes. One kid drew a picture of Satan sitting on a toilet. The convoluted pipes dripped out on Earth.

Between classes Jason and his friends went to the park to smoke. On the way back, Jason got his books from his car. History was next. Jason liked the class even though the teacher was tough.

He liked history. He liked prophecy too. He was always thinking about the future. He wondered if the world would survive to the new millennium. Some people said it wouldn't. But he didn't see how it could end so soon.

The class had spent a lot of time of time talking about the war in Kosovo this spring. And the teacher was rushing to cover the rest of world history in the few remaining days of school.

They were learning about Hitler and the Holocaust now. Jason's mother is Jewish. Her grandparents ran from the Nazis. Jason's great-grandfather actually saw Hitler once. Still Jason didn't know very much about World War II and he wanted to learn.

The teacher explained in grim detail how the concentration camps worked. She read to the class from "Night," a book by Elie Wiesel about his boyhood experience in the camps.

Then the students read to themselves. The only sound was the low hum of the ventilation, the soft sound of butts shifting in the uncomfortable plastic chairs, and an occasional heavy sigh. The story was gripping. The details were powerful and upsetting. Jason had never read anything like it before in his life. And this was something he felt connected to by his own history.

Elie Wiesel described a boy's hanging. "That night," Wiesel wrote, "the soup tasted like corpses."

Jason put the book down. "That's sick," he said.

He wrote a cursory summary of the chapter in his notebook and talked with some other students about a dance that night. He was thinking of going with his friends. The band was from the high school. It was a swing dance. That was kind of lame. But it was free. It was something to do besides sitting around smoking and playing video games. Mike was going to spike his hair.

They would try to start a mosh pit among the swing dancers.

On the way out of the school Jason bought a power bar for lunch. He joined the other smokers. They had half an hour to eat. But nobody ate much. They smoked and talked until it was time to go back in.

Jason thought he was going to like astronomy when he signed up for it at the beginning of the year. But it turned out the class wasn't even as interesting as his eighth-grade science class. Back then his teacher had been much more enthusiastic about everything from quarks to black holes. Jason loved that stuff.

Today there was a substitute. "Can I have your attention?" she said. "No," said a kid in the back.

The teacher told them to copy an overhead projection showing the geologic layers of the moon. Then she put on a video, Apollo 13. In the dark, Jason and most of the other kids gathered around two tables and played cards.

They were getting bored with variations on 21 and five-card stud, when the principal's voice came over the intercom. It was hard to tell what he was saying. Something about a situation at the south end of the building that he wasn't comfortable with. The teacher shouted for somebody to turn the TV off.

Stay calm and leave the building, they heard the principal say. There will be no more school today. Have a nice weekend.

He went on but they didn't hear it over the shouts of joy and commotion as kids headed for the door. On his way out, Jason saw the yellow police tape and cops guarding the walkway in front of the bathroom, just down the hall from their classroom. Right below was the central atrium of the school. It was filled with kids now. Everybody was headed for the doors.

Nobody seemed especially worried. Jason went downstairs and out the door and past the police cars parked out front.

He met Mike and Danny by his car. "Today was hella short," said Jason. "I've never gotten out this early unless I ditched. And I haven't done that since last year."

They climbed in his car and merged into the stream of traffic leaving the school. At Mike's house, they put on techno music and turned on the TV to check out Mike's new video game. Danny pulled a bottle of blue school glue out of a backpack and he and Jason set to work turning Mike's soft bleached blond Mohawk into foot-long spikes standing straight up from his skull.

Jason and Mike took turns playing the video game. It was called "Oddworld: Abe's Exodus." In a weird way, it was kind of like the Holocaust and the movie, Schindler's List. The goal of the game was to save as many people as possible from a hellish labyrinth of mines run by an evil company making soul juice from the bones of dead workers. The players did this by getting around the bad guys, disarming explosives, and chanting a shaman song to set free the gentle tribal members trapped in the mine.

Jason and Mike tried to get as far as they could without getting killed themselves or harming anyone, since it was easier to sneak by the bad guys than to fight them. But sometimes they had to kill a bad guy and they laughed. And sometimes an innocent died or was killed by a guard and they were sorry because they couldn't win the game in the end without saving all the innocents. "That sucks! Oh God, that was mean as hell!" said Jason. "He capped him!"

But sometimes they got frustrated and didn't bother sorting out the innocents or the bad guys. They killed everybody and allowed themselves to be blown up and laughed. They didn't take it seriously. It wasn't real. It was just a game.

Meanwhile, Danny chatted with friends on the phone about probation officers and urine analysis tests.

Late in the afternoon, Jason got up to leave. He had to go home, clean up, and eat dinner with his parents. He agreed to meet Mike and Danny later to go to the dance.

At home, Jason put on ska music, an upbeat cross of Jamaican reggae rhythms and kicking rock and roll. When he was down in the afternoon, ska picked him up. He put away the dishes and tidied the living room.

His mom came home from her data entry job at the Nevada Department of Taxation. "How was school?" she asked. "Pretty good, until last period," Jason said.

They talked about the bomb threat. She had heard about it at work. The radio news was now saying it was a fake pipe bomb.

"It's scary when stuff like this happens," said his dad, when he came home from Western Nevada Community College, where he is the director of financial aid. "It's sure a lot more violent than when we were in school."

Jason's mom asked how he would feel about metal detectors and security searches at the school. "I wouldn't stand for it," Jason said. "It would feel like prison." He assured his parents that he didn't think anything really bad would happen at the high school. Kids don't hate school that much, he said.

Jason and his parents went out for pizza. While they were waiting for dinner, Jason tried to call his friends from the pay phone outside. They were balking about coming to the dance. But Jason didn't want to go where they were either. One of the parents there was just coming off a binge and being a real jerk.

So when Jason's parents asked if they could go to the dance with him, he said he didn't mind. It was just down the street. Some of the band members were kids Jason recognized from school. They were dressed in sharp suits with fedoras and played horns.

Jason's parents loved the music. Jason thought it was OK. He skanked among the other dancers for a few songs, doing his own angular, elbows and knees akimbo, freestyle dance. But he was getting mad about his friends not showing up, so he decided to just go home.

On the way to his car he ran into his old science teacher, who was taking his two parrots for a ride on his bicycle handlebars. Jason stopped and talked and held the parrots. The anger went out of him for a moment, but seeped back when he got in his car. He peeled out in front of the crowd gathered on the sidewalk in the warm evening air, just to show he was there.

It was a way to call attention to himself, like body piercings. He wouldn't get his tongue or nose or eyebrows pierced like some of his friends. It would be hard to get a job like that. But he wanted to get his nipples pierced real bad. And that cost money. So he had to get to work early in the morning.

He could make the compromises he needed to make and still be himself. He had a job. His grades were good enough. He had a good relationship with his parents. But none of that meant much on Friday night without his friends.

He was waiting for a light to change when he saw them bouncing down the sidewalk toward him. Mike with his spiky hair. Danny with his nose ring and shaved head. James with his blue Mohawk. They yelled and waved to each other.

Danny and James skipped through the traffic to his car. Jason told them he would turn around and go back to the dance with them.

Suddenly the growing darkness had lifted a little. And the night was still young.

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