How the Hell Did I Get Here?

I live in a great neighborhood in a beautiful house in a picturesque Seattle suburb soon to be known as Fairwood. Apparently some of those residing in the Fairwood area don’t think the City of Renton is improving quick enough, and since they just paid over $400,000 for their house, they don’t want to have “Renton” in their address. I don’t care about any of that pretentious bullshit all I want to know is if it’s going to cost me more money when I have to pay taxes.

I find myself living a life that ten years ago would have been on my “Things I Really Hate” list. I have one child, a husband, and a dog. I don’t drive a minivan, but I think of getting one every time I struggle to free my writhing toddler from her car seat and smack her head in the process. My life is a suburban dream. On paper I should be happy, but something about this life just doesn’t gel with me. I’ve spent a lot of money and time thinking about this and I’ve finally come to the conclusion: I’m a punk.

At 32 years old I feel the same way about some things as I did when I was 15. I still hate the government, most corporations, pop music, the majority of the crap on TV, magazines with airbrushed models on the covers, people who tell me what to do, and the dictates of a routine schedule. I find the suburbs dreadfully boring, and become invigorated every time I go to the city. Some of the best years of my life, so far, have been when I was working in the music industry or traveling the world. I still listen to hardcore music; the kind that would scare the hell out of my neighbors, and make their kids smile.

I’m caught in a life that is somewhere between Wisteria Lane and CBGB, and I’m having some difficulty making it all add up. Just like in therapy, I have to start at the beginning.

My parents divorced when I was nine months old. They were teenagers at the time, and were practicing the type of birth control popular during the time of the “peace and love generation”: drop acid, have sex and see what happens. My mom and I were a team living on our own in a small Connecticut town until a few years later when my younger sister, Misty, came along. Then one night, for no reason, we moved across country to Idaho. That’s right, we went from a small town in New England to the bastard child, and the most uncool part, of the Pacific Northwest. I would find out later in life after my mother’s death that she worked for an employer that resembled Tony Soprano, in almost every way, and one night got pinched by the cops in a bust. At that moment she realized that perhaps her career choice wasn’t the best one, and wanted away from that life. Hence we moved to the last place they, or anyone, would think to look: a small town of 19,000 called Nampa. I never forgave my mother for that.

The only positive thing that came out of an upbringing in Idaho was the healthy development of my punk attitude and outlook. Small, shithole towns with little hope and a dismal future are the most ideal breeding grounds for punks. While growing up in Nampa, I got a top-notch education in how to hate people, how to despise organized religion, and what “thinking outside the box” truly means, since no one else did. Nampa was a two-class society divided into those kids who were from “good”, middle class homes, and those who weren’t. You have probably concluded that given my mother’s runaway status, and the fact that she was lugging two kids along that we weren’t exactly swimming in wealth. We were downright poor, and would move to a new apartment every six months until I was 12 years old. The moving thing had nothing to do with our financial status and had more to do with the whole running from the mob thing my mom was involved in earlier in her life. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

I hung out with the “stoners” despite never touching drugs until I was in my second year of college. I always harbored the belief that if I tried drugs, I would wind up being a junkie loser who worked at a convenience store and lived in Nampa for the rest of my life. The stoners were a great group of kids, and we all liked the same kind of music. By age 12, my mom and step dad had purchased a small hotel and my sister and I, along with a younger brother, Matthew, moved into a 1,000 square foot house with a front façade that served as the hotel office. It was on the bad side of town, but the “bad side of town” in Nampa still meant that in the 1980s you could keep just a screen door closed on a hot summer’s night and no one would break into your house.

On the good side of town lived a group of upper middle class, white kids known as “preppies”. Preppies listened to pop music and wore Izod shirts with the collar up. They participated in sports and sat in the lower bleachers during lame-assed pep assemblies. Their cars were nicer pieces of shit, and most of them quit riding the school bus by 16. The preppies were the group that didn’t have to worry about money for college or whether one of their parents might come home drunk. The group I hung out with were the ones who were never supposed to succeed, but in the end, we did. As I sit and write this 14 years after graduation, a good portion of the preppies I had little regard for ended up in and out of rehab, divorced, going from job to job, and mostly miserable. My stoner buddies ended up similar to me: making a good living, residing in a beautiful house in the suburbs with happy, fully functional kids, driving a minivan, and doing okay. I often wonder though if they now find themselves in the same predicament. If they look around and wonder how they went from wearing a faded jean jacket with a Misfits “Fiend Club” backpatch while smoking cigarettes behind the Maverick gas station at lunch to wearing an awful Hawaiian shirt while nursing a microbrew and socializing at the neighborhood 4th of July barbecue. What the fuck happened to us?

Maybe it was growing up poor in dysfunctional families that led us to something so normal. On the other hand, we despised normal and still do. Perhaps in resisting so hard what society told us to do, we ended up following that path on a subconscious level. Then again, maybe we were all just a bunch of lazy asses, and it was easier to hang out in the ‘burbs rather than subverting the dominate paradigm. Either way, I can’t be the only one asking what happened.