Matt Lifson
I was sixteen in the fall of 2002. There weren't many outlets for an outsider like me in South Florida. When I wasn’t burying my face in my sketchbook at the beloved underground poetry coffee house me and the few friends I had frequented, sitting for hours while drinking way too much coffee and drowning in a cloud of Djarum Black clove cigarettes smoke, I was surviving on punk and hardcore shows. My weekends were sacred: local bands, mostly comprised of my friends from school, performed at Spanky’s: a sports bar with a big outdoor area that housed sweaty mosh pits and walls shaking from distortion and teenage rage. The music was loud enough to drown out everything I didn’t want to feel. Back then, I was angsty, closed off, taking deep drags from the ever-present camel light pinched between my index and middle finger, trying to look pissed off enough that no one would talk to me—and for the most part, they didn’t.
One night at Spanky’s, while my friend Rebecca was using the bathroom, a guy who I had been standing next to, bopping our heads in unison to the wave of nu-metal exploding through crunchy amplifiers, spoke to me.
“These guys are sick!” He yelled over the noise. I pretended not to hear, assuming he was talking to someone else. Then he nudged me with his elbow, and when I turned my head, I was met with the biggest grin on one of the cutest faces I had ever seen.
“I’m Joey”.
He was my age, said he’d just moved down from New Jersey to Port St. Lucie and didn’t know many people yet. He had a fuzzy buzzcut that made his pierced ears stick out, a deep tan like he'd been living on the beach, and eyes that seemed to hold me in an inescapable grip. He wasn’t like the other guys I knew, the ones I had grown to be afraid of. The ones who made fun of my skinny frame, my gaunt stance, trying to pry a confession of the poser faggot everyone thought I was but was too much of a pussy to admit. He was just there. Just real.
We started talking during the set change, standing side by side while a local hardcore band tuned up, yelling over the buzz of the amps. I wasn’t used to this kind of attention, especially not from someone like him. I tried playing it cool, clinging to my aloof attitude I had become so used to hiding behind, even though inside I was spinning. In 2002, cell phones were on the brink of becoming ubiquitous tools of communication, but kids rarely had them. Before we each left with the respective friends we came with, we exchanged AOL Instant Messenger screen names. Back then, that was everything.
The second I got home that night, I logged on. No message. I waited and waited, unable to pry myself from the screen. Come on, Joey. I’m waiting for you. Come to me. Still nothing. I laid in my bed for hours thinking of his face, realizing it had been too dimly lit to see him clearly. All I could recall was the soft glow of his backlit head, the halo of light dancing around his shaved hair and the peach fuzz cascading along the edges of his ears. Most of all, I thought of his toothy grin, the kind that belonged to so many of the boys I longed for in high school but knew I could never have.
I logged into AOL the next morning, anxiously waiting for the annoying dialup screeching to take me to the homepage. There it was.
“Hey, it was fun hanging out last night,” sent from Got2bJoeKing
I read that sentence probably a hundred times.
Over the next two weeks, Joey and I chatted constantly. AIM became our secret lifeline. My heart felt like it would explode as I made my way home from school each day, practically sprinting in my skinny girl jeans to the family computer. We flirted—awkwardly at first, then with more confidence, or at least I did, safe behind a screen in a way I never could be face to face. We talked about music and art, about how Florida was weird, about how hard it was to find people you didn’t feel like you had to pretend around. I was getting my driver’s license soon, and the plan formed quickly. I told him I’d drive up to see him again.
When the day came, I borrowed my grandparents’ car, a beat-up silver Saturn coupe that smelled like vinyl and stale perfume. I told my parents I was spending the day with Pam, a friend I typically did spend most days on end with. They barely looked up, just nodded, asking if I’d be home for dinner. I said no. I had become such a stranger to my mom and stepdad that we barely knew how to talk to one another. My appearance became more confounding to them. My hair was long, well past shoulder length, and dyed blue-black. I hid behind thick black rimmed glasses, my septum and bottom lip shining with metal piercings. I wore skintight black jeans and a red shirt from the children’s section of Wal Mart, several sizes too small for someone my age. I was so skinny I could wear a child’s Medium without so much as a stretch in the fabric. On the front with a black sharpie pen I had drawn an open hand reaching across the chest, unravelling at the forearm, undoubtedly inspired by Derek Hess’s illustrations that were signature of the many hardcore album covers at that peculiar time of the early aughts.
I drove two long hours north, adrenaline humming through my veins, windows down, stereo too loud, heart on fire. Joey snuck out of his house like a runaway delinquent from a juvenile detention center as I pulled up. He quickly jumped in the car, and we just drove, aimless. Looking for somewhere private, somewhere quiet, somewhere we could be alone.
We found it in the parking lot of what looked like an abandoned church a few miles from his house. The black asphalt was cracked, with weeds growing through like nature was reclaiming it. I felt a strange kinship with those weeds and the splits in the earth they grew from. Something was about to break out from inside me, too. The building loomed behind us, hollowed out, forgotten. It felt like the perfect place for us, for me.
I pushed in the car’s electric lighter and pulled out a joint from the glovebox. Joey’s hazel eyes narrowed, and his beautiful lips curved upward at the corners into an impish grin. I let him have first puff. He took an impressively deep hit, then moved closer to me with his lips wrapped in a tight O. My heart raced as I leaned over, inhaling as he blew. I returned the favor and even treated him to a trick my friend Nicole taught me; inverting the burning end of the joint inside my mouth with the tip sticking out between my teeth and letting Joey hit it, planting his lips against mine as he sucked.
There was a silent pause that lasted for ages after I extinguished the rest of the joint. We both looked in opposite directions out the window. I felt like I might have a heart attack. I fumbled through a stack of loose CDs in the little storage area under the dashboard, my trembling fingers selecting one at random. Full Collapse by Thursday. I slid it into the car’s janky CD player, and as the first screaming guitar hit, we leaned towards each other and kissed. Just like that. No asking. No second-guessing. Just need.
We kissed for the entire album.
It wasn’t messy or desperate. It was passion. Tender and sweet. We tilted our heads from side to side, smushing our noses against one another. God, the way his lips felt against my tongue. Our hands moved like we were reading each other in braille - fingertips gliding over backs, arms, necks, pausing in places that made us both tense our muscles and exhale hard. Soon our hands migrated towards one another’s crotches, fumbling with zippers without breaking our kiss. His light blue boxers, with faded anchors and flamingos printed on them, were tenting and wet where the tip of his dick was. Mine were grey with black paisley print, and they matched his priapic excitement. In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about consequences or fear or labels. Just him.
And then came the bang on the window.
It was loud. We jumped. I turned my head abruptly, forgetting that Joey’s earring was trapped between my teeth as I nibbled on his earlobe.
“Fuck Ow!” he yelped.
Two cops stood outside with their arms folded. One of them smirked. “Busted.”
We scrambled with our zippers. I rolled the window down, trying to act calm while my brain was short-circuiting.
They told us to step out. Asked what we were doing on private property. We tried to answer, but our stories clashed immediately. The officer opened the car door and looked inside. It didn’t take long for him to detect the smell of pot and find the half-smoked joint in the ashtray.
Within minutes, we were both handcuffed and stuffed into the backseat of the squad car. I felt like my body wasn’t even real anymore, like I was watching it all from somewhere outside myself. Joey was crying silently beside me. He wouldn’t look at me. I heard him whimper:
“My dad. Oh fuck, my dad’s gonna kill me. Like… actually kill me.”
I wanted to say something, to put my arms around him, to let him know he wasn’t alone. But my arms were cuffed tightly behind my back. I couldn’t do anything. I cried too.
At the station, they called my mom.
She had to drive nearly two hours to pick me up. When she walked in, I saw something in her face break open - some combination of rage, disappointment, and worry that I’d never seen before. She had been mad at me plenty of times in the past few years since high school started. Nearly kicked out of the most prestigious magnet art school in Florida for being caught smoking, not once, not twice, but three times in one day. Falling down the stairs and nearly cracking my head open after snorting Xanex in the communications building. And now this. I was ready for the worst.
In the car, she let me have it. Her voice was shaking, sharp, asking again and again why I’d done it. Why I drove so far. Who I was with. What I was thinking. Threatening all kinds of punishments. I tried to lie, saying I just wanted to go for a drive. But it didn’t hold. It never does when your whole body is trembling with shame, and you can’t make eye contact with the person who loves you more than anyone ever will.
Eventually, I cracked. Looking away from her, I told her I was gay. That I met a boy and just wanted to see him again.
The words felt like razor blades in my mouth.
I’d imagined coming out a hundred ways. None of them were like this. None of them involved a cop car, a confiscated joint, and the humiliation of being caught mid-hand job in my grandparents’ car while an emo band whined in the background. I felt disgusted. Exposed. Like everything I had been trying to keep buried had been yanked into the light all at once, and I still wasn’t ready to be seen. To be known.
I saw her expression change. The fury faded. Her face softened into something like concern, and then—slowly—sadness.
She saw it. The deeper thing. She realized this wasn’t just rebellion or teen angst. This was me, terrified of who I was. Terrified of letting anyone see it. She hugged me tight, for a long time, as I sobbed. I hated who I was. Since I was old enough to develop a sense of self, I wished I could have been someone, anyone, other than myself. I hated being gay. How much harder it made everything. I hated being so skinny that the kids on the school bus asked me if I was anorexic, or worse, if I had AIDS. I hated that I had to lie, to pretend to be someone I knew I never could be.
We didn’t say much as she drove me back to the abandoned church where the old silver Saturn was left. It was night now. The old, boarded up building, along with the weeds, had been devoured by the dark. And once again, I felt a kinship with it.
“I’ll see you at home, sweetie” mom said, sniffing back tears. She kissed my cheek, and I watched as she drove off.
The car was silent, except for the road noise and the low hum of the tires over I-95. I couldn’t listen to music. I just stared into the distance, driving into the dark, my eyes swollen and red. There were many thoughts swirling in my head as I tried to replay the events of the past several hours. I thought of Joey. How close I felt to him, how I didn’t know him at all. I never knew what became of him.
To this day, I can’t listen that opening song, Understanding In A Car Crash, without being brought back to that old silver, hotboxed Saturn, feeling more alive than I had in years with a boy I would never see again.