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My friend Kyle was punk.
Really punk.
His hair was held up in pink-and-green liberty spikes every Friday night. Only on Fridays, mind you, because it was such a chore to prepare. Hours were spent gelling and spraying, tilting his head to this side or that, twisting long colored strands of hair clockwise, and instilling spirit. True spirit.
Then he was ready.
My friend Kyle the punk was ready.
He was ready to sneak himself in on the college party scene. We went to a large party at an unnamed student�s house. We knew it was a large party because they supposedly had five kegs on tap. Kyle the punk. He all knew that his looks didn�t quite fit it, but he didn�t care. He couldn�t have cared. I watched him spend two-and-a-half hours preparing for the occasion. Everyone at the body-to-body party stared, laughed, and shook his hand. A friendly preppy guy leaned over to me and exclaimed:
�I love it when people like you guys show up!�
I looked at him, smiled, and said, �Yeah?�
�Yeah, it really lightens the mood.� He shook my buzzed hand with his drunken hand and disappeared into the sea of seemingly stationary bodies. I took it as a compliment.
People there knew Kyle.
My friend Kyle the punk.
They spotted his spiked hair and leather jacket, singling him out in a room of mirror images. The mirrors repeated themselves ten times over, as if it was the way. But, it was not. Not this time. Kyle knows what�s going on. He chatted with acquaintances for brief moments, always finding himself back in our little circle to the side.
It was them,
us,
And three neatly dressed black gentlemen in a circle next to ours. Actually, theirs wasn�t quite a circle. It was more like a half-circle, facing the crowd. The neatly dressed black gentlemen were not having a good time; I could tell by the looks on their faces. Not a good time at all. I scanned over the surrounding dark room, viewing all the white kids. All the white kids in Kalamazoo in one dark room with all the black kids in Kalamazoo. I turned away from my circle to complete theirs for a moment.
�Hey,� I said to gentlemen to my immediate right. �You guys should come across state sometime, to Ypsilanti. These white kids don�t know how to party.� I smiled my warmest smile and he smiled back.
�Should we now?� he asked me, as if I had to reassure him.
�Yes,� I said reassuringly. �It�s much more fair in my town. Less barriers, more getting-along�� I stopped for a split second, reviewing what I had just said. ��But not that sappy.�
He laughed.
�I like to see it as a social utopia; a step above, if you will.� If I could�ve accented a semi-colon in my speech, it would have made a distinct syllable. I offered my hand and he shook it. �Seriously, you guys would have a blast.� They thanked me non-verbally as I turned, breaking their circle and once again completing mine. I shivered, delighted that two pseudo-educated folk could have a good-natured conversation on such a socially taboo subject.
Whatever that means.
When everybody had enough, we left. We left with such spirit that the household cats knew. Animals know a thing or two about spirit. So do punks. We drove home listening to punk music because that�s the kind of stuff punks listen to. Kyle could tell me all about punk. He could tell me the difference between drunk punks and fashion punks. He could show me the Exploited and Anti-Flag. He even knew a thing or two about Sid Vicious, he did. That�s how punk Kyle was.
My friend Kyle was punk.
Until the day I found out that he wasn�t.
That was the day Kyle sold all his punk t-shirts and albums through an Ebay auction. He scraped all the Dead Kennedys stickers off the bumper of his Ford Escort and traded his chains and safety pins in for plastic beads. Colorful plastic bracelets that covered up his wrists in their entirety. His studded leather jacket mutated into a blue Ecko hoodie.
Kyle wasn�t so punk anymore.
He didn�t go to punk shows anymore and thrust his fists in the air. Instead, he went to raves. He went to raves every weekend and did things like K and Ecstasy. He forgot things like how corporations control society, how governments hurt people, why the Philips Corporation is bad, and why Jello Biafra should have been the 43rd president.
He met lots of people. Lots of people from all sorts of cities. Soon he met the right people. He bought jars of Ecstasy from the right people and sold them at raves. He quit his job and bought a cell phone. He dropped out of school. He got an underage raver girlfriend. She dropped out of school. Now Kyle has all sorts of friends. They have all sorts of neat personalities. Of course, they don�t hang out with him because he has lots of Ecstasy. That would be unheard of. They hang out with him because he has lots of spirit. Even the animals know it.
But,
I think the animals are wrong. Just this time, anyways.
What will Kyle be next year?
Which way is the wind blowing?
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