Senior Project Writing #3

Our Teenage Punk stands with one foot on the curb and the other on the street. He hunches over the drain, spitting. Standing, he’s only abot five and a half feet tall, but his skinny jeans let him look taller. A single, empty Frank’s Red Hot Sauce bottle falls from his side and hits the sidewalk. Our Teenage Punk continues spitting. One look from the bottle to the kid makes the red tint of his spittle more noticeable. He’s relieving his mouth of a cayenne residue/saliva hybrid, naturally. Then we see Chipotle. Yes, Our Teenage Punk stole his beverage from Chipotle.

“You go girl,” shouts his friend. Despite his nature, he’s trying to grow a beard. Judging from the sight (vision is one of two ways through which we can gauge the legitimacy of one’s beard), the endeavor has been far from fruitful.

“Shut the fuck up,” responds Our Teenage Punk. He snickers, then spits some more. When he’s done spitting, which requires several concentrated seconds, he stands up straight, looking at his audience as he wipes his grin with a pale forearm. For the moment, he is our hero; he overcomes obstacles no one else is willing to surmount, and we don’t seem to care that said obstacles are irrelevant or that the act of overcoming them is little more than fleeting. We wanted to see someone steal a bottle from Chipotle and drink the entire thing, and Our Motherfucking Teenage Punk did just that.

He’s there every Friday, every Saturday, and every Sunday. He attends Cleveland Heights High School, and he’d drop out if it didn’t mean losing contact with his friends. His friends aren’t like him in any way, but there they are every weekend, slouching around, smoking cigs, skateboarding, blasting loud music and singing along. His jeans sport an unrealistic number of holes, and his t-shirts (he wears his influences on black cloth, wears them on his chest) look as though they’ve never been washed. But that’s how he bought them, right? He strides up and down Coventry, surveying the area for familiar faces. Everyone’s either a friend or an enemy, of course. Mock the former, mock the latter. That’s what Our Teenage Punks live for, mocking. Fire is motion. Is motion growth? Everyday Our Teenage Punk resists becoming defined by his boundaries, but he has become so integrated in the Local System that his blows send him backwards. Coventry owns him. He’s just far too stubborn to admit it.

When it hit the ground, the bottle didn’t break.