When I first met Bjorn, he was at Anders’s house, wearing checkered Vans shoes, a Quicksilver hoodie, and skinny blue jeans. He had long, curly sand- colored hair and a wiry frame. His face was pensive and amused; he resembled a wolf, and his cerulean eyes peeked out from under a black visor beanie. I had never seen him before; he went to public school. I had just begun the 8th grade at private school in Dobbs Ferry. I was wearing a Bob Dylan T-shirt, khaki shorts and sneakers. He was sitting on the couch as Anders turned up the volume dial on the computer speakers, causing an eruption of heavy metal music. We and Anders’s other four friends began violently thrashing our heads and playing imaginary instruments in the air with rapid finger-shaking, like we had seen the band In Flames do in online concert videos.
Thirty seconds into the song, Bjorn shouted to me over the roar, “You’re not doing it right. They don’t just strum, the guitarist has to put his left hand on the frets.” Glancing down at my own fingers and then at the Youtube video, I noticed he was right. When he said that he knew because he played guitar, I asked him how long he’d been playing for. “Two weeks.”
The next week, Bjorn invited me over to his house. It was a bit of a zoo, complete with a cat, a dog, a little brother, and an obnoxious parakeet, the kind that repeats everything you say. The carpet was covered with shed hair. His black Epiphone guitar was on a stand by the wall. When we sat down at the table in the living room, I noticed celadon-colored pills in a plastic bag on his desk. He said it was Ritalin, his ADHD treatment. I gradually noticed over the next few weeks that he was pretty hyper when he didn’t take it. He seemed constrained by the need to always move. I feel free because of that need, always able to change.
Having newly purchased black jeans like Bjorn’s, I mentioned that they were my first pair of skinny jeans.
“No, those are slim jeans,” he responded. “Try these on.” The jeans I put on were tight, but something about them just felt cool, a little like the first time I listened to punk rock. The disorganized noise can be soothing to an anxious spirit.
We ate dinner and soon found black stickers in his room with the words, “EXPLOSIVE,” “MIRACULOUS,” “MYSTICAL,” and other thought- provoking adjectives. He shared them with me. We stuck them to our jeans’ crotch area. Next thing I knew, we were wading through foot-high snow at 1:00 A.M., crossing his neighbors’ expanses of wintry lawn, legs constricted by rigid denim. We stenciled out the letters “F-U-C-K” in the widest snow-covered backyard, each letter twelve feet by twelve feet. We were chuckling, when suddenly an outdoor light came on. He sprinted to the side of the property, ducking behind a pile of firewood, silently flailing his hands to instruct me to do the same.
As I dove over the woodpile, he whispered, “I forgot to mention, these guys have a shotgun and an automatic light.”
Shivering, I responded, “You forgot to mention? How do you forget something like that?” We laughed a little bit. The cold forced us to hug ourselves in search of warmth.
“You know what? You’d look really badass with a cigarette right now,” Bjorn whispered. We both returned to dead silence. My grandpa had recently died from cancer, which had cemented my stance on cigarettes. He knew that. I frowned.
“You know I’m never going to touch one of those.” “I’m not saying you should! You’d just look really cool.” And silence again.
. . . The end of middle school brought with it many realizations. One was that Bjorn and I were becoming best friends, which was affirmed when he invited me to spend a summer weekend with his family and their friends in a house in the Hamptons that they rented. We strummed electric guitars without amps and got farmers’ tans until our arms appeared crustacean. We actually went crab fishing, catching one bold little guy who kept ramming the wall of our Styrofoam cooler until we let him go out of pure admiration. We shook our shoes together on the front porch until all the sand seeped through the cracks in the porch. Mosquitoes bit us in the same places. On the four-hour bus ride alone to Manhattan, where my dad would pick me up, I whistled with satisfied nostalgia.
The other realization was that kids my age had actually started experimenting with drugs. I heard rumors from school friends that one notorious kid had actually smoked “the marijuana.” To escape from that, I hung out more with my friends from outside of school, like Bjorn. He and I saw a little-known metal band perform over the summer, Sky Eats Airplane. During one song, I cupped my hands and boosted Bjorn onto outstretched arms of fellow fans. They excitedly passed him up to the stage, where he gave the lead singer a massive hug. When Bjorn returned, he lifted me up too. Hands surged and receded like tiny undulating waves beneath me. I reached the stage. I was there for only a moment before diving back onto the ocean of fingers, which passed me back to Bjorn’s wide smile.
When high school started, it wasn’t as scary as I’d thought it would be, until one Friday, when I got the first memorable call.
“Hey...I know we were supposed to hang out tonight, but my parents grounded me.” Bjorn was breathing heavily. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed afraid.
“Why would they ground you?” “Well, I’ve been suspended from school.” He stopped audibly breathing. “What for?” “Look. A teacher found my bowl.” His voice had channeled half of its fear into embarrassment.
“Bowl? Bowl of what?” “Y’know.” He hesitated. “Pot.” As I hung up the phone, I whispered to myself, “Bjorn...does pot?” That night, I stayed at home and watched Dragon Ball Z, a cartoon I could follow for hours. I was depressed, but too unnerved to tell my parents the real reason why I was staying at home. I hugged my knees on the couch in our den, watching Vegeta (a good guy) fall to the Majin (the bad guys) and become one of them. I imagined myself as Krillin, a weaker good guy who could only watch behind a boulder as Vegeta was defeated.
Over the next couple of months, I got a lot of calls canceling our plans. Either “something has come up” or “I have a lot of homework to do.” I expected to see him again at Anders’s house, but Bjorn stopped coming. One time I waited for him on the porch for an hour, sitting on a bench that was suspended so that it swayed like a rocking chair, pushing myself back and forth through the leafy autumn wind.
When I finally went to Bjorn’s house again, I was wearing my own hoodie, skinny jeans, and Vans grey-and-black-checkered shoes. He was a little pale and temperamental. He’d gone off Ritalin, but he seemed pretty calm anyway. We stayed up till 3:00 A.M. talking about life. He had a “sort-of-girlfriend,” which seemed fairly impressive. I remember telling him that a girl I had asked out had declined, to which he jeered, “FRIEND ZONE. FRIEND ZONE,” over and over. I looked down somberly; I had yet to earn a rite of passage he had obtained. The equality hovering over us cracked. He mentioned that he had met two kids from my school.
“A 10th grader brought them over to a party.”
“He did? Isn’t he a...a pothead?” I said. “They’re all potheads. Well, fail potheads.” Fail was an adjective at the time. We frequently agreed that Justin Bieber was a fail musician because his songs failed to be enjoyable.
“How does someone be a...fail pothead?” Rubbing his closed eyes with his right hand, he sighed complacently and walked over to the bathroom. I was disappointed to be clearly out of the loop.
. . . Soon after, Bjorn got grounded again when his parents caught him getting high. I’d just assumed that once his teachers had caught him with his bowl, or whatever, that the jig would be up. That he’d flush it down the toilet or something. He’d never offered me any, which was a relief. I was especially upset because we had been so excited, listening to the punk band Rise Against for weeks in preparation to see them rock the crowd at Bamboozle, a massive concert in Asbury Park. Both of us had to sell our tickets—I just couldn’t go alone, without him—and we bought tickets to go see a less popular band, Anvil, a couple weeks after with a few friends. For the first time, my dad was coming to supervise. I thought it was weird that he would agree to go to a heavy metal concert. He’s more of a James Taylor guy.
When we got to the venue, the warm-up band had already started playing. One of Bjorn’s friends, Ryan, offered us earplugs. Bjorn answered for me, “Earplugs are for pussies.”
When Anvil came out and asked us how we were doing, a screaming fan launched a pillow-sized bag of weed onto the stage, a ritual offering for his favorite god.
As the band began to play, a mosh-pit opened in the middle of the room. “You coming in?” Bjorn asked. “Isn’t it dangerous? You showed me a video of someone dying in one of those...”
“That wasn’t a mosh-pit; that was a wall of death.” My dad, aloof as always, sat loftily in the seating while we entered the mob of erratic shoving that was the pit. Even as the fierce drumbeat and the melodic screeching guitar flooded our ears with music, my dad remained invisible. Some supervisor he was. We pushed screeching mohawked strangers into imperviously fat college students wearing sweaty, sleeveless Iron Maiden shirts, only to be tossed back around the pit ferociously. We were all like wolves in Call of the Wild, attacking one another to receive both honor and a moment’s rest. For half a second, I’d stand in place, a champion, with other fans towards the sides of the pit or on the ground. I’d hear the guitar ascend a musical scale as if lifting me into the air—but then I would drop, a tangle of elbows and knees breaking my fall and probably my vertebrae as I slowly blinked and heard the scale inevitably descend back again.
Then Bjorn got hit in the face. The culprit was a thirty-something year-old man, who rather than shoving, employed whirring karate chops and manic kickboxing.
“Well that guy’s a dick.” All of us “traditional” moshers roared in agreement. We left the fool spinning like a top his own corner of the pit, while he derived no enjoyment from slicing the moist air with overgrown nails. Bjorn and I kept inaudibly yelling the word “asshole” into the rapid current of deafening music. The top hadn’t seriously hurt Bjorn, but he had ignored moshing etiquette. No kicking, no hitting—just shoving. There was a correct way to fight people for fun.
We took a break, escaping the pit with ignored bruises. Two of our friends came over with a couple of joints from absolute strangers. They airily pointed at their source.
I turned to Bjorn grimly. “What are you going to do, Bjorn?” “I promise I won’t. I promise. But if your dad sees them, make sure he knows I wasn’t involved.” Bjorn grabbed my shoulders, practically shaking me. “Make sure he knows. You have to make sure. Please, I need you to make sure.” He was quivering. I was shocked. My mouth was open, but instead of saying anything, I could only nod. He’d gone from blithe to scared to now desperate to stay out of trouble. Did that mean he was cleaning up his act, or just being more discreet?
I woke up the next morning with ringing in my ears. I chewed on a muffin for a little while in front of the phone, considering calling Bjorn. I was afraid of making plans that would only be canceled again, but scattered hope was better than a weekend alone. So I called; He was going to Vermont. He would be around in two weeks. But two weeks later he wrote to me on Facebook telling me we could hang out on Friday or Saturday. But he canceled on Friday. And then on Saturday. So I stopped calling him.
* The names of the people in this narrative have been changed to protect their privacy.