It’s Thursday afternoon. After-school activities are in progress.

A group of about seven teenagers are sitting around a truck in front of the 7-Eleven. Burnouts. I know from the pose, the clothes, the turf. Yep, in another age they’d be hitters or greasers or hippies or heads or freaks. On another coast – they’d be stoners. Archenemies of jocks, dexters, rah-rahs or socs for all eternity.

So begins the exerpt from Donna Gaines’ book, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead-End Kids from The Faber Book Of Pop. This rather brilliant description of life in the hinterworld during the late ‘80’s is nothing short of breathtakingly “on”.

I knew these kids. I was friends with these kids. But I wasn’t one of these kids. I was the faggy little goth boy that a select few of these kids miraculously chose to protect in high-school. My junior and senior yearbooks still show the loopy, heart-inflected signatures and goofy drawings of these kids. “TTFN – BF4E” “English Blows! And you do too Fag! JK! (Heart) U!”

Guys with earrings, crucifixes, long hair hanging over a concert shirt or a hooded sweatshirt. Walking in threes with boom boxes blasting AC/DC, Bon Jovi, or Zep. Suburban rocker kids are patriotic – everyone wears denim jackets (a prized commodity among international rocker youth, proof of America’s pop-cultural world supremacy). Back panel is painted, a shrine to on’e most beloved band: Iron Maiden, Metallica, The Grateful Dead.

Ladies have bi-level haircuts. Long shags blown, sprayed, clipped to one side, teased, sometimes bleached. Grease & glamour. Where Farrah and Madonna meet Twisted Sister. Bergen Mall trendy, buy informed by the careful reading of albums and metal magazines. Earrings, junk jewels, eye makeup, leggings or spandex pants. Oversized cotton shirts hang down past a more stylized, unpainted denim jacket. Heavy cotton athletic socks slouch over whit or black leather ankleboots or white sneakers

Okay who didn’t know these kids in the ‘80’s, or better yet, if you didn’t know them, who wasn’t harassed by a group of these bad-ass, pot-smoking danger children.

There’d been a little mass suicide of four friends in a small city called Bergenfield, and Gaines is there to try to get to the bottom of why four teenagers, with seemingly nothing to lose, nothing to be so upset about would take their own lives.

Nicky slaps his girlfriend Doreen on the ass. A few feet away, out by the main road, another girl walks by. She hurries past the store. She is spotted by Doreen. Her friends, Susie and Joan, rush over to her. “You going to fight her?” Doreen knows that Nicky went with her the other night. She’d like to kill her. Bitch. Nothing happens. This is my first introduction to the girls.

We settle in. I say that I’m not really interested in interrogating them about the suicide pact. I understand they are sick of the reporters. I explain that I wanted to check out the town, to know what it’s like to be a “burnout”. Nicky understands my purpose at once. Pointing to his friends, he says, “yeah, well, you got the right ones” No doubt about it; They are “burnouts”

Of course the conversation turns to more important things….

Nicky and Doreen are making out. The Bon Jovi tape plays “Runaway” on the truck’s stereo. I check out the system. Impressive! More talk about music. We compare favorite bands. I ask if they like Metallica. Heads bang back and forth and we play air guitar “Batterrreee!” Nicky figures yeah, if I like Motorhead, I’d probably like Metallica. We are now at a regional hardcore- heavy metal – thrasher convention. What goes on next is a rock and roll version of “Paison…landsman…you like Anthrax?” You sniff out cultural heritage. Then you talk. You either know it; or you don’t; you can’t fake it.

Eventually conversation rolls around to what it always seemed to roll around to in the late ‘80’s. Hatred of authority and how to deal with them, whether they be parents, principals or cops.

”I know, but what can you do about it?” Joe asks. Doreen and Nicky come up for air, he taps me. “Hey, don’t you like us?” He’s insulted, I’m ignoring them! “I’m being respectful, you’re on a date.” He laughs. “A date!” And offers me gum.

I get serious. “You have to fight back.” Joe asks me how. I have no answer but I have to answer Joe. “I don’t know, but you can. You have to, or they win. They get to write history.”

Photo stills and video clip from Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

Go to my blog, T.M.L., here, to check out some audio samples from the golden age of metal.