Reading Brendan Kiley’s “Confessions of a Gasoline Huffer” in this week’s issue reminded me of a low point in my own life. No, I wasn’t experimenting with inhalants. I was experimenting with punk rock. And t-shirts.

When I was a teenager, I must’ve seen Gas Huffer play at the Old Firehouse a dozen times. One of those times, I bought a t-shirt. It was puke green, with a caricature of a dude with a big nose hunched over a canister of rocket fuel, fumes wafting up into his giant nostrils, maybe x’s on his eyes (anyone have an image of said shirt?). It was probably extra large for that baggy, mid ’90s suburban alterna-teen look. Anyway, I got the shirt home and my mom cut it up with a pair of scissors and threw it in the trash. She was worried that I was going to start huffing gas or that the shirt encouraged drug use or something. I did do drugs, but I never huffed gas, and Kiley’s story makes it pretty clear that obscure psych textbooks, not punk rock, is the real gateway into huff-town. Mom wouldn’t reimburse me the $10 I spent on the shirt. I’ve still never huffed gas.