In Bergenfield, New Jersey, on the morning or March 11, 1987, the bodies of four teenagers, who died from carbon monoxide inside a 1977 rust-colored Chevrolet Camaro. The teenagers were described in the papers as “burnouts” who barely got by in school and at home and who did not impress authority figures in any remarkable way except as fuck-ups. In the following weeks multiple rock bands in the area dedicated songs to the teens from Bergenfield. But I was very pissed off at what I kept reading. How people in Bergenfield openly referred to the kids as “troubled losers,” “druggies,” “dropouts.” Something was wrong so I took the opportunity to investigate. From the beginning I believed that the kids represented a tragic defeat for young people. Something was happening in the larger society that was not yet comprehended. Because the world has changed for today’s kids. We engaged in activities that adults called self- destructive. But for my generation, “doing it” meant having sex; for them it means committing suicide. “Teenage suicide” was a virtually nonexistent category prior to 1960. But between 1950 and 1890 it nearly tripled. To date, there are more than 5,000 teen suicides annually, accounting for 12 percent of youth mortalities. By 1987, we had books and articles describing “copycat” and “cluster” suicides. Teenage suicide was being described as an epidemic.
I wondered, did the “burnouts” see themselves as a community under siege? Like the 960 Jews at Masda who jumped to their deaths rather than face defeat by the Romans? Were the “burnouts” choosing death over surrender?
The starting-off point for this research, then is a teenage suicide pact in an upper poor white ethic suburb in northern new Jersey. There were specific sociocultural patterns operating in bergenfield through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible- that made suicide seem like the best alternative.
In the 1990s, as before, high school kids at the top were the preps, jocks, or brains depending on the region. In white suburban high schools like Bergenfield, the burnouts are often the kids near the bottom. To outsiders, they look tough, scruffy, poor, and wild. Uninvolved in and unimpressed by convention, they create an alternative world, a retreat, a refuge. Some burnouts are proud; they “wave their freak flags high.” they call themselves burnouts to flaunt their break with society’s order…
Joe knows he can’t win in this town. He’s got a bad bad name. What’s the use. Hes tried it at least six times. Once he gashed his vein with an army knife he picked up in times square. He strokes the scars. Tonight he says he’s going to a bible study class. Some girl invited him. Shows me a God pamphlet, inspirational literature. He doesn’t want anyone to know about this although. He thought the jesus girl was nice. Suicide comes up again, susie is forced to show me her freshly bandaged wrists and she smiles at me seductively. What the fuck is this, erotic? Kicks? Romantic? I feel cold panic. Nicky slashed his wrists when his girlfriend moved out of state. His scars are much older. I motion to him about susie. Discreetly he says: its best to ignore it, don’t pay too much attention.
After the suicide pact, parents complained that the kids really did need someplace to go when school let out. The after school activities were limited to academics, sports, or organized school clubs. Even with part-time after school jobs, a number of the town’s young people did not find the conventional activities offered by the town particularly intriguing. But according to established adult reasoning, if you didn’t get absorbed into legitimate, established routine of social activity, you’d be left to burn in the street, killing time, getting wasted. It was impossible to imagine any autonomous activity that nonconforming youth en masse might enjoy that would not be self destructive, potentially criminal, or meaningless. Ten years ago, in any suburban town, teenagers complaints of nothing to do would be met with adult annoyance, not anymore.
Youngsters have always been cationed by adults that the devil would make use of their idle hands. But now they understood something else: boredom led to drugs, boredom could kill. Yet it was still taken for granted that if you refused to be colonized, if you ventured beyond the boundaries circumsized by adults, you were looking for trouble. But in reality, it was adult organization of young people’s social reality over the last few hundred years being wasted and getting wasted.
So by now, when kids hang out, congregating in some unstructured setting , adults read as dangerous. The outcast members of Bergenfield’s youth population would tell me these things: the cops are dicks, the school blows, the jocks suck, billy milano was from a nearby town, and iron maiden had dedicated “wasted years” to the Buress sisters the last time the band played jersey.
Like many suburban towns, Bergenfield is occupationally mixed. Blue collar aristocrats may make more money than college professors, and so one’s local class identity is unclear. Schools claim to track kids in terms of “ability,” and cliques are determined by subculture, style, participation, and refusal.
Because the myth of a democratized mass makes class lines in the suburbs of the United States so ambiguous to begin with, difference in status become the critical lines of democratization. And in the mostly white, mainly christian town of Bergenfield, where there are neither very rich nor very poor people, this sports thing became an important criterion for determining “whos who” among the young people.
The kids at the bottom, who everybody here simply called burnouts, were actually a conglomerate of several cliques- serious druggies, deadheads, dirtbags, skinheads, metalheads, thrashers, and punks. Some were good students, from good families with money and prestige. In any other setting all of these people might have been bitter rivals, or at least very separate cliques. But here, thanks to the adults and the primacy of sports, they were all lumped together- united by virtue of a common enemy, the jocks.
Both the dirts and the burnt may understand how they are being fucked over and by whom. And while partying rituals may actually celebrate the refusal to play the game, neither group has a clue where to take it beyond the parking lot of 7-Eleven. So they end up stranded in the teenage wasteland.
Such wasted suburban kids are typically not politically “correct,” nor do they constitute and identifiable segment of the industrial working class. They are not members of a specific racial or ethnic minority, and they have few political advocates. Only on the political issue of abortion and the death penalty for minors will wasted teenage girls and boys be likely to find adults in their corner. In the scheme of things, average american kids who don’t have rich or well connected parents have these choices: Play the game and try to get ahead.
Many openly admit that they would rather end it all now than end up losers. Schools urge kids to make these choices as early as possible, in a variety of ways. In the terse words of the San Francisco hardcore band MDC: there’s no such thing as cheating in the loser’s game. Nevertheless, everyone pretends that everything is possible if you give it your best shot. We actually believe it.
Girls get slightly different choices. They may hope to become spectacular by virtue of their talents and their beauty. Being the girlfriend of a guy in a band means you might get to live in his mansion someday if you stick it out with him during his lean years. If you are unspectacular- not too book- smart, of average looks and moderate creative ability- there have always been places for you. Much of your teachers efforts will be devoted to your more promising peers, and so will your nations resources. But your parents will explain to you that this is the way it is, and early on, you will know to expect very little from school.
Even though half the kids in America today will never go to college, the country still acts as if they will. At least, most schools seem to be set up to prepare you for college. And your most devoted teachers at vocational high school will never tell you that the training you will get from them is barely enough to get your foot in the door.
The skills used in a typical “shit job”… involve slapping rancid butter on stale hard rolls, mopping the floor selling Lotto tickets, making sure shelves and refrigerators are clean, sorting and stacking magazines, taking delivery on newspapers, and signing out videos. For a while I wondered if the excessive labeling process in bergenfield was killing off the “burnouts.” Essentially, their role, their collective identity in their town was that of the “nigger” or “jew.” Us and them, the one and the other. Yes, Bergenfield was guilty of blaming the victims.
They often held out one last question, sometimes contemptuously: why didn’t they just leave? As if the four kids had failed even as outcasts. My friends found this confusing: no matter how worthless the people who make the rules say you are, you don’t have to play their game. You can always walk and not look back, they would argue.
During the eighties, dead-end kids- kids with personal problems and unspectacular talents living in punitive or indifferent towns with a sense of futility about life- became more common. There were lots of kids with bad lives. They did not all commit suicide.
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