Nicky is a Punk Rocker

My adolescence is now looked back on as a punk rock blur. I was a punker, not a liberty punk with fucking colored spikes. No, I was a gutter punk. My experiences growing up punk have equipped me with the tools I have used to live a rich and full life. As a young adult in the Army, I met all kinds of Americans from across all spectrums of life. I also met many immigrants working to earn their citizenship in the service. It was common for us to congregate and discuss our recent comings of ages. It was in those discussions that I learned just how exceptional my own personal teenage wasteland was. Here is an excerpt.
For a time I lived in a large studio with a large skate ramp. I kept my belongings under the ramp. I don’t know why or how but, my fellow squatters and I had amassed many refrigerators. (I assumed they were stolen from houses by ambitious thieves, but I’m just guessing.) To this day I don’t know who, if anyone was paying the rent there. For that matter I don’t even know if the building was condemned. It was filled with artists and punkers of all flavors. Rather than scrape up enough change for a pack of cigarettes, we would scrape up bus fare for one. That unlucky individual would take the buss to the mall and scour the ashtrays for long butts. Many times I asked myself what my life was as I was stared at by a bus full of discussed onlookers. I cradled shirt loads of half smoked smokes, a diligent hunter gatherer for my punk rock tribe.
I often ran with a crowd called the robo junkies. They bore this moniker because of their drug of choice. Robitussen DM. These guys largely lived at home. You know the type, rich kids on LSD. They had many strange rituals. At parties in different suburban houses we would tale wash rags from the linen closets and chew on them like dogs. In a show of masculinity the boys would grasp opposite ends of the same rag in their teeth and fight over them. When very high on cough syrup and other intoxicants we would often speak in “robo talk”, where we would drop all articles and prepositions.
The whole time I was out stretching my wings and flirting with death I had two loving parents I could go home to. In fact they were yearning for me to do so. I just dug that scene.