Read Online Death Grip by Matt Samet - Free Book Online

out to the track, plunked down on the bleachers, lit a cigarette, primed his stopwatch, and put Sergio and me through windsprints.
    The next year was little better. I made sure to overstay my welcome at the Academy, so that a transfer halfway through freshman year became inevitable. That October of 1985, two of us “liberated” cans of the spray-on athletic adhesive Tuff Skin from a gymnasium storage closet and spritzed it through ventilation holes in the PE lockers. The adhesive turned the clothes inside into sticky, starchy planks. Just for good measure, we did this a few times. I remember sitting sheepishly before the upper-school disciplinarian, Mr. Buck, with his Harry Potter glasses and THE BUCK STOPS HERE placard, and being told that we would need to come to school one weekend and weed planter beds. My buddy and I pulled up thistle and tumbleweeds, and then I told my parents that I could not stay at the Academy. Some of my grades had even dropped to Bs for the first time in my life. I was rapidly going off the rails.
    *   *   *
    N ot this again. N ot another “street fight.” Wading through my first semester of ninth grade, hating life at the Academy, I’d been jumped for the fourth time in as many months. Fact: Going around the streets of Albuquerque dressed like a punk rocker will get you jumped. Sergio and I had learned this the hard way, paddling along Twelfth Street down in the Valley, when a road crew of juvenile-detention inmates surrounded us with shovels and pickaxes and tried to take our skateboards, the ringleader punching me in the mouth and knocking me to the pavement. A small band of us had learned this at the underage nightclub The Big Apple, when two packs, of jocks and metalheads, converged on us in the rear parking lot over a minor verbal misunderstanding. And I’d learned it again just two blocks from my mother’s home, skating alone behind Jefferson Middle School one night when a dozen barrio kids chased after me, trying to steal my deck. There was always an edge of mortal peril to the attacks, an undiscriminating, many-on-few bloodlust forged in the city’s hot, dusty crucible. Kids get stabbed and shot in Albuquerque, so I always tried to cut and run. I’m strong, but not street tough. I didn’t grow up in the crack-shack ghetto but instead in middle-class neighborhoods in the Northeast Heights, the wealthiest quadrant in town. It barely mattered, because the weirdness goes down everywhere. Albuquerque has a well-merited reputation for crime, racial tension, and random violence—it’s an economically and ethnically mixed, sun-blasted, windswept Southwestern mini-megalopolis split by two major interstates—a smaller Los Angeles where evil happens quickly and without apparent motive. (As one friend who also moved away, to Texas, put it, “I hate coming home. Everywhere I go, I feel like I’m looking over my shoulder.”) The city’s dark undercurrent seeps into your soul, even those of children.
    Now, the one time we victims outnumbered our attacker, he had to be some armed sociopath older and larger than ourselves with the saucer eyes of a panicked horse. Mean as a rattler, impervious to reason, an unfeeling killer from some cold, alternate universe. Another thief of skateboards, a creature of the night just like we fancied ourselves to be when we’d steal out of our parents’ homes to hit the silent streets.
    We liked to do this: sneak out after midnight, rendezvous, smoke cigarettes, drink watery beer, and pop ollies and try wall-rides and acid drops on lots, stairwells, and parking garages where we’d be chased off by day. Night skating was the best. The air had cooled, the asphalt had hardened, and there was no one about to call the police, no cars in the way or grumpy old codgers hollering abuse from their driveways. Our favorite was to street-luge from the four-way intersection at Constitution and