Trouble Bored
Matthew Ryan Lowery
Copyright
This is a work of fiction based on true events. Although its form is that of a memoir, it is not one. Names, dates, places, events, and details have been changed, invented, and altered to suit the convenience of the book. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.
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Copyright © 2021 Matthew Ryan Lowery
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All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by
U.S. copyright law.
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For permission, contact: [email protected]
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Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-0879-4083-0
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-0878-8706-7
E-book: ISBN 978-1-0878-8880-4
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Edited by: Paige Polinsky
Cover art by: Scott White
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Lyrics from the song “Knowledge” off the album Energy by Operation Ivy.
Copyright © 1989 Jesse Michaels/Operation Ivy.
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www.MatthewRyanLowery.com
P.O. Box 1390
Guilderland, NY 12084
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Rotterdam
2. Nico
3. South Gate Avenue
4. Trouble Bored
5. “It’s Ryder. Over.”
6. “You promise?”
7. “Stay out of trouble tonight.”
8. “Good enough for punk rock.”
9. Energy
10. Mario’s
11. “Ready when you are.”
12. “I’ll call you tonight. Bye.”
13. “Come on, Bungie.”
14. “I’m on it.”
15. “Check this out.”
16. “Pull over!”
17. Trooper
18. Green 90
19. “How strong is it?”
20. Straight to Hell
21. Home
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Matthew Ryan Lowery
Acknowledgments
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Thank you to my beautiful wife, Jillian Lowery, for her patience while I wrote this book. May she forgive me as I write the next one. I love you. Stay perfect.
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Thank you to all of my bandmates: Kevin Leonard, Jimmy Jacobs, Mike Roe, Nate Fregoe, Anthony Salvatore, Nick Micheli, and Greg Welch. There is another stage I hope we can share someday.
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Thank you to Andrew Kline, James Jackson, and Dan Tomkowski for the vault of memories from which I am endlessly inspired.
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Thank you to Matthew Warren for his excellent advice on storytelling and criticism of my early outlines for the screenplay that became this novel.
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To my readers: It is my firmly held belief that one should create as much art as their soul can carry in their lifetime. Your continued support allows me the strength to not be crushed under the weight of my passions. Thank you.
-Matt
Dedicated to the memories of
Jimmy Jacobs
and
Mario Salerno.
One
Rotterdam
I just want a chance to tell this story without anyone interrupting me. No one jumping in to put their spin on how things were to protect their image. Trust me when I say — it went down like this. I mean it fucking went down just like this. Also, fuck your fucking image. Write your own book if it matters that much to you.
This is how it was, and this is how we all were. Me, Steve, Wolf, and whatever drummer we resorted to, going for it as best we could manage. Punk rockers bound for death or glory. Hunting to make something out of our band while simultaneously self-destructing every chance we got. Maybe subconsciously, we figured if we could burn out before making it anywhere, we could always chalk our failures up to cliche.
We lived this cycle of abuse, and we absolutely refused to quit it for two reasons: the first being that it was probably the thing we were all best at, and the second being that it was honestly the least boring thing we could think to ever do at that time in our lives.
I guess at some point, self-preservation took over. The will to survive. Not in a midlife crisis type of way, we were far too young, but more in the way of an instinct to pump the brakes before the inevitable crash. We were living some kind of life, man, and there were no fucking seatbelts involved.
When I think about the years I spent with my brothers in music, before it all slipped away, one weekend comes to mind as the supernova of our entire existence as a band. The climax and the point of no return, where everything we worked for and everything we took for granted was gut checked out of our control. Before we self-sabotaged, before some of us lost faith, before some of us left this earth, we had this last crazy weekend where everything we earned and everything we owed played out.
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I’ve told this story many times to my closest friends. But for an outsider to understand the intricacy and magnitude of the situation, I’ve got to get you caught up on what life was like for us, worlds ago, as teenagers in the early 2000s.
It’s hard to imagine all these years later how unconventional everything was back then and how conventional all that unconventionalism actually seemed. The disparity between our lifestyles and the lifestyles of our peers was amplified against the backdrop of us growing up in a really normal town and going to a very normal school. Most of us had parents. We weren’t bad kids, depending on who was keeping score. If you had to throw a dart at one consistent factor causing our recklessness and restlessness, I would have to presume nine times out of ten, the culprit was boredom.
Rotterdam, New York, is a small suburb within Schenectady County, just outside the actual city of Schenectady. I was born there in 1986. Back then, the town was a lot less boarded up.
It’s about three hours north of New York City, considerably far enough away from Ground Zero to have witnessed the actual atrocity of 9/11 firsthand. But the impact the attacks had on my small-town life as a teenager and my perception of the world, society, and personal value was profound—the fallout of which cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor to my assimilation of the punk rock ethos.
Truly we saw the last of the glory days, of cutting class and smoking in the boys room with a slap on the wrist. Everything in school changed post-9/11. We were subjected to this new mantra, “Sacrifice freedom for security,” that would be a political tug-of-war for the next twenty years. We suffered all of the harsher penalties that came with it. Most of the kids fell in line, but for my friends—the punx, the skateboarders, the potheads—it was the end times. Fuck authority. I made it another year or so before I dropped out in 2003.
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I’ll admit, though, I thought Rotterdam to be, for the most part, a wholesome town growing up. Me, Nico Ricci, and Freddy Caldwell would stay over at Chris Jessup’s house every weekend. His mom didn’t care if we went out all night to skateboard. We felt completely safe walking around at night, and usually the cops didn’t bother us. Usually. They only ever wanted to know our names and check Chris’s backpack for spray paint, which we didn’t consider an issue since we didn’t tag.
One cop was so convinced that we were guilty of spray-painting around town that she brought Chris and I home and made us wake his mom up in the middle of the night. His mom was fucking pissed. She was a sergeant correctional officer who at one time had actually trained the officer who brought us home. She bitched the co
p out for accusing us of spray painting and basically got us a free pass to never be bothered again.
We skateboarded everyday after school, but nothing beat going skating at night. We could vault fences and clear gaps that were off-limits in the daylight. It was a lot safer too, because there were no cars around. The sound a skateboard makes when you fuck up a kickflip and land on the board upside down is one of the loudest noises I have ever heard. We would wake up one street, then move on to the next.
It wasn’t all innocence, though. We fucked around a ton. Once we fell off our boards enough, smashed our shins, rolled an ankle, it was usually time to chew some Advil and start getting into mischief. We would walk down Altamont Avenue and do pull-ups on the height limit bar in the McDonalds drive-thru. We would take campaign signs off people's front yards, remove the metal legs, and throw them as hard as we could into the air just to watch them come crashing down. Nico and I once pulled a stop sign all the way to the ground—just bent the fucking thing until it was sideways. We would steal those shiny glass ball decorations from rich people’s yards and smash them. We’d roll car tires down a hill to see what they would hit.
One time we were rolling a tire across Altamont Ave right where it meets Curry Road, two of us hiding on either side. The tire would roll across the street, hit the curb, fall over, and we would crack up. Complete overtired and overcaffeinated teenager nonsense, but we found it hilarious. The tire was laying flat in the street when a Rotterdam cop car came flying down Altamont with no lights on and nailed the tire at full speed, causing the car to flop around from nose to tail as the suspension tried to regain balance. The cop never turned around.
Chris and Freddy had a thing for stealing street signs. They'd stash a pile behind some bushes while they kept going back out to get more for no reason other than a thrill. Freddy had a compulsion to check any doors belonging to abandoned businesses. He was so goddamn curious all the time, and you would be surprised how often doors around town were actually left unlocked. He once found a way into the old Grand Union building on Hamburg Street and we would go fuck around on the roof. He and Chris got into the abandoned end of Mohawk Mall back when Media Play was the only store in business, and they skateboarded all over it before smashing light bulbs and blowing off the fire extinguishers they found.
We really weren’t bad kids though. It was the suburbs. We were teenagers. Maybe it was a rite of passage. I don’t know. It’s tough to explain, but honestly there was nothing else to do.
Two
Nico
“Where the fuck is Nico?”
I was always impatient, but damn. Where the fuck was he?
It was a Friday night, early June 2003. I had waited all day for Chris and Freddy to get out of school so we could chill. Dropping out had left me with a ton of time on my hands. At first, I was going to these mandatory GED classes for dropouts under the age of eighteen. I couldn’t stand them though. Not only did I have to walk to school everyday—you can’t take the bus when you technically aren’t a student anymore—but they’d given me a packet of lessons and exercises to complete over the course of, like, 150 hours or something. I had finished the entire thing in the first two days. I wasn’t a fucking idiot; I just hated school. They told me I had to keep showing up for the remainder of the program and expected me to quietly read books for a couple months while the rest of the dipshits sniffed their asses and picked fights with each other all day. Yeah, no. I dropped out of dropout class.
By the time the weekend rolled around, I was ready to see my friends. We were at Chris’s house like always, a Cape Cod-style house on Spry Lane. His room was upstairs. The roof was slanted on both sides but not at such a pitch as to prevent our teenage growth spurt selves from freely standing.
Chris could draw, like really draw. His entire ceiling was covered in anime wall scrolls and posters, all the cool shit from the 90s and early 2000s: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gundam Wing, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell. He filled any blank space with cut-up issues of Transworld Skateboarding and Thrasher Magazine, full pages of his favorites: Marc Johnson, Rodney Mullen, Jamie Thomas.
Chris cranked the A/C in his room. It was freezing, but it felt great to return to after skateboarding. When we weren’t skating, we were playing video games, chain-smoking, or getting stoned. Usually all three at once.
It was our home away from home. For Freddy, literally — a couple weeks prior, he’d punched his alcoholic stepfather in the face full blast. Just snapped one day and cold-fucking-clocked him. Punched that bastard in the face, ran into his mom’s room, and locked the door. When his mom got home, he explained the situation to her and I guess she said she was going to leave the abusive prick and go out of town for a bit. So Freddy was staying at Chris’s until further notice. He was still waiting on an update. And we were still waiting on Nico.
“I don’t know. I left him a voicemail.” Chris handed Freddy his PlayStation 2 controller.
“He’s probably working.” Freddy booted up Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
“Working with his mom or working at Price Saver?” I sat down to watch.
Price Saver is an East Coast thing. Nico bagged groceries there. He also helped his mom clean state office buildings in Albany part-time. She was a single mother. Nico’s dad grew up in Rotterdam too, but he was born in Italy. Must have missed the place; he skipped out when Nico was a toddler and never came back. Never called or wrote either.
“Well, shit,” I said. "He’s our last chance to find weed.”
We’d already made all the usual calls to all the usual kids. Weed wasn’t always hard to find in Rotterdam; most people just bought it at school. Radio silence from our usual contacts, though, made it safe to assume there was a drought. Droughts sucked, and they always seemed to occur closer to the summer, when the hippie festivals in Mariaville came around. Anyone who had weed was twenty minutes out of town, selling to the festival crowd. Anyone who needed weed had to then go there to get it. The problem was we hadn’t yet broken our hippie fest cherries, mostly because we didn’t like hippies; and we hardly had money for weed let alone festival tickets.
Suddenly, we heard the carpeted stairs to Chris’s room creak as someone shuffled up to the door. They knocked twice before letting themselves in.
“‘Sup, queers?”
“Ayyyy!” We all got excited to see Nico.
Nico was the oldest by a few months. Then Chris, then Freddy, then me. If you counted the age gap between Nico and I, it was about a full year. He was the closest thing to a big brother I ever had. He was tall and heavyset whereas the rest of us were average height and thin. Nico wore skater shit like the rest of us. Cargo shorts, T-shirt. He had a pair of DC shoes and a black Element beanie.
He walked up to each of us and gave the reigning handshake of the era—kind of a hybrid low-five handshake with a snap on the pull-off, topped with a fist bump. No one in particular made that up; it was just a thing. When he got around to me, he threw an arm over my shoulder.
“Grayson!”
“Friday night!” I responded. “Finally! What took you so long?”
“Helping my mom. But look what I got from Montgomery.”
Nico took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.
“Camel Double Wides?” I asked, “They look like something Indiana Jones would smoke.”
“One of these is like two cigarettes. This is like a pack of forty cigs, dude.”
Who could argue with that logic?
“Well, shit,” I said.
“We can’t find weed.” Freddy died on-screen and passed the controller back to Chris.
“I know,” Nico stated “Everyone is at hippie fest. I’m waiting for this guy Eric to call me back.”
“Who’s Eric?” asked Chris.
“He works at Price Saver. He’s twenty-three.”
Nico was always making older friends. It had something to do with being raised Italian and sitting at the table with the adults in his family more often than not, bei
ng spoken to like an adult—that and not having a dad around. I think he was always looking for a father figure. He was a king of conversation, which I truly admired. It got him into plenty of trouble, but he was always able to talk his way out of it.
“He lives over in South Gate.”
South Gate was a low-income project area just past the edge of town on your way to Schenectady. Way rougher than our neighborhood. Freddy had some friends in Schenectady that always cut around South Gate to get to Rotterdam.
“Can he stop by?” asked Chris.
“He doesn’t have a car, but he said his girl can bring him through when she gets out of work.”
Another hour and a half passed before I convinced Nico to call Eric back. Chris and Freddy had pretty much given up on finding weed for the night and were content with virtual crime sprees.
Nico came back into the room on his cell phone. “Okay, cool. We’ll call you when we’re there.”
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