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- Feb 7, 2006
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Yes, this is a retelling of American Idiot. Yes, it does feature mature themes, sex, drugs, and plenty of language. If you've got problems with that, don't read ahead, and if you do, don't come bitching to me.
I. jesus of suburbia
“What the **** is this?”
There I was, standing in my house, in my living room, staring down what should be my dad with his hand up my mom’s shirt. Instead I get Brad, staring blankly up at me, slowly withdrawing his hand from my giggling mother’s top. And instead of a remote, or a beer, or whatever the **** normal teenagers hold when they confront their couldn’t-give-a-shit mother and deadbeat would-be stepfather, I was squeezing a bottle of Ritalin so hard it was cracking.
“I…Is that prescription?” Brad asked, the ****. He looked at my mother for approval, but she just shrugged and took a drag of her cigarette. What a bitch.
“No, it’s not ****ing prescription.” It probably was. “And you were slipping me it, weren’t you?” This was unbecoming of me. Me, the so called Jesus of Suburbia. Popping pills like some lowlife addict ****up. I kept myself straight, on a steady diet of Novocain and coke. I was a model citizen of Jingletown USA, after all. Nothing less would do for me.
Brad looked scared. Mom looked apathetic. Story of my life. Eventually, he got up off his fat ass and looked at me, and said slowly, "Now, son." He paused after that. His lips flopped aimlessly for a while, trying to say something deep. After a while, he gave up, falling back onto the couch, his hand reaching hopelessly for the remote. Brad didn't function well under pressure, I had found.
I rolled the bottle in my gritty hands and listened to the pills jitter around inside. "This is bullshit. I have a right to know about this shit. I've got a right to know about whatever you're putting into me." This was more of a growl than anything else. I could work off Brad's fear, hopefully scare the shit out of him. Maybe shake mom up a little too. "So what the **** do you have to say for yourselves, huh?"
No one said anything. I smiled a little on the inside. Another score for the Jesus of Suburbia.
And then mom stood up, and she walked over to me, smoke trailing from her lips. An inch away from my face, she took another puff of her cigarette, and blew the leftover shit into my face. Then she slapped me, goddamn hard. Her nails scraped across my cheek, and blood sprayed out. At least, it felt like it did. I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't scream. In my defense, though, my mom was edgy. She did a lot of drugs back in the day, they burned her out pretty bad. But when she was mad, she got mad.
I hit the ground hard, my eyes stinging from the smoke, my face burning. And all I could smell was that disgusting perfume that she drowned the room in. “You don’t need to know anything. You don’t know jack shit.” She said, her mouth working around the ashy filth she was always chewing on. “I know what’s best. You just keep your ****ing head down swallow your goddamn pills.”
I felt numb. Worse than when I was dosed. I felt empty. Just what the **** kind of environment was this for a kid to grow up in? I vocalized this thought absently and got the end of a cigarette dug into my arm. Moaning, I glanced back up at my two would-be parents. Brad refused to look at me. Big ****ing surprise. I bet he wouldn't even remember this by tomorrow. Mom, on the other hand, looked angry. Like, real angry. She probably would've beaten me some more if it weren't so late. I thought it was all kind of amusing. Except the whole burnt arm and bleeding face thing.
I didn’t get up again Mom and Brad had slunk upstairs to their bedroom. As soon as I heard the door shut, I pushed myself up and rummaged around in my back pocket, my hands all shaky like. After harsh times like this I liked to block out the trauma with some light shit. Dipping myself in a bit of Mary Jane was my immediate reaction to something not going my way. It wasn't exactly a long term solution, but it got me through the shit I took better than talking to anyone ever did. I flicked the bottle of Ritalin to the side and fingered the blunt mournfully. I didn’t like this stuff.
Big deal, though. You had to do what you had to do in a place like this.
I grabbed the remote that Brad had dropped on his way out of the room. There was shit on that night, but it didn't matter. I found the flashiest kids show I could and settled back, getting into the rhythm of it all. After ten minutes my eyes were burning, and I took a puff of the joint to calm myself down. This was my childhood. This is what I endured day in and day out, as the Jesus of Suburbia. This was my proverbial crucifix. I took everything and gave nothing back, like a real rebel should. And I was a rebel, no matter what else anyone said, I was the closest thing anyone had to a savior in this run down shit hole called Jingletown.
And the funny thing was, I was bored to shit.
II. city of the dead
I took a drag of the cigarette, blowing the smoke into a careful ring, and grinning at the result. At least there was one ****ing thing I could be proud of.
I liked to hang out at the local 7-11. Didn’t matter if it was open or shut, I liked to drop down in front of that overhang and just think. And smoke, of course. You couldn’t do any real thinking unless you were baked in Jingletown. Besides, the shit kept me thinking happy thoughts, and I needed my head clear for the night ahead.
The store was my home away from home. Sometimes I actually slept there. It was true I liked the vibe I got from the place, and I liked the owner, but that wasn’t the reason I stuck around. It was for the City of the Damned. For the Underbellies.
After dark the nearby shopping mall really lit up. The streetlights went black, and my mates came out to play. They came from every corner of our ****ed up little society, some worked the streets, some were the sons of millionaires, some were dirt poor. The only thing we had in common was that we had nothing in common. That, and none of us would give half a shit about each other before the sun set. We were just too different. The only thing that bonded us together past mutual emotions was what we called ourselves. We were all Underbellies. What a stupid name.
Well, it was our stupid name.
Everyone refused to meet until after all the lights went out. It wasn't exactly to protect ourselves; we could've easily gotten away with anything we did during the day if we just hid ourselves right. It wasn't that. I guess we just didn't want to feel like rats. We wanted to be able to run around and do whatever the **** we wanted to out in the open, give ourselves a little freedom. That's the vibe I got, at least. So most days I'd just crash in front of the 7-11 and try to wait out the sun. Life was kind of murky then, I never got the buzz I wanted sitting there, observing the human condition, but whatever. If I was going to hang with the Underbellies, everything would be alright.
I glanced up at the blistering sun, only half aware that it wasn't there anymore. Some small part of me knew that I didn't have long to wait now. Usually someone would stop by and pick me up around sundown, just in case I was too trashed to get down there myself. Today, I definitely was, and as usual, they sent down Joseph.
I heard his car before I saw him. I heard him before I saw him too. A husky arm pulled me to my feet, and through the terrible sonic filter than was my pot, he said "Sup Jesus?" It wasn't much, but it was what I needed to hear. In a second, all the shit was out of my system, and I was back in reality. Joseph's unshaven face came into view, and I gave him a quick smile, falling onto him, half to hug him and half for support. "Where you been, man? We're all waiting for you. You know we can't start shit without you there."
"Stuff happened." I replied solidly. Joseph wouldn't pry past that. He was too fried to really care, anyways. Still, I felt like if anyone in this world did actually care about my problems, it would've been Joseph. If being the key word, of course.
He nodded in response, and dragged me back to his car. We were at the City of the Damned after a good ten minutes. That whole trip, unfortunately, is one big blank spot it my mind. I was prone to blankouts on occasion. I tried not to worry about it too much. We unloaded Joseph's trunk stash after he ditched the car in the mostly empty parking lot; booze, condoms, drugs, whatever we thought we'd need for tonight. We were just thoughtful like that.
The strobe lights were already blaring when we made it into the main plaza. You couldn’t see a ****ing thing. It was amazing. All around us the Underbellies pulsed with the lights and the music, soaking in every drop of sex, energy, and, dare I say it, love that was just etched into the walls of the place. All of them writhing, dancing, grinding, ****ing, doing everything they could to emphasize that they were outside the walls of society, never to return. Not until the sun came back up again, at least.
Joseph pulled me up onto one of the benches and passed me a mic, winking at me, as he faded back into the crowd, lost in the sea of lust and insanity. One by one the people in the crowd went silent as they saw me hovering over them. I might as well have been nailed to a ****ing cross, I was like Jesus Christ himself standing up here. When everyone went silent, I flicked the mic on, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “The Jesus of Suburbia is here! The Jesus of Suburbia is ****ing home!”
And then everyone went wild, just like I knew they would. The music exploded and flooded down the halls, the lights drowned any possible doubts, and the screaming, well, shit, that just made things even better. And it was then that I smiled, standing on that bench, a head above at least five hundred ****s from all over Jingletown, loosing their ****ing minds, and I knew that this was their home.
But was it my home? I always had a little ache in the back of my head, and somehow I knew it was connected to this question.
I didn’t know the answer.
I never knew.
------NEW--
I left everyone to their sex and their drugs and headed to the bathroom stall on the third floor, where we stashed the ‘Scriptures’. Like any reasonable culture, we had our own history. We didn’t write it up like most normal groups did, of course, but we had it there, scrawled on the walls of that stall, the holy scriptures of our shopping mall. It was Joseph’s idea, in the beginning, but we all caught on pretty fast. Everyone's name was in there, somewhere, and we all had some shit written up about us; our accomplishments, our failures, our sexual exploits. Everything worth remembering was here, and would be till the world ended. Our they tore down the mall. Or painted over it. Whatever.
It was the best ****in’ place in the world to do some soul searching.
The lights were always flickering in the bathroom, like no one changed them since they were put in almost ten ****ing years ago. Wouldn’t surprise me if no one did, either. Made everything look more spiritual, anyways, or mystical. Something like that. The Underbellies seemed to like that. It gave me the creeps.
I glanced at myself briefly in the spider web-cracked mirror as I passed by. There were huge bags under my ragged red eyes, and my skin was pale and slightly green. I looked dead. Convincing myself it was just the fluorescent lights, and shoved open the door to the Scripture’s stall. There, scribbled in every color of the ****ing rainbow, was our history. I stepped up onto the toilet lid and pulled myself up onto the divider, and began to inspect the wall.
At the top of the off-white wall was Joseph’s name, in huge graffiti letters, and then there was all the shit he’d done. It was respectable. He was a regular saint, after all, he’d done everything from stealing candy from children to blowing up cars. I was definitely proud to call him my mate.
Past that was Mary’s little list. She was Joseph’s girl. The gang slut. Her list was at least twice as long as Joseph’s, but it wasn’t anywhere near as impressive. It just didn’t take any courage to shut your eyes and **** left and right, didn’t take any balls. I guess she wouldn’t understand that, anyways. Still, I didn’t like her, even if I couldn’t help but imagine her naked every time we talked.
Right below hers was mine, underneath a little cross sprayed in red. Mine was the longest of them all. It was all there, everything that a respectable little punk could ever hope to pull off, and more. This was why I was called the Jesus of Suburbia, I’d done more shit in my lifetime than Jesus Christ pulled off in almost twice as long.
I stared long and hard at that wall. I slowly drew my fingers across it, feeling the peeling paint with my own numb fingers. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I did belong here. Everything usually got clearer when I read the scriptures, going over my old escapades did wonders for my head. But now, reading this, all I could think about was how much I wanted to stay.
I was sick of all this shit. All these goddamn signs, misleading to nowhere.
C&C, plz. I'll try to update daily until it's done.
~Dorian Gray
I. jesus of suburbia
“What the **** is this?”
There I was, standing in my house, in my living room, staring down what should be my dad with his hand up my mom’s shirt. Instead I get Brad, staring blankly up at me, slowly withdrawing his hand from my giggling mother’s top. And instead of a remote, or a beer, or whatever the **** normal teenagers hold when they confront their couldn’t-give-a-shit mother and deadbeat would-be stepfather, I was squeezing a bottle of Ritalin so hard it was cracking.
“I…Is that prescription?” Brad asked, the ****. He looked at my mother for approval, but she just shrugged and took a drag of her cigarette. What a bitch.
“No, it’s not ****ing prescription.” It probably was. “And you were slipping me it, weren’t you?” This was unbecoming of me. Me, the so called Jesus of Suburbia. Popping pills like some lowlife addict ****up. I kept myself straight, on a steady diet of Novocain and coke. I was a model citizen of Jingletown USA, after all. Nothing less would do for me.
Brad looked scared. Mom looked apathetic. Story of my life. Eventually, he got up off his fat ass and looked at me, and said slowly, "Now, son." He paused after that. His lips flopped aimlessly for a while, trying to say something deep. After a while, he gave up, falling back onto the couch, his hand reaching hopelessly for the remote. Brad didn't function well under pressure, I had found.
I rolled the bottle in my gritty hands and listened to the pills jitter around inside. "This is bullshit. I have a right to know about this shit. I've got a right to know about whatever you're putting into me." This was more of a growl than anything else. I could work off Brad's fear, hopefully scare the shit out of him. Maybe shake mom up a little too. "So what the **** do you have to say for yourselves, huh?"
No one said anything. I smiled a little on the inside. Another score for the Jesus of Suburbia.
And then mom stood up, and she walked over to me, smoke trailing from her lips. An inch away from my face, she took another puff of her cigarette, and blew the leftover shit into my face. Then she slapped me, goddamn hard. Her nails scraped across my cheek, and blood sprayed out. At least, it felt like it did. I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't scream. In my defense, though, my mom was edgy. She did a lot of drugs back in the day, they burned her out pretty bad. But when she was mad, she got mad.
I hit the ground hard, my eyes stinging from the smoke, my face burning. And all I could smell was that disgusting perfume that she drowned the room in. “You don’t need to know anything. You don’t know jack shit.” She said, her mouth working around the ashy filth she was always chewing on. “I know what’s best. You just keep your ****ing head down swallow your goddamn pills.”
I felt numb. Worse than when I was dosed. I felt empty. Just what the **** kind of environment was this for a kid to grow up in? I vocalized this thought absently and got the end of a cigarette dug into my arm. Moaning, I glanced back up at my two would-be parents. Brad refused to look at me. Big ****ing surprise. I bet he wouldn't even remember this by tomorrow. Mom, on the other hand, looked angry. Like, real angry. She probably would've beaten me some more if it weren't so late. I thought it was all kind of amusing. Except the whole burnt arm and bleeding face thing.
I didn’t get up again Mom and Brad had slunk upstairs to their bedroom. As soon as I heard the door shut, I pushed myself up and rummaged around in my back pocket, my hands all shaky like. After harsh times like this I liked to block out the trauma with some light shit. Dipping myself in a bit of Mary Jane was my immediate reaction to something not going my way. It wasn't exactly a long term solution, but it got me through the shit I took better than talking to anyone ever did. I flicked the bottle of Ritalin to the side and fingered the blunt mournfully. I didn’t like this stuff.
Big deal, though. You had to do what you had to do in a place like this.
I grabbed the remote that Brad had dropped on his way out of the room. There was shit on that night, but it didn't matter. I found the flashiest kids show I could and settled back, getting into the rhythm of it all. After ten minutes my eyes were burning, and I took a puff of the joint to calm myself down. This was my childhood. This is what I endured day in and day out, as the Jesus of Suburbia. This was my proverbial crucifix. I took everything and gave nothing back, like a real rebel should. And I was a rebel, no matter what else anyone said, I was the closest thing anyone had to a savior in this run down shit hole called Jingletown.
And the funny thing was, I was bored to shit.
II. city of the dead
I took a drag of the cigarette, blowing the smoke into a careful ring, and grinning at the result. At least there was one ****ing thing I could be proud of.
I liked to hang out at the local 7-11. Didn’t matter if it was open or shut, I liked to drop down in front of that overhang and just think. And smoke, of course. You couldn’t do any real thinking unless you were baked in Jingletown. Besides, the shit kept me thinking happy thoughts, and I needed my head clear for the night ahead.
The store was my home away from home. Sometimes I actually slept there. It was true I liked the vibe I got from the place, and I liked the owner, but that wasn’t the reason I stuck around. It was for the City of the Damned. For the Underbellies.
After dark the nearby shopping mall really lit up. The streetlights went black, and my mates came out to play. They came from every corner of our ****ed up little society, some worked the streets, some were the sons of millionaires, some were dirt poor. The only thing we had in common was that we had nothing in common. That, and none of us would give half a shit about each other before the sun set. We were just too different. The only thing that bonded us together past mutual emotions was what we called ourselves. We were all Underbellies. What a stupid name.
Well, it was our stupid name.
Everyone refused to meet until after all the lights went out. It wasn't exactly to protect ourselves; we could've easily gotten away with anything we did during the day if we just hid ourselves right. It wasn't that. I guess we just didn't want to feel like rats. We wanted to be able to run around and do whatever the **** we wanted to out in the open, give ourselves a little freedom. That's the vibe I got, at least. So most days I'd just crash in front of the 7-11 and try to wait out the sun. Life was kind of murky then, I never got the buzz I wanted sitting there, observing the human condition, but whatever. If I was going to hang with the Underbellies, everything would be alright.
I glanced up at the blistering sun, only half aware that it wasn't there anymore. Some small part of me knew that I didn't have long to wait now. Usually someone would stop by and pick me up around sundown, just in case I was too trashed to get down there myself. Today, I definitely was, and as usual, they sent down Joseph.
I heard his car before I saw him. I heard him before I saw him too. A husky arm pulled me to my feet, and through the terrible sonic filter than was my pot, he said "Sup Jesus?" It wasn't much, but it was what I needed to hear. In a second, all the shit was out of my system, and I was back in reality. Joseph's unshaven face came into view, and I gave him a quick smile, falling onto him, half to hug him and half for support. "Where you been, man? We're all waiting for you. You know we can't start shit without you there."
"Stuff happened." I replied solidly. Joseph wouldn't pry past that. He was too fried to really care, anyways. Still, I felt like if anyone in this world did actually care about my problems, it would've been Joseph. If being the key word, of course.
He nodded in response, and dragged me back to his car. We were at the City of the Damned after a good ten minutes. That whole trip, unfortunately, is one big blank spot it my mind. I was prone to blankouts on occasion. I tried not to worry about it too much. We unloaded Joseph's trunk stash after he ditched the car in the mostly empty parking lot; booze, condoms, drugs, whatever we thought we'd need for tonight. We were just thoughtful like that.
The strobe lights were already blaring when we made it into the main plaza. You couldn’t see a ****ing thing. It was amazing. All around us the Underbellies pulsed with the lights and the music, soaking in every drop of sex, energy, and, dare I say it, love that was just etched into the walls of the place. All of them writhing, dancing, grinding, ****ing, doing everything they could to emphasize that they were outside the walls of society, never to return. Not until the sun came back up again, at least.
Joseph pulled me up onto one of the benches and passed me a mic, winking at me, as he faded back into the crowd, lost in the sea of lust and insanity. One by one the people in the crowd went silent as they saw me hovering over them. I might as well have been nailed to a ****ing cross, I was like Jesus Christ himself standing up here. When everyone went silent, I flicked the mic on, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “The Jesus of Suburbia is here! The Jesus of Suburbia is ****ing home!”
And then everyone went wild, just like I knew they would. The music exploded and flooded down the halls, the lights drowned any possible doubts, and the screaming, well, shit, that just made things even better. And it was then that I smiled, standing on that bench, a head above at least five hundred ****s from all over Jingletown, loosing their ****ing minds, and I knew that this was their home.
But was it my home? I always had a little ache in the back of my head, and somehow I knew it was connected to this question.
I didn’t know the answer.
I never knew.
------NEW--
I left everyone to their sex and their drugs and headed to the bathroom stall on the third floor, where we stashed the ‘Scriptures’. Like any reasonable culture, we had our own history. We didn’t write it up like most normal groups did, of course, but we had it there, scrawled on the walls of that stall, the holy scriptures of our shopping mall. It was Joseph’s idea, in the beginning, but we all caught on pretty fast. Everyone's name was in there, somewhere, and we all had some shit written up about us; our accomplishments, our failures, our sexual exploits. Everything worth remembering was here, and would be till the world ended. Our they tore down the mall. Or painted over it. Whatever.
It was the best ****in’ place in the world to do some soul searching.
The lights were always flickering in the bathroom, like no one changed them since they were put in almost ten ****ing years ago. Wouldn’t surprise me if no one did, either. Made everything look more spiritual, anyways, or mystical. Something like that. The Underbellies seemed to like that. It gave me the creeps.
I glanced at myself briefly in the spider web-cracked mirror as I passed by. There were huge bags under my ragged red eyes, and my skin was pale and slightly green. I looked dead. Convincing myself it was just the fluorescent lights, and shoved open the door to the Scripture’s stall. There, scribbled in every color of the ****ing rainbow, was our history. I stepped up onto the toilet lid and pulled myself up onto the divider, and began to inspect the wall.
At the top of the off-white wall was Joseph’s name, in huge graffiti letters, and then there was all the shit he’d done. It was respectable. He was a regular saint, after all, he’d done everything from stealing candy from children to blowing up cars. I was definitely proud to call him my mate.
Past that was Mary’s little list. She was Joseph’s girl. The gang slut. Her list was at least twice as long as Joseph’s, but it wasn’t anywhere near as impressive. It just didn’t take any courage to shut your eyes and **** left and right, didn’t take any balls. I guess she wouldn’t understand that, anyways. Still, I didn’t like her, even if I couldn’t help but imagine her naked every time we talked.
Right below hers was mine, underneath a little cross sprayed in red. Mine was the longest of them all. It was all there, everything that a respectable little punk could ever hope to pull off, and more. This was why I was called the Jesus of Suburbia, I’d done more shit in my lifetime than Jesus Christ pulled off in almost twice as long.
I stared long and hard at that wall. I slowly drew my fingers across it, feeling the peeling paint with my own numb fingers. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I did belong here. Everything usually got clearer when I read the scriptures, going over my old escapades did wonders for my head. But now, reading this, all I could think about was how much I wanted to stay.
I was sick of all this shit. All these goddamn signs, misleading to nowhere.
C&C, plz. I'll try to update daily until it's done.
~Dorian Gray
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