When I was in junior high school (centuries ago), I always found the metalhead clique at my school intimidating. Rangy boys with long, oily hair and a collective uniform consisting of boots, black-washed jeans, and black T-shirts imprinted with art from album covers by bands whose names bore gratuitous double consonants and lent themselves to harsh, angular logo designs, the metalheads always hung out together at the side of gym class, discussing their heroes’ latest wailing guitar concoctions and glowering at the rest of the world. They sported the shifty desperation unique to 14-year-olds jonesing for a drag on a stolen cigarette.
It was all kind of alarming for us clean-cut students whose main ambition for gym class was to avoid notice by the jocks and dropouts while hanging out on the sidelines discussing the latest Zelda strategies with each other (dude, if you just keep going up when you get to that one spot in the mountains, there’s a dungeon there!). In hindsight, though, I realize that the metalhead kids were harmless. They never picked on anyone; they never caused trouble outside of skipping class to hang out and listen to noisy music. They were as geeky as the video-game-fixated A-students; the only difference between us was that their obsessions were wrapped up in an affected antisocial style. Their music may have been about volume and screaming and satanic posturing, but it was just that: Posturing. Underneath it all, those guys just wanted to do their own thing, and they wore their ragged Dokken shirts with pride because they sincerely thought that airbrushed zombie warriors chained to naked, guitar-wielding sex slaves was, like, so awesome.
