Don’t Die Young

What happened to the gutter punks?

A while back, I asked the question on Reddit. The most common answer was either that they rejoined society as parents, partners, music lovers, or that they died.

Those who survived joined the dead ex-boyfriend/friend club, carrying scars.

Jax never thought he belonged in the club. He tried very hard in his 20s to convince himself that punk was just a phase. He kept the lies close to his heart until one day, someone cracked through the pretense. He opened his eyes and saw that he’d just been running away from the truth.

Even in pretense, he always felt different. Everyone else had a voice. He didn’t. He just wanted to be invisible so no one would see he was different.

Nothing he wore to work felt right. He hated his skin. His face. His job. His entire existence.

Being punk isn’t a choice.

Punk aesthetic is.

There’s a big difference between the two.

Jax belonged to the first group. And what they didn’t tell you on the package cover is what it really meant. Punks don’t survive well in society. People don’t like the truly weird ones. You’re allowed to dress punk. There’s an acceptable way to enjoy the aesthetic. But when you’re the real thing, and your brain is wired to do and say stuff that is different from what others do or say, they are horrified. They find every single way possible to stuff you back into the box.

You’re crucified. All the time.

Life had a funny way of foreshadowing things because before all those losses, Jax dedicated two years of his life volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline to pull lost souls from the edge. Then life got away. He stopped doing that for a while. Somewhere during that time, while he was trying hard to run away from himself, he lost one of his best friends.

Jensen died suddenly when he was only 29.

Roughly a year and a bit more after Jax and he last talked.

His family sent out the obituary.

In fact, Jax didn’t even know until four months after Jensen’s death. Because when your friendship isn’t sanitized enough for neighbors, relatives, and friends who live in their town, you don’t actually exist in their world.

Jax knew the ugliest, messiest side of Jensen that everyone hated and tried to erase. He loved him — not despite it. It was simply how they knew each other, no pretense, no filters, and it never crossed his mind how others saw it.

Jensen was a musician. An artist with a promising future and a dream to start his own production company. He was raised a Christian, the kind who’d save himself for marriage. His parents invested a lot in his education. He was supposed to be this successful musician, marry an amazing woman, and walk the road the last two generations of his family had paved for him.

“I came nowhere near that perfect version of his life, but what we had was beautiful,” Jax said. “I knew he wanted to be that version everyone convinced him he was.”

“He really believed he was supposed to be like that, and when things didn’t turn out that way, he had a hard time. He didn’t want to be anyone’s puppet. To be honest, for a long time, I thought he hated music too. He was trying so hard to force himself to do it. To be the professional composer everyone wanted him to be. To not be a disappointment. So he kept increasing the doses, just to make the art everyone wanted to see from him.”

“It wasn’t until I found an old SoundCloud track he uploaded when he was 12 that I realized how much music meant to him. He wrote, ‘Before I found music, I always felt I was broken. I was different. My mind didn’t work like others. I was failing at school, and everyone thought there was something wrong with me. And then, I found music, and it all clicked.’”

So I guess my question is, how did he get from doing what he loves to being killed by the very thing he loved?

“He put everything in his songs. He was struggling, singing about not gonna make it and wanting to give up, dying young, but did anyone hear it?” Jax asked. “I listened to the last album he put out every single year after he passed. And every time, it hit me like a fucking train. Yeah, it wasn’t something people wanted to hear. It was fucking ugly. But it was also the truth.”

“He was talking about doing heroin, mailing me drugs, and getting into trouble with the feds and stuff… He was so disappointed/disillusioned about the world, the people around him, and he was one of the kindest souls I knew.”

Jensen had burned most bridges in his life, but Jax always replied when he reached out. Most of the time, the conversations ended abruptly, and the next time would be days later at 3 am or months later, a random text.

Jensen was hurting, and everyone knew.

Jax admitted that sometimes, Jensen scared him, too.

“Like, when he talked about going to California to find me, I was just like, I ain’t telling him where I live…”

Jensen’s death was sudden, but not unexpected.

“I was trained to pick up signs like that, but I missed it because in real life, they don’t text you in the middle of the night, telling you whatever demon they’re facing. What they do is they call you ten times at 3 am in the morning, rumbling about something crazy. And they try to hide whatever is hurting them. They try to be cool. Telling you something that has nothing to do with their struggles, so you’d stay in that moment with them.”

It’s like being in a car accident. Even though you’re safe, the incident itself makes you scared of every potential crash coming at you in the least predictable places.

“Yeah, on some level, I felt like I could’ve done more. Be a better friend. Check in more. Tell him all the things I didn’t.”

But in the end, some stories in life don’t have perfect endings. All there left is a message no one replied to.

“I read our last couple of conversations so many times. I used to blame myself for how everything turned out for Jensen because when we broke up, it really messed him up. He said, I put the punk in him, and boom, everything changed. I fucking blamed myself for his death for two years.”

“Our last exchange, he said it was good to have someone who still replies to him. The last meaningful thing I said to him was I loved every single track because he felt that his voice got ruined by the drugs. I told him no matter how he sounds, because it’s from him, and who cares about perfection?

But Jensen never replied to Jax’s last message.

The real goodbyes in life hardly involve parting words.

And what he got was an obituary writing Jensen off as the good son who failed…

“I couldn’t bring myself to reply to his parents. I know they were hurting. Trust me, I tried over the course of 3 months. But I can’t. Knowing him the way I did, I just couldn’t…” he said. “It’s like, he died, and the world is still erasing him. First, who he was, then his music.”

“As a kid, I thought a lot about joining the 27 Club. I fantasized about it like all the assholes at that age. And even this year, there were moments I truly wanted not to exist anymore. So I get it. But in journalism, there’s this rule we can’t write about suicide like any other topic because studies show when we do that, the rate goes up.”

And here’s something true they don’t say:

“You don’t know who that person is gonna be — who’s gonna carry the weight. You’d think no one would - and I bet Jensen never thought his death would affect me the way it did. But it did. It’s been two years, and it still fucking hurts because for me, I didn’t just lose a friend. I lost a kindred spirit. A person who makes me feel less alone in the world. And when he died, everything fucking turned grey.”

So the next time Jax heard a friend hitting a little too hard on antidepressants, he reached out. He was there. He talked like a fucking ray of sunshine even though it triggered the hell out of him.

Why? Because we punks gotta stick together. We can’t afford to lose another.

“To Jensen.”

*Names are changed.