Fourteen years old. That period in human life known by the science of psychiatry as adolescence, that branch of science taught from behind rickety desks with wobbly legs, that period of human life in which symptoms are described by professors as irregular intermittent bouts of rage, inappropriate reactions, exaggerated behavior. All those books on adolescence talk about getting accustomed to oneself and one’s environment, and about the difficulties in adapting to society. And the authors of those scientific articles, well, they never knew Black T and they couldn’t even remember what the hell they were doing when they were fourteen. But the fact is that it’s all pretty straightforward.
You’re born and before fifteen years are up you realize just what kind of a place the world is and you know that you’re just stuck somewhere between birth and death. It’s a feeling more than it’s actual knowledge. Then there’s the first revolt. You scream as loud as you can. But it’s no different than the desperate cries of someone in a crowd who realizes his wallet’s been stolen. At first, people in the crowd look at him with contempt or indifference, then they get tired of listening to the noise and they appoint someone to speak to him. The representative comes and says: “So what if your wallet’s been stolen? Our wallets have been stolen, too. But we’re not making such a fuss.” For a real scientific intervention, it’s better to send someone with a diploma. So, faced with the indifference of the crowd, the rabble-rouser gradually makes less and less noise. He begins to accept reality and starts filling the void around himself with people. It’s called growing up or becoming an adult. But to be more exact, it’s about adult compliance or docility. It’s an artificial mode of being. It’s fabricated. Calculations have been made on its proposed function and it’s shaped and designed accordingly.
The founding principle of adult compliance is the belief that each and every individual in a society should be useful in some way so that the existence of society is somehow guaranteed. And, more importantly, in a totally chaotic world, adult compliance is measured with deadly accuracy. It’s all about the young tree bending down and kissing its own roots. But a fourteen-year-old kid’s outrageous behavior is natural, even though it’s frowned upon and classified as adolescent rage. His eyes have opened to the horrors of the world and he’s come to understand that all the nasty business in the world is on him. He locks himself in his room. He tries to lock himself away from the outside world. Or he tries to break down all the doors and walls and barriers by screaming as loud as he can. It’s the same kind of reaction you’d have to a fire-breathing dragon. It follows that these reactions won’t disappear as long as you’re alive—that’s to say as long as the dragon exists.
But of course, as allowing a band of adolescents to remain in their natural state would lead straight to the disintegration of any societal structure, the transition to adult compliance is seen as a necessity for humanity. A social requirement. But some people are dense and they go on screaming till their dying breath. Because life is a violent process and the world is a violent place and what both life and the world deserve are extremely violent punches dead square in the face. It’s why an adolescent revolt is thrusting a knife through someone sixty times to kill him. A fourteen-year-old kid who truly opens his eyes understands that every human is surrounded by at least sixty dragons with smoke bellowing out of their mouths. Adolescence, in spite of all its stupidity, is the period in which a human being is most free.
When their lives and the world they live in become docile you can expect adolescents to calm down, but not until then. Stanley was one of those kids stuck at fourteen. And he might’ve seemed like an idiot coming home to his old room with The Cramps posters up on the walls, but at least he was doing his best to pay the world back in full for what it had given him. Not that he knew anything about life on earth. He didn’t watch the news and he wasn’t a political activist following his conscience. Stanley was doing everything he did without knowing anything about the world, like any other fourteen-year-old would.
Why did you need to know that somewhere in the world there were people bombing schools? This world reeked of burning flesh no matter how you looked at it. And why did you need to know that other kids in the world were dying of starvation? This world has halitosis because it’s always hungry. Children’s noses pick up the smell and give it back to the world as adolescent rage, till the time their noses are blocked with adult compliance. Would that day ever come for Stanley? It’s hard to say. But for the time being he was having himself whipped and taking heroin because of a desperation he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Like any other fourteen-year-old, he couldn’t express his pain. He felt something, but didn’t know anything, so he was unable to see the shit all around him. But it always reeked. So, like most adolescents, he thought he was insane and he was constantly looking for someone he could infect with his madness.
He couldn’t have found a better victim than Derdâ, Derdâ who once soiled her black gloves as she stimulated the nerve endings in his asshole. Her gloves smelled like shit. So Stanley became the man to give Derdâ her first heroin injection.
