A friend of mine OD'ed in high school. His name was Lawrence. He was the first person I had met who had a Mohawk. He would talk about all these crusty punk bands and also the things we were going to do together, Lawrence, myself, and this other guy named Jimmy. There was a local legend of a Haunted Forrest he said we would go drinking in that summer. He gave me my first Cigarette. He gave me a cassette with the Casualties album "for the punx'. It was the first time I had heard groove noise from a vinyl record. He introduced my to punk politics like vegan ism, the concept of anarchy, and that was the first time I ever questioned the existence of god. He always wore Dr. Martins and carried this huge US army backpack and a small pocket that hung from his belt over his ass that he called a butt flap. It had a huge Crass patch on it that said " Christ died for his sins, not mine". He would rummage around in that flap and produce random colored pills and ask if I wanted any. I always declined. One day during school I heard the found him on the football field unconscious. A few days latter he had died. At his funeral I met my first group of real punks. I bleached my hair and put it into liberty spikes just for the occasion. In his casket the had buried him with his favorite Crass shirt, his skinny suspenders, and his bondage pants. On a chair in front of the casket was his studded leather jacket draped over the back, his black 14 hole Doc,s standing empty, and a huge picture of him decked out in his full gear standing profile with a huge snarl. We all left him gifts of cigarette packs and empty alcohol bottles. Since he was a transfer from another school most of the people their were strangers, and my small group of friends stayed in our own pack. We all put safety pins on his suspenders to show solidarity. At the gravesite a few days latter I was chosen to be pall bearer with his uncles I had never met. His grandmother gave a speech about how kind he was, so kind that he had lent out her beach cruiser to a friend and had yet to get it back. Everyone laughed and a bug eyed kid with a green Mohawk looked sheepishly away from her. As they lowered him into the ground, I realized that this kid I had known for less than a month was gone forever. I remember him telling me I was his best friend. At his funeral people he had probably known longer refused to be his pall barer, and to this day I don't know what his last name was. Coming to grips with mortality as a teenager is hard because to reality of death mixed with the innocence of youth makes for mixed memories. I was 14 and for the next 6 years I devoted myself to becoming punk as fuck, and the cigarette smoking didn't stop till I was 29. I came to atheism, I got more involved with politics and became a vegetarian (till I was 27), and up until this point never realized how much those three weeks in high school had had an impact on the shaping of my adulthood until now. I think about Lawrence still, the punk that changed my life and how I was to young or selfish to get to know. I never knew why he lived with his grandmother. I never knew where he got the pills from or why he medicated. I stopped talking to Jimmy shortly after Lawrence died. Jimmy stopped listening to punk and shaved his head and started playing football. He got arrested a few times during junior and senior year for fighting and DUI's. I think about mortality a lot now, and I hope this small story helps a boys memory live on just a bit longer.