This would be a folie a deux right out of “Wayne’s World” if Marc and Shawn, both 16, didn’t also have glimmerings of an undeluded sense of where and who they really are. Shawn has written raps since the eighth grade but admits, “There’s not much to write about when you live in the suburbs. You listen to these songs, they’re like: ‘I shot this guy in the street because he tried to rob me,’ whatever. That never happens to me. It never will.” They spend time at the video arcade playing Mortal Kombat II (“It’s kind of controversial,” Shawn explains. “It’s the video where you crush people’s heads off and rip out people’s hearts”), but neither has even been in a fistfight since grade school. In Wallingford, the tough kids are the ones who smoke cigarettes, dip Skoal or drink beer in the littered woods behind the school, where the same spent condom has lain for three years. “I got a condom in like eighth grade,” says Shawn. “It expired in October.”
The dream of being Q-Marc and JuV doesn’t come cheap. They both took jobs at Granite Run Mall partly to be able to keep buying the proper clothes: the overpromoted, overpriced baggy jeans, sweat shirts and footgear that go with Marc’s earrings and Shawn’s modified fade. “I used to buy Nikes,” says Shawn, “but they got expensive so I started buying Adidas.” “We used to wear a lot of Cross Colours,” adds Marc. “Now instead of $60 shirts I’m buying $30 shirts.” Shawn works at Waldenbooks; Marc put in up to 30 hours a week at Burger King until just before Christmas, when he “got smart with the boss” and was fired. (Their grades have suffered, though Shawn admits he also “slacked off majorly this quarter.”) It’s a drearily apt emblem of what suburban teen culture offers. On the one hand, the climate-controlled drudgery of the mall; on the other, the simulated thrills of gangsta rap and Mortal Kombat. As Marc says of himself and Shawn, “We’re different. But the same.”
