“Linoleum” • NoFX (by Sarp Sozdinler)

When I was thirteen, I shoplifted a studded wristband from Hot Topic because I thought it would make me punk. It didn’t. It made me sweaty and paranoid. I stood in the mall bathroom, wrist-deep in guilt, the scent of Wetzel’s Pretzels mixing with adolescent dread, wondering how Bad Religion made it look so easy.

That same year, my cousin Troy burned me a CD. It had a Sharpie scrawl that read “PUNK SH*T” on it and a tracklist that started with “Linoleum” by NoFX. I didn’t know what linoleum was, but the opening riff hit like a middle finger made of caffeine and broken skateboard decks. It was messy. It was fast. It didn’t have a chorus. It sounded like what being thirteen felt like—awkward, loud, trying too hard and not enough all at once.

Fat Mike sang like he was on the verge of a breakdown or a breakthrough. I couldn’t tell which. He sounded like someone who knew he was a joke and decided to laugh first. That felt important, somehow.

“Possessions never meant anything to me,” he yelled, and probably for the right reasons.

I paused the CD and looked around my room. Action figures on the shelves. Trophies for sports I never truly excelled at. A poster of Linkin Park because I was “still trying to figure out who I was.” I wanted to believe possessions didn’t mean anything to me either. But I really liked my GameCube. I liked my stack of Goosebumps books.

Still, I played “Linoleum” until the CD skipped. Then I played it again. And again. And again. It became my soundtrack for everything: riding my bike with no hands, trying to ollie on a skateboard I bought at a garage sale for $8, and failing algebra with style. It didn’t matter that I didn’t fully understand its politics, or its satire, or who Eric Melvin really was. NoFX made me feel like not knowing was part of the point.

Once, I tried to impress a girl in eighth grade by writing the lyrics to “Linoleum” on my Converse in white-out. She asked if it was a Bible verse. I told her it was from The Book of Fat Mike. She laughed and never spoke to me again.

But for those three minutes and nine seconds, every time I hit play, I wasn’t the awkward kid who still kind of liked Pokémon. I was someone. I was angry, but in a cool way. I didn’t need things. I didn’t need a chorus. I had power chords, drum fills like someone falling down the stairs, and a singer who sounded like he gargled thumbtacks.

Years later, in college, someone at a party played “Linoleum” on an old iPod plugged into a speaker with duct tape. Everyone screamed the lyrics like they were sacred. People I didn’t know handed me cheap beer and screamed “That’s me on the street, with a violin under my chin!” even though none of us played violin. It didn’t matter. We were all just kids who never really grew out of yelling along to a song that made nonsense feel like gospel.

Now I’m thirty-something. I own throw pillows. I pay taxes. The same old story. Sometimes, when I’m at a crowded cafe, I pretend I’m the kind of person who reads The New Yorker and eats lentils on purpose. But when “Linoleum” comes on—usually in the car, volume way too high for a responsible adult—I remember the kid who wore safety pins in his hoodie like it meant something. I remember believing that a song could be a personality.

And maybe it still can.

Because even now, all these years later, “Linoleum” reminds me that not everything needs polish. Some things are better raw. Some things don’t need a chorus. Some things just need to scream.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Hobart, HAD, X-R-A-Y, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Find him online @sarpsozdinler or www.sarpsozdinler.com