Legends Never Die

Two decades after a low-budget film turned Washington Square skaters into celebrities, the kids from "Kids" struggle with lost lives and the fine art of growing up.

To say writing this Narratively Classic formatively shape-shifted and impacted the course of my life and career would be an understatement. It’s where I cultivated my style and chops as a reporter, how I learned to have a decentralized conversation with a source, rather than a transactional hierarchical exchange. There are quotes and conversations I still think about. Weekly. And there are friendships and collaborations that came out of working on this that remain to this day. I lost sleep. Canceled meetings. Got an extension on my taxes. The responsibility felt immense. Narratively was brand new. I got paid a fraction of what I would today to write this piece — but what I got back was invaluable. The lessons endure, and so, too, do the legends. I hope I was able to do justice in adding to the vast and vital canon of storytelling and art that honors the lives and legacies of Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce, and the communities that call their stories home.

—Caroline Rothstein 

Photo courtesy of Gunars Elmuts | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

August 1990, St. Marks Place. Priscilla Forsyth, one month shy of her fourteenth birthday and just home from summer camp, straddles one of the two lion statues guarding the downward staircase to the apartment building her family has owned since 1975. Naturally blonde Liza and dyed blonde Margaret idle with her. It’s hot out, and Priscilla is becoming more curious about the world beyond her sidewalk.

An energetic kid with a scrawny but chiseled build named Harold Hunter rides up on his BMX bike. “I’ve never seen blonde people in New York” before, he tells the girls, giggling. He was from the Campos Plaza Housing Projects nearby–a different world, to be sure, although he’d obviously seen blonde girls before.

“That was his little excuse to start talking to us,” Priscilla recalls. “Harold was known for that.” The superlatives, the tall tales and jokes, the genuinely amicable first encounters–anyone who knew him knew that was Harold.

A month later, Priscilla and her friends were meandering downtown drinking forties, celebrating her birthday. They passed the Astor Place cube, a favored location for New York City’s premiere skateboard crew at the time. Priscilla and her girlfriends exchanged numbers with the skaters, and joined them the next day at the Brooklyn Banks, a world-renowned skateboarding mecca underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge–that is, until the city shut it down a few years ago to use as storage space for bridge restoration.

When the girls arrived at the Banks, they met Harold and his friends, an infamous crew of amateur and professional skateboarders who rode alongside moving taxicabs and jumped off building and museum steps. Wherever they went throughout the city, the boys rode with a gutsy and fluid style. “It looked like art on a skateboard,” says Peter Bici, a skater and close friend of Harold’s. “It was a combination of New York City and the movement of streets and constant continuity of the city’s energy.” The kids loved each other like family, and didn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought of them. “We were minding our own business,” says Peter. “We don’t bother you. You don’t bother us. We all had each other’s backs.” It was an era when skateboarding wasn’t cool. If they heard wheels coming down the street, they’d run after them.

When Harold saw the girls, invited by his other friends, he made sure everyone knew he met them first. Priscilla says this now, twenty-three years later, imitating Harold in the nasal, raspy voice his loved ones mimic when telling Harold stories; the impersonation brings a comical lightness to the forefront, just like Harold always did.

Harold started regularly coming to the Forsyths’ for dinner. He became Priscilla’s surrogate brother. “Families didn’t adopt Harold, he adopted families,” says Priscilla’s sister Jessica.

Priscilla, now thirty-six, and Jessica, thirty-nine, with a black father from Grenada and a white mother from the Cleveland suburbs, went to the prestigious Hunter College Elementary and High Schools, commuting each weekday to the Upper East Side. But it was in the East Village where they met the skater crew, and Harold started bringing his friends over to the house too. Soon enough, the Forsyths’ apartment on St. Marks Place became another stomping ground, a clubhouse of sorts for this group of “lost boys.” Many, like Harold, hailed from broken homes.

When the 1995 film Kids, written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark, was released, Newsweek called it “astonishing”; Janet Maslin of the New York Times said it was "a wake-up call to the modern world." The Motion Picture Association of America initially branded the film with an NC-17 rating; upstart film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein created a new distribution company to release it unrated into theaters.

In his July 28, 1995, review, the late Roger Ebert wrote, “Most kids are not like those in Kids, and never will be, I hope. But some are, and they represent a failure of home, school, church and society. They could have been raised in a zoo, educated only to the base instincts.”

Leo Fitzpatrick, who played the infamous prepubescent lothario Telly. (Photos by Jonathan Weiskopf)

The main character of Telly, played by Leo Fitzpatrick, is a scrawny, cocky kid on a perpetual hunt to seduce young New York City virgins; he and his sidekick Casper, a hyperactive foul-mouthed slice of authenticity played by Justin Pierce, traverse the city from sunup to sundown to complete their quest. Meanwhile, in an apartment somewhere, un-chaperoned teen girls wax poetic about sex. Two girls–Jennie, played by Chloë Sevigny, and Ruby, played by Rosario Dawson–go for AIDS tests; Jennie comes up HIV positive. She’s only had sex once, with Telly, and she sets out on her own hunt to find him. The boys meet up with their skater friends in Washington Square Park, some boys and girls break into a closed pool and go swimming, Jennie takes drugs at a nightclub, and they all end up at a house party where four little kids shoved side by side on a couch pass a joint back and forth. Telly screws his second virgin of the day just as Jennie arrives at the party to find Telly still inside his conquest. She passes out herself and is raped by Casper. The next morning, Casper wakes up naked on a couch and says directly to the camera, “Jesus Christ, what happened?”