Philadelphia, Meet Your Future

Sweeney's mom remarried, and the family lived in a rowhouse in the 1500 block of East Berks Street. Joey found his neighborhood tough. As the other kids were pumping "guido music" from their teal Chevy IROCs — songs like "Let the Music Play" and "Diamond Girl" — Sweeney, nerdy and unathletic, obsessed over Brit post-punk bands like the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen. He was taunted and chased home from school. In conversations about his old neighborhood, Sweeney often is breathtakingly disparaging. "Nobody in Fishtown understands birth control," he tells me, "so it's like fucking Lord of the Flies. It's just like kids running around, fucking harassing people, just like animals."

He says black families trying to move into the neighborhood were intimidated, threatened and scared off. "Friday nights the older kids would go down to Front Street and literally have knife fights with the Puerto Ricans," he says. "Everybody was trying to protect, like, the whiteness of the neighborhood for a long time. But the reality was that there was nothing to protect. It was shit."

Salvation for Joey came in the form of — well, Christ's peeps. Instead of sending him to high school at North Catholic, where the other kids, his mom and stepdad told him, "would eat me alive," they insisted Joey go to St. Joe's Prep. It would prove a life-changing bit of parental strong-arming. Over the next four years, Joey's four parents — his father by then drug-free, back in Joey's life, remarried and working for PGW — all scrimped and saved to make the tuition payments.

At the Prep — ultimately on his way to St. Joe's U — Joey experienced his fair share of culture shock. He felt embarrassed as his mother, then barely 30, was often mistaken for his sister at school events. The always difficult transition to adolescence was compounded by his Fishtown background. "The process [was] arduous," he recalled self-righteously in the same Salon.com piece, and the entire time he felt "caught between two worlds: one that is defiantly, stupidly poor, uneducated and paralyzed with derisive fear of all that lies outside of it, and another that is made bored and too comfortable by wealth and education, and still paralyzed with derisive fear of all that lies outside of it."

Still, for the first time in his life he met kids who were like him in interests and thinking (and in Morrissey haircuts). Playing alternative music with them, honing his writing skills, Joey changed; at the Prep, he consciously dropped his deep North Philly accent, and the school "turned out to be the thing that sort of made me who I am."