Lived in NYC in the 90's. This movie was very accurate

I lived in New York City from 1992 to around 2001, moving out the day after I turned 21 and just a few months before 9/11 changed everything.

This movie is sort of real. The scenes are obviously dramatizations played by professional actors, but it's very much inspired by how things really were being a teenager in NYC in the 90's.

Best example I can give is the movie Goodfellas. The movie is technically fictional and it's very obvious Ray Liotta is not the real Henry Hill, but the basic outline of events are true and some of the names get changed for legal reasons.

Same thing with Kids. Telly and Casper were real people but were played by actors in the movie. I was their best friend and went to high school with them.

Telly and Casper were just their street names, we used the names of cartoon characters and anime characters for our street names. My street name was Mr. Conductor and Ruby was in the gang too. Her street name was Sailor Mercury and the real Ruby was Asian, as was Telly.

We belonged to a gang along with a few of our friends from school as well. Our gang was the Van Buren Boys, and we originally started as a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP group in October 1992, back when we were still in middle school.

I founded the Van Buren Boys and was the gang's original leader from 1992 to around 2000 or so. Telly was my right-hand man and the second-in-command. I sort of stepped down and let Telly run the crew for a while. Me and Telly both left the gang in 2001 and put Sailor Mercury (Ruby) in charge of the gang.

Dunno who ran it after her, but I kept hearing how they rolled really hard and were violent psychos, hunting down rival gangsters and sacrificing them to Satan. Even the NYPD were scared to go in our turf after dark, especially because we had the backing of the Russian Mafia and the Italian Mafia, as well as the Camarilla elders and KaibaCorp enterprises.

We called ourselves the Van Buren Boys because Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States and there were eight of us (Telly, Casper, Sailor Mercury, Bart Simpson, Tuxedo Mask, Buster Bunny, Miko Mido, and yours truly, the one and only Mr. Conductor) plus we were proud to be from New York and Van Buren was the first president born in New York.

But yeah, the Van Buren Boys were just a bunch of bad dudes, mostly poor white guys and Asian guys, but we knew how to fight and could hold our against the black gangs and against the skinheads too, and we'd use both for black magic ritual sacrifices sometimes.

Our colors were black, gray, and crimson. The gang's symbols included the number eight, a tentacle, a Satanic pentagram, the Confederate Flag, and a naked anime girl. The naked anime girl was our mascot named Rebel Joy. Some symbols were only allowed for certain deeds. The tentacle tattoo was only given for those who attacked rival female gang members or the wives and girlfriends of rival gangsters.

Red tentacles meant you wounded her, black tentacles meant you killed her.

Rebel Joy was the same for going after the guys. Red hair with green eyes for wounding them and black hair with purple eyes for killing them.

Hard to believe it started out as eight anime fans who loved to play Mind's Eye Theatre Vampire LARP, but we were rolling pretty hard up by the end of it in the early 2000's. Our crew eventually dissolved in 2007.

Some of us went legit like I did when I left in 2001, others died and some got cliqued up with the Italian Mafia and Triads. IIRC, Sailor Mercury (Ruby in the movie) went to prison in the early 2000's. Dunno what happened to her afterward or if she ever got out.

Most of the events depicted in Kids happened around the summer of 1994, but some stuff happened in Spring of 1995.

The guy getting beat up was in '95, and we actually cut him up bad and drank some of his blood. Thankfully, he didn't die and was too scared to call the cops afterwards.

Now, Telly really did contract HIV but did not die and it never progressed to AIDS. See, ol' Telly found the magic cliff in September of 94 and became an immortal like in Highlander.

He left the Van Buren Boys around the same time I did (June 2001), we both made a deal to quit the gang and go legit. I now live in Wise, Virginia and I make an honest living these days. I sell propane and propane accessories.

Telly started to walk the Earth after we left NYC and he wants to become the last immortal so he can get The Prize.

To this day, he is still searching for The Prize. In his last postcard, Telly mentioned he killed Duncan McLeod and Methos. Now only Magic Johnson stands between him and Wichita.

Wichita is the hiding place of the Kurgan, one of only three immortals left (the others being Telly and Magic Johnson)