A brother described Bauer as a real dead-end kid who always was going around with a bloody nose.

Even at Central, among dead-end kids destined for the darkest reaches of the criminal justice system, the words still matter.

"I had this dead-end kid from Chicago I'd made my bodyguard.

Maybe the Jokers looked like dead-end kids back then, but now they look like sweet representatives of a lost era.

To his family, Mr. Cobain was a dead-end kid.

It came about halfway through Sweet Chariot, when the dead-end kid rises from his body as an angel.

He said the city started building pools because dozens of youngsters, "dead-end kids" in the popular phrase, had been drowning in the rivers each summer.

Mark Harmon is the feckless high school gym teacher transformed by his stint tutoring dead-end kids in English.

Her face is that of the littlest angel; her resilience that of a dead-end kid.

Dexter (Armando Riesco) is a good-hearted, hip-hop basketball player with something of the dead-end kid about him.

An alibi from these dead-end kids from Liberty City wasn't good enough for Detective Rick Larsen and his lynch mob.

Then he sends them off to fight local gangs as if they were crusaders instead of aging dead-end kids breaking knuckles and bottles over the heads of thugs.

Billy Bright was supposed to be a dead-end kid accidentally shot dead while trying to prevent his father robbing a bank - to become (almost inevitably) a do-gooding angel.

But the yobby sidekick he played was a kind of retread of his earlier roles, a dead-end kid that signalled the career cul-de-sac he was facing.

But as its talented cast hams it up in a storm of fruitless effort to make these modern dead-end kids seem adorable, the movie wears a poker-faced comic smirk.

The Red Wings had taken a 1-0 lead at 6 minutes 38 seconds when another of their dead-end kids, Kirk Maltby, scored on a two-on-none break while shorthanded.

Laila Robins, tall and pencil thin, comes up with a nice switch on the perfumed blond seductress: She gives her the itchy, edgy toughness of a dead-end kid.

Some parents, it seems, hear the word "vocational" and they think of dead-end kids bending steel bars in metal shop, when agriculture school now takes in everything from greenhouses to landscaping and oyster beds.

Huck is a backwoods dead-end kid (precursor of the juvenile delinquent who would obsess America a century later); also a rebel who finds a just cause without having to give up his prankster rights.

," a twist on innocent-sounding lyrics, and Lisa Viola was the dead-end kid shooting the wolf of poverty in "I Went Hunting and the Big Bad Wolf Was Dead."

Yet in the second half of the 19th century Horatio Alger wrote more than 100 books proving that even the poorest dead-end kid could make it to the board room - if only he were willing to work hard and use his initiative.

But if you feel that to be young, restless and on a dark road to nowhere is no laughing matter, you can always visit the dead-end kids in the black-hole revival of Eric Bogosian's "subUrbia," which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater.

But as he sat there watching his brother pulverize his opponent, he found his mind slipping back in time, the memories spurred on by the smells and sights of Mo's, the fighting all around him, the gang graffiti on the walls, the walk and talk of dead-end kids.

"The baby-boom psyche is focused on the development of the self, whereas young people are preoccupied with multicultural diversity and globalism," said Donna Gaines, a sociologist of youth who teaches at Columbia and is the author of the 1985 book "Teen-Age Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead-End Kids."