by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Yannick Asselin aka Nick Evil

Age: 29

Occupation: Social worker

Bio: When not playing guitar in his band The Evil Boys, this bubbly and vivacious Villeray resident is busy working as coordinator of Avenue 1217, a "maison des jeunes" in St-Jérôme. Going around local skate parks and the like, armed with free condoms and a litany of anti-drug rhetoric, Yannick spends many of his evenings hunting down troubled kids and directing them towards his centre, where he may further teach them a thing or two about music or introduce them to the infinite wonder of computers. He says the kids relate to him because he doesn't fit the conventional image of a social worker. "I don't have long hair and wear Birkenstocks." He does, however, drive a totally cool 1961 Oldsmobile F85.

The drug of choice among St-Jérôme teens: Cannabis. "There's not a lot of hard drugs here. My biggest job is prevention."

Do rowdy teens ever tell him to get his busybody social worker ass the fuck out of their skate park or they are going to cut his throat? "It can happen but it's very rare."

His guess as to how many of the little delinquent brats he works with will wind up in jail: Not too many of them. "There are no rotten apples at this age. There is still time for them."

Something he feels is making life increasingly difficult for kids, especially teen chicks: Hip hop culture. "Seven years ago there were more punk kids - in the Green Day era - and they had a bit more of a rebellious, fuck-you attitude. But now the kids are into hip hop or Britney Spears, and there is more sexual objectification of young girls. They wear less clothes and there is more pressure on them to be a certain way. And the boys have less respect for them because of the way they see their heroes in music videos treat women. Things have changed very much in a very short time, and we [social workers] have found we need to take a very different approach now. The [teen] culture is much more criminal now. The clothes all the kids want are very expensive and most of their parents can't afford them, but in this culture, to be a rebel you have to have all these expensive things. For the punks, all they needed was some ripped up clothes."

Is a good old-fashioned bare-assed spanking the best way for a social worker to learn a 15-year-old girl to stop behaving like a slut? Not really.

Where you might find him boozin': Club Saphir, Café Chaos.

Childhood ambition: To become a rock star.

Musical preferences: "Mostly the classics. You know, the Ramones, the Cramps."

Literary preferences: Car Kulture DeLuxe magazine.

Fave TV Show: Monster Garage.

A recent film he dug: House of 1000 Corpses.

The deity he worships: George Romero.

Words of wisdom: "When you say cliché, I say classic."

Comments? dimwit@openface.ca