“Yeah, I’m doin’ great, Mike.”
“That’s good. Because I’ve been hearing some things.” Mike shoots me a smile that expresses his insinuation. “I’m keeping my eye on you, Novak!”
The tour is strange. I feel like an outsider, as if I am no longer a part of the team. However, a degree of comfort lies in my pocket, in a small cloth sack containing pills and several baggies of Heroin powder.
The first demo. I am not landing anything. I’m dizzy. A few fans ask me if I am okay. The other skaters don’t seem very concerned about my condition. They probably understand it’s self-induced.
A child of perhaps six or seven approaches, hand outstretched, offering a bottle of water. “Here, Brandon, you look like you need this.” I recognize in his voice a familiar innocence of youth, which my lifestyle has strangled from me. I thank the boy, a vision of my former self. The water does not quench my thirst. It weighs heavily in my stomach, making me sick.
As I cross the course toward the shade of a tree, I vomit uncontrollably on the middle of the street course, in front of all the fans and my fellow professional skaters.
As vomit drips from my chin to chest, I lift my head to see Bucky, my onetime hero, who had done everything in his power to perpetuate my success, shaking his head. His former enthusiasm has transformed into disgust. How did I let myself get like this?
Humiliated, I skate to the sideline, leaving my team members to skate around the pool of my vomit for the remainder of the demo. I have, in effect, regurgitated on the Powell Peralta team name.
After Vallely’s next run, he skates my way and calls, “Sitting this one out, Novak?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sick today. I think I have food poisoning.”
Mike hears me but doesn’t acknowledge my answer.
After the demo and autograph signing, as we load into the bus, Vallely approaches me with a confrontational look. I try to climb on board before he has a chance to speak with me, but his booming voice can be heard by the entire team. “Brandon, I’d like a word with you.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Look, I don’t know why you came on this trip, but this is a skate tour. I don’t think you take it too seriously, but the rest of us do, and we worked hard to be here.”
“Uh-huh.” I roll my eyes. Mike steps closer, three inches from my face making it physically impossible to ignore him.
“Now, I know, and you know, that you have some pot on you, and probably a few other things that aren’t legal. These kids who come to our demos aren’t blind, and they aren’t stupid. They can tell you’re on drugs, and they can spot you sneaking off to get high all the time. Like it or not, we’re role models to these kids. I know you don’t care about that, but I won’t let you set a bad example for them while you’re a part of this team, my team, understand?”
I am very uncomfortable with this guy barking in my face. I step back and he steps forward, this time placing his hand on my chest. I want to tell him not to touch me, but I know he will keep pushing until his point has been made. His hazel-green eyes stare at me as he presses the issue. “As long as you have drugs on you, this tour is in jeopardy. When we skate together, you are compromising your own safety and everyone else’s. If we get pulled over and the cops find drugs on you, we’ll all be in trouble, and the bad publicity will reflect on the rest of us. So here’s what’s going to happen.” Mike points to a street gutter. “You’re going to take all your drugs and you’re gonna throw them where they belong, down this gutter, and you and I are going to stand right here until you do!”
Sometimes, when being called out, it is easiest to leave your opponent with the false sense that he has won. “You’re right, Mike. Fuck, I don’t need this shit. I’m not even into drugs anyway. I only had this stuff because some fan gave it to me. I’ll definitely throw this stuff out, it makes no difference to me.” Mike, of course, knows this is a lie, but he is willing to tolerate the charade as long as I do as he told me. He watches me empty my pockets and throw my bag of stash down the gutter as I hold back my pain.
Later that night, at a party, I convinced some fans to drive me back to that gutter. With a tire iron, I lifted the sewer grate so I could reclaim possession of my drugs.
After the tour Mike Vallely phoned me. “Look, Brandon, you have to understand that there’s a real big problem here.”
“What, are you telling me you’re pissed or something?”
“Brandon, pissed happened months ago. Here we are, your team, and you disrespect us. When was the last time you even practiced?”
“What do you want from me? Where’s this going?” I demand. “Sounds like you’re beating around the bush to me.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, and only because you leave me no choice. I’m putting an ultimatum on the table, and I’m leaving the decision up to you. Okay, here it is: one, either you check yourself into a rehab and you clean up and start making improvements, or two, you’ll just have to quit the team. You make the choice!”
Now, for something which I have worked so hard for since I was a kid, I do not even allow a full breath of air to enter my lungs before I answer. “Well, Mike, thanks for everything, but I quit.”
Mike pauses. “Okay, then, I guess you and I have nothing more to talk about.”
“I guess not.”
“I’ll see you around, Brandon.”
“Later.”
Click. The phone disconnects in my ear.
That night, I went out with Alexia and my drug friends and celebrated the fact that I had quit my lifelong dream. At this point, the drugs were deteriorating my morals, my value system, and all that was positive in my life.
Everything I once created for myself was now gone.
Guys interrupts. “So, then with your skateboarding career out of the way, you allowed yourself to reject any responsibility in your life.”
“Yeah,” I respond. “And the sad part is, I thought I didn’t care. I actually convinced myself that it didn’t matter to me that I had just given up on all my aspirations.”
“Well, Brandon, the important thing is that you realize why you did this. You were creating an environment for yourself in which your addiction would be possible. You had, essentially, cleared your schedule of all other activities, and your defenses forced you to suppress your feelings so you could believe that you no longer cared about things that once mattered. Like your family, your friends, your skateboarding team. And at this point, you needed the drugs to ignore your emotions.”
I stare at Guy Leeper. He is exactly right.
Guy prompts me, “What ended up happening with Dwight?”
It’s the universal story of every junkie who has ever been on top. Eventually, the weight of Heroin pulls him to the bottom. Like so many other addicts throughout history, and like me, the world he had spent his life to build crumbled down around him.
After Dwight’s appetite for Heroin grew and he began using all day, every day, he neglected his business. At first, he was late with payments to his suppliers. Soon he was making fewer deals because he was too high to pull them off. One time, his connections in Mexico sent him a hundred pounds of weed, which he sold but failed to pay for. They couldn’t understand why Dwight had fallen short on payments—after all, they had a history with Dwight, and he had always been reliable. When they realized he had become a drug addict, it made sense. So, in reconciliation, they flew him another hundred pounds of marijuana and sent two men to stay with him until he sold it and worked off his debt. This kept him alive and bought him amnesty, but after that, his Mexican connection would never do business with him again.
Two months later we drove to our pick-up neighborhood and he handed off his Rolex for about a grand’s worth of Heroin. When I visited his apartment, I noticed that his possessions were sparser. I concluded that he had been pawning them.
One afternoon, he picked me up in his metallic-blue Mercedes. He was upset because his girlfriend had broken up with him and it was strange to see hi
m in this condition, because, if he had experienced emotions of unhappiness during the course of our relationship, he must have gone through great lengths to suppress them. When he asked me if I was holding, and I said no, he drove his Mercedes to the dealership and sold it back to them. He then phoned a cab that took us to our pick-up neighborhood to score.
In time, the items missing in his house went beyond decorative knickknacks to include the centerpieces of his lifestyle: his surround-sound stereo system, his rear-projection television set, his furniture.
“When was the last time you saw Dwight?” Guy asks.
I remember I had just scored some Dope and went directly to Dwight’s place to shoot up. He wasn’t home, and I had to piss, so I went in the alley next to his house. Some cops spotted me and pulled their car up to the mouth of the alley, blocking me in. Quickly, I stuffed my two fifteen-dollar bags in my asshole. Uncomfortable, yes, but also impossible to find in a frisk search. They ran me in and stuck me in jail for loitering, just to give me a hard time. After I got out, I went back to Dwight’s apartment to use the Dope I had hidden so well.
As we prepared to shoot up, Dwight told me, “I’ll give you anything I have for one of those bags. You can take anything in this apartment.” How about that? The man who was once my hero, was offering me anything in his possession for a fifteen-dollar bag of Dope that had been in my asshole. I looked around his apartment, which was once filled with the expensive furnishings of a lavish lifestyle. Now it was almost empty, except for a bed, a dresser, and some dirty clothes. I told him I couldn’t accept anything from him, and shared my Dope as kind of a sick farewell party. I left Dwight’s house that night and never returned.
Guy takes a breath, regrouping his thoughts. “It sounds like things must have gone downhill from here.”
“Actually, Guy, no. For a while after that, I still managed to keep shit together enough to…well, actually, screw up some pretty major opportunities for myself. I swear, I don’t know what it is about me, but I make the worst decisions known to man. I think it’s time for me to go now. I’m done for the day.”
Guy says, “No, sir, you are not done for the day. As I have indicated before, your life is now dominated by guilt and remorse for what you have done, which makes it easy for you to reject any sort of help. It is important for you to understand that you must now face these things in order to begin to accept yourself. This is the only way you can gain freedom from the isolation brought on by your guilt, anger, fear, and self-pity.”
I sit in silence.
Guy takes a hard look at me. “Now, Brandon, we are going to do this. I am going to ask you, and you need to answer. What were you just about to tell me?”
I give an ironic smile. “Well, it might be hard to believe, but this junkie sitting in front of you was in a movie and had a documentary made about him.”
“You what?” Guy asks.
“Well, I should start off by telling you that a friend of mine, Bam Margera, was in a TV show and a movie titled Jackass. He put out a few skateboard films, and then he made an independent movie called Haggard. He put me in the film and made a “making of” documentary about how they made the movie. But The Making of Haggard ended up being a documentary about how my friends dealt with me and my addiction.”
“What was this fellow who made the film’s name again?” Guy asks.
“Everyone calls him Bam. His dad gave him that nickname because he was so destructive when he was a little kid. Anyway, I met him when I was young; we knew each other from the skateboarding scene. Bucky and I used to hang out with him on a regular basis….”
chapter twenty-six
Bam Margera
I was twelve years old, waiting outside my house with my skateboard and a bag of clothes. Judging by the decibel level of the music emitted by the eighteen-inch speakers that took up the entire trunk of Bucky Lasek’s pale blue custom-built Honda Civic CRX, I knew he was less than two blocks away. Excited, I stepped to the curb. Bucky whipped around the corner, picked me up, and we sped away on the Civic’s sixteen-inch chrome rims, which caused the custom body to ride so low that it seemed to bump the ground with every pothole, ditch, and speed bump. This began our weekend ritual, the journey to West Chester, Pennsylvania, the home of our skateboarding pal, ten-year-old Brandon “Bam” Margera.
Bam lived in a small rancher, situated across the street from the town sewer plant. The yard smelled like shit, especially after a rain, but the odor mattered little to us because Bam had a backyard miniramp. He also had access to a bunch of great suburban skate spots, which were rarities in Baltimore.
Bam’s mom, who allowed us to call her by her first name, April, was a real-life version of June Cleaver, the mother on television’s Leave It to Beaver. Between our arrival and the time we headed back to Baltimore, she provided a nonstop supply of homemade pies, cookies, cakes, cobbler, turnovers, pastries, and my favorite, Rice Krispie Treats.
The itinerary at Bam’s house was set in stone. First, we would skate all day. Afterward, we would take showers, watch the video footage we had taken, and discuss our progress. April would wash our clothes and prepare our dinner, and while we ate we would discuss the tricks we were going to learn the following day. In our world there were no girls, no bars, no drugs. They were the best days of my life.
I was always amazed by Bam’s powers of concentration. He forced those around him to focus. Each moment spent with him was centered around skating and staying productive.
In the time I spent with Bam, I began to sense that he felt a degree of jealousy toward me because of my association with the Powell Peralta team. Bam had always dreamed of skating for the Powell Peralta Bones Brigade. These elite skaters seemed to have been chosen by the very hand of skateboarding itself for the purpose of sculpting its future through their talent and personalities. Bam was considered the young, promising “little guy that could,” the skating prodigy who would be the next big name in skateboarding…until I came around.
Not only was Bam envious of me, but I was equally, if not more, envious of him. This was for one simple reason: Phil Margera, Bam’s father.
Phil was everything a father could be. He was strong in mind and body, attentive, understanding, generous, and committed to his family. He was everything that every kid wished his father was.
Phil’s work ethic would make most men exhausted just to consider. Although he awoke at sunrise and reported to his shift at the grocery store bakery by seven, and did side jobs to make ends meet, when Bam and his brother Jess got home from school, however, Phil considered it his duty, privilege, and pleasure to spend the rest of his waking hours with them. While other fathers spent their weekends pursuing their own interests, Phil simply had no other interests to pursue. From the second he awoke, until his head touched the pillow at night, Phil devoted every precious second to his family.
Phil was supportive of Bam’s decisions and committed to help his son in every way. Unlike most parents who discouraged their sons from pursuing a career in skateboarding, Phil drove Bam to whatever skate spot his son wished and would videotape Bam skateboarding with his friends and idols for hours or until the tape ran out.
I recall hearing about an occasion when Phil was playing with his young sons on the living room carpet. He looked at his sons and then to God, saying a prayer, begging that if it was in the Lord’s divine plan to take one of his sons, or if either of them were to experience a life of pain, to please take him in their place.
Phil extended his fatherly care to every child in the neighborhood. When other kids tried to gain autonomy from their parents by spending time away from home, they went to the Margera house. Kids loved the Margeras because they knew if they were with them, they would have fun—or rather, the kids were afraid to not hang out with the Margeras because of the fun they might miss. Take, for example, the story of the “Yellow Buick.”
Phil drove a mid-70s Buick he had bought from his brother Vince “Don Vito” for $200. The car was yellow, al
though you could hardly see its color through the layers of stickers coating the car from roof to hubcaps, promoting Bam’s favorite bands and skateboard companies. You couldn’t miss this car in any parking lot.
Many of Bam’s friends had parents who drove Mercedes and BMWs, but when there was a community event, the kids would beg their parents to let them ride with the Margeras in the Yellow Buick. The other parents couldn’t understand why.
The Yellow Buick had a seat belt warning mechanism with an unusual malfunction: instead of sounding the ding-ding-ding made by other cars of its era, the Yellow Buick belched out a hideous, disturbingly loud buzz when the front seat belt was not connected.
On a trip, with the car piled full of twice as many kids as was legal, Phil would provide the setup. “Okay now, Bam, I just got the car fixed, but it could still explode at any second. But it should be okay, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”
The kids would exchange glances. “Wait, the car might…explode??”
“Yeah,” continues Phil, in a tone of utmost sincerity. “But the mechanic just installed a special alarm, so when it sounds, we still have a good fifteen or twenty seconds—plenty of time to get out. We should be fine.”
This speech was always met with dead silence as these kids faced the possibilities of their demise.
Soon, in mid-traffic, Phil would carefully disconnect his seat belt, triggering the alarm: Zzzooowwwzzzzooowwwzzzooowww.
Dreamseller Page 16
