Drugs were embedded in the culture in Naples. South Florida was an international point of entry for the U.S. drug pipeline. Missing their intended drop points, kilos would regularly fall out of the sky and wash up on shore into the arms of sheriff’s deputies. It was easier for a kid my age to buy cocaine than alcohol. Hanging outside the mall on a Friday night smoking cigarettes got you in with the kind of kids who wanted to get fucked up, too. After cigarettes became a habit for me, I smoked weed and ate acid or psychedelic mushrooms, which could be easily harvested from farm fields after a summer rain. With the exception of huffing, I was willing to try anything I could get my hands on, and I always wanted more. I tasted cocaine for the first time at 13 years old, snorting lines in the bathroom of the public library, right off a copy of Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows.
Through experimentation, I noticed the way different drugs affected my dysphoria. When I smoked weed, what seemed like a fantasy became more real and I felt less panicked; time stood still. When I drank or did cocaine, I became numb, and I didn’t care that I couldn’t be her. All I wanted was another drink or another line. On psychedelics, though, not only could I fully become her, but I could fully detach from all reality.
After one year, my father’s next assignment brought him back to America, in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where he would eventually retire after his 20th year of his service and marry a woman almost 20 years his junior. It seemed obvious to me and Mark that she didn’t want anything to do with kids, let alone the kids from her new husband’s previous marriage. Dad didn’t even tell us that he had gotten remarried. We learned by noticing that her last name had changed on the mail being sent to their house. Mark and I split our lives between school years in Florida and summers in Missouri, but neither of us were able to get our relationship with our father back on track after the divorce.
I hated Missouri almost as much as I hated Florida. My father’s house was miles off base in a desolate spot in the middle of Mark Twain National Forest, where there was no cable, and therefore, no MTV. I wandered through those woods praying I’d stumble onto a field of marijuana growing, like I’d seen in drug busts on TV. With no other way to catch a buzz, I settled for stealing my dad’s beers and highball glasses of schnapps after he went to sleep.
At my request, my dad built me a bedroom in the basement. Like my childhood forts, I liked the isolation it offered. The cavelike darkness let me sleep all day, and the privacy meant I could do whatever I wanted after everyone else had gone to sleep.
Restless at night, I would search through my dad’s old military footlockers, looking at pictures and reading old letters. There were boxes from my father’s past life; his half of the family possessions received in the divorce. In one of those boxes I found my mother’s wedding dress. I spent all summer in that basement, dressed like a bride, and drinking Miller Lites while playing guitar or writing in my journal.
Journaling was something I’d picked up in third grade when my father was assigned to a month-long training exercise in Germany and had to pull me and Mark out of school. Because I was going to be missing so much class, my teacher told me to keep a journal and write about my traveling experiences every day. I wrote about visiting the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. Walking the grounds where thousands of Jewish people had been put to death by a deranged Nazi, I knew that the devil must be real. I also wrote about seeing my brother bolt into oncoming traffic and be struck by a delivery truck, which stopped directly on top of his legs. We spent the night in the hospital with him. He was shaken up, but fortunately his young bones did not break under the weight. The experience was traumatizing, but it taught me the value of expressing myself on paper. Its confessional nature was therapeutic. I came back from the trip, read these two entries in front of my class, and received an A on the assignment. I never stopped keeping a journal after that.
The only break in the monotony of Missouri was our trip to visit my grandparents’ lake cabin in northeastern Pennsylvania, where I had an attic bedroom to myself. One night, I stumbled upon a sports almanac there. There was a two-paragraph article in it about Renée Richards, the professional tennis player who underwent a male-to-female sex change.
This was the first time I’d ever heard of such a concept. I could hardly believe it was really possible. In the sanctuary of the attic, I read those two paragraphs over and over. I wanted this so badly, but didn’t know how to make it happen. All those sleepless nights praying to God for this one miracle never got me a word back. After everyone was asleep, in a moment of pure desperation, I turned to Satan.
There on a cot set up among boxes, beneath a single pull-string light bulb, I kneeled in front of the bed and took out a piece of paper, the sports almanac underneath for a hard surface, a bird feather for a pen, and my Swiss Army knife. I cut my thumb and dipped the end of the feather into the growing droplet, and started writing.
“I pledge my allegiance to the Dark Lord in exchange for…”
I vowed to do whatever he wanted. I offered my soul, anything in trade. I begged for Satan to please, please let me wake up a woman. Not a girl, but a fully grown woman; instant emancipation so that I could run away and escape it all. I had a full, intricate plan worked out in my head. I would wake up that next morning before the rest of my family and disappear into the woods, never to be seen again. I wrote out the contract and signed it in my own blood, but of course I never woke up the woman I wished to be.
Puberty arrived, and with it came a raging flow of testosterone. My body started changing, and I felt the peer pressure to have sexual experiences, the thought of which terrified me.
I don’t know how I pulled off dating a senior as a sophomore, let alone one as beautiful as Tami. Still too young for a license, embarrassingly I had to ask my mom for the occasional drive to her house. Tami was sexually experienced, and I was not. She seemed out of my league. I had gotten a blowjob from one of the girls at church, and she had let me finger her, but I had never gone all the way. I was both terrified and relieved when Tami and I started dating, knowing that I would most assuredly lose my virginity to her.
Her alcoholic mother was passed out in the other room one night, and we were watching the early Angelina Jolie movie Hackers on the living room couch. Neither of us had any interest in the movie. I just sat there, nervously trying to think of a way to make a move, when she took me by the hand and led me into her bedroom, leaving the lights off. She pushed me down onto the bed and started taking her clothes off, and I followed suit. Once naked, she straddled me. This was it. This was the moment. I was going to have sex. My skin felt like it was on fire. I was so flushed with nerves, sweating bullets before any action even started. She put me inside of her and… ecstasy. I was reborn. I came within seconds.
“Before you cum, let’s stop and put a condom on, yeah?” she whispered into my ear.
“Um… it may be a little too late for that…”
We dated for another four months before I broke up with her after she told me she slept with her ex-boyfriend. But those four months were like sex boot camp. She taught me how to fuck, telling me exactly what did and didn’t feel good, stopping short of breaking out charts and graphs. I was fascinated by her body. I liked fucking just as much as I liked drugs, each of them their own escape.
The rush of pubescent hormones only amplified my dysphoria, and I grew even more angry and confused. Why did I desperately feel that I wanted to be a girl but at the same time have deep crushes on all the girls at school? I feared that I was gay. The thought of intimacy scared me. Could someone love me if they knew my secret? And would it really be true love if I kept this part of me from them? This mess of thoughts brought on my first memorable bout with depression, a mental illness present in both sides of my family. Grandma Grace, who never remarried after her husband died of a heart attack in 1964, would slip into depression and not get out of bed for days. We would admit her to the hospital for treatment, and she’d spend a month there, get release
d, and six months later, need to be admitted again. I felt like I understood her hopelessness.
While drugs and sex could reliably hold me over, my biggest distraction and relief from depression came when I discovered punk rock.
“You should give this album a listen,” said Debbie, handing me a copy of Dookie by Green Day. Debbie and her husband, Sam, owned Offbeat Music, the only independent record store in Southwest Florida at the time. “This band is about to be huge,” she assured me. “Get in before they sell out!”
Soon I caught Green Day’s video for “Longview” on MTV’s 120 Minutes, a show I would stay awake every Sunday night to watch at the price of exhaustion on Monday morning. The video was everything Debbie had promised—punk slackers killing their suburban boredom by watching TV. The meta nature of this was not lost on me. One night, I saw an episode guest-hosted by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen, two punks with foot-high mohawks, tattoos, and leather jackets completely covered in metal spikes. They looked like they were from another planet. I was immediately back at Offbeat the next day seeking out the albums by every band whose video they played. Each of those albums led me to discover other bands and opened up a whole new world of music—the Clash, X, Operation Ivy, the Ramones, NOFX, and an endless list of others.
Using my mom’s razor and scissors, I cut my long hair and shaved the sides into a mohawk, spiking it up with Knox gelatin. I stole a pair of black Levis from the mall and ordered a Discharge shirt from a punk mail-order catalog. This, combined with black combat boots, became my uniform. I never changed or washed them. When holes developed in my jeans, I would simply sew punk patches over them. Inspired by a photo of the Germs’ singer, Darby Crash, I stuck a safety pin through my ear and started collecting piercings—a few in my ears, one through my septum, two through my nipples, one through my dick. A thick chain connected to a padlock hung around my neck. None of this was ideal in the sweltering heat and daily rain of Florida, but I was willing to suffer for punk fashion.
Green Day was touring through Florida with a stop at a venue called the Edge in Orlando. A friend from class named Dustin Fridkin was also a Rancid and Green Day fan, and his dad bought us tickets and volunteered to drive us. In advance of the concert, we both dyed our hair green.
Standing in the audience waiting for the band to take the stage, the new Rancid album was playing over the house PA.
“What is this shit they’re playing? I wish Green Day would hurry up and come out,” griped the two girls standing in front of us. Dustin and I turned to each other and rolled our eyes. We were more in the know and thus cooler than they were.
When the band finally walked out, the floor in front of us instantly opened up into a violence I’d only heard rumor of—a circle pit. It was terrifying, but there was no question as to whether or not we were heading in. This was the last step in our initiation. Fists flew, bodies surfed overhead. No matter how many times we were spit out, we jumped back in until the show was over.
Waiting for Dustin’s dad on the curb outside the venue, shirt collars torn, bloodied and bruised, green hair dye melted out of our hair and onto our faces, we had seen the future.
“We should start a punk band of our own!” I said.
Punk was the perfect outlet for a young outcast living in Naples. The city mainly comprised tourists and rich, white, elderly people. That was where the tax revenue came from, so that was who the city services catered to. Youth was preferably neither seen nor heard. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, other than swim at the beach—and I hated the beach. After Tami and I broke up, I started seeing a girl named Jenn. I pawned the Mickey Mantle baseball card my dad had given me to buy bus tickets out of town for us. We only made it as far as the Greyhound station in Fort Myers, the next city north on I-75, before being picked up by the sheriff’s department. My mom had reported me after coming home from work for lunch unexpectedly and finding the goodbye letter I’d left on the kitchen table. We were both grounded for weeks after that. I felt trapped and thought I’d never leave Naples alive.
Punk rock was a cathartic way to fight back against the town’s bigotry—the asshole jocks at school who beat me up and called me a faggot, a church and God that turned me away and damned my soul, and teachers who wanted to erase my individuality. It was the nihilism and self-destructive nature of punk rock that I first latched on to. Live fast, die young. Then at 15, on the Fourth of July, I had a change of perspective. Punk politics that seemed only theoretical became all too real.
I was a scrawny, Sid Vicious–looking kid. I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, a dirty, smelly trouble magnet who liked to run his mouth. I ran it to the wrong cops on the wrong day.
Looking for some friends on the boardwalk, I heard a voice from behind me, thick with authority. “Time to move along, son!”
I turned around to find two cops; one male, one female. The one who’d said it was the spitting image of Erik Estrada from CHiPs—same coiffed hairdo, same silver aviator sunglasses, one thumb hitched in his belt buckle, close to his gun, and the other hand pointing at me while barking orders. I walked away through the crowd of red, white, and blue-clad patriotic families, still in search.
“I already told you, son, it’s time to move along!” he said when he found me again.
Before I could even give any lip back, my arms were twisted behind my back. I was led by the shoulder and slammed face-first onto the trunk of a Collier County sheriff’s cruiser that had been baking in the summer sun all day. I kept bucking up off the sizzling hot metal and was slammed back down each time. Both officers held me down, spread my legs apart, and emptied out my pockets.
“You fucking Nazi pigs, you fascist fucking assholes! What the fuck are you arresting me for? Fuck you! Fuck you!!!” I shouted. The officer grabbed the back of my hair and slammed my head multiple times on the trunk, slapped handcuffs on me, opened the door to the cruiser, and threw me in the back as more cops showed up.
He looked down at me through the open window and I could see myself in the reflection of his sunglasses. “You’re going to jail, you little fucker!” I mustered all the saliva I could in my mouth and spit it directly into his face.
The door was ripped back open and I was pulled out. I collapsed to my knees and was lifted by the elbows, a cop on each side. All my body weight leaned into my cuffed wrists and I kicked my feet out, flailing to hit whatever I could. Two more officers rushed over, each grabbing a leg. More backup continued to arrive. I was carried around the car into the street and thrown face-first to the ground. A boot on my head, a knee in my back. My ankles were zip-tied to my wrists. Hog-tied and defenseless, I was picked up like a suitcase and carried around while the pigs shared a laugh at my squirming.
When we arrived at the station, parked inside the jail receiving area, the back door opened by my knees and I heard a voice say, “I’m going to cut your ankles free now. If you kick me, I’m going to kill you.”
Sitting alone in a cell waiting still to be processed for release, the Estrada look-alike entered and sat down in front of me. “Look at this face, you little asshole,” he said, pointing to his smug grin. “Look at it good and never forget it. Oh yeah, you little shit, you’re screwed, I got you, you’re fucked. Remember this face as long as you live. I’m always coming for you.”
Hours later, my mother posted bond. A reporter came to our house the next day and interviewed me for a story about whether police had gone too far in handling my arrest and if it bordered on brutality. My mother gathered all her savings and retained a lawyer for my defense.
I was tried as an adult on charges of resisting arrest with violence and battery on an officer, and ultimately convicted of both felonies. It came down to siding with a member of law enforcement or a punk teenager, and the court chose the law. I got off relatively easy with a summer of house arrest and 180 hours of community service, which I spent volunteering in the cardiac rehabilitation wing of the local hospital.
Once my probation-regulated
drug testing sobered me up a bit, I realized that something inside me had changed. Suddenly the dick and fart jokes in the NOFX songs I’d grown to love seemed less appealing. Punk became more than mohawks and patches. I was pissed off. My arrest and conviction were a catalyst, politicizing my teenage mind, opening up new worlds of thought, and turning me on to anarchist philosophy. I had seen the way the system worked firsthand, and I knew I wanted nothing to do with it. The more I looked, I saw oppression and inequality happening all around me.
Fights at school were finding me more often and were becoming more intense. Most of my friends had already dropped out, and I was sick of getting my ass kicked every day. After the second time I ran away from home—this time only making it as far as Offbeat Music before being picked up by the cops—my mother told me I could drop out if I promised not to run away again. At 16, I threw my textbooks in a dumpster and washed my hands of school forever.
My mother got remarried to a gentle, goofy guy who was the polar opposite of my dad, and I made life hell for them. This wasn’t new for her, of course. As in my toddler days, I was still “Tom Tom the Atom Bomb.” In addition to my charge of resisting with violence, I picked up arrests for resisting without violence, possession of weed, carrying a concealed weapon (a thick bike chain, in case anyone tried to fuck with me), and the usual Friday night detentions by mall security. But mom was always there to bail me out, and I was always an ungrateful little shit.
She even helped me buy a car once I got my license, a 1976 Buick LeSabre. Soon after, I was driving around with some friends one night, and got in a car chase with some football players in a red Mazda Miata, no match for the 350 V8 under the Buick’s hood. After I sideswiped them into a ditch, I thought I had lost them, but they followed me to my house. I stored a machete under my car seat, never knowing when it might come in handy. I grabbed it, hopped out, and started wailing on their hood with it. Their doors flew open, and they charged me. They had called my bluff, since I wasn’t going to kill them with a machete. My friends ran toward my house, so I bolted after them. My mother was awakened by all the noise. She rushed out onto the lawn wielding a baseball bat to scare off my attackers. Everyone was screaming at each other until my mother suddenly froze, grabbed her chest, and dropped to her knees. The guys were so shocked by this that they got back in their car and sped off. Meanwhile, my stepdad and I rushed her to the emergency room. The doctor told us it was a stress-induced heart attack. I literally gave my mother a heart attack.
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