I was on my way out the door, heading to dinner in Naples with my wife and mother, when Andrew called in a panic to warn me.
“If someone you don’t know comes knocking at your door, do not answer! I just got fucking served with papers from Sarig. They’re going to serve all of us!”
Our former manager was suing us for $1.24 million. My stomach started to churn with anxiety and my eyelid wouldn’t stop twitching. $1.24 million. It was more money than the four of us would have had if we sold everything we owned. I hadn’t even been out of legal trouble for a year, and again I was being dragged back into the system.
Being sued feels like an act of violence being committed on your very existence. You are completely defenseless against it.
October 9, 2008—Washington DC
Ian MacKaye was at our Black Cat show tonight. The whole time we were playing, I felt conscious of his presence and what a sellout I am.
The entertainment lawyer—the lawyer who negotiated our major label deal and who we fired along with the manager—is withholding files we need for the lawsuit, saying that we owe him $2,500. We paid him $70k for one contract and now he’s hard-balling us for $2,500. What a shitbag weasel.
We’ve never even met the lawyer defending us in the lawsuit. He’s just some voice on the other end of a conference call, a name attached to emails, and the name we’re writing checks out to. His first course of action has been to ask for an extension of time from the judge. He also filed for a dismissal based on there being no contract between us and the manager, but it will be months before we hear back on that. This lawsuit is going to take years to play out.
I feel no motivation to write in my journal, to write lyrics, to write songs. I’m not sure when, if ever, during the day I’m present. It all seems pointless, like a fight I can’t possibly win, my only choice is to give in. Someone will always own you. I wonder if it’s not too late to explore a different career. I wonder if I would be happier with a different vocation. I could go back to school. Journalism? Law? Anything besides music. Is it too late?
My afternoon phone interview with the LA Times had a political slant to it. The journalist asked really esoteric, abstract questions about our music. I hate interviews. They feel like homework and I’m just trying to guess the right answers so the journalist will write an article that will help us sell records.
“What purpose do you think music serves in protest movements?” I don’t fucking care. I’m a sellout. Why are you asking me? I can’t answer the question honestly so I make up some meaningless garbage.
More depressed than ever. Considering suicide.
October 22, 2008—SLC, Utah—8:47 PM
First and foremost, I am glad that we are all unharmed, alive.
Everyone was asleep when it happened. I woke up to the sound of screaming, the sensation of spinning, the sound of crashing inside and outside of the bus. My eyes opened to the blackness. I immediately pressed my hands and feet onto the roof of my bunk as hard as I could, bracing for what I did not know.
When we stopped, our bus driver started calling out names one by one to make sure everyone was okay. I didn’t want to wake up, moments before I was so deeply asleep. I was annoyed. It wasn’t until I got off my bunk that I realized how completely un-level to the ground the bus was, we were almost completely on our side. The contents of the bus were thrown everywhere up and down the hallway—luggage, food, DVDs, video games, broken glass.
Looking out the front window of the bus, I saw that our trailer was laying on its side and our bus driver was out there trying to quickly push our gear, which was strewn all along the highway, to the side of the road. I sleep fully dressed on the bus just in case something like this happens, so I don’t have to search for my clothes.
The eastbound lanes of the highway, where most of the gear was laying, was closed down. The westbound lane was not and as we all scrambled to push gear to the side of the road. A semi-truck hit the same patch of ice we had, spun out of control, narrowly missing our bus, and landed in the median just behind it. A couple rescue vehicles showed up and we were advised not to get back into the bus. It was freezing cold. We were offered two blankets to share amongst the ten of us.
The tour manager caught a ride into Rawlins, Wyoming, which was about 50 miles away where he rented a U-Haul truck. We waited on the side of the road for him to come back so we could load the U-Haul with our battered, broken gear. Andrew and I drove the U-Haul to SLC, the bus followed behind us. We had to cancel the show.
With no fanfare or acknowledgement, another year of touring came to an end for Against Me!. We had spent 245 days on tour in 2008. I felt like I’d finally run out of road, my career was over. I was hated, uninteresting, and outdated.
We all showed up to our practice space in Gainesville on the last day of the year, having not seen each other since our last tour had ended weeks ago. We’d cancelled our France run in December, knowing it wasn’t going to make us any money, and with the lawsuit hanging over our heads, none of us were interested in taking the financial hit.
No one talked at first. We just set up our instruments in silence. For a few minutes, we all sat in a circle, looking at each other as our amps hummed behind us. Warren opened it up. He said that he thought the band was diseased, that it had a sickness, and that he could never envision himself being excited about playing music with the three of us again. I knew what he meant. He meant that I was diseased, and that he could never see himself being excited about playing music with me again. “Yeah, well, right back at you, buddy,” I thought. “I might be a shitty person, but you have terrible meter.”
Warren and I went back and forth, airing our grievances and venting repressed hatred of one another. Andrew made futile attempts at maintaining some middle ground between us, and James, as usual, barely said anything at all. If he had opinions, he sure did a hell of a job of keeping them to himself.
Then, after we had spent almost an hour talking about how we couldn’t stand to play music together anymore, we picked up our instruments and started working on a new song. What else could we do? We were being sued for over a million dollars. This was the only way to keep money coming in to afford the increasingly expensive legal bills we were being slammed with. We all hated each other, but we hated the manager more. At least we were united in that.
Plus, we were contractually obligated to deliver another album to Sire. More accurately, and ironically thanks to the manager and lawyer, Sire was contractually obligated to release one more album by us. We had what was called a “two firm deal,” meaning no matter how badly the first album did, on top of the million dollars they had already given us, they still had to give us another $500,000 to record a follow-up. Butch had already asked if we would do another album with him.
Against Me! felt less like a band and more like a prison sentence we were all handed with no foreseeable release date. Our only chance of escaping the straits we were in was for me to write our most successful album to date.
So this was my plan. I knew we had the war fund of label cash, and I wanted to fight. Fuck Warren, fuck Andrew, and fuck James, I thought. I had already accepted that I was in it on my own, and no one else was going to contribute creatively. The songwriting was all on me.
I was determined to do it. Not confident, but determined. I wrote my New Year’s resolution on the wall before shutting the lights: “Write a hit fucking record.”
I took the long way home from practice that night, through the coastal roads of Saint Augustine, loaded up on rage and Adderall, and desperate for inspiration. I hung a right onto King Street, driving past the coral towers of Flagler College and the old slave market, an open-air pavilion where Africans were once traded and sold. Not far ahead was a beach that housed shoreline race riots in the 1960s as well as the jail that famously held Martin Luther King Jr. for a night in June of 1964 after his sole Florida arrest. His crime: daring to eat at a restaurant in the Monson Motor Lodge.
Just before midnight hit
, and brought with it another year of uncertainty, I headed north on San Marco Avenue, stopping in front of the Mission of Nombre De Dios and La Leche Shrine. To the right, an anti-abortion display of four thousand crosses, one for every fetus aborted every day in America, arranged neatly in front of the world’s tallest cross, which stood 208 feet high, erected to mark the site where Christianity first landed in America in 1565.
I looked upon my city for an epiphany, but all I saw around me were monuments to its mistakes and reminders of the disgrace buried deep within its soil. White crosses on the church lawn—I wanted to smash them all.
7. WHITE CROSSES
We took a third test just to be sure. Another blue line, another positive result. Heather was pregnant. It took me hours just to comprehend the implications behind this information. Somewhere in the dark, our baby was forming, coming to life, a son or daughter. Heather was going to be a mother. I was going to be a father.
My instinct was to rush out and buy a crib, call family and friends, and start celebrating. But I knew I was getting ahead of myself. One thing at a time. Heather scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the next morning to get some official word before telling our parents. We’d wait the recommended three months before telling friends.
This wasn’t a surprise pregnancy. We had been trying to have a baby. Heather had come off of birth control over the summer and started taking prenatal vitamins, which we had been busted for after the band discovered them in the tour bus fridge that past summer on Warped Tour. We denied we were trying for it, but there aren’t a lot of other reasons to take prenatal vitamins.
The pregnancy was well planned, even, to fit into the time between album touring cycles. Still, the full impact didn’t hit me until the doctor told us this was for real. We were going to be responsible for a human life, a little person that we didn’t even know yet, a person that shared our DNA and our characteristics. I couldn’t even comprehend the magnitude of it all.
It has to be a girl, I thought. Please let it be a girl. Oh fuck, what if it’s a boy? The possibility of having a boy terrified me, knowing I wouldn’t be able to be the proper male role model he would need. Heather didn’t want to know ahead of time, insisting it be a surprise, so I’d have to wait. She said if it ended up being a boy, she’d want to name him Tommy. The superstitious wishes I used to make on things like finding a penny heads up or seeing a shooting star turned from “I wish for a platinum selling record” to “I wish for a healthy baby girl.” Please, just let it be a girl, and let her be healthy.
Heather’s sister was also expecting when we found out, a couple months further along, so she invited Heather to visit for a week in Belgium, where she lived with her husband, a pro basketball player on the European circuit. They were excited to share their pregnancies together. I was excited for the time alone to focus on writing songs. I called off band practice for the week with the intention of hunkering down, just me and my acoustic guitar.
Even with the privacy of Heather being gone, writing was still daunting. Not only did the record need to be good enough to ward off the lawsuit and save the band, but it would now have to produce enough income to support a family. The pressure had doubled. I smoked a bowl of weed that first morning she was gone, sitting there on our blue velvet living room couch, eager to relieve the stress of these thoughts, and then took a hot shower.
When I came out, I wrapped a fresh towel around my waist and went into the bedroom. There were reminders of Heather everywhere. Her perfume sat in a little bottle on her vanity. I picked it up and smelled the tip of it, breathing her in. I sprayed it into the air, stuck my nose into the mist, and inhaled. I held the bottle up to the side of my neck and pushed the button down, feeling the cool, fragrant drops as they landed on me, from my Adam’s apple down to my clavicle. I turned my cheek and sprayed the other side as well.
The door to the closet was open. I walked in and turned on the light, all of Heather’s beautiful black vintage gowns hanging in front of me. I took down a summer dress and held it in my hands, feeling the delicacy of the material in my fingertips. Almost not realizing what I was doing, I slipped it on over my head. “Tom, no,” a voice inside me whispered, but it was a slow surrender, an urge I was powerless to fight. “Well maybe just this one last time,” the voice conceded. I stepped into a pair of her high heels. We wore the same size shoes, and they fit perfectly.
What an absolute relief. It felt so good. My shoulders relaxed from the tension of the fight-or-flight state they had been in for years. I later went out and bought a couple of wigs for fun, intent on spending the rest of the week at home as “her.” It was enough to just sit in the silence of the house, the fading Florida sun streaming through the cracks in the blinds. I wanted the world, but this would have to suffice. Menial chores like doing the dishes, vacuuming, organizing receipts ahead of tax season—no matter how boring, they were exciting as her. My guitar sat silent in the corner. That wasn’t her guitar; that was his. Record label pressures, lawsuit looming, marriage responsibilities, baby on the way—those were his problems. That was his life, not mine.
At the end of my week, I drove to pick up Heather from the airport, checking my face in the rearview mirror at every red light. I had scrubbed my eyes raw making sure all traces of her eyeliner were gone, but it still wasn’t enough. I stopped at a drugstore to buy makeup remover, and kept vigorously rubbing my eyelids in the car.
I threw the cleaning wipes, the bag, and the receipt out the window before pulling up to curbside pick-up. The makeup was gone, but I could still feel the guilt drawn on my face. Heather hugged me as she approached the car with her luggage, but I couldn’t look her in the eye for fear that she’d know. Seeing Heather snapped me back to the real world. The relief I’d experienced all week was gone, replaced by shame and paranoia.
On the ride back to our place, where I had been meticulous about putting all of Heather’s belongings back exactly the way I’d found them before she left, she told me stories about her trip and gave updates on how her body was adapting to the pregnancy. I tried to listen, but I was sweating the whole way home, wondering how I’d let this happen again. I hadn’t worn a woman’s clothes in almost five years, and I hadn’t worn Heather’s clothes ever. I’d slipped up and relapsed. I didn’t understand why it was suddenly back, or how it had found me.
Wasn’t it all behind me?
While the news of Heather’s pregnancy continued to hit me like waves over the following weeks, it turned out that Warren had some big news of his own. He was opening up a Mexican restaurant in Gainesville. He casually told us all out of the blue one morning as we were in the first week of a two-week tour of the Southeast, still nursing hangovers from the night before. He even offered the rest of the band the opportunity to be investors. I was at a complete loss for words. We were being sued, working our asses off to save the band from complete bankruptcy, and he was opening a fucking restaurant?
I later pulled James and Andrew aside and told them I wanted Warren gone. They didn’t disagree. I had already made a couple of calls to line up potential drummers and arranged some tryouts. I hoped that adding new blood to our chemistry and ditching the weakest musical link for a better player would give us that extra push needed for a hit. We conspired to break the news to him before the end of tour.
All I could think about that whole tour, besides how much I hated Warren, was how badly I was dying to express my femininity. Everywhere I looked were reminders. I would glance out into our audience while we played and my eyes would fix on an attractive woman and keep finding their way back to her throughout the set—not because I wanted to fuck her like rock stars are supposed to do, but because I wished I was as pretty as her, and because of how much I wished her body was my own. I could almost live it like it was real—close my eyes and I was her, long hair brushing against my exposed shoulders as I danced in a trance. Then we’d play a new song, and someone would yell out “sellout!” or hold up a sign that said YOU FAILED US above an a
narchy symbol, and I’d stumble through the rest of the song, tripping up on lyrics and tripping over patch cords. I’d scurry to my amplifier to down another chug from the glass of Jameson that always rested on top of it.
Three days before the end of tour, I told James and Andrew it was time. Before the set in Wilmington I grabbed Warren, told him we needed to talk, and the four of us walked to the top of a parking garage behind the venue. The sun already down, and the stadium lights overhead, the scene probably looked like a drug deal or an execution was about to go down. We weren’t breaking up, we told him; we just didn’t want to play with him anymore. Warren took it in stride. I’m sure he must have felt ganged-up on and I can’t imagine that feeling, when three in the family decide to eat the fourth. He said he’d still do the rest of the tour, and we told him he could tell everyone he’d quit.
The next night in Athens at Tasty World was a riot. I’m not sure we had ever played better as a band, but I spoiled the memory of it by getting good and drunk afterward and becoming verbally abusive toward Warren in the hallway of our hotel. I told him what I felt and then some, told him to fuck off. I blinked and the hallways were empty. Everyone was gone. I couldn’t remember what room I was in, and didn’t have my key even if I could.
I had to piss so badly that I did so right there in a stairwell. I was drunk enough that it seemed logical, even courteous, to piss on the walls as opposed to pissing directly onto the carpet. I thought the housekeeping staff would thank me for this act of thoughtfulness. I drenched the wall and the floor with my piss, collapsed into the puddle, and passed out. I woke up in my room the next morning and didn’t know how I’d gotten there. I never saw this, but my mom once told me that my dad used to piss on the walls of our house when I was a kid. He’d come home from the field drunk, get angry, and start pissing. I guess I shared that with him.
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