One day in 1989 ninth grader Chris Smallwood was walking through this region, down La Sierra Street in Riverside, where he lived with his mother and sister, heading to school. He met a kid named Chuck, aka Charles Donald Kueck, who had just rounded the corner from Doverwood, where he lived with his mother, her boyfriend, and two sisters, one from his mother’s first marriage and the other from her third. Chuck was tall and skinny and dressed in black—black T-shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans, black boots—and he was pushing a ten-speed bike. He was a bit embarrassed about his impaired vehicle situation and later, by way of explanation, added some information about his family, off-hand comments that to an outsider would sound an alarm: “My mother’s wasted and so’s her old man.” But not here in this working-class neighborhood of small one- and two-bedroom homes, where the mothers were beleaguered and the fathers were broken, often absent because of divorce or jail time, or at home, barely hanging on, drowning in booze or drugs, lashing out at their wives and kids, at ghosts, trying to shake off a legacy of poverty and violence that dated back to the clan rivalries of their Scots-Irish forebears, some of whom came to America as indentured white slaves. On the day of that first encounter, the boys formed a quick bond, mainly because of the neighborhood that they lived in and the mutual knowledge of what that meant. As they continued on to school, they discussed matters of the day, discovering their shared love of certain bands—Black Flag, Social Distortion, the Dead Kennedys—and spoke of their own musical aspirations. From then they on were buddies.
A few weeks later, a kid named Rande Linville was standing outside the window of a liquor store in downtown Riverside. It was 1:30 in the morning and he was about to break in. But he heard the sound of skateboard wheels on pavement and turned to look. “There were these two guys on boards,” he says. “I was surprised to see them because there weren’t very many skateboarders then. And most of them looked like me, blonde, clean-cut, with surfer hair. These guys were wearing black leather jackets and looked like punks.” They were Chuck Kueck and Chris Smallwood and along with Rande they were about to become a close band of friends who called themselves The Three Amigos—a reference to the John Landis movie with Chevy Chase, Martin Short, and Steve Martin, in which three actors who play gunfighters end up in a Mexican village where they actually have to fend for themselves.
As they stood in the parking lot on the night of their first encounter, Rande asked, “What’s up?” He was wondering if he was going to have to fight two people off for the swag from the liquor store, especially because there appeared to be a serious tribal difference if you judged the situation by clothing alone. And then came the response: “What’s up?” For a moment there was a standoff, and then Chris decided to end it, reaching into his crotch—to Rande’s alarm—and pulling out an American flag. “Dude,” Rande said, “whaaa?” Chris explained that they were out stealing flags and were on their way back to Chuck’s house to burn them. The news was startling and hilarious, and Rande cracked up and then they all started laughing, and then Rande explained his break-in plans. Chuck and Chris approved and Rande picked up his skateboard and smashed the window. Chuck dove in and then the other two boys followed, returning with candy, cigarettes, and beer, and then they jumped on their boards. Instead of heading to Chuck’s, they cruised back to Rande’s apartment, a small, three-room unit he shared with his mother and sister in a nearby Section 8 housing project. Inside Rande’s bedroom, they cracked open a six-pack and started to drink. “Dude,” Chuck said as he looked around the room, “you like Black Flag?” He was referring to a wall poster and he was impressed. Then Chris joined in, noting a flyer for the Circle Jerks, and high-fiving Rande. Surprised that the surfy-looking guy would be into punk rock instead of metal, Chuck and Chris exchanged a look, and then Chuck turned to Rande. “I play bass,” he said. “Chris plays lead. We need a drummer. Do you—?” Before he could finish, Rande was in—as it turned out, he was a heavy metal drummer transitioning into punk, and he had been playing for a long time. Soon after that they formed their first band, named one night after Chris and Chuck had seen the Oliver Stone movie JFK and Chuck, recalls Chris, “was all, ‘Dude, dude, dude,’”—mimicking his friend—“Oswald was set up, we gotta call our band Oswald’s Revenge and I said, ‘Dude, that is so right,’ and from then on, that was our band.”
Chuck was now part of a world that was getting some serious attention; it included bands like No Doubt and the local outfit Voodoo Glow Skulls, regulars at Spanky’s and famous all over the country. In fact, amigo Rande Linville’s best friend was a member of the Glowskulls, the most revered band in the Inland Empire. Because of the association, Linville became a sought-after drummer, and his crew—Chuck, Chris, and all of their musician associates—assumed a high profile in the Inland Empire, their fame only adding to their street cred. When Gwen Stefani was in town, they could go backstage, and a couple of times they partied with one of their idols, Henry Rollins, along with his seminal OC band Black Flag. Along with outlaws like William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, Rollins was a serious inspiration. Rollins looked and dressed like a skinhead, but he was anything but. Chuck often quoted from his book Pissing in the Gene Pool, with one passage holding particular relevance. “I’ve got a roach crawling on my hand,” it went. “Should I kill it? . . . I don’t know, let me think. It was the first thought that popped into my head. I raised my other hand to crush it but all of a sudden I stopped dead in my tracks. I thought about all the people who think of me the same way I think of this roach. All the people who see me as a filthy crawling piece of vermin that should be destroyed. Hah! The roach is my brother and long may he prosper!”
Heartened by kindred spirits and part of a flourishing nationwide scene, Chuck and his friends were in demand as musicians, playing gigs around Riverside and once or twice at clubs in Los Angeles. After a while, Oswald’s Revenge became other bands, as bands have a way of doing, but the three amigos were always in them, adding and subtracting other personnel, and they were always together, in spirit or in person, bonded forever by the fact that, as Rande recalls, they were “three fully abused kids who loved the same music.” In the annals of rough upbringings, this was not an exaggeration; they were indeed fully abused, but underlying that was a theme that ran through their lives, which could be summarized by way of one question: Where’s Dad? In the case of Rande Linville, he confided to his friends that his father—long gone by the time the boys had met—was a heavy drinker prone to violent outbursts directed at his mother and the entire family. After one especially bad episode during which his mother was roughed up and the cops were called, the father left for good, and it would take years for his mother to right herself, ultimately returning to college and graduating with a degree in nursing.
Rande was five years old when his family collapsed, and by the time he met Chris and Chuck in the liquor store parking lot, he had been out of control for a decade. But even before that, at the age of twelve, he was selling large quantities of pot and sacks of speed provided by relatives in a nearby town, smoking a lot of marijuana himself, and becoming involved in various scrapes and runins with unsavory characters and the law. In sixth grade he was also facing the kind of bad luck that seems to plague people, especially kids, who are already in trouble—his school bus crashed and he incurred a broken femur, resulting in years of pain which he sucked up, already quite adept at hiding his feelings. Through it all, he found solace and grace in rock and roll, reveling in it when he would visit his grandparents, a country act called the Conways who had settled in the high desert town of Joshua Tree. Out there amid the creosote and sage Rande would join in when they sang the old bluegrass standards, learning harmony and how to play the guitar, knowing from then on that music was an escape route, although he wouldn’t fully follow it for years. By the time he was nineteen, he was busted for dealing large quantities of marijuana. He did a two-year stint at the Banning Correctional Facility in Riverside County, coming out angrier, stronger, and—after ye
ars of street fighting, skateboarding, and snowboarding—more buff than ever and ready to take on the world. His strength and youth would serve him well, for the three amigos would soon find themselves in an epic battle involving a very big and very bad man who had a starring role in their lives. By then, they were all rough and ready.
The situation involved amigo Chris Smallwood, fatherless in a way that could never be fixed; his father was killed in a bar when the husband of a woman he once had an affair with walked in and shot him in the head. At the time Chris was thirteen years old. His younger sister Amanda was twelve. But even before Donny Smallwood died, Chris had felt his absence. A Vietnam vet who had served on the USS Hector in the navy, he returned and was wracked with nightmares, unable to shake the effects of war—in his case, bringing men home in body bags. So he started drinking and he was running around, running really, and he didn’t hold down a job for more than two weeks and then one day someone put a stop to all of it. The children were bereft and destitute and their mother was stunned; she knew her husband was tormented but certainly was not prepared for his death, let alone a violent one. She had been working for years as a dental assistant after putting herself through school with a job at Montgomery Ward, and she could hardly afford to quit now in order to minister full-time to her kids. Coming to Virginia Smallwood’s aide in the aftermath of the killing was a friend of her husband’s—a three-hundred-pound man with a swastika and an eagle on his back. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call him Al. At first he seemed harmless enough, a physically huge knight to the rescue who consoled mother and children, fending off other comers and hardships. To get away from everything, Virginia had decided to move her family to Kentucky, where her parents lived. En route in Phoenix, the U-Haul broke down. Al had been driving them and called a family member who lived nearby. As the truck was being repaired, Virginia looked around. “I thought hey, this looks pretty nice,” she tells me on the phone. “Let’s stay here.” They did, and for a while things were OK. Al liked cocaine; it mellowed him out, unlike the effect it had on others, and it was usually available. After about a year, proximity to some especially gnarly neighbors forced a move, and Al and Virginia and the kids headed for Las Vegas. It was difficult to score coke there and things started to get bad. Al began to take control of the household, issuing rules about organizing the kids’ clothes by way of color and permitting one hour per day of television. The rules seemed acceptable at first, but he displayed frightening outbursts if they were broken. The situation degenerated when the kids were at school. Al became destructive and violent, hitting Virginia, breaking things, throwing large pieces of furniture across the room. When the kids came home, they would notice that their mother was bruised. “One day,” Virginia says, “he grabbed me and put a knife to my throat.” Cops were called and things settled down, until they boiled over again, and Al would get violent. Finally, there was an escape route: a friend was visiting, and Virginia asked him to take Al to a casino. While they were gone, she packed up the kids and left, heading back to California. They stayed with friends in Norco, a rustic town where to this day people ride their horses to the store, and soon they moved back to Riverside.
In 1928, the Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned a series of monuments called the Madonna of the Trail. There was one in each state along the National Old Trails Road, which extended from Maryland to California—twelve in all. The idea was to commemorate the pioneer woman whose strength and courage helped conquer the wilderness and make a new home in the Promised Land. Wrought from granite, the towering sculpture portrays a bonneted woman in full pioneer dress, baby in her arms and youngster at her side. She is in mid-stride, resolute, clutching a rifle. On February 1, 1929, the second to last of the Madonnas was dedicated in Upland, California, at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Euclid Avenue, a few miles from Riverside, where the first white trappers had entered the Golden State by land. The women who soon followed had not been acknowledged in such a way until this unveiling. “They were just as brave or braver than their men,” President Harry Truman had said at the ceremony for an earlier monument. “In many cases, they went with sad hearts and trembling bodies. They went, however, and endured every hardship that befalls a pioneer.”
Over 150 years later, little had changed on the frontier. Yes, it was modern and crowded, but still brutal, with women trying to hold the line. Amid a world of violence, on LaSierra Avenue in Riverside, Virginia Smallwood maintained a safe place—not for her, as it turned out, but for the kids who gathered there. You see, Al had returned to California, to stay with his own family and seek the company of Virginia. After a while, they reunited, and Al moved back in with the Smallwoods. It wasn’t long before the same problems erupted. Yet even while sometimes bruised and visibly battered, Virginia was everyone’s mother, or in the words of her daughter Amanda, she was “the community mom”—a comparatively stable parent with a steady job (she had resumed working as a dental assistant), a person who liked to take care of others, not so she could receive foster care payments from a government agency (as some who abused the system, and the kids in it, were known to do), but simply because she felt so inclined. Sooner or later, in this land of want and need, the children who wandered the malls looking for their own kind, or just drifted through because that’s where the trails led, made their way to the Smallwoods’ house, gathering ’round the table for dinner on any given evening, nurturing their weary bones with the burritos or chorizos and eggs cooked up by the generous Mrs. Smallwood, stretching her small salary to feed an army of haunted kids.
There was one kid who seemed a bit different, more troublesome, a tornado really; as soon as he started coming home with Chris, Virginia noticed that his energy was more chaotic and yet very intense and everyone seemed to fall under his spell. He was living with his mother at the time yet sometimes stayed on the streets, or at the homes of other kids, and soon, as always, his good looks, wit, and explosive charisma won the day, and Mrs. Smallwood permitted him to become a member of her household and move into her garage. Over time, she and the other members of her family learned the details of his personal story, and it was one of the worst she had heard, becoming more harrowing with every revelation, confirmed eventually by relatives and friends who had already fallen into his orbit.
Who can say when the trouble began? Certainly the fact that his father had walked out of his family’s life was a factor, opening up a fissure that would not come together again in spite of attempts by both father and son to reach across it after not having seen each other for over ten years. There were other factors too—a mother whose troubles were a mystery to outsiders and her involvement with a strange man whom Chuck and his friends came to call Ranch Dressing Rod, after his fondness for slathering food with this particular condiment. And by all means, we must consider genetics, which now show that nearly all aspects of personality, seemingly, are hard-wired (though susceptible to refinement in one way or another), and certainly we must acknowledge the general malaise that prevailed in the late twentieth-century cities of the Inland Empire, where the natural world was fast becoming a dream, replaced with such things as the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a rock quarry that was used for years as a dump for toxic waste, then named as the first Superfund cleanup site, one of the biggest hazmat episodes in modern history. It was a sad fate for the region; where once the scent of orange infused the air, now Riverside County was one of the most polluted areas of the country. On any given day, you could not just see but taste and feel the particulate smog emanating from the diesel trucks that plied the freeways; it was a presence, obliterating what had come before, especially during the summer months, when the heat would trap it and cage it up like some foul entity that needed to be exorcised from the land. Soon some locals—kids mostly—started to call the place Rivercide, and it was popping up on top ten lists for “highest rate of meth use” in the country or “cities with the worst smog,” and it was running out of jobs and possibilities, and as always in Amer
ica, the old saying prevailed—the rich got richer and the poor got drunk or, more accurately at this point, high, wasted, or tweaked. A new vocabulary was upon the land; words like “rehab” and “OD” were in common rotation, becoming strange badges of honor, providing an identity for many who otherwise would remain unknown, conveying a life story instantly, to the listener and the bearer, a thing to hang on to, with echoes of street fights and trouble with cops and bands you admired, signifying that you belonged to a tribe, and that tribe was everywhere with no place to go, except the next party.
As to what exactly contrived to make Charles Donald Kueck an alcoholic by the time he was twelve we cannot say—not that the problem was noticed, by anyone other than Chuck—far from it, in fact. It seemed that all of those times he fell out of the tree while playing at his grandparents’ home in the working-class suburb of Lynwood were viewed as the product of a young boy’s rowdiness, even the time when he hit his head and passed out for a while. As he later told an uncle, he wasn’t accident-prone or “not being careful,” he was blasted on Martini and Rossi. That this could have been a lie to win affection must be considered, for the boy was a con man, a good one, and his uncle blamed himself and cursed his family and thinks he may have given Chuck some money to make up for the oversight, money that of course went right into a drug purchase, but many years later, when the boy’s friends and relatives were able to put his story together—all of the near-misses, the illnesses, the roller-coaster ride with spills and thrills for those who came along—it was all of a piece, and by then everyone knew that Chuck was a hard-core junkie and, in the way of all good junkies of the era, was on his way to Seattle.
A Desert Reckoning Page 10
