The shit got hairy for a while. I even had local Puerto Ricans from my block say to me, “Yo man, you need to watch out. There are people after you, and this isn’t even personal, this is about money.” I’d be like, “But what about my mom? We live on this block, what am I supposed to do?” And they’d straight-up tell me, “Everybody likes your mom, don’t worry about her, everything’s cool. But you should disappear for a while.” The shit was real. That’s when I started to realize the violent repercussions of my lifestyle. Even H.R. said to me at that point, “You live by the sword, you die by the sword.” That’s when it started sinking in. It was not too long after that that I wound up heading out West.
When I left home and was squatting, it was no big deal. In fact, I had more space, more freedom, and more privacy. So what if it was in burned-out buildings? Having been raised by hippies and always being on the move, it was nothing new to rough it and just get by. Like I said, I had more space, more freedom; I was on my own. It was cool. By then, I guess I was almost 14. But the state was still giving my mom problems, ’cause I wasn’t going to school and I was fucking up a lot. They wanted to take me away and send me to Spofford, a juvenile institution, like a prison for kids. I was not with that program. Soon after that, I was like “Fuck it!” and went to Cali.
Chapter Five
GOING OUT TO CALI
HARLEY AT THE COMPOUND, SF, 1981, BY AMY KEIM
January 1982. I had been getting into so much trouble: doing a lot of drugs, drinking heavily, and fighting all the time. One night in Tompkins Square Park, eight or nine Puerto Rican dudes almost stabbed me. They walked up to us with golf clubs and 007s, which were these big-ass folding knives that everyone carried back then. They were talking mad shit. It was Tony T-Shirt who sang for Ultra Violence, and me, and these three chicks. They were all huffing glue, and probably dusted. Those were pretty much the neighborhood drugs of choice for gang bangers and street kids—glue and dust.
We were immediately surrounded. Two of the punk rock girls that were with us were actually Puerto Ricans, and the other was black. One of the girls, Bernadette, was getting all up in their faces ’cause they were talkin’ shit to her: “What’re you doin’ hanging out with these white boys?” And she was like, “Fuck you! You make me ashamed of my own race!” All of a sudden, I’ve got knives at my neck, chest, and eye, and it’s like, yo, even if you’re a bad motherfucker, you’re still a dead motherfucker. Or you’re gonna catch a golf club in the back of the head, and then you’ll get stuck by everybody fuckin’ else. I think they just started laughing and walked off, and we went back across the street to A7.
That night, I was like, “Yo, I can’t take this shit anymore. I live in a squat with no running water, and I bathe in a fuckin’ fire hydrant with a bucket.” I was doing this in February. People would be walking around in down coats, and me and John Bloodclot would be out there with liquid soap, doing sponge baths in the freezing fucking hydrant water. It was such madness for me here, I didn’t have anything to lose by leaving.
So across the street at A7 were two Cali bands, Whipping Boy, and another called Hammer Slag with a girl singer, Lucille, who was a crazy Dutch chick, and this cat Dave Burks, who was only about 16 or 17 himself, and two other guys. I asked them, “Do you think I can hitch a ride with you?” They said, “Sure. There ain’t much room, but okay.”
The sun was coming up, and right in front of A7, I jumped in the car—five of us in an old beat-up car, with hardly any money: a chick with a reverse mohawk, my skinny little 14-year-old shaved-headed ass, and the three skinny Hardcore dudes. We were heading out West, eventually to San Francisco, against the protest of my friend John Watson, who was now Agnostic Front’s first singer. He kept saying, “Yo, don’t go! Yo, let him out at the bridge! He doesn’t know what he’s doing! You don’t know nobody out there!” I left anyway, with nothing but the clothes on my back and less than a dollar in change.
It was five of us in a four-seater, and one of the back windows wouldn’t roll up, which sucked when it rained—which it did for days. I was the only good shoplifter of the bunch, so I had to steal all the food and drinks at truck stops along the way. We’d split all the candy bars, chips or whatever I could steal, five ways. And that was dinner. I was walking around shaving my head with a Bic razor, but every day I’d miss spots, so I was this totally mangy-looking thing. It was really a wild trip—it’s its own story.
Dave remembered: “Since this badly planned tour was a bust, we of course had no food and just enough money for gas home. At the gas stations Harley saved us from starvation…he would have the band members distract the clerk while he would load up his shirt and pants with frozen burritos and candy bars. We would cook the burritos on the car’s metal dash in the sun while the car overheated.”
We looked like a fucking mess wherever we rolled in. At one point, we had to detour from the trip to visit one of their family members and hit them up for gas money. Nobody was there, so we broke into their house, stole change, raided their fridge, and left a note. A week or so later with a few stops and minor mishaps along the way, I finally wound up in San Francisco. I envisioned getting to California and it would be nothing but beaches, sun, and chicks in bikinis. I thought everything in California was going to be like a Sunkist commercial or a Beach Boys song. We pulled into San Francisco, and it was freezing cold and foggy. The first place we got to was the Castro, and I was just like, “Damn, this ain’t nothing like the commercials!”
Fortunately, I was able to get an address and phone number of my friend Kirsten, who had lived in New York, and had introduced me to Mugger and a few other people from the West Coast before I went out there. She was originally from the West Coast, and was friends with Darby Crash, the Germs, the Avengers, and most of the old-school West Coast bands. She had moved to San Francisco. So I showed up at her door in the middle of the night, standing in the rain. She’s like, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?!” I stayed there for a few weeks. She lived in a big-ass house with these dudes. I don’t know if they were college students or what. They weren’t punk rockers or anything.
CRO-MAGS AT CBGB, BY KIM GRAF
I never really got to know any of them, but one of them had a grow room. He said, “Dude, help yourself. Pinch a little bit every once in a while if you want.” Well, he should never have said that ’cause I smoked almost his whole fuckin’ room before it even fully matured! I didn’t know shit had to mature. I was just throwing shit in the microwave and smoking it. By the time I moved out, he had twigs with a few buds left on them.
Kirsten introduced me to the Lewd, the Undead SF, and Terry Sergeant, who roadied for the Undead SF and some of the other locals. I remember the first show I went to on the West Coast; I almost got into a fight on the dance floor. I stepped to the dude that was beefing, and I let them all know right away: “People might think you’re a badass around here, but I’m from New York, and I don’t give a fuck who you are. I’ll kick your fucking ass!” And that was it, no one jumped me. Me and the kid that was beefing made up, we became friends, and I had made a name for myself pretty much right away.
After I stayed with Kirsten, I jammed for a minute with a band called Murder, with Bobby Clic or “Bobby Lewd” from the Lewd, who had a great record called American Wino. Murder wasn’t really a Hardcore-type band, they were kind of the first punk/metal “crossover” band in SF. But they were too early, so the punks had a problem with them, and the metal bands out there like Exodus still sounded like Priest or Maiden. The singer of Murder was this chick Nyna, who came from a punk band called the VKTMS.
It was during that stay in San Francisco that I discovered Black Sabbath. While I was jamming with Murder, I moved in with their bass player, Ju. He was a freak who played an eight-string bass. I had been tripping for a week or so, and my man put Black Sabbath on. He’s like, “Dude, really, you gotta check these guys out.” I was pretty uninterested. He was a lot older than me, and I thought it was just some hippie band fro
m back in the day, I really had no idea what the fuck was up. He put on Master of Reality, and started with “Children of the Grave.” That intro started, and I had this LSD-induced vision of barbarians with horns on their helmets coming out of the speakers, on horses with axes, ready to kill screaming villagers! Then I heard “Into the Void”—the whole thing blew me away. To this day, Sabbath is still one of my all-time favorites.
After I played with Murder for a while, I pretty much crashed everywhere and anywhere I could. And like everyone else, I was doing tons of drugs—lots of speed and acid. I started meeting a lot of kids on the scene through Bobby Lewd, Ju, Terry Sergeant, the singer from the Undead SF, Sid Terror and all of his bandmembers. Terry had a mohawk then; actually, he had three—one big one in the middle and two little ones on each side. Sometimes he just had the one. His jacket was all studded up old-school like Discharge. Years later, he became one of the most legendary and notorious San Francisco Skinheads.
Terry and me became good friends. We were always fucked up and running wild. He was all into crystal meth, while I was more into acid, alcohol, mescaline, and whatever. But as far as drugs went at this point, I was dead-set against shooting and heroin.
RABEEZ, VINNIE STIGMA, HARLEY AND ROGER MIRET, BY BRUCE RHODES
Being from New York and seeing that whole Max’s-era scene, I knew better. And even when I experimented with speed for the first time like a dumb fuck, it was almost like a dare. I was always hounding Terry about the fact that he used to shoot speed all the time. Everyone out there did. I’d bitch him out for it, and he once gave me the, “Man, fuck you. You’ve never even done it. Quit trying to preach to me about shit you don’t know.” He pretty much shut me the fuck up. As a 14-year-old, I didn’t have the intelligence to be like, “You know what? If this dude wants to kill himself, then that’s on him.” I felt like in order for me to actually speak about it from a point of knowledge, I had to at least experience it one time. So I could say, “Bullshit. I have done it…” Real smart, huh?
Anyway, I did it, and I enjoyed it—that shit is fuckin’ evil. I wound up doing a lot of it for quite a period of time while I was out there. The first time I did it, it was at a club called the Tool and Die, at a Mentors gig with this Mexican dude with a green mohawk named Carlos. He got us some speed off one of the local dealers. I told him if he got me some I’d share it with him. We went in the bathroom, split it, and he shot me up.
I had seen it done, but I had always been against that shit and had never done it ’til then. He prepared it, tied my arm off and injected me first. I tasted it in the back of my throat, and right away it hit me. I’m lucky I didn’t have a heart attack right then and there. It was zero to a thousand in one second, an instant rush of adrenaline: jet fuel, heart pounding, fuck, it was insane; and then he did his. I was just a kid. He was an adult. When I think back on it now it makes me sick. If I could go back I’d kick his fuckin’ ass, but I was a dumb kid and he was a scumbag punk rock speed freak so he didn’t give a fuck.
Fortunately, I didn’t stick myself with needles for more than a few months. But I guess I was that kid that gets asked by their parents, “If your friends all jump off a bridge, are you gonna do it too?” At that point in my life the answer was “Yes!” That was the beginning of my unraveling.
Prior to that shit, me and Terry ate so much acid that it’s amazing I can still talk. We had been dosing pretty regularly, and one day we were walking down Haight Street. On the corner of Haight and Ashbury, we found a baggie of acid. And we ate all of it. He ate 14 hits and I ate 19 hits. It wasn’t like we ate ’em all at once, but we might as well have. First, we ate two or three each. We had been tripping a lot that week so we figured to feel it, we had better eat a couple. Time went by and we didn’t feel anything, so we ate more. After a while, we started getting a mild sensation, but it was really weak. So we figured it must’ve gotten rained on or something, so we just split the whole fucking bag, thinking if we eat it all, we’ll get a buzz. Well, we’re walking down Haight Street from Golden Gate Park down toward the Mission and as we’re walking by that store, the Compound, all of a sudden we start getting serious rushes, slow and heavy. My man looks at me and says, “Dude, that was good acid, man. We better get to my friend’s house.”
By the time we got to his building, we were starting to trip severely. It felt like the Earth was made of marshmallow, like we were walking on a big soft marshmallow, and things were getting more and more confusing. We got there, and I remember sitting on the floor. I was there for days, I have no idea how many, but I was trippin’ my balls off. I could not see or function. A lot of times I was in the fetal position; sometimes I’d lay around, roll around, and say weird little things. But I didn’t do much except fry. Terry was a mess, too. When I eventually came down, one of the weird quirks that came out of it was I felt like I didn’t have to wear shoes anymore. I wanted to “feel the ground beneath me.” I didn’t wear shoes for like a month after that. For some reason, it made sense. But acid does some crazy shit to people. I mean, my mother thought she was a fuckin’ snowflake back in the ’60s, taking all her clothes off and running down the street.
Around that time, I started hanging at a place called the Compound. It was a punk rock store that sold second-hand records in the back, and punk clothes and boots on the second floor. They also sold tea and coffee. It was like the total DIY punk rock minimall, on 16th Street near Mission not far from La Cumbre. The drummer from the Avengers was working there. I was hanging out there a lot when I first arrived, and would meet people, bum food, and panhandle on the street. I was just a kid and very far from home.
Another friend of Kirsten was Richie Detrick, the singer of the Nuns. We were hanging out one day. I had picked up some acid from this crazy fuck who hung out by the On Broadway, this redhead dude who looked like an evil version of Jesus. He dressed in all black and had a pentagram necklace, and said he was a disciple of Anton LaVey. He used to fuck with the Christian preachers and Jesus freaks handing out the pamphlets by the On Broadway. But anyway, Detrick hadn’t tripped in years, so I gave him some. But after a long night of partying, we both fell asleep on the couches before it hit us, and about an hour or so later, we were both tripping our fucking faces off. We just crawled around on the floor, unable to get up. The walls looked like a H.R. Giger painting from Alien. It was a bad experience. Finally, we came down enough to get our shit together.
After having such a bad trip, I actually went and bought more of the same acid, ’cause I figured, “Man, that was some good shit. Maybe if I just put myself in a better head before it hits me, I’ll have a good trip.” So the next time I ate that shit was with Terry. He ate some and freaked. He tried jumping out the window, ’cause he said there was a stainless steel butterfly doing circles around the building, and he wanted to jump out the window and grab a ride. We had to physically restrain him from leaping out the fucking window. LSD is one hell of a drug. I don’t recommend it.
The San Francisco scene was total fuckin’ debauchery. It was like New York but even crazier and bigger. Back home, it was just me and my boys that were fuckin’ maniacs. Out there, it seemed like they all were. There were way more of “us.” Like Berserkers, they didn’t give a fuck: drinking, drugging, fighting, fucking, and taking no prisoners. I started hanging with the Fuck-Ups and a few other bands: Verbal Abuse, Code of Honor, Sick Pleasure, Bad Posture, MDC, and Crucifix. I was a friend with the Dead Kennedys.
They were no Nazi-type Skinheads in SF at the time, at least not like Oi! boy boots-and-braces types. I saw so many great shows out there, like at the On Broadway and the Tool & Die. The On Broadway was great. Almost every band that rolled through I knew from having met them in NYC, so I always managed to get in on the guest list as someone’s kid brother. Dirk Dirkson, a legendary San Francisco promoter who put on shows there, would say, “You sure have a lot of brothers, don’t you? You’re ‘related’ to every fucking band that comes through!” If I didn’t know who was playi
ng, we’d climb up the back of the building and in through the window in this back room where they had a piano.
HARLEY AND DARRYL JENIFER, BY KAREN O’SULLIVAN
One night, some chick who was like new wave or something got into an argument with these two little Hardcore girls, Heather and her sister. They were 13 and 14 years with their heads shaved, black lipstick, crazy eyeliner, and spike dog collars, and always tripping. Well, next thing you know, they ripped that new wave chick’s fucking dress off! She was standing in the middle of the club butt-ass naked, freaking out, getting spit on and laughed at, ’til the bouncers covered her up and dragged her out.
Another time, there was a gig going on and outside there were tons of Navy guys all up and down the strip in uniform, getting drunk, going to titty bars, and starting shit. Of course, shit popped off. There was a mini-riot: Navy guys in their white uniforms fighting everywhere, brawling; and then, white uniforms covered in blood, running down the street. A few punk rockers got fucked up, but not many. It all began ’cause they started a fight with this punk chick called Monster. I think she was panhandling and they thought she was a dude ’cause she had a mohawk and tattoos and rings in her nose and ears and shit. They were fucking with her. Next thing you knew, it was a full-on riot! A lot of those old San Francisco boys were pretty hard. There were a lot of crazy motherfuckers out there who would throw down, like Bob Noxious and a lot of other crazy fucks. That was a wild night: Punk Rockers 1, Navy 0.
At that point, I was crashing all over the place. I stayed at the Mission A House for a little while, along with about a dozen speed freaks, including the singer from Bad Posture, Four Way, who sold speed at the time. I was so fucked up on speed at one point that I remember sitting in a chair for about a week straight, playing bass. I pretty much only took breaks to do more speed. I wrote about a hundred songs and forgot them all. But I learned how to play real fast. By the end of the week, the bass was encrusted in blood, and my fingers were all ripped up and raw. I actually wound up staying in that same fucking apartment years later in the ’90s, with Flipper drummer Steve DePace.
Hard-Core: Life of My Own Page 12
