Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  I was such a mess. By that point, I was not feeling good. The last thing I’d eaten the night before was broccoli and tofu with black bean sauce, and brown rice. I was sitting on the subway bench next to the window, leaning all over. Well, you know how you can get that “projectile vomit” going? It comes up, you catch it in your cheek for a quick second, and then it just explodes out of your face? Well, it just filled up my mouth, and went bwaaaaaaaahhh—all over the floor! Then it happened again.

  I had a circle of people around me trying to get as far away from me as they could. But there was no room anywhere. I started heavin’. I got up, got to the door. The door opened for a quick second—it was too crowded on the train for anyone to get in, so the doors did one of those quick “open and shut” moves before anybody could get in or get out. But in that quick second that the door was open, I projectile-vomited straight ahead, right at the entire platform of people standing in front of me! I blasted them right in their fuckin’ faces! It was in Midtown too, so everybody was dressed in suits. Everybody standing on that platform in front of the door got projectile-vomited on by this horrible, been-up-for-days mess of a burned-out rock ‘n’ roll loser. That door opened, and I just blasted them all, face-level, straight ahead of me! There was no way to escape, move, or avoid it, as the platform was packed. The door shut, and the train peeled out. I guarantee you that there were a lot of people who needed serious therapy after that shit. When this book comes out, somebody’s probably going to track me down and kill me for being “that fuckin’ guy that threw up on me at 8:00 in the morning on my way to work…in my mouth!”

  I remember around that time, I somehow got word that P. Diddy was doing an audition for some rock project he was working on; it was supposedly a “black rock” project. I told a couple people I knew about it. One of them was Dr. Know from the Bad Brains; he said, “Why don’t you go?” I said, “I ain’t a brother!” He said, “Yeah you are,” laughed, and said, “You might get the job!” So I went.

  I showed up at some big rehearsal studio, I can’t remember which one. Now mind you, this is back when I was smoking a lot of dust and shit—I was a mess, I had a scraggly beard going. So I get to the studio with a girlfriend of mine. There were all these people there. I don’t remember why, but either my shirt was off or I was just wearing a vest or whatever, but I remember I was wilding out, all hyperactive and animated.

  When P. Diddy, JLo and his entourage walked in, they looked at me, especially JLo, like I was nuts, but they tried not to react like anything was out of place. She couldn’t stop gawking at my girlfriend and me. They were with some big gangbanger-looking bouncer, all in blue and some other rapper with tons of gold and diamonds and rings and gold teeth and shit. I guess they thought I was some crazy rock dude, which I was, but anyway…

  The auditions started. He just sat there with her and his people and put different groups of us together to jam, no songs, just freestyle. I played bass and drums with a few different line-ups. Then at the end, he stood up and thanked us all for our time; he was very polite and courteous. Thinking about it now, the shit was comical: me wilding and freakin’ the fuck out, with no shirt on in front of P. Diddy and JLo and all their crew—it was funny.

  Around that time I was living in Fort Green, Brooklyn. It was still a bad neighborhood. I was down the block from Spike Lee, a few blocks from his store, “40 Acres and a Mule.”

  I’d started doing lots of psychedelics again. I was eating mushrooms, drinking mushroom tea, and smoking a lot of dust. One time, I really wanted to take it to another level and go deep inside my mind. So I filled my bathtub with hot water, turned on the cold shower, and aimed the fan at me. I turned off all the lights so I was in total darkness with the wind blowing, the hot steamy water from the tub, and the cold shower. I ate like an eighth of mushrooms, drank mushroom tea, ate acid, smoked a bag of dust, and got in the tub.

  It was like sensory deprivation and stimulation all at the same time. I don’t know how many hours I was in there, but when my girlfriend got home hours later, I looked like a fuckin’ raisin. My mind was fuckin’ out there; she thought I had lost it. I had one of the most insane and intense trips in my life, in the dark with just my mind to trip out on.

  For a moment, I felt I could understand the mysteries of the universe and how everything worked. As I started to come back to Earth over the next few hours and days, I started to write it all down, all mixed with symbols and all kinds of crazy shit and it all made sense to me. I was like, “Wow! I figured out the mysteries of the universe!” Of course I lost the notebook a few weeks later with all of the mysteries of the universe in it! Oh well. I’ll never do that shit again. I’m lucky that my brain still works.

  When I was at my worst, I carried a gun and was a bit of a dusthead. I think it was a paranoia thing. I was always in really shitty neighborhoods, and being a white dude in a lot of those neighborhoods was always a little sketchy. More than a few situations happened that were not so cool during that time—I’ll just leave it at that.

  So, I had an old Army issue .45 and a .38 snub-nose with hollow tips and fragmentation bullets that break into fragments when they hit bones and rip through you like shrapnel. But it wasn’t even like I was “into guns,” it was just the way I was living. I was bugging, doing crazy shit. There was a time in New York, in certain neighborhoods, where being armed may be the reason you got home at the end of the night—especially if you were dealing with criminals and drugs.

  One time, I was so fucking high and stupid that I jumped the turnstile in a subway station, with that .38 full of hollow-tip bullets in it, and I got caught. I jumped it at the same time as these two other cats that I didn’t know had jumped it, too. I had my gun and all my shit in a plastic bag with notebooks and this and that. As soon as I saw the cops come out, I dropped the bag—I let it slide down the back of my leg so they wouldn’t see it. So if you were standing in front of me, you didn’t really see me drop it. As I got up against the wall, I moved the bag over with my foot, and I stepped a little bit away from it. They start asking us, “Do you have ID?” I said, “I don’t have ID, officer, but I’ve got my phone book in my pocket. There’s a hundred numbers in here that you can call to verify who I am. Here’s my mother’s number, call her to verify who I am.” The other guys had no ID, so the cops started cuffing them. Because I could at least try to prove who I was, they just wrote me a ticket. They’re like, “All right, you can go now. Just make sure you show up on this date.” I turned around, picked up my plastic bag, and fuckin’ walked!

  I was spending a lot of time in Central Park; I’d even hang out there at night, getting laid, getting high. One time, this fuck-up rich kid I knew had stolen a bunch of liquid Demerol and morphine from his dad, who had cancer or something. Anyway, we were getting fucked up in the bushes near Strawberry Fields, and I had never done liquid Demerol and morphine combined. I had no idea how much would be lethal or how much would be just enough to get high. I remember that right before I did it, I told the kid, “Just do me a favor, if I O.D., just call an ambulance before you split.” Yeah, shit was pretty grim.

  Another time in Central Park, it was the middle of the night and I was walking down one of those little paths; there was this staircase that went down a small hill and around to one of the side exits with lots of bushes and big rocks. It was on the Upper West Side of the park around 106th Street. On the path, there must’ve been thousands of empty crack vials with all the different colored caps scattered everywhere. The closer you got to this one spot on the hill, there were more and more of them. I was on dust so it was even more visceral. I was walking around the corner down the steps off in the bushes by this rock, and I see a pair of little girl’s panties lying there in the bushes, and it sent a really bad feeling through me. I knew something fucked-up went down in those bushes. The whole shit was creepy and disturbing. This was New York back then; this is the way it was.

  At one point I wound up in Albany, because I got a letter in my
P.O. box from this band called Stigmata inviting me up there to see them play and maybe do a few songs with them. They said I could stay with them and they’d feed me, smoke me out, and get me drunk. I took them up on it; I had nothing else to do. I took another fuck-up friend of mine called O-Z with me. We were hanging out that day, and I figured, “Why take the ride alone?” We were both pretty dusted out at the time. He was a mess too, but not quite as “gone.” He said, “Sure, fuck it,” and we went up there on a Greyhound bus. I was smoking dust the whole way up in the bathroom of the bus, with one of those little metal blimps that people used to pack full of weed and smoke. At one point, I was so fucked up that I felt like I was in a spaceship and I’d forget I was in the bathroom. Every now and then, O-Z would come knock on the door and be like, “Yo, you been in there for a while. People need to use the bathroom, bro.” I was like, “I’ll be out in a minute,” and I’d zone out, smoke some more, and breathe it out this little flap in the window.

  I was so fucking zooted that I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I mighta been in there for hours, had he not got me out. I finally got to Albany, and there were a bunch of those kids waiting for me at the bus station. All of them were like Hardcore kids with their Jason Newsted of Metallica mohawks. Back then, everybody outside of Manhattan who was into metal had one of those haircuts. I showed up, and I was just a raging basket case, fucked up on dust. There were so many of them waiting for me, I couldn’t even try to begin to remember all of their names. So I just made up nicknames for all of them and that was that. They didn’t know what to make of me. There were a bunch of parties the week we got there, at people’s houses in basements and keg parties in the woods. O-Z split back to the city after a few days and I stuck around to go to their gig.

  When I originally got the letter and read it, I thought it said New York—I didn’t realize they meant fucking Buffalo, New York! Damn, that’s a hell of a drive. But I had nothing better to do, and I had no plans back home. I was kind of couch-surfing, crashing here and there. I had brought a bunch of dust up there with me, like a dozen bags or so. I was a mess, and I got that whole area’s local fuck-ups fucked up out of their minds on Crazy Eddie. Anyway, I was smoking dust the whole drive to Buffalo with Stigmata, so I was fuckin’ crazy. I was babbling all kinds of nonsense, singing songs, and playing acoustic guitar in their van, having a good old time, just being out of my mind. Those kids were all Cro-Mags fans—they must have all thought I was completely crazy.

  So we got there and checked in to the hotel, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden, we see all of these Skinheads at the hotel. Not just your normal Skinheads that you might see at a Hardcore show, but straight-up Nazis with swastikas and Skrewdriver shirts, Hitler tattoos, and all that White Power shit. And they’re walking around in groups outside the hotel with camcorders, talking “Nigger this, nigger that,” and filming it. Then we started realizing there were other Skinheads at the hotel as well; they had a bunch of rooms. Some of the Stigmata guys were getting a little nervous; there were a few nervous giggles from our group. There was a black couple in the parking lot that got freaked out from all the shit they were talking. The hotel staff was black. It was a really fuckin’ ugly scene. There were a few black guests at the hotel, but besides that, the hotel was nearly empty; it was the Nazi Skinheads, the black staff, a few other guests, and us. The Skinheads pretty much outnumbered us all together. It was the middle of the night, and it kept getting weirder and tenser.

  A couple of the Skinheads started making fun of the Stigmata guys ’cause they looked all metal. Anyway, we all got up to our room, and everybody was freaked out, trying to figure out what to do. The guys were all spread out, a few of us on each bed, some on the floor with sleeping bags and pillows. I was pretty high, but in my dusted state I was still very alert and aware of the situation and all of the potential outcomes. Having been in many violent situations and having been a Skinhead, I could see what might be around the corner. But I was so nuts at that point, I was reverting to crazy street mode and I was almost enjoying the tension, despite the chaos that might ensue. So I was in “ready mode.” I had my Tanto knife with a 9” blade, which I kept in my inside jacket pocket, and my dust. I started looking around, assessing the group I was with. Despite most of these guys not seeming like fighters, there were a few in the bunch I felt would bang. I didn’t know these boys well but I felt confident that if we stuck together, we’d be fine.

  Bob Riley, the singer for Stigmata, was a big boy. One of the guitarists was a black belt; another guy, Caruba, was a big dude. He later joined the gang FSU and then became an outlaw biker. Plus there were a couple other guys that I thought would bang if shit went down—if nothing else out of fear. So, as I was sitting there looking around at this bunch and still wondering why all the fucking Skinheads were there to begin with, there was a knock at the door. Someone opened it, and about a dozen Skinheads were in the hall and started coming into the room. Most of them were like six feet tall and one of them had a camcorder filming. They were all Sieg Heiling at us, throwing their hands up in the air, going “White power!” They were all smirking, like, “Hmmm, what have we got here?” Immediately, the Stigmata guys got nervous and those guys could smell the fear, so they started trying to intimidate a little. Remember, there were very few people in the hotel.

  At that point, I was recognized. Turns out pretty much every one of them had been a Cro-Mags fan at one point or another, and were all huge fans of The Age of Quarrel, and most of them had seen us play. Some of them had become Skinheads after having seen us play. So there was some respect there—but not much ’cause I was with all these “longhairs.” I was looking all crazy and on drugs with long hair myself, hanging out with a bunch of hippie-looking metalhead motherfuckers and lookin’ high as a motherfucker. So on one hand they were like, “Oh shit, Harley Flanagan from the Cro-Mags!” But at the same time they were like, “What the fuck happened to you?”

  So they were checking me out, but they immediately started trying to intimidate the room. One of them said some shit to me about “What’s up with the long hair?” They all looked at me to see the response. In one quick motion, I pulled my big-ass Tanto knife out from my inside vest pocket, and put it within an inch of his eyeball. Everyone froze. He started looking nervous. No one expected that shit; the room went dead silent; no one knew what to do. Everyone was frozen at that point. I was lookin’ at him like “Yeah, what? My hair’s a little longer, but I can still cut a motherfucker’s eyeball out!”

  After a few tense moments, I smiled and put the knife away. They started telling me what fans they were, and how they’d seen me play. Turned out that some of them were in the band Bound For Glory. Pretty soon, some of the older ones began reminiscing about jumping people at our shows during The Age of Quarrel tour, with this look in their eyes like they were dreaming back to their best childhood memories, like they were talkin’ about Christmas at their grandparents’ home opening gifts or some shit. They were like, “Man, you guys were great!” They wound up leaving our room pretty quick after I pulled the knife on the one dude—and all the guys I was with breathed a sigh of relief. All the Stigmata guys were like, “What the fuck was up with that?” The guitarist Mike Maney or “3/5” as I called him, ’cause he had a S/E tattooed on his hand, and when I first saw it, it was upside down and I thought it said 3/5. Anyway, he was 3/5 from that point on. 3/5 and the rest of these guys were buggin’ out. So I decided to go scout out the situation.

  I walked around the hotel ’til I heard noise. I went and knocked on the door to one of the rooms full of Skinheads. I walked in as one of them was telling the rest all about his “Harley sighting,” and that I had pulled a knife and what a mess I look like and shit. I was looking rather Charles Manson-ish at the time. I just walked in and was like, “What’s up guys?” The room went silent. “How’s it going?” They stayed quiet. I sat on the bed in the middle of them. One of them was looking at me all hard—grinding his teeth, t
rying to look crazy, like he wanted to jump me or some shit. I immediately stood up and went face-to-face with him and said, “What? You wanna do something? What’s up?” I looked him dead in the face, and he looked down at the floor and kept grinding his jaw. He didn’t say shit. I was like, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I sat back down and smiled. “So, how you guys doing?” I was still dusted out of my mind, so I didn’t mind the whole tenseness of the situation. I was enjoying it and I was having fun fucking with them.

  It turned out this one fat bitch who was with them was Canadian and knew Yob, Orbit, and some of them other dickheads from back in the day. So this gig that Stigmata had invited me to was a Skinhead White Power fest! This was in the middle of the blackest fuckin’ ghetto in Buffalo, and this Nazi Skinhead band, Bound For Glory, was headlining, and playing along with all these other Skinhead bands. They had Nazi flags, rebel flags, and swastikas everywhere. And when I tell you it was an all-black neighborhood, I’m tellin’ you, the shit was “’hood.” The bar was small, and run by some crazy biker-looking dude. Turns out there were Skinheads coming from all over the country and Canada. I guess this gig was a big deal in the world of Nazi Skinheads—there were bands from all over the place, but it still only amounted to a small club full of about two hundred people at best.

  Anyway, I was dusted out of my mind and still had a few bags left. The Stigmata guys completely freaked out when they saw what this gig was all about. Remember, most of the Stigmata guys were good kids; they weren’t Nazis or Skinheads. One of them had a tattoo that said “Unity” with a black and a white hand. This was not their kind of scene. But they couldn’t really leave, ’cause they needed to play the gig and get the money for gas to get home; it was a really long trip. It was a bad situation. So we were sitting there in their van in front of this shithole club in a black ghetto, with all these Nazi Skinheads running around Sieg Heiling, singing Skrewdriver songs, and making a lot of noise. Most of the ’hood wasn’t really aware of what was going on yet, but as the evening progressed, people started noticing the racist energy that was projected. It started getting a little tense.