American Outlaw

by James, Jesse

  “That one kid with the tats on his face?” asked Eerie Von, their bassist.

  “Exactly.” He turned to me. “Did you see him, Jesse?”

  “No,” I admitted. I had been too involved with the overall experience: the music blasting relentlessly from the speakers, engulfing my body and my head.

  “So, you gotta have better eyes, okay? Remember, we’re all depending on you. I’m sure you’re great at reacting—you got awesome reflexes and everything—but paying really close attention is even more important,” he said. “Instead of dealing with problems, anticipate them. It’s better that way.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, man, I’m really sorry. You’re right.”

  “No problem,” Glenn said. “You’re learning. I think you’re gonna be really good at this.”

  Encouraged, I ordered another beer. We sat back and drank, and idly, I wondered whether the stories I’d heard about bands on tour were true—was it all a bunch of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll? If so, when was it going to start?

  I began to get a nice little buzz going. In my little personal haze, I stared up happily at the gyrating dancer on stage.

  Just then, I noticed Glenn, who was up at the bar getting a beer. An older dude appeared to have recognized him. He was leaning over him, harassing him, and Danzig seemed totally uninterested. Immediately, I saw that I’d been given the perfect opportunity to redeem myself. Anticipate!

  Popping out of my seat, I strode quickly toward Glenn and the older guy.

  “Yo, jerk-off,” I growled. “Take a step back.”

  “Jesse, it’s . . .” Glenn began.

  “Not a problem, Glenn,” I said, turning to the older dude. “Are you deaf? My friend doesn’t want to talk to you. So take a fucking step back.”

  “You telling me to step back?” the older guy said, amazed. “Why, you stupid lunkhead, I should . . .”

  He never finished his sentence. I stun-punched him in the face, and his head snapped back into a glass stuffed-animal vending machine. The plate glass of the machine cracked, spiderwebbing.

  The rowdy Acropolis suddenly fell completely silent. I could hear the record screech to a halt. The house lights came on. A blond, leggy stripper, who only moments before had been grinding lustfully on stage, covered her huge breasts with her hands.

  “Jesse,” Glenn said quietly. “You just punched the manager of this club in the face.”

  “I should send you to jail, you bastard,” he mumbled from the floor. The machine’s metallic claw wobbled unsteadily.

  “I’ll pay for the damage,” I mumbled. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You’ll be reimbursed for your machine, Jack,” Glenn said, shooting me a dirty look. “Not to mention a trip to the doctor. It’ll come out of our new security guard’s first paycheck.”

  Our bus ride back to our hotel was somber.

  “So . . .” Glenn began.

  “Yeah,” I said. My head was already hurting from the alcohol. “I know . . .”

  “You really can’t do that, Jesse.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “We have to find a middle ground, man,” Glenn said, laughing. “I need to know that you’re one hundred percent behind me, so I can be as crazy as I want to be. But I don’t actually want you to, you know, incur bodily harm on anyone.”

  I sighed. “I’m sorry, Glenn. I was just trying to do my job right.”

  “Just remember this,” he said. “You are the biggest guy in the room. You can make people do your bidding, simply by standing there. So watch your temper. Be nice.”

  “Be nice,” I repeated.

  “People want to obey you,” he said, smiling. “So let them.”

  With Glenn Danzig’s words echoing around in my head like a confusing Zen koan, I took to the remainder of the tour with a newfound determination to execute my job like a pro. Again, I was reminded of playing outside linebacker: you used quickness and intelligence, not brute force, to anticipate the rush of the crowd. There was always going to be more of them than you, so you had to learn to watch them carefully, and let them expend their energy, instead of wasting yours. Being a bodyguard was not about crushing heads. It was about creating an impression of yourself that was bigger, calmer, and more woefully dangerous than anyone else in the world.

  Of course, theories didn’t always translate to the real world, and they didn’t always save your ass from taking a beating every once in a while. As much as people liked to pick fights with Glenn, even more they liked to shout at me, insult me, and tell me to go to hell. Punk crowds were unified by a hatred of authority—and, as odd as it was to realize, I was that now. At one of my first shows, a quick “FUCK YOU!” alerted me to a Newcastle bottle spinning quickly toward my face.

  Transfixed, I watched it come closer, unable to move. It made a curious humming sound as it spun. And then it smashed into my head. The bottle didn’t even break, but my head got a dent.

  This job, I thought, is going to cost me some brain cells.

  On the brighter side, Glenn and I grew close pretty quick. Both of us were fighters. We bonded around that.

  “Come do this Muay Thai thing with me, man,” he’d say, all excited. “I want to show you how they box in Thailand, it’s super violent!”

  We checked out all kinds of martial arts together, spurring one another to do more and more intense trainings. We must have made a funny pair: I was a six-foot-three, blond, and wide-eyed twenty-year-old. Then here was Glenn, this little black-haired Italian dude with a wrinkled forehead and tiny black boots, whose attitude was so relentlessly aggressive that half the time I felt smaller than him. On stage, Glenn was so full of testosterone and rage, he reminded me of some kind of mutant superhero.

  He took the music real personal. Metal at that time really had gotten kind of soft and mushy, with glam acts like Poison and Warrant getting crazy airplay on MTV, filling arenas with their diarrhea power ballads and capturing the hearts of thirteen-year-old girls. To real punks like Glenn, it was insulting. And that came through in the focused rage of his performances.

  Somewhat disappointingly, the sex part of this rock ’n’ roll dream never seemed to materialize. Maybe because we were mired in the late 1980s. AIDS was a real threat. It seemed like everyone knew someone who had died of it, and that took a lot of the zip out of casual sex. Plus, I was always skeptical: if I was at a show, and met a girl who immediately offered to give me head, well, then what did that make me? Nothing more than a guy who could get her backstage.

  Glenn had pretty much the same attitude.

  “Dude, you know what I always ask myself?” he said to me one night in his office.

  “What’s that?”

  “This groupie chick who wants to sleep with me, what was she doing last week?”

  “I don’t know. What’s the answer?”

  “Pantera.”

  So Glenn was a rocker who didn’t fit that lecherous mold. Most of the time I knew him, he had a long-term girlfriend. She’d even come on the road with us occasionally. Slowly, as I observed Glenn and the way he treated people, he sort of grew into a role model for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a rock musician or live that lifestyle; far from it. But there was a type of dignity to him, the way he carried himself, that I hadn’t been exposed to before.

  In due time, I became quite serious about being top-notch security. In order to get my band from the hotel to the show, on stage and off, then backstage, onto the bus, and finally rushed through the lobby to their hotel room without anything happening to them, every single movement had to be calculated. I had to be watching over my shoulder the entire time. I was kind of a mother hen to them, which was funny, since I was all of twenty years old.

  Life was exciting. But due to my responsibilities, I rarely let loose all that much. For the most part, my rock life was wound up real tight. Stressful, even. And I still had a furious temper that would explode when I was challenged.

  One night, at a show in Hamburg, Germany, a bald
-headed punker in the front row began to go ballistic when the band shifted into the song “Mother.”

  “Die you freaking cocksucking prick!” he screamed at Glenn. That in itself wasn’t really a problem, since everyone screamed at the band. That was just part of the scene. But this dude was also spitting: sending gobs of saliva into the air, with great distance and accuracy. And that pissed me off.

  “Knock it off!” I yelled, coming down to the barricade, spearing him with my meanest look. “Quit spitting at the band.”

  “FACK YOU!” he screamed at me, his beer-breath exploding all over my face. He continued to scream maniacally at Danzig and the band, then leaned around me and launched another huge hawk of spit at the stage.

  “Stop fucking spitting,” I demanded, furious. “Or I will kick your ass!”

  “FACK! YOU!” he cried again, and, hocking up the thickest gob he could muster, he spat directly into my face.

  Disgusted, I snapped my head back and head-butted the punk in the face as hard as I could. In an instant, I had split his face from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. Spraying blood like a burst water balloon, he crumpled backward into the crowd. Immediately, the pit turned on him like deranged wolves and began attacking him with crazed vengeance.

  Sheepishly, I looked up to the band. Danzig was shaking his head, bemused, like a dad finding his kid fucking up, yet again. I shrugged my shoulders apologetically. I still had a few things to learn.

  ——

  When Danzig’s tour ended, I headed back home to California. My mom’s house was still open to me, and I intended to stay there for a while.

  But soon the word got out to other bands that I’d done a pretty good job for Danzig. They started to woo me into working for them. Part of me wanted to say no, but the money and the adventure were just too intense for a young punk to resist. Working a Slayer/White Flag/Social Distortion show? I couldn’t pass that up even if I tried.

  I had the good luck to work with some pretty amazing bands in those days. In 1991, Rick Rubin hooked me up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were recording a new album, and Rick had the weird idea that they should do it as recluses in this funky old mansion that he’d rented. I lived there with them for about a month, helping them out and doing their errands, since it was clear they never wanted to step outside for even an instant. It was a legitimately spooky house, which made sense: it had been Harry Houdini’s once upon a time. It fit perfectly with the name of the album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

  I got along pretty well with everyone in the band, especially Chad Smith, their drummer, who liked bikes, so when the Chili Peppers were about to go on tour to promote the album, they asked me along to work it.

  “Of course,” I agreed.

  What was especially memorable about that tour was not just that the Chili Peppers were performing an awesome album, finally coming into their own as superstars, but that Pearl Jam and Nirvana were the opening acts. I remember watching from the side of the stage as Kurt Cobain broke into “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time on a national scale. I had never heard of this guy before, but instantly, I recognized that he meant something. The crowd always went nuts for Anthony Kiedis and Flea—those guys owned every audience they’d ever met, make no mistake about it—but during the shows I worked, they loved Cobain. The entire audience hung on his every word.

  Slowly, over the next several years, I grew into my gig. I became fairly well known among rock groups, recognized as someone who took his work seriously and commanded respect. I had no interest in drugs, and I think that, too, was attractive to the groups. Cocaine and heroin had savaged so many of their talented members. Gradually, I let my flattop grow out. I did a tour with Soundgarden. Slayer was next. White Zombie followed.

  Bit by bit, I was becoming part of the scene. It was a peculiar little world that I had stumbled into, and certainly an interesting one for a young man. I was proud of being an insider, and if mine wasn’t the most glamorous of all jobs—I mean, I wasn’t exactly invited out on stage during encores—well, then, neither was welding.

  I was getting to see places I’d never even considered visiting. The blue-collar kid from Long Beach had somehow managed to get over to Europe.

  “Let’s go out, let’s walk around, man!” That was my chorus. I’d rather have died than sit around in my hotel room at any given moment. I felt it was a terrible waste of time.

  Almost all the bands had been to Europe before, though, and hence they were a little bit more reserved.

  “We got a show tonight, Jesse. Ever heard of a nap?”

  “You guys are practically in your coffins,” I said. “It’s sickening. Don’t you want to go out and see stuff?”

  “You’re security, dude. Watch some TV. Start working on your potbelly.”

  That wasn’t going to be my fate, though. I might have been hired muscle for a punk band, but I’d be damned if I was going to let a whole continent’s worth of sights go unexplored. With the enthusiasm of a total nerd, I began seeking out all the Italian frescoes and Renaissance museums I could find. No matter where I went, I couldn’t get enough of the architecture and the incredible attention paid to detail.

  I wasn’t all about the high art, though; sooner or later, I’d inevitably find myself at a bookstand, leafing through European motorcycle magazines. I wanted my next cycle to be bitchin’, blow everybody else out of the water. And to do that, I needed it loud, fast, and most of all, unique. Because I was overseas, I felt like I had an advantage over the rest of the cats stuck stateside—cycles were more popular over here, and they had much more stylistic variance. I pored over hundreds and hundreds of motorcycle magazines in Sweden, France, Italy, and Spain, often purchasing them to examine more closely backstage or on the bus. I received a per diem for food, but I never used it. I filled up on apples and oranges at the hotel, and usually copped a free dinner backstage. I put all my money toward bike magazine research.

  Backstage, when I had a free moment, I enjoyed talking shop with other bodyguards.

  “I have patented the absolute foolproof way to remove a groupie from a hotel. No fuss, no hassle.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, you know how it is, man,” I said. “Your bass player was all stoked to get this chick inside his suite at midnight. But now it’s three in the morning, and he’s had his kicks. He wants her out.”

  Sympathetic nods all around; clearly, this is familiar grist within the security guard community.

  “So you’re stuck. Obviously, she doesn’t want to leave—no groupie worth her stripes is gonna leave without being told flat-out. I mean, she’s done her job, right?” I said. “Any decent human being would let her rest in his bed till morning. But remember, we’re not dealing with human beings, we’re talking about musicians.”

  “Preach it.”

  “So all of a sudden, she becomes your job, right? ‘Jesse! Get rid of her for me!’ You can try reasoning, but that almost never works, and you can’t touch the girl. No way. Then you’ve got a drama on your hands.”

  “Can’t have that.”

  “Of course not. So what I do,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential whisper, “I breeze into the room, and before anyone can say a word, I grab the groupie’s handbag, and I fling it into the hallway. She’ll run after it like a poodle. At that point, I slam the door shut behind her.”

  “No!”

  “Yep. She’ll immediately start banging on the door like some psycho, but you have to ignore that. Then you just call down to the front desk, say there’s some crazy woman trying to break into your room—and if you wouldn’t mind, could you please have her ejected, immediately?”

  “Genius,” my compatriots said.

  “Give me a little credit here,” I said modestly. “I’m very good at what I do.”

  When I was back in the States, I spent almost all of my free time in my garage, trying to get better at building motorcycles. Progress came slowly. I could slap a whole bunch of cool par
ts on my bikes, sure, and make everything kind of function as a whole, but from a design perspective, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything earth-shattering.

  Still, I kept riding Harleys as fast as I could around Riverside and Long Beach, rattling my teeth, blowing off steam, having fun. Random security gigs continued to come my way. If they appealed to me, I’d accept them. When a dive bar in Anaheim called the Doll Hut requested my services, being the generous soul I was, I decided to appease them.

  God bless the bar. Working security at one of those places was like a paid vacation. I was too tightly wound to take a night off—already, in my early twenties, I was well on my way to becoming a workaholic—but folding my arms in the fun, stupid, party atmosphere served fairly well as a social event.

  After a few weeks of working at the Doll Hut, I got to be friends with a few of the people there. One chick, Kelly, and her rockabilly boyfriend, Mike, had grown up right around the corner from me. They were neighborhood folks, real cool people.

  “Jesse, tomorrow night, I want you to come with us to Captain Cream’s!” said Kelly. That was a club in Mission Viejo where she worked. “There’s this superhot chick working there, and guess what? She’s single. We’ll introduce you!”

  I agreed, and the following night, we all tooled over to the Captain’s together. As we came in the door, Kelly nudged me, pointing a lacquered nail toward the stage.

  “There she is,” Kelly proclaimed, gesturing toward the sexy blonde on stage, who was writhing rhythmically in a red bikini. “Didn’t I say she was hot?”

  I nodded, impressed, and waited for the bikini to come off. But Captain Cream’s was only a bikini bar, and the girls didn’t do full-on nudity. The suit stayed on.

  “Geez, what a tease,” I sulked.

  But I continued to watch the girl on stage. After only a few moments, I had to admit, she had it going on. I’d gotten used to the ultra-slutty, over-the-top, almost comic sexual pantomime that they served up everywhere else. But there was a kind of class to this woman. She had the perfect body and the perfect moves, but somehow she danced to entertain. By the end of her set, I was hypnotized.