Chapter 4

Most of my early music memories come from being with my mom and my stepfather, who listened to a lot of cumbia, which was Colombian music, and salsa. Oddly enough, they were also into R&B, including Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Barry White. I liked that stuff, but once I started listening to the radio I got into disco, strangely enough. In the late ’70s, the disco craze was everywhere and a lot of Latin people evolved from Merengue and salsa music to full-on disco. Like everyone else, I listened to Donna Summer, Chic and Village People. Blasting that stuff got me through some harsh emotional times.

There were some funny moments in between the episodes of violence. When I was 14 my mom decided to advance her career, so she left the meat factory and went to cosmetology school. She asked me to babysit my siblings. I was supposed to supervise and feed them. One day I gave them Alpo dog food between two slices of bread and called it sloppy joe. Afterward I told them what they had eaten. They’re still mad at me about that.

While my mom was in school, my stepfather was striving to better himself, too. He quit the meat plant and started a family business, Bulldog Gas, in Passaic, down the street from where we lived. Instead of hiring another employee, he made me pump gas and work on cars. He taught me how to change oil and make basic repairs, and I became a grease monkey. I may have had trouble painting a door, but I was a natural with cars. Still, I was more interested in motorcycles. I was in awe whenever a gang of guys on Harleys came into the shop. I thought their outcast culture was so cool. My stepdad didn’t want me to be a sissy boy, so he was okay with me being into motorcycles. He appreciated that the guys who rode them were tough.

My stepdad was big on anything macho, and he believed in this heroic code. He rarely practiced what he preached, but he made sure I always had Rudy’s back. As fucked up as his attitude was about domestic violence, he believed in family dignity, and that meant if Rudy was in a fight, I was in a fight, too. He would sit there and watch us duke it out with these neighborhood kids over the stupidest shit. Once a bunch of black kids came over and started fucking with Rudy because he looked white. They might not have messed with him if they had known he was Hispanic.

“Go out and help your brother. He’s in a fight,” my stepdad said.

I went into the street and Rudy and I started battling all these kids. We were doing well. It was like a video game or a martial arts film without the martial arts. I’d swing at one kid and feel that satisfying thud as my fist connected with his chest or face and he’d hit the ground. Then I’d turn around and throw a hook at another kid. There were 16 or 17 of them, and we were holding our own until they started throwing bricks at us. When one came too close to cracking open my skull, my father came outside and chased the kids away. The next day they invited us to ride bikes with them, and we were all friends.

“You see that?” my stepdad said. “They have respect for you now because you stood up for yourselves and showed them you weren’t afraid.”

He was right. That’s the type of shit my stepdad taught us. He was also seriously into making sure we had a strong work ethic, which is hard to teach a kid who’s 14 and wants to do his own thing. The main reason I didn’t want to keep working on cars with him was because he forced me to do it. I wanted to be outside playing with the other kids. He wasn’t having that.

When I started outgrowing my clothes he said I’d have to work overtime to buy new ones. I worked through the summer at his auto repair shop for slave’s wages. Then when I was too big to button my pants, we went to the store, but he still wouldn’t pay for the clothes! We picked out shirts, pants, socks and underwear and put them into a burlap sack. Then he distracted the store clerk while Rudy and I went over to a ladder. We climbed up, opened the hatch, went onto the roof and threw the sack full of clothes over the property’s fence. Then we left the store and picked up the clothes.

If we wanted new shoes we tried on a pair we liked, left our old shoes in the changing room and walked out of the store wearing the new pair. Back then stores didn’t have security tags on the clothes that set off alarms, so we always got away. But the fucker still made me work for him before he’d let me steal my own clothes.

The summer before I turned 15, I went to Florida to visit my grandma Cho-Cho and my dad. I spent a lot of time hanging out with my cousins, Albert and Clara, and Clara’s boyfriend, Kiko. They played me Meatloaf and Led Zeppelin. I really liked Zep’s “Fool in the Rain.” There was a whistle near the end and it got really fast. The first time I heard the song, Kiko was driving a Ford Mustang Mach 1, Clara was in the front seat and I was in the back. I was already into Zeppelin, and I hadn’t even heard “Stairway to Heaven,” “Communication Breakdown” or “Whole Lotta Love” yet.

When I was in Kiko’s car I’d listen to whatever he was blasting on the stereo: Zep, Foreigner, Bad Company. That was as close as I got to classic rock for a while. When I got back to New Jersey, I discovered bands like the Sex Pistols and The Damned. That was all thanks to my cousin Chuchi, who was into punk music and blasted it really loud in the house. Chuchi could do anything without getting in trouble since he was really ill. He had a kidney disease and the doctors thought he was terminal. He was an only child, so his parents gave him everything he wanted. He had this big Marshall amplifier stack and a guitar and went into the City to see shows any time he wanted. His parents thought he was living on borrowed time.

After numerous surgeries Chuchi miraculously recovered. Today he has half a lung, but he got into weight-lifting and strength training and wound up being Mr. Natural Universe in New Jersey. Eventually, he got a job with New Jersey law enforcement and is still working as a cop.

Back in 1978, Chuchi had a girlfriend named Barbara who lived on the street. She was a Blondie fanatic. Some people think of Blondie as a glossy pop band that played hits like “One Way or Another” and “Heart of Glass,” but Blondie were a big part of the ’70s CBGB scene and a portal between punk and new wave. They were fast and intense, and Debbie Harry could snarl like Johnny Rotten and sing like Joan Jett. I thought they were cool and liked that they were from New York

The first time I bought records was that summer I went to Florida when I was 14. My grandma Cho-Cho took me to Peaches in North Miami Beach and let me choose three records. I picked up Blondie’s Parallel Lines, The Cars’ self-titled debut and the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia. I loved them all, but the last one was a game-changer. I listened to it over and over. The blunt simplicity and buzzing heaviness of “Rockaway Beach” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” was like nothing I had ever heard. The vocals were melodic like those of ’60s girl groups, but with guys singing. It was fast and made me want to throw rocks through windows. I’d run around the house singing all the songs on the record until someone yelled at me to shut up.

While I was in Florida I spent most of my time with Cho-Cho and my aunt Clara. I had some private time with my dad, which was always weird. He didn’t treat my mom well, but he loved her and was devastated when she married my stepfather. It took all the fight out of him, and he never recovered. When I chose to live with my mom instead of him, he went a little crazy.

“You want to meet my new girlfriend?” he asked me that summer.

“Yeah, what’s she like?” I said.

“She’s beautiful,” he replied. “Let’s go see her.”

He took me to a strip joint. I was a kid at a nudie club, which was fucked up. He introduced me to one of the strippers, bought two drinks and handed her a few extra bucks.

“This is my new girlfriend, Lola,” he said. And then he did shots of tequila with the dancer.

I was old enough to know she wasn’t really with him, but what could I say?

“Okay, Dad. That’s good. I’m glad you found someone.”

I never got the chance to talk to him about a lot of real stuff, like dignity, self-respect and raising a family right. He wouldn’t have understood any of that anyway. I never had any closure in our relationship when he died on September 10, 1994, from cirrhosis of the liver and lung cancer. He was only 54.

Chuchi and I had a blast listening to new music. He got me into the Sex Pistols, which was the gateway to Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and the early New York shit like The Stimulators and The Mad. Chuchi went to Max’s Kansas City to see all these bands and sometimes I went with him. He turned me onto this drug called rush, which came in little packets that you sniffed, kind of like airplane glue, but the effects were more like acid. He also got me into mescaline, which I loved and used regularly for a while. There were little pills called Purple Haze, which were stronger than the other types I’ve tried. It was similar to taking shrooms, but they didn’t taste like dirt. It was kind of the same as acid, but not as strong. I hallucinated some crazy shit on that, like walls bleeding and roads cracking like I was in the middle of an earthquake. I’ve seen funny things, too, like people growing extra noses or mouths and food changing colors and breathing like it was alive.

The first time I took mescaline, we were in Chuchi’s room and his mom walked in. We were cranking music and he was playing guitar, trying to keep up with the riffs on a Dead Kennedys record. We were tripping balls. I had a glass of water in my hand and my head was still tilted back swallowing a pill when she opened the door.

“Can you turn that music down?” she yelled reflexively over the sound of screaming vocals, raggedly strummed guitars and a hammering beat. Her eyes darted from the glass I was holding to a bag of pills on the table. Busted!

Chuchi didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, so I burst in. “Uhhh, we were just . . .”

I tried to concentrate on what I was saying, but somewhere between the first and fourth word all I heard in my head was TV static. I started again. “We’re listening to music,” I spoke slowly—not so she could understand me but because that’s as fast as I could talk.

“Okay, well, please just turn the stereo down.”

She knew we were high as fuck, but she didn’t care because we were inside and we were safe. I thought that was cool. Chuchi eventually formed a band called Barbed Wire Babies. It wasn’t much, but I thought it was cool. They played a bunch of little towns in New Jersey and I stole my mom’s car to drive out to one of their shows. Right after I joined Agnostic Front years later, Barbed Wire Babies opened for us at CBGB.

My mom didn’t catch me the first time I took her car, so I took that as an open invitation to use it whenever I wanted to. I knew how to drive well because I had been parking cars for my stepdad for a while. We lived on Jackson Street between Passaic and Paterson, right behind an old venue called The Capitol Theatre, which was built in 1926 as a vaudeville joint. Later it became a porno theater before promoter John Scher took it over in the ’70s and turned it into a music venue.

All these big rock shows came into town and I parked people’s cars in our backyard to make extra money. My stepfather put up a “Park Here” sign and charged concertgoers to use our rental property as a parking lot. We spent hours moving their cars. In the afternoon, before the crowd arrived, Rudy and I watched the backstage area of the venue open up. We could see the bands and people hanging out. We saw Talking Heads, The Tubes and the Ramones. One day there were a lot of Rastafarians hanging around. I didn’t know anything about reggae or Rasta culture. I had never even heard a strong English accent until that day; it was March 8, 1980, and The Clash were headlining at the Capitol Theatre. Between the British accents and the Rasta talk I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I listened to some of the music during their soundcheck, but I was more interested in the crazy accents.

I didn’t find out about Rastafarians until years later because the only way for me to learn about history or culture was at school and they didn’t teach about The Clash, the Sex Pistols or Bob Marley. They taught about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—shit that seemed useless at the time but would prove invaluable when I was a young adult (especially the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures).

I used to “borrow” my mom’s car a lot to see concerts in New York. But I didn’t drive all the way to the City. That seemed too risky. I drove to the Jersey City PATH station and then took the PATH train into Manhattan. When I was out on the town I was free to soak in the music and nightlife, and there were beautiful girls everywhere. I just didn’t have the courage to talk to any of them. Still, I could do whatever I wanted. At home I felt like I was in a cage. And the violence in the clubs was nothing compared to the violence at home.

My stepdad was ruthless and the beatings never stopped. The memory of the swooshing sound when he took off that fucking belt still makes me queasy. Sometimes, for a change of pace, he smacked us with an untwisted clothes hanger. He was the man in the house. That was clear. My mom was the one who raised us and I couldn’t understand how she allowed him to physically abuse her and us, especially after she had gone through it all with my real dad. I think it had something to do with her feeling inferior, as if she didn’t deserve anything better. Who the hell wants a woman with four kids? That’s baggage. She was trying to hold onto whatever she could, even though it was bad. I always felt like she should have shot him again and ended everyone’s misery, but if she did that she probably would have wound up in prison and I didn’t want that.