by Jack Grisham
I sleep with the light on. There was a moral code, unbeknownst to me, and I violated it, stepped over the line, and now the minute the sun goes down, the nightmares arise. Kicking an eye out is all good fun in your teens, but when the offending orb rolls into your thirties, forties, and fifties and hangs like blood-speckled gelatin from the ceiling, it gets real old. They didn’t like us. They said we were violent, that we ruined their scene and brought in an element of muscle-headed beach thuggery. It hurt my feelings. I wasn’t a thug. I was a gentleman. The cut of my coat was clean. The zippers on the back of my pants were eighteen-inch razor-sharp lines descending into silk-smooth lizard-skin boots—the spurs, polished silver. I guess if you wanted to dance all by yourselves, you shouldn’t have played the music so loud. Your hard chords ran wicked along the edges of the freeways and stumbled onto our beaches—spoiled our suntanned Kashmir beliefs. To be honest, I could’ve done without your influence and your cold shoulder. I preferred the parties by the piers, the drunken cheerleaders getting ready to lose their virginity to some asshole they couldn’t believe they’d slept with, but if you were a young punk from the beach and wanted to see The Germs, X, or The Bags, you had to drive into the city.
Los Angeles was a distance—a 1-Adam-12 see-the-woman through a mist of colored faces and filth. I hated it. The LA punks had a cooler-than-you vibe—although I wasn’t sure how drug addiction and homelessness gave them the right to feel so superior. I stood at the edges and watched. The dancing, which the music press had dubbed “slamming,” was nothing more than a polite art-school hop or pogo not meant to harm—more pose than pop. The boys from the beach brought life to the dance floor: tanned muscular bodies that were made to be hurt, suburban hybrid robots that thought bleeding was fun. The headlines read “Punk Rocker Carves Swastika in Baby’s Forehead!” and we did our best to live up to the hype.
The first night I went to Los Angeles I wore black. I look good in it still. My grandmother said I looked like a storm trooper—handsome and serious. She said nothing about the swastika armband that adorned me. Why would she? Her politics ran, without apology, hard right—my politics, by contrast, were nonexistent. I didn’t give a fuck about those who thought they were in charge. I was a kid living with my parents. I didn’t vote, work, or pay taxes.
I greased what was left of my hair with a handful of brilliantine and jerked off thinking about the city—fantasizing about the rough punk girls, with their torn fishnets and their dirty Converse. There’s something about chipped nails and a used-condom hairbow that turns me on. I’ve always been a fan of strong women—I’ll fuck the weak ones, but I love being destroyed.
There were eight of us that first evening. A local crew who rolled close together for preservation. The punks in Hollywood lived inside walls—a circle of human-trafficked miscreants who let them pogo around the neighborhood without too much static. At the beach we stood out like dirty diapers on the sand—displeasing trash that the police and the concerned citizenry tried their best to remove. We had to travel in packs. Have you ever been hated and chased, stumbling frantically over lush green lawns as you were hounded by a mob? Have you ever been arrested, thrown into a holding cell with forty lice-ridden criminals who thought “punk” meant “faggot” and thought your split-colored mohawk looked like a great target for their cum? A punk in the suburbs was guilty by the sheer nature of his look. A dyed head was a black flag of piracy flown valiantly as you sailed down Main Street. When you slapped on your homemade Germs T-shirt, you were saying that you were willing to take a beating and that you were well aware that your trip to the liquor store to pimp beer and play a game of Pac-Man could go horribly south at any time. And when things did go down, no matter what your involvement, it was always your fault. Fuck. Those Hollywood punks should have printed a disclaimer on that Yes L.A. EP, one that read, “By listening to this music and believing these lyrics and adopting these fashions you acknowledge that you are willing to put yourself in danger and that at any time some blockheaded fuck might attempt to beat you senseless.” Looking back, I find it amusing that those earlier punks considered us violent when their lives, their words, and their beliefs all influenced the way we behaved. It was their fault—not ours.
That first night made me a believer. I thought I’d been sucked into a family of those with like minds, sideways-torn rebels whose willingness to take a beating mimicked my own. I was standing in an alley. The salt from that day’s surf was still coating my skin. I was talking to a young man—maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. He was wearing a pair of leather pants and a jacket—no buttons, no badges, no bondage straps. Other than the words of sedition that spewed like aural cocaine from his mouth, he could have been a used-car salesman. The police pulled up—two black-and-whites—lights, no sirens. I started to walk away—cow-like behavior that’d been learned from the white teen kegger parties: when the man in blue arrived, you grumbled and made your way like a good hippie to the car. My alley companion laughed. He stood fast. He downed the last few gulps from his beer and then fired the bottle overhand, hurling glass-flashing anarchy into the face of one of the officers. I came in my pants. I wish you could feel what I felt—the satisfaction, the connection, the brotherhood. I was angry. I grew up with a father who was a military man. I had to salute him when he returned from work. I wanted people to hurt. I wanted to be big enough to grab the plastic cord from my father’s hand and use it to tear his own skin. I wanted him to grovel on the ground, attempting to cover his ass and legs while I inflicted crisscrossing, bloody, raised welts across them. And here he was, the image of my father, wearing the dark blue uniform of the LA police, and he’d gone down on his knees bleeding before the Mickey’s Big Mouthed assault of my new companion. I followed suit. I fired all I had. This was a now-declared war against anyone that wasn’t with us.
There were punks that night who complained about our behavior. They cried over the closing of their club, the crackdown from the man. “They’re ruining it for everybody,” they whined. I was shocked. Could you imagine a group of freedom fighters crying because the tanks of their oppressors had bulldozed their clubhouse? Fucking bitches. I wanted to line them up against that alley wall and, one by one, deposit a hot-lead slug between their Gary Gilmore eyes. They seemed like police sympathizers to me. Not real. Losing the club was part of the deal—a war-torn casualty that gave credence to our struggles. It was “us against them.” There was no safe ground, no “free zone.” My violence was never directed at other punks—I thought we were family. My anger was directed at those who said we can’t or we should not, and I had no problem with the oppressor’s reflection of my hate bouncing back against me.
The first show I played was at the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach—my band, Vicious Circle, opened for The Middle Class and The Germs. I wore a straightjacket. It was hard to be on stage. I didn’t like the exposure. I preferred to be in the crowd, immersed in the energy. My manners didn’t match my look. I was afraid to move, to let go, to swing. I stood behind the microphone and squeezed the thin metal stand. The music started slow—a few bent guitar notes escaping from the tears in the speakers. The sound traveled across the stage and into my body, but like vein or lash or spleen, I was unconnected to its presence. It was buried. I screamed and lay upright—a verbal stiff fuck unwilling to wrap my legs around the crowd, but they defiled me. They slammed into each other. They fought. They hurt. They took whatever I was willing to give—anything I had—and then they moved on.
I was raised with rules—guidelines defined by our society: don’t take what doesn’t belong to you; keep your hands to yourself; honor your mother and your father; men sleep with women, boys with girls; and, above all, respect authority. I was never comfortable there. I desired to be honorable, and I suppose in some fucked-up way this desire materialized toward my peers. But I was a creep, a deviant pretending to be civilized. Have you ever held your piss until your stomach cramps with the pain and then maybe just a squirt trickles out in your pants or panties and it feels good? But you know you can’t let go, you can’t wet yourself here, but then another squirt, and another feels good, and then more pain until you finally say fuck it and you release. I held in my desire to strike back until it hurt so bad that I had to let it go, and then after that first blast, the pain came again, so I released more, and then more, until the stream of my hate and my hurt cascaded onto those around me. It was the same with crime, with disrespect, and with sex. Action by action I released my willingness to be good, to be principled, and to be restrained. The next time I crawled onstage I was a cunt—a syphilitic whore willing to do any trick for the crowd. I was completely unbridled and unthinking. I had violated the instilled moral code—and there was no return.
People ask me about the music, what I liked about it, what my favorite bands were, but I don’t know what to tell them. Yes, I saw X, The Germs, The Bags, and The Controllers. I played backyard parties with Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. I came from an area that spawned Social Distortion, The Adolescents, T.S.O.L., and The Crowd. I was part of a scene that has influenced millions with its style and its sound, but I really couldn’t give a fuck. You might as well be asking me what color pants I wore when I threw my first Molotov cocktail or built my first bomb. The punk scene and the sound was just a bedspread that I fucked on; for me it was never about the music. It was about the pathway of letting go.
Now, if you wanted to ask me something, you could ask me about the backlash from the violence. You could ask me if I mind the night terrors and the inability to be close to another. You could ask me whether I could ever live vanilla when I had raped and slashed my way through the soft flesh of a rainbow. I apologize for nothing. I refuse to stand as some repentant fuck while the crimes of my past are read aloud in the court of post-punk history. I love waking up afraid, and although I no longer hold to those beliefs, I don’t regret them.