Punk Rock Dad Read online

  When I first discovered punk rock by purchasing Never Mind the Bollocks, I finally felt like I wasn’t alone in the universe. Before then I had no idea what my place in the world was—or even who I was. Parents and friends didn’t understand me, and most of the time I just felt classically misunderstood and out of step with everyone else. Finding punk rock let me know there were other disillusioned souls out there who had bottled-up resentment and frustrations that could only be purged by distortion and angst. Having kindred spirits in the world helped lessen the anxiety about facing the unknown, and for several years I felt comfort knowing I had a secret brotherhood in the punk rock community, listening to their Black Flag and T.S.O.L. records alone in their bedrooms like I did. This was something to believe in, somewhere to belong.

  Decades later when I found out my wife, Jennifer, and I were having our first child, my initial feeling was one of crippling anxiety about us being alone to take on the awesome responsibility of bringing a child into the world. When we put that little jelly-bean-sized infant into our giant car seat to take her home for the first time, and she was so small the strap wouldn’t even hold her in and her tiny pea head kept slumping down in the seat, I suddenly thought, “We’re not ready for this. We should take her back into the hospital and let the professionals take care of her. I’m a punk rocker, for God’s sake! You don’t give us babies! We’re the most irresponsible people on the planet!”

  When I did finally accept that I was a dad and it wasn’t all some huge cosmic mistake, I realized I would be entering a world of parenting that can at times seem like it’s only populated by every type of conservative religious fanatic/competitive psycho you can imagine, who would, in turn, look at me like I was the freak. So it’s good to know that now there are millions of parents out there just like me, who still have the spirit of punk rock in their hearts while they chaperone the kids to ballet class and kindergarten, even though sometimes it feels like we’re raising our kids on another planet.

  I DON’T WANNA GROW UP

  The whole alternative/punk movement can be seen as one childlike refusal to grow up and take on responsibility, and the image of the immature, tattooed, and pierced alternative slacker/stoner, addicted to Internet porn and video games, has become the archetype that defines our entire generation. For me, becoming a parent became the one thing that finally forced me to grow up and accept that I wasn’t a kid anymore. It didn’t mean I had to turn into a boring old fart bag who sits in a recliner all day and yells at the kids to stay off the grass, but almost everything changes when you become a dad. Just try to stay out all night and then wake up in time to go to your kid’s soccer game. A few friends and I went to a Bad Religion show a while back and tried to pretend we were still eighteen by pounding a few beers in the parking lot, swilling multiple rum and Cokes in the V.I.P. area, and then continuing on to the after-party, where we engaged in a shot-drinking contest until the wee hours. When I finally stumbled home, Jennifer informed me that daughter number two had an 8 A.M. soccer game that morning, a few short hours away. Sitting in the fetal position in a lawn chair on the sidelines with my hat pulled down over my sunglasses, I was fooling no one. My voice was thrashed, my complexion two or three shades of sea foam green, and I smelled like the bar I’d nearly passed out in a few hours earlier. Every time I stood up to watch number two take one of a hundred shots on goal, I immediately had to sit back down in fear of adding some of last night’s Jägermeister and nachos supreme to the game field. Next time I’ll stay home.

  My kids are what get me up in the morning, literally and figuratively. I can’t really remember the last good night’s sleep I’ve had. Usually it starts with the little one, daughter number three, crying from her crib at about 1 A.M., an hour or so after I’ve turned off Letterman. So instead of carrying her around and bouncing her back to sleep or just letting her cry in the dark and giving her an abandonment complex, I grab her and throw her in our bed. She goes right back to sleep, and I get about two good hours in until about 3 A.M., when the oldest one appears at the side of the bed saying she’s had a scary dream about a headless skeleton and wants to sleep in our bed. It doesn’t take number two long to figure out she’s the only one who’s not in mom and dad’s bed, so by four o’clock the entire family is in our bed, I’m hanging off the side with someone’s elbow lodged in my neck, and I’ve been kicked in the nuts about five times already. This is a good night’s sleep now.

  It’s kind of like someone warning you when you are about to go on a particularly frightening roller-coaster ride or you’re about to watch an extremely scary film. Of course you should go; they just want to warn you that you’re probably not really prepared for what you’re getting into, so here’s a little cautionary advice: “Don’t look down on the third loop,” and “Avert your eyes during the scene where the severed head pops out of the shipwreck if you’re prone to heart failure, but of course you should go!” They went and they’re going again because it was frickin’ awesome. This is why I have three kids.

  1

  STORY OF MY LIFE

  I am the world’s forgotten boy

  The one who’s searching to destroy

  —Iggy & the Stooges

  I didn’t choose punk rock. Punk rock chose me. Mainly because the small L.A. beach town where I was raised was destined to become a fertile punk rock breeding ground, but also because a genetic malfunction virtually ensured that when I first heard its forbidden beat, I would respond emphatically. I probably would have been perfectly content to grow up and become a happy-go-lucky, productive member of society, but somehow, while floating around in my mother’s fallopian tubes on the journey down to my uterine home, I inherited a mutated gene from one of my ancestors that meant when I came out, instead of having both eyes gazing lovingly up at my parents, they were both staring at my nose, unable to move, as if a fly were resting there that I couldn’t stop looking at.

  Strabismus is a condition that affects thousands of babies worldwide. It means that somewhere in my fetal development, my eyes decided they didn’t want to work together and focus on objects like a team, and instead looked around independent of each other. The wonderful layman’s term for this condition is called “being fucking cross-eyed.” The problem is that it seems to be one of the few handicaps, along with stuttering and chronic flatulence, that most people have absolutely no problem with making fun of to your face. You walk up to them with one eye staring at your nose and they think you’re being funny. Those who are so gifted to be able to mimic the condition will salute you by laughing and doing it right back to you. You wouldn’t walk up to a kid with one leg and start hopping around like you’re on a pogo stick, but for some reason a person with screwy eyes is fair game.

  The first time I realized I had this deformity was a particularly jarring experience for someone of my tender age. My parents must have kept me hidden in a closet until kindergarten or broken all our mirrors because for all I knew I was a happy, well-adjusted youngster, but when I walked out onto the playground for the first time, I met a kid who was running around scaring little girls by yanking his lips apart and moaning like he was Frankenstein. When I approached to join their game, he took one look at me and my eyes and said, “Yeah, you do that, and we’ll chase the girls around together.” Apparently, my normal visage was enough to horrify five-year-old girls into a panic.

  Last time I checked, no five-year-old likes to be singled out as being different from everyone else, so I remember starting to feel a little ashamed and freaked out about my condition as far back as kindergarten. It’s hard to win friends and influence people when the first rule is to always look people in the eye. Later on, with surgery, the effect was lessened to the point where instead of staring at my nose, I could look at you with one eye but the other would kind of wander off into orbit like a lost satellite. I’m convinced this mutated gene and the harsh vibes I got from other kids had a profound impact on my later personality. The mind is a wonderful, adaptive thing in our formati
ve years, and since the soul craves acceptance by our peers, I compensated for my ocular malfunction by deciding that if I did weird things and acted strangely to go along with it, people would think I was just being funny. I started being disruptive in class and doing idiotic things to divert attention away from my eye problem. I’d use my hands to make farting noises while the teacher was talking, wear ridiculous fishing hats to school, and eat gross things off the sidewalk for the other kids’ amusement—your typical cry-for-help attempts to get people to accept me. Pretty soon I became popular at school just for being a total freak.

  My psycho rebelliousness only increased in junior high, and since I had no fear of getting in trouble, I started becoming a regular outside the principal’s office after school. One Friday afternoon I convinced a friend that going into my dad’s refrigerator in the garage and drinking as much beer as we could stomach before our Little League game was a great idea. I don’t remember much of the details of what happened afterward, but I do know it involved me eating a significant amount of dirt in the infield, flipping off my baseball coach, punching a kid on the other team, and culminated in me being chased around the outfield by my sister and her friends while disgusted parents looked on from the bleachers. I remember thinking even before I opened the first beer that I was probably going to get in a lot of trouble for doing this, but that didn’t stop me. I did it because I wanted to break up the monotony of everyday life, and getting into trouble seemed like the best way to do it. That memorable Friday evening finally ended with me pulling down my pants and streaking the full length of Ardmore Avenue, ass cheeks to the wind.

  Like many other kids I never stopped rebelling, and when punk rock came around it was like we were meant for each other. I remember reading a newspaper article about a new kind of music scene happening in London and seeing pictures of these freaky-looking teenagers with spiked, colored hair, studded leather jackets, and military boots, sulking around and flipping off the camera. It looked really awful and a lot of fun. The band they were writing about was called the Sex Pistols, so that same day I went up to the local Music Plus store and picked up the garish Day-Glo pink and green album which spelled out the title on the cover like a ransom note, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols! I had no idea what bollocks were but I brought it home, and from the opening thunderous guitar chord, followed by Johnny Rotten’s snotty, antagonistic growl, I was hooked. This was exactly what I had been waiting for.

  Rotten sounded like a kid who didn’t care what anyone thought of him, his voice being the sonic equivalent of giving the finger to everyone who ever oppressed you in life; your parents, your teachers, the cops, the jock bullies at school, everyone who’d ever made you feel powerless, and for a kid growing accustomed to having people look at him strange because of an eye problem, this attitude of not caring what other people thought suited me perfectly. Hearing the Sex Pistols was like instantly finding out who I was. I was punk. I knew it deep down in my soul. Whether or not I ever had a Mohawk or played in a band didn’t matter, this was how I’d always felt inside. It was a reaction to all the rejection I had received since I first walked out on that playground when I was five. “If you won’t accept me as I am, then I don’t want to be anything like you.”

  After my initiation into punk music with the Sex Pistols, I started seeking out my new identity anywhere I could find it. The Southern California version of the new musical phenomenon was far different from London’s, with its emphasis on fashion and facial piercings, and New York, with its avant-garde art scene mentality; ours was populated by bored, middle-class, angry suburban youths looking for an outlet for their antipathy and frustration. Across the street from one of my best friends lived the O’Connor brothers, two raging street kids a couple years older who lived alone with their mother in a small white clapboard house, and whose daily regimen consisted of surfing at 26th Street, skateboarding the alleys and driveways behind the beach houses, listening to punk rock, and getting into trouble. Thanks to the O’Connor brothers and a cast of other local punks who hung around their house drinking cans of Bud all day, I was given a steady diet of the best music punk rock had to offer. Every day I would come home from school, turn on the crappy Panasonic stereo I confiscated from my parents’ living room, and listen to the nihilistic sounds of the Adolescents, T.S.O.L, and the Dead Kennedys, memorizing every word and staring at their album covers for tips on how to look, dress, and act punk. The sound track of my life constantly echoing through my ears as I rode my skateboard through the back alleys and down the steep hills of the South Bay became one of adolescent rage and defiance. I’m not sure what we were all so angry about, probably just overactive hormones and a craving for independence from all the figures of authority continually trying to rein us in. Maybe it was sheer suburban boredom, but the music matched exactly how I felt.

  For no reason other than the fact that I had absolutely no fear of looking stupid in public, during my sophomore year I answered an ad in the local newspaper for a high school band looking for a singer. I had never tried to sing before, or even been told I had a good voice, but I knew I really wanted to scream into a microphone like my punk heroes and let out some of the rage I’d bottled up all those years. The band was three guys from Redondo who were looking to play cover songs at parties. I suggested “Clampdown” by The Clash and “Zero Hour” by The Plimsouls. They learned the songs and I brought over my rented Radio Shack P.A. system to their garage and set it up. The thing howled and screamed feedback during our entire first practice, but after two or three false starts, underneath the earsplitting racket of the too-loud guitar, poorly timed drumming, and my Peter Brady vocals, we started playing something that vaguely resembled an actual song. At one point of particularly impressive sophomore garage band dexterity, we all looked up at each other and smiled. We were a band.

  This led to years of backyard party bands, where I’d get ridiculously hammered and make a total ass of myself, but just like in kindergarten, it helped people look past the eye problem and gave me just enough popularity in the high school battlefield that I didn’t have to sit in my room alone and grow hair on my palms. The bands I was in played cover songs of whatever people wanted to hear so they could hook up with each other, lock braces, and struggle with bra straps in the backseats of their parents’ cars afterward. We’d play punk, party music, and stupid songs I wrote about girlfriends, hating your teachers, and surfing.

  After the punk scene had pretty much imploded during the late 1980s, and was taken over by heavy metal boys in tight leather crotchless ass pants, chick hair, and makeup, I gave up on my dreams of rock stardom, went to college, and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life. While wasting my time at San Diego State, surfing, and getting bounced from frat parties, on the weekends when I’d drive back to the South Bay, I started noticing a group of girls cruising around town in a blue ’65 Mustang Fastback, all of them hot, local, blond surf chicks, but the girl driving with the sleepy green eyes seemed different from your typical Brian Wilson surfer girl. She had a certain soulful quality about her, without the fake, valley girl, airhead mentality some of the local girls had adopted to make themselves seem easily available. Every time I saw her drive by I’d think to myself that was the girl for me, that somehow we were destined to be together, but she just didn’t know it yet.

  We were finally introduced by some mutual friends at a party and ended up walking down to a park and sat around talking until the sprinklers came on and we ran into a cement tube on the playground, where we fell asleep together. I couldn’t have known it then but there was also another more subliminal reason I was attracted to her. She was smart, wryly funny, and beautiful, but also very straight and responsible. At the time we met, my life could have gone two very different ways. I could have continued partying, met some equally self-destructive punk rock girl, and spent my life in rehabs, jail cells, or worse, but meeting her made me want to clean up my act and try to make something of myself. When she
was at UC Santa Barbara in college, her roommates called her “Mom” because she was always telling them to be careful, and making sure no one drove drunk, and baking cakes for people’s birthdays, and hemming dresses for them. She basically had all the maternal instincts she needed already in place before we ever had kids. Her friends now are always asking her for advice when it comes to dealing with fevers and flus and their children’s various rashes and illnesses because they know my wife has read every parenting book out there and is a walking childcare encyclopedia. This couldn’t have worked out better for me, being a hedonistic weekend warrior, since she’s always keeping me grounded and knows just how far to let me go before I need to be lassoed and reeled back in. It also worked out better for our future family since I’m clueless and know next to nothing about raising kids beyond the fact that you’re supposed to hand them five bucks when they ask for it. If we were Sid and Nancy, things would not have worked out as well for us.

  With her as my motivation, I eventually started getting better grades and was able to transfer to UCLA and earn a degree in English, putting it to fine use when my dad landed me a job after graduation as an outside sales rep in the air cargo industry. I put on the suit and tie, got the company car, the 401(k), my very own cubicle and computer, and joined the working world. This was right about when I started hearing that my neighbor Jason, from a street over, had started a band called Pennywise.

  Jason Thirsk lived next door to my best friend who used to bully him and his little brother Justin. I always liked Jason because instead of picking on his little brother like most older siblings, he always stood up for him. Later on, he grew up to be a guy everyone in the South Bay liked and admired. He had a standard uniform he wore every day of long shorts, a wrinkled T-shirt, and black Doc Martens. He always had an emphatic celebratory nickname he’d greet you with whenever you walked up to him, with mine being one of the most complicated. He called me “Jim-Bo-Billy-Bob Omar Sharif.” I have no idea how he came up with that, but I loved hearing it every time I saw him. He listened to all kinds of punk music, could answer any TV trivia question, especially those concerning his beloved Bonanza, and all the girls loved him unconditionally. He was just one of those all-around likable guys, the kind I could never be, which was why I liked him so much.