Tag: Violence

I just watched a documentary about the mid-nineties San Diego underground music scene called It’s Gonna Blow! that I would definitely recommend checking out if the subject at all interests you. I just about missed out on everything featured in the documentary – I wouldn’t have been old enough to go to The Casbah but there were most likely all ages opportunities I didn’t take advantage of.

Most embarrassing is the fact that my friend Kevin who would later form The Beautiful Mutants invited me to come see Crash Worship at The World Beat Center but in my infinite fourteen year old wisdom I thought it “sounded like a stupid hippy drum circle”.

Around the time that I was in Ninth Grade friends at school would show me CDs for local bands they were into: Three Mile Pilot, Heavy Vegetable and Blink before they had to add the -182. For whatever reason I never asked to borrow or get a copy of any of it. The closest thing I did to checking out the local scene that year was accompanying my parents and grandfather to see the folk group The Electrocarpathians at the soon to be shuttered Better Worlde Galleria.

Not long after I started going to a tiny spot in El Cajon called the Soul Kitchen to see the punk bands forming out of SDSCPA – an arts focused high school that my sisters and most of my friends went to but my mom wouldn’t let me because I had to do the IB program at San Diego High. This included a precursor to The Beautiful Mutants called The Mutant Turtles, Diana DeLuna’s group The Vendettas and the late Nick Galvas’ project Wingdilly.

Many of the groups featured in the documentary also would have played there but they didn’t share bills with my younger friends and El Cajon was too much of a haul on buses to just check out casually. In the end the closest I ever got to the Golden Age of San Diego Alternative and Post-Rock was watching Lucy’s Fur Coat at some kind of free Balboa Park event and the two years where the former bassist of aMiniature was my High School Physics teacher.

One thing that they talked about for a lot of the documentary that I definitely did not miss out on was San Diego’s endemic violence – a result of the proximity to USMC base Camp Pendleton and the long term popularity of the skinhead lifestyle. Luckily for me the Marines almost exclusively frequented over 21 drinking establishments so in my teenage years I almost never came into contact with them. I say almost because I did have an unpleasant run in while riding the trolley.

Once I started going to school downtown and got my hands on a bus pass I became a dedicated thrifter and a bit of a clothes horse. On this particular day I was wearing a cheap costume style black bowler hat, blocky laboratory safety glasses with translucent red frames and a snap up black vest of an almost plastic like synthetic material over a red turtleneck. A large group of Marines thought I looked like a member of the band Spacehog and wanted to kick my ass because of it.

If anything my outfit on that particular day was more influenced by Devo but I didn’t press this detail. I got the fuck off the trolley and considered myself fortunate that they were too concerned with reaching their destination, most like the Tijuana border crossing, to follow.

In contrast the skinheads were a constant fixture in environments that I was spending a lot of time in – third wave ska shows. Judging by what people were saying in the film Nazi Skins, also known as Boneheads, were a significant threat at San Diego live shows in the Eighties but I can’t remember ever seeing any. Many of my friends would talk about how red and white laces in Doc Martens were code for Nazis and white supremacists but despite constant vigilance I never ran into anyone rocking these colors – the skinheads around were mostly Sharps.

Sharp is an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice and they typically wear yellow bootlaces although black laces also seemed to be popular. Ostensibly they were supposed to fight and defend the scene against Nazi skins but if these clashes ever happened I never saw them. I would say they liked to fight but I never actually saw them fighting either – they would just typically look for a defenseless target to beat the shit out of.

I decided not to use his name but the one Black guy in the group of gutter punks that hung out with my sister later morphed into a Sharp Skinhead. He also got really muscular around this time – I remember somebody saying that he looked like a Ninja Turtle. One night at a party he got into some kind of disagreement with a wispy little indie rock looking guy and broke the dude’s fingers.

The person in question immediately started screaming out the N word so it was hard to feel too bad for him but the entire situation just felt sad. Besides being unpleasant to be around this kind of violence could often get a show or party broken up by cops – and if Skinheads were around it was nearly an inevitability.

We also had the militant straight edge flavor of Skinheads in San Diego. Not long after Off The Record opened it’s North Park store by 30th and University a local ska band called Unsteady played a free afternoon concert there. Francois was living about a block and a half down the alley and had just gotten into wearing a little crocheted cap in the signature Rastafarian colors,

The straight edge skins decided he looked like he was stoned and were threatening to beat the shit out of him. This was especially ironic as Francois and I were essentially straight edge ourselves at the time – we just didn’t write X’s on our hands or refer to ourselves as such. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with either of us being stoned but at that point in time neither of us had tried marijuana or a single alcoholic beverage.

My father was also at this show and seeing how the music was essentially a form of reggae he decided to spark up a joint and offer it to anyone in the crowd that might be interested. Actually he did this at every live music event regardless of genre. The straight edgers shifted their violent overtures to him and unlike the situation with Francois they were not about to be redirected.

We had to slip him out through the alley and wait a while in Francois’s apartment because they even tried to follow us.

So many things about this are infuriating: the fact that a group of muscle heads would feel justified in ganging up on a single good natured and diminutive hippy man with visibly graying hair, the fact that they unironically considered themselves fans of a music form from actual Jamaica and didn’t see the contradiction in their actions but most importantly the fact that this behavior constantly went unchallenged in all of the spaces throughout our community.

That was San Diego though – I’m not sure when it first started and couldn’t say whether it’s in the past now but now that I think about it nearly every time I’ve been physically assaulted has been in my home city. I might have missed my chance at seeing early Three Mile Pilot and Crash Worship but this was one aspect of San Diego’s underground that was simply unavoidable.

This next incident took place on Valentine’s Day of either 2004 or 2005. It was during the period of time when I was with the girlfriend I’ve referred to as a “New England Pedigree Girl” and after we’d started using heroin together. She was working late somewhere, most likely a night game at Petco Park, so I went to this party without her but not before leaving a Valentine’s Day gift on the kitchen table of our apartment.

I had made a heart shaped card out of construction paper with two rattlesnakes facing each other and the message Fangs for being my Valentine. The inside said Happy Valentines Day Let’s Get Stung – a reference to both a colloquial expression for venomous snake bites and the second part of the gift: two capped syringes loaded up with black tar heroin resting in a champagne flute.

This is mostly not relevant to the story that is about to follow except for the detail that I would have been on a small amount of this drug when the ensuing events took place – but not to the extent of nodding out or anything.

The party was at a house that my friend Bryan Welch had just started renting with some other kids from the scene I can’t remember the names of. When we were still in High School he lived with his mother in Mission Hills and was clearly in a higher economic bracket than my family. The first time I ever went to his house he put on the Laurie Anderson song O Superman and while I immediately dug it he was already a bit of a music snob and I was nervous to display my ignorance by asking the name of the artist.

This resulted in me mistakenly buying the Barbra Streisand Superman album the next time I saw it in a Thrift Store and being severely disappointed when I got home and put on what I thought was the same song.

Anyway this new house he was living in was super fancy. It had a vintage Malm orange metal fireplace in the center along with some other mid century furniture and an actual bar that was very much in use. I can’t remember if it was just a rent party or if they were raising money for some other cause but they were slinging an assortment of fancy cocktails including one that was served in an actual coconut.

I should mention that this last beverage lost quite a few points in presentation due to the fact that somebody had forgotten to pick up straws and this detail was only divulged the moment the drink had already been paid for and was being deposited into the buyer’s hand.

Anyway some Skinheads showed up – I’m not sure if they called themselves Sharps but they definitely weren’t straight edgers or Nazis. As they always do they searched the party for somebody to beat up on and selected a pair of French guys most likely because they figured they wouldn’t have any friends there. To reiterate I have never once seen a skinhead looking for a fair fight.

One of the French guys got sucker punched and things were about to get uglier. While everybody looked unhappy about this turn of events nobody was actually doing anything about it. I am absolutely not a fighter but after dealing with this shit since my teenage years I hit a breaking point where I wasn’t going to just powerlessly watch it happen. I placed myself in front of the next targeted French guy and addressed the skinhead preparing to swing on him:

“You can’t fight here. Fighting is gonna get the party broken up. If you want to fight you have to take it somewhere else.”

I am fairly tall at six feet and four inches but I’ve always been thin and gangly. I should also mention that I had dressed up for the holiday: a pink pair of Gloria Vanderbilt twill jeans and a floral printed button up in pinks and purples. My hair was long and I was most likely wearing heavy eyeshadow in complementary colors. I might not have been as bold if I didn’t figure that looking stereotypically effeminate might have a protective effect.

With this first guy it basically worked the way I had planned. He tried to shove me out of the way but I’ve been in my share of mosh pits so I planted my feet and did not waver. He tried a couple more shoves but I remained steadfast and repeated what I had just said. As I was hoping he didn’t look at me as a person he could actually swing on so he finally growled in disgust and angrily stomped off.

Unfortunately one of his companions had no such compunctions. This skinhead was a Mexican guy with the body type that basically looks like a bowling ball with arms and legs sticking out – he probably wasn’t as tall as me but it wasn’t a big difference. He had watched everything that just transpired and now placed himself in front of me:

“Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

“I wasn’t talking shit. I told him there’s no fighting at this party because there’s no fighting at this party. Fighting brings cops.”

Without a word he turned and walked over to the back of a pickup truck with camper shell that was parked at the curb about fifteen feet away. He lowered the tail gate and then rubbed his hands together with glee like he was about to eat something delicious in a cartoon. He then pulled out a wooden baseball bat, hefted it over his shoulder and strolled back to where I was standing with a newly smug and self satisfied expression:

“Let me rephrase that. Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

I should clarify that I am well aware that not every person that dresses or identifies as a skinhead is like this. The first time I ever met my friend Lil Four she looked like a skinhead. It was 10th Grade and she was going to a dance at my school with me and a girl named Anne Gregory. We had taken the bus to where she lived by the beach with her mother to pick her up.

The movie The Nutty Professor had just come out and her mother evidently had a crush on the fat suit version of Eddie Murphy. She had cut multiple pictures of this character out of newspapers and framed them around the house. Lil Four, or I should say Danielle as she was going by her original name, seemed a little embarrassed by this.

She had a bleached Chelsea cut and wore a green bomber jacket over her dress. The dress was red because the three of us had coordinated a red and black theme for our outfits. I wish I still had the photos but they disappeared when I lost the box of papers going back to Kindergarten from my parents’ house. Anyway I’ve known plenty of other perfectly charming, pleasant and not especially violent skinheads.

But then there are the ones like the guy who is threatening me with a baseball bat. He’s already three times my size, I’m clearly incapable of fighting and I’m dressed like a stereotypical pansy. He could probably seriously injure me with one arm tied behind his back but that isn’t good enough for him. He needs a vicious weapon too so he can not just completely dominate me but put me in the hospital while he’s at it.

I remember feeling disgusted but I forget if I actually said anything or not. I turned my back on him and slowly walked back into the house. Of course I was worried that he could easily swing at the back of my head but in the moment it felt like the best available course of action. I tried to project certain things: disdain, an absence of intimidation and dismissal in the proper balance so that he would feel too foolish to retaliate in force.

Once I got inside my sister helped to find me a ride to get out of there. Just like I had done with my father years before I was smuggled out through the back. A friend pulled a car to the side of the house and I climbed into the back seat so I could lay out of sight and he drove me home to my girlfriend who was waiting for me to come do drugs with her.

I don’t know what happened with the party or the French guys after that. Maybe the skinheads renewed their attack on them or found a new target or simply left. I felt a bit disappointed that nobody had stepped up to back me up in the moment, after all there were so many more of us than them, but at the same time I understood. Everybody there had grown up with this exactly like I had and I had just stood by countless times before reaching a point where I had to stand up and do something,

Everybody had to reach this point for themselves and it may well never happen at all.

Nothing about it is easy.

As fate would have it this wasn’t the only time I got threatened by a skinhead with a baseball bat in San Diego. This other incident might have been a little before or after the one I just described but I feel fairly certain it was within a year. I was performing at the Che Cafe with Raquel – either as Sex Affection or right after we changed the name to Hood Ri¢h.

The show was sparsely attended and there were some especially aggressive younger kids there who kind of looked like skinheads and kind of looked like Circle Jerks era thrash punks. I can’t imagine who they would have been there to see as it would have been a mostly experimental flavored lineup – maybe xbxrx. Regardless they were lightly heckling us so I was heckling them back and said something about coming up so we could start a “big gay mosh pit”.

I confess it’s not especially clever. While the Che is officially an alcohol free venue I’d been drinking something, probably Captain Morgan and Vanilla Coke, from an innocuous opaque cup. I probably thought they were most likely homophobic and it would get under their skin.

Evidently it did.

A kid in a red and black plaid flannel ran up to the stage and started throwing punches. My friend Andreas later said it looked like I was expertly dodging every one of his swings but it was actually dumb luck. In the moment my first thought was that he was coming to dance with me and when I bobbed my head from side to side it just so happened to neatly avoid each successive strike. It caused me to drop and spill my drink which was probably for the best.

Andreas is an absolute teddy bear who I’ve never seen in another altercation but to his credit he sprang into action and quickly ejected my assailant from the side door and told him he wasn’t coming back in. Now that I think about we would have been sharing the bill with a short lived experimental band called Business Lady. The singer Mikey happened to have a similar build and was wearing an almost identical shirt to the kid who attacked me so for the rest of the night everybody would tense up every time he walked into the room only to relax when they saw his face.

If you’ve ever spent time at the Che Cafe you would know that there is a small circular table toward the rear on the parking lot side where attendees often hang out and smoke cigarettes. It sits in the shadows and due to this relative darkness is almost impossible to see from the inside even though it’s next to the window. Toward the end of the night I was sitting there smoking a cigarette and whoever I was with finished theirs and left so I was out there by myself.

I suddenly got approached by one of flannel kid’s friends. When I try to picture what this kid looked like the first thing that comes to mind is a baseball cap with the bill flipped up and tagged on in the style of Suicidal Tendencies. It actually doesn’t sound like these kids were skinheads at all – the connecting thread is more just the baseball bat as he was also brandishing one in a threatening manner.

He wanted to know why I had – in his words “gotten his friend kicked out”. The way he saw it the person who assaulted me was a hapless victim forced into action against his will by my uncivil and inflammatory provocation. Accountability was clearly wanting but it was difficult to focus on the exchange as a teachable moment when the surrounding circumstances necessitated that my thoughts pivot on how I might extricate myself while avoiding grievous injury.

I don’t know what I said but it isn’t so much about the what as it is the how. After a certain amount of time it becomes instinctual – you either learn how to fight or learn how to avoid fighting or join up with the people creating the situation in the first place. It’s something that marks every person who’s had to grow up there. I’m not saying other cities aren’t violent but just like music there’s regional varieties to everything.

I missed out on a lot of what was going on around me and experienced these things in other cities instead. The first time I saw The Locust was at 924 Gilman in Berkeley and I didn’t really get into hardcore or feel like I was part of a scene until I moved to Chicago. There’s a lot of San Diego bands like The Shortwave Channel that I didn’t start listening to until they’d already broken up.

But when I heard people like John Reis start talking about their experiences of inescapable violence, even though it was before my time in the ‘80s, at that moment I get a very specific feeling:

I was there…