1996: It was Jim, Nick, Nicole, myself, and one or two extras. We had left a party Sean was throwing at his mom’s place in La Mesa in search of hard drugs. Nick had brokered a deal to trade some of the acid I still had for some speed that our friend Fat Head had. We made the late-night journey across the suburbs to find him and some other kids playing cards and mething around in typical tweaker fashion.
After doing the trade, doing some drugs, and playing some cards, we set out on the journey back to the party around 3am. We were feeling invincible and didn’t give curfew or the police a single thought, preferring the most direct route back. It was quite a shock back to reality to see the cop car parked on the side of the road that would be unavoidable to walk next to. I’m sure it was also quite a shock to the cop when she looked up to see a trail of young delinquents trying their best to nonchalantly sneak by in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t long before we were all rounded up and sitting on the curb while she started taking down our information. I had a ridiculous amount and variety of drugs in my little film canister so I whispered to Jim to meet me back at the party, did a quick stretch, and bolted like there was no tomorrow—which there wouldn’t be if I got caught. She shouted something useless like “Stop” or “Wait” but had everyone else to deal with and didn’t give chase.
We were right next to Jackson Park and I took off through the baseball field. I popped out at the top of the park just in time to hide behind some bushes from some spotlights. See, there isn’t much else for LMPD to do at that hour and every cop in the area jumped on the opportunity to chase down some punk kid. I made my way south down Jackson trying to strike a balance between speed and caution, knowing that the Grossmont tunnels would be the only home base I could reach in time and be reasonably safe. I was spotted crossing Jackson and dashing behind Big E Liquor but I managed to escape behind some trucks and scaled a wall through some apartments, nearing and eventually making it to the secret side entrance of the tunnels without a moment to spare.
At this point I am not sure what else happened in the real world but I remember all too well what was happening in the nightmare world of panic and delusion that my brain was inhabiting on so much acid and speed. Flashlight beams danced on the walls and ghostly voices shouted as I stumbled through the circular side tunnel in pitch darkness, oblivious to the masses of spider webs I was charging through face-first. I soon made it into the main tunnels and headed deeper, still too scared to even spark my lighter lest the specters catch a glimpse of it. I hid the drugs in a spot that I knew and continued to stagger deeper and deeper into the tunnels nervously looking back every few seconds at the phantom lights that were still following me.
After three or four hours of this the drugs finally started to wear off and with them the panic started to subside. Just past dawn I emerged, covered in sewer muck and spider webs, from the other end of the tunnels and made it back to Sean’s mom’s house much to the surprise of everyone who wasn’t passed out by then. Jim and I recovered the drugs later that day and did a lot of them in my trailer.
1996: This was the start of the drug dealing. We pawned my bass and acoustic guitar for $110 and headed back to OB to buy a sheet of acid. Within an hour we had the acid, with five hits apiece of our tongues already. We traded some for a quarter ounce of bammer weed and soon had a bunch of new friends to trip with. Jim was living with a hippie street clown in a small apartment on Brighton not far from the beach and we all headed there to get stoned and start our trip.
Tensions were high between Jim and the clown. We knew he would be home soon so we saved some weed to smoke with him in the hopes that he wouldn’t be too upset to find a bunch of tripping kids in his living room after coming home from a long day of being a clown for money in the park. He was frowning as he came in the door but was very compassionate to our situation of just starting to trip. He was with his clown girlfriend and they started making tripped out balloon animals and flowers that would change into twisted versions of themselves with a flick of his wrist.
1996: My uncle had some crazy acid he had been playing up and I was trying to get him to give me some. He took it out just to show me but who cares what acid looks like so I assumed I was supposed to eat all five hits and did so. His jaw dropped open, first in shock that I had just eaten all that acid, then in anger that I had just eaten all of HIS acid. He said something to the effect of, “I’m pissed you just did that but don’t worry about it now. You better get someplace good ‘cause you’re about to start tripping SO HARD.”
I figured OB would be the best place to spend my trip and headed to the trolley station. At some point during the commute to the beach I picked up some generic East County reject that I had met sometime before and I was starting to get pretty high by the time we got there. I quickly convinced some hippies to get us stoned and that’s when things started to get really weird. As I was entering the swirling hell of a bad peak on LSD, my weak-willed companion was having similar problems with the weed. I had stopped hearing peoples’ voices and was instead hearing their inner spirit animals. His had been descending further and further into angry growls and what words I could comprehend were very hostile towards our hippie friends. I decided I needed to get away from all this bad energy and headed down the beach amid howls and growls from everyone hanging out on the wall.
Eventually I stumbled back towards the main drag of boardwalk and saw my idiot friend getting rousted by the cops. This sent me into a frightful panic and I made my way into an alley as nonchalantly as possible. I hid in a carport with my jacket over my head for the rest of the night.
1995: I was a fresh teenage runaway, eager to be a young punk but still stuck in East County San Diego where the scene was lacking, to say the least. I did know about one fledgling punk band named Wingdilly from meeting a (very) young Nick Galvas (“Is that dumb? I might change the name.”) the year before, smoking clove cigarettes in front of Henry’s grocery in San Carlos. It turned out they were playing that night at the one venue I did know about, Soul Kitchen in El Cajon.
I didn’t have the $5 they were asking at the door so I headed to the back to see about sneaking over the fence. As luck would have it, a young Kevin von Mutant had been tasked with watching the back fence that night and he cared as much about it as you’d expect. We talked about how much we liked DEVO and he said if he ever started a DEVO cover band he was going to call it The Beautiful Mutants.
1995: There was this pseudo-novelty punk band from LA called Rebel Rebel that was a local favorite not because of any great talent but more for the huge amount of chaos and destruction that would happen at their shows. Their performance that night was typically chaotic and destructive, with piles of broken televisions and burning junk everywhere.
There were some youths trying to tip over the vending machine in the corner of the club and at a particularly inspirational moment I picked up a piece of metal from the rubble and started hitting the front of it. It quickly broke, the youths cheered, and I ran out the back and over the fence before anyone in authority could figure out what had happened.
Rebel Rebel got some video of it happening and when I saw them around in subsequent years they would always say, “Hey, it’s the vending machine guy”, in their fake English accents.
1996: Not that any of our drug deals were prone to going particularly RIGHT. While I had picked up some street smarts and swagger during my bit of travelling, and Jim had some interesting experiences as a Marine (he was a cook, mind you), both of us were incredibly naive when it came to being drug dealers. Not to mention we were so comically fucked up all the time it’s amazing things didn’t fail even more spectacularly.
This day we had a bunch of acid we were trying to get rid of at the trolley station and we met a guy who knew somebody who had some weed that they wanted to trade. We headed to Lemon Grove and trekked out into the suburbs to his friend’s house. We were pretty naive, as I said, but also drug dealing is pretty shady business even when it is done well. Waiting in front of a couple of houses while he talked to people didn’t throw up any warning signs. Another random dude joining our entourage didn’t. Taking a shortcut through a big empty field seemed like a completely reasonable thing to do. When the first dude picked up a 2x4 along the way I maybe started to think something was up but it was when Jim got hit in the head by it in the field that I finally realized things were going poorly.
I had all the acid in a film canister in my pocket and I knew Jim would agree that preservation of the drugs and money was obviously the most important thing so I took off running while the other guy landed a couple glancing blows to the back of my head. I made my way back the way we came and eventually found some neighbors and told them we had been jumped in the field by two guys. This wasn’t so much to get Jim the medical help that he probably needed, it was so I wasn’t alone when they realized Jim didn’t have anything on him and came for me. It worked and the guys ended up taking off elsewhere when they saw me with help. This part is pretty fuzzy and I think maybe the guy went to help Jim while I took off fearing eventual police involvement.
I hung out at Grossmont Center for a while and was heading back to the trolley to go to a show when who did I see but Jim stumbling across the street from Grossmont Hospital with a fresh batch of staples in his head. He gave me a hearty thanks for leaving him and saving the drugs and we headed off to Showcase Theatre for the punk show.
1996: I had been running around with this guy Jim for a while, getting into hijinks and adventure during our brief foray into drug dealing. An early-twenties ex-Marine from the midwest who had recently been dishonorably discharged for smoking weed, Jim was freakishly tall, had no eyebrows, and wore knee-high Doc Martens with his jeans tucked in and a bandana with an american eagle on it. I was a fifteen or sixteen year old juvenile delinquent, looking very unhealthy and punk.
We had somehow masterminded a deal where we ended up with all this free meth and had been up for an indeterminate amount of time smoking it with some other kids, talking about tweaker stuff and drawing on the walls of the apartment in Ocean Beach where we had a little hovel in the kitchen. I seem to remember a small fire breaking out, or it could of just been the morning sun, whatever it was something snapped us out of the previous night’s stupor and we decided to head to the beach.
We made our way down to The Wall, what the locals called the main stretch of boardwalk there, and found a nice place to sit and start the day. To the cops credit, I bet we looked EXTREMELY SKETCHY being a bunch of dazed looking teenagers and a Marine sitting on the boardwalk on a school day, so they ended up hassling us. They weren’t really buying my fake name and story, and knowing I had warrants for ditching out on probation I decided to spring into action.
My meth senses tingling, I took off down Newport Ave, dodging traffic while I decided what to do next. I instinctively knew I wouldn’t be able to outrun them with it being broad daylight and I made it five-or-so blocks before diving into some bushes on the side of the grocery store. I didn’t know it at the time, but I have since learned that cops REALLY HATE IT when you run from them. They were hating it so much at the time that they very quickly dispatched a helicopter to aid in their search. From the safety of my bush I watched several cops drive by and the helicopter fly around, waiting for as long as it would take for them to either lose interest or discover me.
After quite some time, an hour or two, my friends had given up on me and were heading back to the house. Luckily for me they just happened to walk by my bush, where I was still hunkered in, shaking and sweating, and I let out a loud PSSSSST. And then another. And then maybe a HEEEEY. I finally directed their attention to my bush and after a moment of disbelief they told me to wait right there while they formulated a plan. Jim soon returned with a baseball cap and a windbreaker for a disguise and we began our mission of paranoia to smuggle me back across town. Taking side streets, allweyways, and apartment complex cut-throughs, we made the perilous journey back to the house and let out an exhausted cheer.
This is a good story to start off this blog with because it’s the first time I ran from the cops and hid in a bush from a helicopter BUT NOT THE LAST. Stay tuned.
