Sympathy for the Demon

Southern California is a land that eats its young. If I were to stretch my net wide enough, the list of my peers who are now dead would be as long as my arm, and if I were to expand the list to include those who are now but a hollow shell of their former selves, it would be like a photographic negative of the stars in the heavens, an almost numberless recitation of lives lost, of potentials unfulfilled.

I’ve yet to read a book that better captures the manic desperation of my time than Jack Grisham’s “An American Demon,” of the existential dichotomy that everything was possible but that nothing was right. The Orange County punk scene, circa 1980, was a white hot blast of unrivalled aggression, a dagger to the throat of a complacent suburbia where broken families, drug addiction, and a hollow materialism were hidden behind the smiling façade of the endless California summer.

Most of us were a little crazy, and some were just plain fucked. I had a friend named Rob who one day dyed his hair canary yellow, superglued devil horns onto his scalp, spray-painted a black swastika on his surfboard, and told me he was about to head to the beach with a blackjack in his bag, looking for a fight. Just about anything was a good reason for bloodshed, but jocks and “hippies,” which essentially meant the old school surfers who didn’t like the punk kids on their beach, were particular targets of abuse. From the cops to the jocks to the bikers to the Mexican gangsters, we took them all on. And lived to tell the tale. Well, most of us. At least for awhile.

Jack Grisham was one of the leaders of this new wave of crazy beach kids. He was also the lead singer for Vicious Circle and TSOL, bands who developed a big following in the scene. While he may have been a first class asshole, Jack Grisham was also kind of a hero of mine. I was a scrawny kid from honors class who, predictably enough, hated to get hit and was not much good in a fight. At the time, there was a large crew of very large guys, many of them football players from Edison High School, known as the Crop Dusters (a “crop” being slang for short hair), who would drive around the coast of central Orange County, looking for punk kids to beat up. I would flip them off, of course, and get real mouthy. But once they got out of their cars and started their approach, I’d turn tail and run for all I was worth, at least if I was by myself. Now, if I was with a crew, that was a different story. I got pretty good at being a set-up man, looking some guy in the eye while my buddy cut his legs out from under him and then giving the fallen jock a swift kick to the skull. But one-on-one, I was just another lit school pussy.

Jack Grisham wasn’t one of these turn-tail punks. The night when the Vicious Circle crew routed a band of Crop Dusters at the river jetty, sending most of them to the hospital, was a legend we all knew (and one that is recalled by Grisham in his memoir). If an accompanying legend was that the VC’s, as part of an induction ceremony, stripped a young girl naked, tied her up, stuffed her private parts with raw hamburger, and then let a Doberman loose on her to do its worst, well it was abhorrent, of course, but these devils were our devils, and pretty damn good in a fight.

One of the great things about punk is that it is both decentralized and local, making it pretty easy to have direct contact with your heroes. I’d meet Jack at parties. We even had a couple of good conversations. He was smart and personable. So when Jack would get on stage, I could honestly look up there and say, “I know that guy, and he’s pretty cool.” Even if he was also a misogynist, a thief, and a thug.

When the L.A. press first stumbled onto the crazy, violent, destructive scene that was boiling up at south suburban beach clubs like the Fleetwood and the Cuckoo’s Nest, many were incredulous. Few of these writers were native Angelenos, and they struggled to make sense out of where this scene had come from. Weren’t Californians supposed to be mellow, laid back, go-with-the-flow kinds of folks? How could we get so angry living near the beach? They didn’t understand who we were, of course.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s, Orange County was largely populated by the children of Oakies. My generation was the children of these children, the 3rd generation of Scotch-Irish fucks to live in the warm California sun. Couple this with the 1970’s notion of personal license, where most parents were too busy “doing their own thing” to raise their children, and we were the result. We are what happens when you take a bunch of defiant Celts, place them in a sunny land, feed them well and give them decent dental care, but also deracinate them and take away most of their cultural bearings. What happened was HB 1979. And Jack Grisham was our poster child.

I’ve always had a problem with literary nastiness. You shouldn’t be able to talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. When someone like Bret Easton Ellis evokes an unblinking portrait of violence, it makes me want to pull him into a back alley and hit him over the head with a tire iron. But I don’t have that problem with the memoirs of Jack Grisham, because the guy is the real deal. Now, I can’t vouch for how autobiographical this “memoir” actually is, as it begins with the idea that Grisham has been inhabited by a demon. So let’s just say that Grisham takes a bit of license in portraying his life. And he also misses why we were so angry, blaming it on irrelevancies like Ronald Reagan and the Contras. Sorry Jack, none of us really gave a crap about politics. It was just an excuse, a vehicle to express our pent-up rage. The actual reason we were angry was because our ancestors had toiled for generations to get us to where we were, and we were told that this was the Good Life, but we were offered nothing: No purpose, no meaning, nothing real at all, nothing but a hollow materialism and a prepackaged notion of youth. And the beach. We were offered the beach. Which was nice. But everything human around us pretty much sucked.

Jack Grisham was one of those guys who could stand up on stage and get his fans to do almost anything. But I tell you what I wanted him to do. Towards the end of one of TSOL’s sold-out shows at the Cuckoo’s Nest, after we had routed all the bouncers and the hippies and the wanna be cowboys at Zubies next door, I wanted Jack to tell us that we should all go down to South Coast Plaza and burn that fucker down. It would be our way of saying that the stupid consumer society they were offering us was unacceptable. And it would have scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. It would have been glorious.

Instead, what we witnessed was a long, slow decay, both individually and collectively, a decay which is lived out in Grisham’s memoir. Grisham would set up scene after scene of depravity, and I kept telling myself, “Oh no, he’s not really gonna do that, is he?” And then the tale would head somewhere even worse. Destructive relationships, mind-numbing bouts of violence, alcohol and drug addiction, a general fall from grace; it’s an oft-told tale, but this is not a typical celebrity tell-all book. In the first place, Grisham wasn’t living the high life; he was increasingly broke and still living with his mom in a nondescript tract home on the flats of Long Beach. And he was convinced that he was possessed by a demon.

When I wasn’t horrified by Grisham’s actions, I found myself laughing with him, like at one point during his steep decline, as he was driving to his job at the “University Club” section of the young men’s clothing department in The Broadway, dressed in a dorky pastel polo shirt and wearing a name tag, when a car full of tough guys forced this seeming dork off to the shoulder of the 405 Freeway. Grisham gets out of his car, pulls a sawed-off shotgun from under his seat, and unloads a round of buckshot into the other car as they were stopped right there on the side of the freeway.

Then there are the odd sidebars of cosmogony, all justified by the fact that, hey, the narrator is a demon, so he has an up-front purview and can thus state as a matter of fact that all men go to God when they die, while demons are reincarnated, at least until the point that the “Not-Quite,” as Grisham refers to his demonic overlord, doesn’t need them anymore (at which point the demon simply ceases to exist). Also, he posits that men crave alcohol because it is a “synthetic God,” thus replacing and supplanting our own innate desire for a connection with the real thing. Then, after these bits of amateur theology, it’s back to vandalizing churches and screwing underage girls. So it is an odd book, a bit of a crazy quilt. But I liked it in part because of that.

I left Los Angeles in 1988 and moved to Chicago. I left for a lot of reasons, but probably the biggest was that I had gotten too immersed in the Hollywood music scene, which was becoming a dead-end road littered with victims of addiction, delusion, and plain old bad luck. I needed to find somewhere else to call home. But I still visited Southern California every year. And while most of my close friends are still alive, and many have found their niche, on seemingly every visit I would find out about one or two more folks from the scene who had kicked the bucket. This has been going on for over 20 years now. And these aren’t just due to the normal, expected causes of death. Sure, there has been the usual share of drug overdoses and suicides, but there have also been a lot of weird deaths, from drowning to a violent mugging to getting run over by a freight train. It is like the entire town lives under a bad moon. There are a lot of things that I love about Chicago, but perhaps the most inviolable is the fact it gave me another home away from all that shit.

Like a lot of us back in the day, Jack Grisham also tried to escape. At one point, he briefly moved up to Alaska, a move noted in his memoirs, but he hated the isolation and the cold and was soon back at his parents’ house in Long Beach. And there he remained, spiraling steadily downward, until he wound up crawling into a concrete sewage pipe that ran underneath a local park, contemplating the idea of slitting his wrists and ending it all right then and there. Then he thought about his estranged daughter, crawled back out of the drainpipe, and decided to live.

One of the problems with playing music in L.A. was that it had become a very cliquish scene. There was always a notion that style mattered, to the point where it became hard to imagine the next relevant thing. A lot of bands foundered on these shores, TSOL included. They did a glam/goth album, followed by something a little more metal. And while some of their individual songs were good, the band seemed to be thrashing around in a failed search for a new identity. So when I listened to Jack sing about depression or suicide on songs like "Beneath the Shadows", "I'm Tired of Life", or "Flowers at the Door," I assumed that he was just trying on another one of his personas. I now know that he wasn’t just trying to speak for the confused kids in his audience; he was one of us, another victim.

It seems every other prominent new writer these days hails from the same five-square mile patch of Brooklyn, channeling the same zeitgeist, or at the very least sitting in the same coffee houses. But most of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past couple of years have come from someplace else and been written by a comparative amateur. I find Grisham’s somewhat confused narrative style appealing. It sure beats another dish of polished tripe fed to you by some MFA grad. And unlike a lot of folks, Jack Grisham has stayed put, making a life amongst the non-descript tract homes of suburbia. He has written an inspired tale about my homeland. I wish him well.