The Dirt Read online

  When I was four, she married Vinny and we moved to Lake Tahoe, which was becoming a mini–Las Vegas. I’d wake up at six in the morning in the little brown house where we lived, ready to play, but I’d end up alone, skipping rocks in the pond outside until they got out of bed around 2 P.M. I knew not to try and wake Vinny, because he’d knock me out. He was always in a terrible mood, and at the slightest provocation would take it out on me. One afternoon, he was taking a bath when he noticed me brushing my teeth from side to side instead of up and down, as he had taught me. He stood up, naked, hairy, and beaded with water like an ape caught in a hailstorm, and smashed his fist into the side of my head, knocking me to the ground. Then my mother, as usual, turned red and attacked him while I ran to the pond to hide.

  That Christmas, I received two presents: my father stopped by our house while I was outside playing and, as either a feeble gesture to absolve his guilt or a genuine effort to be a father with the little means available to him, left me a red plastic circular sled with leather handles. And my half sister, Ceci, was born.

  We moved to Mexico when I was six, either because my mother and Vinny had made enough money to take a year’s sabbatical or because they were running from something (most likely someone in a blue uniform). They never told me why. All I remember is that my mother and Ceci flew there which meant that I had to cross the border in the Corvair with Vinny and Belle. Belle was his German shepherd who, much like Vinny, constantly attacked me for no reason. My legs, arms, and torso were covered with bite marks for years. To this day, I still can’t fucking stand German shepherds. (It somehow makes sense that Vince just bought one for himself.)

  Mexico was probably the best time of my childhood: I ran around naked with the Mexican kids on the beach near our cottage, played with the goats and chickens roaming the neighborhood like they owned it, ate ceviche, went into town for fire-cooked corn ears wrapped in tinfoil, and, at the age of seven, smoked pot for the first time with my mother.

  When Mexico grew stale for them, we returned to Idaho, where my grandparents bought me my first phonograph, a gray plastic toy that only played singles. It had a needle on the lid, so whenever it was closed the song played and when it was open it stopped. I used to listen to Alvin and the Chipmunks all the time, which my mother never let me forget.

  A year later, we all piled into a U-Haul trailer and headed for El Paso, Texas. My grandfather slept in a sleeping bag outside, my grandmother napped in a seat, and I curled up on the floor like a dog. At the age of eight, I was already sick of touring.

  After so much traveling, spending most of my time in the company of myself, friendship became like television to me: It was something to flip on now and then to distract myself from the fact that I was alone. Whenever I was around a group of kids my age, I felt awkward and out of place. In school, I had trouble focusing. It was hard to care or pay attention when I knew that before the year was up, I’d be gone and never have to see any of those teachers or kids again.

  In El Paso, my grandfather worked at a Shell gas station, my grandmother stayed in the trailer, and I went to the local grade school, where the kids were merciless. They pushed me, picked on me, and said I ran like a girl. Every day as I walked alone to school, I’d have to cross the high school yard and get pelted with soccer balls, footballs, and food. To further my humiliation, my grandfather cut my hair, which my mother had always let grow long, into a flattop—not the most popular style in the late sixties.

  I eventually grew to like El Paso because I started spending time with Victor, a hyperactive Mexican kid who lived across the street. We became best friends and did everything together, enabling me to ignore the scores of other kids who hated my guts because I was poor white California trash. But just as I began to get comfortable, the inevitable news came: We were moving again. I was devastated, because this time I would have to leave someone behind, Victor.

  WE MOVED TO THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT in Anthony, New Mexico, because my grandparents thought they could make more money on a hog farm. We raised chickens and rabbits as well as pigs. My job was to take each rabbit, hold him by his hind legs, grab a stick, and smash it into the fur on the back of his head. His body would convulse in my hands, blood would drip out of his nose, and I’d stand there thinking, “He was just my friend. I’m killing my friends.” But at the same time I knew that slaughtering them was my role in the family; it was what I had to do to become a man.

  fig. 4

  Nikki’s sixth grade report card, Anthony, New Mexico, Gasden School District

  fig. 5

  Nikki’s father, Frank Feranna

  School was a ninety-minute bus ride of unpaved roads and constant bullying away. When we arrived, the older kids who sat in the back of the bus would push me to the ground and stand on me until I gave them my lunch money. After the first seven times, I vowed that it would never happen again. The next day, it happened again.

  The following morning, I brought a metal Apollo 13 lunch box with me and filled it with rocks at the bus stop. As soon as we arrived at school, I ran off the bus and, as usual, they caught up with me. But this time, I started swinging, breaking noses, denting heads, and sending blood everywhere until the lunch box broke open on connecting with the face of one inbred shitkicker.

  They never fucked with me again—and I felt power. Instead of cowering around older kids, I’d just think, “Don’t start with me, because I will fuck you up.” And I did: If anyone pushed me, I’d fucking deck them. I was demented, and they all started to realize that and kept their distance. Instead of skipping stones when I was alone, I started walking down dirt roads with my BB gun, picking off all things animate and inanimate. My only friend was an old lady who lived in a trailer nearby, all alone in the middle of the desert. She’d sit on her faded flower-patterned couch and drink vodka while I fed the goldfish.

  After a year of living in Anthony, my grandparents decided that raising pigs wasn’t the road to riches they had thought it would be. When they told me we’d be moving back to El Paso—one block from our old house—I was ecstatic. I would get to see my friend Victor again.

  But I wasn’t the same me anymore—I was bitter and destructive—and Victor had found new friends. I passed by his house at least twice a day, feeling my isolation and anger grow, before walking through the high school to get pelted with sports equipment on the way to the Gasden District Junior High that I hated. I started stealing books and clothes from people’s lockers out of spite and going into the general store, Piggly Wiggly’s, and swiping candy and sticking Hot Wheels in the ten-cent bags of popcorn hoping people would choke on them. For Christmas, my grandfather sold some of his most prized possessions—including his radio and his only suit—just to buy me a buck knife, and I rewarded his sacrifice by using it to slash tires. Revenge, self-hate, and boredom had opened up the path to juvenile delinquency for me. And I chose to follow it to the very end.

  My grandparents eventually moved back to Idaho, to a sixty-acre cornfield in Twin Falls. We lived next to a silage pit, which is where the extra husks and waste left over after harvesting were dumped, mixed with chemicals, covered with plastic, and left to rot in the ground until they stank enough to feed to the cows. I lived a Huckleberry Finn life that summer—fishing in the creek, walking along the railroad tracks, crushing pennies under trains, and building forts out of haystacks.

  Most evenings, I would run around the house, pretending like I had a motorcycle, then lock myself in my room and listen to the radio. One night, the DJ played “Big Bad John,” by Jimmy Dean, and I lost my mind. It cut through the boredom like a scythe. The song had style and attitude: It was cool. “I found it,” I thought. “This is what I’ve been looking for.” I phoned the station so much to request “Big Bad John” that the DJ told me to stop calling.

  When school started, it was like Anthony all over again. The kids picked on me and I had to resort to my fists to stop them. They made fun of my hair, my face, my shoes, my clothes—nothing about me f
it. I felt like a puzzle with a piece missing, and I couldn’t figure out what that piece was or where I could find it. So I joined the football team because violence was the only thing that gave me any sense of power over other people. I made the first string and, though I played both offense and defense, I thrived as a defensive end where I could just cream the quarterbacks. I loved hurting those motherfuckers. I was psycho. I’d get so worked up on the field I’d whip my helmet off and start smashing other kids with it, just like it was my Apollo 13 lunch box in Anthony. My grandfather still tells me, “You play rock and roll exactly like you played football.”

  Through football came respect, and through football and respect came girls. They started noticing me and I started noticing them. But just when I was finally starting to find a niche, my grandparents moved—to Jerome, Idaho—and I had to start all over again. But this time, there was a difference: thanks to Jimmy Dean, I had music. I’d listen to the radio ten hours a day: Deep Purple, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Pink Floyd. However, the first record that I bought was Nilsson Schmilsson, by Harry Nilsson. I had no choice.

  One of my first friends, a redneck named Pete, had a sister who was a tan, blond small-town hottie. She’d walk around in short cutoff jeans that sent me into convulsions of desire and panic. Her legs were golden arches, and every night in bed all I could think about was how well I would fit between them. I’d follow her around like a clown, tripping over my own shoes. She hung out at a combination pharmacy, soda shop, and record store where, when I finally saved up enough money to buy Deep Purple’s Fireball, she smiled at me with those big white teeth and suddenly I found myself buying Nilsson Schmilsson because she had mentioned it.

  It was Jerome that started me down the alley that would lead to Alcoholics Anonymous years later, where, coincidentally, I met and became friends with Harry Nilsson. (In fact, in a delusional state of sobriety, we actually talked about collaborating on an album.) Jerome had the highest substance abuse rate per capita of any city in the United States, which was impressive for a town of three thousand.

  I also made friends with a fellow dork named Allan Weeks, and we spent most of our time in his house, listening to Black Sabbath and Bread and staring at our school yearbook, talking about which girls we wanted to go out with. Of course, when it came down to it, we were pathetic. At high school dances we just stood outside, listening to music leak out the door and feeling uncomfortable when girls walked past because we were too scared to dance with them.

  That spring, we heard that a local band was coming to play at our high school and bought tickets. The bass player had a huge afro and a headband, like Jimi Hendrix, and the guitar player had long hair and a biker mustache, like a Hell’s Angel. They seemed so cool: They used real instruments, they had big amplifiers, and they held three hundred kids spellbound in a gymnasium in Jerome. It was the first time I had seen a live rock band, and I was awestruck (though they were probably hating whoever booked them in a shitty small-town high school). I don’t remember what they were called, what they sounded like, or whether they played cover songs or originals. All I knew was that they looked like gods.

  I was too goofy to ever have a chance with Pete’s sister, so I settled for Sarah Hopper: a fat, freckled girl with glasses, no cutoff shorts, and legs that looked more like pasty semicircles than golden arches. Sarah and I would hold hands and walk around downtown Jerome, which was about one city block. Then we’d go to the pharmacy and look at the same records over and over. Sometimes, to impress her, I’d walk out with a Beatles album hidden under my shirt and we’d listen to it at the immaculate house where her Quaker parents lived.

  One night, I was lying on my grandparents’ avocado-green carpet when their black Bakelite phone, which was used so rarely that it just hung on the wall with no chair or table around it, rang. “I want to give you a present,” the voice on the other end—Sarah’s—said.

  “Well, what is it?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you the initials,” she cooed into the receiver. “B.J.”

  And I replied, “What’s that?”

  “I’m baby-sitting. Just come over.”

  As I walked to meet her, I mulled over the possibilities—a Billy Joel record, a Baby Jesus figurine, a Big Joint? When I got there, she was wearing ill-fitting red lingerie that belonged to the woman who owned the house.

  “Do you want to go into the bedroom?” she asked, leaning with her elbow against the wall and her hand on her head.

  “Why?” I asked like an idiot.

  So while the kids played in the room next door, I had sex for the first time and discovered that it was like masturbation, but a lot more work.

  Sarah, however, wasn’t letting me off easy. She wanted it all the time: As her parents made cookies for us at her house, I’d bonk their daughter in the other room. While her parents were in church, Sarah and I would slip out to the car. That was the routine until I came to a sudden realization that all men must face at least once during the course of their lives: I was bonking the ugliest girl in town. Why not step it up a notch?

  So I shed Sarah Hopper and, while I was at it, dumped Allan Weeks, too. And I didn’t give a shit about how they felt because it was the first time I ever had the courage to believe I could rise above the bottom of the barrel. Instead, I started hanging out with the classy kids, like a three-hundred-pound Mexican named Bubba Smith. I had gotten laid and started doing alcohol and drugs, which I thought made me look pretty hip—especially under the black lights I soon bought for my bedroom. And, as anyone with a teenager in the house knows, once there are black lights in the bedroom, that kid is no longer yours. He belongs to his friends. Goodbye chocolate chip cookies and Beatles, hello weed and Iron Maiden.

  I was still far from the coolest kids in Jerome. They had cars; we had bicycles, which we’d use to ride around the park and terrorize couples making out. I’d come home late, amped up on pot, and watch Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. And if my grandparents tried in any way to constrain or criticize me, I’d flip out. It was too much for them to handle night after night. So they sent me away to live with my mother, who had migrated with my half sister, Ceci, to the Queen Ann Hill area of Seattle, where they lived with her new husband, Ramone, a big, tenderhearted Mexican with a low-rider and slicked-back black hair.

  HERE, FINALLY, WAS A CITY CRAWLING with creeps and degenerates, a city big enough to cater to my drug-taking, alcohol-drinking, music-obsessed state. Ramone listened to El Chicano, Chuck Mangione, Sly and the Family Stone, and all kinds of Hispanic jazz and funk, which, between tokes on a joint, he’d try to teach me to play on a beat-up, out-of-tune acoustic guitar with a missing A string.

  We soon moved, of course, to an area nearby called Fort Bliss, a massive cluster of small four-apartment pod buildings for people on welfare. On my first day of school, instead of beating me up, my classmates asked if I was in a band. So I told them I was.

  I had to take two buses to school and, to kill time during the half-hour wait for the second bus, I’d stop by an instrument store called West Music. There was a beautiful Les Paul gold-top guitar hanging on the wall that had a clear, rich tone. When I played it, I tried to imagine that I was shredding up the stage with the Stooges, sending squealing guitar solos spiraling to the rafters as Iggy Pop convulsed at the microphone stand and the audience erupted like they did in that high school gym in Jerome. At school, I befriended a rocker named Rick Van Zant, a longhaired stoner who played in a band and had a Stratocaster guitar and a Marshall amp stack in his basement. He said he needed a bassist, but I had no instrument.

  So I walked into West Music one afternoon with an empty guitar case one of Rick’s friends had loaned me. I asked for a work application and, when the guy turned around to find one, I stuck a guitar into the case. My heart was hammering through my shirt and I could hardly speak when he handed me the form. As I examined it, I noticed that the price tag for the guitar was hanging out of the case. I told him I’d come back and drop off the application,
and walked out as casually as I could, accidentally banging the conspicuous guitar case into walls, doors, and drum sets as I left.

  I had my first guitar. I was ready to rock, so I headed straight for Rick’s basement.

  “You need a bassist,” I told him. “I’m your man.”

  “You need a bass guitar,” he sneered.

  “Beautiful,” I replied as I threw the case on a table, opened it up, and pulled out my newest possession.

  “That’s a guitar, you fucking idiot.”

  “I know,” I lied. “I’ll play bass on the guitar.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  So I bid farewell to my first guitar and sold it, using the money to buy a shiny black Rickenbacker bass with a white pick guard. Every day I’d try to learn the Stooges, Sparks (especially “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”), and Aerosmith. I wanted so badly to join Rick’s band, but they knew as well as I did that I couldn’t play for shit. Besides, they were more into traditional big-riff rockers, like Ritchie Blackmore, Cream, and Alice Cooper (especially Muscle of Love). A guy across the street from him was starting a band called Mary Jane’s, so I tried to jam with him, but I was hopeless. All I could do was pick a note every thirty seconds or so and hope it was the right one.

  Finally, outside an eighteen-and-over show I was trying to get into, I met a guy named Gaylord, a punk rocker who had his own apartment and band, the Vidiots. Every day after school, I’d go to his house and drink until I passed out, listening to the New York Dolls, the MC5, and Blue Cheer. There’d always be a dozen glammed-out New York Dolls–looking chicks and dudes there, wearing fingernail polish and eye makeup. They called us the Whiz Kids, not because we took a lot of speed—which we did—but because we were flashy dressers, like David Bowie, whose Young Americans album had just come out. Like the mods in England, we’d sell drugs to buy clothes. I practically moved into Gaylord’s and stopped going home. I did drugs all the time—pot, mescaline, acid, crank—and was soon a bona fide punk-rock Whiz Kid selling drugs for them.