by Jim Lindberg
Pennywise had been playing together for just under a year when Fletcher, the 6'5", 300-pound guitar player, came into the local watering hole where I was playing in a cover band and told me they needed a new lead singer. I went over to their practice place, which was a small, beat-down, one-car clapboard garage covered in skate punk graffiti. The windows buzzed and the whole place rattled and shook from the sound of them playing inside. I remember standing outside the door listening and wondering if I should go in. I was about to walk away when I thought to myself that I’d never worried about looking stupid before, so I might as well give it a try. It was impossible for me to know at the time that when I opened the door to that sweaty carpet cave, I was opening the door to the next twenty years of my life.
After that first practice on Irena Street, with Fletcher playing as fast and as loud as he could, Byron, the drummer, doing tom rolls up and down his kit in the time it would take most drummers to do one, Jason sweating and hammering away on his beloved Rickenbacker bass, and me just trying to keep up with them, things started to develop pretty fast for us. We played a lot of backyard parties that got bigger and rowdier each time, usually ending with a battalion of cop cars swooping in and scattering the crowd. With the help of a local friend who was starting his own label, we made our first recording at a tiny studio in Venice Beach, where we were constantly being told by the engineers to quit screwing around and play the songs right. A DJ at a local college station gave it to Brett Gurewitz, the renowned punk-scene guitarist and songwriter for Bad Religion, who had just put out our favorite new album, Suffer, on Epitaph Records, a tiny label he’d started on a loan from his dad. Fortunately for us, Brett liked what he heard and signed us to a record deal based on a cassette tape we made of our new songs on a ghetto blaster. I can still remember when Fletcher and Jason came to my house to tell me we were getting signed by Epitaph. We whooped it up and then sat there in disbelief that someone was going to give four screwed-up, delinquent kids from the South Bay a chance to record our own album.
Even though we had been signed to a record deal I still had to keep my day job, and it soon became apparent that I hadn’t inherited my father’s talent for salesmanship, as I hadn’t landed a single account in three months. I quit that job, and while moonlighting as a punk singer, I found work at an advertising brokerage firm, booking TV commercials to air during episodes of Baywatch and Jeopardy! At night we were recording our first album in a small one-bedroom bungalow in Hollywood and playing shows in dingy Sunset Strip clubs like Coconut Teaser and the Anti-Club, where local punk gangs from L.A., Venice, and the Valley would use our shows as a battleground for bloody gang fights. I’d go to work in the morning and tell my boss about how the night before I’d been surrounded in the bathroom and nearly stabbed by gang members, and he would just shake his head and complain to the team manager every time I mistakenly keyed in an ad to air during the wrong TV program that he had “a punk rocker for an assistant.”
Eventually, I convinced Jennifer that we should get married, and we moved into a tiny apartment in Hermosa. After two more equally unsuccessful jobs in the advertising industry, and with her supporting us as a sales team manager at a software company, I quit my day job so I could go on tour and gamble on a future as a full-time singer in a punk band. For a bunch of beach kids raised on beer and fast music, being let loose on the world in the back of a converted Dodge van to go on tour meant that we would basically start partying when we left for the first show, and wouldn’t stop until we got home a month later. It’s not hard to see how, with hours of sitting around all day waiting to play later that night, the band and crew of a four-band bill would have little left to do but drink copious amounts of alcohol and challenge one another to perform ridiculous punk rock stunts, of which Fletcher was the grand champion, performing his patented up-the-nose and out-the-mouth chain trick that would cause him to throw up on unsuspecting bystanders. Our record deal gave us carte blanche to continue acting like young, irresponsible punks, and even though our songs were Minor Threat-and 7 Seconds-inspired Thoreau-ian punk rock rallying cries to “live life by your own rules,” when we were on the road it was all about chaos and destruction.
With Fletcher as our ring leader, he and his band of merry drunken crew men would destroy backstage areas and antagonize security guards and local authorities and basically anyone trying to rope in his good time. During our show the crowd would sometimes spontaneously come up on stage unprovoked, breaking down the wall between band and audience, a spectacle that usually ended in something that to the untrained eye would look like a small-scale riot, but what was really just a bacchanalian celebration of being alive and having a good time. Afterward Fletcher would adopt a group of fans, maybe destroy a minimart or truck stop while stocking up on beer and microwaveable burritos, and then go back to the hotel to trash more rooms and hassle security guards. We’d get a few hours of sleep and then wake up to do it all again.
While the punk rock, surf, and skate scene fell on lean times in the late 1980s, a strong resurgence began to develop in the early ’90s when Nirvana exploded, and action sports aerialists Kelly Slater and Tony Hawk started pushing their sports to new levels. When young video directors started using music from underground skate punk bands like us, NOFX, Rancid, the Offspring, and Blink 182 as the sound tracks to their videos, we saw our popularity increase around the world. By our second tour we were playing to large crowds of surfers, skaters, and street punks all over Europe, Australia, and North America, anywhere there was a healthy independent music scene happening. All the surf industry companies wanted us wearing their clothes and sporting their shades, and where we came from, being sponsored meant you’d made it, so who were we to turn them down? I can remember being on stage at one particularly massive festival in Europe and glancing over at Jason, and we exchanged a look of amazement, that somehow, against all odds, we were living out our dreams of playing music for thousands of people, and every night seemed like a nonstop party.
With Jennifer at home moving up the corporate ladder at her new job, we planned that one day when we were ready, we’d settle down and start a family, but at the time I was having too much fun being young and carefree and traveling the world playing in my punk band and watching Fletcher barf on people. The threat of any kind of real responsibility seemed decades away.
2
PARTY AT GROUND ZERO
I was furiously playing guitar in our sweltering garage one summer afternoon trying to come up with the fiftieth song for our next album and getting nowhere. I’d been working on one song all afternoon, thinking I’d just come up with the next big feel-good punk rock hit of the summer, when I realized it was “Sweet Home Alabama,” just played a lot faster. I was staring at the six strings of my Les Paul, waiting for inspiration, when suddenly the garage door swung open, blinding me. Jennifer knows not to interrupt the songwriting genius when he’s working, so already I wasn’t in a great mood. She then came over and gave me what looked like a birthday card in a yellow envelope.
The first wave of panic hit me because I thought I must have forgotten our anniversary. I quickly started looking around the garage at the hammers and wrenches on the pegboard so I could fashion a makeshift present to give to her, but this was the summer and our anniversary was in May. I can always remember this because we were married during the weekend of the L.A. Riots in ’92, up on a hill in Palos Verdes that overlooks the city. (For our first dance, our guests got to watch the smoke rising from the burning Korean grocery stores behind us.) I opened the envelope, took out the card, and read on the cover, “To the new father-to-be…”
Some guys react to the news that they’re going to be a father like someone has just thrown a toaster into their bathtub. They’re in such denial they get all pissed off and want to know how it happened, as if they weren’t in the same room when she was riding them bareback like a mechanical bull for eight hours. Others who’d been planning to get their wives pregnant are just relieved to find out t
hat all their plumbing works. There’s something that makes guys want to trade high fives and moon walk and salute the crowd like they’ve just sunk the game-winning shot when they find out they’ve impregnated their wives, when in fact all they did was climb on top and poke their girlfriend for the hundredth time.
Although we’d been planning on having kids one day, it always seemed like something way off in the distant future. When she first told me she was going off the pill, I must have processed it like everything else in the daily list of chores she gives me while I’m drinking my coffee and reading the morning paper; in other words, it went in one ear and out the other. “I need you to take some shirts to the dry cleaners, stop and get a quart of milk, I went off the pill so we could be having kids soon and your life could be over, and, oh yeah, don’t forget to pay the phone bill.”
The news hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. Staring down at the card, I got a hot flash and my knees started to buckle a little bit. I wasn’t ready for this. I’m the singer for a punk band; you don’t give us babies. You give us a microphone and a can of beer, put us in the back of a van, and send us on the road for the rest of our lives. I don’t change diapers, I yell out in defiance and rage against machines. Our band was just about to go on the Warped Tour and I was staring down a month’s worth of shows in the heat of the summer, playing to thousands of sweaty, shirtless, adrenaline-pumped dudes, and I didn’t have time for morning sickness and Lamaze class and baby-proofing, much less children. Besides, I was the most irresponsible person I knew. In high school I’d been suspended three times and expelled once. I eventually graduated from college but that was only because they had the best parties there. I’d had a total of four jobs since graduating and ended up quitting all of them within a year, and now I spent most of my time going on stage and acting like a spoiled three-year-old, complaining about how the world wasn’t exactly how I liked it. I was not the picture of a perfect responsible dad in training, I was a world-class screwup.
She then showed me the small in-home early pregnancy test and explained many times in detail, to which I again asked multiple times for clarification that the two blue lines meant she was indeed pregnant and that we would be having a baby in nine months time. My mind started racing, thinking about everything that was riding on the backs of those two thin lines, the crushing reality of the decades of responsibility that lay ahead of us, and what it all meant. After all, we both still felt like kids ourselves. Wasn’t it just a few years ago we were still in high school, drinking and partying every night, going out to Hollywood to see Social Distortion and X shows, and sponging off our parents for everything we needed in life? Would I still be able to do all the irresponsible, inappropriate, and unseemly things I enjoyed doing? Would I turn Republican? What the hell was going to happen to me? Like two boundaries between our old life and the one that awaited us, as stark and defiant as the border lines that divide countries and states, that tiny pair of indigo streaks defined the edge of a new frontier, bisecting our lives into two strict portions, the years spent before and those spent after having kids.
START SPREADING THE NEWS
After we both digested the results of the E.P.T. and the next day the doctor confirmed that yes, we would be having a baby in nine months time, of course the first thing we wanted to do was start telling people, beginning with my mom and dad. Most parents will be overjoyed and freak out and cry and make a big spectacle of themselves, and you should count yourselves lucky if this happens to you because it pretty much guarantees you’re going to have unlimited babysitting for as long as you need it. My parents, on the other hand, had just been through the wonderful, rewarding hell ride of raising my sister and me and probably felt lucky to have made it out the other side relatively sane and with a few dollars left in their savings account. During my junior year of high school on a school night, my mom caught me trying to drunkenly sneak back into my room at five in the morning after being out all night at a show in Hollywood. Since the heavily eye-linered Mike Ness, lead singer of Social Distortion was my latest role model, I’d dyed my hair jet black and used egg whites to make it stand straight up on end, and I had black goth eye makeup streaming down my face. When she came into my room to check on me, instead of having her little cherubic angel tucked in bed for school the next day, she found some kind of prepubescent, postapocalyptic, teenage zombie boy with porcupine hair, laughing drunk and hanging halfway out the window. She took one look at me and yelled, “I’VE RAISED A COUPLE OF FREAKS!” and burst out crying.
So although they were cautiously happy about our big announcement, they both knew all too well what we were getting ourselves into. They probably weren’t thrilled to be prematurely forced into the title of grandparents again, either. When they heard the news, I’m sure they had visions of themselves hunched over walkers in polyester tracksuits, ordering the fish sticks and Jell-O plate from the Silver Fox menu at Denny’s. They may also have suddenly realized that after having finally pawned me off onto society and turned my bedroom into a fitness center, now they’d have more grandchildren to deal with and worry about. So, considering what I’d put them through, I let my mom call herself “Nana” and tried not to be upset when my dad didn’t use the “World’s Best Grandpa” beer holder I gave him right away.
When it comes to telling your friends, there’s a pecking order you need to follow because if your pretty good friend finds out before your best friend, your best friend will be pissed. If this person hears that you’re having a kid from the guy at the local skateboard shop, he might not say anything, but inside, you’re dead to him. Our friends who already had kids were happy for us, because now they had someone to swap diaper stories with, but we could tell that some of the others weren’t as thrilled with the news. Our graduation into parenthood forced some of them to unwillingly take stock of their own lives, especially those that had the kind of parents who were constantly asking them when they were going to get married and give them some grandchildren. Some of my friends probably worried that they were losing a drinking buddy to a life of dirty diapers, parenting groups, and playgrounds. To them, I may as well have said we were moving to Alaska, because even with promises that we would write, they knew they’d be lucky to see us at all between birthday parties, Disneyland trips, and piano recitals.
I’m not sure how my fellow bandmates took the news, either, because, let’s face it, being a dad isn’t very punk rock. Punk is supposed to be about nihilism, and nihilism and parenting don’t really go hand in hand. Becoming a father means that you actually have to care about something and begin to take on responsibility, whereas punk rock is about not giving a crap about anything. I’m sure they worried about how I was going to maintain my punk rock attitude while pushing around a baby stroller and carrying a diaper bag. They also probably feared that this development was going to put some pretty strict limitations on the amount of time I’d be able to go on tour if I needed to be at home spooning bites of mushed carrots into a baby’s mouth. Although no one let on, I’m sure they were wondering if my becoming a father would make me lose my edge. What would it do to our tough guy image if I was doing stage dives with a one-year-old in Winnie the Pooh pajamas?
I tried not to let anyone’s reaction to the news that we were having a kid get to me though, especially the ones who heard the news, shrugged, and asked me to pass the beer nuts. This was my deal and I couldn’t control what other people thought about it. I just tried to follow the golden rule: “Do unto others how you’d want them to do unto you, and if they still have a problem, screw ’em.” For your buddy who’s worried that he’s going to lose his wingman, you take him out for a cold beer and explain that the “new” you is going to be the same as the “old” you, except the “new” you might have a baby strapped to his chest and spit-up running down his shoulder. If he still complains, you buy him a soft taco and tell him to quit being a wuss.
NAUSEA
When it came to pregnancy, I knew next to nothing about what to expect o
ther than what I’d seen on TV shows. I had sitcom images of my wife turning into some kind of swollen hormonal bitch from hell, throwing up like a lawn sprinkler after eating pickles and ice cream all day, and looking like she’d swallowed a beach ball. I found out soon enough that physical signs of pregnancy are different for most women. Some go through the entire pregnancy like one of those long-distance runners who look as happy and energetic crossing the finish line as they did at the start, while others look like the one who collapsed halfway through and crapped her running shorts. The wife of one of my best friends pretty much puked all the time. You could be sitting there talking to her and just mention the words “pepperoni pizza” or “baloney sandwich” and she would just quietly open her purse and hurl into it. Jennifer didn’t throw up that much, but she was tired, achy, and felt vaguely nauseous the entire first trimester. She was also so absentminded she’d miss doctors’ appointments, lose her car keys, and then get all flustered and just take a nap somewhere.