A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  He was nineteen or twenty at the time and had some serious chops—major cred as an addict and rocker on the punk scene in Riverside, by way of early training in Huntington Beach, where he lived as a preteen with his mother and stepsister before they landed in the Inland Empire. At the beach, he had gotten involved with skinheads, dressing the part, an angry kid in combat boots and leather. For him, skinheads were a form of protection against a cruel world and also a bulwark against a stepfather who was a violent disciplinarian. Not that they intervened, but he was comforted by their presence; they were a ready-made brotherhood for a kid who didn’t have one. He was doing acid then, causing mayhem around town, and his mother tried the tough love approach, sending him to Phoenix House for a twelve-month stint in the early 1980s. Phoenix House was one of the country’s first addiction treatment centers, forming alliances with law enforcement agencies everywhere as the drug problem erupted across the land, making arrangements with courts and parents to keep kids in rehab lockdown as an alternative to actually going to jail. When Chuck emerged, nothing had changed, other than the fact that he was one pissed-off kid, and more determined than ever to make his mark.

  To get away from the skinhead scene at the beach, Chuck’s mother took the kids and followed a time-honored trail that led to the Promised Land; although for her it was west to east, still into the desert, to the city of Riverside. It had the amenities of an urban center, she reasoned, and with all of the wide-open space out there, her kids would have room to breathe—and live. But the desert is a trickster sometimes, a blank slate on which many a projection is made and thought to be confirmed, even when it calls from a distance and the dreamer has not yet paid it a personal visit. The endless vistas with the still and frozen plants and the post-rainstorm flower and frog surprises and the granite mesas you can lie across and soak up the warmth from when it’s hot are the one true thing that calms the restless soul, asking not for a reaction but a submission, a letting go, if only the dreamer can do such a thing. Perhaps, for a little while—in retrospect, for Chuck and his family, maybe it was a few hours or days or weeks possibly—it seems that they did so. But as it happened, there were skinheads in the desert—all over So Cal, actually—and one day Chuck would find himself among them again, long after he had been following a different path.

  It’s not that he calmed down in Riverside—far from it. Inside Chuck’s head there was a lot of static. It came out via music and in all manner of raging. At the time America was involved in two desert wars. One was far away in Iraq and Kuwait, the Gulf War. But on the home front, there was a siege involving poor kids who lived in areas dependent on income from members of the military who were stationed at nearby bases and shopped in local cities and towns. Many of these soldiers and Marines and members of the Air Force were deployed, and the American desert was bereft of income. There was little money flowing through the pipeline of gas stations, fast food joints, bars, and other establishments that depended on the men and women of the US military to drop a lot of cash every other week on payday. The situation created a lot of stress in homes across the region, and hit hardest were the kids, many of whom had found themselves in various battles since they were born. Now, the violence in their homes spiked, and they acted out accordingly.

  In terms of who had what role in the platoon of lost children, Chuck Kueck was always the first in. Diving through a broken window at the liquor store was just one example. Another one occurred during a family reunion in Laughlin, Nevada. Chuck’s uncle had brought some fireworks to celebrate the rare occasion. On the eighth floor of a hotel, Chuck lit a bottle rocket, sending an elderly woman to the hospital. Then there was the thing that happened one night at a show at Spanky’s. The place was packed, and there had been a number of hot bands playing—punk, ska, maybe some metal. In the middle of a particularly intense set, with action at the mosh pit in full effect, the music suddenly stopped—or at least it became barely audible. When a high is interrupted, especially one involving hundreds of pumped-up, tweaked, and blasted teenagers packed into a small place with few lights and poor ventilation, anything can happen—and did. Projectiles were thrown at the band—cans, bottles, hammers—someone stormed the ticket guy, and then he was trampled; the mosh pit erupted into a free-for-all with a tier of kids piling up as some screamed for air.

  Watching it all was a thirteen-year-old named Fritz Aragon, a regular on the scene; he had seen some kid with a Mohawk unplug the electrical cord for the band’s amps and then leap into the pit of moshing fans. The next day when he was walking to school on La Sierra, he spotted a lanky boy with freaky hair on the other side of the street. He was heading toward Fritz. “Oh my God,” he thought, “that’s the kid who unplugged the show.” It was Chuck Kueck. They struck up a conversation, decided to skip school, and headed over to Chris Smallwood’s, where Chuck was then living. For the rest of the day, they played music. But before they jammed, Fritz noticed something strange. “What’s up with this old guy?” he thought. “Why is he here?” “He” was Chris, on lead guitar. At thirteen, the boy had gray hair; the kid with the murdered father had grown up really fast. And so had Chuck: as he told his friends, after his own father had walked out, his mother had remarried. His stepfather had treated him with cruelty, and his mother was plagued with her own problems. Although she was now divorced and had a new boyfriend, the damage was done and escalating; no wonder he was swallowing pills and guzzling booze and, soon, jamming smack-filled needles into his arm. It all came out in their music, and it wasn’t long before Chuck and Chris and Fritz were playing in a new band called Falling Sickness, after the archaic name for epilepsy; none of them had it, but for sure they were all falling down—wasn’t everyone?

  But behind the label, trouble was brewing, and one night it all erupted at Chris Smallwood’s house. Chris and Chuck and Rande had been out waging mayhem, their own brand of urban terror. For kicks, they used to set off gopher bombs at Stater Brothers and other large stores in the area. Gopher bombs are incendiary devices sold in many places, used to wipe out small animals such as moles, voles, ground squirrels, gophers, and so on. You light the fuse and drop the lit end of “The Giant Destroyer” or whatever device you purchase into the animal’s burrow. Once lit, the item becomes a smoke bomb, sending sulfur into the tunnel and smothering small creatures that live there. But the bombs can start fires or, if dropped into air vents, emit foul odors into crowds, setting off smoke alarms and sending people into the streets. It was a successful night of local vandalism for the three amigos, with bombs going off in several places and various citizens confronted with foul odors, smoke, and general disruption of activities.

  When the boys returned to home base in the morning, Virginia had just gotten off the phone with Al. They had been arguing. Wearing her characteristic muumuu, she greeted Chris and Rande and went outside to pick up the newspaper. Suddenly a green Jetta screeched across the lawn, driven by Al. He was heading for Virginia, trying to run her over. She jumped away and Al slammed on the brakes. Flying from the vehicle, he lunged for Virginia, who was trying to flee. Meanwhile Chris had ripped through the screen door and was running toward Al. Unbeknownst to Al, the three amigos had been keeping an ax handle covered in duct tape stashed away in case of a self-defense emergency. In fact, they had been preparing for months, lifting weights and doing push-ups; as Rande recalls years later, “We were eighteen and ready.” Chris’s sister Amanda ran for the ax and handed it to Rande. He rushed out with the weapon and Chris grabbed it, attacking Al and subduing him with serious blows. Rande piled on and they both returned the years of violence with their own amped up kicks and strikes as Virginia kept calling “Stop!” It was a bloody and prolonged battle for household supremacy, but the boys won. With a black-and-white racing towards the scene, Amanda chucked the ax in the brush behind the house. Al was severely battered and appeared to have broken bones. When the cop asked what happened, he said the boys had attacked him and he didn’t know why. But the twenty feet of skid marks an
d the general situation said otherwise. Chris and Rande explained their story and Virginia backed them up. There were no arrests and Al was taken to the hospital. As for the Jetta, no one remembers.

  The cycle of violence inside the Smallwood house had come to an end, and Chris’s mother was grateful. But the battle would reverberate for all of them, for years. And it also cemented their bond; including Chuck, they were now the three amigos forever. As Rande Linville describes it years later: “It was fuck you and your perfect family. We never had one.”

  Yet trouble has a way of hanging around, and its favorite was Chuck. On the last day of summer school after his junior year, he took six hits of acid, stole someone’s tricycle, and was riding erratically through downtown Riverside wearing his leather jacket. Was he acting “trippy”? Did he do something that seemed out of the ordinary, such as have a conversation with a door or tree or parked vehicle? We do not know, but because of the stolen trike, an APB had been issued, and he wasn’t hard to spot, given his general demeanor and foot-high Mohawk, recently spray painted by his friends. We do not know who said what first, or exactly what Chuck was hearing, but when the cop stopped him, he went for his gun. There was a scuffle and it was over quickly. Chuck was cuffed, arrested, and thrown in the Riverside County tank—in particular, a cell filled with local skinheads and Nazis. Although they were once his presumed protectors, this was no longer the situation. His friends were now a wide range of cosmopolitan people who were making all sorts of kick-ass music, and they were drawing from reggae and ska and acid rock and punk—a rock and roll drift net that was sweeping up kids across the land and saving them from all manner of riptides at home.

  To further bind himself to this world, Chuck had asked a friend for an anti-Nazi tattoo, and the tat artist obliged him. In jail, he was covered up in the requisite orange jumpsuit. That doesn’t mean your cellmates don’t find out what’s on your skin; in fact, one of the first things that happens is someone will ask you to roll up your pants so everyone can see your tattoos. This was not something Chuck wanted to do, but he was forced to. The sight of an equality sign—a circle bearing the letter E on Chuck’s forearm—with a KKK figure hanging from it by a noose enraged his cellmates. They were amped up even more by the “Fuck off Nazis” inscription beneath it. “I got worked,” he told his friends when he was released, and they could see from the bruises and wires in his jaw that he wasn’t kidding. “The racist cop threw me in with the skinheads, and they rearranged my face.”

  From then on, his anti-establishment fervor spiked and so did his paranoia, and he vowed never to return to jail. Years later, it was a vow his father would make after his own time in the slammer, their lives an echo of one another, even intertwining during the years they had no contact, father and son on a strange downward spiral, both heading to the same place.

  As Chuck’s nosedive escalated, so did his fame. With his jailhouse stint, he was now an ex-con, as new war stories added to his chest. Girls were drawn to him more than ever, hoping either to rescue the bad boy, to be bad with him, or for a combination of both. One of these girls, a regular on the junkie circuit of kids that stretched from the California deserts into the northwestern cities of Portland and Seattle, began supplying Chuck with heroin. He liked it and began using regularly. Among other things, it made him feel close to Kurt Cobain. Like a lot of kids, he idolized the grunge king and found himself in the anguish of his songs. Soon he would head to Seattle and enter Cobain’s orbit. But there was another junkie he admired as well. This was Sid Vicious, who had recently OD’d and become more famous than ever with the release of the movie Sid and Nancy, which told the tale of his descent into addiction and the strange murder of his girlfriend in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, where they were living. Chuck wanted to live like that, deciding at some point in his heroin haze that it was time for a change. His friends in Riverside weren’t really hard-core enough; they were drinking and doing acid, maybe some other things, but not shooting smack. By then he was dressing like Sid Vicious, wearing a padlocked chain around his neck. To wipe out his old identity he changed his name to Jello, telling people it was after Jello Biafra in the Dead Kennedys. But really it was an old nickname he had gotten from the amigos while swimming in a pool filled with gelatin. “That’s when I knew Chuck was done,” Chris recalls years later. “When he told everyone to call him Jello.”

  But it would take a few years to finish the job. First he wanted to reconnect with his father. He knew that Don was living in the desert, and he decided to head out and see him. One of the first things he did when he got there was tell him about what happened in jail.

  MAY I HAVE THIS DANCE?

  Take my license ‘n’ all that jive.

  —Sammy Hagar, “I Can’t Drive 55”

  ON JUNE 6, 1994, AT HIGH NOON, DONALD CHARLES KUECK and Deputy Steve Sorensen had their first fateful encounter. As it escalated, both men became resolute and angry, and then frightened. They acted accordingly, becoming involved in a series of rapidly cascading mistakes and bad reads. In this encounter dark seeds were sown and they would flower nearly ten years later in a nearby pocket of the desert.

  Sorensen was heading west in a remote area on Avenue J in his 1990 red Toyota pickup, on his way to the North County Correctional Facility, or Wayside in cop parlance. He was stationed there as a guard—part of the mandatory work for all new recruits in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In front of him was a ’71 Lincoln, two, maybe three lengths ahead. Suddenly, Sorensen told police, the Lincoln slammed on its brakes, causing him to brake in order to avoid a collision. Thinking that the driver of the Lincoln had been trying to avoid an animal, he fell back to about eight car lengths and then accelerated, trying to pass the vehicle again. But between 130th Street East and 122nd Street East, the Lincoln braked two more times. At 121st Street East Sorensen tried to pass once more. But when he approached the rear of the Lincoln, it moved into the eastbound lane, causing him to swerve left to avoid a collision and head across the road onto the shoulder, with the Lincoln still in the way. Thinking that the driver was trying to force an accident, Sorensen reached for a pad and pencil that had fallen to the floorboards when he braked, retrieving it to write down the vehicle’s license plate number.

  From his rearview mirror, Kueck saw the deputy bending over and reaching toward the floor on the passenger side of his truck. As the truck veered closer to the Lincoln, Kueck became concerned that if the driver did not look up, there might be a collision, so he accelerated. Sorensen followed the Lincoln for another five hundred feet, until it stopped and the driver exited, walking quickly toward the pickup. “Hey motherfucker,” Kueck yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? I don’t tolerate this kind of shit!”

  Concerned that Kueck was about to harm him, Sorensen took out his badge and Beretta, identifying himself and pointing them both at Kueck. “You ain’t no real cop,” Kueck shouted. “And that badge don’t mean shit.” He continued to advance, and Sorensen told him to stop or he would shoot him. Kueck stopped, turned around, and put his hands behind his head. Sorensen then told him to lie down on the ground. “Fuck no! It’s too hot, man,” Kueck said, and put his hands on the Lincoln. At that point, a man in a truck in the westbound lane noticed the car with an open door on the side of the road and the pickup parked nearby. Thinking that the car had broken down and someone needed help, he turned around and saw that a man was standing there, with a gun aimed at another man near the back of the Lincoln. Sorensen told the motorist that he was an off-duty deputy and asked him to call for help. He contacted police on his CB radio and wondered if something awful was about to happen. “He ain’t a real cop,” Kueck kept yelling, refusing to stand still, jumping around and making several moves toward Sorensen, and then backing away like he was going to run. “I don’t have to listen to you ’til I get a lawyer,” he said to Sorensen, still pointing his gun at Kueck. Within minutes, a chopper landed in the adjacent alfalfa field, and a deputy emerged, ordering Kueck to lie d
own. Again he refused, lowering to his knees. At that point he was handcuffed and placed in the back seat of an arriving patrol car as several additional police vehicles converged on the scene.

  Statements were taken from Sorensen and Kueck, and they differed. Kueck explained that he hadn’t slammed on his brakes but was tapping the brake pedal to keep Sorensen from tailgating. He also said that when both vehicles had stopped and he got out of his car, Sorensen was already out of his truck, yelling orders and pointing his badge and gun. He claimed that he was the one who flagged down the motorist and had been following Sorensen’s orders all along, even though the deputy kept yelling, “I’m going to do you.” When an investigator asked him why he kept watching the truck in his rearview mirror and tapping his brakes, especially when he could see that the victim was not looking at the road, Kueck spun out a strange story about his car having fiber-optic cables that pointed toward the driver and lit up when the brake lights were on. When he finished giving his statement, he was released.

  He got back into his Lincoln and headed to a doctor’s appointment. A traffic incident report was filed, with statements from Sorensen, Kueck, officers on the scene, and eyewitnesses. At first, investigators found the report puzzling. Sorensen was on his way to work in a remote area, and there had been plenty of room to pass Kueck. There would have been no reason to tailgate. As for Kueck, he wasn’t speeding—the usual problem on far-flung desert roads—so something else was going on, as both men had said. Moreover, Kueck couldn’t have known at first that Sorensen was a cop; he was in a pickup truck and off-duty. Any driver might have been reluctant to pull over and face the wrath of a stranger. On the other hand, Kueck did appear to be driving erratically. Why was he obstructing a man in a truck behind him? What was the big deal about just letting someone pass? The deputy wasn’t trying to pull him over; he just wanted to get in front of the vehicle, until it became clear that was not going to happen. So what was the problem? Was Kueck tweaking? One of the passing motorists thought so, judging from his apparently manic demeanor. But maybe he was on edge for another reason. Only hours before his run-in with Steve, his son had told him about getting beaten up in jail, placing emphasis on having been set up by the guards. He might have been worked up about the story and taken it out on anyone who approached, especially when he found out that they were a cop. Not that his motivations mattered; for cops, traffic stops are the deadliest kind of police action, next to domestic violence calls, and anyone who causes trouble during one generally incurs the full force of the law.