Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  Of course, the Bad Brains had a lot to do with that whole shit by introducing religion and spiritualism to the New York Hardcore scene with Rastafarianism. With their influence, it just started a spiritual fire. Tomas, who lived with Jerry Williams at 171A, got into Krishna, and in turn got John Bloodclot and Watson and all those cats into it. Around that time, people on the scene were getting very political—left-wing/anarchy/peace/hippie Crass-holes, or right-wing pseudo-Nazi Skinhead, or straight edge, and everything else. Then there was John, trying to instill Krishna, vegetarianism, and good karma, but still always up to no good.

  One time John talked me into trying to rob one of the weed delivery services. He was a grown man talking a 15-year-old into laying in the snow and hiding with him for like three hours—with fake guns—to try to rob a pot delivery service! He was like, “I know what room their safe is in, we’ve just got to grab somebody, put the guns to them, and force them to open it”—with our plastic-ass fake-looking guns. That’s the type of shit this guy would do. Anyway, the robbery didn’t wind up happening, because we ended up laying there all night, didn’t get in, and we wound up abandoning ship. It was ridiculous: “the Hare Krishna criminal.” He was so hypocritical that it was funny—it just added to his character. We were definitely the two most unsuccessful criminals as far as that went. I mean, he’d always manage to pull one scam or another and get by. But there were some really dumb moments. However, one thing that we were really good at was shoplifting.

  Besides the free vegetarian food from Vinnie, it was up to what we could steal throughout the course of the day to survive. We were total kleptos when it came to that shit. I had a jacket with a pocket that was missing, so I could walk around looking like my hand was in my pocket—meanwhile, I’d be filling my jacket full of shit, and they couldn’t see it. We’d go into stores and walk out with over $100 worth of groceries! It was survival, you do what you have to do.

  But like I said, some of the moral values that this dude was propagating—someone who was trying to live “the spiritual path”—were pretty ridiculous. He once told me, “Dude, you can convince anybody anything, if you convince yourself first.” Then he gave me an example of a time he completely bullshitted his way on a cross-country bus or train or flight; just ask him, I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell the story. He got a free ticket ’cause he accused the person next to him of stealing his wallet! First, he started looking through his shit, making a big stink. “Yo, where’s my shit? Yo, where’s my wallet? That shit was right here, in my jacket pocket!” Everybody started noticing; people started to help him look for it. He started flipping on the dude sitting next to him, threatening to kick his ass and to call the cops! He flipped out so hard. It was like, “Yo, how could he be lying?” It got to the point that the person next to him was so freaked out and panic-stricken from John freaking the fuck out on him that the passengers chipped in to pay for his ticket! Everyone was trying to help him find a ticket he never had!

  Listening to him tell the shit, he was laughing his ass off the whole time: “You just gotta believe your own bullshit.” I guess he’s right, ’cause to this day people still believe the bullshit that guy says. But in his defense, he went through a lot of crazy shit growing up too. I don’t blame him for being who he is. I mean, despite it all, I still have love for the guy—he was like a brother or as close to one as I had at the time.

  Ultimately, the Hare Krishna influence was positive for me. Even Roger from Agnostic Front has said he credited that influence with saving me from prison or death. It helped turn me on to vegetarianism again, and over a period of time it definitely mellowed me out. It got me more philosophical. But since I had been a Skinhead and a hard-ass for so long, a lot of people on the scene started feeling a need to test me, to see if I still “had it.”

  Even people that I thought were my friends turned on me a little because of the whole Hare Krishna thing, people that I had been down with for years. It did bother me a little, but what can you do? I understood. I mean, I was confused and upset when Bloodclot, Watson, and especially Eric got into it; I felt they were being brain-washed or something. I just didn’t want to see my friends go—that’s really what it was. And I guess some of my old friends felt that same way. But for the most part, it was the new jacks talking shit. That’s when lines started getting drawn: who’s down with Agnostic Front-Warzone-Murphy’s Law, and who is down with John and Harley, etc. It was fucking lame as fuck.

  Basically a lot of the new kids that we didn’t give a fuck about—simply ’cause we didn’t know them and didn’t care—thought John and me were stuck-up, or aloof or some shit. Like we were better than everybody else or some shit. Maybe in some ways we thought we were. I know John always did, ’cause he talked shit about everything and everyone, like if you ate meat or if you didn’t believe in the same religion. Whatever it was, I never really gave a fuck; I just didn’t care what people thought of me.

  Some of the guys who became Cro-Mags’ roadies and some of our tight friends were also kind of following that spiritual path. Ironically, trying to spiritualize themselves, were some of the hardest motherfuckers you wouldn’t want to fuck with. My boy Bleu was a black belt.

  Bleu and me just had this weird chemistry. It seemed like every time we’d get together and go somewhere, we’d get in a fight. Not just a fight—we are talking serious beatings, where people would go to the hospital. It wasn’t like we’d seek them out, but we had some weird karmic connection. Shit would fly, and people would get fucked up. It always happened, on the street, at parties, at shows. Him, me, my boy Stig, and Squint, they were vegetarians, too. It was funny, we wouldn’t even wear leather; we were trying real hard to follow this path that we thought would lead us to a higher place. But at the same time we also had these beliefs that justified our violent streak, because we were somehow of the “warrior class,” and were not meant to take shit from nobody. We had this weird idea of how we fit in philosophically into the whole thing. These guys were meditating and practicing yoga all the time, but we were also getting in fuckin’ crazy fights all the time, and somehow it all made sense.

  But in reality, I don’t think I’m really that tough. There are plenty of people that could kick my ass. The only thing is, I grew up on the streets and around ill shit, and I just didn’t give a fuck. If I got in a fight with someone big, I’d grab something off the street, like a bottle, something out of a garbage can, or throw the garbage can at them! And I did train a lot and spar hard with my homies, who were all either black belts or great street fighters. We’d work on combinations, kicks, stretches—even weapons. We’d wrestle each other and do full-contact shit; we’d beat each other’s asses training.

  But as far as being a badass, it comes down to heart. If you ain’t got heart, you ain’t got heart. It don’t matter if a motherfucker is 90 pounds—if they are really “hungry” they’re gonna eat you alive. If motherfuckers are soft, no matter how big they are, no matter how many people they’re rolling with, they’re still soft inside. When you wind up dealing with a crazy motherfucker who’s got heart or who has no remorse in life, it doesn’t matter how little they are. Trust me, I’ve seen big motherfuckers get their asses kicked by little ones.

  But yeah, we were always getting into shit. If we didn’t find it, it found us. One night, we were in D.C., and we were getting ready to go to the O Street Hare Krishna Preaching Center, to eat and hear the lecture. We were standing on the street, and two rednecks drove by in a pickup truck and said some crude shit to this chick that Bleu and Squint knew. We were about eight or nine feet away, so they didn’t know that we were with her. So, being the assholes that we were, we had to make sure that they got reprimanded severely for their insults. We were probably just jonesing for an excuse to get in a fight or fuck somebody up, to be 100% honest.

  So we jumped in the car, and we followed these motherfuckers for like three or four miles, until we caught up to them at a red light. We jumped out with shovels that this chick ha
d in her car—I guess it was her dad’s car—and we started smashing in their windshields and taking out the side windows. My boy Bleu wails a brick through one window. Then Richie Stig picks one up, hurls it through the broken window, leans in, and screams in the guy’s face. Richie’s brother David was there too, and he’s smashing the car with a shovel the whole while. This one redneck is in his friend’s lap, bleeding and cowering, while we’re crushing their windows and the shovel is ripping holes in the hood of their car. And then we just hopped in our car and drove away. Meanwhile, the chick that got insulted, it was her dad’s car, and she doesn’t want any part of this. The whole shit lasted three to four minutes tops. It turns out the shit happened not more than two minutes from a police station. So some passerby took down our license plate. After this shit goes down, we go to the O Street Preaching Center for dinner.

  So we were at the Krishna Temple, having prasadam—food that has been offered to the Lord. All of a sudden, we hear walkie-talkies and see cops coming through the front door. We snuck through the temple room, where they just finished reading from Bhagavad Gita and everybody was eating. We tiptoed through the room, climbed out the back, down the back wall, and snuck out the back of the Hare Krishna Temple. Krishna Skinhead thugs—it sounds like something out of a Mel Brooks movie!

  The thing about Bleu was, like myself, he wasn’t a very big dude. He was under six feet, about 160 pounds maybe. He didn’t look like a tough guy. He sounded like the kind of guy that you’d be like, “I will fuck this dude up.” He just wasn’t very intimidating. And that was the problem—he was kind of a magnet for people who thought that they were hard. And they would get fucked up.

  One time, also in D.C., there was this big black Skinhead acting all hard, fucking with people in front of our show at the 9:30 Club. My boy Bleu looked at him like, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?” The dude walked up to him and said, “You’ve got something to say? What’s up, faggot?” And my boy just looked at him, like, “Yeah, all right.” But see, Bleu would always try to be discreet about when and where he’d bust someone’s ass. Usually, he’d wait ’til the end of the night, when our show was over and the gear and merch were packed up, and then he’d approach whoever had pissed him off, and basically take them the fuck out big-time. You have no idea how many shows we left peeling out of town with a bloody mess twitching behind us.

  So anyway, he saw that guy again later in the club. The guy had made his way downstairs to the backstage and was walking toward the dressing room in a little hallway. And I walked up right as Bleu was pulling on his SAP gloves, which are police gloves—they have eight ounces of powdered lead in the knuckles. We used to all have those gloves. I saw him pulling the gloves on, and I knew someone was about to get laid the fuck out. So I ran up behind him and put my hand on Bleu’s shoulder, and I’m about to stop him. I’m like, “No!!” And right as I said that—quicker than you could see it happen—he spun around, kicked this dude right in the temple. Mind you, this dude was like 6’4”. The dude’s head just cracked and tilted to the side. He was out before he hit the floor. And before the guy dropped, Bleu caught him with an overhand right while the dude was still frozen, with his head tilted to the side, a trickle of blood running out of a crack in the side of his skull. The dude dropped and hit the floor. He had plasma coming out of his head, and was twitching. Those were the kind of cats I was rolling with.

  I moved into the temple for a brief period of time. I really did believe there was a higher purpose in life, and I knew I was missing it. That was one of the phases of my journey; I was trying to “find myself.” One night on Avenue A, a bunch of the new-jack Skinheads made the mistake of starting a fight with Bleu, and John Watson and some other Krishna Skins. Bleu wheel-kicked one guy in the face, Watson bashed another dude’s head in with a skateboard. The “attacked” became the “attackers.” I got wind of this in the temple, that a bunch of my friends had gotten jumped. Even though these new-jacks lost, I still felt like they were attacking me and Krishna consciousness.

  So that Sunday I left the temple, and I went to CBGBs with the intention of fucking those dudes up. I remember vividly the stoop across the street, right around the corner from the deli—eight or nine of those cats were hanging out on the steps. Billy Psycho was one of them, this kid Eugene, and a few others. Anyway, I picked up a quarter-piece of a cinderblock and wrapped it in a T-shirt. So basically it looked like I had a T-shirt in my hand, but I had a good-sized piece of rock. This big black English rude-boy Skinhead friend of ours, Errol, told me that he asked John Bloodclot, “Should we go give Harley a hand?” John just laughed and said, “Nah, he can handle this.”

  I started walking over. I walked up the steps, right up into the middle of them. Everybody moved a bit away from me, and I stepped right up to the main one who had instigated the whole fight the previous weekend. I said, “So what’s up, Billy? You want to start some shit? You’ve got a problem? You want to fuck with my boys? What’s up?” He wouldn’t make eye contact with me—he was all stuttering, “Nah, nah man.” I smacked him in his face, and all of his friends got up and started backing away. So I smacked him again, and he started tearing at the eye—you know how when you get smacked real hard, your eye tears up? He had a big old nice imprint on his face of my hand, and I was like, “So what’s up motherfucker? You want to fuck with my boys?” At this point, he was backing away from me, and up the steps into the doorway. I was like, “What? You’ve got nothing to say now?” And right then, my boy Squint comes running past me and screams, “You lying fat pig!” It stuck in my memory—it was such a funny choice of words! He came flying up the stairs past me, and started pounding on this dude’s face like he was working a speed bag. He hit him so many fucking times that this guy couldn’t even raise his hands to defend himself; he was just getting pummeled.

  So he scrambled and jumped off the stoop past us and started running. Squint chased him across the street and down Broadway. I turned to one of the other guys who was one of the main instigators. And I’m like, “What’s up motherfucker? You want some?” Right as he made eye contact with me, one of my friends comes behind me with a sweatshirt with a brick in the pocket, holding it by the sleeves. He swung it over my shoulder, and caught the dude in the temple. The last thing the dude saw before he got knocked into a coma was me standing in front of him. So of course, he thought I did it to him. It was a bad scene. He hit the ground and blood started coming out of his ears and his nose. He hit the ground with such force that the impact caused his head to bounce back up, into sitting and then back down. He started doing “the fish” on the floor. When I say somebody’s doing the fish, it’s what we called it when they started twitching uncontrollably on the ground from getting fucked up real bad. Kind of like a fish that’s not in water.

  I’ve seen a lot of people do the fish over the years, but at that point it just turned into a really bad beatdown. I don’t remember if I kicked him first, but I remember my friend Errol blasted him in the face with a 40-ounce bottle, and then Squint ran up and blasted him with a brick in the chest. It was overkill. This guy was getting fucked up, and he wound up in a coma for a while. Everyone at the matinee was all freaked out and upset. I just looked around at them all as they gathered around us. I was like, “What!? They started that shit!”

  All those motherfuckers who thought they were badasses were crossing over to see what happened. They were looking at this kid in shock. I don’t think most of them had ever seen that kind of a beating. I started looking at all the assholes and yelled at them, “See what happens when you fuck around!” I wanted all these fuckers to know, “Don’t fuck with us or you will get fucked up!” That kid had to learn how to talk and walk again, but the way we looked at it, there were eight or nine of them sitting there. And when they jumped my boys, they outnumbered them. So, payback is a bitch. That’s why we went after them with such intensity. Besides, at first, I went after them by myself. They started it that past weekend when they jumped my frien
ds, so fuck it. But they all punked and scattered, then it turned into me and maybe three friends of mine taking on the whole bunch of them, and pretty much laying them to waste.

  The rumor was I delivered the damaging blow that put him in the coma. But that wasn’t the case. Anyway, no charges went against me. There were some retaliation attempts, but nothing that amounted to shit. After the dude finally got out of the hospital and learned how to talk again, we did a gig in Long Island like a few months later. It was at the club Sundance. Doug’s friend Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols was hanging there with us. It was a great show, and we had a blast. I think Steve missed most of our set ’cause he was getting a blowjob in the dressing room.

  But anyway, we were driving home from the show. We were speeding, trying to get home because it was late. We were doing like 70. All of a sudden, a black van pulls up next to us. The window rolls down, and a fucking cinder block comes flying at our windshield! It just bounced off the side window. We swerve, but our driver was able to recover quick. Steve Jones was in the van with us, and he was freaking, “What the fuck?! Who the fuck is that?” And me and Bleu are like, “Drive! Drive! Get after them! Step on the gas!” Steve is like, “No, no! Just let them go, let them go!” Anyway, they hit the gas, and just peeled away, so we lost them. But it was funny listening to Steve Jones freak out.

  A month or two later, I was in the city near Houston and 2nd Avenue. I was sitting on a stoop in front of this bar talking to Petey Hines. All of a sudden, a van slowly pulls up, and the door slides open. A bunch of guys came piling out, with ball-peen hammers and shit, and came running at us. I jumped up and used my momentum to drive forward as I jumped up from the curb. I grabbed the first guy, and drove him straight into a parked car, and then spun around and whipped him in front of me. I was still holding him, so while everybody was trying to hit me with hammers and tire irons, I was using this guy as a human shield! I had him by the sides of his jacket, and I was just swinging him from side to side, keeping him completely off balance. So he was taking most of the shots. I had my back to the car, so no one could really swing on me. As soon as I saw a chance, I punched one guy in the face as hard as I could. His knees buckled as he dropped and I ran through the hole I’d just created. I ran about 30 or 40 feet, and turned around to see who was coming. That’s when I realized that one of them was the kid that had been put into the coma. He had grown a goatee so it took me a minute to recognize him and figure out who he was. They were walking toward me spread out, through the middle of the avenue.