American Outlaw

by James, Jesse

  “Let’s give it up for Karessa!” sang the DJ, as she moved off the stage.

  “Karess-a?” I laughed.

  “What?” Kelly said. She looked at me, confused. “Her real name’s Karla.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, still smiling.

  “Karessa’s a very good name,” Kelly said, eyeing me distrustfully.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Very classy.”

  Later in the week, Mike called me up and said a double date was in the works; was I interested?

  “Heck, yeah,” I said. “I’m all about it. Just tell me where and when.”

  The four of us went to a Mexican restaurant in Long Beach. I was very nervous. At that point in my life, I hardly even knew how to function around real women. I just had no game at all.

  “Tell Karla about what you do, Jesse,” Mike prompted me.

  “I’m . . . I’m on the road a lot. With bands,” I stammered.

  “Jesse’s friends with all these famous dudes,” Mike said, talking me up. “He’s in security. Keeps everyone safe and sound.”

  “Sounds like a real mental workout,” Karla said, smiling. She was so pretty, she looked even more amazing in clothes than she did in the club. Her skin was tan and her hair blond. Every inch of her was confident and impeccable.

  “Are you . . . making fun of me?” I asked, reaching for a handful of tortilla chips and stuffing them in my mouth, embarrassed.

  “No way,” Karla said, smiling even bigger. “Why would I do that?”

  Over the course of dinner and our subsequent conversation, I realized that Karla was mature and well-spoken. She was a dancer, sure, but she obviously had her shit in line, and knew who she was. With a tingle of excitement, I thought to myself, Jesse James, you’re officially on a date with an older woman.

  I ended up dropping Mike and Kelly off first. Then I took Karla to her apartment in Huntington Beach.

  “Do you have roommates?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said. “I live by myself.”

  “I guess you have your own wheels, too, huh?”

  “Brand-new Mustang,” Karla said. Proudly, she pointed to her car in the lot. “Well, Jesse?”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you at least going to come up and take a look at my place?”

  I smiled, embarrassed. “I was sort of waiting for you to ask.”

  We made out rather drunkenly for a few minutes at her place, but it was very late, and another tour was beginning for me early the next morning.

  “I better go,” I said regretfully.

  “Too bad,” Karla said, smiling. “I was just beginning to like you.”

  “Do you . . . want to hang out when I get home from Europe?”

  “Maybe,” she said, smiling slyly. “I’ll consider it.”

  “All right,” I said. “What’s your number?”

  She scribbled it down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Are you really going to keep this?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just ask for Karessa, right?”

  She socked me in the arm. “That’s so funny.”

  We kissed a final time, and then I made for the door. My hand was on the doorknob, when she cleared her throat.

  “Hey.” I turned my head to look back at her. She shrugged, kind of shyly. “I really do want you to call me,” she said, finally.

  I grinned. “I will.”

  ——

  Karla stayed firmly in the forefront of my mind, and as soon as I returned home from my tour, I asked her out on another date. She accepted. That evening, over drinks, she regaled me with the latest tales from the bikini bar.

  “A guy this weekend tried to get kind of wise,” Karla said. “I had to do your job, Jesse.”

  “How’s that?” I asked, laughing.

  “I had to beat the shit out of him!” she said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all,” she said, cheerily. “Look, this jackass was trying to feel up on my friend Paulina, just being real rude and stupid. When she pushed his hand off, she spilled his drink all over his suit.”

  “Criminal,” I said, taking a long pull on my beer.

  “Isn’t it? So anyway, he got all pissed, and backhanded her!”

  “Ooh,” I said. “Unwise.”

  “Unforgivable. I punched him right in the head. And man, I about broke my hand! This idiot had a really hard head.”

  “Try not to use your knuckles on somebody’s skull,” I advised, as I motioned for another round for both of us. “Recipe for pain.”

  “So I’m a rookie,” Karla’s voice lowered conspiratorially. “Want to hear what happened next?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Yes! This jerk freaking punched me in the face. Broke my fucking nose,” Karla said, proudly. “That was the end of my night! I had to go to the hospital and get my nose set, so I can stay pretty. There was blood all over my bathing suit. Pretty sick!”

  I was speechless for a second. “Yes,” I said, finally. “That’s frightening.”

  She was an outlaw; that much was clear. And it became clearer, the more time we spent with each other. Karla had grown up an orphan in Pennsylvania. Her adoptive mother, whom she’d loved, had died when she was just seven years old, and from there, she had bounced around to a bevy of foster homes. Unsurprisingly, she had failed to make deep connections there. At eighteen, she’d come to California. When the opportunity came up to start dancing, making real money, she had taken it.

  “How, um . . .” I didn’t quite know how to phrase this. “How . . . um . . . ?”

  “How old am I?”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty,” she answered. “And how old are you, Jesse James?”

  “Well . . . twenty.”

  “Does the age difference bother you?” she asked. “Do you envision it to be a problem?”

  “No,” I said honestly. She was a woman, in every sense of the word. Self-sufficient, strong, experienced, and totally gorgeous. I had no problems.

  “Great,” Karla said, shortly. “Got any more questions?”

  I began daydreaming about Karla when I couldn’t be with her. On tour, I often found myself smiling, thinking about the odd stories and adventures that she’d gotten herself into. And when I was at home in Long Beach, there was just no one else I wanted to be with.

  “How about taking me out in that cool-ass Mustang of yours?” I asked her one day. “I’m in the mood to joyride.”

  We drove out into the traffic, letting the warm Southern California air hit our faces. Normally, I hated to be in the passenger seat. But next to this exciting new girlfriend of mine, it felt perfect.

  “Hey, let’s pull in here and get a Coke,” Karla said, hooking a quick right into a parking lot.

  She spied an unoccupied space in the otherwise packed lot, and made for it. But as Karla swung into the spot, an older guy in the space next to her opened his car door.

  “Karla!” I yelled. But she didn’t stop. Instead, she increased her speed, drove directly into his door, and smashed it hard enough to nearly rip it off the hinges.

  “What the fuck!” I yelled.

  “Crap,” Karla said. “Let’s get out of here, quick!” With a glance behind her, she threw the car into reverse, peeled hellacious rubber, and took off screeching out of the parking lot.

  “What the fuck did you just do?” I yelled.

  “Hit that guy’s door,” she admitted, adding, “that was probably my fault.”

  “You think?” My heart was pounding.

  “Don’t have a heart attack.” Karla laughed. “Gosh, you need to unwind a little bit, Jesse. I think maybe you work too much.”

  Karla wasn’t pretending to be tough—she was tough. She was a hothead, sure, but her pugnacity was tempered with enough maturity and smarts that it came off as impressive more than anything else. Together, I thought secretly, we make a pretty great package.

  ——


  Glenn had remained a friend over the years. One afternoon, he approached me with a proposition.

  “Jesse,” he said, “how about you come back to work for me for a while?”

  “What’s the gig?”

  “Just a U.S. tour. Simple as can be. What do you say? Are you there?”

  “Oh, why not?” I said, shrugging. “You guys suck pretty bad these days, but I suppose I could do a few shows just for old time’s sake.”

  Danzig had been steadily gaining in popularity, and by the early nineties, they’d begun to play larger arenas. Instead of working clubs with two thousand or three thousand kids, now they were playing in ten-thousand-seat arenas, and as usual kicking huge mountains of ass. The crowds were harder to control at big shows, though, and more security was necessary. Arenas had to hire their own team of guys—locals who didn’t necessarily have experience or any sympathy with the punk scene itself.

  One night in Orlando, Florida, I had a very bad feeling that something was going to go wrong. All of the security looked like meathead ex-football players, which kind of made me hate them right off the bat. Then I saw that they were being really aggressive to the kids who were slam dancing and crowd surfing. Whenever a kid got up on someone’s shoulders, they’d pounce on him and wrestle him to the ground.

  “Assholes,” I mumbled to myself. The fans were just expending some energy. If they tried to touch the band, well, then that was one thing. But crowd surfing? That was part of what they paid for.

  “Tell your children not to hold my hand,” Glenn screamed.

  I stood there stewing, but then the music punched into me, making my hair stand on end. I had been doing this for several years, but it still thrilled me to be on stage, watching the barricade pulse, feeling the manic energy of thousands of punk elbows and knees flying.

  “Tell your children not to understand!” he cried.

  Just then, I saw a very tiny kid get up on someone’s shoulders in the first row. He looked like a little twelve-year-old punker, with a shaved head and maroon lace-up Doc Marten’s that were about three sizes too big for him—a little mutt of a kid. He was tossed backward and started to surf the crowd. They passed him from hand to hand. He looked surprised and ecstatic. I grinned. He was having his time.

  “Hey, get the fuck down from there!”

  Out of nowhere, a beefy security guard came stomping toward him, salivating—this kid was easy meat. The guard pushed three kids out of his way, and then seized the little twelve-year-old by the scruff of the neck and slammed him down to the ground.

  I watched it happen, and again it pissed me off. Let the kids mosh. That’s the whole point. After a minute, I realized something was wrong. The runt wasn’t getting up. He had been down there too long. Immediately, I jumped down from the stage into the crowd. It was an eight-foot drop. My boots hit the floor hard, stinging.

  “Move! Get out of the way, now!”

  I pushed everyone away from the spot where he had landed. They cleared.

  And there, on the ground, lay the small punk, completely motionless.

  I picked him up in my arms. He weighed almost nothing. I felt some kind of convulsing in his chest.

  “Wake up, kid,” I said. There was no response. “Come on!”

  He gave no acknowledgment that he’d heard me, though. Scared, I hefted him up and placed him on stage. I jumped back up, and, picking him up, I ran through the side doors to get us into the fresh air.

  “Please, kid,” I said, crying. “Hey, wake up, man. Don’t die on us, okay?”

  At that moment, I felt him go completely limp in my arms.

  8

  I was just so devastated. I had never felt anyone die in my arms before. He was such a skinny little kid, tiny. More than anything, he was so incredibly young.

  “It never should have happened,” I said hoarsely that night on the phone with Karla. I tried to express the grief that was overwhelming me. “They didn’t have to pull him down like that.”

  “I’m really sorry, Jesse,” she said. Her voice was soft. “I’m so sorry that happened.”

  “The worst case should have been to take that kid and throw him out of the show, you know?” I choked.

  “Yes,” Karla said.

  “He’s listening to his favorite band, crowd surfing, going nuts—and then suddenly, he’s outside, listening to the show. That’d be enough of a lesson, wouldn’t it?” I sniffed. “Instead, they broke his neck and he’s fucking dead.”

  Karla was quiet for a moment. “Is there any way you could change things?”

  “Meatheads rule this job. I can try to tell them to use less force. But I don’t know if they’re gonna listen.”

  “Jesse, you are so gentle,” Karla said. “You look like such a big, tough guy. But you’re just this little gentle guy inside. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, right,” I grumbled. “Whatever.”

  “Hey, wait a second,” Karla said, seriously. “I love that about you. You understand that, right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I love you, Jesse.”

  I didn’t respond. Just listened to the hum of the phone. “I better go,” I said, finally.

  “I said, I love you,” Karla repeated. She waited. “Got anything to say to that?”

  ——

  From that day on, I made sure that if I was going to work, part of my job would include training the arena security on the day of the gig.

  “These kids are going to mosh,” I told everyone. “They’re going to look like they’re killing each other. But they aren’t. If anyone’s fighting for real, drawing blood, or actually posing a real threat, just grab them and escort them out, and shut the door behind them.”

  I was greeted by nods and affable shrugs.

  “Do not injure anyone,” I said.

  But it’s tough to change the way aggressive men operate. Aging jocks with pale-yellow security jackets and thick beer bellies continued to break punk heads all across Ann Arbor, Boston, and New York City. I probably even broke a few myself. Bit by bit, I felt myself growing disgusted by the entire enterprise.

  “I’m thinking about turning in my stripes,” I confessed to Eerie Von, Danzig’s bassist.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You’re not surprised?” I asked.

  “Jesse,” he said, “you are way too smart for this.”

  “Ah, shut up.”

  Eerie shrugged. “I don’t see you being sixty years old and still knocking people on their heads.” He took a long pull at his beer, and stared at me incredulously. “Do you?”

  With Eerie and Glenn’s encouragement, I segued into tour management. Now, instead of being in the front lines, I was handling the day-in and day-out needs for the bands. I was accountable for an exhausting litany of tasks, including but not limited to: checking the musicians into their hotel rooms, getting their keys, producing a reliable itinerary, schmoozing the front desk, standing up to the concert promoters, and making sure there was Jim Beam and not Jack Daniel’s in the dressing rooms—or Gummy Bears and not Jujubes.

  This is totally fucking absurd, I realized in no time at all. Rock stars were very talented at what they did, to be sure, but they were also coddled little children who were generally used to getting their own way. I was not very good at coddling. It was not part of my skill set.

  I was pretty damn proficient at collecting the money, though. Concert promoters, notorious for lying about the gate, often put their heads together with sleazy tour managers to stiff the record companies and skim great profits off the top. I was a record company’s dream—no concert promoter in the world was going to swindle me. I looked way too scary. At the end of the week, I’d fly out to the record executives with a big briefcase full of cash, feeling like a Mafia don.

  But the thrill of transporting someone else’s hundred-dollar bills was fleeting. I wasn’t quite dumb enough to think there was a future in what I was doing.

  Then one day Eerie came to me, l
ooking low.

  “Jess,” he said glumly, “you’re going to have to book Chuck a flight back home.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Dimwit, man. He’s dead.”

  Chuck Biscuit’s little brother had died of a heroin overdose. Dimwit had been a one-of-a-kinder, a great talent with a huge personality, not to mention the guy who’d hooked me up with touring in the first place. He was one of the most brutal drummers punk had ever seen, but he wasn’t invincible. The lifestyle had kicked his ass, and I saw it as a sign.

  What finally pushed me over the edge, though, wasn’t the death and drugs surrounding me. Instead, it was a simple videotape.

  I was working for White Zombie at the time. We were all sitting on a tour bus, headed into Detroit, when Rob Zombie leaned over to me and said, “Jesse, you like bikes, right?”

  “Yes, Rob,” I said patiently. Rob knew I liked bikes. Everybody who knew me at that time understood it was all I could stand to talk about with any kind of interest. He was just giving me the needle. “Yes I do.”

  “Then you’ll get a huge kick out of this.” And he flipped on the Easyriders tape.

  Easyriders Video Magazine—not to be confused with the famous Peter Fonda movie of similar name—was a cheesy promotional vehicle that focused on the bearded dudes and jean-shorted chicks who inhabited the bike world. This particular episode featured some geriatric biker who apparently had done security for the Grateful Dead for about twenty-five years.

  “This right here’s my baby!” said the roadie proudly, thumbing toward a decrepit Harley panhead that leaned next to a brick building, a ramshackle police-service sidecar attached clumsily to the old machine.

  I squinted distrustfully at the television screen, inspecting that roadie more closely. A dirty red bandanna wrapped around his head. Beard stubble sprouted from his chin and cheeks, grizzled and irregular.

  Shit, I thought to myself. Is that going to be . . . me?

  Outside my window, Midwest scenery whipped by. I envisioned myself twenty years from now, with cracked teeth and flabby arms, going out on midnight runs for the band: Jess! Pick us up some speed, would ya, man? Haw haw haw! Roadies rule!