American Outlaw - Jesse James [10]
“Look, you gotta get the nut job out of there,” the ref said. “He shouldn’t be playing with the tadpoles.”
So they moved me to the varsity after that. Finally, I felt happy—vindicated, I guess. I was an outside linebacker, which meant my job was basically to kill the quarterback. And that’s just what I did, over and over again. I was quicker and crazier than any of the kids out there, and I was out for blood. By my sophomore year of high school, I was six foot three, weighed 220 pounds, and could run a forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. I was just a horrible person to have gunning for you.
Due to the fact that I could play ball, I was given an identity at school: jock. I guess I looked the part, due to my build, and the fact that I was sporting a flattop back then. Not too many kids wore flattops in the mid-eighties in Southern California. It was more of a long-hair period. Inside, though, I didn’t feel much like a jock. I loved football and lived for being on the field, but I didn’t really like other jocks. I wasn’t going to jock parties or drinking jock beer. A glorious secret remained hidden in the sinew of my fifteen-year-old body: deep down inside, where no one could see it, I was a punk.
“Are you back again?”
“Sure am, back again,” I mumbled to the clerk at Zed’s, the best record store in Long Beach.
“Gonna buy anything this time?”
“Maybe,” I said, rifling through the tapes as fast as I could. “You guys have that new Misfits album?”
“Nah,” the clerk sighed. “Try me later this week. Maybe you can shoplift it then.”
So they were on to me. I didn’t really care. I loved the music. I was going to get it any way I could. Suicidal Tendencies, D.O.A., Circle Jerks, Black Flag—it was all just full-on aggression and rage and manic energy, channeled into thrash. To people who hated the sound, I know it probably sounded like a bunch of screaming. But to those of us who loved it, it was powerful. It was a way to say that something rotten and fake and wrong was going on in the world. Punk said we’d evaluated the situation, and weren’t going to nod along.
Punk was sort of the opposite of jock in that way, actually.
If I was going to listen to Social Distortion, then I needed punk style. No punk would be caught dead with long hair, let alone Tom-Dixon-blow-dried-jock hair. I longed to shave my head, like a true hard-core, but I couldn’t, because my dad wouldn’t let me. I shaved my head exactly one time, and afterward, he wouldn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks. He was just a dick like that.
So I settled on the flattop as a compromise. My barber was a retired military dude who’d cut hundreds of heads every week for twenty-five years running. He slapped apple pectin on my scalp, so the bristly blond strands stood straight up, looking tough.
Of the flattop, my dad approved. But it remained clear that no matter what, I’d be fending for myself when it came to school clothes. Exasperated, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Hidden under my mattress, I still had most of the cash that I’d gotten from the burger stand robbery. Gingerly, I removed the giant wad of money and flipped it through my hands carefully. Even after all this time, the faintest whiff of French-fry grease still clung to it.
The preppiest store in the Tyler Mall was GHQ. All the rich kids shopped there; the shirts in the windows at GHQ were precisely the same ones that the preps would be wearing in the halls on Monday mornings. Publicly, I scoffed at the fuckers, but secretly, I wished I could show up to school just once looking store-bought. I’d never had the money for it before. Looking at my wad, I knew it was time.
The heat felt stifling as I stepped out of my house. I had no wheels, so I had to hoof it over to the mall. Only a few determined strides into my journey, I was sweating hard. By the time I got to the store, my ratty shirt was soaked all the way through.
“Man,” I muttered, disgusted, trying to peel my shirt off my chest. The Tyler