American Outlaw - Jesse James [52]
Transfixed, I watched it come closer, unable to move. It made a curious humming sound as it spun. And then it smashed into my head. The bottle didn’t even break, but my head got a dent.
This job, I thought, is going to cost me some brain cells.
On the brighter side, Glenn and I grew close pretty quick. Both of us were fighters. We bonded around that.
“Come do this Muay Thai thing with me, man,” he’d say, all excited. “I want to show you how they box in Thailand, it’s super violent!”
We checked out all kinds of martial arts together, spurring one another to do more and more intense trainings. We must have made a funny pair: I was a six-foot-three, blond, and wide-eyed twenty-year-old. Then here was Glenn, this little black-haired Italian dude with a wrinkled forehead and tiny black boots, whose attitude was so relentlessly aggressive that half the time I felt smaller than him. On stage, Glenn was so full of testosterone and rage, he reminded me of some kind of mutant superhero.
He took the music real personal. Metal at that time really had gotten kind of soft and mushy, with glam acts like Poison and Warrant getting crazy airplay on MTV, filling arenas with their diarrhea power ballads and capturing the hearts of thirteen-year-old girls. To real punks like Glenn, it was insulting. And that came through in the focused rage of his performances.
Somewhat disappointingly, the sex part of this rock ’n’ roll dream never seemed to materialize. Maybe because we were mired in the late 1980s. AIDS was a real threat. It seemed like everyone knew someone who had died of it, and that took a lot of the zip out of casual sex. Plus, I was always skeptical: if I was at a show, and met a girl who immediately offered to give me head, well, then what did that make me? Nothing more than a guy who could get her backstage.
Glenn had pretty much the same attitude.
“Dude, you know what I always ask myself?” he said to me one night in his office.
“What’s that?”
“This groupie chick who wants to sleep with me, what was she doing last week?”
“I don’t know. What’s the answer?”
“Pantera.”
So Glenn was a rocker who didn’t fit that lecherous mold. Most of the time I knew him, he had a long-term girlfriend. She’d even come on the road with us occasionally. Slowly, as I observed Glenn and the way he treated people, he sort of grew into a role model for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a rock musician or live that lifestyle; far from it. But there was a type of dignity to him, the way he carried himself, that I hadn’t been exposed to before.
In due time, I became quite serious about being top-notch security. In order to get my band from the hotel to the show, on stage and off, then backstage, onto the bus, and finally rushed through the lobby to their hotel room without anything happening to them, every single movement had to be calculated. I had to be watching over my shoulder the entire time. I was kind of a mother hen to them, which was funny, since I was all of twenty years old.
Life was exciting. But due to my responsibilities, I rarely let loose all that much. For the most part, my rock life was wound up real tight. Stressful, even. And I still had a furious temper that would explode when I was challenged.
One night, at a show in Hamburg, Germany, a bald-headed punker in the front row began to go ballistic when the band shifted into the song “Mother.”
“Die you freaking cocksucking prick!” he screamed at Glenn. That in itself wasn’t really a problem, since everyone screamed at the band. That was just part of the scene. But this dude was also spitting: sending gobs of saliva into the air, with great distance and accuracy. And that pissed me off.
“Knock it off!” I yelled, coming down to the barricade, spearing him with my meanest look. “Quit spitting at the band.”
“FACK YOU!” he screamed at me, his beer-breath exploding all over my face. He continued to scream maniacally at Danzig and the band, then leaned around me and launched another huge hawk of spit at the stage.
“Stop fucking