American Outlaw - Jesse James [57]
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.