Death Grip (7 page)

The next year was little better. I made sure to overstay my welcome at the Academy, so that a transfer halfway through freshman year became inevitable. That October of 1985, two of us “liberated” cans of the spray-on athletic adhesive Tuff Skin from a gymnasium storage closet and spritzed it through ventilation holes in the PE lockers. The adhesive turned the clothes inside into sticky, starchy planks. Just for good measure, we did this a few times. I remember sitting sheepishly before the upper-school disciplinarian, Mr. Buck, with his Harry Potter glasses and
THE BUCK STOPS HERE
placard, and being told that we would need to come to school one weekend and weed planter beds. My buddy and I pulled up thistle and tumbleweeds, and then I told my parents that I could not stay at the Academy. Some of my grades had even dropped to Bs for the first time in my life. I was rapidly going off the rails.

*   *   *

N
ot
this
again.
N
ot another
“street fight.” Wading through my first semester of ninth grade, hating life at the Academy, I'd been jumped for the fourth time in as many months. Fact: Going around the streets of Albuquerque dressed like a punk rocker will get you jumped. Sergio and I had learned this the hard way, paddling along Twelfth Street down in the Valley, when a road crew of juvenile-detention inmates surrounded us with shovels and pickaxes and tried to take our skateboards, the ringleader punching me in the mouth and knocking me to the pavement. A small band of us had learned this at the underage nightclub The Big Apple, when two packs, of jocks and metalheads, converged on us in the rear parking lot over a minor verbal misunderstanding. And I'd learned it again just two blocks from my mother's home, skating alone behind Jefferson Middle School one night when a dozen barrio kids chased after me, trying to steal my deck. There was always an edge of mortal peril to the attacks, an undiscriminating, many-on-few bloodlust forged in the city's hot, dusty crucible. Kids get stabbed and shot in Albuquerque, so I always tried to cut and run. I'm strong, but not street tough. I didn't grow up in the crack-shack ghetto but instead in middle-class neighborhoods in the Northeast Heights, the wealthiest quadrant in town. It barely mattered, because the weirdness goes down everywhere. Albuquerque has a well-merited reputation for crime, racial tension, and random violence—it's an economically and ethnically mixed, sun-blasted, windswept Southwestern mini-megalopolis split by two major interstates—a smaller Los Angeles where evil happens quickly and without apparent motive. (As one friend who also moved away, to Texas, put it, “I hate coming home. Everywhere I go, I feel like I'm looking over my shoulder.”) The city's dark undercurrent seeps into your soul, even those of children.

Now, the one time we victims outnumbered our attacker, he had to be some armed sociopath older and larger than ourselves with the saucer eyes of a panicked horse. Mean as a rattler, impervious to reason, an unfeeling killer from some cold, alternate universe. Another thief of skateboards, a creature of the night just like we fancied ourselves to be when we'd steal out of our parents' homes to hit the silent streets.

We liked to do this: sneak out after midnight, rendezvous, smoke cigarettes, drink watery beer, and pop ollies and try wall-rides and acid drops on lots, stairwells, and parking garages where we'd be chased off by day. Night skating was the best. The air had cooled, the asphalt had hardened, and there was no one about to call the police, no cars in the way or grumpy old codgers hollering abuse from their driveways. Our favorite was to street-luge from the four-way intersection at Constitution and Washington boulevards. The streets dropped precipitously to the west, north, and south, all with run-outs onto flatter spans. We'd tighten our trucks with a skate key so the boards wouldn't wobble, lie feetfirst on our backs or face-first on our stomachs, and then bomb down the tarmac, backyard fences whipping by, the asphalt a black blur but inches away, praying a car didn't turn in from a side street. I stood up a few times and realized, from this higher vantage, how fast we were going: thirty mph, maybe more near the bottom. Had you hit gravel or gotten mired in pothole filler, it would have been curtains. Constitution ran out by the Safeway next to Aspen Plaza. We'd coast to a stop there on moon-bright nights of boundless possibility, skid plates grinding as the boards' noses came up, happy to be alive in our private playground, feeling the hermetic specialness of the slumbering city.

But now: “Give me your fucking skateboards!” this madman shouted. “You think I'm fucking around?” He held a length of PVC pipe high in one hand, a switchblade extended in the other. He wore a denim jacket with an AC/DC logo on the back and tight black jeans: the metalhead uniform.

“I've got my bat … and I've got my knife … and I'll fucking kill you!” he continued, advancing on us four wee skatekids.

We'd seen him in the distance, a tall figure with a wild tangle of dark hair, noodling around a bus stop along Lomas Boulevard by the Bernalillo County Medical Center, kicking over newspaper-vending machines and then weaving an erratic path along the sidewalk, orange with pools of nocturnal halogen. One among us, Owen, had skated past the guy on his way to our meeting point at the Albuquerque Indian Hospital, on UNM's medical campus. Owen said something about “a weirdo down the road,” but we didn't think much of it. Down the road meant somewhere else. Flapping about in our trench coats, we lit up Kools, trying rail slides on parking blocks, oblivious as our attacker advanced through the night. When he suddenly emerged from a pine grove on the lawn, I saw the PCP glaze to his eyes and felt my heart skip a beat.

When bad things go down like this—when you're confronted with a physical threat—the “fight-or-flight” reaction kicks in. A primitive, automatic, animal survival mechanism, fight-or-flight activates at the first perception of peril as an azure spot—a brain-stem nucleus called the “locus coeruleus”—sets off a series of physical reactions.
2
The locus manufactures norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline),
3
which is a neuropeptide or neurotransmitter, a message-relaying, mobile protein molecule found throughout the brain and body, and one key to fight-or-flight. At essence, neurotransmitters are the intermediaries between the 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) in our brains, where they relay chemical messages across inter-neuron gaps called synapses, and between all the neurons found throughout our bodies. This transmittal happens when a message travels from each pre-synaptic neuron along a single axon; these axons, of varying lengths, then branch into many terminals from which the neurotransmitter “jumps” to specific, mirror-image receptor sites on the membrane of the post-synaptic neuron. (The neurotransmitter does so by traversing a twenty-nanometer gap called the “synaptic cleft.” Received impulses enter the post-synaptic neuron via dendrites.) As Robert Whitaker frames it in his excellent exposé of modern psychiatry,
Anatomy of an Epidemic,
“A single neuron has between one thousand and ten thousand synaptic connections, with the adult brain as a whole having perhaps 150 million synapses.”
4
Untold neuron-to-neuron transactions are going on at any given time—the human brain and nervous system are immeasurably complex.

Meanwhile, neurotransmitters are called either excitatory (activating) or inhibitory (inhibiting) in their action, in that they either encourage the post-synaptic neuron to carry out a specific task or they prevent it from doing so. Excitatory neurotransmitters activate the brain by causing neurons to fire, releasing neurotransmitters that then carry the message to other neurons in a kind of domino effect, while the inhibitory ones call a “cease-fire” that stabilizes or calms the brain—though some neurotransmitters carry out both functions. (Neurotransmitters also regulate our bodily functions—they course throughout the immune and endocrine systems, guts, lungs, heart, and so on, and can communicate with cells and organs.) At essence, neurotransmitters serve as chemical mediators of our emotional reality: As Richard Restak, M.D., writes in his examination of anxiety,
Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber
, “
all
[emphasis added] mental processes result from the release of neurotransmitters from billions of cells in the brain and the reception of these chemicals by billions of other cells.”
5
And, as Paul Foxman puts forth in
Dancing with Fear,
neurotransmitters translate our emotions, feelings, and every thought—even unconscious ones—into “physiological changes.”
6
Without neurotransmitters and receptors, we would just be switched-off computers.

In a fight-or-flight situation, then, activating neurotransmitters such as epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and serotonin flood the bloodstream.
7
More specifically, the adrenal glands release epinephrine as the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)—one branch of the body's autonomic nervous system (ANS)—fires, the so-called “adrenaline rush” during which your muscles tense, sight and hearing sharpen, breathing and heart rate quicken to take in more oxygen, and your posture becomes defensive. It's the process by which, as Foxman writes, “your body becomes charged and energized to protect itself”
8
—either through battling the threat or fleeing it. Only the triggering of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the SNS' counterpart, brings you back down. (The PNS controls salivation, lacrimation, urination, digestion, and defecation,
9
and is like the “brakes” to the SNS' “accelerator.” Think about the last time you were confronted with some danger, and the almost holy calm that washed over after the danger had passed: That was the PNS bringing you back to baseline.) The two complementary systems have long helped man to survive—to recognize and then confront and/or evade imminent threats. I would later have a therapist frame fight-or-flight this way: When man was both predator and prey, roaming the steppes and hurling spears at antelope, we evolved the response as a safeguard against creatures like saber-toothed tigers. These days, however, because we have few natural enemies—other than each other—fight-or-flight is almost an anachronism.

For the moment, however, the urge to flee our midnight attacker was perfectly understandable. This guy, after all, had a knife and seemed ready to use it. I'd never been in a proper fight (and still never have). My parents had always insisted that it was wrong to hit anyone, even in self-defense, so I'd learned to bail out even in situations I might have resolved with my fists. They'd told me this in second grade after I'd been cornered and stoned on the schoolyard by two reprobates I'd prevented, days earlier, from beating up a mentally challenged boy down the block.

“We'll get off your turf, man,” I told our assailant lamely. I'd just watched the gang film
Rumble Fish
, so this seemed like a thing you might say. The wild man whirled from boy to boy, brandishing his weapons, his face a grim mask of homicidal rage. Clearly, this wasn't about “turf.” It all felt slowed and unreal, like some terrible dream. The white glare of a streetlight painted us in a surreal glaze.

“I don't care about turf, you stupid motherfucker!” he said. “Now give me your skateboards!”

None of us were older than fourteen
and
we were a gaggle of whitebread wimps; this guy was eighteen or older, a veteran of the streets. We began backing away just as he brought the pipe down on tall, skinny Owen's head hard enough to shatter the plastic. Owen dropped his board and we fled east through the parking lot, looking back over our shoulders as the metalhead followed, knife hand pumping beside him, eyes flashing. When we reached a cross street, I looked back again to see that he'd returned to the lot to inspect Owen's skateboard. The guy had gotten what he came for, in that Albuquerque way.

I still replay that incident—and the others—in my head. Four of us with skateboards: If we were “real” men, why didn't we just gang up and clobber the guy? Instead of standing there like a useless clod, I picture teenage me raising my pink Alva skateboard, raking the trucks across his face, staving in his flaring nostrils with a jab of the board's tail, and then taking up his knife and exsanguinating him. He lies on the pavement, the PVC pipe clutched to his chest, holding his other hand to a burbling, hissing neck wound. He's fucked with the wrong guy—the guy who will not be a victim. The guy who claims personal power and who chooses fight, not flight. In the days that followed, I replayed the scene that way so many times, I began to feel like I
had
committed a murder. Feeling sharp pangs of guilt, I'd check the papers to see if a body had turned up or the police were looking for suspects.

But it didn't happen that way, not that time and not the others. Not ever, because I'd been raised not to fight; I'd been raised to flee.

*   *   *

H
alfway through freshman year,
I
transferred to Highland High, a public, inner-city high school where most of Albuquerque's core punk-rock kids attended and where, rumor had it, you could dress however you wanted, smoke cigarettes out front, and skate all over the surrounding streets. By then I was a full-bore wannabe punk rocker with a safety pin in my left ear, black combat boots, a long dark-blue trench coat, and a gelled-up Mohawk. To the back of the coat, I'd pinned a bit of T-shirt I'd cut away: cover art for the punk outfit Charged GBH's album
City Baby's Revenge
. It showed a baby wearing a spiked collar and with blood dripping from his mouth who'd taken a hatchet to rats and hung his stuffed-dog toy from a noose in the nursery. I couldn't have stood out more conspicuously. I was a one-man lightning rod at Highland. I'd emigrated with friend and fellow Academy expatriate Jeff, our transfer part of what he, nearly a quarter-century later in an e-mail, would eloquently recall as a “kamikaze brothers' pact,” our hopeful launch into a “bitchin' new punk-rock adventure at the cool kids' school” as we left behind the Academy bubble.