"In 1980 we hated the jocks and the jocks hated us. Everybody hated us, and they especially hated Eric for his big head, and I carried a golf club with me everywhere I went, for the jocks. That was after a jeep load of jocks attacked me while I waited for a bus. I got the best punches in though, on that one jock, bloodied up his face good. Back then, the only thing a jock was good for was killing, and we had a song about killing them along with all of their hippie counterparts. We had a song about killing allof the kids in Gainesville, the ones who came to see us when we played there along with Terminal Fun and Roach Motel and The Flower Children; that song was called SOCIAL OBLITERATION. My teachers thought I was retarded.
And we played songs about killing our parents, and raping Ted Bundy's wife. We didn't give a fuck about Ronald Reagan or world politics, though on occasion we pretended to in our songs. Blame that on Eric who wrote BAN THE BIBLE and, after getting labeled a homophobe, wrote I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE GAY. I preferred songs about stealing babies from shopping carts and fighting with my mother. Gary thought the hamburgers from Wendy's smelled like pussy. We ate a lot of those hamburgers, and it was thanks to those pussy-smelling hamburgers that we met what was to become the baddest and the fastest drummer in the south, David Magoo who, when we were going through the drive-thru asked us if we needed a drummer.
It was David who came up with the line, "I wanna join the KKK, kill off the minority." That was from our big hit HARDCORE RULES. One day after practice, driving through the neighborhood, some girl in a Bug shot us a bird and David drove after her, swinging a chain outside of the window and screaming crazy shit. Our parents were bigots. Nazi skins were bullshit, mythical in our town at the time, but could only be, when their time would come, jocks that had crossed over from jockdom into the punky land of stupid kids with nothing to do.
Cops whistled at me, told me I was cute. We were the only ones around with weird haircuts, triple mohawks and mange cuts. Naturally, we made fun of everybody, ourselves included. KILL A PUNK ROCKER! Why not? It wasn't that it was a bad world–everything about it could only be perfect–just that we needed a place of sanity to pocket all of our good energy."-John Hodges, guitarist of Hated Youth
1979. Frank was an awful guy but a great roommate. He was never around. It wasn't safe for him to enter Travis County, and so he'd slip in once a month in the middle of the night around the 3rd and leave his share of the money in cash on the TV set. The building manager was this Mrs. Roper type who wore big billowing florid Muumuus and never had a kind word for anybody; she wasn't as crazy about my having Frank as a roommate because the cops were starting to show up looking for him with alarming regularity and she didn't feel this reflected well on the building. Frank was the guy who introduced me to shooting speed.
Back when he could still safely enter Travis County we'd all shoot up in the bathroom of this chick's place and play new-wave 8-track tapes and shoot up some more; the rush was like being fucked by God, this giant body fucking meth and adrenaline blast that would leave me spent and quivering and dying for more. I'd wind up shooting so much speed during a two day period just to keep experiencing that God fuck rush over and over that I would be far too loaded to even move. We'd all sit around the chick's dining room table and someone would be talking and talking and talking and talking and everyone else would be clutching at the sides of the table like we were in the starting blocks waiting for the gun each of us hoping that the talker would take a deep breath and that we would be the first one outta the blocks, so that we could talk and talk and talk and talk and talk while everyone else clutched at the sides of the table waiting for that deep breath. Did anyone ever say anything? Who knows? No one was listening to the words, just for the pause. The starter's gun.
We all hated each other. And the same 8-track would play over and over and over, an endless loop of cheesy new-wave, running non-stop for a day and half, we were out of speed and all so loaded that we all feared a sudden move would cause us to explode splattering speed soaked blood guts and viscera all over the chick's walls. And so we sat there clutching the table waiting for the pause. Tweaker projects? We were way too loaded for any fuckin' tweaker projects. We were paralyzed. I never wanted to get high. I wanted to get low. I never understood why people took "mind expanding" drugs. Expanding my mind was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to contract it, shut it off, turn down the deafening white noise of my thoughts, and if I couldn't find anything that would do that then maxing out the volume on everything outside was the next best thing. A three day speed shooting binge gave me a sense of equilibrium.
Frank started fucking this very sad woman who worked at Le Femme massage. She had two kids. She wanted to open a clothing store. She was making decent money as a whore, and giving him whatever she had for free, so he started coming back into Austin. He got busted in a huge raid just on the other side of I-35 in East Austin; the cops blocked off the entire street and went in there with guns. I never knew what he was wanted for. I didn't keep in touch after he got busted. He was an asshole and completely useless to me when he was in prison. After he got out, he hooked back up with the massage chick. I saw in the papers he got busted for burning the kids with cigarettes.
He was a piece of shit, but he always had good speed.
