The Flashpoint

     I’m taken back to the days of teenage dance halls, new romantic melodies and eyeliner.

My name is Alex, I’m a sixteen-year-old runaway dressed in black, androgynous with Billy Idol beats and dog collars, swaying to the illustrious movements of our young libidos. Pupils dilated, hiding behind long bangs of blue-black hair. The vodka princess with stitched wrists beckons. All hail her darkened glory. A diva of death so young. Acid deals in parking lots with Schaffer beer chase. All ideals of self-preservation lost as we danced in the shadow of Ronnie Raygun’s Cheyenne Mountain Monster, only a few miles away from our adolescent den of discordia.

     True nihilism was the dish of the day. Not a care in the world, for we cared not for the world. I was convinced that my life would end by twenty-four. “Maximum Overdrive” was seemingly prophetic. Its AC/DCscore really put the hook in me. We were criminals living in a world, which presumed that its laws applied to us. Who were they kidding? I used to commit a federal felony a day just to keep my edge. We used to go dancing at a place called the Flashpoint. A seedy little dive down in Southgate. It was all ages, so there was no drinking inside but outside, it was like a Grateful Dead parking lot. Acid, pot, whiskey, sex, and everybody looked so damned fine. We wrote the books on fashion.  I’ve never been to another “bar” where there were so many drugs and young women.

     There was a security guard there but she looked the other way. That other way was usually towards some of the young does prancing about in water-proof eye-liner on the inside of their eyes. High heel boots, fishnets, mini-skirts, man, life was beautiful. I almost became an acid guru with my knowledge of magick and alternate publications such as De Sade and Masoch, Leary, Huxley, Crowley, Regardie, etc… Because I was a runaway with a pad I could take my friends to private parties and have mad sex and acid discussions. I was on my way to becoming a new-romantic Manson. My roommates helped make the whole scene even better.

     You see, when I turned fifteen my dad got me a job digging ditches for the construction company he worked for. It was hard work, but I made good money. I saved enough to buy me a little Datsun to cruise around in. By the time the summer job ended I decided to run away with my friend Bane, a friend who had similar problems but lived in Pueblo. He was tall and lanky with short spiky blond hair. One cool motherfucker. When my Datsun didn’t work we rode in his VW Bug. He liked techno more than me, I was more into guitars. He was the perfect wingman for me. What women didn’t find in me they sure found in him. We were always with a girl. When we split we were given shelter by our new found friends Mary, Tom, Joe, and Cathy. We met them at night clubs where they were the d.j.s. We made a good impression on them even though we were much younger; they let us into their house. I let my mom knew where I was, but she knew I wasn’t going back to the house ruled by my father.

     Mary was a little overweight and half Japanese. She had spiky black hair and one eye for fashion. She had a great collection of Negal’s paintings and had a synth a guitar she used to play around with. She did the local midnight punk rock show on the public listening radio station. She knew her musick. Her shows were the best. I used to go into the station with her and help pick out albums to play. This was still in the day when there were twelve inch singles and records. There were no CD’s. I used to love going to the station with her. She was the best personality on the air. Mary had one sexy voice. Tom was a D.J. at some of the local clubs around. He was gay and introduced me to alot of his queen friends. I really admired them. What balls to stand up for the way you wished to present yourself. He used to be a football player at Western State University so he was a rather large fellow, but man could he do make up and hair. He taught me so much. One night we had a friend there who was tripping for the first time. It really hit Liza hard. I feel bad about this now because it was a mean trick, but I had Tom carry me down the stairs as if I had had an attack of some kind. Man she freaked out. She was trying to wake me up, and tried to make me conscience. I jumped up and scared the shit out of her. She jumped from the living room through the kitchen and into the backyard. Strangely enough she became somewhat straight edge and was against drugs after that. Man that was a mean trick, I still feel sorry about that.

          Of course there was going to be an eventual downfall to all this, I just didn’t know when or how. My drug dealing was paying for some of it, but my usage tapped into the funds. I was a sixteen-year runaway trying to find a job while my head was so screwed up. It was the car crash of life headed straight for me.

           I eventually locked my self up in a nut house. Amazingly some of my friends came and visited me. Thanx Liza and Mary. When I was admitted I was wearing my make-up, tie-dyed jeans, dashiki, earrings and other assorted garments. I was on about eight hits of some good, and I mean really good LSD. Admittance into a psych ward is just about as surreal as the drugs you’re on. They drag you into a room where the most fucking psychedelic paper they can come up with is and make you just sit there. I’m just trying to make sense to these assholes and they got gotta have all this southwestern art around which brings me back to my Indian heritage and so naturally that’s what I want to talk about. They keep probing me with their strange sterile instruments of psycho secretion.

      I tell them,” Hey, look I’m Tripping my fucking balls off and all this science shit ain’t gonna help me come down, just let me sit here a while with my headphones on and listen to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and I’ll be OK.” Of course, that was the first thing they took away from me, fucking bastards. The musick was the only thing keeping me sane at that time. They put me into a room where all the walls were melting, with doctors probing me with questions which I really didn’t feel like answering.

          So what can I tell you about Cedar Springs. It’s a place where rich parents and parents with good insurance can put their kids away when they can’t handle them. Yuppie parents who forgot all about the trial and tribulations that teenagers go through. Most of the baby boomers were raised by television so it’s no wonder they are inept at raising children, plus they’re too interested in their “perfect marriage, or their spotless image. They forgot how to love their children because in reality they don’t really even love themselves. So, they pay seven hundred dollars a day to have their children babysat by professional counselors and nurses.  You can never leave the memories behind. They are too ingrained. I can’t remember most of the names of those I was in there with, but I’ll never forget the stories. The place was like a eight week zoo where you talked out all your problems to someone who tried to forget them when they got home and put on the football game and cracked open a tall one. I’m not saying that the people that worked there didn’t care about us or our problems it’s just that it was a job for them. I believe that intent prescribes method. If my intent is to climb a mountain, I’m going to find the best footholds that I can. If my intent is to make money, Then I’m going to find a job. This was a job for them not their lives. I didn’t go home at the end of the day or receive a paycheck. There methods were always skewed by the bylaws of the hospital.  They had to follow rules. They couldn’t just act on instinct and do what might be the best course of action for the situation. Unfortunately, the mental health system of America is not an altruistic program.Psychologists and psychiatrists spend so much money going to college and then they do their internships before they get a private practice. They deserve the money they make but, in all reality, it is still just a job. They can’t let themselves get overly wrapped up in their patient’s problems that would be counterproductive. One must be their own therapist but how can one be completely objective. They can’t and that’s the crux of it. Especially for the young. They don’t even have enough life experience to handle some of life’s basic situations. I know one thing though, throwing your kids into a psychiatric institution is not the key. In fact it is so counterproductive it should be illegal. I was there twice eight weeks at a time. All it taught me was how to play mind games better.

     These kids didn’t have problems that demanded them being incarcerated. It gave them stigmas of insanity. Made them think they were crazy and got them addicted to their overly priced medications. They had me on sixteen hundred milligrams of Melliril a day. You wanna talk about one fucking zombie. Not only that but they had me on Seventy-five milligrams of Imipramine two milligrams of Cogentin. At sixteen I did not need to be that doped up to that degree. They wonder why I have an affinity for downers and booze. They were giving me this much medication before I even locked myself up. Try going to school on just four hundred milligrams of this major tranquilizer. That’s what it is, a major tranquilizer and anti-psychotic. This is the shit they give violent offenders in jail and criminal institutions. I wonder why my grades weren’t so good. My father punished me irrationally for low grades. He would punish me with nine weeks restrictions for low grades. When he would come home drunk, I would receive repeated beatings, which happened four or five nights a week. Now I want to make this clear, Her did not beat me every single night but he would sit me down at the table and just belittle me in front of my crying mother, who, when she could would try to defend me. My mom is so cool. Anyone who has ever met my mom has had their life enriched. You could just be yourself and if you weren’t, she’d know.

     I admit I was a very wild child. I would sneak out late at night and go smoking pot and tripping on acid or psychedelic mushrooms. I needed this release and the allegiance of my friends helped to deal with my drunken violent household. I wish there was some kind of program that would have helped me, but every time the cops were called to my house for domestic violence, they didn’t do shit. Neither did my mother. She was afraid of losing the house and all the financial support of my father. Men can just keep their family under their thumbs this way and there is no where for the kid to turn to without breaking up his family. There might be some programs now for kids, but back in Eighty-three in Fountain Colorado there was nothing. The police were always on my dad’s side because he was a good old boy and I was a long-haired punk who couldn’t keep my mouth shut when I was pissed. Boy he could really piss me off. My dad weighed around two-hundred and ten pounds and I weighed around a hundred and thirty pounds. My mom weighed one twenty dripping wet. When my dad would hit my mom it just sent her across the room. For many years there was nothing I could do except just sit in my room and hide. I went through years of that shit. Screaming and yelling, shit breaking, loud booming sounds coming from everywhere. I think my imagination was what made it so scary because I could only guess what would come next. I started fighting back when I turned around twelve or thirteen years old.

     I put myself in the institution twice because it was my sanctuary. I don’t think they helped me out psychologically, but they did give me a place to live instead of my drunken abusive household. I had been seeing both a psychologist and a psychiatrist for some years before I was institutionalized. Dr. Richtoffen was my psychologist and Dr. Homer was my psychiatrist. They gave me all the standard tests, the MMPI, the WISC-R, the Rorschach, and the Myers-Briggs personality type battery. They found me to be exceptionally intelligent and a little too creative, whatever that means. They decided to prescribe to me Melleril, Imiprimine and Cogentin. My parents, unknowingly what these drugs were, agreed to the prescription.

     Melleril is a major tranquilizer and anti-psychotic, and Imiprimine is a anti-depressant. This shit turned me into a zombie. I still had to go to school while dosed on the meds. The one thing they weren’t addressing was the fact that my father was an abusive son of a bitch. I could not keep my mind in an academic manner with all the hell going on at the house. I mean he would take the time when I should be working on school work and sit me down to yell and belittle me. This of course caused a major rebellion within me. I’d sneak out at night, go get high and just try and relax and talk to my friends. When I was in elementary school it was worse. I was in a Christian private school, so in the day I was in a church hearing the wonderful things about Jesus and then at night I would hide in my room listening to my father abuse my mother. I was serving out a childhood sentence in Heaven and Hell every fucking day.

     We got into two fights after I was released. The first one was pretty bad. He pulled me out of my basement bedroom by my hair and made me apologize to my mom for being such a bastard. He kept pulling at my hair while I was on my knees. I twisted around and punched him square in the balls.

     The next fight, the final of all fights started by him calling me a long-haired faggot S.O.B. then he hit me. I had my Dingo’s on and kicked him square in the jaw. I have never in my life seen someone get up so fast. Before I knew it, he had his hands around my throat and was slamming my head into the refrigerator in the kitchen. Slam! Slam! Slam! He was doing a number on me. One thing he forgot though was that he had sock feet on. Smash! Smash! Smash! I dropped him to the ground and started kicking him in the ribs. I hate to say it but that was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life. He never touched my mother or me again.

     God, I thought I would never get along with my father, but as he’s aged, he has mellowed out and stopped drinking. I think he has alot of guilt issues. If it were me I would have divorced him and taken him for everything he had, but that’s my mother’s decision. They seem to get along really well now. I really am happy for them both.

     Well, I moved out of the house and got some of my old high school buddies to be roommates with me. We got a place in the Foxfire apartments up on Academy and Austin Bluffs. There was Kurt, who was kinda the leader of our group He was about my size and an avid AC\DC fan. He had long hair that was sometimes permed. He probably read every Star Trek book that was out at the time. Kurt and I had a bad habit of slamming a fifth of Jose` Cuervo and then go outside and beat the shit out of each other, just for fun of course, we were best friends. Bob, by far the biggest and sometimes the most opinionated of us he didn’t drink but maybe a beer on special occasions. Then there was Judy, how do I explain her? She was the youngest and the younger sister of Kurt’s ex-girlfriend. Her parents let us take care of her because she didn’t want to move out to Illinois with her family. They were the best goodhearted biker family I ever met. I really looked up to them. When I had problems at home I would go up and talk to their parents. We’d smoke a joint drink a beer and make me feel right at home. These people were not influencing children in the wrong way, they just figured it was better to have adult supervision around our partying. They trusted us with keeping an eye on their youngest daughter while they were out of state. No one ever made a move on her and we protected her like she was our own. I got a job with a movie theater that was just down the street. Ms.C was my boss and the first one to turn me on to Allen Ginsburg. She was a great boss. The job really got me into the pursuit of trying to make a career in the film industry. I got Judy a job there too. She really was ahead of her age group. She paid her part of the rent and never griped about working. Looking was probably the most mature of all of us. Kurt’s girl-friend was a goth rocker named Venus. She was the Vodka Princess I mentioned earlier in the story. Man was she a mess. She would get so loaded and then start fights with Kurt, slit her wrists and bleed all over the apartment. This made the neighbors upstairs think that we were killing girls downstairs. They were older and probably scared as hell of us. Looking back it’s fucking hilarious. But at the time I was always afraid Venus would get our asses thrown in jail. I was messing around with her best friend Kari. Man was she fine. She looked kinda like Columbia out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show but ten times better. I think I was her first. One night at a party in Briargate we got so loaded we wandered of onto a construction site and made love on the top of a scraper. Man, she was so cool. Years and years later when I was living in Eugene, Oregon, Venus and Kari hunted me down and spent the night with Mike and I. Mike is my oldest friend and was my roommate in Oregon. Though Kari and I slept in the same bed all we did was just lie there and talk about all the things that had occurred within our lives. There visit was such an excellent surprise. They didn’t even know our address or nothing. They wandered around to some of the local bars and sure as shit, they found us. Mike and I had played many of the bars in town in our various bands.

     Anyhow, we lived in the Foxfire apartments for nearly a year. We all had jobs that were pretty local. Kurt worked in a restaurant near the house and we’d party with some of his fellow employees. One of our friends Al started to get involved with this thief named Clayborn. We never trusted that motherfucker and good thing we didn’t. He and Al got involved in this mess where Clayborn killed his roommate and sold us some of the stuff he ripped off. We new nothing of the death, but when the cops started to get involved with the situation all of us were interrogated. There were guns stolen, clothes, and just a bunch of other junk. Al went to prison for the crime and we pretty much never heard from him again.

          The neighbor who lived across the hall, Rick, was one great guitar player and sold us his Takhamini acoustic guitar for sixty bucks. It had a condenser microphone in it so we could plug it in. What a great deal. He even gave Kurt and me lessons. I was never really into The Who, but that was his favorite band, so he’d sit us down and make us listen to Quadraphenia, Tommy, Who’s Next, etc, etc. I have become an avid Fan of the Who. I’ve seen them twice. Once in Boulder, and then years later I saw Quadraphenia done in its entirety in Portland Oregon. That was my favorite concert I’ve had the honor to see. Anyhow, he was the first one to really teach me some guitar.

          Kurt and Rick took a vacation to Mexico where they visited Billy The Kid’s gravesite. They brought back some mezcal too. That was a great drunk, except when I was trying to swim I went under and couldn’t find my way back up. This truly Scared the living shit out of me. I’m still a little afraid of the water.

          Kurt and Venus’ relationship didn’t last that long. They were a weird couple. He was all heavy metal and classic rock and she was glam/ goth. One good thing came out of it though. One night when Kurt and I were living in another place, we get a phone call from her. She had won tickets to go see Ozzy Osbourne in Denver and wanted to trade the tickets for a fifth of Jim Beam. We were on that in seconds. We call up a couple of our best buddies, Ace and Epstein, and they gave us a ride up to Denver for the concert. Great show. Coolest entrance I’ve ever seen. There was this giant curtain in on  the stage hanging there with Ozzy’s name on it. They shined a spotlight on it to make it look like there was the moon behind the clouds. The curtain dropped and up came this giant pillar of fire, and when it came down, there was the Prince of Darkness wearing a wizards robe and screaming, “Let’s fucking rock and roll!” It was great. Two tenth row seats for a fifth of Beam.

          Eventually Bob and I got an apartment together. It was two rooms in a Victorian house, a kitchen and a living room, no bedroom. We shared the room and actually didn’t drive each other insane because we had a  “no bitching” rule. It worked. We would wake up in the morning, exercise, meditate, drink tea, and played a game with a bean bag. We would throw the bean bag at each others face while sitting only four or five feet from each other. Ten points for the face and five for the chest. This made our reflexes really attuned.

          One night while over at a friend named Erick’s house, I ran into an ex-girlfriend named Anna who I was seeing when I was sixteen or seventeen. She had long hair now instead of the spiky little mop she used to have. Man, she was fine. She was half German and half Thai. A gothic princess in the sexiest attire you can imagine. She looked like Death out of The Sandman comic series. Well, as it goes, Erick was getting together with her best friend, this luscious red-head named Jenny. Anna and I was an old item, so sparks were not hard to re-kindle. Man, we hit it off good. We threw Erick out of his room and had just the meanest most passionate sex right there on his waterbed. We became inseprable. That made it a problem if I wanted to take Anna home because I had no bedroom in Bob and I’s house. So really soon a bunch of us friends got a place on Wahsatch. Bob, Kurt, Wendy, and I. Anna stayed with me in my room. The living arrangements worked for a little while. Jenny always came by to hang out with Anna and I. Eventually Jenny and Kurt got together, though that didn’t last long. I think they only went out because Kurt and I were best friends and it seemed like the thing to do.