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Punk Rock Dad
No Rules, Just Real Life
Chapter One
Story of My Life
I am the world's forgotten boy
The one who's searching to destroy
—Iggy & the Stooges
I didn't choose punk rock. Punk rock chose me. Mainly because the small L.A. beach town where I was raised was destined to become a fertile punk rock breeding ground, but also because a genetic malfunction virtually ensured that when I first heard its forbidden beat, I would respond emphatically. I probably would have been perfectly content to grow up and become a happy-go-lucky, productive member of society, but somehow, while floating around in my mother's fallopian tubes on the journey down to my uterine home, I inherited a mutated gene from one of my ancestors that meant when I came out, instead of having both eyes gazing lovingly up at my parents, they were both staring at my nose, unable to move, as if a fly were resting there that I couldn't stop looking at.
Strabismus is a condition that affects thousands of babies worldwide. It means that somewhere in my fetal development, my eyes decided they didn't want to work together and focus on objects like a team, and instead looked around independent of each other. The wonderful layman's term for this condition is called "being fucking cross-eyed." The problem is that it seems to be one of the few handicaps, along with stuttering and chronic flatulence, that most people have absolutely no problem with making fun of to your face. You walk up to them with one eye staring at your nose and they think you're being funny. Those who are so gifted to be able to mimic thecondition will salute you by laughing and doing it right back to you. You wouldn't walk up to a kid with one leg and start hopping around like you're on a pogo stick, but for some reason a person with screwy eyes is fair game.
The first time I realized I had this deformity was a particularly jarring experience for someone of my tender age. My parents must have kept me hidden in a closet until kindergarten or broken all our mirrors because for all I knew I was a happy, well-adjusted youngster, but when I walked out onto the playground for the first time, I met a kid who was running around scaring little girls by yanking his lips apart and moaning like he was Frankenstein. When I approached to join their game, he took one look at me and my eyes and said, "Yeah, you do that, and we'll chase the girls around together." Apparently, my normal visage was enough to horrify five-year-old girls into a panic.
Last time I checked, no five-year-old likes to be singled out as being different from everyone else, so I remember starting to feel a little ashamed and freaked out about my condition as far back as kindergarten. It's hard to win friends and influence people when the first rule is to always look people in the eye. Later on, with surgery, the effect was lessened to the point where instead of staring at my nose, I could look at you with one eye but the other would kind of wander off into orbit like a lost satellite. I'm convinced this mutated gene and the harsh vibes I got from other kids had a profound impact on my later personality. The mind is a wonderful, adaptive thing in our formative years, and since the soul craves acceptance by our peers, I compensated for my ocular malfunction by deciding that if I did weird things and acted strangely to go along with it, people would think I was just being funny. I started being disruptive in class and doing idiotic things to divert attention away from my eye problem. I'd use my hands to make farting noises while the teacher was talking, wear ridiculous fishing hats to school, and eat gross things off the sidewalk for the other kids' amusement—your typical cry-for-help attempts to get people to accept me. Pretty soon I became popular at school just for being a total freak.
My psycho rebelliousness only increased in junior high, and since I had no fear of getting in trouble, I started becoming a regular outside the principal's office after school. One Friday afternoon I convinced a friend that going into my dad's refrigerator in the garage and drinking as much beer as we could stomach before our Little League game was a great idea. I don't remember much of the details of what happened afterward, but I do know it involved me eating a significant amount of dirt in the infield, flipping off my baseball coach, punching a kid on the other team, and culminated in me being chased around the outfield by my sister and her friends while disgusted parents looked on from the bleachers. I remember thinking even before I opened the first beer that I was probably going to get in a lot of trouble for doing this, but that didn't stop me. I did it because I wanted to break up the monotony of everyday life, and getting into trouble seemed like the best way to do it. That memorable Friday evening finally ended with me pulling down my pants and streaking the full length of Ardmore Avenue, ass cheeks to the wind.
Like many other kids I never stopped rebelling, and when punk rock came around it was like we were meant for each other. I remember reading a newspaper article about a new kind of music scene happening in London and seeing pictures of these freaky-looking teenagers with spiked, colored hair, studded leather jackets, and military boots, sulking around and flipping off the camera. It looked really awful and a lot of fun. The band they were writing about was called the Sex Pistols, so that same day I went up to the local Music Plus store and picked up the garish Day-Glo pink and green album . . .
Punk Rock Dad
No Rules, Just Real Life. Copyright © by Jim Lindberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
