A NOTE
I offer this only partly as memoir with necessary adjustments and embellishments as memory is fluid, a living thing, until we die and take it with us. Mostly, however, it’s an elegy, which implies the author learns something about the mysteries of life and its dim conclusion through the death of another. I didn’t learn much more about the truth of death (an inscrutable study, really) when my childhood friend Jay Buck was killed fighting in an Atlanta parking lot at a 2000 Halloween party by a squatter punk named Jimmy Skaggs (foot goes up, boot hits face, Jay goes down), but life certainly did change shape. Conclusions, after all, are as fleeting as the raw materials of life: a full belly, a good sleep, an orgasm.
The elegy is an ancient form dating back to my blood ancestors, the Greeks, and continued on through time by my English-language ancestors, guys like John Milton, in Lycidas, and Shelley, who wrote Adonais as an elegy to John Keats who died at 26, not much older than Jay when he was snuffed out. Those two mourned the lives of other poets, and while Jay Buck could barely spell, he lived life like some manic poem he was authoring on the fly, skateboard beneath him, coasting down the street like some mad prophet. My aim is to give chase, try to toss the lasso of language around a life of blurry action. Just as it was when we were kids, I am always trying to catch up
TWO VIEWS OF ST. ANDREW’S HALL: 1994, 2000
"No wonder then that there is grief for the friend who dies – a darkness of sorrow over all, the heart melting to tears as the sweet becomes bitter, the life lost to death making others' lives a kind of death." St. Augustine, Confessions
We destroyed things in the carnival of our youth. We were young pups at furious play. We flopped on torn-up couches in our parents’ basements as long as we could without jobs, our ambitions wrecked. L-Town, our affectionate moniker for Livonia in suburban Detroit, was home, a magical place of quiet streets we sought to disrupt; yelling, breaking windows, driving across the manicured front lawns in economy cars, annihilating the silence and sadness. Detroit was our urban playground a few miles away, a city that only fueled our fuck-all attitudes, a city chewing itself up from the inside out. We ran amok there and everywhere.
We fought each other. We quit sports and school. We skateboarded, drank too much, smoked too much and listened to punk rock music on cheap stereos. We got suspended from school and in trouble with the law. We greeted sunrises with bottles of stolen liquor on the rooftops when parents were away. We did too many drugs. We hooked up with girls in their parents’ beds and wiped ourselves off on the pillowcases. We screwed each other’s girlfriends and fought over it.
If you found a glob of spit on your back, that was us. If you found a turd in your freezer a few days after a party, that was us too. If your son or daughter came home crying with a welt on their face, chances are they ran into us.
We truly, honestly didn’t give a flying fuck where we ended up, did we Jay Buck?
*
NOFX was playing the night the drunken asshole paraded around on top of the band’s tour bus in front of St. Andrew’s Hall, waving a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, a gift for whoever would punch him in the face. A large crowd had spilled out of the old brownstone meeting hall, built in 1907 by a society of ethnically proud Scotsmen, and onto E. Congress after the show. The building has hosted major touring acts since being converted into a concert venue around 1980. It’s the same St. Andrew’s that “she walked up on” in the Jane's Addiction song. We were there every other weekend for shows, it seemed.
Despite warnings from the burly guards at the door, the crowd wouldn’t disperse. We were part of a blob expanding and contracting in the streets of downtown Detroit. It was late autumn and the city smelled like post-apocalyptic dust. Steam shot up from the manholes. The city was smoldering, dying.
Jay, his girlfriend, my brother and I were in the middle of the crowd watching the guy parade on top of the tour bus parked across the street. He presided over the crowd like some deranged preacher, waving the money around.
“I'll give someone twenty bucks if they punch me in the face,” he slurred.
I hoped the guy would disappear and that Jay Buck wouldn’t notice him. These were the kinds of situations where Jay could get us in trouble. To my temporary relief, one of the bouncers forced the drunken guy off the bus and the two disappeared in the crowd. I don’t know what everybody was waiting for. We certainly didn’t. We were just standing there.
The guy with the twenty dollar bill popped out of the crowd and was now before us. Somehow he had escaped from the bouncers. My brother and I stood with our hands in our pockets, buzzed and numbed from two hours of cheap beer and loud music. Jay stood by his girlfriend.
“I'll give anyone twenty dollars if they punch me in the face,” the drunk guy slurred.
He was older than us, about thirty, and had a craggy face. Jay and I couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. We still had lean, athletic bodies, before all the 40s of malt liquor we drank gave us beer bellies. Jay Buck was always skinnier and smaller than me, but when we fist-fought years before it had been a draw because he was tougher. He still had the same oversized ears and big teeth he had in elementary school. When I first met him in the fourth grade, I thought people were calling him Buck because of his teeth, not because it was his name, which over the years was always uttered with both first and last names. He was usually never just Jay or Buck, but Jay Buck like one name.
He was already punk rock in elementary school and had won numerous skateboarding trophies. When we were young, he’d wear jean jackets with the sleeves cut off and band names like JFA (Jodie Foster’s Army) and DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) written on them with black Magic Marker. I grew up listening to such family favorites and Huey Lewis and the News and Bruce Springsteen and found the band names bizarre and threatening. Jay came to the NOFX show with us just for something to do, I think. He probably didn’t consider the Southern California “new school” band sufficiently punk enough.
I was built like my dad, the former nose tackle, and had a department store wardrobe when we were kids. I hadn’t grown up punk, didn’t know what it was until I met Jay Buck. In size, I was bigger and had broader shoulders. I had played football until I quit my junior year to start a punk band. Both Jay and I frequently dyed our hair, but always kept it short, giving each other haircuts in his backyard with store-bought shavers. Back then, we wore beaded necklaces, earrings, baggy blue jeans or Army cargo pants and T-shirts with band or skateboarding logos on them.
My brother, Chris, would have been in his mid-twenties, fresh out of college, and mature beyond his years. He was always our chaperone. My parents wouldn’t let me go to places like St. Andrew’s without him because he was older and would supposedly keep us out of trouble.
This never worked. Not with Jay Buck around, at least.
The crowd moved away from the drunk and a circle formed around him like he was a big tent barker. He had longish blond hair and would have almost looked normal if it weren't for his wild eyes. He moved toward us and was within arms-reach now.
“You really want someone to punch you in the face?” Jay said.
Chris and I stood watching with our hands in our pockets, amused but anxious. You never knew what Jay Buck would do.
“I'm serious,” the guy slurred. “Twenty bucks. See?”
He waved around the creased and flimsy twenty. Strangers on the rim of the circle watched in anticipation. Jay turned to Chris and I.
“Look at this asshole,” he said, smirking.
He looked at the rest of the crowd.
“What a fucking idiot.”
Jay’s girlfriend was standing next to him. Everyone called her Rage because she wore a burgundy Rage Against the Machine T-shirt to school nearly every day. She had pale skin and pitch-black hair –a plumper version of Morticia Addams.
Jay slid behind Rage’s body and scooted her closer to the drunk guy. On the steps of the Hall, the bouncers were yelling at the crowd to leave.
“Everyone has to go home!”
The lazy mob buzzed. People around us watched the drunk guy and Jay, waiting for something to happen.
“C’mon!” the guy said. “Somebody punch me in the fucking face! I got twenty dollars here. I want someone to punch me. Come on. Somebody do it. Punch me right here!”
He pointed to his cheekbone.
Jay reached his arm underneath Rage’s, grabbed her wrist and swung her hand at the guy, but somehow connected his own fist with the guy’s jaw. The man staggered backwards, collapsed, and rolled on the pavement, clutching his face. It happened so fast, no one saw what Jay had really done.
“Look,” someone in the crowd said. “That girl knocked him out!”
The guy rocked on the ground and groaned. Jay snatched the twenty-dollar bill out of his hand.
As usual, my brother and I could only stand back and watch Jay Buck’s mad antics with amazement. Chris grabbed Jay and Rage and pulled them away. We quickly hustled out of the crowd toward the red Tempo parked a few blocks away. No one gave chase. We were free.
We stopped at a liquor store on the way to a house party back in L-Town and Jay bought a whole case of Mickey’s 40s with the drunk’s twenty. Jay Buck, mooch-king, never had money and owed us. We roared down the freeway out of Detroit, cracking our beer and smoking cigarettes, the radio cranked for our concert-deaf ears, retelling the story about what just happened over and over again.
*
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on November 3, 2000:
A man police say crashed a weekend Halloween party is facing a murder charge in the beating death of another partygoer. Jimmy Skaggs, 25, of Atlanta was not invited to the party on Murphy Avenue in the West End neighborhood, police said.
Skaggs and Jason A. Buck, 22, also of Atlanta, got into a fight about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. After he hit the ground, Buck lapsed into a coma and never regained consciousness.
From the same paper on November 4, 2000:
JASON A. BUCK, 22, died Tuesday. The body will be cremated. Funeral, 4 p.m. Sunday, Christ the King Lutheran Church, Livonia, Mich.; Thayer-Rock Funeral Home, Farmington, Mich.
*
The dead exist inside the guts of memory. We’re surrounded by their phantoms. They live in the sights, the smells and the sounds of wherever life pushes us in the present. We walk into rooms they once occupied and are assailed by a rusty sadness while looking at the armchair where they once sat.
I see a maple tree in the middle of a forest and think of the tree in the schoolyard where I fist-fought Jay Buck in the fourth grade and all trees have inexorably changed for me. Catching a whiff of shampoo or hair gel has my memory smelling the Butch Wax hair gunk Jay used to spiff up his flat-top with, smearing it on his head with its underarm deodorant-like applicator. I hear the clack of a neighborhood kid’s skateboard on pavement, but in my memory it’s Jay Buck landing a 360 kickflip in the parking lot of our elementary school, grinning like a devil.
Our minds when we’re awake are in all places at once: past, present and future. Therefore the dead pay their visits whenever they want. The gates are always opened. We are forced to live with ghosts.
Our nighttime brains are even more prime for phantoms. In dreams, the dead have more power. They walk and talk; comfort and terrorize us. A few months after Jay Buck was killed, I had one of the most significant dreams of my life. The image of his face stretched the capacity of blackness in my mind spinning and spinning. His mouth didn’t move, but I could feel him speaking: “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK.”
That eternally smooth face will never know a wrinkle in my memory. It will be 22 years old forever.
We never accept our dead. We are never ready for it, even when it’s a 90-year-old grandparent. We never truly “get over it” or “move on.” Given the passage of time, they might not be the burning suns filling up our skies they were at the raw moment immediately following their deaths. Instead, they transform into the heaviest, densest dead stars. We carry them around in the pits of our souls until we too return our dust to the cosmos.
What the dead change the most are the places we shared together. The suburban homes, the schools, the streets of our old neighborhood we walked together; the punk rock clubs where we hung out, the cars we drove around in, the garages we smoked cigarettes behind – all are transformed. St. Andrew’s Hall was one of those places for Jay Buck and I. We came of age there, from when we were scrappy kids sneaking plastic cups of beer in the balcony to when all his mourners held a benefit show for him a month after he was killed.
The day and night of the benefit, I wandered around St. Andrew’s Hall like I had done many times before with Jay Buck and the occasions my bands played shows there during the past seven years. Like those times before, there was a band setting up onstage. People blanketed the hardwood floor and rickety balcony, drinking and talking, just like any other show. My band was set to go on soon. It all felt familiar, but this was a sadly different situation.
I never stopped wandering. It was evening and I had been walking aimlessly since the early afternoon when we had to load in our gear. I would pause to talk to people, but never for more than a few moments.
I kept moving. I couldn’t stop moving.
I wouldn’t find Jay Buck among these faces. I knew it, but I kept looking, expecting him to pop his head out among a circle of people, waving me over to join, “We’re over here, Yanni.”
Yanni was the nickname he gave me in elementary school.
There were old-school punks sporting leathers with chains, ripped up T-shirts and Mohawks. There were skateboarders with their thick, tattered skate shoes, baggy pants and sweatshirts. There were burnouts in hooded sweatshirts and Detroit Tiger baseball caps on backwards, sneaking down into the scummy, graffiti-covered basement bathroom to burn a joint.
It would almost seem like any other rock show at the Hall, except there was Dad, dressed in a turtleneck and sport coat, sipping a Scotch. And Mom, wearing slacks and a colorful sweater, holding a plastic cup of beer. They stood by the bar drinking with some of the other parents who knew Jay.
I rambled around, trying to think of something to say when I took the stage later. I was having a hard time.
“Jay Buck was brilliant at being a bastard. He was a son and a son-of-a-bitch, a brother, bastard, lover, cheat and a rat fink. He was a lizard-catching, cocksucker extraordinaire for the sole reason that he went and died just to make us all feel like shit, the motherfucker.”
I couldn’t say that onstage, of course.
“We drove each other crazy. We fought and had falling outs. You didn’t want to leave him in your house unsupervised because usually something would go missing or he’d break something. He’d steal cigarettes, your dad’s condoms and beer from your garage. In the rare moments he settled down, when he wasn’t trying to fuck your girlfriend, or shoot out your neighbor’s car window with a BB gun, or taking a shit in his hands in the corner of your basement, Jay could be sincere. Full of life and heart.”
That wouldn’t work either.
We were allowed to hate each other occasionally because we loved each other most of the time. I didn’t know that yet. Young men aren’t supposed to acknowledge love for one another, which makes grieving even more complicated. We were supposed to be tough. We weren’t supposed to cry. We could love hot girls, our parents, music and skateboarding, but we couldn’t admit we loved one another. We didn’t want to be weak, the worst reputation a young man can have. It’s why we misbehaved. It’s why we raised so much hell. It’s why Jay Buck couldn’t have backed down to Jimmy Skaggs in that Atlanta parking lot.
When Jay died I was devastated for weeks, but still couldn’t acknowledge that love. It took ten years for me to admit it, to say it out loud, “Jay Buck died and I was very sad because I loved him.” At the time, I just felt like a shot of Novocain had been injected into the center of my heart. I stumbled around somnambulant and hungover for days, skipping my college classes and drinking with friends. I wasn’t prepared for death. I had only lost a few people in my life, all due to old age: great-grandparents and a grandpa. I didn’t know about the gut of my memory and the weight the dead had inside of it. I didn’t yet know every death transforms us as long as we go on living. I didn’t yet know just how much I had loved and would miss Jay Buck.
It wasn’t just me. Jay was charismatic. He had lived recklessly for years, tossing himself into the world and our lives in madcap fashion. He skated, drank, loved, fucked and fought without regard to convention. He made some dubious decisions, but also taught us all how to be daring. We all loved him for his craziness, his mad humor, the way he helped unleash the raw wildness in our own hearts.
A whole community felt this way and had come together that night for collective mourning.
Here they were in St. Andrew’s wearing T-shirts and sweatshirts with pictures of Jay on them. He’s skateboarding in one, wearing a huge full-brimmed hat, grinding a park bench in some city. There is another shirt with a close-up of his face, a skateboard rested upside down on his head while taking a break. I’m uneasy about wearing these things. I’m also wary about how everyone else is mourning Jay. I don’t want to get caught up in the amnesia of death, when how the person was in real life is forgotten and they become instant saints. Jay Buck was definitely no saint. I wanted my love and memory of him to be true, not based on a revised version of his character.
Plus, T-shirts and stickers are paltry offerings to the dead. A sweatshirt can get a hole in it; memories cannot. The only shirt I kept and wore is the one commemorating this show, an Anti-Violence Benefit in Memory of Jason Buck. It listed all the bands on the back: Blindshot, Cast in Fire, Cold as Life, Few and Far Between, Gutter Punx, Malpractice, Murder City Wrecks, PT’s Revenge, Slo-Poke, Suburban Delinquents, The Suicide Machines, Telegraph, U.S. Killers, Without Warning and Wristrocket.
I was in two of them—Suburban Delinquents and Wristrocket—along with Steve Toth, who played guitar in both bands and used to skate with Jay in the old days. Toth, an art school kid, designed the graphic for the shirt. There was no picture of Jay. Instead, it was a drawing of a skateboard rising up like a tombstone. There was an Old English “L” in the middle of the board representing L-Town, where we all grew up. At the bottom, it said: Jay Buck 1978-2000 R.I.P.
The new band we’d started, Wristrocket, had already played. That was easy. I only played guitar in that band. I was nowhere near a microphone. But I was the singer in Suburban Delinquents. Now, I’m lost in the crowd, not knowing what to say when I take the stage.
The Delinquents was the band I was in when we were in our late teens, before Jay moved to Atlanta. We’d broken up a few years earlier. Jay’s brother, Matt, who passed a love of punk rock music down to first his little brother and then to me, asked us to play last. We got the original members together and practiced old songs for the show. And since we were playing last, I should have something meaningful to say at that moment when we take the stage. I’d known Jay Buck for a decade and feel I should have these miraculous, healing words to utter into the microphone, words that everyone I’ve ever known will hear and be moved by.
But as I roamed, stopping for a moment or two to talk with friends before heading off into the crowd again, I could think of absolutely nothing to say. So I didn’t. I took the stage, walked up to the mic beneath the hot, colorful blaze of the overhead lights and said, “I don’t know what to say about what happened to Jay,” before starting in on the first song, my electric guitar screaming.
I still feel like I don’t know what to say about Jay, but will make my most humble efforts to try.