I was a totally rapeable child, if I do say so myself.

I don’t know where this fascination with pedophiles came from. I was never raped, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or not that I remember, anyway. Although, once, when I was 8, our neighbor—a 14-year-old girl with short hair and a reputation for violence—pinned me down in the backyard and unzipped my pants so she could suck me off on a moist patch of grass. I can’t remember her name, only that she was incredibly ugly. The kids on the street called her Alleyway because her face was dirty and freckled, and she always smelled of cat piss.

“I’m going to kiss it,” she said, chasing me around an Elm tree. Her braces flashed in the sunlight. I didn’t know what the “it” was.

I didn’t run as fast as I could have and when she caught me I only pretended to put up a fight while she fumbled around with my belt and zipper. I remember the feel of her mouth—warm and wet—and I decided the sensation of her quick, dry breath against my groin, her chalky tongue combined with the meaty smell of her head was somewhere in between horrifying and religious. But it certainly wasn’t rape in any of its devious forms. And, frankly, the story doesn’t explain much, except perhaps my own ecosystem of sickness and perversion, which is another freak show entirely.

Anyway, I’d taken to searching the sexual offender database almost every day for the past four years, so I’d gotten quite familiar with it. It’s set up so you can search by location or name and there’s a map marked with blue dots to indicate where the offenders live. When you click on one of the blue dots, you see the offender’s picture, a physical description (including tattoos), their address and their crimes, which range from public indecency to kidnapping and rape. I always begin the search in my Del Paso neighborhood, which occupies a poor, gang-infested corridor of North Sacramento. A ghetto, in the classic sense. My neighborhood is riddled with so many blue dots that in certain places they’re stacked on top of one another. If you didn’t know better, it would look like a rich terrain of royal blue castles, when really it’s a sinister Disneyland of sexual depravity.

James :(

Recently, to my surprise, I found my neighbor, James (a sad looking black man who reminds me of every grade school janitor I’d ever seen growing up in Boston—fat, bald, and unimpressed with everything). His saggy eyes and ashy brown skin were never sinister, just tired, so his crime—kidnapping and assault on a minor—seemed to betray him.

And as it turns out, Salome lives just down the street. He’s a Native American with a Johnny Depp goatee and a ponytail pulled back like a Samurai. In his picture he’s wearing a tight necklace made of Buddhist prayer beads. Salome was charged with rape in concert with violence and oral copulation on a minor.

In my four years of clicking through the blue-specked map, I’ve examined almost every one of the 90,000 registered sex offenders in California. Sometimes, by accident, I’ll click on one I’ve already seen and remember him like he was a long lost relative. In four years, I’d acquired 90,000 frightening uncles.

And aunts.

The Jodie Foster of child rapists

It’s not just men who are sexual offenders. There are also women, like Tamara, the 24-year-old spitting image of Jodie Foster. Tamara was a counselor at Bridges after school program when she fell in love with one of her students, a young girl named Josephine. According to Tamara’s court testimony, she fell in love with the little girl and the little girl fell in love with her back. It was mutual, she pleaded. Tamara forged emergency release documents and took her out of school, so they could express their love sexually in a hotel room. Four years later, Tamara’s internet presence hangs over her like a noose.

So here’s where the story gets kind of messy.

When I get home from work I decide that I need to call one of the pedophiles. I can’t explain why, but I can try to explain the feeling: I open the refrigerator, see a jug of filtered water and then feel something break in my brain, like the little pocket of air that pops in your knuckle when you push at it too hard. So I sit at my computer and pick one name at random from the database. The name is Charles, a disheveled man with unkempt hair. In his photo he’s wearing a suit and he reminds me of a poor man’s Rush Limbaugh. His crime is lewd and lascivious acts upon a child. When I type his name into Google there are many results: he’s a writer, a pizza maker, a veteran, a lawyer, a mechanic. I narrow the search by typing in his area code next to his name. And there it is, Charles’s phone number—right in front of me, like an old dollar bill folded neatly on the sidewalk.

Now that I think back, there was this one time when I was nine and I lived in Boston with my mom and step-dad. They wanted me to learn how to swim, so they enrolled me in lessons at the local high school. I was a shy kid and didn’t like being around other kids my age, mostly because they were cruel and impatient. But my parents insisted that spending another summer traveling the city’s subway system by myself was unhealthy. I didn’t know anybody in my class.

Our teacher, Mark, was probably 30. He had a big nose and tiny eyes, like a toucan. He spoke in the thick Boston accent that my mom always warned me about.

“Be careful with the way you talk,” she said. “People will treat you differently.”

But Mark was unashamed of his.

“Down, out, togethah!” he yelled when he taught the breast stroke.

After class, all the kids would run into the locker room. We shivered as we changed. Some of the kids snapped each other with towels. And Mark stood there, in the middle of the room with one foot up on a bench, taking it all in.

One time, when we finished changing, he approached and asked me if I wanted a ride home.

“No thanks,” I told him.

For the next two weeks, he asked me the same question, each time with more urgency, until I finally told my mom, who shook her head and laughed nervously.

My mother patted me on the shoulder. “Keep your little pants on,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“She wanted it”

When the phone rings, my hands begin to shake and suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing.

“Hello?” he answers. His mouth sounds like it’s stuffed with jelly doughnuts. Charles’ picture is still up on my computer screen and his large red face and shoulder length greasy hair remind me of a grocery store manager. “Charles?”

“Yeah, who is this?”
 For a second, I forget. My body is light. My brain turns into steam that’s billowing out through my ears into the porous ceiling. Words finally escape through the teacup of my mouth.

“We don’t know each other. Sorry. I’m writing a story.”

“How did you get my number?” he asks. I imagine his thick jowls swinging as he speaks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was on Google.”

“Stop apologizing,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be on there, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well I just typed it in,” I say. “And it popped up.”

“What is this about?”
 “I have to be honest, I saw you on the offender website. I wanted to ask you some questions.”

At this point, I’m fairly certain he’ll hang up. I want him to hang up. I’m not sure what I’m expecting from the conversation, but I’m fairly positive this isn’t it. But Charles doesn’t hang up. Instead, he sits on the other end of the line, presumably thinking. I can hear him breathing long, disturbing breaths.

“What’s this about?” he asks again.

“It’s for school,” I say, lying.

“School?” he asks. “Are you going to record this?”

“No,” I say, another lie.

“So you’re not recording this right now?”

“No.”

We end up talking for an hour. He’s lonely. He tells me about his life now that he’s on “the list,” which consists mainly of watching television and reading passages from the Bible.

“Does it help you?” I ask.

“Does what help me?”

“The Bible.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I ask him what it feels like to be outcast.

“It’s bad,” he says. “People spit on me when I’m walking down the street. They wait at my house. They threaten me.”

Charles tells me about his childhood: His mother was an alcoholic; he was a strange kid who didn’t get along with other kids; he was a bad student, but he liked to read. When his father died he cried, even though he beat Charles and his mother until they both ended up in the hospital.

“Right now I’ve stopped living,” Charles says. “I’m only existing.

He tells me about how he can’t get a job and how he only makes enough money by doing random odds and ends to pay rent. Sometimes he doesn’t eat for days.

“Can you tell me about the girl?” I ask.

“What girl?”
 “The girl,” I say. “The one you assaulted.”

“She was 13. My wife’s daughter from another marriage,” he says, pausing. “You know, men have certain impulses. We can’t help things. The girls now wear all kinds of short clothes, tank tops.” Charles tells me how she’d come home at night and they were alone together. The aloneness is what broke him. It was unbearable, he said. She was suggestive. He insists that he didn’t rape her. It was consensual, he says.

“She wanted it?”

“The crime was absolutely wrong,” he says. “No ifs, no ands, no buts, no excuses—but there has to come a time when the pound of flesh has been exacted. With a registered sex offender, that pound of flesh doesn’t exist.” I can hear the frustration growing in Charles’ tone. He wants me to understand. He’s expecting a high-five.

“The daughter, the one you raped, does her mother still talk to you?”

“She wants nothing to do with me,” Charles says. “But I don’t blame her.” When I hang up with Charles, I look out the window. As the sun begins to set, I watch two men smoke cigarettes and talk outside the pornography shop across the street. One of them is so obese that his stomach hangs from his opened jacket, over his belt and it covers his groin. The smaller one gestures wildly with his hands and they laugh. The fat one holds his hand over his heart. The men flick their butts onto the street, get into a rusted pickup and drive off toward the freeway.

World’s Greatest Grandpa

I open my laptop to another offender—Roger—who lives just a few blocks from where I live, though I’ve never seen him in real life. He was born in 1948, but his wispy white hair and thin brittle skin are deceptive. He looks older—demented, even. His jaw bones form sharp angles and he wears the chin of an old boxer. When he was younger, he might have smoked a pipe and imitated Sinatra while his wife put down her magazine and rolled her eyes in the bedroom. He might have been handsome—an athlete who kept a girl in the library and one at the bowling alley, just in case. Or perhaps he was a family man, the kind of guy who’d steal a bouquet of flowers from the cemetery on mother’s day. He has a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his forearm and one of a lightning bolt on his neck. Under his list of crimes, it says 288, which is the California Penal Code that means he’s been caught having sex with a child. I close my eyes and imagine how he was once a child. It’s almost impossible to picture a child rapist as a young boy, so I keep trying. I think about how he carried books in his backpack, how his eyes were blue but now they’re darker, the color of wet concrete, like he’d been crying for the entirety of his 62 years.

“This is me,” he says, his sharp lips expose the rawness of his bloody gums. He’s choking back a ball of tears, trying to muster a truthful smile. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “Right?”

So if you click here your penis will grow like 5 inches. If you’re a girl, I suggest you don’t click on the link.

I guess I forgot to put this story on the website. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s too long.

This is the tale of how I turned from doing a lot of drugs and drinking to doing no drugs or drinking at all, which is perfect because today, January 4, is my 4 year birthday of sobriety. That’s a long time with no booze.

Run, Josh, run

An SN&R writer races from his addicted past

By Josh Fernandez

PHOTOS BY ANDREW NILSEN

Five in the morning is a lonely hour. The air is cold from the earth soaking up the nighttime; Loki, the gray cat, who has taken a liking to sleeping next to my face, wakes up, looks around and then buries his head back under the tufts of his paws. Even for him it’s too early to be hungry, but for some reason I get up anyway. When I lift my legs out of the bed, I’m still a bit sore from the previous day’s workout. I stretch out my arms and yawn, and something in my chest lets out a loud crack. My calves are tight, my left knee feels bruised and my thighs speak out with a dull soreness. It’s so quiet in the morning that I can hear each groan of my body’s ailments with outstanding clarity. The wooden floor creeks as I walk toward the bathroom; I imagine that I’m walking on a ship, through the galley, to the gangplank.

The hard light in the bathroom hurts my eyes; when I look into the mirror I see a man who is much older than I remember. Sharp lines, like demarcations for highways on a road map, streak across my forehead. Perhaps it’s an act of catching up with myself, or maybe it’s just plain narcissism, but every morning I’ve taken to staring at my image for one minute. But after I brush my teeth, the real ritual of the morning begins.

The drawer at the bottom of the shelf is where I keep my running gear, which is the only clothing in my closet that’s folded neatly. The socks, the shorts, the shirts all have their own place, and I unfold each piece of clothing with care, perhaps as a religious person would dust off the cover of his Bible. I put on socks first, running tights, shorts over them, a long-sleeved shirt, then my shoes, and do a few light stretches. The pre-running process is calming. It relaxes me to know that I’m going out to run; the act of exercise, the grueling challenge against the body, allows me to separate myself from what influences me; it allows me to separate what I’ve learned from who I am.

My training schedule calls for a 10-mile run. It’s a moderate distance for the middle of the week that usually takes about an hour and 15 minutes. The river by Sacramento State has a perfectly serene trail for morning runs, so I drive there from my Midtown apartment. Save for a few trucks and wary motorists probably headed for Tahoe, nobody else is on the freeway. I park along the road and walk down to the trail; it’s still dark and hard to see, but I can make out an older man walking up from the path in a heavy coat. He has a rough, reddish beard and a fishing cap. He looks cold and confused, and when he sees me he turns away quickly and stumbles up the dirt path, walking unsteadily toward the highway. He reminds me of my biological father, a schizophrenic and alcoholic who lived along the Sacramento River for a period of time. To be honest, I’d be surprised if he was still alive. The last time I saw him was in San Diego. He showed up to my house unannounced and made a camp in my backyard. That night, we got into a drunken fistfight and the police hauled him away.

I take off running down the trail. I can see my breath in front of me, and the light barely cracks through the thick brush. The air smells of heavy tree bark. Up ahead, I can see a thick layer of fog settled near the ground, and I run faster toward it.

I’m training for the December 7 California International Marathon, a 26.2-mile course beginning in Folsom and ending at the Capitol building in downtown Sacramento that I’m told is a fast and flat run. The CIM isn’t my first marathon, and because of that I learned that you have to follow a strict training schedule if you want to make it the entire 26.2 miles. My schedule seems to work for me: 5 to 7 miles on Tuesdays and Thursdays, some weight lifting on Mondays, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays about 10 miles. Fridays are a rest day, and on Sunday is the long run of about 15 to 20 miles.

My first 26.2-mile race was in the San Francisco Marathon back in August. I worked out for 18 weeks beforehand. By the time the race came, most of my toenails turned black and fell off from constantly pounding against my shoes, and I lost about 10 pounds. The rigorous training chiseled my normally chubby face into a strangely angular shape, giving it an athletic zombie kind of look. Sometimes I felt sick and couldn’t eat, followed by periods of severe gluttony where I consumed pizza and pasta at an extraordinary volume. My mood often went from ecstatic to flat-out tired. But it was the healthiest I’d felt in my life, and I successfully trained my body to run for almost four hours without stopping.

On August 3, the morning of the San Francisco Marathon, I could barely contain myself; I felt as if my entire body would explode in anticipation. My girlfriend and I stayed in a hotel the night before, where I slept for a fitful three hours. I spent most of the night tossing around the bed in a cold sweat wondering what it was going to be like to run my first marathon. I got up 30 minutes before my alarm went off, because I couldn’t take the restlessness anymore. When I got to the Embarcadero, it was shortly after 5 a.m., and there was already a crowd of runners at the start line. Apparently I had gone the wrong way, so a large fence separated me from the other entrants. A cop stood in the street telling people they had to go around, but I didn’t have time. I pretended not to hear the officer and jumped over the fence when he looked away. “Hey you!” he said. “You need to go around.” I ran into the crowd so he couldn’t catch me.

When I stood in the middle of the sea of several thousand runners I felt a tremendous surge of energy; it felt like I was in the midst of an electrical windstorm. Everyone was jittery and couldn’t stop moving. People got each other’s names, asking if they’d ever run a marathon before. I couldn’t stop smiling. My knees were trembling, in part because we were in San Francisco and the sun still wasn’t up, and also because I was incredibly nervous. And before I knew it, we were running. We ran along the wharf, past Pier 39, at a good pace. The sound of running shoes patting all around me was like nothing I’d ever heard; my mind began firing rapidly. It sounded like thousands of fingers typing on keyboards, or a flock of pigeons exploding toward the moon. I could barely contain my thoughts. The city glowed orange under the streetlights, and thousands of runners moved forward in the dark. I’d never felt so connected to the earth, my feet touching down so intently upon the road; I felt an extreme connection to the other runners as I soaked up their energy, and I’d never felt so in tune with myself as my body and mind propelled me forward.

The wind felt good against my face. When cars passed on the other side of the street, they honked and waved. The pack of runners was thick, and we kept a steady pace as we passed by Ghirardelli Square. Just past the buildings, through a thicket of trees, I could see the Golden Gate Bridge sitting on a hill in a bed of fog, like some majestic kingdom.

It was then that I noticed that I was crying. I didn’t understand it at first, but it felt good. I didn’t wipe away the tears because I felt like they were supposed to be there. I just ran in the moment and let the tears stream down my face. I wasn’t sad at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure that was the happiest moment of my life. The experience made me reflect heavily on my past.

On any given day five years ago, I would probably have still been up at 5 in the morning, except that I wouldn’t have been running. I would have been buzzing around the city of Sacramento, high on methamphetamine or wandering the streets trying to find a bottle of whiskey. I had pretty much cut my family off at that point, talking to my parents every so often but rarely visiting. I called them when I needed something. It was a different life, maybe even the opposite life. It was unhealthy, and I was sicker than I realized.

I looked up at the steep incline heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge, about to run a full 26.2 miles. My parents and my girlfriend would be waiting for me at the finish line, and there just wasn’t any way to keep the tears in.

For 11 years after high school in Davis, I had no idea what I was doing. While my friends went off to college, I took off to New York City. I worked as a busboy, then I worked whatever job I could get just to support my lifestyle of buying drugs, getting alcohol and partying. A couple years later I came back to Sacramento and lived with Mike, a musician who was a terrible heroin addict. We occupied a practice space for bands in Oak Park on Stockton Boulevard. Groups would come to rehearse in the evening and not leave until late at night. Sometimes I’d sleep in my car just to escape the noise.

Whenever he wasn’t in prison, our friend Lou, a tweaker, would come over with a huge bag of meth. Lou and I would smoke the dope while my roommate and his friends shot up in the kitchen. I remember one night sitting on the couch, waiting for the glass pipe to come around, watching my roommate and his friends standing around with rolled-up sleeves and rubber cords around their arms. I couldn’t imagine sticking myself with a needle. “Pshht,” I thought. “That’s pathetic.” The pipe came to me and I took a big hit of smoke; I watched the perfectly white cloud dissipate into the air. The high of crystal meth was like nothing I could imagine. I felt energized, talkative, introspective, sexual and strong.

I wrote and read a lot back then. Often times when I was high, I’d get a handle of rum and sit on my bed scratching out poems. Sometimes I’d send the poems—drug-crazed, self-obsessed and incoherent—to literary journals or poetry magazines, and nobody would take them. “Dear Mr. Fernandez, Thank you for your recent submission. We regret to inform you—” At that point, I’d throw the letter in the trash. “Fuck literature,” I’d think, then drink the rest of the day away.

One day, I walked out of my room and Mike was on the couch, tucked under a sleeping bag staring up at the ceiling.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Sick,” he said.

In the background, Maya Angelou was on the television. She was on the Oprah show, talking about how life always gets better. It made me extremely angry and bitter. I walked into the bathroom to take a shower, and the sick cat was in there breathing irregularly. I didn’t even know his name. He was missing fur in spots and he always had a thick cake of yellow crud covering one eye. The other eye was missing. Just looking at him made me physically ill. There were 4 inches of black water in the shower with bits of iridescent goo that floated to the top. Instead of showering, I just waited for Lou to arrive with the drugs. He never showed up, so I spent a good hour searching the carpet for shards of crystal meth that might have dropped. All I got were clipped toenails. It was a very typical day for me. I was out of drugs, booze and money, so I locked myself in my room and wrote a poem that I called “After Watching Maya Angelou on The Oprah Winfrey Show.” The writing was characteristic of everything I’d written at the time—angry, desperate and full of hatred. It began like this: “Here’s a fucking poem: / Mikey is on the couch / dopesick / and the shower is ankle deep / with piss / and tar sludge. / Everything on the carpet / looks like The Last Shard, / especially the toenails, / so I bite into each one, / hoping to taste / the bitter chemical of love.”

The bleak poem continued on in that vein and ended, finally: “I’m sleeping in a car tonight, / and tomorrow night. / I don’t want to hear / another migraine sun drop / to a mucus covered moon / fiending and coughing. / And it’s not going to get better. / Ever. / Got it?”

I sent the poem out to a small literary magazine in Boston and got a surprisingly fast reply back: “Dear Mr. Fernandez, Thank you for your recent submissions. We regret—”

It was the story of my life.

Still, I felt like being high made me more creative. Being hungover made me feel insane, which was good for writing, I thought. A lot of my favorite writers were insane: Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles Bukowski, etc. I wasn’t a good writer, but maybe I just wasn’t getting high enough, I thought.

One day, in the fall of 2000, my girlfriend at the time told me that I was a mess. I cheated on her, lied to her, got physically violent with her and stole her money. She took me in her car to Sacramento City College and dumped me off there and left for San Francisco. Because I had nothing else to do, I started taking classes: biology, statistics, history, whatever they offered, I took and enjoyed them all pretty well. School kept me out of my disgusting apartment in Oak Park, away from that decaying cat. I took a full load of classes and at night, I’d go home while bands were rehearsing in the living room. I’d wait for Lou, smoke some speed, go to a parking lot, study until 4 or 5 a.m., then go to class the next day. It was a bleak way to enter academia, but it worked. The strange pattern gave me enough credits to transfer to UC Davis.

By the time I transferred, I was a full-blown alcoholic. I put whiskey in my coffee in the morning and went to most of my classes drunk. Once, in a poetry workshop, another student told me my poem was shit. Drunk, I leapt up and ran at him with the intent of killing him. Luckily, the fight was broken up. I made it through UC Davis with dean’s honors. The week I graduated, I took a flight to South Korea to teach English and drink myself to death.

Of course, I didn’t die, but I drank more than I ever had in my life there. Every night I’d go to the bar with my Australian friend and black out, sometimes ending up alone in some desolate part of South Korea. I’d take a cab back to class smelling like cigarettes and soju.

When I came back to America seven months later, my alcoholism was so bad that my whole body shook without booze in it. I stayed with my mom and my stepfather in Davis, where I’d drink all day and night. Finally I got a job in Carson City, Nev., writing for a motorcycle magazine. I had never even touched a motorcycle. I was scared of them, but I was writing about motorcycles as if I had been around them my whole life. I kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my office. And then I’d go back to my apartment and drink until I could no longer stand.

One night after a particularly long day, I drank a bottle of vodka and cut my arm open with a razor. I called the police and they took me to the hospital. The next morning, I woke up in a mental institution in Reno. In the activity room, a gray, brick wall was painted to resemble a sky. There were large, white clouds in the sky, and there was also a painting of a gigantic sun. “Do they think I’m crazy enough that this shitty painting will trick me into being happy?” I asked myself. It was the first realization that my life might be headed in the wrong direction.

After less than a year in Nevada, I returned to my parents with my head hung low.

I decided to clean up my life, not because of some divine intervention; I don’t even think I was at the famed “rock bottom”; I was simply tired: tired of being poor, tired of lying to everyone, tired of owing money, tired of pawning all my belongings for drugs, tired of going to jail, tired of fighting in the streets, tired of stealing, tired of getting fired, tired of dealing with people who were just as manipulative as me. I moved back in with my parents and started going to 12-step programs. The programs were all the same; they were full of people who admitted their powerlessness over the drug; they had all given everything they had to a higher power. I remember the first meeting I attended was a group dedicated to young people. It was held at a church.

“This is not about religion,” said the discussion leader, a rosy-cheeked blond girl who couldn’t have been more than 20. As she spoke, I couldn’t help but notice the gigantic gold crucifix behind her. I was pretty sure that Alcoholics Anonymous was too depressing for me.

I needed to keep my body on edge. I needed drugs and alcohol because they punished my body but at the same time made it feel strong and full of life. My friends in the 12-step programs were the same as me. They talked about it at every meeting, documenting their every love affair with narcotics in great detail. But sitting around with a bunch of other burnouts wasn’t my answer. I needed to replace that dangerous chemical feeling with something equally as dangerous.

After a few months of floundering around AA meetings, my friend Joe, a guy I’ve known since kindergarten in Boston, told me he was moving out to San Diego. He began running in college, and since then he’d competed in several marathons and triathlons. I’ve always admired him. He never used drugs or drank much alcohol but has managed to be one of the happiest and most successful people I’ve ever known. When I was out in the streets, I missed Joe dearly.

It was in a moment of pure desperation when I decided to start running. I was educated, but unmotivated to do anything but ingest alcohol and drugs. I was unemployable. I hated authority figures, and worse, I hated myself and everything that had to do with me, including the people I loved. I was decrepit: My skin turned a yellowish white and my brain sizzled with anger. My mom told me I looked sick. My suicidal thoughts were uncontrollable and I wanted to die. I was becoming an expatriate of my own self, and I was worse off than the disgusting cat I hated in my Oak Park apartment. So I didn’t start running to be like my friend Joe, but I started just to get a taste of what he had. I wanted to experience joy without the effects of drugs. I wanted to be happy and creative without having to rely on chemicals. After all, how could I claim a piece of poetry as my own if it was the splendor of drugs that created it?

I started running on a treadmill. I smoked cigarettes, so I could only go for about two minutes at a time. When I ran, I felt a layer of fat jiggling up and down and it was a very unpleasant experience at first. I joined the YMCA so I could get in shape, and each week I’d increase my time by a few minutes. Soon I was running for 15 minutes. Then I increased it to 20, then to 45, and so on.

Pretty soon I’d stopped going to AA meetings altogether. Instead, I went to the gym. I quit smoking, and even though I thought about it every day, I didn’t drink.

I started running longer distances. The feeling I got during a long run made me incredibly high. When you get accustomed to running long distances, your breathing becomes different as your body exerts the energy it takes to maintain your stride; your mind is focused but free to wander. It’s a euphoric feeling that lasts as long as you’re running. When you stop, there’s a feeling of accomplishment, followed by a strength and confidence that’s unmatched. And when you’re at home that night eating dinner, you begin to crave another run. Sometimes it takes all your sensibility not to skip dessert and slip out into the night for a run along the river.

I can’t escape my addictions. Even in the midst of the San Francisco Marathon, a prankster, dressed up as a devil, offers runners glasses of cold beer instead of water. I take the water, but seriously consider the beer. I’m on mile 16 and feeling surprisingly good. I don’t ache, my breathing is still regular and I feel like I might be able to make the 10.2 miles that remain. I’m not a great runner. I’m simply running because I enjoy it; it makes me feel good to be spending my day on the road. We’ve already gone over the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Outer Richmond, up the winding trails of Golden Gate Park.

In Golden Gate Park, Joe’s wife Keely is there to take pictures and ride on her bike along the course to cheer me on. She follows me through Haight-Ashbury and waves goodbye as I run through mile 19. By the 20th mile, I’m starting to feel the wrath of the road. My legs, I realize, are more tired than they have ever been for the entirety of my life. I don’t quite understand how just 10 minutes prior, I was smiling and feeling fine. I manage to run 2 more miles and realize that I’ve hit the dreaded “wall” that you so often hear about in marathon stories. It seems like every incline is 90 degrees. Every pebble in the road is my enemy. Each crack in the ground was put there to trip me. People on the streets cheer and I want them to stop. “Nice tattoos,” a lady on the sidewalk says as she waves and gives me the thumbs-up sign. “Fuck you!” I want to yell, but I’m too tired and I want to die. I pass through the Mission and look around at some of the other runners. They all look as bad or worse than I do, which gives me some hope. It’s torture, but I run farther, maybe just to see if I will actually die. The thought of me splayed out on the street, dead from running, makes me giggle. But the joy doesn’t last long.

Though somehow I don’t stop. On mile 25, we’re by the ballpark. I can feel vomit gurgling up in my stomach, and my legs feel like they’re no longer in charge. If I was a religious man I would say that God was powering them, but I’m not a religious man at all, so I think it was just pure stubbornness. I can see the Bay Bridge. Just a little bit farther and I will have completed my first marathon. When I see the finish line I run as fast as I can, which at that point is comically slow. My mom, stepdad and girlfriend are there cheering by the sideline.

I cross the finish line and look at my time: 3 hours, 44 minutes and 40 seconds. I take a medal, grab a banana and sit on the ground, feeling at once exhausted, excited, proud, energized, whole, fearless, strong, worthy and extremely high.

It’s been almost three years since I’ve touched alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. I’ve replaced them with running. When I am stressed out, I run. When I am happy, I run. When I dwell on what my life used to be, I run. But it would be incredibly naive to believe that my past can be simply erased just because I want it to be. Even after serious efforts to right the severe wrongs I have done, my past always has a way of manifesting itself in one form or another: a debt collector, an ex-girlfriend, an old forgotten lie, a warrant for my arrest.

Most nights I still dream about smoking meth or drinking. I have this recurring dream where I go into a neighborhood that’s like a war zone—groups of thugs wander around, picking fights with everyone—so I hide behind trees until I find the apartment I want. It’s upstairs and the door is broken. When I knock, a man with a shaved head and goatee peeps through a crack in the door. He opens up at the sight of me and produces a plastic bag full of narcotics: Ecstasy, crack, cocaine and meth. The guy hands me the drugs, and I run to the park to do them as fast as I can. Only in my dream I can’t actually feel the high. I always wake up with a feeling of extreme disappointment.

Not a day goes by when I wouldn’t rather be drinking or doing drugs. I love them like they were my own family. Drugs are more fun than running; they are instantaneous. It’s not easy for me to fight the boredom of life. From birth, I was plagued with restlessness and a desire to feel more than I normally do. These are my demons. Sometimes I think they’re following me for some kind of karmic retribution for all the people I’ve hurt with my selfishness. And sometimes I think that my past is following me, nipping at my back, simply to get me moving, to keep me on the run.

When Jonathan Kiefer, Ed Dunn and Emily Page all worked at the Sacramento News & Review, we decided to unload all our stupid band photos and headshots from the file cabinet and make a story out of them. Of course, readers wrote in to complain about how unoriginal and how mean we were, but like I always say, “Fuck readers.” It’s true, readers don’t know anything. They can barely even read.

Jon Kiefer narrates.

When encountering an image like this one, of Citrus Heights’ Boyz Nite Out, it’s hard to know what to say. And just how would your band look if left to the mercy of a sheltered, junior-level style director and a hasty spree in the men’s casual section, eh? Well, right, you would never call your band Boyz Nite Out, for fuck’s sake, so it’s a moot point. That said, Ed’s suggested caption, “The Wal-Mart Boyz,” gives a good, needed ribbing, and remains sportsmanlike. Emily goes there, too, and a little further, with “Boyz II Men Who Still Look Like Boyz.” But caption writing isn’t about making friends, so Josh pushes forward with “They put the melody in Megan’s Law.” Because, honestly, how can you go wrong with halfway libelous sex-offender humor?

Don’t answer that. Here’s a grabber from Trabant. These jaunty electronica rockers from Reykjavik, having apparently named themselves after an endearingly dinky Eastern Bloc automobile, decided to call their last album Emotional, and put this image on its cover. So they’ve asked for it: “The Republican National Convention’s Who needs women, anyway? tour,” from Josh; “Remember, if you don’t make eye contact, it’s not really sex,” from Ed; and the striking, unabashedly interpretive “Trabant is an ancient translation for ‘cluster-fuck Mark Wahlberg,’” from Emily. Yes, look again

OK, here we have a pouty, tousled Jackie Greene, Sacramento’s great white hope of Dylan-derivative rootsicana. Depicted in archly artful black and white, his smoldering eyes obscured behind some photographer’s masturbatory gimmick, young Jackie is, perhaps unwittingly, asking for trouble. Like most publicity materials, the image is gratingly emphatic, its tone unduly earnest. Hence Emily’s good suggestion: “Jackie Greene is serious, guys. Seriously.” Well, it’s obviously true, isn’t it? I’m also partial to Ed’s nimble “Hey, Jackie, Ric Ocasek called. No, actually, he doesn’t want his look back.” That reversal is a nice touch, for its extra meanness and surprise. Josh anticipates reader (and editor) exhaustion, and steers straight into it, with “This is what it takes to appear in the SN&R 1,363,500 times.”

The local metal shred monsters known collectively as KnifeThruHead obviously understand that a band photo needn’t be boring. Sometimes that makes a caption harder to dream up. Emily keeps her cool, with a wryly informational tone: “KnifeThruHead bring their unique post-Rio Linda pervert-core to Sacramento.” In Josh’s estimation, one of these performers—it’s up to us to determine which—has been captured in the throes of an inner monologue: “If this doesn’t work, I’m convinced there is no such thing as a ‘vagina.’” Blunt, yes, but also—paradoxically—understated in its way, and variously interpretable. Wait, you say. What does that mean? And then you realize that you’re searching for meaning in a picture of some pasty, skuzzy, half-naked dudes spazzing out in an alley in Midtown (or wherever). Then it’s Ed to the rescue with the winning “ThongThruCrack.”

You probably wouldn’t believe that Immortal here is a Lawrence Welk-era AM-radio folk duo. Which is why it might be fun to suggest as much in a photo caption. Otherwise, everybody seems to want to put words into these guys’ mouths, maybe because you probably wouldn’t believe they can speak, either. Consider the nuances of characterization. Emily: “Auuuggghhh, my spiked jock strap itches!” Josh: “Just 10 years ago, these pants were huge on me. Must be all that decayed Christian carcass—goes straight to the hips. I had to let my belt out by three bullets. Three bullets!” And finally, Ed: “Me make big poops!!!”

This hot flash of vapid sleeze from Susanna and the Magical Orchestra has real possibilities: The woman, like an animated waif from some Tim Burton movie, slightly mussed and standing almost pigeon-toed; the guy, like—uh, whatever it is that he’s like. It’s no wonder the photo-caption brain trust yields variations on a certain single theme. “There’s nothing like a ferocious quickie right before a photo shoot,” posits Ed, coming close to Emily’s “After-sex hair speaks louder than words, and we’re not so sure we want to listen.” And by now you’re probably prepared for Josh’s politically, sexually and culturally insensitive zinger of imagined quotation: “You like woman? I trade her for small boy and healthy goat.”

We don’t neglect the major stars, by the way. On the contrary, the enormity of their publicity machines only sharpens our appetites for rebuke. For example, what to make of this Diddy ditty? “Chair: The Remix,” offers Josh; “You should see his matching Frank Gehry toilet brush and plunger,” says Ed; and Emily takes that concept to where it really needs to go, with “Mo’ money, mo’ hemorrhoids.”

With only this hotel-hallway snapshot to go on, we’re not sure if Out of Place is actually a band or just some lacrosse players who meant to send it to the editor of their prep-school yearbook. No matter. Ed’s suggestion, “Out of Interest,” makes efficient use of the pun-on-band’s-dumb-name technique—concisely annotating the lads’ expressions and our response to them in one fell swoop. Emily’s “From right to left: One musician’s journey through a sex-change operation,” on the other hand, is a marvel of catty charm, refusing any kind of surrender to the picture’s oppressive banality. But Josh, picking up on the claustrophobic anonymity of the locale, the menacing air of trust-fund entitlement and underachievement, really nails it with “Date rape, anyone?” Back we go to uneasy, aggressive sexuality. Which is pretty much the foundation of modern popular music, anyway, so it all works out. It usually does.

This story inspired us to take our own band photo. So we dressed up like assholes, grabbed our photographer and did this:

Joe Grand is a hacker, electrical engineer, father, husband, son, friend, child of the lord, wacky party bro and was also one of the hosts of the recently cancelled show on Discovery Channel called Prototype This. He’s really detail oriented, so if I fuck up this intro and get a bunch of stuff wrong he’s going to be really pissed and sue the shit out of me. Anyway, I don’t really know why Prototype This was cancelled. I guess it was too expensive or they didn’t get enough viewers or something. If this was a newspaper I guess I’d have to research that and give you some facts, but since it isn’t, just use your fucking imagination or something.

Sorry, Joe, but here are some fun facts that I can get right:

• I’ve known Joe Grand since kindergarten and we spent a lot of that year in a timeout box.
• Our kindergarten teacher had a brown greasy face.
• kindergarten is a really fucked up word to spell.
• There is a Trivial Pursuit card about Joe Grand.
• Joe Grand once built a tazer and we may or may not have used it on a cab driver.
• Joe Grand is an electrical engineer and he builds things that don’t make sense to the average human being.
• There is such thing as the Jewish Olympics and Joe Grand participated. Because he is a sporty Jew.
• Joe Grand once testified in front of some kind of U.S. Senate committee or some other group of powerful and old white people about some computery type shit.

[This interview happened when the show was still on the air, hence the present tense. C'mon, it's Monday at 4:35  in the morning and I just finished working on a project that took like ten fucking hours. Like you do work on the fucking weekends. Psshhht. OK, now I feel bad, like you're judging me.]

"Gahhh, my girl-o-meter detects a female humanoid presence!"

So which guy are you on the show?

I’m the electronics-hardware hacker guy, and probably the goofiest and the nerdiest of them all. And then Zoz [Brooks] specializes in robotics and software programming; Terry [Sandin] does the machining and Mike [North] is a material scientist.

Has there been one project that you were pretty stoked on?

I really liked the “pyro pack” that I designed for the firefighter project. That was cool because I got to use a lot of my skills and also do something that firefighters would really like. The thing about the show is we’re building prototypes of stuff just to prove the concept that we can do something. But a lot of people watch the show and are like, “Oh whatever—no one’s really going to wear an ergonomic fire pack.”

But it seems like the firefighters liked it.

Oh, they were totally stoked. They were cool; they had big mustaches.

So does the team end up getting in arguments a lot?

We used to. Like the first few episodes of the show were weird because none of us knew each other, and the producers didn’t know anything about engineering. They just threw us all in a room and they’re like, “Here, build this.”

What is it like when nerds fight? Is it like when regular people fight?

It’s crazy. You know how when they have rap battles? … It’s like that, but we spew code.

How did you do on the Run to Feed the Hungry?

I ran 18:42. I was fifth place in the Male 30-34 and 48th overall out of 14,992. That was the fastest I’ve run in, like, two years.

Didn’t you do the Jewish Olympics or something?

Yeah, the Maccabiah. [It happens] every four years, and it’s the third largest athletic event in the world, next to the Olympics and the Asian Games.

You did pretty well in the last one.

The one I went to before was the Pan American Maccabi Games. … That one I got second place in my division and fifth place overall in the Olympic distance triathlon. … It’s cool to beat Jews from other countries.

That’s always been my motto. Hey, is the government building an invisibility cloak?

Are they? They’re building a lot of crazy shit.

Is that even possible, do you think?

I don’t know. No. But people didn’t think airplanes could fly, either. They built a sound-generating thing where if you point it at someone they’ll throw up. So if they can do that, they can probably make somebody disappear.

About nine Jack and Cokes later I spotted him. He was wearing red leather pants, which seemed uncharacteristic for Lars, a seemingly humble fellow. But given Metallica’s aural shift from raw, gritty thrash (Garage Days) to MTV-ready, close-cropped metal (St. Anger), red leather pants didn’t seem all that outrageous.

As I approached him, Lars looked a bit fatter, shorter, and worse for the wear than I had expected. And he had this shitty “I’m rich” smirk on his face (like the one Hugh Hefner has sported since 1855, or whenever he was born). Before Lars could react, my thumb and forefinger latched onto his right nipple like pit-bull jaws on a newborn’s head. As I twisted his tiny nub, I realized that I was actually very angry, which was surprising. But, I mean, I was drunk, thinking, with their little hairdos and their MTV appearances … what the hell happened to Metallica?

Seriously. Popularity did not suit the band that once played some of the grimiest thrash in America. After all, there were incredibly popular metal bands like Lamb of God, whose albums, such as As the Palaces Burn, melded pounding, heavy drums with technical riffs that didn’t make metal fans cringe like Metallica’s cock rock Reload did. Despite the name change (from the totally badass Burn the Priest to the way less badass Lamb of God), the band, through a thin veil of popularity, still kept its impressive metal composure.

I think I was mostly pissed off at Lars because fans of heavy music knew there were so many other metal bands that were getting pushed aside by Metallica’s mainstream machine. In Flames, for instance (who would later go on to tour with Children of Bodom and Sepultura), who always just played what they did best: melodic death metal. Those guys have kept it simple, experimenting with delicate instrumentation, even becoming well known for their drastic change of sound. But In Flames wasn’t catering to anybody like Metallica seemed to be.

And it’s not like there’s a template for what good metal is. Take Savannah, Georgia’s Kylesa, who are probably one of the most successful experimental metal bands to date. At worst, average metal fans describe Kylesa as “interesting” because of their tendency to stray from classic metal into an atmospheric jam-band vibe. But not even they wear red leather pants.

The point is, during that time, in the early 2000s, I was sick of Metallica. And so were a lot of other metal fans. Which is probably why I was holding onto Lars’s nipple for dear life, twisting it like a radio dial that wasn’t getting reception.

“What the fuck … please!” Lars screamed. He might have been crying when I finally let go.

And then I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. And then another hand grabbed my neck. Within seconds, I could feel fists bouncing my head into other fists.

“Jesus Christ, it was just a joke,” I said, as I was dragged out to the alleyway by a bunch of women. Or men.

“What are you doing?” asked a bouncer as I lay on the ground clutching my belly.

“It was a joke between me and Lars,” I pleaded.

“If you’re talking about Metallica Lars, he’s on tour. And he doesn’t live here anymore. That wasn’t Lars. Idiot.”

I was left in the alleyway for dead, thinking, “I guess Lars wouldn’t get fat and wear red leather pants.”

If anything, this is an apology to the stranger who could seriously stunt-double for Metallica’s Lars Ulrich if they needed him to. For what it’s worth, I’ve learned a lesson. And I hope your nipple has healed nicely.

Deltron 3030

The first time I saw a white dude with cornrows I almost choked to death on my own laughter. The year was 1991. George H.W. Bush declared the end of the Gulf War; everybody celebrated in their baggy Cross Colours. While the 80s shrugged hip-hop off as a passing fad, the 90s welcomed it with open pocketbooks. Even parents in the suburbs were like, “Yo!” So I should have been more prepared when I watched in awe the teenager strutting down the center of Arden Mall with a huge cellular phone in one hand, his obese girlfriend’s hand in the other and some big, nasty, greasy-ass blonde cornrows sectioning off the real estate of his scalp.

In the 90s, even skateboarding was taking on an urban feel. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a hobby for miscreants and rejects, but metropolitan influence was slowly creeping in. Skateboarding meandered away from its Southern California surf roots of punk rock, vert ramps and neon headbands to merge with a city aesthetic of hip-hop, the streets and baggy pants (and I’m convinced that because of this union Shameika Evans finally let me feel a gigantic boob under her shirt). It was somewhere around 1992 that skateboarding and hip-hop’s marriage was solidified.

“We were outcasts, so I hung with people that was like me,” says Del the Funky Homosapien, the Oakland rapper who has always identified with skateboarders. “[Hip-hop and skateboarding] are both creative, and they both take skill. You can’t just pick up a skateboard and be raw—you have to practice; hip-hop used to be the same way. There is no way you could get in a cypher if you couldn’t rap. You might get whooped on.”

Del’s catchy, high energy track “Ahone Two, Ahone Two” was eventually featured in the 1992 Plan B skate video Questionable (often thought of as the most innovative skateboarding video of its time) which fused hip-hop, rock ‘n’ roll and skating into an iron structure of counter culture, which has held to this day.

Del’s manager and rapper/skateboarder/graffiti artist Tion Torrence, aka, Bukue One, is also a product of the era when skateboarding and hip-hop began to meld. “I’ve been skateboarding since ’87,” says the Bay Area native. “Back then, there wasn’t any hip-hop in skateboarding so I got into Operation Ivy, Bad Religion, Dinosaur Jr. and Primus. But when we would go skating we would [also] listen to Run DMC, N.W.A., A Tribe Called Quest … and even the thugs in my hood were skating then.”

Nowadays, there’s money to be made in both hip-hop and skateboarding. Nike sponsors skateboarders.  Hip-hop is used to sell breakfast cereal. Counter culture “ is a multi-million dollar industry that took over the world,” says Del. “It’s like in the 60s and 70s, with the new consciousness/awareness that was coming out—a lot of cats didn’t really understand it. So when the media and different industries zoomed in on that, took advantage of it and sold it, you had a lot of cats buying into it but they was just doing it because it was the thing to do.”

I wonder if that white guy even knew why he had cornrows. Did he braid his silky blonde hair to subconsciously emulate DJ Quik? Or was he intentionally ahead of his time? Who knows; times change so fast that it’s useless to ponder. What we thought was ridiculous one minute might be totally plausible in a matter of days. For instance, we have a black President who wears chinos hiked up to his nipples and a former NBA star is the mayor of Sacramento. Del’s cousin Ice Cube, who once rapped in a group called Niggaz With Attitude (“AK-47 is the tool/ don’t make me act a’ motherfucking fool”) is set to play Mr. Kotter in a big screen version of Welcome Back Kotter.

You know, it’s best to not even think about it.