NOTES ON THE BORN AGAINST VAN

Dept. of Lost Motor Vehicles

I bought a silver-gray 1985 Dodge Ram van in the summer of 1990. It cost $3,500 and had about as many miles. I’d brought my pal Neil to negotiate with the seller, as I was 21 and didn’t feel like I was in any way up for serious adult transactions. The seller turned out to be a preacher; the van had been used for his church. It was in remarkable condition. At the end of our meeting, Neil lit a cigarette and asked the preacher if he could slide us a deal on the sales tax. The preacher looked off into the distance and said, “Well I’m a preacher, so I don’t think I could do such a thing in good conscience.” I’ve used that phrase many times over the decades since. In good conscience; all the things I cannot, in good conscience, do. Later, Neil would borrow this van and drive it to Harlem to purchase angel dust.

We covered the back in right-wing bumper stickers. Over the course of five national tours, no cop ever ticketed us. Even isolated rest stops in the Midwest or deep south felt less dangerous because of those stickers. In such places, punky weirdos are easy pickings. No one wants to interact with punky weirdos who are actually Jesus freaks.

The military surplus store cashier who sold me the MY SON IS A US MARINE bumper sticker had his doubts.

Him: “You have an adult son?”

Me: “It’s for my dad.”

Him: “You were in the Marines?”

Me: “No, my brother was.”

The cashier rang me up with visible reluctance. To the best of my recollection, this was the only shit anyone ever gave me for these stickers. Although sometimes something worse would happen; I’d meet likeminded souls on the road. Once, racing across the Pulaski Skyway, a limo started furiously honking at me. It pulled alongside, the passenger window rolled down, and an excited man in a chauffeur cap motioned for me to roll my own window down. “Hey brother!” he yelled, beaming. “What church do you attend?” With an odd mix of terror and mortification, I accelerated away as he kept honking.

In late June 1991, we pulled up to a venue in Miami and found dozens of scowling skinheads waiting for us. They’d heard a rumor that we burned an American flag at every show. We assured the promoter this was not the case, loaded in, then parked a block away. I was sick with the bronchitis that would plague me throughout the 10-week tour (people still smoked at clubs back then), so I walked back out to the van and tried to nap. It was clear the crowd were looking for an excuse to pound us. I remember lying on a bench seat in the sticky Florida heat and staring at the ceiling. It occurred to me I didn’t have to walk back to that club. At that point, I still had a good amount of the family money I had used to start my record label. I could’ve taken a cab to the airport and literally flown anywhere I wanted. This strange compulsion to keep putting myself in harm’s way didn’t completely make sense to me, and I vaguely understood that a future therapist would have a lot of material to work with (an accurate prediction). I eventually walked back and we played a set so bad that the audience seemed to pity us. Multiple people asked for refunds on the albums they’d bought before our performance.¹

In February 1992, I was woken from a deep, warm slumber by Adam screaming “Shit!” I found myself nestled among jostling luggage on our carpeted loft, registering the strange sensation of being atop a 3,700-pound vehicle filled with amps, merch, luggage, instruments, and five adults suddenly drifting diagonally of its own volition. We had hit black ice on a bridge at night. From my vantage point, I could see we were going to smash the railing hard, and might flip to fall 20 feet upside down onto the lower road. But we didn’t. Instead, the collision merely bent the front passenger wheel at a crazy angle. Adam continued on through a blinding blizzard at five MPH. This was a long, slow drive.

Out of the rushing snow, a strange scene emerged. The opposing lane was ten feet above us. A Cadillac-length car had crashed through the upper railing and landed on the steep embankment nose down, lights on, almost completely vertical. We pulled to a stop and ran over. The driver was a very polite white lady who rolled the window down and calmly explained that a good Samaritan had already notified the police and that she was just fine. Her seatbelt was on, so she was dangling comically over the dashboard. The heater and radio were going. I wish I could remember what song was playing. She assured us not to worry about her. We continued on and eventually came to the tiny town of Wells, NV, where we got a room at a fleabag motel, the only time the band ever paid for lodging.

None of my bandmates liked my driving, which inadvertently worked to my advantage. On the last national tour, our guitarist Adam might as well have worn the chauffeur cap. I made a bet with Brooks, our drummer, about who could drive the least. We both made it coast to coast without ever touching the wheel. But on the second to last night of the tour, in Richmond, VA, I had to grab something from the back, and the van had been parked with the back door next to a brick wall. I got in, pulled forward, and realized I’d just lost a 6,000-mile bet by four feet.

Later, after I’d moved to Richmond, I found myself driving past a raucous anti-abortion demonstration. I rolled the window down and yelled, at the slack-jawed crowd, “Go back to Russia, you commies!” Then I slowed down and let the bumper stickers do their stuff. That same month, I got a job at an upscale health food store. A week in, I noticed my fellow employees gathered around the front window. “We’re trying to figure out what maniac keeps coming to this store every day,” someone said, pointing across the lot towards my van.

Twenty years after the city of Richmond hauled off the van for unpaid parking tickets, I called my old neighbor Mark Yolles. Mark and I had lived on the same Albany street when I was a kid, and I’d always looked up to him and his wife, both members of an international activist community that included the famed folk singer, Pete Seeger. I was calling to get his advice on a few details in a book I was writing, but at the end of the call I took the opportunity to absolve myself. “Hey, I’m not sure if you remember, but back in the early 1990s, I visited Albany in this big cargo van, and wound up parking in front of your house,” I said. “I remember you catching sight of all my right-wing bumper stickers, so I just want to assure you that was just my way of avoiding small town cops across the country. I’m not, you know…. that way.” He and I shared a nice laugh. Mark passed away just two years later, and I was always grateful for that conversation.

Creem Magazine recently published a piece I wrote about Born Against’s disastrous 1992 European tour.

1. In the 2015 film Green Room, a touring punk band gets trapped inside a skinhead compound. The premise felt impossible to me. Nothing about it made sense, starting with the band’s impromptu cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in front of an audience of Nazi punks. I have met touring band members who might do just such a thing, but each of those people were terrifying fucking sociopaths. The kids in this film are just that, kids. In that scene, I saw nothing of that weird fear I felt onstage in Miami, and their fictional situation was far, far scarier. No rational human person would have made the decision to antagonize an audience full of Nazi skinheads. It’d be like taking a shit in front of a cop. Why would you?