Fargo Rock City (30 page)

I don't know; perhaps there is a societal aspect to this world and I'm just not seeing it. There's still a thriving death metal scene in Florida, so maybe the presence of old people makes the concept of death more pertinent.

The Bulletboys debut record—and its single “For the Love of Money”—falls out of the
Billboard
200 and disappears forever.

“Burn your bridges, take what you can get,” crooned Gene Simmons on the unremarkable KISS song “While the City Sleeps,” and that still seems like practical (if not necessarily amiable) advice. “Go for the throat, 'cause you paid your debt.” According to scripture in the Book of Gene, there is no better revenge than living well.

The tune comes off the 1984 release
Animalize,
an album that also featured a track called “Get All You Can Take.” This was the cassette I was listening to in my brother's Chevrolet pickup on the day that I made the worst decision of my life.

With the exception of gangsta rap, hair metal was probably the most unabashedly economic music ever made. And having money makes you do crazy shit: During Skid Row's peak, ectomorphic singer Sebastian Bach bought a pair of leather pants for a thousand dollars. The reason I know this is because I asked the six-foot-five Bach how much he weighed on his solo tour in January of 2000, and he said he still weighed 179 pounds, which was his touring weight in 1990. Bach's explanation for why he's remained the same size: “I still gotta get into those fucking pants, man. They cost me a thousand dollars.”

When Vince Neil appeared on the cover of
SPIN
magazine in 1992, he was pictured lighting a cigar with a thousand-dollar bill (I guess he had enough pants). Logically, this should not have been the image rock bands wanted to foster (especially not “gritty” bands like Mötley Crüe, who sang about cats in the alley and rats in their snakeskin boots). But burning money certainly seemed acceptable at the time; Mötley Crüe had signed a six-record deal with Elektra for a reported $25 million. Of course, this was also the era when people thought movie characters like Gordon Gecko were fascinating. I can even recall my senior English teacher telling our entire class that Donald Trump was the sexiest man alive. It was a Golden Age of Glam Capitalism.

This story begins in the summer of 1989, when I was obsessed with being anywhere the stench of freshly laid asphalt was more prominent than the aroma of freshly cut grass. And this did not mean I wanted to run away to the big city; it just meant I wanted to be in a place that wasn't a farm. That place ended up being Wahpeton, North Dakota, which is about as dreadful a community as there is in North America. Wahpeton has fifteen thousand people and the worst of everything: There's nothing to do (except go to Hardee's), but it's not really a small town, either (you have to lock your car doors overnight, you don't recognize most of the people you pass on the street, and a lot of the middle school kids like to huff gas). Nonetheless, I aggressively pursued a summer job in Wahpeton where I was supposed to teach small children how to play basketball, and this gave me an excuse to escape from my house three times a week and drive the twenty-five miles to an outdoor recreational facility near the Wahpeton Zoo. And since I usually went to Hardee's after work, everything was pretty cool.

I can't remember any of the kids I coached and I don't recall teaching them anything of consequence, but I always enjoyed the drive. It meant an hour a day in my brother's shiny red pickup truck, and—as all metalheads know—pickup trucks have the finest acoustics in the world. Twenty minutes in the front seat of a Chevy Silverado is a better sonic experience than an
entire afternoon at Abbey Road Studios, and the explanation for why is simple logistics:
The speakers are right behind your head!
That was a very loud summer. Lots of Ratt.

One day after “work” (i.e., watching eleven-year-olds miss left-hand layups), I stopped off at my bank to get some money from the instant cash machine. My family has always done their banking in Wahpeton, and since my hometown did not have an ATM, this was always kind of a neat luxury. I got my twenty dollar bill and I looked at my receipt, expecting to see about $80. Instead, I had a little over $3,200.

Something was afoot.

I walked in the bank and showed my receipt to the teller (which shows just how neat I thought that ATM machine was—I used it even when the bank was open). She told me that machines sometimes make mistakes and that I shouldn't worry about it. I followed her advice and went home.

A week later, I went to get cash again. This time, the receipt claimed I had $8,865. Again, I walked into the bank and informed the teller that I was not, in fact, a sixteen-year-old entrepreneur. This time she said it was probably a decimal point mistake, and I likely had $88.65 in my account. That sort of made sense (but not really). Still, I basically ignored the weirdness and went home. I mean, what else could I do?

At this point, you can probably see where this is leading.

I didn't get any more cash for almost a month. To be honest, my life really didn't have too many expenses (I could last a
long
time on $80, unless I was buying fireworks). However, one night my good friend Edd and my sort-of-friend Pud decided to see
The Dream Team
at the newly built Wahpeton four-plex, and I stopped at the bank to get a few frogskins. I got $20 … and found myself staring at a transaction slip that indicated I had $63,000.

This time, it was 6:45
P.M.
and the bank was closed. There was no part-time teller to tell me it was all a misunderstanding, and I was in no mood to consider the consequences of my actions (or my life). Most of all, I remembered what I had learned from KISS. Burn your bridges, take what you can get, I thought. I should go
for the throat, because I had paid my debt. I was going to live well, which would be my best revenge. I would give 'em hell.

I would rage against this machine.

I tried to withdraw $200. The electronic screen told me I couldn't take out more than $200 a day. For a second, this confused me. Then I did the math. I withdrew $180.

And then I was rich.

I had no intentions of making this into a recreational habit. However, I probably should have, because it ended up becoming a serious addiction. The size of the account varied wildly and inexplicably (sometimes it was as high as $75,000), and it was always more money than I could possibly comprehend.

And frankly, none of this seemed all that weird to me.

Sixteen is a dangerous age; you're just dumb enough to be really fucking cool. I suppose I thought about my future, but never beyond graduation. It seemed completely plausible that as long as I didn't get greedy, these withdrawals could just slip by detection until I went to college. All I needed to do was get out of high school and move somewhere else. As far as I could tell, that would be the equivalent of faking my own death.

Now that I had a bottomless wallet, I could seriously rock. I got my first CD player, and I replaced all five of my old Mötley Crüe cassettes with shiny new compact discs. I made all these purchases in one store, all within the span of fifteen minutes. My cousin was with me at the time, and I suspect he thought I was God. I bought a pair of $70 New Balance basketball shoes; when I blew out the sole during the first week of practice, I didn't waste my time returning them. I just picked up a pair of $85 Nikes. In Wyndmere, this was how rock stars lived.

Obviously, this scenario posed a lot of unanswered questions, and most of them were difficult to ignore (although I somehow always found a way). Whenever I got my monthly bank statement in the mail, the amount was always correct (and I was still writing a normal number of checks in my attempt to seem like an inconspicuous consumer). The big money was only available through ATMs, and there was no clear explanation as to why.

I tried to keep this fiscal phenomenon a secret and told only my closest friends, but high school kids are not exactly known for playing things close to the vest. As the school year progressed, there was a growing rumor that I had access to massive sums of money (fortunately, I think most of my peers simply assumed I was lying about this, which certainly would have been a more reasonable explanation than the truth).

There was also a fairly unavoidable ethical problem with all this thievery, and it was slowly starting to wear me down. In Penelope Spheeris's documentary
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,
the wise sage Paul Stanley explains the best part about having money is “not having to
worry
about money.” However, that philosophy does not apply when the money you have is not actually yours. I worried about it constantly. Despite my best attempts at rationalization, I could not avoid the fact that this money was obviously coming from
someone.

Of course, a little omnipresent guilt still didn't stop me from becoming an amateur (professional?) embezzler. I'd withdraw $20 just to see what level my balance was at (always half expecting—and maybe even hoping—to see “$80”), and inevitably see five figures of fantasy and request another transaction.

Months passed, and I kept banging my head. I got
Double Platinum
and the debut effort from Skid Row. I got
Surprise Attack
by Tora Tora (which I actually regarded as “underground” metal). I replaced my tapes of
Led Zeppelin IV
and
Van Halen II
with CD replicants, concreting my classic rock credibility. I even decided to buy all twenty-plus KISS releases, but only on cassette; even with free money, buying that many compact discs just seemed a little too decadent.

I still have all these purchases, and they continue to haunt me—or at least remind me—of my criminal past (in fact, whenever I'm looking through my CD racks and my eyes pass over that Tora Tora disc, it's the
only
thing I think about). My relationship to the music has been replaced by my relationship with its acquisition. I wonder if Cuban drug lords feel the same sensation when they look at their collection of speedboats.

Suddenly, it was April. I had been an independently wealthy seventeen-year-old for almost ten months. However, I had finally stopped using my ATM card. I could no longer handle lying in bed all night and thinking about all the things Catholic boys think about when they sin, particularly purgatory. Since the bank was partially at fault for all this, I assumed my offense could not legally constitute eternity in hell, but purgatory was totally plausible (and going to purgatory just seemed so damn
boring
—it would be like spending four thousand years in an airport). Sometimes I think if I had just kept up this abstinence, everything would have been okay; maybe I would have just gone to college and transferred my account to a different bank, and nobody would have gotten hurt. Maybe escaping from reality wouldn't have been as impossible as it should have been.

Unfortunately, I had to go to a track meet in Rosholt, South Dakota.

Rosholt is a small town just across the North Dakota/South Dakota border, and its high school hosts track and field meets twice every spring. These were always my favorite track meets of the season, because it provided the chance to mingle with girls from a whole different state (in the rural Midwest, track meets are the equivalent of Studio 54—I knew tons of guys who only went out for track in order to meet women).

The problem was that Rosholt's track was covered with black asphalt, so it got extraordinarily sticky whenever it was hot and extraordinarily hard whenever it was cold. If you were going to run in Rosholt, you needed to bring a wide assortment of spikes for your running shoes (the individual spikes are removable, so you'd screw in long spikes when the surface was warm and gummy and short spikes when it was cold and impenetrable).

I didn't know what the weather was going to be like in Rosholt, but I knew I wasn't prepared (at least in terms of spikes). I cut class and drove to Stan Kostka's Sporting Goods in downtown Wahpeton, where I could buy some one-eighth-inch spikes. But as I walked toward the store, I suddenly remembered I had spent the last of my available cash on Slaughter's
Stick It to Ya.
(This was
because Slaughter—along with Faster Pussycat—was the opening act for the KISS
Hot in the Shade
tour coming to Fargo in late May, and I needed to familiarize myself with their work.)

I had my checkbook, but I decided to just pop into the bank and get $10 from the ATM. Spikes are cheap, so why write a check for $2.99?

I slid my card into the machine's metal mouth. I punched in my four-digit code, 1805 (“18” being my high school football number, “05” being my jersey number for hoops). I hit the key that signified “cash from checking.”

My transaction was denied.

I repunched my numeric code. Again, denied.

And then—for reasons I shall never quite understand—I went into the bank to complain.