J. J. Anselmi - Heavy: A Memoir of Wyoming, BMX, Drugs, and Heavy Fucking Music

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Copyright 2016 by J. J. Anselmi

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Set in Minion

ePub ISBN: 978-1-940207-50-6

Parts of this book have been published, in varying forms, in The Writing Disorder, Connotation Press, Copper Nickel, Slab, The Jackson Hole Review, Flyway, Nickelsteak, Entropy, and The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review .

This manuscript was completed as an MFA Thesis with CSU Fresno.

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Anselmi, J.J., author.
Title: Heavy : A memoir of Wyoming , BMX , drugs , and heavy fucking music / J.J. Anselmi.
Description: A Barnacle Book | Los Angeles, New York : Rare Bird Books | 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-940207-50-6
Subjects: LCSH: Heavy metal (Music)Biography. | WyomingBiography. | CyclistsUnited StatesBiography. | Bicycle motocrossBiography. | Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. | Straight-edge cultureUnited States. | YouthDrug UseBiography | Suicide. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts.
Classification: LCC: ML3534 .A555 2016 | DCC: 784.5/4/00922dc23.

This and everything else I write is for my mom and sister.

As a work of creative nonfiction, this is a subjective recounting of actual events. Many names have been changed for privacy. There are a few minor alterations with the timeline for the sake of narrative clarity. Dialogue has been reconstructed to the best of the authors ability.

I ve been going through a process of tattoo removal for the past eight years.

When I was eighteen, I got the signature guitar of Tony Iommi, the guitarist for Black Sabbath, tattooed on the inside of my left wrist, along with the song title and lyric, Killing Yourself To Live, wrapped around my wrist. I got three more tattoos engraved onto my skin within the next six months: Panteras emblem, CFH, on my right wrist; a large skull with sharp teeth and bats pushing through it that Metallica used on merch and posters during their Master Of Puppets tour, which covered my right forearm; and Black Sabbaths effeminate fallen angel on my right shoulder.

Two years later, I felt like I needed to erase my tattoos. But I also decided to keep the fallen angel.

Every six or seven months, a surgeon cuts elliptical strips of skin from my arms and sutures me back together, slowly cutting away the tattoos and leaving scars in their place. My Pantera tattoo is completely gone, and so is Killing Yourself To Live. Theres only a remnant of Tony Iommis guitar on my left wrista long, crooked white scar cuts through the oddly shaped blob of black ink. An eight-inch-long strip of pearled scar tissue has replaced most of the skull on my right forearm.

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Contents

I

SUBSIDENCE

I last visited Rock Springs, Wyoming during the summer of 2011, when I was twenty-five. A sign for the Outlaw Inn, my dead grandfathers motel, loomed over the interstate. Sandstone cliff faces yawned. After exiting off I-80 West, I passed a green sign with white letteringRock Springs; Population: 23,036. Since Id moved away six years earlier, methane gas in Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline, both about seventy miles north, motivated over five thousand people to move here.

Wind pushed against my truck, making me veer to the left. A Shell and Phillips 66 sat across the street from each other. Decrepit cars, trucks, and other mechanical equipment cluttered the fenced-in yards next to each building. These gas stations looked exactly the same as they did when I was a child. Even though I no longer lived in Rock Springs, the feeling that Id never leave rose in my throat. Throughout junior high and high school, this feeling was unremitting.

Half a block down the street, the white outline of an eagle flew above rates for the Renegade Motel. Next door, a gold-painted statue of Buddha sat on a throne, welcoming people into the parking lot of the Sands Cafe, a Chinese-American diner. Passing the restaurant, I thought about the Rock Springs Massacre. In 1885, 150 white railroad workers slaughtered twenty-eight Chinese immigrants, wounded fifteen, and forced several hundred others out of town, because, in part, Chinese workers were willing to work for less than whites.

Driving through downtown, I looked at a white metal arch with red lettering: Home of Rock Springs Coal. Built in 1929, the arch welcomed people who came into town by train. Later, it was dismantled and left in a field as scrap metal. During the early nineties, right around the time when hydraulic fracturing operations started in Jonah Field, my great uncle, John, decided that the sign should be refurbished and placed downtown.

An 1850 survey party discovered coal in the Rock Springs area. In his account of the expedition, Howard Stansbury recalls finding a bed of bituminous coal cropping out of the north bluff of the valley, with every indication of it being quite abundant. The party also discovered a creek, later named Bitter Creek because of its foul taste.

Water in the desert and a surfeit of coal motivated Union Pacific to lay train tracks through this area in 1868. From 1875 to 1930, Rock Springs produced more coal than any other town connected to the Union Pacific Railroad. Even so, aside from a meager creek, coal, (and now) methane gas, Trona, and oil, Rock Springs doesnt offer much for humans, a fact made apparent by the types of vegetation that survive here: sagebrush, cedar trees, and prairie grass.

I turned onto a road leading toward Carson Street, where my familys old house sits. Driving up a hill, I watched Rock Springs sprawl behind guardrails, nestled between sandstone cliffs and hills covered with cedars and sagebrush. Buildings and houses glinted like broken glass.

Rock Springs is a microcosm of Wyoming, where the per capita suicide rate is consistently one of the highest in the US. I had my first encounter with suicide when I was nine, and my dads best friend, Freddy Martinez, shot himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

As a child, I didnt see beyond the happy-go-lucky character Freddy projected. Wide shoulders on a solid frame of fat and muscle, black hair past the middle of his back, and a thick beardhe seemed like a friendly ogre, which, Im pretty sure, is exactly how he wanted to present himself.

One afternoon, while a few kindergarten friends and I threw water balloons at each other in my parents front yard, Freddy pulled into our driveway on a new motorcycle, which he wanted to show my dad. Its black gas tank and mirror-finish chrome tubing shimmered in the summer sun. I immediately wanted to bombard it with water balloons.

Hey, little J. J. Wheres big J. J.?

Probably in the basement. Can we throw water balloons at your motorcycle?

Laughing as he walked toward the front door, Freddy said, Go for it, you little weasels.

Of course our water balloons didnt hurt the motorcycle. Still, letting my friends and me do this seemed to complicate Freddys desire to show off his powerful new toy. To me, this memory illustrates something about his personality that didnt quite fit other characters he inhabited: Freddy genuinely liked to make other people feel good.