Barker Travis - Can I say: living large, cheating death, and drums drums drums

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SOMETIMES WHEN IM PLAYING, I SCRAPE MY KNUCKLES RAW AND BLEED ALL OVER MY DRUM KIT. THIS BLOOD-SPLATTER DESIGN IS BASED ON MY OWN DNA, SCANNED BY JAYSON FOX.

This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of his abilities. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

CAN I SAY. Copyright 2015 by Clarence Worley, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-231942-5

EPub Edition October 2015 ISBN 9780062319449

15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my familyyou made me who I am today.

Im not proud of everything in this booksome of it makes my skin crawl with shamebut its the truth.

I love you.

COURTESY OF WILLE TOLEDO

I am on fire.

I am running as fast as I can, and I am on fire. The night is dark, but I can see my way, because of the light from my own burning flesh. I have never felt this much pain in my life: it feels like everything inside of my body is boiling and trying to burst through my skin. I am stripping off my clothes as I run across a grassy field, but I am still on fire.

Behind me, I can sense death: a burning airplane that contains the bodies of two pilots and two good friends. Less than a minute from now, it will explode. In front of me, there is a highway. Nothing that is happening feels real, or even possible. If I make it to the highway, I think that maybe I can stay alive. I hear people screaming at me, but I dont know what theyre saying. All I care about is trying to survive. I want to see my children, my wife, my father, my sisters. In the final seconds of my life, anything that isnt important goes up in flames. With every step Im taking, everything in my life is burning away, except for my family. Im running faster than I knew was possible. Im running toward the road that will keep me alive. Im running for love, Im running for my future, Im running for my life.

LOVING DRUMS FROM A YOUNG AGE

A nimal. He was pure primitive orange insanity, and he was my hero. He would go buck wild, play an awesome drum solo, and then eat his cymbals. The first time I saw Animal on The Muppet Show, I wanted to eat my cymbals. I wanted to be a drummer. I was four years old.

My mother and father made sure I got drum lessons, and took me to every single one. My dad drove us, and my mom always sat in the room and taped the lesson. She learned how to read music and hold the drumsticks right; if I didnt understand something, I could always go to her. She was learning as fast as mewhen I was a kid, Mom was just as good on drums as I was. But she didnt walk around copying Animal by sticking cymbals in her mouth, the way I did.

Her name was Gloria Marie Rose McCarty, but her friends called her Cookie. She was born September 10, 1947, in Chicago. She had some Osage Indian ancestry. Her half sister was an actress, Mary McCarty, who starred in the original version of Chicago on Broadway.

Cookie met my father, Randall Leonard Barker (born March 12, 1942), in Fontana, east of Los Angeles; they got married and settled down together. They had two girls, Randalai and Tamara, and then, on November 14, 1975, I was born: Travis Landon Barker. I was an accidentTamara is five years older than me and Randalai is seven years older. I dont know how my mom picked the name Travis, but the Landon was because of Michael Landon, star of Little House on the Prairie. She was a huge fan of him (and the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and the Police). If it had been up to her, she probably would have named me Michael Landon Barker. I was a massively obese baby: by the time I was twelve months old, I already weighed thirty-five pounds. My mom would try to give me baths in the sink, but she couldnt even squeeze me in. As I grew up, I got skinnier.

BABY PHOTO

I grew up lower middle-class, but I never knew it. Both Mom and Pops came from nothing. Pops had built our house himself, with a close family friendhe didnt want to have a house payment. He bought some land and said, Im going to build this house with my own two hands. When we first moved in, it was like camping out: there were no drapes, no carpet, not even bathrooms or running water. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags. Mom heated water in a coffeepot to wash us.

I was just a toddler when Pops was building it. When I was fifteen months old, I was playing around his construction supplies and a pile of boards fell on my hand, breaking the middle finger on my left hand. My parents had to decide whether to set it straight or crooked. Luckily for me, they set it crookedif it had been set straight, I wouldnt be able to play drums effectively and I would have constantly been flipping people off. Its crooked to this day.

I had my own room; there was a TV room and a living room and a kitchen. Pops had been in the army for two years, and served in Vietnam. When he came home, he worked at Kaiser Steelthe steel mill was the main industry in Fontana. And then he was a machinist at different warehouses and factories. He was blue-collar, doing hard labor forty to sixty hours a week. He never stopped working: when he came home, he was doing yard work, fixing the car, or working on the house. And he would never run the air conditioner or the heater, no matter how hot or cold it was.

Pops has always dressed like a greaser. He wouldnt wash his hair for weeks at a time: Your hair needs natural grease, hed tell us. He always carried a comb and he was always dressed sharp: an extra-clean white T-shirt and creased jeans. He hung up his jeans on special hangers to keep that crease. He wore black motorcycle boots, and he rode a Harley. If he took me to Sears, Id ride on the back of his motorcycle, holding on for dear lifebut I loved every minute of it.