Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums

Prologue

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 don’t know what they’re 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 isn’t important goes up in flames. With every step I’m taking, everything in my life is burning away, except for my family. I’m running faster than I knew was possible. I’m running toward the road that will keep me alive. I’m running for love, I’m running for my future, I’m running for my life.

LOVING DRUMS FROM A YOUNG AGE

1

Almost Famous

Animal. 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 didn’t understand something, I could always go to her. She was learning as fast as me—when I was a kid, Mom was just as good on drums as I was. But she didn’t 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 accident—Tamara is five years older than me and Randalai is seven years older. I don’t 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 couldn’t 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 friend—he didn’t want to have a house payment. He bought some land and said, I’m 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 crooked—if it had been set straight, I wouldn’t be able to play drums effectively and I would have constantly been flipping people off. It’s 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 Steel—the 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 wouldn’t wash his hair for weeks at a time: Your hair needs natural grease, he’d 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, I’d ride on the back of his motorcycle, holding on for dear life—but I loved every minute of it.

RANDY BARKER (FATHER)

I grew up in a steel-mill town called Elizabeth, just outside of Pittsburgh. When I was eighteen, my family moved from Pennsylvania to California—we had relatives that lived in Fontana. I was drafted into the army around 1973, and I spent two years in the military: one year in the States and one year in Vietnam. They trained me as a radio teletype operator, but when I went there, they handed me the keys to a jeep and said, You’re a jeep driver. The jeeps were supposed to have radios in them, but they took them out because they said it was unsafe—somebody in the backseat might hit his head on it. So that’s pretty much what I did the whole time I was there, driving around. I went over with an engineering outfit and then, about two months later, I got sent to the Korean Artillery Division with a liaison team. I wasn’t crazy about being in the armed forces at first, but it’s probably an experience that every kid should go through. Not the war—being with all kinds of different people from all over the United States and our territories.

DAD AND ME

When I got home, all I wanted to do was run around and have a good time. The first two weeks I was back, I had five speeding tickets. I had a highway patrolman chase me to a red light. He said, I don’t know how fast you were going, but I know damn well you wasn’t going the speed limit. I’m going to write you up for seventy-five. I took it, because I was going somewhere between ninety and a hundred miles an hour.

A friend of mine used to have a restaurant in Fontana called the Red Devil—it served pizza and different Italian dishes. He sold it, but I still went in there. I liked a waitress, Cookie—she was a very pretty girl, and petite. She weighed only ninety-seven pounds. I just took a liking to her and nobody could change my mind. Cookie’s mother and her uncle were the new owners of the Red Devil, but she and her mother didn’t get along too well. One night, Cookie just up and left. I asked her mother, Where’s Cookie at?

She left.

So I went out and caught her on her way home, and picked her up. We drove around for about four hours that night, just talking, getting acquainted. From that time on, it developed into a romance. We dated for maybe four or six months before we got married. I was loafing around, but before we decided to get married, I thought I’d better find a job. So I went to work at Kaiser Steel—I started out as a helper in the machine shop and I moved up from there. I was always mechanically inclined—I don’t know how many times I was underneath my uncle’s car, rebuilding the engine. I wanted to be a machinist—that was what my dad was, and he was my hero. (He died when he was sixty-two, when Travis was about three years old. He had cirrhosis of the liver: he got hepatitis C from a blood transfusion.)

Cookie told me that when I first started going into the restaurant, her mother used to say, Why don’t you get with a nice guy like that? Of course, after we got together, she couldn’t do nothing but run me down. But after a while, she knew I was in love with her daughter.

Cookie had a half sister, Mary McCarty, who was an actress. She had been in the profession since she was a kid—but we never, ever met her. Cookie didn’t want to impose on anybody: I don’t want her to think that we’re trying to get friendly with her to help the kids.

During this time I was working at Kaiser, I laid carpet on the side, and I was going to a night college to study air-conditioning. When I came home from work, she would meet me at the door with the kids and say, This is your dad—he’s going to come in, eat dinner, and change clothes, and then he’s going off to school. He’ll be home sometime after you’ve gone to bed. It got to the point where she said something had to go. I gave up the school and the laying carpet, although I took a job once in a while.

For Travis’s first Christmas, we bought him a tin drum. One day, he was sitting on the floor, just beating the daylights out of this drum. My wife looked at him and said, You know what, I think he’s going to be a drummer. So on his fourth birthday, we bought him a full set of drums. We took him to drum lessons: Cookie wasn’t crazy about driving, so I was the chauffeur and she would tape the lesson. Then for the rest of the week, she would practice with him with that tape recorder. When he gave her a hard time, I would tell him that he had to listen to her. I was just the driver and the enforcer.

I didn’t allow my girls off the block, but I let Travis run the streets. I thought that someday he was going to have to earn a living and support a family, where my girls were supposed to rely on a husband. So he had to be a little more streetwise than they were.

When I was growing up, my mom was very loving, and she was there for me all the time. One of my first memories is falling asleep while she rubbed my head. Mom was a hard, hard worker. She ran a daycare at our house, so every day there were seven to twelve kids there. I loved my sisters and played with them a lot, but there were a couple of times when they dressed me up like a girl. It was cool for me to have some boys around at daycare. We would go outside and ride bikes, play cowboys and Indians, or get on our skateboards.

I knew where my dad kept all his army medals. When I wanted to play cops and robbers, I would go into his closet and put the medals on. I was really stoked to wear his pins, but I lost them all running around. He didn’t find out right away—but I knew what had happened, and I felt guilty. He also had a box of pictures from Vietnam: when I asked him about the war, he wouldn’t tell me much. But because of the war, he would never keep a gun in the house.

I watched boxing on TV with my dad, but wrestling was my favorite: it was like a soap opera for boys. I loved the Iron Sheik, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and George The Animal Steele. Junkyard Dog was one of my favorites: he would wear a big chain around his neck and howl when he got into the ring. One time, Pops surprised me and took me to a WWF wrestling event in San Bernardino. It was the highlight of my summer. Junkyard Dog was wrestling that night, and I reached out and touched him after he won his match, getting some of his sweat on my hand.

Basically, I was a boy. I was into skateboarding and BMX. I liked to ride my go-kart all around the neighborhood and drive it into chain-link fences. I was into throwing rocks. I would start fights with my sisters, I would get into trouble, I would talk back to my dad and get whooped. Whenever my dad thought I was getting out of hand, he’d put me in line. I could get away with murder with my mom, but Pops was in charge of discipline.

I never accepted anybody’s authority: when Mom would try to get me to do something, a lot of the time I would just argue with her and generally talk back. Then she started secretly recording me with a miniature tape recorder she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. When Pops came home, she wouldn’t just be saying I was out of line, she had documentary proof. I learned to fear the tape recorder.

TAMARA BARKER (SISTER)

When Travis graduated from kindergarten, he kept standing up and bowing, even when it wasn’t his name being called. He was very comical.

He was also a brat. He would probably deny it, but I remember one time when he was throwing rocks at me in the backyard. When I went inside the house to tell our mom, he denied ever doing it. Another time, he jumped off the fireplace mantel and fell onto the ground—and then he said that I had pushed him.

TAMARA AND ME

More than anything, I loved drumming. Every year in grade school, I would fill out a journal where I would have to say what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I always said I was going to be a drummer in a rock band. There was never a year where I wanted to be a football player or a superhero: there was nothing cooler to me than being a drummer. I had all the other kids around me convinced that I was going to drum in a rock band.

From the moment I first picked up drumsticks, my mom told me I was going to be a rock star. I don’t know if she ever had aspirations to be a musician herself, or if she was just trying to encourage me, but she kept telling me that I would be her drummer boy. One Christmas, she made me learn The Little Drummer Boy and play it all the time. She would play that song on repeat, hoping it would have some long-lasting effect on me. She played it even when it wasn’t Christmastime.

I would have spent every waking hour drumming and skateboarding if I could have, but Mom kept me busy. Once I got home from school, I had to do my homework. Then I had to do what she called studies, which was extra homework that she fabricated for me to get ahead, or at least stay up to par if I was falling behind in school. (Nothing in class excited me as much as drumming and skateboarding.) She always tried to keep me sharp.

My other extra homework was in catechism class—that was Sunday school, where they taught me about God and the Catholic Church. When I was seven, I had my first Holy Communion. They put the wafer in my mouth and it tasted nasty, so I spat it out. Then they put the wine punch in my mouth. I had been really curious about how that would taste. The answer is that it was disgusting—I spit out the wine too. So I did the Holy Communion, but I was rejecting the body and the blood of Christ. Mom was embarrassed and Pops was furious.

Around that time, I figured out that death was a real thing. I don’t know if I saw a movie, or I overheard people talking about someone who died. But I realized that my parents could die, and I freaked out. I just lay on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing hysterically—all I could think about was that they might die any minute. Mom and Pops tried to reassure me, telling me that nothing was going to happen. But I couldn’t shake that feeling.

The first fistfight I ever got into was when I was in third grade—this kid Brandon said that there was no Santa Claus, so I walked up to him and punched him. What made it worse was that later that year, my parents told me that maybe Santa Claus would bring me a real drum set for Christmas. I had been banging on my Muppets toy drum kit, or on pots, pans, and anything else I could find: I was always tapping, tapping, tapping. On Christmas Eve, I stayed up late, and I creeped out to the living room and spied on my parents setting up the drum kit. The next morning, they said, Look what Santa brought you!

I said, You guys are lying to me—I saw you setting that up last night. They were speechless. And then I realized: I socked that kid for nothing! Santa Claus was a hoax!

RANDALAI AND ME

RANDALAI BARKER (SISTER)

We lived right next to the elementary school. When my brother went to school there, he felt that because he lived two doors down, he could leave whenever he wanted. So he would walk out of school and go home to use the restroom: he liked to use it at home, not at school. My mom would say, What are you doing home? and have to walk him back to school. He did this all the time.

When he had sleepovers at friends’ houses, maybe they lived across the street or a block or two away. He’d get his stuff together, we’d drop him off, and he’d go spend the night. Around midnight or one in the morning, we would get the call: Mom, can you come get me? I really just want to come home. Every time. He never spent the night at a friend’s house. When I was old enough to drive, I would go out and get him to save my mom and dad the trip. I don’t even know why my parents let him go on sleepovers: we knew he was going to be coming home. He just had this thing about sleeping in his bed. If he had friends over for a sleepover, my brother would be in his bed and his friends would be on the floor.

My best friend in elementary school was named Ruben: we both played drums and we started hanging out. We were obsessed with any movie about breakdancing, especially Breakin’—we believed we were the real-life versions of the main characters, Ozone and Turbo. I would spend hours in front of the mirror, practicing. We would put on breakdancing shows. He could pop and lock, and I was a good breaker. We’d walk down the street with a ghetto blaster and a cardboard box, and we’d do performances on the side of the streets. We weren’t really looking for a crowd, but sometimes cars would honk at us, and that was awesome—that was as much excitement as you could get in my neighborhood.

BREAK DANCING

Sometimes we would battle other breakdancers, particularly these guys who lived on our street. If we knew a move that they didn’t, they would get really pissed off and want to fight us.

I loved rap: Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick. I was a huge Whodini fan—I can still recite lyrics from all their songs. But I was also incredibly into metal. I used to put Slayer and King Diamond posters on my bedroom wall, and Mom would tear them off because she thought they were satanic. Sometimes I would buy a poster from Sound City, the local record store, and it wouldn’t even make it twenty-four hours on my wall.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Fontana. In my neighborhood, there were some houses to the left and some apartment buildings to the right—there was always trouble happening at the apartments. Up the street, there was a car wash and a place called the Golden Ox Burger. It was a tough city: there were shootings and stabbings at the Golden Ox. Behind us, there was an old house where a bunch of bikers and Hell’s Angels lived. They were cool, though.*

There always seemed to be construction crews putting up more apartment buildings in my neighborhood. I would go onto the construction sites after hours and steal wood so we could build launch ramps for our skateboards and BMX bikes. There were almost always big mounds of dirt on those sites, so we would turn them into bike tracks. One time, I climbed the fence at a construction site and jumped off it, right onto a board with a nail sticking out of it. The nail went completely through my foot and was sticking out of my shoe on the top side. The board was attached to me. I freaked out and walked home with the wood stuck to me. Pops yanked it off, but then I had to go to the hospital to get a tetanus shot.

When Ruben and I were bored, we would skate down to the local 7-Eleven, which also had a gas station, plus a nook where they had two or three arcade games. There was a machine with a high-pressure air hose so people could inflate their tires for a quarter; we discovered that its latch wasn’t working. So we would grab all the quarters from this machine and buy Slurpees and candy and play video games. Then we escalated: if there weren’t quarters and we wanted some, we’d wait until somebody went inside the 7-Eleven, and then we’d hustle over to their car and deflate as many of their tires as we could before they came back. Whenever a customer came into that 7-Eleven, they got at least one flat tire. If we had money left over, we’d buy magazines—our favorites were Circus, BMX Plus! and Thrasher—or go to Rick’s Bicycle City where we could buy stickers for our bikes. This scam worked for about two weeks—and then one day there was a new lock on the machine and it was over.

I had a crazy streak, and I was infatuated with fire. Fireworks, pyrotechnics, seeing explosions on TV. I had a friend named Richie whose family had money—they owned a hot-rod shop one town over from Fontana. So he had the nicest house of anybody I knew. I was over at his place one afternoon, and we started playing with hair spray and a lighter, doing one of those homemade flamethrowers. And we managed to light the living room drapes on fire. Smoke alarms were going off, and his family’s maid was freaking out in Spanish. Richie and I pretended we didn’t have anything to do with it, and somehow we got away with it.

Around that same time, Mom took us kids on a trip to Chicago to visit her family. Pops had to work, so he stayed home. That was the first time I was ever on an airplane, and I found out Mom was terrified of flying. She was crying, almost frantic, and because I could see she was afraid, I got scared too. That was the beginning of my fear of flying.

Once we got to Chicago, I started running wild with my cousins. The first thing I did was toilet-paper the entire neighborhood. Then I wanted to light something on fire—and there was a church next door to the house where we were staying. I got some hair spray, just like the time I burned the drapes at Richie’s. I also found a can of gasoline—I was looking for anything flammable—and I went over to the church property with my cousins. They were telling me not to do it, but I started a fire. I didn’t pick that church for any religious (or anti-religious) reason: it was just that it was big and convenient. Nobody was around the church at night, so I started burning some grass and weeds that were right next to it. I used a little hair spray to get it started, but the grass was pretty dry. Pretty quickly, the church caught fire—it went from me thinking Fire, fire, fire to Shit, it’s on fire. I bolted. The church didn’t burn down to the ground, but it was seriously damaged; the fire department came and had to put it out. Neighbors came over to see what was going on, and I acted like I didn’t know anything about it.

Before I left Chicago, I cut the electricity to my cousins’ house. Twice. I denied everything, but they knew it was me—none of that stuff was happening before I showed up. Without Pops around, I was running wild, and I just wanted to find out how much I could get away with. How far could I take it? I think Mom knew I was making trouble, but she never told Pops because she knew the repercussions would be insane.

Mom cooked really good Italian food like gnocchi and manicotti. And if I was good all week, she’d reward me with tapioca pudding—a favorite for me and my dad. But starting around the age of ten, I didn’t like to eat meat. It wasn’t a big ethical thing for me—I don’t think I really understood at that age that I was eating a cow, or eating a pig. I just didn’t like the texture. But I never wanted to hurt her feelings, and I couldn’t leave the dinner table until my plate was clean, so I would hide most of the meat from my plate in my pockets and throw it away later. Sometimes I would forget it was there and put the clothes in the laundry. Then she’d get so bummed: What is this meat doing in the washing machine?

We ate dinner every night at five o’clock: the kids would be home from school, Pops would get home from work, and we’d sit down together. But one time Pops didn’t make it home. My mom waited for a while, worrying, and then she started calling the hospitals: Is there a Randy Barker there? We were afraid that he’d had an accident on his Harley, because he drove that thing like a wild man (at least when I wasn’t on it). And sure enough, he had taken a spill, but he was so tough he didn’t want to call home to let us know he was in the hospital.

FIRST SKATEBOARD

My mom hated that motorcycle: she was scared to death Pops would kill himself on it. Sometimes she’d push it out into the front yard and put a FOR SALE sign on it. Pops would say, Goddamnit, what are you doing? That’s my bike. You’re not selling it. No doubt about it, he loved his Harley-Davidson.

Another time, Pops was late for dinner, but the hospital called us: We have your husband, Randy Barker, here. He had a heart attack. Do you want to come down to the hospital? But Pops didn’t want us to come down: he insisted he was fine and refused to see a heart specialist. Pops was always tough as nails.

When I was in fifth grade, there was a kid in my neighborhood who had an ill half-pipe in his backyard. I wanted to skate on it, and he gave me a challenge: I had to learn to play Master of Puppets by Metallica front to back, or I couldn’t come skate with him and his friends. It took me a week and a half to get Lars Ulrich’s parts down—and then I had a pass into that backyard.

I started skateboarding with my sisters’ hand-me-downs: little orange plastic skateboards. Then my parents got me a Kamikaze skateboard at Price Club, which was fatter and wider. I started learning to do tricks on that board, but it was such a generic board, real skaters would make fun of you if you showed up with it at the skate park. Our local skate park was called Upland Pipeline, which was about half an hour away by car; sometimes Pops would drive me over. There were always pros skating there. My first true skateboard was a Brand X, but I kept upgrading. After that I got a Vision Psycho Stick, and I was obsessed with Powell Peralta. I liked skateboarding so much, I started selling drums and cymbals from my drum kit to get money for new skateboard parts. At the time, none of my friends were playing musical instruments, so I didn’t know anybody to start a band with.

We explored every neighborhood near us, trying to find cool places to skate and good curbs to rail-slide on. Around this time, my friend Matt and I started smoking: we’d pick up cigarette butts that weren’t burnt all the way down and smoke them for a quick head rush. We thought we were so cool, sitting around after we finished skateboarding for the day, talking about who had pulled off what trick, smoking used cigarettes.

There was a Pic ’N’ Save warehouse right by our house—a distribution center for the discount store—and the property had a ditch that we would skate sometimes. It was a really popular skate spot, but it was fenced off, so you had to push open a gate or break the bolts to the gate. Every couple of weeks, Pops would drive me and my friends over to the warehouse, which was awesome—he was so supportive of me skateboarding, he turned a blind eye to the trespassing. We’d load up our ’79 Buick with six or seven of my friends, with all of our boards in the trunk. When we got there, there’d usually be twenty to thirty people skating in the ditch. Sometimes the cops would show up—they’d arrest people if they didn’t clear out fast enough. Pops wouldn’t be cutting the chain-link fence for us, but he was cool about making a quick getaway.

Skateboarding was awesome—it always seemed like skateboarders had the best taste in everything. I watched the movie The Search for Animal Chin over and over. I had skateboard posters on my walls, I listened to skate rock 24/7*: basically, I wanted total skateboarding immersion. I didn’t want to wear anything but skateboarding clothes: the fashion then was longer shorts where the bottom half would be a different fabric. But they were hella expensive, so Mom made me a lot of them herself. We’d buy fabric from the store and then Mom would make them with her friend Twyla, who was a seamstress. My mother never drank or smoked her entire life, but Twyla smoked constantly. So if I came home from school and smelled cigarettes in the house, that meant Twyla was over and I’d be getting a ton of new shorts.

I would write messages like SKATE OR DIE or SKATE AND CREATE or band names like FACTION on my sneakers, which were usually Vision Street Wear. I didn’t usually have nice shoes, but one time, Mom and Pops got me the new Air Jordans. (They were always cool like that: they’d spend their last penny on me.) One afternoon, I was at a local burrito place called Baker’s—for $1.07, you could get a burrito, fries, and a drink. These eight cholos came in and stole my Jordans. I rode my bike home barefoot. And I never wanted Jordans again.

My parents wanted me to do as much musically as I could. I sang in a madrigal choir at school for three or four years, just like my sisters had, and that was pretty fun. I took piano lessons for a while, the only instrument I ever studied aside from drums: I had to practice every day. So I’d be out skateboarding in the street, and Mom would call, Travis, get home, you have piano lessons.

I was really embarrassed: playing drums was so much cooler than playing piano. The piano wasn’t as masculine. When I was drumming, I was hitting shit. I’d pretend I didn’t hear Mom, and I’d tell my friends, She’s not talking to me, she must mean my sister.* One time, my sister Randalai came out in the street to tell me it was time for piano lessons. I was so mad, I shot my skateboard off the launch ramp—right into Randalai’s shin. And then I felt guilty—it wasn’t her fault I hated piano.

As far back as I can remember, I was girl crazy. I had a girlfriend named Toni: we both loved metal, from Slayer to Guns N’ Roses. I carved her name into my leg with a razor blade, and she did the same with my name. It wasn’t a suicidal move—it was just a way of marking myself up before I started getting tattoos.

When I was eleven, I went to a party at Ruben’s house—his sister was older, and she liked Jane’s Addiction and listened to KROQ, which was the cool radio station. At this party, I was trying to mack on one of his sister’s friends, who was about five years older than me. I was trying to impress her, so I was drinking beer and smoking weed. And I couldn’t handle it—I turned green. It was terrible. Mom and Pops had to come get me from the