Gimme Something Better (26 page)

She had came from hardscrabble Virginia, she lived in a boardinghouse with her mom. I think it just ate her up to see me blowing tens of thousands of dollars on fuckin’ heroin. Because she was talking about investing in a legitimate business and trying to parlay all of this money into legitimate things.

And I thought, “Well we’ve got a fuckin’ nice apartment, I just bought a new Triumph, you got a nice car, what?”

I never thought I was gonna live to be 18. So the future was not in my plans. But to placate her I went down to Los Angeles to ostensibly clean up, and left her in charge of my business. I was parking cars at a Renaissance Faire. Great place to go to kick drugs! I was working in the parking lot and shooting heroin. And coke. So I really wasn’t getting clean. And she knew it.

I’d started hearing rumblings as I was coming back that she was foolin’ around with other guys. This guy in Texas was one of my best customers. He would come and get 20 to 50,000 hits sometimes twice a month. She couldn’t get that kind of quantity at the drop of a hat. So that’s why I was coming back.

I got back early and I was at the house, and the guy from Texas had shown up. The phone rang and it was this guy from Salt Lake City, and he was acting really weird towards me. I’m like, “Dude, what the fuck is going on?” He said, “Hey look, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on out there, but she said that you’ve been burning people, and that you’re out of your fucking mind, and that she’s moving to Texas, and that if I want to keep doing business I should do business with her.” And he unwittingly let me know that she had started a bank account in South Carolina.

So that’s how I found out that she’d basically been bad-mouthing me to all of my customers I’d set up over years, and had planned on taking my business and moving to Texas with my best customer. I took off.

About five o’clock in the morning—I’d gotten a bottle of whiskey, I was getting all wasted—I decided I was gonna inform them about this. And I came back to the apartment, parked the car underneath the big picture window. I saw this guy from Texas coming out of my bedroom, he was pulling his boxer shorts up. So at that point I lost it. I fuckin’ chased him.

He got away, and she didn’t.

Tom Flynn:
Someone called my roommate and told her, “We just called Dixie’s house and a policeman answered, said ‘Homicide. ’ ” Whoa. I didn’t know what was going on. I found out that day.

Hef:
I got a call somewhere around noon from Patty Wagon, who used to be a well-known KALX DJ. She said, “Did you hear what happened? Dixie’s dead, and Sam’s missing, and they’re looking for him.”

Tom Flynn:
I wasn’t expecting it, but I could see that happening. They say she was his girlfriend, but I think she was more of his ex-girlfriend. I don’t really know the story. Who knows.

Hef:
Sam had been strung out on heroin for at least six months before this happened. When we were living at Madonna Inn, we were constantly trying to get him off of heroin. Not that I have any training in psychology or psychiatry, but I would say he would have been considered clinically insane. You could barely hold a conversation with him, he was that strung out.

Tom Flynn:
People were mad at him, that I knew. Because they knew her. The band had already broken up, so they were not in good circumstances.

Sammytown:
I left the apartment that morning and was on the East Coast within 24 hours. I took all the money. There was quite a bit of it. I did slide back into the Bay Area for a short period of time before I went to Alaska. But when I was here, the last thing I was gonna do was go to a punk rock party.

Paul Casteel:
The scene had died down. A lot of people who had been around, like me and Sammy, we had all gotten into drugs. I can say that about myself. I was a mess then. That whole thing happened without me even realizing it.

Tom Flynn:
The
Current Affair
people came to my house, and talked to my roommates. I didn’t want anything to do with them. I was in the bathroom, running water, while they were trying to do the interview. And the guy came over and said, “Don’t you know what’s going on here?”

Rachel Rudnick:
They did a two-part series on it. The first one was what he did, and he was at large. And the second one was a follow-up saying he was still at large.

Jesse Luscious:
He was on the run. And we were like, he’s in Kenosha, Wisconsin . . . he’s in Alaska . . .

Gavin MacArthur:
It was unbelievable. But it was sad at the same time, because I knew he was really fucked up. Now he’s killing somebody? Ahh shit.

Sham Saenz:
This is a super-sensitive subject in the scene. Sam McBride is not the first person I’ve known who’s killed someone. Honestly—I grew up in Oakland.

As I understand, a lot of people had turned their back on him. Dixie Lee was the sweetest fuckin’ girl on earth. And basically Sam admitted in a court of law that he asphyxiated her to death with a pillow. That was fuckin’ pivotal. A slap of reality that we were not invincible. A lot of us could no longer go and pretend that it didn’t make a difference.

Sam was the best when I was a kid. And that’s why I have to say that I’m kind of still loyal to the guy who was my friend to me growing up. I can’t turn my back on him. I remember the guy he was before he started using. And I know what drugs turn you into.

Noah Landis:
I was used to violence and seeing people go to prison. But I wasn’t used to seeing people killed in ways like that. I saw how it affected my friends. How it affected Dave Chavez and Kate Knox and Steve Chinn, who were in the Fang family and in the band.

Sammytown:
In some ways I thought it might have brought a lot of people together. They started talking more. They probably conversed. There were people who were telling the cops where I was.

Marcus DA Anarchist:
Kate Knox knew his girlfriend really well and she won’t have anything to do with Sammytown. Anytime she sees him, she’s fucking raging pissed. And I don’t blame her.

Hef:
Kate is in a lot of ways queen of the scene. And I’m not saying this with any negative connotation, it’s just the factual way it is. A lot of people follow her lead, especially some of the younger punks. She said, “I’m done with him. As far as I’m concerned he betrayed all of his friends.” She refuses to forgive him. There are a lot of people who are like, “We don’t want anything to do with Sam.”

Sammytown:
I ran for a long time. I got a job up in Alaska, working in a screen-printing place in Anchorage. I kicked heroin up there. I knew I couldn’t be strung out, on the run. Then I got a phone call, “They know you’re there.”

I went to the airport and it was snowed in. I waited 24 hours before they could actually start flying out of there again. And that was long enough for the federal marshals to get set up and be waiting for me.

I knew I was busted. I walked in that airport and I just knew. They were pretty slick about it, actually. This middle-aged couple had like fuckin’ carry-on luggage and shit. Another guy who was a federal marshal was working at the newspaper stand. I have to give them credit.

And then I was back in Oakland, in county jail. I found out who would still talk to me. And who would have absolutely nothing to do with me.

Bill Halen:
I was living back in Buffalo, and I was watching
America’s Most Wanted
, and they were saying, “The punk rock singer for the punk rock band Fang.” And I am like, Sammytown? No fucking way. I got freaked out. I talked to Sammy on the phone: “What the fuck? How did you land in jail? You really need to be thankful that you have this second chance. Make the best of it.”

Sammytown:
I was sitting in North County Jail and
Current Affair
had the follow-up, after I’d been arrested. I was sitting there in the pod. My public defender had told me that it was gonna be on TV. So I actually made sure to set my watch. I sat there next to some old black guy, we were watching TV. He stood up and said, “Yo, that’s McBride on TV! Come over here, check it out! That motherfucker’s on TV!” That really helped me, you know. ’Cause usually I’m the only white guy in the fuckin’ tank. I was in county jail for about 16, 18 months, fighting it.

Lorraine:
By the time he got arrested, Johnny Puke and I had hooked up. Sam and Johnny were best friends since they were like 12 or something. Somehow Sam got the word on the street. We would go visit him every Wednesday and Sunday.

Sammytown:
They finally offered me an 11-year manslaughter deal and I took the deal. Went to San Quentin, was in Soledad for awhile. Very few people came to see me while I was incarcerated.

Hef:
Sam and I would write each other. He would call me sometimes from prison. The first time I talked to him, he said, “I didn’t do it.” And I said, “Sam, you know what? Everybody knows that you did it.”

The next time he called me up he said, “Yeah, okay, I did it. I’m sorry. It was an error and I realize there’s nothing I can do about it now. It’s done. It’s not like I can bring her back to life.” He sounded like he was sorry. Probably for a whole bunch of reasons, including his life. But I never got the feeling that he was totally repentant.

Jimmy Crucifix:
These people made these flyers, “WANTED: Sammytown.” They put ’em up in Lennon Studios. I tore ’em down, I just thought it was ruthless. When there’s drugs and alcohol involved, who knows? You could have been in that position.

Sammytown:
I was gone from ’89 to ’96. I was in Soledad when Nirvana started getting radio play. I heard them on the radio, it blew me away. And then Rancid. Tim and Matt were in Rancid—they were little kids! I was hearin’ it on the radio, it was awesome.

Toni DMR:
As far as I’m concerned, he did his time. Shit happens if you’re a junkie. If you’re going to mess around with that shit, that’s the fucking risk you’re going to take. I feel really bad about what happened, but I wasn’t there.

The last time I had seen him was at an NA meeting that Pat Tidd dragged me to. Sam was there, and I was like, “So Sam, did you do it?” “Oh, I can’t talk about it.” And I was like, “That’s okay, I don’t fucking want to know anyway.”

Lenny Filth:
People bitch about the time he served, and to me, it’s like he served his time that our judicial system gave him. You don’t ask for more because you did something wrong. You take what you get. He didn’t get out early, he did his fuckin’ time. What’s he supposed to do? Ask to stay?

Mike Avilez:
Back then I was living in L.A. I didn’t know about the murder until I moved up here. I was working at Rasputin Records in early ’96 when he got out of jail. He came in with long hair, looking like a biker and fresh out of prison. And he said, “I’m trying to find a band called Green Day that covered one of our songs.”

James Washburn:
Green Day covered a few Fang songs. Courtney Love sent Billie Joe all of Kurt Cobain’s Fang albums, ’cause Billie’s from Oakland. Think about how influential Nirvana was, and then look at what was in his record collection. Fang spread that far. Fuckin’ badass band. With a dude that did some weak-ass shit.

Bucky Sinister:
I ran into him in L.A. one time, and he was all like, “I’m Sammy, I used to play for Fang.” I said, “Why would you ever tell anyone that? Everybody knows what you did. People did not forgive you for that. You might have done your time, but people are still mad about that shit. Why don’t you just say you’re Sammy? I never would have known.”