Flavor Of The Weak by American Hi-Fi

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In 1986, I spent many nights in my early teen years at the home of my friend Alex, who shows up in some of the other stories here. We did typical teenage boy things:  watch movies, play video games, listen to music, talk baseball, eat junk food, dream about girls who would never talk to us.  We were pretty good kids, all things considered – the most stupid thing we did was probably walking to 7-11 in the middle of the night to get Big Gulps.

Well, that was probably the second most stupid thing. Here comes the story of the #1 most stupid thing.

Alex lived with his brother Greg and their dad, an attorney named Jeff. Jeff used to take us to play baseball at the park, usually with one of Greg’s friends too and we’d spend hours chasing fly balls and negotiating grounders. On his 12^th birthday, two of Alex’s friends and I piled into the backseat of Jeff’s Buick Regal and he just drove us around Phoenix as we listened to loud music, acted like goofballs and made funny faces at other cars.  Jeff mostly just smiled and shook his head at us.

Greg wasn’t even two years older than Alex, so we spent time with him too. He had a sweet 80’s computer setup in his room, played piano like his dad, and he loved Billy Joel. The brothers would occasionally fight but mostly got along. We spent hours playing a game called Rock Band on his Commodore 64, an early game based on artist management.

Greg’s friend David was often over at the same time I was there, and arcade-size versions of Asteroids Deluxe and Battleship in their spare bedroom became the center of tournaments and shouting matches. David was an okay guy, but he didn’t mind causing trouble – he knew how to push Alex’s buttons, much to the delight of Greg. David wasn’t much for rules either – his was the first car I drove, just after I turned 14.

A year after that, the four of us were at Alex’s house one night, bored with video games and HBO and whatever else. Who exactly came up with this idea, I don’t recall, although it was probably David.  I do think it was not the first time we had done this. But for this night, the decision was made to drive around and…throw water balloons at cars.

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My wife Margot and I moved to Los Angeles in 2000. After I sold my share of my record store, Hoodlums, I started a marketing job with Universal Music Group in LA, which mainly consisted of calling record stores across a few states and setting up promotions with them around my label’s group of artists.  I worked on Island Records, which was in the process of rebooting after many years with Bob Marley and U2 as the flagship names. We had the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and PJ Harvey, we relaunched Bon Jovi and broke the Canadian pop-punk band Sum 41 out of LA.

In 2001, I loved one of our new rock bands, a four-piece called American Hi-Fi.  You’re forgiven if you don’t remember them, but they gave us a brilliantly fun song called “Flavor Of The Weak”, in which the singer pines for another dude’s girl – but she’s obsessed with her clueless, cheating, loser boyfriend. He’s “too stoned/Nintendo”, went one of the big hooks.  The song was a Top 5 alternative hit that got a little pop airplay, it’s a spot-on early 2000’s pop-punk-rock track with a bag of hooks.  But you have to see the video because that’s what pulls this all together.

Also in 1986, years before YouTube, social media or even reality TV, two guys named Jeff Krulik and John Heyn took their video camera (camcorder?) to the parking lot of the Capital Centre arena in Landover, MD and talked to young people tailgating before a Judas Priest concert. They edited it into a 17-minute long documentary and called it “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”. For years, it was an underground cult classic, never properly released but was said to be a regular fixture as a bootleg on tour buses. It’s all mulleted shirtless dudes drinking beer and extolling the praises of Judas Priest (and opening band, Dokken), girls with sky-high hair hanging all over these guys, and some amazing cars. There’s a guy in a full zebra-print outfit, barely coherent, standing by his Pontiac Firebird, talking about how punk sucks and metal rules.

The video for American Hi-Fi’s “Flavor Of The Weak” pays huge tribute to “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, re-creating scenes, characters and other visuals, including liberal use of a Pontiac Firebird. While I was working the record, I connected with the filmmakers – they sent me a VHS copy of the movie and we tried working on special screenings around the movie’s then-15^th anniversary, tying in the band and the song.

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Water went into balloons in the bathroom at Alex’s house. It was late, but we were not living after midnight (heh).  Jeff was unaware of our plans, he had already turned in for the night. By this time, the Buick Regal had been passed on to Greg, and he was our driver for the evening’s activities and David sat shotgun. I sat behind him and Alex climbed in behind his brother. They lived on 6^th Street, a cul-de-sac with a dozen houses on either side of the street.  Greg backed out of the garage, we turned up the music and headed up to the stop sign.  We turned right on Northern Avenue and crossed through the big intersection at 7^th Street and Northern. Off we headed, into the night, to cause havoc.

David, sitting in the passenger seat, was positioned and more than willing to launch balloons as we drove through the city. Alex and I were stuck in the back seat – the Regal was one of those big 1980s GM cars with only two doors and front seats that folded forward, so we were relegated to watching the action, but David didn’t mind. It took him a couple of attempts, but he got the timing down and at least a few found their targets, splashing down on the roofs of unsuspecting cars.

David, for added mischief, had grabbed a large bottle of hand lotion before we left the house. With the pump on the top of the bottle, David positioned the bottle on his lap and angled it toward his open window.  Sitting at a stop light, just before the light turned green, he’d smack the pump in quick bursts, landing spurts of lotion on the windshield of the Toyota next to us. We all stared forward with straight faces, trying to look innocent and barely keeping from bursting into laughter before Greg turned in another direction and before the other driver knew what was happening.

Alex and I did not attend the same high school but he lived closer to my school than his own. In fact, at the end of 6^th Street, if we crossed straight over Northern Avenue to the other side to where 6^th Street extended, we were in my school’s district. So he knew plenty of people from my school, even though we were just freshmen.

At one point while we were driving, a very loud car came roaring up behind us and then passed us.  It was a guy from our school named Robby McGregor, a senior who I didn’t know personally but everyone knew who he was, mainly because of his car. He had a mustache and a classic 80s rocker haircut.  And he drove a black Pontiac Firebird.  

After a bit more mayhem, we were just about out of balloons but we were tired and it was time to call it a night. Thankfully, we hadn’t caused any accidents. I’m sure we were planning on hitting a drive-thru and heading back to watch something on HBO. We were near Alex’s house, heading north on 7^th Street, maybe headed for a McDonald’s or 7-11.  Just before we crossed Northern Avenue, I saw a familiar car heading in our direction on the opposite side of the street.

Things get a little hazy in my memory from here.  I am quite sure everything shifted to slow motion and the rest of us were looking at David, saying something like, “NOOOOOO….”

But yes. The balloon left David’s hand and flew through the air, across the center lane. Just as we passed each other, David scored a direct hit…right in the middle of the Firebird on the hood.

“Oh shit!”

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Tires squealed and I twisted around in my seat to see the Firebird do a 180. He was coming after us.

“Shit, Greg!  Drive!”, we all yelled.

The Buick Regal was not your grandparents’ car.  It had a V8 engine and some power, and Greg floored it, while the rest of us looked back and hoped Robby McGregor and his muscle car would somehow not catch up to us. 

“There, Greg!  Turn left there on Harmont! That’ll get us back home!”

Greg jammed on the brakes and hung a hard left on Harmont Drive, which quickly curved left, then right, then left again, until we found ourselves on 6^th Street…but on the north side of Northern.  We just had to get across to the south side, so we could get back to Alex’s house…while hopefully losing the Firebird.  

Because it was late, there wasn’t much traffic, but we couldn’t just blow through the stop sign up ahead without facing uncertain fate, but…there wasn’t much choice. A quick glance each way, fingers crossed and various things clenched – we blew through and made it to the other side!

Flying down 6^th Street, we looked back…and saw two headlights all the way back across Northern.  But we were almost home, just had to get into the garage and get it to close before Robby and the Firebird could reach us. We roared into the driveway as David jammed the garage opener button repeatedly to get it to open. Precious seconds ticked by as the door took its sweet goddamn time to open and we blasted into the right side of the garage. Greg threw it into Park, jumped out, tagging the button to close the garage as he ran inside the house, calling frantically to his father for help. 

David, whose passenger side-door was on the right, against the wall, got out…and crouched down.

The now-closing garage door, oblivious to the urgency of our situation, was moseying its way back down. Robby’s skinny girlfriend slipped under the garage door to reverse its direction, sending it back upward.  

The Firebird was now in the driveway behind us, engine humming, bright headlights now shining right into the Regal.

That left Alex and me.  Sitting ducks in the back seat, with the driver’s side door, wide open.

Alex took the first flurry of punches to the head, as he tried to deflect what he could, but nothing really landed.  Robby had a friend with him, and they were doing their best to get at us, as we were sitting, seat-belted in the back seat of a 1982 Buick Regal.

“Please come out here!” one of them said to me (although he might have said it differently), half-crawling into the car, across Alex.

“I didn’t throw anyth…” and then a few punches landed on top of my head, as I covered up with my forearms.

The whole ordeal in the garage probably lasted less than a minute but felt like an eternity when our attackers suddenly relented. I raised my head for a second and saw Jeff appear in the doorway.  Robby, his friend and their girlfriends were yelling at Jeff – and Alex and I were still in the back of the Buick, unwilling to move. Jeff walked with them out to the edge of the driveway with them, ever calm.  We heard more voices and after a minute or so, the Firebird peeled back out and disappeared into the night.

Alex and I extracted ourselves from the backseat.  We weren’t injured or bleeding, just shaken a bit. David had reappeared, smirking ever so slightly.  Jeff walked back into the garage and looked at the four of us.

“Go inside, and sit down,” he said, with an ice cold stare.

The four of us, filed in and sat on the couch in the living room, awaiting a thrashing.  Jeff closed the garage, walked slowly into the house and past the four of us.  He headed into the adjoining kitchen, which was behind us.

And he started washing dishes.  For about thirty minutes.

And so we sat in the quiet, enduring the most intense silent treatment of all time, wondering when he would stop and say something to us. But words did not come.  After the painstaking silence, he shut off the kitchen light, leaving us in darkness with our regrets and relief that nothing truly awful had happened. There would be no further water balloon related activity in our future.

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In 2001, the song and video for “Flavor Of The Weak” by American Hi-Fi brought back instant memories of escaping a certain ass-kicking at the hands of a Firebird-driving maniac, even 15 years after it actually happened, and it still reminds me of the stupid shit we did that night. In retrospect, for Alex and me, being stuck in the backseat of the Buick was actually a blessing in disguise – if we’d have been climbing out when Robby and his pal ran into the garage, we’d surely have caught a couple of haymakers.  And we’d have deserved them.

But maybe not as much as David.