The Outsiders
The unofficial leader of Amarillo’s punk scene looked and dressed and acted different. His nonconformity made him an easy target—and it may have kept the football player who killed him from going to jail.
ON FRIDAY NIGHTS IN AMARILLO, after the high school football season and its hopes have faded, there is a restless energy on Western Street, where students from Amarillo High and its crosstown rival, Tascosa, idle in empty parking lots, leaning out the windows of their pickups to discuss the night’s possibilities. The uneasy tensions of adolescence reverberate along this broad boulevard lined with fast-food joints, convenience stores, and all-night drive-throughs, where the jocks and the punks and the kickers and the stoners while away their weekend evenings. Here, the jocks—sometimes called the White Hats for the ball caps they regularly wear—reign supreme: With a sense of certainty and the self-assurance of those who know their worth, they drive along Western Street, surveying the landscape as if it were their own. The objects of their scorn are the misfits who stand at its fringes: punks in patched-up pants and black leather jackets and the occasional blue mohawk. Over the years, the punks say, the White Hats have mocked and bullied them without mercy, spitting on them as they walk down the hall at school, roughing them up in the restroom, and swinging at them, on occasion, from the back of pickup trucks with bats. “Hey, freak,” the jocks would yell from their cars at the punks passing by on foot, scattering broken glass along the pavement as hurled beer bottles missed their mark.
Amarillo turned a blind eye to these cruelties until a brawl of such extraordinary violence erupted one night on Western Street that a Tascosa High football player would later say it “seemed like a dream.” It happened on a Friday night much like any other, a few weeks before Christmas in 1997. Rumors had been circulating at Tascosa all week that the football players—the Rebels—were going to fight the punks. The previous weekend there had been a scuffle between the two groups outside a coffee shop on Western Street at which seventeen-year-old Dustin Camp, the ruddy-cheeked center for the junior varsity team, had gotten into an argument with several punks. It had quickly escalated: Dustin’s windshield had been smashed, and though he denies it, the punks say he had taken swipes at them with his car before peeling off down the boulevard. Now he had returned to the coffee shop to see how the rematch would unfold. Beside him in his prized 1983 Cadillac sat varsity tight end Rob Mansfield and in the back was Rob’s friend Elise Thompson, a poised, serious-minded girl who would graduate as the valedictorian of the class of 1999. Elise had heard the rumors, but she didn’t believe they were anything more than the usual bluster. There was often such talk, but rarely did the boys do anything more than throw a few punches before hightailing it out of there.
As Dustin turned his Cadillac onto Western Street, the coffee shop came into view: A large group of boys in varsity jackets stood outside, along with dozens of students who had gathered to watch. Several punks, armed with bats and chains, soon approached, challenging the jocks to fight; the melee began in the parking lot across the way with a ferocity that sent a chill through Elise. Alarmed, she assumed that Dustin would take her and Rob home, but he steered his Cadillac toward the action, weaving through the boys, who wrangled with one another under the streetlights. To his left, he caught a glimpse of one of his good friends, Andrew McCullough, being beaten by several punks. It was then, Elise later recalled, that Dustin “snapped.” Veering toward the crowd, he knocked one of the punks off his feet and onto the hood of the Cadillac; the boy stared in startled amazement before falling off to the side. “Let’s go,” cried Rob as the punks pummeled the car with bats and fists, making a thunderous racket. “Let’s get out of here!” Dustin drove hurriedly toward the exit, then changed his mind; circling back around, he jumped a median as he picked up speed. Spotting a punk, nineteen-year-old Brian Deneke, striking someone, he drove steadily toward him. Brian turned for an instant as the headlights drew nearer and struck the Cadillac with a chain when it came too close.
Then there was a thud. Brian rolled up onto the hood before sliding beneath the car. Elise closed her eyes and prayed that it was only the median she had felt underneath the wheels.
“I’m a ninja in my Caddy,” Elise heard Dustin boast. “I bet he liked that one.”
Elise looked over her shoulder, out the back window, and saw Brian crumpled on the pavement in a pool of blood. “I might have screamed,” she later testified. “I was having trouble forming words…The emotions were so intense—we were overwhelmed. It was insane.”
The Cadillac lurched out of the parking lot and sped toward the highway, leaving Brian dying on the pavement. In its wake, over the course of the many months that followed, the city’s sympathies would be divided as it waited for the football player behind the wheel to be tried for murder. But in those first searing moments, as the Cadillac fled the scene, all of that was unforseeable to the three teenagers inside. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, Elise leaned forward, trembling, and asked the question that was no doubt on their minds: “What if he’s dead?”
AMARILLO STRADDLES THE FLAT, empty prairie that stretches north across the Panhandle toward Oklahoma—a stark landscape of wide-open sky and grassy plains unexpectedly broken just west of town by the upturned tailfins of Cadillac Ranch. It is arguably Texas’ last great Western outpost, a city of 169,000 bordered to the east by the ragged barbed wire of the stockyards and vast ranchland that extends to the horizon. Named “Amarillo” (Spanish for “yellow”) after the yellow wildflowers that bloom in its pastures each spring and the yellow soil that lines its creek banks, it is a place of contrary impulses: with rutted cowpaths and an interstate highway, honky-tonks and old-money enclaves, roughnecks and debutantes who fly to Dallas to shop at Neiman’s. Founded a little more than a century ago by bullheaded men who disregarded its wild and inhospitable weather and embraced the solitary freedom of the range, Amarillo has long been home to independent thinkers and contrarians. “In the fifties it was the cowboys versus the city slickers,” resident eccentric Stanley Marsh 3 recalled as he sat in his downtown office in a white brimmed cowboy hat and a fake sheriff’s star that read “Boss.” “And before that, at the turn of the century, it was the merchants versus the ranchers. I’ve been told they had a gold rope up at the cemetery so that merchants and ranchers—who smelled worse and who were considered speculators because they could lose everything on a herd of cattle—wouldn’t have to mix.”
Isolated by its geography and steeped in a stubborn frontier tradition, Amarillo has seen a good number of colorful squabbles in its history, including several in recent years: During the eighties, there was Boone Pickens’ vendetta against the Amarillo Globe-News for its scathing criticism of a university president whom he steadfastly supported; in the nineties there was the feud between Marsh and the wealthy Whittenburg clan that boiled over into a bitter civil lawsuit. For younger residents, whose rivalries play out on a smaller scale—typically in the form of high school football, a sport with an almost religious significance in this northern corner of the state—the city’s insularity gives rise to a heightened sense of antagonism, one that permeates teenage culture to its core.
During Hell Week, the seven days of pranks and vandalism that precede each year’s big game between the Tascosa Rebels and the Amarillo High Sandies, students give in to a feverish aggression: They paintball their opponents’ trucks and set off firecrackers on their lawns, egg houses and string trees with toilet paper, and most notably, get into fistfights around town. Throughout the season, Tascosa students are riled up at pep rallies by their pep squad, the Fanatics, cheering while football players pretend to beat and stomp on dummies dressed as their opponents’ mascots. Such rowdiness is winked at, its excesses as much a part of the culture as the machismo that informs the landscape: In the commons area of Tascosa High stands a statue of the Rebel, a cowboy with one hand resting firmly on his holstered gun.
Indeed, for Amarillo’s other rebels, the “freaks” who sit disinterestedly at the very top of the bleachers during pep rallies, the rah-rah atmosphere has an ugly side: It leaves little room for those without athletic ability or school spirit or, by extension, those who deviate from the norm. “Teenagers here pay a lot of attention to what your parents do, where you live, what name-brand clothing you wear, what church you go to, what kind of car you drive,” one mother lamented. “If you can’t compete, you’re an outcast.” If conformity has become a virtue at schools here as elsewhere, it is only reinforced by the fact that Amarillo itself is a stronghold of both cultural and religious traditionalism: Bordered by some of Texas’ few remaining dry counties, its FM dial carries an abundance of evangelical radio stations, and its newspaper regularly runs letters to the editor advocating the return of school prayer and creationism in the curriculum. “It’s like we’re stuck in the fifties here,” sighed more than one teenager. Even if the city has provoked a wholly original flamboyance in a few individuals, its conservative bent can be stifling for those who do not adhere to its expectations. “I believe it’s natural for a certain number of young people to do outrageous things like swallow goldfish or dress like Elvis or tuck their jeans into their boots to shock their elders,” Marsh observed. “When I was growing up in Amarillo, it was considered radical to turn your jeans up only once at the cuff, instead of twice like everybody else.”
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