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.
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No less radical by today’s standards, the punk scene—a loosely defined subculture populated by disaffected kids who range in style from skateboarders to skinheads—arrived in Amarillo by way of Interstate 40, a major thoroughfare for touring bands traveling west to Los Angeles. When punk rock exploded onto the East Coast in the late seventies, soon spreading to the Midwest and West Coast as well, seminal bands like the Clash passed through town not long afterward, bringing a whole new sound and sensibility with them. “When punk came here in the early eighties, it was exhilarating—the energy was tremendous,” recalled David Poindexter, a tattooed plumber who, at 45, is the old man of the Amarillo punk scene. “You danced until the sweat poured off you, until you were too exhausted to stand. It felt like something was finally happening here.”
Punk’s defiant lyrics and its rejection of mainstream conventions—with its outrageous attire, anti-authoritarian attitude, and disdain for middle-class materialism—appealed to some young Amarilloans in the throes of adolescent rebellion. Though it was first and foremost about the music, which was fast and loud and often lacked any semblance of melody or virtuosity, punk also provided a ready-made aesthetic and an all-encompassing lifestyle for those who had never found their place in the world. They were not, for the most part, teenagers who excelled at school or went out for any team: They were kids who had never quite fit in, calling themselves nerds, loners, rejects, and geeks. Most were raised outside the privileged milieu of Wolflin—the older neighborhood of stately homes, well-tended lawns, and brick-paved streets where ranching families have lived for generations—and lacked the privileges others took for granted, having neither their own car nor the requisite expensive clothing. In the punk scene, they found a haven from sometimes chaotic homes and a hostile atmosphere at school. Their decision to become punks represented a shift in thinking: They were no longer outsiders by circumstance but by choice. Flaunting their differentness, they styled their hair into mohawks, covered themselves with tattoos and piercings, and wore secondhand clothes on which they scrawled slogans like “No Future.”
The most extreme-looking of the bunch are the gutter punks, a subculture within a subculture consisting of a handful of local runaways who scavenge food from dumpsters and squat in abandoned homes. Other punks view their slovenly habits and excessive drinking with contempt, arguing that they give the scene a bad name. Among their most outspoken critics in Amarillo are the Bomb City Skins, a group whose name refers to the nearby Pantex plant that once manufactured, and now disassembles, nuclear weapons. The Skins have adopted the look of traditional skinheads—pegged pants, suspenders, and work boots—but not their racist ideology; they are apolitical punks who shaved off their mohawks to be employable, and they hold down minimum-wage jobs around town. The rest of Amarillo’s punks are not as tribalized; some dress unremarkably, while others wear studded dog collars and thick black eyeliner—their entire presentation, from their green hair down to their steel-toed boots, an affront to prevailing notions of good taste.
Until recently, punks gathered at the Eighth Street House, a run-down crash pad in an overgrown, weedy lot near the center of town. It was an uninspiring place, with cheap wood paneling that was covered with graffiti and posters advertising old punk shows and a few dim fluorescent bulbs illuminating an ungodly layer of grime. Gutter punks lived there when they needed a place to stay, pooling money for rent and food; their furniture was picked from castoffs on the street, and their electricity was illegally wired into the house with jumper cables. The mood at the Eighth Street House on my first visit last summer was oppressive: A limping dog meandered along the stoop, where a boy with blue hair sipped a Schlitz and ate spaghetti out of a can, talking at length about his luckless attempts to find a job. Music blared in the background, and another boy lay disinterestedly on a beaten-up couch behind him, watching his cigarette smoke drift through the air. Among the residents there was a dead-end sort of feeling. But the place came alive at night, when a Dallas punk band played to an appreciative crowd of sixty or so teenagers, who rushed into the cavernous rec room when the thrashing cacophony of sound began to ricochet off the concrete floors. Grabbing each other by the hand, they ran toward the makeshift stage and danced in a circle to the frenetic beat—a reeling sea of boots and fists and spikes from which a few fell to the ground laughing before returning to the fray.
This was where Brian Deneke, the punk who died on Western Street, had briefly lived with his girlfriend, Jennifer Hix, a short, stocky girl with bleached-blond hair shaved on the sides and tinted pink at the edges. When I first met her at the Eighth Street House, she sat in her bedroom on a patchwork velvet bedspread, chain-smoking and absently examining her chipped blue nail polish; she wore a spiked dog collar and a faded black T-shirt that read “Conflict,” and behind her on the wall, next to an upside-down flag, rested a small sign that said, “Be Warned! The Nature of Your Oppression Is the Aesthetic of Our Anger.” Despite her forbidding, tough-girl attitude—her mouth, pierced multiple times, was often pursed determinedly into a pout—Jennifer seemed vulnerable and shy, a fragile girl behind extravagant posturing. She had first met Brian when they were kids living in the same neighborhood; when they were younger, she recalled, they used to throw eggs at each other. She had become a habitual runaway, spending time in a detention center and a work camp, but Brian later became a central figure in her turbulent life, traveling the country with her and caring for her when she had no money. The room still held remnants of his presence; in addition to the tattoo on her forearm bearing his name, his black leather jacket was hung reverently on the door—the same leather jacket that he had worn on the night he was killed.
Jennifer had been there, in the empty parking lot off of Western Street, when Brian died. The moment was still fresh in her mind, as it was for everyone who passed through the Eighth Street House. “Brian was the candle burning the fastest and brightest—people gravitated toward him,” said Dan Kelso, an older punk who once worked with him. “He was the face of the scene here. He was visible, smiling, standing tall. When he was killed, part of these kids died too.”
BRIAN GREW UP ON THE SOUTHWESTERN side of Amarillo in a working-class neighborhood of tan-colored tract homes and sun-bleached lawns—a colorless grid dotted with the occasional basketball hoop and American flag, each block one of uninspiring similarity. His parents are ordinary, hardworking people, both Kansas natives who moved to the city nearly twenty years ago when his father was transferred there by his employer. Mike Deneke is a stainless-steel-cookware salesman, a genial, heavyset man who favors plaid shirts and suspenders; his wife, Betty, a reserved woman with dark eyes, manages a photo-processing lab. It is clear upon first meeting the Denekes that they lead lives of quiet devastation; their grief, apparent in their slow gestures and downcast gazes, permeates their home with an acute sense of mourning. Their house is one of suburban propriety, with a bed of gardenias out front and, in the back yard, a mulberry tree that cradles the treehouse in which Brian and his brother, Jason, once played. In their den, an otherwise unremarkable room with an easy chair and an assortment of painted enamel butterflies and china bells in glass cases, is a black and white photo of Brian with a mohawk. “We thought that if we didn’t accept him, we would lose him,” his father said. “You get to the point where you can keep battling with your children, but you realize you’re not going to change them.”
While Jason, two years his senior, was bookish and introverted, Brian was gregarious and outspoken—a strong-willed, restless boy who rarely sat still. “He never took much of an interest in school, and he wasn’t an athletic star,” Jason recalled. “If you’re not an athlete, if you’re not a part of the culture, you’re nothing. It was difficult for Brian to fit in.” When he was thirteen, he started using a skateboard to maneuver his way around the neighborhood. He met other skaters who introduced him to punk rock, and he was soon attending local punk shows with his brother, who would become a Bomb City Skin. The hard-edged music and rebellious attitude appealed to Brian, and during his years at Crockett Middle School, he began his transformation from a Boy Scout to a skateboarder with a streak of green hair to a full-fledged punk whose hair was fashioned into a mohawk with a handful of Knox gelatin. His parents were mortified; there was constant arguing at home, and during one particularly heated confrontation, they attempted to cut Brian’s mohawk off. “He had a real strong opinion that it shouldn’t matter how he had his hair, how he dressed,” his father explained. “Even though he was right in a theoretical sense, it didn’t matter. We knew that society would judge him, and that there would be consequences.”
Brian would become one of the most controversial-looking punks in town, covering his arms with tattoos and dyeing his hair blue, piercing his nose and wearing a studded dog collar and T-shirts with slogans like “Destroy Everything.” It was not a look that went unnoticed in Amarillo. “Brian had a sense of theater about him,” recalled Marsh. “He was a smartass, and that’s why I liked him. He walked around asking for it and grinned all the way through it.” Lacking a car, Brian was a conspicuous target as he walked to and from school; after several beatings—including one that required stitches in his head—his friends nicknamed him Fist Magnet. “People tried to start fights with him wherever he went,” Jennifer said. “When people drove past him, they flipped him off or ran their mouth, calling him a freak or a faggot or a worthless piece of trash. He’d smile and say things like, ‘Oh, you’re such a big man.’ He’d point out how ignorant they were, try to broaden their horizons, and sometimes they’d listen.” For protection, he began wearing a “smiley”: a chain fastened to his belt loop with a lock on the end. In the tenth grade he responded to taunts with violence: Finally fed up with students yelling insults at him and splashing puddles on him as he walked to an Arby’s near school for lunch, he lost his temper and threw a rock at another student’s pickup. He was put on juvenile probation and promptly dropped out of Amarillo High.
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