When you pick through the work of accomplished nonfiction writers, you’ll usually find that they keep exploring the same general theme through multiple projects. In the case of Randall Sullivan, that theme can be neatly summarized as, “Charismatic individuals whose delusions of grandeur exert a strong gravitational pull on people in search of meaning.” It’s most evident in his first and best book, The Price of Experience, the definitive account of the Billionaire Boys Club murder case in 1980s Los Angeles. But it also runs throughout a lot of his early magazine work, all of which is admirable for the depth of Sullivan’s reporting and his palpable empathy for characters who crave a sense of belonging.
One hard-to-find example, thankfully included in this anthology, is his 1986 Rolling Stone story about the rise and fall of Fight for Freedom FFF, a punk-band-turned-gang from the San Fernando Valley. The piece is front-loaded with material about FFF’s founder, a narcissist if there ever was one, but it really picks up steam once Sullivan delves into the backstory of 15-year-old Mark Miller, whose murder brought about the gang’s demise. There’s nothing particularly flashy about the prose here, which discussed the differences between the ill-fated Mark and his slightly older brother; instead, Sullivan evokes teenage heartache through the steady accretion of detail.
While Larry found comfort in the mainstream, though, Mark was drawn to sharp edges and dark corners. When the older brother was decorating his bedroom with Springsteen posters, the younger was collecting LPs of a band called the Germs, whose lead singer, Darby Crash, cut himself onstage with shards of glass and spawned a cult of kids who marked themselves on the left wrist with cigarette burns; he told an interviewer, “Blue circles and hard drugs are everything—one day you’ll pray to me,” a few months before his suicide by heroin overdose at age twenty-two.
Larry wanted to go to college on the beach in Santa Barbara and maybe be a plastic surgeon; he had heard it paid well. Mark had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and said money didn’t matter. After Karen moved over the hill into Hollywood during the fall of 1984, Mark would come home from school and hike up the hill the the Cahuenga West Motel, a fading establishment filled with war vets and old men on welfare. “Mark liked to hear their stories,” Karen recalled. “He’d spend his allowance on them, buy ‘em cigarettes, invite ‘em home for dinner.”
I feel obligated to add that I first became a Sullivan fan after reading his Wired story about Swedish tech executive who did it all with smoke and mirrors—and wrecked a priceless Ferrari in the process. I feel like I’ve spent my entire Wired career tying to spin a yarn that compelling, all to no avail.
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