The Hyperkinetic Glow of the Dead Kennedys Late Drummer D.H. Peligro

I’d heard of the Dead Kennedys but didn’t really know their music when the school bus pulled into the empty lot adjacent to the crumbling house I was living in in West Hollywood in June 1987. The $700-a-month bungalow housed me, my brother, my boyfriend Tim Sampson, three boa constrictors, two dogs, two cats, and a black widow named Betsy who one day gave birth to several hundred baby black widows. Really, what were two more creatures in the yard?

One of those creatures was sublime. Not that the other was not! Mark was a slightly spooky guy, nevertheless extremely nice, who, realizing I was cooking for the multiple dudes in and out of the house every day, had his mother write on an index card the recipe for “Mark’s Mother’s Fish Chowder.”

The sublime creature was D.H. Peligro, drummer for the Dead Kennedys and, as the years came on, for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Feederz, and his own outfits. D never stopped moving—what was the next gig, and the one after that?

None of this could be known the night the bus pulled in. Mark and D.H. were very sweet—was it okay if they stayed? Once we assured them that of course it was, D was like Superman pulling off his street clothes because that’s the person he always was: hyperkinetic, glowing, absolutely needing to have a 4,000-word a minute conversation with you right now, right now!

We were all in our twenties, D a few years older than me. The Kennedys had broken up and he was trying to find his place, but in the meantime, there was all the weed to be smoked, which was easy to do, as someone who shall remain nameless was dealing weed out of the bungalow. There were regularly bread-loaf-size paper bags lying around and, idiot that I was, I once asked if someone had brought home a dead skunk.

But the weed was like a magnet, of course, and the fire pit in the front yard was regularly surrounded by music friends of D’s. Flea was there sometimes, maybe other members of the Chili Peppers, the guys in Fishbone, Jimmy and Billy Fishman, who’d made “Tapeheads,” young actors and actresses that would pass through, some of whom would soon overdose—including the daughter of one of the Righteous Brothers, who announced, as D watched The Billionaire’s Boys Club, that she could see murdering someone for a million dollars.

Few of us at the time understood how money worked. “Sis,” D said, standing in the yard one day, holding out a bunch of letters from the IRS, saying he owed all this money. He hadn’t realized taxes would have to be paid on the residual checks he was getting from Alternative Tentacles. Live and learn.

In the meantime! There were dart games to be played, and barbecues to be had, and sadness when people within the crew lost people or were lost themselves. I woke up one morning at 6:30 to find Jamie Slovak, brother of Chili Peppers founding guitarist Hillel Slovak, standing at the chain link fence by the school bus. Hillel had overdosed, and I would be lying if I said D.H. and I ministered to him at that hour, but I am absolutely sure we did so later that day.

How does a person go from being someone in your orbit to being a brother or sister? In D’s and my case, it came from his sitting with me as I cooked and baked for the revolving cast of people in and out of the house. There are few people in this world more appreciative of being fed than young men, and D had an appetite for everything: music, art, friends, laughing with you, picking you up in his arms and showing you his glow, showing you that he loved you.

D had some troubles with drugs, and I am going to say some time around 1993, he went home to I think Detroit to hang with his mom. I was living in a different house around 1994 when a brand-new Ford Mustang pulled into my driveway. Out stepped D, and when I tell you he looked like the shining sun, I exaggerate not at all. He was like a magnificent sun god and had come to tell me how good things were.

Time goes on. D and I dipped in and out of each other’s lives, but never, never, never, for one second would I not be sis. That was bedrock. D also had been particularly close with my boyfriend Tim, with whom I had a daughter in 1989. D saw and played with my daughter that day in 1994. We were still young, if with a little more mileage. D was forming new bands, he told me. He gave me a script he’d written; everything was still in the future.

It is the case that when some people become your bedrock, you don’t need to see them often, or at all, you pick up right where you left off, which D and I always did. Maybe 10 years ago, when my daughter was about 22, my brother Chris took her to a show D was performing in New York City. They were backstage before the show, D talking with my bro, maybe thinking this young pretty girl with Chris was his girlfriend, when Chris asks, “You know who this is? It’s Nancy and Tim’s daughter.”

At which, my daughter tells me, D was uncharacteristically silent, tears rolling down his face before… he became D, and picked her up and spun her in his arms

I learned a few hours ago that D.H. died on Friday. I am not sure how to explain except to say, D’s death kicks another foundation out from under our lives. I went outside after I learned, and looked at the bright quarter moon, at a star that might be a planet, at the last of some coral-colored clouds on the horizon, and wondered, perhaps hoped, that Tim, who died in 2019, was there to meet D.H. when he got there.