An alcoholic, schizophrenic punk rock star sounds like the fever dream of a wicked alchemist, or maybe the red herring in a snarky hipster indie-film. Something more fun to ponder than to actually be, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, that’s the steaming plate life unceremoniously handed to punk journalist Jimmy Reject to feast on, and in “The Enemy’s Within”, he lays out the whole sordid tale of woe and wow in bite-sized chunks of careful, overwrought prose with equal doses of venom and tears. Reject’s style is either gonna drag you in or it’s not; it’s sometimes deadly accurate, but sometimes marble-mouthed, and for most o’ the book, he comes off like a jailhouse philosopher coppin’ a plea. But even if Reject is presenting a good chunk of this collection as pseudo-fiction, it’s really just barely concealed journal ramblings, and it’s really only fair to view it as such.

The stories in “The Enemy’s Within” take place during several different eras in Reject’s past, but a lot of it deals with his days as a teenage suburban punk rocker on the outskirts of Boston, doing every kinda cheapjack drug possible, drinking every half-bottle of whatever left lying around, and gamely trying to dredge up enough self-confidence to score a cute punk girl or two. A lot of these stories rang pretty true, since it turns out that Reject and I were actually at some of the same shows in the late 80’s, and at least peripherally, knew some of the same people. Probably even screwed some of the same chicks, but mebbe we don’t wanna compare notes in that amount of detail. Of course, there’s one major difference between my kinda teen deathtrip hijinks and Reject’s – he was actually suffering from a debilitating mental illness, made even worse by all the nasty alcoholic swill he was guzzling at the time. His horrifying discovery that something was really wrong with him, while on a pilgrimage to meet his boyhood hero GG Allin, is as unsettling a first-person account of mental illness as you can get, really, and it stays with you long after the book is put down. Jimmy traces his slow, steady downfall, from the days of industrial club-meets-drug hell warzone “Ground Zero”, to traveling to NYC to meet up with his Maximum Rock n’ Roll columnist heroes, Mykel Board and Donny the Punk, and finding himself oddly embarrassed by the two older punks (doesn’t help that Donny begs to suck his dick the whole time, or that Reject finally gave in to Donny’s advances and pissed on him in a drunken golden shower episode), to his ongoing career as a punk rock drummer, most notably with glitter-snot Clash revivalists the Dimestore Haloes. At every stop in the path, there is madness and alcoholic oblivion to meet him. Believe me, it gets ugly. How could it not, really?

Then there’s the more purely fictional second-half, a sort of tour diary-that-never-was for an imaginary shock rock band (Tasteless), which serves as a sort of speedball catharsis for Reject, and (most likely) prurient kicks for everybody else. Fights, booze, heroin, that kinda thing.

I will admit that Jimmy Reject’s writing is raw and (conversely enough) sometimes overcooked, but it’s easy enough to look beyond that, and see the bruised and battered punk rock hero behind it all, bravely slathering on some cheap mascara and getting back into the fray for another round of me-against-the-world. “The Enemy’s Within” is not the feel good book of the year by an stretch of the imagination, but it is real and honest and presented without fear. And that, brothers and sisters, is rare enough these days to warrant a read.

-Sleazegrinder