Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir

by Mark Hoppus

This is where I grew up. Ridgecrest, California. A small town in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The only reason a town even exists in this barren landscape is the large, adjacent military base. A million acres of creosote and nothingness where the Navy develops and tests their missiles, rockets, and bombs. It’s where my father has worked since I was born.

My family lived in a double-wide trailer in the middle of the dirt, and it wasn’t much safer in there. Even with a swamp cooler, it got so hot that the water evaporated out of the toilets.

My dad was literally a rocket scientist, an aerospace engineer who spent his career designing missiles and bombs for the Navy.

I believe at one point Ridgecrest was the methamphetamine capital of the United States. It may have just been California, but I like to dream big.

She was a hot, redheaded, rock ’n’ roll babe. She was also my dad’s secretary. So there it was. The reason for the racket behind the closed doors.

Our parents loved us both very much. They never wanted to hurt us, but they definitely wanted to hurt each other, and children are a handy cudgel.

But with that desire to please people comes the fear of letting them down. I am constantly worried about being the source of friction. I want everyone to get along. I never want to put my own needs forward in case they upset a precarious balance. This dynamic is what made me the person I am. It gave me the good parts of my personality, as well as the darker parts. It gave me compassion and patience. It also gave me anxiety, hypervigilance, and the constant need for reassurance that everything is okay. Is everything okay? Really?

This established a dynamic early on that would remain for years to come: Tom dreamed big and I saw it through. He strove and I stabilized. He’s the guy reaching for more and I’m the guy making sure the band can withstand the structural pressure from the leap to hyperspace.

TO TOUR IN A VAN, you’ve got to want it. Anyone with any semblance of home or normalcy or decorum or compassion for their fellow man has no place in a van tour. Van touring is as close as one can get to the days of pirates roaming the open seas, for better and for worse. It strips life down to the bare essentials. Food. Music. Show. Laundry occasionally. Sleep if you’re lucky.

“Adam’s Song” means a lot to me. It’s a song I avoid singing and find excuses to not put into our live set. But it helped me immensely. Writing it made me face the reality that I was lonely. It helped to say it out loud. My weaknesses, my fears, my doubts. Tell it to the world. And myself. It was the first time in a long time that I admitted I felt lost. That I often feel lost. Maybe I’d felt a little lost ever since I was a kid, afraid of the angry voices behind the door. Whatever was going on behind the scenes of my everyday thoughts, it’d grown more insistent that I pay it the proper attention, until one night it punched me in the gut.

I’ve seen “tomorrow holds such better days” tattooed on countless limbs. To this day fans come up to tell me the song saved their lives. Thank you, it saved mine, too.

Sometimes I look back and I miss that freedom and innocence. I wish I could get out of my own way more when I sit down to write songs. I wish I didn’t have to think about everything that happened next.

Whenever I think back on this Enema period, I imagine a Mafia movie. Specifically, the second act. The second act of every mobster movie is always the most fun. Everyone’s on top of the world. Nothing can touch them. Doors open wherever they go. People kiss their rings and do any favor they ask. No one ever stops to worry what might be waiting for them around the corner in the third act. Life is too good to worry about how they might end up stuffed into a car’s trunk or hanging in a meat locker. This was blink-182 at the turn of the century. We were unstoppable. People loved us. It felt like we could do no wrong.

I grabbed a guitar and sat on the living room floor. “Alright, motherfucker. You want a happy summertime song? Here you go.” I wrote the first thing that popped into my head out of pure spite. The catchiest tune I could think of, about falling in love with a girl at the Warped Tour. Call it “The Rock Show.” Perfect. Done. There’s your fun-time song. Fuck you. Apparently Tom had the exact same reaction, because he went home that night and wrote his own take-your-criticism-and-shove-it-up-your-ass song called “First Date” about a . . . well, the title pretty much sums it up. In a way, those two songs ended up being the most fun. There was no way to overthink them. It was almost like anti-thought. Just making something people would like. And of course, our go-to producer Jerry reliably shaped them into the radio-friendly jams Rick had envisioned.

But watching all these hardworking people also made me uneasy. Every day, there were 15 semitrucks and 15 buses carrying a crew of 70 people, plus the extensive local-venue staff, all depending on the three of us. We were running a large business that supported an entire economic infrastructure. Millions of dollars were at stake every single night. If I got hurt or sick and we had to cancel even one show, all of these people wouldn’t get paid. Not to mention the arena full of disappointed ticket holders. Everything rested on our shoulders. It reminded me of the way I felt as a kid when my parents were divorcing, trying desperately to make sure everyone was kept happy all the time.

Things had quickly evolved from Tom saying he wanted to play acoustic guitar with his friend to creating a full-blown band called Box Car Racer featuring Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, with our manager handling them and our label releasing their music, with shows booked by our agency and represented by our attorneys. It was blink-182, minus Mark Hoppus. I was heartbroken. It all felt so secretive. I was shut out, completely in the dark, and no one would give me a straight answer about anything.

Tom and I came to an understanding about Box Car Racer, but the chemistry we had in blink didn’t feel the same. The message to me was clear: Tom thought I held him back from greatness. It didn’t feel like we were best friends trying to conquer the world together anymore.

Another item Green Day had written into their contract was that they wouldn’t go on until sunset. In a lot of towns, we were playing outdoor venues. The sun set around 8 P.M. but civil twilight lasted another forty-five minutes. Since there was still some light out, Green Day waited backstage, refusing to go on until it was pitch black. And once they finally took the stage, they didn’t cut their set short, which could push our start time to almost 11 P.M. Some areas have noise curfews. Shows have to be over by midnight or you’ll be fined thousands of dollars. Some places won’t even fine you; they’ll just pull the plug. So we would have to cut our set short.

I got the sense that Green Day fucking hated that they’d been reduced to opening for us. It must have been a difficult pill to swallow. There was a lot of tension on that tour. Some nights we drank together like old war buddies. Other nights I got into screaming matches with their manager in the hallways.

Green Day absolutely smoked us on a lot of those shows. It was obvious from the first night that they’d come for blood. They were on top of their game, working out before the shows, lifting weights, jumping rope. They marched onstage and their set was tight. Meticulous. Rehearsed. Choreographed to the point I could mouth along with everything Billie said between songs. We realized we had probably taken our hit-record status for granted and had grown complacent.

Drummer Tré Cool was the one who was always a bit leery of us. It was a territorial thing. I think he was jealous that Travis continuously upstaged his role as punk’s best drummer.

I still don’t know how Green Day felt about doing that tour with us or why they agreed to it in the first place. We keep asking for a rematch and they keep refusing, but we’re always friendly when we see each other. They’re the rival gang across town who we both despise and respect.

If you’ve ever seen a band on tour in the winter, trust me, they were miserable. One by one the members of their crew have fallen ill, their van or bus has almost slid off the road several times, and they’re sick to death of dirty, slushy snow. They’re probably eating Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s parents’ house in Philadelphia. Be nice to them.

Tom just shook his head. He and I were in nearly identical situations—both recently married with toddlers back home, playing in a hugely successful band on a sold-out tour—and yet completely opposite in our attitudes. I wanted to keep it all going, Tom wanted to shut it all down. We all wanted to get home and see our families, but Travis and I were excited to take what we did on the Untitled record and keep pushing forward.

Every night was a fight backstage. Me and Travis on one side, Tom on the other.

A pause. “No. Mark. Tom is out. He quit.” I still wasn’t getting it. “Oh my God, for real? Is he really acting like this right now? Ugh. Okay, let me call him and I’ll get right back to you.” “Don’t bother. He changed his number. He doesn’t want to talk to you. He doesn’t want to talk to Travis. Tom is out.”

Communication between Tom and me stopped. Everything had to go through management and lawyers. My best friend of more than a decade, and I had to have my people call his people. I was paying a lawyer top dollar to communicate with the kid I used to break into abandoned buildings with to skateboard.

Jerry’s funeral was held weeks after his death, in the parking lot of Conway, his favorite recording studio. “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys played on repeat while a photo montage shuffled on a TV. Tom didn’t come. Too busy pushing the album of the century. I hated him for that.

“It’s me. It’s Tom.” I stepped into my backyard to take the call. I hadn’t spoken to Tom in four years, since the day we argued in the parking lot of Mates Studios. The last memory I had of him was watching him walk away.

We finished recording Neighborhoods and started preparing for tour. Then Travis called me in a panic. “Dude, I don’t think we have the record. It’s not done,” he said. “We shouldn’t do this tour. We’re not ready.”

The Neighborhoods tour was, without question, the hardest tour we’d done. Grueling and brutal in every way. As usual, the performances were solid, but behind the curtain it felt cold and alien.

happen.” Tom scoffed. “Music is the easy part. We can write hit songs in our sleep. We could take a shit on a CD and people will buy it. I’d give away our music for free just to capture people’s email addresses.” I sank into my chair and screamed internally. Dude, did you really just fucking say that?

The commodification of blink-182 made Travis and me suspicious of Tom’s motivations for rejoining blink. He was so business-oriented now. Did he really care about the band or just the money it could bring in? The two of us wanted to focus on making the next great blink-182 album, but Tom was on some other shit. He couldn’t care less about an album.

In the span of one month, he said: I am excited to record and tour. I will not record, but I will tour. I will not tour either. I want to tour. I want out of the band. I want back in the band. I want to tour. I will not tour. I might not tour. I will play one show in Canada. Cancel everything.

When Tom quit the band the first time, Travis and I just kept our heads down and went to work. We let Tom control the narrative. Everyone assumed blink couldn’t possibly survive without the genius of the visionary Tom DeLonge, and Travis and I looked like the helpless chumps who got left behind. Fuck that, not this time. No way.

My phone was killing the last remaining shreds of my sanity. “Hmm, why am I so unhappy lately?” I’d ask myself as I stared into a beam of pure concentrated negativity for the tenth consecutive hour.