Iggy Pop – "Repo Man" (1984)

I'm a repo man

And I'm looking for the joke . . .

Looking for the joke with a microscope

In 2003, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with Bravo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion – the unit that was the “tip of the spear” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

Wright’s book about his experiences, Generation Kill, was made into an HBO series with the same title.      One of the Marines who is prominently featured in the book is Sgt. Antonio Espera, who portrayed himself in the TV series.  (I would have never guessed he wasn’t a professional actor.)   

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Espera, who grew up in a broken home in Southern California, told Wright that he was a “bad motherf*cker”:

You see, dog, my wife is smart, but she f*cked up big time when she married me.  I was a piece of sh*t. . . . See, I didn’t grow up with no understanding.  My mom tried, but my dad is a psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet.

Espera’s father abandoned him when he was young.  Several years later, he tried to patch things up by taking his son on a fishing trip.

On the way to the lake, the elder Espera decided to stop off at an X-rated bookstore.  While his son waited for his dad to take care of business in the store’s viewing booths, he got into an argument in the parking lot with a man he thought was trying to cruise him.  Espera ended up throwing a brick through the man’s windshield.

“That was our father-son trip,” he told Wright.

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After meeting his wife – who was a college student at the time – Espera became a voracious reader.  During his time in Iraq, he spent his free time writing long letters to his wife.  

Sgt. Antonio Espera

Here’s an excerpt from one of those letters:

I’ve lost 20 pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night.  I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference.  I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.

After reading that letter to Wright, Espera asked him, “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?”

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Before he joined the Marines, Espera worked as a repo man in Los Angeles.  He learned that the ideal time and place to repossess a car was in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded parking lot:

Jump in, drive that bitch off with the car alarm going – nobody’s going to stop you, nobody’s going to even look at you.  You know why?  Nobody gives a f*ck.  In my line of work, that was the key to everything.

Espera told Wright that he ever wrote a memoir of his days as a repo man, he would title it Nobody Gives a F*ck.

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Today’s featured song is from the soundtrack of the 1984 cult movie, Repo Man, which also includes songs by Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, and other hardcore L.A. punk bands.    

Here’s the Repo Man poster:

Repo Man – whose executive producer was ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith – was directed by Alex Cox.  Cox also directed the Sid Vicious biopic, Sid and Nancy.

Click here to listen to Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man.”