The Suicide Kings are Rupert Estanislao, Geoff Trenchard, Jamie DeWolf, the last of whom just happens to be the great-grandson of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.  However, none of these men are Scientologists. They're performers, slam poets, and collectively a spoken word theatrical troop. Their performances are a mix of stand-up comedy, acapella hip hop and punk rock theatrics.

Chief Magazine: How did the three of you guys meet? 

Geoff Trenchard:  Jamie and I met in 1999 or 2000, something like that.  We both went to the Starry Plow, which is a slam poetry spot in Berkeley.  It was a month or two after the Columbine shootings and we both had poems about the Columbine shootings that were not, to a certain extent, sympathetic to the killers’ perspective, or at least acknowledging an understanding of the killers’ perspective.  It went from there.

Jamie DeWolf:  Basically, I was doing a bout versus another poet who had been talking a bunch of shit and called me out like “I’m gonna destroy you” but I totally whooped his ass.  It was hilarious.  I met Jeff that night and we started talking about Eric and Dylan and that whole phenomenon.  We a lot of shared aesthetics around that.  Then, Jeff gave me a flyer that had Jesus Christ holding an AK-47 and after that it was creepy boy bonding time.  He used to run a show in San Jose, a really long running underground open mike.  I would go down there and perform. 

Rubert Estanislao:  In Vallejo, at the time I met Jamie and Jeff, I wasn’t at a good place in my life.  I had never heard of poetry jams but I had always written and played in bands around Vallejo.  It just came up around a time that I felt like I needed to break away from the people that I was hanging out with, which were not such a good influence on me and how I was living my life.  So, basically when I Jamie and Jeff, I was a drug addict and I was hooked on meth.  The first night I met them, I had never been to a poetry slam before.  I had never competed or even read to that many people.  They introduced me to a whole new community of people, where it didn’t matter what age, race or class you were.  People just came together for the art of spoken word.

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JD:  So, we started traveling out to some of the Oakland shows and Berkeley shows that we had been doing and I brought Rupert on my first school appearance.  It was actually a Continuation school that I had previously gone to.  They paid us to come back into the classroom and perform.  Rupert and I started doing a lot of tag-team performances.  We were both lost in the same suburban shithole [Vallejo].  Then, Jeff was moving up to Berkeley so we kinda ended up getting onto the same Berkeley slam team together.  We unified under this vision that we had a real singular aesthetic in the world of poetry.  I mean, a lot of poetry is god-awful and a lot that is successful doesn’t really vibe with what we try to do.  We try to do more sort of gritty oral storytelling.  I think there’s more in common with punk rock and hip hop than really poetry in what we do.  We are certainly influenced by poetry but you’re gonna see a lot more comparisons to punk bands and Wu Tang Clan than you’re gonna see to Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Platt.   

So, your poem or play that you’re performing tonight… What exactly is In Spite of Everything?  It’s about a school shooting?

JD:  In Spite of Everything is sort of a circular idea in that the fictional premise is the Suicide Kings do a writing workshop in a high school, which we do all the time in real life.  So, we do a writing workshop in an English classroom the day before a student in the class comes in and kills all of the students and the teacher in that class.  Then, he leaves a note implicating us.  The play proceeds through a series of interrogations of the poems that we’ve done in the class, poems reflecting on the larger issue.  It just circles around the issue of school shootings and why kids kill kids, and every real fascist of the dark and dirty prism of it. 

RE:  It also explores our past experiences, which are pretty violent and troubled.  It brings it to the fact that even though we came from those backgrounds, we are able to help people.

JD:  Survival through art… But really to analyze and scrutinize why kids unloading clip after clip, would actually happen. 

GT:  A big influence for us, for this, was the frustration we had, especially after the first school [Columbine] shooting, and it keeps happening and happening.  The same sort of dumb question keeps getting asked in the media.  The larger discussion is ‘I can’t understand why anyone would want to do this’ and to us, part of the reason why these things happen is because we have a culture where people don’t understand why these things can happen.  The same kind of thing with 9/11… ‘Why would anyone wanna fly planes into the world trade center?’ but the fact that we don’t understand why people would be angry at America’s foreign policy and economic attitude, is part of the reason why.

RE:  It also explores a different type of immigrant experience for myself.  I came here in 1993 from the Philippines and the first introduction I had was in a Continuation school.  I gravitated towards the group of people that spoke my language and that group of people happened to be gang bangers, so it goes through this very different immigrant experience where you’re thrust into another violent world, where you have to fend for yourself.

GT:  It really studies the roots of youth violence, both from the victim and victimizers standpoint, and everyone that would be touched by the shotgun blast radius of one person turning their suicide into mass homicide.

Sounds pretty heavy for 70 minutes…

GT:  It’s pretty rock and roll.  It’s actually got some lighter moments and funnier parts.  We do a good satire of the modern media’s portrayal of this kind of thing.  A lot of the stuff we talk about and the way we present ourselves in class definitely has a real sardonic humor to it.