Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 25: The Kahiki

The Kahiki: 1986-1998

The Kahiki was a Columbus late-night landmark, one of the largest and more elaborate Tiki restaurants in the country, it was founded in 1961 and by the time I first visited there in 1986 it was still coasting from a mid-sixties lounge vibe. With elaborate drinks made mostly with rum and punch served in smoke filled skull glasses and Easter Island designs it shimmered with an almost Las Vegas atmosphere that begged one to have try not to have fun. It was a vast building, with an A-frame roof with two large Easter Island head statues parked at the double doorway, Columbus Ohio had never seen anything like it before or since. Upon entering the restaurant, one was transfixed by large fish tanks, nubile Indonesian women dressed in grass dresses and lays, in the back of the restaurant, presented like a large Catholic Church crucifix hanging above an alter was an in-ground waterfall. Periodically, there would be an indoor rainstorm transplanting the patrons from the staid flatness of Central Ohio to the plush exotic environment of Indonesian. It would also take one’s concentration off the very bland and tasteless Polynesian food that was closer to warmed over Chinese take-out spruced up with pineapples than any sort of dish flavored with the scrumptious spiciness of sambal.

My first encounter at the Kahiki was with Jenny Mae, we were seniors in high school very much in love and without a drop of some of the weary cyncicism that would sprout up in our lives in just a few years. Being the high school equivalent of a social dissenter, I had no proclivity of attending Senior Prom for a variety of reasons. The main being that my biggest ambition was to graduate and shake the farm dust of Catawba Ohio out of my well worn sneakers and never return. My second ambition for that particular weekend was to attend the Ohio University Spring Fest in Athens where Jason and The Scorchers happened to be playing. I had become  a fan of the Scorchers the previous year with the release of their first full length, “Fervor” which I played constantly on my radio show. Jenny had other plans, and with me more than willing to do her bidding, I caved on my plans of venturing down to Athens for a weekend of cheap beer and music.

Jenny had been to the Kahiki the prior year for junior prom with her then boyfriend, Randy. Not only did I not like his name, nor didn’t the fact that he was the complete opposite of me, he an angry blond haired redneck but I also like to be reminded of him. It only brought out any sort of hidden insecurities I had; I certainly didn’t want to drive all the way to Columbus to eat at the same reason he did. The fact that I didn’t have a job was another reminder of my pathetic adolescent state, I would have to borrow $40 off my then step father which was akin to zipping my dick up in my fly. We were to drive to the Kahiki with Jenny’s best friend Natalie whom I always believed looked down on me, although in hindsight she probably never thought too much about me to even harbor an ill thought.

I got a tuxedo, feeling foolish the entire time, my cackles already raised at my inherent distrust and apathy of ceremony and one built around high school. I never believed then nor do I now that high school is a person’s greatest age. The feelings of complete inadequacy, jockeying for social status, sweaty palms and the sensation of overpowering displacement were a complete drag. I murmured and muttered as Jenny and her mother turned me around in their kitchen, impressed by how well I cleaned up I felt as foolish as a grown man in a mascot costume. There was nothing that has ever made a person feel more crooked emotionally than having to stand on ceremony, with the weight of countless generational traditions bearing the brunt of nostalgia some of us cower and duck away from this sort of pageantry. It did not help matters that Jenny’s mother was homecoming and prom queen her senior year. Jenny herself had ducked out of the Clark County Fair Queen ceremony to lie in my bed, she was crowned Lamb Queen in absenteeism.

The night started on a disaster, we were running late and while I wanted to drive Jenny and I in my beat up Toyota Corolla complete with broken broom handle holding in the starter, Natalie’s boyfriend John was going to drive. John was a nice enough fellow, truly a good-old-boy in the most sincere sense he would whoop and holler at the drop of a hat and when he had a few drinks in him he turned into an extra from the Dukes of Hazard. We got along well, we once all rented a cabin in the Hocking Hills, and John getting overtly excited about Pink Floyd’s “comfortably numb” playing on his car radio and punched out his windshield while driving. Prom night would be “a blast” Jenny told me. We drove the hour to Columbus and arrived at the Kahiki in the late afternoon hours, I was too busy to notice the grandiosity of the Kahiki, I was too busy focused on the expensive menu prices and they were carding so I could not order a drink. I ate some stir-fried rice and thought of Jason and the Scorchers.

On the way back I started feeling a little ill, the rice did not settle well, it was climbing the walls of my gut as if it were trapped. The prom was held in the Springfield Holiday Inn, in a large banquet room called the “Holidome” it could have been the title of a mid-eighties horror movie. We didn’t even stay very long at the prom as we were already well oiled up, the plan was to go back to my house and all sleep there. My step-father was gone; I was basically living there by myself. Jon and Natalie could have my brother’s room while Jenny and I slept in my room. Natalie had issues with my brother’s room as the sheets had not been changed since he graduated high school the previous year. He was living in Germany and I wasn’t going to change his sheets. After some protestations, Natalie and Jon left in the middle of the night while Jenny pleaded with them to stay. In spite of a very upset stomach I insisted that we have sex because when I was seventeen I never thought I would have it again, any opportunity was the best opportunity. Jenny was drunk, tired and mad but she went along with it, because I suppose that is the American tradition; to get drunk and laid on prom night. As I did my best clumsy concentrated sex my seventeen year old boy body could muster, Jenny appeared to yawn and scratch her left breast. I was dumbstruck. How could she not be enjoying this? I stopped and incredulously asked her “did you just scratch your tit?” Feigning passion, she simply stated “no, I was just really getting into it.” That’s what I thought, I plugged away for about fifty more seconds till my shattered in an adolescent burst. I puked about five minutes later.

I started having Anyway Festivals on the last weekend of August somewhere around 1993 as a way to showcase music and have a three day party. On one of these first ones, my friend Liz drove down from Ann Arbor and a later friend Paul drove in from New York. They both were well versed in the Kahiki. In fact several of the other out-of-towners were familiar with the exotic lounge restaurant. We made a point of going, the interlopers were excited. Finding out that the Kahiki had a reputation was analogous to finding out that the obnoxious uncle who makes fart jokes at the dinner table is a well respected philosopher. I had no idea.

The Kahiki became a landing point for any vacationer to Columbus; we would go, tell everybody present not to order the drinks but stick to the flaming drinks and the vast amount of liquor served in brown bowls with Tiki Men statues.  Somewhere on the tail end of 1994 when the world was startled into frenzy by the sounds of Seattle, everybody wanted to know what town would be the next-big-thing. A very brief few thought for a minute that it may in fact be Columbus. This came from several essential facts about what would constitute a music town, first and foremost a college that could foster and harbor artist’s types. Check one, Columbus is home to The Ohio State University although the underground scene received scant support from the typical OSU student. Secondly it has to have a healthy live music scene which Columbus had in spades due to the close proximity of the High Street bars such as Staches, Bernie’s and Apollo’s. Thirdly it had to have an independent record label, Columbus had several. My own label, Anyway, Craig Regala and Chad von Wagner’s Datapanik and Lizard Family Music which housed some of the younger indie-influenced bands. Fourthly, the town had to have a sound. Which Columbus had, it was somewhat of a lo-fi haven not because it made esthetically but more because of economics. It was much more affordable to have Jerry, Craig Dunson or Mike Rep record your band for a case of beer than go to a real recording studio. Lastly and most importantly bands such as The New Bomb Turks, The Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Gaunt had some well connected fans who loved the “Columbus” sound.

A few of these friends made their way to Columbus in the early nineties, for a while Guided by Voices were telling people they were a Columbus band and people such as Matt Sweeny and Paul Sommerstien, who worked for the promotions company Nasty Little Man would travel to Columbus where we would have a riotous time, with Sweeny’s excellent Chavez sharing the stage with the New Bomb Turks, GBV and V-3 over the course of several years.

Entertainment Weekly decided to do a story on the next Seattle, bringing in several writers to spend an extended weekend in Columbus where Jerry and I played host. We organized a hastily show that showcased a spectrum of Columbus bands we were affiliated with, got drunk and took them to the Kahiki. It was a hilarious weekend as Jerry and I took full advantage of the Entertainment Weekly credit card. The weekend was a blur, filled with clouded nights and the rushed adrenaline of being in the center of the moment. We laughed at the absurdity of the situation; while we knew it wouldn’t last we had never thought that it would ever even be a moment. We spent around five hundred dollars on Entertainment Weekly’s money at the Kahiki; I believe there were around seven of us there. Jerry and I cackled at the bar bill and we were secretly proud that one of the men from Entertainment Weekly went to rehab immediately after getting back to New York. An act I would follow only five years later.

Our last visit to the Kahiki was when Gaunt was being courted by Warner Brothers; a kind hearted teddy-bear of a man named Bruce Maguire was the A&R man who signed Gaunt to Warner Brothers. Bruce resided in Minneapolis, where he got to see Gaunt several times as they were on Amphetamine Reptile records based in the Twin Cities, their sound man , Tim Mac worked from Am-Rep. Bruce was instrumental in helping to break the Flaming Lips and Gaunt was his first signing. We he came to town complete with Warner Brother charge card we headed to the Kahiki. Bruce didn’t drink, nor did Jovan Karcic but Brett Lewis (Gaunt’s bass player at the time), Sam Brown, myself and Jerry did. We acted like five year old children let loose in the candy shop, ordering almost the entire drink menu. Bruce was the only person who ate. He was flabbergasted as we had assembled an army of Tiki Men glasses on the table, devouring the dry-ice drinks as if we had been residing on a desert (Easter) Island he shook his head in astonishment. The bill came to a staggering amount by our mid-west flannel standards, it cleared $700. Brett and I figured it was over $170 per person drinking. For the first time, Bruce was a bit nervous over his courtship of Gaunt, but most likely that night sealed the deal for Jerry, Brett and Sam, the quickest way to their heart was through a liquor bottle. Shortly thereafter, the Kahiki shuttered its long wooden doors, emptying the famous eatery in crates to be sold at auction. For me, I will always remember it as a place with Jerry laughing and holding a long straw as he sucked some strange rum concoction from a flaming saucer, astonished at his good fortune.

http://www.kahiki.com/about-us/supper-club.aspx#

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 24 “The Trailer”

Athens: 1990

The trailer sat roughly ten miles outside of town, half-way up a small Appalachian foothill in Athens County. Athens is a small college town, nestled within a high poverty area of Southeastern Ohio, that at one time consisted of many Eastern European immigrants who worked in the high sulfur coal mines. In fact my brother’s pee-wee football coach went by the name Bela although he had a very distinct Appalachian accent. It was known as “The Trailer”, and bore the reputation of an almost living breathing entity, some of my friends in Athens who knew little about my brother had heard rumors and tales of  “The Trailer”. It was a standard size trailer with two bedrooms, a small living area that easily connected to the cramped kitchen area. It was situated in a flat area of the hill, and was completely surrounded by trees. The small drive that widened up the steep pitched hill was basically a smoothed over mud patch, more suitable for BMX biking than driving a car. It’s a wonder how the trailer was moved up to the spot where it rested, perhaps a UFO had plopped it onto the hill.

My brother is a year older than me, he choose a much different career path than me, and he joined the service, became a Green Beret and then proceeded to go to college and became an officer. He is still in the military today. After he returned from his first overseas stint in Germany he went to get his undergrad at Ohio University. For a while Jenny and I would sometimes visit with him when we went to Athens although we generally ran around a much different crowd in Athens. He tended to hang out with his rugby buddies (who engaged is all sorts of unmentionable bar-room activities) and we would hang out at the Union bar and get plastered while watching local and national bands such as The Cows, Guided by Voices and Thinking Fellers Union.

It was odd when my brother decided to move into “The Trailer”, it was a setting that was not conducive to studying and his future roommates where ones whom the term “baked” had nothing to do with bread. He had been all over world because of his career choice, growing up in Athens with a father who was an ex-professor all of us children had assumed we would attend Ohio University. My older sister attended OU for what amounted to an extended burp and Zoltan waited until he was already in his mid-twenties with a military career already full-go. I had used Athens as an escape from my life that was already centered around escaping itself.  Zoltan always had a loyalty that was much more bountiful than my own; I was one to stick with a few ideas and friends while Zoltan could remember every classmate from first grade. When he went back to Athens for school he settled in with the townies, a group of home-grown locals who, at times had a skeptical view of the imported student population but took part in all the extra-carricular activities the student population brought. These consisted of a downtown that consisted of more bars than actual retail businesses, huge block length parties and an abundance of locally grown “spices”.  Just outside of the town limits the environment turned impoverished, with a huge contingent of poverty stricken low-income whites that piece-mealed a sustenance together, cobbling together enough hard work and luck to just get by. The farms that flecked the rolling hills were small and barely large enough to eke out a promising existence.

The trailer was owned by a boyhood friend of my brother, a good-old boy from a traditional Midwestern family that farmed a small plot of land. Danny, was red-haired and large, prone to drinking too much alcohol on a daily basis (as many in the area are) who was cast adrift after completing high school. For many in the area, although they grew just shy of the large state university, college was not a choice. This is not uncommon in most of the Midwest, where even in a largely populated state like Ohio that is filled with a plethora of higher education opportunities, there exists little career opportunities for high school graduates. In Springfield, where we went to high school, one had the choice of working at the large International Harvester, Honda, farming or most likely a shitty fast-food job. In Southeastern, Ohio the two previously mentioned job opportunities were not available.

Many, if not most of the recent high school graduates, schlepped around for a few years, moving through their early twenties unmoored until they either got somebody pregnant, got pregnant or somehow managed to wrangle a suitable job from the hollow economy of the area. For many, life was an endless weekend as opportunities were spaced far between cases of Pabst-Blue Ribbon Beer and bong-loads. With each passing year, life could grapple the ankles of fortune and pull a poor boy down into a pit devoid of favorable circumstance. This was the population my brother gravitated to upon returning to Athens. The trailer housed Danny, my brother and an old grade-school friend named Brian. How my brother accomplished reading one book in the trailer is beyond even my broad imagination, some of it may have to do with his ability to live in a swamp for a week with one knife, one match, one piece of rope and a live chicken.

Jenny and I would visit the trailer on our monthly visits to Athens, although we would never stay very long, for it would reawaken the very recent memories of a high school period surrounded by good-old boys (i.e. rednecks) and the blunt immediacy of personal confrontation. Where manhood could be summed up in loud vocal tones and one’s ability to discuss the ingredients of a powerful engine. I was always looking for a way out. The muddy path sloped up the crooked hill, with hesitant and hic-uppy stops only a large truck or earth moving vehicle had the hopes of climbing up that treacherous driveway. At that time Dominoes Pizza would offer a free pizza if they could not deliver your pizza to you under thirty minutes, on rainy nights they boys would order a few pizzas knowing full well that a car could not drive up the impassable drive, and they would get the pizzas for free. Soon enough, Dominoes refused to deliver pizza to the trailer.

Our firs excursion to the trailer happened on a Friday night, I had just gotten a new car, a 1984 blue Chevette, complete with an AM radio and stick shift. I had bought it off my former step-father for $400 and was proud of the small, compact and ugly machine. On the way down, Jenny and I stopped at a McDonalds to get some coffee to chase the 40 ounce beers we had. While waiting in the drive-through window line she asked to drive, I said “No, you can’t drive a stick. You’ll ruin the transmission.” She protested, saying “my dad taught me how, last summer.” I knew this was a bald-faced lie, I taught Jenny how to drive and not in a stick-shift. In fact, I took her to get her driver’s license in my former car. “Jenny,” I smiled “you’re lying, I taught you to drive. You can’t drive a stick.” Smiling back, “yes, he did. I promise I know how, I won’t mess it up. I’ll make it up for you.” I knew what this meant, a sexual favor. “O.k. but be careful.” We switched places and as she tried to pull forward she grinded the transmission, making a horrific racket, all of sudden with eyes bulging out and me screaming the car shuttered to a spasmodic halt. She looked over to me and proceeded to hand me the shifter. “Oops….here.” I was dumbstruck as I held the foot-long stick shift in my hand, staring at the oily end hovering above my lap. “What the fuck?! What the fuck?! What the fuck?!” I yelled. She said matter-of-factly “maybe you should drive.” With that she got out of the car.

The car was in second gear and somehow I manage to stick the shifter into the grimy black hole and get it into third gear. We ended up driving the rest of the way, praying that we didn’t hit any stop lights. I silently wept for the first twenty minutes and Jenny talked and drank beer as if nothing had happened. We eventually got to the imposing hill, as muddy stream of water cutting down the center of it. I managed to get the haggard Chevette half way up the hill where eventually because I could not downshift it stalled and rolled back into a small sapling. The night was going to be a disaster. Climbing out of the car, our shoes quickly filled with mud and we trudged up the hill, with each step our feet became enormous globs of mud. I went from a size eleven to a size thirty in three steps. Next to the trailer sat a large 4X4 truck that was left for dead as evidenced by its bed housing a mountain of empty beer cans that towered over its cab like an aluminum tower.

Opening the door, our boyhood friend Brian laughed at us, as did the living room full of townies. The living room had two couches and several chairs with a small table that was overfilled with empty beer cans and liquor bottles. My brother got up, and said “that hill is a trip isn’t it. Should have told you to park at the bottom and walk up.” I handed him my stick-shifter, “we had a little trouble on the way down” I said glancing over at Jenny. Danny jumped up, laughing he said “sorry for laughing at you trying to master that hill, I can fix that for you now.” With that he disappeared into the wooded darkness and reappeared several minutes later, “all fixed”. He did it with nary a tool as his hands were covered in grease. “It just kinda pops back in. It should stay that way.” I went to use the rest room, peeing I looked over and saw a fork lying next to the tub. After rinsing my hands in the filthy sink I grabbed the fork to take it back into the kitchen. As I walked into the living room everybody howled “Oh, shit put that back and scrub your hands” and “shit, do you see what he has?!”  I held up the fork as if it were an unexploded grenade. “This?” “Yes, that’s our pube remover.” I was confused. “What, your pube remover? What the hell is that?” My brother got up and bravely took the fork from my hands and escorted me back to bathroom. “Be, we use that to pull the pubic hair from the drain.” As I scrubbed my hands I murmured “obviously.”

When we left the rest room, Zoltan motioned to the room off to the side, “that’s my bedroom, you guys can stay in there but I should warn you we saw a black snake in there last week.” I decided then we were going to stay with Chris Biester in town. Sitting on the couch my backside nearly touched the floor. Everybody noticed my clumsiness, and explained “we cut the legs off all the couches because guys were just shoveling their plates underneath and squirrels were getting in and eating the food off the plates.” I offered “why don’t you just wash your dishes?” This drew cackles. I then noticed the shotguns lying next to the couches, there were four of them. I asked what they were for. “Oh, in the daytime we take bets on who can shoot a squirrel from the couch. Whoever misses has to go on the next beer-run.”  “Oh, makes sense.”

Jenny and I sat on one of the couches, we were handed fresh beers, directly to my left sat an older sandy haired man named Tommy. I knew everybody else which consisted of childhood friends Danny, Brian, Mark, and my brother’s younger girlfriend Sandy. Tommy shook our hands and winked at Jenny. He was a Vietnam vet and was very pleasant at first. We drank beer and played drinking games and after an hour Tommy switched, he looked over at my brother’s girlfriend and grinned, with clumsy syntax he stuttered “you, my dear are quite munch able.” Zoltan chimed in “Hey, Tommy cut it out, that’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.”  Tommy looked over at Jenny “I must say, you are too.” That was it; my brother stood up and demanded an apology from the drunken vet. They faced off; one broken ex-Vietnam vet whom, I later learned had spent a great deal of time in prison, and a large young buck of an Army officer. Circling each other, Tommy baited my brother, “hey you may be Army but you ain’t really army till you kill somebody. Going to Germany ain’t nothing like getting’ shot at.” Zoltan, who towered over the smallish thimble of a man, was keeping his cool, “Tommy you can stay if you settle down and apologize.” Tommy sneered, “fuck you, I can take you. Fuckin’ pussy.” Being mindful of all the shotguns, that I assumed didn’t have their safeties on we moved towards the kitchen. Finally, Tommy left. I told Zoltan that we needed to meet up with our friend Chris in town. We left with minutes after Tommy left. Things just didn’t seem right.

Later that night, Tommy came back brandishing a handgun which he shoved into my brother’s stomach. As the other inhabitants of the trailer scrambled out of the way, ducking behind legless couches and grabbing their own guns my brother managed to talk him down but not before Tommy needing to prove the severity of the situation fired several shots into the woods. Tommy would later die in prison; my brother forgave him and sent him letters and books while he was incarcerated. Zoltan would soon after move to First Street where he lived with a cast of other characters and eventually he too would see the havoc of war. We never returned to the trailer.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 23: Rev. Horton Heat and Jerry

Jerry and I were so similar in many ways but in others we drastically different, this came out in the way we communicated with each other. While I was looking for saviors I believe he was looking for validation that for him came in the recognition of being an artist, a burning cinder of compulsion that would last long after he arrived and departed. In the latter sense this was truer than he could have ever imagined. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of my former best friend Jerry and the path he carved through my shambled over-grown mind. Perhaps the most memorable aspects of Jerry wasn’t so much of the music he created, which in terms of artistic talent never achieved the heightened hopes we may have hoped but of the person who by sheer force of personality penetrated his four chords and rudimentary drumming into his music, sculpting his very being into simple pop music clouded by brawny yet sophisticated guitar licks that amped his songs like all the laughter he created.

I was a fan of pop music, a person who idolized Randy Newman, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones until the age of fifteen when I discovered Lou Reed, The Ramones and R.E.M., and till this day if it doesn’t have a melody I couldn’t really give a fuck. Jerry, was firmly rooted in the Cleveland punk and underground scene. In a sense most of us on the scene were historians, the kind of geeks that would trace the musicians on a particular record back to their deepest roots; we knew the engineers, the producers and the meanings behind the songs. What was a revelation for us as we navigated and operated through the incestuous underground scene was that people listened to us, we both became authorities on the validations of My Dad is Dead, Dead Moon and the Dead Sea. This trust emboldened the both of us and we could talk for hours about the historical significance of Pere Ubu or such up and coming bands as Pavement (Jerry only liked the 10”) and Urge Overkill (Jerry thought they were brilliant, I thought they were all show with little purpose.) In hindsight it was all silly, but of great importance to both of us at the time. As much as I can sense the seriousness of witches for my four year old daughter from my wizened perch of forty-one, I realize that purpose is essential to many of us.

I was never a fan of nostalgia, hated the glamorization of the nineteen sixties growing up and thought that “the greatest generation” was always a self-congratulatory affirmation used to assuage guilt and sell product. I have always believed that people have certain times and incidents in their lives that help shape and build them regardless of the year in their lives. For me, it only made sense that I huddled near other like-minded souls in my twenties and if I was alive in 1961, no doubt I would have breathed in the same air as a young Phil Ochs and other Larry’s regulars. I would have been a fan of be-bop in 1949 and would have read the early beats and no doubt if I were twenty today I would relish the newest recordings by The Gaslight Anthem , Eat Skull and Kurt Vile. In this way I was always distrustful of artists who gravitated towards the past and the people who followed them.

I never cared for Rock-a-Billy music too much, I liked Elvis as a kid but the only thing close to rock-a-Billy I liked was the punk influenced art-fucked sounds of The Cramps, the Cheater Slicks, the Gibson Brothers and Big Stick. I hated Brian Setzer and had no feelings towards tattoos and thought wearing sun glasses indoors was pretentious and un-necessary. I always wanted to cut to the chase, get to the meaning of things and never mind the glamour or fashion of any community. Being a loner for most of my life provided me the opportunity to pick and choose and while I spent much of my life in and around nightclubs it was very common of me to go to Staches for the opening band and then wander down to Bernie’s or Apollo’s for two other bands.  Most of us did this.

One night, the Supersuckers were opening for the Reverend Horton Heat at Staches.  The Supersuckers had just released “The Smoke of Hell”, their finest moment on record, full of cock-sure bravado with tongues firmly in cheek; they managed to encapsulate all the importance of making devil-may-care music with the right amount of self-mockery that allowed one to fully trust them. To me, the Reverend Horton Heat was no difference than a glorified underground version of Brian Setzer or ever worse George Thorogood whose rock-a-billy was even worse because he played blues music. I was already sad enough, I wanted to dance, cheer and shake my head to the music not talk about guitar licks and being a lower middle class white kid from Ohio I couldn’t pretend to relate to Muddy Waters—I had no need for  blues music. Anyway, Jerry was a big fan of Horton Heat. We met at the show and loved the Supersuckers who put on a fast triumphant show that consisted of cowboy hats, choreographed stage moves and genuine silliness backed by Marshall stacks. They had managed to turn to all-to-seriousness of 70’s guitar rock onto the flamboyant funniness of punk rock; which is much harder than it sounds.

After they played I told Jerry I was leaving, he was incredulous and followed me outside. “What, I can’t believe you’re leaving?!” I looked at him, “I hate Horton Heat, he’s like a glorified George Thorogood. I’m going down to Bernie’s to see Clay.”  Jerry shook his head at me as I wandered, half-lit down High Street to hear the spasmodic sounds of Clay who came on like a carnival version of Pere Ubu and Brian Eno. For three months in 1993, Clay was the best band in Columbus.

Later that night, Jerry came down to Bernie’s and said that Horton Heat was an asshole. Apparently Jerry, overcome by cheap beer had decided to heckle the Reverend. Calling him among other things “a George Thorogood wannabe”, this prompted Mr. Heat to stop the show and threaten to come down and beat Jerry’s ass. The next day, Jerry sold all of his Reverend Horton Heat records.

If there was line that people adhered to, we crossed it, taking the opportunity to make someone feel uncomfortable we took it, Jerry much more often than I ever did. Jerry thrived in doing this; it is a testament to his charm that he didn’t get beat up on a weekly basis. There were times we would go to certain clubs, such as the Newport or restaurants where we thought the food was too expensive and we would go to the rest room together. We would both stand next to each other at the urinals and pull our britches all way down to the floor so our little bare asses stared out to the waiting masses. It was all five-year-old pissing style and we would be pelted with a variety of insults such as “you fucking fags” or “come-on, grow up you fucking idiots” which just made us cackle louder. This was always unsettling in some of the high end restaurants we would sometimes drink at, as men in suits would shake their heads at us no doubt wondering just what the hell we were doing in a place that was a step below a dress code. We would laugh on the way out and saddle up at the bar, next to our dates that always got a kick out of our adolescent behavior. The angry businessmen to doubt wondering how such beautiful women would be in the company of such idiots. We laughed louder, longer and more heartfelt than anybody in those crusty establishments and we took a certain amount of pride in this.

Jerry wanted to matter, to be remembered as some of his heroes such as Peter Laughner, Townes van Zandt and Johnny Thunders. The best songwriters we both knew up close and personal were Ron House and Mark Eitzel. We both had a vast amount of respect for Ron and Jerry craved his acknowledgement as if he were the coach’s son. Since we all lived in world built upon not revealing too much of ourselves, our praise came in the form of back-handed compliments and perhaps a nod of appreciation. We dare not venture to let someone know they moved us; this was an impossibility. Ron and Jerry bickered more than Jerry and I did, I respected Ron and we held respectable distance from one-another, each one confident in our own ability to navigate our lives in spite of vices that could be debilitating. This was most likely also due to the fact that I wasn’t a musician, I may have painted and wrote but I didn’t play a guitar-I really wasn’t a threat to all the other big fish in our medium sized pond.

Sadly, for many of us we didn’t get the opportunity to tell Jerry how much he mattered to us musically until after he died. I was living in Gainesville when I received an e-mail from Rough Trade records in the U.K. They were assembling a compilation of their greatest rock and roll songs of all time, all of them post 1977. As a testament to the talent of Jerry and Ron both Gaunt and the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments were to be included on the compilation. This would have been the perfect validation for Jerry, as the CD contains such essential acts as The Stooges, Mudhoney, Rocket from The Crypt, The Pixies and Suicide. Seven years later The Columbus Alive would vote that Gaunt’s “Kryptonite” the best Columbus record of the past thirty years.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: part 22-Jim Shepard & V-3

Jim Shepard

There were several people whom we bounced around with, the majority were people in our same age group who had the same interest, The New Bomb Turks, Greenhorn, Moviola and various bartenders and bar maids.  Outside of this group there was a core group of Columbus musicians and artists whom we all admired; these were for the most part the 80’s generation of the underground music scene: Dan Dow, Ron House, Mike “Rep” Hummel, Scrawl, Don Howland, Jeff Evans, Dan Dougan and Jim Shepard. We all had our walls, some built up by bandied down rumors, some by musical preference, some by the types of intoxicants people took and others by past and future romantic interests. For a while, Jerry, Jenny and I spent a great deal of time sitting in the wooden booths at Larry’s, standing by the stage at Staches or Apollo’s or manning the corner window at BW-3, drinking a vase of happy hour Budweiser.

Jim Shepard was an outsider in a land of outsiders; he had spent a great deal of his life in Florida, a veritable outpost of misfits and a state that was constructed for interlopers and floaters who would head down south in search of new beginnings and self-inventions. Jim was a short man, who wore his mat of greasy black hair as if it were a prop from a Harry Crews short-story. He walked with a slight lean as if the weight of the world pulled him forward, waiting to smother him in its own gravitational pull. He was constantly unshaven but never bearded; it was as if he had gotten a George Michael shaving kit from the liquor store. He was a constant ruffled sort, who spoke in a deep mumble as if he were sending himself coded messages. In a sense, even though I drank copious amounts of alcohol and spent hours on barstools next to Jim, I never really knew him but then again I’m not sure if I’ve never really known anybody.

Jim had Jerry’s and I respect from the get-go, he was semi-famous by our standards as a long-time home recorder who had been putting out records for well over a decade. He also had garnered a well versed fan base especially with the East Coast music tastemakers such as Thurston Moore, Johan Kugelberg and Byron Coley. He had been performing music for many years and his band Vertical Slit was a quiet, yet solid underground force in Columbus.

When I met Jim, I was working at Used Kids; he was working for a local jukebox repair shop and was good friends with Mike Hummel. Jim would drop in during lunch time and hang out, flip through records and chat. Once in a while he would sell us some of his records which were put out by out of town labels such as Ropeburn and Siltbreeze. He would huddle with Hummel next door at the Used Kids Annex and they would fuck with his tapes and bang out music deep into the night. On certain Monday evenings, Jerry and I would stroll down to Larry’s for our start on the evening and we would be disappointed by the weekly poetry night, we took offense to collegian artist’s types butting in on our time at Larry’s. On many of these Mondays both Jim and Mike would be there, reading and spontaneously spouting off their poetry. Jim’s being more of the science-fiction-cum-gutter-found prose influenced by Phillip K. Dick and William Burroughs. Jerry and I would crowd against one another, no doubt too chicken-shit to express our own poetry in such a stark setting, Jerry would couch his in between blasting guitars and punk-rock beats and I my own would lay dormant in dog-eared rumpled notebooks where they still sit, twenty years later.

V-3 came about after the breakup of Vertical Slit, it was an unsightly band with Jim’s paranoid dark blue-collar mystique, Rudy, a drummer of small demeanor and Nudge Squidfish a jovial wide-eyed gentleman who was prone to talk of UFO’s and conspiracy theories when prompted by a few drinks. Live they were freakish sight straight out of community access television but they carried a powerful force in Jim’s highly melodic art-ish squall that was one part early Fall, another part Joy Division and the rest filled with land-locked Florida bizarreness and mid-Western sludge.

Jim was funny, even if one could not always hear his almost inaudible comments that would slip out of his mouth like a small bump in the road. For a moment when he spoke you would think that a ghost passed through the room, moving a coffee cup or beer bottle across the table; you would think you heard him and then you didn’t. It wasn’t before long that Jim and Jenny Mae had developed a strong friendship, both of them had a fondness for the dive bars of North Campus and both of them enjoyed slurping a few drinks before the sun set down.

It would appear that musically that Jim and Jenny would have little in common musically as many of her pop songs where constructed out of a love of early sixties pop, The Beach Boys and the bounce of early eighties college rock whereas Jim’s music was as serious as a life pursuit. What they bonded over was a sense of melody and a meeting of the bohemian lifestyle, filled with creativity, late nights, cheap rent and the cultivation of laughter. Both suffered, more internally than physically, with Jim although it should be noted I did not know him well-he was too closed for that, you could feel the gravity of his darkness through sunken eyes, mused hair and the stubble around his chin. He wore his clothes as if they were an afterthought, articles for warmth-nothing else; they consisted of ragged blouses, jeans and old flannel. He carried himself as if he were Harvey Pekar, one with a distrust of the modern world and its complexities as a point of contention. His songs evolved around science-fiction, social commentary and the pursuit of a connection I think he never gained with the exception of his music.  Perhaps his greatest line was “negotiate nothing, tear it all down.”

Jenny and he started drinking together shortly before his death, they would both meet at either Walt’s or Bourbon Street in mid-afternoon passing the afternoon hours in a connected shadow world lit by bar lights and their own brilliant creativity. Jenny told me one day that she had been drinking with Jim for a while and that they had started recording together, mostly her adding keyboards and trumpet to some of his tracks. I joked that they should record a cover of the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rodgers duet “Islands in the Stream”, which Jenny used to play. She shocked me a week later and told me that Jim was up for it, I have no idea if it were ever recorded.

Our world was small but it opened up the universe where ideas bounced off of one another like bubbles in beer, we would have one ingenious idea flowing after another without a filter to identify the logical of said idea. Huddled around empty bottles and amplifiers the stage of the world was in the basements and living rooms of our lives. Fashioned out of four-track tapes, sticky homemade record covers and note books furnished out of loneliness and dreams that were one part illusion and another part delusion Jim, Jenny and Jerry bonded over the ideal that the world was what you carved out of it, one note at a time.

As much as Jim’s outsider manner defined his life and his being, he made strong connections with other like minded people, although many of us came from somewhat disparate backgrounds we all had (have) a passion of the transformative essence of music. The opportunity to escape the mundane of our lives through the process of electricity, sound and speakers. Jim made an impression on Bob Pollard and commented one drunken evening to Bob while marveling at Bob’s propensity to fashion melodies as if they were breathes of air, that he “was like a vampire on Titus, sucking songs out of the earth.” Titus was the street that Bob lived on at the time, next thing you know the next Guided by Voices album was named “Vampire on Titus.”

Jim, Ron House, Bob, Don Howland and Mike Rep were the elders in our world, wizened cynical “old” men who had been there-done that and were still plugging in and plugging away, making vital music deep into their (aghast!) thirties while most other people we knew of that age were watching Disney videos with diaper fitted children and listening to generic alt-rock pretending that one could be hip with a mortgage payment. That lifestyle was so far removed from what we were living it might have been in an alternative universe. Our own misgivings kept us  happily insolated and isolated.

Jim, Ron, Mike, Don and Tommy Jay somehow having the insight to recognize their own place in the small pond of the Columbus underground scene managed to tolerate one another long enough to record together under the guise of Ego Summit and released a terrific record titled “The Room Isn’t Big Enough” (now available digitally on Old 3-C Records). A smorgasbord of clashing but similar styles coalescing to carve a minor dent in the history of nineties home-tape underground. It contains one of the most disturbing songs in the Midwestern music cannons in Ron House’s “Half Off” about a prostitute who eats her leg off to get out of a trap. Sung/spoken by Don Howland it is as chilling as it is as shittily recorded, with a claustrophobic aura that chokes the listener almost as much as the smoke being exhaled by the musicians when recording the record. Therapy is recommended after every listen, it is that frightening.

In the failed experiment of nineties rock and roll perhaps the most elaborate but yet simple minded plan was for major labels to sign well respected but commercially limited bands and dropping then when sales didn’t match those of Seven Mary Three or Bush. Columbus was ripe for this idiotic take on major label experimentalism, and sadly this would have detrimental effects on most persons in this blog. It’s not as if signing to a major label was idiotic in itself it was that at that point in the business design of corporate music was one part fed off the ideals of the sixties and early seventies when artists as diverse as The Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Moondog and Phil Ochs could be signed and allowed the freedom to be artists. Whereas the major label mindset professed this ideology it still worked (works) with the mind frame of the quick-cash turnover of the most blandest and cynical music of the nineteen-eighties, whereas the bottom line is sales and the exposure. Hence some of the oddest couplings of artists and money since the Hampton Grease Band signed to Columbia. Such was V-3 signing to American imprint Onion records.

Johan Kugelberg had left Matador Records to take a job working directly under Rick Rubin and was given his own vanity label which he titled Onion, a very tasty but yet smelly vegetable. He managed to sneak in four excellent releases before the label realized his venture would not bring in any money. These were: The Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments “Bait and Switch”, The Monks re-issue, The Stiffs (whose uncanny New York streetwise-art-punk would predate the Strokes by several years) and V-3. Even by the non-startled place in our collective world the signing of Jim Shepard to American was stupefying basically because Jim’s music could be equally standoffish and abrasive, a challenge of sorts to the listener just like the man himself. “Photograph Burns” has some very warming songs on it, most notably “Bristol Girl” which ended up on countless mix tapes I constructed on my living room floor deep into the night. There was nothing odd about the conundrum of many of the underground artists signing to major labels, as Jerry once told me “I want to be famous”, what I think he really meant was that he wanted to be immortal. It is easier to be immortal if more people know who you are, so it only makes sense to hitch your song to a corporate machine like Warner Brothers whose Bugs Bunny may be more immortal that any human. Besides one could always return to the basement, although Jim never really returned to the basement after V-3 got dropped after Johan lost his job. He was dead within two years.

I saw Jim huddled next to the video trivia game console on the end of the bar at Bourbon Street one Sunday night during an absolutely depressing bout of Karaoke sung by half awake hipsters who took pride in the fact that their jobs didn’t require them to be their early Monday morning. He eyes were flat and deep enough in his skull that they could be mined. He had a jar of beer sitting in front of him, I asked if he were ok and he said he was fine. He was a vacant as a vacuum. I said something to Jerry who loved Karaoke about Jim, “he’s just fucked up tonight.” A few days later at work, Ron hung up the phone and said “Jim Shepard hung himself last night.” Jim’s funeral was the first of several in a few years’ times for a small but close knit scene of outsiders, artists and music fans. A collection of dazed and rocked ex-girlfriends, musicians, bar-keeps and family gathered around a photo of a smiling (!) Jim and talked to pass the time as a sweaty undercurrent no doubt sent us all scurrying to various hidden parts of ourselves that we dare not try to touch.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae Part 21: Thanksgiving 1988

Thanksgiving 1989

Jenny and I were living on Chittenden Avenue on Thanksgiving of 1989, we had moved from the downstairs apartment to the middle apartment right above. It was quite literally a move up, with the overwhelming stream of roaches that crawled in and out of the sink, walls and furniture mostly being confined to the downstairs apartment to be in closer proximity to scrounge through the trash littered alleys and sidewalks around the house. The whole surrounding area was a garden of concrete, blacktop, empty fast food bags and broken bottles. The second floor apartment was larger, and unlike the downstairs unit it ran the length of the house. We were student poor, except I wasn’t a student, just a poor schlep of a middling corporate record store manager trying to figure out how to sell cassingles and New Kids on The Block on the largest University campus in the country. It was a baffling proposition and if it wasn’t for Larry’s, Used Kids and Craig Regala I most likely would have blown my head off if I had the chance. Jenny was in and out of school at this point, majoring in Spanish and preparing for trying out for The Ohio State Marching Band. A nice dinner out for us was the all you could eat salad bar at Wendy’s where we would inevitably stuff some burritos into her purse for later consumption.

The house was large, three stories split into six apartments, we had moved in mid-ninety eighty seven. First moving into the tiny cramped first floor apartment, we had an ex-OSU football player who lived above us and spoke so slowly looking back he may have suffered a head injury playing ball. His speech was a cross between Rocky Balboa and a brick. Above him was an intense lunatic engineering student who once fired a gun in the air off his balcony when some tow-truck driver tried to tow his car from our lot. He once challenged my Green Beret brother to a fight at two a.m.; it was like a drunken Bay of Pigs. The two overtly masculine men staring down one another, contemplating who would make the first move against the others well known aggressive reputation; thankfully it ended in a few pointed “fuck-you’s” and “fuck-you too’s.” We had a steady flow of guests and couch floaters in the downstairs apartment. By the time we moved upstairs we learned our lesson for the most part when it came to letting people sleep in our house.

This was a period of timeless young insanity that masked itself as the gasoline of youth; when bravery made an appropriate substitute for foolishness. The apartment had a small bedroom and the living room appeared to sit on crooked stilts and the grime in the floor was  thick as cheap carpet. Moping the floor was about as appropriate as mopping a mud puddle but we loved having our own place. We decorated the walls with Jenny’s painted doileys, my father’s and grandfather’s art-work and lone photo I took of Randy Newman after waiting outside the Newport for three hours to meet him. Randy asked if he wanted me to get someone to take a picture of us together and I told him that was silly because it was foolish to pretend we knew one another. He smiled, later that night he dedicated  “Louisiana 1927” for me.

One of the first people we let crash occasionally was a south campus street musician named Dan Stock; he was from Cleveland and was roughly fifteen years older than us. Dan had matted dark black hair, a scar thatrang from side of his face  down to his adam’s apple and an immortal cigarette dangling from his mouth. He would sit on the corner of 11^th and High and play shitty cover tunes of Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton. We got to know him over our vast love of the cheapest food and beer on campus which was a dugout pizza joint named Sandros. Sandro was a leftover from 1974, with a bushy mustache that enveloped his face and hid his cocaine eyes, he wore a beat up folded fedora that mimicked his hand-drawn signs that littered the place, pathetically proclaiming that his “1/2 lb. Slab of Pizza was a slice of Chicago.” One could eat a slice of “Chicago” and get a pitcher of oily beer for $5.

Dan eventually crashed on our couch, it was the first time I had ever seen somebody ever do cocaine; an episode that so horrified me that I forever had a fear of drugs. Dan was staying at our house for a few days and we walked in the living room and as he put down a small mirror a large chunk of his nose fell on the table. It was as big as a marble, a big bloody gob of meat that cut through the atmosphere like an overflowing toilet. Dan stared at us horrified as we did him; he had a small driblet of blood coming out of his right nostril. “Holy shit, Dan!” yelled Jenny. Dan, frozen in shame nodded his head back and forth. “Dan, what the hell are you doing in our house, shit man, are you o.k.?” I asked. Dan then picked the bloody marble up and stuffed it into his pocket, as if it was a wad of gum (instead of a piece of his nose) and he was just caught at school. He replied ‘wish you nice folks didn’t have to see that.”  Later, Jenny and I vowed never to use cocaine, a promise that she would sadly never keep.

The small apartment building next to use had three units that housed seven young women in all of them. The women appeared to be students who had decided to forgo their sorority house for their last years of school. Because we were so poor, Jenny and I would at time drink a twelve pack and stare out the living room window out into the small sidewalk that separated our house from the apartment building. We would hide behind the curtains and make quiet comments towards the passersby’s.  This was not at as boring as it seems, we were just steps off of High Street and South Campus bordered one of the most dangerous ghettos in Columbus so there were all sorts of people cutting through the alleys and sidewalks around our house. It was not uncommon to witness couples making out in the alley or between the house, drunken brawls and sheer idiocy. One time we witnessed one of the sorority girls leave her apartment, lock her door and fart. She reached in her purse, pulled out a small bottle of perfume and sprayed it on her ass. We burst out laughing as the woman looked hurriedly around her. A sight that has been burned into my mind like a prison tattoo.

The next year we moved upstairs. We decided we would travel to Cincinnati for Thanksgiving, Jenny’s parents had split up and her dad hated me anyways, it made sense to visit my mother. For many of our holidays we would travel with my Hungarian grandmother Isabel but I believe she was visiting Hungary during this period. Jenny and I loaded the large 1978 Ford LTD I owned with two months of laundry and set off for my mother’s house.  We feasted and spent a day doing laundry. We were always short on food and my mother made sure she packed extra leftovers for us. We re-loaded the car and drove back to Columbus, full of turkey and clean clothes.

A young African-American man moved into the old apartment below us. When he moved in we went down and welcomed him and met his parents who were both white and appeared wealthy. He was a nice kid who hung out with us a few times and seemed determined to make his way through college, leaving our apartment before too much alcohol absorbed the night away. After a month or so his behavior got more erratic and he would disappear for days at a time. Soon some shady looking fellows complete with sunglasses-at-night attire and stoic jaw line would be looking for him, pounding on his door with so much force it would rouse us out of our dream world and cause us to peer over the balcony and ask “what’s going on down there?” They would holler up “you seen this guy lately?” “MMMM, nope.” And we would slink back into our apartment and lock the door. Other times we could hear screaming in his apartment, violent terrifying screams that even seemed out of place for our shitty neighborhood. Our locale was better than the cable television we couldn’t afford.

We arrived home from Thanksgiving and hauled in the laundry, depositing it in the stairwell that connected all of the apartments but was usually never used. It made a deluxe closet. The next day I would have to work all day since it was the day after Thanksgiving. A month of Christmas music awaited me. Roughly two weeks later a stench started coming up through the floor. We had not seen the neighbor since before the holiday. We went upstairs and asked Kurt, the intense engineer if he had seen him. He hadn’t but remarked at how acrid the smell was from the stairwell. I knocked on his door and we gave it a few more days. Finally we decided to call the police, it was obvious he had either been killed or had over-dosed and died.

The police arrived and immediately agreed with us that somebody had died in the apartment below us, the smell was heavy and rancid. They knocked on his door and when no reply came they contacted the landlord and called for backup. This was exciting stuff. They entered his apartment and came up shortly thereafter saying that there was not a body to be found. The apartment was empty. They asked to check the basement and we let them in, soon a police officer was knocking on the door that led to the stairwell. The officer said “I have found your body” with that he pushed aside a bundle of laundry to reveal the Thanksgiving leftovers from two weeks prior. He shook his head at us and said “Maybe you guys should change your clothes.”

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 20 “Jim Williams part one”

2001-2005 Jim Williams Pt. One

Jim Williams was the other love of Jenny’s life besides me, probably even more so than her ex-husband David. Jim was some fifteen years or so older than Jenny, a semi-retired businessman who loved to sail, eat and get drunk. I met Jim several times, and spoke to him on an almost daily basis for several years as he tried in vain to subdue and harness Jenny’s alcoholism and mental illness. This was hard for Jim because of his vast wealth and his own issues with substance dependence and insanity.

The first time I met Jim was in a Double Tree hotel in downtown Columbus in 2002. I was living in Gainesville visiting Used Kids and trying to keep my wits about myself as I struggled with trying to reinvent myself with the same parts that I always had. Jim and Jenny were living in Miami, with his elderly mother, a cankerous woman who never thought her son had amounted to anything. She would take broad shots at him, causing the giant ape of a man to slump at times into a moldering mass of hic-huppy tears and panicked breaths. There would be times when I would be talking to Jim on the phone and I could hear his mother’s shrill voice in the background, sounding like a prop from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. She would berate him as he struggled through braced teeth and watery mind to vent his frustrations and ask for advice from me.

It was in the spring of 2002 when I met Jim; I had been warned by Tom Shannon who had met Jim at Used Kids that Jim was a character even by Jenny’s standards. Jim opened the door in his bathrobe, he had a thick thatch of black hair, combed over as if he were a police detective in some mid-seventies Roy Sheider movie. He was large, with broad shoulders and a wide face that looked pained and stiff even through his smile. He acted as if it were normal for a man to open his hotel door in a bathrobe at three pm.

He showed me in, and as he sat down in the large plush chair his penis poked its way out of the rob, just checking on the company. Jenny came bounding out of the bathroom, eyes wide and her mouth motoring away, she (thankfully) was dressed, and she gave me a big hug and said I looked good. I was in perhaps the best physical shape of my life, I was running anywhere from five to seven miles a day and had recently given up alcohol, I was getting plenty of sun in Gainesville. I was hesitant to be there, I had been speaking with Jim on the phone, and these mostly consisted of helpless angry phone calls from him or her with the subject matter pertaining to the other.

It was a large hotel room, actually a suite to be precise, a front room with a bedroom attached. It had a small table and several large comfortable chairs. There was a litany of prescription pill bottles hunkered around one another on the table, each one hoping to be the next pill popped. Jim, knowing I didn’t drink asked if I wanted a mineral water, I declined; I actually wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. The room smelled of excess, a palatable feeling of uneasiness overtook me. Jenny and Jim glanced at one another, giving each other quiet cues that I was not supposed to understand. Jenny told me her little brother, Tony had spent the night and he was thinking of moving to Florida. Tony, lived in Columbus on and off, and I realized that if he stayed the night then this was still nighttime for them.

We made small talk, it was obvious there was more going on than I could place. Jenny grabbed a Heineken and pulled me into the restroom. Jim said he was going to get dressed. In the bathroom Jenny said “I don’t know what I’m going to do with Jim. He is going to kill himself, or me.” This was a repeat of all the phone conversations we had been having the past few months. I eyed her over, looking for any signs of physical abuse; Jenny had a propensity for getting the shit knocked out of her by men. Something to do with the mixture of alcohol, lack of sleep, cocaine (or lack of), jealously and unnecessary comments. “I’m fine” she said, following my eyes, “he hasn’t hit me.” She peaked through the doors, “no, it’s the coke and prostitutes combined with all those medicines he takes.”  Looking for a way to bolt through the door, I insted twisted my foot, perhaps I would be able to bore my way through the floor. “I think I love him but things get crazy sometimes” she went on, “I don’t really do the coke, he does almost all of it” she stated through blood shot eyes. I knew nothing about the drug and prostitute scene, I had kept my vices to the dive bars and night clubs, shying away from drugs and limiting my exposure to prostitutes to late night Showtime movies.

I was stuck dumb for a moment, I was roughly six months removed from my last drink, flailing around emotionally as if a toaster had been dropped into my inner bathtub, and I didn’t know what to say. I said “well, why don’t you get your shit together and move back to Columbus?” She regarded me with contempt, “there you go again, trying to run my life. You don’t even listen. You are no fun, Mr. High-Horse.” I was baffled, I certainly had no idea what had just happened, “was she asking me for help?” I asked my self. Jim opened the door, dressed in casual slacks and a collared short-sleeve shirt that had a gold anchor embroidered over his heart. “Everything, o.k. in here?” his voice was tight, and I noticed for the first time that he seemed to be speaking through clinched teeth. Jenny nodded. “Yeah, Bela was just saying he had to leave.” I was relieved, I had spent a life time trying to stay in the pressure cooker and now it took all an army full of uncertain actions to try to stay out of the heat. Jim shook his head, “We wanted to take you out for lunch, where ever you wanted to go. As a gesture for all the help you have given us.” Confused, I shook his clammy hand; I noticed he too had opened a beer. I always noticed this; I could spot a bottle of beer from 300 feet. Always have, most likely always will. Roughly five years ago my friend Chris and I drove to Cleveland to see Dinosaur Jr. at The House of Blues and I counted how many beers Murph drank. Four beers and he chugged the last one right before sitting down for the last encore. My friend Chris had three whiskey’s.

“Jim, nice meeting you in person. Perhaps we can drive down and see you guys in Miami?” I offered. Jim replied, “I’d love to take you guys out on the Lord Jim and out to dinner.” The Lord Jim was his yacht; Jim was a trophy winning sailor. Jenny flatly stated “bye.” I left, shaking with anger and frustration as the elevator took me down to the lobby. I wanted to call my support persons in Florida but they had all warned me that I wasn’t ready to go back to Columbus, let alone see Jenny. I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my glove box and proceeded to make the long drive back to Gainesville.

Between 2002 and 2005, Jenny and Jim would battle back and forth and the weirdness would get weirder and more bizarre. Jim felt an affinity towards me, he admired me because I had been able to quit drinking and stayed quit and for the fact that I cared deeply for Jenny and had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep her from dying to ending up on the street. Jim was a man of a vast wealth, his Aunt had helped develop South Beach and while he worked for many years as an engineer for airlines, at this point in his life he hadn’t worked for several years. His mother and he had a large house just outside of Coconut Grove and soon Jenny was living with him in the small apartment attached to the back.  Jenny and Jim traveled a great deal, to the Caribbean and to Colorado where they no doubt got hammered and skied.  Jim told me that he was mentally-ill which didn’t take very much convincing for me to believe that, although he denied that he ever had a substance abuse problem. He compared his use with Jenny’s which is like comparing a head cold to leukemia. Jenny, at this point would suffer extreme withdrawal symptoms with severe tremors , vomiting and pain in her back when she tried to quit drinking. Jim, on the other hand would suffer through a few days of headaches and crankiness when he quit for a week or so.

In the summer of 2003 I got a call from Jim, they had taken the Lord Jim out into the ocean where they planned to detox themselves. Jenny or Jim had smuggled some cocaine onto the boat, although it may be better to say that they had just brought it along for one last hurrah as they gave up the last hurrah. Jim was concerned about Jenny; his voice more bound and pressured than usual was a whisper. He made no sense. “Bela,” he slurred, “you gotta help us. We are out in the ocean and Jenny is claiming that there are people on the boat making her perform sex acts. Listen, I’ve searched the boat, we are the only people on here.” Dumbfounded, thinking “why would someone have to search the boat anyway if they were the only two who left Miami.”  “Um, why don’t you go back and take her to the hospital?” I offered. Jim, suspicious as a possum said “well, I’d like to but she says they’ll come and get us if we go back now. I think we should wait it out.” Taking several deep breaths, I tried to wrap my mind around the conversation, as the thoughts were trying to be corralled I asked “what the hell is going on Jim?” It appeared as if he wrapped himself small, “I dunno” he clinched, “but there isn’t anybody on this boat with us and she insists there is.” I heard Jenny in the background.

“Who are you talking to, is that Bela? Put him on.” Jenny’s voice was animated and manic. “Bela, you gotta call the Coast Guard or somebody, we are out on the boat trying to get clean and there are these…o.k., don’t laugh but I’m serious here, there are these miniature people here and they are making these pornos and making me participate.” I paused “Fuck,” I thought, “Jim is making her make midget porn. That fucker.” Incredulous, I asked “what the fuck is he making you do!” Jenny replied “nothing, Jim doesn’t know about it, they hide when Jim comes to the front of the boat. It’s crazy, they aren’t like midgets they are like normal proportioned people just real small. The bald guy is the leader. You gotta help, Jim doesn’t know what to do but they are real evil people. I don’t know why he can’t find them. They’re sneaky as hell.” Jim came back on the phone. “Jim,” I offered, “I think you need to take Jenny back to Jackson County Hospital. I don’t think there are any real people on the boat with you guys.” Jim’s response was measured and thoughtful, “I suppose you’re right. Maybe we should, huh? You think she could be imagining all of it?” Taking another deep breath, “maybe.”

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 19 “There’s A Bar Around” & Cheater Slicks

1995-2001

Jenny had a great talent for ducking out when things were going well for her, some may say that she had a fear of success but I now believe that it had more to do with her mental illness and an inability to handle stress in any sort of proactive way. This was true for many of us, life came easy for us, the successes as well as the failures slipped in and out of our collective grasps as so much rain hurtling to the ground in November. Jenny split town shortly after her first record was made, she and her husband flew the coup to New Orleans where she always felt a kinship.

Jenny used to listen to New Orleans jazz and ragtime every Saturday night while living in rural western Ohio. The station was from Dayton or Indianapolis, was most likely a tiny AM band that seemed to flicker in and out of our beat up radios deep into the night. On a good clear night in rural Ohio one can quite easily listen to stations from Chicago, New York and even Canada. These far off locales adding more mystery to an antsy teenager than the music they play. She loved the sound of old jazz and very early on became a big fan of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Billie Holliday. In 1989 she and Dan Dow conspired together and bought me a ticket to New Orleans. It was one of the sweetest presents anybody has ever given to me. Dan asked me to go to the airport to pick up one of his friends and when we got there, Jenny produced the tickets.

Jenny and I stayed in a bed and breakfast in the gay section of the French Quarter; it was there I went to my first gay bar with her. It was a giant, bigger than most bars in Columbus and they had a huge wall of videos playing the Pet Shop Boys version of “Where the Streets Have No Name”, it cemented my thoughts that The Pet Shop Boys are one of the finest bands of our time. Anyway, we stayed in the quarter, drank tons and saw a shit load of music. Jenny loved the Preservation Hall Jazz band and we went to the tiny jazz club and watched some of the oldest jazz musicians alive at the time practice their trade. I was glad to get home to the comfortable confines of Columbus but I suppose Jenny’s heart always thirsted for the romantic notions that New Orleans seems to produce from people who are always lost in the wonderment of place.

She moved there with her former husband David, both finding work as bartenders and soon they had a small apartment in the French quarter. I, on the other hand was becoming somewhat unglued as I tried to piece her debut record together. It was a mishmash of cassettes and digital tape, we didn’t know exactly who played on what and Jenny’s delicate finances made certain that her phone was frequently cut off. She sent me a box of photos and said that this was to be the cover. I never liked the cover of her first record and thought we should have used one black and white photo but it wasn’t my record. I had just gotten a production and distribution deal with Revolver USA, a conglomerate of people centered around Gary Held, one of the nicest gentlest men I’ve ever come across. What the deal entailed was that Revolver would manufacture and distribute any record I wanted to put out. Jenny Mae’s debut was the first record as part of this deal. Needless to say this was a bit nerve-wracking. I would get together with a twelve pack and go through the songs with Ted Hattemer and Steve Evans (who produced the record) and we would discuss the track listing, art work and credits while Jenny sat a thousand miles away, most likely on a humid barstool. We decided to call the record “There’s a Bar Around the Corner…Assholes” after Jenny flung open the door to one of the new coffee shops on campus one afternoon and shouted that to the bewildered customers. She was aghast that any sane person would spend an afternoon in a coffee shop instead of a bar.

When the record came out it got glowing reviews, it was featured in Entertainment Weekly, the College Music Journal and countless fanzines, she toured a little behind it. Some of these shows were opening for Will Oldham and Chris Knox in the south and East Coast. But she never got her shit together at this time to establish a permenant backing band, it was usually a hodge-podge of muscians who would practice a few days together and go. The basic line-up at this time was Jovan Karcic (drums), Wil Foster (bass), Sean Woosely (guitar) and Jenny but it could change nightly.

As was her nature she met an assortment of characters in New Orleans, some musicians, most notably Azalea Snail whom she recorded with. There was an elderly woman from Guatemala who used to be a well known stripper in the nineteen fifties and sixties. They called her “mama” and whenever Jenny’s phone was disconnected I could reach her through “mama”. I would call down and in broken-slurred English, mama would say “noooo, Jinny no here now. You sounda like-a sexy.” I was always taken aback that some old woman would hit up on me from five states away,
thinking to myself “where does she find these people?”  Mama claimed to have once had Bobby Kennedy as a lover. She would appear on the cover of Jenny’s single for “Runaway.” Jenny started doing cocaine with Mama and would tell me stories about this eccentric old woman (who must have been in her seventies) and her young twenty-something lover whom she called “tha dairee boy.” Jenny wrote a song about this relationship.

When Jenny finally moved back to Columbus in early 1997 she moved behind a pair of bars, one was an old lesbian bar called the Summit Station and the other was called Whisky Flats (both are now the Summit and Bourbon Street respectively). The house was small, just two bedrooms and lime green in color. The neighbors were two gravel parking lots, and she quickly constructed the house in her own style complete with a functioning waterfall that she found in a dumpster. Both her and Dave got jobs bartending at high end down-town hotels.

David Olds was a bright and handsome man who resembled a California surfer in looks and a wary on-looker in personality. He was devoted to Jenny, he quite simply adored her and at times he appeared to follow in her wake. He encouraged her and at times became so frustrated with her that he would try to move her to settle her down. As with New Orleans, one had to be careful where one moved in order to get away. David was wise, a man whose politeness was as asset as he was able to procure upper class service jobs as a bartender, playhouse manager and maitre d at various institutions where dinner cost more than their rent. David also liked to drink as much as Jenny did and both of them had no difficulty putting in long nights and being able to rouse them in the morning to catch the bus downtown.

We lived just several blocks from Jenny and Dave, some mornings I would jog over, rouse them from bed and lift weights on their universal weight set. In the evenings we may wander over and sit on their back patio, listening to jazz or the Beach Boys and drink till we were wobbly. She became fast friends with the Shannon brothers. Tom and Dave Shannon were 2/3 of the Cheater Slicks who had resettled to Columbus after rising rents and a Midwest fondness brought them back. I had met Tom and Dave some years earlier when I twice booked the Cheater Slicks. The first time I saw them was with the unsightly Kudgel, a noise rock outfit from Boston who consisted of four large but insanely funny men who wore dresses and shouted into the microphone. The Cheater Slicks made a noise that sounded as if the paint on their guitars was weeping. I was entranced. The second time they came back was in support of 68’ Comeback, an truly oddball assortment of under-ground rock fugitives like Jack Taylor and Darren Lin Wood, centered around Jeff Evans of the Gibson Brothers. Compared to 68’ Comeback, the Cheater Slicks looked like garage door salesmen.

Tom and Dave were sweethearts, in a way they fit right in with the distant romantic sensibilities of Jenny and her love of old jazz and vintage dresses. They trucked around vast quantities of 78” records and both had an encyclopedic mind for music and all things vintage. Although they did not overtly romanticize the past as many of the time whose idea of cool chic was a tattoo of a buxom gal, a girlfriend with a Betty Page hairdo and a wallet attached to a chain. The Shannon’s, despite the mournful squalor they could raise, have always been sophisticated in their taste whether it be literature or an affiliation with Lee Hazelwood. Both of them, instead of seeing the eccentricities of Jenny as outlandish behavior, had a respect and affinity towards her and her way of life and she did them. Years later, as I swam in the bottom of shit pile of my life, Tom did his best to pull me out and let me stay with him for several months, no doubt earning a highway of gold bricks in heaven.

Cover for the first record

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: Part 18 Walt’s Lounge and Dives

Walt’s Lounge was located roughly half-way between Jenny’s house and my house on Summit. My wife and I lived on Clinton Street, in a duplex that had a somewhat long history for various Columbus musicians and underground personalities. We lived on the east side of the duplex, taking over an apartment that Jim Weber lived in ever-so-briefly and Jerry Dannemiller and his wife-to-be lived on the other side. Before Jerry moved in Gretchen Zimmer who was one of the angel bartenders at Staches lived there with Jovan Karcic and before them lived Ron House and his fore-giving wife Trina. The house was like hundreds that flecked the campus area of Columbus. The floor-plan consisted of a front room, leading into a living room with stairs leading upstairs and in the back a fairly large kitchen. The upstairs consisted of three bed rooms of varying sizes and a bathroom with a claw bathtub. We were fortunate and had a washer and dryer in the leaky basement.  Jerry stole a winter coat from the dead man who once lived on our side, and he always liked to say he wore a dead-mans coat. Indeed. We paid $365.00 in rent.

The neighborhood was mixed, at the time the north campus area mostly consisted of graduate students and twenty and thirty something campus hanger-ons who came to Columbus for college and stayed for the cheap rent and effiecient lifestyle.  The house to the west of us (which is now condemned) housed an Appalachian family that somehow only consisted of men. There were two brothers, the eldest was a man who sat on the side steps with a twelve pack every day that must have gave him the courage to enter the house in the evening. The youngest brother was a blond haired man who was mostly blind, he would come into the record shop occasionally and purchase blue-grass records. He owned several little pug dogs, one of which was much braver than it should have been, its leash no doubt saving its puny life countless times. My wife stopped the man one day and asked what the dog’s name was and the man answered in a slow Appalachian drawl, “his name is pug, ‘cause he’s a pug dog.” Obviously. One evening when we were getting out of our car a giant bag of garbage was hurled out of the second story of their house, landing in their backyard where it lived for the winter. Across the street lived a woman who at first appeared to be a new graduated sorority girl, one could hear her blasting Journey out of her house one day. Then suddenly a few weeks after some man banged on her door screaming “you fucking lying bitch, you fuckin’ slut”, the Grateful Dead was blaring and she was wearing tie-dyed skirts and owned a big dog. Walt’s Lounge was just around the corner.

Walt’s basically consisted on one wide dark hallway, with two uneven tables and roughly seven bar stools, the television flickered in hazy color and the sound was turned down except in the afternoons when one could watch three hours of day-time soaps with cans of Budweiser. Even though I never trusted a bar that served beer in cans, I had a fondness for Walt’s. One reason was that nobody, with the exception of Jenny and Jerry ever went there. Initially anyway, soon after we discovered it various Columbus personalities would also hide out there. On a weekend towards the late nineties it was not too uncommon to find Tom or Dave Shannon from the Cheater Slicks or Jim Shepard, other than those three its dank confines would frighten off even the most hardened hipster.

Walt’s had a semi-mediocre jukebox, one half was pretty much garbage with Night Ranger being pumped alongside Faith Hill and Tim McGraw but the other half was pure dive-bar gold. Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Hank Williams Sr. & Jr., Tom Petty and George Jones.  We could always pump dollars into its never satisfied slot and pretend that we were real down-and-out country folk. Which for the exception of Jenny, we weren’t. Jerry and I were terrific slummers who fit all the criteria for Americana showmen with the exception that we were living just above the poverty line. At one point Jerry had given up black punk rock t-shirts with black jeans for mother-of-pearl Western styled shirts and um black jeans. I went through my George Jones western shirt phase in the late eighties and early nineties, and ended up giving him some of my shirts. I also went through a phase of wearing polyester picture shirts which would certainly fetch a few bucks on e-bay these days.

There was something that was romantic and liberating that we would find in the dive bars that dotted the north campus area around Ohio State. Walt’s was small but it provided an escape, even from the regular haunts we usually inhabited, by the time we started visiting Walt’s, Moriarity’s and The Ranch (all within a three block area of Summit) we were all well versed in escapism.

Walt’s was run by a tiny German woman who spoke with a pronounced lisp; she appeared to live in the bar for she was always present, no matter the time of day.  Her eyes were small, with lids that seemed half shut even when she was delighted, I never thought it was because of alcohol or drugs (although she was always nursing one of those cans of Budweiser); she was just built that way. She was kind to us even if some of the clientele were skeptical of us, they could tell we were former students at best and art-chic losers at worst but we didn’t give a fuck. I usually went to Walt’s once a week for a few years.

Jerry and I also inhabited Moriarty’s for a while; it was just north of Walt’s on the corner of Summit and Hudson, a block south of where Jerry would be killed in 2001. While Walt’s held a severely beaten down clientele, Moriarity’s could be a bit more dangerous, it was as if the folks that inhabited Moriarity’s were prison bound for sure while Walt’s consisted of either inept former criminals or just the average low-income wage earner who just bottomed out. During several instances I had to remind Jerry to shut his mouth at Moriarity’s. While Jerry barked big he had little experience in using his hands in a bar-room other than holding a cold beer, playing pool or lighting a cigarette. I, on the other hand was usually dumb and brave enough to duke it out and I knew the men in Moriarity’s were cut from a much different cloth than the campus lunkheads or indie-rockers I would occasionally tangle with. But after a while the bartender at Moriarity’s became familiar with our being there and when I started dating my ex-wife Robin (who was a regular pool hustler) he became quite fond of us.

A few years later I would take my second (and current) wife to Moriarty’s and to the Ranch (two doors down from Moriarty’s) on our first date where I introduced her to shots of whiskey chased by shots of Jagermiester. Pure fucking romance, man.  I once took a date to an even scarier bar just off the corner Hudson and Indianola called “Mac’s”, it was as if there were three cognitively challenged named Walt, Dan and Mac Moriarty opened up these bars and never understood why they never got rich at every family reunion. Mac’s was a frightening place even by my low give-a-shit standards, while my date and I chatted at the sticky cigarette charred bar a fellow approached her and tried to charm her away from me. We ended up leaving after he kept screaming “hey, Lens Crafters, come on over here and fight me for her!! Len’s Crafter, you hear me?!” Mac’s closed shortly after that after a man was shot to death there. It coulda been old Len’s Crafter screamer himself.

These establishments housed the absurd, which we were drawn to like a junkie to heroin. At times we would venture into them during the afternoon, and I have a vivid memory of singing “Outside This Bar” by American Music Club while sitting in Walt’s one afternoon.

Jenny went to Walt’s more than I did, and being the lure for nonsensical happenings Jenny was witness to bizarre behavior. There was a man who was wheelchair bound in the neighborhood, he had a large dog attached to his chair and  was missing most of his teeth. Tethered to the back of his chair was a large black Hefty bag that would hold the aluminum cans he would pick up around the numerous alleys.  One afternoon Jenny was nursing her drink watching the Guiding Light with the German barkeep and an older woman who lived above the Laundromat next to Walt’s. In wheeled the man in the wheelchair, and the older woman rolled her eyes towards Jenny and said “Party’s over, here he comes with that fuckin’ stinking dog of his.” The man ignored her and ordered a beer. During the next hour as more drinks were swallowed, the woman became more vocal, insisting that he take his dog outside. Jenny by this time had moved to the other end of the bar, while the German told her it would settle down. Finally the old woman shouted “Git yer fuckin’ stinking dog out of my face.” With that the man jumped out of his wheel chair leaped behind the bar and grabbed the phone and ran to the back room of the bar and dialed 9-1-1. Jenny was astonished, she didn’t know if it were more so because he could walk or because he actully called 9-1-1 because his dog was insulted. When the police arrived they asked him to leave, while he protested shouting “she made fun of my dog!” ,  most likely wondering just what in the hell the world was coming to.

A few months after this, my wife came running into Walt’s tears streaming down her face, while looking relieved at the same time. She konked me on the head with her fist and then kissed  and hugged me. She had just gotten home and a dead man was lying in the street with multiple stab wounds, apparently a man got out of his car after almost hitting him and stabbed him to death. The street was roped off and when she got home our front door was open and she assumed the dead man was me, when the police let her look at him she realized I must be at Walt’s. She was right, there I was sitting next to Jenny who had gotten into a fight with her husband. Jenny and I both thought this was funny, in hindsight it was horrifying. It would take me years to make up for this destructive attitude.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: Part 17 Bipolar Disorder/Alcohol

1986-1991

Jenny started wrestling with her mental illness after starting college, because of her ability to be clever and humorous I believe that she was able to hide much of the paranoia and mania that she went through. Her family was all drinkers and when she and I met in high school we both had a terrific gift for being able to pile away the beer in our guts. I myself had started drinking in earnest when I was fifteen, although I had been exposed to alcohol at a very early age through both sets of grandparents I did not discover the utter escapism of alcohol until Jeanette George’s barn party in 1984. This was a complete revelation for me, not only did some of the girls not think of me as literally a 98 pound weakling but some of the uber-macho farm boys noticed that I could be hysterically funny. This was all manifested through the intake of alcohol. I was taken away by its sublime powers that fall evening, and would not be able to quiet the seductive allure of it for nearly seventeen years.

Chris Biester, on winter break from Ohio University, purchased a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon for Jenny and me on our first date. At that time the drinking age in Ohio was nineteen and it was very easy to score booze whenever one wanted some. From that night forward Jenny and I would drink nearly every day that we spent together until I left her four years later. Even after that, with the exception of me going through one period of not drinking when we broke up and her being in the hospital or jail we both drank nearly every day.

Jenny and I quickly went off the scholastic road when we arrived in central Ohio in during the fall of 1986. She enrolled at Ohio State University and quickly made the marching band, I for some ungodly reason decided not to go to Ohio University in Athens and instead enrolled at the mostly conservative division III university of Otterbein located in Westerville, Ohio. Westerville was the birthplace of prohibition and I fit in there about even less so than I did in rural western Ohio. I could not have choose a more inappropriate college if I were blindfolded and asleep. At that time my mother was divorcing my step-father who was in and out of mental institutions; I was severely depressed and relied heavily on Jenny Mae. She was living in the high rise dormitories of Ohio State that were located roughly ¾ of a mile from High Street. Lincoln Tower was a revolving party from one suite to another, there was little if any supervision, marijuana, alcohol, LSD and were rampant and Jenny was in the midst of it all. It was not uncommon to locate a party on any given night within a few minutes of looking for one and if one was not to be found, High Street was just a ten minute walk away.

In the midst of an explosive depressive state, one October day I drove to her dorm room and slept there for nearly a week and a half, coming out of my shell and peeling the parking tickets that blanketed my windshield and drove back to Westerville. I somehow managed to pass all of my classes but knew I would drop out. When winter quarter arrived I moved into Jenny’s dorm room, fortunately none of the other women in the suite of sixteen appeared to mind my presence and I stayed there until the spring. Jenny and I drank nearly every on High Street, I had secured a few part time jobs and this supported our habit. At this juncture Jenny started displaying some of the signs of paranoia that would later envelope her life. She had covered the area around her bed in blankets and was nervous when we walked home at night. At times she would say half jokingly that “people are out to get me.”

Jenny Mae would not be diagnosed with Bipolar disorder until many years later when she was living in Miami, at this time in our lives we just rode her manias out and tried in earnest to keep my depression at bay. She was apt to compare our moods, she was usually in a mania state during that part of her life and when she went into a low she filled it with alcohol and would float on top of it out her morose valley. She was at times, hypersexual which is a symptom of bipolar disorder and I tended to take her promiscuity with a sense of acceptance and hesitant ignorance for we were young and in love. I also believed that I had nobody else to turn to in my life, my brother was living in Germany and I was somewhat estranged from the rest of my family. Jenny and her mother were basically it for support, or so I thought. It was a life that was filled with a great deal of laughter intermingled with stints of heavy laborious desolation for the both of us; we spent our spare time drinking, listening to music and playing euchre. School was ranked eleventh on the top ten things of importance in our lives. It was as annoying as a fly at a backyard barbeque.

A few years later when she had started writing songs with the encouragement of myself, Jerry Wick and Dan Dow she would stay up for days on end with only a few spot hours of sleep and write music, paint or throw herself into various other art projects such as making sculptures of found objects or writing short stories. She once created a huge garden in our bed room attic, our bed was in the closet to help stem her paranoia and the rest of the room had been made into a green house. During her down periods she would forget to do her laundry, clean the dishes and she would smoke pot and watch the Guiding Light soap opera for weeks on end. When this happened her keyboard would stay under the couch, pushed aside like a pair of old shoes waiting to collect dust and spider webs. She would discontinue school and have to beg her professors to let her back in when her depression lifted, still we would always drink and neither one of us felt as if anything was amiss.

When I left her in the fall of 1990, she was seeing a few different men and I quickly recovered from the break-up by meeting various women. She soon approached me about reconciliation but I had no interest, I cared for her and wanted her to be safe but I was not interested in a romantic relationship. Walking her back to the Norwich house from Bernie’s one night with her she suddenly clocked me in the head with her purse which was filled with beer bottles. We scuffled for a moment and I told her to stay away from me, that she was too scary for me. The next day she checked herself into the psychiatric unit at Ohio State University, I was told I could not visit her and our friend Joe Moore provided kept me up to date with her progress. She was in the hospital for over two weeks, I don’t think she told her parents. It would be the first of many hospitalizations for Jenny but the next hospitalization would not be for almost ten more years, years in which her illness and ways of treating it would slowly eat everything in her life that she had held of importance including her marriage, her pets, her house, cars, artwork and her one constant solace-her music.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae Part 16: Bettina Richards & Jack (Richie) Taylor (Violet)

1992. Bettina Richards and Jack (Richie) Taylor (Violet)

Jerry and I were working at Used Kids one early afternoon, no doubt talking about music and laughing. It was somewhat rare for Jerry to be working behind the counter, usually his job responsibility was to stay on the floor or sit at the back counter and smoke cigarettes while he eye-balled customers.

Used Kids was tiny, just a cramped shoe-box of a store, hidden below High Street with thousands of records crammed in every corner. The décor was made up of hundreds of flyers from various punk and indie shows and old LP covers. A great deal of the decorating was done on several spastic afternoons by Jack Taylor (birth name Richard Violet), who was fired and rehired by Dan Dow. Jack, like the décor of Used Kids was a living example of a life half finished, this is not just for the fact that Ritchie (as I first knew him as) died young in an unremarkable fashion. While giving up the lures of the city, Richie moved home to lonesome Urbana, Ohio and got a job at a local United Dairy Farmers convenient store. A long drop from the coolness of playing CBGB’s and getting name checked on an Unsane record. It was there in the vast flatness of western Ohio that Richie took a shot of dope too deep for his veins and died behind the UDF store, proving that heroin can be found everywhere.  Richie, was a cross between  Bluto from “Animal House” and a tarnished flannel shirt, he could be devastatingly charming and brilliant on one hand and on the other he could stab you with an insult that could bring the worst of high school back in a flutter of embarrassed red cheeks. He was the first member of Monster Truck 005 to die. I remember seeing his utterly great band Blood Family at a crappy High Street dive seemed to breathe “coke-front” from its walls. As I stood in front of the wall length urinal taking a leak I was surprised to see him drinking a beer, because I had only known him to use drugs. He was ridiculously drunk, as I pointed out my alarm at him drinking a beer he absentmindedly placed the long-neck smack dab in the middle of the urinal. To my astonishment as piss ricocheted around the bottle, he leaned into me and said “yeah, I can drink too sometimes.” And with that he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long pull off the beer. Jenny wrote a song about Richie called “Jesus” on her first record.

Richie had plastered the walls and ceiling of Used Kids over two afternoons, using wheat paste and his half-hazard manner of symmetry, where one flyer would appear to push out the presence of its neighbor. It was as if Big Black were jostling for attention over Richard Thompson. Then inexplicitly he stopped and only 2/3 of the store was covered. Since I was the man who replaced Richie at Used Kids, I suppose I took it as part of my job responsibility to finish the job. When Richie ventured into the store he would comment that I should have used wheat paste on the 1/3 that I decorated. He was right.

The flyers and album sleeves gave the store even more of a sense of claustrophobia, the atmosphere of the store could be stifling if there were more than ten people in the shop. When I started there, this rarely happened, perhaps only on the weekends but with the advent of compact discs came a rise of an increased customer base. We resisted the digital revolution, it was something that some of us took to heart, the compact disc appeared to be a corporate plan to increase the profit of record companies and doubling the price of music. This was anthemia to those of us whom music was the tonic for not blowing our brains out. We were lucky, we worked in an environment where this elixir was pumped into our systems for hours every day. At the same time it vastly expanded the resources and profits of the store, shortly thereafter Dan would open up the Used Kids Annex and bringing in the saintly Dave “Captain” Deimer.

Jerry hated CD’s he regarded them as a symbol of everything that was evil, he resisted buying a compact disc player for years and poked fun at the mostly tinny sound that many of the early CD’s had. He referred to them as “the eight-track tape” of the nineties; in light of what has transpired over the past ten years his words were very prophetic.

This afternoon, Jerry and I were manning the shop by ourselves, and as I would implore him most days when we worked together that he would need to sit at the back he regarded this as unnecessary worrying. Dan had a propensity to drop by and check on us when Jerry was up front with me and we would be changing the record. The phone rang and Jerry picked it up. Talking for a while he hung up with that toothy grin of his. “That was just totally amazing” he said. He pulled out a cigarette and shook his head. “What?” I implored. “That was this woman who lives in New York and she bought ‘Jim Motherfucker’ last weekend and now she wants to put a whole record by Gaunt. She said she just broke up with this guy named Jim and it’s all she has played.” I was floored. “Really? Is she legit” I asked, as if we were legit. “Oh yeah, she works at Pier Platters.” This was like the word of God had spoken, anybody who knew their shit in records knew that Pier Platters in Hoboken was one of the best record stores in the country.

The woman was Bettina Richards, whose giddiness for music matched or surmounted our own. Bettina proved to be extremely patient with the varying mood swings and emotional instability of Jerry. She would hold true to her word and in short order Gaunt’s first full length record (actually an extended EP) would come out in 10” format within a few months. Bettina understood the unspoken geekiness-language that a ten inch record alluded to.She was not only patient but funny and kind, one who would garner my respect not just because she had an excellent taste in music (she had helped sign Eleventh Dream Day to Atlantic) but because of a steadfast belief in what she did as a trade.

Bettina lived in a small raisin box of an apartment on 8^th and Avenue C in Hell’s Kitchen. She would always open her doors to traveling bands and the shaky emotional drunkard as myself. Shortly after meeting her, I developed a phone crush on her roommate but when I finally met her face to face I had already moved on. During one of my first visits to New York, after arriving with my friends Jerry Dannemiller and John Elsasser (who by sheer coincidence were staying just across the hall of Bettina’s apartment) with a pink of whisky that I had mostly downed on the cab ride over I spent the early morning half curled up in her bathroom with my legs poking out into her dining/living/guest bedroom vomiting out a night of four nightclubs. She always let me return.

Like everyone that Jerry came in contact with he would invariably try Bettina’s patience, one moment accusing her of not promoting Gaunt while at the next moment speaking of her as if she were the guardian angel we all coveted. We wrestled with our expectations of ourselves, a belief that at times these expectations were thrust upon us like a blanket over a hapless dog, wondering in confusion what the fuss was about but taking comfort in the attention. Jerry could bare his teeth as well as any threatened dog but his bite was harmless, his growl could be punishing and his love could be fulfilling. There were times when I wondered why Bettina put up with Jerry, but when like myself even when our friendship was at its most morose, like the gum on the underside of a shoe. In an instant Jerry could bring me back to sense of unaffected joy.

There was a sense of familiarity in all of our lives; it was not uncommon for us to have a sense of place with others whom we didn’t know, just through the process of collecting giant record collections. Anywhere we went we invariably ran amongst other like minded souls, who seemed to covet the same sense of escape that we had through music and the arts.  We consisted of a ruddy bunch whose worlds may be as far reaching as New York, Austin, Seattle and Groningen but who would collide over an almost religious devotion to feedback and catchy choruses. Where the innocent child-like mannerisms of Jad Fair could be the ultimate sexual tease but was devoid of danger, for a man who yearned to be spared the masculine stereotypes that the nineteen eighties and mass culture seemed to thrust upon us this was liberation. This was a world where outsiders were considered with distrust, where even the influence of technology was judged with suspicion (i.e. compact discs) and that belonging revolved around a short wooden stage. This is where Jerry and I thrived, in a place where we were free to explore (with apprehension) the world of our records and books. Hence, the community that we at one time strove to be a part of, would now nuture and welcome us. We thought that the joy we felt that afternoon would last forever, Jerry and Gaunt had arrived in our diminutive world. We would later discover that age and our own demons would swallow and consume that joy, leaving us, dead in a sense, alone behind the metaphysical convenient store.