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.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 15-Athens, Ohio; Monster Truck 005

1992-1998

I had started to take road trips to Athens, Ohio where I spent the majority of my childhood.  Even though I had found a community in Columbus, a sense of belonging there was still a part of me that felt that only a part of me was accepted (or was that accepting) of the scene I was with in Columbus. Even though I was burnished with a sense of growing confidence inside of the insular world of the underground rock scene in Columbus I still yearned for something else, I wasn’t sure if it were to be found in the form of a woman, of music or another collective community. In a sense I wanted to merge all of these together although I could not seem to blend even one of these with the other in my own life. I had been trying unsuccessfully ever since I was a teenager. My busted up and fractured relationship with Jenny Mae had taught me several things, one was that trust was something that stabs like a cactus and the more you rub the needles the more imbedded they become and that putting all of your hope in one person was not a real bright idea. In the mid-nineties I was still figuring this out.

I had always loved Athens; it was the most physical place that ever reminded me of home. A small mid-western town, with a large courthouse the rose off the top of Court Street like so many other small-town courthouses that dotted the landscape of Ohio, Athens was different from the confining invisible walls of such similar tiny towns in Ohio like Findley, Urbana and Xenia, and this difference was solely due to the Ohio University. The first land-grant University west of the Appalachians. Ohio U. is a big college with over 20,000 students but is dwarfed next to its colossus cousin to the north in Columbus, The Ohio State University. While OSU was known for football, its law school and farming, Ohio U. was known for partying and its counter-culture way of life. Jerry always referred to Athens as “that hippie town” which I thought was odd since he attended Kent State which I also considered a “hippie town.” The big difference for me was that the scene in Athens appeared tighter, more organic in a sense and the music was reflective of this.

Appalachian Death Ride was the biggest band in Athens during the nineties, led by my childhood friend Chris Biester they could be devastating live, especially in the cozy confines of the Athens club scene for which they ruled the roost. They were basically the house band of the Union, an old biker bar in the nineteen seventies that was now how to the counter-culture scene in Athens. A diverse scene made up of film-makers, artists, drop-outs and hate rock purveyors with names such as Torque and God and Texas (who moved down from Columbus around 1991.) Thing moved slower in Athens, shows didn’t start until almost eleven or later and didn’t end until three am. Even out of town bands that frequented the town appeared bothered by the late start times, I remember speaking with Chuck Cleaver from the Ass Ponys and Bob Pollard from Guided by Voices who both were frustrated by late starting times. It all worked for a relaxed scene that did not appear to have some of the competitive mannerisms of Columbus. It was not uncommon to see a crowd dancing in Athens no matter the type of music whereas in Columbus it was more common to see the more standard hands-folded-across-the-chest pose of so many self conscious independent rockers.

I loved my drives to Columbus; I would leave work at Used Kids usually a few hours early on a Saturday, and stop and get a six-pack or a few forty ounce beers for the hour and a half drive down. Even though I brimmed over with self-confidence during this time in my life, I realize in hindsight how uncomfortable I really was with myself as I reconsider my reasons for needing to drink so much by myself for these drives. By the time I would arrive in Athens, I would be half drunk, the sun would usually still be shining and I would head over to my brother’s house. My brother, Zoltan is a year older than myself and has spent a lifetime in the military, at that time he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Ohio U. and was still active in the Army. He was a green beret and lived in a house that had a revolving cast of characters that included redneck townies, conservative college republicans and died-in-the-wool hippie bong loaders. At any given time there were at least four dogs living in the house. In the middle of this was my brother, who worked and played well with others for most of his entire life.

Next door to his dog infested home was another small cape cod with an assortment of characters, three women and Pat Humphries who was the tall bearded bass player of Monster Truck 005. Pat was a fixture of High Street, the complete opposite of his brother John who fronted the animalistic but precise hate machine known as God and Texas. Both were giant, over six-two with lanky but muscular frames, while John would not look out of place in the polished sheen of “A Few Good Men”, Pat, on the other hand looked like an extra from Jeremiah Johnson. He had times a ratted flowing beard and hidden within all that hair was a disarming smile, a grin that no doubt flowed from a well thought of concoction of intoxicants. Pat drove a truck that resembled a crossbreed of a huge Army Jeep, Hummer and an ancient semi-truck. It was quite literally a Monster Truck. Pat was reserved but goofy, he had a gentle voice but when drunk and dark he could appear spooky due to his unmannered looks.

The early nineties was a time of hair, so to speak when the sounds more echoed the ghosts of The Stooges and the demons of Altamont there appeared to be an indirect correlation to the non-fashion sense the late sixties/early seventies. We wore thrift store clothing because we were broke, and avoided combing our hair because it was a drag. Flannel was in because it was cold in Ohio, or Chicago and Seattle. In Ohio it is not uncommon for the weather to change like the moods of a drunken step father, at one point breathing warm air and the next day to be frigid and chilling. Pat was a perfect example of this. My last sight of Pat was him driving that beast of a car of his, turning wildly onto High Street, yelling my name and holding a whiskey bottle out of his window. It was noon on a weekday. That was most likely 1995.

It was not uncommon to see Pat and my brother sitting on the couch watching the Cleveland Browns or Pittsburgh Steelers with beers in their laps, a stark contrast of styles breaking bread, as it were to the great American religion of professional football. I had been seeing a woman who lived in the house that Pat dwelled in, she was like many of the women I knew, more of a comfort than a relationship. One who, if her room was not already occupied when I arrived would let me curl up next to her and feel accepted. She was nice, pretty with long black curly hair and like so many of the women I have known had her share of demons that one may never have guessed by her forgiving accepting demeanor.

Jenny Mae understood my longing for Athens, which no doubt drew for the long lost feeling of home and safety that I had as a child growing up there. In an era where people in small towns did not have to lock their doors and instead of video football we scrapped together every kid in a three block area and played football in muddy grass with stained knees and torn t-shirts, each one of us a miniature model of our own gridiron hero—Terry Bradshaw, Sammie White or Brian Sipe. She would travel down with me when we were a couple and later when she was married her and her husband would accompany me on a few trips. She wrote the song “leprechaun” off of her first album from a time she went to Athens on Halloween and took a hit of LSD. She had witnessed a custom-goer getting squished in the Court Street mob and wrote the song in her head.

Jerry too, would accompany me on several of these trips although he liked to say at times he loathed Athens, he always enjoyed the trips away from Columbus. Athens, reminded him of Kent and he also had an old girlfriend there whom he would hook up with. Although he wasn’t the biggest fan of the Athens music scene or of Appalachian Death Ride, we saw them play the Dugout on one of these trips and after they had burned through several nuclear versions of “Pale Blue Eyes” and “American Girl” he turned to me and said “they are fucking amazing.” Jerry couldn’t drive; he never had a license so it was always me who did the reckless drive to Athens. We would smoke cigarettes and drink cheap beer and talk about girls and music. It was a magical time when one could leave behind any responsibilities for twenty-four hours and not be frightened of the consequences.

It is a ramshackle of an evening, filled with at least three clubs in Athens and weird afterhours that is winding down. I am past stumbling and into slow motion land swimming, the afterhour has been declared over and people are hustling to grab the last few drinks and free hands that they can scrounge up. The desperation is palatable. The evening lottery from loneliness is ticking away; I clumsily open a beer with a lighter in the dark. I manage to get the cap off the imported beer but also the tip my right index finger. I laugh at the blood and drink the beer. Jenny and her ex-husband Dave laugh alongside of me; we are oblivious to pain at this point. A small blonde woman winds her way through the dissipating crowd, she is older than me, most likely in her late thirties even in the dark I can see the wrinkles forming around her eyes. She says nothing to me but grabs my right hand and sucks the blood out of my finger. Feeling alarmed, horrified and weirdly turned on I stare back at her. I can see Jenny and Dave off to the side, the whites of their eyes almost illuminating the room. Their heads are shaking.

The woman takes my finger out of her mouth and asks me if I am Bela.  Shocked that she knows me, for I have never seen her at the Union or any other club in Athens I affirm her answer. She tells me her name and says “you used to work at Case Que Pasa in the eighties with a bunch of high school guys didn’t you?”  My first job was cleaning chickens at the hippie-Mexican restaurant when I was fifteen, looking older than I was I would drink St. Pauli’s beer and listen to Lou Reed’s “New Sensations” and The Talking Heads and pull boiled chicken off of the bones. “Yes, that was my first job.” The woman then goes on to tell me that she worked there and that the women there had a bet as to which one of them could get me and my two friends in bed first. All I can think of is “I spent my fifteenth year summer trying to lose my virginity to no avail and now you tell me this.” We talk some more and I my curiosity is peaked. Eventually she offers me a ride to her house and I explain that I have Jenny and Dave with me. She offers her couch to them. We follow her home in my car, Jenny incredulous says “You can’t fuck her; she sucked your blood without even knowing who you are.” By this time, I had gathered enough information from the woman to know that I couldn’t sleep with her in a carnal manner. She had divulged to me that her divorce was finalized that week, this lead me to the conclusion that as much as I would like to believe that it was my own charisma that had reached back ten years to 1985 that had silently seduced this woman in actuality it was her own broken heart and desperation that prompted her to try to heal the bloody index finger of a drunken boob.

When we arrived at her house, Jenny eyed me and mouthed “you have to fuck her.” I shook my head; I had enough hang-ups with intimacy that I promised myself that I wouldn’t take advantage of this woman. She made a bed for Jenny and Dave and we went to her room. She approached me and we kissed but I informed her I couldn’t sleep with her. We crawled in her bed and held one another and kissed a few times. Finally she asked me if I thought she was attractive, she was in fact, quite lovely. With a small frame, slim and a bob haircut. “Of course” I replied, “but I can’t sleep with you tonight.” I looked skyward, perplexed and noticed that the bedroom door was slightly ajar. I looked past the woman and noticed Jenny and Dave crawling across the floor. After about five minutes of silence, with my back turned to the woman and my head facing the wall the woman nudged against me and offered “can I at least suck you off?”  Giggles emanated from the far side of the room. “No, but we can hold each other” I offered.  The next morning on the way back to Columbus and for the next several months Jenny and Dave would ask me “can I suck you off?” and release the giggles again. A few months later, I saw the woman eating lunch by herself in a bar in Athens; she was reading the paper and looked right past me. I thought to myself, “That is loneliness in action.”

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: Vibralux and Norwich

1990-91

Jenny Mae and I moved out of the club house of a home on Summit in the summer of 1990 to an old house with a big yard located at 44 East Norwich. This was a step forward for us in a number of ways, the first was that it would be the first time in some years that we would be living with no roommates and secondly and perhaps more importantly it signaled a step deep into a world that we wanted to very much a part of and a world that appeared to welcome us.  We moved through our lives almost as disengaged participants, with fixed goals that we could not identify we operated on emotions and feelings. For us, all that mattered first and foremost was music, this was what brought us together when words wouldn’t work. Bringing a sense of purpose to lives that while not purposeless certainly remained undefined. This was by no means a stain on our beings, it was quite the opposite we were attracted to our own sensitivity and the essence of music blanketed this state of being and provided and unseen direction that helped us float in our own little worlds. What we were discovering, in spite of the emotional pain of actually being a failed couple was a whole other world that operated and cared for the same types of attractions that we had. We were sliding quite comfortably into this world with an ease that was so light that it was almost invisible.

Curt Schieber, who owned School Kids Records in Columbus, came into Used Kids one day that spring and asked if I was interested in moving into his house, he was getting married and was buying a house. His house on Norwich was epic in stature for many of us; he had for years thrown a huge summertime party that consisted of much food, music and general decadence. We had started attending these a few years beforehand when Curt’s house was lined by shelf after shelf of records, roughly 12,000 in total it was like walking into an orgasm for my young geeky ears. There were original Velvet Underground records, vintage jazz records and I feasted my eyes on records that I had only heard whispers about such as Skip Spence’s “Oar” and Big Star’s “Radio City.”

In terms of a physical place, 44 East Norwich was almost like sacred ground.  After I told him that I would be interested he left and Dan Dow turned to me and said “that’s the best place to live on campus.”

The Norwich property had a great deal of historical significance in the Campus area, an elderly crank of a woman named Puna lived on the back end of the property in a log cabin that she had been born in. She was acutely aware of the property’s respectful value in the neighborhood; she didn’t rent the front house to college kids or to single women. Curt had rented to her for many years and she regaled in his Pig-Fests, drinking and laughing with the bohemian crowd, under her crusty exterior she was an old liberal sweetheart. It was a large yard, next to a church and had a slight incline, one that would have been perfect for children; whom we all were anyway.

The front house was divided into two living units, the bottom where Curt (and later Jenny and I) lived and the upstairs which consisted of a tiny apartment. Dan Dougan who owned Staches lived upstairs. We moved in early summer and by the middle of the fall I had moved out, in a way the story of our brief stay in the house was emblemic of every shattered opportunity we never knew we had.

It was nice living below Dan, who thought Jenny was nuts from the get-go, he was somewhat skeptical of her western-Ohio cum southern drawl and her outrageous behavior. She immediately installed a horse-shoe game directly in front of the expansive porch. We would clang horseshoes and try to blare Replacement records through half blown mix and match speakers. Dan didn’t seem to mind; usually he would have a few drinks with us. Jenny had just formed the Rahvers at this time; they would practice downstairs during the day when I was at work. This did not please Puna who complained to me that she had rented the apartment to me and was not thrilled to have a woman living there again. She would say “I just don’t like women in that house, it’s unsafe.” I think something awful must have happened to a woman in that house many years ago.

Jenny and I were not doing well; we were drinking a lot and fighting even more. I was trying to maintain the house; she was working at the Ohio State faculty club but had by this time dropped out of college. She was a senior and just a few credits short of graduation. She had no interest in college. Jenny pursued laughter like antelopes chase fields of grass; she would chase it at all costs with little care for lions lurking nearby. The only thing that had changed was the locations where we drank. We had given up the grimy sludge of South Campus bars, where pitchers of beer costs $10 and one would receive a beautiful layer of oil on the top of the frothy beer. We had moved north, hanging out at the four horsemen of dive bars on the north end of campus: Bernie’s, Larry’s, Dick’s Den and Staches. Dick’s Den at that time had quarter beer nights, an enterprise that was so daunting to me that I only sojourned to it a few times before my disgust level had been maxed out. Jenny on the other hand, who was known to drink beer out of a person’s ass crack at Mean Mr. Mustards (she called this the Australian Butt-Chug) was quite the regular at $.25 beer night. We defiantly had fissures forming in our relationship.

The first time I had encountered the Australian Butt Chug was a few years earlier when I arrived home at around ten o’clock at our super-crappy Chittenden apartment to find it empty. I knew it was bucket beer night at Mustards and headed over there, it was just a few stumbles out the front of our house. I got a beer and headed towards the back corner of the bar, and there to my disbelief was a group of men gathered around a picnic table chanting as Jenny (my girlfriend for Christ-sakes!) drinking beer that was being poured down the backside of a greasy workmate of hers named Eric. She didn’t flinch when she saw me, bugged eyed and furious, “Hey Be, you gotta try this, it is fucking hilarious. We call it the Australian Butt-Chug.” And with that she switched places with Eric, dropped her drawers and had beer poured down her backside for Eric to drink. I didn’t know whether to be horrified, pissed or humored. I just grabbed a beer and shook my head.

So now we had migrated north, we were in our early twenties–already seasoned campus regulars, it was as if we had been born and raised there. We had a few parties on the Norwich house, an odd conglomerate of hipsters, college flunkies and some of Jenny’s straight laced work mates.  At this time I was drinking so much that I had a hard time keeping vertical most nights, we all thought this insanely humorous. My body would turn into slow motion; cemented in two seconds ago, I would grin in the frozen melting of time as the rest of the world moved by me in real-time. On some of these occassions Jenny would take the opportunity to baffle me by her quick dexterity, either ripping off my glasses and tossing them to the side or tearing the clothes off of my body. At times stripping me bare cackling all the time, I would dip-shittedly limp off to the bushes or the house with a dumb-ass drunken smirk on my face. On one of these occasions I remember being stuck in the prickly bush laughing and begging that someone get me some clothes. Dan shook his head in bewilderment “Jesus, you guys are fucking nuts.” This was everyday behavior for us, we thought nothing of it.

Around this time, Dan came downstairs and asked me if I thought he should book Nirvana with Urge Overkill at Staches, he had just done Nirvana earlier in the year and they didn’t have a big draw. I had an advance of “Nevermind” and I told him I thought it was going to be the biggest record of the year, “Dan, this thing is going to be huge. Even my brother is going to love it. It will destroy all the stupid hair metal and Guns and Roses bullshit forever.” Almost. I think he did the show for $2,000 and my musical acumen with Dan was cemented.

The end of our romance came when the trust that had already been shattered and stitched together had been hurdled to cement one too many times, I moved out and couch surfed for a brief period. I had an apartment I kept in Athens, and while Jenny and I didn’t talk for about a month she broke up the Rahvers after realizing that fucking a Ratt loving frat guy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She had started recording in earnest with Craig Dunson and soon this partnership would blossom into Vibralux after a short detour both musically and romantically with Jeff Regensberger called Hot Rod.

When Jenny became involved with Jeff and I was happy about this, Jeff was about as a stand-up person as I had ever met. Funny, handsome in a Steve Buscemi way complete with bulging intense eyes and thick Adam’s apple, Jeff was very courteous and respectful towards Jenny. I was disappointed when the romance didn’t last more than a few months; I believe a part of my hope with Jenny was that she would find someone or something to take care of her. I still hold onto this hope, no matter how faded and brittle it may have transformed itself into. The hope has turned into a ghost.

Vibralux was Jenny Mae and half of Pica Huss with Craig Dunson playing guitar and Mark Deane playing drums, Craig’s girlfriend Gaye Conley played bass. This was the first time Jenny had played with real musicians outside of the Ohio State Marching Band, and the initial results were promising. Craig was a student of music who had a love of Dick Dale, Les Paul, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, this wasn’t always clear with the slithering sickness of Pica Huss but he brought a respectful sophisticated sound to Jenny’s songs. One of the first songs they recorded was fragments of a poem I had written for her, one of which I tried to explain my smallness next to her colossal nature. She had somehow pulled it together around a staggering hook that allowed Craig to soar on the guitar. I was playing a rough mix of it one day at the door and Bill Eichenberger from the Columbus Dispatch stopped in his tracks and asked “wow, what is that.” I gave him the tape and a week later Vibralux had a full page color article in the Dispatch without even playing a show.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae Part 13: Ted Hattemer

1991–2001

We all had our saviors, although we didn’t always realize it at the time. This should be clarified, I believe that both Jenny Mae and I had our saviors while Jerry searched for one, through his music, through the booze and the bars but his inability to let himself be emotionally close prevented anybody to help pull him up and out. For me and Jenny one of our mutual guardians was a mild mannered man named Ted Hattemer. Ted was active in the underground scene long before I ever met him in 1991, he was a bearded long-haired bartender at Bernie’s, slinging mugs of imported beer for barflies that would try to travel the world on a barstool without ever leaving the cozy, stinking confines of the underground bagel shop. Ted was involved all types of ridiculous sounding band names during the late eighties such as Cavejacket before finding a home in the moody lumbering Stupid Fuckin’ Hippie for which he played bass.

It was at this juncture that I began to know Ted, he was soft spoken, polite and articulate and brought a sense of seriousness to any interaction with him. Stupid Fuckin’ Hippie, in hindsight was not that terrific of a band but they did provide a respite from the more amplified churning of most High Street punk and funk bands that dotted most nightclubs. Stupid Fuckin’ Hippie sounded like Monster Magnet’s little brother without the sense of junkie-dangerousness that early Monster Magnet brought to the table, SFH did not see the necessity to explore anything harder than what most college undergraduates experiment with. For the summer of 1992 (or was it 1991), Stupid Fuckin’ Hippie was the soundtrack at Bernie’s and they appeared to be the house band. As the summer rolled on they vastly improved, with their singer Steve (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Jim Morrison) becoming more comfortable with a guttural growl they provided a pleasant backdrop to playing the Terminator pinball game and swigging Black Label beer.

Ted worked for the Ohio State University; he was basically the only person on the scene who had a real job, one that you had to wash a shirt for.  Although it should be noted that Eric’s Mother, an un-melodic psychedelic band whose singer had spooky eyes and blew fire out of his mouth had a working lawyer in the band. Ted worked on computers for the university and he lived in a large house with several men who would later form the more organic sounding Moviola. At this point, Anyway Records was generating a bit of a buzz, with all of our first five singles selling out immediately upon release. Jerry and I did not think of repressing anything, we were to hurried to think backwards so we wanted to get as much out as we could. One would never know when the proverbial other shoe would drop. We both had lifetimes of shoes dropping around us. Their clatter bearing witness to the utter bafflement of our lives.

Jerry and I started to break apart somewhat at this point; there were more pressing issues with Jerry and Gaunt. Gaunt was in the midst of recording their first full-length and I was bankrolling almost all of Anyway myself with help from the bands. Jerry, who was supposed to be providing a chunk of money, simply didn’t have it. He was disappointed with my leanings towards more pop friendly choices in bands (Log, Greenhorn and Belreve) while his big project was a single by Monster Truck Five whose squalid sounds would frighten the paint off of witches’ house. I ended up paying for over half of the MT005 single including the mastering which took an afternoon to do.  The noise that MT005 on tape caused the arm of the lacquer machine to jump off the waxy plate every time the engineer tried to carve the sounds into the lacquer. John Hull and kindly old man who ran our local pressing plant turned to me after several hours and said ever-so-gently, “so, people listen to this.”  I nodded, “I suppose.”  Jerry and I were both too unskilled to resolve our annoyances at one another over the MT005 single and we simply did what we did best which was to bitch about the other person to whom would ever listen. At times, we both thought the other a complete idiot.

I was approached by Ted and Wayne Lin of SFH during this summer and asked if Anyway would be interested in doing a Stupid Fuckin’ Hippie single that they would finance. I replied “sure.” There were several reasons for this, the main being that both men worked at bartenders at one of my favorite places to drink and the other was that I thought their music was interesting and they  both understood that Anyway was more of a community enterprise at this point than anything else. Jerry was not pleased and by the end of the year he would leave Anyway to me.

This is how I came to know Ted; shortly after this Craig Dunson who was playing guitar in Jenny’s band Vibralux played me a space-echoy song called “Wrecking Ball” by a gutter punk band named the Econothugs. I was blown away, it sounded like carnival version of Galaxie 500. Craig explained that the singer from the Econothugs, Jake Housh was making a new band called Moviola and they would sound like this. Craig’s new label Eardrop, would be putting out their single.  There were many new labels sprouting up in Columbus, no doubt by the idea that if two drunk fuck-ups like Jerry and I could find success anybody could. What we may have lacked in business or planning acumen was made up in surgical passion and a giddiness for the absurd, which is what the world was like for us. Ted was going to play drums. Ted and I became good friends at this point, I trusted his judgment and I admired the fact that he was stable, with a 9-5 job and he was buying a house. Nobody I knew bought a house or a new car. Ted shortly became the defacto art-director of Anyway, laying out most of the covers for singles, CD’s and vinyl covers. He helped me find out how to procure a bar-code for the label.

In a few years Ted would save me from several embarrassing romantic castrophies. I had started seeing a woman who was living with a man in Athens, Ohio. She was a driven, beautiful and ummm driven. She wanted to leave him and I agreed she should. Why not?  We had only been seeing one another for a few weeks and she said she was going to move to Columbus where she had grown up. I thought this was a good idea, she was unhappy with him, had recently graduated from Ohio University and Columbus made sense. “Sure, move up” I told her. In a few days she arrived in front of my house with her pick-up truck filled with her belongings.  I liked my relationships to be at arm’s length emotionally and physically I preferred them to be several blocks apart. My lonely nightly darkness was too intense to share with anybody at this point in my life; it would just lead to yet another disappointment. While she waited at my front door I hurriedly phoned Ted and explained that this woman had just arrived at my house with all her shit, and not just for the weekend. There were lamps in the back of that black truck. I could see them jutting out of boxes, surrounded by paintings and toiletries. If I wasn’t so dehydrated from a night of drinking I would have pissed down my leg. Ted didn’t flinch; he said “you know Scotty just moved to Alaska for the summer, she can stay in his room.” That is friendship. Needless to say there was some animosity between the woman and myself and the relationship died an awkward deflated death on my front yard that Saturday morning but it cemented my friendship with Ted.

A few years later, after my five month “infomercial” marriage disintegrated in a heap of busted expectations, tears and broken plates Ted would remodel his attic and take me and my two obnoxious but lovable dogs into his house.

Just as I had relied on Jenny after my suicidal breakup in 1991, she would return to me over the years to help and motivate her. At times this caused an ordinate amount of grief for both of us, with me believing that I was watching a house burning around her and her believing that I was overtly critical of her life. Jenny had a knack of getting some of the most talented musicians in town to back her up, an assortment of  Columbus finest including Dan Spurgeon who fronted Greenhorn, Craig Dunson from Pica Huss, Mark Deane who played drums for Pica Huss, Mary Adam 12 and Monster Truck 005, Derrick DeCinzo a professional jack-of-all-trades jazz musician, Wil Foster of Clay and the Guinea Worms, Jovan Karcic and Ted all played and recorded with Jenny over the years.

Jenny was confounding as an artist, at times brilliant and at others a pathetic mess who would rather smash her equipment and drink beer than practice or play shows out of town. It was as if every time something was planned for her a collective breath would be held and more times than not the breath would be blown towards the floor as a small community would slowly shake their heads. Ted was always supportive of Jenny, dropping his plans to either fill in on drums or bass for her. He played out of town shows with her several times and was present whenever she needed him. At the height of Jenny’s madness she would bulldoze this relationship, and soon she would be on her own in the streets of Columbus.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 12: Early Gaunt

Jerry, like myself, was full of self doubt although both of us did a tremendous job and hiding in under a veneer of self-assurance that was bolstered by our vocal opinions on music, art, lifestyle, politics and just about anything else we were confronted with. We had little resources to support our own emotional well being and a headful of doubt when it came to relationships and our own talents as artists. It was quite easy for each one of us to use the resources of our profound love of music to be the face of our lives, for we had been practicing this ideal for almost as long as we had been living. From our early purchases of Kiss records to the hiding out in our respective bedrooms listening to hour after hour of music that stretched our worlds a billion different directions. Even to this day, one of the highlights of my life is climbing aboard a treadmill or writing a paper listening to music through my headphones. For us music was the shelter in our lives and we took umbrage with anybody who wasn’t as enthusiastic or respectful as we were. This may have come off as a sense of snobbishness or a case of unwarrented seriousness, it most likely was both in hindsight but it came down to a certain protection for both of us. We were in essence protecting our armor and defending the love of our lives.

There was a point in my own life, somewhere around the age of fifteen when I had a revelation of self-assurance, this also came to fruition via my passion for music which provided me a haven to explore feelings and a burgeoning wonderment of love and the grandiose aspirations of a teenage boy. In the early to mid-eighties the there was a distinct disadvantage of exploration of art and music for a young person living in rural Ohio. I received most of my education via Rolling Stone and Record magazines and the low-wattage college radio waves of WUSO, based in nearby Springfield. Springfield lacked an adequate record store that could cater to my blossoming curiosity of music. There was a Camalot record store in the mall but it was limited, I usually ended up making bulk purchases at School Kids Records in Athens or Columbus (where years later I would cement my personal identity in the same physical building.) In a record I could reassure myself of a world that was different from what I was surrounded by, which consisted of corn fields, inarticulate language and dull flatness. In non-physical manners I felt constricted by what I perceived as tight fearful conservative values, pride in being skeptical of outsiders, racism and an overabundance of male stereotypes. I was lost in a sense but I took solitude in the music and books I read.

I also consumed books and magazines, I read nearly every Vonnegut book, Mark Twain, historical and crappy musical biographies such as “Up and Down with The Rolling Stones” and the ridiculous “No One Gets Out Of Here Alive” about Jim Morrison. Even at the age of sixteen I found that “No One Gets Out of Here Alive” was a sub-standard exercise in the mis-glorification of a drug addled rock star whose sexuality made up for poor poetry. I mistrusted rock stars even at that young age. I envisioned my rock stars to be approachable and the sort of people whom I could have a conversation with. My meeting R.E.M. at the age of fifteen bolstered this as Peter Buck and Micheal Stipe both asked me to go drinking with them after the Wittenberg concert (I appeared physically older at that age).

I believe both Jerry and I mistrusted some of the excesses of rock stardom, although Jerry in his own way aspired to be a star. This latter point had to more with being immortal than holding riches or beautiful models on his arm; he was too sensitive to hold women in that regard. The picture of music for many of us during that time, was bleak, most radio stations played either the vapid non-dangerous music of Phil Collins, Lionel Richie or Michael Jackson or the mind-numbing music of anthem rock such as Def Leppard, Motley Crue and Journey. There was little room for anything else unless you dug for it, which we both did. Jerry had the luxury of living in Parma, Ohio a large working class suburb of Cleveland. He was just down the road from Cleveland and had its vast resources of music to bathe in. He was exposed to the emotional dangerousness of The Dead Boys, Death Of Samantha and Pere Ubu at an early age, while I would comb through the stacks at WUSO during my summers and play anything that had an interesting cover from the rootsy rock of The Beat Farmers and Jason and The Scorchers to more standard college rock fare as The Replacements and Camper Van Beethoven. I was at a disadvantage musically because I did not have a chance to experience live music until moving to Columbus and having resources of such small clubs as Staches, Apollo’s and Bernies.

While Jerry and I took solace in music we both channeled this passion in divergent ways, Jerry picked up the guitar while I never had the discipline nor the inclination to be a musician. I desired to sub-consciously make my mark as a fan.  I envisioned myself as a writer, one who would document the events around myself both externally and internally for nobody in particular but myself. Jerry on the other hand made music, music that derived from his vast record collection and sense of  the musical history that swayed and evolved around him. Jerry craved attention, but at the same time he held it at bay, he insisted that it be on his terms hence his dilemma when it came to his music and his personal life.

Gaunt was a powder-keg live, at once brilliant and in another moment a disheveled angry machine if a guitar string popped or the atmosphere wasn’t right. When Jerry formed Gaunt he had an ace-in-the-hole fellow musician in Eric Barth. Eric had played in several excellent Columbus bands, most notably Two-Hour Trip which was comprised of the Spurgeon brothers (Dan Spurgeon was once Jerry’s roommate.) Eric was a deft and melodious bass player, Jeff Regensberger however was new to the drums but what he may have lacked in drum rolls he brought in an easy-going enthusiasm to the seriousness of Jerry’s songs. Jeff was more than capable of banging out a basic even quick punk rock beat to the music of Jerry and he smiled throughout their live sets, he was lantern of good-will on stage.

The first Gaunt single was a split with the New Bomb Turks, released on Craig Regala’s Datapanik label. The funds were cobbled together from as assortment of Columbus underground music-fanatics such as the band members, Ron House, Craig and myself. It was an immediate collector’s item, it was furious and fast one part Saints, Husker Du, Pagans and all Mid-Western. The Turks side got the most attention, and while Gaunt could be breathtaking at times, the Turks were a combine compared to the diesel engine of early Gaunt. All of the Turks were more than average musicians, with the only hesitancy (hard to believe now) coming from the vocal mannerisms of singer Eric Davidson who, fully confident stage wise pranced around like a cross between an obnoxious eleven year old and Mick Jagger. From the strength of their split with Gaunt, their next single and fans such as Johan Kugelberg who worked at Matador, the Turks quickly got a deal with Crypt Records, who at the time was the quintessential garage label in the world. Jerry felt left behind for a moment. He confided in me before “Jim Motherfucker” came out that he had the blessing and the curse of sharing a record with The New Bomb Turks, shortly before the single was released he asked Jim Weber from the Turks to play second guitar in Gaunt.

Jim wasn’t in Gaunt very long, just a hic-cup really but his being in Gaunt gave Jerry the realization that Gaunt would benefit from another guitar player. Shortly thereafter he asked Jovan Karcic to be in the band. Jovan was a perfect foil for Jerry’s manic energy he was a little taller than Jerry with a bushel of handsome hair and a reserved demeanor he constrasted brilliantly with Jerry.  Even Jovan’s guitar playing was filled with smart humorous licks that would balance perfectly with Jerry’s almost psychotic playing.

Jerry and I were almost inseparable at this time, I was still nursing my break-up but had started coming out of my shell.  I had started dating again, a bit hesitantly at first and I was staying off the booze for the most part. At some point I came to the realization that alcohol would help with my renewed interest in dating. All the while, Jerry would keep an eye on me, no doubt guarding my heart and my life with his concern. I had started “dating” a stripper who was impressed that I didn’t drink too much and hated drugs. I say “dating” because we only got as far as kissing and eighth grader-ish petting. She would not French kiss because she hated anything being in her body. We went to movies and out to eat, she liked the idea that I didn’t really want sex, I was much too scared of that at this point in my life. She had been molested as a child and told me stories about this, I believe her father was a sheriff somewhere in small town Ohio and took advantage of his little girl. I was horrified by her stories and spent a lot of time listening to her. Around this time I attempted my first substantial short story based on her life and the life of my new dog. Jerry would ask me if I had slept with her, not so much out of curiosity but out of concern. After making out with her one day on my porch, we decided to move inside, suddenly my dog Istvan who had escaped earlier in the day came bounding up the porch steps and jumped on the couch.  “Who’s this” she asked as she scratched his ears, just then Istvan puked next to her.  It was surreal, he had found some Dinty More Beef Stew or something that resembled it out of some garbage can and vomited all over the couch. Too make matters worse the vomit was covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny maggots. She got up and left, I never saw her again. I suppose I wasn’t really ready to go upstairs with her. God works in mysterious ways.V