Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae: Part 52–The Ramones past II

Ramones, part two

Bruno, my blond-haired, blue-eyed, energy-at-11 boy but age at 4, loves punk rock. We get in the car and he asks, “Daddy, can we listen to punk rock?” His sister, who has a remarkable fondness for opera and classical music, is under his shrieking assault as to what is played on our morning drive to school. “No! Saskia, we have to listen to PUNK ROCK!” Something about guitars tends to move our joined hearts.

The other day I walked out of the courtroom where I work and noticed a young woman, sitting in the blue felt and partially stained chairs in the hallway as she casually tried to look cool with a tint of blue hair hanging like a dropped flower over heavily mascara eyes, her legs pulled tight under her with a snippet of torn fishnet stocking poking from under frazzled blue jeans. To top off her ensemble she was wearing a faded, black Ramones T-shirt, the one with the Ramones Presidential seal. As I took her back to my office to conduct her assessment, I wanted to tell her of my personal Ramones experience, as if this would help bridge the therapeutic relationship between a 19-year-old, mentally-ill heroin addict and a graying 44-year-old man wearing a wrinkled dress-shirt and a tie with a dollop of jelly. I decided not to.

 

After Keith and I drank our fill at Larry’s, we decided to head down to the Newport, the large concert hall on High Street. My own experiences at the Newport were tenuous, as I had had a difficult experience with several bouncers at a dynamic triple bill of Th’ Faith Healers, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the Breeders. I had ended up losing my temper and clocking a man several times my weight, after which his coworkers dragged me out by my neck, my feet dangling under me like a chicken carried across the barnyard, with me clutching my dark-rimmed glasses that were not built for barroom skirmishes. Bob Pollard was in line while I was on my way to being flung out the front door. He said, “Hey Bela, do you need help?” and then, upon noticing the thick-necked, beefy men escorting me out, “Uh, never mind!”

I had also managed to criticize the Newport management in one of the weekly papers for their lack of support of local and underground music in their pursuit of money, which was not the wisest move. At times, my own sideline hobby of promoting music was hindered by this “Fuck you” attitude toward the local corporate rock scene, as many of the bands that I had booked into Columbus who had risen to the status of playing a room the size of the Newport left me out in the dark when I could have had a nice payday for my earlier efforts. I had explained a part of this to Johnny Ramone, and he instructed Keith and me to come to the rear of the Newport to pick up some backstage passes after I assured him that my name would be crossed off the guest list for my past behavior.

Keith was excited, repeating, “The fucking Ramones, wow, can you believe it? The fucking Ramones, they know my name.” I was excited, but more so because I was to meet a woman at Larry’s after the show. We were to meet around midnight, which meant we were really just meeting to have sex.

The back of the Newport bordered Pearl Alley, and a large tour bus with a Western sunset motif painted along the side was parked next to the club. There was a small line of young women standing outside the back stage door that sat atop a small fire escape. With beer and whisky breath we stood on the crunchy gravel, keeping our distance from the chattering, nervous young punk rock women waiting to meet the elder statesmen of American punk rock. Suddenly, the Ramones tour manager, a dark-haired man wearing mandatory Ray-Ban sunglasses and chewing gum, appeared to be arguing with several staff members of the Newport. Another man in a brown suit appeared, clean-cut and holding a walkie-talkie, and yelled above the burgeoning din, “You guys have been selling your passes to all these girls all night. The show is sold out and none of your passes are good anymore!”

Mr. Ray-Ban yelled back, “That’s bullshit, you can’t do that! Show me the proof!” Keith and I looked at each other. How odd this all seemed.

Abruptly, Joey was on the scene, with his thin, angular frame and wearing a T-shirt. He pointed towards Keith and me, standing in the parking lot, giggling to ourselves. “Hey, I don’t know about all these girls, but those two guys get passes.”

Mr. Brown-Suit looked down at us, “I don’t care who it is, nobody else is getting in!”

Joey scoffed, “They don’t get in, we don’t play!”

I looked over at Keith, “This is fucking crazy.”

“Yup,” he said with a nod. It went back and forth for a few minutes.

Finally, Joey came down the stairs with Mr. Ray-Ban. “Hey, someone in our crew was selling our back-stage passes and they won’t let us. Why don’t you guys come up to Detroit tomorrow and we’ll get you in then?”

The next day was a Sunday. “I can’t, I have some family stuff going on,” in reality knowing a full-on hangover would impede driving the three hours to Detroit, getting drunk again, and driving back.

“How about Cincy, we’ll be there in two days?” This worked and we agreed to see them in Cincinnati.

Keith and I looked at each other as if we were being filmed for a sitcom. “Did Joey Ramone just say they wouldn’t play unless we were will allowed in?” I asked Keith.

Keith nodded, “Yeah, he said, if the two record store guys don’t get in, we don’t play.” I had a feeling it could have stemmed from my being banned from the venue for that idiotic move of slugging the bouncer. “Well, now what?” Keith asked.

“Well shit, we’re already on South Campus, so let’s go to Crazy Mama’s.”

Nodding, “Yup, sounds cool, might was well dance.”

As we started walking away, a bespectacled man with a beard right out of a King Crimson gatefold record cover, complete with pot seeds in the bent spine, yelled after us. “Hey guys, hold up. The fellas feel terrible and are embarrassed you couldn’t see the show, so I wanna help you out a little.” He explained that he was one of the roadies and drove their bus, the huge concert bus with a Western motif airbrushed on the side—a perfect cover for one of the most essential punk rock bands in history. He led us to the bus, telling us he was from Poland, Ohio, and had been with the Ramones for nearly ten years. “The best band you could hope to work for, even if they don’t talk to each other much. Total class guys. Salt of the earth.” As he was talking he pulled a baggie out of a worn, green satchel that was filled with marijuana. “Hey, this is for you guys, for your trouble,” and he tossed it to me.

I explained to him, “Man, we don’t need this, I don’t even smoke—I only drink.”

He smiled, “Hey, it’ll come in handy sometime.”

Keith grabbed it, “Shit, I know some girls who smoke,” and he tucked it into his pants. We thanked the bus driver from Poland, Ohio, assured him we would be in Cincinnati in a few days, and trudged off to get our dancing shoes on.

The night was strange, with an eerie energy that was fueled by our intake of Jim Beam and Black Label throughout the afternoon and evening. But South Campus in 1994 was much different than the sparkling new buildings and movie theater of the Ohio State University campus today. At the time, it was lined with bar after bar that made money selling an abundance of alcohol at a cut-rate, served in plastic pitchers and wash-buckets of beer, all with a fine film of grease floating on top. One could get shots of peach or peppermint  schnapps for a mere dollar, and before stumbling home at the end of the evening, clutching hard against the person who would quiet one’s loneliness for a few hours, a person could grab a gyro for only a dollar—a perfect mint to share kisses with at 3 am. The street would be lined with cops on the weekend, some on horseback trotting over to break up fights and to help guide the lines into the packed, smudgy bars, pulsating with sounds of Bananarama, The Cure, Ah-Ha, and if one were lucky enough, New Order or The Clash. One bar even made a Sunday evening of playing mostly AC/DC and The Cult, a choice that was popular at the time but in hindsight was about as short-sighted sonically as Ian Asbury singing for The Doors.  Columbus’s finest would line thin wires around the telephone poles so no future politicians, doctors, engineers, or teachers would drunkenly slip off the curb into an oncoming giant pick-up truck from one of the nearby rural burgs that dotted the adjacent counties.

I had shed South Campus several years prior. My drinking tastes no longer required me to search for the cheapest beer around, and the clientele of these establishments only pushed my buttons as I was just as likely to lose my temper with frat-boy lunk-heads or what I assumed were silly coeds. Besides, I had moved up north, closer to the store, near Larry’s and Stache’s——a convenient walk from any of these hangouts with little to no danger of getting into a row.

“Let’s take the alleyway, that way we don’t have to deal with the bullshit of High Street,” I suggested to Keith.

“Good call, man, that shit gotten even crazier, didn’t it?” I was drunk. We stopped at UDF to share a 40 ounce in the alley as we needed to feed the buzz lest it be too diminished before we completed the three-block walk to Crazy Mama’s.

“To be honest Keith, that was some really weird shit. I mean, it was like they were honored to know us, not vice-versa.” We hustled to the alley, pulling swallows from the bottle, and had finished it by the time we got to Crazy Mama’s. Dumping the empty bottle in a dumpster, I remarked to Keith, “It’s amazing that these dumbasses can’t seem to do this. Here we are drunker than shit and we know enough to throw our bottle away.”

Crazy Mama’s had steep stairs and as we climbed them we could feel the sweat inside the room. Bauhaus was playing. “I dunno Keith, they’re playing gothic shit tonight, maybe we should just go back to Larry’s.”

“We’re already here, besides some gothic chicks are sexy.”

Rolling my eyes, I said, “Whatever.” It was packed, with a whole slew of folks we hadn’t seen and a lot of punks from out of town, including a group of skinheads that lurked on one side of the dance floor on the opposite of the bar. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” I murmured to Keith. I hated crowds. Especially drunk crowds. With skinheads. Suddenly “Beat on the Brat” exploded over the bar, and I said, “Cool, we’ll stay” as I grabbed three beers, two for me and one for Keith.

Part three sometime in the future.

Part 51: First Christmas

Part 51: 1st Christmas

I drove several cars that were bound together with loose ends, one with a starter held in place by the end of a broom handle and it was not uncommon for a few bolts to be laying in the gravel driveway when I pulled out, bald tires struggling to gain traction on the small gray pebbles. Every car ride was a trial in hesitation, deep breaths as the engine struggled to turn over, at times a small billow of smoke emanating from the hood, was it more oil leaking or had that brave wooden handle finally caught fire? there was no money in my wallet, a small black cracked bit of leather I had been given after my grandfather had died. It never had any money in it when he owned it as well. At times, I would look in it, hoping that maybe, just maybe a five dollar bill would appear, but it only held an old Social Security card, a blemished and forged ID and my own driver’s license. Getting gas money was a trial in itself, a mad scramble around the house, pushing aside couch and chair cushions in search of loose change, a return of a few Coca-Cola bottles and a quick rummage through my step fathers change jar that sat atop his misty room. Sunshine illuminating the gray room with specks of dust, in calm panic pushing aside old buttons, scraps of paper with scribbled phone numbers and empty match books, grabbing a handful of change, hoping that there was more silver and copper. If luck was with me, there may be $1.75 or so to put into the tank. Gas was hovering around a dollar a gallon, and a gallon and a half could get an anxious high school boy to school and back a few times. Taking the bus was unheard of, an exercise in self oppression that one would avoid at all costs. It was better not to go to school than to take the nausea inducing trail of fear over the rolling hills and creaky shocks that was part and parcel of the bus number 24.

A date, perhaps the first one with a girl from my high school, even though I was halfway through my senior year, the mutual attraction between myself and the girls of Northeastern was unspoken at best, and most likely in complete abstinence. In the world of avoidance that I tended to move in a furtive glance was what I would hope for, perhaps a short moment of sparkle as quip would dart out of my mouth would give me a moment of hope but usually my own neediness in a mountain of farmer boy machismo would have prevented even the most interested gal to think secondly. My high school dates involved girls from other schools or more often during my summer and spring breaks in Athens where it was ok to wear glasses and be of minor stature.

The snow fell in clumps, big, fat flakes that swirled in circles before nestling atop a field of other frozen particles. The rolling hills leading into Catawba were shrouded in white, at times the snow fell so heavily that the road melded into the side of the road, causing the relic of a Toyota to work extra hard as brakes were pushed and coaxed into keeping the orange metal on course. There was sweat dripping from my hands, and next to me there was a portable Panasonic cassette player with failing batteries but was a better alternative to the generic teased hair music that was prevalent in the mid-west during the mid-nineties eighties. Driving with a slight amount of the overpowering testosterone  that coursed through my body, a permanent hard-on for the past four years of my life had now blended into the reality of a date. Passing barns that appeared asleep, with the white powder of snow freezing them into what appeared to a postcard of a fast vanishing America, the car galloped over paltry hills that were more mounds than hills. Catawba lay on a small bluff, that overlooked several large fields of corn and soybeans, with an abandoned corn mill on the edge of town, it provided a picturesque view of the town but upon closer inspection the years of neglect wore off its lumbering metal sides through chestnut colored rust as it crawled alongside of the mill like a giant spider web. Everything in this town failed the scrutiny test, from the perspective on my seventeen year old eyes, but now as the old mill faded into the mist of snow in a cracked rearview mirror held in place by shiny duct tape, that was no concern of mine.

South Vienna, which some of us referred to as “South-by-God-Vienna!” was roughly six miles or so from Catawba, it was itself a tiny burp of a town, located between I-70 and the old National Road, it almost dwarfed Catawba as it had at least five traffic lights, curbs, a carpet store and a grocery. Jenny lived at the edge of town, in a small ranch right smack dab in the middle of the National Road. The car chugged and surged in the snow, with small burps of exhaust it behaved like the Engine-That-Could while snow swirled around in a winter ballet of young lust and the hope of opportunity. I knocked on the door, trying to make the large lenses on my wire framed glasses smaller by leaning away from the porch light. I wore a bigger-than-me camouflaged US Army jacket that my brother had brought me back from his first foreign deployment in Germany. Jenny answered, and I as I stepped hesitantly into the living room, I eyed her family as much as they eyed me. A little boy lay on the carpet with tiny action figures spread around as if they had been blown apart, two younger sisters lay on opposite end of the couch, staring into the television. One I recognized, Rachel, who nodded at me. She was a freshman. The other just a few years older than the boy, said “hey,” and resumed watching the television. Jenny’s mother, got up from an yellow easy chair, “well, you’re this Bela everyone has been talking about. I have heard so much about you, Jenny says you are very funny. And you live in Catawba, did Jenny tell you we used to live there. I grew up in Catawba. You can see how far, I’ve come,” laughing she added, “all the way to South Vienna.” Wearing a shaky smile, I stammered, “yeah, um, yeah, hmmm….Jenny’s pretty funny herself.” “well, I’m Ginger, and welcome to our house” she turned her head, and raised her voice towards the kitchen, “Harry, Jenny’s date is here!”

Upon those words, the insides of a young man’s stomach crunched a little, and for the first time in what would be a lifetime of emotional hesitation reared its head in my belly that I would lead to the fact that I would be figured out. Jenny’s father entered, carrying a bowl of chips, “hey, how are you” with a quick glance, “you kids better watch this quick, me and the boy will be watching the game in a little bit. By the way,” looking me over again, “what have you got planned tonight?” “Well, I thought I would take your daughter back to the parsonage and fuck her brains out” was the first thing that I thought of but instead I replied, “maybe get a pizza or something, I don’t really know, I thought I would ask Jenny”, turning my head towards her for a rescue. “Sure, that sounds good, Bye mom, bye dad.” She said and pulled me out the door. “you don’t wanna talk to my dad too long, he loves to scare any boy that comes to my house.” I had no money for a date, in fact I only had about $7, five of which I had given to Chris Biester to buy a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “I thought we would go back to my house, hang out—listen to music.” Jenny thought this was a good idea. She was amazed at my record and tape collection. She had never seen so much music in anybody’s room. My brother Zoltan, home on leave was doing what most young mid-west American’s were doing on Christmas break were doing, getting loaded on a nightly basis. My stepfather was out, most likely at a support group meeting or in Columbus.

Jenny had never heard of much of the music I had, “Who is R.E.M.? Is that short for something? What is the Replacements? I have never heard any of this, oh wait, I know who the Beatles and The Rolling Stones are, you listen to them huh?” She scanned the wall of tapes, “how did you get so many of these, there must be at least a hundred.” Opening the first beer of the night, “Well, I love music, I got to DJ at the Wittenberg radio station for the past few years, so some I taped from them, some from my friends in Athens. You can pick whatever you want to.” Leaning into the wall of cassettes she would pull one out and without looking towards me, hand it over. “Wow, this is a lot. Who is Lou Reed and if he has so many records how come I’ve never heard of him?…..Oh, here play this, I love Pink Floyd and then play this” pushing a Cars tape into my hand. We stayed there in my room, drinking beer, eventually having our first kiss together and with the clumsiness that comes from teenage love, discovered one another’s body’s. When she pulled her top off, she wore an emerald green brassiere and later, to my astonishment, matching green panties which she refused to remove. By the end of the evening we were finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at how we had appeared to know one since birth but had only, tonight really talked to one another. The anxiety I had felt, slipped away, replaced by an inner confidence that, somehow, this is the way things were supposed to be and I was ok with this. The snow covered the car as we left the house, it was nearly ten o’clock and Christmas was just a few days away. Praying for the car to start, the key turned in the ignition, it seemed to have a gasp while groaning, “it had better start, my dad would kill me if he knew we came back to your house.” A deep breath seemed to do the trick, as the ignition turned again, and in some manner looked to have winked at me and came to a shuddering start. The exhaust convulsed with black smoke, the caused us to laugh nervously, and we roared out of the driveway into the twirling snow.

Two days later on Christmas Eve, as we sat in hard wooden pew while Midnight Christmas Services went on, we exchanged notes. Holding sweating hands, one said, “only two days.” It had felt like forever and at the same time as if the future was complete in our twitchy arms.

Below: Jenny playing for only the second time in 14 years, nearly 27 years to the day of that first date. (thanks to Shirley Tobias for the video)

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 42: Outsider

Outsider.

Ohio lays flat in places. Just west of Columbus it has a skyline the size of the Pacific Ocean, blanketed with fields of soybeans, corn, and wheat. There are a few larger towns in western Ohio, most notably Dayton and, of course, Toledo. The rest of the wide, smooth land is mottled with small towns. These towns are glorified as small town heartland America. They have large brick courthouses at their centers, several ice cream shops, and hardware stores that have every widget known to man, complete with kindly old gents who know the names of every kid in town. A homegrown sense of Americana sprouts in western Ohio like the farms that once helped feed the steelworkers in Youngstown and Cleveland and the academics and policy-makers in Columbus. There among the one-traffic-light towns there is a sense of nostalgia that for most of them, has only existed in a vacant dream-state, one that is hazy and filled with apathy and a strangulated sense of loyalty of something, like diminishing smoke, that has only vaguely existed. Most of the residents no longer feel. The belief in the American Dream that was long ago crushed by the greed of capitalism still stands proud every Memorial Day and Fourth of July, but a cursory weekend drive through any of these towns reveals the deflated dream of Middle America, from the empty store fronts to the lack of children playing baseball, football, or kick-the-can. When I arrived in the tiny burg of Catawba at the age of fourteen, my cynicism about romantic fantasies like the American Dream had already been ripened by my experiences of broken homes and the reality of attending over eight schools by the age of fourteen; I had an ingrained mistrust of platitudes.

We moved to Catawba in the summer of 1982. I had discovered Adam Ant, the Clash, and the Ramones during my eighth grade year, before we moved to Catawba. New wave was the only thing that MTV was showing, aside from Quarterflash, and it had just started on cable in Athens, Ohio. Catawba did not have cable television, and some of the kids hadn’t even heard of MTV, let alone Adam Ant, Elvis Costello, or the Clash. I was pegged, and rightfully so, as a nerd of the highest degree. A wave of nausea washed over me as we drove through the Ohio hinterlands, a sick feeling that would not leave my stomach for the next four years.

I missed the colors of the hills of southeastern Ohio as well as the excitement of the college town, where a stroll through the streets that sunk down below the uptown shops and the greenery of the campus exposed the passerby to music playing on lawns where college students played Frisbee in shorts, laughed, and drank beer. I went to late-night movies as a middle-school student in Athens: Rock and Roll High School, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and An American Werewolf in London. My older sister Erica, a high school senior who was dating a “townie” who was a freshman at Ohio University, took me to many of these. Being exposed to this atmosphere provided me with experiences that I soon discovered that my classmates at my new high school did not have. In the truest sense, among the fields and the slow everyday movement in Catawba, it was easy to imagine that the both land and the people who lived in this rural community had grown fallow and dormant, perhaps proudly so. My first day of school, I heard the hushed tones of my fellow school bus riders as they eyed me as if I were foreigner.

“Wow, look at that new kid. He’s so small.”

“Bela?! What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Are you even American?”

“Isn’t that a girl’s name? Are you sure you’re not a girl?”.

I felt isolated even before I arrived at school. The dread I felt was so thick that I could have balled it up and stuck it in my pocket.

Living parts of my childhood years near a college campus gave me opportunities that most of my classmates at tiny Springfield Northeastern High School never had. I was used to seeing a cross section of different cultural backgrounds. My mother was friends with many Nigerian students, and we had many students in my grade school who were the sons and daughters of foreign exchange students. At Northeastern, I was shocked to learn that there were no African-American students. It wasn’t until later, when I met Jenny Mae’s mother, that I learned that there had not been an African-American student at the high school for over twenty years. On my first day of school, I felt as if I would never fit in. The school was rampant with racism, although there were no African-American kids in the school, one could hear the word nigger throughout the day, on kid of Mexican descent was referred to as a “sand nigger”, I wanted to shout at some of the kids who said these things that the slang word for Mexican’s was “spick” but I didn’t thought they would miss my point and take me seriously. It wasn’t just the students who espoused racist attitudes on several occasions I heard both our principle (Donald Smith-thankfully retired) and football coach (Mr.Wasserman) tell racist jokes to our wrestling team and biology classes respectfully.  I felt as if I were in a time warp. Growing up, we were taught under any circumstance to never use the word nigger or any other type of derogatory slang. Whenever my brother and I would use the word redneck, my mother would remind us that our grandparents were from Appalachia, we would roll our eyes at her political correctness but we took the slandering of other races to heart.

I have a photograph of myself, circa 1976, standing in the backyard of our new house in Newport News, Virginia. It was our second house in Newport News, and in reality it wasn’t a house. It was a new sort of condo that is now prevalent, with a “brick” façade hiding the particle board innards, as if this apparition of strength could hide the fragile, cheap-as-hell construction of the building. We had moved from another part of Newport News because of concerns about the urban grade school I was attending, where I didn’t have a single friend. The condo community we moved into was filled with the families of Navy personnel and working class families. I had a small room that I shared with my brother, my sister had a room just next to ours, and the bathroom connected to the hallway to the master bedroom. The yard was roughly ten feet by ten feet, big enough to catch a lizard in and that was about it.

In the photograph, I am wearing a red and white Washington Redskins t-shirt, although I was already a Steelers fan like my big brother. Perhaps I was trying to find my own identity as an eight year old, or perhaps others were trying to find it for me.  The photo is faded like so many photos from the seventies; instantly dated, as if the picture was taken behind marbled glass. It gives the impression that the whole world was slightly askew and blurred. When looking at photographs from the nineteen thirties and forties, it feels as if the poverty that gripped the thin, weathered faces of those who managed to survive the Great Depression was more severe in black and white—as if the world had never been in color. Blurred and fuzzy, I stood in the backyard in that picture from the seventies, knowing that even if this was yet another new house, new school, and new friends; I would forever be tethered to the feelings of isolation that I felt at that moment.

In the spring of 2004, I had received a message from Jenny. She was back in Columbus, at least temporarily, and she was drunk, incoherent, and lost, as if the map to her inner soul had been doused in gasoline and burned. Over the phone, her voice sounded as if it were being wired through the ages from a time that had long since passed. It was broken, brittle, and frayed. If her message had been a photograph, it would have been faded, black and white, with eyes staring towards the lens with all of the effort of a dustbowl victim.  Jenny sounded small, huddled into herself; the message spoke of desolation and the crazed chaos of alcoholism, mental illness, and the misfortune of loneliness that is only magnified by alcohol.  “I don’t know what to do. I’m borrowing some girl’s phone. She must think I’m nuts.  What can I do without him? I need help.” Click.

I had no idea what time Jenny had called and I sure where she was. I had been rebuilding myself for a few years at this point, living back in Columbus, working at Used Kids, and plunging headlong into various kinds of volunteer work to help other drinkers. I was ill prepared to offer solace to Jenny. With furrowed brow, I took to the stairs of Used Kids, passing the timeline of flyers that line the walls of the stairwell, a cornucopia of brazen and hectic nights of my life. Pavement, New Bomb Turks, Thinking Fellers Union, Love Battery, All-Male Mowdown, All-Girl Hoedown, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, The Great Plains, Scrawl—a virtual testament to my twenties that marked my trajectory from young, feisty indie-punk to cynical record-store drunk to grizzled befuddled optimist, the walls captured and dismissed me at the same time.

I headed to Bernie’s, where Jenny had struck up several romances since returning to town. I assumed that she had borrowed a phone from some future barfly there who had not yet dipped her life into the inkwell of wretchedness that years of bar sitting can bring, but Bernie’s in the daytime was a good as any place to start. Poking my head into the bar, the bartender glanced at me and said, “She left about three hours ago, and she was a mess, yelling at Nate about some craziness. She is off her fucking rocker. I told her not to come back for a while. She is scaring some of the customers.”

I glanced at a bearded man with bits of egg in his beard and four inches of stretched belly hanging out over a belt that longed to be put to sleep. His t-shirt was blanched and threadbare, with dollops of pizza stains and pocketed with small stretchy holes that barely contained his daily-beer-drinker’s girth. He raised one eyebrow, hoisted a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy, and slowly nodded his head in agreement. I gazed at another man sitting two seats down, decked in a faded leather jacket with a chain wallet dangling against his bar stool as if he were tethered to it like a dog. He looked up from his tallboy and said, “Bela, that chick is nuts.” In the background, Homer Simpson mirrored this same scene at Moe’s Tavern.

Crossing High Street, I entered the OSU Music Building and climbed the stairs to the top floor, where the university kept the practice pianos. I crept quietly and listened. I heard the vague plinking of the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.”  Opening the door, I found Jenny, hair matted, filthy and clinging to her skull and shoulders, and a thin dress drenched in sweat sticking to her arms and back as if it wallpapered onto her. She was braless, with the contours of her breasts exposed revealing not sexiness but total sadness. She gazed up at me, tears streaming down her cheeks, with a bottle of vodka stashed between her legs and the overwhelming odor of sweat, booze, and depression blanketing the air. “Oh Bela, what am I gonna do?” She turned and tried to play “Lady Madonna”, but only made it through the first several lines before switching course and attempting “Maybe I’m Amazed.”  Gurgling, she croaked, “That was his favorite. He loved Paul McCartney. I would play that over and over.”  Of this, I had no doubt, as she once told me that they had spent $275 playing David Bowie’s “Major Tom” over and over in a hotel while on a two-day-long coke binge.  The other half of the “they” was Jim Williams, her boyfriend who had passed away only a few months ago. “You know,” she slurred, “we saw Paul McCartney five times. We flew across the county to see him. Jim was like that, once he became obsessed with something he did it to death.”

My first thought, which I managed to keep in my mouth, was “like cocaine.”

Taking a pull off the warm vodka bottle, she said, almost to no one in particular, “You know, they threw out all my stuff when he died. His brother and that bitch sister-in-law, they went to the boat I lived on and dumped it all. Even my pink records.” The pink records were the Guided By Voices split she did, the one that had been reviewed in Spin magazine only seven years prior, where Charles Aaron called her “astonishing and one of the best bohemian song-writers alive.”

Frozen, I simply said, “I’m sorry.” Inside I was angry, upset that anybody would discard somebody’s possessions with such impudence. Although Jenny could be difficult, she didn’t deserve that. Peeking under the cover of madness takes skill, an unwavering sense of determination, and a smidgeon of courage, all of which I lacked at that time. My skin felt like science fiction, sweat dripping down my back. The room was an oven—don’t they have air conditioning here?  “Jenny, why don’t you go somewhere and get some help?”

Plinking on the piano, she whispered, “You can’t help, you never wanted to help. You just want to tell me what to do. Leave me alone.”  Not wanting to fight, I left, a hole inside of me shuddering as if another shovel of dirt had been lifted out and dumped onto the pile of unhappy memories that littered my life. I thought of that picture of me, taken so many years ago, feeling like an outsider at the age of seven, and I realized that there is nothing sadder than being an outsider in your own life.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 38: First Death

First Death.

Every time I visit my memories I bump into the dead, who curl around my thoughts like wisps of smoke rising up and disintegrating into the air, silent but ever present in spite of my busy life filled with middle-aged responsibilities. As my two fair-haired children dance for me, arms extended as if only I can temper the giddiness that shoots like downed power lines from their frantic arms, I think of moments of true escape from the closed dread of an ordinary life that I once both at times strived for and repelled with all of my might. Sleep comes harder but is more restful as I wade into my forties, with the experiences someone who has seen breathtaking beauty and horror in the same moment but with the fear of a mortality that has yet to enter my children’s life. There is a story that the Buddha’s father tried in vain to protect his son from the destruction of life, but it wasn’t until Shakyamuni Buddha witnessed the true revulsion of life that he became determined to vanquish his attachment to the material world and the causes of suffering. At times, as I gaze down at the blond jewels of my life, the sparkling of life emanating out of their big blue eyes, setting each moment on fire, I gaze into their future, trying in vain to protect them from the tragedies of survival. I am nothing but a bystander as the moments tick past, and the floor of life rises faster than anything my eyes has ever held It is pointless to try to protect them. As a father, I can only try to help them navigate tragedies as they appear in their lives, for in surviving one is the constant spectator of both the elegance and ugliness of life.

After my breakup with Jenny, I couch surfed in Columbus for a few months and rented a small apartment in Athens. I would make my getaway to Athens on the weekends, spending time at The Union Bar on West State Street. As a boy, I spent my afternoons in uptown Athens at the Side-One Record store that stood almost exactly across the street from the Union. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was in middle-school. Both the store and the town provided a purpose to me, as I searched for a family that had disintegrated in the hushed tones of secrets and mental illness that, sadly, have remained unchecked for thirty years.

Side-One was a sliver of a store wedged between the underground comic book/used record store/tee-shirt shop known as Hoffa’s and The Underwear. It sold mostly cut-out LP’s with a few new releases. The two men who ran it, were kind to me. Taking a gawky, nerdy kid of eleven under their wings, they let me play records and howled as I mimicked the bass lines of late 70’s funk and “Another One Bites The Dust.” They seemed to live the easy life, sipping beers behind the counter and playing Herman Brood and His Wild Romance at top volume. Across the street, stood the Union, a townie biker bar that sold hot dogs for a dollar and let me in to order for the gentlemen from the record shop. I knew at that early age what I wanted from life—an opportunity to escape into the safe confines of laughter and music. Sadly, Side-One closed up shop the summer of my seventh grade year, forced out by the larger and more in-depth School Kids Records, a semi-loose brand of indie-stores that catered to the punk and college rock of university campuses in Big Ten country.

Every college town had one. In Columbus we had two: Bernie’s & Staches. In Champaign it was the Blind Pig, Cleveland had the Euclid Tavern, and Chapel Hill had the Cat’s Cradle. While I never visited Champaign or Chapel Hill, those night clubs were known country-wide as safe -havens for the near drop-outs, rockers, and bookish music nerds of the American underground scene. The Blind Pig was made famous by the long forgotten Honcho Overload, who described the best method of romantic revenge as getting wasted. The Cat’s Cradle was the clubhouse of all things North Carolina, namely Superchunk, who provided the soundtrack of our lives and deaths.

Athens had a pretty health music scene that was a bit more ragged, freakish, and organic than the hardened punkish and ironic sounds of Columbus. Folks in Athens were more prone to dance, even to the bizarre hardness of some of the Amphetamine Reptile bands, such as The Cows and Surgery, who played there often. The most popular bands in Athens were the majestic Appalachian Death Ride and Torque, who managed to get the gritty, metallic hate of the Amrep bands down to a science. I was more inclined to ADR, whose sounds came from the same organic roots as such like-minded bands of the time as Mudhoney, early Soul Asylum, and Eleventh Dream Day, bands whose high school record collections contained not only Neil Young, but also The Stooges, Black Sabbath, and early hardcore.

Torque branded itself as hate rock. They were led by a large, good-looking singer-guitarist named Pat Brown, whose girth was offset by his glinting blue eyes and good-natured laugh. He never wanted for a woman. The drummer, Ted O’Neal, was a friendly, handsome man who had long dark locks of curly hair that no doubt played a part in him securing a breathtakingly beautiful woman named Marissa. Ted manned several bars in Athens, including the Union and Tony’s. Tony’s was the underground version of a sports bar, where you could go to watch the Browns on a Sunday afternoon while My Bloody Valentine, Prisonshake, or Gram Parsons provided the play-by-play. Ted was the best kind of bartender. He freely provided me with a two-for-one special every time I ordered. This was manna for a happy drunkard.

The Union was a long bar, with small booths crammed against the wall just a body-width from the long bar that ran 2/3 the length of the building. There was a small area in which those delicious hot dogs were made and a back area that held a pool table and one shitty Simpson’s video game. The club portion was upstairs—a shoe box of a concert setting containing a large stage with sightlines that were hindered by support columns and the use of too many intoxicants. This was nothing to complain about, as the crowds in Athens always moved to the music, whether it was Tar, The Cynics, or a local art-school experiment. The walls were covered with Pabst Blue Ribbon signs and the shoddy, amateurish paintings of patrons who aspired to be more than the sum of their talents (as we all do).

I used some of my contacts to help book several shows at the Union, as I was, by this time, getting my feet wet and wallet soaked promoting shows in Columbus at Bernie’s and Staches. But for every money-making show with Love Battery, Sebadoh, or Pavement, there were money-gulping shows like Moonshake, the aforementioned Eleventh Dream Day, the Grifters, and the incredible Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. I had helped arrange some show in the fall of 1994 at the Union. I have no idea what it was, but I was in the midst of developing my talent as a baffling, hysterical, frenzied, alcoholic being. Prone to an elevated state of being fueled by Jim Beam, long-neck beers, and copious amounts of coffee, I could somehow channel the energy of my future children. This usually brought about tears of laughter to my eyes, as I was a stand-up comic in my own head. Many of the onlookers got my joke (i.e., the joke was me), but others were embarrassed. I had no impulse control.

Ted lived with Eric Gunn, whose love for all things hateful was only surpassed by an obsessive record- collecting gene. He had boxes of records spread out in his damp, semi-crooked house that smelled of perpetual marijuana smoke, stale alcohol, damp carpet, and the mustiness that only a large wolf-like dog can provide. I spent several nights on the uneven couch in that house. The after-hours would be cramped with people huddled around the worn coffee table. As the bong was passed, I would demur—I had no use for anything that would impede the racing buzz that flowed through my body. I stood at full drunken power, rapidly describing the different life choices of me and my Green Beret brother, who lived in Athens and knew many of the Union regulars but had a life of college classrooms, rugby, and bars.

Although much of that time is faded, fuzzy, and forgotten, I do remember a comical discussion my brother and I had about him wanting to give me gun. I had tried to describe to him how I was unhinged, and that putting a gun in my hands was akin to giving an anvil to a drowning man. I remember Ted and Marissa laughing as the verbal bolts of lightning shot out of my mouth and into the room. A week later, Ted lay in a hospital bed in Columbus, clutching to life as a shot of heroin proved too much for his battered body. Ted hung on for two weeks, during which time visiting friends met and shared memories at my house. I slowly fell in love with my first wife during this time, even though I was seeing another woman from Athens. As Ted struggled to regain consciousness, I became enamored with Robin, who had dark black hair and a wickedly fast sense of humor. We would gather in my obtuse living room, drinking beer and trading stories as each of us thought of death, lust and friendship in our own separate manner.

Ted was buried in Dayton. We gathered at Pat Brown’s  parents house. His parents exuded Republican, Midwestern values—his mother made Velveeta Mexican dip with Triscuits and we were all on our best behavior. As I pulled out of the cemetery and drove back to Athens with a woman I would break up within a matter of days as I tried to seduce my first wife, I popped in an advance copy of Bee Thousand and listened to “Ester’s Day” over and over. Ted was the first friend who died in my life.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 36: The Ramones part one

The Ramones:

Saturday’s at Used Kids was an event, at times I may have been nursing a hangover and would have stopped at Bernie’s before opening up the store and have gotten a Bloody Mary to go in a styrophone cup, complete with straw to help me over the ten am hump or I would have sent Jerry down to Larry’s to get a cold six pack of Black Label at two pm to get an early start on a long evening. By early afternoon the CD side of the store would be crammed with people, shuffling around one another, jockeying for an advantageous view of the racks of used cd’s and vinyl records. By 1994, we had opened up the Used Kids Annex, which was the “collector’s” side, although the philosophy of the establishment was not to ever have collector prices. Dan Dow’s motto was “get the music to the people” which translated into an almost idealistic socialist idea of music; it should always be affordable. Music may have been a commodity but we felt that it should be an inherent right first and foremost, of course, later as the burned timbers of the music industry crashed around our bewildered, frightened heads we had no choice but to embrace e-bay and other “collectable” venues. But the early nineties were the salad days of music buying, the proverbial party before the dawn.

The Annex was run by a gentle soul, Dave “Captain” Diemer, a large man who had a striking resemblance to Richard Brautigan. Cap at one time worked at Moles Record Exchange with Dan and later ran Capital City Records, the collector’s offshoot of Singing Dog. Dan loved Cap with all of his heart and soul, and Captain was as kindhearted as he was large, a tall man with a bushy white mustache, slightly stooped he lived a life that had captured the essence of the sixties but was cynical enough to embrace the sounds of punk rock and heavy metal. He loved the sweet melancholy sounds of Phil Ochs as well as the death sirens of “War Pigs” of which he could air drum every drum fill. Captain had the most stable family life of us all, an affectionate wife and a young son all living in a small tiny farmhouse in rural Delaware County.  Captain was the wise man in our world, one who presented an island of calm in the general neurotic filled days of our lives as we all crashed against the chaos and calm the sundered around us. He was always lending a bent ear to our tales, most mornings when I would bring him a large coffee with cream from Buckeye Donuts, he would beat me to my own punch, lean against me, slowly shaking his head he would mutter “I got so fucking drunk last night.” I never knew Captain to drink but he certainly was accustomed to my proclivities.

The compact disc changed everything from the staid familiarity of the vinyl record, not so much because it sounded better (which it didn’t) but because it was much more convenient. The format duped the listener into thinking the sound was better, just because it had a cleaner sound but the CD lacked depth and the affable inviting sounds of vinyl. The CD did make music exciting again for people and for some years people rushed to replace their old scratched records with shiny new compact discs and Tuesdays (which is the national release day for records) meant something. Used Kids, as with hundreds of other small mom and pop stores across the county, became a destination point.

By nineteen-ninety-three, some bands had achieved legendary status in our lives, maybe not necessarily across mainstream America, we had yet to see the self-congratulating cynicism of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the make believe idiocy of Guitar Hero and for those of us who hid our lives deep inside our record collections we relished the moment to bump shoulders with some these legends. For all intents and purposes, punk rock was not yet thirty years old and for the most part the musicians we adored in high school were still making music. Because of the good easy access of Staches and the Newport, it was quite easy to chat up John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Pere Ubu, and Alex Chilton, whose early work helped shape our comfy world. The Ramones, had turned into a punk-rock version of the Grateful Dead at this point, not in any way to insult either band but they made their money by touring, releasing semi-pedestrian records every so often that was a facsimile to their braver, younger selves. The Ramones were giants in our eyes, pillars of our musical and philosophical foundation.  I had first heard the Ramones from the movie “Rock and Roll High School” which I saw in 1981. By the time I was fifteen I owned their first four records.

The Ramones played Columbus yearly, an annual stop at the Newport and at the Used Kids Annex to see Captain. Johnny and Joey never came in together but both would come in and see Captain and peruse the shelves for hours. Johnny was the bigger collector and he would be escorted to the dingy, damp back room to rifle through boxes of hard-to-find sixties garage and surf records. Truly, still a boy at heart.

We had two English gents working at Used Kids at that time, Colin Harris and Keith Hayward (who is now a semi-famous scholar) but quite English and charming in the old world ways. Keith was blond, handsome with a winsome personality that was skilled enough to entice any barmaid in town. Colin wore the dark morbidity of centuries old island living under the guise of his quick wit and eager thirst for draught beer. As I was standing up, slurping down a cold Black  Label beer one Saturday afternoon, Keith came barging in the front door of Used Kids. “Mate, you won’t fuckin’ believe it” he excitedly exclaimed, “but Joey FUCKING Ramone” just walked in the Annex!” In my knowing, been-there, seen-that voice, I replied “yeah, he comes in every year to see Captain.” “Holy shite!” Keith shook his head “ I had no idea” he muttered to himself. I asked him in anybody was manning the counter next door, “um, no but give me a beer.” I handed him a beer and he disappeared. A few hours later he appeared, “you won’t fucking believe this mate but fucking Johnny just walked in.” I told him to show him the stuff in the back and gave him a few more beers to settle his nerves.

I went over during a lull in the action, Johnny asked about Captain, who left early on Saturdays and chatted up Keith, by this time I had met so many of my idols that I was mostly concerned with how I was going to drink for the night and who I would meet. I was already past the hill on disenchantment and while it could appear that I was aloof perhaps even haughty, the feeling I felt was more insular and I realized that people are the same everywhere. Some of us were too narcissistic to bother. Johnny bought a stack of records including a “Wild Angels” soundtrack which he accidently left on the counter. He of course, got tax off. He told Keith and me to come around the back of the Newport that night and he would have some passes for us, as it was already seven o’clock and would be too late to put us on their guest list. After closing up shop Keith and I ambled up to Larry’s to procure a few more drinks so the buzz would peter out.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 35: Songs part one-Now, back to the suffering.

Songs. Pt one: Back to the Suffering, thank you.

We collected songs the way some people collect comic books, baseball cards or shoes, holding each song close to our hearts-an immediate mood changer. Everything was about either setting the mood, matching the mood or of course changing it. Growing up, feeling separated the sounds of music provided an elixir to a sometimes utter feeling of isolation that helped many of us through the suffering afternoons and evenings of adolescence. An opportunity to escape in our bedrooms, or when we hit sixteen in our cars, feeling a sense of escape as bald tires lifted us from the mundane often cruel existence of high school, forming rapid distance from a parking lot of rusted junkers and peers that were only peers by age not interests. An album was like a vacation, a chance to step into the life of someone bigger than life, who told a story that we could relate to and at times only dream about.

At the end of my fifteenth year, as another Ohio summer slowly cranked the humid grind of days, I heard Lou Reed for the first time as I picked meat off of fifteen boiled chickens in the kitchen of a small hippie Mexican restaurant in Athens, Ohio. Within two weeks I had half his catalog and later that summer Polygram released the long out of print (only fifteen years or so at that time though) Velvet Underground records. Providing my achingly boring existence with colors I thought only capable by moving to New York City, which seemed a million miles and countless years away. From there, I discovered a mountain of underground sounds such a R.E.M., The Replacements, the Lyres and a host of other bands arising from the underbelly of the vapid clean sounds of commercial radio. I was hosting my own radio show at Wittenberg University by the end of the summer, where I was exposed to even more music such as the Minutemen, Black Flag and English pop like Echo and the Bunnymen, early Adam and the Ants and Joy Division. I was prone to like the more pop oriented stuff associated with the Paisley underground,  the Long Ryders, Beat Farmers, and Let’s Active, my punk-rock credentials have always been more of an attitude than a sound.

When Jenny and I began dating within a year and half of my musical revelation, I suppose I appeared exotic, at least as exotic as a lonely but confident seventeen year old can appear in rural Clark county Ohio can appear. After school, the gravel parking lot of Northeastern high school would be filled with the canned sounds of Def Lepard, Hank Williams Jr., and early bland banal sounds of early hair metal which in one fell swoop took any danger left in rock and roll and bottled it for the safety of every Spencer Gift shop in every mall in suburban America. It was the bane of my existence, and I took it seriously. Jenny climbed the stairs up to my bedroom on our first date, as I had no job, no money and nobody at home to watch what I did. We carried a six pack of Pabst Blue label and I opened her eyes to the sounds of early R.E.M., Lou Reed and early Bowie which she had never heard. I had about seventy records at that time, and 100 cassettes, she had never seen so much music. Perhaps it was the sound of the unknown that propelled her to fall in love with me. She had never heard any Rolling Stones besides the hits off of “Tattoo You” and “Satisfaction”, so hearing “Some Girls” and “Sticky Fingers” helped lay the ground for me to present myself as someone who I wasn’t quite sure who I was to the funny, eccentric girl of seventeen.

All most of us wanted to ever do was to listen to music, to have temporary deliverance from the reality of our surroundings, an atmosphere that at times inflicted tiny pointed darts of pain in all of our lives. Witnesses to the bruised and at times, bludgeoned emotional lives of our parents, music was (and is) the balm that allowed a mind to turn off and get lost in the wonder of being. It helped that our parents were either unavailable or scattered in the morasses of their own lives and insanity that they couldn’t pick up on the comical dangers of the Ramones or tender loss of the Smiths, it was our own secret. At times, this was the equivalent of hugging a building for redemption.

As the door to the bedroom or car shut, the stereo turned to ten, head bouncing, cracking-out-of-tune voice bellowing out the words to “Bring on the Dancing Horses”, I was fortified for moment. And when the song ended, it was back to the suffering.

Jerry and I met, we immediately found the kindred spirit of songs, of a hook that could flinch you away from now and fling you to there. There being, the space between emotion and dreams, of feeling pleasantly lost while three chords matched whatever feeling you had. For Jerry, his musical upbringing was graduate school compared to mine, by growing up in Parma, at the metaphorical foothills of the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, he had the luxury of hearing first hand (while in high school) such wonderful sounds as the Mice, Death of Samantha and Spike in Vain and was only a few short years removed from The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu and the Pagans. Jerry was a romantic at heart, whose hope for a life that only existed among the sung and written word would always tragically disappoint him. This romantic ideal would always show when he played solo under the moniker of “The Cocaine Sniffing Triumphs” (itself a homage to The Modern Lovers), as he always covered The Ramones “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”

and:

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 34: A Sense of Right and Wrong

A Sense of Right and Wrong

No matter how splintered life had become, there are those among us who never fail to acknowledge the suffering of others. This could be that there is a part of every person that realizes that as long as breath escapes one’s lips, there is always someone worse off, and in the gesture of recognition we somehow alleviate our own suffering no matter how intense it may be. For some this comes easy, for others they may need to find the darkened stained-glass environments of a church or the corners of bookstores and libraries learning how to trap compassion into words.

Jenny’s mother was one of these people, a woman who would offer the food off of her plate to feed a troubled high-school kid. With a shortened sixties bee-hive this thin woman would startle a room by her misgivings of various television shows, one time she exclaimed that Freddy Kruger was “the trashiest man I have ever see”, and another time stated in reference to “Revenge of the Nerds”, shaking her head, “my heavens, well nerds are people to!” I quickly nodded my approval.

My grandmother, due to untold suffering in the Second World War, was a hoarder, one who had a multi-colored collection of empty egg cartons stuffed under varying sizes of plastic bread bags filled with coupons, cut-out photos of flowers, teddy-bears and used stamps. For years, her living room consisted of varying paths leading to chairs and the television, rugs covered by thick plastic protectors that could have been used for industrial use. Magazines, stuffed animals and Kleenex boxes formed miniature mountains throughout her house, with Cheeto tubs and Triscett boxes strewn along the paths to offer fortitude for the weary traveler who dare traverse the house on Boxwood Drive. One time at an all-you-can-eat Ponderosa I witnessed her stabbing my uncle Peter in the backside of his hand as he tried to steal a spoonful of mayonnaise and cheese from her bowl of uh, mayonnaise and cheese. It wasn’t as if my family wasn’t kind it is that for some, empathy was something to look for, a search for betterment that needed constant feeding.

Jenny has always had a heart bigger than even her thirst for the drink. In the summer of 2005 rolled on, she was staying in the ravine. The ramshackle camp she lived in was fraught with fights and the seething discomfort that only a homeless camp combined with the thick acrid wave of humidity that only Central Ohio spews forth. At times, when I would go looking for her, the camp would consist of only two or three men, men for whom time and weather had turned their skin leathery and their faces taunt with alcoholic poverty and vacant stares. “She ain’t here, there was some trouble last night and they took off up the ravine or they went by the river” one of them would bellow, “She’s with some safe guys, she’s alright but someone got cut here last night.” Traipsing down into the ravine, careful not to come into contact with any poison ivy I never felt fear but was always hesitant about what I may find. “Christ, what the fuck happened the last ten years” I would think to myself as I try to spy empty forty ounce bottles or fast food bags. Jenny had told me once that if you went deep enough into the ravine and arrived at the tunnel that connected the Glen Ellen Park you had gone too far, because the crack heads tended to smoke around the tunnel. It could get dangerous back there.

I walked about 100 feet back and didn’t find anything, except empty cans, no signs of anybody sleeping in the bushes. When this happened my insides would curl for a moment, an edge would climb up into my head and settle for most of the day. Sometimes, my wife would pick up on it and ask me what was wrong, depending on how severe my concern was I would tell her or not. She worried about me going to the camp, even though it was just a stone’s throw from out front porch. Our lives had changed dramatically in the past few years; we were more domesticated than ever before. She was getting ready to give birth to our first child; I was contentedly working at Used Kids and had returned to college. I had taken my Buddhist vows earlier in the year and was meditating every day, trying hard to extinguish the fires of attachment that still burden me to this day.

There is a time when frustration unattended turns into acceptance, I had quit wrestling with trying to save my high school sweetheart, the times of being the white knight had passed and I wrestled with just not acting on whatever though went through my head. Jenny would always appear in a few days, when the violence would settle down in the camp and it was safe to reclaim their small patch of concrete behind the Goodwill. Some of the men were in fact dangerous, one in particular, a tall man with a striking resemblance to Snoop Dog could be frightening in the manner in which he could switch. At first he had tried to protect her, and they were lovers briefly until she realized he occasionally smoked crack, when she rebuffed him he could turn violent and he would show up at the camp intermittently to harass her and her boyfriend. His name was Butch, he was roughly forty-seven and had sinewy arms that a lanky athletic body that betrayed the hard life he had lived. There were stories that he had done time for murdering one man and had perhaps killed another. He was respectful of me as all of the “tramps” were. Jenny, in her most romantic Hollywood way, referred to all of them as tramps and the camp was filled with these blighted men and women (only a few). She would build up my exploits and kindness to these folks, so when I came down offering coffee, White Castle hamburgers or bottles of water they would change their tone of voice as if I had some authority that I didn’t have. I just wanted to get her out of there.

Butch knew I was sober and once in a while he would talk to me about some of the 12-Step meetings I went to, which were a lot back then. He had experienced small steps of sobriety over the years and we could talk about this and what his life was like. He would shake his head, look towards the pavement and say, “yeah, but that rock will get you every time.” I suppose it would but I always tried to squirm away from some of these conversations with the men. There is a maudlin stereotypical version to much of the speech used by homeless and criminal offenders, as if they had lost everything except a high school cliché of life that they desperately hung onto. I had tried most of my life to avoid clichés, not only verbally but especially living one.

When I would bring Jenny and her boyfriend food, she always first offered it to the other tramps, who would dig in with a gusto only found around dog shelters and kegs. She would wait until everybody ate. After living in the camp for roughly five months an outreach housing program helped get her and her boyfriend off the street. She had been housed since then, with two moves into better apartments during the past five years. It was not uncommon during the first several years to arrive at her apartment and find the floor littered with several tramps who knew they could count on the kind sympathy of Jenny. I would tell her, “You’ll get kicked out of the housing program if you let them stay here.” “Where are they supposed to go?” she would scowl back. “A shelter, they can go to a shelter.” With that one of the heads would rise up from the floor, the stench of stale alcohol spreading across the room in slow motion drift, “I ain’t stayin’ in no fuckin’ shelter!” For some of the tramps the shelters could be more dangerous than the woods, with more drug use than in the camps. For many of these mentally ill men and women, they were safer banding together with their bottles of booze and cans of soup.

Jenny was always like that, it was not uncommon for me to find some barfly, whose fingernails told the sure sign of homelessness on our couch with  a plate full of food and one of my Milwaukee’s Best ensconced in his hand. She would have had a happy hour pitcher with him or pulled him from the corner of Chittenden and High and brought him home to feed. I would let him finish, slip him a few bucks and send him on his way. Haranguing Jenny all the way back to our pitiful bedroom where she would hide under the blankets to get her verbal whipping. “One of these days, I’m gonna come home and find you dead and raped by one of these guys. Shit, you can’t save them all.”

Some years later as I sat talking to a friend and colleague who did a lot of work going into the homeless camps of Columbus, I had mentioned Jenny and inquired into whether he knew her. He did and replied, “Wow, what happened to her? Everybody knew her, at first we were like, is she a worker? But then we realized she wasn’t. I would think, how did she end up here?” I looked at him and said, “yeah, me too.”

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 33: Death and Life

Death and Life

Gainesville is a small town with an oversized university, filled with a heat that feeds the surrounding poverty like a polluted fog; you are either there for the University or to do your time in scrapping out subsistence that  at the end may wrap around your soul like the rapidly mushrooming fauna that covers the earth. The wildness of Central Florida moves quickly yet because the heat is so oppressive it is stealth-like, not only with nature but in the characters that inhabit the swampland. Everything stays green and as spring arrives in late February, the season eventually hinders everything just a bit greener and  incurs a desperation among the locals that requires many to set a great deal of their belongings in their yards every morning in the hopes that a passing excursionist may stop and pick up a souvenir on their way to Orlando or Sarasota. Florida is filled with fugitives and vagrants, folks who try in vain to settle in an unsettlable  and unstable land, hoping to carve out an existence that was impossible in their hometowns. These hometown being mostly from the Midwest and New York, snowbirds is what the locals refer to those who make a yearly sojourn in the winter months but a great deal of Floridians once resided in places such as Columbus, Albany and Dayton. There is a myth in America about the idea that people move west to pursue their identity, in fact when you live in the Midwest you head to Florida to discover the eccentric self. There was a reason the Jim Shepard once called Florida home.

The house was small, almost exhibiting two double-wide trailers, the only difference was that it was a real house and it sat on a small hill and had a basement constructed of dirt and mold. Across the street in direct antithesis of the emotional upheaval going inside of the house sat a plush green golf course, complete with ponds filled with deadly alligators and rolling soft hills. As a perfect symbol of the authentic in-authenticity of Florida, the white wooden fence that bordered the entire course was upon closer inspection made of plastic. I knew nobody in Gainesville, save two displaced scensters who knew of me through my days as a minor player in the American independent rock and roll scene. I didn’t even know my roommate in Florida when I moved there, this roommate was in fact my wife and we had managed to grow so far apart while we lived separate lives both physically and emotionally the prior six months. It could be said that for the both of us, we were strangers not only to each other but to ourselves.

Cracked, and broken, life had felt as if it were truly melting in the smoldering heat of Gainesville. We chose the house across for the serene golf course for a number of reasons, first it was only a ten minute walk from the University, quite literally it lie just beyond the shadow of the Florida University football stadium, know to the locals as the Swamp. Secondly, it was an easy walk from the two campus dive bars that I knew I would inhabit. I did not trust myself to be able to navigate my way through the crisscrossing streets of Gainesville, whose layout was most likely designed by a drunken fisherman. Nor, was I going to chance drinking in any of the outlying redneck bars scattered throughout the town, I could handle myself in the hillbilly dive bars of Ohio but woe to the straggler who ends up on the wrong barstool in central Florida. Arriving defeated, mustering up the energy to decide that life did not have to play out in the manner of all of my dear dead and insane friends, I threw my lot in with the vines, swelter and oddities of Gainesville.

I had come to some realization that I could not quit drinking by my own volition, no matter how hard I tried, once the drink was in my hand, my head would not rest until I had drank my fill. A drunkard’s fill is as bottomless as his loneliness, when it is assuaged another thought may come and pop the balloon of satisfaction that booze provides. It had turned into a terrible discomforting existence. The fact of the matter was I hid it well, especially in the cozy confines of my neighborhood bars back in Columbus. A drinker knows his fault lines and will plan his life accordingly, avoiding the missteps of bravery like a child skirting away from every crack to avoid breaking her mother’s back. The last chance to be vulnerable was one to be avoided, so the drinks piled on top of the drinks and the desperation of nightfall wrecked havoc on my mind. Upon my arrival, stripped to the nakedness of the reality of my own madness, I suffered through the days. Trying to mend wounds to my wife, whom I adored and had an unstoppable faith in me, I wandered. Clueless. I was a weeble-wobble that kept trying to fall down.

My best friend had died that year, my other best friend lived down the highway, cawing with the seagulls in Miami, she was more lost than I could have ever imagined. I started seeing a therapist who after about a month, thought there must be a mental illness that directed my odd thought patterns. I was referred to a psychiatrist who interviewed me for an hour and bluntly stated, “Well, I absolutely believe you are an alcoholic and you might also be bi-polar.” I left his office, excitedly telling my wife, “He thinks I’m bi-polar and I might be an alcoholic.” I couldn’t fathom not taking a drink. The next day, after drinking half a Natural Light with dinner I found myself entering a treatment center. Needless to say, I am not bi-polar, I just act that way when I drink for seventeen years straight.

Sobriety was difficult, throughout the first several years, I thought of my friend Jerry, whose own battles with the bottle were scorched into my mind like the veins in my forearms and of Jenny whose own battles took her on journeys that no-one should have to experience. There was never a day that I didn’t think of Jerry, and a great deal of my sobriety was dedicated to his memory for I felt I could taste the trueness of reality for both of us, no matter how frightening, fragile and delicate it appeared. I could envision Jerry, who at times was the gentlest soul I ever knew, poking holes in my soberness with his toothy cackle. A part of me thought he would never approve, but then I would think about the time when he confessed on the barstool of Larry’s that he was scared as hell to drink and I stared dumbly back at him. I had no answer. I still don’t. Although, I use our life together as a fuel to relish the mundaneness of a life that I strived to avoid.

When my daughter was born, I wanted to show Jerry this fine frail creature that was at once a part but also completely separate from my being that I helped make. He would have cooed at her, as his own vulnerability touched her own and she would smile back and his adult goofiness. He loved Tom T. Hall, as I do, and we would both sing “Sneaky Snake” together, Jerry would sing it with a lisp making the ridiculous song even more ridiculous. Today, it is permanently on my MP3 player, painful as it is upon the four hundredth listen but I smile at Jerry bobbing his head to it, envisioning him singing it to my children. My son turns two this month, a gorgeous blond boy with curly hair that captures light and absorbs the sun into his being. He is a testament to all that I couldn’t do but was willing to risk; the children an honor to two friends who stepped over the line and never quite came back.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 32: The Fruits of Happenstance part II

The Fruits of Happenstance part two:

Jeff Graham was a different sort of musician from the type that I was used to; he had short hair that was slightly gelled, he had good teeth, no tattoos and he drove a large Land Rover. This was in stark contrast to most of the musicians I had known, even the ones who I got to know through my being a middling promoter of smallish proportions. I was quite skeptical of Jeff, my biases towards others that did not co-habitat the insular world of which I flourished tended to have an adverse effect on my willingness to venture into any sort of semblance towards mainstream culture. An attitude for which I still cling to at times with a measured tone of sanity; I will not venture into a mall today nor have I ever watched a “reality” television show. Jeff was perhaps the first “professional” engineer I had ever met, in fact of all the artists I had dealt with over the years I can only think of a few who came across as treating their craft as a professional: Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu, John Cale, Walter Salas-Humera (of the Silos) and the saxophonist Charles Gayle. The rest of the people I bumped into in the confined indie-rock world seemed cut from the same cloth as me, somewhat surprised and nonchalant about building a career out of music and always willing to sit for a drink.

Getting to know Jeff was a joy, he was good humored but serious and he was able to help Jenny not to be lazy in the studio and with her music. She was able to adhere to Jeff’s direction and he could coax her with humor and an ever flowing storage of Dewar’s. The fact that she was playing with Dan Spurgeon, whose songwriting talent could be devastatingly powerful, provided her some of the needed self-confidence she may have lacked in her earlier endeavors. Like many of us, Jenny did not like to challenge herself, at times life is easier to take when the emotional muscles of intrinsic effort may take one of kilter. We grounded ourselves in alcohol, sex and music and to challenge one of these was a risk many of us were frightened to take. Jenny had learned from Bob Pollard that a song can be perfect when written as a whole that is all at once. She would write the melody and add lyrics later, usually just snippets of something she heard or at times she would borrow some of my poetry and use some of these.

On “Don’t Wait Up for Me” she started working a bit harder on her lyrics but at times she was still hesitant to make the songs longer or to try to fully tell a story. Jeff helped her with this and my own implorations always fell on deaf ears with her. We had too much history to be able to discuss her music. I had started dating my future wife shortly before the making of this record, and I would drag her to the studio and we would huddle around the large console that took up a large part of the basement studio. Drinking beer and doing shots as Jeff played back the songs, my wife must have thought that my life was much more exotic than it really was. Boy, was she in for a wake-up call.

As the songs started to evolve I sent a few off to my friend James Hunter who was a freelance writer and worked as a scout for several record companies. James is a thin man, whose family provided him with an impeccable taste in music, fashion and the arts, his tastes run to the far end of sophistication but he is discerning enough to understand the loveliness of a Patty Loveless or Pet Shop Boy song over the annoyance of standard pop fair. I had met James several years prior as he introduced himself to me at Used Kids, he would venture up from West Virginia periodically to the bright lights of Columbus as it is often said in Kentucky and West Virginia: “readin, writin, and route 23”. As many of from the southern border states would make the exodus up Route 23 to the hopeful jobs of Franklin County. Jim introduced himself and we hit it off, he was an early supporter of Guided by Voices and he later interviewed me for a story on the underground scene for the New York Times. We hit if off over our joint fondness of classic pop and country music, with our ears perking up to the refined sounds of country stars such as Dwight Yoakum and Merle Haggard to mutual appreciation of the euro-beat sounds of Erasure and New Order to the epic vocalizing of Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield. Jim did not have the fondness of punk rock that I did nor did he embrace the DIY aesthetic of the independent scene that I so readily embraced. The Smashing Pumpkins (whom he adored) were the yin to my yang (Mudhoney) whom he did not appreciate as I did.

Upon receiving the initial tapes I sent him, James called me almost immediately, with a hurried voice full of excitement he exclaimed “this is the best demo I have heard since Basehead and Matthew Sweet.” He could not wrap his mind around the fact that this was Jenny singing, he had met her a few times at some of shows we attended. With her western-southern Ohio drawl, a propensity of saying whatever arouses in her gin-soaked brain, Jenny did not always make the best first or fourth impression. She was liable to snicker in your face with an inside joke that she barely understood herself that could be off putting, but here she was on tape, summoning the sounds of emotional profoundness as she dredged up forlorn darkness into a perfect three minute song.

James was working closely with EMI records at the time, with Davitt Sigerson, a long-time music producer (David & David, The Bangles, Tori Amos) who just took over the failing American branch of EMI Records. He asked me to send a few of the tracks Jenny was recording to Davitt and in a few weeks Davitt asked if Jenny could come and play New York. Jenny and her band had not yet played out, in fact she had not played with a stable backing band in nearly five years, and her live band always consisted of generous souls such as Wil Foster, Jovan Karcic and Derrick DeCinzo.  Davitt seemed serious, and I assume that he thought I would be more experienced than I was having run a label for nearly half a decade and working with various labels and bands over the years. I was a novice, in over my head as I was from the day I was birthed.

In the mid-nineties as the underground scene became above ground commodity there were odd marriages as major labels realized that there was something happening that they did not quite understand. As the business model they were used to shifted under the weight of Nirvana, Pavement, The Smashing Pumpkins and Helmet there were shot-gun marriages of authentically independent labels such as Matador with Atlantic then with Capital, Caroline with Virgin, Amphetamine Reptile with Atlantic and the labels were on the constant hunt for the next independent cash-cow. A readymade band for the masses to swallow without much work or planning. This very rarely succeeded and when it did the results usually ended in disaster such as the case of Nirvana and end the ruined musical careers of countless vital bands. In Ohio the amount of failed experiments could be found in every town: Gaunt, Scrawl, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Big Back 40 and V-3 (Columbus), Ass Ponys (Cincinnati), Snapdragons (Athens), Gem  & Bill Fox (Cleveland).

Moviola were starting to record their follow-up to “The Year You Were Born” and were interested in recording in a studio that couldn’t fit into a shoe box and started to record a few songs with James at Diamond Mine. This was not a good marriage but it did garner the interest of Davitt who became interested in signing Anyway to EMI with Jenny Mae and Moviola the two flagship artists. To me this was akin to betting on any Cleveland sports team to win any championship, but I was willing to listen as I took every day as something to beholden. Nothing appeared to phase me, with the exception of the endless stream of precarious romantic relationships I found myself in. I desired nothing more than to feel comfortable with a woman who felt comfortable with me and the way I lived my life. Davitt was working as a consultant on the Blondie comeback record (“No Exit”) and told me that Deborah Harry  was interested in recording one of Jenny’s songs called “Hey Baby”. Much of this would hinge in the New York show. With a handful of practices we left for New York, I had been able to secure a show at Brownies which had always been kind to Columbus bands. Jenny would play an earlier show at nine pm and then would have to leave.

We arrived early and headed to a western themed bar just down the block that I had drank in on previous trips, I quickly met up with my friend Ron who would end up putting out the next Moviola record. His lawyer was a bartender at the bar. Jenny walked in and stumbled out after an hour. Wearing my scraggly clothes, a thread bared SST t-shirt and frayed jeans, unshaven and with an eight hour car ride chased by two hours in a Manhattan country bar I met the President of EMI records. Davitt was a large man, he smoked a cigar that was as large as my wrist and seemed unmoved by my offer of drink as I explained in the most Midwestern manner that I could fathom “we were drinking free”. James was there, he appeared a bit nervous while I was quite content with the way my world was functioning the prospect of teaming of EMI did not move me either way. I would have been relieved if the larger label would just as soon Jenny and Moviola and leave me to lurk in a record store abode, content as a cat in a sunbeam.

Davitt and James sat at table off to the side of the stage, and I huddled at the bar, not knowing what to say to the ambassador of music professionalism. It was not apathy that enveloped my life it was more of being completely unskilled in any sort of communication outside of what was familiar. Choosing the underbelly of life is a pragmatic choice, one made in increments and in short life decisions, dropping a class followed by dropping out of school. Exemplified by staying out too late on a Tuesday night followed next by the Wednesday and Thursday nights, choosing a job that allows extremely casual clothes and times that are congruent with week-night drinking and dancing. When this world is as welcoming as an impassioned lover the disdain for the other side of life grows up and around the philosophy of skepticism of all things conformist.  My pod was just fine, thank you but at the same time I yearned for Jenny and Moviola to have large-scale success as I did for all of my friends. I was happy to be a conduit to their success, although I did not necessarily want a piece of it.

The club was half filled when Jenny played, a few fans were there, James McNew from Yo La Tengo and Lisa Carver were present and I was pleased an old girlfriend of mine showed up perhaps I thought, she will invite me home. Jenny played a ragged set, the band was dressed in suits and this was their first live show together, she was visibly drunk her nervousness showed like a pimple on an otherwise clear face. Any sophistication that was evident on the recordings was displaced by too many glasses of Dewar’s and Iron Horse beer. After the show, Jenny stumbled up and met Davitt; she grinned and patted his large belly. That sealed the deal, he was no longer interested. Not only that but any talk of Deborah Harry recording one her songs went out the window with the ill-fated tap upon the stomach of the President of EMI. Shortly thereafter, the recordings that Moviola were making with James disintegrated into infighting and apprehension made it evident that neither Moviola nor EMI were interested in one another. Jenny would continue to record “Don’t Wait Up For Me” not concerned about the brief flirtation with a major label, as we scurried back to Ohio filled with one night of free booze and the pleasure of seeing old friends. I made it back to that ex-girlfriend’s apartment only to throw up and pass out before I could display any of my refined cuddling tools.  The puking a perfect metaphor for the trip.

davitt sigerson

davitt sigerson

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 31: The Fruit of Happenstance part one



The Fruit of Happenstance part one.–1995-1996

“How to kill a frog?” is a question that has never entered my mind, in as much as being to ask myself a question on how to stitch a pair of jeans together. There is a saying that pertains to boiling a frog slowly and the frog becoming used to the warming water and finally being unable to escape the clutches of the water as it starts to rage around the poor critter. In this manner so it went with some of the madness that not only shrouded our lives but also provided the stability to enjoy the water as is rose around us. There were happy coincidences  that paved the way to finding company in fits of panicked loneliness where one would find themselves talking to the bass player of band passing through town and discovering her best friend went out with a local lead singer or even the fact that her favorite obscure song is not so obscure to you. These were the breathtaking episodes that have long provided the mini-oasis’s of my life, for a moment when the world would halt around dim-litted beer signs and the skinny shuddering of a bare chested man, belting out “this is a job for a stupid man…” as he would slither across a crowd of other like minded rabble who cursed day jobs of slinging paper into feeders or food on plates. In that scene everything would breathe in at once and then freeze, like a Nike sports commercial where the athlete hovers in the air in science fiction fashion, I starred in my own science fiction where reality would peer through as if blanketed in mask made of panty hose. I could see the outlines but never the details.

Shit just fell in our lap; karma meant nothing as there was no sense of order in an existence that was constructed out of attention deficit disorder cement. In the summer of 1995 as I lurched through a marriage and divorce that grabbed and shook all of the disappointment from a childhood designed by escape the music was the only promise that held true. Jenny was in New Orleans, living the life of a bohemian that many of us in Columbus only pretended to be, she had left the past behind as she ran from her future. Her apartment was just off the French Quarter, working as a waitress she and her husband at the time, spent evening in the jazz clubs she adored and she painted and grew her flowers in a small courtyard directly behind her house.

Ted Hattemer and I assembled her debut album and I hated her idea of the cover, I should have trusted my instincts and used just one black and white photo of her as a naked child smiling as she was showered with the garden hose. That year, the dinky little label that Jerry and I started just a few years would release four full length records through Revolver USA. The promise that Jerry had bellowed in my ear that we would be self-sustaining appeared to be happening even if my utter accident.  In fact, in hindsight it was amazing that we could even get records shipped out on time, as only recently I discovered a check of $22 from Comm Four, a tiny distribution company in New York dated from 1993. Revolver USA was at this point completely funding the label, with a belief that some of the international and national press that music from Columbus was garnering would translate into sales. Years later I have a garage filled with physical copies of mis-guided faith in my business acumen.

We did not realize that some of the fuel that made us burn could also consume our everyday existence as evidenced by the marriage and divorce that rocked my little rock and roll world that year. Instead of celebration I was wrecked with self-doubt and reservation. Jenny appeared to enjoy New Orleans but she got the itch to return to Columbus and soon was living in the little green house directly behind what now houses The Bourbon Street and Summit nightclubs. Upon returning, she hooked up with Jeff Graham, who owned a small basement studio on the outskirts of what can only be referred to as the hood.

Diamond Mine studios was housed in a small pillbox styled house in the Linden area of Columbus, an area that my mother grew up in. During the forties this area was populated by many of the returning G.I.s who would use their GI Bill money and live in this new developed neighborhood. Stretching from just north of downtown Columbus, Linden is bordered by the I-71 freeway directly to the west and Cleveland Avenue which shoots out of downtown in an angled line like a bullet from a gun. Linden was a victim of white flight in the mid-fifties, and my mother’s parents were the only white family to stay in their house on 19^th Avenue and Hamilton. Diamond Mine lay just to the north of this house, and today the neighborhood is pocket-marked by blocks of suburban bliss only to be rudely accented by the next block housing boarded up crack houses and gun shots borne out of frustration and confusion.

I knew who Jeff was, he was in couple of bands that were of the college rock variety, whose influences would both consist of Elvis Costello and Kansas so I knew little of him. I was shocked when I was led down to the basement studio which was much larger and sophisticated than I had ever imagined. It was the real deal, not some crappy cassette 4-track set up on a case of Black Label beer with shitty Radio Shack microphones duct-taped to broken mic-stands. His sound board had different colored lights and could have from a set of Star Trek. He played me some of the new songs Jenny was recording with him, Dan Spurgeon and Sean Woosely. The sound was rich, deep and sophisticated; I could not believe my ears. I had no idea that Jenny could sing to well. Maybe she wasn’t such a fuck up as she hic-cupped her way around me in the cramped studio….