Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 30: Funerals and Winter

Funerals and Winter

Winters in Ohio are made of the emotional dregs of depression, the ashen polluted air of decrepit steel mills and coal mines and a landscape populated with battered hopes and forlorn thoughts. These somehow congeal together to make a gray morass of dingy desperate grey that rises with the fallen hopes of fall football fans stretching from Cincinnati (the Bungles), through Columbus (the Luckeyes) and settling into Cleveland (the Mistake on the Lake. This gray wraps around the skyline from November, just in time for most of the football Gods to have squelched any hope for a January championship, into the late blasting winds of March. It is unrelenting and oppressive, with an ability to cause statewide cursing on a daily basis by almost broken saddened masses who wrap themselves as snuggly as they can in winter coats, multi-colored scarves and wet boots that get their monies worth in the ever ending slush of winter.

There is a certain physical hardness that comes from living in Ohio, where brutal winter after brutal winter can shape a face into a soft enamel of skin. This is more from the neurotic impact of the never-ending gray than the wind and snow. Ohio lacks any semblance of a mountains and the haphazardness of the weather disallows such outdoor winter fare as pond skating, skiing or hockey so we naturally hold things in, wearing brave faces, drink beer and hone a cynicism that only a veteran bar-fly would appreciate. For many Ohioans, they go underground, hibernating in basement dens with large televisions, pizza and sports television thus resulting in bodies transfigured by lack of exercise and shitty food, bloated and immense as the depression that festers inside the girth. For others of us, we pined for escape through art, music, treadmills and alcohol we found our relief in stumbling through the slop of icy mud while we looked for our cars that we only parked a few hours earlier. I am not certain if there are any studies on the rise of alcohol sales and the use of anti-depressants in the winter months but I am quite certain that in Ohio these tend to skyrocket.

Jerry passed away in January, it was fitting that his death arrived amid snow drifts and the general crappiness of Ohio weather. Where the general mood is “what the fuck else can go wrong”, where many people tend to take the weather personally as another gray filled day is an act from God, exacting one more piece of a bruised soul. Anyway, this was how I felt when Jerry died, I had suffered from depression for many years and the old ways of dealing with it were drying up as much as I was trying to keep them wet. The music scene was changing for me, and much of my hopes in bands and artists were being vanquished by the personal choices the musicians were making. Jenny was living in Florida, having given up her music career as she stood on the brink of minor-celebrity in the indie-rock world, Moviola had shrunk from the favors of major-label overtures in favor of children and home buying, Appalachian Death Ride had basically ceased to exist as members battled their own demons, only the New Bomb Turks were still making music. Jerry was dead and I felt my life was now being defined by lose.

The world was getting suffocating, the choices fewer and while not yet thirty-three I couldn’t see myself at forty yet alone at thirty-five. Instead of being an active participant, as I once was I struggled to find a place within my shifting existence. I was certainly becoming someone whom I swore I would never become, a cynical bitter shadow who ducked from participation to search for meager pockets of laughter and sex brought by the ingestion of alcohol. Even these once fantastical pursuits were shriveling up and unsatisfying. Jim Shepard had hung himself, his life defined by his rejected death, swinging by a belt fastened to a doorway whose sole purpose was to hold the weight of the walls above the passerby’s was now betrayed by the ultimate act of sadness. For myself, the suicide of Jim was an event that reached deep with my own psyche bringing a long thought act into fruition, it was as destabilizing an event as any as I had ever encountered. Until the death of Jerry.

Jerry’s funeral was planned by his family, who were sweeter than I would have thought, as for many years Jerry shied away from his upbringing as so many of us were prone to do. Our insular world was filled with familial outcasts who not only scattered far from our physical upbringing but tended to push the memories of broken childhoods away to be replaced by the swagger and commotion of searing guitars, cigarettes and laughter. These latter three ingredients were the saviors we always searched for, and for me they were being replaced by urns and pine boxes. Jerry was buried in Parma, Ohio and large working class suburb of Cleveland, filled with tiny shoe-box houses constructed after the Second World War to house the returning G.I.’s and their lustful spouses. I met his father, mother and younger brother, trying in vain to let them know the joy their son had brought to our confined world. How Jerry’s music had touched people overseas and most importantly been able to grant those who knew and love him a starting point for merriment and copious amounts of late night cackling. I don’t know if I ever came close to succeeding. Jerry, flinched with the sound of religion especially fundamentalist Christianity, he would badger me for my weekly attendance to mass and try in vain to poke holes in my belief in Catholicism. His funeral was rigid, with a large gathering of his friends from Columbus, Cleveland and Chicago crowded into the hard wooden pews that were symbiotic of the service. The pastor didn’t try to capture Jerry’s audacious sense of humor and was much more focused on the afterlife, with little semblance of hope for those gathered around his coffin that we could emerge from foolish lifestyles.

I had driven up with Brett Lewis and our friend Jim, my girlfriend was going to meet us up there for the funeral. They picked me up at my house, I brought along a bottle of vodka I had started to become friendly with and a twelve pack of beer. We landed in at the motel and caught up with Bettina Richards and Elliot Dix, a Columbus native who had become a fixture in the Chicago music scene. We went out to the small neighbor dive bars that Jerry no doubt would have inhabited if he chose to stay in Parma and laughed as we told ridiculous Jerry story after ridiculous story. When I walked into the funeral home the next day and saw Jerry laying in the casket I quickly turned heel and found a dive-bar just a muddle away from the funeral home. I had two doubles of Maker’s Mark and returned, emboldened by the alcohol I could now face my friend. I knew at that moment I had a very serious issue with alcohol.

Cleveland was gray with a callous skyline that heaved masses of smoke into the air, as if the smoke stacks that pocketed the area were upturned water faucets, gushing grayer into an already overflowing bathtub of sky. We huddled around his grave as tears fell to the ground and the shattered expressions blossomed around the cemetery, I felt guilty as I did not answer his father’s call for pall bearers. I wanted to hide somewhere but stood there with my back against a tree, muttering to our friends about the Jerry’s foolishness. Jerry’s parents made a beautiful gravestone for him, complete with a guitar carved into the granite surface. For them, the loss must have been greater as they never had the opportunity to know the sheer pleasure of their adult boy, only unanswered questions. I was too chickenshit to help them clean his house out, I begged off every opportunity I could as they made the trip from Cleveland; they were left alone to piece together his life over the past twelve years. Later, his father contacted me, asking for video of his son. I still haven’t gathered these together.

I quit drinking roughly over a year later; I had a very difficult year after Jerry died. A year filled with trepidation, loss, and eventually new awakenings. As, I traversed early sobriety, Jerry would flash across my mind and leave tiny bits of encouragement as I fought feelings of escape and angst. I was one of the only persons I had known to give up the drink at that time, a singular figure in my life held up by the unsettling events of my near past and the promise of strangers I had no idea existed. When my daughter was born nearly four years later, I would cradle her in my arms and think of Jerry. How much he loved kids, he loved to be silly and how much he would have loved my darling little daughter.  For once, I think Jerry would have been brave enough to tell me he was proud of me. For a moment even the gray of an Ohio winter, cast rays of light throughout my life.

photo by Jay Bown

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 25: The Kahiki

The Kahiki: 1986-1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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