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 and Jenny Mae part 29: Ohio

Ohio

Growing up in Ohio is different for all Ohioans, most because, like so much of the United States, Ohio is both vastly rural and also contains some of the largest and best known cities in the country. Everybody has heard of Cleveland and Cincinnati two large cities with history and reputations. Cleveland was populated by a large ethnic population from Eastern Europe, with massive Serbian, Hungarian and Czech immigrants who traveled west-ward to boil away their lives in the steel mills and manufacturing jobs of Northeastern Ohio. Cincinnati is nestled in the southwestern part of the state, just across from Kentucky; it is metaphorically across the invisible mason-Dixon line of Ohio. Hamilton and Clermont counties are two of the most conservative counties in Ohio, and while much of the state has overcome many of the racial tensions, Cincinnati with several large riots in the past two decades appears, at times mired in the early 1960’s.

Columbus would be that invisible Mason-Dixon Line, most people have heard of Columbus, the largest in terms of population of all the cities in Ohio it is mostly known as the largest college town in the country. A city that lives and breathes Ohio State football, which was mired in a multi-decade hangover after repeated defeats in the Rose Bowl that costs the saintly Buckeyes numerous National Championships. Even the smaller cities of Ohio are known, Toledo, Dayton, Canton and Akron have all garnered space in the minds of national citizenry, even if it is for such pop-culture phenomena as Corporal Klinger, the Wright brothers, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and rubber tires.

Then there is small town Ohio, with images of Sherwood Anderson, unlocked doors, county fairs filled with cotton candy and first kisses. An idealistic concept that feeds into the basic American dream that a small-town anybody can arise from corn-fields and hidden glens to climb into space like Neil Armstrong or John Glenn, the Presidency (seven of them-all mediocre hail from Ohio, or the silver screen such as Paul Newman and Clark Gable.

Because of its history and rich tradition, Ohio ranks fifth in colleges and universities which logically lead one to believe this is the reason it is home to so many artistic and inventive people. In spite of all of this, when one grows up in Ohio, one has the feeling of being the underdog, of someone who always just comes up short.

Ohio is known and felt as an also-ran, an area known for what it almost has but never had, and in fact never will. For an ocean we have a large lake, for mountains we have foothills and we are forever defined by our collective losses. Our sports teams are known for despair, in Cleveland it is brought out in such slogans as The Fumble, The Drive and losing the World Series with one out to go. Cincinnati is tethered to a football team better known as the Bungles and Ohio State Football went thirty years between National Championships and is better known now for losing two in the past five years. We are in our hearts cynical but lovable malcontents.

Musically, Ohio is rich, especially when it comes to punk rock, with an abrasive arty sound that helped birth the movement. Helped by the ample liberal arts colleges that dot the state, such as Oberlin, Kenyon and Antioch and huge state universities such as The Ohio State University, Ohio University, Kent State and Bowling Green. The arts scenes have always burped out terrific and idiosyncratic fare such as Pere Ubu, Devo, the Wolverton Brothers, the Dead Boys, and Guided by Voices. In the late eighties each town had its own brand that helped define and nurture the other bands and artists. Cleveland had the most excellent and under-appreciated Prisonshake, the Mice, Death of Samantha, My Dad is Dead and Cruel, Cruel Moon. Dayton had Guided by Voices. Cincinnati had the aforementioned Wolverton Brothers whose shambling country-art punk is as twisted as anything from a David Lynch movie, the Ass Ponys and the Afghan Whigs. Athens birthed Appalachian Death Ride and Geraldine, two sinister bands that would be at least marginally famous if they resided anywhere but Athens, Ohio.

In Columbus, we first had Jim Shepard (Vertical Slit/V-3), Scrawl, the Great Plains, the Gibson Brothers, Royal Crescent Mob, Boys From Nowhere and Mike Rep all made up of various odd-balls and characters who would play a huge role in the development of what is somewhat now being regarded as a high point in the Columbus underground scene. The specialness of that time was mostly due to the large and fanatical friendships and respect we had for not only one another but also for those bands that set the stage. Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae would both be besides themselves to share the stage with any Ron House fronted band and the same would be said for the New Bomb Turks who would open for any band they deeply respected, whether it be the Fastbacks (from Seattle) or Prisonshake.

We put stock in ourselves and to a large part, our friends. Friends who would carry the torch of loneliness offset by a burning desire to be heard and to hopefully lay next to another congenial soul by five am. Our hopes, crashed as theirs did when things did not quite pan out as we had planned. We were prepared for it, as it is in an Ohioan’s soul to step up to the plate and be called out by the proverbial sinker ball. Three strikes. The Trip. The Fumble. The Drive. Etcetera and so forth. Nobody got famous, nobody ever really made a dent in any product counting mechanism like Billboard, The College Music Journal or MTV but we loved and cherished one another as if our lives depended on it, night in and night out. What we discovered was the result wasn’t the prize; the prize was the friendship and the making of art for fuck’s sake. That is what an Ohioan does, not always stylish but always sincere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part ten: Guided by Voices

₁₉₈₉

One afternoon as I was perusing the middle island at Used Kids, which was filled with hundreds of $1 LP’s, I found a bright yellow record with blunted Times New Roman type-face and what appeared to be a smudge of  a thumb print. It looked fairly interesting enough, well enough for me to pick it up and flip it over. It was pressed in Dayton and had been just been released although the sparse cover art and the thickness of the cardboard sleeve made an impression that it was actually pressed in the late 70’s or early 80’s.  At that point in time, pre-blog, pre-online anything, pre-instant satisfaction and instant opinion one had to be a bit more curious about records.  Anything you bought may have an unknown quality to it, on one hand it could possibly change your life (like the first time I heard “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney) or it may prove that you wasted anywhere from $1 to $9 depending on the errant purchase, such as a vast majority of the dollar records.  At this time I relied heavily on Ron House and Dan Dow, who ran and owned Used Kids and who to this day have the most impeccable tastes and judgment in music that I have ever met. The name of the record was “Self Inflicted Arial Nostalgia” and it was by Guided by Voices.

Used Kids was started by Dan and Ron, as they shedded the shackles of Moles records and started their own store underneath the newly opened School Kids Records run by Curt Schieber. Kurt owned School Kids and his shop had once dwelled in the subterranean basement. Anyway, in 1989 I was still working at Discount Records, wearing a poly-cotton blend pant that chaffed my legs as I yearned to be free to not sell New Kids on the Block or the newly invented cas-single. I usually headed to Used Kids on my lunch break or if it were later in the day, I would stop in there as I headed to Larry’s to get a drink to tied me over the last few hours at Discount.  I was at that age, more knowledgeable in music than any sane twenty year old should be, where I could tell you how mastered every Elvis Costello or Randy Newman record but could barely handle long division. I had been living and breathing records for as long as I could recall.  I remember in 1977, pleading with my father in Kroger’s that I would be happy to eat eggs and cereal all week if he just spent the grocery money on three records.  Mostly likely Kiss or Stevie Wonder records.  When I was going to middle school in Athens I spent my afternoons behind the counter of a hole-in-the wall shop called “Side One Records”, I wasn’t allowed to work but the two guys who ran it let me hang out.  I can still remember them playing the hell out of a Herman Brood and His Wild Romance record. It was basically all I ever wanted to do besides maybe be a college professor. I never became a college professor but I did marry one. So one and a half of my dreams have been realized, anyway it’s probably funner to fuck a college professor than to actually be one.

After a short while, the two men at Used Kids gleaned that I knew my stuff musically, especially when it came to classical and most rock. I was soon doing short afternoon stints when I got off at Discount. Even though I was the manager of Discount, I felt a kinship and admired Ron and Dan a great deal.  I felt immediately invited into a small community that I had somehow already been born into. All I had to do was find it. I think the fact that Dan had noticed me at two very sparsely attended shows a Bogart’s in Cincinnati helped seal the deal (they were respectively the Proclaimers and Lucinda Williams circa 1988).

I suppose Jerry felt the same way, there was something about finding a community when you are in young adulthood, for most of us who were/are part of this small but vital scene in Columbus this meant a realization that for many of us only existed through the music and the books we listened to in high school. By submerging myself in the music I listened to growing up I was awakened to the possibility that there was a world that existed outside of Springfield, Ohio. We didn’t necessarily believe in the myth of rock and roll per se, in fact I believe we embraced the everyday possibilities that the type of music we listened to promised.  There was something bloated, sickening and skeptical about most of the force fed music of the late 70’s and 80’s.  Our idea of escape did not exist through a can of hair spray and the glorification of hookers but of the grimy world of the Velvet Underground, the subliminal humor of the Ramones, the geeky romance of Elvis Costello, the anger of the clash and the mumbling beauty of R.E.M.. Plus we wanted to dance, to feel the abandonment that punk rock promised and we wanted to be able to touch it and for most of us we wanted to help create that avenue of deliverance. For Jerry and I that meant having heroes, for both of us our heroes were not so much the kinds propagated on MTV or through Hollywood movies but the kind of people who you could sit down and have a beer with.  Ron, Dan and others along High Street had made music that was not just manufactured by companies out of town but were in fact very, very good. It meant the idea that the fellow selling you a quart of beer or serving you food could also be the one writing songs about your loneliness or the crush you had on that barmaid down the street. He may be actually be writing his songs about her.

We were not the kind to be blessed with beauty, we were not the captains of the football team or the cheerleaders but the ones who made wise-ass remarks and knew that high school wasn’t the best time of our lives, nor was it the worst, it was simply a time in our lives that had to exist. We had our defects whether they be physical, emotional or financial, we didn’t hide from them in fact we would grow to accent some of these whether it would be wearing outsized cheap glasses or writing songs with our hearts on our sleeves. Jerry would flat out say that he wouldn’t take his shirt off because his chest was concave, it was like “well big deal now that you told us just take the fucker off.”  We drank cheap beer because we had to, and we wore thrift store clothing not because it was fashionable but because we were broke, from shitty paying jobs and life choices that made our worlds a little less complicated and funnier than it really appeared to be.

I admired a man named Craig Regala who worked alongside his longtime girlfriend at Magnolia Thuderpussy records, I had an undying crush on her but with her being with him and at least twenty-six years old was way out of my league. When the north location of Magnolia’s closed, I hired Craig at Discount where we laughed at the insanity of a corporate record store. We would sometimes crouch below the counter as the other one rang up a pain-in-the-ass customer and pull our penises out and wiggle them around, just out of eye shot of the customer. Craig had about seventy-seven ear piercings in his ears and tattoos that didn’t consist of roses or naked ladies on his arms, he was funny as hell and insightful. He turned me onto Galaxie 500 and the fact that Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground was playing Staches up the street. Craig would later start Datapanik, the direct inspiration for Anyway. He served as a bridge to the other side, when I was young and living with Jenny. He took interest in the classic country music I had been listening to for several years.  He didn’t laugh when I tried in vain to grow a well sculpted mutton chops like George Jones, in early 1988. I was living with Jenny and much of the life we knew consisted of drinking twelve packs, and prank phone calling pizza joints and eating at the Wendy’s salad bar was a night out.  We were introduced to a world where everybody made an impact, where the genius really did live next door. It opened up the world as if we were toddlers discovering the magnificence of the back yard.

When I asked Ron about the yellow $1 record I was holding in my hand, he said it was decent and that a customer from Dayton sold it.  The customer was the singer in the band. I took the record home and was impressed, not blown away, it lacked the sonic wonderment of their next few records but it was especially catchy, especially “Navigating Flood Regions”. In a few years Bob Pollard would make a bi-weekly journey to Used Kids to work with Mike “Rep” Hummel on his next couple of records and I would get to know him pretty well. He was like the rest of us, with a bit of the manic frenzy Jerry had but with a slight hint of some sort of autistic brilliance about him, he was funny, gentle and extremely eager. Gaunt would be the first band I knew to realize the talent of GBV when they recorded an excellent cover of “Quality of Armor” for a label called Bag of Hammers. Jerry and I loved it when Bob and some of the other Guided by Voices crew came up; they were always polite and deferential to us about music. We drank with them and Kevin Fennell didn’t drink, I was blown away by this because the others ones drank like we did, which meant a vast amount. The drinking didn’t appear to impair their lives as nurses, teachers and artists as it didn’t appear to adversely affect our lives as record-store dudes.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part seven

There is a movie theater just up the road from campus smack dab in an older residential neighborhood, the theater is one of the oldest in Columbus but during the era of multi-plexes the theater struggled. For a while it had to resort to tactics to get people to view a movie, it had a bar, offered pizza and charged only $1.50 for most second run movies during the nineteen-nineties. It would also offer late night fare such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and midnight viewings of Animal House or science fiction movies. One weekend Jerry and I double date and see a double feature of Mel Brooks’s films, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” We were both too young to see them in the theater when they came out. His girlfriend Jill and my wife at the time, Robin are close friends and always seems to have the opportunity to talk about how disappointed each one of them is with Jerry and me.

Neither one of the women really wanted to spend a Saturday evening in a bar masquerading as a movie theater watching two old Mel Brooks movies with their drunk boyfriends.  We could not understand why, for us this was the perfect night out. We had both spent the majority of the day getting loaded at Used Kids, Saturday’s were the busiest day of the week for us and I worked a ten hour day. Drinking usually started around three on Saturdays, and I would go to Larry’s at five for a couple of drinks consisting of either Maker’s Mark or a few Kamikaze’s before heading back for the last few hours of work. When the music got louder and the laughter was just as intoxicating as the Black Label beer we were drinking. We usually had regulars on these nights, just like a bar, a few customers who could come down and have a few beers while perusing the racks of records and CD’s. Bystanders just enjoyed the show. Jerry and I would take turns manning the turntable, alternating between punk rock favorites or George Jones, sometimes we would put on some comedy records such as the Jerky Tapes or Robert Schimmel.  I am sure on the night of “Blazing Saddles” we listened to a great deal of the comedy stuff.

We decided we would walk to my house after we closed, “Blazing Saddles” started at nine, we would meet the girls at my house. Jerry and I never made it there, we stopped at Larry’s and slowly strolled up High Street, stopping at Dow’s on High, Dick’s Den and then finally at the Blue Danube. We had walked right past my street. I phoned Robin who said they had been waiting; her tone was not conducive to laughter.  Jerry was leaning against the bar, chatting with the bar-maid, he glowed like a lantern on Hallows Eve, his ass crack sticking up from his black grimy jeans. He never wore underwear. In fact he came to me one afternoon after a Gaunt tour and said that he had a urinary track infection.  I was stunned, “I thought only women got those?” I replied. He lowered his voice and said “My doctor said I got it cause I don’t wear underwear and I only have a few pairs of jeans.”  I looked back at him as if he were an alien.

At the Dube he spied me from the corner of his eye, he leans back, putting the ass crack to bed “lemme guess, they are pissed off.”  The air in my balloon has not been sucked out yet, laughing with familiarity “of course they are, what did you expect?”  The kinship of disappointment was something we shared; it bonded us and directed us forming a steering wheel that chose our path through our lives. We intersected in all the right and wrong places, the weight of a relationship both crippled and fueled us with a sense of joy that ended up blinding us through the self doubt that we would need a pair of Wellington’s to wade through.

Jill was the most serious relationship that I ever saw Jerry partake in, he wrestled with this particular one than any other, he would haggle with me and my pre-occupation with striving to have a legitimate (i.e. stable) relationship with a woman. I was always in a drama soaked relationship, afraid of one-night stands I would jump from a series of women as I struggled to find a balance between staying out most nights and being at home with someone who wanted more than beer breath and a staggering gait at three am. Jerry’s advice always went something like this, “stay away from her, she is just a crazy as the last one.”  He said this for most of the women I went out with. I marveled at the way he could spend the night by himself; for myself I needed a warm body close by just to prove to myself that I was still alive.  This wasn’t just about sex it was about holding onto something that I never knew, I needed something after the laughter dissipated into the faint yearning of last call to get me through the next four hours. Jerry on the other hand, was content to sleep alone, as if getting close to someone betrayed an inner promise not to let anybody through his emotional gate. He could be almost monk-like.

In terms of a double date, the evening was a disaster, by the time we hooked up with the two women who must have been energizing one another’s disgust with us; Jerry and I were quite wasted.  As we sat at the bar of the Blue Danube, we did not have any insight into our equilibrium, leaning against one another, preparing ourselves for the laughter that would ensue when the movies started we were well flushed with booze and anticipation. We egged each other on, to the chagrin of anybody within earshot. Really, there was little need for our mates at this point in the evening, it would have been best if they had bailed on us. When the two women arrived with looks of consternation on their faces, we grinned as they shook their heads at us, at first the women protested about even going to the movie. It was late, the first movie had started and besides we promised them dinner. “Just get something to eat here” we said, “oh, and by the way we aren’t hungry.”  We both knew that a meal would slow the buzz that was building into a ferris-wheel in our brains. This was an offer that was an insult, apparently we had promised a real meal, one that entailed a waiter in a uniform, a table cloth and bathrooms that didn’t have miniature cockaroaches climbing up the walls..  It would not be tonight.

We stumbled to the theater, arriving mid-way through “Blazing Saddles” which annoyed the women even more, for Jerry and I this was now the most important event of our lives, even if we had missed half the film already.  Immediately our girlfriends found us past annoying, we were laughing too hard, there was no way a movie could be as funny as we thought it was.  They left us at the theater, they would never understand us we said to each other, and no doubt this was the same conversation the women were having as they walked home alone. Jerry and I stayed through half of “Young Frankenstein” before deciding we needed to go dancing, we breathed in the autumn air and felt reinvigorated, and managed to squeeze another round of drinks at the one bar on the way home. Telling each other that it was women who just didn’t understand, that the expectations they placed upon us were too much, too unrealistic, too unreasonable and that they lacked the ability to enjoy life as we did.  By the time we arrived at my house, it was just past midnight, I would have to drive us to the disco and we had gone about twenty minutes since the last drink. I had climbed over the edge of my buzz by that point and had settled into the slow comfort of exhaustion.  I had no desire to go dancing, besides Robin was still up, I saw the television flickering in the living room.  Jerry said he was going to head for a few more drinks at Dow’s or Larry’s and go to bed. He swayed off into the streetlights, cigarette in one hand the other hand buried in his coat pocket and I went inside and tried to make amends.

When Jerry was creating “Kryptonite” and “Yeah, Me Too” we were both struggling to balance a romantic relationship with our own sense of identity which involved a belief in our life style and a romantic sense of being an artist, a bohemian if you will. This was a chasm that for both us would not be reconciled with the women we were involved with, it was one that would most likely only be bridged by life experience, of figuring out how to compromise and be totally present in a relationship. Jerry tried his best with Jill; he had this belief in the wholesomeness of romantic commitment that bordered on complete fantasy.

For instance here was a Thanksgiving dinner that my wife and I had at our house, where my family was invited. My sister, who was a double divorcee was there with her two young daughters and she introduced herself to Jerry. Her license plates read “socr mom”.  Jerry developed an instant crush on my sister, I was completely perplexed by this, and for my sister was the epitome of middle-class. Living in the suburbs, she tried to construct the all-American household that I had no use for. Two kids, cat and a dog, she wore sweaters and loved Rod Stewart, and not the early stuff, the later 80’s version. And yet, here was Jerry obsessed with my  sister and his idea of her life, I knew her struggles with divorcee and the fear of raising two young daughters alone and attending college at night. Jerry had no idea of the incredible sacrifices she had made with her life, sacrifices that I could not fathom because I was to chickenshit to even try.  Jill, on the other hand was much more sophisticated than my sister, I could see where men would be attracted to Jill, and she had a cynical tongue that carried ingredients for laughter when she spoke. She was a tiny woman, with a black bob haircut and who pushed flirtation to the border of total come-on. She once gave Robin advice on men, “just give them a blow job on the first date and they will do anything for you.”  Looking back, Jerry had always tried to meld to incompatible parts to one another, hence the friction that boiled over in every part of his being.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part six

Year: 2001

I am living in Gainesville Florida where my wife has taken a position teaching at the University of Florida; it is a dream job for her.  In Gainesville, I find myself drowning in sorrow intermingled with a smidgen of hope wondering how I managed to slip on my future while being paralyzed by my past.  Jenny is living in Miami with her then husband David and working as a bartender in an exclusive rich-mans dive bar, situated amongst the docks of Coconut Grove.  My short marriage has fallen apart and I am going insane.  I call Jenny and she suggests I drive down and visit her for a long weekend, since I don’t have a job I decide it’s a good idea.  The drive is only about four hours long and I make it without having to stop and get a drink, I smoke and listen to music.  My attention is solely focused on the doom that is my life.

I call ahead and Jenny tells me to park next to the Dade County Courthouse which is nestled between the piers and the city of Coconut Grove.  I get out of my car wondering what I am doing in Miami.  It is January and the wind is brisk, I think to myself that I should have brought a coat.  Within a few minutes I spy Jenny and David walking towards me along the side of the road that borders land and ocean.  Jenny gives me a hug and asks me how bad it is, I am near tears and reply “bad”. I shake David’s hand and he says we’ll go get a drink. First we need to drop my bag off.  I look around for their car but I am reminded that they don’t live in a house any longer. We walk to one of the endless piers and climb down into a small dingy.  We climb in what must be a dingy version of a Pinto, it is amazing the few pieces of board even floats.

Jenny and David moved out of their house about and year and a half ago.  They decided that they could live in house boat and not pay any more rent.  They have two dogs, and a pet bird.  They somehow came to the conclusion that two dogs and a bird would also enjoy living on a boat.  We climb into the dingy, three people and two Labrador retrievers, named Maggie and Chicken respectively.  The boat they bought for nearly two thousand dollars is nearly forty years old and at one time it must have been gorgeous.  It has a finished wood interior, a small kitchen, and a living area complete with a stove and refrigerator.  Jenny tells me the bathroom doesn’t work and shows me a bucket if I have to take a shit.  I raise my eyebrows and she tells me “oh, don’t worry about it we do it all the time.  Either that or you can try to lean over and take a shit off the side of the boat or wait till we get on land.”  She says this matter-of-factly as if this is just a normal thing for a person to do.

We drop my bag off, I am shown the bed where I spent New Years Eve the previous year. It is made up of two water proof pillows laid out near the rear of the boat; I am not exposed to the elements with a small alcove made of a large overhanging window and a small door just above my head and bent knees.  We go back ashore and Jenny says we are going to first go to the Tattletale; a dive bar in the truest sense of the word.  I spent the previous New Years at the Tigertail and it struck me then as bordering the precipice of utter madness and absurdity.  I don’t feel like going to the Tigertail I suggest to  Jenny maybe we could go somewhere else.  She shakes her head and says she wants me to talk to her friend Albert, who is a non-drinking millionaire that spends most of his days in the Tigertail fending off an unpleasant marriage by watching people slowly destroy themselves.  I have no desire to speak to neither Albert nor anyone else, I want to dive into a deep sleep and wake up to have my life miraculously changed and I know the Tigertail cannot help with this.  As my New Years Eve memory came flooding back, all I can think of is that the Tigertail is a spooky place where people drink cans of beer and snort lines of coke off the bar. Nobody smiles and everybody is jumpy and suspicious. Not a real big pick-me-up of a place.

The Tigertail is owned by a former light heavyweight contender named Bobby Dykes who once fought Sugar Ray Robinson and who also lost a title fight with Kid Galivan in the early 1950’s.  When we enter Jenny says hello to him and he says hello back, he is medium built with white hair.  Jenny introduces us and he looks past me as he shakes my hand with a handshake that is as soft as tissue paper.  We sit at the bar and the bartender is a woman named “Noelle” but when she turns her back Jenny mouths “Snowelle” and holds her index finger up to her nose and sniffs.  Sensing my discomfort Jenny tells me that we won’t stay long and I lean over and tell her that I do not want a repeat of my previous visit to Miami.  She assures me that this won’t happen but I feel that I can’t trust her.  Sure enough, we meet her hook up in the Tiger Tail while Bobby Dykes who appears to be more punch drunk or just plain wasted hovers in the background.  I spend the rest of the evening driving around Miami while Jenny and Dave try in vain to hide a cocaine addiction that has so far only cost them their house and van.  Everywhere we stop to get a drink one of them runs into the rest room, we end up back at the Tiger Tail Lounge on three separate occasions during the evening.  I am wasted and even more disgusted.

The next day I realize that there is nothing Jenny and Dave can do to help my cause; they could not provide the salve for my emotional wound. In fact, I am thoroughly annoyed that I had thought they could help. I climb back in my car and Jenny asks me where I am going, I tell her I think I need to drive back to Gainesville. She asks me to drive her downtown to which I reluctantly agree to do. As I stop at a gas station, we argue, she insists that I am too serious and that was always my problem and divorce is looming in my future. Years of frustration boil over onto the baked parking lot of the Esso station, “fuck this” I stammer.  I get in the car and drive off, leaving her alone and cursing my rear view mirror. We don’t talk for months. As I drive back to Gainesville, with pent up frustration with her, my wife, and most especially myself I feel utterly hopeless. At one point I get stuck in an insane traffic jam and piss my pants because I am in front of a police car, I think it really can’t get any more pathetic than this.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part Five

My own relationship with booze had taken a breather after I left Jenny, I tried to quit cold turkey but the comfort of it was too inviting.  I was in a quandary with it because after a few drinks thoughts of suicide would creep in around my mind and I felt helpless to these thoughts.  I managed to be almost completely dry during my relationship with Sharon, I had found her company mostly left me satisfied and the coldness I gathered from her only came periodically, I should add that I was quite used to emotional coldness, in fact Jenny had repeatedly accused me of being distant. Like a cloud.  I didn’t need the booze.  I went out to a lot of shows but managed to be able to sip a whisky or a non-alcoholic beer.  This went on for most of the relationship.  The morning after the aspirin dinner, I decided that I was not going to drink again.  My roommates encouraged me to take this action.  So did Jerry.  Jerry came by that night and took me to the Dube where we drank vast amount of coffee and he introduced me to the wet fries.  Over the progression of the following months this was an almost nightly affair.  We spent the evenings bouncing between the Dube and Staches which were catty-corner from one another.  Jerry would occasionally have a beer at Staches while we watched Scrawl, the Afghan Whigs or Tar and I would drink more coffee.  Jerry nursed me through this time, he encouraged me, he laughed at my stories and we developed a best friends’ rapport.  Soon we were ending each others sentences, laughing at our own in-side jokes.  He gave me advice on women; mostly to stay away. He could see that I was still a fragile man.  I was approaching utter desperate loneliness but Jerry kept me from it.  We played records, and went dancing.  Mostly to the gay bars downtown where the music on off nights leaned to bouncy Anglophile fare such as the Pet Shop Boys, the Cure, New Order and The Smiths with the token Madonna track thrown in to keep the boys happy. There were some underground rumors that Jerry and I had become gay lovers, that we only were happy to fuel by publically kissing each other at Larry’s or Staches.  But this was just for show; we only got a kick out of other peoples assumptions.  We were about as punk as I thought anyone could be.  We marveled over Billy Childish and the newest singles on Sub-Pop.

I got my first credit card shortly before Jerry picked me off from my emotional hangover, Sharon was a woman with certain needs and I thought a credit card would help with these needs.  One day talking to Jerry about Gaunt’s upcoming single I mentioned that I could help with the next one.  I had already contributed $50 to the first Gaunt/New Bomb Turks split single and was starting to do some of the ordering at Used Kids so it only seemed natural to me.  Jerry pounced on the idea; I suggested that he form a partnership with me.  We would call it “anyway” after a word I seemed to use with frequency.  He loved it; he spoke grand, with a plan to have the label supporting itself within a year.  He was frantic when he spoke as if he were plugged into an electrical outlet. Pure animation fueled by chemicals and a passion to burn as brightly as he could until pure exhaustion would shut him up.  I was the more pragmatic one, knowing that I barely made $12,000 a year at Used Kids and Jerry made less between filling in part-time at Used Kids and working his shifts at the pizza joint.  I just wanted to get the first one out.

“Jim Motherfucker/Spine” was the first single we put out together; funding was half by me and half by Gaunt.  I called the distributors that Used Kids ordered from: Scat, Twin Cities, Matador, Revolver, Caroline, Get Hip, Comm 4 and K.  The single sold out within the first week.  It was a ferocious piece of music with an almost marching hypnotic bear punctuated by Jerry snarling “Jim! Jim! Jim!” with newly added guitarist Jim Weber from the Turks shouting “Motherfucker!” between each “Jim!”  Both musicians were frightened that their mothers’ would hear it.  The covers were made with Xeroxed colored paper from Kinko’s.  Hand stuffed with the labels being hand stamped with a rubber stamp that said “Anyway Stuff” and a-side and b-side. We already had plans for a series of singles.

Jerry had an outlook on life that was epic in scale; this was with everything that he did, whether it had to do with Anyway, friendships, or especially Gaunt. For him, it appeared the thought of not making a mark in the world was a foreign idea.  Although it should be explained that Jerry, myself and a large swath of the community in which we hung out with took great pains not to be overly ambitious, in the sense that we did not really care for bands or artists who put themselves out there. For Jerry, having Ron House or Tom Lax listen to his music and giving approval was enough. We were geeks, hung up on our own perspectives of the world, a world the was outside of the mainstream a world that we could construct ourselves and move with impunity within its confines. There was looseness within this community that allowed a freedom we had not encountered in the lifestyles of our adolescence.

For Jerry, his adolescence was prohibited by the religious fanaticism of his family, who were blue-collar born again Christians and did not understand their boys’ fascination with punk rock and Kiss. When Jerry was caught masturbating by his mother she threw him in the shower, hollering “I know something that will cool you off.” When I met him he was completely estranged from his family.  He had a younger brother but spoke little of him, he said “he is just like my parents.” For me the confines of living in a very rural small town during my high school years was excruciating at times, where heavy metal and Hank Williams Jr. were the only types of music most kids listened to. I was the only student I knew in high school who listened to The Replacements, R.E.M., The Clash or even the Ramones or The Rolling Stones. I was small, wore glasses and had a terrific wit that earned me a great deal of hassle from larger kids. I would say both Jerry and I were somewhat loners in high school although on appearances I did get along with most of my peers, I just didn’t socialize that much. Both Jerry and I yearned for a way out of the boredom of provincial living. Ideas fueled by this yearning shot through him like a geyser.