Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae: part 50–Two Funerals

Two Funerals: 2012.

With the flicker of lights and  widened eyes, I learned of the tragic death of a childhood friend’s wife this week. Scrolling through many mindless electronic updates of photos of food, electronic ironic cards, political outrages aimed at the choir, and links to music videos I caught one that stopped my mind for a moment. The wife of one of my oldest friends, Mark, had  fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. She had died. My first thought was of their two young boys and then of Mark himself, and how the suddenness of empty space can cripple us. How would he manage? Staring at the computer screen, contemplating phoning my brother, I did nothing except send an electronic message. My stomach hurt. Shifting on the brown leather couch, the football game seemed suddenly trite, grown men banging into one another while somewhere across town two little boys were trying to sleep without their mother to tuck them in.

On my way to work the next morning, I thought that I needed to phone Jenny. Her companion, Dale Chandler (not William, as I have previously named him in this blog) was in hospice care and I had promised her I would take her to see him, as she is confined to a wheel chair and has no transportation available. The cell phone shuddered. It was Jenny.  She croaked, “Dale just died, about five minutes ago. The nursing home called, he just died. I’m so sad. He died.”

“Oh Jenny, I’m so sorry.”

Through tears she matter-of-factly explained the obvious, “Well, we knew it was going to happen. Shit, his eyes weren’t even straight anymore, he didn’t know what the fuck was going on. But it still fucking hurts. I’m not going to see my Dale anymore.”

“Listen, I’m late to work and I have two meetings, but I’ll leave early and see you.”

Sniffling, she said, “Really, you don’t have to do anything. Nothing can be done. He’s dead. They’ll call me from the nursing home. I’m not going to fuck up though. I got my paperwork together for my state hearing tomorrow to get my Medicaid turned back on. Thank God I did it last night.” In the travesty that is the American safety net, populated by regulations that are constructed by (mostly) men who have never seen poverty up close, Jenny had managed to lose her Medical insurance because she missed an appointment. She had missed the appointment because she was in the same nursing home that had initiated her Medicaid application and despite having  had spent nearly three weeks in intensive care and then transferred to the nursing home, she was denied for the sole reason of making an appointment she was physically unable to attend.

Dale Chandler Jr. was in his late forties or early fifties. He grew up in West Virginia and walked with a gait that smacked of a life breathing intoxicants in and out, as if the trees themselves were pushing them through the veins in their leaves. Even when sober, he looked drunk. Dale was a light-skinned African American with glow-in-the-dark blue eyes that watered at the wisp of the wind. When he smiled his white teeth sparkled like the tips of a wave in sunshine.

Some people dip their toes into eternity while others dive into it as if it were a baptismal pool, shunting the cares of the world to swim with the ghosts of the past. With a life fraught with reckless behavior, Dale slowly lost the use of his mind, his organs, and later his extremities. Tall, with a thin frame that must have, at one point, many years ago, supported the adulation of cheering crowds on the athletic battlefields of his youth, he was gentle, to a point. When drinking, he could grow coarse, his mood like sandpaper rubbing against burnt skin, and woe to those who crossed his path.

Jenny had fled the confines of Weigel Hall, which she had called home for a few weeks in the summer and fall of 2005. The faculty of the Ohio State University did not take kindly to a former student living in one of the practice rooms of the building, though, and so she soon hit the street. First she found refugee with one of the daytime barflies of Bernie’s, but soon he became aware that this sad singing woman would not be leaving soon nor did she have the money to pay for the vast amounts of alcohol she needed to get through the day. He chucked her out as if she were a bucket of water. She weaved her way up north, sleeping in our back yard a few times and then running into an old friend who, like her, had found himself living through unfortunate times. They slept near the river, in a small tent, but soon she discovered that he had an insatiable taste for crack cocaine, which turned kindness into spastic paranoia, and she found safety with Dale.

Dale protected her like a lioness over her cubs, and soon they moved into a homeless camp just north of the Ohio State University. Being homeless is a difficult existence, harder if you are a woman, albeit a woman who is well educated, sassy and the wits of a coyote, but with severe alcoholism and, at times, debilitating mental illness. Dale had done time in prison during the 1990s. He explained to Jenny that it was for manslaughter for a man who had molested him, although on the streets it is sometimes better to take any criminal history and blow it through the special effects of imagination. Jenny had also connected with a man named Brian—a very tall, thin man with eyes that breathed like the devil’s breath and whose tongue danced the dance of cons perfected during long years of thieving and consumption. He was a dangerous man who was prone to jealously and had truthfully taken a man’s life. He had blackened and bruised Jenny in an eruption of envy and emotional desperation. He would lurk around the camp like stench on spoiled milk, and the seven or eight men and woman there felt terrorized by this man, who in down times looked like a subdued Snoop Dogg, albeit one who would make a better spokesman for the ravages of smoking cocaine than the fun times smoking five blunts a day. Dale eventually used a splintered, cracked two-by-four to pummel Brian and soon thereafter Brian’s frightening tactics disappeared.

When the homeless outreach workers of Columbus put their resources towards housing those in the camp, Jenny and Dale had already fallen in love. Their love was built around mutual safety, but Dale idolized Jenny. Unlike most of her previous paramours, Dale did not challenge Jenny in any creative capacity, and his worship at times prevented her from moving forward in her life. It was as if they were submerged in a quicksand that only went up to their waists, but as long as they would not smother in the iciness of the dredge then everything was okay. Both insisted on being housed together, and soon they were given a small, one-bedroom apartment, nearly eight miles from the campus area and one mile from the nearest bus stop. They had no food stamps, income, or phone. They would get up every morning and walk the three miles to the freeway, where they would fly signs. That is, they would stand by the off ramp holding a sign that stated that they were homeless and ask for money. While technically not homeless, they had no income and no way of garnering an income. Both, with severe alcohol and mental health issues, were unemployable. Their clothes were ruined by months of homelessness and they lived off the charity of church groups and the discarded wares of neighbors. Jenny had perfected the art of dumpster diving.

When they would fly a sign, they ran the risk of getting arrested or being issued a ticket that they would never be able to pay and soon a warrant would be issued for their arrest. On average they would collectively make about $25 a day for five hours of work. This money was spent on food and, more importantly, alcohol, which prevented them from going into alcohol withdrawal. Several times during this period, Jenny had severe seizures when she did not have access to alcohol and the neighbors were called. Dale would do the dirty work when they needed alcohol. Because of his own mental illness he would sometimes get lost for several days, usually when they would travel to the OSU campus so Jenny could watch the OSU Marching Band before football games. They would end up drinking all day and usually slept outdoors with friends they had once been homeless with. Dale would sometimes not make it home, either lost or arrested.

The first apartment was a sub-basement dwelling, with a large piece of plywood covering one of the windows where one of the local dope boys kicked it in, mistaking their apartment for the one in back of them. “Open up you chicken shit motherfucker! Gimme my fuckin’ money, bitch! We gonna pop you one, motherfucker! You can’t hide from us, we know you in there!” Dale hid in the closet. Jenny was getting forty-ouncers at the carry-out and the young men dispersed as she walked up, staring at the broken window while she crossed the street.

“What the fuck?” she said to herself.

“You gotta problem with somethin’ bitch?!” she heard behind her.

“Nope.” They never bothered them again, but Jenny said they beat the shit out of the guy who lived behind them, and soon there was an eviction notice on his door. And Jenny and Dale soon got an eviction notice for the broken window, I helped them pay for a new one so they would not be back on the street.

Sprawled across several frayed couches and a coffee table piled high with uncurled, spent cigarette butts was a collage of spent vodka, malt liquor, and carry-out wine bottles, shuffled together as if they were chess pieces ready to be played in a sick game of chess. In one corner of the room was a bent coat hanger tied to the curtain rod, a delicate balance that was one drunken slip to a splendid crash. A stray cat came and went with the same mannerisms as the “tramps” who frequented the apartment.  With a heart almost as big as her liver, Jenny felt compelled to help anyone and everyone, even to the detriment of her health. The tramps, who she grew to know on the streets, would find their way to Jenny and Dale’s, crashing when the weather turned sour or the cops cracked down. Dale did his best to match wits with Jenny, although it was apparent that something was cognitively amiss with him. Although Jenny later found that he did indeed graduate college, there was little evidence in his slow, mannered speech. His search for words would end in a trail of mumbles and then, finally, a gasp of a smile.

After several years, they moved with the help of their housing case manager, a Nigerian with the compassion of Jimmy Carter, into a larger two bedroom apartment smack dead in the middle of urban violence that kept most neighbors entrenched in their apartments while gun shots and gangs roamed the streets with aplomb. “Fuck Bela, this place is better than the other one cause there’s a Dollar Store just a block away, but I swear to God, they are killing people over here. If it wasn’t for Dale, I’d be dead. I’m the only white person in the whole complex.” Jenny, who grew up in the midst of rural Ohio racism, in the worst underbelly of the American Midwest, where the sagging pride of a once-proud work ethic had ebbed into a fear of the unknown, was safe in the arms of the only man who would protect her, a tall African-American man with a debilitating mental illness and an addiction to alcohol that would take his mind and body to the sea of death.

Dale went into a nursing home this past year, a fading cloud of his former self, his essence obscured by a declining liver and a brain riddled with the holes of dementia. He would struggle to name the year and the name of the President while his body was just a vehicle, torn asunder by decades of poverty and suffering. Jenny called me one day and asked, “Hey, do you know anyone who needs Depends? They just dropped off  Dale’s supply and they must have fucked up, because they brought so many they are literally stacked to the ceiling. They kept bringing them in. I was like, hold on, he can’t even shit this much for the rest of his life.” His life would not last much longer.

Dale went into a nursing home in the spring of 2012, unable to stand on his own and feed himself. After several hospitalizations it was determined that a nursing home would be best. I discussed possible placements with Jenny and Dale’s social worker at the hospital and recommended a very caring nursing home that they decided to send him to. A few months later, after her own issues with failing extremities, Jenny was also taken to the same nursing home after being in intensive care for two weeks. Their rooms were around the corner from one another. Jenny’s mood brightened. She made the staff adore her as well as the sad-sack residents, who she would wheel by and devastate with her quick wit. Off of alcohol for nearly three months her mind was quick, and although she never really regained use of her legs, she appeared more hopeful. Meanwhile, Dale sunk deeper into a swamp of death. Most days he was unable to feed himself, but when Jenny wheeled in he would flash a crooked smile and his cloudy eyes would  flicker with a spark of recognition.

Dale passed away, silently and alone, in September, without even with Jenny by his side. She was unable to get to his bedside—yet another cumbersome aspect of abject poverty. I had phoned her the weekend before he passed, when he was in hospice. Jenny said, “I saw him yesterday. He didn’t know nothin’, he has no fuckin’ idea where he is. I don’t know if I can go back, it breaks my heart.” She spoke under the slurred words of pain, paralyzed by alcoholism. I offered to take her to see him the coming week, but she demurred. “We’ll see, I can’t take another death. What the fuck will I do?”

“Survive, Jenny. That’s what you’ll do. You’ll be fine.”

A deep breath, followed by an exhale, “I know that’s what ole Jenny does. At least I got a lot of Depends if I need them.”

There was no service for Dale. His family, from whom he had been estranged since he went to prison in the early 1990s, did not want to have a service, let alone drive from West Virginia to see his body interned in an indigent’s grave. Jenny had no money so there was no obituary. His death was only spoken of—a few whispered words from social workers to psychiatrists and, finally, to other caring professionals. He had no friends. And when he left the world as we know it, a sigh may have escaped his parched lips or a spike of fear may have been in those cloudy eyes, but in the end he was alone.

At the other end of town, a small gathering converged in huddled grief as a mother, wife, daughter, and friend lay before them, encased in a $9,000 box to be covered in dirt. For five days, relatives, co-workers, and friends cried and laughed, desperately trying to unfold time from something that was unbelievable into something believable. In the contours of pain, the loss of those we hold deep, the ones we tell our biggest fears and our tallest dreams, seem to fall away—a reminder that we all stop, that reality is unreal. I put on my dark shirt, slid a razor over the white whiskers growing under my chin, mussed my hair as I have done for the past twenty-five years and drove to see one of my oldest friends, Mark, in all the dark glory of grieving. His mother had changed as I had grown older. I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years, her body smaller as I stood taller. I hugged her as a full grown, middle-aged man and  she recognized me immediately, the goofy unsure grin that I had as a fifth grader unchanged by fifteen thousand experiences. His father, who recently turned eighty, looked spry, with the body of someone years younger. Finally I hugged his two brothers. The older one, still fit after all these years, looked like a track coach, his body aging as a fine athlete’s is supposed to. His other brother  gave me a hug and asked me to help look after his baby brother, now a widower with two young sons.

Some are supposed to die young, with the itching of immortality pinning us against the well of our breath fueling the gallop to the end of their lives. Some live each moment as if it were a child’s game. Tag and you’re dead. The world spills into another moment and the past plays a fruitless game of catch up while memories get trampled underfoot. Jerry died on a bike, a fact that my children ask about almost daily when we speed past the spot where his body, in the end, was no match for a hurtling mass of metal and glass just a block from our house. Others have also died young, where the wish to seduce death was done with an easy grace that only the flamboyant can pull off. Chris Wilson, Richie Violet, Jim Shepard, Dale Chandler, Ted from Torque, and others whose addictions kept the fear of abandonment away but in the end chewed them up like a paper in the gears of an engine. Bone, blood, and snot laying on the pavement, some die more gracefully than others. But in the end, thoughts of them keep ricocheting in my skull.

Jerry Wick & Jenny Mae part 49: Thinking 1985/2012

Thinking. 1985/2012

Weaving through traffic, driving the first new car I ever bought on my own at the age of 40, music blaring as I sing along as if I am in a bullet traveling 45 miles an hour through downtown Columbus. The songs reach back to childhood (Springsteen, Rolling Stones, Woody Guthrie) to my twenties, (New Bomb Turks, Superchunk, Sinead O’Conner, Dinosaur Jr, Matador Records) and then into the present, (Allo Darlin, Sea Lions, Luke Roberts), giving me moments of elsewhere while waiting for a mini-van to get the fuck out of the way. Watching pedestrians as they bustle with bags and briefcases across steamy downtown streets, all the seriousness that a suit can imply, stuck on faces that look straight ahead; no doubt they are thinking of jobs to be done. In the car, contemplating visions of the past while guitars blast into my ears, I invariably think of a father long gone–a man who choose to vacate his family years ago, I think of Jerry, who is always just a flicker of thought and finally of Jenny and what her life is like these days.

Bruno shouts from the back seat, “daddy, punk rock, daddy, punk rock” , leaning down I skip from a Puccini aria to the Dogmatics, and he is pleased. One day, he may have the faint impression of a memory, sitting in the back seat as his father dodges slow cars, singing along to the soundtrack of Bruno’s childhood. I feel alone. Sensing that all the other inhabitants feel the same as I do, constrained to their bodies, thoughts limited to their own experiences, yearning to feel together if not for just a moment. But with the knowing of the isolation that rises again, the feeling that not only intercourse can relieve because the moments after intercourse are a reminder that yet, again, we are all alone.

It’s a science fiction experiment, these bodies of our, like tiny droplets of rain, hurtling towards the soil until our souls splash and explode against the concrete and dirt of our lives. Swallowed by the force of the ground. It is the music that keeps the feeling of life while sitting in the white Volkswagen with a boy in the backseat, shouting above the din, “daddy, more guitars, daddy, louder.”

The phone rings, yet another example of science fiction come to fruition, “hey, just want you to know, I’m still alive.” It’s Jenny, in the hospital again. “shit is crazy over here,” she explains, her voice muffled from the sheer tiredness of life, “but they can’t kill ole Jenny.” She has the memory of an elephant, at moments she is able to conjure a piece of the past that, even if I were there I would doubt that it would happen, some of it so surreal and outstanding that I scarcely believe that it happened. “I was thinking of that one time we had that New Year’s Eve party in that hotel in Springfield with your brother and all his fucked up friends. Remember?” Searching the moldiest canals of my mind, past exams I took, under papers I wrote, children saying the most fucked up shit, I bump into the memory, sheltered away some twenty-seven years ago. “Um, yeah sorta.” “Remember, you and I went and fucked in that broom closet and then went back to the party . We paid that security guard $20 to pretend he was arresting Donny Acuff, and then the guy got fired and ended up back at the parsonage partying with us all night. And what’s her face killed Russ, your goldfish? Boy, you told that bitch off.” Pulling into the parking garage, I try to balance the memory with the idea that part of my job is to advise treatment, justice and compassion in court today. “er, yeah, I remember that, but I can’t really think about that right now.” “That shit was funny. Anyway, I’m doing ok, trying to figure out how to get my legs working, and I failed my HUD inspection.” Jerking to attention on this last note, “What, how can you fail a HUD inspection when you are in a nursing home and have been in the hospital for two weeks?” I ask, flabbergasted that some moron at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority would do such a thing. “Do they know you are in a nursing home?” “Yup, of course they know. They said I still had to do it, so I called a friend to go over there. Everything has to be fixed within ten days or I will lose my Section 8 voucher. But my friend said he’ll fix it.” Thinking to myself, the same friend who beat the shit out of you last month.

“Find out who your worker is over there and I’ll send a letter over and make a few phone calls.” There is a pause, “I don’t know who it is, all my paperwork is at the apartment and I can’t leave here, fuck, I can’t walk.” blowing an air of frustration, with cheeks in full puffed mode, I answer, “Ok, I’ll find out.”

Being poor is not easy, especially in America where people tend to be shuttled between bureaucratic paths that resemble something between a Kafka story and the story of the little girl who feel down the well, at times frustratingly sad but also bold in the ironic malice of workers whose job it is to guard the most basic rights of the poor. I see this on a daily basis, the vilification of the poor and mentally ill, as if those who are blessed with opportunities had in some astral manner, earned these opportunities. The belief that being born into opportunity gives someone the license to dis-empower the powerless.

Every state in the Union has its own laws and guidelines for social workers, counselors and outreach workers, with some states requiring a four year college degree plus the passing of a licensure test to practice the art of helping. Others, have laws that have a minimal requirement, with any four or two year degree sufficing in allowing, someone, usually with good intentions to work with the poor, mentally ill, homeless and addicted. Sadly, in the midst of slogans, uninformed opinions, we, collectively wage war on the underclass as if brandishing their shortcomings in front of them, we will somehow protect our own. Draconian voting laws, every form of stereotype, whether under the guise of patriotism, religion and or capitalism is used as a weapon to keep ourselves from looking at what is barely ours. A fragile shell that is protected by the opportunities that most of us are born into. It is a skinny path we walk, one filled with dangers that can dart suddenly from the underbrush of our lives, in the form of an accident, cancer, job loss, addiction or mental illness. I choose to do what I do as a way to relieve my own guilt for the underprivileged and at times, I do it with a chip on my shoulder, as I have no use for the shaming of the people I choose to serve. I am blunt with the truth as it is the only way I can make sense of the suffering I see, perhaps, I do it to make sense of  the confusion I was brought up with or maybe it is a calling.

There was a large farm next abutted next to the tiny chuck of yard where the tiny ranch house stood, a house that resembled one of millions in America, this one set right of the old National Highway. Three small bedrooms and an unfinished basement where Jenny and her younger sister slept, a piece of 1970′s frayed green carpet kept bare teenage feet from slapping against the concrete. Upstairs their little brother Tony slept in the same room with another younger sister, Megan and down a “hallway” that consisted of two medium steps from the closet sized bathroom was the parents room. This was the third house the family had lived in over the past four years, all of them less than a mile apart. The farm behind and next to them was abandon, the silo standing as a white beacon of failure to every passerby. This was the mid-eighties when the scorched-earth polices of Reagan capitalism cindered many a family farm, but the workings of these policies were cloaked in the feel good speech of an old actor who while robbing the heartland blind made us all feel a little safer. Jenny and her siblings each raised a lamb for the annual Clark County Fair, active members of 4-H, they realized the fragile lesson of life, death and the meaning of the cycle of hardship. The sheep would be slaughtered after the fair, and hopefully each child would be able to sell the animal for a good price, money to be invested in college, a car or to help the family out.

After school, we would climb into my tarnished Ford Mustang, bits of it chipped at the bottom with bucket seats that sat so low to the ground you could swear you could feel the heat of the asphalt under your ass. She would run the sheep, who by nature are not the brightest animals, trying to get them in shape to tone the muscles that would soon be ripped from bone and consumed. The animals would stare at her dumbfounded as if she were an alien, they had no reason to run in circles, besides they thought, “it’s hot and we are wearing wool for christsakes!” I would laugh at her efforts, drinking sun-tea while her mother shook her head, “it looks silly, I know, but she wins every year.” This was true Jenny won a lot of contests, her intelligence hidden by her quick wit and outrageousness. She won first place in the State of Ohio Soil Judging Contest sponsored by the Future Farmers of America, as a junior in high school although she was neither a  farmer presently or in the future. She twice won the State of Ohio Wool Judging Contest sponsored by the FFA. She was in the National Honor Society and was warned by several teachers to be wary of me, due to my mischievous nature and poor grades although I came from a long line of professors and professionals.

We would walk the abandon farm, in the cold and the warmth of spring, trasping over withered husks of corn, clumps of dirt that remained unmoved season to season, the massive wooden doors of the farm remained locked, shackled together with a rusty thick chain. We tried in vain to get into the barn, with the simple reason to unhinge our teenage lust in the dark shadows and moistness of mildewing hay that was waiting for us behind the tethered doors. The raspy corn would crunch beneath our shoes, the wind would sail across the unproductive patch of earth that surrounded us into our chest, holding hands the questions of our adolescent minds abounded as if compelled by the chilly wind. She would explain things to me as we stepped over forgotten plants, pockets of dirt that remained upturned and why certain crops could grow in Ohio and how crop rotation works. This was all new to me, I had assumed through my lens of persecution that farming just involved listening to Hank Williams Jr while riding on a tractor and telling nigger jokes. Of being provincial and dismissive of outsiders, like myself, although it would take me nearly thirty-five years to come to terms that I was an outsider nearly everywhere I went, including, at times my own house. The lump of distaste and protection I had accumulated over four years in living in rural Ohio slowly melted during this time, and an understanding of the wisdom, care and struggles of my classmates and neighbors came into focus. As Jenny called me out on my class snobbishness, one that was rooted in a liberal sense politics, as we were by all accounts poor in a monetary sense, I felt more at ease in my surroundings.

Nestled in the dirt roughly 200 yards back from the farm, her own house a dot in the distance, we found the carcass of a cow. Almost complete, it’s bones, weathered white  and picked clean by birds, rodents, bugs and seasons, we crouched around it in awe. Who would let an animal die out in the field, let alone wouldn’t the animal be noticed? “How does this happen?” I asked, crouching down, examining a hip bone, half buried into the dirt, the white bone resembling a conch shell in the middle of Ohio. She pulled it out, clumps of dirt sticking to its side, it was too cold for any insects, “it’s weird, huh?” I took a few steps back, resting on my haunches, keeping my balance with my left hand I felt something hard in the dirt. There was another carcass and soon we noticed roughly four or five cow skeletons. It as if we had managed to slowly walk into a cave, and slowly brushed a beetle off our arm and noticed that there were thousands crawling around us. “Christ, look at all these fucking bones.” The sky was gray, with soft rolling clouds hanging above the earth as if they were licking their collective lips readying themselves to unleash a torrent of cold rain. A splash of lightening shattered in the distant. I looked at Jenny and she stared at me, a large thick raindrop exploded between us. Wind seemed to gurgle in our ears, and she tried to put the hip bone back where it had submerged, as if it were never disturbed. “I don’t know why anyone would let these poor animals die out here and never collect them”, she said more to herself than me.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae pt 48: Dampness

Pt. Dampness

Jenny’s coat wrapped around her body as if it were beaten into her, the rain fell between the cracked plastic and settled into the rotting poly-cotton stuffing that peaked through as if it were making baby faces to the outside world. She huddled into herself, shivering on my porch as the rain whipped behind her. At the end of our walkway, William, waved shyly, his blue eyes a stark contrast to his brown skin. I stepped out onto the porch making sure that none of the cold could slip into our warm house, my wife stood in the kitchen, head bobbing in the background wondering who would be knocking at the front door in this weather.

We didn’t have too many unannounced visitors, and as we settled into the house we had planned to remake into our own, we preferred it this way. As sobriety surrounded us, the clamoring for social affirmation diminished and we simply kept to ourselves. Jenny was swaying, almost to the vibrations of the house, the wind, or some internal song churning into her ears. It had been a long time since she swiped makeup over her face, put a line of lipstick around her lips or wore a necklace around her neck; the skin on her face was taunt, tan from the sun and as weathered as the paint peeling off the side of our house. Her hands were leathery, the ends slightly yellowed by cigarettes, light brown spots a gift from the sunshine, it was hard to believe that just five years prior she wore silver bracelets and pearls.  She had been through a lot this past year, from living in South Beach, in the mansion of a millionaire, to the streets and jails of Miami to the streets of Columbus. During this time she went from making a record with a new collaborator in Boston to having almost everything she owned put out on the sidewalk. I had been given her trumpet and a small suitcase that held a few of her CD’s and records but the rest was gone. She had nothing to play them on and her lungs were no longer capable of blowing a melody into the trumpet.

Her artwork, which she created in manic bursts, had been dumped into trash bins, which would happen anyway over the years as she would gather up some of her belongings and then discard them within a few years as the urge to move would be greater than the need to stay. She had painted hundred of doilies with thin limbed characters holding glasses of wine or playing skinnier pianos, other creations where painted coconut shells that appeared to be a mash-up of dive-bar art with deranged arts and crafts that would horrify most average JoAnn Fabric’s shopper. At one point, while living in Florida my wife and I drove down to Miami for an art show my wife was participating in. We went out to dinner with Jim Williams and Jenny on a beach front restaurant that not only smelled of seafood but of money, the wait staff knew Jenny and Jim and brought them there drinks without them asking what they wanted. The next morning we went to the sprawling house that Jim lived in with his elderly mother, he inhabited a sort of mother-in-law suite that was attached off the living room. The house was stuffed with garish art work and a baby grand piano collected half a room of dust in one corner, as we passed it Jenny said, “His old bitch of a mom won’t let me play it, we had to move to this other part because her and Jim kept yelling at each other.” Jim’s unit was crammed with recording equipment, keyboards, guitars and a big red bass the bounced the sunlight off of its shiny exterior. “Jim bought me all this shit, even if I can’t really play guitar, he wants me to make another record.” The back yard was complete with a bar and dozens of painted coconut shells with dangling baubles, gold chains and the hair of the shells were combed down to make glamorous “sea” models. Jenny said she was trying to make a “whole platoon of these things, I wanna string them around the whole yard, so when it’s night time, the moon can bounce of their jewelry. I have about forty of them done.”  These too, in their ruffled glory were tossed to the trash bin when Jim died.

“Hey, Bela, I know you’re busy,” she stuttered, “but we need to use your bathroom real quick, the Tim Horton’s power went out and William has to take a shit and we don’t have anything in the tent. In case you didn’t notice, it’s kinda raining out.” She grinned when she said this last line. Jim waved in the background as if waving to the President in a motorcade, weakly smiled back, I turned and said, more to my wife than Jenny, “sure come on in, but be quiet the baby is asleep.” Williams started stomping and rattling the rain off of his soggy body as he trudged up the steps, Jenny with arms folded refused to go farther than the front entrance. “Jenny comes into the kitchen, do you want some water?” my wife asked. “No, I’m cool, I’ll just hang here, I don’t want to wake the baby and I’m real wet, if you can’t tell.” The smell of alcohol shrouded her voice, and I realized that breakfast had been served in the homeless camp.

William smiled as he entered and was prone to over thanking us so I nodded at him and casually mentioned that anytime we could help we would. When manic and drinking, Jenny usually spoke with pressured speech, jaw set tight, and her lips stretched around her teeth as if they were made of crystal. Her blue eyes held droplets of water, and for a moment the room was illuminated in these gobs of heavy water, she looked like a battered Christmas tress waiting to be cut down. “I’m sorry to come over here, especially when we have been drinking, we have to get a little bit in the morning, you know, I don’t want Merijn to see me like this.” She paused. “It’s embarrassing.” Most of my life I have never been at a loss for words, but at certain times in dealing with Jenny I was. There were a few moments when all was quiet, the sound being interrupted by William unloading in the other room. We laughed, “I swear to God, I’m going to kill him. Jesus, his ass is going to wake the baby,” she muttered. I heard my wife go upstairs, “bye Jenny.”

Earlier that year, after Jenny had been evicted from the Ohio State School of Music I woke up one morning and found her sleeping at the end of my driveway under the front end of my car. A congested mass of hangover, twigs, frayed nerves and sweat, with a large piece of Little Debbie Snack Cake plastic stuck to the side of her face. “Shit,” she said when I aroused her, “I didn’t have any place to go,” wincing as she pulled the plastic off her face, “what the fuck, I don’t even eat this shit.” “It’s probably from the plasma center customers, they are always throwing shit in our yard, candy wrappers, cigarettes, roaches, I even found a crack pipe in our yard.” That night, I let her sleep in our garage but told her she couldn’t drink in it and couldn’t tell Merijn. I found her gone the next morning, the garage door open and an empty bottle of vodka upstairs next to her make-shift bed. She walked in while I stood standing there, my head trying to shake the disappointment from my shoulders. “Oh, shit, sorry,” she tried to explain, I told her to leave and she started screaming at me, “God-damnit, you’re so fucking uptight, I can’t believe anybody would live with your ass. You fucking control freak, what the fuck, you are such a son-of-a-bitch. Fine, I’ll fucking find my own place, I don’t need your fucking help if all your gonna do is try to control me!” Taking a breath as if it were water, I paused, counting, “Jenny, there is some expensive stuff in her, what did I say, this is Merijn’s studio.” “Fuck you, it’s not that it’s you want to tell me what to do, always.” She continued yelling as I went into the house and called the police; by the time they arrived she was gone.

A small pool of water collected at her feet, looking into the puddle she bent her neck slightly like a scientist gazing through a telescope, “I don’t think we’ll stay out there long, some guys from the shelter are trying to get us out of there. But I and William want to stay together, they think I could get my own place but I want him there. The apartments they give you are in the hood, I just don’t feel safe. We saw a few of them; can you imagine me stumbling out there in crackville central? I’d be eaten alive…no, I want him there with me even if he can be a pain in the ass. He doesn’t smoke that shit anymore, he did once and I told him to forget about me if he was going to do it, I’m done with coke especially after Jim died.”

Jenny’s apartment is on the east side of Columbus, it is her second apartment since living on the streets in 2005, it’s a bit safer than her first one she shared with William, the one with gun holes in the walls, roaches openly defying a person who chose to sit on the threadbare couch, and the group of young African-American teenage boys, conferring in the parking lot at all hours who would always acknowledge be with a nod. I would do my visits there, with my work badge attached, the one that said that I worked for the largest community mental health center. Even drug dealers have a soft spot for social workers. It gave me access to the most dangerous of places.

Her current apartment is still in an unsafe part of Columbus, especially for a mostly single woman who has no income and who battles inner demons on a daily basis. She doesn’t go out at night and takes great care to make sure she has the required reserve of alcohol in her cupboards, under her bed and strews around the house before night falls. She drinks bottom basement vodka, which is usually Kalashnikov, long gone are the days when she would drink Stoli’s, Grey Goose or even Skyy her needs are more basic at this stage of her life. At one point her liquor cabinet was full, with Dewar’s, Makers Mark, Jamison’s and imported beers stocking her refrigerator and pantry, her vodka at that time would be housed in the freezer, as it would not be consumed entirely during the course of the day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and late-night keep me grounded. She pours it into a large tumbler that she keeps next to her bed, mixed with a splash of fruit juice, a twisted reversal of a standard drink. Her artwork climbs the walls, paintings of landscapes, black and white photographs she has torn and forged from discarded library books and old Life magazines. Photos of young romantics, cuddling in outdoor cafes, the scent of love on their necks as they take in the scents of whatever far off city they happened to be captured in, Paris, Antwerp, and Brussels, whatever. The smells of the cafes mingling with the cigarettes that hangs, as if they were props, from long thin fingers while the other hand is intertwined with their lover. For Jenny, it’s the idea of romance and the reinforcement that desire is not tossed asunder as one age, the fact that ideas live in a person’s head regardless of circumstance. She is proud, and her defiance to her situation, while at times appears to threaten her life, is one to behold. The photos of a young John Kennedy and of a determined Leonard Bernstein attest to the culture that have sprung from her well of life in spite of the pain she has tunneled through over the years.

Life is difficult for everybody, and as age grows around our ears, crowding our brains with the trivial and the serious, oftentimes in the same moment it is easy to take the burdens of daily life as a personal Odyssey although for the most part the majority of people I know have a journey paved with soft beds, scrumptious meals and a fairly easy commute to work, there are many where life is a continuous botched attempt to find a moment’s solace. Nearly every time I want to cook an elaborate meal, I run to the store in my 2009 VW, complete with MP3 player and heated seats. There is one mederterian store across the street from my house, and two large grocery stores within one mile of my house as well as five pharmacies within a one mile radius. I mutter under my breath while I stand in line holding a bunch of cilantro and a habanera pepper, thinking of my valuable time.

Chronic, long-term alcoholism can result in a condition called alcoholic peripheral neuropathy, which in laymen’s terms means that muscles cannot receive vital minerals, potassium and calcium due to liver damage. This can result in an awkward gait or at worse the inability to walk; it was one reason why many alcoholics die from taking a tumble down the stairs even though they might not have had very much to drink or anything at all. At times, both William and Jenny have a need to use a wheelchair or a walker, a startling experience for those of us who knew her in high school when she used her young legs to run cross country on a team that won the State Championship, or the young woman who graced the field of Ohio Stadium during half time of a Buckeyes game while marching in The Best Damn Band in the Land. One afternoon, circa 1996, I was leaving Bernie’s Bagels, stepping into the sunlit afternoon from the damp underground bar after taking a short beer break from Used Kids; I passed Jenny replete in gray sweat pants, running bra and white tee-shirt, running down High Street. “Jenny,” I shouted as she galloped past, “what are you doing?” She turned, blowing out hot breath, “shit, I got to get into shape; I thought I’d start running again. What are you doing?” Glancing down High Street, I answered, “oh, I just went on my beer break, Larry’s isn’t open yet so I went to Bernie’s. I’m on my way back to work. I have time for another one, if you want?” Jenny looked down at her brand-new running shoes, glowing white and unblemished from any dirt, fresh out of the box, “sure, I can always run later.”

Running became a passion of mine, shortly thereafter; I started in 1992, to ward off a beer gut that started creeping over my jeans. It blossomed around 1998 when I took to running roughly five miles a day and erupted in 2000, when a personal life that was crashing around me, and an inability to quit drinking once I started I trained and ran a marathon. I did not let a hangover cripple my runs and at one point ran eighteen miles with a hangover that would have immobilized a small dog, cursing my legs and my body the last two miles, I found solace in the long runs where music would guide my emotions and for a brief period I had a purpose even if it were only to put one foot in front of the other for two hours while the OutKast or Superchunk provided the background to the pleasures of my thought.

The journey of running has little to do with the physical aspect, which is easily solved through practice and finding a pace that fits one’s body, but the key is the isolation as feet pound against concrete, step by step, mile by mile until there is nothing. At about forty minutes the brain releases a flood of dopamine into the body, about the same amount as a small shot of heroin, and from there, feeling the runner’s high, a runner finds relaxation and perhaps the glow of creativity. Shortly prior to the summer of 2001, while training for my second marathon, my spouse got a job in Gainesville, teaching Fine Arts at the University of Florida. A dream job for her. I was running daily, drinking roughly four days a week, staying out as late as I could and starting arguments with her on the nights when she wanted me home, so I could escape into the bar lights and the mist of alcohol. Jerry had died shortly before then, Jenny had moved to Miami and I was unmoored, restless with pangs of secrecy and self doubt, even music did keep me grounded. In June while I was in Oklahoma for my cousins wedding I got a call from my wife, “honey, I have some bad news,” she said as I stood above the toilet, willing a minor amount of urine to come out, my head balanced against the wall as my wedding party hangover threatened to dis-rail the soft grip I had on my dick. “What?” She answered slowly, “the record store burned down last night, it’s in ruins, and everything is destroyed.”

Running became something that helped absorb whatever thoughts I had mounting in my mind, diverting fear into the pulse of my headphones zapping mix-tapes into my ears while sweat poured down my back, it was a daily practice that I still continue although the fear has since left me many miles ago when the drink found another person to occupy. The fear now is of age, of finding time to cram the lilting dreams that still drive me today, dreams for my children, dreams for my job, dreams for my friends, and dreams of finding time to write all my ideas.

Jenny is frail, with thin arms and legs that are slivers of skin, her clothes hang off her as if she were truly skeleton pried up by skin. She shakes and wobbles when walking, and with William in a nursing home, she has taken to wheeling herself around her small apartment. She needs medication but does not have health insurance and no income; both she and William live off of his Social Security that she helped him get. She has been hospitalized at least five times this past year but in an all too frequent encounter I have daily, the system has failed her. Several times, I have spoken with social workers while she was in the hospital to help her get her Medicaid as she easily qualifies, it has never been done. She was linked to a mental health center some years ago and got awful service, where her case manager lied to her and never followed up. Her case was eventually closed as her case manager stated “she refused services” although I had spoken to her case manager directly explaining her needs and advocating for her.

The nearest grocery store to Jenny is roughly two miles from her house, it takes her three buses to get there, and fare for a bus is $4. There is a convenient store about half a mile from her apartment as well as a Dollar Store, she buys pasta and tomato sauce and sometimes sells her food stamps for a ride to Kroger. She is given prescriptions when she leaves the hospital but is unable to fill them as she has doesn’t have insurance. She has not been able to have any mental health service in five years as she doesn’t have any insurance. The only alcohol and treatment center in town will not pick her up, she will need to call every morning by seven am and the get herself there by eight if a bed is available. It is nearly an hour and a half bus ride to get there. At times, she feels stuck, hiding in her apartment, huddling in her bed, watching reruns of the Golden Girls, at times feeling the inspiration to paint a picture or play some songs on her keyboard.

Days clog into one another; the fermenting carpet that is dotted with vomit, coffee and vodka and juice droplets makes the apartment more oppressive. Lately, with William sleeping against death’s door, Jenny is again reminded of what she has lost. Her eruptions are always on the phone, and while the anger has long since been wrenched from her voice, the fear remains steadfast. She calls and I listen. Listen. And then I listen some more. While my son points out the back window of the car, noticing the fire engines, a dog or the billowing blow up advertisement of a Jiffy Lube sale, Jenny issues a play-by-play of the madness in her world. Her life is one of frustration, of a beginning that never really begins and an ending that is clouded in the annoyance that the little things never get done or have never arrived.  The oddity of my own life is that I have spent a good deal of my days the past seven years helping many people like Jenny, at times helping the person leave the shell of poverty, mental illness and addiction but most of the times, offering a concerned ear to the decimation of their lives. I get paid to be compassionate. With Jenny, there is always the wish that something would click but I have learned in my life that I cannot put my own expectations for her life as a guide to measure her life, so I listen some more.

Jenny Mae and Jerry Wick part 46: Guided by Voices, Part II-The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

Guided by Voices, Part II: The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

The house on Patterson looked good in every season, as it was constructed of bulky, brown, stained, wooden clapboard and had stony, raised gardens. In the winter it looked lonely and almost haunted, while in the summer the peeling brown clapboard was blistered by the sun, but in autumn the house was in it element. With its tarnished grass fading gray and brown and yellowing leaves bulging out of its overstuffed gutters, it could be a grimy wooden effigy or the loss that October seems to bring.

The days and nights shuddered and burped along. Every package we received at Used Kids came bearing gifts of sound, and the mail box on Patterson always seemed to contain some letter requesting music from Columbus. Time was as still as a television station that was always on but never watched. Nobody paid heed to it.

I had fallen hard for the sound of the Grifters, a band from Memphis that annihilated sound and built it back up with blasts of melodic sounds that were at once disquieting and soothing.  I had received their first full-length, So Happy Together, from Scat Records. I listened to it while working at Used Kids one morning, and by the third song I was on the phone with Robert Griffin, seeing if he could get me in contact with them. By the end of the afternoon I had booked them a show at Staches with Moviola and Gaunt.

Onstage, the Grifters were a shuddering, calculated, belching wreckage of sound. With a cloud of distorted guitars straining to stay out of tune and, in a spurt of electric coughing, the audio version of a halfback darting from the pile into open space, they would bend into a melody as breathtaking as a dive into a warm pool of water. They were, in a sense, a counter balance to Guided by Voices. Where GBV would inject a heavy dose of smiling hope into their minute-and-a-half epics, the Grifters were more concerned with the disappointment that tragedy brings, a sorrowful blend of noise and crankiness.

At that first Grifters show at Staches, there was hardly anyone there, only myself and a few patrons who had managed to pick up the band’s record at Used Kids. Jerry Wick was not yet too impressed with the Grifters, but the Ted Hattemer and the other fellows in Moviola were enamored of their sound. The Grifters took a step into the freedom of feedback and built something that was as extraordinary as a stone castle, a noisy blackened musical hook to hang yourself with.

The next morning over coffee in my dining room, I played some Guided by Voices for the Grifters, explaining that I thought they had a lot in common musically. It was apparent that Dave from the Grifters was every bit as much a music fan as Bob Pollard. We spent the morning playing records and talking music.  This listening together was a form of breaking bread, and the bond of kinship was born.

There is really nothing as a stranger asking, “What kind of music do you like?”

I always think that a good response would be, “I really like the idea of Anal Cunt, but I never really liked their sound,” or, “I really like the first Cars record because I got my first blow job to it, but after that they went completely and embarrassingly downhill.” There was a difference in the world I inhabited. It was common knowledge that we all obsessed over sound. The knowledge that the mechanism of sound could be used to transport a person somewhere else was the adhesive that held our community together.

Bob and the rest of Guided by Voices were making monthly visits to Columbus, usually to record with Mike Rep and drink beer with Ron House, Jim Shepard, Jerry and me. Shuffling into the store in the late afternoon, fresh from the hour drive from Dayton, they would arrive just in time for the five o’clock God-given right to a beer. Dan Dow once made the outrageous claim that getting stone drunk at work was not always a good idea. Ron replied, “Well Dan, that’s why we fought the fuckin’ revolution!” There was no argument from us—how could anyone dispute the constitutional right to happy hour? After sharing Rolling Rocks or vases of Budweiser at Larry’s or BW-3, Bob would huddle with Mike in the annex and mix and mash-up the tinny four-track recordings he had made. We talked music and sports mostly, because in Ohio there is really nothing else that matters. The weather is always gray, the economy is grayer, and politics is just a slick slope to traverse over beer..

One afternoon Bob asked me if I was familiar with Odyssey and Oracle, by the Zombies. “Yeah, I love it. It’s kinda like Odessa by the Bee Gees. In fact, it’s my girlfriend’s favorite record.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“Yeah, it’s not on CD yet. In fact, there’s only a crappy best of on CD. I actually think I have a first pressing as well as a Rhino re-issue. You can have the reissue or I’ll trade you something for the original.”  Bob offered to trade his copy of Slay Tracks, the first single by Pavement, which I gladly accepted.  We also talked about new bands we liked, especially the Grifters, whose tarnished, feedback-laden sound had made an impression on Bob.

He wondered aloud, “That’s what I’m trying to do, get that sound, but maybe my songs are too poppy.”

“Oh, you have to see them live. They pull all that noise off in person and it’s like watching a choreographed car wreck.”

Bob excitedly replied, “Lemme know when they play next and I’ll make sure GBV plays with them.”

Guided by Voices were playing in Columbus quite a bit. Dayton hadn’t embraced them  yet and they were not quite polished enough to get shows there, so they would come to Columbus and play with the Slave Apartments, V-3, Belreve, Gaunt, and Jenny. One of the most memorable shows they played around this time was when they opened for  V-3 and the Dutch noise band The Ex.

Roughly a month or so later, Flower Booking called me and asked if I would be willing to book another Grifters show. Although I had already brought them to Columbus several times, losing a pocketful of money on every occasion, I gladly accepted. By now Jerry had become a fan, mostly on the basis of their single “She Blows Blasts of Static”, a song of epic, noisy wreckage that pulled you in and then pummeled you with leathery hooks before offering release, so Gaunt was on the bill. I phoned Bob, who said that because it was on a week night not everyone could get off of work to play the show, but he would come up anyway. During the show, Bob, Jerry, and I were just to the left of the stage. As the Grifters plied their splintered sound in front of thirty or so souls, Bob turned to me and Jerry and yelled, “The three best bands ever: the Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks!” Jerry and I would repeat this often to one another, nodding our head with laughter at our own inside joke. “The Beatles, the Grifters, and Sparks!” Indeed.

Bob wearing a Used Kids t-shirt on this early video

no Jenny Mae on youtube:

go.

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 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 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 & Jenny Mae part 28: Jerry Dies

Jerry Dies.

One morning I woke up to the alarm, NPR and Bob Edwards were talking to a room full of static sleep, I had a slight headache not too much of a hangover but enough to hit the snooze button and see how the other end of the pillow looked. Every morning the NPR station spends a few moments announcing local news and this particular morning wasn’t any different. “An unnamed bicyclist was killed early this morning by a hit and run driver near the Ohio State Campus. A body was found on the intersection of Hudson and North Fourth Street and the pedestrian was later pronounced dead at The Ohio University Hospital.” I blinked open my eyes, “wow, that is right at the end of our street. I may know that person,” I thought as I shimmied under the blankets. My wife nudged me a little, “did you hear that.” “Yeah,” I groaned. She got out of bed, left soon after and in a while I was showered, drinking my pot of coffee and reading the newspaper.

I drove to work; I had to be there at eleven a.m., so I had a leisurely morning and ambled in through the front door of Used Kids. With one look at Ron, I realized that something was amiss. He had a stern look on his face; he mouth was taunt and flat. He glanced up at me and said “Bela, I have some terrible news….Jerry Wick was killed last night. The police just left here.” I stared at him in disbelief. I groaned a little, making some weird sort of animal noise that would have no doubt caused a grin from Jerry. “Well, that can’t be I saw him last night, we hung out here.” Ron shook his head, “I guess he got hit by a car, right by your house.” So, I did know that guy from the radio. I ran to the back room, buried my head in my hands and wept for a few moments. The tears falling awkwardly out of my body as I have never been a weeper, I felt the uneasiness of myself all round my being and wanted to be anywhere but where I was. Be anybody than who I was. I picked up the phone and called my wife. She was sweet, and said she would come home. I told her not to bother, I would stay at work. I didn’t know what else to do. It was too early to start drinking.

I then picked up the phone and called Jenny, she herself made a similar sound as I did. She was now living in Miami. She couldn’t believe it. She asked me to call her back when I knew the funeral plans; I knew she could not afford to return for the funeral. I walked back into the store, got another coffee and sat at the back counter. Staring straight ahead. Soon, many of Jerry’s friends around Columbus were phoning the store and dropping in. Dan Dow came in, looking a bit shell shocked as we all slowly digested Jerry’s death. Jim from the New Bomb Turks came by with Brett Lewis and we soon headed up to BW-3 and started drinking. Soon thereafter Ron joined us, it was quite the shitty day. Cold, gray and stupid.

Details began to surface, Jerry had spent most of the previous day at Used Kids with me and Mike Rep. We had started drinking around five and he shuffled between the annex and Used Kids until a little after eight. We were in a pleasant mood, Jerry happy to be working as a cook for a semi-upscale diner in the Short North and he had started recording again. He was making extra money selling some of his records on the ever-burgeoning E-Bay market under the moniker of Monkey-Pizza. He had recently purchased a small GI Bill built house in a neighborhood just across the freeway from Clintonville. He was patching up a long strained relationship with his parents who were helping him fix up the house and spending time with him. After a few beers at Larry’s, Jerry asked me to stay and hang out but I had designed a very strict regiment to help keep my own alcohol consumption in check. I did not drink on certain days, nor did I allow myself to be taken off this schedule. It was quite testament to my will power that evening to be able to decline his offer at nine pm as there is no doubt that I had already drank five or six beers. I drove home and had a later dinner with my wife.

Jerry had spent the rest of the evening between Larry’s and BW-3, some people said they saw him at Bernie’s but in any manner he bought himself a pizza and started to bicycle home. Balancing the pizza on his handle bars, dressed entirely in black he coasted down the slight incline of 4^th Avenue onto Hudson Street. There he was met by a small compact car, whose driver having his windshield smashed by Jerry’s upper body, drove off into the night leaving Jerry paralyzed by the side of the road with a broken neck. The driver would later turn himself in; explaining to Columbus Police that he thought someone threw a rock at his windshield. Needless to say, a large swath of the community doubted this explanation while the man got off with a minor violation. He later tried to sue both Jerry’s family and Used Kids for defamation, all in all a pretty stand up guy.

I was in shock for a good while, not only had I lost one of the best friend’s in my entire life, a person who helped bring me back from the brink of death several times but someone who had the same sense of cynical humor and love of music that I had. I thought of him continuously. His death brought an immediate effect on how I lived my own life, in the decisions I had made and were continuing to make. The past ten years had come too quickly and had ended in disarray, disappointment and death. Jerry was the fourth person that I had been involved with both musically and personally who had died in a sixteen month period.  His death followed the overdose of Jack Taylor from Monster Truck 005, the mysterious traffic death of Chris Wilson of Monster Truck 005 and then the suicide of Jim Shepard. Besides, Jenny had moved to Miami and had appeared to have given up on music for the lure of dive bars in Coconut Grove.  My life was veritable shit sandwhich.

I had started to doubt my own drinking, it wasn’t getting the results it once had and over the course of several years it had become a glaring issue between my wife and I. I hesitated every time I ordered a drink and was unsure of myself. I had also started partaking in other sorts of unsavory and dangerous activities that were by no means helpful to my mental well being. I felt like the Phil Ochs song “The Scorpion Departs but Never Returns” with an ongoing chorus of “tell me I’m not drinking, tell me I’m not drinking” kept on loop in my mind. There was a line crossed somewhere, it was unknown and invisible but there was a space where one world had ended and another had begun. There was no known equation to determine when this happened but it was somewhere along the meandering path that we all took collectively together. Music was our map, with alcohol and sex our compass we drifted in and out of one another’s lives like the thoughts that raced in our minds. Sometimes overwhelming ourselves as we tasted one epic night after another but soon the redundancy of the chase left us tired, spent and vacant of the promise that once fueled our lives. The cyncism was setting in, shaking away the confidence that was the feature of our very beings as we beamed from barstools and from the front of cramped wooden stages that provided up the platform for us to broadcast the inventions of our thoughts. I had become as clouded as the dark beer and whiskey that powered my life, and yet I was barely past thirty and my friends were dead or dying.

There were certainties in my life, aspects that were as dependable as a new car starting up, these consisted of the love of my wife, music, alcohol and friendship. In a few short years these would all be tossed into the meat grinder of experience and I would at times come to question not only the power of these dimensions of my life but also my own ability to interact with them. There was a thread that connected all of them, I knew this to be alcohol, this and music were the constant. Although, I had by now ended such musical endeavors as promoting shows and putting out music, for the most part I was only seeing a handful of shows that I used to attend. A great many times I would lurch towards High Street with the purpose of seeing live music either at Little Brothers or Bernie’s but I usually only made it as far as Larry’s. There the allure of the bottom of the bottle was too great for me to push myself away from the barstool into a night filled with the dramatic crescendo’s of 4/4 drum beats and ringing guitars. My life had come to a slow but definitive change and my friend was dead. I was breaking by degrees.

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

Jim Shepard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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