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

Ramones, part two

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part three sometime in the future.

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.

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 and Jenny Mae part 45: Gay

Gay.

Steve was interesting; unlike anyone I had never met, especially in Springfield. He was somewhat short, with wispy blond hair that was cut in layered steps, and he was lean but athletic, with veiny forearms and biceps that bulged slightly under his Little Caesar’s pizza shirt. He had a trimmed mustache, which wasn’t odd in 1986, when Magnum P.I. mustaches weren’t yet ironic. The only suspicious thing was that he had multiple gold hoops in both ears. I couldn’t remember if it was a right or left earring that meant a person was gay, as nobody at Northeastern High School would come out of the closet for years. He was funny, hysterically funny in fact; cracking jokes while he plied the dough, rolling his eyes at the serious assistant manager who wanted every pizza pie to contain the exact amount of cheese, sauce, and pepperoni—deviating from the scale meant a loss of revenue! This couldn’t happen if Little Caesar’s were to ever usurp Dominoes. The fact that the pizza tasted like the cardboard it was served in didn’t seem to matter.

Steve had recently left the Navy and was working at the pizza place to get enough money to return to San Diego. It was obvious that he was worldlier than all of Livingstone Avenue in Springfield, Ohio. I awkwardly kneaded the dough, weighed the cheese, and constructed pizza boxes, never ending pallets of pizza boxes. I was shy, so I kept to myself, singing my favorite songs and hiding in my car during my breaks so I could listen to WOSU, finding the strength to make a hundred more pizza boxes with college radio.

He asked me what music I listened to and it turned out that he was familiar with the same bands. He had also seen R.E.M. a few years ago at the Wittenberg Field House and he said he saw Husker Du in San Diego. He asked me to go party with him and his friends after work the next time we worked together.

That night, I told Jenny that there was one island of sanity in the Little Caesar’s Pizza shop, one person who didn’t talk about his truck, niggers, or pussy. There was a sense of loathing when it came to the pizza shop, not just due to the awkward anxiety that presented as laziness, the co-workers with their constant hate filled masculine chattering. Jenny said I should go out with him and his friends the coming Friday. She would be working at the drive-in theater, and I could pick her up afterwards.

Friday rolled around and I went to work, flush with my first paycheck, all $85 of it. I was ready to hit the bars. I looked old enough and had a smudged up I.D.; the drinking age was only nineteen at the time. He asked if I wanted to go out after work and I said, “Sure, but I need to leave at midnight to get my girlfriend.”

His eyebrows rose. “Oh, you have a girlfriend? I would have never guessed.”

That’s odd, I thought, replying with, “Why not?”

He laughed and said, “Oh, I just assumed you were gay like me, that’s all.”

For a moment, the world flipped-flopped. Gay, he thinks I’m gay, and furthermore, he’s gay. Nauseated, every assumption I held true was under attack, Maybe I’m gay and don’t know it, I thought. I made excuses and left early, telling him that I would catch him next week.

What now? If I’m gay, then I can’t be in love with Jenny. Is this why I want to move to Columbus? I had been told that Columbus was a “smorgasbord of homos”. Two years prior my father had tried to convince me that Lucifer walked the earth, and that he would try to tempt me, most likely in the guise of a gay man. I paid no heed to this—even as a fifteen year old I knew the absurdity of it, but it may have watered the seed of homophobia that was the norm for any high schooler in rural Ohio.

I picked Jenny up and we went back to the parsonage, where I confessed my fear to her that maybe, just maybe, I was queer. I couldn’t remember ever being attracted to a man before, though, and I had a stack of Playboy magazine’s next to my bed. That had to mean something. “It’s okay if you’re gay,” she said, stroking my head, “although I don’t think you are.” She put a soft hand on my lap. Afterwards, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe I was gay. Steve had no gay behaviors, no lisp. He was built like a running back and he liked the same music as me. And I liked him—he made me laugh, made me feel welcome in the shit-hole fast food pizza place where I worked.

I ran to the toilet, barreling through doors, and crouched on the floor to empty my guts into the toilet bowl. “I want to go to my mom’s,” I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. The world was asunder.

My mother drove me to Galion, where she lived with her boyfriend, and I spent a day there contemplating what being a gay man might be. Everything would be different, my relationships, my family, and the way I socialized, and, most importantly, sex would change.  Where I grew up, kids were fed hate and ignorance about gay people. We weren’t taught that there are many kinds of relationships. Instead, people who were frightened, who wore their racism, homophobia, and sexism as badges of honor, told us the world was black and white.

While I tried to reject this worldview, it could be difficult, especially the homophobia aspect. Bewildered, I didn’t understand that a person could have relationships with gay men without having gay sex. I came to the realization that in order to be truly gay, one must want to have gay sex, which I didn’t.

On the bookcase in the living room of my in-laws house, thousands of miles from the Franklin County Courthouse, there is a small photo of me and my wife standing across the street from the courthouse, a small bouquet of flowers in her hand and an expectant smile on her red, flushed face. I’m standing next to her with a freshly pressed powder-blue shirt with a crooked grin that seems to say, “This time I will get it right.” We married just four years and two days after the end of my previous marriage in the same courthouse where both that marriage and the subsequent divorce took place.

The courthouse is huge in Franklin County, three towering buildings that mete out justice between marble and drop ceilings. They are a trifecta of fear, loathing, and, in some rare cases, joy, with the Justice of the Peace sandwiched between Adult Probation and the Public Defender’s office. Dizzyingly busy at times, they are filled with pleated skirts, blue suits, leather-bound briefcases, and lawyers carrying piles of documents in the hope that the sheer magnitude of paperwork will turn a judge or jury in their favor. By contrast the other inhabitants of the court house, are the poor and economically malnourished, many of the men brandishing neck tattoos, and women pulling along toddlers, at times picking up the child by the arm, the frustration of the day being put into action. Parking is a chore, with few parking meters available. If you’re unfamiliar with how the courthouse works, then understanding how long a marriage or divorce takes is a puzzle.

Today, one of the responsibilities of my job is to appear in court with mentally ill clients, who approach the courthouse with a very real sense of trepidation or fear, not knowing if they will be leaving the courthouse in a bus with corrugated fencing over the windows via the basement entrance. The fear I once had of the courthouse is a far cry from the fear of my clients.

 

Me and Robin, my soon-to-be-ex wife drove to the courthouse in the same car, a white Metro that I had bought with money borrowed from Dan Dow (a sum that he would largely forgive a few years later). I was going to give the car to her as part of the divorce—that and temporary custody of Istvan, my beagle-collie mix who liked to eat records and shit on the floor. I would have given anything to rid myself of the pangs of guilt caused by yet another failed relationship.

 

We drove to the courthouse together to untie the knot that we had just months prior banded together, hoping that this dreadful day would never come. We were nervous and somehow on this particular morning this energy somehow brought us together when we were publically tearing ourselves apart. I had arranged for our mutual acquaintance Mark Fisher to handle the dissolution. Mark is known as the “rock and roll lawyer” in Columbus circles. He helped organize the annual Community Festival, a somewhat self-congratulatory endeavor of the bohemian, left-minded wing of Franklin County that celebrates local music, liberal ideals, and lots of alcohol. I have never cared for the festival, although it tends to be the one gathering that brings the Columbus music and arts scenes together for one mud-filled and alcohol-soaked weekend a year.  Mark did the dissolution for the low sum of $500, and, since we owned very little, it was easy. We appeared in the courtroom, signed some paperwork, and our marriage was dissolved.

An emptiness came with our failure, a type of vacancy that blended the present moment with the past, muddled together to wipe out any sense of body or emotion. For a moment, when the realization hit, I couldn’t feel the outside, as if I were a flag, shifting with the wind, the skin like bare thread bouncing but not feeling anything expect the lack of feeling. Stepping to the curb, Robin and I looked at one another, nervous smiles across our faces. We had a permanent public scar on our history; the brunt of our deteriorated relationship would be in the newspaper tomorrow. We looked at one another, trying to figure out the next step. On the car ride back to her apartment we stopped for a drink, and then another drink, before finally succumbing to one another. We got a twelve-pack and drove to her house, with nervous energy bouncing off of one another like invisible emotional darts. Did we feel sadness, anger, relief, or shame?

Heading to her room, we undressed to engage in the one activity that lifted all oppressive emotions for at least a moment. Afterwards, she laid her head on my chest. Feeling as if I were standing too close to a campfire, my eyebrows singeing, I bolted upright. “I gotta go, now,” I stammered.

Scowling, she replied, “That’s just like you, you are such a fucking asshole. God, I hate your fucking guts. You’ve RUINED my fucking life!” I listened to her screaming while I wrestled a pair of jeans on in the other room. My little dog Istvan stared up at me, wondering where I was going.

Lurching home, I picked up a 12-pack of Milwaukee’s Best Light and, with drama in every step, plodded up Ted Hattemer’s wooden porch steps. The dazzling sun was in stark contrast to the grayness that filled me. Plopping down in front of the stereo, I listened to “Dear You” by Jawbreaker, a favorite of both me and Jerry Wick. And looked back at the drama I had set up for myself as if it was something straight out of a John Hughes movie. In reality, everything about me that week was a wreck. That night, after a quick drunken nap, I decided to go out. I went to Larry’s and quickly started a conversation with a dark-haired woman who had tattoos stretching up one arm and down the other. A few hours later I found myself in her bed. After sloppy and guilt ridden sex, I laid on my back, trying to see if the ceiling in her room really had a tapestry pinned to it. I wanted an inner shower.

The next day, sauntering in to work with a large black Buckeye Donuts coffee to purge my sweaty hangover, my colleagues were kind enough not to mention the day before. The drinking started early again that day, as it would for the majority of the next year. It usually began at five p.m., but sometimes it started earlier, at around three. A quick double shot of vodka and lime juice at Larry’s followed by a six pack of Black Label to get me through the last few hours of Used Kids and I was ready to stumble into the coming night.

That night I went to Staches and ended up at The Blue Danube, where I ran into Jerry and two women drinking at the bar. Jerry cracked to the women that I just gotten a divorce, which somehow impressed them. Either they were amazed that someone would marry a schlep like me or that I had lived long enough to be married and divorced. Nobody in our scene actually married. We eventually ended up downtown, the four of us, dancing at the Garage, better known to wizened souls as the Gay-Rage. Our bodies twisted and we flicked our sweat onto all the gay men hurtling themselves to the heavy techno beats of the time. Feeling lost, I went home with one of the two women. I urgently needed to be held, smelled, and felled. Waking up the next morning, in another strange house, was unnerving. She was gone, and she had left a note on her dinner table that directed me to the still-warm coffee and gave me her phone number and name. Walking home, I was overcome with an even heavier sense of loss than I’d had the day before.

Rinse and repeat. The next night I found myself at Dow’s on High and then at Dick’s Den, two havens for drunken outsiders who were fond of classic country music and jazz. I ran into Eric Davidson’s girlfriend, Heather, and a female bartender from Bernie’s named Jen. Jen and I had been flirting for several years, trading gazes across the bar that implied we both wanted more than drinks. She was short, with solid blonde hair that wasn’t dyed, and she had a quick wit that works well when serving drinks to the cynical crowd. At Dick’s Den, under the influence of a mixture of Maker’s Mark and Pabst Blue Ribbon, she said “Good” when I told her I had gotten divorced three days ago. Later, on groggy, loose legs, I asked her if she wanted to go back to my house to listen to records. This was the indie version of asking a woman if she wanted to have sex. Although on this night, as the effects of the PBR and Maker’s Mark went from pleasing to drudging up more guilt, listening to records was actually what I wanted to do.

The attic of Ted’s house had been reconstructed to handle me post divorce. I had asked Ted if I could move in with him some months earlier, and he had converted the attic into a two room area with a half bath for me. It was lined with records, CDs, books, and a few barely alive plants. The floor was littered with t-shirts and most of the free areas on shelves and the dresser were filled with empty beer bottles stuffed with cigarette butts.

I had my grandmother and grandfather’s huge bed, which was nearly an acre across in order to hold my grandmother’s enormous girth and the dying body of my grandfather. The bed filled the room, with sheets twisted across it as if they had been lifted by a tornado and deposited at the other end. The dog hair was thick on both the bed and the carpet beside the bed, but I kept it as clean as I could. I had slept in enough strangers’ beds to be aware of how it feels to lay back naked on a filthy mattress. I explained all of this to Jen in a drunken, laughing dialect that only alcohol can create. “It’s clean,” I said as I pointed to the bed, “except for all that dog hair. I mean, the dogs are also clean. I bathe them, you know? Those beer bottles are new. Smell them. They don’t smell like Bernie’s or anything. I drank them in the past few days—same with the clothes. I mean, I didn’t drink the clothes…I wore them, but just the past few days…I’m not dirty.” At this point, I started to move my hips ever so slightly to the rapturous sounds of Les Thugs. She smiled. “I mean,” I said, casting a mischievous smile her way, “I’m dirty but not like dirt dirty.” I thought that this sounded wiser than “I’m horny.” I leaned in to her and we kissed, but suddenly I wasn’t feeling so dirty any longer, just sad.

I stopped kissing Jen and sat on the edge of the bed until “I Love You So” faded into the next song, which wasn’t nearly as epic. Putting on the first Bee Gees’ record, I left to take a piss. When I came back, talking to myself about the greatness of the Bee Gees, there she stood, completely naked but for her earrings. Shit, I thought, I can’t do this—three nights in a row with different women. I had plenty of hang-ups about sex, even without considering the divorce I had gotten a few days ago. I hugged her and then perched myself back on the corner of the bed. She kissed my neck, placing a hand on my chest. I said, “I can’t do this now.”

“Why? You know we didn’t come to your house to listen to records.”

I looked down, not knowing what to say; even though this scene was something out of a fifteen year old’s fantasy. “Well, I just got my divorce,” I stumbled over words as she pulled my shirt up. I was listless both inside and out.

“Yeah….” She purred. I waited a few moments, taking some breaths, thinking as the moments ticked by. What do I say? I thought, as my mood was quickly changing. “Ummm, I got my divorce because I’m gay,” I stammered.

She waited, thinking, and then turned my head. Before kissing me fully on the lips she said, “you ARE NOT gay.” And we completed the task.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 40: The Ocean

The Ocean

The North Sea is not to be confused with the Atlantic Ocean, especially if you are Dutch. The Dutch can get a bit testy if you refer to the Noordzee as the ocean. Not only will you get stern look, but you may even get a chuckle. When I was a young child, my family spent a few years living in Springs, New York, which is located at the far tip of Long Island—just a stone’s throw from Montauk. We could cut through the forest that backed up against our yard and be at a small harbor, smelling the salty air of the Atlantic, in just a few minutes. Some weekend mornings we would drive to the lighthouse and pick from what appeared to be acres of mussels. They were so plentiful on the beach that their shells would crack and snap under our rubber boots. Gazing into the grayness of the Atlantic, I would try to see all the way to England, although my step-father would gently remind me that if I could see that far I would most likely see Spain, France, or Holland. The damned curvature of the ocean always prevented my owl-like vision from seeing the other side of the world.

Holland is below sea level, but the Dutch have used their centuries of expertise and ingenious determination to carve a complex series of dikes and canals into the ocean. Water is ever present in the minds of the Dutch. The ocean can be threatening in terms of rising water, storms, and global warming, but it also provides life and income. The Dutch made their mark in trading—Holland has been a hub of international trading since the 1300s—and they are surgical in terms of practicality and efficiency; they do not tolerate fools lightly. I met my wife Merijn at Used Kids. She was a young Dutch woman with the characteristics of most Dutch women; that is, she was staggeringly beautiful. She was tall and mysterious, with close-cropped blonde hair and a hushed voice that was a cross between Marilyn Monroe breathily singing “Happy Birthday” and IngridBergman. She was prone to blushing whenever I cracked a joked, gently pushing whatever compact disc she bought. She came into the shop roughly three days a week, always when I was there. Soon I was openly flirting with her. I was recently divorced and trying out one-night stands as if they were cups of coffee, floundering is too kind of a word. . Some of my co-workers shook their heads at me when she was in, never failing to mention that she was out of my league. In fact, she was out of everybody’s league in Columbus, Ohio. Luckily, talking to women was never an issue for me because I realized that a way to a woman’s secrets is through her laughter. It also helped that I have never known when to shut up. I made Merijn laugh every time I saw her.

One afternoon she came in with a tall curly-haired man with stark blue eyes that were reminiscent of hers. They laughed and spoke a strange hockery-guttural language. They had an intimacy that suggested that they were a couple. But when they got to the counter, she eyed me and him and then me again, as if pointing me out with her eyes. I smiled at her and she blushed like a school girl caught with a note in her hands. Within a few weeks, determination set in. Talking to my friend Candace, I mentioned, “I think I’m in love with this foreign woman.”

Candace smiled. “Is she kinda tall and blonde?”

Feeling my heart quicken, I said, “Yes, she is.”

“She likes you. I’m in class with her. She said there is this guy at the record store who is very handsome and funny and she keeps going back.”

Eyeing her, I asked, “Are you sure that’s me?”

Laughing, Candace said, “Of course.”  A few nights later, Candace pointed her out to me at a crowded Larry’s. By the next week, I had her phone number and was invited into her window of the Dutch world.

After getting through the initial trepidation of new lovers—when one explores each other’s past history of lovers, matching up against the past, measuring the ability to hold onto brand new love as if it were shiny pearl to be polished and cared for—I found out that the tall curly-haired gentleman was Merijn’s Dutch friend Edo Visser, who was also going to graduate school at Ohio State. He was a gentle man who was full of pensive yet easy laughter and an almost childlike amazement about the world. He would gently laugh at the baffling ways of Americans, who could be so quick to do the absurd, choosing illogical avenues that were so contrary to the Dutch philosophy.

Edo was student of Paul Nini’s, the leader of the band Log, whose Kiwi sounds I adored and whose members all looked as if they owned homes, made regular car payments and knew their way around a New York Times crossword puzzle.  Paul taught design at Ohio State, and Edo was blown away when I showed him Log’s CD that had come out on Anyway. In a sense, this helped Edo understand that everything in the world is local, everything is small and interconnected. Soon he was accompanying me and Merijn to shows, where he was exposed to the world of underground music.

Edo was fascinated by the life I lived, including the bands and the art I was submerged in. He was interested in the fact that, like so many of my acquaintances, I had dropped out of college but was well read. We wrote and tried in our own ways to live lives of creation and evolution.  He was taken aback by the amount of alcohol we consumed—he had never had a drink of alcohol in his life, nor did he eat meat or talk derisively about others. It was as if we were bugs in a glass jar for him, and his eyes would grow large as he ventured into our world. He came into the store at least once a week, usually spending about an hour combing through the $3 CD bin. He could only afford cheap CDs on his meager grad-student salary. He would pick music based on the artwork, hoping that would be reflected by the music inside.

He was soon a participant in our world a bystander in a world filled with music and hilarity, where every night was a chance at making a mark on world. He was a witness to the fragility and emotional ineptitude of a small swath of artists and musicians in Columbus at that time. He became friendly with our all of our friends, attending the wild parties of Jenny Mae and sometimes sitting in the corner booth of BW-3 with Ron House, Jerry Wick, and myself as five-o’clock rolled around. As we tempered the day with vases of alcohol, Edo would sip his coke and then shuffle off to his house.

One evening I decided to make Edo dinner. I was living with Ted Hattemer and our pack of dogs. Edo sat in the kitchen as I made vegetarian chili, and as I prepared to cut up the green peppers, he offered to show a secret method to slice them. I called him off, wanting to do the work myself. I was insistent. He made some flaky, stuffed hors d’oeuvres with filo dough and cheese. Later that night, he talked to Merijn as I swayed in front of a stage while Two Dollar Guitar sang about a dead friend. What is so odd about that mundane experience in the kitchen is that every time I handle a green pepper, I think of Edo. And in some way I yearn for him to show me the secret of slicing a pepper. It is the small reminders of friendship that bound into my thoughts, in the same way, every time I’m on the corner of Summit and Hudson Streets in Columbus, I think of Jerry Wick.

The Dutch are emotionally reserved. Plunging into a relationship can seem like a violation of ethical concerns to them. While this can be frustrating, upon deeper reflection it makes sense. One must keep one’s sense when living under the ocean and being dependent on the trading of goods for survival. Edo never spoke of his family with the exception of his sister, who he appeared to adore. There seemed to be an extra layer of emotional veneer about him as he said, “I don’t drink. People in my family did and that was enough for me.” But he never judged me about my own intake of alcohol, and when my voice would rise in a burst of emotional turmoil towards some dissatisfaction with Merijn, Edo would turn heel and leave.

Edo adored Jenny Mae. He was amazed that someone whose life was in such chaos could make such touching and delicate music. He was respectful, hesitant, and curious about her outspoken, ramshackle mannerisms. She could easily crack a joke about blowjobs and stinky balls and, in the next breath, play a song as heart wrenching as “Ho’ Bitch.”

One night we traveled over to Jenny’s, whose tiny green house sat directly behind two bars in the middle of a gravel parking lot. Her house was hidden from the neighborhood—as if it had been erected only for outsiders—parked in an alley with only tiny stones and broken glass for a yard.  She had decided to have a party. In her own way, every night was a party. There were times when she would invite Merijn and me over, saying she was having a party, and it would be only us and her husband. “Where’s the party Jenny?” I would ask, annoyed that we had dropped our plans for her “party.” After about ten times of this, Merijn would say, “I’m not going to any more of Jenny’s parties unless it is a real party. This is madness.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell anyone,” she would say nonchalantly, taking a pull from a wine bottle. When she did have a party, she invited her friends—usually only a handful of people she identified with, including other musician types who stood on the outskirts of the mainstream, never wanting to put a toe into the flowing river of conformity.

That night, we arrived to a half-full house. The Shannon brothers, Tom and Dave, who made up 2/3 of the Cheater Slicks, were there, along with Jerry Wick, Ted Hattemer and his future wife Julie, and some of Jenny’s band mates. Later, Ron House showed up with Mark Eitzel of American Music Club. Jenny was dressed in a thrift store evening gown with long, fake diamond pearls hanging deep into her formidable cleavage and her husband, Dave, was wearing a black suit. There was a small waterfall in her living room that she had dragged from a dumpster and her walls were adorned with black-and-white photos that she had ripped from old Life magazines and her own paintings of odd looking women with large heads and thin bodies. Edo was impressed. He turned to me and said, “Wow, she is really some artist-type person. I always got the impression she was just a drunkard.” Later, as she turned on her fog machine, smoke rolled from her basement practice space and the cocaine she snorted in the bedroom lit a fire in her belly. The drunken absurdist Jenny took over, with her new record blaring from the speakers all the while. I asked Edo that night if he would do the artwork for the record.

Edo took his design work seriously; he was smart and deliberate in his work. He was careful and respectful of Jenny’s idea for the cover of Don’t Wait up For Me. I told him that I had never liked her idea for the cover of There’s A Bar Around the Corner…Assholes. This time, I wanted something that displayed the emotion of the music. He did a fine job. I then asked him to do the artwork for a record I had been trying to assemble for nearly eight years. I Stayed up All Night Listening to Records was intended to capture songwriters in their own element, without any assistance from others. The guidelines were that the song, the instruments, and the recording had to be done by each performer solo. For the most part this ended up being true, with the exception of a few recordings that people did in a studio. I asked a lot of musicians I greatly admired. Most were from Columbus, but I also asked several who I had come into contact with and respected. I asked too many musicians, and when I got to the studio to assemble the record I had to keep several artists who had submitted stuff off the final record. Two of the most notable deletions were Tim Easton and Paul K., who contributed a live band recording.

I wanted the artwork for I Stayed up All Night Listening to Records to pay homage to the Folkways records I had grown up with as a child. This would be hard to do, as it was only going to come out on compact disc—Revolver was not going to splurge for a double LP of mostly Midwestern songwriters. I gave Edo a copy of Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie along with Music Time with Charity Bailey and Songs to Grow On. He came back a few weeks later with beautiful cover for the record that was humble and simple, but, most importantly, that was descriptive of the mostly simple four-track recordings.

Some of us must have a gathering around us, or just a hesitant phone call away, to bind the grimness of being together with laughter and companionship to create the joy of an unfettered existence. Others choose the solitary life, for it is more emotionally economical to sit on the sidelines of life, observing as the world lurches by. Still others settle in between the two, letting music, books, and movies be their companions when the world is too tight. Gaiety has always come easy for me. My well-worn sense of humor has cost me at times, but humor goes a long way when the core of a person is unsettled. Edo traversed a lonely path, most likely by choice. At the end of graduate school we sat in my kitchen, Edo, Merijn, and I, discussing the future as we ruffled the heads of itchy dogs and drank coffee.

My wife decided to stay in America for another year, taking a gamble on a charming man with ruffled hair, a winsome smile, and blood diluted with copious amounts of alcohol and the hopes of a job. Edo planned a trip down the west coast by locomotive, just him and the rails in pursuit of an all-American sense of adventure that could only be found in the imagination of a European boy. Taking a sip out of my “Proud to be a Democrat” cup—a defiant token against the impending impeachment of the President—I asked, “Are you are going by yourself?”

Edo, sipping his herbal tea, said, “Of course.” He continued, pulling a map from his a worn leather bag, “See, I will fly to Chicago and take a train to Seattle and then travel down to San Francisco and then I will fly home, and then fly home again.” He smiled at the double life he lived, one in Columbus and one in Holland.

Surprised, impressed, and curious, I asked, “Really, you will go across America by yourself?” The idea that one would choose to be alone without so much as a reassuring touch available was beyond my grasp. In view of his choice to travel alone, I was left with the fact that I had not spent more than a few weeks of my adult life alone. I always searched for companionship, and I was fortunate (or unfortunate) to always have it available to me.

Perhaps Edo had no one to travel with. He had mentioned that he had a lady friend in Holland for a while—an older woman in her late thirties who was married—but in the States he had no romantic partner that I was aware of. I last saw Edo two years ago, at my in-laws. He traveled down from Amsterdam and took a long walk with us in the gray flatlands of Southern Holland, past Dutch cows and miniature horses who breathed mists of air as we walked by. Edo held our daughter’s hand and pointed out the animals and spoke to her in English and Dutch. His English was blunted with age, withered by the years now spent in the Netherlands. His features had hardened a bit, his brown hair retreating and flecked with gray, but his eyes sparkled with playfulness as he charmed our three-year-old daughter. He had a gift for me, a wonderful book by Hazrat Inayat Khan, titled The Art of Being and Becoming, written in the early 20^th Century, it’s Sufi philosophy jibbed well with my ever growing interest in Buddhist literature.

In a sense, he was more isolated than he was some eight years prior, living alone, as if his years in the Midwest had transformed him into a man without a land to call home. His exposure to American ways of life had transformed him, mutating his sense of society. He experienced how rigid the Dutch could be, as contrasted with Americans, but realized that there was a fine line between knowing too much and not enough. Edo went home a visitor and stayed that way.

Last year Edo moved to a small island just off the coast of the Netherlands. He was working as a designer for a boating magazine, seeking solace in the sea as waves of turmoil crashed in his head. Early in the year, I had to travel to Holland as part of a research class and contacted Edo. We made arrangements to meet up in Amsterdam, but upon my arrival he never responded to my emails. By June, his email account was closed. Sometime in August, Edo cleaned up his small apartment, making sure that his belongings were in place, and headed towards the seashore. Thinking of his family, his recently lost job, and the sensitivity that comes from being too vulnerable in one’s own skin, he walked into the ocean. What does a person think as the water swallows him whole? Did Edo fight the current or let him take him away? His sister emailed my wife earlier this month to tell us that his body had washed ashore in September.

Jenny Mae & Jerry Wick part 39: Matador at 21

Matador at 21

Standing on the shoulders of the past is a dangerous position gazing through the haze of dead bodies, former lovers, and the highs and lows of the past can provided a remedy for today. 1989-1990 were years of planting seeds, at least for the soft underbelly of the fermenting underground scene. At night we huddled in bars, clutching long-necks as if they were talismans, eyeing bands on crumbling stages while looking for lovers through the haze of cigarette smoke. Back then we got paid to listen to records and laugh at the responsibilities of the rest of the world. Very few of us had children, had jobs that required button-down shirt or, god forbid had mortgage payments to make. The thirst inside of us was for music, booze, and the sense of belonging that those two ingredients can provide.

The grotesque hierarchy of major labels and commercial entities tried to foist the sickening, barbaric, and sexually destructive machismo of such drivel as Warrant, Motley Crue, and other purveyors of all things hair, spandex, and stupidity on us. The underground scene was more approachable, and although Dinosaur Jr. may have lacked the audio sheen of “Girls Girls Girls”, the guitar solo from “Freak Scene” ferociously laid waste to the whole ridiculous genre of 80s corporate rock, and Dinosaur Jr.’s song was more honest about relationships than anything Vince Neil and his skinny dumbfuck drummer could ever hope to aspire to. We discovered that those who made the most precious, moving art were among us, just a phone call or, better yet, a 7-inch away.

At Used Kids, we were connected to the loose but sophisticated network of labels, booking agents, fanzine writers, and fans across the country. There were only a few distributors getting the music into people’s hands. The labels were started in living rooms and some, by sheer force of personality, perseverance, and hard work, lifted themselves out of those living rooms and into real offices with fax machines, computers, and maybe even a Starburst commercial or two. It’s ironic that now, twenty years after the static indie/grunge rock revolution, many labels are again being run out of living rooms, coffee shops, or wherever one’s laptop may be. Because of the kind but acerbic enthusiasm of Ron House and Dan Dow, whose reputations preceded them, I got to know most every important player in nineties underground rock. A tiny touchstone in the largest college town in America, soon I was handling the ordering at Used Kids, and I started booking shows into the cozy confines of Staches and Bernie’s. My own enthusiasm was exhausting—records were more important than anything. more important than sex because a record can’t hurt you, more important than jobs because songs don’t have responsibilities, and more important than families because music can’t leave you.

Gerard Cosloy phoned Used Kids one day and asked Ron to order the first full-length record on his new label, Matador Records. My memory is clouded because I thought it was Teenage Fanclub’s A Catholic Education, but it must have been Superchunk’s self-titled debut. In any event, we ordered a handful and were blown away by both records, especially the life-affirming sound of Superchunk’s “My Noise” and “Slack Motherfucker,” the sentiments of which laid the groundwork for an entire generation soon to be labeled Gen-Xers. A Catholic Education was itself an epiphany, combining the raggedness of Sonic Youth with the fragility of Dinosaur Jr. (two bands that Gerard had worked closely with at Homestead Records). Teenage Fanclub’s record was beautiful in every staticky, disordered note, a watershed of sound coalescing into what may be described simply as Perfect Sound Forever.

We ordered direct from most labels; Scat in Cleveland, Dischord in Washington, DC, Ajax in Chicago, Siltbreeze in Philadelphia, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Revolver in San Francisco. All of them were run by people with the same devotion to musical escape that we shared. It wasn’t too long before I was working closely with the labels as bands played and sweated through the college towns and major cities across America. Bands and label employees knew that they could find ears and couches in Columbus, and it wasn’t long before Columbus had become a main stop for touring bands. I discovered that every town had someone like me who was all too willing to shell out meager guarantees to musicians who were escaping their own mundane jobs for two weeks to eat greasy eggs and falafel and snuggle up to a stranger’s dog. I got to know some of these folks myself, either closely or by the casual association of the scene. In Athens, Georgia, Henry Owings booked shows and was soon putting out the devastatingly funny Chunklet zine that lampooned our entire tiny universe. In Pittsburgh, a curly haired, overtly serious short man named Manny brought bands in by the dozens. In Cleveland, Kathy Simkoff eked out a living finding bands to fill her small club, the Grog Shop, with many of the same bands who would wake up at eleven A.M. on my floor and make the two-and-half-hour drive to Cleveland.

I had only two unpleasant interactions with bands over the years, both involving bands that I booked as favors for their labels. The first was H.P. Zinker, who managed to have the debut releases for both Matador and Thrill Jockey Records. I had gotten a last minute show for them at Bernie’s on a Monday night with Gaunt, who had just “signed” with Thrill Jockey. There were all of six people at the show—me, Gaunt, and one rabid, blonde-haired fan who stood in front of H.P. Zinker for their entire set. The drummer also played in the Amherst band Gobblehoof (for whom J. Mascis moonlighted on drums) and he was a bit irate that I didn’t have more than the fifty bucks I gave him out of my pocket. He threatened to take me outside and “kick my skinny little ass.” At that point in my life, I was sober—a quiet, peaceful record store guy whose only aspiration was to listen to the next Ass Ponys record. There were to be no fights that night, although I did not offer my couch or to introduce them to my lovable dogs.

The second unpleasant interaction was with Moonshake, an English band signed to the brilliant Too Pure label. They lacked the frenetic genius of label mates Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab, and leader Dave Callahan and songstress Margaret Fielder didn’t have the charm and politeness of those bands. After receiving a call from the Matador offices asking for a last minute show for Moonshake as they came from Chicago to New York for the annual College Music Journal Marathon, I placed them on a bill with three noisy, garagey bands on Thrill Jockey: Zipgun and Gorilla were from Seattle (Gorilla had released a brilliant song called “Detox Man”) and, of course, Gaunt.  Moonshake didn’t like the fact that they had to go on second nor did they approve of the garage drunkenness of the other bands. Several times during the night, Margaret complained to me about the order of bands and the sounds of the bands.  At the end of the night, after splitting the modest door four ways, each band made roughly $150 (with the exception of Gaunt, who usually played for free on the shows I booked). Needless to say, Margaret was none too pleased with this and said, “Well, I think most people were here to see us as we are on Matador.” I was in no mood to get in a pissing match with a musician, so I simply walked away. Several days later we bumped into one another in the Matador offices, as we were all in New York City for the CMJ festival.

In the pastures of middle age, when the difficulties in life are simpler yet can be complicated by the spilling of apple juice, finding a moment to sink into the electric hum of guitars requires planning. Choices are made based on the effects that they have on one’s ability to navigate through to the next day and provide a modicum of the appearance of responsibility. In my office, the records climb the walls, the compact discs wrestle for space, and books long ago read ply for space on cheap warping particle board shelves. Downstairs, the stereo is surrounded by more compact discs and a few long lost but just discovered cassettes, with every vinyl record I have purchased over the past three years stacked underneath. Most are unopened, as I buy them out of habit, by rote as I navigate the various websites to purchase music. Again, as I did twenty years ago as the buyer for Used Kids, I either order directly from the labels (both Matador/Beggars and Merge are favorites, as their LPs contain download codes) or obtain new music from e-music (I subscribe to the connoisseur plan, 75 downloads a month) or get it on the cheap from Amazon. I usually run out of my downloads from E-music within a week and wrestle with whether I want purchase more downloads. Like a fat man eating pizza, I don’t always taste what I shove in my mouth—I consume and forget how to digest the music I hear. I find favorites for a moment (currently Bare Wires, Justin Townes Earle, and Love is All) and continue to be bowled over by old friends like Superchunk and Teenage Fanclub.

Over our lifetimes, we gather, hoard, and discard, playing a mathematical game of emotion versus materialism. I have spent the last nine years quitting—quitting drinking, quitting screwing around on my wife, trying to quit eating shitty food, quitting expecting myself to be someone who I may have been but can no longer be. I have seen the destruction of longing and attachment eat up the ones I love the most, leaving bare spaces of loss in my psyche that I try to fill up with a new life of young children and, of course, music.

Sometimes I play a mental game, revisiting myself as a younger man wading into a scene I was once very much a part of. Now I sit outside the lines, learning to not so gracefully be a bystander to the lives of others who are a bit younger and a bit more curious. I can see myself picking up a bottle at whatever show is playing at Columbus’s newest version of Staches (this year it is the Summit) and making the young women cackle and the men nod in agreement. I realize that with my graying hair sticking out like a thorny bush, a slight paunch not from alcohol but from exhaustion, and daily stubble that resembles tiny bits of prickly confetti scattered around my mouth as if they were a small parade for the losers, I would be a mess in a matter of hours. I would pine for my new self while wrestling for a time that came and went and was left asunder by alcoholism and mental illness that, fortunately, never held me hostage. Instead, I climb into bed early, even when I have the notion to huddle next to the stage, bobbing my head back and forth while a band plays loud and passionately.

I got an email from my cousin’s wife a few months ago asking if I was going to Las Vegas for the Matador Anniversary show—three nights of memories that would not be a nostalgia act but a celebration. I gazed at the lineup: Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Chavez, Pavement, and Yo La Tengo. These names brought me back to some of the happiest moments of my life, as they provided a soundtrack to a life that I lived and still live. They all meant something personal to me, either by casual relationships or because of the sheer beauty of the music they made. Superchunk’s music defined several breakups in my life. Their album Foolish provided me with solace as I maneuvered through several fleeting relationships in 1995, grappling with the fact that perhaps a fuckup means you’re not able to sustain any type of relationship that requires being able to navigate the end of a night without some assistance from a bottle. Likewise, Here’s to Shutting Up provided the balm to me when, at the ripe age of thirty-three, I was as broken and shattered as the plane imagery of that album, with lines such as “plane crash footage on tee-vee, I know that could be me” (“Phone Sex”), and “they’re building skeletons out of steel” (“The Animal Has Left It’s Shell”) and another song “Out on a Wing”, the record eerily mirrored the tragedy of the Twin Towers. Sometimes, crawling inside of a record is the safest thing a person can do, safer than the clutch of another body holding on for dear life as the emotions drip from the ending of and the beginnings of dreams. In the comfort of sound, we could be who we dreamed to be, with invisible walls that drew attention away from the bewildering aspects of our lives, we found consolation in sound. Even water is drawn to water, so it was the underground sounds found is home in those of us who choose to live outside the parameters set for us. The fact that most of us were white, (somewhat) college educated, and prone to make cynical and ironic statements made us prone to derision by some, surely not the same amount of derision we felt for much of mainstream culture.

As my wife and I visited Gainesville in the late spring of 2001, we stayed in hotel in the middle of the University of Florida campus. The atmosphere was thick with smoke erupting out of fires that had engulfed much of central Florida. As I gazed out into the swamp of the campus, the environment thick with green, creeping plants and the encroaching smoke snarling the hopes I had for a successful marriage, I had a feeling that the fires did not portend a hopeful year. While there offering my newlywed spouse the fragile words of encouragement for a lifelong and very adult dream of teaching fine arts to adults, I felt a touch of sickness for myself and for her, in her dreams I slowly realized that a part of mine was shifting, disintegrating around me. Snaggled and constricted like the smoke that was slowing covering the ground below. Appropriately one of the most painful songs on Here’s to Shutting Up that I repeatedly subjected myself to, is titled “Florida’s on Fire.”

After gazing at the line-up for the anniversary show, I emailed my wife, whose last concert was five years ago (Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips). I was startled by the fact that she said that she might consider attending. Sadly, but with a tiny amount of relief, I realized that the event would be held during my monthly weekend of graduate school classes. We could not attend. I would be in Cleveland, learning how to be more skilled in the act of providing clinical compassion. In the years since giving up the bottle, I have learned that I suffer from a social phobia. It is with a small sense of dread that I attend concerts. I set little rules for myself when attending shows—I go late, usually when the band I want to see is ready to go on and I leave when I grow tired. Last month I saw Titus Andronicus, staying for only about six songs. I thought that they were brilliant, but I had to get up the next morning and shuffle off to work after helping balance a jittery house filled with two over-anxious youngsters. I know that I can’t operate on as little sleep as I once did, even without a hangover. Seeing Pavement earlier this month was a pleasant experience, but I had no desire to wander up to the stage or try to talk to the band that once slept on my floor after I booked them several times in Columbus. I sat back and marveled at the easy pleasure they had in playing old songs and how well they all looked. Tonight the reformed Guided by Voices are playing in a show that may be one of their only Columbus shows that I did not have a hand, I haven’t decided if I am going to go yet (I did decide to go and had a wonderful time). Perhaps more than any other band, I have been identified with GBV, mostly due to the fact that a very good bootleg was recorded at my 26^th birthday party when they were hitting their stride. Crying Your Knife Away was recorded shortly before Bee Thousand was released and after Alien Lanes was already finished (Alien Lanes was tentatively called Scalping the Guru at the time). We were all friends then, but over the course of time we have become un-friends. This is not due to any squabbling, but my own interests rise and fall as every diaper is changed.

In the newest New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes a somewhat dismissive article about Pavement, accusing the band in not-so-subtle terms of playing reserved and couching their sound in an attitude built around their supposed “normalcy” to exclude people who were unlike them.  He thus dismisses the cultural times that the band was created in—that of Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, the aforementioned prefab shit of eighties hair-metal, the radio bombast of Phil Collins, and the tepidness of inauthentic rebels like Billy Idol and Bon Jovi, who were about as dangerous as a two-liter bottle of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. Mr. Jones misses the point. We longed for normalcy to combat the force-fed tripe many of us suffered through while growing up in high schools across the land. There were sonic oases to be found on the far-left bands of FM radio stations and in the bins of local record stores. It was bands like Pavement, Guided by Voices, Mudhoney, and Superchunk that bound us together, providing the belief and determination that we didn’t have to buy the bill of goods that mainstream America was throwing against the wall. If anything, Pavement brought the warm, reality-based sounds of the Velvet Underground into the nineties, and they had enough self assurance not to have to wear sunglasses indoors or have tattoos of women whose breasts were as big as watermelons on their arms. There was no need to pretend to be something else—a Disney version of rock & roll—because we were self assured enough in our own lives to realize that we may not have known what we wanted, but we did know what we didn’t want. If you were in the middle of Mr. Jones, so-called clique, it didn’t feel that way, it felt like home.

After having spent a vast amount of time trying to tear our worlds down night by night, beer by beer, shot by shot, and note by note, I now spend my days trying to rebuild lives, sentence by sentence, listen by listen, and patience by patience. It is an ongoing struggle that is tempered by the gold soundz of my MP3 player.

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 and Jenny Mae part 27: Drinking

1999-2002 Drinking

It was a sunny afternoon day, listening to Lucinda William’s “Car Wheels on Gravel Road” at the record store and Jerry popped in. It was one of those afternoons that tasted like perfection, with enough breeze to take the bite out of the sunshine and keep the sweat off the back of one’s ankles. I was nursing a Black Label that was stashed under the counter and drinking a black coffee. I always referred to this as my poor man’s speedball, which was so much like me to make a reference to something I had never done (cocaine or heroin). Business was lagging behind the few clouds in the sky, drifting across the afternoon, marking an invisible chalk outline around the deadened time between lunch and the busy early evening hours.

Jerry lived just a few footfalls from the store, he was still living above Larry’s and his job at Used Kids was tenuous at that juncture. He was pursuing Gaunt full-time but the money the band was making wasn’t enough to support him quitting. Although Gaunt had a briefcase full of positive press clippings, toured Europe, done multiple cross country US tours and had four full-length records out; none of these managed to put any money in anybody’s pocket. Jerry loved the store, it was the nails that held our collective clubhouse together, while the music was the glue and store put a physical place to meet, share and feel a part of something more tangible than just the sound of three chords and Rolling Rock.

Jerry had somewhat of a contentious relationship with Ron House at this time, while both Jerry and I had tremendous respect for Ron as an artist and an intellectual we both sometimes bristled over Ron’s management style. This is not entirely fair to Ron, as we all had such strong personalities we tended to bristle under the sheer force of our own personalities. Ron loved the store, even more so than Jerry and I and he wanted it to do well, as it was the one stable entity in our collective lives. Jerry being in a touring rock band was not the easiest antecedent for this. His hours were cut.

Jerry came down that afternoon and asked me to take a walk with him, finishing my beer I asked Lamont “Bim” Thomas to man the fort for half an hour. I told him to call Larry’s if I was needed. Jerry and I walked down the street and got another coffee and then turned heel and walked past the record store, carrying our two black coffee’s we entered Larry’s and ordered a couple of beers. It was three pm or so. Along the way Jerry told me of some of the friction in Gaunt, there were a few personality issues with one of the members and rumors of infidelity of his girlfriend. As we carried the coffee, Jerry’s lower lip fluttered and he wept for a few moments. Flabbergasted, I turned to him with some concern as he only cried when he was very drunk. When this happened it was not unusual for a small funk to hover over the area of the bar he was nestled in, his personality so strong that he could change the air pressure. His energy was that epic in scope.

Peeling the label off my beer as I was accustomed to do, forming a small minor art project with the dark bottle and the gluey underside of the bottle’s logo I waited to listen to what else Jerry had to say. We had grown apart the past few years, the cord of our friendship had grown tattered and faded as we both pursued women, art and a lifestyle that had at one time brought us so close together but had almost at this point left it completely asunder. I knew this was serious as he hadn’t confided with me in some time, he thought my closeness to my future wife was a betrayal to my safety. He must have envisioned me as a life-long bachelor. Jerry looked at me after taking a pull of his beer, “I can’t quit drinking” was all he said. I was shocked, “what do mean.” I held a belief that stated “why would anyone want to stop.” Jerry was serious though, I felt it in his speech and his look. He looked straight ahead and said “now, that I’ve had this one I’ll be here, BW-3 and in my room all night.” He went further explaining that he had gotten hooked on five o-clock trivia at BW-3; the hot wings franchise served enormous glasses of beer at happy hour and few in an hour was comparable to a six-pack. He said this combined with living above Larry’s and High Street had him out all the time. He was scared. I had no idea what to say.

My own drinking had actually settled down, after some contentious arguments with my girlfriend, I had basically given up doing any sort of shots. I usually settled on one type of drink during the course of the night (Maker’s Mark, beer or vodka-cranberry). I had also stopped promoting as many rock and roll shows so I was only drinking about three nights a week. On off nights, I usually wouldn’t drink at all. I asked Jerry if he tried this and he said he had but something had always come up, someone was in town or someone asked him to go for a happy hour drink. This I could relate to, as being known as a drinker it was easy to be found out by some other lonely soul looking for someone to share an hour with as the sun hid from the stars. I was fortunate to live with my girlfriend a mile from campus. Jerry did not have this luxury.

After our drinks, I left him there at the bar, walked back to the store and continued my own thirsty travel into the night. I am sure Jerry walked his own soaked road that night.

In late August of 2001, I got a call from my friend Jim. My wife and I were separated, she was teaching at a large state University in Florida. I was busy completely deconstructing my life, one drink at a time. I had left the store travelled to Larry’s and Dick’s Den and made it home by midnight. The minute I walked in the door, the phone rang. “Dude, Jim Stone is having a hot-tub party behind his house.” Jim Stone was a campus figure, manning the bar at Bernie’s and Dow’s on High, Jim’s girth was superseded by his easy going nature; a permanent grin on his face. “I’m there” I slurred into the phone.

The hot-tub sat behind the North Campus Taco Bell on the edge of a sordid alley, I arrived and quickly peeled off my clothes. Somehow the hot tub wasn’t just as bubbly as it should have been. Apparently the party was on its fourth day as the hot tub was rented for the Friday night. It was a cool evening, almost frigid in fact and I quickly ignored the thin layer of human grease and grim that shrouded the surface of the muddied water.

As I slipped into the tub I took a gander at my bath mates, Jim Stone was next to me; naked with the exception of a cowboy hat, next to him were a few female bartenders who had defiantly seen the better part of the extended weekend. To my right was a nice enough fellow who was the lead singer for an operatic-inspired rock band. I had never seen him without a hat, he had a startling resemblance to Riff-Raff from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” as his long hair drooped past his shoulders and his completely bald head acted like a shimmering dance floor for the moonbeams that sauntered around it. There was another, younger man whom I didn’t know. I felt completely pathetic.

After a few beers, the water was feeling cooler and the shame within me rose higher. I contemplated my wife waiting for me in the suffocating sun of Gainesville and the fact that here I was naked in an alley behind Taco Bell. I left the tub, shaking the water off of me, got in my car and drove home. “What the fuck am I doing” I thought as I drove home, the shame was deep enough to peel my skin. I resigned to do something different. As I put the key in my front door I looked down to notice that I was only wearing a white tee-shirt. Just a poof of pubic hair jutting out from the edges of shirt as the August temperature dipped into the forties. “Fuck,” I thought. I climbed back into the car and drove back to the party to retrieve my clothes. Failing to run inside and put some shorts or pants on. Life was a complete mess. Arriving back, I listened to the cat-calls from the tub “Bela, you idiot, you forgot to put your clothes on.” Shaking my head, “I know I muttered to the ground. I know.”  It would be another few months before I would end this sort of behavior

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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