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I started a group while I was home on vacation. We were called, 'London.' I played guitar. I tried singing backup, but I was such a bad singer that the rest of the band said, "..Um, Cash, you are a really good guitar player. Why don't you just concentrate on your guitar playing. I ignored them and practiced singing on my own. In about 10 yeas, I was really good at singing.
We played a dance at the church in my home town. There were about a hundred kids there and they liked us. I really dug playing our top-forty cover songs for them. I thought, "I could do this for ever..."
Back at school, I was reading Pete Seeger's autobiography, "How Can I keep from Singing." One of the brats in my cottage saw it and said, "Cool, you found a book to keep you from singing."
One day in class, I decided that I was going to drop out of school and pursue my dream. I was 15. I walked dramatically out of class and went to the headmaster and told him that I wanted to call my mother and that I was going to go home. He listened with the ears of a man who had heard everything in 50 years of helping kids with his strict but caring ways. He pushed his phone across his desk to me and said, "Call your mother, son."
She lovingly and firmly told me to get back to class and make her proud.
I kept playing guitar and living in fantasy and smoking pot more, and working on school a lot less. When my mother got my report card, she called me and told me that she was going to have the headmaster take my guitar away until my grades improved. I freaked out and hung up on her. I went upstairs and listened to Led Zeppelin. I had a vision that Satan was talking to me, offering me a deal. Satan appeared in my little pea-brain and told me that he would give me certain things in exchange for my soul.
I was stoopid. I didn't sign the standard "Rich and famous" clause. I told the Lord of Darkness that I wanted to make great records, travel the world, and be able to fuck any woman that I could make laugh. I heard him say that in return, I would die at age 43, and go to hell. And if I was able to bring my wife to the service of Satan, I would get to be a court musician in hell.
Satan told me to cut my foot (Not my hands, I needed them to play guitar.) and write a contract in blood. I did. Satan dictated in my ear while I wrote by dipping a dried-up ball-point into my bleeding right big-toe. (I still have the scar.) I signed my name at the bottom, and added all sorts of arcane symbols (A few of them taken directly off the Zep album that I was listening to.)
Then I sealed the magic by masturbating and blessing the contract with my sperm. Then I went to sleep.
I felt powerful in the weeks that followed. I felt that Mister Satan was watching over me. I actually started doing a little better in school, because I knew I didn't have to; I knew that I was going to be a rock star.
My friend Mark came to my parents house with me for Easter his parents didn't want him. I told him about the Satan thing on our way to the airport. On the plane, he developed an excruciating tooth ache that made him cry out loud, and every one on the plane looked at him.
When we got to my house, we were sitting in front of fire on the Persian rug, talking about the lord of darkness. I took the bandage off my toe and threw it into the fire. Even though it only had a couple drops of blood, when it filled the room with the smell of burning flesh. (Which is exactly the same as the smell of burning hair.) Mark and I got breathlessly scared.
I called Denise, three towns away. When I told her what I had done, she screamed. She told me, "I had a dream that you were going to sell your soul!" I asked her what to do. She said that I had to go to a Catholic priest and show him the contract. (Denise was yet to forsake the religion of her parents. She has since settled into a urban-pagan humanism of her own making. It fits her well.) I said that I would.
"...And make sure that he's catholic!!!" She added. . I guess I thought all priests were the same. Now I think of Episcopalianism as a sort of Catholicism-lite: Catholicism with half the guilt.
I called my bass player, Nicky, and asked him where a Catholic church was. He was hesitant. (He probably thought, and rightfully so, that I was as likely to vandalize a church as I was to go to confession.)
I trudged through the snow, watching little halos of lysergic-purple shimmer around the street lights. The town was deserted. It was lovely. I loved the way my little town felt on winter nights, with the snow dampening every sound, except my heart trying to claw its way out of its cage.
I found the priest alone in the majestic cavern of stained-glass and guilt. He was lighting candles to prepare for midnight mass. He greeted me with a cliché, as I half expected. "Welcome my son, come unburden your soul to me."
"I am not catholic, father. I am not even religious, even though I go to an Episcopal boarding school."
"That is OK my son, I will hear your sins anyway."
"I think I sold my soul to the devil." I showed him the contract.
He examined it and told me, "If you read the bible and believe in Jesus, the contract will become annulled." I guess I didn't sell my soul after all, I mearly pawned it. (I wish I'd had lawyers with the contractual prowess of that priest later, when I got into the nitty-gritty of the music business.)
The cassocked contract-negotiator said some mumbo-jumbo in Latin, and lit a candle for me. . I asked him what he was going to do with the contract. He said "burn it."
I didn't believe him. I was betting that he was going to put it in a folder and save it for the next "Evils of Rock." sermon.
(Everything promised in the contract has since come true, except my death and descent into hell. I believe the priest. I think that I won.)
I walked back home feeling scrubbed and happy. When I got home I got out my mother's bible and began to read.
For the next 9 months, I was a Christian. I loved Jesus. I prayed. I quit smoking pot. My grades improved. I spent countless hours calling and writing Denise, and sharing our love for Christ.
Basically, I led a virtuous life. I got my act together. There was one thing that I didn't count on though, something that hit me like an errant millstone rolling from the sacrificial altar: diablophobia. I suddenly feared and hated the Devil so much, that I saw him everywhere. Or at least his influence. He was in a lot of the music I'd previously loved. He was in my friends. He was in and on TV He was everywhere, except at great effort, in my heart. I would wake up in the morning, happy to be alive. For about fifteen seconds. Then I would remember that there is a being and force in this universe named Lucifer that was so diametrically opposed to all that I felt and believed, that I would spend every moment of the rest of the day dodging him and praying to Jesus to keep Satan out of my life.
Slowly, Denise slipped out of Christianity. She was dating a 40 year old man, William, who had his own mini-cult going in his house. This cat had helped invent the microchip. I thought he was sexy for being into computers 15 years before it was hip.
He was a rich, charismatic genius-nerd. He was sexy enough to have four 18-year old girls living in his house, all believing his stuff and loving his soul and body. They were all pretty and smart, with low self-esteem and they all were on bad terms with their fathers. Nice work if you can get it. I didn't like him. He was stealing my gal. ( I later ended up doing Stephanie, another member of his fold, so it all worked out. She was my third lover, but the first woman that I had absolutely earth-moving sex with.) but it was all good, because he seduced her away from Christianity. She in turn , swayed me. I must be a pussy ass mother-fucker to let a woman pull me away from something as fundamental as my religion. Oh well.....
I forgot how to be Christian also. I started smoking pot and having fun again too. There was always still some lingering Christian guilt floating around in the back of my cerebral-cortex. I'm an urban Christian pagan with two conflicting sets of ideas. It is hard being me.
I went to the Church of Jesus in the Field for a total of four years. I made a few friends but mostly kept to myself. I played a lot of guitar. I started a group called, 'Axis.' We sucked, but it was good experience. And fun.
I got drafted to the varsity wrestling team in 10th grade. I weighed 100 pounds, and they needed someone for the 105-pound class. They figured that it would be better to have someone out there flopping like a fish, than being forced to forfeit entirely.
My record was not very good. I was 3-and-12 for the season. One of those, I won on points, and the other two pins were the same kid. (We played the same school twice.) I usually got called for unnessacary roughness. I was short and strong, and most kids in my weight category were tall and skinny, and not very strong. I hated wrestling, but it did get me into being physically active in a gym, which has come in handy later in life, to maintain my ghoulish-figure.
It was really weird being away from girls 9 months of the year. The only women at the school were old, except for one music teacher, who was really sexy, and married. She had an affair with a friend of mine, Thomas. He had been considered kind of a nerd by everybody. After he had the affair and word got out, (Necessitating both Thomas and the teacher leaving school.) He was revered as a god.
Another friend got kicked out and was a hero after he left; He got expelled for breaking into the headmasters house. The headmaster came home early from vacation and found Cal in the headmasters bed, wearing the headmasters robe, smoking his cigar and drinking his brandy and watching TV.
At the end of 11th grade, I was getting pretty restless. My grades were OK, (Bs and Cs) but I really wanted to be a senior. Actually, I wanted to graduate. I wanted to be on my own and be a rockstar. School was getting in the way of my drug use. My friends and I were eating a lot of morning-glory seeds and tripping our brains out. We had purchased a pound of the stoney little lumps mail-order.
One day, a week before the end of 11th grade, me and a few friends were sitting around the dinner table, talking about what we might do with our senior year to make it memorable. One guy suggested starting an underground newspaper. Someone else said, "Let's start a radio station."
I said, "Let's write a letter to Mick Jagger and get him to buy the school and make it really cool." My friends laughed. Paul said, "Far out! I think that that could actually work. Let's do it!" I pulled a piece of paper and a pen from my book bag under the table. Paul did the actually penmanship, I did the dictation, and I signed my name to the document. We mailed it, to John Lennon's address. We figured that he would get it to his pal, Jagger. (This was before Lennon had broken my heart by getting shot.)
I forgot about it until three weeks later. I had just hitchhiked thirty miles to William's house to visit my sexy little blonde-haired, big-breasted hippie girlfriend, Stephanie. I climbed in the window and started blowing her . William yelled down the stairs to her basement room, "Stephanie, Cash has a phone call." I picked up the phone. It was my mother. She had NEVER called me there. She sounded worried.
"You have to come home right away. Your dad is on the way to get you."
"Why do I have to come home, Mother?"
"I cannot tell you." I told her that I wouldn't come home unless she told me why I had to come home.
"You have been kicked out of The School of Jesus in the Field. Your father is on his way."
Dad didn't say much on the way home. It reminded me a lot of the mood of the time that dad had to pick me up at the jail when I got busted stealing shotgun shells.
When I got home, It was an uncomfortable stare-down in the living room. I could feel my mother's heart breaking. My folks hadn't been in the same room since before the divorce.
They showed me the letter that the headmaster had written them. Included was the letter that I had written. I had forgotten what I had said. I had called the headmaster a "Fat, bald, overtly-Christian old-fart." I tried not to laugh when I re-read that. My parents were not in a mood to hear me laughing at that moment.
Apparently, the letter had been returned unopened. The school's address was printed on the envelope, but I had not written my name on it. The headmaster had received the letter two weeks into the summer, He had opened it to see which mailbox it belonged in. He didn't like what I had said about him, and decided that I would not be returning the following season.
I don't know if I was regarded as a hero after I got kicked out.
I called my old hometown school and talked to the guidance councilor. He suggested that I go for the PEP program. The pre-entrance program was a way to take the smart, trouble making kids and get them out of the local public school by sending them to community college for their senior year. It was a pretty sweet deal. I got to get a real high school diploma, and concurrently receive college credit for the same classes. Furthermore, I got to have my own apartment 30 miles from home, in the town where my girlfriend lived, and have all my bills paid. Rock On!
I still keep having dreams where I'm back at The School of Jesus in the Field, and it's the last week of school and I'm trying to get into my mail box to get that letter before it gets found. I have a lot of reoccurring dreams where I did go to my senior year at The School of Jesus in the Field. It's the last week of school and I just don't graduate; I walk out to the highway that goes through the school and hitchhike and just leave and never come back.
I often think about the School of Jesus in the Field. I wonder what it is like being a kid there now. The world has changed. I wonder if there is heroin there now. I wonder if the kids are little gangsters answering their little pagers when their mommies call. I wonder what the headmaster thinks of kids being into 2-live crew and ice-cube instead of the Sugar-Hill gang. I wonder if the kids have computers and are on-line and have doggie-porn streaming onto their rooms. (The internet is such a weird little thing. I don't understand it. I always thought that the implementation of big brother would come as one autocratic boot-like swoop. Instead, we are scrambling to hard-wire ourselves for the apocalypse. It is like the Revenge of the Nerds, competitive gold-rush fever to get these twinkling electrodes running into our homes. As prices of computer hardware spirals exponentially down-There exists now, palm-top net-ready computers, that also run the Microsoft-office package, for 600 dollars, and the price continues to drop.- I envision a time in very few years when EVERYBODY will be on-line. I predict that in three years, many homeless people will have computers on their shopping carts. I based this on the fact that many homeless people have Walkmans, and I think that in 2 years, a used lap-top computer will be comparable in price to a Walkman. Never have so many had so much access to so much power. I ain't interested though. Fuck computers. Give me a Gibson and my women and call me old-fashioned. I like my ignorance. I am terrified of computers.
My first day at the college I blew off classes and took acid and went to school, got my picture taken the day after, when I'd come down from acid (I look really dazed in it).
My dad got me a flea-ridden apartment in Jamestown, New York. I took more acid and wandered around. I didn't know my way around the city got lost. It was 98 degrees out and I was standing on the street corner, with no shirt, drinking milk out of a gallon container that I bought. I had really long hair, and little granny-glasses. I was standing on the corner looking really confused. A little blond boy, about 8, came up to me and said, "What's the matter, Mister?"
It was the first time in my life that I had ever been called 'mister.' It bummed me out. I said, "I am trying to find my house."
"He scratched his blond head and said, "You don't know where you live, Mister?"
Hell, he was a kid, and he knew where HE lived. I felt stoopid.
I didn't have a rock-group at first. I played solo-electric guitar for anyone who would listen. I also ended up playing bass in a really weird group with three senior-citizens. We were called, "Three Old Goats and a Kidd."
I had been sitting in a really weird little working-man's bar on zero street. (The local name for the un-named drive just bellow 1st street, down by the river.) The bar was called "The Roosevelt inn." It looked like Teddy and Franklin D. had sipped a few drinks there. The place was old, old, old. It was dark and had old framed newspaper clippings on the wall. They were all from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and were all about unions. (There was a local joke that Jimmy Hoffa was buried in the basement.) A 75-year old man came up and said, "Hey, boy, you ever take LSD? I love to take LSD and fuck girls all night! You might think I am some old man full of lies and tales, but I ain't! I am for real. So you play music? I play a hell of a piano.....Hey, son I don't get my check till the first, buy an old fool a beer?"
"All right..." I said, "My name is Cash. Two beers please!" I laid a fiver on the bar. "What's your name, fellow?"
"Charlie." he coughed. "I play Piano. I have a group with my two girlfriends. They should be in here later. Can you play a bass guitar, son?"
"Yea, I can play one all right."
Charlie said, "Well, I got a really nice Fender in the car. It is a 1960 Jazz bass. It is worth a lot of money. you aren't a thief, are you?"
"No. And I would be honored to play it. You seem like a really cool fellow."
I followed him out to his white 1960 Ford Mustang. It was in mint condition. As he took the bass case and the tiny amp out of the trunk he said, "You know why there so many classic cars are white, Cash?"
"No"
"Because the red ones were all bought by punk teenagers who got drunk and wrapped them around trees. The white ones were owned by granny, who only used it once a week to drive to her AA meetings. Then she died and I got the car." He laughed and handed me the bass. "This bass is the same year as the car. but I bought the bass, new for 79 dollars. That was a lot of money then."
We went inside and set up the amp by the piano in the little living room-type area in the corner of the bar. There was a funky lamp with a colorful spiral-paper-and-tassel hanging shade. There were those cool old columnar waist-height ashtrays. There was an old faded-yet pretty Persian rug underfoot. And there was Charlie and the piano. He warmed up. The bartender brought us a pitcher of good beer and two glasses. (Charlie played for fun, beer and tips. and peanuts, all the bar peanuts we could stuff into our cheeks. Yup, we played for peanuts.)
Charlie called out, "Key of D, Cash, play a shuffle. I V VI I. Got it?" and started playing an tune called, "There's more old drunks than there are old doctors, so let's have another round."
The 7 or eight folks in the bar applauded. Charlie took me through the paces of playing every Tin-Pan Alley tune ever written. (Some that he had written.) He would just yell out the key and the chord progression and I would fake it, farting away playing staccato walking bass.
That semester I drank for free almost every night. We did the rounds, the old zero-street union bar, the VFW, the old-folk's home, the Moose club. Sometimes we would be accompanied by Flossy on guitar and Beverly on drums (She played very well with brushes on a really little kit; a small bass drum and a snare and a single cymbal.) Frequently, it was just me and Charlie. He really was fucking both of the ladies, and more often than not, one or both were furious at him, and they would be on strike.
One day I somehow ended up opening solo-electric for a punk-rock band called "Amyl and the Accidents." I opened for them in Salamanca, New York, at a white-trash bar on an Indian reservation. I took acid and they hated me. I was playing really long, trippy, a-rhythmic original suites in the style that I wrote in then; sort of third-rate Yes or Genesis. It was chicken wing night and they were throwing chicken bones at me and spitting beer on me and hurling invective such as, "My grandmother can sing better than that!!"
I finished out my set by turning the Marshall up to 11 and torturing their ears with a very tentative version of 'Star-Spangled Banner.' Someone threw a beer bottle at my head and some biker came up to me after and said, "I am gonna kill you after the show." Luckily, he was beating one of his own as we were loading out.
I have played thousands of gigs in my life, in 27 different countries. I have been physically threatened three times and they were all within 30 miles of my birthplace. That was a good place to leave.
The second semester, I ended up living with some punk rockers. (Or at least what passed for punk rockers in Upstate New York....These people had read about punk rock in Rolling Stone, and decided to try it...They interpreted it with their own misconceptions about life in general thrown in for a good measure. Come to think of it...Perhaps their sheer ignorance made them more "punk" than the urban sophisticates they were emulating.)
They listened to Flipper and Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and The Feederz and D.O.A. I liked that stuff.
(The first time that I heard Flipper, though, I didn't really like them. It was on the Dr. Demento radio show. He played a song that I had never heard. It sounded like static with a beat, and someone screaming wordlessly over it. Dr. Demento mewled his avuncular drawl and said, "That was a little ditty by a San Francisco outfit called, Flipper." The wife-beating hippie artist that I was getting drunk with said, "Flipper, eh? remember that name. You are going to hear that name again, I tell you that!" I thought that he was insane.)
We had rockin' parties almost every weekend. We would all take LSD and jam until the sun came up. People would have sex all over the house, nothing would get stolen, everyone would leave happy. They were that kind of parties.
I remember one party on Holloween. My band, "The Armless Children" Played. My drummer was a particularly redneck asshole. (It is a rule of rock and roll that in the drum department, we generally take what we can get.) He passed out drunk. (He refused to take LSD. That was for those, "Crazy hippies.") Gary My room-mate with the mohawk.) and a few others decided to do the typical punk-rock-frat boy thing. Then they took magic markers and wrote all over him. Then They hung Christmas decorations. from his ears. then they put makeup on him. Then they hung Christmas lights on him and plugged them in. I said, "Isn't that dangerous?" Gary threw a beer on the snoring body and said "So? I don't like him. Let's kill him."
I was aghast. I couldn't understand how this silly game was getting out of hand. (I would later learn that they were thinking about a movie that they had seen where some punk rockers take pictures posing with a body of a guy who died at their party.) I also thought that LSD was a magic panacea that made everybody love each other. I would later figure out that my favorite part of the psychedelic experience is the sinister under-current. (Why else would I take acid 120 times after every trip had become a bad trip? My first three hits really did expand my mind. After that it was always heaven mixed with hell, but I did it anyway, or maybe because of that.)
Gary wanted to smother my drummer with a pillow. "It would be the perfect crime. It will look like alcohol killed him. Fucking drunk farmer...."
I talked Gary out of killing my drummer. Years later, Gary was arrested and convicted of child-molestation.
At that same party, as the sun began to rise, three of us were upstairs watching the sun rise out of a second-floor window. We weren't talking much. The mood was that post-lysergic kind of let-down where you want the party to keep going, but it just ain't gonna happen. So in sad silence, we waited out the inevitable- the return to an unaltered state of mind.
Right as it started to get light out, the crippled man who lived next door (The one who always called the cops on us.) hobbled out on his veranda. He put a pumpkin on the ledge. than he hobbled back inside, and returned on his crutches, with a large carving knife, pirate-style, in his teeth. He proceeded to cut a single hole in the pumpkin. "What do you think he's doing?" I asked to no one in particular.
"Maybe he's gonna fuck it!" said Gary.
You could not measure our suprise when it turned out that Gary was right. We felt like we were watching Saturday-morning cartoons for the criminally-insane.
We brushed it off as a disturbing collective hallucination. But we could not shake the fact that it was real. There was an unspoken agreement that we would never speak of this. I am not sure why it disturbed us so. Perhaps we were worried that someday we would be desperate enough to fuck a pumpkin.
Community college is just high school with ashtrays. I was bored. I barely made it through my first year at school. At the end of the year I got to go put on a cap and gown and receive a diploma (Which I later burned at a party my first week in the summer after graduation.) with a class that I had not seen in five years.
My second year at Jamestown Community College, I lived in the same house on 8 Curtis street. I was drinking a lot, fucking a lot, playing guitar a lot and not going to class much. I didn't go to class much. I spent most of my on-campus time in the school library, stoned, listening to "Vincebus Eruptum" by Blue Cheer, or in the college radio station, WJWK. It was a ten-watt station that barely made it past the parking lot, but I loved DJing there. I had a free-form hallucinatory show that would play Pink Floyd "Ummagumma" and pan back and forth between that and the first "Television" album. I would invite local poets to come in and read. I would broadcast static. Typical collegiate fare, to be sure, but I didn't know that. I thought I was inventing the medium. (What is it about free-programming and LSD that makes kids independently come up with Great-idea, not-so-great sounding radio shows?)
This was before the term "slacker" existed, but I think that was pretty much applicable. I majored in playing guitar and fucking. What'd I take in school? I took LSD.
Our station manager had no vision. One day the first Meat Puppets record came in the mail. He Looked at the band's name and said, "Cash, you can have this album if you take it home and never play it on the air." I played it on the air all the time, and he never knew, because he hated listening to my show.
I flunked out my third and fourth semesters, but stayed in school, because my dad was paying my rent. I lied to him and hid my report cards from him. I felt bad, but I was too scared to actually go out and get a job. My household was becoming insane, but so was I. I would lock myself in my room with some acid and my girlfriend and my guitar and not come out for three days. Eventually my girlfriend left me, but I found another. She was even weirder than I.
Gary and his friends thought it would be "punk" to trash the house, so another night at a party (With no live music, girls or marijuana to calm them down- just a bunch of horny, drunk dudes and nothing to do.) they smashed everything. They knocked twenty-three rungs out of the stair-case. They slam-danced the front yard ceramic statuary into dust. They threw a brick though the front window. They Tracked five gallons of oil-based paint through every room in the house. At dawn they left to go into a studio to record an album. I lent them my Gibson SG guitar.
The next day we all got evicted. And the landlord's henchmen confiscated all of the musical equipment in the house (Except the one guitar that I had lent the group, and Gary's amp, which was in the basement-they didn't find it.)
I called my dad and asked him what to do. I told him that I hadn't been involved (Which was true... I wasn't even drinking that night.... I had sat on top of the refrigerator and witnessed the proceedings....Feeling a combination or horror and humor....) He said he would consult his lawyer and let me know.
When I called him back, (I didn't have a phone, otherwise I might have called the cops on my own party) he told me that the landlord would have to serve papers to begin any legal proceedings with me. He said that they would have to be served in person....So he told me that I should go stay with some friends for a while.
I went and stayed with my friend Jane. I didn't know how long I'd be there to avoid being served process, and I told her that. She was very cool about it, said that I could stay as long as I wanted .
She occupied the whole top floor of her building... A clean, modern three room apartment, and a large broom closet with a window across the hall. That's where I stayed. It was on the fourth floor, and had one window. She gave me keys, food and privacy. She even let me fuck women in my closet. (Which was little bigger than the queen sized mattress I was sleeping on... I felt it was very romantic....The artist in his garret, one window, calm, quiet, view of the top of a spreading maple tree....Being kept by a generous woman....)
One night I fucked her and went to my room and laid down. I just wanted to sleep. But I couldn't. I was plagued by a tenacious conception (no pun intended): that somehow, I knew that I had just impregnated Jane
( Matter of truth, I knew it at the exact moment I came. I have caused 4 pregnancies in my life that I know of. Two have ended in abortion, one as a miscarriage, and one a child. In all four cases, I knew each time. At the instant I came. I say 4 that I know of...Not to be a cocky love-em and leave-em stud. I ain't about that. I keep in touch with all the women I fuck. Or at least make sure that they have ways of getting in touch with me if they want to. [This got easier when I started putting out records....Any one could write me at the address I on the records {except the address on the first Vagrant Vampires record...Which will no longer forward mail. Never rent a P.O. Box from U-Haul} or care of the record companies and it will eventually get to me.] No, I say this because of a rumor that I heard. I heard recently that I had gotten a woman pregnant about ten years ago, in Upstate New York. The woman was furious with me, and had an abortion, but didn't want me to know. It was probably one of the girls that I was fucking in Jane's apartment, in the broom closet. I feel bad about this, and a little bit angry. Not that the woman didn't have the right to withhold this information, because she did. I just would have like to know. I guess it just frustrates me to realize that I really have no control over anyone, especially women. And the need for control has been breed deep into me.)
That was the last time that I had sex with Jane.
When she told me, six weeks later, that she was pregnant, I froke.( Past tense of freak?) I was not ready to take care of a kid (I could barely take care of myself). I told her this.
Soon after, I told Jane that I was moving out. She said that was fine with her. My friend Trip was going back to DC, and he said that there was room for me in the car. He also said that his dad would still be summering in Wehauqua till for another month, and that I could stay in his mansion for a few weeks.
I gave Trip's address and phone number to Jane, and hitchhiked the ten miles to Wehauqua. Trip met me outside the grounds and smuggled me past the guards in his trunk. ( I was too cheap to buy a season or even a day pass.) I went and found my father and said good-bye to him. ( He gave me 50 dollars....Knowing I'd be gone for a while... I told him I'd probably only be gone for a couple weeks, but he knew better than me. He'd had three kids leave the nest, and knew just what it felt like. Sorta like that exact moment that the sperm hits the egg, 18 years or so later when that mature zygote finally uncouples from you, you know. You just know.) Then I visited my mother at her store, hugged her good-bye, hopped in the tiny trunk on Trip's sports car, and left.
A quarter mile outside the Wehauqua grounds, Trip let me out of the trunk, and I got in the front seat of the classic Jaguar. Trip reprimanded me for risking him getting in trouble by jokingly singing Pink Floyd songs loudly while we drove through Checkpoint Charlie at the Wehauqua entrance.
Wehauqua is an Iroquois Indian word for "Place where one was lost." That sort of described how I felt at this juncture; no matter where I was situated geographically. This is why I kept moving.
We stopped somewhere and Trip double parked while I ran into a store and bought food with food stamps, and produced a double-take by the cashier and bag boy as I walked out and jumped into his Jaguar convertible. We ate government-subsidized junk food and blasted the Blaupunkt as we sped south towards my new life
When I first got in the car....I hadn't thought much about what was in store for me, or how long I'd stay.
Trip and I whiled away the time by talking about punk rock. Now understand....My first knowledge of punk rock had come from Rolling Stone also. That magazine had painted punk as an ugly scourge of disaffected Brit-youth who hated Pink Floyd and loved to fight. I loved Pink Floyd, and at the time, hated even the idea of violence. ( I have since modified that to; "I hate senseless violence, and am too small to participate even in the sensible kind, but some people just deserve to get their ass kicked...Especially those who prey on weaker animals...") At first, I had no clue that the American version of punk rot could hold a place for me....
But Trip painted a pretty glowing picture for me...That the DC punk community was a place where misfits were not only readily accepted, but celebrated for their caviler approaches and attitudes. He told of a brilliant, spontaneous network of kids who had decided to throw convention away, and make their own rules....He told of teen run record labels,...teen organized gigs, alternative (Back when the word actually meant something.) radio shows, etc.
He told me of this wonderful record label called Dischord and the kids who ran it, especially of the 20-year old CEO, Ian Mac Kaye. He said that all the kids revered Ian, and took his word and opinion as law, and that if Ian liked you, and your output, you could pretty much write your own ticket in that town.
About three hours into the 9 hour trip, I had begun to form my own grand scheme for world domination; I would arrive in DC. On my second day there, I would find some rich Senator in search of a young blond long-haired boy to keep as his pet. He would give me lots of spending money. I would move into his mansion. I'd take the third day off, relaxing in the opulence of it all, ordering the servants around. My fourth day there I would start a group. I would enlist the most cut-throat insane, young, squatter-musicians I could find. They would lack direction. They would understand my crystalline-vision and follow my word as law, and revere me as a god. We would move the group into the Senator's mansion and write a set of super-charged Anti-establishment youth anthems. On the sixth day, we would record a demo of these songs. On the seventh day, me and the band would relax , and sit around the Senators pool, drinking martinis and daiquiris, and seeing that what we had done was good.
On the following Monday, we would storm the Dischord corporate offices on Beecher street, and demand an audience with Mr. Mac Kaye.
We would walk right up the stairs of that three story, modest, clean modern office building, and tell the young, punky-looking, attractive receptionist woman (She would be dressed in all black, with bleached hair-shaved on one side. She would be sporting a nose ring and a "Minor Threat" tattoo.) that we had to see Mr. Mac Kaye immediately. We wouldn't take no for an answer.
We would play our rough tape for Ian, and he would pull a contract out of his desk, smiling. We would review the terms, (That were very much in favor of the artist, and would give a modest living stipend to those members of my band who badly needed it.) We would sign it. Ian would say "I'd offer you a cigar, but I don't smoke, don't drink, and don't fuck."
I would quip, "Well, at least you can fucking think," and me and my group would go and cash the first advance check, and go drinking to celebrate.
When we actually arrived at Trip's dad's mansion (In the extremely affluent DC suburb, Chevy Chase, Maryland.) I was relived, and amazed. Relieved, because my back hurt from being cramped in the tiny sports car for 9 hours. Amazed, because I had never dreamed that the place could be so plush. The place was a 35-room spread of wealth and prominent consumption. I'd met Trip's dad, an important lawyer who's specialty was suing the united states government for various corporations . I liked him.. He mowed his own lawn, rather then paying some kid five bucks an hour, and then joining a gym that he'd never goes to, like most millionaires would.
Trip and I wasted no time in breaking out the two hits of LSD that I'd brought for the trip. (Back when I cared about that stuff....My motto was practically...Don't leave home without it.)
We ate huge bowls of cereal as we waited for the legendary stuff to do its legendary thing.
We watched the regal mansion melt around us. (It was particularly strong LSD) Trip had never tripped before. He spent an hour looking at a particularly accurate brass bust of himself make faces at him. (His dad was an apprentice sculpture....And quite a good one.) I wondered around the estate, pretending that I lived there. We spent about half an hour looking at Trip's friends' drum kit, which was set up in the basement. Trip finally came up with the hilarious truism, "drums are the ultimate in, "what the hell do you do that for?" We saw a silverfish climb out of an unused basement fireplace and decided that it had crawled up from hell.
Then I found a pile of Time-Life books on Nazi Germany. I spent countless moments enthralled in the act of consuming page after page of holocaust-horror photos. Then I decided, in a flash of inspiration, that I had to shave my head , and change my name to , "Billy Auschwitz." Why not? No one knew me here, why not start anew with a completely fresh identity... I told Trip of my plan... He said ,"are you sure you want to do this?" Hmm...The thought of not doing it had never even crossed my melting mind.
"Oh course I want to do this. Will you help me?"
Trip went upstairs, and he returned from one of the many rooms with the family-dog clippers in his hand. We ceremoniously buzzed my head while listening to the only punk rock in the house...The Sex Pistols, "Never Mind The Bullocks." I had never heard it in its entirety, and tripping, it sounded amazingly vibrant.
I watched in amazement as Trip deftly manipulated the buzzers across my skull. It felt great...And I was astonish to watch the transformation taking place in the mirror. I was going from being a soft, feminine looking hippie to being an extremely mean looking, masculine creature. I kept saying outloud, "I...AM...A...HUMAN...MALE...ANIMAL..."
To compound the effect, here and there we left some little tufts of hair...The effect of these patches was to make me look like a chemotherapy or concentration camp victim. I WAS Billy Auschwitz.
MORE COOL WRITING...
