BURNED – Living Through the 80s and 90s as a Rock Guitarist
Bobby DeVito
©2010
all rights reserved
BOBBY DEVITO – “BURNED – Living Through the 80s and 90s as a Rock Guitar Player”
Intro – Disclaimer
This is a truthful record of my experiences and life. Names have been changed, but the facts are the facts. I wish that I would have to make this stuff up; it would have been easier than living it. With any memoir-type work of literature, there may be small gaps in accuracy inherent within the creation. But I have strived to keep this as accurate as possible, going back to my numerous journals and records that I have managed to keep.
PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THIS AWAY FREELY, it took me years to write, and I deserve my $4.99 for it. Thank you!
FOREWORD:
It was the title of this book that first caught my eye. After all, I’ve lived through the
80’s and 90’s, and I would consider myself a “rock guitarist” of sorts, despite the fact that I primarily play bass. Of course bass players are always infinitely cooler than guitar players, so my curiosity was piqued when I saw that a “rock guitarist” had written an entire book about his experience. Most of the “rock guitarists” that I have known in my lifetime would have a difficult time filling out a job application much less writing a short story, so I sat down expecting a mildly amusing, if not somewhat drab tale.
I also enjoy a quick and easy read, as evidenced by the ever-growing stack of books and Sweetwater music catalogs that constantly adorn my private meditation chamber (the john, for those not in the know). Non-fiction is always preferred, as our current reality is growing ever stranger and more fascinating. And reality with a pinch of fantasy thrown in for good measure usually ensures success.
A quick scan of the pages herein revealed that the contents of this book lie somewhere between a Bukowski novel and the lyrics of Prince’s Little Red Corvette. As I pressed onward, a small voice in my head got louder and louder until I could no longer ignore the question. Why in the world would anyone want to read a story about Bobby Devito?
Sexual conquests and drug-a-logues notwithstanding, this is the tale of an atypical wannabe rockstar in the 80’s. I say atypical because typical “rock guitarists” do not generally write books nor attend colleges and have ‘A’ averages. The dichotomy of senor Devito is what separates him from the mainstream. Forget about cookie-cutter American Idols. Back then, if you wanted to be the best, you had to LIVE THE DREAM. The only way to “get there” was to EARN it. Bobby Devito has paid his fair share of dues. Unfortunately, in this economy there is only enough room at the top for a few. But to concentrate on being the top dog is to miss the point of this book completely which is the
enjoyment of the ride itself. Not everyone who survived those days has remained as unscathed as Devito, which leads to my next question:
If this book is true, how in the HELL does he remember all of this shit?
Maybe it’s because I grew up in the first “MTV” generation, but my memories of
the 70’s and 80’s always seem to appear juxtaposed as if in a string of music videos, complete with the caption of artist, title, album and producer in the lower left-hand corner. Each colorful episode in Devito’s book fits perfectly within this mental scheme, and evokes dusty footage of big-haired icon Riki Rachtman hosting Headbangers Ball whilst channel surfing for Madonna videos to provide a much needed sexual outlet in the restricted cable access youth of the desolate American south. But I digress.
For whatever reason, Devito has managed to recollect (or is it resurrect?) a series of personal events that flow together like a collage of bandanas on the mike stand of Steven Tyler. Endearing terminology like “pity blowjob” (where can I get one of those!) and “strawberry shortcake on acid” leads me to believe that although Devito was discharged from the navy, he was rapidly advancing ranks within the KISS army.
Lastly, this book is about recovery. Recovery from what I’m not exactly sure, and perhaps neither is Devito. But at least he has the generosity to share his tale with the rest of us who may or may not be interested. There is a current trend in polarization of religious and anti-religious zealots world-wide. Perhaps the ghostly, grandfatherly intervention that spared his life from a near-fatal car wreck simply reminds us that there is something out there beyond ourselves worth investigating, and that things do happen for a divine purpose after all.
Not a bad concept for a “rock guitarist”.
-Richard Vega
PROLOGUE
“You’re a fucking drug addict”
The words reverberated throughout the small room where we were all gathered in a circle for yet another morning group. It was part of what our leader Bob Uzzo called “reality therapy”. And I had ended up on the hot seat that morning. This was my second time around in the world of rehab, after having graduated to this facility in sunny and plastic Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Two years ago I was on tour, playing in a blues band that toured Italy all summer long, reveling in the sights and sounds of my father’s homeland while partying every night and staying in four-star hotels. Now it has all come to this, my own personal VH1 “Behind the Music” story. I had officially become a fucking cliché as well as a fucking drug addict. And an alcoholic. Not to mention a passive aggressive, narcissistic control freak with borderline personality issues. I had begun to arrive at the conclusion that Bob may be right.
Looking back, it seemed like I had always been headed for a similar end. My maternal grandfather had been a hard drinking, hard living country guitar player who had been “blackballed” in the Nashville music world for being an alcoholic. And ethnically, I am a mix of Cherokee & Blackfoot American Indian, Irish, and Italian…quite a potent mix of the oppressor and oppressed, the question and the answer, New World and Old World. “I am large; I contain multitudes” wrote Walt Whitman. I have always been able to relate to that poem more than I would have liked. Multitudes? I contain the whole damn gumball machine!
Bob Uzzo is a proud Sicilian man nearing 60, with the uniform seen on so many other northeastern “snowbird” type transplant residents in South Florida. Khaki cargo shorts, a sensible Seiko watch, and a button up cotton shirt topped off with just a couple of nods to his heritage – a Gucci link chunky gold bracelet, and a beautiful gold and onyx pendant studded with diamonds in the Narcotics Anonymous logo. The rumor around our rehab facility, called “Sobrenity”, is that a very famous actress gave this pendant to Bob. The pendant glints in the morning sunlight, briefly taking my attention away from the fact that I am on the hot seat, being grilled once again by “The Godfather’, as we have all nicknamed Bob. His face is red with frustration, and I can see many elements of my own angry Italian father from my childhood in this man. At least I can understand what he means when he lapses angrily into Italian curses.
“You’re a fucking drug addict, that’s why you’re here!” Bob exclaims again, trying to sink this message into my drug addled brain. I am still in my first few weeks, and have not yet “pulled my head out of my ass”, as The Godfather is fond of saying. He is trying to get me to realize the truth. But thirty-six years of denial and avoidance can be strong foes to realization. As I sit there in the hot seat with all my fellow inmates surrounding me, I realize that it’s taken a long time to get here and it’s going to take some time to get back. But back to what? My life was a complete shambles, I was married to a complete bitch with whom I had run away on a drunken weekend to Savannah…and she was pregnant with my child. I had no job and had sold my broken down car as scrap, promptly taking the money and buying more drugs to get high. And here I was in REHAB. Such an ugly word from the outside, a word infused with concepts like “failure, useless, piece of shit, derelict, homeless, unwanted, broken”. I had been set to the island of broken toys, and was being systematically broken down for parts like my poor old car that I had sent to the junkyard.
This is my story, as I can best recollect it after all these crazy years. I write it for several reasons; partially as therapy and also to illustrate that there’s always hope. Bob would say that the concept of hope is lame; that we have to have faith. Hope implies that you expect something for nothing, and faith requires you to do some of the work. I hope this book doesn’t suck, and I have faith that I am going to write it as best I can. With all the recent publicity trained on writers like James Frey, there does seem to be a need for the “truthfulness clause” on the front page. I am trying to tell the truth completely here, even when it is ugly. Unfortunately, I don’t have to make up anything for this book.
Chapter 1
Beginnings
I was born in the early 1960s in a small town on the Jersey Shore called Long Branch in Monmouth County, New Jersey. My father’s father had come through Ellis Island like millions of other Italian immigrants, but thankfully since our family name was fairly short it remained “DeVito”. Our family hails from the southern part of Italy in Calabria, what we Americans would consider the “red-neck” part of the country. My descendants were goat farmers and olive growers, with a few standouts that include a professor of music who became a textbook writer and respected music theorist in the old country. My father’s family settled there in Long Branch, and began to build houses. My father was the youngest of the family, and grew up with a hammer in his hands, doing carpentry work along with the rest of his brothers for my grandfather.
My mother met my father in a bowling alley in Jersey, and they have remained together ever since. They were married in April, and I was born in September. Obviously, they had already forged a bond before the marriage, to put it delicately. My mother was from rural North Carolina, but was an early feminist and relatively free-thinker compared to the rest of her siblings. Both of my parents came from large families, but my mother was the oldest among her siblings. Mom was a registered nurse, and was the only member of her family to get the hell out of small town North Carolina when she was young. She had married once before she had met my dad to some guy who had attempted to initiate a lifestyle of domestic violence upon her. Notice I said “attempted” – she immediately took a frying pan to this guy’s head, and promptly got a “quickie” divorce in Alabama. No restraining order needed for my mom. She would still take a frying pan to you today if she felt threatened.
After I came into the world, my parents remained in Long Branch for a couple of years. My father worked for Electronics Associates Incorporated (EAI), a company that manufactured analog computers and had helped develop “core memory”, the forerunner to our modern RAM memory. My father had been an aviation electronics guy in the US Navy for four years before he met my mom, and electronics in the sixties was about as hot as it got for careers. Well, that and “plastics young man, plastics”…I remember little about this era of my life, other than our family dog which my father had named “Boats”, after the deckhands on Navy ships. Boats was a cute little collie-shepherd mix they had found at the dog pound, and I remember eating and sharing my meat bones from the spaghetti sauce with him. My father ended up getting a job with Control Data at this time, as he had encouraged EAI to start focusing on digital computers, but they were still just making analog computers and could not see the change taking place. So, we packed up and moved to Virginia, and left Boats behind.
Virginia is still in a bit of a haze for me. I remember being there, and I remember one event in particular. There was a huge drain pipe there that seemed to be 12 feet tall, and my mom told me there were giant snakes and monsters living in that pipe. Of course, I had to find out for myself. That seems to be a recurrent theme in my life; tell me the stove is hot and I immediately place my hand on the stove. I never did find any giant snakes or monsters in that pipe, but it wasn’t for lack of investigation.
The other vivid memory I have of that time was going to work with my father, marveling at the rooms filled with computers. I always respected my father and his work with computers and electronics and found it all fascinating. Control Data was on the cutting edge in the late 60s, and it was an incredible sight to walk by rooms with huge tape drives whirring, the punch card machines clicking and clacking away, lights flashing, and the smell of cleanliness and feeling of order. I was on “the inside”, VIP, all access backstage. The feeling of belonging, yet being elevated and above the masses. I must have been a pretty strange kid.
I will state one thing right here, right now – my parents truly did they best they could with the tools they had when raising me. It seems to me that parents are such an easy target for blame when it comes to addiction and recovery, or life skills in general. I am living proof that a person can be raised just fine, yet turn out as a complete disaster. My parental units were not perfect, but compared to the horror stories I have heard over the years from my friends, significant others, fellow rehab inmates, and just general conversation – my parents were saints. Although for years I have always addressed cards to my mother as “Mommy Dearest”.
My father ended up going to work for GTE Sylvania, and helped to develop their technical schools to train a much needed skilled work force in electronics. We lived in Lowell Mass, which during the early 70s was a clean little suburban life. Unlike today, where it is a gang ridden urban ghetto, next to one of the most polluted waterways in the entire country, the Merrimack river. We lived on 25 Luz Drive in Lowell, and were situated on the edge of the Pawtucketville National Forest. To say these years were idyllic would be a real understatement. Perhaps in some ways these were very formative years for me, in character and expectation of the world around me. “Old School” Alcoholics Anonymous members speak of a concept they call “King Baby”, which goes back to Freud. King Baby is that demanding, insistent little bastard that lives inside of me and wants what it wants, right fucking now. It is infantile, yet enormous in power. And yes, I have one.
Growing up in Lowell was very Beaver Cleaver-like at that time. I had watched the Apollo moon missions with great interest and excitement. My mother was very attentive to me, buying me the 8x10 color photos from the moon mission, as well as the lunar lander toys. She had basically decided to stay home with me and raise me full time until I was old enough for grade school. She taught me to read herself, and I remember being able to read “Reader’s Digest” before I entered kindergarten. Childhood traumas? My memories from this era are golden and beautiful. I remember going out into the large forest, seeking out leopard frogs and various brightly colored salamanders. I caught lot of snakes, reptiles, amphibians, and brought them home to scare my mom. I had a real interest in nature, the woods, and the outdoors. I also had a bit of a dark side, as I remember killing some of these creatures in various ways, like blowing up toads with firecrackers.
One experience that has stayed with me was when I caught my mother lying to me. I had found a book of matches, and like many young boys had a slight streak of pyromania. I was playing with them, lighting them up and burning them. I believe I set the whole book on fire and watched it burn out in one of my mom’s many huge ceramic 60’s ashtrays. Smoking used to be a whole lot more glamorous and accepted back then, and the ashtrays were a lot more interesting to look at, huge asymmetrical creations in usually one of those classic colors like harvest gold or burnt orange. My mother arrived home and saw the smoking carnage I had created in this huge ashtray, and she completely freaked out. There was a neighbor across the street from us who must have been a HAM radio operator, a scanner enthusiast, or simply someone with a fetish for antennas, as he had all sorts of these aluminum creatures emanating from his house like some sort of signal-gathering octopus. My mother promptly informed me that this guy was the culprit, and with his magic antennae he was able to SEE WHAT I WAS DOING inside of our house, and that he could even read my thoughts, and that was why she had come home suddenly – he had called and informed her that I was up to no good and was burning down the house.
Even at the age of five, I intuitively knew this was bullshit. But it scared me deeply that there was the Orwellian possibility that someone was secretly watching me and my thoughts. When I read “1984” a few years later, I could completely identify with the concept of “Big Brother”. And I suppose it partly explains why I always had a fascination with HAM radio and electronic warfare to this day.
My parents had the typical middle-class early 70s life. My dad went to work Monday through Friday, 9-5. He came home, my mom made dinner; we had family time in front of our Zenith console TV, or listened to our gorgeous sounding all tube Zenith console stereo. I used to turn it on when no one was around, and tune it in to the local rock station. An early song from Steely Dan used to really catch my ear called “Do It Again”
“You go back, Jack, Do it again
Wheel turning round and round”
The sound of this song was unlike anything my parents listened to. My mother, who had been called “The Little Kitty Wells” at age 14 on the Grand Ol Opry, preferred to listen to hardcore female country singers like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. My father liked cheesy Italian music by the Mantovani Orchestra, or “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. Come to think of it, Neil Diamond ended up being cooler than I initially thought. My dad was right about a few things.
Things were rapidly changing in society in the early 70s, and so was I. I seemed to have an early fascination for women, and got caught in my new obsession by my second-grade teacher. During class I had written a note for one of my female classmates, detailing how I was going to ride on her bus instead of my own, and that we would then get off the bus at her stop, go into the woods, and she would pull her pants down and show me her stuff. The note was intercepted by my teacher, her of the horn-rimmed glasses, puffy cotton dresses, and stern looks. She read the note and I could see her face sink, and she looked at me like I was the lowest form of life on Earth. I’ll never forget the utter disdain in her eyes that day, but it didn’t curb my prurient interest in the opposite sex. Heck, I still want to go home with strange women on the bus and get them to take off their pants.
During my third-grade year, something happened with my parents. We had welcomed the addition of both my younger sister and my younger brother, only 11 months apart. Things seemed to be going good with my dad’s job at GTE Sylvania; I even got to see him regularly on TV as the spokesman for the GTE Sylvania Technical Schools. “In the dark about your future?” my dad would say as a single light bulb would illuminate him in the commercial. I would be watching “Speed Racer”, and then my dad would pop up. Slightly surreal, but soon to end. My parents decided to move to my mother’s hometown of Stanley, North Carolina.
Stanley NC is one of those towns that if you are from there, you describe it in relation to some bigger town. It is simply a town that doesn’t exist on its own two feet. Stanley cannot be simply said, it has to be explained. I typically say I’m from a town “20 miles outside Charlotte”. Most people seem to know where Charlotte is, thankfully. Some even know where Gastonia is, which is an even closer town. But you pretty much need to be from Stanley to know where Stanley is. And don’t even get me started with Alexis, RFD. That’s “Rural Fire District”, for those of y’all who ain’t lived in the country. We ended up moving to the outskirts of Stanley, being in a suburb of a non-existent town. We had truly made it to nowheresville. Yee-fucking-haw.
At this point in my life, my parents had a somewhat skewed view of me. They had me IQ tested at age 9, and I was off to the far right side of the bell curve. They didn’t understand yet that while I am exceptionally good at taking tests, I “don’t have the common sense that God gave a Billy goat” (classic mom-speak). So here I am in Stanley, forced to enter class at O.L. Kiser Elementary. I can remember the name of this school so vividly; I can recall the weather that day, the angle of the sun, the red mud that seemed to be everywhere. It seems like we always remember the bad stuff in Technicolor. I have a Boston Mass accent, and am at least 2 grades ahead of what they are teaching here in Stanley for 3rd grade. I look funny, I talk funny, and I haven’t taken martial arts yet. How do you spell target? I got my ass kicked for a while, but it was just really difficult getting used to this new environment. While the northeast was cold, it had a stark beauty that was austere yet brilliant, and had a colorful variety of wildlife and fauna that never ceased to fascinate me. My initial impressions of North Carolina were very dark. Lots of red mud, lots of pine trees, everything was uniformly “blah”. I had gone from a fine elementary school outside of Boston, a perfect little house in a perfect little suburb, and summers on Cape Cod, Dad bringing home fresh lobster on Fridays – to pinto beans, cornbread, grits, red mud, and rednecks. All was not lost, however. I finally did manage to convince some girls to get naked for me, as I had attempted in second grade. In true redneck fashion, they were first cousins…welcome to North Carolina.
I had always been a somewhat introverted child, one who spent a great deal of time alone, either in the woods or curled up with music and a good book. Early on in my childhood, I knew I was somehow different than many of the other children I lived close to, or went to school with. Looking at many of the adults that I came in contact with, I knew that I didn’t want to be most of them. They seemed to live passionless, boring lives that were dictated by jobs, family life, and duties. And once I was dropped into rural North Carolina, these tendencies became even more prominent and exaggerated. My mother’s family just looked at me like many people stare at caged animals in the zoo, especially those with gross deformities. I was sort of a curiosity to them, being raised “up north” and having a fair amount of intelligence and a rapidly skewing view of the world I lived in. Thankfully, there were lots of woods to explore and a very small public library in Stanley that kept me occupied. Although I managed to freak out the librarian Mrs. Weaver more than once by filling out inter-library loan forms for archaic and occult textbooks. I read Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” at age 11. By all accounts, I was a weird kid.
There were a few adults other than my parents who made vivid impressions on me when I was young. My father’s oldest brother was “Uncle Joe” DeVito, and I completely loved him. Uncle Joe had been in the Navy too, just like my dad, but had suffered in a horrible explosion that covered him in third degree burns, and he was left alone in San Diego for a year to recover with no family visits. He was a total bachelor, swinging 60s kind of guy and I loved when he came to visit. When he got married to this totally hot young Thai woman named Mu, he came to visit us, and they both took me on part of their honeymoon with them. I thought he has the coolest guy ever, and still do to this day. Uncle Joe is still around, but lives alone in a trailer in Jersey and doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the DeVito clan. I don’t judge him, because I know he’s been through a lot of shit, just like I have. He was very close to me, and it’s always made me wonder if he somehow intuitively knew I was going to go through the hell he himself had endured.
The other adult figure that really impacted me immediately upon my arrival to North Carolina was my grandfather, Warren G. “Slim” Henderson. He and my grandmother Mabel lived in a JP Stevens mill house on 3rd Street in Stanley. My grandfather is a legendary man, for many reasons. He was a musician, a ne’er do well, a rounder on the railways, a songwriter, an amazing alcoholic. My mother was the eldest child in that family, and she told me that Slim would sell everything of value in the house and just take off, playing music and drinking with the boys all over the country. Slim ended up getting blacklisted in the country music biz for getting drunk on the air and adding some choice obscenities to the song “Frankie and Johnny” on live radio in the 1940s. Slim during the 70s was pretty much on the porch by that time. He had a nice couple acres out in back of the house and grew plenty of vegetables and peppers for stringing. He drank Schlitz 16 oz “tall boys” in the old tin cans, with a little salt around the rim. He liked to hang out on the front porch and play guitar, and that’s one of the early ways that I learned how to play. I watched him a lot, and he showed me things here and there. I never actually got “lessons” from my grandfather. In an interview I did in the 90s, a music journalist asked me if I was my “grandfather’s favorite”. The truth was, I was just the grandkid that he disliked the least.
My grandmother Mabel is a living Buddha. I cannot say enough about how amazing this woman is, and I always knew and felt that from the age of 9, when I began to have constant contact with her. She was the sort of woman who would make you go get your own “switch” or “hickory” that she would then spank you with. Maybe I’m wrong, but I see a lot of kids today that could use a few swats with a nice limber switch. My grandmother could stripe your legs if she wanted to. But then you would go pick blackberries, bring a bunch back, and she’d make blackberry cobbler. I am literally drooling while typing this, like some Pavlovian rural creature remembering the good old days. Some of them actually were.
My first drink had occurred even before we left Lowell and had landed in Hicktown. The beautiful house we lived in on Luz Drive had a basement that had been converted into a large family room, with the typical wood paneled walls and avocado green couches. My parents were always very social people, and had lots of regular card games and such with other suburban middle class couples in the neighborhood. One night my parents had a fairly large holiday party, and it went well into the night. The noise kept me awake, and I had to go check it out. As I crept down the steps, I found a nearly full frozen concoction called a “grasshopper”, and it looked good to me. I noticed it tasted kind of funny and mentholish, but that it felt good and warm going down. After downing the entire drink, I went back to bed and slept through the rest of the party.
My parents have almost always been moderate with everything. I have never seen either of them drunk. My dad can drink one beer, one glass of scotch, one glass of wine. I can’t even have one friggin Entenmanns’s doughnut. If they are the chocolate frosted kind, the whole box of eight is in imminent danger.
My time in North Carolina had some bright points. For some unknown reason, my father decided upon opening an Italian restaurant in Stanley. Even though it was obvious that the menu could not deviate from pizza, spaghetti & meatballs, or lasagna. My father tried to add the obviously subversive manicotti to the menu, and there were months of mispronounced questions about that particular offering. We ended up having multiple locations for a while, and then my father built the huge Log Cabin restaurant that still stands on Main Street in Stanley, next to the bank and Roberts Super Market. Of course I worked for my dad, it’s the Italian way! Plus, although I had begged and pleaded for an electric guitar, my parents had gotten me an acoustic instead. Showing my infinite patience and understanding, I spied a beat up electric guitar at a yard sale, and promptly traded my shiny brand new acoustic for this $15 yard sale special electric guitar. I tried to tell my father it was a “Fender”, and he said “Yeah, a DENTED Fender”. He still recalls this with a laugh to this day sometimes. But back then he was pretty pissed about it, and I knew I had to pay for my next guitar. So I folded pizza boxes, cut onions and tomatoes, did prep and cleanup work to make money. I sold 200 boxes of personalized Christmas cards in July in a town of only 2500 people. I did everything I could to finally get that Gibson SG guitar that was going to make my life worth living. Guitar had become my oasis, my meditation cave away from the world. Looking back, it was as escapist as it can be, me sitting around with a record player or tape deck, immersed in the sounds and notes, the timbres and timings of people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. They represented ultimate freedom to me, free to “wave your freak flag” and do what one wanted. I knew that I wanted to be out of Stanley when I grew up, and that guitar was my way out of this town, this boring middle class existence, and my bad hair.
I had friends in Stanley; probably the best two were Chip and Jeff Anderson. They lived with their mom Ruth in a house up the street. Ruth was a very uptight woman, and had her hands full raising these two, I guess. She hated me for some reason, and didn’t like that we all hung out together. While I was there during these days, plenty of odd stuff happened to me. Another neighbor’s son tried to sexually molest me. A group of teenage boys from up the street tried to sexually abuse me. They say that childhood is a battlefield, and I would agree...but North Carolina was Pearl Harbor in my youth.
To try and chronicle all of my experience there almost seems futile. I went from public school to a private fundamentalist Baptist junior high. I was the kid who showed up to Bible class with a copy of Thomas Paine’s “Age or Reason”. As anyone can imagine, I was thrown out of that school for various offenses against fundamentalism. I ended up back in Stanley Jr High, and ended up getting busted in 7th grade for wanting drugs. Not actually possessing drugs, just simply wanting them. We had a 9th grade kid named Goldman Carver, and he allegedly dealt drugs. I had written him a note in class, asking him if I could buy “some speed and some joints”. Of course I signed my name to it, and later that day when there was a big undercover drug bust at our school; Goldman was busted, with my note in his pocket. So, a week later I was on my way to live with my Uncle Augustino back in Long Branch New Jersey, and attending Holy Trinity Catholic School. And my parents actually thought this school was going to be better for me than going to Stanley Jr High. I could have gotten a lot more and a lot better drugs at Catholic School.
I was born dead. “Black as the Ace of Spades” my mother used to say. When I arrived into this world, they had to do some serious work on me to bring me back. Sometimes it seems like I have had more than my share of these experiences over the years. When I was eleven, I had been introduced to “huffing” chemicals by some of the older boys around my neighborhood. First time, they had made up a bag of model glue, and then forced me to hold onto their bikes while I ran behind them breathing into the bag until I passed out from the fumes. I had tried it with gasoline as well, and would sometimes go under our house in North Carolina and inhale the gas fumes until I could hear loud helicopter noises in my head. I did not know what auditory hallucinations were yet, but I was already experiencing them.
One night we were all camping out a short distance in the woods behind my parent’s house. Jeff and Chip Anderson and I were all cozy around the fire. We had all inhaled some fumes from a plastic milk jug of gas, and I had it between my legs. I think I must have passed out, as the jug spilled onto my pants and all over me, eventually reaching the campfire and lighting me up into one big flaming torch. I immediately ran as fast as I could, heading towards a stream about a half mile south. Luckily, Chip was a local football hero and athlete, and he chased me down and gave me a good football tackle that brought me down. He put me out, burning his hands and arms in the process. I was in shock, and managed to walk back to my parent’s house. I had 3rd degree burns on 40% of my body, yet I walked in as calmly as possible and tried to hide in my bedroom. My mother, ever the RN, was tending to Chip’s burns, and he kept insisting that she had to take care of me. I had already attempted to get in the shower to see if I could “wash off” the burns and escape undetected. No such luck.
My mother says she went to the bathroom first, and found a tub that was covered in charred, burnt flesh and skin. I was huddled in my bed, trying to hide. Trying to escape from what would have been one tremendous ass-whipping had I not been so injured.
One of the many small miracles of my life occurred this night. There were two ambulances sent out that night – one for Chip, and one for myself. They put me in the ambulance and rushed me to Lincolnton Memorial Hospital, about 20 minutes away. Chip was placed in the other ambulance, and for some reason this ambulance died on the spot, and it took them an hour to get it running again. If I had been in that ambulance, I would have died right there in my parent’s driveway.
Recovery was a long, slow process, beginning at Lincolnton Memorial and then later I was transferred to Charlotte for all of the surgeries. I was told that I’d probably never walk again, that I was lucky to be alive. I had numerous skin graft operations, and endured bandage changes every 4 hours for months straight. I also got two pints of chocolate milk and a nice yellow Valium 5mg tablet every time they came to change those bandages. I drank so much chocolate milk that I burst out in hives and caused one of the skin graft operations to completely fail. The doctor was PISSED. It took them all a few days to figure out it was the chocolate milk.
I endured a lot of pain, and got a lot of sympathy from the local people of Stanley, lots of prayers from all the churches, and lots of chili cheeseburgers on demand. And occasionally a lobster dinner when I could guilt someone into hitting the local Red Lobster for me. I never had childish tastes, and would as soon order Lobster Thermidore at age 5 as a cheeseburger. And as far as sympathy goes, the only thing that topped the lobster was a certain young candy-striper who used to come listen to me play guitar in my room a lot during the end of my stay in the hospital. It was my first sexual experience, and I’m sure it was a pity blowjob. I enjoyed it all the same and felt like I was truly “the man”. I still couldn’t walk at that point, and they sent me home to my family house, with a hospital bed set up in the living room. My mom was in charge of my physical therapy, and literally motivated me any way necessary for me to do my physical rehab. She cajoled, bribed, kicked, screamed, and slapped me silly at times, but I did get up and walk again. In fact, I ended up running the mile in track at high school.
I got a lot of solid stuff from my mother. She is a no-nonsense southern woman, a collector of antique milk glass, a hardcore thrift shopper and yard-saler. She felt there were already “enough useless men in this world”, so she impressed upon me that I needed to be able to do all the household stuff like dishes, laundry, housecleaning, typically female-specific tasks in those days. She also gave me “The Joy of Sex” to read when I had questions about sexuality. Having been a nurse, and working in the medical field nearly all of her life, she was always very open with me about the facts of life. I guess it was difficult for both her and my father to understand me as a child. According to both them and the test results, I was supposed to be an “A” student bent on college and medical school or an advanced degree. But I was a smart-assed young guitar player who had already by age 12 dodged death several times, would not accept the fundamentalist Baptist religion my parents had embraced (my father got converted, not like St Paul on the road to Damascus, but at a freakin WAFFLE HOUSE in Gastonia, NC), and simply was not turning out quite like they had imagined.
After my recovery from the burns, my parents brought me to see a psychiatrist. This went on for what seems like a year, hour long sessions where I would have to go to this big facility in Gastonia, sit in a lobby with brightly colored geometric 70s carpets and Naugahyde waiting room couches with scattered “Boys Life” magazines on them. The place smelled of too many people, magazines, and dusty Naugahyde. Coming to this place was always fraught with anxiety for me. What were we doing here and why was I being made to see a psychiatrist if I was not crazy? I focused some of my reading on Freud and Jung, read some clinical literature, and began to heavy-handedly feed the shrinks with stuff I had gleaned from perusing their literature. One episode I remember quite vividly was the counselor handing me a female doll to represent my mother. He also handed me a hypodermic syringe to use on the doll. “OK, now give your mommy a shot anywhere you want to”, he intimated softly, in his prescription Foster Grant eyeglasses and strong aroma of Hai Karate. I immediately took the needle and plunged it into the doll’s neck, sticking it furiously and exclaiming “I would give her a shot right here in the neck so she would finally SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!” I think that was about the end of my psychiatric “treatment”. All I ever got as a conclusion from those “treatments” is that the counselors told my parents that I needed to be beaten more and given a lot more discipline. I wonder how much that sage advice cost my poor parents. I am sure anyone in our town already figured I needed a few more good ass-whippings.
So after my little adventure in 7th grade being busted for merely wanting drugs, I got sent to New Jersey to live with my aunt and uncle and go to Catholic school. This was a great time; it was exciting to be so close to New York City and the music scene. I saw Twisted Sister when they were a cover band and played at the March of Dimes Walkathon, and I saw the US premiere of Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” at Madison Square Gardens. My aunt Marie was really into my musical talents, and encouraged me greatly when it came to the guitar. She had me play for the Saturday night folk mass at the church, and I really started to play more and more during this time. My cousin Stephen and I played a lot of guitar, and listened to records all the time. I got to hang out with my autistic cousin Chris, who has a photographic memory for music and still remembers nearly every song we listened to 30 years ago. I’ve spent my whole life trying to develop musical memory like that while being allegedly “normal”. So I spent about 9 months living with my aunt and uncle in Long Branch, going to Holy Trinity Catholic, and playing guitar at mass, a good Italian boy.
I was able to get into some good surfing during that time in New Jersey. I was out at the beach quite frequently. After recovering from the burns on my legs, I had to wear pants to shield my skin grafts from the sun when I was swimming. I had just gotten out into the water that day, and was drifting out to where the water was just over my head. There were jetties to my north, and unbeknownst to me a healthy riptide was churning. I got caught into the riptide and fought it as it dragged me further out and southwards down the beach. I began to go under, and I remember looking up at the surface as I was sinking downwards, thinking that it really sucked that I had just a year ago escaped death from the gasoline explosion and now was going to simply drown. I kept sinking and taking in water when I was suddenly grabbed and brought to the surface by a lifeguard. He hauled me to shore, where I was trying to get the water out of my lungs. He hauled me up on the beach and laid me flat on the sand, trying to get me to breathe. As soon as I came to, I bolted upright and hit the ground running, leaving him far behind. I’m sure I owed this poor guy at least a “thank you” for saving my life, but I hit the road. I had already caused my immediate and extended family far too much grief already, and did not want to add another near death experience to the rapidly growing list.
After my time in New Jersey, I did miss my parents and headed home to North Carolina. I managed to stay there long enough to make it into East Gaston High School in Mt Holly NC, a town that is next door to Stanley and is actually big enough to have a high school. I had started occasionally drinking at this point, either with the guys after a day of baling hay or on a weekend night out. Stanley was a dry town, so one would have to drive nearly 15 miles to actually purchase any alcohol. I smoked pot with several of the older musicians that I hung around with, but refrained from trying anything harder. I had a fantastic chorus teacher at East Gaston named Catherine Painter, she was an ex-opera singer with taste and class, and there’s no telling how this poor woman ended up in a town like Stanley. I never really fit in with any particular social group in high school, but was accepted by most because I could play some pretty mean guitar, even back then.
I had a good friend across the street who was one grade older than I was named Donny Martin. He had one of those mothers who had that whole Joan Collins thing going on. She would walk around the house in the afternoons wearing revealing nightgowns and drinking Crown Royal, and would sometimes fix me one as well if she was feeling good. She had an amazing body, and was always very attentive to me. I liked the taste of Crown Royal and Coke from the very beginning. Donny had a beautiful ’65 Ford Galaxie that his stepfather bought for him when he turned 16, and I used to ride to school with him instead of riding the bus. He was a smart, funny guy who everyone liked at school, and we had a lot of good times together. During the summer, a female cousin of his came to stay with his family for a few weeks. Donna was 17 and was a complete wild child. She had beautiful golden hair, and a body that distracted me to no end. Donny and I partied with her frequently, and she liked pills. I had never experimented with pills previously to this summer, but remembered how good the Valium had felt in the hospital. Donna had a few yellow Valiums, but I went one better – my mother had an entire bottle of the much stronger blue Valiums in her medicine cabinet. I ended up taking six of them that day, and don’t remember much of what happened. Donna and Donny told me that we had walked to a local pond to hang out, and that I had simply walked over to a huge hornet’s nest and began kicking it as the hornets swarmed around me. Miraculously, I did not suffer a single sting from the creatures. I had absolutely no fear, and walked away. The next morning, I woke up in bed with the two of them, and had no idea of what had happened the night before. A blackout episode before I had even turned 16!
All during this era, my parents were killing themselves running the restaurants. When my father got a job offer from his old employer Control Data to run their New Orleans technical school, my father sold the business and off we went. My parents bought a house on the West Bank Harvey neighborhood on the other side of the river from the Big Easy. Suddenly, I was 15 years old and thrust into a much different world. The high school I was enrolled in was nearly 3,000 students, equally split between whites, blacks, and the newly arrived Vietnamese boatpeople that had been settled by our government primarily in Louisiana. Our school had all sorts of racial problems, riots, gangs, weapons, barbed wire fences, the cops, the works. I ended up skipping nearly half of the days of my junior year and flunked 11th grade. I lived in a subdivision called Woodmere, and ran around with a group of somewhat noble hoods from the area. We did a lot of typical stuff, vandalism and theft, blowing things up, causing trouble to the construction guys by firing up the bulldozers and ruining a days’ work. We never tried to hurt anybody, just out to get something quick and simple for cash – like stealing a boat motor and selling it for a quick $500, even if it was worth $10,000. Taking that money and buying a quarter-pound of pot and enough beer to last for days was heaven to us.
New Orleans had a great effect on me musically. I had a fake ID at 16 years old, and I was getting into most nightclubs I wanted to visit. I managed to get an audition with a local bar band called “Cypress”, and played a few gigs with them. I hung out at Tipitina’s, Jimmy’s, Old Man Rivers on the West bank. Randy Jackson, the guitarist/vocalist for the amazing Zebra used to let me sneak in with the band sometimes. New Orleans music was alive and vibrant, and there was a cool little New Wave music scene happening. My sister Anna was totally getting into music at this point, going to see The Fixx and Flock of Seagulls on the Riverboat President. I would sometimes take my electric guitar and battery powered amplifier and go jam in the French Quarter for tourist money. My family also really took to N’awlins culture like fish to water – we ate crawfish and went to all manner of Mardi Gras parades, had a baby cake at the house every day of Mardi Gras, and did weekend trips to Grand Isle, Baton Rouge, and Slidell to take in as much Louisiana as possible.
New Orleans is also the site of the only Prom I ever attended. My good friend Billy Murry was a rock and roll singer, and a damn fine one at that. He and I had hung out for a year or so, had jammed music and smoked a LOT of pot together, and orbited the same group of people from Woodmere. He had a sister that was a couple of years younger than I named Lucy, and she was really a great girl – Lucy went to a private Catholic girls school, had good grades, and was a local volleyball star. Of course, since she was Billy’s sister, she was pretty much off-limits to the rest of us. However, two days before the prom her date suddenly cancelled on her, leaving her stranded. Billy was already taking one of Lucy’s friends, and they were all supposed to do it together in a big limo, the works. So, with me being quite possibly one of the more harmless of Billy’s friends, I was asked to take Lucy to the prom. It sounded like fun to me, so I got a rush rental tux and off we went. I started drinking Black Russians at four in the afternoon as I got dressed. In the limo, we drank bad champagne. At the finest restaurant on the West bank, we dined on Trout Almandine, and drank more champagne. After dinner, we finally made it to the prom. Exiting the long black limo, we mad a beeline for the dance floor and danced one dance, and headed straight for the photo line. We did our obligatory “we were there” Prom photos, and headed back to the limo to go to the French Quarter. Less than 30 minutes wasted at the event, we arrived in the City of Sin, and got dropped off at Pat O’Brien’s for a Hurricane – basically red kool-aid filled with more liquor than anyone really needs in one glass. I remember heading to my favorite watering hole, The Olde Absinthe House, for one more drink before we headed to the hotel we had arranged downtown. I don’t remember anything after that drink, other than being kicked out of the limo onto my front lawn much later that night. It’s too bad, Lucy and I were certainly vibing that night, and although I am sure Billy would have kicked my ass, if I had been a bit more sober that night Lucy and I would have made some fond memories of that night. As it is, from what I heard I ended up painting the inside of the limo with purple and red puke, and thy just took me home and kicked me out onto my parents lawn. My mom opened the door as I was fumbling with my keys. God bless her, she helped me get out of the vomit-ridden tux and get to bed. Then, she woke me around noon and forced me to go shopping with her for hours. And hours. It was punishment in a very passive-aggressive way. Nothing like the head-splitting sound of feedback through the public address system at Schwegmann’s “We need a porter with a mop to aisle 17….weeeeaaaahhhhh!!!!! Porter with a mop to aisle 17!!!”
I haven’t really spoken much of my love life during these teenage years, because there wasn’t much to really speak of. I was sort of a late bloomer, and it seemed like everyone was getting it on but me in the late 70s. I was always the guy that girls loved to talk to and be friends with, so they could complain to me about their asshole football player boyfriends. I had my share of crushes over those years, especially the preacher’s daughter, Cheryl Edwards. My attraction with her seems almost like a primal imprint or something, as it has remained with me as some flawed ideal in the physical sense. She was just absolutely beautiful to me, with bright blue eyes, long straight blonde hair, and a fantastic body. I have been seeking a woman like her the rest of my life, and still have never found another quite like her.
I was sitting in class during what was supposed to be my senior year, but I was still a junior, as I had flunked 11th grade for non-attendance. The Armed Forces came through, and offered us a 6 hour pass out of classes to take the ASVAB test. I’m pretty good with tests, and wanted to get out of class, so naturally I went for the ride. I ended up scoring so highly that the various branches were calling me and making me offers. So on my 17th birthday, I entered the US Navy as an Electronics Warfare trainee, and spent Christmas 1981 in boot camp at NTSC San Diego. My first night of boot camp was classic intimidation and shenanigan. We new recruits had spilled out of the bus, and the company commanders were already breaking us down and tearing us apart. They asked us “are there any musicians among you?” Luckily, although I had been counseled not to volunteer for anything, I raised my hand. “What do you play?” queried the leader of the group. “Guitar….and drums” said I, remembering that I had played drums in marching band back at Stanley Jr High. I, and the rest of my musical counterparts, were segregated into what is known as a “drill company”, and we focused on being the base marching band for most of our boot camp experience. It sure beat doing laps around the base like the Marines were doing. But unlike high school, if you made a mistake you had to do laps around the training ground WITH YOUR INSTRUMENT. I sometimes wish I could do this with musicians today. It would make rehearsals infinitely easier.