Crazy Enough (24 page)

This wasn't just any gig. We were having our CD release party at Bottom of the Hill, a club in Potrero Hill in San Francisco. I was
overly excited and chatty, chain smoking and drinking coffee. I stayed at the club after sound check to eat the free greasy-spoon dinner they offered. I had a pint of black bar coffee and a veggie burger with real bacon, plus jalapenos and Tabasco sauce.

Then I took a nap in the dressing room.

When I woke up, my throat was raw and my voice was a little froggy, so I had some Maker's Mark and about five cigarettes while I put on my makeup and my just-for-the-CD-release-party-rubber shirt. We swagger on to the stage to howls of “I love you!” and rowdy cheers, I cough through the first few numbers expecting to warm up and smooth out, enabling me to rock for two hours. Three songs into the show, my voice evaporated. I stood, sweating in my makeup and rubber shirt, in front of four hundred die-hard fans, couldn't make a sound, and went into a full, nightmare panic attack.

The band started the song “Beautiful,” a fan favorite. I opened my mouth and prayed, “She was over the top, and out of control, she ran away when she was thirteen years old . . .”

Only air and squeaking bleats of sound creaked out. I told the band to stop, hot tears were mixing with the sweat, I choked out an excuse, “I got something in my throat, I'll be right back . . . the band will . . .”

The packed crowd unanimously roared “No, don't go!

“Do you guys wanna sing it?” I croaked.

Everybody nodded and cheered.

I looked at the band, my guitar player started the opening strains, I held out the microphone to the audience. “She was over the top, and out of control, she ran away when she was thirteen years old
. . . but she had her feet on the ground, and nobody pushed her around . . .” The audience sang the whole song. They sang the heck out of it, too. It was beautiful.

The Bad: O, Canada! She's quite a bit bigger than the United States, with about a tenth of its population. So, when you're driving across country, say, heading west from Toronto to Thunder Bay and beyond, it's a minimum six-hour drive to the next semblance of a town. In between are kilometers and kilometers of woods, farms, hockey stars on billboards, mangy bears, and road signs threatening moose violence. Oh, and a butt load of Tim Horton's. And for you Americans who haven't been up to our neighbors in the north country: Tim Horton's is like a Dunkin' Donuts that just gave up.

We were packing up after a show in Regina, Saskatchewan, headed to a gig in Calgary, about a seven-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer drive. Kilometers might be smarter, but they aren't as big and powerful as our American
miles,
so we were looking at about a four-hundred-mile drag to the next gig. It was the tenth or eleventh gig on a three-week jaunt, and we were all tired, dreading yet another long drive through the bucolic, nonstop, Groundhog Day landscape.

I was in the dark parking lot behind the club, dumping some crap into the van, when I turned and found myself face to face with a human Pez dispenser. She was pretty, or had been once, but she had that faces of meth thing creeping in. A pipsqueak of squirrely sinew, her energy blasted off her with such trembling waves of whacko, it gave me goose bumps. She was also so suddenly close she could have tasted me or started stabbing me with the pen she held in her hand.

“Hi! Oh my
god
you rocked
so hard
! That was
awesome
! I want you to tattoo me!”

“Hi. Um. What?” James was suddenly there and flanked me, so I relaxed a bit. “You want me to . . . ?”

“Tattoo me!” Turns out, she wasn't holding a pen; it was the point of what looked like bouquet of dentist's tools duct taped
together. With her other hand she hauls up her tank top, “Right here! I won't even feel it!” She drew an air circle over her skinny torso, indicating a rather large area across her pronounced rib cage.

“Um. No, I think that's, ah, a bad idea. Unsanitary. You know? You want some stickers?” Behind her in the dark was a looming figure, smoking, not coming too close but paying attention to the exchange. He was hanging back, but I knew he was with her.

“She'll totally do it,” it said from the shadows.

“I'll totally do it! Totally! It won't hurt. Come on!” she begged. “Just your name, I want your name on me!”

Without fans, a musician is only a bunch of hot air in the dark. Most fans are simply glad to see you live, but some are hell-bent on meeting you, touching you, having a moment with you, and then there exists that special handful, who wants to peel you and dance around in the moonlight wearing your skin. This pasty little wastoid didn't want to hurt me, but she clearly wanted me to hurt her by helping her getting tetanus. I felt pretty powerful and powerless at the same time.

Moreover, I wanted none of it, but I wanted to treat this bony little bag of bad decisions sweetly.

“What if I just write my name on you with a nice, soft Sharpie marker?”

“Oh. OK. Oh! Then I'll just get it tattooed on me! Awesome! Totally do it!” Everyone watched as I pulled out a black marker and she held her shirt up her side. “Do it big, too! Yeah!”

Maybe, because I was tired and punchy, I decided to draw my name so huge on her little body that she would never get it needled in. When I was done, it essentially was a half corset. “Yeah, awesome!”

The S was central on her sunken belly, then the T, then the O was the size of a football from the top of her hip bone to her armpit, then R then M up and down her back.

We all admired my penmanship, as it was very neat and well balanced.

My thinking was that she would never be so fucked up as to get that tattooed on her. Because that would be insane.

“There you go, sweetie. You hungry? You look like you could use a sandwich.”

“No way, I'm so fine! I'm totally gonna get this put on me right now! You rock!” She scuttled back to the looming man and they both hopped into a car. “You rock!!!!” she called from the passenger side as they pulled out.

“You know she was serious, right?” James said.

“No way, man. There's no way she'll get that tattooed on her. That's just nuts.”

“Uh huh,” he said as he went into the van.

The events surrounding the Lilliputian loony tune showing up at our next gig, four hundred American miles and one dozen moose warnings later, are a might too nasty for my beloved editor to allow here. They involve a maxi pad, a boot, and a mix of fake blood and feces that all end up in someone's mouth. However, I can tell you, James was right. She was serious.

The Pipsqueak Pez Dispenser not only showed up, but she pounced on stage and grappled a quick, bony hung onto me. As she went into a stage dive, we saw the loose corset of bandages peeking out from her tiny half shirt.

The Ugly: We toured a bit of the West Coast and were drawing larger and larger crowds in San Francisco. My favorite place to play was the Paradise Lounge on 11th and Folsom Streets; it was my home
away from home. I loved the place so much that I swore the day the Paradise Lounge closed down would be the day I moved away from San Francisco for good.

We had a gig at my beloved Paradise this one night when I was sick as a dog with a hideous lung infection. During a vocally dramatic moment on stage, something hacked out of my infected lungs and caught in my windpipe, kicked up into my throat and stuck there, wildly itching and choking me. I dropped to the floor as the crowd and band lost it simultaneously, the band going through its usual smashing sound wall of booming chords and huge cock wagging, the crowd surged forward, caught up in the electric crushing and my crawling across the floor, heaving.

“ROCK 'N' ROLL!!!” A girl screamed from the front. The crowd thought I was having some epic moment onstage where I couldn't even handle gravity, and I must have been convulsing because I was so fucking into it! “Yeah, Stoorm!!!”

I couldn't breathe and I couldn't stop hacking. The thing, whatever it was, was in a perfect spot to gag and choke me at the same time. I'd inhale to get a blast of air behind it and a tickling trail of its slime would thread back down my esophagus making the cough harder and more desperate. I had about nineteen seconds to get whatever it was out of me so I could get to the verse.

I had a roll of toilet paper on stage, in front of the kick drum, for blowing my nose and wiping up my fever tears. I grabbed a heaping wad of it and shoved it against my mouth and with a mighty retching “Haaack!” up came the offending item out of my mouth, ker-plunking into the ball of toilet paper. I looked at it through my bleary eyes and was stunned. It was a grayish, sea-anemone-looking glossy lump of something with protrusions sticking off it, laced with a light bit of blood. It was bigger than a lima bean, had some weight to it, too.

That's when I saw her.

She was a slip of a boy girl, short hair sticking out in spikes from under her baseball cap. She stared hard at me, looking serious, as she extended her hand towards me in a gimme-that gesture.

She wanted my loogie.

I shook my head
no
. She nodded,
oh, yes
. I shook my head again,
No, no, no
. She nodded with matching vigor. Horrified, I slowly held the tissue wad out to her. Her eyes lit up as if I were handing her a ball of folding money that would save her life. She snatched it out of my hand and held it in both of hers with a look of purest adoration and gratitude.

Afterwards, I crumpled in my drummer's car, shaking and sweating with full-on flu, I waited for the rest of the band to come out so I could go home. In my fevered fog and twanging aches, I chuckled at the thought of someone building a shrine to my goo. On the way home, my drummer marveled at the level of crazy some of our fans were getting. I couldn't talk, but I smiled in agreement, knowing that I must be doing something right.

“Y
our mom is a good person; she just isn't acting like a good person these days.”

That was the gist of the letter that my dad sent to each of my brothers and me, over the winter of 1999. It was right after the night when, during a horrific blizzard, Mom got hold of my brother Henry in one of her, “I don't know how many pills I took, I think I see a tunnel . . .” calls. Henry, with a sick baby at home, had gotten in his car and nearly killed himself skidding through the blinding snow. He reached Mom's apartment just in time to see her being wheeled, high and blathering, into the ambulance that beat him there.

It was a diplomatic way to say ignore your mother, she doesn't care for anyone's comfort or even safety when it comes to her bullshit dramas. We already knew Dad felt that way, but it was striking to
see him actively convey anything out loud about her. Mom had been long dead and buried in Dad's head box, he never uttered her name nor made any reference to her since what seemed like forever, but since one of us almost died again at her behest, he had to speak up.

He was preaching to the choir, as far as I was concerned. Mom had been dead to me so many times that it was easy to toss dirt on that grave again. Mom had pulled the “Gotcha” on me not too long before I got that letter, so, let the dead-to-me lay.

The Gotcha was a neat trick Mom would pull whenever I got soft. I'd start feeling a need to reconnect, try to have a relationship with her. This would happen every couple of years. She would be sweet and open, seem healthy, changed, and would sprinkle my heart with tickles of hope for a new beginning. I love you, too, Mom. Then within twenty-four hours there would be a medical meltdown, a tear-soaked snit, some heinous drama that I would find myself in. Like a bait and switch, but instead of a con man showing you a real watch, then switching it for the bogus one, I would be shown a mom to reach for, only to be given a screeching infant who wants to rip your heart out.

Around a year after getting away from Billy and the Demons, and I was on a healthier path, I came back to Southborough for a visit. Mom was in a halfway house. It had been a year or so since I'd been in touch with her, but I figured I was in a much stronger place, so I went to see her.