Makeup to Breakup (5 page)

By the time I was fifteen, I got a job delivering meat on the weekends for a local butcher shop. The owner knew I was into drums, and one day he told me, “I’ve got a set of Slingerland Radio King drums down in my cellar that I don’t play anymore. There’s a twenty-four-inch bass drum, a trap case with a snare, a couple of cymbal holders, and a tom-tom. They were made in 1935, and they were originally mother-of-pearl, but they turned yellow.”

Slingerlands! The brand that Gene Krupa used.

“You’re kidding me! Would you sell them to me?” I burst out.

“Yeah, I’ll sell them to you for two hundred dollars,” he said.

I rushed home and I asked my mom and dad if I could get those drums.

“If you want them that bad, why don’t you work for them?” my mom suggested. “We don’t have two hundred dollars, but you can pay them off a little out of each paycheck.”

So every weekend Joe would take fifteen bucks out of my pay, and he paid me a little more to mop the floors of the tenement building the shop was in, and eventually I paid them off. I’ll never forget bringing them home to my grandmother’s apartment. I was walking down the street with the bass drum on my back, kicking the trap case in front of me inch by inch with the tom-tom on top of it. I finally got the whole set up the stairs and into the kitchen. When I took them out of their cases and set them up, it was like an orgasm. If I could have slept with those drums, I would have.

But then I had a major problem. I didn’t know how to play with a full set. I always just played on a snare drum. But my friend Jerry Nolan had a beautiful set of red sparkle drums and he gave me my first lesson. One hand kept a steady beat and the other was going pop, pop, pop. I worked on that beat everywhere I went, even on the train (which is a great place to hear unusual rhythms when the train wheels hit the tracks), and I finally got it. That was like opening up Pandora’s box. I learned a million different beats from that one beat.

I was a slave to those drums. I cleaned them and buffed them, so proud that this was something I worked for and got. I’d come home from school for lunch and play the whole hour. I’d play them all night until I had to go to bed. The kids outside would say, “Oh, man, why don’t you come on down and play stickball?” I’d say, “Nah, it’s cool, I gotta just play.” I wanted to play my drums much more than I wanted to be in a gang. Jerry and I began to cultivate other role models, guys who didn’t have tattoos on their necks. Guys like Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis and Cal Tjader.

We found a way out of the gang life through social clubs. The clubs were a great institution. You’d rent out a store and get members to pay dues to cover the rent. Then you’d blacken out the windows so nobody
could see in and put up some cool things on the walls. You’d put a jukebox in the front room and lots of couches all over, even in the back room. We found an old deli that went out of business, rented the space, and called our place Club Gentlemen. Jerry designed a logo with a top hat, a cane, and two white gloves. I became the president; Jerry was the vice president. Our rent was made my life a living hell would ever like sixty-five dollars a month, but it was easy to cover because we got the Mob to put a jukebox inside and we got a piece of the proceeds.

Once you entered, it was pitch black except for a few red and blue lights. Which was the perfect environment to start experimenting with sex and drugs. I was about fifteen when I got introduced to Mary Jane. Pot was spooky then—it was so taboo. This older guy we called the Dirty Swede would sell us a skinny little joint for a buck. That was okay money in the early sixties, so two guys would chip in and buy one. We’d go down in the basement and it would be pitch black and we’d light up. Immediately that eerie smell would hit you and you knew you were doing something forbidden. You feared that you might get addicted and get into heroin: All that propaganda was out then. I didn’t even get high the first time we did it, but the second time was the charm. Jerry and I just laughed and ate a million Twinkies and listened to the jukebox. Music had never sounded so good before. Eventually I brought my drums into the club and I’d get high and play along to the jukebox, which was a lot more fun than playing to the radio.

Having the club was a godsend. It certainly kept us off the streets. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the biggest attraction to having a social club. You’d bring a chick to the club, turn on the jukebox, give her some wine or pot, dance a little bit, and then, if you were lucky, take her to a couch in the back room and get laid.

Now, if music was in my blood, so was sex. My dad was very horny. He was always chasing my mother around to get laid. She’d be like, “Get your dirty hands off me!” I was always incredibly open with my mother: We could talk about anything. One time, years later, I was visiting with my parents and my dad went off into the other room.

“Hey, Ma, did you ever give Dad head?” I asked her.

“What? Are you serious?” She frowned. “Do you think I would do
something that filthy with your father? That’s disgusting. Get away from the table, you’re making me sick to my stomach. I think the music is making you crazy.”

I knew that they had missed that boat. For them it was just do it and have a kid. They were old-school people.

I learned from an early age the difference between sex and love. The first time I fell in love was in summer camp. It was a Catholic camp, and it was really scary for a kid from the streets going out to the country by himself. I cried my eyes out that first night. This nun came around with a strap and slapped the shit out of whoever cried, so I had to stick my head in the pillow and muffle my sobs. But there was this nurse there who was just beautiful, and I fell in love with her. I was so crazy about her, I would scratch myself just so I could have her fix it.

But having sex itself was far from that romantic. My uncle George got me my first blowjob. I was around thirteen when he came over one night. He was loaded.

“I gotta go down to the bar,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me and I’ll get you a Coke and some potato chips.” I always dug visiting with my uncle at his bar, so I went.

My uncle would hang out with his friends at the end of the bar and I would sit at a nearby booth because it was illegal for a minor to sit at the bar. Right around the corner at the end of the bar were the bathrooms and a big phone booth and then the kitchen. I was sitting at the booth and I watched as one by one, my uncle’s friends went back to the kitchen area. I wondered what they were doing back there. Then my uncle came">predicament.” s” over to me.

“Do you want to try something that you’ll never forget? But you can’t tell your mom or Nanny!”

“Sure, Uncle George,” I said.

His friends were all laughing, getting a kick out of this. One guy said, “Send the kid in, break his cherry.” So Unc told me to go back to the phone booth. In the booth was a forty-something dirty blonde, skinny, somewhat attractive. I was scared shitless. I’d never been with a girl, let alone a grown woman. She sat me down in the booth and got down on her knees and pulled down my little jockey shorts and I got my dick sucked
for the first time in my life. It didn’t take long, trust me. When I came back out to the bar area, I was white as snow and the men were hysterical.

I started getting a steady diet of blowjobs a few years later when I worked at the butcher shop. The three butchers were real horny Italian guys. They had
Playboy
centerfolds plastered all over the walls of the back room of the shop. That was the first time that I saw a centerfold with the big tits and great ass. I didn’t have anything like that at home, so I’d always find an excuse to go to the back room and whack off looking at those pictures, keeping one eye on the door so I wouldn’t get caught.

Every Friday night, after they cleaned up and prepared for the big Saturday rush, they’d bring a broad in to blow them in the back bathroom. A lot of these women came in, sadly enough, for food. I remember one who had kids and her husband had just left her and they would give her two huge shopping bags full of meat for blowing them. It was quite an education, that little shop.

One Friday night, one of the guys came over to me.

“We’re going to get you laid.”

I thought that was pretty cool. I had had a blowjob, but I’d never lost my cherry.

“Go in the bathroom in ten minutes and she’ll be waiting for you.”

I waited and then I went in and there was this thirty-something black woman sitting there. She was attractive but a little bit chunky with huge boobs.

“Hi, honey,” she said. “I know you’re a little nervous, but it’s gonna be fine. Sit down.”

I sat down on the toilet seat, petrified. She sat down on top of me and took my dick out and tried to put it in her but it wasn’t even there. It disappeared. All I can think was that there was a big black naked woman sitting on top of this skinny little Italian boy. I couldn’t get it up, but she just laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it, honey. I’m gonna go out there and tell ’em you were the best, man. You put them to shame.” And she did.

I eventually lost my virginity with a neighborhood girl and I went on to conquer quite a few of them on the couches of our social club. But I lost my real virginity to the first girl that I loved and didn’t just fantasize about,
like that nurse. Her name was Denicia and she lived downstairs from my friend Jerry Nolan. She was half Spanish and half Irish, a tall, willowy, blue-eyed blonde. I was smitten from the moment I laid my seventeen-year-old eyes on her. When I met her I was pretty wild, going to social clubs with Jerry, fooling around, but this was the real thing, I thought. This was love.

I’ll never forget the first time we slept together. My grandmother was working, so I told Denicia to cut school that day and come over. Oh, my God, it was excitin a little uncomfortable.frng. I didn’t use protection, like an idiot. We didn’t think of that, we just did it. I really got into it and the minute I put it in, I came. But I was young, so, boom, it popped right back up, and the fucking thing wouldn’t stay down. We did it a couple of times more. I felt like this was a sacred screw, not just getting laid by some black whore who was coming in for some lamb chops. This was marriage screwing. And I wanted to get married.

As much of a rebel and an outcast as I was, I still believed in the notion that there was stability in family life. You get married, you have kids, you get a house on Long Island. I had those ideas instilled in me. So after going out with Denicia a couple of years, I started thinking that I wasn’t going to be a rock star and I should get a good job and have the white-picket-fence life. And this was the girl to do it with.

So I went to a pawnshop and I bought an engagement ring for $150. Now we were engaged. My mother was ecstatic: She was crazy about Denicia. My sister Nancy, not so much. Denicia actually got into a fistfight with my sister and my sister beat the shit out of her.

In the end, I was just kidding myself with the marriage thing. I was much too young to get married and settle down. And I was not nice to Denicia. Sometimes I’d get really nasty and treat her like shit. I thought I was Mr. Badass. But eventually she found a badder ass, a biker, and she gave me back my ring. I was crushed. I spent the whole summer crying in my grandmother’s bedroom. It took me years to get over her.

I was so confused then. I was going to a vocational high school in downtown Brooklyn called George Westinghouse. The Vietnam War was heating up, and everybody told me that I had to have a trade, like an electrician or a plumber. So I went to Westinghouse and somehow I started
taking dental mechanics. It seemed like an easy course, and I liked that you got to wear long white doctor-type coats.

I quit my job at the butcher shop and got a job at my uncle George’s bar in the summertime. It was a nightmare. There I was, eighteen years old, and when I went to open at seven
A.M
. there were already barflies lined up to get some drinks before they went off to work. One of these guys would shake so bad that he’d have me pour him a drink, then he’d take his tie off, take the thin end of the tie and tie it around his wrist, then put the tie on around his neck and use the tie to get the glass to his mouth. By his third shot he’d get better and the shakes would go away and he’d say, “Okay, I got to go to work.” He was there every fucking morning.

One time a black guy came in and had a few drinks. Then he said, “I’m not going to pay you.”

“You’d better fucking pay me,” I said, and I pulled out the machete that my uncle kept behind the bar.

So he pulled out a gun.

“Oh, yeah, fuck you,” he said, and left.

I dropped the knife and peed my pants.

I wasn’t into working at the bar, and I really wasn’t into becoming a dental mechanic. Music was still in my blood, and I was soaking it up every chance I could. I’d go to the big Easter Sunday shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music downtown. Murray the K was a big celebrity deejay then, and he would host the shows. For something like $3.50 you’d see fifteen acts, one after another, just constant music. You had Jan and Dean with the California sound, then Dionne Warwick and the girl groups like the Crystals and the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack. made my life a living hell would ever ” I loved Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I saw Little Stevie Wonder with his harmonica doing “Fingertips Pt.1,” one of the first big Motown hits. And these great groups just totally took you out of the depression of Brooklyn, the gangs and the fighting and the illnesses. They just grabbed hold of your soul, and it soared and it was beautiful.

Jerry Nolan was my partner in crime on these musical expeditions. He was an Irish army brat. We would go to school together for a couple of years and then he’d disappear for a year or so and live in the Philippines and then he’d be back, a little more seasoned than I was from all
his travels. When he was around we were inseparable. Deep down, we both wanted to be drummers and to be famous someday. Jerry’s dad made money so he always had nice clothes, much nicer than mine. He would take me shopping and style me. He was very flamboyant and charismatic, and my father thought he was like Gene Krupa—that he was the greatest drummer on the planet. He’d go “Jerry this” and “Jerry that.” I was so jealous that he thought Jerry was better than me.