We had no choice but to leave Baby with Grandma during our first gig back in SoCal because we had no choice but to stay at my parents’ house once again while we looked for a place of our own. The gig, directly across from Disneyland, was an outside setup, sans drums, sans the kind of heating stands now ubiquitous at outdoor venues, and while it was summer, the temperature dropped sharply in those pre-climate-change evenings. The gig had been waiting for us when we hit town, so there was no pre-performance time to apartment hunt. But our absence had made no heart fonder, so we dove into the task and quickly found a townhome in what my mother deemed “the slums” of Orange County.
Ah, my mother: the poster child for white supremacy, a fervent “I’m not a bigot!” believer as proven by the fact that she regularly contributed to Jewish organizations and often chatted with her Hispanic “cleaning girl” during her lunch break. To be fair, it’s really presentistic to view her as anything other than a product of her times and heritage. My paternal grandfather’s affinity for the term n****r made me cringe throughout my childhood, but the one time I dared bring it up—to her, of course, since I knew better than to voice thoughts to anyone else in my non-family—she fed me 1940s racial bullshit.
I know not why I instinctively recognized it as bullshit. I’d seen similar explanations in magazine articles and novels and even a textbook or two, complete with scientific study quotes and graphs. They were bullshit, too. When life progressed and I began ghostwriting books, those same instincts served me well… and not. I essentially killed a high-profile author’s memoir by accentuating his racial hatreds and homophobia so that no one would touch the thing—at that time. Today, hell, he’d probably be hailed as a right-wing influencer.
On the other hand, I lost a very high-paying gig wherein the author was so wrong about so many topics—and so rigidly adamant he was right—that the book had no forward trajectory. I mean, some bullshit is just too damn stinky and stupid.
Full disclosure: I learned a lot from both projects. That’s the part those who draw lines don’t understand. There’s something of value in every project, in every stance, in every point of view, even if it’s just insight into “the other side’s” mindset and thought processes. In a world where facts are, and have been for quite some time, denigrated and vilified, one must know how to emotionally detach so they can suss out the underbelly weaknesses. But that’s a discussion for an entirely different future series.
We lived poor because we were poor, two working musicians with a crawling infant and daily diverging ambitions. When it’d been just the two of us, Tom and I talked or touched on anything, everything, especially during those twenty-four/seven together road days—a fool’s paradise I had adored and clung to. But once we landed in a real home, reality sprung up in corners and sidewall cracks.
Tom had a new goal, to be a musician’s musician. He still wanted to keep the act going, but … new people were entering our lives, changing dynamics all around. One of his Chicago friends)—a cis-gender hetero with toxic masculinity I’ll call SOB (because, frankly, while I can still see his face his name is gone, gone, gone—had recently moved to California, the better to lounge around our place, incessantly whine about every job he couldn’t manage to hold, and eat our food. His presence always made me Cassandra-tingle, but to my husband he was a good friend, a ready ally… and, of course, a trusted weed supplier.
For the record, I neither indulged nor partook. Yes, it became an issue—for me—because it also became non-discussable, thus helping re-revitalize my turtle-osity. Tom’s brain chemistry gradually became more erratic, his behavior less defensible—and my path more littered with tread alerts once again. So when with rage-driven adrenaline he lifted an old-fashioned metal shopping cart over his head and heaved it across an empty parking lot at 12:30 one morning, I pulled into my shell and said nothing. When he screamed at me about… whatever, whenever… I turtled deeper. When he threw things everywhere around the house looking for something he bitterly swore I’d hidden from him—only to find it exactly where he’d left it—I shrank and hid and tried to put myself between his wrath and our daughter.
Understand, I still had no idea what manic depression was at that point and hadn’t yet made the connection between his uncontrollable fury and his increasing weed and alcohol consumption, which he called self-medication. Life in our music-business-adjacent world wasn’t laying down the way he wanted or anticipated. Yeah, he was good, but other players were just as, if not better. And they could all sightread, something he was afraid to even attempt—likely due to his undiagnosed ADHD, yet to be a recognized, much less non-stigmatized condition.
Fortunately, I could fall back on my own tried-and-true coping mechanisms: lying, hiding, and denying. It wasn’t long before life-with-Tom began to resemble my childhood life-with-mother. I unfailingly bent to his will, kept my mouth shut about my own wants and needs, and spent inordinate amounts of energy appeasing, supporting, and reassuring him.
Old habits don’t necessarily die hard; sometimes they just adapt to new conditions.
The other, rather disconcerting, personnel upgrade was a guy who respected Tom’s talent but never fell under his charismatic spell. I’ll call him Fezzik, since he stood just about as tall, wide, and bulky as the legendary Princess Bride giant. We met after moving into the townhouse maybe a week earlier and hadn’t yet discovered the scorpions that slithered under the back door, the ants that swarmed across the kitchen cupboards during the heat, or the management’s “I’ll put it on the list” non-repair policy.
Scene: Tom was in the van parked in the alley between the complex’s two rows of open-to-all-thieves carports, swearing at a second-hand refrigerator the salesman had helped us load via the store’s removable metal ramp—which he’d then removed, despite assuring us he was tucking it inside to be returned after we unloaded.
Fezzik was in his own stall, kiddy-corner from ours, working on his engine.
My stage life hadn’t collapsed yet, and I figured the guy wouldn’t just pull a shiv and kill me out in the open—not in front of Baby in her carriage—so I pulled out my best quip voice and said, “You look like someone who could move a refrigerator.”
Turned out, he could. Also turned out he’d been the road manager for New Riders of the Purple Sage, the country-rock band precursor to the Grateful Dead. He wasn’t Jewish, but we were Lonsmen on the spot, thanks to him being instantly enraptured by Baby.
He fell in love with our daughter, not a hard thing to do. He also later fell in love with me, for reasons not only beyond my understanding but equally beyond my ability to handle. He was a great guy who I enjoyed spending time with, but he was completely straight and utterly convinced I was one hundred percent woman. I’d forgotten just how disconcerting, not to mention irritating, that could be. Plus, he complained about how Tom—and my mother!—talked to and treated me, thus raising my shell and giving me one more person I had to defend to and about.
Retrospectively, it’s clear why I was so exhausted all the time. It wasn’t just the hidden MS and heart congestion—it was holding everyone in my life at bay from each other.
But I’m jumping ahead. For the time being, he was cautiously friendly, an overweight vegetarian who lived on frozen-food-like substances and loved to tell stories about the insane M&M clauses bands put in their show contracts. Long story short, he soon became our road manager.
Now, that was a blast. If not for Fezzik, I’d never have had the experience of showing up at a First Annual Muff Dive and Wet T-Shirt Contest only to watch him single-handedly—without dolly or even a grunt—pull out one of our 150 lb. speakers and gently set it on the ground. It was our first gig under his management, so Tom and I had agreed to, “Just follow my lead.”
“That’s our good faith gesture,” our giant told the event producer. “I’ll unload the rest as soon as I have your cash in my hand.”
“No, no, that’s not how it works,” the guy protested. “You play, I pay.”
“At a ‘first annual’? In your dreams. I can have this baby back in the van in less than a minute. Cash now, all of it, or we leave.”
“You can’t do that! I’m sold out!”
“Good! Then you’ve got our money.”
“But not with me!”
“So go get it. We’ll wait. You’ve got—” He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”
“My bank isn’t anywhere around here! Come on, be reasonable. Load your stuff in. Your people are supposed to be on in less than an hour!”
“Fourteen minutes.”
The guy turned to Tom. “You’re the band leader, right? I’m telling you to unload, right now!”
“Oh, um… I don’t think so.”
He turned to me. “Who are you, the chick singer? Tell them or you’ll never get another union gig as long as you live!”
I shrugged. “This isn’t a union gig. And I’m not a chick singer. I’m a chick drummer.”
“Thirteen minutes.”
“Sonovabitch!”
He paid. We played. Beer flowed. People stomped and drank and sang along and drank and called for more beer and drank some more. Everybody was having a hellova great time—until one and then two and then all of them demanded the big attraction they’d paid for: big-bosomed girls in tight, hosed-down T-shirts and split-seamed undies.
Slight problem: none of the wet-and-dive girls had shown up.
Or maybe they had only to find the producer had given all his money to us. Whatever the truth, we were the ones stuck in a big, echoing cargo bay with a couple dozen drunks getting drunker and rowdier by the musical measure.
“They’re gonna start throwing things any minute,” Fezzik said from behind the raised bandstand. “Stay with the equipment and keep playing. No matter what, don’t get off stage.”
Good advice, but hardly necessary. We’d already had the delightful experience of playing behind chicken wire in one particularly wild-west venue where the crowd was known for pitching cans and bottles (and each other) at the musicians. (The Blues Brothers didn’t make anything up; it just showed what already was.)
In the end, the producer had to talk his girlfriend into letting a succession of men eat her out while others took Polaroids of their conquest. Somebody got a bit too handy… or tonguey, I suppose… bring things to an abrupt end after some screaming, a few flying fists and “oomph!” head butts, and the sobering sound of bottles smashing against a table.
We kept playing until the crowd disbursed, at which point the producer demanded Fezzik return some of our money because we hadn’t “played through to the contracted end time.” Yeah, right. Needless to say, there was never a follow-up “Second Annual.”
We worked with/through Fezzik until Baby was old enough to climb him, which they both loved. He was her very first boyfriend, a ready-to-hand uncle who outshone all her biological ones. I doubt she ever forgave me when his and my relationship blew up a few decades later.
Meanwhile, Tom started sitting in with various groups, attracting the kind of attention he quite rightly deserved from the musical community. None of us are just one thing, and we all have a golden something(s) to show the world. One of his was the ability to make anyone on his stage sound good. Anyone. So when a slimy, misogynistic, there-but-for-the-grace-of-not-being-that-good piece of shit threw his drumsticks into the mix, it ended our act and replaced Tom’s previous supplier all in one swell foop.
Yeah, it was inevitable; no, I didn’t take it well. Enter life stage number three, post-puppet-master, post-music/comedy career—a story for another chapter.
