Johnny Rollerfeet's Echo Chamber

I don’t know if any of the previous chapters in any way could have explained the lifestyle choices that led me toThe Psycho Waitress and so many women like her. Child of alcoholic parents, drug and alcohol addiction, a steady stream of brown organic mescaline, the intoxicating allure of danger, people, places and things, blah, blah, blah. I just craved a non-stop roller-coaster ride. Not to sound like Willie Nelson but I often look back at almost all of the women with great affection and a ‘Where are they now?’ inquisitiveness. The first gal that ever really broke my heart, I mean trashed the living shit out of that vital pumping organ lodged in my chest so that I genuinely entertained the notion of taking “the big plunge” was Judy the Obscure in my senior year of high school. How ridiculously naive and futile it seems in retrospect. I sure was dead serious at the time though. We were together for a year and a half. She was a stunner and lived in one of those mansions on Sedgwick I talked about earlier. She was half Greek and half Italian, had had jaundice as a child so she had this dark golden-olive skin and jet black ringlets for hair, and was a music and literature fan. She was made to order with a gorgeously perfect smile. I think there were braces just prior to my meeting her if I remember correctly. Anyway she dumped me, spiraling me into a big ass Trent Reznor size teen depression. But everybody gets these corny ass high school dramas but that doesn’t necessarily lead to bedding knife wielding ghetto dwelling psycho hillbilly bitches on a near weekly basis. Or maybe it does, I should probably take a poll. You know how when you get dumped and you’re all mad and angry and you wish the worst for that person, like you’re thinking, “I hope they wind up homeless, toothless, old, gray, wrinkled and eating out of a dumpster somewhere?” I mean you don’t really mean it, your ego is like a bent and mutilated bumper in a auto demolition derby and you’re angry and hurt so you say a bunch of stuff you don’t really mean on a long term basis. Except this actually was how the girl ended up thirty years later. Shit. Does not make you feel good at all. I mean I’ve known dumpster divers in my life, and I’ve liked and befriended dumpster divers in my life, but I never dated any dumpster divers in my life. Well, I guess I have but no dating while they were dumpster diving. If truth be told, were I had been able to look into the future and seen her as a future dumpster diver I don’t think it would have inhibited my loving her one bit. We had a soulful connection. At least until she trashed me for a better looking guy.  But nobody wants to think about some toothless 50 year old woman with bare bloodied feet walking her old upscale neighborhood trying to catch a squirrel for dinner and going, “Hey! There’s my old flame Judy the Obscure! I wonder how’s she’s doing?”

The only time I didn’t play in a band was a brief stint in college. I couldn’t devote enough time to either; both were suffering and so I stopped the music, got the degree and pursued music full time after I graduated. Immediately out of college I bought a van, a P.A., put together a rocking little trio and got a steady gig at The Amber Inn on Otisco Lake. This was my first indoctrination to “Lake People”. Let’s put it bluntly and accurately: Lake People are prone to partying. Really fucking hard. It’s in their nature, it’s a lifestyle and it’s generational. They are very non-judgmental. For instance, if you wake up in the morning, pour yourself a large double Vodka Bloody Mary, smoke a couple joints, do a shot of bourbon as a “bracer” and possibly a few lines of Peruvian Flake to steady your nerves and then proceed to fill an ice chest with imported beer, a couple flasks of rum and tequila, the makings for a dozen Martinis, pot, Quaaludes, Crystal Meth, some cold meat sandwiches and then load it into your boat with your water skis to get down to some serious partying coupled with water sports no other boaters are going to give you a hard time. The reason? Because they’re doing it too! It is “The Way of the Lake!” (Sidenote: Greatest makeshift bong I ever witnessed on Otisco Lake: Someone named Lumpy had taken a cooling fan from a computer, about 12 inches in circumference, and attached a screen to the sucking side and then used bathroom caulking to secure a length of plastic tubing that utilized a dozen other gasketed tubes into a makeshift Home Depot hookah, a light purplish contraption reminiscent of a steaming octopus. The finishing touch was a plastic tarp that was stapled to the deck of his wooden boat and a small crawl through space allowing 7 or 8 fun lovers to enter, wrap their greedy lips around the tubing and partake. Now, here’s the deal, you’d put a dime bag of pot on the screen, turn that fan on and the pot would immediately turn to smoke in less than 10 seconds with a whirring and sucking sound. The hugest and most effective marijuana shotgun I‘ve ever witnessed. Eventually they added a turntable, amp and a collection of vinyl in this latex clubhouse and of course the longer you stayed in there, with no means for this dense smoke to dissipate or escape the higher you got. Genius. Lake culture. Hell, I didn’t know, I abhorred water sports, (outside of the bedroom) as much as I abhorred winter sports. But I caught on quick enough. I witnessed games of “chicken” where boats were sawed in half. Cabins set on fire. Our drummer, who had a camp out there invented some kind of giant man-size kite that you attach yourself to and ski for awhile and then rise up out of the water like some weird bastard drunken Pterodactyl  and try to chug a 40 0Z. Our band was pretty mediocre but I honed my front man skills, all the while doing “cover songs” that were particular favorites of the locals. It was a lot of fun and very educational. Now that I think about it there was one whack case girl at the lake I did get involved with. She was married to a guy ten years older than her but she was a wicked alcoholic and I was too young at 21 to have any scruples regarding marriage. I mean I wasn’t married. She’d have to work this stuff out for herself. Which she did, mostly in the back of my van. She eventually got strangled over a drug deal gone bad.

This is also where I got my very first roadie, Otter. His pay was free draft beer. He carried some gear into the club from the van at the beginning of the night. He wasn’t quite as spry at the end of the night being just shy of comatose vomit induced suffocation. He was a great guy, had a beautiful laugh and in his very primal intellect he knew that life was too short not to get the most laughs as humanly possible. He was a bit like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. You probably don’t want him babysitting your three year old, but if you needed heavy stuff shifted around the yard, he was your guy. His way of getting sympathy or attention was always to get injured in some way. One week he’d be wearing an eye patch, the next week he’d have a cast on his leg and sporting crutches and the next week he’s somehow have 16 stitches in his cheek. On and on, time after time, but of course he’d soldier on roadying, all for the love of rock and roll. I lost touch with Otter when The Lake gig ended. I’d see him in bars or out seeing music and we’d take up where we left off, rekindling our friendship in minutes. Years later, after I moved out of my hometown I had heard that Otter had gotten three DWI’s which in Upstate New York meant mandatory incarceration. Otter was NOT cut out to do jail time. He possessed a beautiful childlike soul, and despite his boundless energy and barrel chested strength he was no hard ass, a big hearted softie and jail was going to eat him up. While gigging once in My Hometown area I stopped into The Music Store where I had worked for so many years. A new guy behind the counter said, “Hey, your man died.” I didn’t know what the hell he was referring to. Sure enough, Otter was headed to jail and he and his girlfriend rented a U-Haul to store his possessions. He rode in the back with his stuff while his girlfriend drove. Ever the practical joker Otter climbed out the back of the truck as his lady was navigating a particularly curvy stretch of country road. He climbed over the top of the truck and stuck his face down in the windshield in an attempt to startle her as she was driving. It was highly effective because it scared the shit out of her, she slammed on the brakes and he flew off and into a tree, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. There was a lot of gossip flying around town because she was seen a couple weeks later “entertaining” a man at a bar and some close friends of Otters got up in her face about it, but I always feel that people grieve in different and personal ways. Between the guilt and the loneliness, the turmoil of emotions she probably needed some company. And if I know Otter he wouldn’t have wanted her to be lonely or suffer, he would have wanted her to laugh as soon as possible.

This showed up in my feed reader, but I don’t see it on Hamell’s official site. Sometimes RSS feeds go wonky and Google’s Reader can’t tell where a post came from. This may be one of those, or it could have been pulled from his site for other reasons. I’m (probably illegally) copying it here so that I have it at hand. Hamell’s a great story teller, and his stories are always worth being told.