Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

in. His stepfather was a drinker, and we liked that. But I suspect the part of his new father that Danny really appreciated was the occasional hunting trip they took together. His new father had taught him how to kill.
    Our early teen years were given to making and breaking the rules. Eventually, Danny went away on one of his many trips to DeHoCo (Detroit House of Correction) or some other institution for incorrigible young men. He would one day be released, get a good job at Chrysler in the boiler room, find a wife, and raise a family. I don’t recall when or if the brutality and rage ever ceased because, even though I didn’t know it, my life was about to make a change.
    When it comes to morally responsible tenets and the spiritual ritual of boys to men, a young boy, by example––and in the absence of a loving, instructive, and caringmale (whether father, part time father, or mentor)––takes what is in front of him. I was sick of it. Just sick of it. I wanted my father to be there. I wanted him to show me how I was going to survive this emotional and physical transition and freefall, the fear and brutality, the relentless perversities, the poverty. Was I wrong? Was life not as it seemed? Were we not poor, needy, and lacking in every imaginable way? Was that accidental and foreign smell of happiness on the rare misplaced wind from an existing world? Was there still, at least, some small hope, dear Father? Or, was what I saw around me all there was and all there could ever be?
    My selfishness and anger only made matters worse. My mother was pregnant again. On the day of what should have been wonderful news I came to my own conclusion about the reason we were stuck in the neighborhood I despised, the reason we never had enough money, why I was embarrassed to bring my friends to my house, why I had no good clothes, why my teeth were rotting out of my mouth, and why I couldn’t get a job. So, I approached my father and asked him why he didn’t use the rubbers I had discovered while pilfering through his drawers. He said he had tried but he was such a bad ass he ended up blowing them off the end of his dick. He was laughing, as if he had made a joke.
    I called him an asshole and he slammed me into the wall of his bedroom. This was the same bedroom in which my mother, so many years earlier, had tried through some quaint hillbilly remedy to ease the pain of infection that raged through my aching, sweating body by blowing cigarette smoke into my ears and rocking me for hours as my four-year-old mind danced from one hallucination to the next. Then, my father started punching. The only difference between my father and Danny was the fact that my father sometimes said he was sorry.
    Today, gazing into my mirror at the afterimage of my father, irony bumps against genetic proof as I struggle to rid myself of my past. And yet, I don’t want to throw all of it away. If I do, how can I exist? If I could discern the why, if we had known each other better, wouldn’t I then, more surely than defame, defend? Such a great man. You left a hole in my heart Father, and I will not pretend to make things better. Not in a memory for or a memory of you. Life is a long, bitter road with sudden twists and turns, and no promise of the unexpected ever ending. I am sorry, Father.
    In the late summer of 1959 I entered high school.

Chapter 3
     
    I S YOU IS OR IS YOU ain’t my baby? Enchantment wafts through the fantasy of my Faustian assurances as the world of high school put distance between what actually was and the promise of what was to be. Although I hadn’t sold my soul, it was dirty and in need of repair. High school was “the cleaners.” Not only would I now be privy to the combined knowledge of the entire civilized world but, better still, I would be thrust into a caste system where every intellectual wore the irrefutable grade of an “A+” on his forehead. This would prove to be a problem. And thus, it only took my freshman year to pacify my great expectations.
    I have heard it said that desperate men do desperate things, and so I willfully drew upon my meager inheritance––desperation. My father had wanted to be an artist. He had tried to teach me but, unbeknownst to him, his failures, frustrations, and lack of confidence were always part of the lesson. My father had wanted to be a singer, but it was such a bitter pill that he didn’t bother to pass it to me. During my high school experience I excelled in art and