Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

It’s a good stage at this venue. This sturdy-looking bar-thing a few feet above and to the side. Looks like if you hit it right, you might be able to swing over the chain link onto the lawn seats. Fast-forward: you can. I tumbled into the grassy area. People on blankets leapt up and started running away, booking for the back wall. A human blimp in zebra Spandex stood in front of me with her arms over her head screaming “NO!” My bass was barely recognizable as a musical instrument and was spewing green smoke all over the place like a weapon from Jupiter, and, I discovered, I was bleeding profusely from a head wound. I ran back toward the stage, vaulted the fence one-handed (the other had to play notes), and did a violent somersault down a small concrete hill and crashed into the crowd barrier at the foot of the stage. Guy down the end goes what the fuck. Beginning to think that’s his main job, that guy.

  SEPTEMBER 14

  Woke up from a siesta in the hotel. I’m sure there is a medical term for what I woke up from, but we’ll call it a siesta. Lying there on the bed I couldn’t think why the maid would be vacuuming in the bathroom, with the door closed. It went on and on. Then the door opened and Matt walked out looking like a guy who’d just been kicked out of Duran Duran. Angrily shoving a blow drier into his duffel of shiny clothes, tamping out the last drops of rider vodka into his motel orange juice. Ill-advised unisex rocker ornament, and these boozy tics he’s developed—Easy Reader meets Mr. Natural, as Lenny might say. Running in place and moving his arms like pistons, this bit. With the poofed hair, he resembled a fetishized prize chicken. I must’ve had some kind of expression on my face because he said, “What the fuck are you lookin’ at, twatface.”

  A crested frizzle came to mind.

  SEPTEMBER 15

  Matt announced that he’s going back to New York for Wilma’s birthday. And here we are, the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the Worst Idea Anyone Has Ever Had. Matt adamant about it. All kinds of threats if someone “stands in his way.” We have two nights off, and apart from phoners for Canadian press in advance of the tour up there, and common sense, which is off the table, nothing obligates him to be here. Nothing we can do short of physically restraining him, which would have its own set of consequences. He insists he’ll be back in time for the next show. And fuck us for even suggesting otherwise. Carrying a time bomb across a minefield. That’s the feeling.

  SEPTEMBER 16

  Matt was not on the four o’clock flight, or the 6:10, or any after that. Steve talked to him, reports that Matt wants us all to know that he’s “very unhappy” and that he refuses to come back at all if he has to hear any more “boo-shit.” Steve had to go to the Leppard people, tail between legs, to tell them they’ve got no opener for the sold-out 20,000-seater, with the story that Matt was sick. Absolutely nobody in the Leppard camp bought that for a second, of course. Only way to drag him back in is wearing kid gloves, Steve’s appraisal. Eugene said, “Can they be around his neck?”

  Called Lenny. Get a jump on damage control. He was pissed but practical. “I’ll put out some fires, but if he’s seen drinking in the city blowing off a major tour we’ll all be up a serious fucking creek. Tell me he’s not anywhere on the Lower East Side.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Ah, fuck. All right. Tell Steve to tell Matty to make sure he keeps a low profile. Not to go anywhere near the office, and not to talk to anybody that even looks like they might know someone in the music business. And definitely tell him to stay the fuck away from Max Fish. He cannot be seen in New York.”

  “We’ll try—”

  “No! Don’t try, do. This is a delicate situation, very very fucking delicate. And what we do not need is a big I-told-you-so here. That’s game over. Got it? I’m dead serious.”

  “Johnson’s folly.”

  “What?”

  “Like Hammond’s folly. What the record people called Dylan, after the guy who signed him, Hammond.”

  “Yeah, well. You guys aren’t fuckin’ Bob Dylan.”

  Nobody is. Not even Bob Dylan.

  SEPTEMBER 23 / VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA

  Steve couldn’t reach Matt, left a message. Only solution was to meet him here. No chance we’ll make it if we waited back—wherever we were. Checked into a Swillton in an Old Testament rain. My room’s got a balcony and a sea view. Salt wind, ocean boom.

  Opened the paper. The band Valeria works with is playing some other enormo-venue in the area. Called her. She and the band picked me up in their transport van on the way to the venue. They just went platinum. The way she handles them is masterful, almost witchy. The music industry is a misogynist’s playgroup, but Valeria can obviously handle it. How long she’ll put up with it is another matter. Apparently the band has been listening to our album to get pumped up before shows. The singer asked how I would feel about them covering “Too Much Is Never Enough.” I said good.

  Their show was sold out, to a median age twenty years south of the average Leppard concertgoer. Beatlemaniac noise wall when the band came out, and there was an olfactory surge, of fruity drugstore makeup. I didn’t stay long.

  No word from Matt.

  When the cabin port-holes are dark and green

  Because of the seas outside;

  When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)

  And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,

  And the trunks begin to slide . . . *

  SEPTEMBER 24

  Eating B-grade crab legs with Valeria on the patio of the B-grade crab legs place near the hotel that has better Bloody Marys than the B-grade crab legs place near the beach. Good company. Refreshing to talk to someone outside the immediate fart cloud. And she knows something about bands.

  “From my experience you guys are asymptomatic for lead singer disease. And lowish risk. Ten thousand people booing you every night isn’t likely to pump up anybody’s ego. Could be maybe taking a toll, on some level, that.”

  “Nah. It’s just hazing. Development, whatever they call it. Temporary.”

  “Sure. If you can stick it out. Then, it’s kind of hard to picture you guys doing anything else.”

  “Matt and I sold kitchen knives door-to-door for a while. Tried, anyway.”

  “Kitchen knives. As in ding-dong, and it’s you two with a bunch of cleavers and things?”

  “We were enthusiastic about the products. What.”

  “Nothing. I’m surprised that didn’t work out. Getting more organized, day to day, that might help. What’s your management situation now?”

  “The three of us go into a room, agree on something unanimously, come out, nobody agrees what was agreed to, and one of us doesn’t agree that he was in the room, which two of us agree is effectively true, voiding any agreement.”

  “That sounds productive.”

  “It is, comparatively.”

  “I get the idea. This might sound ridiculous, but under the circumstances, has anybody thought about an intervention?”

  There was a loud bang as behind Valeria, a car, it looked like a Honda, with at least two people inside, crashed through the cement barrier on the roof of the parking garage across the street, did a half twist in the air, and landed in the overgrown lot four stories below, where the Budweiser Clydesdales are barracked, destroying a horse trailer. People came out of the restaurant to stand and watch. Hands covered mouths. Emergency vehicles sped onto the scene; firemen ran with rescue tools and lifesaving equipment. A sudden cascade of terrified whinnies reverberated through the parking structure, and ended abruptly. After a bit the waiter came over and leaned in; he circled his hand over our Bloody Marys. “These are gonna be on the house.”

  SEPTEMBER 25

  Gray skies, unseasonable cold. On Tuesday’s parking garage accident the local paper reports that there’s a multidepartmental investigation into “whether the parking structure meets building codes.” A small, half-plastic car went through a supposedly cement wall a foot thick. Building codes for what, a sand castle?

  In other news, from New York, fo
r Wilma’s birthday she and Matt not only visited Max Fish maximally, but dragged a Billboard editor along as they guzzled through a half-dozen downtown bars, impressing music professionals, fellow bands, label execs, and numberless loose-lipped publicists, flogged—literally, with an implement—a prominent music writer in the middle of Ludlow Street, then capped the night off at a high-profile industry karaoke party, “mad fucked up” according to TVT employees in attendance, whose fractured intel to Lenny included indecent exposure, “Grand Drunk Railroad,” and the VP of everything in the world, basically, “tittytwisted” into a full drinks tray.

  Show scrapped, of course. Considered doing it anyway, just Eugene and I, a bass and drum jam. “Drum and bass,” no? Is that not a thing? More realistic, for a minute, was having Steve play with us. Quite honestly we could probably pull something off. But that’s not the gig. Matt will supposedly meet us in Maryland. Timed it so we can grab him from the train and still make soundcheck. Last show, last chance. Should be . . .

  Here on the hotel balcony. Ocean-boom. Fuck.

  SEPTEMBER 26

  Making tonight’s show was looking good, until Matt called from the train station in Virginia Beach saying where the fuck is everybody. Maryland. Shit’s Creek, MD.

  OCTOBER 2 / SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

  Drove down to the fair, the Big E, in West Springton with Peeler, who wanted to see the Def Leppard show without having to carry anything, deal with bullshit, etc.

  Seasonal traffic congestion; all roads clogged with leaf peeping Sunday drivers. Suiciding trees. The Big E is an agrarian maelstrom, of tractors pulling logs, shifty amputees operating puke-streaked whirligigs; sticky, bawling, children, shitfaced on sugar being dragged around by an arm, their dopplering screeches . . . Cattle is judged, ridden, and eaten with sauerkraut; there’s a smash-up derby; glum, boozy couples who resemble the giant pink stuffed animal prizes they hump down the midway; more giant pink people stand around observing idle farm equipment and eating sphincter off a stick—anything and everything that can be fried, is. No one converses at country fairs, there is only sloshed yelling, resentful silence, and barked swindles. An excitable man on a microphone claims to have the largest kielbasa in the free world.”

  I’d stopped at the packie by the house and picked up local syrup in bottles that look like Jack Daniel’s for Def Leppard and some of the crew, and gift cards that completed the gag. Stashed the syrup bottles backstage then went and joined Peeler at the show. After “Rock of Ages” I went for a wander, find a quiet place to have a beverage. The horse stable doing business as a Budweiser tent was a diorama of obesity and ruin, grease-bombed madness. Skipped it and wandered into a building with a pie contest. Not competitive eating, pie versus pie. Stern chap in tweed with a clipboard, using a pen to point out “impressive central tumescence” and “memorableness” on a meringue. I felt like I’d slipped through a crack in the fabric of the universe. And another one within that universe when I found myself in a crowd gathered around a small pen, where a stuffed monkey in a little remote-controlled jeep was being used to chase a live goose around. I thought there must be something else to it, but no. That was it. Had to be fifty, sixty people watching this, nobody saying anything, just eating, eating, eating more. The goose was perturbed but resigned; the sunken old yokel operating the car controller couldn’t be bothered. A cardboard clock on a signpost next to him read “Shows every 20 minutes.”

  Later, the scene on the Leppard bus was relaxed; they had days off ahead. Nice parting words, no hard feelings with the tour manager or anybody else. The band sold us their retiring wireless gear, receivers, transmitters, microphones. Including Steve Clark’s, labeled, which they hadn’t managed to part with, or separate, since he died. While the tech was getting all that together I went back to get the syrup.

  The syrup wasn’t where I left it. I looked around and found the bag. The bottles were gone. Someone had doubtless thought they were stealing a stash of actual Jack Daniel’s whiskey. The gift cards were still in the bag but the inscriptions on them made no sense without the bottles. I chucked the lot in a trash barrel on the way out. Somewhere a local chump would walk into a party like king shit, and whip out six pints of maple syrup he stole off Def Leppard. Not much consolation for what in the end was basically a three-month flameout.

  Walked through the fair to meet Peeler, past the goose and monkey show, between shows. The goose ambled around the pen, pecked at something in the grass. People were already gathered around, waiting.

  22

  YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER THING COMING

  MONDAY, OCTOBER SOMETHING / NEW YORK

  Met Lenny at the office this morning and we went to the Irish place across the street. We had a couple of beers and as always the conversation turned to Matt, and the Troubles.

  “Fear of success,” said Lenny. “Happens all the time.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “Being able to pay the rent? Who wouldn’t be terrified.”

  “Seriously. Seen it a hundred times. You know, afraid of not meeting people’s expectations.”

  “People expect we’re going to be wasted, and fuck up pretty much everything we do,” I said. “So, fear of failure, you’re saying.”

  “Whatever. I’m just saying it’s a pressure thing. As the singer he’s bound to feel a bit more heat.”

  Lenny cashed us out, handed me back my wrinkled dollar. “Label’s got these. But not forever. You guys need to get Matty back on track, quick. Maybe this trip down south will do him some good.”

  “What trip.”

  “I didn’t tell you? We’re sending him to Texas to teach Millard Fillmore to rock.” Millard Fillmore is a new band on the label. The name says it all. “Matty’ll just hang around, do his Matty thing, hopefully some of it rubs off on the band.”

  “Why would you want that?”

  “One, it gets Matty a change of scene and head space away from the missus. Two, Millard Fillmore do not rock. Like, at all.”

  THURSDAY

  “Where’s Matty?” Lenny on the phone, yesterday.

  “If it’s Thursday, high tea at the Carlyle. Friday, fundraiser at the Met, I think. Why?”

  Lenny wanted to make sure Matty had told us. “Told us what?”

  We were supposed to be recording a Judas Priest song for a new Adam Sandler movie. We were due at the studio. Now.

  “What’s the movie about?” I asked.

  “It’s a fuckin’ Adam Sandler movie—it’s about ninety minutes. Find Matty.” He clicked off.

  Under the current policy of appeasement, Matt as the contact point, so he—and Wilma—can be sure no one is, as they say, “doing shady shit,” thus far nobody’s any happier, paranoia is up thirty percent, and now we don’t hear about anything until someone’s pissed off we didn’t show up, or otherwise deliver. Not that that didn’t happen before. When the stakes were a lot lower, and there were always second chances. More often than not, any window of opportunity is nailed down, boarded up.

  Back when we were at Avatar re-mixing the record with Kevin Shirley, beefing up the original tracks we recorded up at Slaughterhouse, Kevin’s friend Pat, an arena rock hero prototype who played lead for the Pat Travers Band in the seventies, would stop by, almost daily. Pat and Kevin would make vague references to Pat’s “project” up in the “attic,” in tones that left me content to imagine a baby with gills or a failed ray-gun or something. In fact up in the attic, Pat’s garret laboratory where we were installed to record this last-minute song, it’s possible to work for much cheaper than the regular studio rate due to the guinea-pig factor: you plug a guitar into the computer and record directly into it, through simulated amplifiers. Graphics of the amp heads appear on-screen, and you move the knobs with the mouse. The sounds are fine but my initial feeling was that we had been demoted, that the studio management or the label was afraid we’d break the real equipment. (It does happen. I have a reverse-Midas thing going on, I touch stuff and it stops working, or blows up.) B
ut no, apparently this computer bit is, or will be, the new normal for recording. Since there’s no tape involved it’s possible (“simple,” Pat insists) to do edits in seconds—no more breaks long enough to sauna and write lyrics while the engineer fixes a drum track or a fade-out with a razor blade and little adhesive tabs. Now you can slice the waveform on the screen with the cursor, move the pieces around as you please. Impressive, but you’ll still need razor blades around the studio. Because good luck chopping up lines with a computer mouse. Or slitting your wrists with one, should that be prudent.

  It’s always preferable to record together but Matt was running late so Eug and I recorded the bass and drums, and we both added some rhythm guitars, a bed. The less Matt has to do, the better. Pat did some mixing, and we fell on the breakfast spread we hadn’t had time to decimate on arrival, bagels and so forth. Fresh things. It’s not a bad life.

  Matt showed up with Wilma and the Chihuahua, and a bottle of vodka. Wilma shook the vodka bottle at Eugene and I and said, “Nunna you homos better even look at this bottle of vodka. Thissum for me en him only. Got it? We got some shit to deal with.”

  A housing crisis. They’ve been ejected from Wilma’s apartment—which is how until this morning they referred to the West Village walk-up where Wilma, as it turns out, was only supposed to feed the cat and get the mail. I went by once. The general area of the doorway was plenty close to experience the accumulated squalor of the place. It was as if a tornado spit out a strip club. Wilma reported that the rightful occupant, a girl who somehow after several years in New York City remains unconnected to the sex industry (cue Wilma’s insistent snort and eye-roll) had returned earlier and opened her door to find her apartment a debauched cesspit, Matt and Wilma on her bed, invertebrate with drink (I’m paraphrasing Wilma’s “taking a nap”), and no cat in sight. Wilma told the woman to “chill,” that her cat was “probably around here somewhere,” and the woman, as Wilma related to us, circling her ear with her finger, went “off her rocker.” Matt and Wilma barely made it down to the street with their lives, they said, with “that crazy, hysterical bitch” screaming and crying and hurling their belongings out of the third-story window at them. Go-go boots, glittery shirts, and review dildos raining down onto Christopher Street. If you don’t like the weather in the West Village just wait a minute.