“So Matty was saying something about maybe possibly me coming out there with a guitar, to maybe play a little bit or something—I think,” Mink said. “Honestly, Mikey, I’m not exactly sure what he was saying. Does he always talk like that now? With all the mixed-up pronouns?”
“The skank patois. Yes.”
“Wow. That’s bad.”
“Apocalypse everything.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda the vibe I got. Would it be helpful if I came out and—I don’t know. I’d like to help, do whatever I can.”
“Yes. Maybe beyond help. But just come.”
I topped up my drink by dumping another drink on top of it, and went back to the living room and sat back down in front of the camera. Lex resumed the interview. Much of it, Lex says, was conducted with me on the floor, since I was in no mood for chairs, and vice versa.
MARCH 9
Mink arrived at about seven last night. (New car, another undercover cop sedan, to keep the real ones away, so far so good.) He’d popped ’round Matt and Wilma’s to assess vis-à-vis music playing—whether it might be possible, and if possible, advisable. His two-plus hours in their “love nest” got him a Pabst (undrinkable), a headache, and peed on by the Chihuahua. (Nothing against the dog, brave little thing.) When they fell into some fathomless, rummy squabble, Mink said, he saw his window, and ran out the door and drove up here, at precisely not-exactly the speed limit, as always.
“Dollars to donuts they haven’t noticed I’m gone,” he said. “Oh, also she peed into his other amp, so both amps are in the shop now. With urine damage.” Not the dog, Wilma. This is her “thing,” still.
Planned to go to the space, Eug, Mink, and I, to make some noise, the configuration we used to play in if Matt was indisposed, the Tri-Nums. Very loose, loud, The Who circa ’68. We went for a drink at the little red inn down the street. The crochet and wicker depress me no end, but that’s why man created the martini. Martini is plural, by the way.
25
BIRTHDAY SPANKINGS
“Good Luck—now drop your drawers.
You’re gonna get older now.
How’s it feel to be older now?”
The Unband, “Birthday Spankings,” Sink (unreleased)
JULY 30 / THE COMPOUND
Goal right now is holding it together for seventeen days. In seventeen days the Second Album cycle kicks in, the advance is released (into the new account a proper business account), and a week later we’re on a flight to Jamaica to make a record. Jamaica because Jamaica. Seventeen days, that’s all should be fine.
The mood at the label has been grim for a while now, though no one’s talking doom explicitly, but the cheerleading feels distinctly empty. Lenny laid it out, reined in his usual optimism. People at the label are doing their best to spin, but word is out that we’re a train wreck, and the party might be over soon, domino-effecting side deals left and right. “I’m standing here with my finger in the dike,” he said. “Getting to where that’s about all I can do.”
The Bowery Ballroom. Just a one-off here, with the Heroine Sheiks (as New York as it gets; too hip for their own good, but there’s plenty to like about them). To be expected, the sense that there’s quite a bit riding on our performance. Short of a physical fight onstage, a distinct possibility despite the deep-centering yoga and meditation sessions (I’ve succumbed), or catastrophic equipment failure, ever looming—nothing to worry about. Regardless of anything else, two, three-hundred shows a year for a couple years, we’re a performance machine. And the new songs are all right, suggestive of better ones to come.
If they come, I mean.
The promoter arranged for a schoolgirl-gram to present a birthday cake to Matt onstage. In a weak moment I agreed to get the cake. After soundcheck, which was a waking nightmare, I went out looking for a birthday cake for Matt. Making my way toward Little Italy by a series of digressions, popping into bars, so on, I ran into Lenny, on his way to the club. We ducked into the nearest place for a pint.
Then one pint later everything with decent baked goods was already closed, so I grabbed an Entenmann’s crumble slab from Food Emporium and Lenny and I walked back to the Bowery.
Moved through the club avoiding eye contact with anybody. Socializing impossible—and it’s impossible not to socialize in the dressing room. Overcrowded, smoky, we’re doubled up with the Heroine Sheiks. The ever-scrolling guest list. Some German women with video cameras not filming anything smoked disapprovingly. The tall one said to me, “You are one, too. Thees men with their gheetars. We are making a moofie for it. It is so deezgusting. All uhf you. Ech.” People dropping things. Cups, food, guitars. Pants. Standards.
Matt’s family was there. Wilma patroled their perimeter. My arriving with Lenny was proof positive of the conspiracy Wilma and Matt were convinced (or sure) was afoot.” She wheezed. “Ohhh, real subtle, assholes!” Don’t even try to make it look like you’re not up to no-good boo-shit.” Lenny spun on his heel, “Nope, not doing it,” and disappeared. Wilma hung her arm on Matt’s mother, who looked supremely uncomfortable. “We see right fucking through you, and we will unilaterally kick your fuckin’ ass if you try any fuckin’ shit.”
During the show the girl came out with the cake to burlesque music on the PA. Smiling and playing the part, until she breached the invisible morass onstage. She made a face while she did a half-hearted little sexy dance, upended the cake toward Matt (who dropped half of it), and fast-walked off, stage right.
As far as the performance, there was some consensus it was one of our better ones. People spoke in superlatives. Whether they were right, at any rate not bad for a cadaveric spasm.
After our set we beelined for the bar on Seventh Street, sans Matt. Typical scene (Lord Riley in fine form), upbeat, then Peeler came in the door, reporting white-hot action back at the Bowery. Matt and Wilma, Peeler said, were rabid about Eugene wandering off with the van keys (Eug checked, he had) to the point of bodily violence and property destruction. It sounded like we maybe should get over there, before it got worse. Outside the bar Lenny was nearby on the sidewalk holding his phone off his ear, laughing, wide-eyed with disbelief. He snapped it shut, cutting off Matt’s rant, and hailed a cab.
In the cab, Lenny declared himself done, out, washing his hands of us, with apologies to Eug and I. Then he got another call, listened, and told the cabbie to step on it. “Apparently there’s a situation,” Lenny said, and ordered the cabbie to take a more direct route. The cabbie said he couldn’t, there was some kind of accident in the road, Delancey, he said, pointing to his radio. When we rounded onto Delancey Street on foot, cars were trying to maneuver around my refrigerator-sized bass cabinet, Matt writhing on top of it then jumping off to kick it, and pound on it. Then he went back to the curb where the rest of the equipment was piled and started draggin the drums out into the road. Wilma brayed and squawked—it was about the funniest thing she’d ever seen. The whole block was a mess, honking, profanities flying, people cursing us as we dragged the amp over to the sidewalk and people tried to wrangle gear away from Matt. When the cops got there they just waved the traffic around and didn’t have much to say about it to us, which was new.
26
FACE THE MUSIC
A version of the classic lightbulb joke told by Lord Riley: “How many members of The Unband does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three. Eugene holds the bulb and Matt and Mike drink until the room spins.” This is fundamentally accurate. Maybe a little tweak to the setup: “How many Unband members does it take to screw up a lightbulb?” At any rate the atomic structure of the band is in the punchline.
Minutes after the todo obstructing traffic on Delancey Street, there was an understanding that the band had called it quits, carried into the next morning’s Post, that was mostly lip service, nothing that would hold up. The definitive end of The Unband came some months later, back in Northampton, after some last straw—further drama with the musical equipment, or other minor incident. Eugene fell into a rage ne
plus ultra, and decided to settle Matt’s hash once and for all; he tore over to his house, with Peeler for backup. He got as far as Matt’s front stoop, where, Eug said, he suddenly realized that somewhere between where he was and wherever he’d come from (the Bay State, probably) he’d stopped caring, completely. And, after thirteen years with his arm in the air, let go of the bulb. That was the end; the only way it could have ended.
Like a sharp stick in the eye, simultaneous with The Unband flatlining, the musical climate shifted. The timing was close enough to imagine it was a result, or had immediately followed someone retracting a curtain and giving the “all clear”: On a beach that summer I saw an ad plane fly overhead towing a banner that read “Rock Is Back!” The dipshit responsible needed a good smack in the head, for being a dipshit. All the same there it was, written across the sky.
Years passed.
Eugene and I continued to play together. First in New York, almost immediately, with the best guys we knew, who happened to be the best there were. That was both too much and too little and either way too soon, it turned out. The pressure to pick up the pieces keeps you dropping them, psyching yourself out comparing things that aren’t comparable . . . but it was good and we managed to do well for a while. After that we got into a more low-key configuration, at home.
Matt continued under our old alias, Fistah, hot-footing around town claiming he’d fired Eugene and I, the label, and everybody else. There were separate contingents, but no one seemed to take sides, really. The rare times Eug and I came down from the hills, friends around town went to lengths to keep us from running into Matt and Wilma anywhere, knowing we’d go at it like wolverines in a sack. An emergency exit alarm might sound as Eug and I walked into a bar, or as we were escorted briskly out of one, secret service style. And the Hand kept its own counsel on the Compound’s front porch, where it awed the local kids, rabbit-eared at Easter, festooned at solstices, hung with string-lights and baubles at Christmas. Halloween pleased it best.
A few years back—not long after Wilma bolted, though at the time our faction didn’t know she had—Matt approached Peeler at a bar with an apology and a drink. Too soon. Peeler didn’t buy the apology, and laid him out. Then for a long time nothing happened. A year or so after that Matt approached Eugene with same, and got roughly the same result. The year after that Eugene accepted the drink.
Around the four-year mark, when a rehearsal room opened up on the first floor of an old mill building in Holyoke, Mass., Eugene and I agreed to share it with Fistah. Mink was playing with them off and on, and said (nudging ever-diplomatic; Lord Riloy nudged too) that Matt seemed to be on an even keel. He’d taken a job managing a halfway house or something, we heard, looking after head-injured people. Later we heard he and Rude Becky were engaged; as momentarily jarring as that news was (I walked into a screen door carrying groceries), you had to figure he’d settled down some. Still, in an effort to maintain the peace, everybody in both bands agreed to communicate clearly regarding rehearsal times and so forth, and that we’d all keep to a tight schedule—which seems impossible, and is. So it was that one evening we found ourselves in the same room together, with instruments, and instinct took over.
As it was in the beginning, in Eugene’s bedroom, The Unband had no future outside of the rehearsal room in Holyoke. If it did, it was better for the creative drive to pretend it didn’t. Small towns have a way of complicating things. We kept it to ourselves, avoided being seen all together, so forth. Stealth mode. We told virtually no one when we started recording new music back at Slaughterhouse, courtesy a tentative but supportive TVT, and remained discreet right up until we left to play the Drunkard Convention in Las Vegas, where discretion was unseemly.
27
NEW COLOSSUS
The Modern Drunkard Convention had gone well; swimmingly, would be a good word. We had our sea legs, and reintroduced ourselves to New York by boat.
The Half-Seas (unofficially rechristened) was part of a booze cruise operation on the East River that booked original rock bands, a downtown rock club, transplanted onto a boat. The vessel itself, a no-frills affair with an enclosed lower deck and a covered upper deck where the bands played, bars on both levels, and room for about two hundred passengers. It left from Twenty-Third Street, sailed down to lower Manhattan and circled the Statue of Liberty a number of times while bands played and everyone contemplated form and line, and freedom, then repeated the trip. We’d never seen the Statue of Liberty up close and might never again.
The proceedings were well under way by the time the Half-Seas shoved off, on time, under an overcast full moon. The rock show topside was like any decent blowout at CBGB or the Continental, the uptick in disequilibrium and nausea seasickness added to the usual causes, and the wakes and random swells compounding dumped drinks, drug-sprinkled shirtfronts, and poignant faceplants all balanced out by the genial reunion element, and the novelty of being out of context, meaning you could smoke. Eugene was in his best mesh body sock for the occasion, and I’d gotten my hands on a maritime captain getup someplace. Matt arrived separately, dressed for aerial power yoga, complete with lotus flower. We reconvened at the bar just before showtime. “Namaste,” he said, his hands folded around the lotus flower and a vodka soda, as the guy he’d been talking to convulsed, and vomited elaborately over the gunwale. It was a cool early Spring night, perfect weather for this sort of thing.
We were well into our set, so far so good, the boat doing another lap around Liberty Island, and Eugene, as he does, split a crash cymbal in half, beyond utility. Between songs he wrangled it off its stand and frisbeed it offstage, over the starboard rail, actually, with a good spin on it. Almost instantly, a searchbeam streaked onto the deck, like God’s Maglight. Weaponized illumination, intended to shock and stupefy, enough to make you claw and shriek like a vampire at Dawn, or shield your eyes less dramatically, depending. The boat’s engines stopped and the main power cut out, silencing feedback from the amps, and whatever Matt was on about through the PA. A helpful junkie undrowsed and weaved through the crowd murmuring “Five-oh, five-oh.” From behind the light a voice, a firm, agitated, voice, identified itself through a loudspeaker, evidently attached to a United States Coast Guard vessel, the “blow-fish” or something, and instructed all persons aboard the Half-Seas to stay where we were and to keep both hands fully visible. “Significant firepower is trained on all areas of your vessel,” the Voice said, before advising that Coast Guard personnel are authorized and would not hesitate to use deadly force (the Voice sounded inclined), and making sure we understood that the firepower aimed at us included high-powered mounted machine guns. Always Something. If in almost two decades we’ve learned only one thing, which, rounding up, is probably accurate—it’s that. A standard timing-related faux-pas here, obviously, common to this variety, to this style, of misunderstanding. From the military’s perspective, The Blowfish, running lights extinguished, snuck alongside the Half-Seas for a closer look at the activity on board, at which point the Half-Seas, without warning, fired a wobbly, retarded-looking, possibly defective, foreign ordnance from her upper deck. Whether the faint clang some people recall hearing shortly after the cymbal went over the rail was the result of impact with another boat or from dinging the looming Mother of Exiles herself hardly mattered. The Blowfish, the USCG whatever it was called, had by definition been fired on, and all sorts of protocols to assess and neutralize threats to the homeland were activating, with prejudice. We heard sirens, not the singing kind, approaching, as everyone on deck, your wired, your poor, your befuddled masses yearning to drink free, complied, as much as could be managed under the circumstances, amid whispered debate regards Fourth Amendment rights on a boat (ask a .50 caliber deck gun) and requisite opining on The Man and so forth. Shouting from the bridge about there being no weapons whatsoever on board failed to impress as a helicopter pulsed overhead, and a police skiff, or else some kind of tactical discotec, was closing fast astern, behind Eugene, who, on his drum throne in
spasms of silent laughter (very probably he bobbed around crosshairs before a trained eye), was haloed in a wallop of candlepower from somewhere new, and the Voice said, “Heave to and prepare to be boarded.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL RUFFINO is a musician and a writer. He lives in Los Angeles, California, the best way he knows how.
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CREDITS
Cover design and lettering by Steve Attardo
Cover photograph © Seth Kaye
COPYRIGHT
ADIOS, MOTHERFUCKER. Copyright © 2017 by Michael Ruffino. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2017.
ISBN 978-0-06-222896-3
EPub Edition August 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-222897-0
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Adios, Motherfucker Page 31