Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  It was an incredible relief to me to know I wasn’t alone. I spent many meetings just listening to other people talk, learning whatever I could, knowing someone else had been to that terrible place, seeing there was hope. And there was hope. Some of the speakers had been sober for weeks or months. Others for five, ten, fifteen years. Just the fact that these veterans of the program kept coming was an amazing thing to consider.

  Gradually, I began to share my own story. The more I shared, the more comfortable it became. I started to mingle with other people after meetings and continue my story and theirs. The stories were always evolving because every day sober was another obstacle. You didn’t know what might set you off or set you back. The bottle was always waiting in the wings, powerful as ever. But knowing that in an hour or two you would be talking to someone who really understood gave you the power to fight back. And that tremendous resource was how I got through Steps Two and Three. I didn’t look up in the sky for my higher power. My higher power was the collective miracles of the people in the room.

  In AA, a sponsor is someone who has more time sober than you do and is willing to be a friend, teacher, mentor, and above all someone you can just pick up the phone and talk to about what’s going on in your life at that moment. After a few months sober, I was lucky enough to get my sponsor. He was a New York Italian guy who worked as a jeweler on Forty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. He was very good at what he did. We had a lot in common. We were around the same age and liked a lot of the same music. Of course, I had a lot to say about music. And he had a lot to say about our addiction. He had already been sober over six years.

  Sometimes I would meet my sponsor for lunch in the Diamond District. Sometimes he would meet me if I had an appointment in Manhattan. When we met at night, it was usually to go to a meeting. Everything centered around meetings. It was the reverse image of the picture when I was drinking, when everything centered around alcohol and wherever it was served. My sponsor’s approach on a tough day was usually exactly what I needed to hear. Keep it simple. Think of the positive things in your life. Do something constructive at the moment. Make a meeting. Of course, my sponsor and I didn’t go to every meeting together. My sponsor had his own sponsor.

  Although meetings gave life rhythm, there needed to be music in between the beats. As far as actually playing music was concerned, at least in a band situation, I was counseled against it. A psychiatrist I saw at Bayley Seton strongly suggested that I not jump back into the lion’s den until I had, at the bare minimum, a full year sober. My sponsor agreed. So the music would come from the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

  When we were kids, we biked everywhere. The subways took us from Brooklyn to Manhattan but not from neighborhood to neighborhood. Bikes gave us freedom. Bikes gave us mobility. Bikes gave us accountability, because we had to take care of our transportation for it to take care of us. In my thirties, it was about to happen all over again.

  I became a bike messenger. I knew the territory from a short stint many years before. Most of the action was in Manhattan. I would get up at five thirty in the morning, eat a big breakfast, ride the subway in with my bike, and report to the dispatch office on West Twenty-Seventh Street. I wore sweatpants and bicycle shoes. I tucked my hair into a baseball cap. When I showed up at the bare-bones office around 7:15 a.m. and approached the dispatch desk, I was Marc. People may have known who Marky Ramone was, but that was not me. This was Bike Messengers Anonymous.

  Not much had changed. Delivering packages by bike in New York may not have been a lion’s den, but it was definitely a jungle. Cars, taxis, trucks, and buses were predators, and we were prey. Intersections were like swamps. You hoped you and your backpack were going to make it out alive. But I liked the jungle. It was survival of the fittest, and I was getting fit. I had a feel for how to cut through traffic and where to take an alternate route. I felt the rhythm of the city in my arms and legs.

  There were moments of peril. You never knew when the door of a parked car was going to swing open in your face. You never knew when a yellow cab was going to run a red light. But as long as it was only a scare or a scrape, I wasn’t going to start a confrontation. The streets of Manhattan were a strange kind of proving ground for my sobriety. If there was anything in the world that could drive you to drink, it was New York traffic.

  The money was okay. Not that I needed it. I was lucky. We were paid by the parcel. But there was another bonus that I hadn’t counted on: every day was filled with pickups and deliveries, and with every one, I dealt with someone outside my usual walk of life. There were secretaries and clerks, concierges and bellhops, designers and fabric cutters, editors and advertisers. Every one of them had a backstory and a deadline of some type, and with my success or failure to traverse Seventh Avenue in under ten minutes, I had the ability to make or break their day. After being driven and flown for so many years, now I was the driver and the flier. I was relearning a work ethic from the ground up.

  No one impressed me more than the other bike messengers. On a hundred-degree day in mid-August, when sweat poured off me like a car wash, I could fall back on the idea that I wanted to do this but didn’t need to. For most of the other bike messengers, that wasn’t the case. They were paying bills with three dollars here, four-fifty there, one mad run at a time. But these guys and gals lived like brave bombardiers with every new mission, not knowing which one might be their last.

  One afternoon the supervisor asked me to deliver a bunch of packages on a dolly. So I loaded up the dolly and rolled it into the freight elevator. As I walked west along Twenty-Seventh Street and pulled the dolly behind me, I blended in seamlessly with the midafternoon crowd swelling the sidewalk. It was business as usual. Then I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Marc!”

  It was a friend of mine from high school who had been walking in the opposite direction. If my cover was eventually going to be blown, it made sense that it wasn’t someone from the music scene. My friend held out his hand, and I shook it.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” he said. “I thought you were playing all over the world! Where are the other Ramones?”

  “Yeah, well, I think they deliver for another messenger service.”

  “Seriously. What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Can you keep a secret?” I said.

  “Yeah, you know me.”

  “I’m in recovery,” I said. “This is part of the program. Part of staying sober.”

  “Holy shit. That’s great. Really. People aren’t recognizing you . . .”

  “You’re the first,” I said. “I gotta run. So give me a call.”

  “Bah-bah-bah-bah, b-bah-bah-bah-bah! I wanna be sedated!” He sang and smiled as I walked on. Then he waved.

  A couple of weeks later, I was given a small package to deliver by hand. That happened when occasionally the pickup and delivery were both close to the office. As I walked west on Twenty-Ninth Street, a familiar face came into focus from about fifty yards. He had black hair hanging straight down in bangs and a wide angular chin. There was no question: it was Dee Dee.

  I was in my usual all-purpose nondescript messenger outfit with the baseball cap. Dee Dee’s mind was usually not at street level unless he was copping. I knew the only way he would recognize me was if I made a move and got right in his face. As it was, I barely recognized him. It wasn’t just that he had aged more than I might have expected. It was more a matter of his gaining about another twenty pounds. It had to be all the psychotropic drugs he was still taking. They altered your whole metabolism.

  I made my move, in the other direction. I turned away at just the moment Dee Dee might have seen me and had a clue. I wanted to talk to him. I had more to say than ever. But I just wasn’t ready.

  Winter in New York is cold enough. Winter on a bike nine hours a day peddling directly into the wind is like living in the Ice Age. I hung up the bike for a while. But I had logged hund
reds and hundreds of miles, lost fifteen pounds, gotten into great shape, and maintained my sobriety even while riding between lanes on Broadway during rush-hour traffic. I also felt a lot more connected to the people around me. My sponsor encouraged me to find another occupation for a while and keep the momentum going.

  It so happened our downstairs neighbor knew a locksmith who had just gotten a big city contract and needed to staff up. The contract called for sealing off abandoned buildings by installing wrought iron security gates in the windows. The locksmith turned out to be a really sweet guy when I met him, and he hired me on the spot.

  The buildings were concentrated in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, a largely blighted neighborhood with potential for a comeback. Most of the buildings had been crack houses, and Mayor Koch wanted to make sure the addicts didn’t return. So he hired an ex-addict to seal them off. By the time we got there, the squatters had been cleared by the police. But I got to see in plain daylight the remains of the lives they were leading.

  There were empty crack vials all over the floors. Crack had taken over entire communities in the mid-eighties. It was cheap, easily smoked, and available almost everywhere. But the vials and needles were just the beginning. There were utensils and hot plates. There were plastic bags with ratty clothing and makeshift beds of newspapers and old blankets. There were a few books, sometimes neatly arranged inside a milk crate.

  Once in a while, I would spot a wire draped in through a window and jumped to a light pole outside. Like most people, I would have believed that life inside a crack house was completely chaotic and random, but there was lots of evidence these people, even in the middle of their horrible addiction, were incredibly resourceful. Sounded like somebody I knew.

  One thing their ingenuity couldn’t overcome was the lack of adequate bathroom facilities. Whether we were working in a narrow three-story walk-up or a sizable six-story building, most of the plumbing fixtures had been ripped out, and even where they remained, there was no active plumbing. The stench was overwhelming. Everyone at one time or another had been to a gas station bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned in a while. This was different. This was the smell of death.

  Using an acetylene torch was a new experience for me. The only thing I had ever torched was an ashtray filled with Bacardi 151. The first thing I did with the acetylene torch was make sure my hair was tucked completely in my cap. There was a lot more than I thought to installing a window grate. The opening had to be made stable so you were anchoring the bars into something solid. The opening sizes and shapes varied a lot, so we were always cutting and fitting. But I was always good with my hands, and within a few weeks I was like a pro.

  Whereas at one time I was freelancing in the music business and got jobs by word of mouth, I was now freelancing in the construction business. The job installing window security gates led to a job doing interior demolition in Manhattan. The condo craze had hit New York. There was Wall Street money all over the place and property values were soaring. High-income people wanted to own luxury apartments, mortgage rates were pretty low, and the tax write-offs were great. Old rental buildings with small, basic apartments were being converted into condominiums with large spaces, granite floors, marble kitchen islands, and central air. The first step was to knock down walls, and that’s where I came in.

  Demo work wasn’t one of the Twelve Steps, but maybe it should have been. Demolition was the most I ever sweated without riding a bike or hitting a snare drum. And it was by far the dirtiest. Knocking down walls was just the beginning. I cut down wood beams and steel beams. I cut the thick wire lath on the old plaster walls. I stripped off half a dozen coats of paint from old metal doorframes. It wasn’t all brute force. Demolition was an art. Without the right tools and technique you were just fighting a losing battle. Sledgehammers, reciprocating saws, drills, and heat guns all became my friends.

  Before you did anything, you had to make sure you weren’t removing a load-bearing wall or you would be demolishing yourself as well. The debris had to be cleared constantly to keep the floors from collapsing. The dust had to be controlled to keep us breathing. All of it had to be collected and brought to the main dumpster so the Mob could cart it away.

  The whole process made me think. By the time the Mob got the waste, it was all neatly packed. By the time the carpenters, masons, and electricians got to the job, all the really nasty work was done. Demolition represented the trenches. I had surprised myself by surviving, living, even thriving in the trenches. I could stay there if I had to. I had gotten my AA medallion with the Serenity prayer for six months sober, a year, then two years.

  Life was good. Marion and I were good. My parents were good. The only thing was, I missed being in the band. With time, I understood on a gut level what I really missed about it. I missed the feeling of playing music. I missed the friendships that formed in a band. And I missed giving people the gift of music.

  I didn’t miss drinking. At least I thought I didn’t. I had talked to my sponsor about it many times. I thought it was time to go back into the lion’s den. Clubs and bars were where the music was. It was also where the alcohol was. You could have one without the other, even though it wasn’t always going to be easy. What I had done was put myself through what I thought was enough physical, mental, and spiritual training to recognize the danger and deal with it. Regardless, I’d be going to many more meetings than clubs and had no illusion that I could go it alone. I was not afraid of the lions.

  The Cat Club was the home of glam metal in New York. Located on East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, the club’s management included Roy Webb, who ran the Electric Circus back in the day. The Cat Club was a bit of a circus, with everyone from Joey Ramone to Billy Idol to Dee Snider of Twisted Sister hanging out. The New York scene had changed while I was delivering packages and knocking down walls. Hair bands like Cinderella and Poison were huge. My friends and I couldn’t stand much of it, and if there was a next big thing it was likely to come out of a place like the Cat Club.

  My band, King Flux, was ready to be that thing. We played a hybrid of punk and metal with lots of stops and high-pitched vibrato singing. The group was started by Richie Stotts, a founding member of the Plasmatics, who, with Wendy O. Williams fronting the band, blew minds and blew up TVs and cars onstage. Also on guitar was Billy Hilfiger, with his brother Andy on bass. Billy and Andy were younger brothers of the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger and were truly stand-up guys. The lead vocalist and frontman was another stand-up guy, Anthony Nicholas.

  We rehearsed in a building near the Port Authority, and sometimes Tommy would come down and take us along with his brothers out to eat. Tommy had just started his own line of clothing, was extremely generous, and living proof that you could still make it in America if you had vision and the willingness to back it up with a lot of hard work.

  There was plenty of drinking going on at the Cat Club, but none of it by me. I had been in King Flux for a few months and had proved to myself it was safe to go back in. There were so many positive things going on, and alcohol didn’t have a place at my table. We had sold out the Cat Club a few times, and it was a fairly large room. Our “following” included some of my favorite musicians and people in the world—Joey and Dee Dee, and Steven Van Zandt of Springsteen’s E Street Band.

  Joey was probably happier than anyone to see me. Even years after the fact, he was still apologizing for having to let me go. The important thing, I always told him, was that getting the boot was the beginning of my getting sober. I was still sober, and if anything, I owed him a thank-you.

  There was a buzz around King Flux, and we were given an industry showcase at the Ritz on East Eleventh Street, a sizable venue. There were at least three record companies interested in signing us, with Elektra the lead among them. The A&R guys came to every show and told us how much they liked the act. That was great, but I had been down this road before. It was as if each of them were waiting for the other one to make a move, and none of them did. We
did a great show at the Ritz, so once a few days had passed and there was no phone call, it seemed the writing was on the wall.

  We heard through the grapevine that the record companies thought, despite all the money they were still making, that hair bands were on their way out. We weren’t a hair band, glam metal, or even metal, strictly speaking, but we were the baby thrown out with the bathwater. The industry was looking for the next big thing and as far as it was concerned, we were part of the previous big thing.

  In theory, a band forms to create music and continues as long as the music is good and they enjoy playing together. Reality can be something very different. The experience of nearly being signed can tear a band apart. When disappointment replaces anticipation, the steam can go out of the engine quickly, and that’s what happened to King Flux. You could argue that it’s better to build a following slowly without any record company interest, but it’s not as if you can control what happens in the wide world. It’s hard enough to manage anything inside the band.

  The aftermath of King Flux was a side project called the Richie Stotts Experience. Since the rise and tragic early fall of Jimi Hendrix, his original band more or less owned the name “Experience.” Not legally, but for all practical purposes. Taking on that surname was like taking “Zeppelin,” “Stones,” or “Sabbath.” You didn’t do it unless you were a tribute band, i.e., Dread Zeppelin, Bowling Stones, Crack Sabbath. But the Richie Stotts band was not a Jimi Hendrix tribute band, and Richie Stotts was no Jimi Hendrix. No one was.

  I agreed to play drums anyway. It was a good little band. Daniel Rey, who had both produced and played lead guitar on the Ramones’ latest album, Halfway to Sanity, was our bassist. Richie decided we would do a warm-up gig for a bunch of invited friends at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A between Sixth and Seventh Streets.