by Nick Apuzzo
She cackled at his bizarre persona "Yeah right! But after Led Zep…"
He smiled "Raw Deal".
"YEAH THAT'S IT…I knew it!" she said "You played guitar, I remember you! Do you remember me?"
His eyes narrowed "No offense but we played a lot of places. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but you meet a lot of people."
"I met you at Legend one night. You were at the bar with your friend, the other guitar player and me and my girlfriend came up to you guys. We even went out on a date once."
"CLAIRE!! Holy crap!" Ingy smiled "CLAIRE. I didn't recognize you, you look so different! How are you?"
Clair laughed and forgave him for not recognizing her; they spoke for an hour about those days and life afterward; eventually the service station attendant was able to get them to pay their bills and make room for other cars. Ingy started dating Claire and it seemed to everyone that it was lifting him out of his depression. Claire worked at a non-profit group home organization for the mentally and emotionally handicapped; one day, when everything seemed to be going wrong at once, she called Ingy in desperation asking his help with a problem she had at a particular home. It was a simple request to board up a window that had been vandalized and Ingy, hearing the strain in her voice, assured her that he'd handle it. A week later a similar situation occurred and again he came to the rescue. Two weeks later he was employed and soon after finally found fulfillment and a sense of belonging; working to help those less fortunate resonated in him and he became an indispensible part of the organization, loved by handicapped and staff members alike. In their second year together, Ingy and Claire married and proved to be a better fit for each other than most marriages. The birth of their daughter Caitlin provided the last piece of the puzzle for him; he proved to be a very dedicated father and though she proved to have some natural musical ability, her facility with mathematics drew her to a career in science and engineering. Around the house Ingy frequently and affectionately called her 'Egghead'.
After the breakup I submerged myself in work for a while, it kept my mind off of what happened, until it gradually took its place in the past, alongside all of the other significant events in my life. I was promoted and earning enough to propose to Venice, so I did! She must have been drunk or something because she accepted. We didn't feel like waiting a year so we married just four months later. Good thing Jimmy was at the wedding because there was some damage done to some property and when the cops came, Jimmy, being one himself, was able to talk them out of arresting a couple of people. It would be sordid to tell you who did what, and it would tarnish the cherished memory of our nuptials…but on the other hand, it wasn't ME so why not!
We had our wedding reception at Bear Mountain Inn, that's way up above NYC, near West Point; it's a beautiful place set in the middle of a vast expanse of grass and trees. After everyone was lubed up and dancing, Ingy steps outside to smoke a cigarette, which would have been fine…but Dave decided to keep him company. So these two are chatting back and forth just outside of the Inn and they notice a couple of golf carts, you know the kind that security guys use? So there are two carts and two of them and without thinking about it consciously they end up sitting in the carts and continuing their rambling conversation in comfort. And then…Dave noticed that the key was in the ignition. For reasons I still can't fathom, he told Ingy; which is like handing a loaded gun to a four year old. So let's add this up; two drunken guys plus golf carts PLUS a vast expanse of grass and trees. Those two idiots wound up chasing each other around the forest, tearing up the grass and playing chicken. When the security guys started yelling, they laughed and mocked them and then preformed a coup de grâce by head-on collision that wrecked both carts. Miraculously there weren't any broken bones.
Venice and I rented a small house that was close to my work and while she waited out an opportunity in the school district she accepted an offer from Pepsico for an entry level marketing position. We were there for nearly a year and a half when our daughter Carly was born; Venice decided that she wanted to stay home and be a full time mother. We made ends meet but it was a stretch, so we decided that it might make sense for me to look into transferring to a less expensive area of the country; this resulted in our moving to Minnesota. You may have heard that the winters there are cold; when the plane landed there we got off and I saw a fire standing in front of another fire. I learned in Minnesota that if my ears itched on a cold day, not to scratch them, they might snap off. Still in all I loved it there, there was lots of room and the people were just fantastic; I made some life long friends in the five years we lived there. However, due to the cold, our son Daniel and our younger daughter Kimberly were born while we lived there; there's only SO MUCH you can do in the great outdoors when it's ten below zero. Eventually I received an offer to relocate to California and join the sales organization as a technical support guy; this was a stretch but there were two factors that pulled me in that direction. First, the manager making the offer, Joe, was a good friend and poker buddy from Minnesota who'd relocated himself, and second I had a bizarre interview with the hiring executive…we talked guitars the entire time.
I remember that after the interview was over he stood up and shook my hand and asked "When can you start?"
"But…don't you want to ask me any work related questions?" I asked.
"Not really, I've already looked into all of that." he said.
"Then why did you need me to come out here for an interview?" I asked, perplexed.
"Oh! Well Joe said you played guitar in a band so I wanted to find out about it." he said with a broad smile.
He was a pretty fair blues guitar player and I have to say, he had an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. It was not possible to stump him; he even knew mistakes in credits and things like that. For a white boy, he flat out loved the blues.
I took the job, we moved the family to California and eventually I became a sales person. After a few years I wanted to get a feeling of what other companies were like, so I hopped around for a while…sales guy here…business development guy there. I must admit I'm a fairly introspective person. As I hopped between jobs I was becoming less and less passionate about my career. I knew what I wanted to move away from, but not what I wanted to move toward, which is a great recipe for disappointment and is shared by many in their forties.
I had to DO something though, so I sat down at my computer and began typing my random thoughts, without regard to purpose. One week and one hundred pages later I realized what I wanted to move toward.
I spent all of my spare time over the next year and a half writing a novel and I have to say, the effort required to finish and publish it was much more than I'd expected. Even so, it felt so natural, as if it was what I was meant to do in life; I don't believe in fate, but that's what it felt like. The book was received fairly well and I felt good about the quality of my first effort.
Every year since I moved away from New York I've returned, I time my visit so it coincides with our Kenny remembrance get together. After the last visit I had an inspiration and began my second novel; it's about my experiences during the chaotic years in the early 80's when guitar bands ruled, the live music scene was jumping and I was part of a small and dedicated band of people who ultimately became my second family through both triumph and tragedy.
Track 24
Memorial
Saturday April 16, 2011
It had been twenty seven years since we broke up and at first we would meet at a bar on the anniversary of the day he died and hoist a few in his honor. When Sean opened the coffee shop we moved the gathering there, and a couple of years later we began gradually expanding the memorial into a celebration; when that happened we also moved it out into April so that there was a decent chance of the weather being a bit warmer. Today the weather cooperated, it's sixty degrees or so…sweater weather. The boys got here today at ten in the morning to drink a 'wakeup' cup and begin the setup. Sean has a large grill station set up in the parki
ng lot in front of the shop; he also worked his connections at the supermarket and has an array of sausage, steaks, ground beef, pork ribs and a box of assorted seafood.
After Kenny's father died, his mom asked Sean if any of us wanted his artwork; he took it all and stored it in a corner of the backroom of the coffee shop. We put all of the artwork on display along with band photos and other photos of Kenny. Kenny's mother came to one of the memorials and was shocked at the size of the event. She had a great time but the following autumn she died and was only able to attend the one time.
The guys and I brought our instruments and usually played a few songs for fun. The first year we played, Dave agreed to fill in on the bass and he'd been doing it ever since. We moved a few tables outside to make room for Jimmy's drums and our amps and stuff, and Tommy had this little four channel board that we fed into a pair of compact PA speakers; it worked perfectly for our lower volume antics. We didn't want to get shut down by the adjacent store owners, although the free food and drink kept them pretty much in check.
Ingy and I were responsible for the drinks, we were going to make T-shirts this year that said 'Team Beverage' or 'BevGuyz' or 'The Refreshment Brotherhood' but we couldn't come up with a cool enough sounding phrase so we wound up wearing "I'M WITH STUPID" T-shirts and spent the first couple of hours trying to stand next to each other without being noticed so the arrow pointed at the other. It got old fast. We brought a massive amount of beer, soda, bottled water and enough ice to stage a sled dog race. Tommy always handled the music, he set up a CD player for post-80's music but always brought an actual turntable for the vintage heavy metal, and he still had all of the original albums. We tried calling him DJ Tom…did I mention that Tommy has that beer cap thing down cold? He can sandwich it between thumb and middle finger and flick it with enough force to cause an actual scratch. An hour and about twenty scratches later we stopped calling him DJ Tom and switched to 'Reverend' to which he had no objection. Jimmy and Dave were in charge of events. Jimmy always had fireworks, not the 'safe and sane' ones but the really good ones; the only way a fireworks show is gonna 'wow' anyone is if life and limb are at stake…or in the words of Ingy (doing his best Spock) "One cannot CHEAT death." Of course the one police officer among us, a Detective no less, is the one who was able to get the illegal fireworks. Ours may be a slightly corrupt system in the United States, but it does work!
Our wives and some of our kids came to the event, usually showing up sometime after noon, so Jimmy and Dave arranged a raffle for a flat screen TV with the proceeds going to the local Police Athletic League, and set up a few fun games of chance and skill as well.
By two o'clock the memorial was in full swing; the grill was going, people were stopping by to see what the crowd was all about and having hamburgers shoved at them. Ingy and I took turns watching the keg so no underage kids got us locked up and there were at least twenty of them. Venice and Chloe and Sharon and Margaret and Claire, or as we called them 'The Thugs', chatted at a speed that scrambled our male brains. I know that sounds sexist, and maybe it is…but years of real life experience has shown that a group of wives talking amongst themselves, converse at a rate that is always a whole-number multiple of the rate that their husbands do.
Example: A group husbands are speaking at an average of two words per second. Their wives will speak at a rate given by the equation:
R(wives) = N x R(husbands)
Where:
R is the rate, in words per second.
N is an integer from 2 to infinity.
So if the men are speaking at 2 words per second, the women will always speak at 4 or 6 or 8…words per second. If husbands are speaking at 3 words per second, the wives will always speak at 6 or 9 or 12…words per second. In a recent University study, a group of mother-in-law's was clocked at 88 words per second! Truly amazing!
But I digress. The time had come to play a little rock and roll. I got Ingy's brother Colm to watch the keg and cooler and we assembled ourselves inside. As people gravitated toward the sound of drum rolls and guitar warm up licks, the neighborhood teenagers that were part of the coffee shop regulars squeezed in front of just about everyone else and I could hear them making comments to each other about 'oldies' music…I heard one kid call us 'The Fossil Band'. Pretty funny stuff…you little bastard! We'll see who's a fossil I thought.
We started out with Electric Eye…you can't go wrong with Judas Priest. The teens were standing there with they're mouths open and the first thing I heard one of them utter was "Holy Shit!" Tommy was belting it out, my solo was scorching and we owned it. We played a few of our originals but also some Dio, Iron Maiden and Ozzy. Every year I expect it to sound pretty mediocre as we're getting older, but honestly it always surprises me how good it sounds. Jimmy's chops are right there, Ingy and Dave are clean and tight, it comes as naturally to me as it ever did. Needless to say, Tommy is a FOOT of thick icing on the cake…his voice is still great.
When we were almost done, Tommy took a moment to address the purpose of the gathering. Every year he said something unique and this year was a real tear jerker; we were all watery by the time he was done. We 'closed' with Quiet Exile; they loved it. (Some things don't change.)
When I think back to those days, playing in the clubs, it comes to me as a series of little memories; they're like mini-movies in my mind. My mini-movies aren't about the cheering crowds or the sexy girls, but rather the incidental and funny experiences we shared. John Lennon once wrote "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." and remembering my time in Raw Deal is like that. Ingy and I probably created more acid in the stomachs of Sean and Tommy than anything they'd been forced to endure before or since. The fun that I got out of a little red water pistol that only cost me a buck is closer to my heart than being approached by a record company. Leading "The Great Unrest of '83" against Scott the sound dictator or remembering the night we found Tommy (or he found us)…that's the good stuff. The fact that we found each other and are still, nearly thirty years later, as close as people can be, shows that friendship, loyalty and love are everything in life. Everything else is just disco.
*****
LINER NOTES
*****
RAW DEAL
Vocals: The Reverend Tommy Charik
Drums: Jimmy McGrath
Bass Guitar: Kenny Wright
Guitars: Ingy (a.k.a. Mark England)
Guitars: Nick Guesswho
Guitars: Lenny Carlsson (11/82 - 3/83)
RAW ROAD WARRIORS
Manager: Sean O'Neil
Technician: Dave French
Technician: Bill Kardos
Sound: Scott Randall
Lights: Bobby-the-light-guy Spoza
Original Song List (circa 1983 to 1984):
Quiet Exile
Rampage Sonata
Sister Diesel
Fast n Hard
Bleed Me
The Way It Goes
Upside Down
Shotgun Blues
Life In Shadows
(She Did It For) Spite
Vampire's Waltz
'Cover' Song List (circa 1981 to 1984):
Restless and Wild (Accept)
Sin City (AC/DC)
Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath)
Neon Knights (Black Sabbath)
Children of the Sea (Black Sabbath)
Let It Go (Def Leppard)
Too Late For Love (Def Leppard)
Switch 625 (Def Leppard)
Let It Go (Def Leppard)
Rock Brigade (Def Leppard)
Wasted (Def Leppard)
Don't Talk to Strangers (Dio)
We Rock (Dio)
Last In Line (Dio)
Holy Diver (Dio)
Stick It (Great White)
Street Killer (Great White)
Number of the Beast (Iron Maiden)
Run to the Hills (Iron Maiden)
Die With Your Boots On (Iron Maiden)
Flight of the Icarus
(Iron Maiden)
The Prisoner (Iron Maiden)
The Trooper (Iron Maiden)
Aces High (Iron Maiden)
Where Eagles Dare (Iron Maiden)
Hallowed Be Thy Name (Iron Maiden)
Revelations (Iron Maiden)
Still Life (Iron Maiden)
Quest for Fire (Iron Maiden)
Sun and Steel (Iron Maiden)
To Tame a Land (Iron Maiden)
Hell Bent for Leather (Judas Priest)
Electric Eye (Judas Priest)
The Green Manalishi (Judas Priest) (Fleetwood Mac)
Victim of Changes (Judas Priest)
Diamonds and Rust (Judas Priest) (Joan Baez)
Breaking the Law (Judas Priest)
Exciter (Judas Priest)
You've Got Another Thing Comin' (Judas Priest)
Cold Gin (Kiss)
Goin' Blind (Kiss)
Deuce (Kiss)
Thank You (Led Zeppelin)
Black Dog (Led Zeppelin)
Heart Breaker (Led Zeppelin)
Living Loving Maid (Led Zeppelin)
Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)
The Ocean (Led Zeppelin)
Angel Dust (Loudness)
Live Wire (Mötley Crüe)
Crazy Train (Ozzy)
Mr. Crowley (Ozzy)
Revelation (Mother Earth) (Ozzy)
Steal Away (The Night) (Ozzy)
Don't Hold Back (Riot)
Swords and Tequila (Riot)