I was a slave to those drums. I cleaned them and buffed them, so proud that this was something I worked for and got. I’d come home from school for lunch and play the whole hour. I’d play them all night until I had to go to bed. The kids outside would say, “Oh, man, why don’t you come on down and play stickball?” I’d say, “Nah, it’s cool, I gotta just play.” I wanted to play my drums much more than I wanted to be in a gang. Jerry and I began to cultivate other role models, guys who didn’t have tattoos on their necks. Guys like Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis and Cal Tjader.
We found a way out of the gang life through social clubs. The clubs were a great institution. You’d rent out a store and get members to pay dues to cover the rent. Then you’d blacken out the windows so nobody could see in and put up some cool things on the walls. You’d put a jukebox in the front room and lots of couches all over, even in the back room. We found an old deli that went out of business, rented the space, and called our place Club Gentlemen. Jerry designed a logo with a top hat, a cane, and two white gloves. I became the president; Jerry was the vice president. Our rent was made my life a living hell would ever like sixty-five dollars a month, but it was easy to cover because we got the Mob to put a jukebox inside and we got a piece of the proceeds.
Once you entered, it was pitch black except for a few red and blue lights. Which was the perfect environment to start experimenting with sex and drugs. I was about fifteen when I got introduced to Mary Jane. Pot was spooky then—it was so taboo. This older guy we called the Dirty Swede would sell us a skinny little joint for a buck. That was okay money in the early sixties, so two guys would chip in and buy one. We’d go down in the basement and it would be pitch black and we’d light up. Immediately that eerie smell would hit you and you knew you were doing something forbidden. You feared that you might get addicted and get into heroin: All that propaganda was out then. I didn’t even get high the first time we did it, but the second time was the charm. Jerry and I just laughed and ate a million Twinkies and listened to the jukebox. Music had never sounded so good before. Eventually I brought my drums into the club and I’d get high and play along to the jukebox, which was a lot more fun than playing to the radio.
Having the club was a godsend. It certainly kept us off the streets. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the biggest attraction to having a social club. You’d bring a chick to the club, turn on the jukebox, give her some wine or pot, dance a little bit, and then, if you were lucky, take her to a couch in the back room and get laid.
Now, if music was in my blood, so was sex. My dad was very horny. He was always chasing my mother around to get laid. She’d be like, “Get your dirty hands off me!” I was always incredibly open with my mother: We could talk about anything. One time, years later, I was visiting with my parents and my dad went off into the other room.
“Hey, Ma, did you ever give Dad head?” I asked her.
“What? Are you serious?” She frowned. “Do you think I would do something that filthy with your father? That’s disgusting. Get away from the table, you’re making me sick to my stomach. I think the music is making you crazy.”
I knew that they had missed that boat. For them it was just do it and have a kid. They were old-school people.
I learned from an early age the difference between sex and love. The first time I fell in love was in summer camp. It was a Catholic camp, and it was really scary for a kid from the streets going out to the country by himself. I cried my eyes out that first night. This nun came around with a strap and slapped the shit out of whoever cried, so I had to stick my head in the pillow and muffle my sobs. But there was this nurse there who was just beautiful, and I fell in love with her. I was so crazy about her, I would scratch myself just so I could have her fix it.
But having sex itself was far from that romantic. My uncle George got me my first blowjob. I was around thirteen when he came over one night. He was loaded.
“I gotta go down to the bar,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me and I’ll get you a Coke and some potato chips.” I always dug visiting with my uncle at his bar, so I went.
My uncle would hang out with his friends at the end of the bar and I would sit at a nearby booth because it was illegal for a minor to sit at the bar. Right around the corner at the end of the bar were the bathrooms and a big phone booth and then the kitchen. I was sitting at the booth and I watched as one by one, my uncle’s friends went back to the kitchen area. I wondered what they were doing back there. Then my uncle came">predicament.” s” over to me.
“Do you want to try something that you’ll never forget? But you can’t tell your mom or Nanny!”
“Sure, Uncle George,” I said.
His friends were all laughing, getting a kick out of this. One guy said, “Send the kid in, break his cherry.” So Unc told me to go back to the phone booth. In the booth was a forty-something dirty blonde, skinny, somewhat attractive. I was scared shitless. I’d never been with a girl, let alone a grown woman. She sat me down in the booth and got down on her knees and pulled down my little jockey shorts and I got my dick sucked for the first time in my life. It didn’t take long, trust me. When I came back out to the bar area, I was white as snow and the men were hysterical.
I started getting a steady diet of blowjobs a few years later when I worked at the butcher shop. The three butchers were real horny Italian guys. They had Playboy centerfolds plastered all over the walls of the back room of the shop. That was the first time that I saw a centerfold with the big tits and great ass. I didn’t have anything like that at home, so I’d always find an excuse to go to the back room and whack off looking at those pictures, keeping one eye on the door so I wouldn’t get caught.
Every Friday night, after they cleaned up and prepared for the big Saturday rush, they’d bring a broad in to blow them in the back bathroom. A lot of these women came in, sadly enough, for food. I remember one who had kids and her husband had just left her and they would give her two huge shopping bags full of meat for blowing them. It was quite an education, that little shop.
One Friday night, one of the guys came over to me.
“We’re going to get you laid.”
I thought that was pretty cool. I had had a blowjob, but I’d never lost my cherry.
“Go in the bathroom in ten minutes and she’ll be waiting for you.”
I waited and then I went in and there was this thirty-something black woman sitting there. She was attractive but a little bit chunky with huge boobs.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “I know you’re a little nervous, but it’s gonna be fine. Sit down.”
I sat down on the toilet seat, petrified. She sat down on top of me and took my dick out and tried to put it in her but it wasn’t even there. It disappeared. All I can think was that there was a big black naked woman sitting on top of this skinny little Italian boy. I couldn’t get it up, but she just laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it, honey. I’m gonna go out there and tell ’em you were the best, man. You put them to shame.” And she did.
I eventually lost my virginity with a neighborhood girl and I went on to conquer quite a few of them on the couches of our social club. But I lost my real virginity to the first girl that I loved and didn’t just fantasize about, like that nurse. Her name was Denicia and she lived downstairs from my friend Jerry Nolan. She was half Spanish and half Irish, a tall, willowy, blue-eyed blonde. I was smitten from the moment I laid my seventeen-year-old eyes on her. When I met her I was pretty wild, going to social clubs with Jerry, fooling around, but this was the real thing, I thought. This was love.
I’ll never forget the first time we slept together. My grandmother was working, so I told Denicia to cut school that day and come over. Oh, my God, it was excitin a little uncomfortable.frng. I didn’t use protection, like an idiot. We didn’t think of that, we just did it. I really got into it and the minute I put it in, I came. But I was young, so, boom, it popped right back up, and the fucking thing wouldn’t stay down. We did it a couple
of times more. I felt like this was a sacred screw, not just getting laid by some black whore who was coming in for some lamb chops. This was marriage screwing. And I wanted to get married.
As much of a rebel and an outcast as I was, I still believed in the notion that there was stability in family life. You get married, you have kids, you get a house on Long Island. I had those ideas instilled in me. So after going out with Denicia a couple of years, I started thinking that I wasn’t going to be a rock star and I should get a good job and have the white-picket-fence life. And this was the girl to do it with.
So I went to a pawnshop and I bought an engagement ring for $150. Now we were engaged. My mother was ecstatic: She was crazy about Denicia. My sister Nancy, not so much. Denicia actually got into a fistfight with my sister and my sister beat the shit out of her.
In the end, I was just kidding myself with the marriage thing. I was much too young to get married and settle down. And I was not nice to Denicia. Sometimes I’d get really nasty and treat her like shit. I thought I was Mr. Badass. But eventually she found a badder ass, a biker, and she gave me back my ring. I was crushed. I spent the whole summer crying in my grandmother’s bedroom. It took me years to get over her.
I was so confused then. I was going to a vocational high school in downtown Brooklyn called George Westinghouse. The Vietnam War was heating up, and everybody told me that I had to have a trade, like an electrician or a plumber. So I went to Westinghouse and somehow I started taking dental mechanics. It seemed like an easy course, and I liked that you got to wear long white doctor-type coats.
I quit my job at the butcher shop and got a job at my uncle George’s bar in the summertime. It was a nightmare. There I was, eighteen years old, and when I went to open at seven A.M. there were already barflies lined up to get some drinks before they went off to work. One of these guys would shake so bad that he’d have me pour him a drink, then he’d take his tie off, take the thin end of the tie and tie it around his wrist, then put the tie on around his neck and use the tie to get the glass to his mouth. By his third shot he’d get better and the shakes would go away and he’d say, “Okay, I got to go to work.” He was there every fucking morning.
One time a black guy came in and had a few drinks. Then he said, “I’m not going to pay you.”
“You’d better fucking pay me,” I said, and I pulled out the machete that my uncle kept behind the bar.
So he pulled out a gun.
“Oh, yeah, fuck you,” he said, and left.
I dropped the knife and peed my pants.
I wasn’t into working at the bar, and I really wasn’t into becoming a dental mechanic. Music was still in my blood, and I was soaking it up every chance I could. I’d go to the big Easter Sunday shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music downtown. Murray the K was a big celebrity deejay then, and he would host the shows. For something like $3.50 you’d see fifteen acts, one after another, just constant music. You had Jan and Dean with the California sound, then Dionne Warwick and the girl groups like the Crystals and the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack. made my life a living hell would ever ” I loved Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I saw Little Stevie Wonder with his harmonica doing “Fingertips Pt.1,” one of the first big Motown hits. And these great groups just totally took you out of the depression of Brooklyn, the gangs and the fighting and the illnesses. They just grabbed hold of your soul, and it soared and it was beautiful.
Jerry Nolan was my partner in crime on these musical expeditions. He was an Irish army brat. We would go to school together for a couple of years and then he’d disappear for a year or so and live in the Philippines and then he’d be back, a little more seasoned than I was from all his travels. When he was around we were inseparable. Deep down, we both wanted to be drummers and to be famous someday. Jerry’s dad made money so he always had nice clothes, much nicer than mine. He would take me shopping and style me. He was very flamboyant and charismatic, and my father thought he was like Gene Krupa—that he was the greatest drummer on the planet. He’d go “Jerry this” and “Jerry that.” I was so jealous that he thought Jerry was better than me.
Our first love was jazz. We’d dress up in our three-piece suits and slick back our hair and go to the Village Vanguard to see people like Brubeck and Mingus and Monk. But then as our musical palette expanded and Motown was coming in, we got into the Temptations and the Four Tops. Then Phil Spector blew me away. When I heard “Be My Baby,” my balls hit the floor. The sound he got on drums was unbelievable compared to any recorded jazz drumming.
After a while, we started hanging out in Washington Square Park in the Village. Now, instead of suits, people were wearing sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off and chinos with sandals. We’d go to the coffee shops and you’d see Bob Dylan walking in, or Joan Baez. I got to meet the Loving Spoonful, and we’d sit in and play with them at the Night Owl Café. The Village was the place to be.
That’s where we realized that Vietnam was not the place to be. People were going thousands of miles from home to die in some jungle. For what? We were savvy enough not to fall for that war. So when Jerry and I got our draft notices, that letter that began with “Greetings,” we were petrified.
“Let’s say we’re gay,” I suggested.
“Let’s say we’re junkies,” he countered. “They’ll never take us.”
So we stuck needles in our arms, putting pinholes in the veins, and reported for our physicals at Whitehall Street. Jerry, being an army brat, had connections, and he was the only son in the family so he immediately got out on a hardship thing. But I was stuck. So I filed in and saw the army shrink.
“Are you gay?” he asked me.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Do you have any issues with carrying a gun?” he asked.
“Nope. If I had a gun I’d shoot the captain before I went over any hill.”
I was full of bravado, but in the end what got me out of the service were my flat feet.
While I was exploring the city’s musical scenes, I hooked up with a band back in Williamsburg. The Barracudas used to practice in the cellar of a building that the bandleader’s parents owned. His name was Carlos Cancel, and he was about twenty-one. Carlos and his friend Alan Rosen both played guitar and they had a sax player and Carlos’s brother played drums. I was only made my life a living hell would ever about seventeen, but I would stand outside and listen to them practice. One day I got to meet Carlos, and he told me that his brother had just gotten married and was quitting the group.
“Come on down and play with us,” he told me.
I lived about fifteen blocks from them, so my mother helped me bring my drums over to the cellar. She waited outside on the street while I auditioned, and finally I came out.
“Ma, I got the gig!” I said.
Our first job was a bar mitzvah. I had to wear a yarmulke on my head and play “Hava Nagila.” We got paid twenty-five dollars and we got to eat. It was great, my first professional gig. Of course, I gave my mom half of my earnings.
After that we played bars, weddings, everything. Eventually we got a steady job at a local Mafia hangout called the King’s Lounge. The guys would come in with pinkie rings. “How you doin’?” they’d say, and they all had their gal with the big boobs.
Little did Carlos know it, but it was because of him I finally decided that I was going to make music my career. One night, he and I went up to see Joey Greco and the In Crowd play at the Metropole, on Broadway and Fifty-eighth Street. The Metropole was one of the hottest places to see music in the city. There was a long bar at the front of the place with a floor-to-ceiling mirror behind it and a bandstand where both the bands and these go-go girls would perform. It was nonstop music from morning to night, and a huge crowd would gather outside on the sidewalk to watch the girls and listen to the bands.
When we got there, I was talking to Joey, who I knew from the Village. He told me that his drummer broke his leg and asked if I’d replace him for this gig,
which was going to run the whole summer. I didn’t even care about the $125 a week I could earn. I was ecstatic because Gene Krupa was playing there at the same time.
Krupa was my idol. It was my dream to meet him, and now I had a chance to open for him! To me he was the gold standard, the greatest drummer in the world, greater than Buddy Rich, greater than Joe Morello, greater than Louie Bellson. I must have seen his biopic The Gene Krupa Story a hundred times. I used to go home and slick back my hair and try to move like him.
I started the gig and I got to see him up close. He was one of the nicest gentlemen you’d ever want to meet, but you could tell he was not happy at this juncture of his life. This was not the Krupa who played with Benny Goodman’s big band, not even the Krupa who had his own forty-piece band. He had been busted for pot, for possessing two joints, in the forties, and he’d spent most of his money fighting the charge but still had to do a three-month sentence. That took a lot out of him. Then the swing era faded but he still did well in the bebop period. So now he was fifty-two but he looked like sixty-two. His hair was graying and he seemed a little bit broken. I remember walking past his dressing room one night and he was sitting in front of the mirror, smoking and drinking from a bottle of J&B scotch, slowly putting his bow tie on because he always wore a tux. It was a haunting, melancholy image, to see my hero like that. How the mighty could fall.
But I was still in awe of Gene. I must have been a pain in his ass, telling him how I worshipped the ground he walked on, but he was always cordial. He showed me a few things on the drums and he always encouraged me.
“You got it, kid,” he’d say. “You could be something someday.”
Makeup to Breakup Page 4