SATURDAY, AUGUST 2, 2008

(part 87) LIKE FATHER LIKE SON


As stated, a couple of posts ago, my father committed suicide a few months after Diane's death. I had finally convinced Nancy to leave me for fear she would have followed me down into hell and died. I cared about her in a way that I have never cared for another human being, in other words, I thought more of her welfare than my own. To this day I know I did the right thing even though it left me completely alone at the time.

Another friend of mine from "The Strip", Gino Danello, cut his wrists and bled to death in an abandon building on Sunset Blvd. during this same period. I was surrounded by death and had finally decided that it was just a matter of time for me as well. I started telling people,"like father like son," in a grim determination to accept my own fate. As far as I was concerned it was inevitable for me to just suicide out and end what had been my life of repeated failures and shortcomings. I stopped eating and drank all the time except when I passed out. I was consuming about a half a gallon of cheap SCORESBY scotch a day, which cost about ten dollars. I kept doing enough to stay in the apartment and buy the booze. It was one of the darkest periods of my life but it didn't kill me.

I learned just how hard it is to starve and drink yourself to death during that period and I chalked it up to another one of my failures. At some point I went up to Palo Alto on a bus to see my mother who was in a state of deep depression because of Bill Jameson's suicide and a friend of hers son had been murdered, the shape I was in didn't help matters. While I was there, I had to check her in to a mental health facility, because she was in such a bad way. No matter where I turned I could not find any help for myself, which just pushed me further into darkness.

After doing some crystal meth with my younger brother Quentin, I went back to L A and the apartment on Sweetzer and continued on with my black journey downward. It was during this time that I wrote "BIG SPOKE WHEEL" (which can be heard on my myspace 2 site) on the roof top of the building on Sweetzer during an eclipse of the sun, which is why I was on the roof in the first place. I had seen EASY RIDER and thought I'd write a song to capture my impression of the movie, thus, "Big Spoke Wheel" was born.

I went up to the building where GRT RECORDS had their offices and got Ron Cramer to see me. I had gone there in a desperate attempt to get money for "WORKING", which GRT had released. I was pretty well gone and had a hard time making myself go there to begin with. During an all night bout of drinking I'd shaved my head after reading a science fiction novel called "STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND" by Robert Heinlein, I hadn't remembered doing it, so when I came to I went to the bathroom and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I walked by. "JESUS CHRIST!" I exclaimed, as I stood there looking back at my completely bald head from the reflection in the mirror.

I could not believe how bad I looked, as I stood there in near shock. I was so thin anyway, that with my hair gone, I looked like a pencil with eyes standing on it's tip. Anyway, when I was at GRT RECORDS I was completely self conscious of this new look and kept waiting for someone to say, "Man what did you do to yourself?" It was during this visit to GRT that I met John Rhys who was producing an album of a group from Cleveland called RASTUS, whose album would eventually be released on GRT. For some reason John took a liking to me and invited me out to a studio in the valley where he was mixing part of the RASTUS album. He said he was going back to Cleveland in a couple of weeks to finish work on the album and told me I was welcome to go back with him if I was interested. I jumped at the chance to get out of L A and said, "Yeah, I'll go, I'll go anywhere at this point." That statement was true as true could be. The vibes in Hollywood sucked and I wanted away from the whole stinking mess, so I said "Yeah John, I'll go I'd like to go."