As you can see from the pics, I had a pretty typical awesome childhood with great parents and a cool sister. We grew up in a place called Mequon, Wisconsin which was a suburban/semi-rural area just outside of Milwaukee. The pictures speak at least a thousand words, and I’ll be adding more as I find them. Love you Mom, Dad and Sis! 🙂
As you already know if you’ve read any of my “work” stories, film and photo production often beats a “real job.” And if you’ve read some of my life stories, you can probably tell that I’m pretty open and honest, often to a fault! Whether it’s business or personal (and the two overlapped for me to a huge degree), the most important quality one can have is honesty, both with oneself and with others. As I said in my story about “How I Learned Honesty from My Mom” (via spanking!), honesty is an essential component of trust, and without trust you really don’t have a valuable relationship with anyone. Oh sure, it could be potentially “valuable” in the short term to lie about money in a business relationship or something else in a personal relationship, but it’s my firm belief that dishonesty can only generate short-term rewards and will not provide any long-term success or meaning in one’s life.
Having been self-employed my entire adult life, I know the value of honesty better than most by working with all types of people from all over the world. In my film and photo advertising career I did over 900 projects with about 500 different clients and their producers/account reps, etc. Having to negotiate the terms of all those projects from scratch, I’ve seen the entire range of humanity in terms of those who were 100% honest and trustworthy to those I wouldn’t trust for a split second if my back were turned. And if I accepted 900 projects, that means I turned down over 2,000 of them because they weren’t willing to pay my crew and I a fair amount of money or wanted me to participate in some other dishonesty to cut corners in some way or another.
I made kind of a serious joke to my friend Rob when he bought my company that 70% of the calls you get won’t be “real jobs” that you can accept. He looked surprised at that high percentage, but the fact is that about half of the 70% simply don’t know what they’re doing and are asking for the impossible (I referred to them as “crack smokers” because they would have to be really high to think what they were proposing were even remotely possible either logistically or for their very short money—Hahahaha!!), and the other half of the 70% know damned well they’re bullshitting you about money (and likely a lot of other details as well!) and are just looking for a sucker who will agree to their bad deal initially and find out later what a bad deal it really was. (And I had many names for them as well…)
Fortunately, I learned this lesson early on, and here are a couple of examples. Back in my early days (probably around 1994 or so), my partner Marc and I had a 36′ Dodge Allegro production motorhome that we would rent out and drive to shoots for use as a production office in the front half, and a hair, makeup and wardrobe space in the back. That thing was a beast to drive, but we customized it fairly well so that it was quite functional for film and photo shoots. We had about $20K and a lot of sweat equity invested in it, and we rented it out for the princely sum of $325/day, and that included one of us driving it. A standard day in our industry varied depending on your job, but the motorhome standard was 10 hours, and after that the driver got paid overtime. The driver’s rate was also a princely sum–$125/10-hour day, and I don’t think it was too much to ask for time-and-a-half based on that blue collar rate!
This particular job was a Nissan commercial featuring Arie Lyundeyk the Indy car race driver. In 1993 any car commercial was a big, expensive proposition with a large crew, and having a real race car driver made it even bigger. My good friend Denise was the local production manager, but this was a big shoot so she had to answer to a couple of other producers above her on the food chain. She was getting pressure from them to save money anywhere she could because the client and ad agency were trying to pay for this somewhat over-the-top shindig any way they could. Hell, Arie’s agent probably charged them six figures for two days’ work just to say three lines and drive the Nissan around for a minute!
At one point just before the shoot, Denise told me to expect very long shoot days and ask if I would work on a 12-hour day instead of a 10-hour day based on the lie she was told that “the shoot was on a really tight budget.” (I was a relative newbie at the time and hadn’t yet learned that there was really no such thing as a “low-budget” car shoot in 1993!) I scowled a bit I’m sure, but since Denise was my friend I agreed as a favor to her. I showed up on the shoot day at zero-dark-thirty as usual to get things set up in my motorhome, and a few hours later the Japanese clients came cruising onto the location in two or three large passenger vans. Now normally a big shoot like this might have anywhere from 3-6 people on the client side, but Nissan literally sent about 20 people all the way from Japan for this one! For me this was a huge red flag that we were being lied to by the main producers in terms of the project having a so-called “tight budget.”
I casually asked Denise where all these undoubtedly “essential-to-the-shoot” Nissan clients were staying while they were here on their “tight budget” project, and when Denise replied, “Oh, they’re at the Biltmore” (one of the most posh and expensive resorts in Phoenix!) I think steam came out of my ears as I told her we were back on a 10-hour day. We went back and forth a little more on it, but I stuck to my guns and told Denise that if any of those lying SOBs had a problem with Eric the motorhome peon being fairly paid while a bunch of Japanese dudes got an all-expense paid vacation to Arizona in high season, they could talk to me directly. I never heard another word and I was paid based on a 10-hour day.
That valuable lesson and a few others early in my career paid off in spades as I got more experience and became a producer myself and started my own production company with my ex-wife Sandy. We figured out pretty quickly that I had a pretty good nose for bullshit, so I was the default project estimator and negotiator pretty much from the start of our company in 1994. (And I had a nice deep voice on the phone that said: “Don’t fuck with this guy”—Hahahaha!!) Sandy was much too nice and sweet, which made me want to marry her, but I did not want her on the phone with a lot of New York City liars (even if she was from New York!)
We’ve all heard the expression “shit flows downhill,” and I was actually told this more than once by an arrogant client, producer, or other brainwashed idiot over the years. But I had a great response that went pretty much like this: “Shit may flow downhill, but if it hits me I’ll pick it up and fling it right back up in your face.” Yes, I actually said exactly that more than once, and it tended to shut the arrogant liars up pretty quickly. I definitely never viewed my business or industry as a “ladder” with the client on top and various levels underneath, each of whom was required to follow the orders of those above them in some imaginary “food chain.” Of course it was my goal (and my job!) to do the best work I could for the client to make them happy (and want to work with me again!), but I viewed the production process as a wheel with me the producer as the hub of the wheel rather than a ladder with me somewhere in the middle trying desperately not to be knocked off and sent flying!
It was my job to organize the client, crew, talent, location owners, vendors, etc. (the spokes of the wheel) and keep kicking them all in the ass so they would be in sync and the wheel would keep moving forward! Our industry had very tight deadlines, so a “ladder” model didn’t work nearly as well as a “wheel” in rolling out a project in record time. And I was always honest with everyone so they understood why I needed decisions made now and shit done immediately afterward. And that honesty made for much easier and successful shoots, so I got lots of repeat business and referrals based on the idea that I could be trusted to tell the truth to everyone and get the job done smoothly and without undue stress on anyone.
We did a lot of fashion catalogs in the 1990s, and they were notorious for sending out their own very inexperienced “producers” (fashion catalog production was considered an entry level job in NYC back then), yet they conveniently didn’t put any money in their budget (or so they told me) for us to be paid for most of our local production work that was actually necessary to make the shoot go smoothly. Their hope was that they could rent our motorhome, have us set up their shooting locations, hook them up with our best local people, and then turn them loose on our town for a week or two even though they had never been here before without charging them another dime for the entire shoot! Their “logic” was that once everything was set up during the 2-3 prep days they paid us for, they had us “on call” for a week or two to work for free on any last-minute changes the client or photographer might dream up! And believe me, there were almost always lots of questions, changes, last-minute requests, ad infinitum to keep us busy throughout the entire shoot.
After a couple of shoots like this I learned my lesson and was honest right upfront and said that this business arrangement was unacceptable. We needed at least a few thousand more dollars to cover the inevitable shit that was going to hit the fan when the crack-smokin’ creatives hit town, and it was simply an inevitable part of the “creative process” that shit was constantly changing with the majority of clients. I got some “how dare you who is below us on the business ladder presume to dictate terms to us,” but I quickly pointed out that I ran my own business and would gladly turn the job down if I weren’t being paid enough for the work. In 90% of the cases, they would begrudgingly pay up because they knew I was telling the truth and that earned me a certain amount of respect for not being a dumb schmuck from the desert as the New York fashionistas sometimes viewed us!
I could cite a few hundred other examples of client and fellow producer BS, but I essentially learned the high value of honesty in business by observing the chaos and bullshit that was often the result of the dishonest people running the show. I was on some of their shoots as a location scout/manager, and even though I made sure my department was run honestly (despite the best efforts of the lying sacks to lie to me and get me to lie to others for them!), and that resulted in less stress on my location owners and I, and most importantly led to me being invited back, which had HUGE value at the end of the day. My reputation for honesty meant that I had literally dozens of homeowners (and probably hundreds of other location owners) who would turn me and my crew loose in their million-dollar homes for the entire day based solely on the fact that they trusted me and could take me at my word. I would tell the property owner up front if a given client were likely to be a pain in the ass and would give the them a chance to say no to a project even if that isn’t the answer I wanted. But what was interesting was that 95% of the time they said yes to one of my more pain-in-the-ass clients BECAUSE I was honest and they kind of felt bad for me and wanted to help me out for being honest with them. Karma definitely exists in the business world, and honesty breeds good karma which in turn breeds trust and success.
The same thing was definitely true on the crew and vendor side of the equation as well. Even though the crew and vendors who technically below me on the hypothetical “food chain” because I was paying them (which wasn’t my philosophy as I mentioned above), I was always brutally honest with them about the project and the pain-in-the-ass level of a particular crack-smokin’ creative upfront. It was important to me that everyone knew what they were getting into from the start because realistic expectations all around meant that the shoot would run as smoothly as possible with the least possible “attitude” from everyone on the proverbial “production wheel.”
Another important karmic effect of being brutally honest with my crew and vendors was that the best people would always want to work with me. Not only was this essential for long-term business success, but it made my business life much less stressful. Honesty all around and the resulting trust meant that I could explain what was needed once and turn everyone loose knowing that they would give it 100% effort and be honest with me if there were any issues or problems that needed to be worked out. And going right back to the beginning of the story about the lying clients and producers who claim to have “no money” or a “low budget,” I always made sure I demanded and budgeted enough money from the start to make sure my crew could do a good job and be fairly compensated for their hard work.
In my production world, I took good care to make sure there was as little “shit” as humanly possible, and I would never let it “flow downhill” onto my crew and I. I always considered it part of my job to fling that shit right back upstairs before it hit my crew. And I’m eternally grateful for the good karma and financial success that was the end result. As crappy as my health issues are right now, I can’t even imagine what they would be like without so many good friends looking out for me, many from work, and I feel really bad for anyone trying to navigate a nasty illness like this without having any money to take care of things. I’m beyond grateful for the fact that I have an abundance of friends and money to take care of myself the best I can and find as much peace as possible. Life really is connected in a lot of ways we don’t expect, and Karma can be either a bitch or a sweetheart, depending on how you treat her!
Ok—I know I’m going to catch some shit for discussing this topic in an unorthodox way and for my somewhat snarky title, but please remember that I was born in Wisconsin in 1962 and that was a very different time and place. So please don’t judge my behavior in 1979 by 2019 standards or I’ll be calling you a freakin’ snowflake!
To be very clear about the different eras, when a cop pulled you over late on a Saturday night in the 1970s or 1980s (and it happened to me three times, once while I was underage) the first question he asked you was how many drinks you have had. The question was not today’s, “Have you been drinking?” because they knew damned well that you very likely had been and you had better not insult their intelligence by lying about it. With that in mind, you had also better not insult the cop’s intelligence by saying “a couple of beers” at 2am. He also knew damned well that you had probably been out partying for 4-6 hours, so the “correct” answer was “I think about 5 or 6, officer.” People’s jaws drop when I tell them that today because that answer would mean instant arrest for DUI. But back in 1980, the cop would talk to you for a minute to see if you were coherent and then give you a few field sobriety tests with the actual intention of seeing if you were capable of driving reasonably safely, not for the express purpose of arresting you for a DUI.
As I said, I was pulled over three times late at night after probably having 10-12 beers in a 4-6 hour period, and I actually could walk, talk, and drive. (More on that to come…) I think twice I had a taillight out and the third cop was just checking to see if I was OK at 3am cruising down our dark country roads. All three stops went pretty much the same–I talked calmly to the cop for a minute or two, he told me my taillight was out, had me walk the line, touch my nose, shined his light in my eyes, etc. and every time I passed the tests and he let me go. During the one stop when I was only 17, I thought for sure the cop would bust me for being underage, but he just made an offhand comment as he gave me my driver’s license back about how I should be more careful having working taillights at least until I was 18 in a few months–Hahaha!!!
We’ve all heard the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but I’m going to lay my personal driving track record stats on you and then explain why I’m grateful in a variety of ways.
Eric’s Lifetime Driving Miles: Approximately 2,000,000 in 40 years
Eric’s Lifetime DUI Miles: Approximately 500,000
Eric’s Lifetime Auto Accident and DUI Record: 0
Let me begin by saying right upfront that my heart goes out to anyone who has experienced the potentially deadly result of people who don’t drive safely whether in a sober or DUI condition. (And I do believe that there are actually plenty of sober drivers who are more dangerous than DUIers for a variety of reasons.) Given my current experience with a deadly disease, I definitely have plenty of empathy to go around for anyone’s suffering no matter what the cause.
The first and probably most important thing I’m grateful for is my somewhat Zen ability to be at one with a car and the road, and I think I must have been born with this. From the time I first drove my go-cart at age 10 (Thanks, Dad–You probably saved my life at least once!) to sneaking out in our parents’ cars when we were 14 and 15 (see “Learning to Drive in 1975” if you’re curious), I always LOVED to be behind the wheel and felt totally comfortable from the get go.
When I first got my license, I had already been drinking and smoking weed for a couple of years, but just to be cautious I didn’t smoke or drink and drive for the first few months to see how confident I felt about driving all over town and to places I’d never driven before. Even at age 16 I felt a responsibility to know my limits, and after a few months I felt comfortable enough to enjoy the freedom of driving to bars and partying with my friends. (The drinking age was 18 at the time; I looked about 14; but a few bucks, a friendly attitude and a fake ID would get you into a lot of places!) After all, if you couldn’t drink a bunch of beers and a take a few tokes, why were you going out with your friends on a Saturday night?! And FYI—I don’t think the phrase “designated driver” even existed back then. To us, the “designated driver” was simply the one with the best overall road skills at closing time whether DUI or sober! And due to my overall driving skills and sane attitude, I was usually elected as the “DDD” (“designated drunk driver”).
What made it work for me was my attitude of focus and diligence behind the wheel, and I’m very grateful I always had this attitude that driving was serious business. The fact that I was chemically impaired never altered my personality to the point that I became completely irrational, overly emotional, or had all my sanity filters removed. I could be in the bar or at the party for hours drinking, dancing, smoking, jamming, and generally living it up with my friends and feeling totally free as a bird. A lot of my DUI miles and years were racked up when I was playing in bands and going to live music shows from age 16-30. But when the gig or party night was over and I got behind the wheel, my party attitude immediately switched off and my 100% focus was becoming one with the car and the road so I could get everyone safely home without drawing the attention of the police. If I got in a wreck or got busted, my freedom to have fun would be gone, and that was definitely strong motivation for a teenage boy! I literally treated every buzzed drive as if I were taking a driver’s test. My mental routine was to double-check everything possible in my mind before I even put the car in drive. Headlights on? Check. The route home? Check—Run it through my mind (no, we didn’t have GPS dashboard maps talking to us in those days—Hahaha!) Weather conditions? Check—It’s snowing tonight so be extra careful in that rear-wheel drive car with the nearly bald tires! You get the idea, and I would never speed, tailgate, swerve around or drive in any other dangerous or risky way. But I had friends who did, and I’ll be getting to them shortly…
What you younger readers and many of you from Arizona don’t know is that although DUI was obviously illegal everywhere even in the ancient 1970s and 1980s, the punishment in Wisconsin was a $180 fine and you lost your license for a whole 3 months with an allowance that you could still drive to and from work! And I don’t think they even raised the fine or the loss of license time until your third or fourth offense. While people today would consider that appallingly weak enforcement of DUI laws, the fact is that Wisconsin in the ’70s and ’80s was a drinking culture (and still is), and what me and my friends were doing was pretty much (except for the weed!) what our parents, their friends, and even the cops were doing on their party nights out. I will confess to being a little bit worse than the older generation in the sense that I typically did a “wake and bake” at 7:30 in the morning on the drive to “high” school. Of course, the older generation often had booze in their offices (I know my dad’s office did!), so we were probably pretty even on this score except that they waited until 10am at least—Hahaha!
Having said all that, I did have some incidents that challenged my driving diligence to a pretty extreme degree, and I can honestly say that I occasionally just got lucky. I generally tried not to drive while taking psychedelic drugs, but it did happen a few times. There’s nothing like driving through a storm of florescent purple snow while the road is melting in front of you! (The road where this happened was ironically named “Lake Shore Drive,” and I’ll leave it to you to figure out the irony we saw in that—Hahaha!) Talk about needing all your mental powers of focus… Seeing double from too much alcohol was also a challenge as well. Fortunately, there was a simple remedy for this in that you could close your non-dominant eye and focus on the lines on the road. Voila–No more double vision!
But these were very rare occurrences, and it’s also important to know that in these 2am situations there was generally not much traffic on the road, and any mishap would only injure me and my fellow party animals in the car. And I am so grateful that never happened with me behind the wheel. I wouldn’t be the same person today if I had hurt or killed someone (most likely a close friend) because of something stupid I had done while driving. I tried to strike a balance between my WTF attitude that life was meant to be wild and fun with the idea that life is at risk when you don’t do your best to mitigate the risks you can. I think I did a pretty good job balancing risk and reward, but I am also grateful for the luck that was involved in achieving half a million trouble-free DUI miles.
OK—So that was my attitude toward diligent DUI in the ancient days, but unfortunately not all of my friends shared that attitude. Like many young men, they thought they were Mr. Invincible and Mario Andretti (you youngsters look him up) all rolled into one whether sober or drunk. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve been scared shitless by some of my friends’ driving behavior in a variety of both sober and altered states.
One of my most memorable scared shitless moments came when four of us were driving from high school downtown about 15 miles or so to our friend Marc’s house after final exams one semester in high school. I’m sure we fired up a fattie and popped a cold one in my friend Tim’s car on the way out of the parking lot, but DUI wasn’t really the issue that day. Tim had a souped-up 1974 Firebird that really hauled ass, and he never missed an opportunity to let you know it!
On the way to Marc’s house, we ran into some road construction and an ensuing traffic jam on the highway where they had closed off one lane and only left one lane open. Of course this slowed us down from 70mph to 10mph, and we had a case of cold beer waiting for us at Marc’s house! Well, Tim weaved back and forth for about a minute trying to see how long the traffic jam was, and it looked like it went on for quite a while. The left lane was closed, the right lane was open, and I was sitting in the minuscule rear passenger seat with the rather narrow emergency lane to my right outside the window. Tim kept jockeying in there to see if he could get a look ahead, and this brought my face to within literally inches of the 4′ tall solid cement retaining wall next to the narrow emergency lane. This didn’t bother me much when we were stuck in traffic at 10mph, but Tim quickly became impatient and decided to drive in the narrow emergency lane instead. (Apparently, he wanted that beer pretty soon!)
For the first few seconds at about 25mph I was cool with my face so close to the retaining well that I could count the rebar pieces, but as he quickly picked up speed I started to get pretty nervous. There was literally only about a foot between the line of slow cars to our left and about a foot between my face and the cement retaining wall. All it would have taken was one other curious driver to weave into the emergency lane for a second to assess the jam ahead, and we (particularly me!) would be toast.
When we hit about 40-50 with a line of nearly stopped cars to the left and the retaining wall almost touching my nose, I started to get really scared and yelled at Tim to chill out and slow down. Tim kind of laughed at me in the rear view mirror, so I gave a quick glance in Tim’s younger brother Brian’s direction in the rear driver’s side seat beside me and kind of raised my eyebrows as if to say: “He’s your brother-Can you please say something?” Brian kind of shook his head with a smirk as if to say: “Dude, you shouldn’t have said anything—It will only encourage him,” and damned if he wasn’t right about that! My fear and Brian’s knowledge of his brother proved to be accurate as we immediately got going to around 70-80mph because “that was closer to the speed limit” as Tim said later. The stopped traffic was literally a blur on my left as the cars flew by, and the retaining wall was so close I could have kissed it. I yelled a few more times to no avail, and eventually closed my eyes and STFU hoping I wouldn’t feel any pain as I died. The jam turned out to be about a mile long, and at 70mph that meant we made it through in about a minute, but I have to say that was one of the longest minutes of my life! So my gratitude in this situation is for the purely random good luck we were given that no other impatient drivers decided to have a quick swerve to look at the jam or to do what we did and veer into the emergency lane unexpectedly to “beat the traffic!”
A few years after this, Tim and I were college roommates living in downtown Milwaukee. One night we decided to go out drinking at a place called the Midget Tavern (also infamous serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s regular hangout, and I’ll get to that in a minute!), and my car must have been in the shop because we took Tim’s motorcycle, a rather tiny Honda 350 road bike. The Midget was only about 3-4 miles away, so I thought nothing of it. (I never learn—Hahaha!) Of course we stayed until closing time (3:30am on Saturdays), and we were definitely pretty shit faced! I asked Tim if he was OK to drive us home on the bike and he told me I could wear the helmet! We were in the city so I knew we wouldn’t be going too far or too fast, so I hopped on.
I asked Tim if there was anything I needed to do as a passenger, and he told me that whenever we stopped at a light I should not put my feet down but keep them on the pegs and stay centered on the seat behind him. He would do everything else, which turned out to mean everything except stay awake long enough to get us home in 10 minutes! We got to a rather long stop light only a few blocks from our apartment, and I noticed Tim was slowly leaning the bike to the right for no apparent reason. Like a good passenger, I followed his instructions and kept my feet on the pegs right up until we kept leaning further right and eventually hit the ground! Of course we weren’t hurt and I apologized for not putting my feet down and asked him what happened. He rather sheepishly (or sleepily) admitted to me that he had literally fallen asleep at the traffic light! Obviously, this isn’t a particularly scary story, but if Tim had fallen asleep while we were going 35 on a main drag, the story could have had quite a different ending indeed! So I’m grateful for that bit of good luck too…
Ok–So it’s time for the Jeffrey Dahmer sidebar story here… The Midget Tavern had been a favorite hangout of Tim’s and Scooter’s since our high school days, and they knew the owner Mike very well. The “Midget” was a very apropos name for the place because it was a tiny neighborhood bar that seated literally maybe 20-30 people. Needless to say, Mike the owner was on a first-name basis with almost everybody who came into his bar. When Tim and Kathy got married in the early ’80s, they had a little pre-wedding get together at the Midget for the wedding party. I went to the wedding, but I missed the Midget gathering because I wasn’t in the wedding party. (In hindsight, I certainly wish I had been in the photos below!)
In the photos below, Tim and Kathy are the third and fourth people from the left, and best man Scooter is standing next to Tim. Tim’s niece Becky is the cute little flower girl on the other side of the bar, and the dude in the baseball cap right behind her is none other than infamous serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. He lived only a few blocks away and was a regular patron of the Midget. He and Mike the owner were on a first-name basis, and nobody knew at the time that he had a bunch of dismembered bodies in his freezer that he was scarfing down on a regular basis!
Although Tim was often a fast and aggressive driver, my high school friend John was absolutely nuts when sober, and he got even worse when drinking. He would mouth off to guys twice his size, insult entire groups of people when it was just me and him (and I’ve never been in a fight in my life—Seriously! And I’m grateful for that too!), and he would drive like an absolute maniac when alcohol lowered his inhibitions and removed all filters from his brain (and they were defective to begin with). John had already gotten in at least two pretty serious wrecks by the time he was 18, and fortunately they were both one-car collisions and there were no passengers in his car. Until wreck #3 where I was the passenger…
We had been to a party in an outer suburb of Milwaukee and we were staying at my house in a different outer suburb about 35 miles away. So we had a good long drive ahead of us at about 2am, and the dozen beers each of us had didn’t help matters. I should stop and say right here that if it had been one of my other friends, I might have been offered the keys as the sane, focused DDD (designated drunk driver) and things would likely have turned out differently. But John had an ego the size of Texas and he was going to drive come hell or high water.
At that time John drove a ’74 Triumph TR6 convertible, and it was summer so we were riding with the top down. When we left the party around 2am, we noticed that one of our buddies had disconnected the two front seats from the floor and they were completely loose and floating on the floor! We didn’t have the tools or the patience to reconnect them then, so we lined them up in their tracks the best we could and headed out to my house. When we got about 5 miles away from home, we were on a rural road I knew quite well (it was that “Lake Shore Drive” again!), and we were going about 55 in a 35, but it was 2:30 in the morning so I wasn’t too worried until we started approaching what I knew to be a hairpin turn. I mentioned it to John at least ÂĽ mile in advance and figured he would slow down, but he told his Triumph could handle that “no problem” because it was a “sports car,” it was made for that, and he babbled something about how he was going to “oversteer” or some arrogant driving geek bullshit that would allow him to navigate the hairpin turn flawlessly without touching the brakes.
I started to panic when he didn’t slow down because I knew a few things he didn’t about the turn, namely that even in a “sports car” you couldn’t go faster than about 30, that there was no guardrail on the hairpin turn, the ditch was literally about 6 feet deep, and there were large oak trees planted just beyond the ditch in the yard adjacent to the road! Knowing this, I yelled at him more loudly and firmly but to no avail. We hit that turn at about 45 as John hit the brakes at the last second when he had his “Oh, shit!” moment, and we of course went careening right off the road and into the deep ditch before we even made it halfway around the turn. I can still remember seeing one of the oak trees approaching the window directly in front of me, and I thought I was a goner. But by some miracle, the car hit something else underneath a nanosecond before and shifted the car far enough to the left that I didn’t end up eating the oak tree as a midnight snack! And remember, our seats weren’t even attached to the floor and we weren’t wearing our seatbelts because of that! I would have likely been launched out of the convertible at 40mph to almost certain death.
We crashed to a stop in the ditch without hitting a tree, and miraculously neither one of us was even hurt. I think John may have bumped his head on the steering wheel, but that was it. I let out a huge sigh of relief as I realized we had made it through this potentially deadly disaster unscathed but John was having none of that. The word “gratitude” did not exist in John’s vocabulary (nor the concept in his mind apparently either), and the first words out of his mouth were something like: “Why didn’t you tell me it was a REAL hairpin turn?!!” as though it were now somehow MY fault that he had crashed his car! I barked back that I had been screaming at him to slow down for a ÂĽ mile, the sign on the road said “15 MPH” with a 90-degree curve icon on it, and I never stopped telling him to slow down right up until he hit the brakes at the last second when it was already too late.
That shut him up long enough for us to think about how we were going to go the 5 remaining miles to my house (there was no Uber and Lyft in 1980—Hahaha!), and we certainly didn’t want to hang around until some neighbor called the cops and John got a DUI. This was rural BFE land in Mequon (my semi-rural suburb at the time), so there was nobody around at 3am. We started walking down the road and my plan was to make it a mile or so to the more major intersection and dream up a good story I could tell my Mom when I called her on the pay phone. As we were walking, a car approached and just for grins we put our thumbs out to try and hitch a ride. We figured nobody would stop at 3am, but it turned out to be a cool dude about our age who did us a total solid and drove us all the way back to my house!
I thought we were home free, but my Mom heard us come in and I made the mistake of telling her the truth about John putting his car in the ditch. I told her we weren’t hurt and we were going to hit the hay and deal with it in the morning. What I hadn’t counted on was my Mom’s “play by The Man’s rules” authoritarian side rising out of bed at 3am and insisting on calling the local police to report the “accident.” I told her we didn’t hit any other cars, nobody else was remotely involved, etc. but to no avail. Mom had to “do the right thing” in her mind, and although I was a bit nervous (for John really—I wasn’t driving), I thought the cops would just tell us to sort it out in the morning since we had already left the scene, and they wouldn’t want to schlep out there at 4am, etc.
Unfortunately, I underestimated how little the Mequon police had to do at 4am, and they insisted that Mom drive us both back to the scene of the accident so they could investigate, write their report, etc. So into Mom’s ’74 Eldorado we went, and there were four cops there when we arrived. My Mom had figured out by this time that we were quite drunk and she told us both to shut the hell up and stay near her car while she went over to talk to the cops. That actually surprised me, but Mom was walking the tightrope between trying to follow “the rules” while still trying to protect us from the wrath of the law. The cops didn’t have too much trouble figuring out what happened, and we figured John would get breath tested, arrested, and be on his way to a DUI.
Buuuuuut…We got really lucky in that one of the cops was Robert, our former next-door neighbor for about 10 years, and our families knew each other very well. In fact, Robert’s family were the local farmers who developed our neighborhood and we actually bought our house from them! My Mom confirmed Robert’s suspicions that we were probably quite drunk, and Robert had the kindness to not take things any further. They made John show his driver’s license, sign the report, and arrange for the car to be towed out of the ditch, and my Mom had already told both of us to shut the hell up and be nice to the cops because they were doing us (well really John) a huge favor as long as we didn’t say something stupid and piss them off. For once, John listened to some sound advice! Of course my Mom had to call John’s Mom and tell her what happened, and of course John bitched about that. I don’t think I need to explain the huge amount of gratitude I have for escaping my closest call ever with a premature death. Sure, things are pretty ugly now but that was nearly 40 years ago and I’m very grateful for that near miss with death and several others as well. I’ve already had nine lives, and I’m very glad “Lake Shore Drive” never got me over the years! (And it gave me my “Eric the Nudist” story, so I really can’t complain about the Tao of LSD, er—I mean “Lake Shore Drive.”)
It’s often said that people are better off not seeing death coming because death can obviously be a very unsettling and sometimes depressing idea, particularly if it involves suffering dragged out over a long period of time. I think we’ve all heard multiple variations of a phrase like “I hope I go suddenly in my sleep” from a stroke or some variation of a quick, painless death, and most of us have probably even said it at lease once or twice ourselves. I know I have.
Fortunately we live in the modern era where medical science can alleviate some of the suffering with pain meds, surgical treatments and that type of thing, and death doesn’t have to be quite as painful as it was 100 or 200 years ago. Imagine having “doctors” (and I use the term loosely!) cutting off limbs with no anesthesia and shit like that! Hell, the person removing your limb and trying to make sure you didn’t bleed to death, die from an infection (before they knew what caused them!) wasn’t even likely to be a doctor because you probably hacked up a limb working on your farm, and the nearest doctor was a few hours away on horseback! A friend or family member would have to “wing it” on the fly, and I can’t imagine how brutal things must have been in say the 1800s. It’s absolutely hideous to think about and makes the pain I’m feeling now pale in comparison.
Even in the modern era, people do still suffer incredible pain from certain illnesses and even their potential treatments. I’ve heard that the pain and suffering caused by the side effects of chemotherapy can be worse than the cancer itself. I’ve personally suffered a lot of physical pain from my disease and additional pain from both prescription drug side effects and herbal protocol reactions. (No, because it’s “herbal” or “natural” does not mean something is automatically harmless or won’t mess with you. Plenty of toxic poisons are “natural.”) And it’s obviously very difficult psychologically to deal with the idea that you stand a good or pretty much guaranteed chance of dying from your illness, and that stress is obviously a constant weight that constantly chokes your psyche. But you still have some time to experience both suffering and joy. I read something another victim wrote about ALS “feeling like you’re being buried alive” and another that wrote “it feels like lead is flowing through your body and it’s slowly getting heavier.” Both of these descriptions are sadly quite accurate, but I still get to have joyful moments with my friends and family as the dying process evolves.
In contrast, many people are suddenly diagnosed with a disease and told they have only a few weeks to live. I can’t even begin to imagine the level of stress involved in having only mere weeks to “get one’s affairs in order” and try to say goodbye to all your loved ones. I sure as hell couldn’t get all that done, and I’m a “get shit done” kind of guy!! As I’ve said throughout my writing, I’ve been lucky enough to have a life filled with so many awesome people that I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to everyone, tell everyone how much I love them, deal with the legal and financial aspects of death, much less have the time to ruminate and reflect on my wonderful life and write a few hundred pages worth of memories about it! Sure, the physical and emotional pain of seeing death coming totally sucks, but not having the opportunity to reminisce and write your own swan song of gratefulness probably sucks even more. Hell—even if I die suddenly in my sleep tonight from an unexpected or yet unknown condition completely unrelated to my ALS, I’ve had the opportunity for many months now to deal with death in my own way. And as much as it hurts at times, not having a chance at all or trying to do what I’ve done in the past year in a mere month or not at all would be far, far worse in a lot of ways. I’m certainly not sure whether life is simply a series of random events or something with a higher purpose, but I started writing this blog because I needed to wrap my head around what was happening to me and if there was some cosmic reason I got ALS and what it all meant. I sent the text thread below to my friend Jean discussing this very thing and made a note to myself to think and write about it.
As a Taoist, I’ve got to look at life and death as two sides of the same coin, and experiencing both to the fullest is truly a blessing rather than a curse in a lot of ways. I’ve said WTF to a lot of things in life, and why should my inevitable death be any different? I’ve experienced an outpouring of more real friendship and love than I ever thought possible in recent months. I’ve cried together with many friends knowing that we will genuinely miss each other greatly. I’ve remembered cool happenings and stories long forgotten and been reminded of many others I had forgotten by friends who shared their fond memories with me. I wouldn’t have experienced any of these things if I died suddenly or even on a few weeks’ notice.
For me the biggest challenge is making the decision about when to go. If I wait long enough, the ALS will decide for me, but I don’t really want to end up like these people in the photos below just to hang on another year. The decision is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that I love life so much. I want to squeeze out every last drop of joy, fun, love and minute of experience from life, so that makes it that much harder to say goodbye. It’s a really delicate balance in terms of how much pain and suffering is too much versus reaching for a few extra moments of joy. The million-dollar question is whether having the power to make that decision is a blessing or a curse.
My friend Denise recently posed a really interesting quality-of-life question to me recently. Her question was: “If you had a choice between living one more year of life at your physical peak a few years ago versus five more years in your current state, which would you choose?” My first response was kind of snarky, although it makes sense in a way. I replied: “How about a compromise where I get to live three years limping around on a cane, but actually being able to work, drive, go out of the house often, hit the gym, etc…?” My next thought was of course that I would take one quality year over five more painful years, but I’ve got to say that the more I think about it, the harder the question becomes to answer. I have a lot of bad days and few horrendous ones, but there are some not-so-bad days and great moments in there too.
I’ve also thought more about how a lot of other people suffer pretty much in silence (or not—Hahaha!) throughout their entire lives, yet they somehow have the will to stay alive and keep suffering for decades. I’ve been thinking recently about my cousin Michael and a friend Sandra’s son David who both suffered from schizophrenia since it kicked in for them during puberty. Michael lived to be about 45 and died from chronic alcohol abuse as his remedy to fight the imaginary voices in his head destroyed his liver. David endured about 10 years of suffering before he died, and he struggled constantly with the exhausting side effects of the meds versus the other option of daily mental torture at the hands of schizophrenia. I’ve known others who are chronically anxious and depressed for most of their lives. They haven’t had anywhere near the amount of enjoyment I’ve had, and after a few bad reactions to meds, I can’t even imagine living most of your life feeling that way. And then there are many others who live pretty boring lives (by my standards) and really don’t seem to experience a lot of joy, happiness, pain, suffering, or much of anything at all. I do think about that as write about my life, and even if the end is shitty, I would never trade my “55 rock star years” for 85 or even 95 boring-ass years!
I’ve recently been thinking too about others who have lost family members and friends far too young. My best friend Kevin and Sandy’s son Ryan had a rare birth defect called Trisomy 18 which took his life at only 9 months old. My high school friend Chris lost his brother in his 20s in a windsurfing accident when Robbie had an epileptic seizure. My good friend Robert nearly died getting hit by a car on his bike when he was in his early 20s, and he’s probably had at least a dozen different prosthetic legs during the ensuing 40 years. And my friends Tim and Kathy’s son Luke was born with some cognitive birth defect so rare it doesn’t even have a name! But Luke has been going for 26 years with the mind of a kid aged 9 months to a few years old, even though he’s now in the body of a full-grown adult. I know it’s been quite a challenge for Tim and Kathy to care for Luke all these years.
Geez—What do I have to be so sad about? I’ve been lucky enough to live many decades with many moments of pure ecstasy and very little pain. The worst health problems I’ve ever had were some asthmatic allergies as a kid and a couple of minor injuries in the gym. Hell–Both my parents are still alive and they are almost 90!
What all this has made me realize is that I probably should have had a lot more empathy for others over the years. I’ve received an outpouring of empathy since my health went south, and I think I could have been there more than I was for some of my friends over the years. I’ve always been kind of an energetic Type A personality who typically focused on my own business and my own pleasure, and I don’t think I really fully related to the pain others were going though as much as I should have.
That said, I think I’ve always been an honest (probably to a fault—Hahaha!) fair, open-minded person that has tried to be a good friend to everyone (when I wasn’t too busy working or hanging with other friends!), so hopefully karma will be good to me if such a thing ultimately matters in the universe. And seeing death coming has also allowed me to become more generous and start helping others personally and financially as well. I’ve set up a trust to take care of my parents. I’ve given away some of my prized personal possessions to friends who will really appreciate them, and I’m thinking of how I can help others with money I’ve saved that I’ll never be able to spend. And it makes me feel good each time I do it, and I’ve honestly been more motivated to do that by all the unselfish love everyone has shown me. You guys taught me the largest lesson of love late in life (how’s that for alliteration!), and I’m going to do my best to pay it forward as much as I can in the time I have left. Life is a delicate balancing act, and I’ve had so much of the good stuff it’s probably just my turn for some pain. I’ll just hang in there as long as I can and grab all the joyful moments I can…
Back in the old days, if you wanted to record anything on the cheap without a real recording studio, you used some version of the Teac Tascam 4-track cassette recorder I had. The sound was nowhere near what a recording studio was in those days, but the cool thing about it was that it was small enough and could run on batteries so you could take it to make live recordings anywhere you wanted! And you could record live stuff in stereo and use the other two tracks for overdubs without getting involved in any elaborate mixing schemes.
Yuppie Schmuck
This was a parody of a parody that Kevin and I recorded in my “home studio,” (see above) The original song was “Hey Joe,” made popular by Jimi Hendrix of course. Shortly after it came out, Frank Zappa used it to parody the hippie culture in his 1967 version called “Flower Punk.” In 1985 or so, the “yuppies” ruled America, so Kevin and I got the bright idea to update Zappa’s parody and morphed the song into yet another parody of a parody called “Yuppie Schmuck.” I’m not sure if you’ll understand the lyrics, but I may get around to putting what I can remember up here someday. Just think back to 1985 and you’ll get the gist of it. As I recall, I’m playing drums and bass, Kevin is playing keyboards, and we’re both singing.
“Yuppie Schmuck” and a couple of the other songs on this page are definitely too outside the box to interest most people, but listen if you dare and download if you like. One interesting factoid about this song is that it did receive radio airplay (back in the day when people listened to FM radio!) during morning drive time (peak listening hours) on KSLX, the major rock radio station in Phoenix. So that means that 50,000 people have heard this weird song! On a whim, I had sent a recording to a guy named Bob Boze Bell, one of the morning DJs over there. He was the kind of guy with a WTF attitude, and he and his partner Jones played it just for the hell of it based on my letter explaining what the hell the song was. So Kevin and I had our five minutes of radio fame…
Spider Walk–Phases 1 & 2
Spider Walk–Phase 1 was actually a song I wrote as part of a term paper to hand in for one of my students back in the day when I wrote term papers for a living (See “Do You Have the Term Paper Blues” if you are curious about that!) I think the paper was for an English class, and the gist of it was that the student had to describe the creative process as they created some artistic work. When my student brought this to me, I first asked her whether she was skilled in any artistic area and whether she had an idea in mind for the theme of the project. She said no, and I of course immediately thought of music, and that’s partly because I had no abilities in any other artistic endeavor. The best thing I could draw or paint was a stick figure, and I don’t write fiction!
When I first proposed the idea, my student wasn’t a fan because she didn’t actually play music, so I came up with the way I would explain that in “her” paper as part of the creative process. I ended up creating the song and playing all the parts myself on “the ol’ 4-track,” but I described her role in the creative process as a collaboration with her “friend” Eric in that he would play all the background music and then teach her how to play the lead solo on the 1967 Farfisa organ. I described how I marked the right organ keys to hit to stay in the right key on the song and how I gave her a few lessons and a lot of trial, error, multiple takes and editing involved so that even a novice could play some kind of a”space jam.” It’s certainly not my best work because I’m a guitar and bass player who can fake an easy song or two on the keyboards, but I have no business playing drums as you will hear if you dare! 🙂
Pain and Strife aka “Anal Strife”
Kevin had a college friend named Dale who was pretty much a solo singer/songwriter type guy and he was weird and funny as hell! I’ll let Kevin write a Dale story if he likes, but the gist of Dale was that he was a cacophony of contradictions in terms of his real personality and his music. He could write stuff that ran the gamut from beyond rude and crude to downright maudlin sometimes within the same song! Pain and Strife (Kevin always called it “Anal Strife” to annoy Dale–Hahahaha!) was perhaps one of Dale’s most maudlin efforts. “I Like My Women Buck Naked” on the other hand…
I was visiting Kevin in Dayton around 1982 or so and of course I brought the “Ol’ 4-track” in case some musical inspiration struck us while we were in an altered state or something… One night, Dale came over; we all started jamming, and I graciously volunteered to record Dale’s song for posterior–er, I mean posterity, on my 4-track. You can judge this maudlin love song for yourself–Hahahaha! (And if you ever read this Dale, you know I’m just messing with you–sort of… :-))
The Scumbo Variations
This tune was my personal version of Frank Zappa’s “The Gumbo Variations.” I was experimenting with my 4-track to see what I could accomplish all by myself in my home “studio.” You can decide for yourself how well I channeled the musical vibe of my idol FZ. Of course, he had an entire band of real musicians playing on his studio recordings! I did the best I could for a 20-something kid, but I would recommend a little bit of a trendy chemical amusement aid first…
Dust My Broom & Killing Floor
More early experimentation with the 4-track. I was lucky enough to get Tom Coulson to overdub drums for me after I recorded these sans drums. I actually recorded these in mine and Cindy’s first apartment, and Tom was a teacher at her school. (And I know–I’m sure as hell no singer!) At least my rhythm was solid enough that Tom could overdub drums on top of it.
If you’ve read my piece about learning about sex and love in the 70s, then you know things began with me learning about sex from stone-age things like magazines and of course I did the usual experimentation with a couple of girlfriends in high school. I’m still debating whether to tell any of those stories since we were minors (although what the hell–It’s not like I’m going to live forever!), but I feel a little safer in the modern era where information never dies talking about my two girlfriends from the 1980s when I had moved to Arizona at age 21.
If you’ve read my story “No Guts, No Glory” then you already know that I met both of my serious girlfriends Cindy and April on the dance floor at clubs listening to live music. One thing that was very cool about both of them was that they were real music aficionados like me. We all liked real music played live by real musicians. None of this crappy “dance club” plastic pop music would cut it for any of us. I was literally out at clubs listening and dancing to live music 3-5 nights a week for most of my 20s, and I played in bands as well at times.
I met April first because we used to follow a reggae/ska band with a rock edge called The Effects. There were a half a dozen other bands we followed as well, but this was the favorite for both of us. As I said in my other essay, we met on the dance floor constantly, and she was a cute Asian chick so I was definitely interested! I was only 21 at the time, and I really couldn’t tell her age (not that Mr. WTF would have cared anyway!), so I did my best to flirt and hit on her. What I didn’t know initially but she eventually told me was that April was 36 at the time! She didn’t look it but certainly got plenty of attention from guys more in her age bracket. Actually, she was quite the outgoing type and got plenty of attention from everyone! But I remained undeterred and continued dancing and hanging out with her, and I was the only guy who could keep up with her on the dance floor. We were both WTF types who just liked to have fun at the live music clubs. I tried for at least several months to get her interested in more, but we remained just dancing and partying buddies for the time being.
As I said in my other story, I met Cindy at a Big Pete Pearson show because we were both big blues fans. Cindy was somewhat serious about school and not quite the party animal I was, and she was actually 27 when we met at Tony’s New Yorker. That said, she loved music and dancing too, and she ended up making the first move by having our mutual friend Harmonica Bob introduce us and buying me a beer. (One of the reasons I love older women–They weren’t shy back then.) We danced the rest of the night away and ended up spending the night together at her house (lucky me!!!)
Cindy must have woken up before I did and was probably looking at me sober in the morning light thinking: “Holy shit—Is this guy even 18?!” I did look really young for my 21 years, and even a 6-year age difference is already a big deal when you are in your 20s. (FYI–The drinking age in AZ at the time was only 19, so anything was possible.) Cindy apparently had to be sure I wasn’t lying about my age, so she went into my wallet and pulled out my driver’s license while I remained blissfully unaware sleeping in her bed. She lived in a house with 3 roommates and took my license out to the kitchen so they could all have a look in the daylight. Now it’s important to know that in those days (1984) an Arizona driver’s license was filled out by hand in one’s own handwriting, signed by you, and then scanned, printed, and issued to you by the DMV. Well, my birth year was 1962, but a piece of the “f” in my last name below the year extended into the “2” in the year making it look like it could be a “4.” I had never thought about it before, but when I looked later I had to admit you really couldn’t be sure either way.
By the time she came back in the bedroom I was starting to wake up, and we engaged in some morning after small talk before she “popped the question.” I must admit I was rather shocked when she simultaneously showed me my license and asked whether that was a “2” or a “4!” I told her truthfully that it was indeed a “2” and explained that I had simply signed the “f” in my name so that it accidentally looked like a “4” and I could understand how she might think what she had. At this point, I had woken up enough to begin wondering what the hell she was doing in my wallet without asking in the first place, but I can say that I was in no mood to start a fight with a sexy older woman who took me places a mere few hours ago that this 21-year-old had never been before—Hahahaha!! If she was a little nosy, I sure as hell didn’t care as long as I could get another date with her!
Fortunately, I had passed the age test, and Cindy & I started dating on a regular basis. I did find out a few weeks later though that her roommates’ secret name for me had been invented that morning and I henceforth became known as “Barely Legal” to them—Hahahaha!!! I was jealous of Cindy’s roommate Chris who gave me the nickname because his nickname was “The Centurian.” Chris claimed to have banged over 100 women in his 40-some years on earth, and judging by the parade in and out of his bedroom across from Cindy’s I couldn’t call him a liar! In my young mind his nickname should have been “The Inspirer!”
Cindy and I hit it off quite well, and in a few months or so I asked if she wanted to be my girlfriend. I was honestly shocked when she said “no” but that we should continue dating, be open to dating others, and see how it went! We got along great, loved the same music, always had a blast hanging out, and the sex was definitely happening for both of us, so I was somewhat confused and frankly a little hurt. But I got over that fast enough—It wasn’t like the fun or the hot sex slowed down, so what the hell? I was young and just wrote it off to me not understanding “older women.” Maybe I was just a fling for her, but what 21-year-old could bitch about that?
The beauty of this scenario was that I was still free to date other women, so of course I redoubled my efforts on April, my other favorite party girl! Well, April knew I was dating Cindy, and I’m not really sure why, but she eventually decided that if some other “older woman” liked me that I must be worthy for some reason and wanted to at least give me a try. Sooooo…One thing led to another and before long this young dude had a 27-year-old and a 36-year old showing him the “ways of love!” And I don’t need to tell you how grateful I was to have not one, but two super fun, sexually experienced women keeping me busy almost 7 nights a week. Talk about nirvana!!!
My nirvana continued for a couple of months, and April knew I was also dating Cindy (April was dating other guys too, including her 18-year-old neighbor half her age!), but Cindy didn’t know I was hanging with April as anything more than a dancing friend at the live music clubs. But to be clear—I wasn’t cheating or anything. I had asked Cindy for an exclusive relationship; she had said no to that, and that it was fine to date other people. So I wisely kept my normally big, honest trap shut for a while and went along with the flow. There was one Saturday morning when April and I were out having breakfast and shopping on Mill Ave. and we almost accidentally bumped into Cindy though. April came rushing nervously back to me after wandering into a store telling me that Cindy was in the same store! My response was to shrug and point out that nobody was doing anything wrong, but I guess women have an intuition about these things that I sure as hell didn’t at the time.
That incident did get me thinking though about whether I should tell Cindy or not. It’s my nature to be honest and I would have felt better with everyone knowing what the score was. And it was getting steadily harder to schedule two women every week without complete transparency all the way around. So after a couple of months of nirvana, Mr. Dumbass blew it and casually let Cindy know about April one day when we were scheduling our upcoming week of fun at the clubs. Cindy was a bit of a “hippie chick” in those days; she hadn’t mentioned my exclusivity offer in the several months since I made it, so I mistakenly assumed that it just wasn’t important to her and I honestly thought it would be no big deal. Boy—was I wrong—Hahaha!! It just goes to show how naĂŻve a young guy can be and how little I really knew about women. The minute I opened my mouth and inserted my foot, I got an earful about “how could I do that, and with HER?!!” and a bunch of other stuff I won’t go into detail about.
The end result was pretty good though—Cindy immediately changed her mind about my boyfriend/girlfriend offer, and we moved in together in short order! We actually were quite a good couple at the time, and we continued our fun life together sharing musical stuff, hanging out and partying, and of course the loving got even better as we became more intimately acquainted. We both had such large record album collections that when we merged them together, it took up half the living room! Fortunately, neither of us gave a shit about television and didn’t own one, so we spent a couple of years going to school, working, and having lots of fun together!
Cindy used to live in Flagstaff and took me on several trips up north for my first experiences in the beautiful mountain woods. She had a nice Ford F150 pickup truck, and I can still remember camping on a mattress in the back of the truck in the open air. We eventually broke up when Cindy graduated and got a job in Sedona but continued to reconnect every once in a while for some friendship and fun (lucky me!)
In the meantime, April had gotten serious with a guy close to her age, they had a son Alex together, and she dropped off the radar as my club dancing buddy. She had taken it well when Cindy gave me the ultimatum. I think she pretty much laughed at my youthful stupidity, and she wasn’t in love with me or anything. We certainly did like each other, but we were pretty much party friends with benefits.
Fast forward about five years (I was about 26 or so by then), and I ran into April with her man at one of the old clubs we used to frequent. I knew him from the old days too (his name was Michael and he was in The Effects, one of the bands we loved), so we all just started talking and rekindled old friendships. It started slowly at first, but I had graduated from college in a pretty crappy economy and was just starting to write term papers for a living (see my piece called “Do You Have the Term Paper Blues?” if you’re curious…) and was also ( believe it or not!) a babysitter for another friend’s kids on the side. April mentioned that they sometimes needed a babysitter for Alex and voila!—Our friendship was ramped up initially because of Alex and my “babysitting skills”—Hahahaha!!!
Unbeknownst to me initially, April and Michael were having some issues, and I eventually became more her friend and confidante than Michael’s. I won’t get into the gory details on a public blog, but I will admit that April and I started rekindling the old flame, and I am ashamed to this day that I did that to Michael, who was also my friend at the time. I had been cheated on, and I already knew that it didn’t feel very good, and I’m still very sorry I did it to someone else. That said, I think I was a “soft landing” for April to get out of a bad relationship, and we ended up as boyfriend and girlfriend for about a year and a half. We moved to my home state of Wisconsin for a year, and it was April’s first time in her 44 years living in a snowy climate! While we were there, I joined the best band I would ever be in, and April went out to many of the Brave New Groove gigs and danced for us all night long. The gringo Polacks in Cheeseland didn’t know what the hell to make of April! Some things never change… 🙂
I’ve never had my own children, and it was very cool for me that Alex lived with us for that year in Wisconsin. He was about 3 at the time, but he knew me quite well since I had been babysitting him since he was about 9 months old. That part was pretty chill—It wasn’t like he moved in with a stranger, but things were a bit difficult for him because he was uprooted at such a young age and I know he missed his dad. I doubt he remembers a lot of our year together, but I certainly do and I am grateful for it to this day. He taught me (at age 3-4!) how to play some primitive video game called “DigDug” I think! There aren’t a lot of photos from the ’80s era with Cindy and April, but fortunately April saved some pics of Alex, and they bring back some great memories of all the fun things you do with little kids.
Eventually, April felt a little bad for Alex because he missed his dad (and I honestly don’t think she was all that fond of the Wisconsin winter!), so she decided to move back to Arizona after a year or so. I moved back about 6 months after she did, but the gap in time had made things a little weird and it didn’t really work out on a permanent basis. I started working in film and photo production shortly after I moved back to Arizona (see “It Beats a Real Job” if you are curious about how that 28-year accident changed my life!), and I met my future wife Sandy on a fashion shoot in 1992.
April wanted to remain friends but that didn’t really work as Sandy and I got together, but 20 years after that, April and I became friends again, and we are still friends to this day! Cindy and I are still friends as well, and I’m very grateful to have both of them as friends to this day. I don’t think there are a lot of guys who can say they are still friends with their girlfriends from decades ago unless they have kids together. Cindy and April have both reached out to me with kindness and concern since I became ill, and April and I have even enjoyed a few music shows together like the old days. We also went out to dinner with Alex and his girlfriend Sami, and I’m glad to say that he turned out to be an awesome dude! I’m a lucky guy in so many ways…
I actually started out writing about this topic before and got sidetracked into how we learned to drive back in 1975. So the first couple of paragraphs will be similar, but I’m not going to talk about driving much at all. The basic point about driving and technology was that in the low-tech “olden days” you had the freedom to go anywhere you wanted because nobody was tracking you with GPS devices, etc. Hell, they didn’t even have cameras on the roads back in those days, and the best anyone could do was check your odometer (assuming it worked, and that was pretty easily remedied if you were inclined to!) The downside was that there was no Uber or Lyft, and if you were out partying you damned well better have great DUI skills because that was the only way you were getting home. (I’m contemplating that essay right now, but my thoughts on that topic will piss a lot of people off in the high-tech era!)
That said, I’m actually quite grateful to have grown up in what were really two distinct technological eras. The reason for that is that both eras have allowed me a great deal of freedom though in considerably different ways. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a freedom lover, and I’m going to do my best in any era to have as much freedom and fun as humanly possible! I’m also kind of a Taoist at heart, and there is always going to be a balance between the positives and negatives of any given thing or situation, and technology is certainly no exception to that.
Of course human technology has always been advancing, and things were obviously different between birth and death for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but the rate of technological acceleration seems to have gone off the charts in my lifetime. I’m amazed at certain things, and I’ve probably said to at least 1,000 people that if you had told me when I was 25 that I would be able to hold a tool in my hand (as I wave my iPhone around) that can access almost all of the world’s knowledge and communicate with over a billion people via the spoken word, the written word, photography, video, music, and ALL PRETTY MUCH SIMULTANEOUSLY, I would have thought you were crazy. And all of this for under $1,000 and about $50/month. Wow…Talk about freedom!
The interesting thing about the technology of the 1960s-2000 and 2000-present is to me the way it has impacted the amount and types of freedom I’ve experienced in my life. Back in the “old days” of the pre-PC era, there was a great deal more personal freedom in many ways because nobody could “track” you, and there was no digital history of what you were doing. It’s been said that once something is online it lives forever, and I think that’s going to be pretty much true until the world as we know it ends or changes in some very drastic way. On the other hand, the ability for immediate personal expression and connection to virtually half the people on the planet is a hugely liberating thing that gives even a lone individual degrees of freedom nobody could have imagined before the modern technological era.
When I was growing up in the low-tech era, there was so much anonymity that I could easily afford to have a WTF attitude and take more risks in a variety of ways. You could get drunk and say whatever the hell you wanted, and the only people who knew about it were your friends and other people who were actually physically present. And if you were at a party or a bar where more off-the-cuff conversation and behavior were likely to happen, chances are that the others in the room were in a similar state and would either laugh at or join in any stupidity you might exhibit, or at least wouldn’t remember it very clearly the next day! Hell—even if you offended 100 people (and most of them probably wouldn’t even know your name), in a week or two all would be forgotten and perhaps most importantly, THERE WERE NO CAMERAS IN EVERYBODY’S POCKETS AND HANDS to provide a permanent record of any stupidity you may have committed. Not to mention, there was no internet to post it on so that your stupidity (or even just outside-the-box self-expression) could INSTANTLY BECOME VISIBLE TO MILLIONS OF PEOPLE FOREVER.
The worst that could happen in the “olden days” was that a small circle of your friends would remember “the X story” and every once in a while you would have to hear something like: “remember when Eric said or did such-and-such to so-and-so, and the other person did this or that?” And everyone in the room might re-live a laugh at your expense, but that would be the extent of it. Hell—My attitude was and is so WTF I actually enjoy making other people laugh, even if it is at “my expense.” I’ve told some of those stories here, and I want you to get a charge out of them and think, “that dude is kind of crazy—I would never say or do that!” (But I’ll bet some of you wish you had—Hahahaha!)
Now think about the old days relative to the all-knowing modern era for a minute. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all heard stories of people who did one thing that wasn’t necessarily even “wrong” in everyone’s eyes had their entire lives negatively impacted by one foolish moment or even worse, a false accusation. I have a friend whose son was falsely accused of something sexually inappropriate by a crazy young woman who has accused at least 4 others (that I know of!) because she likes the attention of being a public “victim.” He was temporarily banished from his college campus and only his parents spending over $50K on a really good lawyer got him back in school. And he went through a shit ton of emotional trauma that he didn’t deserve and could negatively impact his psyche for life. If something like that had happened to me at age 18, I sure as hell wouldn’t have had my WTF attitude and nearly as much fun in life!
Now I’m certainly not saying that all accusations are false (but I know this one was—I’ve seen the digital evidence!), and there has already been a ton of stuff written about this topic online, but think about how modern technology has negatively impacted one’s propensity to take a chance and have a WTF attitude if you don’t even have to actually do something for someone else to say you did in front of THE ENTIRE PLANET. That’s a little scary to me. If a future employer can “Google” your name and find out about something foolish, wild, or a little “outside the box” (or untrue!) decades later and not hire you, I would say that definitely inhibits one’s freedom to take some risks and enjoy life to the fullest. Fortunately, a lot of people are actually human and regularly say WTF anyway. Modern technology just makes the risk that much greater.
Another area that has been impacted by modern technology for both good and for ill is creative license. The propensity for good in the high-tech era can be found in the freedom to create whatever the hell you want and make it available to the world on a moment’s notice. Back in the old days, to make a video, record a song, or write a book and make it publicly available took a huge amount of time and money, which meant that corporate interests tended to exercise much more control over the creative process. And you generally couldn’t get it done without a pile of money! Although this was the case, corporate interests like record companies, etc. really didn’t care about the content itself as long as it sold and made them money. In a way, this gave the artists a lot of creative freedom to say WTF, because they knew their audiences and what they liked. And the old cigar-chomper guys in the office didn’t really look too closely at the creative content while they counted their coin…
Of course there were certainly do-gooder censorship types who would raise a stink in the local media or in Congress once in a while (anyone remember Al’s wife Tipper Gore trying to rate/censor “obscene, violent, sexist, insert your evil adjective here rock music in the mid-1980s?). My idol Frank Zappa actually went in front of Congress during the hearings for Tipper’s bill (and she wasn’t even a legislator, but her husband was a senator, so I guess that was close enough to censor rock ‘n’ roll!) But the end result of this was kind of ho-hum, and a few heavy metal albums were rated as “nasty” in some form. Sure, some parents probably became more aware of what their kids were listening to, but most parents in that era didn’t like rock music so they would pretty much ignore it. Mine sure did even though I played it constantly.
Here are a couple of songs with lyrics by a couple of my favorite artists that were released in 1968 and 1978 respectively. The first one is the Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues.” The gist of it is that the protagonist Mick Jagger is trying to entice a 15-year-old girl and her friend to “come upstairs” to his room for some wild sex. In the live version of the song, Mick changes the girl’s age from 15 to 13. Somehow I can’t see this happening today without a huge amount of instant outrage on social media, etc… (On second thought, perhaps all those wealthy executives and powerful politicians who hung out with Jeffery Epstein on his “kiddie island” might not object to it. Or to Hitlery killing him either–But I digress…)
stray cat blues – – Video Search Results
The second song is Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown,” and the gist of this song is that some arrogant jock dude (Bobby Brown) “fucks this dyke” who cuts of his balls and turns him into a “homo.” FYI—I bought the Rolling Stones’ record when I was about 15 and the Zappa record when I was 17 or 18. Ahhh…The creative freedom of the ancient age when nobody was the wiser… Have a listen if you dare. But be prepared to be “offended” even though the song is intended as a complete satire on arrogant Joe Jockstraps, who are certainly a safe target these days–Hahaha! Hell–I even played this song in front of audiences a few times in a band…
youtube bobby brown frank zappa – – Video Search Results
Now, I’m not of fan of most modern music (mostly because they play it with computers instead of real humans creating a real groove with real instruments, but hey—I’m an old guy who used to play actual instruments…), and I’m guessing that equally nasty lyrics abound and you can find songs like that on the internet. But, much like the person who holds back from saying something “offensive” or having a WTF attitude, I think that the threat of instant backlash on the internet is going to create a lot of self-censorship even as the songs are being written, particularly if the goal is to sell as much music as possible in whatever format they sell music in these days (digital downloads?)
I’m guessing this self-censorship is similar to the person at the party who doesn’t want to take a risk because everyone has a device connected to the internet, and one mistake could ruin a career or at least one’s social life. I think this is especially true in the current PC era where every snowflake wants to have their 15 seconds of fame on the internet signaling their virtue and being “offended” by something racist, sexist, misogynist, ad infinitum, ad absurdum… Feel free in the comments to point out that I’m completely wrong though. I would love to hear some edgy new stuff very soon!
And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for—Dating in the low-tech and high-tech eras! The first (and rather obvious) thing I must point out is that the advent of modern technology did not eliminate the old school ways of dating and mating in any way, shape or form. The great news is that even with Match, Tinder, Bumble, Fumble (yeah, I THINK I’m kidding on the last one—Hahaha!) and 100 other dating sites and apps, you can still meet new people the old-fashioned ways at work, at bars, on the dance floor (one of my faves!), in a store, anywhere else in person, or being “fixed up” by a mutual friend (how I met my last girlfriend Sherry if you read our stories in “Imagine”). So technology hasn’t really detracted from the dating scene at all but only added to it.
I’ve done my fair share of dating over the recent years when I was single, and I’ve met fun, interesting, beautiful women in both low-tech and high-tech ways. They both seem to work pretty well. Obviously, the advantage to low-tech is that you usually meet in person first, so you already know if there is a physical attraction at least. Photos online aren’t always accurate (often by design, and I worked in advertising so I ought to know!), and people can spend a lot of time tweaking their profile so they sound more attractive than they really are.
On the other hand, the high-tech method of meeting potential dates is that you literally have the opportunity to meet 1,000 times more people than you would just going about your day, and you can pre-screen people based on 50 different characteristics. I was always very open-minded in terms of age, race, occupation and stuff like that, but I did prefer women who were really into good music or had other common interests like hiking and the gym. Even though you won’t hit it off with the majority of on-line dates, I liked the social WTF nature of meeting new (and potentially “strange”–Hahaha!) women for happy hour (always my first option!) I can say that many people tend to overthink this aspect of things in terms of putting too much emphasis on what a person’s online profile says. Live a little and just say WTF, for Chrissakes! Life is short–What have you got to lose by taking a chance and meeting someone new?
OK—You asked for it. Below are a few G-rated photos of some of the interesting and beautiful women I was lucky enough to meet using both low-tech and high-tech realities in recent years. But I’ve gotten plenty of X-rated ones over the years too which I never once asked for. (I certainly love a woman who shares my WTF attitude in the modern era! But I won’t post them–Scout’s honor…) So now you know why I’m damned grateful for living in both eras. Talk about the best of both worlds! And thank you very much ladies for saying WTF and wanting to meet me. I really enjoyed your company on a date at the very least and sometimes we hit it off! What more can a guy ask from life?
And if you’ve made it to the end, I’ll point out that with only two exceptions all of these women are all in my age bracket (around 50). (And if you try to guess which ones, you’ll probably guess wrong!) I can honestly say that I felt so lucky to have experienced the “dating life” in the modern era with so many sweet, fun, beautiful women my age. And since I was no longer a boy or somewhat clueless young man, I had the time of my life and I think all of the girls enjoyed themselves hanging out with me. At least I hope so because the real beauty of the man/woman thing for me as a straight guy was the yin/yang vibe of hanging out with awesome girls and simply enjoying some time and life together. (Disclaimer: To each his or her own and no judgement express or implied regarding the sexual preferences of others–Hahaha!!)
What’s been interesting about my current situation is that when my old friends have come to visit or have reached out to me via email, etc., they remember old life stories that I had forgotten about. My friend Dano came to visit a month or so ago and reminded me of something that happened when we were about 17 or so, and I can definitely say I was grateful for this fun experience that had completely slipped my mind. It’s nothing deeply meaningful in a cosmic sense, but I think it is funny and does once again demonstrate the WTF attitude I had once I hit puberty.Â
Dano was lucky enough to live in an awesome house right on Lake Michigan in our idyllic town of Mequon, Wisconsin. We used to have campfires on the beach and party there and in his boathouse all through high school and college. Where Dano lived though, the house was actually about a ¼ mile from the lake itself, and you had to climb up a wooded path through the lake bluff forest to get between his house and the beach. Dano liked to fish, and one summer day he had inflated his large rubber raft, dropped it on the beach, and returned up the wooded path to his house to get his fishing gear. That took about 15 minutes or so, and when he returned he was pleasantly surprised (I assume!) and certainly shocked to discover two completely nude girls about our age casually lounging in his raft which they had launched into Lake Michigan! Boring rural Wisconsin had somehow transformed itself into a sexually liberated place like the south of France (or at least Southern California—Hahaha!)
The girls invited him to join them in the raft, but they explained that the raft was now a “nudist raft” and that he would have to “drop trou” if he wanted to get on his own raft—Hahaha! Well, Dano is half Korean and comes from a very socially conservative family so he wasn’t about to do that, particularly in his own back yard! But being the good friend that he is to all his buds, he decided to hike up the bluff again to call his close friend Phil who only lived about 5 minutes away and tell him about the new status of his now “nudist raft.” Of course this was in the old days of hard wired home phones only, and when Phil didn’t answer the phone, Dano had the good sense and kind heart to call his good friend Eric (or “Crickey” as I was known back then) and offer him the opportunity of a lifetime (at least where we lived!) Fortunately for me, I was home and answered the phone on a Saturday afternoon that summer day.Â
What’s funny is that Dano didn’t tell me anything about what was really going on, but simply asked me what I was doing right now. I replied, “not much, what’s up with you?” or something similar, and he said: “You need to come over to my house RIGHT NOW.” I naturally wondered what the hell was going on and asked if everything was OK with him, and he said: “Oh, it’s more than OK—Just trust me on this and get your ass over here right now before it’s too late.” I’m sure I made another comment, but when he told me again to just “trust me on this one,” I hopped in my car and took the 15-minute drive over there. Dano wasn’t the kind of guy to BS you about anything, so I was game for whatever he thought was so important.
When I pulled into the driveway, Dano had this shit-eating grin on his face so I knew at least everything was OK in Danoville. Of course, I asked what was going on and he still refused to tell me, but said that all would be obvious once we got down to the lake. I must say I was rather intrigued but had absolutely no idea what to expect. When we finally got to the beach, the nude girls waved at us and asked us to join them on Dano’s “nudist raft.” I was beside myself with equal measures of surprise and excitement, and the first thought that went through my head was: “Are you freaking kidding me?!!” and the second was, “Oh, hell yeah!” I started taking off my clothes and was pretty much expecting Dano to do the same. I’m not sure if he expected me to be all in so quickly, but my mind was filled with possibilities, and I had to play this thing out. I’m sure it crossed my mind more than once that these two girls wanted to mess around with we two guys, etc. and that some kind of sex fest was indeed quite possible.Â
I asked Dano why he wasn’t getting naked to join the girls, and I think he said something about not wanting to have any of his family see him if they should wander down to the lake by chance. I certainly understood that, and tried to act as cool and nonchalant as possible to impress the very free-spirited girls at this point. I got on the raft with them and tried not to stare at their nubile young bodies, which was pretty tough for a young guy like me! But I knew I had to “act cool” like this was no big deal or the girls would think I was uncool and wouldn’t take things any further.Â
What was interesting was that as we got to relaxing and talking for a while, the thought of sex as a goal or outcome gradually went away and it became clear that the whole nudist thing wasn’t really about sex at all. Being a young man, I certainly enjoyed the view (and I hope they did too—At least the lake wasn’t too cold that day—Hahaha!), but I started to understanding the psychologically liberating nature of nudism as a concept. Dano stayed in the water on the side of the raft and was involved in the conversation while navigating the raft and making sure we didn’t end up too far out into the lake. He did his best to act cool and not stare at the girls.
I think we were all chilling and talking for about an hour when Dano & I noticed a rather large, athletic teenage dude standing on the shore only about 50 feet from us in the raft! Dano later said the guy reminded him of Lou Ferrigno, the actor who played “The Incredible Hulk” on the TV show from that era, and I have to admit there was certainly some resemblance. The dude looked like a high school football linebacker, and I was just a skinny, long-haired guitar player! The girls had told us they were guests visiting family friends a few houses down the road from Dano’s, and when we saw him I thought I was in serious trouble. The first thing that ran through my mind was that one of the girls was his sister, the other was his girlfriend, and I believe that actually turned out to be the case!Â
But when he shouted out to the girls quite casually that they better come back to the house because it was getting close to dinner, I started to relax a little. I wasn’t going to relax quite yet, but one of the girls (the sister, I think) calmly told Dano to bring the raft to the shore, I started to settle down. At that point I felt a little weird, but as we approached the shore and “Hulk, Jr.” could see I was naked, he didn’t bat an eyelash. We all got dressed, said goodbye, and I never really did find out whether these people were tourists from SoCal or just a family of touring nudists. It was an eye-opening experience that prepared me for some later adventures in life… I was grateful at the time for the liberating experience, the lesson that nudism didn’t necessarily mean sex, and even more grateful about 40 years later for the lesson that it could be about sex depending on who the “nudists” were!
I guess this story really begins when we had a puzzle at home featuring Connie Kreski, Playboy magazine’s Miss January 1968. I’m not sure how it ended up under the Christmas tree (it was a gift to my Dad from one of his friends, I’m guessing), but as a 6-year-old boy I loved puzzles, and one with an image of a “naked lady” was an extra special treat! I saw it in the round can and I’m sure I didn’t know ahead of time that it was a beautiful topless Playboy centerfold, but as you will see below, things were pretty tame back in those days.
A few days after Christmas I dumped it out onto the formal dining room table (where we did all our puzzles) and got to work. About halfway through, I realized it was a “naked lady” puzzle, and I was wondering how my parents would react. Not that this stopped me from continuing—I really wanted to see what a beautiful semi-nude woman looked like. Just about then my Mom came in and saw me working away and was starting to scold me for taking out a puzzle that wasn’t mine. My Dad overheard the conversation and stepped in to say that it was fine with him if I did his gift puzzle—I think he kind of gave my Mom a look as if to say: “Don’t worry—He’s supposed to like “naked ladies”—It’s perfectly normal!” I think my Mom realized the truth of this sentiment, and after all this was the “sexually liberated” 1960s. Of course, that was nothing compared to what kids see today in the age of the internet!
In that same vein, I rather suspect that both my Dad and my next door neighbor’s dad made it relatively easy for their sons to find the current issues of Playboy and Penthouse magazines that came out every month. From ages 8-12 or so, my neighbor Chris and I would sneak peeks at the current issues in our Dads’ nightstands and get our first shot at a sexual education. Although we technically grew up in the era of “sexual liberation,” our parents were a little too old to be fully invested in it. But I think it did influence them to at least be open minded enough to expose their kids to nudity and sexuality without having to address the subject directly. Hey—If Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione could do the uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing work for them, why not take advantage of it!
Besides the obvious idea of Dads of that era wanting their boys to grow up to become straight dudes who liked girls, there was also an interesting facet to Penthouse that was advantageous to women as well. They had a column we read every month titled “Call Me Madam” by Xaviera Hollander, a Dutch call girl and madam who had written a book called “The Happy Hooker” before she was hired by Penthouse to write their column. Xaviera’s column was great in several ways—First, it focused on the idea that men needed to know how to please women sexually. Until that time, I’m guessing the prevailing attitude was that a woman’s satisfaction was irrelevant and sexuality was all about the man getting laid.
Second, it was an advice column that taught men specific aspects and techniques about how to please women sexually. Those of you that know me know I’m an avid reader who loves to learn, and I am eternally grateful to Xaviera for wiring my young mind correctly and teaching me enough “how to” stuff to at least get me started off on “the right foot” (so to speak—Hahaha!) once I became a teenage boy. We didn’t have the internet in those days eons ago, and our parents weren’t going to teach us much about sex even if they knew it! Who better than a hot Dutch woman who had sex for a living for decades? Thanks so much, Xaviera! (And the women in my life thank you too…)
In addition to our fathers’ monthly stream of Playboy and Penthouse, we were fortunate enough to have a family of slightly crazy people who lived in a Victorian mansion in the woods about a half mile away from us. They were part of the original farming family who owned the land and built our idyllic neighborhood one house at a time. Aunt Sylvia was a complete wacko (think “crazy old spinster” right out of Central Casting) who lived with her parents at age 50, and she enjoyed having the neighborhood kids in to hang out, play pool, do whatever else, and basically roam their giant “Munsters Mansion” at will. Well, one of the things Chris, Tom and I discovered while roaming the mansion was grandpa’s gigantic stash of Playboy, Penthouse, and a few other more extreme mags that he had virtually filled an entire cabinet with. Unlike our fathers who read and tossed the current issues, (and I will admit to finding a few in the trash and hiding them under my bed–Wink!) Gramps (or maybe even Aunt Sylvia—It’s not like we asked whose mags they were, and in hindsight Aunt Sylvia may have liked girls) saved everything, so we had a virtual sex “library” at our disposal anytime we were there. I do remember Gramps catching and scolding us once, but we all agreed not to tell our parents and the library stayed open—Woohoo!!!
Thanks Dads, thanks Aunt Sylvia, and thanks Gramps for giving the young boys the knowledge to keep their future women as happy as possible!
This is a philosophical piece on how freedom and fear are essentially opposing forces in the universe and within ourselves. The more I contemplate my new life with ALS, the more I am learning about philosophical things like freedom and fear. I may be a prisoner in my body to an extent I never imagined, but this has motivated me to free my own mind even more and to try and help others by freeing theirs a bit.
I can honestly say that I’ve had so many experiences for which I’m grateful largely because I haven’t been afraid to take risks, try new things, and meet people all over the various spectra of life. My default position for most things that aren’t inherently bad/evil is honestly: “Sure, WTF—Why the hell not!” For those of you who have already read some of my other stories, you might be thinking: “That guy is nuts—I would never be crazy enough (or dumb enough in some cases—Hahaha!) to take psychedelic drugs, smoke weed publicly in a foreign country (or in a US jail cell), go trail running alone in 112-degree heat, or drive around in a snowstorm illegally at age 14 (or hallucinating on LSD!) And you would certainly be right that this stuff would be classified as “risky behavior” by many people. (And I still have more “risky behavior” stories on the way!)
But the relationship between freedom and fear is more than that because I think many people let fear get in the way of doing things that are certainly physically and legally safe simply because of their own personal insecurities or “hangups” as the hippies used to call them back in the day (even a little before my time!). A simple example of this might be something I have always loved to do, and that’s dancing by myself in public to live music. Unlike many guys in particular (it’s certainly more socially acceptable for women in our culture), I’ve never hesitated to shake it by myself even when nobody else is out on the dance floor. I’ve had friends (though not close friends—they get me) and strangers give me the hairy eyeball as though there were something wrong with dancing if I didn’t have a female dance partner or wait until other people started dancing, etc.
Some thought I might be gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this was long before it was cool!) or that I was just some kind of weirdo who didn’t want to play by “the rules.” My attitude (often influenced by the 5 beers and other trendy chemical amusement aids) was always that “somebody’s gotta get this party started, and I’m your guy!” I truly loved the music I went out to hear over 1,000 times in my life. It made me want to move and I wasn’t about to let some imaginary fear of “everybody looking at me funny” to stop me from having a good time. And the irony is that a lot of the time, when others saw me out there by myself, they would join in.
Even better, I ended up dancing with and meeting a lot of fun, beautiful women by having the stones to get out there and be the first guy shaking it! I actually met Cindy and April, both of my serious girlfriends in my 20s, doing exactly that. April was someone who would dance alone too, and we would regularly cross paths on the dance floor of our favorite bands like The Effects, Walt Richardson, Small Paul, and others. We literally became friends for life by meeting on the dance floor repeatedly. At a different show, Cindy saw me dancing by myself to Big Pete Pearson and the Blues Connection, and it turned out that we both knew Bob Corritore (Big Pete’s harmonica player at the time and now owner of the famous Rhythm Room). She asked Bob if he knew me, bought me a beer on the break, and we were together for over two years after that. All because I got myself noticed on the dance floor… (And there is another story about Cindy and April on the way—Still love you both!)
The lack of fear influenced my career to a huge extent as well. My friend and former business partner Marc gave me another piece of advice I didn’t mention in my “Film and Photo Production–It Beats a ‘Real Job'” story. This advice was something along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing a bit here) “If someone on set asks you if you know how to do something you’ve never done before, just say “yes” and figure it out.” It was probably only my third or fourth job as a flunkie production assistant (PA), and Richard the producer (who quickly became a friend as well) asked me if I would go to Grand Travel and pick up the production motorhome and drive it for the next couple of days on the shoot. I had never driven one before, but I had seen plenty of geezers riding around town in those giant boats (this one was 34’ long), so I told Richard it was no problem and immediately called Marc to figure out what the hell to do! I told him I had said yes per his advice and he told me not to worry about a thing. “If the old geezers can drive those things, so can you!” was his argument, and I couldn’t argue with his logic.
Fortunately, Marc had driven them before, and he gave me a few handy tips and told me the rental place would give me a 90-minute crash course on how everything worked (electrical, plumbing, removing the bed from the bedroom to make room for the wardrobe department, etc.) and that I should take good notes since I was now officially the motorhome PA on the shoot! I did indeed rise to the challenge and the end result was that this new skill was the impetus for Marc and I buying our own production motorhome and starting a business called Cinemasters together. We had it for about 8 years, and it was instrumental in me getting a lot of the fashion photo production work I got in the first decade of my career as a producer and location scout. Simply saying “yes” instead of “no” or “er, ummmm…” literally advanced my career by leaps and bounds and made me a pretty good chunk of change in the years immediately following. Thanks again for the great advice Marc, and the answer is always “yes!”
I would have to say I took the same approach in terms of personal friendships as well. It seems that the goal of a lot of people is to find and choose friends who are mirror images of themselves or damned close to it. While I certainly agree that you need to have something in common for an initial attraction, the rest of your interests, personality traits, philosophical outlooks on life, etc. can be considerably different. I always enjoyed learning and discovering new interests and new ways of thinking from my friends. For example, on the political spectrum “Eric the libertarian” is a complete outlier in that probably only 1% of people share my almost anarchist philosophy. The fact that 99% of my friends disagree with me makes for a lot of really great fun in terms of kicking ideas around, debating, mocking each other in good fun, etc. And I equally enjoy both the mocking and being mocked! The only “risk” to being mocked is one’s potentially fragile ego, and you need to get over whiny shit by age 15 at the latest. As I recently discovered, taking yourself too seriously is a definite waste of the precious little time you really have in life, and you have no idea how much time that is actually going to be!
On the social side of things, I’ve got friends who range from traditional mainstream religious monogamists to atheist polyamorous swingers. (If you’re lucky, I might decide to tell you more about them–wink!) I’ve got friends whose main interests revolve around outdoor stuff like camping, fishing, and building stuff with their own two hands to others who can’t change a tire on their car but speak several languages and read as many weird books as I do. I’ve got friends who are as into musical diversity and esoteric shit in the extreme (love my ZappaHead friends!), while others listen to musical garbage on the radio that would put me to sleep. But I can assure you that I have other things I love about my musically clueless friends, and we focus on that stuff instead and I occasionally mock their lack of musical knowledge or taste. It is pretty safe to say that if you don’t have a sense of humor (no matter how weird), then I probably won’t be a good friend for you! At the end of the day, I urge everyone to take a chance, say “yes” to something new, and remember that you only have one life to live. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself, so get out and dance, dammit!!!
NO GUTS, NO GLORY!!!
