Now that Mable and Herschel were married and had combined incomes, they started looking for a house to buy. I had lived in apartments for years, and the idea of a house of my own was a dream come true. They found a deal they liked in the community of Lincoln Park. The suburbs south of Detroit were known as “Downriver.” A new subdivision was going up, and the location, price, and style of house worked. The house featured three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, with a full basement on a corner lot, and a big backyard. Paradise! All I cared about was having my own room and a basement where I could have a model train setup and play my guitar. America elected John F. Kennedy as president, and the future looked bright.
We moved in when I was 12, and I started the sixth grade at Priest Elementary School, a 30-minute walk from home. I got along well with the kids, except for the occasional fistfight with boys with whom there seemed to be no other way to resolve our differences. I didn’t mind fighting, and I won as many as I lost. These contests were usually over quickly without any real damage done.
Art class was my favorite. I had always liked to draw, and was good with my hands in clay, or doing woodcuts in asphalt tile. I drew a lot of trains, and I’d copy comic book characters. I loved playing sports and tried out for a PONY-league baseball team, but didn’t make the cut because I was goofing around too much for the coaches’ liking. Pickup games of baseball happened all over the neighborhood, and I enjoyed the physicality of it all, as well as bike riding in the summer and sledding and ice skating in the winter. I was a pretty good ice skater. I played a little hockey, but enjoyed figure skating to music more. I slipped and fell on my face once, drove my front teeth through my lower lip, and got 12 stitches to close the wound. I excelled in gym class at school and loved Scatterball. I had good reflexes and could almost always outlast all the other players.
I played my guitar at home, and through a neighborhood guitarist I met a new music teacher who lived close by. A low-key, gentle man, he had a studio in his basement. He started me on major and minor bar chords, and rhythm and melody playing. I asked him to teach me to play like all the instrumental groups I was hearing, and mostly like Chuck Berry. He couldn’t quite do that, but he was still a good teacher. I studied with him for the next year. The guitar was taking more of my time and interest, and I started looking for records to buy that featured the guitar.
PLAYING MY GUITAR, science fiction movies, drawing, and sports with my friends were the good things in my life at the time. The bad thing that overshadowed everything was that Herschel abused me. When he first moved in with us, he liked to hold me down, tickle me and then tweak my penis, laughing hysterically as if this was good family fun. The smell of his aftershave and the heat of his body were overwhelming. The muscles in his arms were like steel to me. I would scream and cry, violently trying to fight him off. It was perverse, and it was torture. I would battle back as best I could, but my punches didn’t have enough power to make a difference. I would be sweating, breathing hard, and thrashing to get free of him. He was a grown man. I was a boy. This backwoods depravity was horrific, and it increased my revulsion of him.
My mother would laugh along, and seemed to find it highly amusing. It was anything but. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t protecting me from this monster. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. No one ever said anything about it afterward, and it happened far too many times. It was family fun—if your family lived in the ninth circle of hell.
Much later, when I was in my forties, I found out that Herschel’s sexual deviance was much worse with my sister Kathi. This miscreant profoundly harmed her. Like with me, hers would start out with tickling, but then it would move to touching her vagina and fondling her while he held her in his grip. Later, he forced her into fellatio, and she had to endure his cunning, horrific abuse. Now that we’re both adults, we’ve discussed it, and we have to live with its dreadfulness. We have long wondered how Mable could have been the victim of sexual abuse by her own father, and yet have allowed the same thing to happen to her children. I buried these experiences and never brought them up to my mother as an adult. They were just too painful. Kathi confronted her once in her teens and again later as an adult, and both times Mable retreated into denial. Facing her own abuse as a child and then the abuse of her own children was beyond her. The pattern of hiding and denying sexual abuse repeats generation after generation if it’s never brought out in the open. These are experiences we will never get over. I will never forget, and my sister sure as hell never will, either.
I FOUND A MUSIC STORE on Fort Street that sold records, musical instruments, and gave lessons. Town & Country Music had a Rickenbacker franchise, and had all the latest models in stock. One of the fringe benefits of taking lessons there was that I could play the new Ricky’s through an amp. After a while, the teacher would set me up with the guitar, leave the room, and let me play whatever I wanted. Then I got another teacher who was a professional player who worked in the clubs. He’d regale me with stories of things that happened at gigs, which was intriguing. Local musicians would come in and hang out with the instructors, talking about music and gigs. At 13, I transitioned from seeing myself as a solo Elvis-type performer to wanting to be a band member. When my dog, Ben-Hur, was run over and killed in the street in front of my house, I found a place for my feelings by playing my guitar alone in my room.
I had been playing the guitar for a few years, and I could play pretty well. My ongoing problem with most music teachers was that they always tried to teach me to sight-read the standards: Gershwin, Cole Porter, and so on. I wasn’t interested in any of that old cornball stuff; I wanted to play rock & roll. I wanted to know Chuck Berry solos. I wanted to be able to play like the Ventures. I wanted to play “Apache” by Jorgen Ingmann. I started listening to Barney Kessel and Kenny Burrell, but I had trouble figuring out where all those notes they played came from.
I decided to start answering ads in the Sunday papers for “Guitar Player Wanted.” There was so much live music work available in Detroit that there’d be two or three columns of those ads. Groups were active all over Detroit and the suburbs. There was a thriving nightclub scene, and most featured live music. After going on a few auditions, I started to get a feel for what the competition was like. I knew I was too young to work in nightclubs, but I wanted to join a band, and this seemed like the quickest way.
To land a position, you had to be able to play songs like “Hideaway” by Freddie King, and some Ventures stuff. I could play some of the tunes, but not all of them.
I kept running into the same two guys at the auditions: “Big Ray” and “Little Ray,” who were both a little older and beat me out every time. I was in over my head.
Common sense dictated that rather than joining someone else’s band, starting my own band was going to be the route to take. This was an exciting idea, and I obsessed over it. My schoolwork notebooks were filled with drawings of guitars and drums, and bands playing onstage. Lists of band names, song ideas, logos.
I started asking around for kids who played musical instruments. I went through a series of neighborhood connections, but at first couldn’t find any serious partners. And instruments were a problem. Who actually owned any? Finally, I found some like-minded boys with their own gear, and we got down to business. We practiced in our basements and garages. We were truly a garage band. Kids from around the block would hear us playing, and would come over on their bikes to see what the noise was about. We played “Ramrod” by Duane Eddy, “Red River Rock” by Johnny and the Hurricanes, The Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run,” The Rebels’ “Wild Weekend,” and others. We worked on our choreography, practicing when to jump up, and when to crouch down or spin around. Who went up front, and who moved back. The moves were almost as important as the music.
I had started to develop a performance style even before I could play the guitar. A natural ham, I’d entertain my mother and her girlfriends with Elvis impressions, using a broom as my guitar. I learned this by standing in front of the mirror in my mother’s bedroom, holding the broom and lip-synching to records. Jody Reynolds’s “Endless Sleep” was one. The dark mood of the song fit my romantic self-image perfectly. This evolved into entertaining the neighborhood kids out under the streetlights at night.
Now that I was beginning to be able to actually play an instrument and had a gang to do it with, there was little doubt about where I was headed.
Sometimes Herschel would invite a few professional musician friends over for a jam session. I would be asleep, and would wake up to hear live music coming from the living room. Mable let me get up to watch. I was amazed at the way they could go from song to song without having to talk about what they were going to do. I was intrigued by how Don Chessor, a guitarist, could solo and invent a melody on the spot. They’d play for about an hour, then go in the kitchen and drink whiskey, then play another set. When they were on break, Don said it would be okay if I played his guitar, a sunburst Fender Jazzmaster. Someday, I vowed, I’d have a guitar that cool.
Don and I became friends. I volunteered to do his yard work, just to get to know him better. The paragon of cool, Don played in bars, and did electronic repairs as a second job. I couldn’t believe how many songs he knew.
When I was 14, my mother sat me down one day to talk about me being a musician. “I want you to do what you want to do with your life. I want you to do what makes you happy, but being a musician is a very hard life. To be a professional musician means that you’ll be working in bars and nightclubs at night, and sleeping during the day. Plus, musicians are around drinking and drugs, and loose women. It’s a hard life.”
If I wasn’t committed before we had our talk, I was afterward. The things she warned me about sounded great to me.
IN 1962, Mable got pregnant with my sister Peggy. She was born on October 10, 1962. Peggy was very premature, and the oxygen in her incubator compromised her eyesight, blinding her. Mable was stoic and took the news with acceptance, grace, and love. I didn’t really know how to feel about it and just rolled with it all. I naturally loved my new little sister, and liked rocking her to sleep. She was a very sweet baby. I knew she had some challenges ahead, but I was a teenage boy and was going through my own major growing pains.
Besides, I was in a state of constant crisis because my relationship with Herschel couldn’t have been worse. I loathed him, and he didn’t get me at all.
That fall, I was nailed for shoplifting from a discount store at the Lincoln Park Mall. A buddy, a girlfriend, and I were stealing just for the hell of it. I grabbed some model car parts, and my girlfriend stole a facecloth. We had just exited the store when a plainclothes dick grabbed us and brought us back inside to the security office. They made us call our parents and tell them to come and get us. Herschel was home, and he came to collect me. In the car, he asked me why I would do something like that, and I told him I didn’t know. We rode home in silence. When my mother came home from work and heard the news, all hell broke loose. She went into an explosion of disbelief that her son could do such a thing. Stealing! I couldn’t mount any kind of defense, and I just had to take it. This became a pattern. I’d get into another mess, she’d lose her mind for a few days, and then it would pass.
There were three more days of gloom when my grades took a nosedive. I couldn’t focus on school anymore. If I had a great teacher, one who actually took an interest in the class, I did well and got good grades. But more often, the teachers just punched in and collected their pay.
I had big trouble with an eighth-grade teacher. Mrs. Edwards was a mean-spirited disciplinarian with no interest in educating kids. Earlier in the year, she was physically abusive to me and I defended myself. On the last day of school before summer vacation, I went out in our backyard and scooped up some dog turds. I put them in a box, wrapped it like a present, and wrote, “To Mrs. Edwards. What we think of you,” on it. Later that day, she saw me putting it on her desk and gave me a big smile, as if all was forgiven. Just then, another boy lit an entire pack of firecrackers in the classroom.
Pandemonium! Noise and smoke blew into the hallways, and kids were screaming and cracking up. I ran out of the classroom and watched the panic from the stairwell. Mrs. Edwards came at me, convinced that I’d set them off. She dug her nails into my neck and arms, and I swung on her. Another teacher ran over and dug her nails into my earlobe, almost severing it. Blood was pouring as Mrs. Edwards marched me to the office.
After an hour of pleading that I hadn’t set off the firecrackers, she relented and let me go home. I went out riding my bike, enjoying the first day of summer vacation. After a while I went home, and as I was eating a snack, the doorbell rang. I looked out the window to see Mrs. Edwards, her husband, and my guidance counselor, who was holding the gift-wrapped box of dog shit. Herschel let them in. We all stood there in silence looking at each other. They left, and Herschel was dumbstruck again at my behavior. He was totally unequipped for parenthood.
When Mable got home and heard what happened, the earth tipped on its axis. She wept, she screamed, she hit me repeatedly. She sat down with her head in her hands and said, “First it was stealing, then it was lying, then it was bad grades—and now, this!” I felt bad that I’d made my mother feel so bad, but I didn’t cry. And I didn’t regret it.
Later that night when I got ready for bed, she came into my room and saw the claw marks and scratches all over my shoulders and neck, and the deep wound to my ear. She went off again, this time at Mrs. Edwards for abusing me. The next morning, she took me to the school board offices and demanded the teacher be fired for what she’d done. I was proud of her.
That fall at Huff Junior High School, I wanted to join a sports team. I had always enjoyed sports, and although I wasn’t a standout athlete, I was adept and had some physical talent. Having always been a good swimmer (Mable got Kathi and me swimming lessons at an early age), I went out for the swim team. I passed the tryout, joined the team, and attended practice every day after school. I learned the butterfly, and that became my event. I swam the 50-meter fly and the fly leg of the medley relays.
During this time, I was aware that a serious international problem was brewing. I watched the news on TV, and there was no mistaking the gravity of the reports of Russian nuclear missiles being deployed in Cuba. I knew what the atomic bomb was, and that the use of these kinds of bombs would mean that the entire world could be destroyed. No one tried to mitigate my fears; Mable’s business had expanded to a third salon and she had her hands full running them, and Herschel was no student of world affairs. I was just starting to see what grown-up life might hold, and I didn’t want the world to blow up. My concerns grew as the crisis escalated daily. I had no one to talk to about this; it was like only Walter Cronkite and I understood how serious the situation was.
In the final days of the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev, I went to sleep with the certainty that a nuclear attack would happen any minute. I envisioned a giant flash of light off in the distance in the night sky, followed by a shock wave sweeping through the neighborhood, destroying everything. It was so real I could taste it.
The rumor was that Detroit would be a likely target, as it was the manufacturing center of the country, and they’d want to destroy our capacity to build weapons. The city was known as the “Arsenal of Democracy” for its production of tanks, planes, artillery, and jeeps during World War II. I had never been that scared in my entire life. When the crisis passed, I felt reborn. With that behind us, I was committed to rocking.
Around this time, I discovered hot rods and drag racing. I began reading all the current hot rod magazines, and built model cars. Drag racing was popular in the Detroit area, with weekly meets at the Detroit Dragway. The radio ads were exciting; the announcer screaming, “Sunday! Sunday! At Detroit Dragway!” with the piano intro from Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” blasting out underneath. I went whenever I could convince an adult to take me. I was exhilarated by the super-loud sounds of high-performance engines, the smoke from the tires, and the announcer calling out the winning times all under the lights at night.
I had become friends with a kid in the neighborhood named Ricky Derminer. Ricky was a drag racing fan, too, and we liked each other. He introduced me to his brother, Bob, who was four years older than me. Bob was pretty far-out by Lincoln Park norms. He had tight kinky hair, wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and had a gap between his two front teeth. He ignored fashion; he was iconoclastic, even then.
Bob considered himself a beatnik. He listened to jazz, and he also painted. He stayed in the basement of his parents’ house four blocks from mine. He was the first natural intellectual I’d ever met, and he knew about things that I was interested in. We would have marathon talks. I still hung out with Ricky, but his big brother became the object of my interest. I had a lot of questions about why things were the way they were. Bob had radical ideas about life and God, art, science, history, and culture. He was the first person I’d met that had a handle on this stuff, and he didn’t blow me off as being too weird for asking about things that most people didn’t seem interested in.
Bob also exposed me to Zen. With his gentle and humorous teaching style, reincarnation, nirvana, and the wheel of karma made more sense than anything I had been exposed to up to this point. Buddhist thought was palatable to me. It was a philosophy and a way of life with a moral code that held you accountable beyond the fear-driven Catholic burn-in-hell-if-you-sin. I was ready for some new cosmic answers.
The ideas that Bob was exposing me to aligned with my sense of accountability, and didn’t insult my intelligence. At last someone could explain complex ideas and ethics to me without expecting me to buy into unerring stupidity.
I had all the big questions: Where do we go when we die? Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is eternity? Is all this a big accident, or is it part of a secret plan that no one is talking about?
The Catholic Mass confused me. There were too many things to believe that were impossible: life after death, walking on water, virgin birth, and all the other fantastical myths the faith was predicated on.
But Bob’s Zen stuff made more sense. It was better poetry to me than anything I’d heard before.