Some Truth

The top of the forty inch wide stairway leading up to the attic came out a little shy of the halfway line of the room, extending up from the second floor kitchen at the South, or back side of the house, up to my floor level. It opened out into about a sixteen foot deep, by eighteen foot wide area of floor with sufficient head room. The whole attic had hardwood flooring, with the bay window ledge being directly in front of me at about my eye level as I stood on the top step. The house's brick chimney extended through the floor from the West edge of the stairwell up to the roof, with a small gas heated radiator in front of the chimney.

I exchanged the dirty old gas heater with a small fireplace style gas heater, about two feet high by almost three feet wide, so it looked like I had a fireplace with the chimney rising behind it, the chimney being a little wider than the fireplace. I insulated between the roof beams, and put in thirty inch high walls, which ran from the floor up to the roof rafters, with cedar shakes on them all around the four sides, with storage spaces behind those walls.

I then used dry wall from there up to a level eight feet above the floor, with knotty pine running on up toward the peak, six feet higher, and finished the remaining four feet with more cedar shake. With my walls in place, not counting the forty eight square feet of the stairwell opening in the floor, but including the two dormers, I reduced the overall square footage to six hundred seventy eight square feet of usable floor space. The room had a big, three sash, bay window, six feet off the floor, in the center of the northern triangle of the pyramid style roof, which over-looked Wayne Street.

I put a black walnut bay window seat, or at that height, it would more properly be called a ledge, very stoutly built, across the bottom of that. Yes, five feet off the floor, or a foot below the window sills, which were six feet off the floor, with a cocoon like, wicker Emperor's basket chair hanging on an electric hoist, attached at the peak of the dormer for the bay window. This could be raised or lowered as you wished, at the push of a button, from chair height off the floor, to the peak of the bay window's dormer, twelve feet off the floor.

This way I could use the seat with the five foot long black walnut ledge acting as a desk while looking out of the three windows. I could also slide from the chair to the ledge and play guitar on the cushions and pillows I put there, or use the roomy ledge to sit and read underneath my jungle of plants hanging in the windows while drinking my morning coffee.

I then had the two extending dormers, which were revealed upon removing the old walls, the North dormer of which, off to the right of the bay window, my king-size bed fit perfectly in the nine foot by nine foot space, with a big window at the head of the bed. There was room to spare for night tables at either side. The other smaller dormer of just over eighty square feet, which faced east, became my dining nook overlooking a big Ponderosa pine, which pleasantly blocked my view of McDonel Street.

Then with several throw rugs scattered around, and one big Persian carpet, a Chinese screen blocking the view of my bed, a couple of arm chairs, and several bean bag chairs, long low shelves along the walls housing all of my books and albums, a lovely sounding wind chime tinkling, up in the breezy bay window and candles everywhere, I had a very charming and cozy home. I basically turned a dirty, musty, stuffy room into an open, roomy loft with a great deal more sunshine and air coming in, and I'm sure that if the owner came and inspected what I had done, he would have quadrupled my rent, and told me he was still only charging me half of what he should.

During this period, also, I set up and did the sound for the two outdoor shows in Faurot Park, all day affairs with five or six bands playing, and I did three more outdoor shows up the highway from Lima, just out side of a town named North Baltimore. At the third show there, the Allman Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner played, as well as having ZZ Top play too. ZZ wasn't scheduled, but were just passing by in their tour bus, when they heard about the concert while at the Jo Jo's Truck Stop, at that exit off I-75, and they came in and did a set as well.

But at the first show of that summer of 'seventy-one, at Faurot Park in Lima, I met, and later that night had sex with, Deb Andrews, the dark haired eighteen year old girl I saw at the second meeting, who became my second wife a year after my divorce from Patty was final. She not only sucked me off and screwed me our first night together, she let me have public sex with her naked and bent over the hood of my Honda Coupe while traffic passed by us after we just pulled over on the side of the road. She never failed to do me every night we were together from then on.

I took a gig that summer, in Chicago, at the campus of Northwestern University, to do a little blues and jazz show outside on the lawn, open to the public. There, I met a black man by the name of Lawrence Arnolds, who said he represented a management and production company, Inner City Trade Productions that primarily backed black artists. He told me that jazz is difficult to do sound for and reproduce every nuance of the complicated noting of the instruments, and said he was very impressed with the clarity of my mix, that it really enhanced the musicians' playing. He then asked me if I would be interested in doing a few short tours on the "Chitlin' Circuit" with Al Green, and a few other "Soul" singers and groups. I agreed to do whatever shows I could fit into my schedule. As a result, I had the opportunity to work with some of the most stunning talents, musically and vocally, as I have ever run across, over the next few years.

Managing the Carriage House, I rented a room late that summer to Larry Elms, who had been a fellow student at the O.S.U. campus in Lima, and whom everyone called "Turkey". His eventual demise five years later, was a sorrowful tale, involving the cult of Scientology, that broke his faultily valved heart, literally, and mine as well when he then died. Maybe I should tell you about it, but it's still really too depressing for me to even say this much. We ended up becoming close friends, like brothers, and when he wanted to spend the coming months going to Ann Arbor throughout the week to take a good paying job repairing and painting apartments and student housing there, he looked around at the work I had done on my room, and asked me to go work with him.

By then, my divorce was final and I had quit the phone company after one too many arguments with the management. My Dad had just died, while on a family vacation that I had been supposed to go on as well, and had arranged vacation time for. My Mom and Dad and younger sister, Laura went down to our mountain-side in North Carolina so that Dad could work on getting a driveway from the road up to our land, laid out and cleared, so contractors could use it to begin building his retirement house. On the Friday before the weekend we were going to go, the phone company decided that there was a conflict in my and another employee's vacation time, and that I wouldn't be able to take mine. As a result my Father, who had a heart condition, died with a chainsaw in his hands which he would not have been using if I had been there to do it for him.

So, feeling the pressure of mortality, since my Dad just died, and feeling resentful and thinking that life was just too short to deal with their unnecessary bullshit, I quit. I was taking a Bell and Howell electronics course, at the time, by mail through the DeVry Institute of Technology to further extend the design knowledge I had gained taking the phone company's electronics courses, and I was pretty much just breezing through it. Thinking that I could maintain my grades in it, in addition to taking on traveling to work, and after talking it over with the raven haired beauty I was now seeing, Deb Andrews, telling her that I would be back every weekend, I agreed to go with Turkey. As well, I'd had an F.B.I. agent knock at the front door of the Carriage House, flashing pictures of Bob Mack and Steve Norton, who had just been busted for illegal arms possession, plus a bunch of people that I didn't know, so maybe it was time to become scarce around Lima, just for my own peace of mind if no other reason.

Turkey was a great, and I mean a great, unknown acoustic guitar player, with a sweet Martin D-28 that I would have died for. It had beautiful tone, and he could play like Andres Segovia or James Taylor, and anywhere in between the two. He spent a large part of the winter, to all hours of the day and night, jamming acoustically with me, and listening to tunes, from my, now, vast collection of records, on my Killer stereo system. It was a system that I had put together, out of junk tube amp parts from pawnshops, and from the four dynamic twelve-inch speaker drivers, and two EV horn drivers that had I gotten as I could afford it.

The dynamic speakers I bought off of old man Miller, my buddy Mark Miller's Dad, at Miller's Music store on Lima's Square. When I had everything ready to try my system out, I needed the speaker cabinets built. Having no shop of my own to build them in, I went to a fellow who I had installed a bunch of phones for, by the name of Joe, and I'll leave his name at that. Joe had been released after doing twenty years on a twenty to life sentence, for murdering a wise guy who had tried to pull one over on the Guagentis.

He thought he was doing a favor for them at the time, but he was caught. The Guagentis are really just straight businessmen, and owned most of the nice restaurants and nightclubs in Lima, but were purported by the gossips to be Mafia. The cops had a hey day trying to prove that the gossips were right, but they were all full of it. When Joe got out of prison, being the nobly generous kind of people that they are, because he really stirred up some shit for them when he took this "hit" upon himself, as well, I suppose, because they also wanted to rub the noses of their prosecutors in it, the Guagentis set him up with a house and a business.

When he got out of prison, Joe got married to a beautiful girl about half of his age. Moreover, what a wife. She turned out to be a prostitute that even Lima's Mayor enjoyed. I'll leave her and the Mayor nameless, but I will say that if you didn't know she was a whore, you never would have guessed it. She was the perfect housewife, and she just seemed too sweet and innocent to be immoral. I never felt that I should purchase her bedroom services because I might damage my relationship with Joe. Partially because of her, Joe was always one of my heroes, as I guess I couldn't help not being jealous of him and coveting her, as she was such a lovely and compliant woman. But also, Joe really was a nice guy, who came out on top of all of his disparities. To top it off, Joe always lived a relaxed lifestyle, and had great pot to help him stay relaxed.

The business that the Guagentis set Joe up with was a kitchen cabinet construction business out behind his house. I took my plans for the front-loaded speaker cabinets I had designed to him, and he had his boys in the shop build them for me, gratis. They were gorgeous, and, when I had designed and built my crossovers, and a separate power supply to send low voltage to the four dynamic twelves' electro-magnets, they sounded KILLER. Sorry, but, word play is fun. I had a killer make them for me. When I finally got my own P.A. company, since the design for these first speakers was successful enough to astound me with its sound quality, thereby verifying that my theories on the speaker cabinets and the frequency crossover designs were correct, the logo for it was Killer P.A. It didn't help either, that I felt responsible for killing my Pa.

Chapter 6

A New Town

Working in Ann Arbor with Turkey was a good experience. We busted our tails repairing holes in walls and doors, once, even, a front door and a wall that a drunken U. of M. student had driven a motorcycle through, but mostly just holes from fists, feet and beer bottles. We spent our days putting time into fixing moldings and windows, and prepping as well as cutting in apartments in complexes and student housing, then painting everything white. Every place we finished looked like it was brand new when we were done. We were up each day at sunrise, and ended every day at sunset, and then spent a couple of hours exploring Ann Arbor's nightlife. I met many people, some of whom were to be very influential in my life, five years later when I moved to Ann Arbor.

Some of those contacts became immediately profitable, upon returning on the weekends to Lima with several pounds of grass. All through the summers of 'seventy-one, 'seventy-two and 'seventy-three I was constantly in Ann Arbor. On some weekends I was there working with the guys from what was to become Aerial Enterprises, setting up stages and P.A.'s, and doing sound at the Ann Arbor outdoor concerts. Concerts such as the Rally to Free John Sinclair in seventy-one, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang "Give Peace a Chance", ad lib, for the first time ever, the Art Festival stages and the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festivals.

All I had left of my personal gear was a beat up old Gibson J-45 flat top, with a split in the top, right beside where the fret board extended out over the top, an old Gibson tube amp for my electric and a 'sixty-four, red, Les Paul Deluxe electric guitar, one of a hundred made, so I had no real means of putting up systems myself. All the shows I had done sound for independently, I had rented the equipment I needed for each show from what became Aerial Enterprises, I think in 'seventy-three, out of Brighton, Michigan.

They had the only good P.A. equipment I knew of at the time, and used EV mics and Crown amps exclusively, and cabinets of their own design, with Gauss and EV drivers. Often, if they couldn't supply my needs, due to their scheduling, I would rent gear from local music stores in whatever area I was in. That was mostly junk that I had to fix to make it work, and then work around it's hopelessness to put a show on with.

On one of the weekends back in Lima, I took Deb out to a bar on Main Street which I can no longer remember the name of, to see her half brother's band play. We had a great time, and I was fairly impressed by the band. Debbie's half brother, Dave Mowery played bass and sang, while his wife, Pam, his wife, played a rocking boogie piano backbeat, and harmonized vocals to whomever was singing lead in the song. The guitar player was alright, but not stellar, although he had a good voice, and the drummer was good. They played cover tunes, and overall, they were fun to listen to. They broke up, shortly after that night, and I didn't find out why until a couple of months later.

Dave and I talked long and hard that night, starting out with him being very reticent toward me, the strange guy, and I am usually the shy one. When he finally figured out that I wasn't a threat, we got into deep discussion. He was very interested in the idea that I could hook him up with quantities of pot, that he could then ounce out for profit, and he was quite impressed with the quality of what I had brought home with me that weekend. He wanted me to front him a couple of pounds that weekend, telling me he would have it sold off, and have my money for me on the following weekend, when he would want more pounds.

His wife, Pam, or Pammy, as everyone called her, was a tiny little slip of a girl, and was a flirt, who made whatever she was wearing look seriously sensuous, with plenty of skin showing, almost to the point of revealing all of her assets. She was very alluring, and enjoyed being so, knowing just when she had caught your attention, and knowing just what to say, or what movement to make to recapture it. Then with her being an exhibitionist, and coyly displaying her charms so brazenly and invitingly to you, it was very hard not to look, or to lust after her.

On weekends I was home, after that, Deb and I started hanging out with Dave and Pam quite often, at their house on High Street in the East side. They were fairly comfortable to be around, but as we got closer, I often felt that Pam was flirting with, or testing me. I couldn't help but notice a couple of times, due to her cunning, that she was wearing a pair of her tight hip hugger bell bottoms with a hole in the crotch, right at her vaginal opening between her thighs. I didn't respond to any of her lascivious ploys, not even knowing for sure at that time, if that's what they were, but they seemed to become more and more obvious, although I could see no reason why she would direct them at me. I've never seen myself as very handsome or desirable, even though many women have belied this notion. It did free up my weekends to be able to bring Dave the pot I was acquiring, and let him worry about distributing it during the week while I worked.

Dave and Pam had been having problems with their band, and Dave asked me if I knew of any really good musicians that he could start a blues band with. I told him yes, but getting them to move to Lima, from Ann Arbor could be a real bitch. He asked me to try to make it happen. Back in Ann Arbor, I talked to one of the guys I had been thinking about, Brophy Dale. I caught him at the opportune moment, because he was behind on rent, working a nowhere dishwashing job that barely paid, and about to be put out on the street. The guys he had been playing with had split up, so he said he would ask the drummer, "Stick", or actually Rick Broner, if he was interested in joining a band down in Ohio with him.

I knew Brophy was a guitar god, meaning his repertoire was vast, and his fingering was quick, smooth and accurate. He could outplay anyone I had ever heard, except maybe Jeff Beck, or Stevie Ray, although he would modestly deny that, being the penultimate gentleman that he is. Here in two thousand twelve, he is playing in his own band in L.A. and touring with Lee Rocker, the bass player from the old Stray Cats rockabilly band, plus doing promotional stuff for Gretch guitars and amps. He released his own bluesy style C.D. called "Night Hawkin'", in two thousand eight that truly smokes. I highly recommend it.

However, back in seventy-two, the deal that I offered them was a bit more enticing than what Dave and I had discussed. They could stay at Dave's house, Gratis, for ninety days, or until they found jobs, Dave would feed them, and give them an allowance as they needed it, for cigarettes, laundry and such, during that period, and Dave would cover the cost of moving them down to Lima. Dave and I had not talked about paying to move these two South to Lima, or the allowance, but I figured that we could handle it from the profits off our pot sales. Two weeks later, Brophy and Stick were living in Lima. Dave was very impressed. Brophy was everything I said he was, and Stick was tighter than a gnat's ass with Dave's bass. This was the start of the "High Street Blooze Band.

Dave and I drove down to New Albany, Indiana to buy a piece of shit, Peavey mix board that looked as if was built out of Army Surplus parts, that he had his heart set on, even though I argued against it, and a couple of full range Peavey cabinets, that had a mid range horn in the top end of them, with a fifteen inch speaker driving a folded bass enclosure below. Dave wanted Pammy's sister, Bobby's boyfriend to run the sound, seemingly, I guess, because he didn't think I could handle it time-wise, but Bobby's boyfriend didn't know squat, and was busted for D.U.I. and vehicular homicide a few months later, anyway, so I ended up doing their sound.