Читать книгу The Punk and the Professor - Billy Lawrence - Страница 20

13

AFTER WRESTLING WORE OFF, everyone got into music. “Sweet Child O Mine” enraptured us during the summer of ’88. We had become music freaks— denim jackets with patches, tight ripped jeans, and band t-shirts with demons and guns on the fronts. We were crazed by heavy metal in the heat of an MTV revolution of music videos and a top ten where pop music had surrendered to hard rock and metal ballads. We all grew our hair longer. Paul sketched out tattoos for all of us to choose from once we were old enough to get them (still years away). Mine was a heart with flames burning out of the top of it and a sword right down the middle. I was going to slap that one right on my left arm, and then another one above it on the shoulder (likely a girl’s face), and another couple of tattoos on the other arm. We had it all worked out.

One thing we could do now at this age was pierce our ears. My mother took me for my first— one piercing through the left ear. A little while later I popped another two in the left ear after hearing someone tell me how they did it. I bought a couple of sharp pointed stud earrings at the mall, heated up the point, numbed my lobe with ice, and popped them through. They didn’t look bad, considering. Later, I got my right ear pierced at the mall. I wore all kinds of studs and loops. I started to look like a real punk.

We established a band of our own and attempted to play our instruments in Andy and Jeff’s basement. I was the singer and guitarist, Andy played the bass, Jeff was rhythm guitar, Gene was our lead guitarist, and Paul was on drums. Whether it was genuine music or not was debatable. Andy and Jeff’s older brother Trent said I sounded like Metallica with laryngitis. Andy, Jeff, Gene and I all had decent equipment, but we struggled to play even a single chord. The only thing we had going was Paul who actually played the drums in the school band, but he couldn’t move his whole set from his house. He got through it with buckets, pots, and pans.

Andy, Jeff, Gene, Paul, and I were a band, even if it was just for a moment in time, even if we never quite made it past our first and only original song. I envisioned us as the next Guns N’ Roses. I had high hopes, but we really sounded horrendous. At least we had fun.

Steven and I seemed to have our own thing going. He had actually started to fiddle around with a guitar, so he was really the original lead guitarist before Gene. But I guess he was just too much for the whole group to handle. He was better off solo. You can’t group up someone like that for too long— he marched to his own beat. He and I continued to love music together though. We listened to hours of tapes, messed around on guitars, read the metal magazines from the stationary store, and talked about how crazy our favorite bands were.

Steven slept over one night and we stayed up late talking about music. Guns N’ Roses was our favorite band and many of the songs on the Appetite for Destruction album were about drugs and addiction. Some of the band members had been in and out of rehab for heroin. I’ll never forget Steven’s words—

“I’ll never do heroin, Jack. No Mr. Brownstone.”

“Neither would I…the stuff’s evil. I might be a punk, but I’m not dumb.”

$$$

In the midst of our music craze, we would steal audiocassettes from TSS, a local retail store. Everyone would come along sometimes for a grand sweep of cassette raiding. Steven and Ryan were the kings of theft. They’d walk out into the parking lot of the store with cassettes in their pants, their sleeves, their hats, their socks, and who knows where else. Sometimes they would make out with as many as ten cassettes a piece. By the time I was twelve, I had built a cassette collection of three hundred, which included the entire Aerosmith catalogue. Our TSS raids contributed to at least half of my collection. Andy was uninterested in stealing, or perhaps just knew better, and would ride a bike around the store crashing into things. His crashes always made for a perfect distraction and always earned him a cassette. I think he earned himself the entire Def Leppard collection that way.

$$$

One time Steven and I went in alone. This was a mistake because there weren’t enough distractions. An employee spotted Steven putting an L.A. Guns cassette down his pants and confronted him. Steven conceded and was brought away. I later joked that it must’ve been his choice of music that got him nabbed this time. He yelled for me to go get his uncle. Surprisingly they let me walk right out and hadn’t seen me pick off a Black Sabbath cassette in the B section. I crossed the parking lot and made my way the short trip back to Steven’s house. His scruffy looking, shirtless uncle opened the door and I told him what happened. He cursed and told me to hold on. He came back with a t-shirt on, busted through the screen door and hopped off the steps. I started to walk back with him, but he told me to get on.

We were lucky he was the one home. His uncle picked him up, punched him in the shoulder, and told him not to do it again. Steven listened. This was nothing compared to when his father came back into town and got angry with him. Now that Steven was bigger, he’d fight back. Imagine a twelve-year-old battling with his thirty-something father in a driveway fistfight? These two went punch for punch on the lawn. Steven was that good. But it was bloody and upsetting, and I usually had to walk away just before Steven would lose. He wasn’t that good, not yet.

Steven and I had boxed a couple of times for fun. We wore real gloves, but his punches were too much to take. There was so much power behind his punches, so much emotion. I had a headache after just a few punches. It wasn’t like I was a weakling either. I knocked out our friend Gary with only a few punches and he was far bigger than me. I took down Andy a couple of times in the first round too. But Steven, he’d just stare at me blankly when I hit him. He had so much fight in him.