The Incredibly Strange Creature Who Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Zombie

A Memoir: 1980 – 2000

“In the Spring that is young once only” – Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

If my memory serves me well, we parted in the late afternoon on a Manhattan train station runway. Hot pants were still prostitute chic, the Pretenders were new to the charts, Dylan was riding a slow train and the country, after a brief 1,460 Carterful days was transitioning back to a Republican in the White House. The month was July, the year was 1980, and the future was ahead of both of us. I was twenty-five and I suspect you were somewhere around twenty-three. That summer sun was emblematic of our moment in time, bright and limitless. Little did we know what lay ahead for John Lennon, the country and of course, our sorry asses.

For me, the time between then and the end of the Century is fractured with the memory of self-propelled leaps into an unwitting abyss propelled by the vanity of youth and the ever reaching Tina Turner mountains of all our pop dreams.

It is amazing how your name unlocks a rich memory – saying your name, recalling our association in that single and now short thread of experience – that unique and precious chapter in our lives. The explicit treasure trove of memory and recalculation that explodes in saying your name seems my life’s Kilimanjaro.

Perhaps summed up these many years later in the recollection of pouring your little 135-pound hippy body out of my submarine yellow ’74 VW Super Beetle on Tempe’s 13th Street somewhere around 3 am, after the afternoon and evening spent with Carlene Carter, John Chambiotti and our rock ‘n roll invasion of the Scottsdale Rodeo. Wasted and adrift in giggles, grins and innocent stupidity premitted by our belief in forevers.

Oh, to tell you what I have been up to since those untroubled days; where do I begin?

After we parted, I left Amy in the East and traveled by train back to Cleveland. In October, I hitchhiked back to AZ with the goal of getting into advertising as a graphic designer and pursuing my rock n roll dream. I planned on leveraging my Danny Zelisko experience in marketing the up-and-coming bands both local and national.

(Added 2022:) Hitchhiking from Cleveland to Tempe, when I think back upon it, is a mythical trip of another time and place – dare say another American universe. That I travelled those 1900 miles without incident and in only four rides is a miracle it took me years to recognize.

There was the optimistic but somewhat forlorn young couple returning home to Oklahoma City after four years of trying to make it on Broadway, They picked me up in Dayton and took me to OKC.

Then a young black guy in a van, picked me up but was only going to El Reno on his way to Enid. The trip was only 30 miles and I had a long way to go. After about a hour with my thumb out, I remember thinking, ‘what would Kerouac do?’

But his spirit was shining down on me. Waving me on to his car was a bearded guy moving from DC to San Diego after a break up with his girlfriend. His Camaro was loaded to the gills but he has a passenger seat and room for my duffle bag.. I remember we stopped at a bar in Amarillo and watched Monday Night Football, stayed that night in sperate rooms at rough-n-tumble econoline hotel.Got up ealy the next morning and he dropped me off on I-40 at Holbrook, Arizona.

Finally, there was the hunter with an eight point on his roof, coming down from the White Mountains at Holbrook and was headed miraculously three blocks from the Newberry house in Tempe.

I started the trip after traveling to Columbus OH to watch the Arizona State some devils play the Ohio State Buckeyes. I went with my sister Patsy and details of the first day we were there are a little foggy. But I do remember hawking some tickets to the game and having the notion that I would try to find somebody who was flying a private plane back to Tempe to maybe give me a ride. I actually thought that.

For once I got into my seat at the game somewhere around the 20 yard line I was just sitting there with Patsy and the guy next to me a young guy started to chat me up as normal as would be normal at a football game. He asked me where I was from blah blah blah what high school and what high school I went to. This is standard conversation much like where do you work in other locales. Anyway, when I said I went to High School at Cathedral Latin, he perked up and he said: “I loved that team with Jeter, Dubber Ward and Jimmy Wiler and Ed Riley? That was one hell of a football team. I went to all their games especially to watch riley. He was really good.” I’m not making this up. 80,000 fans in the big house and I sit next to somebody who knows my name. For whatever reason that I can’t remember now I never told him who I was. How about that?

MY plan was to stay in Columbus that night and hit the road early in the AM. I was by myself jumping parties left and right and feeling really out of it because I really didn’t know anybody and the whole layout was a strange land. I think I fell asleep on somebody’s couch for a few hours and then hooked up with Patsy who drove me to the freeway and dropped me off on the entrance ramp of I-71 heading to Cincinnati. I got a quick ride and thought, this will be easy. But the guy was only going to Dayton, about 50 miles. He dropped me off at a breakfast place off the free way and I decided to have some breakfast myself. I was making a sign to help me get a ride when the forlorn couple saw me and offered to take me to Oklahoma. Shuck’s yeah.

I took me under three days to get back to Tempe.

Once back at Newberry house, living with I believe aspring musicians Natalie Pace and Andy Kern and not sure who else. I thought I could generate some steady income working for an ad agency. After a bit, I hooked up with a small Tempe agency through a friend and associates at the New Times. Thus began an adventure in adaptation that would be funny if it weren’t so absurd.

I could never really feel comfortable. It was not something for my make up. Unfortunately, I did not know it at the time. But the more I tried; the martini lunches, the networking; the bad ideas sold as good ones, the deeper my frustration. Oh, I had fun; for it was the heyday of the cheap happy hour and drugs did not kill and the girls were the girls.

recall, I was managing my first band at that time, Electric Lawyer, with Natalie, Andy, Chris and Steve. Upon my return to Tempe, I began in earnest to try to develop my vision of a local scene. It led me down a road that allowed me to experience that ten years of final innocence of the American century day by day. Every day was its own adventure and time wasn’t calculated in months or years, but minutes, hours and days.

It was in December of that year that John Lennon was shot. I have often thought what was really lost that day. Both mine and in the American cosmos. More than innocence, it was the first blow against the optimism that had marked my whole life. Despite the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and Watergate there was always a belief in American exceptionalism. But, there something more intravenous occurred outside the Dakota December 8. It was cloud foretelling the coming weather.

Upon my return to Tempe, the first night exactly. After a show by Electric Lawyer, at the Mesa Community Center, I believe. I met and started seeing and earthy, poetic woman (that foretold the eventual break up with Amy in ’81). Though it was doomed from the start, I was too stupid in the heart to know. What it did do was anticipate a series of involvements that hit wax winged perfection that only made the predictable flight back to terra firm that much longer and the crash that much more bruising. And the heart can only take so much. But surprisingly each time, I climbed out of the wreckage, alive and for sure a little wiser.

About that first affair, I think you know the pair, Brian Handy and his wife, Susan. It was velvet. He was in Law School back east and so she was also alone, living in a cute little cottage on a farm located Guadalupe and 48^th St. Far from the madding crowd. I cant even tell you how long it lasted, two weeks? A month? Three months? When we parted, I was left with a hardbound edition of “Sonnets for the Portuguese” that I treasure it to this day. Ah, life!

Through a local hot spot called Merlin’s, I met a very large guy named Tom Murray; he was marketing for a Tempe college nightclub called the Devilhouse. We teamed up to put together a series of highly successful event nights. New Wave Wednesday (skinny ties and all), Teen Night, which as a non-alcohol night that drew thousands every Monday night and Sundays we were allowed to book live music. The club became my top account at the agency, and I became a somebody in the local music scene.

With this success, we were allowed to expand the Sundays nights to other nnights of the week to accommodate tour schedules, being the stop between San Diego and Texas. Being a 500 – 1500 capacity night club we were perfect for up and coming rock bands. I promoted some acts on own and others with Danny Zelisko. You remember Danny? Greta guy and real character. He always called me ‘carrottop’ as I still had the red hair. Since the Devilhouse could squeeze 2000 people, but 500 would make it look crowded, we could really expand into some bands that previously would have had to pass on Phoenix.

Some of shows we did were Marshall Crenshaw, the Raybeats, Joe Jackson, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Steel Pulse, Waitresses (through whom I met the irrepressible Mars Williams) and the ilk were marginally successful. The highpoints were a Billy Idol show on a Saturday night, Gang of Four with opening acts REM. REM cost $250 and their rider consisted of a case of domestic beer and a pizza.

The low point and what was my own personal “Challenger” event; an event after which my life changed directions and I never even knew it. It was a Nick “Cruel to be Kind” Lowe show. Unbeknownst to me, I booked this show in Tempe the same night as Tom Petty was across the river at the ASU Activity Center. Ouch!

On top of that I paid what was for my budget, top dollar for Nick Lowe but was not allowed to use his name in advertising. I had salted away some good bucks from my successes, and this one night cleaned me out. A few more shows like that – The Romantics come to mind – and I was back on Desolation Row.

Let me tell you about the Nick Lowe show. Or more specifically, the eve of the Nick Lowe show. Despite everything you will read hence, there was not a more desperate night. If only because it was the first. As the doomed show neared, I felt an internal hysteria. As the outcome became a certainty and there was no slowing down the clock to preserve a before catastrophe and no speeding it up to get it over with. Just a twenty four hour tick…tick…tick. So, I did what I knew to do, I recused myself to a local watering hole where I had an open tab and as far away from the scene of the crime as possible, but still knowledgeable of the pending doom. Advanced sales were pitiful. No one at the bar knew my predictiament, they still thought me a success. Amongst the unknowing, I drank myself into disconnect. Saddling up with a really sweet girl I knew from the bar probably ten years my junior. I seriously think her name was Mysty. I don’t know what she thought of me, she was a server at the restaurant and was very sweet and attractive. Just the perfect mix for the time until execution. It was an inglorious flameout. I don’t remember leaving the bar.

I awoke the next morning knowing first thing this was the day of the night of my demise, What I did not expect was that I would wake up on a musty-smelling couch, its embroidery imbedded in my cheek, peering into the bright morning eyes of some three year old boy staring at me eye-level. In the background the familiar morning ruckus of a middle American household preparing breakfast before work and school. Whaaa? It was Mysty’s house and she lived at home with her mom and little brother. Let the flogging begin.

The glances from her mother were of the lowest brand, obviously thinking, ‘another loser’ as it seemed this was not the first time Mysty, with a “Y”, had brought home a stray. Why these little moments of one’s life stick like a searchlight you dont want to turn on but somehow can’t help but cast a light on such memories. They make up a life.

The show was the disaster I anticipated, but I did live to see the day after and learned a little more about life with that day’s morning.

Anyway, I had always done the shows with local opening acts, and this brought me in touch with all the local bands in the East Valley, so I began booking other smaller clubs with touring independent bands and top locals. It was a smaller budget operation but was wildly more fun, as you can imagine. After all, this was ‘82 – ‘85. Tee-Hee. I know you know how much fun this must have been. I will say five words – ‘Arizona swimming pools and cocaine.’

At the same time, in my burgeoning moguldom, I next tried to become the Az distributor to the New Wave magazine, Trouser Press. Do you recall that rag? It was published by Ira Rosen. This began a cycle that kept me one step ahead of the rent collector and two steps behind equilibrium. I was also writing music articles for the New Times and pretty much settled in as an underground music gadfly.

As I mentioned, Amy and I had broken up in a devastating long-distance goodbye. I did not take it like a man – and I know what you’re thinking. The year was 1982, and after a series of rebound experiences, I fell hard for this 21-year-old Go-gette waitress from the Devilhouse.

2022: in editing this document for publication in my website I was doing a spell check and in the above paragraph Microsoft was asking me to change to a more gender sensitive description of one who serves drinks at a restaurant. Possibly says more about the times that anything I’m writing here.)

Nina, who was all style, smarts, grace and good breeding with a lot of artistic wannabe developing. She breathed some life back into my bloodshot eyes. Her blameless faith buttressed my reeling psyche.

Through various connections I became aware of a band called Moral Majority. I went to see them at a house party and when they revved up a 4-4 version of the Beach Boy’s “Be True to Your School” I knew I had found something. After the show I introduced myself and this is how I met Bill Leen and Doug Hopkins.

Several months later, they changed some personnel and evolved into a band called The Psalms. Because of my position at the Devilhouse, where I was bringing in national acts, I figured I could manage them and bring what I thought was great promise to the attention of labels.

Andy Kern and I had formed a small record label, aptly titled Reilly Records. It was located in Tempe and connected to a studio we used nearby. I released the band’s first single, “Christmas Island” backed with “Story I Was Told”. This would have some long-term effect down the road, but at the time I did it as a barter with the studio to offset opening act expenses with the local bands who opened for the national acts. The studio did it for the exposure, the bands did it for the studio time, I did it to save money. To paraphrase J Wellington Wimpy: “There will be no money for opening tonight, but what can offer you is six hours studio time.”

By this time, I am a total high-wire act, doing some graphic arts, some advertising, some journalism, some radio copywriting/hosting and some promotion. I am living with Nina and her brother rent free on the Scottsdale/Tempe border, fully conscience I am trying make something out of nothing but cocksure I could do it. After all, I am a Vanderbilt grad in America, ‘male, white & free – and I can do anything I please!’

I was confident that one of four bands I was helping would make it big and my operations would grow with them. I have seen the country’s best underground bands, and at least two of the bands I was helping were as good as the lot of them. I am seeing Tempe explode around me. My oyster!

Then in the summer of ’84, I produce my Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland-let’s-put-on-a- show moment. I am visiting a friend at his house on 5th street, right up the street from Mill Ave and in the shadows of Sun Devil Stadium, across from Bandersnatch. It was literally between Sun Devil Stadium and the Tempe Police station. This friend has this really cool pad on the second floor of this five-bedroom house, a real relic by Tempe standards. It looks like the Animal House only green. He mentions that one of the guys below is moving out. I absolutely reason immediately I could hold parties at this house, charge 5 bucks a head and easily clear $1000.00 for every party. I could pay the rent, live large and never have to get a job ever again.

Thus began a forever eight-month stretch of wild on Tempe that is still legend for those who lived through it. A real fish story that all who were there swear was ten times the cool fun it actually was, including me.

It was 1984, and the bad stuff was somewhere else. I had a party every two weeks, hired bands to play and bought booze and beer for 500. There was no shortage of pharmaceuticals, girls of the first generation of lib and amazing incidents.

The house became known as the Greenhouse, and the parties aptly, “Greenhouse party.” High school kids would bus in from the west side of town and hang around Tempe the whole weekend.

Brian, you would have loved it! To give you a feel for the vibe, a special anecdote comes to mind. There was this rock n roll wanna be, a questionable singer in an even more questionable rockabilly band. But he was doing it and he was a nice guy, and no one cared to tell him the straight scoop, so he had the airs of a rock star. Harmless enough. He sported bowling shirts as his outfit/uniform everywhere and thus picked up the nickname, “Mr. 300.” I don’t recall his real name, but I remember ‘Mr. 300.’

Well, one Friday night we are having a particularly raucous night. The place is packed, and if you could believe it, we had a line at the driveway trying to get into the party. (Seems amazing now, people standing in someone’s driveway waiting to get into a house party)

Mr. 300 is inside, and he is tripping. He’s walking around with that dazed smile muttering, “Awesome, man. Awesome” to whoever is around. Nina ever the cash master is handling the door. I tell her to watch him because you just never know. We both laugh. About fifteen minutes she comes running up, “you better come quick, Mr. 300 just jumped out the window.” I was surprised, but thought she was talking about the kitchen window, which was often an exit strategy when the parties were full tilt. I shrugged and said, its ok, I know that happens. “No, she says, “you don’t understand, the upstairs window – headfirst!”

Whoa. That was a fall. I ran over to where the crowd had gathered and looked up the twenty or so feet from the upstairs window. And looked down at ground – thinking I would see a body or blood. Nothing. But off in the near distance under the outside lamplight, I see ol’ 300. He is laughing and apparently feeling no pain from the fall. A bruise on his head the size of a small country, and -as I recall – the only time I’ve ever actually seen stars and cuckoos circling a head the way you see in a cartoon. (I had indulged in half a tab myself) I walk over to 300 and ask him if he’s ok. He claims perfect health. I tell Nina to get him in a car and over to the hospital right away. Last thing we needed was for him to go home and die in his sleep from internal head injuries. This may or may not have taken place.

The next morning, during our usual Hasta Manana clean-up of beer and Jack-n-the Box, I walk to the place where Mr. 300 had hit the driveway. Someone had spray painted the outline of a body, crime scene style.

There were about 20 or so Greenhouse parties over the course of a little over a half year. People who were in Tempe at the time would be surprised to know it was only that long for many friendships, haps and satellite events evolved from what only I would personally call the Greenhouse era.

But all good things do come to an end, and this was no exception. At some point, the landlord got a call from my next-door neighbors, the Tempe Police, and he yanked the lease. (Which he did on the eve of our New Year’s Party)

There must have been something else going on. About a year later, the bulldozers were called in to demolish the abode. My friend Vinnie and I grabbed a bottle of Jack and sat on the steps of Bandersnatch and watched it go down, knowing we were watching more than the demolition of an old house.

The next few years it was more of the same only with diminishing returns. I continued to book the best underground bands in the country at the time, this time at a club in Tempe called Clancy’s. It was next to the Holiday Inn on the corner of Rural and University. It was a neat club and I held down Sunday nights. In the stretch there my crowning achievement was a show by the Feelies with the Meatpuppets opening. Some of the other bands that we booked were Tex and Horseheads, Minutemen, Love Tractor, Red on Green (future Mazy Star)

We basically pulled the Madam Wong’s bands from LA and the Bowery bands from NY. The Az crowd was usually lukewarm, but the economics were never terrible, so we forged on. And remember – swimming pools and cocaine.

After this gig got up and running, the owner of a Mill Ave club – The Upstairs Pub – approached me about doing the same for him and offered better nights.

This was where I should have buckled down and made a business of it, but alas I was having too much fun.

Booking the two clubs in Tempe allowed me to reach into Tucson and by booking two nights with a band, affording ourselves a better rate from the booking agency. Unfortunately, if no one showed at either place, we took a bigger bath. That’s what’s known as the stakes getting raised. But this gave me a chance to achieve what to this day is maybe my most precious rock experience. The Replacements.

What an awesome failure. All they were asking was $350.00 a night each for Tucson and Phoenix – and I lost money! In fact, I had to call Amy in New York and she wired me the 200 bucks I needed to get them on to their next gig. To this day, it is hard to fathom that most important band in America could only draw 80 people into a 300-person club. But it wasn’t about that to me. It was about drinking and girls and being a celebrity to select mindset in a radius that stopped at Southern to the east, 48^th Ave to west, Guadalupe to the South and Shea Blvd to the North. My Phoenix.

Well, with these high end objectives the spiral continued until I got a call from a former restaurant associate, who offered me a job as the marketing manager for his restaurant chain. This was the Back Stage Off Broadway and began my odyssey into restaurant marketing. It was a great business experience and what I today consider the real graduate school of my life. This was 1987.

The stint at the Back Stage brought me into management and absolutely free alcohol. I had the keys. I made this work for three years, but by 1990 was calling my dad from a pay phone for money to help me get a room at a hotel. And due to what had occurred during those three years, he said no. Are you sure you want to read on?

This became my truly desperate hours. Because I had complete carte blanche on ideas and had a great guy to work with, I was a runaway train on no specific track. He was a corporate restaurant guy who had saved money to start his own place. Someone who had towed the corporate mark for ten years just waiting for the day he could do it his own way. My first intimate exposure to an entrepreneur.

Starting in 1987 and lasting till we had a kitchen fire in 1989, we really tore it up. Unfortunately, since the carte blanche extended to the liquor room, I was tearing up more than anyone knew. I would come in the morning and work on the day’s activities, help manage the lunch rush and prepare for the happy hour and night entertainment. All day sipping my own blends. Mixed with a steady dose of you know what, I was pulling a poor man’s Belushi.

But despite the ongoing shenanigans, I really did learn a lot about running a restaurant and the economics of the operations. We had hokey promotions: Hamster Races, The Dating Game, Balloon Drops etc. all the time building a loyal clientele of the young working folk of Tempe, which was hugely successful for Gary, the owner. I was still working with bands and within the context of a more mainstream club, booked them into the Back Stage.

I was living up the street on Broadway, very near Tempe High with the guitar player in the Psalms, Doug Hopkins. My most memorable character, only partly because what happened and what he did in his life. He was quite the original and we really hit off. We discussed poems, literature, rock and roll and the goofy people we ran across in Tempe. Doug was the first truly gifted person I had ever met. It was obvious to me he lived his life with a superior calculus. Not to say I had not met remarkable people in my life, I was doubly blessed in that. But Doug was something else. Someone who saw something no one else saw and had the stubborn personality to not settle for anything other than what was in his head. Someone who did something many people I knew did well, like write songs and play guitar, and somehow know exactly what to do to make it special – elevation – art. We lived in abject squalor on Broadway Road near Mill Avenue for about two years. Girls coming and going, and all sorts of twisted nights. Truly Hunter Thompson time

I had known Doug for a few years prior to that. As I mentioned, his first recordings were on my own Reilly Records. I remember an exchange that may shed light on Doug and his worldview. He was not a football fan at all, but for some reason we were talking about my hometown team, the Cleveland Browns. Doug was mystified, what was a “Brown”? Is the team named after a family? I had grown up in Cleveland and I was a sports fan, and I had never wondered about such an odd nickname. That was Doug. Clarion of the obvious no one saw.

Interestingly for you, Doug had come back to Tempe in, I think 1987 after he and some friends had ventured to Portland to get out of the Valley, their hometown, and the time in the Northwest made all the difference in the band. Bill and Doug and some others went to Portland and as the 12 O’clock Scholars made what was reported a mild dent in the local music scene there. Mostly they rehearsed, wrote songs and grew up.

This was the basis for what came to be known as the Gin Blossoms. They went to Portland friends playing music and came back a band. Not all the pieces were there yet, they had not joined up with Robin Wilson and Jesse Valenzuela, critical pieces but Doug & Bill had grown in their point of view and had a sense of what they wanted. It was only a matter of finding the people that fit before they became a local hit. I told them I would get them started and booked their shows the first year they were out. And was somewhat responsible for their making a statewide reputation They were the biggest thing to hit Tempe almost from the jump.

But, unfortunately my grasp on things was getting a little wobbly. I was pretty much working at the Back Stage for food & drinks as I dumped everything cash related into the bands and life affirming hijinks. Ore the latter. Gary’s plan was to take the Back Stage idea into a franchise. The restaurant was growing in popularity and my promotions were getting some attention, such as Hamster Races. We would place hamsters on a track we had made, and they would ‘race’ to the finish line. Patrons would bet “hamster dollars” on their favorites. Sports! Gotta love it. Doug and I would keep the hamsters at our apartment between the weekly races. Invariably, Doug would let them out of their cage, and we would scramble to recapture them. Or the most popular Hamster would die and their fans at the bar would be truly saddened.

None of this was making me much money. I just made sure I got my money’s worth in booze. It was an idiot’s contentment. I had rented an office across the street from the restaurant which I could hold court, a 25-dollar hotel within walking distance to take the girls and had all the free time I could possibly want. Just rolling that rock up the mountain.

Then one Sunday in 1988, I get a phone call. ‘Check out the TV’. They said, ‘It’s the Back Stage. And it’s on fire.’

Talk about here today, gone tomorrow. The restaurant was ruined, and everything it supported went crashing with it (me!) The three weeks it took to get up and running was a deal breaker. We hung on for about another six months, but it was over. It was a sad day when we all gathered round the bar for last call that last night.

I escaped to downtown Phoenix and lived on my own for about eight months. It was here I really made a mad stab at art. I had concluded it was fate pointing me in a direction. The canvases created during this period were some of the most self-satisfying creations I’d made. I bowed out of the music business at this time and that pretty much closed that chapter. From hanging around Doug, I estimated I did have some artistic talent and wanted to see what I could do if I “focused” like he did and really went for it instead of trying to slip in the side door. I cut back on drinking and was on the rebound when the fickle arm of the past extended its slithery grip and tried to pull me under.

I scored a job near my apartment that was core nine to five. It was as a clerk for a printing company. It was family owned and a steady paycheck for the first time in almost four years.

I was seeing a girl from Tucson, Karena, and made plans one weekend to go down and visit her. My plan was to go see Fear on Friday night with a friend, trip and then hitch a rode with a friend to the Old Pueblo. (I did not have a car at this juncture). I had an absolutely sublime acid evening walking around downtown PHX at night wandering over to the show and having one of the most excellent trips ever. I went to bed for a while and woke up and drove to Tucson. I spent the weekend with Karena, and then on Sunday afternoon she drove me out to the freeway to hitch home. (Ah, the lost privilege of hitch hiking!). The times they were a changing and I was one of the last to know.

Well, I was on the freeway entrance ramp for almost two hours before I got a ride. And even then, it was only to Eloy, Az. Not even Picacho Peak! As I am walking down the entrance ramp, a cop car pulls around and asks for ID. I don’t really think twice about it, He tells me one can no longer hitch on the entrance ramp, that I had to stay off the freeway. Yeah, right, I think.

As I am waiting for the cop car to disappear before replanting myself on the freeway, I see he is not going away. In fact, he is coming back. Rollers!

“Evidently, they want you back in Tempe, Mr. Reilly.” Ouch. The cop deposits my ass in the Eloy jail for the evening and tells me they will be by to pick me up and take me to Tempe in the morning.

Two conflicting emotions are wrestling for my mind. One, the embarrassment, fear and loathing that comes from being incarcerated and two, well, that was one way to get a ride, I am wrestling with this until I see the bail ticket and the former overcomes the latter. My bail had been set at $365,000.00! What? Oh my god, what is it all about? I spent the miserable night in jail thinking my life over. There were any number of loose ends unresolved with the law that may have aged into felony, but $300K? I am thinking, I am going away for a long time. And for what?

A police van came by in the morning, and its travelogue for the day was to go to all the jails and prisons on Az where an inmate who had a hearing in Phoenix was located. You can imagine my condition as we made our way back to Tucson, picked up a guy and then off to Florence where we pulled into Death Row and picked up three guys who were going to Phoenix for appeals hearings. These guys were dead in the eyes. I will never forget it. Some guy named Skinny Williams, who was in for a double homicide, was shackled to me. As is the custom among the incarcerated, the question ‘whatya in for’ came my way. Unfortunately, I only knew it was a failure to appear. But they glared at me suspiciously; three sets of dead, hollow eyes. My olive green Izod probably didn’t help.

When we got to Chandler, we had to stop for gas. As the two cops driving went into the stop n shop to get a cola, the guy in the front pipes up, “Hey, they left the keys in the car!” Oh, my God, I thought terrorized immediately. Please, no! For the next few minutes, they tried to figure out a way to get into the front seat and take off. In this van, there was not a barricade between us and the front seat, so it seemed entirely possible. I remember thinking, if they could have arranged their bodies in such a fashion, they would have done it. I had a flash of Dan Rather telling my dad where I was and what I had been up to.

But it ended as it should have, with me deposited in the Tempe city jail for a morning hearing. The judge stated he could not figure out what to do with me and had to think about it. He sent me out to do some jail for thirty days. They still really didn’t tell me what it was all about. I found out later it was $160 rent check that bounced six months earlier. The thieving landlord got the last laugh.

So I spent the next thirty days in Durango Jail in Phoenix. I will say, I had a decent stay at Durango, all things considered. The NCAA playoffs were on, so I got to be all wrapped up in that. People were friendly and the accommodations acceptable. When I was re-deposited in Tempe, the judge admitted the bail was a clerical mistake.

He set some terms for a fine, (which I never paid now that I think about it,) and I set out to see what was left of my life after 40 days on hiatus. I had lost my job, my apartment was now back rented, and the shadow of the skids was stretching my way like the shadows of the autumn Arizona sunset…

As luck would have it or by the Grace of God or out of the kindness of his heart, or Providence indeed I was taken in by Don Chiesa, who co-owned Tracks ‘n Wax Records, the used record store on Central and Camelback.

Because all things come from somewhere, there is a certain point of departure preempting a certain future was forged because of this act of charity & circumstance. This began my next chapter.

The Trax ‘n Wax crowd was the polar opposite in many ways from the exact same universe as the crowd in Tempe. The barely graduated high school punk crowd, the working artists as opposed to the collegiate, cultured artists of a university town. Phoenix folks were a less jaded bunch, a more desperate society. I was always somewhat of an interloper with this group. This crowd was seriously goth, and the music and reverie found here was much more grounded in the reality as opposed to the myth of the Beat generation.

Don, a loving and caring guy, was also a junkie. He was able to support his habit with the sale of bootleg record albums he sold from the store. He cleared sometimes 2 grand a week selling Italian imports of Peter Gabriel shows or outtakes from Cocteau Twins recording sessions and such to music hounds all over town. He had carved out a niche in his corner of the universe that wanted for very little and asked for even less. Thus, he was always in a land of plenty.

I nestled into a life of sublime indifference, wounded as I was from the mercurial failures mentioned afore. I earned some money developing ad campaigns and writing radio ads, but if I cleared 200 bucks a week it was windfall. I survived because Don let me survive. He never asked for rent, just said ‘when you get back on your feet, we’ll settle up. He had a great video collection. Foreign films, classics, porno, documentaries. He had it all. Hundreds of tapes. This proved to be my manna, as I spent complete days and nights sucking in the movies. From Truffaut to Mallick, it was an education of its own. All the movies that for whatever reason you had heard about or read about, and maybe on occasion at a party had lied and said you had seen, well I watched them.

We fell into a daily ritual, where a few times a week people would come over, we would cook some food, drink some beer and watch a selected group of videos. Lazy days masquerading as productive.

Don and I became good friends. Since he was a daily consumer of China white, I became a sometimes consumer of what is called in the junkie trade as ‘the rinse.’ When you are finished shooting up, there remains in the spoon sponge with a small residue of heroin in it. Just enough to get a lightweight like myself off.

Man, what a high! Only a few times did I ever take more than the rinse. I discovered then what anyone who has dabbled knows, it is a life consuming habit. I have absolute sympathy and understanding for anyone who dabbles in this and then expects to walk away.

Thanking God now, I did not do this regularly, never to any serious degree. A few people I know through this interaction died from AIDS, and I think often that God was on my side.

My arrangement with Don afforded me the time to get my bent compass balanced. The owner of the Back Stage had landed on his feet at a chain. He offered me a job at Marie Calendar’s restaurants to do their marketing, primarily for the bar area of the business, and soon I was inching myself up off the canvas. I did not stop dabbling in heroin, nor did I stop the pint of vodka almost every day, but “in due time.”

I was convinced the candle burning at both ends suited me just fine. I knew my direction, but was not sure the steps, not sure the distance. This was how I spent 1988-89.

In 1989, I was offered the job of taking over the same position in San Francisco, Northern California to be specific, and I was all about that. My final day in Phoenix, I remember going to see the movie, Wild at Heart, having the most loveless sex of my life with a junkie girlfriend of ours, getting into my 1966 Chevy Impala and driving up to Concord, CA full of renewed confidence and glee.

Even a casual reader of the facts laid here-to-with, will know this was doomed.

“We can never know what to want; because living only one life, we neither compare it to past lives nor perfect it in lives to come.” – Milan Kundera

Three Scoops of Rocky Road, Please

What followed were eighteen months of arm flailing efforts resulting in titanic disappointment – all a roller coast of events. I was seriously trying to find that balance between art and commerce in a city that I thought majored in it, but found myself mired in alcohol, loneliness and self-doubt. I did produce some fiction writing that really moved me from the studious to the serious, developed some functionality as an ad man, was disappointed by women, and discovered San Francisco to be a difficult city to thrive in if you were not already thriving. Anyone who’s tried to do it from a point of need, would agree.

At the same time, I am bouncing in and out of Jails for DUI, (I racked up four arrests in the time I spent there, Yowzah!) I was having a hard time feeling like I belonged anywhere. The restaurant people were below the Mendoza line about music, culture, restaurant-know-how and funny jokes. Just working-class folk, missing their Raiders and hating the 49ers. What I enjoyed was the fact that I traveled all over the NoCal area, from Modesto to Stockton, from Cupertino to Mountainview. This really gave me a slice of it all.

I remember I was driving up the 101 to Stockton and saw a sign announcing the San Jacinto Valley for some reason. I was electrified. The Big Valley! Audra, Luke, Lee Majors. Holy Cow!

When these are the high points, a slow patina of shame creeps in, as I knew I was in an impossible situation. I had to hang in it because I knew nothing else. I remember at one point I thought I would go to work at a Kinkos or something, anything to ground my existence.

Then in 1990, I got word from my family that my younger brother, John, who had joined the Air Force in 1978 and worked his way up a very hard path to become an F-16 pilot, had departed in the night with his squadron from South Carolina, headed to Desert Shield. This was before it became Desert Storm, if you recall they had that three- or four-month build-up where everything was on the hush hush and speculation was all over the news.

I had not seen John since he had come to AZ for something a few years earlier, it was right after he had gotten his wings. We went out to the Mitchell AFB in Phoenix. He wanted to go out there and just look over the fence at the F-16s there. I recall him and his buddy all giddy with excitement that they would be flying these sleek beasts.

Anyway, the thought that if this war became as bad as they were saying, and something were to happen to him it would haunt me the rest of my life. If he became casualty, I would never see him again. I would never have really known him as an adult.

I believed that this would have been my own doing. My pursuit of my version of my so-called life had exiled me from my family. I never really considered the distance. Never recognized the lives that were being led without me, and my life without them. Time and distance were suddenly seen in a light I had never considered.

I recall the afternoon I spent at a beautiful little park in Concord, reading “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. I could not keep my mind on the stories, because each one provided a reflection into the dilemma of disconnect, I was now so keenly aware: Time and Distance, and what it does in our modern world.

Miraculously, within – it seems now – days, I got a call from Gary, from my AZ restaurant days. He had some stores in Atlanta that needed my specific talents and was wondering if I was interested. I think he had to have heard I was drowning in my own vomit in California, (but I know he will never know the full extent to which he saved my life.) I agreed to move to Atlanta, and take the position offered to do marketing.

That was the opportunity that brought me back South. In June of 1991, I loaded up my 1966 Impala with all my earthly possessions, (which fit into the trunk and half the back seat! If that tells you anything) and headed south.

Atlanta

I arrived in Atlanta at 2am on a Sunday and realized I didn’t know where I was going – specifically. I had taken the 580 South to I-5 South. Somewhere outside Bakersfield, I hooked up to Interstate 40 East and kept going till I hit Memphis. After a drop in on the King, I headed to the ATL, where I realized I had not asked where the restaurant was located. I was traveling around on what I now know to be the outer loop of the city, I-285. When after about an hour and half I decided to ask someone, I pulled into a Seven Eleven. I looked around and it was pretty ghetto….?.

That was when it hit me. Atlanta… Martin Luther King…. Civil Rights….. Whoa! There is no doubt, the presence of blacks in the South is something that you can only understand through experience. It is convoluted and omnipresent. And it hit me first time at 3:30am the night I arrived.

It seemed to me in my white brain, that all the folks at the Seven Eleven were up to no good, and I’m asking silly questions about directions. I know now where I was, and you may have heard of the hip hop dance – The Bankhead Bounce – and this was exactly where I was, the Bankhead area of Atlanta. Fortunately, all they gave me was lousy directions.

The following morning, I started my new job. Six months later I was out of a job. The way I wanted to do my job and the way the franchise owners wanted me to do my job were – to say the least – opposed. And, I was drinking pretty seriously still, and thus did not argue my points very well. But the early exit really bopped me on the head. I was broke, friendless and alone. My family, despite what I had planned, was not fully in my corner because of the choices I had made up to the point and in all honesty, the way I had treated them for the past ten years. All the selfish or sympathetically, self-absorbed, moves I had made had isolated me. I will never forget the trauma of the week I spent virtually homeless in Atlanta the fall of 1991.

(Note: do not think I do not consider the underpinning of alcohol in all my troubles. It surfaced as an armor against all I was feeling deep inside, and I was not recognizing its damning effect on everything at the time. I am writing now from a different place.)

My first step was to get re-employed pronto as I had no funds. I was one day away from taking a job at Burger King, (I cannot watch Lost in America or American Beauty without reflecting full on about these days) In my Arizona days, I had taken a night job for about a year doing debt collections on Student Loans, and this experience paid off, as I was able to land a collection job at an agency, and this afforded the opportunity to stabilize once again.

The issues, as I see them now, were that I was fairly depressed, drinking and alone. Not a recipe for success. It was at this time I was blessed with a lifeline, a ray of hope eked itself into my drowning boat.

I was looking to room somewhere, since I had no furniture or real ‘possessions.’ I had my clothes, some mementos and some graphic art stuff. I answered an ad and moved into a house in an eastern suburb of Atlanta, Smyrna, Ga. It was a guy a little older than me who was in process of separating from his wife and was living with his 16-year-old daughter and his father in law. I think I was there because they thought I would be good company for the father in law. The father-in-law was a remarkable 70 year old man who was recuperating from heart surgery. We immediately hit it off. It was this relationship that began a trek that led me out of my darkness. But I went kicking and screaming.

Jim was a retired insurance salesman. The real grey flannel suit salesman. Someone who built a career that began selling insurance policies door to door and grew to prosperity Horatio Alger style. He understood practical hard work, and he imparted this concept to me.

He was also a Braves fan, and every day we sat together and watched the Braves make their improbably rise from ‘worst to first’ in 1991. That year I fell in love with baseball again. I had not watched baseball since I was a teenager, as football took over when I hit high school, and I had forgotten, or probably never knew or needed the joy of The Game.

But the stories and life lessons that Jim imparted to me while we watched the Braves were absolutely sent from above. He will never know how much I loved hearing his stories from WW2, his insurance stories, the stories of raising a family of four girls through two marriages. Also, he provided a center for my life in Atlanta, something to grow from. Being a local (by way of Indiana and Illinois) he has local sense of the city. And he didn’t mind that I drank. Oh, he would mention I might want to slow down, but he was never preachy about it. Not at first anyway.

I worked at one collection agency for about eight months, driving around in my Impala. But the drinking continued, and the odds were shifting. I was arrested twice for DWI in this period of time, finally spending 30 days in the Smyrna jail. This ended my job, obviously, and chased away a girl I was dating. (Actually, she just disappeared, hmmm?) When I was released, Jim tried to tell me it was not good idea to get arrested so often, but I was in denial. I thought I was just having bad luck. I went looking for new job.

I tried to crack the ad game, but I was too much of a generalist. I could do all phases of advertising, but the jobs one could get were all specific, looking for someone with specific job experience. An ad agency looking to hire a Media Buyer 1, was looking for someone who had been a Media Buyer 2.

This track was not mine. After a short period of rejection, I went back into collections. As they are always looking for someone. I went to work for a law firm specializing in collections. And here my luck and life changed.

Wallace & de Mayo was run by two partners. Doug Wallace and Richard de Mayo, who were aggressive, talented and always looking to leverage their staff to an advantage. The firm was composed of the two partners and another lawyer, a technology staff of four and about 20 collectors, five of which specialized in the legal collections. This last group was where I found myself.

I spent the next year in learning the trade of legal collections. I was having a tough time with the booze and was actually good at the job negotiating with people to pay their bills with a soft reasoned approach that, as I look back on it, showed respect for their situation.
But, I went home and drank each night, woke up and after a breakfast vodka, went to work, set up a successful month of lawsuits and collections and thus’ settled’ into a routine. By 1993, I was trying to pull myself in a better direction and started making inroads into the Atlanta arts community.

In the meantime, notes from my friends in the Tempe underground told me that the Gin Blossoms had been signed to A&M records and were in Memphis to record their debut album. I called up there a few times. I talked to Doug and Bill about their album, their good fortune and the road. They invited me up to visit, but my condition was not good for travel. I was glued to my routine in a way I did not recognize as fatal.

One Sunday morning, I woke up invigorated with the prospect of going down to the Bennett St. area of Atlanta to the Nexxus Gallery. An opening was taking place that I thought would be attended by the elusive arts crowd of Atlanta I wanted to get to know. I began the morning by consuming the last half of the bottle of Smirnoff from the night before. I got into my car and headed out.

About a half hour later I was approaching the Howell Mill exit of the freeway that would lead me to my destination. I pulled off the freeway and up to the intersection. Not realizing the intersection was stop sign not a light, I ran the intersection just as a late model Camry was doing the same to my left. Without a warning, the horns and crash of metal tore into my car. My battle wagon was moved but ever so slightly but none the less mortally wounded. The Camry took the brunt of it. The entire front of the car was an organ grinder crunched into a pancake. The steam from the radiator blasted and the sound of a jammed horn sounded. I was stunned. This could not be happening. No, no, no. What to do? How is the ‘other guy’ I was not watching out for?

Luckily, the passenger from the Camry exited the vehicle unharmed, I remember her saying, ‘well, I guess the air bags work.’ I went up to them, there were four people in the other car, and I could tell by their reaction to me, they knew I had been having distilled potatoes for breakfast. I also knew I was in deep, deep shit.

I had to get outta there. I could not wait around for this. This was real trouble. As Gram Parson’s once sang, “it’s a hard way to find out, that trouble is real…”

Major league trouble! I looked around to see if there was an avenue of escape. The corner was occupied by a BP gas station, a hotel and a strip club. I thought I could make it to the strip club and disappear into the trees behind the parking lot. I made the excuse I needed to use the phone to call my insurance company (I was uninsured) I took off in the direction of a pay phone. I got into the phone booth and looked back at the scene to see if they were watching me. They were pretty well consumed with the damage to the cars, and I thought I had an opportunity.

But then something hit me. Some gravity of conscience. No, I could not continue to run. I had to make a stand, had to weather my Waterloo. It’s funny how I felt that my whole life would hinge on the decision I would make in that instant in that phone booth in a nowhere location in Atlanta. I returned to the scene and waited for the police.

They automatically knew I had been drinking, (it was only about 11am). Off to the station. Booked. I called Jim to post my bail. I was told by the cops he refused. Refused. Too embarrassed or prideful to call my family. I was back against the wall solo. The Monday, still in jail, my job was gone.

They held my hearing with no bail I was bound over for trial. The trial was sixty days away, and all I could do, all I could manage was to sit in the city jail and wait, hoping the judge would see an intelligent, well-meaning white guy did not deserve to be sent away with the black urban miscreants. This is what is known as doing time. Spending two months in an overcrowded city jail with most of the population coming and going, a certain routine acknowledged by all as if it were universally understood, and the fact I was one of 4 white guys out of about 60 in my block was a learning experience I would not – from my current vantage point – disavow. Nor would I wish that specific rite of passage on anyone. The whole time I am asking anyone who would possibly know the answer, what will happen?

While in jail, the band I had done a lot to get started, the Gin Blossoms, came through town. Till this day, they do not know where I was when they came through that first time. They played a very cool club, and I remember thinking the absurdity of it all, and that my fortunes had truly plummeted. I was alone.

I watched the Braves play the Blue Jays in the World Series on TV from jail. I could look out the slatted windows of jail and see the lights of Fulton County Stadium, while the glare of game on TV lit my face from the side. That was the year of the upside down Canadian flag.

My day in court arrived, and I was hustled over to the courthouse. There in court was my friend Jim, and the two girls who were in the other car. I was in a shackled line-up of about ten, dressed in prison orange. Jim told me later I looked pretty healthy, which tells me what I must have been leading up to the crisis event.

My hopes skyrocketed when Jim told me he had talked to the judge. They had told me in jail that if someone vouches for you, they will sometimes let you out right then. I was fairly sure they did not want to spend tax dollars on me. I lied and told the judge I had a job. Jim had vouched this was true. But the specter of the “victims” cast a long shadow on the proceedings.

I stood in front of the judge, as we have all seen in countless TV shows, at his mercy. “One year, fifteen hundred dollar fine” was the gist of his summation. I looked at both the girls and Jim as I was led away, uncertain of where in Georgia I was going.

My dad knew my predicament, as Jim had called him in an effort help me at some point while I was in city jail. So, from the holding cell, I called him collect making the most excruciating phone call of my life. As I think back about it now, that one thing has marked my life. I would do anything to never have had to make a call like that again. I would give up many of the great experiences I would have previously never had surrendered if it would not add up to that call. Horrible, horrible.

I’ll be brief about the time I spent on what they call The Farm, which was where they sent me and all non-violent. It was known on the street as Key Road because that was where it was located. For the longest time, when inmates talked about it, I thought everyone was saying “Cairo.”

The place might very well have been where they filmed parts of Cool Hand Luke, truly. And this is how I know: One morning, TBS was showing the film and it was on in my pod television. Honest to God, there I was sitting in a bunk exactly like the one Paul Newman was sitting in. As they panned his room, there I was in an exact same setting. I could be wrong, but I didn’t get the feeling anyone else watching the movie saw it quite as I did.

Main takeaways from my five months there, (you only serve half your time if you stay out of any trouble) was I read 54 books, (count ‘em 54). Two of which, On Native Ground by Alfred Kazan and a big ol’ fat book about the history of Russia, almost made the time spent worth it. I learned how to play spades. I saw the film Undercover during drug treatment school.

Importantly, I saw how difficult it is for some people in this country to rise above their station and understood why crime is the way it is. Hopeless can be as easy to accept by one as hope is for another.

It is a product of the individual and the uncontrollable circumstances of fate. I met some very straight up folks there that will never earn more than the minimum if they stayed the course without some sort of help. I felt certain disgust with myself for all the opportunity I had squandered. I had time to reflect on why and vowed to make the most of whatever opportunity I was given in the future. Unfortunately, that was a vow harder to keep than one reading these pages might think.

Alfred Kazan’s On Native Ground, which melded all my various literary readings into a cohesive vision of American writing. I could see what was American about O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Edna St Vincent Millay and counterpoint that against Anglo or French writers, especially Sartre and Celine. I had long admired the latter writers but did not feel as kindred to them as I did with the Americans. Reading Kazan explained to me the way I observe all things American.

So, I got that going for me! Sheez.

Another thing I was able to do with my time, was become very fluent about the history of Russia and the period leading up to the Russian revolution. I was really blown away by “Red’s” when it came out. But I felt like a whole aspect of America as part of the greater world was unknown to me. Being a huge fan of Chekov, and pretty much had enjoyed all literature Russian I had read. The Russian psyche is very similar to that of Americans. Possibly this is because we both live in class filled societies that are as human as they are defined. I could not understand why they became Communists or how this had all come about. So, through reading the history of the 60 or so years leading up to the October revolution of 1917, allowed me to understand how and why a billion or so people could fall in line with whatever line of rhetoric was coming down from Lenin & Co. Why this comes back to me as a significant achievement of time spent behind bars is no more understood at this moment than any other time, I reflect on it. I think, ‘that was cool, I never would have spent the time on it if I wasn’t pretty much forced to.’

In order to qualify for early release, I had to have job. Boldly, I contacted my old job at the law firm and asked them to take me back, just to get me out. Fortunately, there was an opening in the legal department as a collector. In three days, from petition to release, I was out. It was a strange freedom. Now, whenever I see someone being released from prison – including the beginning of the Blues Brothers – I get a knot in my stomach recalling that disconnected and lonely feeling one has when no longer incarcerated but usure of what happens next. There was no sense of release, no sense of ‘at last.’ Only the terror or ‘what will happen?’

Jim, ever faithful friend and hope springing eternal in the form of this seventy-year-old man, was there to pick me up. He took me to a mall for a meal and offered to take me in. He was now living in a nice suburb townhome. It was good. But this was on the other side of town from my job. But I gladly accepted the travel requirements.

I would have to take the bus to work since the Impala was DOA. That began a yearlong daily odyssey. Up at 4:30am for a bus at 5:15, a forty-minute bus downtown from the northwest side of Atlanta. A short train ride north and into another bus at 7 for a ride out to the northeast side of Atlanta. In a car, the ride is not more than a half hour. Mass transit – two and half hours. But if that’s what I had to chew, I chewed hard. I enjoyed the people at work, did not mind the job.

After about two months, the booze snuck itself back into my life. I was not aware of what a subtle seductress the whole thing is. I did not consider it something a rational man could not control. It took another two years for the slide to be costly again. But cost it did. It’s weird what uncontrollable looks like from the inside. I thought as long as I kept some things in order, showed up for work every day, pay my bills on time I would be ok. But it was so much more.

Doug Hopkins Is No More

(2021 – when preparing this for sending out to a friend to get their feedback, I realized I had left the above as placeholder. At the time of my original writing of this in 2004, still too painful to revisit. But I found the below, the primary section written contemporaneous to the event so the below on Doug’s suicide was written both years and days from my return from Doug Hopkin’s funeral)

I was living in a decent apartment on Roswell Road in North Atlanta. My only connection now to the music business I had escaped was an occasional visit to Eddie’s Attic in Decatur or a trip to record stores in Five Points or the Perimeter. I saw singers and songwriters at Eddie’s Attic and thought of Doug Hopkins and his future.

News from Arizona was not good. As successful as the band was becoming, Doug had continued to drink and from what I was hearing, seem to be at outs with the band. Bill had called or I had called Bill I can’t remember which and they were going to be recording in Memphis and there were tentative plans for me to go up and visit. For whatever reason, possibly that I couldn’t get there possibly I was busy forging a new life in Atlanta possibly I was too lazy. But I did not go. Haunts me till today.

Evidently during the sessions things got untenable with Doug and they fired him. You can Google Doug Hopkins or the Gin Blossoms and find many an article purporting what happened. I choose to believe it was the label and not the band. You take some young guys and give them an opportunity at the brass ring and make an untenable request of them as a gatekeeper to the rings and there’s a likely outcome. He was fired during the recordings of New Miserable Experience even though he was the founder of the band, its most shining light and songwriter of half the songs.

Through my brother Mike who was also living in Arizona at the time, I kept up with what Doug was doing post GBs. He had formed a band with some friends called the Chimera’s. I immediately set about drawing Chimera logos. I called Doug and we talked for a while and he had nothing but hateful spiteful angry things to say about the band in a phrase I heard quoted many times in the papers later, Doug would say “I made those bastards!”

Coincidentally, it was at one of those visits to Eddies Attic that I came up with the idea of having Doug come to Atlanta which had a very strong music scene and thinking he could hook up with people here and possibly resurrect his life. It seemed to me he had burned out in Tempe and like me, a new city might be good. I had an extra bedroom and Atlanta had a solid music scene. I didn’t know anything it was just an idea. But I called Doug got his voicemail and left a probably cryptic message.

I would guess now probably two weeks or three weeks later he called me back and left a message on my phone just saying he was calling back. It was December 2nd. On December 5th Doug shot himself. Unbelievable.

I attended the funeral, and the Hopkins family asked me to say something. On the plane to Phoenix, I could not think of what to say and could not think of anything original. All I could think about was W.H. Auden’s poem at the death of Yeats. So, I decided to just recite it at the funeral, replacing Ireland with Tempe.

“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich woman, the decay,

Yourself. Mad Tempe hurt you into poetry.

Now Tempe has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that believe and die in; it survives

A way of happening, a mouth”

That’s the piece of the poem that spoke to me loudest of Doug. He never left Tempe and his voice, beyond his voice or the music has a mouth.

The only other piece time that ci recalled after I returned for the funeral was a group gathering at a place you and I have gone, Ninth and Ash and a kitchen table get together at someone’s house. Both places were overflowing with Doug stories. I figure if there were three things of note every day of his life there are 35,040 Doug stories out there. As we speak, I don’t think 10% of them have surfaced. Brian, I wish you could have met him, he was truly a good soul and multi-colored whirlwind.

(2010) Recently, rummaging through some papers I found the following. I wrote this sometime after I returned from Doug’s funeral, I want to share this with you now in its raw thought:

Maybe it will be the last time I see those people. That seems strange to consider, but it was five years, and in some cases more, since the last time. If it were not for death, I might not have ever seen them again. I know nothing short of Doug’s demise would have produced anything like the absurd collection that moved around the memorial hall that was Tempe that night.

We were a nob of nobody’s that had come to pay respects to the one guy who made us feel important. His glory was us, and when it became too real for him…

Well, I don’t know who let who down but we were alive and the one who had the most life was dead. They say it was alcohol. I say that was a symptom but not a cause. Giving Doug Hopkins a gun was the cause. A ten day waiting period would have allowed him to possibly come out of his funk, or allowed those closest to him to get him committed or get some help. Or maybe just giving him back his band, his dignity, his life. But Doug had created for himself an environment that demanded something dynamic occur or he was feeling comfortable with the idea of the end, and when that didn’t happen on its own, he was only a muscle reflex away from going where only faith hope and charity comfort us into keeping the spirit of a dead man alive

The double-platinum record that the band thought enough to bequeath me is a constant physical reminder more of Doug than the reconstituted band; but its the music though reminds of him to the bone.

At the end of ’93, opportunity knocked for me. Doug Wallace, one the partners of the law firm had an idea to form a legal network for collection attorneys. He was looking to market the idea and looking for help. My boss, Mike Dozier told him I might be low-cost solution. He knew I could draw. The day before a long New Year’s ‘94 weekend, he and the marketing director, Amy Farber gave me the details behind the idea and asked me to come back with some material. I spent the whole weekend developing a full-blown marketing plan. I had a few different themes, some artwork. I went at it like my life depended on it. And to a significant degree, it did. Not only did I succeed in the meeting, but I also impressed Doug Wallace in a way that has affected my life ever since.

From that moment on, he refused to let me fail. He took me under his wing and groomed me for the legal collections business and taught me how to be an entrepreneur. In February ‘94, I went to Nashville with the group and introduced the network at an association convention for collections lawyers.

That started a whirlwind year of activity. I was provided all the graphic art software I needed, an office and treated somewhat as a wunderkind. I was fueled both by the challenge and the vodka. I was a burning roman candle living my vision of the modern Kerouac life. I produced. Plus, they liked me and just prayed I would straighten up before I blew out.

The network idea took off. It went from an investment by the partners of maybe $300K in ‘94/’95 to grossing about 100K a month in revenue by the start of ‘96. And I was in charge of marketing. I was in full bloom working with Doug and Amy on how to sell the network concept to financial institutions and other law firms. I wrote his speeches and designed all the collateral.

Also, I got word that the Gin Blossoms management want to buy the logo I had designed for them when I managed them. Bill told me that the entire A&M design staff could not come up with logo that was better than mine. I couldn’t believe it. It is still in use today.

But, dear reader, in the fall of 1995, my candle whimpered and almost blew out. I was given a sit down and told if I did not check in for some treatment I would be fired. Although I fully intended to, I didn’t, and they did. I was stunned. I thought I was immune, I thought surely, I would be given another chance. I was mistaken. Not only that, the paying the rent part. I had sort of lost track of that part too. I came home one day, and my stuff had been placed out in the street, and in about two hours, rummaged through by passersby. I retired to a pay by the week hotel within walking distance with a bottle of vodka. A casual girlfriend came round to check on me and I made light of it all to ease her mind and hasten her departure. But inside, I was stunned. I spent the night fighting off the nightmares of what lay next. The recriminations of self, the utter stupidity of it all.

The Twenty-First Chapter

The next day I fell down, but not out. I had wanted to get some treatment, just hadn’t made the time. I rifled through the yellow pages and called around until I found someone who would take me that afternoon and it was within walking distance. It is truly amazing that because of those two random occurances, I can say I am sober.

I went to a county health clinic and met for four hours with a psychologist. One on one, she patiently walked me through my life. Not so much for the actions but for the effect or impact events of my life had imprinted on me a destructive shield. By the end of it, after tears and surrendering to grandiosity, through revelation and humble pie I knew I would never have to have another drink. Simply, I walked out of that meeting and have never had a drink since. It was weird but at last, a light bulb truly went off. I went through an effortless outpatient program that lasted six weeks. I don’t know any more than that.

By January, I was back at work and have not looked back since. This is the first time I have tried to reflect seriously about those days. Doug was hesitant, as was everybody else, but they made the decision to give me another chance. I dug in and tried hard to reward their faith.

I suspected I had a chance, because they had taken my Gin Blossoms Double Platinum record award that I had mounted in my office and hid it from me. They told me later, thinking I might use it to pawn, they did not give it back to me. Looking back now, they wouldn’t have done this if they intended to end it all with me. That they kept it, meant that there was something more than an employee at stake here. They would not let me fail.

The key to it was rewriting my inner text. So much of myself; ever since my days with you, had been built around substance fueled living. My social culture was hardcoded with ‘have a coupla drinks and then…’ Once I realized I needed to change this inside, or remove myself from this environment, it was remarkably easy. Yes, it costs something. But, in the whole what one gains is infinitely more important. It is about choices, and if I’ve learned anything it is that choices have to be made in ways that I would not have thought twenty years ago. It is something I bet we could agree is a product of time on earth and not easily come by.

The attorney network has become what I do. It has afforded me a lot since I came back. Its successful rise has been pretty steady, and this has been good for me both professionally and personally. From ‘96 through ‘99, we grew the network into the largest in the financial serices industry, gaining clients such as GE Capital, Chrysler Financial, Citibank, Household. Revenue grew at about a 35% annual rate from 1996 to 1999.

I was able to travel extensively visiting clients and firms, attending conferences. We were a fixture: Tracy McKergow, our marketing director, Doug Wallace, the managing director and me, the utility player able to provide able back up or assistance in any fashion from presentations to marketing materials created overnight to present to a client exactly what we learned at dinner they wanted to hear in the meeting the next morning.

From here, it slows down but gets strange in a totally different way. This will be conveyed in my next communique. – (EJR 2004)

Postscript: Reading this in 2022, I had to clarify some timelines and tamp down bits of the rhetoric but have mainly tried to maintain the person writing in 2004 on events ten to twenty years earlier.