Copyright — 2011 by Rick Carroll
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Acknowledgements
While I fully acknowledge that there’s a lot in this account that ends up sounding like some gutter drunk’s song and dance routine — like I’m hoping that a bigger lie will bring a bigger tip — I swear on a stack of mothers’ graves that everything in this book is true. In fact, I saved the most ridiculous stuff to hang over the heads of those successful few who made it out whole, and might have a strong incentive to keep it out of print. But that’s just in case the book doesn’t sell.
A man’s gotta eat after all.
Before We Get Started
This book isn’t about music. Not really. It refers to music, since there was plenty of music happening and being played, and music was affecting all the stuff that was happening. There’s even stuff about a band here and there, and bands are all about music. That said, this book isn’t about music. Still, this story doesn’t really make sense without acknowledging the impact that music had on everything that drove everything to be what it ended up being.
Alan Cancelino was the personification of the ’80s. He swam in rivers of excess and flaunted his disregard for convention as if he’d been hired to teach us all how to embrace the hedonism that defined that decade. He raced through money and drugs as flagrantly as all the legends suggest, and did so as if to challenge the percentages that stack up against anyone who’s ever taken a run at public notoriety. Just to show us, and probably himself, that there was always the possibility that the odds weren’t really in charge.
For me and for plenty others, he redefined a lot of what it means to be alive and human on planet Earth, but where he really broke ground was in how he treated music. And to be embarrassingly honest here, at the time I had no idea what was going on as it was happening right in front of me. In fact, I’ve never suspected anything of the sort until a few days ago. Then again, I hadn’t gotten baked — not a stoned kind of baked — in a long time, and Al had never played his final up-at-the-house jam tapes for me. Not the tapes from those last few months in the spring of 1989, before he took his life on the lam and then off to prison. Not those tapes. I’ve never even known those tapes existed.
At first, I thought it was the K-2 fucking with me. I honestly did. But then I listened to the cuts again this afternoon, and no, it wasn’t the K-2. The K-2 just forced me to reach for something — anything — to focus on, and there was Big Al and the last incarnation of his W. Albany St. Blues Band, reaching back through time to set things right in my mind. Slipping surprise after surprise through the slyest mix I’ve ever found myself within, the guys gave time took a break from that next stretch of my life and steadied my feet, as that buzz and the music met with a deep soul kiss of visceral union. Me? I just wandered.
Raw, dark, and belligerently hypnotic. So clean and clear I could tell the age of the strings on Iggy’s bass and whether Coupie was playing with those Dunlop guitar picks of his or if he’d just grabbed a plastic generic off the shelf in the stereo island. It was the Dunlops. He knew the machines were running. Coupie liked to sound good for the machines. And he did. They all did.
But as I drank deep, what surprised me was what I was learning about my buddy Al. His complete and compelling disregard for what the rest of them — the rest of us — were always working so hard within the confines of form and structure to create as a whole. But it wasn’t a disregard for the players, or a disregard for the quality of the music itself, it was a genuine disregard for that structure that we — that all musicians — serve with innate adherence.
Okay, not all musicians. There are some — Miles Davis comes to mind, and so does Lou Reed — who have found their way through those established structures; have learned how to breathe freely within them, but this was Alan. My old pal Alan. Not Miles Davis. Not Lou Reed. And yet, here he was, totally unleashed and writhing in a tactical chaos within the sporadic slurry of a 21 year old recording; an all-night living room free-for-all — live to DAT — as the Wheels of Justice were finely grinding ever closer toward him. His community's core honoring the end of his reign with a wrenchingly honest, periodically psychotic, and harrowingly expressive open jam. It was brilliant.
One vamp bled into another, and so much to get lost with. Phrasing that defies description; like a high wire act with no net, but not an act that you ever knew to be a high wire act. Like discovering that it’d been a high wire act all along. That it had flown to the earth each time it’d left the wire. That there’d never been a fall at all. Never. That familiar dissonance, making so much perfect sense within the solid and dependable groove that’d always been there, always patient and always resilient, no matter how twisted that dissonance decided to be. The whole of it had always been right there in front of me, and I'd always missed it. I was devastated.
Today, I’d decided that you need to hear this stuff, and that’s what this blurb’s about. Log onto http://WAlbanyStBluesBand.com and get to know the other half of this amazing story. The music, the clips, the bios and photos of those who made that world what it was; a slice in time that thousands of folks will never forget. We can’t all tell the world to go fuck itself, but we can sit in Alan’s living room and enjoy the company of some legendary folks who did.
Check it out, come stoned, and feel what it was like to take that dissident break from the world. For an evening, or like me, for the whole weekend.
This book is dedicated to Iggy, Chetty, Coupie, Fernie, Ricky, Herbie, Rodney, and every other colorful bastard who ever found his way up to Alan’s place and tossed in what he had, to make it what it was. And, of course, to Big Al; the only one on the planet who could've ever gotten any of it to survive for more than a weekend.
Chapter I
The Bitch Of It All In A Nutshell
2 December 2009
When the office phone rings, I’m there to grab it. Not to answer it, since answering it would involve screaming as long and as hard and as far into it as I possibly can. I just grab it. I don’t even know what I plan to do with it, but I want to feel it in my fist. I want it to feel its helplessness, as I consider its fate. I stare through it — its little warble babbling innocently that someone is demanding my time — and I don’t know why I’m giving them or this goddamn thing so much of my attention. The truth is, I’ve had it with everyone and everything.
It’s the fifth time it’s gone off since dinner, and this is after I’ve already notified everyone who has my number that evening calls are now off limits. Over the last few weeks or so, they’ve been coming out of the woodwork, and I’m tired of having to defend every sentence, every idea connected to this project. It’s getting ridiculous, and I need to reclaim my life from whatever the hell it is that I brought back with me from Manhattan. This infection that’s turned everyone I know into literary critics.
And it’s not as if anyone agrees with anyone else over why this manuscript sucks. If it’s not one person’s problem with the book’s focus, it’s the general tenor of the voice (the voice?) that’s driving someone else absolutely up a wall. But then, there are the problems that some are finding agreement over. Like too many celebratory references to irresponsible drug use, or the fact that the names haven’t been changed to protect the innocent — as if there are or have ever been any innocent people associated with this true-life account of the celebration of irresponsible drug use. Still, it’s good to see some of these pricks coming together over something. Even if it’s over a mutual disdain for what I’ve done to my buddy Al’s life story.
Hell, I can’t wait for the agent’s mark-ups. If this manuscript — this one that you’re reading — is as much of a failure as the panic suggests, then the flood of blood-red ink coming with his professional critiques will be legendary. An absolute fucking tsunami of it. That is, if those mark-ups ever come at all. It’s been almost a month since we sat across the table from that rep and shook on a partnership to put this mess on store shelves. I’m even getting shit for the fact that the guy turned into an urban legend as soon as we walked out onto the street. As if that’s my fault, too.
I look at the caller ID. Just in case. Maybe it’s some fellow loser who wants to protect my credit cards or something. It’d be nice to have someone who doesn’t hate me on the other end of the line right now. It’s Alan, and he’s 12 hours ahead of schedule. I was expecting this call to wake me up in the morning. I answer it anyway.
“What the hell is this? " he barks as soon as I say my hello. "I thought you were just cleaning the manuscript up a little. This is a whole new version. What’re you doing?”
I can tell that Alan is doing his best to be patient, but over the course of the last month or so, I’ve learned to recognize when that patience is all set to flip over on him. We’re not there yet, but we’re not far away either.
“It’s just the opener, " I reply. "I wanted to take advantage of something that I just learned from one of those old news clippings I copied off you when I was out last week. I never knew the exact time line of that night. How it all played out when the feds finally caught up to you in New Jersey.”
“I got no problem with you putting something in there about the take down up front, but then you go and turn it into a ghost story. It’s like you’re losing control of the whole book right in the first goddamn chapter.”
“Ghost story? " What ghost story? " Where the hell is he getting ghost story from that chapter I’ve just sent him? "Are you sure you read what I emailed you?”
“Not all of it, but I read enough to know that I don’t like it. You’re supposed to be doing rewrites. Not changing the whole friggin’ story.”
“It’s still the same story, but now I feel like I have to explain why I’m writing the damn thing in the first place. This story isn’t just about you, y’know. Somewhere in here, I gotta explain why any of this matters to me.”
“You’re writing it to shove Bannister’s piece of shit book right back up his ass where it come from. At least that’s why you were writing it.”
“Yeah, well, packing Bannister’s ass isn’t a good enough reason for me to write a book.”
To be honest, debunking Paul Bannister’s bullshit "true crime " memoir Deadly Deceptions — Twenty One Years Undercover Without A Badge was exactly why I’d originally agreed to write Alan’s side of the story, but no reader is ever going to accept something like that as a primary plot stresser. That’s not the kind of thing that carries a whole book. People aren’t that petty in real life. Okay, maybe in real life, but no one’s that petty in literary real life.
“Kevin, I think you need to stop talking to people for a while. You’re all over the place on this book since we met with Peter. You need to wait for his mark-ups to come back. You’re getting crazy from the pressure.”
“But I need to change the beginning anyway, " I say. "He hates the first chapter. He already said he hates it. I’m just playing around with it until I get something solid to react to. Did you see how crazy that timing was between us that night? Didn’t that kind of freak you out when you read it?”
“Freaked out isn’t the description I’d use. To tell you the truth, it sounds like you made it up. No one’s going to believe it.”
“But, it’s true. All of it. Right down to the minute, according to the clippings and the police report.”
The phone goes silent for few moments.
“It just sounds weird, " he says.
“Yeah, it does. But that’s what’s so important about it. It kind of makes sense if you believe in that sort of thing.”
“But what if you don’t believe in that stuff? Then it sounds like it’s made up. This is a true story we have here. People aren’t going to think that part of it is true.”
“Alan, when the book starts getting into all the crazy shit that dropped into your lap from…who knows where…the sky, I guess, what makes you think they’ll believe any of that stuff?”
“They’ll believe it because it’s true. All of it.”
“Okay, I know it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that anyone else has to believe it. People lie in true story novels all the time. How about that Million Pieces guy on Oprah? He got caught lying.”
Alan goes quiet again. That Oprah guy lied over a relatively minor amount of drug abuse in his memoir. Alan’s story has totally ridiculous amounts of drug abuse. They don’t even write fiction about the levels of drug abuse contained within Alan’s story. They know better than to think that anyone would believe it.
“So that shit really happened to you while I was getting raided in New Jersey? " Alan seems calmed down and ready to discuss this newest adjustment to the book.
“Just like I describe it, " I say. "Of course, I have to tell my own made up version of what you were doing from minute to minute, but I make it clear that I’m picturing it in my head in the present. I’m not claiming to be psychic.”
“I like the part where I tell the broad that I’d rather get rid of her than the dog. That part’s dead on. I was so tired of her shit by then. The best part of that whole day was watching them haul her off. She was swearing and kicking them. It was worth eight years in prison just to watch someone else have to deal with her.”
I look at the copy of the revision that I have before me. "Are there any changes that you think I need to make?”
“I don’t know, " he says. "It just sounds too dramatic.”
“It’s supposed to sound like that. It’s the big drama introduction sequence. I’m trying to drag the reader into the book here. It’s gotta be compelling.”
“I don’t know. I’m not a writer, so maybe I just don’t know what to look for.”
I take a moment to scan the piece as he makes some comments about this and that — stuff that I’m not really paying attention to. It’s the evening now and my ADD meds aren’t holding me fast to any particular train of thought anymore. The next shiny object will whisk me off. It ends up being that opening segment on the screen in front of me.
In my mind, I can see Alan’s dog, a large German Shepherd that he named after his lawyer, going crazy — barking and growling at nothing but sand and sky in every direction. All summer long, this little beach community of Ship Bottom, New Jersey has offered nothing at all to get excited about, but the dog’s been losing it most of the day, and by now, Al’s finally had enough of the damn thing.
Then again, he brought the dog along to alert him to what he wouldn’t be able to see coming. Like Federal Marshals or FBI, or ATF, DEA, or any other state or federal agency that might suddenly throw a SWAT team at him. The dog’s extremely capable and highly intelligent, and when Al got it, it was all tricked out and ready to go. A real star from the stable of a very reputable trainer. The problem is that its anxiety seems confused — its alerts lacking any sort of focus, and what the hell good is that? You can’t run away from everywhere.
I can hear Alan calling out from the bedroom of a tiny beach house rental to that rangy little blonde he’s been on the lam with since May. "Hey Vivian, can you take George out for a walk or something. He’s driving me nuts.”
She allows another full load of freebase cocaine to soak into her lungs before responding in a dirty blend of her native Kiwi and those bits of American mutt she’s picked up over the years. "That goddamn animal almost ran off the leash on me this afternoon. He’s losing his mind. We might have to get rid of him if he doesn’t snap out of it.”
Alan mutters something about getting rid of her instead, as he lights his own bowl of white rock and deep chocolate resin — the thick, sweet smoke pouring in over his palate. He’s gotten pretty fed up with that broad by the time this fourth month rolls in. Sure, she’s cute and all, but cute isn’t the same thing as agreeable. And agreeable is the key to being a good road companion — which, by all the accounts I’ve ever heard, she’s not.
Now, at this exact moment — and this is where it gets surreal for me when I think back on it — 250 miles north and east of Alan and his little runaway family, I’m onstage in a Cambridge, MA rock club called TT the Bears, and I’m in the middle of my own drama over getting my little garage-pop band’s 10 PM showcase started. Now days, TT’s is a legendary venue, but twenty years ago it wasn’t legendary. It was barely in business and its bag-of-shit sound system was making us late.
I remember being a real asshole, and using that PA system to give my sound guy, Jeff Shirley, an unfair rash of bitch heat over the delay. "So, is this going to ever get together? I don’t want to be a dick, but if this drags on much longer, we’ll never get off New Band Night. " I’m letting that question go out nice and loud over that system, hoping that Connie in the bar area will hear it, and not target me over the hold up.
Connie books the room, and she hates bands that try to delay opening slot start times in order to grab a song or two in front of the next band’s incoming crowd. Over the years, I’ve been plenty guilty of doing just that, but this time I’m actually trying to be good. It’s August 16th, 1989 — the 20th anniversary of Woodstock’s famous Saturday night and the 12th anniversary of Elvis’ death — and I want to honor the auspicious aspects of the night by coming across as a professional for a change. Cheating the other bands’ starts by delaying an early set assignment isn’t being professional, and even the suburb kids know that.
Besides, I’m already in an itchy mood. It’s been building all day, and as one piss-off after another insists on piling before me, I’m whipping up a real belligerence that could become a serious problem for myself and others if things don’t start working out shortly. Finally, Jeff gives us the go ahead for a full run through, and — I don’t know — for some reason, instead of counting into our usual sound-check number, I launch into a grinding, stripper version of "Rock Me”. Now, Rock Me isn’t a song we do. It’s blues, and we don’t play blues. Still, Rock Me is what I feel like playing, and I toss a look over to my bass and drummer that says "If you don’t fall in with this easy 1,4,5 vamp I got loaded — at this exactly fucking moment — we’ll all be going home early tonight.”
Meanwhile, back on the Jersey shoreline, Alan’s emerging from the bedroom and checking his watch. According to the paper, a total lunar eclipse of the full moon will be visible on the eastern seaboard. The guy’s always had this thing for full moons to begin with, and this one’s got that eclipse thing included tonight, so he’s decided that it’s time to check into it. Ten minutes ago, George finally gave in to the pressure to stop bothering everyone over those invisible concerns, and the evening has become quiet, with only a few light salt breezes clearing the small living room of smoke from time to time.
It feels like any other late summer night on the beach as Al walks outside and lights another hit from his bowl before looking up to see what’s so great about a moon that’s ducked out of sight. I refuse to believe that it’s much to look at, even though it’s supposedly pretty special. In my imagination of that moment, as with most things in nature, the big sky show immediately fails in direct comparison with the daily parade that my friend Alan’s been leading for the last seven years. But then, what would you expect? An eclipse is just the earth hiding the moon from the sun for a minute or two. It might be rare, but that doesn’t make it anything to get worked up over.
He takes in the sky, and then wanders back into the living room, where he pulls another deep hit from his packed pipe. That lung full of cocaine becomes the last he’ll ever exhale as Kevlar vests, helmets, boots, guns, cars, trucks, flood lights, and men’s voices pour from every opening the night has to offer. In my version of that moment, Alan is finally ready to call it a day, as he calmly raises his hands high and allows the entire spectacle to swallow him whole.
For George’s part in all of this, the dog did all that could be expected of it. It perceived the threat and alerted its master, but in the end, all that breeding and training provided no weight in the balance. The SWATs had been prepping all day long from every point on the compass. You can’t run away from everywhere.
Now, at the same moment that the night is erupting on that Jersey beach, I’m back at TT’s, ripping my sound-check to shreds in a visceral release that’s emptying the other rooms of the club into the showcase area due to sheer curiosity. TT’s doesn’t book blues, and yet, here’s a big violent blues blasting from the stage. I don’t even notice the influx as I blow my entire soul right through my hands and into the guitar — pulling howls, blistering flurries and full-throated bursts of feedback agony from my amplifier. The whole of it is slamming the vocal mics, resulting in an enormous reverberated spaciousness that this crappy little space has never actually been capable of.
For over five minutes I drag that room high across the raggedest peaks and deep into the darkest pits, until I’ve run my demons through every hell that they each need so desperately. Then, suddenly, I kill it all in mid progression, unplug, and walk off to the green room to finish my drink and to tune up. I’ve never known until now, but by that specific moment, Alan’s big excitement is over, and he’s finally safe and secure in the back of a cruiser. In Cambridge, the folks I just left have been stunned into silence. I can’t remember the set we played that night, but I do remember that, later, at the bar, Jeff asked me, "Where the hell did you learn to play lead guitar like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I never heard you play like that before.”
“That’s how I play, " I said.
“You’ve never played like that around here. Not that I’ve ever seen.”
“My bands don’t play blues, " I said. "I haven’t played blues since I left West Albany Street.”
“What’s West Albany Street?”
I looked up from my drink. "It’s a band I was in back in New York. The W. Albany St. Blues Band. I played blues before I came out to Boston.”
Jeff looked down at his own drink and tapped the glass lightly. "You should play blues again.”
The next evening, I learned that Alan had being taken down by a small army of government soldiers in an assault that didn’t have to go as well as it did. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned that these two events occurred simultaneously, and played out over the exact same small stretch of time. Of course, in my private mind I now connect our two experiences that night, and why not? The W. Albany St. Blues Band was Alan’s band — his heart and soul — and on August 16, 1989, it was still the only blues band I’d ever played in. When I left that band and moved from upstate NY to Boston, I left those blues behind, and until that night, I’d never looked back. I hadn’t even bothered with lead guitar — not to any extent anyway — until that night.
That moment, as I unloaded through that quintessential open jam blues standard during our sound check, I felt as if I was tearing apart something that had been building up all day long. An anxiety that I couldn’t define. All I knew was that I needed to attack — to just fight and clear whatever it was that was wrong, from the world around me. Recently, I’ve started to see that night from the perspective that while Alan was being inhaled by the Justice Dept., I was swinging at phantoms with what I had at hand, and — from what I’ve verified with the official timeline of events on the Jersey shoreline that August night — when I was finally satisfied that I’d done what had been so goddamn necessary for me to do, my friend was safe and unharmed in the backseat of a squad car. Maybe a couple bruises here and there, but still very much alive and no worse for wear. It’d been the best possible outcome considering what had been gathering in force against him all day.
I don’t know. To me, as I look back over all of this, the symmetry of that night means something, even if I have no idea what the hell that something is. I know it’s over-dramatic and all, but it feels like I was reacting in some way or other, fighting the worst outcome in the only way I could. Sending some lightning blues down to my pal when he really needed something to balance the moment out a little in his favor. Not to spring Alan from that trap, but maybe just to hold someone’s hand back in the middle of it all, and keep him from making an agitated impulse decision that we’d all regret. Maybe just to send enough violence from that stage to purge it from the moment elsewhere. Just to drain everyone’s nerves a little for a minute or two.
I do know that after that show, I shut down my rock career, and went back to being a fireball blues guitarist again. Making that big noise and drawing all that attention suddenly seemed like the right, most natural thing to do, and from then on, it’s always seemed like the right thing to do. I never really thought about it until recently, but I guess that once again, Big Al had shifted my life without even realizing it.
Alan pulls me back from my computer screen with a question that he must’ve already asked several times, if his inflections are any indication.
“I said, is this the only part of the book you’ve been screwing with?”
I have to think about it. I’ve been screwing with all of it, but most of what I’ve done is inconsequential. Most of it, Alan wouldn’t even notice.
“I moved some stuff around, " I say. "We’re having this problem with tension and release, so I got a book about fixing it. It’s been pretty helpful.”
“We’re not going to know what the hell’s going on by the time that guy gets back to us. Jeez, I should’ve just yanked the book from you as soon as they set the meeting up. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Alan is being way too jazzed over this, and I’m pretty surprised at the reaction. He’s in for fifty percent of the take, but specific revenue streams have never been much of a concern for him — not that I’ve ever been aware of, anyway. In fact, even when the stakes were ramped to the ceiling — as in life, limb and liberty — Alan’s always been as casual as you could ever ask of anyone. I used to think that the only reason he lived on cocaine back in the old days was that it made up for his natural inability to experience rational levels of stress.
Hell, I remember that summer he was hiding out from the feds after walking off on smuggling charges in May, and even I got a phone call from him one night. I mean, he and I were friends, but in those years, we weren’t close friends. We were more like circumstantial-proximity pals back then. Any calls he would’ve made to me would have been bored calls. The kind of calls you make when nothing’s on TV and one else is home to answer the phone.
That one call I got from him seemed to suggest that he’d gotten tired of his life on the lam and was almost hoping someone would finally get around to finding him. He was having a technical issue, and while it was good to hear from him, I honestly had no idea why he’d turned to me for advice.
“Hey Kevin, " he began, blowing right past the small talk with his first words to me from the void of fugitivedom, "I can’t get the reverb to work on this PA board. What am I doing wrong?”
“Alan, is that you?”
“Of course it’s me. Who else would be calling you about hooking up a reverb unit at 2 o’clock in the morning?”
He had me there. Anyone else who might call with a PA configuration problem would’ve probably waited until after breakfast. Not that I would’ve gotten a call from anyone concerning a PA issue. At the time, I didn’t even own such a system, and certainly wasn’t considered knowledgeable on the subject.
“Aren’t you…? " I was afraid to actually say the word "wanted“, for fear of tipping off anyone who might be listening in, that Big Al Cancelino was reaching out to me from the shadows. I wasn’t worried about myself, but I didn’t want to be the reason he was brought down in a blizzard of federal gunfire. I already felt bad enough about the fact that he’d gone into hiding before I could pay him back whatever it was that I probably still owed him in cash and/or favors. But disclosure of his whereabouts didn’t seem to be a priority concern at the moment. Not for him anyway.
“I’m in New Jersey! Christ, I need some help with this stupid thing. I know I have it hooked up right, but when I turn up the knob, I don’t hear it.”
Suddenly I heard his voice booming in the background as he tested the microphone over and over again. Wherever Alan was in New Jersey, at that moment he was the loudest person for miles in every direction. He spent the next minute or so clanging away on his digital piano — also cranked to a surprising level — as I did my best to understand what was happening. I was on the North Shore of Massachusetts, just up from Boston, and if Al was in New Jersey, then we were both in the same time zone. That meant that he was blasting his voice and piano over a PA system, in some motel in New Jersey, at 2 AM, on a week night.
“See what I mean? " he said, exchanging the mic for the phone. "No echo. No reverb. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
I don’t remember what I said after that. I’m sure it was a scatter of useless crap that didn’t help, but what the hell could I do for him? I wasn’t there to physically verify the connections, to inspect the cabling, to figure out the signal flow, or to make sense out of the fact that Alan was sending 130+ decibels of reckless exposure into the small hours of the morning while actively on the run from four agencies of the federal government. The PA-reverb unit issue notwithstanding, at that moment, the only connection that I was concerned about was Alan’s connection with the specifics of his situation.
Eventually, he changed the topic. "Hey, you gotta come down here to jam some weekend. Coupie’s been down already. We could record it. I have all that studio stuff with me.”
“Yeah, that sounds good, " I lied, while allowing the conversation flow to proceed without specifics. The whole experience had taken on an other-worldly quality by that point, and besides, I didn’t think it prudent to ask for directions to wherever it was that he’d holed up. Like I said, my imagination had already put a panel truck across the street from the triple-decker I was living in. One of those spy trucks they have, with sonic ears, wire tapping thingies, and plenty of headsets to go around for the guys that’d been waiting there all summer for Alan to finally get around to calling me. We hung up without firming up anything, and the next thing I heard about him was that he’d begun his new career as an inmate.
I could’ve been distressed when I heard that he’d been apprehended, but knowing of his sudden plan to buy a boat and escape everything by sailing it with that nutty girlfriend to her place in New Zealand, I was sort of relieved that someone had shut that idea down before it ever got off the ground. Even life in prison offers the possibility for parole. Being food for however many fish — large and small — it takes to recycle your elements into the ecosystem of the South Pacific, is forever. I liked Alan a lot. As bad as jail would be for him, I was glad to know that I’d have a shot at talking with him again someday.
So, now it’s twenty years later, and we’re working on a book about those years. You’d think that reminiscing wouldn’t be as stressful for him as having lived through it all, but this book’s got him pretty edgy. I don’t know. I guess we all eventually find something that we care enough about to lose our cool over. To be fair, this project’s been a lot of fun for me, even if the last few weeks have been rough. I think that it’s the possibility that we might just pull a really large rabbit out of our asses with this book that has him pacing the floor and all these other idiots lobbying for — I don’t even know what they’re lobbying for. I don’t know that they know either. Maybe they just need to squeeze for the home team, and they don’t have any rally charms to play with as they sit in the bleachers and suffer.
Me, I’m so used to stumbling in the home stretch that there’s nothing that can intimidate me. Not even this verdict that I have to rework the entire book if I want it to have a chance to ever be published. In fact, that glitch might be the only part of this project that I can totally relate to.
It’s true. This entire effort has been much too easy, and the doors have opened way too fast for me to trust anything that’s on the other side of each threshold. But then I try to remind myself that everything that Alan has ever touched has reacted like this, so I shouldn’t get suspicious. I’ve watched it happen for him time and time again over the years, and after recently learning some of the details that I missed back in the old days, I’m more convinced than ever that God buried an IC chip in his skull that forces shit to work out for him in ways that just don’t make any sense at all. I even gave him half of the book’s profits, just so that it would have any shot at all of getting published. Seriously.
I’ll admit that I took this book on knowing that it’d be fun and that it might even make money if Alan was involved in it, but the main reason I wanted to help him tell his story, is because it’s a great story, and the world needs great stories. I also remember what I saw and what I lived through during those years I played in his band, and most of it was too unrealistic to be acceptable fiction. Al’s name might’ve showed up in print when Paul Bannister got some 3rd stringer to publish his tiny bullshit take on how the feds took him down, but the real story of the man needs to be finally written as well. I still remember how, as each madness tripped over the heels of the last one, I’d hear one of us whipping along for the ride say, "Christ, someone’s gotta write a book about this shit. " Well, here’s my book about that shit, along with Alan’s own first person account of his side of the story as I write it and I rewrite it and then I rewrite it again.
I want to point out that it’s Alan’s wife, Sue, who deserves the credit for getting us back in touch again, and she’s earned my eternal gratitude for having done so. I also want to point out that each chapter title is dated, and there’s a reason for those dates. Each one corresponds to the day I finished that chapter in original draft, and this book details what that stretch of time was like for me. I started that draft on June 1st and wrapped up in the middle of October in 2009, as a lot of this story was actually happening. Of course, now I’m tearing back into it to force the thing as a whole to make sense, and that’s why some of the dates are out of sync and past the October 1st draft finish date.
Basically, this is a story about rewriting a story that’s about writing a story about someone else’s life by way of my own understanding of that life and that story. Some woman on a writers’ Internet forum told me "If it works, then it’s genius. " If is a big word.
I also want to point out that I’ve never written a book before, but even so, I feel that there’s a chance that between the two of us — me, with my outside perspective and need to write this thing, and Alan, with his own unedited accounts and his gift for finding success where it shouldn’t be — the truth will find its way through this effort and emerge whole, unscarred and traditionally published. Unless I wind up fucking the whole thing, of course.
****
Chapter II
Reaching Back To Grab The Bannister
1 June 2009
Okay, so I’m in Herkimer NY for the burial of my oldest and dearest friend, and I know that the coming-back-home-for-a-funeral cliche is one of the worst ways to start a story like this, but it’s true. I’m here to bury Rhonda, even if I wish to God that I wasn’t. It’s also true that I still have a few hours before show time, and without much hometown to wander through this morning. Normally, I would lay low and avoid anyone that might remember me, since I’m not much on reacquainting myself with associations that didn’t have the legs to survive on their own. I’m especially ill-equipped to deal with people on this particular day. My friend died badly, and it’s been a four month ordeal to get her from a freezer to a proper resting place. This will be the final hurdle to overcome, and what I really want is silence and personal space. So, naturally, I walk into Alan’s son’s Cosmic Closet boutique shop, where I discover his wife, Sue, behind the counter, and it’s here that I learn that she has a remarkable memory.
“Kevin, does Alan know you’re in town?”
I can’t believe she actually remembers my face and my name, but she knows exactly who I am.
“He does now, " I smile. I’m joking, but we both know that I’m right. He’ll learn that I was here, and that means that I’ll make sure that he sees me for himself. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to him, but I respect the guy too much to not show up for hellos in person.
“He’s at the house. You should let him know you’re here.”
My mouth seals the deal without offering the rest of me a vote on the matter. "Okay, I’ll go by and see him right now before I chicken out.”
When I knock, Alan responds from a door off to the right of the front porch; a large one-story addition that puts an end to how far their cars can pull in from the street. At first, he doesn’t even recognize me. I prefer to think it’s because I still look too young to be someone he would know from the old days, while obviously not being anyone he’s dealing with these days, but who knows why. Once he does figure out who I am, the door is open and I’m welcomed in with bear hugs and smiles to spare. Big framed, enthusiastic, and the spitting image of some kid’s favorite Italian grandpa, he makes showing up uninvited easy on me right away.
I look around the small studio/rehearsal room behind him for any remnants of my own favorite memories from those days when he was cloistered off in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, and in full command of his own lunatic fringe. I spot some odds and ends; a pair of congas on a stand, bits of an old drum set tucked behind some ancient amplifier pieces piled against the far wall, Persian rugs that probably cost more than my car, and loads of that unique energy that he’d leave behind — like trace evidence — everywhere he’d go, back when I’d known him on a daily basis.
“So, when did you get in town?”
I smile as I hear him toss out that same opener he used to always greet me with, back when I still thought that he probably already knew the answer to every question he would ask me.
“I got in last night, " I say. "They’re burying Rhonda this afternoon.”
He doesn’t reply right away. He liked my friend Rhonda, back when we were all sharing time and space with one another. Not in the same way that he generally liked attractive women, but in the way that he appreciated what she’d always meant to me for so many years. He lets my statement hang in the air and enjoy the respect it deserves. The respect that she deserves. Like always, Alan knows how to be respectful.
“I read about what happened, " he says. "Goddamn shame.”
“Yeah. Just bad all the way around.”
We both let a short silence honor her before he takes up the heavy lifting of reunion for me again.
“So, are you staying in town tonight?“
“Yeah. Her service is kicking off in a little bit here, so I can’t hang out, but… " I start in with my routine apology for doing a hit and run, which I normally follow with my usual avoidance act until I vanish from town again. But then I immediately reconsider. It hits me that hanging out a little with Al, later on, would be something I’d enjoy. So, I toss in an extra line that I don’t have much practice with. "…but this evening I’ll be free. I’m kind of staying away from people while I’m around, but if you’re going to be here later…”
“You can hide out here, " he says, a smile already on his face. "I don’t do the open house thing anymore.”
To be honest, it feels great to get that invitation, so we get solid for after dinner, and I head back out to my day.
By the time evening shows up, I’m really grateful to have somewhere to go, and glad that we made the plans we did. Usually, I’m pretty good on my own, but it’s been an emotional afternoon. A quality distraction is needed, and needed badly.
As Sue leads me into the living room, I look at the coffee table before Alan, expecting to see — I don’t know what I expect to see. I guess I expect to see just about anything other than the bowl of vanilla ice cream with a mixing of whole fresh cherries that sits there. Not that it doesn’t offer it’s own appeal, once I get over the novelty of seeing something in front of him that isn’t absolutely and bizarrely unexpected. It’s ice cream. Just a normal bowl of ice cream. It’s suddenly crystal clear to me that this isn’t just a new decade, it’s a whole new century, and time had refused to stay put for either one of us.
Still, as I sit down on the couch that right-angles his own, it’s like being back in Al’s legendary retreat in Gray, NY. Okay, not exactly like being up in Gray. For that, you’d have to add three crack-addicted Dobermans, an enormous wooden coffee table that looks like someone dumped a plumber’s widget drawer on it, and ten dope fidgets elbowing each other away from the guy I’m here to visit with. But, other than that (and the fact that Two and a Half Men, and not Triple-Ecstasy satellite porn, is playing across the wide-screen in the room) it’s just like being back there again. I can feel my blood pressure ease off a good twenty clicks as he leans back and inspires me to do the same. For the first time in too many years, I feel like I’m home again.
As always, Alan has time for being sociable, and he makes me feel like my stuff is important. It’s too bad more people can’t learn how to manage that sort of thing, but it seems like the farther I travel in life, the more I run into fully grown people who just can’t imagine that what they have to say isn’t the most important stuff that exists. Just for the record, I lump myself in with these jerks, since I’m just as bad with my load of fascinating crap as any of them. That being the case, he suffers through my big wonderful shit with the patience of a corpse, as I run myself dry in fire hose gushes of me, me and everything me.
It’s almost two hours in before he gets up and walks into a small room off to the right of the TV, and comes back with a paperback book. It’s one of those larger, newer kinds of paperbacks that aren’t like the grocery store paperbacks. This is the kind where there was never a hardcover to begin with, and the paperback is all that’ll ever be available. They make those a bit nicer and a little larger.
“You won’t believe this, " he says, as he hands it to me and then reaches for his back pocket.
I look at the title, then naturally look to see if his name is anywhere on the cover. I don’t recognize anything. "Deadly Deception? Sounds serious.”
“The book. It’s a pile of shit.”
He sits down and gets set to blow his nose into a light blue handkerchief, and I’m immediately grabbed by a twenty-five year old memory. He’d announced to us that someone was stealing his handkerchiefs out of the laundry, and he wanted it to stop. Seriously, someone was grabbing his handkerchiefs, and I can remember being mystified about why anyone would do something like that until he took a moment to explain why he believed it was happening. Whoever it was, they were lifting them after Alan had used them and gunked them up to the point of needing to get them washed, because the guy must’ve thought that he could strain them for all the cocaine they had caked in them.
I wish I was lying about this. It was my first lesson on how depraved people can get, and how little it takes for some of them to get there. The motivation was clear enough, even if the reasoning was still vague. If access to good dope is elevation for some people, then sitting next to stunningly inexhaustible quantities of world-class dope is transcendence. After a while, I got used to seeing the impact of transcendence on the people around me. I also saw plenty of writhing avidity, as bits of immediate relief were dangled overhead by those who’d been tortured in the same manner only the day before Almost enough to understand how someone could get so deranged, but only almost. I may have struggled from time to time with dope horrors, but I never got so lost within Alan’s treacherous funhouse that I resorted to straining snot rags, and for that I still feel a blend of pride and gratitude.
As far as the coke-snots master plan with the handkerchiefs, I don’t know if it ever worked out for the bandit, or how the hell you’d go about separating coke from snots, but the rags were definitely going missing, and on an ongoing basis while we were all still snorting the stuff. When we moved on to basing and smoking it, Alan’s handkerchief situation stabilized. So, I guess the correlation speaks for itself.
This time, he’s probably just blowing dopeless snots into the rag. Even so, I’ve been out of the drug culture for quite a number of years, and, just for the record, that odd coke-snot-handkerchief memory crossed my mind without any urgency attached to it. To be honest, I remember being grossed out when I first heard about it. Some stuff is just too far beyond disgusting.
“So what’s the book about? " I ask, as he folds the cloth and slips it back into his seat pocket.
“Do you remember all those designer jeans I had up at the house? Hundreds of them.”
I shake my head. If there were jeans in that place, even stacks and stacks and piles of jeans, I wouldn’t have ever noticed them. The place was always too freshly confusing for anything to have stood out as being new or temporary. Even thousands of pairs of jeans.
“There were piles of them in the office against the staircase, " he says.
I shake my head again. That whole era has become lengths of b/w newsreel in that History Channel section of my brain. Everything before the last major upheaval in my life generally gets shunted to b/w footage, and immediately loses all discernible pixel resolution. Just old, grainy clips with wobbly sound from then on.
“What year was that?”
“Jeez, I don’t know, " he says. "Some of that stuff blurs around a bit.”
“Was it before, or after, Robbie Palmer tried to kill me by taking the lugs off the van wheel?”
“After. He was gone by then.”
“Before or after that drummer dope panicked and went for the 23rd floor window at the Milford Hotel?”
He pauses a moment.
I wince a little. "Okay, so that did happen a few times, didn’t it?”
“Only twice at the Milford, " he says, reaching for the remote. "It was after all that stuff.”
He pauses again. "No, wait. It was before the Milford.”
“Before the Milford?”
“Before that drummer at the Milford.”
“Okay, so we’re talking about the time with that kid from Syracuse. The tall skinny one with the double-bass kit. Just so that we’re straight on which Milford incident I’m referring to. " I have to smile. We had nothing but terrible drummers back then, but of all the bad drummers, he was easily the worst. I have this theory about musicians and stress, with some musicians and some stresses going together real nicely, while some other musicians and some other stresses not working out so well together. His was a case of the wrong musician meeting the wrong stress, and nothing good coming from any of it.
“Do you still have that kid on video? " I add after another open space drifts through the room.
Alan looks up from the TV listings. "Which kid is that?”
“The second Milford jumper. The skinny, double-kick drummer from Syracuse.”
“The feds took all my video tapes. Let ’em choke on them.”
“Oh good. So, they got me stuttering at that stripper upstairs while she was trying to get me into one of the guest lofts? Christ. " I suddenly feel like a pussy, and to a bunch of cops, no less. Good thing I have twenty years between me and whenever that gem was aired at the sub-station.
“If you’d a done her like you were supposed to, that wouldn’t be an issue, " he replies. "I got her for you for your birthday. I went outa my way.”
“Oh, right, and be the guest of honor on surveillance video night. No way.”
“We watched that clip anyway, " he replies. "You didn’t get away with anything. Your stutter fits were always a good show.”
Maybe so, but I recall that being the star of those fits wasn’t so easy. I remember resorting to using flash cards for a while there. You needed a thick skin to be part of that tribe. Some folks didn’t survive the rough moments.
“Remember when Ricky’s B&E video ran? " I say, changing the subject to someone else’s fire baptism for a moment. "Man, that was a golden night of cinema.”
“I don’t remember.”
“It was the CCTV footage of him climbing through your loft window while you were in New York. Talk about awkward moments.”
Alan sits there and searches his memory. "I think you have that confused with someone else. Ricky never broke in through my window. At least not that I know about. He had a key until I fired him.”
Now it’s me doing a search. I come up empty after a moment or two. "So why did you fire him, then?”
“It was my birthday, and we were all partying. So Ricky gets all sentimental and stuff, and confesses to me that he’s been stealing from me. Money, dope, all kinds of stuff.”
“He confessed?”
“Yeah. Pulled me off to the side. I don’t know why he told me, but what could I do. I had to fire him after that. He’d been stealing from me for years.”
“So, who was the guy in the CCTV clip?”
“I don’t know, " he says. "You tell me. You’re the one who remembers it.”
Damn. Maybe I imagined it, or maybe I pieced different bits of memory together and came up with whatever the hell that was. But, I do remember Ricky handing his keys back to Alan, and walking to the valley on his own one of those nights, as we sat there afterward, blew ounces of dope and memorialized him. Even if that’s also a memory glitch, I know that I was sad that he was gone. We all screwed up now and then, and Ricky was always a lot of fun. I heard from guys who saw him around town from time to time after he left. They said that he seemed lost. Like a guy trying to accept a 12-step program that violates everything in his nature, when all he wants is just one more quality drunk. And then another drunk after that.
“So, I never noticed any jeans, " I admit, momentarily remembering something about piles of jeans that I never knew existed.
“It wasn’t important, " he replies. "I only went along with their scam because I knew it was a set-up, and I wanted to do something nice for some poor kids in Utica.”
“Okay, so what’re we talking about again? " I’m suddenly lost.
“This Bannister guy, " he grumbles. "The guy who wrote that book. He set me up with all those jeans. He was trying to nail me with a sting.”
I look at the book again. Deadly Deception: Twenty-One Years Undercover Without A Badge — The True Story of Paul Bannister as told to John W. Stafford.
“I don’t remember a guy named Bannister around up at the house?”
“He didn’t go by Bannister. He was a rat. A freelancer. My chapter starts on Page 297, " he adds. "He calls me Royal Flush.”