3. He Started a Joke

3. He Started a Joke (Updated 7-13, 7-16, 7-22. 7-23, 7-26, 7-18-15) 

 3.              He Started a Joke

 “Try to sing it from the diaphragm, from the bottom of your lungs.”

“You mean like this?” Johnny was up on the music room stage, a raised slatted parquet floor polished over the decades by hundreds of shuffling high school feet, seven yards from left to right, five yards deep, sparse like a room in an Eastside tenement, now a theater of a hundred gradient dark wood public school chairs with fold up seats. Mr. Sybille, veteran of wars, veteran of Paris night clubs, tenured teacher, sat, his thinning hair revealing hyper lines up beyond his forehead, cheekbones hollowed and sunken by age, bold with a white ‘70’s moustache, bottom, stage right, on a plain long piano stool, directing the audition for the school chorus. His battered baby grand spread over the bare floor, in tune with the surroundings, not yet scratched by graffiti culture. A narrow four-step staircase which entertaining students rose to stardom entered behind his back. Johnny sang accapella:

“I started a joke which started the whole world crying-,” sang Johnny.

“Mr. Livinsky Mr. Livinsky; May I have the sheet music if you would, please?” Johnny jumped off the front stage to get the sheets he’d copied from a big spiral songbook in the school library, handed it to Mr. Sybille, and hopped back on stage. He waited for musical accompaniment then started again. “I started a joke which started the whole world crying, but I didn’t see that the joke was on me…”

 Paul Bupkis, who was just on his way out the door with a bathroom pass stopped in his tracks, door heavily opened, and looked around. Two fifteen-year-old girls that sat behind Johnny’s seat stared up stage and dropped their jaws in unison. They had been spending the first few classes admiring Johnny’s long wavy brown hair from behind but now the head had a voice, a voice that couldn’t be believed, a voice ringing out like Dudley Doright rescuing Belle from Snidely Whiplash.

“Yes, yes; that’s it!” exclaimed Mr. Sybille jumping to his feet.

“But I sound like an opera singer!”

“No no you sound great! Mr. Livinsky, you sound absolutely marvelous! Doesn’t he gang?” The class of twenty-five mixed freshmen and sophomores emphatically agreed and applauded in mock, but sincere, appreciation.

“Take it from the top…” Mr. Sybille started in again with the introduction and Johnny sang, exaggeratedly like Bugs Bunny in a Silly Sym-phony. Mr. Sybille gave him the hairy eyebrow and Johnny obeyed and sang on seriously. “I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing,” sang Johnny, joking outside, but hurting inside where he cried with a heart of teenage loneliness. He had chosen this song for his audition because he meant it; the words told the story of how he felt; ostracized, belittled; an insignificant child of a broken family, sister taunted, pudgy, and a pain in the ass to his single mom. The world would have been a better-off without him until his break-through. Crying to the world was better than crying to himself.

All eyes were upon him now, every girl in the class. Could he hit the high note, too? Could he do it? He couldn’t sing that high. Nobody they knew could jump from a low note to that height.

Johnny’s voice took as running jump with the staccato chords from Mr. Sybille’s urging: “I looked at the sky, running my hands over my eyes. And I fell out of bed, hurting my head for things that I said.” When Johnny said the next line he really meant it.” Till I finally died, which started the whole world living, oh if I’d only seen that the joke was on me, that the joke was on me, Ohhh?” No one heard that cry of desperation, no one except Ferine, Ferine Centerstream.

“Do you think he has a girlfriend?” she said to her friend Georgiana.

“Probably.”

“He’s so adorable; so beautiful!”

“Tell him you like him.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Tell him what a good voice he has.”

Johnny took stage left off the tenement-room stage, exaggerating bows, thinking how silly he must have sounded singing a Bee-Gees song like he was Enrico Caruso. But it was the flexibility of his voice that impressed his music teacher, not the performance. His tone and his meter were impeccable; his delivery had so much oomph. Mr. Sybille saw something in Johnny that no one else saw, and so did Ferine.

Hold that image, Johnny, hold that feeling. Freeze it right there. Don’t let it slip. Johnny was the first of many that would fill Ferine in her night of lights.

Ferine Centerstream was part Irish, part Italian; her looks were Irish, her attitude was Brooklyn Italian. She wasn’t from John Travolta’s family in “Saturday Night Fever” but it was close, the same marone who ever swung a one-pound crucifix from his open-shirted chest, but her father was not a paisan; thank God he was not. Not only did Ferine avoid having a last name like Pellegrino but she would benefit from the open-roaded heart to love a lonely Jewish teenager who sang Bee-Gees, operatically. Her open-mind came from the emerald fields of her father’s dreams, not the pasta belt of Red Hook. How does an Italian girl blush if her true feelings show through? Forgetaboutit! It wouldn’t happen. Italians show their anger no matter what their true feelings are. An Italian girl sounds angry even when she is in love. Not so an Irish lass. Every corpuscle of love is etched, shallowly, in her rosy cheeks, fully exposed in the slightest moistness in her eyes or secretly to herself; that was Ferine’s strength and weakness; uncoverable obviousness. 

What can a girl do with the passion of Italy and the sincerity of Ireland? Answer: Have a lot of sex with everyone you love, long, often, and even in-between when one should be at rest, heaven forbid. Luckily for Ferine, it was supply and demand, or demand of supply. Johnny was an ever-flow of passion and nuts enough to try everything that love could put in his path, especially if it was with one person and that one person was a female; a Jewish restriction. Johnny couldn’t experiment for the sake of being avant guard. Ferine yummed every 10cc she could generate. Johnny would do everything for the girl he loved; Ferine was his first. You know what they say about that; how it’s the deepest, so deep that Johnny almost couldn’t climb out.  

It was 1973. Johnny and Ferine had been steadily at it for two years. Ferine and Johnny cut out of school and spent the day listening to the Doors on Johnny’s dad’s stereo. It had been a year since Jim Morrison passed away from the stage of life. Johnny was looking at the back page of the Village Voice when he noticed something interesting: Memorial to Jim Morrison, Saturday, on the roof of a tenement on Greene Street in Chinatown. It would be held by someone named Patti Smith.

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, 1973, Patti Smith was giving a poetry reading on the roof of underground filmmaker, Jack Smith’s loft at Greene Street near Canal Street in Chinatown, Manhattan. Johnny went with Ferine to celebrate Jim Morrison on the second anniversary of his passing. Jim Morrison was Johnny’s hero and he was curious to see how another poet would pay tribute to him. Johnny had spent July 3^rd, the day Jim Morrison disappeared (Johnny had refused to believe he was dead) playing every Doors record he had, inviting friends to sit Shiva with him, drinking beer, smoking grass and hash, the way Jim would have wanted it to be.

Johnny didn’t know or care who Patti Smith was; she had yet to record and was not known to anyone but a few underground artists in the Andy Warhol scene. He just hoped she would do justice to Jim and maybe sing a Doors song or two, Instead, Johnny ended up being the star that evening.

Twenty odd people sat on the floor of the hot flat roof. The wait was indefinite as the artist, unbeknownst to all, sat with friends like a spectator, and said nothing. Finally, a man with a camcorder turned the light on Patti. She stood up and started reciting. The camera followed her as she moved laconically around the small roof like she was on downers, occasionally looking up and striking poses. Everyone seemed fascinated watching the tall skinny chick in a death shroud that couldn’t carry a tune when the poems she sang. Did she know someone? Who was this Jack Smith and why would he let her up on his roof? Where did she get the nerve to put on this poetry reading? Johnny and the onlookers were expecting something more, at least a Doors song.

In between poetry readings, a young woman came around the squatting audience with a wicker basket asking for donations, donations Johnny doubted she really needed. He clapped his hands; he started clapping his hands, slowly clapping his hands. Ferine joined in.

“My wild love went riding; she rode all the day-ay, she rode to the devil, and asked him to pay-ay…” Others sitting on the roof joined in clapping along slowly. “The devil was wiser, it’s time to repent, he asked her to give back, the money she spent…”

Patti Smith looked over, hesitantly, and then deliberately paid no attention to Johnny. She turned to chat with a man whom she knew. Johnny later, after Patti became famous, recognized him as her guitarist, Lenny Kaye. It seemed like they were discussing what they could do about stealing back the audience from this young man with long brown hair, in the black t-shirt, black jeans and construction boots.

The camcorder shut down. The light was turned off. Johnny wasn’t filmed or recorded. He remained in the dark, singing with others clapping and humming along with verbal percussion. “She rode and she rested, she rode for a while, then stopped for an evening, and laid herself down…” Patti went downstairs through the tarred roof well, probably to the piss factory. She got back just as the small crowd was applauding Johnny.

Patti graciously thanked the anonymous donor with the impromptu song and went back to her agenda. Someone in the crowd requested that she sing a Doors song or a selection from The Lord and the New Creatures. She relented but refused. “There’ll be a surprise, but wait,” she said, like a mother scolding her naughty children, and she went into a reading of a poem she said she had just written for Jim. The audience behaved, sat back on their graveled tar sheets, and listened politely. Johnny was surprised at how contrived it was, how so non-spontaneous while pretending to be so

Johnny Livewire’s fire was extinguished; all that was left was the smoke. Everyone could see there was something hot there, but the source was snuffed out. Ferine felt badly for him; but life went on.

Johnny had a strange reaction watching Patti Smith that evening. The same way Patti felt in recalling her experience her book, Just Kids, in seeing Jim Morrison for the first time:

“Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyper-awareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert.” (P.59) Johnny knew just how she felt.

“Hey, fucking aye, babe. We’re gonna have some fun tonight! Alright, alright,” Johnny shouted into the microphone on its stand, his wavy long brown hair tangled in the wire. He roused the teenagers at the high school concert, sure as hell. The echo in the boys’ gym, a square concrete and tile structure with large, high institutional windows opened by a 20’ long wooden stick with hooked end to thread a indentation in the window frame, windows now only partially opened to keep the December chill out and the coal fueled radiator heat in; an echo that put Sam Phillips to shame. The echo was just right, now if only they would turn down those blazing lights. Classmates and friends had come to hear their classmates in a battle of the bands.

“Hey, there’s Ferine with Georgiana and Lena. Alright, alright!” Johnny said to himself as he scanned the crowd of a hundred or so. “Let’s go, man. I’m ready!” Holy Shit went into their opening number, “Roadhouse Blues” by The Doors. Johnny had his blues harp ready, cupped in hands. Guido plucked the bass. Terry hit the chord. Mousey slammed the drums. The students surged around the roped off area on the gym floor designated as the stage. The song went well; no mistakes. Johnny thanked the audience that applauded.

“Now, here’s a little number I wrote about that shitty feeling we all get when summer’s over and we have to come back to this fuckin’ shitty school. All the chicks you’ve laid in August become like a dream in September.”

“What? What’s that?” Johnny stopped announcing called over to the side of the stage area by a curling finger. The band futzed around, waiting. Some dick teacher he vaguely remembered from the science department was there, hands cupped to his mouth over the loud scream-echoed crowd, calling him.

“I said Principal Saunders wants you to stop with the foul mouth and turn it down; you’re too loud! He’s pulling the plug!”

“What? We just started!”

“Johnny?”

“Okay okay. O-kay! Tell him ‘o-kay,” And to himself, “Fuckin’ fool,” and walked back to the microphone stand, to the crowd said, “Hey man? The shithead principal just told us to ‘shut up’! Believe that? But we’re gonna rock ‘n’ roll tonight, man. Right? Hit it, Terry!”

The administrator realized he had lost control to Johnny. He wasn’t having any of that. It had gone from smiles and backslaps, to folded armed grins at the exit, to grimaces and let his legs do the talking, weaving through the intermittent crowd of oblivious souls, some in sympathy, some lost in space, and he walked out of the gym, perhaps to call the police or someone. Johnny couldn’t care less as he watched him leave. “Call the police. That would be cool!”

“Free fall’s a comin’, the summer made you wanna guess why children are crying in spite of love and tenderness…” the song went on as planned and Johnny grooved along. The bass line crunched a change, the snare flanged, and the tempo slipped like The Doors did at the end of “The Soft Parade.” Johnny howled, “Wanna come with me or don’t you wanna go there?” as the melody took a dipped into a “Wooden Ships” coda. What a song, and what a show. Johnny Livewire’s initial flight into rock ‘n’ roll performance with his group, The Holy Shit, was going great. The bottle of Hiram Walker blackberry brandy tucked behind Terry’s Ampex amp, hit during lead breaks, Mousey pounding on the snare drum, crashing the cymbals, taking his favorite lead break, note for note, Jeff Beck’s “Rock My Plimsoul.”

By the time Johnny got his second and last warning from the high school dean, he was so out of it. Even the crowd and Ferine were starting to wonder where it was all leading to; Holy Shit was the last of three bands, certainly the wildest. Would they make it to the end of their set? Johnny was sprawled out on the floor, mike in hand, from where he sang “Papa’s Will” by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, complete with authentic poisoning scene acting into death. “What a gas! What a show,” Johnny thought. The crowd stood pressed against the tug-of-war rope tied to garbage cans around the stage area, experiencing the spectacle, music or not, of Johnny Livewire, accosted, a removal by two security guards, dragged out of the gym and off the school property.

“We’re gonna take a short break now,” said Mousey into his hanging mike, but from the looks of Johnny, they’d called it a night. The blackberry bottle was empty. Outside the band went to join Johnny, back on his feet laughing, joint in hand, Bogarted, and one being passed by, and cigarettes. His shiny black leather bell bottoms were dull with dust from the grime on the gym floor, from rolling on the unswept parquet floor, black v-neck sweater-shirt drenched in sweat and dotted with sticky spills of blackberry brandy he hadn’t noticed while trying to swig it sideways from a crouching position.

Some of the crowd was starting to leave. “Wait,” Johnny called to them. “Where do you think you’re going?!? There is still a second set!”

“No, there is not, Johnny,” said Ferine who just happened out the heavy steel door. “Dean Koppel called it off.”

“What!?! Nooooooo!!!” Johnny pleaded, handing his joint away. “We’re just getting started, for Christ’s sake.” 

“It’s over,” said Mousey who shrugged his shoulders and went back inside to break down his drum set.

“That’s all, kiddies,” said Terry taking a last drag on his Parliament. “Time to hit the road. Hey, we got in four good songs, didn’t we?”

“Ask them if we could do one more before we go.”

“You ask them!”

“I will.”

Johnny gathered himself and went in through an unguarded side door. “Dean Koppel, please, one more song, our finale,” said Johnny Livewire, his brandy drenched tobacco-weed breath floating to the dean’s nostrils.

“Johnny, if you don’t leave, now, you’ll be in real trouble; you’re in trouble enough already.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Yet.

“Good.”

“So go. Thanks for coming. Bye.”

“My dad says we to go play somewhere else,” said bassist David Canola one sad day in the spring of ‘74. The garage at the back of his family’s large wood-frame colonial house off 13^th Avenue in Italian Borough Park and did not carry the two cars it could hold; those cars could be parked four deep on the driveway alongside the house and its front lawn. David Canola was one of the most popular and handsome boys in the neighborhood with his straight Beatle-cut black hair, meaty Mediterranean waist, soft-haired chest, and deep dark soulful eyes. Only his fleshy long nose with cavernous nostrils exposed his mixed ancestry. He was a friend of Vinny Fibriano and Salvatore D’Amato through whom he met his first band mates that would later become The Holy Shit. “My neighbors are complaining about the noise.”

It was too bad they had to move. The space was perfect for band practice and detached from the house so no one would know what was going on inside without walking up the driveway and looking in to find out. If you wanted to smoke weed, “Take a walk around the block,” David would remind anyone who lit up inside. The best part for Johnny Livewire was being invited in to the Canola living room after practice for an evening with David and his very cute younger sister.

David Canola was fond of The James Gang and wanted the band to play “Funk #49” and “The Bomber.” They both made it into the practice list but Joe Walsh’s voice was too high for Johnny to reach. Just like that, songs were tried and jams were jammed in that famous Borough Park garage. Johnny Livewire sang well and played harmonica on “A New Day Yesterday“by a new band called Jethro Tull. Jimmy Desire (nee Binaca) later of Blondie fame played the electric piano. Vinny Appice, brother of Carmine from Vanilla Fudge fame played the drums. With Teddy McCracken on Guitars and David Canola on bass, wow, what a sound! Johnny Livewire always wished he had a recording of that jam! When there was a practice in session, all the musical kids of the neighborhood would gravitate to the garage from The Square a few blocks away. Through the winter and into the spring the music played in the garage. Jimmy “Desire” Binaca left the hood to join a band called the Kickers and would join Blondie in February 1976 when they decided they needed a keyboard player. He was the most mercenary among them.

“We have to get the equipment out,” David whined while he did his best McCartney snort. 

“Where can we put it?” McCracken was concerned his Ampex amplifier would get bumped up. “Maybe we can rent a store front to pay it in.”

“We don’t have that kind of money,” Johnny reminded them. “You know, I could ask my Mom if it would be okay to leave it in my bedroom. Sister Sam just moved into her boyfriend’s apartment and there is some room.”

“That would be cool,” Mousey shouted I hate setting up and breaking down my drum set unless we’re playing out.” Johnny asked his mom.

“No, absolutely no; No music here!” It never occurred to her that Johnny would ever ask. She knew he was in a new band but how could he even think of practicing rock ‘n’ roll in his bedroom? “This is an apartment building. We have neighbors, you know,” she said I without cuffing her hand on the telephone receiver which she seemed to have glued to her ear all evening long. It would be the next topic of their discussion.

“WE won’t be playing; only storing equipment until we can find a place to practice. Come on!”

“Hold it Lily,” she said as she took a deep breath to shout. “I said N-O; no!”

“Come on, Mom; only a few amplifiers and a drum set.”

“A drum set? I said ‘no.’” Mom finally gave in; she didn’t want to lose Johnny like she lost Sam by being too strict on the younger generation. But mom wasn’t home until six o’clock from work and wouldn’t know what was going on. In the 13’ x 13’ bedroom with one single bed as a lounge chair on the first floor in an apartment in the front of four floor tenement building, The Holy Shit had its new rehearsal space.

One evening, Johnny’s mom heard a drum noise coming from the next room as she sat and watched “Ironside” with Raymond Burr in the next room.

“Johnny, stop that this instant.” So Johnny put down the stick.

Another time, just to see how it felt to play a bass, he picked up David’s Hofner, the same kind Paul McCartney used, and turned on the Plush. At first all you could hear was the hum of the tubes, and then Johnny turned the volume up to three and struck a string. The sound had no oomph so then he put it up to five and plucked again. The sound rattled the walls and plaster crumbled within and trickled down on cockroach nests.

“Johnny?” That got Mom’s attention. That was the first time. After that, Johnny got Mom’s attention often. She didn’t have to go down to the basement to unscrew the fuse from the fuse box; anonymous neighbors did that. The music got so loud when Mom was out, got softer when she came in to complain, and got louder again as soon as she closed the door behind her. Come on, Mom. What the heck? Let Johnny and his friends finish their song. 

Sometimes, when Mom liked the song, like “Beautiful Tonight,” she did let them finish, but the neighbors next door and upstairs were livid. Not to livid, mind you. After all, Mrs. Livinsky’s kid and his friends weren’t smoking crack and sniffing glue like the hoodlums in the schoolyard across the street. Music was the least of all teenage evils and the neighbors were afraid of what might happen to them if they told the boys to stop playing. Why, they couldn’t even call the police on them. Johnny’s Mom would end up being the one getting into trouble. They felt badly for their neighbor and let Johnny and his friends play a few hours at an appropriate time; never on a Sunday. The Holy Shit practice studio rocked on. 

Musicians came and musicians went, but equipment stayed until the musician was ready make arrangements to take it or it needed to be removed for a gig. One day, Charlie Adams from high school brought over his Stevie Wonder-ful electric piano. When Mousey picked up his drums and went home, Mark Kaplan brought in his double floor bass drum set with a half dozen cymbals of all sizes, even a gong! He needed it all to play like Ginger Baker. Soon, Teddy and Dr. Robert Loxsmear were dueling on guitars and The Holy Shit became a five-piece with David Canola pulling out replaced by Alan Dolphin who changed his name to Ami Tofu or something like that when he joined the Hare Krishna movement, Kaplan left for some reason and never returned while Mousey returned bringing Anthony Guido and Alan Dolphin, who was never really good anyway, was politely asked to leave. Instead of moving Mousey’s drums back to Johnny’s bedroom, the equipment was brought to Mousey’s private house basement which became the new Holy Shit practice studio. Mousey’s parents didn’t seem to mind.

It wasn’t easy taking out those large amplifiers. Anyway, Johnny needed them when he invited other boys from the neighborhood and school in to practice and maybe start a new band with. Also, Johnny never had a P.A. system; he just plugged his Shure Unidyne A microphone into whichever amp had the fattest sound, and echo.  

Before too long, the Holy Shit had two more gigs lined up. The first was in Lt. Joseph Petrosina Park on 71 Street and New Utrecht Avenue under the elevated subway train for a block party. The second gig was gotten through Dr. Robert Loxsmear who was a student in the downtown campus of Brooklyn College. Both were paying jobs. Even more exciting, Dr. Loxsmear met Tom Chapin there and bragged about possibly joining Harry Chapin’s brother’s band. Unlike the bathe of the bands at Johnny’s high school, these two jobs paid well, over $200 divided by five musicians. 

One day, a promoter from a record company came to hear The Holy Shit play in Mousy’s basement. Someone (perhaps Mousey’s relative) had sent a record company a reel to reel tape of them playing at the block party and wanted to listen to them in person. It was the first chance Holy Shit had to get a contract. Everyone was excited and stoked!

The band had the five songs chosen and they practiced them every chance they had. When the evening of the audition came, Teddy was perfect on lead guitar, Mousey had every drum beat memorized. Guido practiced so often at home with the amplifier off that he developed a fine set of professional calluses on his finger tips. Johnny Livewire sang everywhere he went, on subway platforms, at The Square, at home with the Plush amp David Canola never bothered to pick up and bring back to the garage.

Johnny Livewire was ready on the downbeat when the intro ended. He was ready and the screaming parts of songs had such a tone and force. Then the promoter came knocking on the door in the middle of the practice song. They let him in and he said hello and sat down at a dinner table. He sat and the band started from the top. He listened to the feedback. When they played, Johnny couldn’t win; his voice was always drowned out by the other musicians. Mousey slapped the drums like pans tumbling off a kitchen counter onto floor tiles. Teddy’s Gibson had to be the loudest because the guitar, according to him, was the most important instrument in a band. Johnny went hoarse trying to sing over the cacophony of squealing licks and ear-splitting power chords. The promoter didn’t look happy.

By the time Johnny got to rolling on the floor during the dying scene in “Papa’s Will,” the promoter had had enough. It was their last song, anyway but he was waving goodbye and out of the basement before they could ask how they were and if he wanted to hear an encore performance. Their first and last audition was over. Not even a ‘thanks.’