Cracked Head Memoirs

About a year after my motorcycle wreck I got a check for a little over $17 thousand dollars. I was 19 and had about as much business with a little money as I did with a pistol. Money meant only one thing to me; you could trade it for stuff. Whether or not I thought I was rich, I can’t recall. I don’t, however, think I had any idea just how fast money could go.

So I bought a used Corvette, got an apartment and a bunch of furniture, a stereo, an electric guitar and amp, some clothes, and all the drugs I could find. In 1981 Quaaludes were the rage. Everyone in my druggie circle of friends was doing them. Additionally, I developed a fondness for Valium, and bought them 100 at a time. Mostly, though, I drank beer and smoked pot. At one point I’d smoked so much weed that when I started coughing I couldn’t stop until I vomited. Good times.

Needless to say I don’t remember much about the six months it took me to blow through the cash. All I did was party. My primary purpose was to get as intoxicated as was humanly possible everyday, with a secondary goal of having sex with some woman I’d just met. I managed to get my first DUI in this period. Miraculously, though, I don’t think I had any wrecks.

When the money was gone I moved in with one of my girlfriends, the Bulldog. For reasons she’d have to explain, she was glad to have me. I didn’t even think about working steadily in the 10 months or so I lived with her. She liked to party as much as me, so we stayed in mostly, and just got stoned. Not surprisingly, I was pretty depressed to be broke after having had it so easy for a minute. I don’t think it was that I’d acted so foolishly that bothered me as much as that I couldn’t be as big a fool as I had previously. Financial constraints are a bitch.

Genius that I am, I talked the Bulldog into letting my best running buddy, I’ll call him Rudy, move in with us. He was a sort of low-level social butterfly and pretty soon we were doing acid and banging chicks two at a time. We’d pick them up at bars and bring them home and switch up on them. We were both banging the Bulldog – sometimes simultaneously. It was just crazy.

There’s only so much debauchery a relationship, and I use that word loosely, can stand. It was like some kind of psycho Jerry Spring meets Lynyrd Skynyrd world, and before too long the Bulldog and I were just exhausted. Not so Rudy, the nastier and crazier it got, the better he liked it. (He still lives exactly like we did when we were 19.) We started to argue and before too long the Bulldog was beating the shit out of me. For whatever reason I wouldn’t hit her. Rudy would try and protect me, but she was pretty tough.

One night we were fighting about something and she got on the phone to call somebody, and I didn’t like it. I jerked the cord running from the phone to the wall. Somehow, seemingly defying the laws of physics, the phone flew up, away from the way I had pulled, and hit the Bulldog right in the nose. She was bleeding pretty bad and I guess I just snapped. I went in the kitchen, got a knife, and as best I can remember, was going to finish her off. Fortunately a couple of buddies grabbed me and she split. Otherwise I might have been executed for having killed her way back in the ’80s.

Shortly after the nose smashing, she shut the place down. She went home to Ohio to rest. Rudy moved out. And I moved to Memphis. For the next three or four years, I was a menace to society in the Bluff City.