Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  “Unlock the door! Now! Unlock the door!”

  The cops were pissed off, and there were other people, civilians, around them. These other people were pissed off, too. They all seemed to want me out of the car. I noticed upholstered chairs, dressers, and beds flipped this way and that surrounding the car. I had an idea about the furniture, but it was only an idea. I thought about opening the lock on the driver’s-side door, but I knew as soon as I did, life would never be the same.

  It was one of those hot, sticky days in late August when summer smothered you and made you pay through the nose for the pleasant days only a month earlier. My plans were to stay inside the apartment on Avenue X with the A/C on. But my old friend Paul Baxter called me around lunchtime to ask if I would give him a lift to the traffic court on Atlantic Avenue so he could pay a bullshit speeding ticket. I said sure, as long as on the way we could stop at a grocery store and pick up a six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale.

  We picked up two six-packs—one for the road and one for the road back. We drove north on Ocean Parkway, and by the time we hit Flatbush Avenue we were working on the six-pack for the road back. Paul threw another empty bottle into the backseat and told me to drop him off at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. He wasn’t sure how long it would take. A half hour if he was lucky. Maybe more. I pulled up to the curb and told him I would circle around and look for him a little later.

  I made a left onto Fourth Avenue, a left onto Pacific, and a left onto Flatbush, completing my first circle. I was blasting WNEW-FM on the car stereo, but they were playing too many commercials. Circling the block got boring fast, and I was quickly out of beer. The air-conditioning was humming, but the traffic was driving me insane. Everybody and his uncle was converging on these streets to pay a ticket, pay a fine, get a license, see a judge, enter a plea, shop, fight for parking, and get in my fucking way.

  I spotted a bar on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush. I didn’t know how I missed it the first four times. My problems were solved. There was even a parking spot right in front of the bar. I pulled in nose-first. As I slammed the door of my ’68 Coupe, I took a look at the perfect silver paint job I had just had done and realized I was parked in a bus stop. I didn’t think I’d be too long and really needed a drink. The sweltering downtown August air made my lungs feel like a couple of wet paper bags.

  The bar was the right place to be. It was air-conditioned, and WNEW-FM was on the radio, so it was like being in the car again with a fresh supply of beer and no traffic. I took an open seat near the bartender, an old-time Brooklyn guy, and ordered a Newcastle Brown. That was becoming as boring as circling the block, so I switched over to shots of Old Grand-Dad. George Thorogood’s version of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” was blasting out over the barroom speakers, and I figured if George can mix it up, so can I.

  When the song was over, I switched back to beer, this time Pabst Blue Ribbon, which was a brew connected to summertime, baseball, and bars just like this one. There were a few guys scattered in the barroom hiding from the world at midday, and I was hiding with them. There was a ball game on the overhead television, and two of the guys were arguing. One of them was saying the Yankees had no pitching and had to rebuild. The other said the first guy didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. And I couldn’t care less. I was chasing whiskey with beer and beer with whiskey and having a good time doing it. The only problem was the Miller Beer clock on the wall, which said five past three. Paul was probably done, so I downed my last shot and left.

  My car wasn’t towed or ticketed. When you’re lucky, you’re lucky. I put the key in the door, got in, put the key in the ignition, and took a quick look out the driver’s-side window. I saw a cop. He looked like one of the old-timers in the bar and was tapping the window with a bottle. I blinked: it wasn’t a bottle. It was a service revolver, but it was the same cop. I saw the chairs, dressers, and beds again and realized for the first time I was in a furniture store. There was glass all over the showroom floor and the showroom window looked like someone had driven a tank through it. Someone had.

  “Unlock the door! Now! Unlock the door!”

  I did. The cop on the driver’s side grabbed me and spun me around while the other one handcuffed me. Like anyone in America, I had the scene in my head from countless movies and news shows. The perp is led away surrounded by mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, neighbors, salesmen, clerks, each one yelling. Each one wanting a piece. Only this time I was the perp.

  “You ran over my daughter’s foot, you piece of shit!”

  If I did, what are you doing here screaming at me?

  I was fingerprinted and booked at the 78th Precinct. It was a large brick fortress of a building just two blocks away. When they took my mug shot, one of the cops told me to smile for the camera. Just what I need to show a judge—that I was so crazy I could laugh it off. I stared deadpan into the lens. It came naturally.

  Bail was set at ten thousand dollars. The charges included driving under the influence and first-degree reckless endangerment. I called Marion, who called a friend. My friend had an attorney friend of his come down to the precinct. He was a middle-aged guy who knew the system. He took off his glasses, stared at me carefully for a moment, and told me I was as lucky a man as he had ever seen in his life.

  No one was killed. No one was injured. Not inside the store and not outside, where a bunch of kids waiting for the bus scattered to either side of my Caddy. The father who claimed his daughter’s foot was run over never took her to the hospital and was not pressing charges. If we ran the same scenario a hundred times, my attorney said, ninety-nine times we would have at least one fatality and a few critical injuries. But the charges were serious, and I was looking at up to seven years behind bars. If I was really lucky—and as far as he was concerned, I had used up all of my luck for this lifetime and the next—I could get probation. That would mean getting sober, staying sober, and proving it. That’s what we were shooting for. But my lawyer was making no guarantees.

  As we walked out of the precinct, I spotted my ’68 Coupe parked across the street. There were dents on the front right side and scratches all over the hood and the roof. I had just finished restoring it and felt like a schmuck. I told myself I would get it into the body shop the next day, or at the latest the day after. I knew the guy there and would ask him to turn it around as fast as he could. As I walked around the car one last time for the moment, I realized it was maybe a two-day job with a new coat of paint and realized it could have been a lot worse. For the first time since the accident, I felt a sense of relief.

  My hearing was at Kings County Criminal Court on Schermerhorn Street. I wore a gray suit and combed my hair. My lawyer was with me and told me to look as serious as possible when the judge addressed me and not to say a word unless I was asked to.

  “Do you understand the seriousness of the charges?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Do you understand this court can order a criminal trial?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  The judge explained I was being given a suspended sentence pending treatment. I was released under the watchful eye of my attorney whose responsibility it was to see to it that I entered a licensed rehabilitation facility. From there it was up to me to complete the program successfully. I was to appear before the court in six weeks, sober and with a letter verifying treatment. If I failed to do so, I could count on going to jail. The judge asked if I understood everything he had just said.

  “Yes, Your Honor. Absolutely.”

  My lawyer turned to me and told me again how lucky I was. But I didn’t feel lucky. My immediate reaction was frustration that I had to waste the next six weeks of my life.

  I spent the next couple of days at home drying out while Marion called around and looked for an inpatient rehab facility. There was one in Freeport, Long Island, that came highly recommended by other people we knew in the music industry. I figured if they could do it, I could do it.
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  Around dinnertime, the downstairs bell rang and I heard my father’s voice over the intercom. Marion buzzed him in. I hadn’t heard from him since the hearing; this was a surprise visit. He walked in and asked me to have a seat in the living room. He grabbed a kitchen chair, placed it a few feet away, and sat down facing me. When you’re a kid, your father looks gigantic, especially if he’s a six-foot-three, 230-pound longshoreman. As you get older, he seems a little smaller every year. At this moment, my father assumed his full stature from my childhood. In fact, he looked even bigger. He took up all the air and light in the room.

  “What do I have to do to get through to you?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m going to rehab. Next week probably.”

  “That’s not what I mean. How do I make you understand where you’re headed? How you’re hurting me. How you’re destroying your mother. Destroying her. You don’t want to know what kind of shape she’s in. What you’ve done to her. You don’t even seem to know what you’ve done to yourself.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want you to say. The problem is if you really understood the position you’ve put yourself in, you would know it. I would know it. We would all know it. But I don’t see anything like that. What I see sitting in front of me is a guy who wants his car back. I see a guy who sees all this as a pain in the ass. Let me ask you something. Do you know what happens if you kill someone?”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “It means everything is over. Everything is gone. Forever. You never get it back—your freedom, your life, your conscience. And that . . . that is the moment you understand for the first time what you actually had. When that door closes . . .”

  My father put his head in his mammoth hand and wiped a tear before looking at me again. I tried to recall the last time I had seen him cry and realized this was the first time. It didn’t last long. He got up, walked out, and slammed the front door. The building shook. I was shaken.

  Falling asleep that night wasn’t easy, and not only because I had been dry for about a day. The episode with my father had me freaked out. I went over it in my mind again and again. He was unbreakable, but I had nearly broken him just by not giving a shit. That was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I wished he could just ignore my misadventures, but for better or worse, that was never going to happen. Because he cared, I was stuck with the power to destroy.

  The threshold with most people was low. That included my mother. She showed her concern the old-fashioned way, by getting upset easily and raising hell. As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, what came to mind was the time I was practicing on the drums in our old apartment building and a bottle sailed through the window, soared over my head, and hit the far wall of my bedroom.

  I knew who it was instantly. The guy who lived across the alleyway worked the nightshift and slept during the day. My room faced the alleyway, so the sound traveled right out my window and into his. He felt like he was living inside a snare drum. He had complained before, but throwing the bottle took it to the next level.

  My mother confronted him right out in the open at the Ditmas Avenue F train station near McDonald Avenue. She spotted him on the platform atop the trestle and let loose. When a woman screams at a man in a crowded public place, it’s a public shaming. And my mother could scream.

  Any number of things could bring any number of reactions from my mother. My father, however, was slow to anger. He thought things through on a deeper level. In his mind, there was a big gulf between a real crisis and every run-of-the-mill nuisance in life. When my father confronted you, you could be sure you had crossed a serious line and were staring out over the edge.

  I had crossed that line a couple of times back in school. On one occasion he told me calmly we were going to the barber. There was no point in resisting. He could have dragged me there with one hand, so I just walked along. It was like walking the plank except that he was walking it with me. The only way to get through to me was a haircut. If I lost that big head of hair, maybe some of the arrogance and stubbornness would go with it. And here we were again walking the plank—a real plank with death and destruction at the other end. We were way past haircuts.

  Marion wasn’t in the apartment in the morning when I woke up. As I walked to the bathroom in my kimono, I felt jittery but hopeful I could make it through the day without a drink. Everything alcoholic was out of the house. That alone made me anxious. A splash of cold water on my face would go a long way. I opened the door and turned on the light in one motion and felt a colder sensation than any splash of water. Standing in the tub was a man in his thirties. He looked like he was from India and he was wearing a suit. He could have been waiting for a train. He was not surprised to see me. But I was surprised to see him.

  I thought of one move and one move only—turning away then looking back again. Then maybe he would be gone. So I turned away. Then I looked back again. But the train hadn’t arrived at the station. The Indian was still there. And I was gone in a flash. I was in my pants and a T-shirt and out on the pavement in under a minute. The nearest bar was three blocks away, and that’s where I was headed on foot. I just hoped I could make it without seeing the Indian along the way.

  I made it to the bar like a desert wanderer to a watering hole. I couldn’t stand another mirage. I ordered a shot of Bacardi 151 and greeted it like a long-lost friend. I leveled out quickly. But I knew I was far from okay.

  I had heard of delirium tremens, or the DTs. Your brain became so chemically dependent upon alcohol that without it, reality and the imagination collided. But knowing about something didn’t mean you were prepared for it. As I walked to my parents’ house on a warm late-summer day, I felt I just needed to keep moving, and as long as I did, I would be okay. It was when I stopped that the problems started.

  I wanted my mother and father to see that I was sober for a few days and was fine. If I could convince them, then maybe I could convince myself. I walked in, said hello, and went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. Before I could put the glass to my mouth, my jaw dropped. There was something large and fuzzy moving slowly through the backyard.

  It took on more definition as I stared. There were scales, a large tail, and three long pointy horns. It was a dinosaur—specifically a triceratops. A fucking triceratops. He was thirty feet long and fifteen feet tall, towering over my parents’ garage. His movements were powerful and intimidating. He had one eye right on me through the kitchen window. I looked away and looked back again. He lumbered toward me, treading heavy on the grass. I wanted the Indian back.

  I bolted out the front door without closing it behind me and ran through the streets of Brooklyn back home as if the triceratops were right behind me. I didn’t want to look. I made it home, ran upstairs, closed the door behind me in the bedroom, pulled down the shades, turned off the lights, and got under the covers.

  I remembered how much as a kid I loved seeing dinosaurs in sci-fi movies and at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. My mind was getting cleaned out like an old stuffed closet. Whatever was in there was coming out in no particular order. I had absolutely no control over it and didn’t want to see what was next.

  I did anyway. They followed me under the covers. There were weird winged one-eyed creatures flying around my head. There were bats with the heads of lions. There were two-headed lizards flicking out their tongues. I thought, This is it. I’m Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. I’m Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses. But I can’t turn off this movie.

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own a business or have similar obligations, we can work with you to ensure you are able to fulfill essential duties during your stay.

  The facility in Freeport, Long Island, was like a country club. I had a clean private room with a TV. The cafeteria was more like a dining room, and we were given menus. We had our choice of a dozen entrees and another dozen main courses. The staff let us know the chef would prepare special dishes if we asked. They probably would have done anything I asked, including setting up a riser with a twelve-piece drum set in the recreation room.

  I did go to the meetings. There were three a day. I barely said a thing the first week. I mostly sat and listened. One woman started drinking when her kids were old enough to go to school and she was alone in the house. There was a guy whose father got him started. I appreciated their honesty in sharing their stories and the details, but very little of it seemed to have anything to do with me. I did go on binges and become loud, obnoxious, and even dangerous sometimes and wanted to put an end to that. But I also had periods where I barely drank at all. I had a problem, but I wasn’t like these people.

  “Hello. I’m Marc. And I guess I’m an alcoholic.”

  That was as far as I would go. I was trying to be polite.

  I kept to myself. The cable service included a movie channel. With all the meetings I was already going to, I didn’t want to beat the thing to death. Whenever I shut off the tube and had time to think, my mind drifted back to things that upset me. Getting ratted out by Dee Dee was near the top of the list. He was not only my best friend in the band but the person who really got me into the Ramones in the first place. We were like brothers on the road. Life wasn’t perfect, but we had a great time most of the time and had each other’s back. I had Dee Dee’s back even when he pulled a knife on me. So the idea that a friend like that would rat me out hurt—especially when his problems were clearly worse than mine. There was a code, and he broke it. He sold me out. If anyone should have been in here, it was Dee Dee.