I got pretty good, though, and I was the starting pitcher in my last two years in Little League. At the all-star game, I pitched and batted fourth. I could hit too. Our town newspaper, the Stewart Manor Mail, would cover the games. I’d get mentioned, and saved a lot of the articles. I played Little League through the age of twelve. I liked having teammates, that was fun, although I can recall only one friend on the team that I hung out with away from the game.
When I played Little League, my dad would come to the games, but he didn’t sit in the stands with the other parents. He would stand way out in the outfield and watch when I pitched. He didn’t want to put any pressure on me. I remember pitching one game and looking out beyond the fence in left field. It seemed way out there, and I could see my dad standing there. I never knew if he was aware that I saw him. Secretly, I was glad he was there.
So I had that interest, baseball, very early, and along with that I developed a love for movies. As a kid I got into movies as soon as I started seeing those ads for the horror and science fiction films in the newspaper. I mean, you’d see this monster or this flying saucer, and all I could think about was how it would look on the screen. Ads attracted me to the theaters a lot. I’d get my parents to take me to the double features and see stuff like Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, and Not of This Earth. As an adult, I starting collecting the original posters from the theatrical release from all of those films I’d go to see in the fifties.
They were scary movies then, and I was just a little kid, so I was really into it, sitting in the dark in some theater in Westbury or someplace. I liked being scared, but only in the confines of a theater or at home, watching TV, or years later, a video. Otherwise it’s serious and real, and I’ve had enough of that.
Those movies did that for me even through the early seventies. As I got older, I saw movies all the time. I loved The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; it really scared me. I liked it enough that we used it as a song title, which was Joey’s idea.
In 1979, I bought one of the first Sony Beta machines for a thousand dollars. The damn thing was so big and heavy. I went over to Crazy Eddie’s to get it. I was living on Tenth Street, and I’d spent every cent I had, so I couldn’t afford a cab to get it home. I walked a mile, block by block, resting. By the time I got it near home, I could only walk two parked cars before I had to rest.
I also loved to watch Chiller Theatre anytime I could. It was on weekends at eleven at night. John Zacherley was the host, and he was terrific. I later met him at a horror convention, and he and I still write to each other. I was a huge fan of his, and getting to meet him was great. He showed all the horror stuff on his show, the traditionals like Dracula, Frankenstein, and all the Mummy features. Those Dracula films, I followed all of those. But I went in cycles for different movie genres. I liked horror, science fiction, even westerns.
By the time the sixties came around, the exploitation films were in, which had mild nudity with some violence, a great combination. I mean, what kid wouldn’t want to watch that?
I liked those Russ Meyer films, like Mudhoney, Lorna, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. They were really exciting. And the ads in the newspapers for all of those were great. They made me really want to see the movie. The New York Post did the best job with that.
So I had all these interests and hobbies as a kid that I kept even when I grew up. I also collected other kinds of cards, like the Davy Crockett series by Topps. I had a coonskin cap, the whole thing. I get flashbacks to certain cards I had when I go through my illustrated reference books on card collecting. I had some car cards and of course the 1956 Elvis cards. I had the Wild West cards too; I think that must have been in the midfifties. I liked those. I always kept my cards nice, unlike the other kids. I didn’t put them in my bicycle spokes. I can just see that rookie Koufax card all bent up, just to make a stupid noise. I kept them in boxes, very carefully, and never touched them. I’d just open the packs and put them in order. All my friends collected comics, but I was into baseball biography books and things like that instead.
The Yankees were my favorite team and Mickey Mantle was my idol. My dad turned me on to baseball. He was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and a Yankees fan. When we’d watch the games on TV, he’d make me stand up for the national anthem. I didn’t think anything of it at the time; I figured they were standing up at the ballpark too.
I’ve always loved going to ball games. I remember being at Ebbets Field at a Dodgers game in 1957. I remember Von McDaniel pitching a two-hit shutout. I’ve even talked to some of the players later on in life, and they knew the game I was talking about and everything. McDaniel was a seventeen-year-old kid out of high school and he pitched a two-hit shutout against the Dodgers. I saved my baseball ticket stubs, but not from the fifties, mostly from the sixties on. If you save the ticket stubs, you can refresh your memory quicker. I saved my concert ticket stubs too. I still have them.
Since I was also into westerns and cowboys and Indians, my parents took me to the rodeo at Madison Square Garden, which had Roy Rogers as a special attraction. I had my Roy Rogers outfit on; I must have been five or six. So Roy Rogers actually stopped and saw me in the front row, put me on his horse, and took me for a ride in front of all those people.
Beginning in ninth grade, for two years I went to military school, first at Staunton Military Academy, in Staunton, Virginia, and then the Peekskill Military Academy, near West Point in New York. It was my idea. I really wanted to do it. At first.
I considered a career in the military. You know, be an officer and retire early. I thought that would have been a pretty good life. But military school was really rough. Staunton, especially. It was full of discipline. They would torture you. If you were in formation and they caught you glancing to the side, they would punch you in the stomach. That’s why I switched up to Peekskill. The difference was that at Peekskill we had two hours a week of military drilling, and at Staunton it was three hours a day. Every day, from two to five in the afternoon, military drills with weapons, marching, hikes, the whole bit. I might as well have been in the army.
I played baseball in military school, and that didn’t go too well. I ended up having two seasons at Peekskill, playing junior varsity my ninth- and tenth-grade years. The competition was a little tougher, but I was still good. I was a pitcher, but the coach batted me ninth, which I didn’t like because I was still hitting well. They used me in relief, and I got a lot of innings. So in ninth grade, I thought, “Well, okay, I’ll bat ninth.” But the next year, I started to have a problem with the coach, and I stopped going to practice. I’d just go to my room and skip it. He’d started to advise me on changing my pitching motion. He was probably right and knew what he was doing, but I was not into taking advice. I was into rebellion, and I thought I knew more than he did. I started to sour on baseball, and at that point I was left alone—no one would coach me. Basically, they were fucking with me, and they stopped even letting me take batting practice. I knew then that I couldn’t make it much further, so I just made it one more hobby. I still played stickball all through the years. I played golf one year at Peekskill, too, but I was so bad at it that all I could do was throw my clubs. I had no patience for that game.
When I was in military school, the teacher lived on the same floor I did, so I went into his room when he wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew when I’d found it—the answer forms to all the tests for the year. At the time, I was skimming along with a 65 average, barely, not doing much at all. I had the ability to be a good student, but I was determined that I would get through everything without doing much. Pretty soon, I was getting a 99 on all of the tests. I’d always get one wrong, intentionally, just so it didn’t look suspicious. I was also selling these answer forms to a few students. Not everybody, because then I would get caught. I never got caught this way, and I made a little cash too.
I was glad to get out of there finally, but I think it was good for me. I came back to publi
c school and I was able to coast through doing zero. You can bullshit your way through to certain levels. Past high school it gets a little hard, I’m sure. But in high school, I felt I had learned enough in ninth and tenth grade in military school to get me through eleventh and twelfth grade without doing anything.
Whatever I did back then, I always gravitated toward doing as little as possible. I was very difficult. I refused to answer the teacher’s questions and would purposely say “I don’t know” to everything. Even if I did know the answer, I would just sit in the back corner, being disagreeable. I would not cooperate. On the first day of classes they’d hand out our books, and I would leave them in my locker and never take them home. I would come to school with just a pen and a piece of paper folded up, and I would try to be defiant. Actually, I guess I just was defiant. School wasn’t interesting to me. You go to school, and I’m sure it’s like this with everybody: You’re just too young, and you don’t want to learn.
I was starting to grow my hair too. I was sixteen; it was 1964. You couldn’t have it that long without getting suspended, not even Beatles length. Just barely over the ears and you could get in trouble. It was rough. It didn’t help that my grades were on the low side in public school, either. I spent three years in introductory Spanish. I can’t speak a word of it. I liked science and history classes; I did the best in those. But kids, a lot of them, when they’re that age, are not ready to sit there and study chemistry or advanced math. Later on, I know I told kids, our fans, to stay in school, and I meant it. But when I was going through it, I just made things difficult for everybody.
I also went out for the baseball team in public school, only this time the coach had a problem with my hair, which I was growing to be Beatles length. He told me I had to get it cut. I couldn’t do that, so they cut me from the team. I wasn’t going to cut my hair for a coach. Rock and roll had really taken hold of me, and playing baseball took on a smaller part in my life. Stickball in the neighborhood was about it.
My dad also didn’t like the long hair, and he gave me a really hard time about it. We had huge arguments. He didn’t like the music, either. My mom and dad both complained about the loud music around the house. There were big problems over it.
All my friends—at least, the people who wanted to hang around with me—and I were into the good music like that. Our lives revolved around it. But in Forest Hills in 1964, we were just outcasts. I met Tommy, our drummer, at school. His full name was Tommy Erdelyi. Later on, we bonded over the Stooges and music in general that was aimed at weirdos. At first, he was just another pal. Joey was Jeffrey Hyman, and he was just around. I really met Dee Dee, who was Doug Colvin, later.
My father was from Brooklyn. He had three brothers and they were all tough guys. They’d sit around our kitchen table and drink and talk about things like construction work and baseball. So, with all that macho stuff, they weren’t all that happy when I started to get really into music.
As I got involved, I even played a little bass in a band, the Tangerine Puppets, with Tommy. He was good; I was terrible. I kept trying to play the guitar and couldn’t do it. I eventually got frustrated and stopped playing altogether. We had other bands, but they never got out of the basement.
I graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1966 and had no idea what I was going to do. I had a high draft number, 350 or something, and was sure that I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I wouldn’t have fled or anything, but I sure didn’t want to go to some country I knew nothing about to fight a war. I was in favor of bombing the enemy into oblivion. Same as any war, if you want to be in it, win it. I didn’t understand why we didn’t just bomb the place out of existence.
At the same time, I didn’t really support the war, because I had no idea what we were doing there. It never made any sense to me. But my high number meant that unless the enemy was landing on our shores, I wasn’t going to have to serve.
I was just a kid like anyone else. I loved rock and roll music. I started dressing like a rock star even when I was in high school. I was a total weirdo; nobody would talk to me outside my social group.
I worked summers stocking produce at a local market near where we lived, off Yellowstone Boulevard in Forest Hills. I was sort of forming my hoodlum future at that point, and I met some kid at the market who was in one of the Irish-Italian gangs from up on Metropolitan Avenue. I was a leader, not a follower, so joining never occurred to me.
At first, I was going to go to college in Florida, but I came back after two days. I got there for orientation and said, “Forget it. This isn’t for me.” Then I went to Manhattan Community College for a term, but I didn’t like that, either.
The music was always the big deal to me. That, I did manage to be consistent with. I didn’t need direction there.
I liked violent bands. I had long hair to my shoulders and all that, like Mark Farner’s look when he started Grand Funk. But I wasn’t a hippie. I hated hippies and never liked that peace and love shit.
I really didn’t know what I wanted to be. So I started acting badly. I got in fights; I took drugs, sniffed glue, Carbona. I got in a fight with a kid one time and hit him, and then his dad came out, and I hit him, too. I took off, the cops came, and nobody would tell them who I was or where I lived. They were scared that I would come and get them if they told on me, and I probably would have. At the age of twenty, I had been on a streak of bad, violent behavior for two years.
I was just bad, every minute of the day. I was a mess at that point. I wasn’t working; I was just bad. I was nineteen, and I just wasn’t ready for it. I couldn’t handle it. I would hang out at the high school at lunchtime, even after I graduated. My mom found some heroin in my dresser drawer, in a little cellophane packet, and flushed it down the toilet. I would see discarded TV sets on the street, and several times, more than once, I took them up to the top floor of an apartment building and dropped them near people walking by on the sidewalk. I wanted to scare them. I spent the night in jail on two separate occasions. The first time, they caught me with some pot, a couple of joints. The second time, they didn’t find anything on me, so they planted some pot on me. My folks were embarrassed. They had to come and get me out of jail. My dad said he had never missed a day of work in his life, and he had to miss two because his son was in jail. Two different times, too.
Looking at it now, I think I was tough, but being tough in my neighborhood, which was pretty nice, was not the same as being tough in someplace like the Bronx or some rough part of Queens. So I had the intimidation factor in this very Jewish neighborhood. The other kids just weren’t brought up to be tough.
One time, it was the middle of the night, and we wanted to get some drugs out of a local pharmacy. But when we got in, we realized that we had broken into the laundry next door. I was disgusted. We left just as the cops were coming.
But I was the terror of the neighborhood, like a really bad Fonzie. I threw bricks through windows. I beat people up. We also broke into a bakery. I knew the kid that worked there, and he told me he would leave the cash in the register one night, so me and this other kid came back to take it. I watched out while he went into the bakery. But building security came, and the police pulled up, so I ran. They chased me and I got away, but the kid inside ratted me out, so the cops came to my house. I was there alone, since my parents were at work. They took me to the building security guard who saw me and chased me, but he said it wasn’t me. He was scared to say it was me because he thought I was in a gang, but I wasn’t. The kid who told on me went to jail for a few days. I beat him up when he got out. He died later when he got run over by a car. That’s what he gets.
I also did some strong-arm stuff—you know, grab an old lady’s purse and run, or punch a kid walking down the street and take his money. I didn’t think about it. It was random. I’d be walking down the block, and if I’d see a bottle in the street, I’d pick it up and throw it through someone’s window. I was like that all day. I was horrible. I was a horrible person.
I don’t even know why I did those things. I think it was just boredom and frustration at not knowing what to do with my life. Tommy wouldn’t even hang out with me. Dee Dee I knew then, but not very well. I had another friend, Stuart Salzman, who is dead now. I think he overdosed on drugs. He’d also tried to commit suicide when his girlfriend broke up with him. He called me one day after she left him and asked if I was going to be around later, and I told him yeah. But I wasn’t when he called. So he slashed his wrists. He pulled through that one.
I had no idea what my parents knew about what I was up to back then. There I was, out of high school, not working, living in their house. I still don’t know what they thought of that.
Then all of a sudden, one day everything changed. I was twenty. I was walking down the block, near my neighborhood, somewhere around Ninety-ninth Street and Sixty-sixth Road in Forest Hills, and I heard a voice. I don’t know what it was, God maybe, but it wasn’t something I had heard before. It asked, “What are you doing with your life? Is this what you are here for?” It was a spiritual awakening. And I just immediately stopped everything. It was all clear-cut right then. I went home and stopped doing drugs, stopped doing everything bad, and I stopped drinking. I sorted it all out, and a year after that I realized that it was okay to have a beer at night and that I could have two drinks, but that was it. I never got drunk again, because after two drinks, I could feel it. I didn’t ever again want to be under the influence. I wanted to be totally under control.
Once I decided to get my life in order, I charted a path to be normal. I wasn’t sure I could handle full-time work right away, so I got myself a part-time job delivering dry cleaning. I didn’t miss a day’s work, and after nine months I was ready for a full-time job. Before that, I had asked my dad for a job as a laborer, and I couldn’t handle it. I was not mentally ready, and it was a really hard job he got me, working outside during the middle of winter, laying down pipes and connecting them in thirty-five-degree weather at a place down on Wall Street. The rain came down and froze to ice and froze your hands. I was making a laborer’s wage, working mostly with Italians right off the boat. I just wasn’t ready. I lasted three months.
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