Chapter Eight: The Family

“Too few are these times—though many—
All my brothers and sisters are here: my Family.
We all share inner strength—nothing less—
And eternal freedom few else possess.”

–The Moonlit Hour, © 1995 Eric Knickerbocker. All rights reserved.

I had my first inexpensive classical guitar and lessons bought for me, but had to scrape and save to afford my first electric. I was reading through the Pennypower, a free magazine of classified ads. I had always heard that a Gibson Les Paul was one of the best guitars that money could buy. When I saw an ad for a 1981 cherry sunburst Les Paul Custom for $450.00, I just had to have it.

I took my money out of my savings account and managed to talk the folks into letting me borrow from some savings bonds they had invested for me when I was younger. I had to agree to save and buy them all back. I finally did, but ironically I would later spend them all up on drugs, though that is getting ahead of my tale.

I did not have an amplifier however, and an electric guitar doesn’t make very much sound, much less pleasing music, without amplification. So I bought a cheap cord at Radio Shack and hooked it up to Mom and Dad’s stereo. It crackled and popped when I walked across the floor, as is a cheap guitar cord’s wont, a result of thin insulation around the cable. That is why the quality guitar cables have a thick layer of shielding, so that they will perform silently and last a lot longer.

Some time later I was thumbing through the Pennypower ads and came across a 250-watt Yamaha amp. The woman who was selling it owned a small recording studio in Springfield, and she was an excellent saleswoman to a dumb kid. I don’t remember how much it cost, but I do know it wasn’t worth it.

It was ancient, big and bulky, and heavy! Still it was an amp, and I was wild about it, until I had a chance to compare it to some of my friends’. It just did not have the sparkle. I did like its built in parametric EQ,¹ though. With a little ingenuity one can be made to sound like helicopter blades, or the like. I guess the rotary effect I could produce worked somewhat like a flanger.²

I was in competition with some of the other guitar players in my school. They had parents who bought them their every whim and wish, so they had all the electric toys. Rather than enrolling them in lessons, they let them adventure on their own. Nor did they start on an acoustic guitar, which I personally believe is a real asset to a beginning guitarist: especially a classical one.

They spent their days playing cover songs from speed and thrash metal bands they’d learned mainly from tablature in guitar magazines. I was intensely jealous, as they were quite good, so I drove myself relentlessly. I was going to show them, and by my junior year I’d begun to hold the sway, though it took me a while to believe it.

Nearly everyone has daydreamed about being in a band at some time or another. One day the twins and I decided we were going to start one. They were going to sing, and I was going to play lead guitar. I would teach Eva bass and Evon rhythm guitar. I can only imagine Eva’s petite fingers on a bass guitar, as the frets are miles apart and the strings are virtual telephone cables, but that was her choice. If you play guitar it is fairly easy to convert to bass, so I recommended she start on guitar.

I agreed to teach them and lent them my classical guitar. They never had much aptitude or patience for it and soon gave up all together. I left it there because I enjoyed playing, and it was convenient to have one guitar at home and one there. Still, I would often lug my electric guitar and amp over, and crank it up.

I never was what you’d call a vocalist, though I’ve been told I have a good voice and have since worked on it some. I would like to sing more, but lack the confidence.

I’d written a song and agreed to play it at their sixteenth birthday party only if they would agree to answer an embarrassing question they were asked. That was a mistake! I underestimated their bravery and was severely lacking in my own. Talk about vibrato! My voice was shaking as badly as my fingers, which it seemed stubbornly refused to stay still long enough to hit a single right note. I could have died.

I finally got them to agree to the idea of singing at church with me. I picked out several patriotic anthems and tabbed the parts out until I had them memorized. During practice it sounded wonderful. They had good voices, and they sung out. But when church started, they locked up out of shyness, trying to hide behind each other, and you could barely hear them. The softer I tried to play the softer they sung. Perhaps I should have tried to drown them out instead.

I also had an old organ I had acquired from my grandmother. I gave it to them because they wanted to learn how to play the keys. I don’t remember it that well. I do remember, however, that from time to time a contact would stick, and that note would continue to ring out. I had to forcibly pull up on the key to silence the annoying monotonous pitch. I would be curious to see it today, now that I play the keys much more proficiently. When they moved, they left it behind, but I made sure I grabbed the classical guitar and took it home with me.

They moved into a farmhouse on the other side of town, up the gravel road from where June³ lived (another female Family friend introduced in a moment). It was supposed to be haunted by an Indian boy that had been murdered in the house by his father. Occasionally, the twins described hearing things rolling down the stairs, though when they’d go to look, nothing was to be found. I did not know what to think, though I knew they had a tendency toward an overly vivid imagination at times.

Down the street was a church that had a cemetery behind it. I would often go down there and walk amongst the graves, especially the oldest of them. They were said to have some kind of ancient history that tied in with the field between the house and the cemetery, an alleged Indian burial ground and place of high spiritual intensity. Sometimes Evon would accompany me in these romps, and we’d usually walk up and down the road side by side under the bright moon, stopping to reflect in the cemetery for a while. It was very peaceful, though my personal demons seldom gave me rest.

Before I plunge further into the skeletons in The Family closet, allow me to share with you a song I wrote a few years ago when I was still married and had grand dreams of resurrecting the old band. It was a rare moment of inspired nostalgia, much the mood that I’m in now. Here it is:

When I was still hanging around Mike in middle school, I noticed a quiet boy I hadn’t seen before. Being the ever zealous salesman, he seemed a perfect candidate to coerce into signing up into the tape clubs. He was a little shy, but it was the long hair and metal tee shirts that really set off my sales pitch. As it turns out, he wasn’t interested. Incidentally, if memory serves me correctly, he did end up signing up under me, but by this time we were best buddies who hung out together a lot. His name, as I was to learn, was Sylvester.⁵ Little did I realize then that his path was yet to cross mine as a fellow Family member.

The Family was soon mobilized thanks to June. She was two years older than me, a tomboy and had long red hair. She generally tried to further her tough reputation in any way possible, though in reality she was actually a very sensitive, kind-hearted person.

She would borrow her mother’s car, and we’d all go riding around. It was an Audi and quite nice. We would pile in, some ten-odd people all squeezed together. It made quite a sight.

June, Sylvester, Sheila,⁶ Junior,⁷ and Brandon⁸ all smoked cigarettes, and soon so did some of the rest of us. Before long, the back seat had a rather large cigarette burn, though her mom had warned her about that. Being a little naïve, I only found out later that all of them smoked pot, except Sylvester who’d quit. So did Violet,⁹ another friend of June’s that we partied with a lot.

Violet wasn’t exactly what I would call innocent and had a bit of a reputation for her extra-curricular activities. She wasn’t really a part of The Family, though she knew most of us and hung out with us occasionally. I can remember hanging out with her and June. Particularly when stoned, they would both try getting into my jeans, but I was too naïve to fully catch on. I just interpreted their passes as irreverent humor.

I seem to remember that Violet and Junior had a short stint for a while, though I remember little about it. I do remember, however, that she gave him a unique birthday present one year: herself. This was because she allegedly felt sorry for him. Who knows? At any rate, she was a really nice person, and I liked her a lot.

June and Sheila (Sylvester’s stepsister) weren’t exactly innocent either. They were also sexually active and had a keen eye for the guys. The two of them became good friends, and they wrote their personal nicknames, Mutt and Jeff, everywhere.

Sheila ended up moving to Idaho, and June missed her a lot, though they continued to write. She and I and some of the others also continued to write for a while, and she missed The Family terribly, though she liked Coeur d’Alene well enough, a city both considerably larger and different from the little town of Bolivar, Missouri. She was always telling me to hug The Family for her, take care of Sylvester, or to rub it in when no one had written.

June and Joe¹⁰ had been actively involved for some time. Though I got along quite well with her, I never really spent much time with Joe. I really did not know him very well, and he was a little intimidated by me I think, even though he was a year older. He was nearly six-foot-five, and his best friend’s name was Brandon. Ironically enough, both—and Joe in particular—were to become my bandmates in our high school rock band, Hypnosis.

Brandon and I did not get along too badly. We had another math class the following year, and he would do the top half of the test, I’d do the bottom and then we’d trade. I still have his picture that he signed, “Eric, We need more tests like that.” It is no small wonder my math skills are still sadly lacking to this day. What was it with my friends and math, anyway?

Somewhere in the course of events June broke up with Joe. It was a major incident, as they had been actively involved with one another for quite a long time. I wasn’t too troubled by it though, as he was not of much concern to me.

For some reason I would even sometimes be a little hostile toward him, glaring at him like I was going to kill him. He took it well, just calmly asking me why I was looking at him like that. I rarely knew. It is no small wonder he was a little intimidated of me. This was to be a harbinger of the intensity of my inner beast, I guess.

It took Joe a while to get over the breakup, and I can totally understand. I did feel bad for the guy. I did not really dislike him or anything. I just did not know him that well, and he seemed a little strange to me. He continued to hang out with us, though he and Brandon kept to themselves a little more.

I did not have a car, so I did not bother getting my license until I was seventeen. Still, it was not at all uncommon for me to stay in town after school for hours with no ride and no food, my highly nourishing cigarettes the only thing to sustain me. Often, I’d just have on a pair of shorts and a metal tee shirt with the arms and neck cut out, forming only a loosely fitting scrap of fabric over my scrawny torso. I remember bumping into Violet one night on the square, and she asked me, “Eric! Where are all your clothes?”

The Family continued to flourish, and I started becoming best buddies with Sylvester. He had long hair, longer than mine, and was into metal too. Actually, the only one who wasn’t too big into heavy metal was Eva, though she would sometimes listen to the likes of Bon Jovi, etc.

We would often get a little tired of watching hours of country music television at the twins’ house, as that was Eva’s big thing. Everyone was good-natured about it, though. It was her house, and we respected her for being different. Nonetheless, we’d tease her about it and tell her she needed to get into Ozzy a little more. He was one of June’s all-time favorite musicians, and I tended to agree.

Sylvester was kind of quiet, and I liked that about him. I was too, but out of the pair of us, I was the most outspoken. In public, I displayed a calm reserve and he, a charming shyness. I did not have too many problems attracting the ladies, but he was a human magnet. I swear! That guy could have walked down the street with a bag over his head, and I’ll bet the women would still have wet themselves! Yet surprisingly, he really wasn’t all that good looking. I’m not saying that he was necessarily bad looking either—he was probably a little above average—but more than anything, I guess, he just seemed to have an air about him they all liked. Truthfully, I’m not one hundred percent sure what they saw in him. I just know that they saw something: that much was painfully obvious.

We loved to dog each other, and we had some rather bizarre, tasteless names we always called each other. I can assure you, gentle reader, that I did not learn them at home. He was Sir Fagot-Ass Shithead, and I was Sire Gay-Lesbian Asshole. (I was Sire because I was “superior.”) I’ll bet you’ll never guess who came up with such ludicrous names.

The rest of The Family generally called him Weeniebutt, a name June concocted in regard to her perception of an item of his anatomy she seemed to be strangely fixated by (maybe that was it). I was everybody’s Heavy Metal Stud Bud, a nickname Mike, my grade school friend, had originally taken for himself. I liked it, used it and eventually my friends—namely June—shortened it to just plain Stud Bud, though I usually continued to write H.M.S.B. on my folders, etc.

On two separate occasions June had asked me if I could hold her pack of Marlboro Reds until the next day, as she did not have any pockets. The first time she asked this favor of me I was curious but did not yield to temptation. The second time I succumbed to the urge and like an idiot, lit one sitting in the armchair. I knew Mom and Dad would flip since they did not let my friends smoke in the house. Fortunately, the smell aired out before they got home, because I was too plastered to move and felt a little green around the edges. I did not actually pick up the habit then, though.

Some time went by and Evon became curious about smoking. June was her biggest influence, though she told her not to start. That aroused Evon’s rebellion and her nonconformity came out. Some of her aunts and uncles smoked too, and she wanted to know why it was such a big deal.

She and Kate soon started smoking, much to my dismay. Fool that I was, I decided to get her to stop by starting. Surely she would regret her actions and quit after seeing me subject myself to such torture. For a while, I pestered her incessantly, but she’d just say, “Shut up and have a cigarette,” throwing one in my lap.

On one such occasion shortly after we started, Kate, Evon, and I were smoking next to Kate’s bedroom window. It was only the third or forth cigarette I’d smoked. When I was finished, I went downstairs, and their mom asked if her girls were smoking upstairs.

She said, “I know my girls have been playing around with cigarettes. I caught Kate the other day, and I know Evon is too. I did not know you did, though.” I don’t remember my response, but obviously my white lie blew up in my face, as white lies are so prone to do.

The first time I bought a pack of cigarettes I had been hanging out on the Bolivar square. Across the street was the now defunct business called The Gold Rush Restaurant, on the northeast corner across Highway 32. Everybody smoked Marlboro Reds, and they were $1.25 out of the machine, the cheapest pack price in town. I was so dense I had to ask Brandon to show me how to open them. He showed me how to pack them too and was gracious not to make me feel like the idiot that I was.

That evening I went home and told Mom and Dad I’d started smoking. My dad offered to buy the pack from me for full value if I’d agree to throw them out and not smoke again. I agreed, but was soon to go back on my word.

He was kind of hurt and told me “I think the only reason you told us was so you wouldn’t have such a guilty conscience.” I guess he was right, because before long Evon, Kate, and I had all become chronic smokers. Eva and Joe were the only smart two.

All of us drank alcohol however, and drank it frequently. I was one of the worst, though I rarely drank beer, preferring wine and harder liquor. I’ve never much cared for the taste or effect of beer: I’m not a fan of the spins.

Shortly after I started smoking, I made the mistake of smoking in the house. My room and my parent’s room were next to each other in the small rock house in which we lived. I should have known that smoking by the window side by side with theirs was pretty foolish. About the instant I got it lit up, I heard my dad call out, “What are you doing! You’re not smoking in the house, are you?”

They had told me in no uncertain terms that they did not want me smoking in the house, so I hurriedly snubbed it out, yelling back “No,” and feeling like a fool. My mom hated my smoking, and there was more than one occasion on which she broke down and cried when she smelled the pungent stench of smoke on me. Often, late at night I’d sneak out my window, making too much noise to truly be stealthy.

There was a rock ledge near the house, overlooking the road, near the bottom of the hill. Especially on bright moonlit nights, I’d go there to smoke and think, often bringing along my acoustic guitar. I loved sitting there like the sage on the mountaintop, basking in the ethereal golden rays of the moon. It was so peaceful and serene. The woods behind me offered solace, and the numerous cedar trees along its edge painted a complementary forest green to the midnight blue sky.

When I wasn’t going over to the twins’ or anyone else’s house after school, the bus driver would let me sit in the very back and smoke. The few remaining younger kids began to suspect the truth, but since he permitted me, they couldn’t say much about it. The only two kids who definitely knew were Curtis and Carla, and her dad would have really had her hide, had he known she snuck a puff one day.

I’d cup the cigarette in my palm to hide it, carefully ashing it out the back window, the whole while trying to act completely innocent and nonchalant. Then when I got home, I already had my first after-school cigarette smoked and could go straight to playing guitar, or enjoying another one.

I tried to keep them out of sight and soon became a little smarter; I started swiping clothespins, clipping the pins on the butts to keep them from stinking up my hand so badly. I’d leave them fastened on the trees outside since they stunk. After wondering where all of them kept disappearing to, Mom and Dad eventually caught on. For the most part, I did not really get busted unless my pack fell out of my pocket while I was talking to them, which did happen once or twice.

For that matter, all the smokers at Bolivar High School became rather crafty at smoking cigarettes. On lunch break my sophomore and junior years we had open lunches and could smoke at Smokers’ Corner, as the section across the street was so called because some of us would stand over there and smoke cigarettes or joints.

My senior year the lunch hour was closed, prohibiting us from leaving campus. Of course we weren’t going to do without our nicotine. So we would stand outside the long steps in front of that old, three-story brick building, smoking and keeping an eye out for the principle, vice principle, or both, who canvassed the area in search of people like ourselves. We would stay hidden in the little corner the steps formed with the building so no one could see us from the second and third story windows, taking turns smoking and watching, ready to cover for each other if need be.

We learned very quickly how to hide the cigarettes under our cuffs, a trail of smoke going up our sleeves. I do well remember what it was like when you accidentally touched it against your bare skin or it burned too far down when the principle was taking a particularly long time lecturing us about smoking on school property. For that matter, the smoke itself could get rather hot, but it was worth the risk. I think only one or two people got busted that year. I did not, anyway. I suppose as long as the smoke did not come out the neck of our clothing we were okay, huh?

I rarely had enough money to support my habit, so I would go hungry, saving my lunch money for more important things like buying cigarettes. You know, as I think of smoking next to those steps of that old building, it seems funny to me. That used to be the high school in my day and still represents that to my mind, though I understand before my time it used to be the junior high building that sat next to the high school building. (They, and several other buildings, were all high school when I attended.)

A new middle school had been built for us in ’86, and it seemed nice to be out of such a squeaky clean environment into an older building that breathed a bit more and spoke of the freedom of coming of age. Now, it is exactly reversed. The high school was turned into the middle school and vice versa, albeit expanded in the process. I understand Smokers’ Corner still stands, only now the middle schoolers frequent it. Nothing ever remains the same, except the memories. (Sigh.)

¹ A parametric equalizer has three variable potentiometers: frequency, rate and bandwidth, unlike a graphic equalizer, which has individual faders for designated values across the frequency spectrum. Both are used to tailor the tone of sound. (The tone of a sound can be measured in frequency values called Hertz, named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the German physicist who standardized the measurement of frequency, or the number of times a wavelength passes a fixed point in a given time. Altering these values changes the tonal characteristics of a sound.)
² A flanger is a special effect that creates an illusion of revolving sound. This is produced essentially by a continuous sine wave passing through a graphic equalizer, changing the values as it travels through the faders, though this is usually a digital simulation. To the ear a flanger resembles a phaser, which is an effect produced by sampling (recording) the frequency (tone), running the source and sample signal (sound) piggyback and then pulling them into and out of phase with themselves. Both effects are usually produced by routing a signal through the circuit path of a tiny computer chip. Ah, the joys of digital technology these days.
³ Not her real name.
⁴ Originally published as a collection of songs entitled Onerous Musicalis (A Collection of Bothersome Musical Soirées). Copyright © 1995 Eric Knickerbocker. All rights reserved.
⁵ Not his real name.
⁶ Not her real name.
⁷ Not his real name.
⁸ Not his real name.
⁹ Not her real name.
¹⁰ Not his real name.