Detroit Rock City (36 page)

Paul Zimmerman:
At the time Jerry was into this thing where instead of interviewing people he thought it was cool to give the band a McDonald's application and have them fill that out, which isn't a terrible idea. But the last thing a band wanted to do is homework, and the Ramones didn't want to do it. Finally, I was dying of hunger, and we were wrapping it up and I had on a
White Noise
T-shirt, and Joey was looking at it, telling me how great it was and that he wanted one. I said, “I'll trade it for a piece of pizza.” He said, “Deal.” So I took off my shirt—literally the shirt off my back—for a piece of Ramones pizza. I kept waiting for him to wear that shirt, but it never happened.

Jerry Vile:
We had this place called the
White Noise
Mansion. It was in a hillbilly area of Detroit.

Paul Zimmerman:
The first one was on Fielding and Old Redford, and it was two bedrooms, a stand-alone house. It was just Jerry and I originally, and then later Steve King moved in. The landlord had fixed the place up pretty nice, but something had happened and there was a hole in the wall in the living room right away. The landlord came over one day unannounced, and he was looking at it and saying, “What?! What?!” I go, “We were moving a couch.” He didn't kick us out.

S. Kay Young:
You walked into the place and the first thing that hit you was the stench of old fast food, and it got worse. In the basement, where people tend to have a washer and dryer, they had a wash tub piled with dishes that were crusted with food. They didn't wash dishes; they just put them down there. The beds had no sheets and they had been pissed on.

Katy Hait (
Sillies, vocalist, photographer
):
I was Jerry's girlfriend for twenty years, including then. There were definitely no sheets on the bed. I don't think you cared how creepy it was at that time. There were fast food bags piled up so thick that you couldn't see the carpet.

Jerry Vile:
If we didn't announce a party after Bookie's, we would come to our house, and people would break in and already have a party started. You'd try to bring a girl home, and there would be a party going on at your house that you hadn't planned on. A lot of gang bangs happened there and bad, bad stuff. There was one girl named 747, and one night she got grain alcohol in her eyes, and I tried to wash it out in the bathtub and she fell. I heard her head hit the bottom of the tub; I can still hear that sound in my head to this day. I'm thinking, “I've fucking killed her,” and I'm fucking around with just a leather jacket, no clothes, and a naked girl in my arms.

Steve McGuire:
I lived at this place called the Earth Center in Hamtramck. I was in the 27, which was Mark Norton's band after the Ramrods. We played at Bookie's, and I had never done coke, and this guy named Tommy Ballantine came up to me and Craig Peters and told how he liked our band and offered us some blow. We did a couple lines and went back to his house and sat up in his attic and did blow for two days. He told us he was going to buy this place in Hamtramck, and it has a hall with a stage and we could practice there, so we said, “Sure.” Craig and I lived there, and there was a stage and there were these two little rooms over the stage,
and we each took one. After 27 broke up, I met Ahmet Ertegün's niece and married her. He was the founder and president of Atlantic Records. I was nineteen, and we got divorced pretty quickly.

Mark Norton:
Of course there were shitloads of parties. One thing the Zimmerman and Vile excelled at was peeing in the shampoo bottles of our host.

S. Kay Young:
There was this after-hours place on the East Side, where you walked in and it had these huge fish tanks, and they sold really bad coke. You'd go in and sit down at a table and there were playing cards on the table. And you would turn them over if you were there to score.

Kirsten Rogoff:
The Chili Sisters had parties all the time after the bars closed. They'd make chili, and we all knew that it was going to be a really good time. The night my mother died I went to a Chili Sister party. I ended up at the basement stairs in a wheelchair covered with confetti.

Diane Koprince (
Chili Sisters
):
It was me and Karen Parapata; they called us the Chili Sisters. We had parties all the time, and we knew there would be a lot of drinking, so we made food so people wouldn't drink on an empty stomach. Plus a lot of those guys in the scene had no money.

Sue Rynski:
The Chili Sisters were friends of mine from high school, and they had a house at 13 Mile and Woodward. They had parties for all the guys and gave them beer and chili.

Kirsten Rogoff:
There was always a lot of drinking and rooms where people would screw each other. I'm surprised they weren't raided.

Diane Koprince:
They were all costume parties. We kept a big box at the door that had things you could make a costume out of if you happened to show up without a costume. In the box we had my old waitress uniforms, with frilly aprons, party masks, clothes from Salvation Army. Jerry Vile came as a sofa one time, with cushions stuffed in front and back.

Jerry Vile:
The Chili Sisters would have chili parties that were also acid parties, and I remember taking a whole bunch of acid because I wasn't getting off, and then getting off really bad. That's one of my bad mistakes in life: these drugs aren't
working, get me more, and then getting off, and then getting instantly paranoid, because I have a paranoid personality. One time I was tripping and I made myself throw up all this chili, seeing trails in the chili and going, “That's not where I want to see trails, I want to see them on my hands, not on my puke.” Sometimes there'd be costume acid parties too.

Paul Zimmerman:
One time we were coming back from Bookie's, and Jerry was passed out in the backseat. When we got home I tried to wake him up. No luck. So I left him there and went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke up, felt sick, but his foot got stuck under the front seat and he puked all over the car.

Jerry Vile:
I woke up in the backseat of Paul's Maverick, and I was throwing up and my feet had gotten pushed under the seat and I couldn't get up, so I'm throwing up all over myself, in the backseat of a Maverick, and I shredded my legs; they were all bloody from pulling them out from the springs. I just managed to get out and left his car door open as I passed out on the lawn. He found me the next day. His whole car is full of puke, and the smell never went away.

Paul Zimmerman:
He cleaned it out a bit the next day. Still stunk. Finally he said he had the solution: Locker Room, that chemical in a tiny container that disco types used to inhale on the dance floor. He stuck that in the car and rolled up all the windows. It smelled better, but on hot days it still reeked of refried barf.

Rick Metcalf:
There used to be a place on the east side of Detroit called the Meet Market, and Jerry and the Boners would play there. The guy who booked the place loved the Boners, and he'd bring them in on a weekday and hardly anyone would show up. They paid them in dope and booze, and we were completely incoherent after that. They had these small tables, and one night Jerry jumped from one to the other, four or five in a row, and people were sitting at them, and people had pitchers of beer spilling on them. But he made it all the way across before he fell in a heap. Another time a black street dude walked in and starting singing Otis Redding, and we turned it into “Otis Otis / he's the way / Otis Otis has a big dick and liked to play.”

Paul Zimmerman:
Bookie's was like the clean up, then, after Bookie's you'd frantically try to find an after-hours party. So sometimes it was in Palmer Park—Mark Norton had a place there; Vince had a place there. In Palmer Park, these apartments—we had this thing called tumbling. It's where you'd pretend to throw
yourself down a flight of stairs but you'd actually hold the railing carefully, and pretend to roll down the stairs, but that would entice someone else to try it. So one night we had Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys with us, and if you've ever been in the Palmer Park apartments, they're metal, the stairs. And so we showed Stiv how to do it, and he just did this swan dive onto the stairs, rolls down, smashes the bottom, hits this door. This old lady comes out like with this horrified expression like, “What are you doing?” And he just goes, with this big smile, “We're tumbling!”

Jerry Vile:
During one of our parties Steve King started up a chainsaw and cut the coffee table in half. Another time we got up one morning and saw Steve's car on the front lawn and the wheels were all that was left. The tires looked like those little drill things with the squares of sandpaper on it. We couldn't believe the car was drivable, three out of four tires were like that—they weren't flat tires; they had turned into these, like, sanding wheels. I don't think he was purposely sideswiping cars that night; I think he was sideswiping because he was drunk. We used to purposely sideswipe cars when we were driving home drunk anyways because we drove such shitty cars. I don't think Steve was doing that, but the cars on the street were dented pretty bad. Bootsey was so mad that we were evicted from one place that he broke the toilet upstairs and it flooded for a couple days; it destroyed the house and all this art on the walls, and it ruined all my art. Our equipment was in the basement, and that's where all the water ended up. We lived at 8 Mile, right by the State Fair—we were a block off of Woodward. Frisco's, that's where Bambi danced at. She was good looking; she was hot.

Stirling Silver:
I called her Michelle, and I went out with her off and on for at least two years. I went and saw her strip a few times. She was beautiful, sexy, and liked to have sex. Plus she liked rock 'n' roll and all that. The Talking Heads came over one time to my house after playing in town at the Punch and Judy. Four guys lived in that house, and between us we had ten thousand albums because we all worked in record stores. So the Talking Heads came over, and Michelle was there. David Byrne sat in this big chair, and he never moved all night and barely talked to anybody. Jerry Harrison wandered all around, talked to a lot of people. Tina and Chris were conversational. Michelle was walking around; she was always wearing, like, something up to here. She had a body. She would wear this one satin dress a lot; it was like, “Jesus Christ.” So Jerry Harrison started hitting on her. She wasn't my girlfriend. I didn't want her to necessarily be my girlfriend because I knew she'd break my heart, so he was flirting with her, and I think they went off for a
while. The next day party's over and Michelle was there, because she would stay there for a couple days with me, then take off. The next morning there's a ring at the doorbell. I opened the door, and it's fucking Jerry Harrison. By himself. And he goes, “Is Michelle here?'

Michelle Southers:
I was a fifteen-year-old runaway. At first I was a live-in housekeeper for this young couple with a toddler in Warren. I'm from Milford, the boondocks. I met this couple at one of our field parties, and I decided to run away from home. They let me live with them because they both worked and had a little child, and I got to live there for free and babysit. One of the woman's friends was a topless dancer, Diana. She'd pull up in this big convertible, and she'd be all, like, just so flashy and blingy and all that, and she was probably all of twenty. I always lied about my age, so she thought I was seventeen. Diana wanted to hear my story and my problems and everything, and I told her the altered version, and I said, “I'm just trying to get a job,” and she said, “Well, if you lived with me, I have a beautiful place.” She had a gorgeous, huge apartment. She said, “You can just stay with me and clean my apartment and I'll give you $150 a week and you don't have to babysit kids.” So yes. One day her car wouldn't start, so the owner of this topless bar she worked at on 7 Mile and Woodward came to pick her up. He saw me and said, “Who is this? Bring her with us. We'll buy you lunch, sweetie.” So I go to the strip joint, and they asked me if I wanted something to drink. I didn't know anything about drinks, so I wanted something ridiculous like Annie Green Springs or Strawberry Hill or something they didn't have. He sent the bouncer to the corner party store to accommodate me, and I had a couple glasses of wine. Then the owner offered me three $100 bills to do one song, to pick a song and go up there, and I'm like, “No, I can't do that—dancing.” “Oh, come on. I have so many costumes, and you only have to take your top off just for like thirty seconds. At the end of the song, just flash 'em.” So I did it. And while I was up there, I also made $200 in tips. I had them play “Brick House.” The rest is history.

Bob Mulrooney:
She lived at the apartment where me and Vince were. She lived in the front room on our couch for a few weeks. It turned out, she gave like five guys from Bookie's VD, and then she ended up moving somewhere else, and she might have moved to LA for a little bit, and then she came back, married this punk rocker. I remember them at parties; they were always doing a ton of coke. I saw them at some little Chinese restaurant; they were ordering food right around that time of the killing.

Michelle Southers:
I was making so much money, and I would only go out with rock stars. Then I met this guy, he was gorgeous. He was six-foot-four, Russian and Italian—Joseph Bazzetta. I met him at the Red Carpet at a 3-D Invisibles show, and after that we were together constantly. After eight months he murdered his stepmother. He was living at his parents' house, and she was looking to get rid of him and get him out of his father's house. They had been on vacation for a few months. She came back first because she wanted to make sure she had everything prepared for her husband's return. We were at the City Club, and it was late, so I stayed there at his house. His bedroom was in the refinished basement, and she would never know anyway. I wake up to this loud noise. Like if somebody dropped something on the roof, like a loud, loud drop, like bam, thud. And he's not with me, and I'm waiting to hear another noise because I'm not supposed to really be there, and I don't want to front myself off; so I threw my clothes on and I started creeping towards the noise, upstairs. I keep going up the stairs, and I walk into the kitchen and he was strangling her. It was a horrible thing. I was frozen. I can't even explain it. It was like being trapped underwater and you can't move and you can't scream. I was paralyzed. Eventually I screamed. And he turned around and he looked like a monster. I was standing in front of . . . there was the stove here and the refrigerator here, and like a little bit of a counter top, and he was in front of me this way by the sink area, and he turned around, he stood up, and he came to me and started shaking me and said, “Shut the fuck up, bitch, or you're next!” This is my boyfriend. So I help him. I went with him while he buried the body in a wooded area in a shallow grave in Oakland County; it was a place where I was from. When you're dating somebody and you show them where you grow up, and this is the place where we used to party, big gravel pits, way out off of Hickory Ridge Road, and he said, “We're going to that place.” He stopped at a nursery on the way there, with a dead body in the car in broad daylight, to buy foliage to plant over and make it look like it's not a fresh grave. But he bought forsythia, which is ornamental. It has no place in a forest, but he didn't know, because at the time it was green. He was always a suspect, and I never told. With this guy, and his reign of abuse, and “If you ever leave me, I'll kill you and your family.” I was a classic battered woman.