Tales Of A RATT (3 page)

At the time, we lived in a Pittsburgh suburb called Turtle Creek. "Turtle Crick", to the locals. Picture in your mind a quaint little village like town. Cobblestone streets and buildings. Victorian style houses. The place was so "small town values" that it could have been a Norman Rockwell painting, and no one would have thought a thing of it.

Around this time, which was 1964 or 1965, things were heading south for my Mum and Dad's marriage. It got pretty bad, and before I knew it, Dad was gone, and they were divorced.

It wasn't long after that when it happened.

I remember being in my room, and hearing all hell breaking loose downstairs. Mum was crying. Wailing, really. And, I could hear Ronnie saying stuff. I couldn't make it out, though.

I came down the stairs, as quiet as I could, and stood there watching Ronnie comfort Mum. She was busted up pretty bad. So was Ronnie, for that matter.

They looked at me, called me over, and told me that my father, Charles "Chuck" Blotzer, was dead.

My grandmother had given my dad a car. It was a Pontiac Tempest with a tragic history. One afternoon, she was driving down a quiet residential street, when a 6-year-old kid darted out from between cars. Whether she had the chance to react or not, I have no idea. She hit the kid with the car, and the boy died at the scene.

It destroyed my grandmother. She was consumed with guilt. Then from that point on, she wouldn't drive. Not for any reason. So, she gave the car to my Dad.

Less than a year later, my Dad died in that car. He was driving on an icy road, lost control, and slid into a telephone pole. I guess he broke his neck, or something, because he was dead when they found him.

I don't believe in curses, but that Tempest was born under a bad sign.

My Dad had a brother, my Uncle Ron, who I kept in touch with over the years. Whenever I'd go back to Pittsburgh to visit, I go see him. He's passed away now, as well, but he used to come see the shows and got a big kick out of it. Ron was the only member of my Dad's side of the family that I kept up with. He's got a bunch of kids who are my cousins, and as far as I know, they're all still back in "Turtle Crick.”

But, it wasn't long before Mum had found someone new, and Pittsburgh was in the rearview mirror.

Joe Schweinberg, "Pete" to anyone who mattered in his life, was a pretty good guy when he started coming around. He tried to do the right thing with the kids. Treated us good, bribed us with change and dollar bills, or candy, that sort of thing. At least that's how it was in the beginning. Pete married my Mum in 1966.

But, that sweet, innocent and simple life in Turtle Crick wasn't to last for long. Things got tough in the Sixties, and in a snap, Pete had moved us into the projects of East Pittsburgh.

Keep in mind that this was the early 1960's, and what people think of, as "projects" weren't what they are today. It was just families with lower incomes. There wasn't a big crime element, and things weren't divided by race or anything like that. Not that there weren't race issues, but they just weren't that intense. It wasn't anything like it was in other parts of the country. No one had ever heard of crack or drugs or shit like that. It was a fairly respectable place, and people got along.

These days, I go up there to visit, and the place is just a wreck. Run down and dilapidated. Crime is like a cancer in that place, and most of it revolves around the drug scene. It's really sad. But, when we lived there, the place was brand new. It was really like a big apartment complex. Big apartment buildings with mostly white families. The few black families were pretty low key. I never caught on to any racial tension or strife in that place. Certainly nothing like what was going on in the south.

Thinking back on it, there obviously was some division between races. My Mum, for instance, was brought up with the notion that you don't hang out with black people. It just isn't done. That was something handed down through her family over the generations. Sort of a racially motivated inheritance. I did note that my Mum was much less dogmatic about the subject than her parents were. Personally, I don't give a shit what color you are, so each generation is getting a little weaker in their racial judgments.

I guess there is some hope against that bullshit.

The ironic thing about my Mum and her distrust for black people was that, during her end days, she was befriended by her next-door neighbor, a black woman. This lady really took care of her. She really did right by my Mum. There came a point where Mum couldn't care for herself, and she had to go live in a hospice hospital. She was visited almost daily by a jovial black preacher, who wound up praying her last prayers with her.

Carol and I got a bittersweet kick out of that. She wasn't hating blacks, my Mum. But, her general distrust and ignorance was something given down to her through family, yet, her last days were spent being comforted and cared for by black people. Very cool.

She did pass a few of those stereotypes down to us kids, but nothing to the degree of what she dealt with. I played with Ron Abrams in Firefox, have several black friends, and love Motown music. My distrust of people has nothing to do with their race. There are people of EVERY race that I don't appreciate, like or trust. I'd even go as far as to say hate. We're talking about no good piece of shit people. Their skin tone has nothing to do with it.

I'll just say this. I'm not a racist. I hate everybody equally.

In fact, I can only think of one instance in my tough life, there in the harsh realities of Sixties East Pittsburgh, where anything remotely racist occurred. It ended with me getting my ass kicked…naturally.

I was walking in the woods with a buddy of mine. We were going down into this ravine, just dicking around, you know. There was this big yellow jacket flying all around me. The thing was trying to tag me, so I started running.

Someone had tossed a mattress and box spring out there, and, while trying like hell to get away from that bee, I fell on the old boxspring. My legs were scraped up really bad, as were my knees, hands, and the whole deal. PLUS, the damned yellow jacket stung me right in the corner of the eye.

So, we were taking my bleeding and puffy ass home, and this one kid named Artie Moses, I remember him clearly, started making fun of me.

That just flat pissed me off. I probably called him a nigger, or told him to fuck off, or something. It's hard to remember. Well, Artie came over and promptly finished what the bee and the mattress had started. He "old school projects" beat my ass.

So, I got my butt kicked by a mattress, and my face stung by a bee. Then Artie Moses, who lived two blocks down, took care of business. God bless the fucker, right?

Karen Lozenski. Kindergarten. She was one of the neighborhood girls, as I recall. She was that curious kind of cute that makes pre-pubescent boys go, "Hey, what's that about?” As curiosity would have it, she thought I was "a curious thing", too.

The two of us would sneak off to the lumberyard near where we lived. Then, we'd spend the afternoon "exploring each other.” We used to go in there and kiss, take our clothes down, the whole thing.

I look back on that with some moral conflict. Someone just reading those two paragraphs might think, "Dude? What? You were in KINDERGARTEN! What the hell kind of world did you grow up in?” At the time, it was a completely innocent thing. Maybe we had watched a little too much TV, or maybe our older siblings had told us about "that.” I've got no idea where our young minds would have gleaned the idea from. Although, I've always been a horn-dog, my whole life, so maybe that has a little to do with it.

Disturbing? Yes, but still funny. I mean … how? I still can't figure it out. But, it's been that way my whole life.

Karen Lozenski. The woman-child who introduced me to the unmentionable parts of the female world, all at the tender young age of six.

Gotta love forward thinking females.

After Pete and Mum got married, things started to change with him. He was a heavy-handed guy, like a lot of guys at that time, but that wasn't the biggest issue with him. Pete was a nomad. He never seemed comfortable in any one place. Given this base nature of his, we became nomads by association. We were young. We could adapt to it, right? Everyone except Ronnie, that is.

My older brother Ron never got on with Pete. To him, Pete was a gypsy who constantly uprooted the family and bounced us around. In eight years time, we lived in seven different places all over the country. The ground would hardly get warm beneath our feet before Pete had us off on another relocation.

In 1968, Pete moved us to New Jersey. Then, in November of 1971, we were whisked away to Torrance, California when Gino's Hamburgers, who he worked for, transferred him out there. Gino's was a burger place that was supposed to be the next McDonald's. It was owned by a couple of former NFL players. They were expanding the thing all over the country, and offered Pete a position on the other side of the universe, as far as I was concerned.

We stayed almost two months at the Portofino Inn, in Redondo Beach, right on the water before Pete found a house in Torrance. That lasted about 45 minutes, because by 1972, we were back in Jersey. In 1973, it was California again; then to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in late 1973; and finally, we were back in the Torrance area by 1974.

In seven short years, I had lived in eight different places...and it was getting pretty damned annoying.

Due to my lack of any real structured education, because of the constant relocation and moving around, I was always able to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, even from a very young age. We were just always uprooting. Even when I got kicked out of school, they never pushed me or made me go back. That was always very weird to me. Especially now, as a dad, I can look and know I would never allow that of my children.

I guess, for me, things started getting really weird in 1971. I was eleven, and Pete was moving us to California. A whole continent away from home. My whole life was on the east coast. Everything I knew. My memories of my father were there, although the curse of a young mind was taking hold, and his details were fading. Ronnie wasn't coming.

Despite his cruelty and general prickishness, Ronnie was the older brother. There's stability in that for younger siblings. Carol and I unknowingly depended on him.

It didn't matter. I didn't know much about California, except that the hippies loved the place. It was supposed to be this happy Mecca of love and bright colors and experimental drugs. Of course, it wasn't that way at all. Maybe it had been a couple of years earlier, but most of the people there didn't know fuck-all about love and peace. Their whole world was getting dumped on its ass.

The drugs and red wine had worn off and the Woodstock generation had gone their own ways, stopping long enough to cash their reality check.

Pete dropped us down in a world that didn't know itself. The Charles Manson "Trial of the Century" was going on, and Los Angeles wasn't the happy, shiny place that an outgoing eleven year old was hoping for.

Even musically, everything was fucked, and nothing fit. The Beatles had split up the year before, leaving a HUGE, cavernous void. There were some flashes of hope, most of which were going to pay off before long. But in 1971, Aerosmith, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, were just starting. And Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison were dead.

Despite all of this down vibe in LA, I still adapted pretty quickly.

I've always been a self-reliant kid. No one needed to hold my hand and show me the way, because I was going to find it one way or the other. Plus, I've always made fast friends. When you're in your pre-teens, and you're already posting a history of being the perineal new guy in town, these are really great tools to have.

Adapting to LA wasn't hard. At least for me. We spent the first two months living in a hotel. The Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach was right on the water. A great place to just hang out and watch the water slap at the ends of the western world. It made for a mellow transition process for me. East coast steel town steeped in history to west coast Xanadu steeped in self-indulgence.

And, that was that. I had found home.

In short order, I had my first LA drug experience.

When we moved to California, I was twelve years old and I took my first hit of acid. Carol was hanging out with some of her friends, and I was along for fun. There were a few young guys there. I was twelve, so they must have been fifteen or sixteen, which seemed really old. They were a bunch of biker wanna-be's, with the boots and chains, and the teen-angst "I hate my parents" thing going on.

They gave me a hit of Blue Micro-Dot. Acid. Some of you who flew through the Seventies may remember this little joy ride.

We were hanging out at the school. It was New Year's Day, so it was closed, and there wasn't another place we could go where we could drink beer and not get caught. When I took the tab, it hit me like a freight train! I remember being really fucked up and just out of my head.

We lived right across from the Gabel House Bowling Alley on 226th and Hawthorne Blvd., there in Torrance. I remember Carol going, "You can't go home, Bobby. You'll get popped!” So, we went to the bowling alley, instead.

Bad idea. Really bad idea. That place was really freaking me out. It was SO loud and SO chaotic. I just couldn't take it, so I bolted to the house.

When I got home, Carol was sitting at the dining room table with Pete, Mum and Michael, just sitting down to have dinner. The lights above that table were the brightest I think I've ever seen. I wasn't myself. Completely tripped out, and there was no hiding it. Pete made me come over and sit down for dinner.

I started playing in my mashed potatoes. They were moving and swaying. I was hallucinating on my mashed potatoes! I felt like I was eating gobs of … I don't know what … glue, or paint, or something like that. All I know is that it didn't have the texture of anything I'd ever eaten before.

Pete looks at me and goes, "What's wrong with your eyes?” He looks at my Mum, and goes, "Look at his pupils!”