Shut Up and Give Me the Mic (19 page)

Upon my return, Jay Jay informed me that the band had decided to hire bodyguards. “You can’t be doing security for us.”

Ya think?

13

D
uring the spring of 1978 I made my move. I asked seventeen-year-old Suzette to marry me.

I was tired of being at clubs and introducing the girl of my dreams, the girl I intended to spend the rest of my life with, as “my girlfriend.” Every guy in every band introduces every girl he’s been with—for even five minutes in a bathroom stall—as his “girlfriend.” Complete with quotation marks. It pissed me off that there was no distinction between Suzette and some groupie.

I plotted to pop the question for some time. Jay Jay’s dad, Lou, was a jewelry salesman and his girlfriend, Josephine, worked in Manhattan’s Diamond District on Forty-Seventh Street. She hooked me up with a good deal on an engagement ring. I put it on layaway and paid the ring off over the next several weeks. When I picked up the ring, I just couldn’t wait. The minute I got back to the apartment, I asked Suzette to be my wife. She cried (I think with joy) and said yes. We both knew that we weren’t ready to set a date or anything and wouldn’t be for some time. Our engagement represented to the world our commitment to each other and our intentions to be together forever.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Suzette’s dad, Vinny, had discovered that Suzette was not living at the dorms. Suzette’s a-hole roommate was more than happy to share this information when he called looking for Suzette.
Bitch.
(“Suzette’s not here. She’s been living
with her boyfriend.”) Her dad was livid (understandably). Not only was his seventeen-year-old daughter living with a now twenty-three-year-old musician, but Vinny was paying for a dorm room that wasn’t being used. They’re not cheap.

It should be noted that Suzette’s dad had once been a working musician himself. The leader and drummer of the Vinny Garron Orchestra in his youth, my wife’s dad tore it up. He gave up his ambitions when he got married and “had to do the right thing,” which is a big deal in the Italian-American community. Besides “knowing” what musicians were like, I can’t help but think that there was a certain amount of jealousy. I was pursuing my dream and he had given his up.

Vinny Garron also hated rock ’n’ roll because it “killed the business,” and rockers weren’t real musicians “because they can’t sight-read music.” Even worse . . . I was a “singah”! I couldn’t have been lower on his right-guy-for-my-daughter totem pole. Suzette’s dad told her he was sending her to Paris to finish school so he could get her away from me. When I asked Suzette to marry me, she says she said yes to kill her dad’s plan and be able to finish school in New York. Suzette claims at that time she had no intention of marrying me. Isn’t that just like a teenage girl?

While Suzette and my growing love may seem romantic, it wasn’t an easy relationship. She was a strong-willed young woman, and I was becoming a more arrogant asshole with each passing day. The more popular my band became, and the more acknowledgment I got for my talents, the more self-centered and self-absorbed I was. And I was just getting warmed up. This was 1978. I didn’t hit my stride until 1985! Can you imagine? I can see now that it was only my relationship with Suzette and her seemingly irrational tantrums that kept me grounded in any way. I was heading down a dark path and it was getting darker fast.

EACH YEAR THE BAND
took a week or two of vacation after Labor Day weekend, the big finish to a long summer of rock. The riotous closing of Hammerheads happened in August, taking the violent intensity
of Twisted Sister shows to a whole new level. The band was ready for a break, and I needed a vacation. Our first in 1977 was relaxing, healing, and good for the soul. The one in 1978, not so much.

ON SEPTEMBER 12, SUZETTE
and I were in my car, driving out to Long Island from the city for a dentist appointment in the late afternoon. As I got off the Clearview Expressway and onto the Grand Central Parkway eastbound, some maniac in a pickup truck cut in front of me and slammed on his brakes! I slammed on mine, screeching to a halt and narrowly missing the back of his vehicle. With that, the asshole took off.
Oh, no, you don’t!

Furious, I stomped on the gas and took off after the piece of shit. Swerving in and out of the building rush-hour traffic (with Suzette admonishing me the whole time), I caught up to the dick and pulled alongside. I gave him the middle finger and the nastiest “Fuck you, asshole!” I could muster. Satisfied, I took off . . . only to have this bastard pursue me!

When he pulled alongside me, he didn’t curse or give me the finger back . . . he tried to run me off the road! I swerved away, narrowly avoiding being hit and/or hitting another car on the road. It didn’t end there. In and out of heavy traffic, he came after me, trying to ram into my vehicle. Traffic on the parkway stopped as this road-rage insanity unfolded.

Finally, the pickup truck sped ahead of me and turned sharply sideways in front of my car, nearly running me off an overpass. When my car came to a stop, this madman (remember: there’s always someone tougher than you are) jumped out of his truck and charged my vehicle. Before I could even get out of the car, he blocks my car door (good move, by the way), reaches in through my partially open window, and starts to yank me through the four-inch opening by my hair.

Now I don’t want to imply that I was brave or badass in any way. I was scared shitless. This is a cautionary tale I’m telling here. The person who was brave was my five-foot-three-inch, 110-pound fiancée. She leapt from of the passenger side of the car, ran around
the back of the vehicle, and jumped on the guy’s back! With one arm wrapped around his neck choking him, she started pounding away at his head with her other hand.

What a woman!

At this point the lunatic let go of my hair with one of his hands and started trying to hit Suzette. Seeing she was in danger, I reached under my car seat and pulled out a tire iron I kept there for protection. Reaching through the window opening with my right hand (I was still being yanked out the small opening), I started swinging the tire iron at the guy the best I could. The whole scene was out of control!

Finally, some people got out of their cars and came over to break it up. Probably because it was the only way they were ever going to get home. They managed to pull my attacker off me, but he broke free. He charged the car, blood dripping down his face, and wiped a big smear of blood across my windshield.

When the police arrived, we were both arrested. As we sat there, waiting to be taken in, I asked him why he came after me in the first place. He replied, “You cut me off.”
Cut him off?
I didn’t even know I cut him off! Then he added, “You’re lucky I didn’t get one of my guns.” The dude had a full gun rack in his pickup.

Our vehicles were impounded, we were taken in and booked. Him for harassment—a misdemeanor—and me for assault with a deadly weapon! The scumbag had tried to kill me and Suzette with his truck, and because I had defended myself and caused him minor bodily harm, I was charged with a felony! To make matters worse, he was released on his own recognizance, and because it was too late in the day for me to be arraigned, I had to spend the night in jail. You know, it’s bad enough when your actions bring you down and cause you pain and suffering, but when they hurt innocent people, especially people you care about, it’s just fucked-up. My stupidity, my road rage, had endangered the girl I loved, and now she was on her own, dealing with the consequences of my actions.

Its being a typical late-summer day, we left the apartment without jackets. While we were at the police station, a cold front came in and it started raining. Wearing only a bloodstained white T-shirt (which became transparent when it got wet), seventeen-year-old Suzette was let out of the police station, into the cold, in a bad part
of the city. She didn’t have a clue where she was in relation to our apartment and had to find her way home with only a couple of dollars in her pocket to get her there. This was the seventies; there were no cell phones or ATM cards. To this day I feel like a complete piece of shit for endangering her and putting her through that. I’m so sorry, Suzette.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN JAIL
, by the time I was moved from the station holding tank to the jail for the night, I had missed the evening meal. Since I couldn’t be arraigned until the next day, they didn’t even bother to give me my phone call. Besides Suzette, nobody knew where I was, and she even didn’t know they had moved me.

They hold you in group cells filled with all kinds of criminals. There’s no separation by the severity of your crime of arrest. Luckily my “felony assault” trumped the hands a lot of my other cellmates were holding and sounded more badass than it actually was, so no one messed with me.

The jail cells were anything but luxurious. They had a common toilet in the middle of the room, and metal “benches” with no bedding of any kind to sit or lie on. I was cold, hungry, scared, and confused.
How did I wind up here?
I had let my anger get the best of me, got carried away with road rage, and met my match. Now I was up on felony charges, punishable by years in jail! Trust me, no matter how you convince yourself that you’ve got no criminal past (except for some arrests for driving with a suspended license) and there’s no way they would
ever
actually imprison you, your mind still messes with you. As you sit in your cell through the night, waiting to face the judge, you are shitting in your pants. I wondered how the hell I had got to this point, examining my whole existence.

In the middle of the night, the jail guards came and took us out of our cell, legs chained us together, and loaded us into a paddy wagon with no windows. I had no idea where they were taking me. How would Suzette or anybody else know where I was? The reality of how, if the authorities want to “misplace” you, they can do it that easily set in, and it was terrifying.

As morning finally came, we were moved for a fourth time and
brought for arraignment. My cellmates and I hadn’t been offered so much as a drink of water the entire night. When I got before the judge, my attacker was there as well (bet he had a nice night’s sleep at his house). I heard the court lawyers saying something about my having no priors, and since prosecution was unlikely, my attacker agreed to drop charges against me if I would drop the charges against him.
What?
Even though I was completely justified in what I had done to him, and that piece of shit started the whole damn thing, I jumped at the chance to get the hell out of there and get my life back. Hallelujah!

When I was released and finally found out where the hell I was, I got to a pay phone and called Eddie Ojeda, who lived the closest. When he arrived, Eddie told me I had the unique look people who had just been in jail have. Ignoring that Eddie had picked up enough people from jail that he would know that we share “a look,” I asked him what the look was.

“A mix of shock, disbelief, and humiliation,” Eddie replied.

That about covered it.

Over the years, I always remember that night as a turning point for me. I came face-to-face with the terrifying path my life was heading down. I even wrote a song, “Burn in Hell,” years later that related my experience of self-discovery.

You can’t believe all the things I’ve done wrong in my life.

Without even trying I’ve lived on the edge of a knife.