I had just turned eleven the summer Uncle Billy wrapped his Coupe de Ville around a telephone pole.
He had always been a bit crazy. Mom didn’t like him much. She used words like ‘uncouth’ and ‘primitive’ and ‘childish’ when she spoke of him. Dad liked him OK but then he kinda had to ‘cause Billy was his little brother. There had been seven kids in dad’s family. Dad had been number five. A sister, he never told me her name, had been number six but she had only lived a few hours. Billy had been lucky seven.
At the funeral, held all the way out in Nova Scotia, the men laughed and told Billy stories. The women mostly tsk-tsked and whispered. There was one real pretty lady there. She had a kid with her, a little girl, couldn’t have been much older than six or so. The other women gave the pretty lady a wide berth, but the men buzzed around her as if she was honey. I found out later in life that the little girl belonged to Uncle Billy and the pretty lady had belonged to Billy at one time too. They had both been named Darla.
A day or two, it might have been three, after they planted what was left of Billy in that good old Nova Scotia soil, mom and dad left me in the care of my older sister Wendy for an afternoon. We were staying in a Motel in Truro, just off the highway. There wasn’t much to do in that Motel. I think Wendy and I just sort of walked about for a bit that day. When mom and dad came back, dad was carrying a guitar case. He called Wendy and I over and told us that Uncle Billy had left a ruby ring to Wendy and a Guitar to me. I was thrilled. Mom, not so much. The Cadillac had been left to another uncle, the oldest one, Robert, known as Bobby. Uncle Bobby had no desire to drive all the way to Ontario to claim his prize. The insurance company had declared the De Ville a total wreck, which it was. So, Bobby had signed the ownership over to my dad and asked him to send him the ten dollars the wreckers had offered. Dad agreed.
Once we got back to Ontario dad sent the ten dollars to Uncle Bobby but rather than turn the car over to the wrecking yard, he had the crumpled old girl towed out to our shack on the edge of town. He and the tow truck driver maneuvered the De Ville out behind an old barn and there she sat for years.
As much as that old Cadillac intrigued me it was the guitar that changed my life. Mom was against that old Fender from the git-go. Dad was all for it until I saved enough for an amplifier. I heard them arguing in the kitchen one night. Dad told mom that a guitar might keep me out of trouble. Give me something to do. Well, there are a lot of things a Telecaster can do, but keeping a kid out of trouble isn’t one of them.
Like most kids back in the 60’s I worked. There was fruit to be picked all summer. Leaves to be raked in the fall. Snow to shovel in the winter. If you needed a dollar, it was never hard to find a way to earn one.
Between school and baseball and work it was tough to find time for the guitar, but I did. After maybe six months I realized that I needed a regular old six string acoustic as well. I hitched up to St. Catharines and visited Garden City Pawn. I knew nothing of guitars of course so, being a kid, I bought the one that looked the coolest. I walked out with a Martin, case included, for $27.50. I had hoped to spend less but the Martin, a 1967 Martin D-12-35 it turned out, had a nice finish and the previous owner had put a ‘peace’ sign sticker on the body, just aft and under the bridge. It looked like a hippie guitar.
By the time I had turned 14 I could play a bit. Not very well, but a bit. There was a long-haired boy, Sid, that lived a couple hundred yards east of us. I was in the ninth grade, and I think he might have been in the eleventh at that time. He let me hang out in the garage where he played, and he taught me a few things. Every so often he and couple of other kids, all of them older than me, would get together and play some songs. They called it ‘jamming’. They would drink beer and smoke cigarettes and swear a lot. Wanting to fit in I did the same.
In the early autumn of that year, and don’t ask me why, I was out fooling around near the back of our property and that old Cadillac caught my eye. Under half an inch of dust, the car was a sparkly blue color, what Cadillac had called Peacock Firemist. Whether it was God or fate or just silly teenage curiosity I don’t know, but that day changed my life. The trunk had escaped almost unhurt in the collision. It was a bit tough to open but I did. Inside was a small valise, leather. After sitting in that old Cadillac for so long the leather had dried out. I set that off to the side while I searched the rest of the car. All that was left in the clove compartment was an address book. On the floorboards in the back seat were three empty cans of American beer, Genesee I think, and two empty bottles of bourbon. Wasn’t hard to figure out what killed Uncle Billy.
Later that night, alone in my room, I went through the address book. There were names and numbers for various clubs and roadhouses with stars next to them. There were two numbers for a guy named ‘Artie’ at the beginning, one titled ‘home’ and one titled ‘office’. Must have been his manager. And there were girls. Lots and lots of girls. The girls had stars as well.
I stole some of moms’ skin lotion and worked it into the leather valise and that worked a charm. Once it was clean and had some flex to it, I opened it up and ruffled through the pages inside. It was sheet music but not the kind of musical notation I was comfortable with. I set that aside to show Sid. The only other thing in the valise was a bottle of white pills. I’d read enough Kerouac to know what they were. I stashed those in my sock drawer.
Sid told me that what I had found was something called ‘fake sheets’, a type of music that just shows the pickers what chord to move to. He said any picker with talent, a ‘pro’ picker, could use them to play along to anything. One night, while Sid and I and his mates were just jamming away pretending to be rock stars he pulled out Uncle Billy’s ‘fake sheets’.
We were blown away. It was all Rockabilly stuff. There was Gone, Gone, Gone, the old Carl Perkins number. There was Race with the Devil, Woo Hoo, Cruisin’, All Shook Up, Flip, Flop Mama, Bird Dog and more. Many more. That night we played our hearts out and laughed our asses off. Turns out Uncle Billy was a hillbilly. A rock and roll hillbilly.
We put those old Fake Sheets away but every couple day’s we’d pull ‘em back out. It took us a few weeks, but it eventually hit us like a sledge; we were rockabilly addicts. After a few beers one night we got to thinking. If you have ever been a teenager, you know that too much thinking, especially drinkin’ thinkin’, can lead to a mess of trouble. And trouble was what we found. With Sid as frontman and a kid named Paul on bass and a kid named Wilber ‘Stones’ White on the drum kit we had us a band. Sid and I shared rhythm and lead. A few beers later we had a name. We became Rockin’ Johnny and the Nuclear Meltdown.
We played our first gig, for ten dollars, at a birthday party. As we got better so did the jobs. Within a year we were earning a few hundred a night and we were playing in bars and roadhouses and school dances all over Southern Ontario and Western New York. By the time I turned 17 I was, I thought, a rock and roll legend. To the distress of mom and the disgust of dad I kicked school life to the curb. I didn’t have time to learn about science and geography. I was too busy learning about crooked agents, flat tires, dirty motels, the day after the night before and jealous husbands. And I also learned why Uncle Billy had kept a bottle of Whites in his car.
The thrill of life on the road to stardom lasted a few years. Stones left to go to plumber’s school. Paul knocked up a girl from Albany New York and traded in his bass and amp for a Green Card. We hired and fired three piano players. We bought a big cube van we had no chance of making the payments on, painted the sides with our logo (a Telecaster with a mushroom cloud shooting off the neck) and then, with the bank hot on our trail, had to burn it for the insurance money.
The end came one night, late, in London Ontario. After our seconds set Sid and I sat at the bar and tossed back a few beverages to wind down. While we were doing that some jerk-off stole my Tele and Sid’s Les Paul. We called the cops. They showed up, gave us attitude, didn’t care about our guitars and then the pricks busted me for an ounce of shitty weed.
That was it. No more Nuclear Meltdown. I cut my hair for court and, while it was short, got myself a new gig machining camshafts for small block Chevy’s at the GM plant in St. Catharines. Nothing sadder than saying goodbye to rock and roll. But I did.
Sid wandered from band to band. In the late 70’s he found a spot in a Punk getup called Poison Ivy or some such shit, changed his name to Johnny Hemlock, and did the safety-pin-in-the-nose thing for a spell. I think that might have been when the Heroin found him. I’m not sure. By the middle of the eighties, he’d traded the safety pins and dog collar in for a big head of somebody else’s hair and a spot playing second lead in an almost heavy metal band called Satan’s Widow. That lasted until maybe 1987. I lost track of Sid after that. A few years later his mom called and told me where the funeral was gonna be. Poor bastard had choked on his own puke after downing a bottle of Jack and a pleasure pack of valium. No one found his body until two days later. The smell had alarmed the Korean cook that toiled away frying up stray cats under Sid’s shitty flat.
That funeral brought back memories good and bad and too foggy to tell. I did miss the proximity to stardom. But if stardom had found me how long would I have lasted? As long as Sid?
Pure shit luck, or fate, or God, or whatever you want to pray to, brought me to London Ontario for a little league ball tournament in August of 1992. The girl I was shacked up with at the time had a kid, not a bad ball player either, that had made some sort of All-Star team. He was maybe twelve? In between games, just to get away from the screaming parents, I tooled down to the center of town. I was poking around the east end, minding my own, checking out the windows and the girls in short skirts. There was a pawn shop. I walked ten feet by before it hit me. An old Telecaster, Blond like mine, white pick guard like mine, hung from a rack in the window. It could have been any Tele. Blonde was not a rare color. But there was spot, a dent, just below where the strap button fits on the ass, the lower hip, and I knew where that dent had come from. I went inside. Informed the skinny meth-head behind the counter that he had a stolen Telecaster and that it might be in his best interest to call the cops. If he didn’t, I said I would. The meth-head did make a call, but it was to his boss. His boss told him to kick me out. Rather than get involved in a pointless donnybrook with a speed freak, a donnybrook that would have pissed my girlfriend off to no end, I walked away, found a telephone booth, dug out a quarter (inflation) and dialed 9-1-1. The nice lady on the other end of the line quickly turned into a not-so-nice lady when I informed her that my emergency involved a thirty-five-year-old stolen guitar. One quarter down, two to go. I dialed the police number I discovered in what was left of the ragged phone book. No answer. Closed for Saturday.
God, still being on my side, then produced a police car easing down the street. My attempt to flag the car down failed. I sprinted after the car and the policeman. That sprint last one quarter of a block. Bent over, heaving for air and certain I was dead, I spotted the cruiser turn back. The policeman, a policewoman it turned out, listened sympathetically and then said, sadly, “Not much I can do. There’s no way to prove that guitar is the one that got stolen from you fifteen years ago. I’d love to bust those guys. They’re crooks. But I just can’t.”
“I can prove it’s my guitar,” said I.
“How?”
I described the dent. That did not impress. “You can’t prove you didn’t just see the dent and then pretend it’s your dent.”
“I know the serial number.”
“Serial number? Guitars have serial numbers?”
“Fenders do. Old Fenders. And my Telecaster is a Fender. A real honest to God made in the USA Fender.”
The lady policeman tore a strip off the meth-head. He buckled. My Telecaster was taken in for evidence. Four months later, in December, I had to drive up to London and testify. The meth-head got a suspended sentence, his boss got 90 days and a fine and I got back my Fender. Merry Christmas.
Unlike most pickers I had never named any of my guitars but after that miraculous once-in-a-blue-moon recovery I named the Tele ‘Uncle Billy’. It only took a couple months before I could play again. My girlfriend kicked me out, said I was a bad influence on her kid. Maybe I was. Uncle Billy and I moved to a townhouse with cheap rent and two divorced dads for room mates.
No idea why, but again maybe fate, maybe God, maybe just misaligned stars, paid me a visit. Bored one day I pulled out Billy’s old address book and started calling his ex-girlfriends. Most of the numbers no longer belonged to cute girls who liked to sleep with pickers. I chatted with a couple that did answer. Most of them sounded old and defeated. I guess a youth filled with late nights and anonymous sex with drunken rockabilly semi-stars hadn’t panned out all that well for the ladies. There was one lady, Dawn, that was thrilled to hear from me. She still lived in Kingston Ontario and had not moved since 1965 which, it turned out, was the last year she had seen Billy. That had been the year before he wrapped his Coupe de Ville around that stupid telephone pole. She told me that she was the mother of a girl, named Stephanie, and that the girl was the fruit of Uncle Billy’s loins. I was gobsmacked. Then she hit me in the balls with more news; Stephanie had a little boy, and she had named the little fella William, after his granddad.
Two weeks later, this would have been the spring of ’93, I drove my rusty old GMC pick-em-up down the 401 to K-Town where I met with Dawn. She had to be in her mid to late forties but didn’t look a day over thirty. Nice lady. She lived in a neat little bungalow with a dog and two cats. No, she said, she had never married. Being a nurse and a mom had taken enough time out of her days. We had a pleasant chat and an hour later Stephanie and her husband, a Jamaican dude named Winston, showed up with Little Billy. Litle Billy was a milk chocolate color with a fuzzy head of hair, big fat dimples and a smile designed to kill the ladies. I didn’t ask but I figured he was maybe four at the time. Most of that day was spent listening to stories about Uncle Billy. Yes, he had been quite the rogue.
That summer the cancer finally caught up to mom and she died one night. Dad was left alone at the farm, so I moved back in. One evening we got to talkin’ and drinkin’ and drinkin’ and talkin’. One of us, I blame dad, came up with the idea of fixing up that old Coupe de Ville. And that is what we did. It took two years, a new frame, a rebuild on the big Caddy V8, new upholstery, a couple grand in body work, new Michelins all around and a few hundred hours of sweat and busted knuckles but she was done. That was the most time I had ever spent with dad. I got to hear some of his war stories from WW II and Korea. A couple times he started to cry remembering his mates that never came home. I had never felt so close to Dad as I did while we worked on Uncle Billy’s old Cadillac.
On the May long weekend, Victoria Day, 1997, a little less than thirty years after Uncle Billy had met the telephone pole, Dawn and Stepahanie and Winston and Little Billy came down for a visit. We had stayed in touch. We were a long-distance family. Close enough to visit and far enough to not get in each others hair.
After a dinner of grilled steak and potato salad and strawberries and beer I pulled out the old Martin. Winston could pick a bit on his Yamaha and Stephanie sang like an angel. Little Billy had a beginner style small kids’ guitar, I think hey call them ‘junior’ guitars, and he could strum OK. I taught Winston some rockabilly riffs and he taught me some Ska. It was maybe ten o’clock when dad disappeared for a few minutes. I could hear the de Ville start but she ran quiet like a Cadillac should and when he came up from the old barn in that car, arm out the window, grinnin’ like a well-fed Buddha, the surprise hit Dawn like a bolt of Mississippi lightening. She could not believe her eyes. She later told me that the front seat of that old de Ville was where Stephanie had been conceived. I never had the heart to tell her that the mice had eaten that old seat and the one she was rubbin’ her hand on was a recycled clone. No sense stealing a memory that don’t cost a penny.
Dad signed the ownership over to Winston and Stephanie on the condition that the car would be handed down to Little Billy when he was old enough to take care of it. As much as I hate to admit it, I teared up a bit. I had no idea what Uncle Billy would have thought about the scene, but I hoped he noticed, and I hoped he was smiling. Uncle Billy’d had one hell of a smile.
Well, I’m an old man now. Dad passed and then Dawn followed. Winston and Stephanie broke up and he moved to British Columbia. Little Billy isn’t very little anymore. He’s married and has two kids of his own, which makes those kids the great grandchildren of Uncle Billy I suppose. Once a year Little Billy loads his mom and his two girls and his pretty wife into that old Cadillac de Ville and comes back to the farm to visit with me. I pull out the Martin and Billy pulls out his dad’s old Yamaha and Stephanie still sings like an angel. The kids get bored, but they put up with us.
The Telecaster, good old Uncle Billy, stays inside. He lives in an airtight case that hangs on the wall opposite the fireplace. Best view in the house.