Vinnie the Metalhead

Before I wrap up I gotta tell you, Vinnie the Metalhead came in last week. He’s a good guy. He’s the guy who likes all your stuff, he’s a little older but doesn’t quite seem it, and he might be pure blue collar, but he’s smart. If you ever came out here, he’s a true fan, he’d be someone to meet. He’d want signed copies, he collects what he likes. I was telling him about some of the Mardi Gras antics of this month and past years, and the crazy stories of Reinhard and like how he put French absinthe with wormwood in the sazerac, and just all kinds of random stories—how I wrote a tiny 350 word piece for Rolling Stone soon after college, something that took five minutes to write, and it paid a month’s rent, so for a few weeks there I thought I had my whole life made—stuff like that, and he’s like, “Dude, you’ve gotta write a book about this stuff!” (He's got a copy of my book, too.) But it wired me up, his enthusiasm: “I mean really dude, you’ve got all these stories, and you knew all these people and you’re all over the place, this stuff is wild, you need to write all this stuff down—man, I tell you, you write this stuff down and I’m sure it’d be a hit!”

Refer a friend

I mean, I’d never have a conversation like that with an academic. But Vinnie, he’s into it. He wants the dirt, he wants the wild ride, he wants to read all the blood you traced out after midnight on paper. He was so convincing he almost got me thinking that it were still possible, that this was still a world for that! But yeah, seriously, the enthusiasm of this guy, and just the way we both talk to each other in stories, and how it’s this down-to-earth true-life stuff, the “reality fiction” I love, and he wants it—makes me want to bang out a big book all night tonight and send it off to the printers next week, and be known as a teller of tales from our age, basically the thing I’ve always wanted to do and stumbled toward.

And there’s big serious truth in this, in that he likes me, he likes your stuff, he’s just a regular guy, blue collar metalhead who definitely didn’t go to college but he loves reading these stories we write—and that’s the kind of person I think we need to wrap into with our stuff. (And, yeah, college graduates too, people like us, let’s not discriminate here. But the point is he’s not some cliquey milquetoast academic looking at degrees and names and connections, or checking your “likes,” but he just legitimately loves these down to earth stories, the real stuff, the stuff we can relate to, our lives.)

Funny thing is, this guy’s got the best stories of all. I want all of them. He’s always got something new that just blows my mind into a splatter of dribbles on the window. Like on Thursday when he came in, he starts telling me how the first four years of his life after high school he made a shit-ton of money, but he was—“How do I say it,” he laughs, shaking his head back, “‘independently employed.’”

Then, a moment later, his greybearded face locked in a deep expression of mulling-it-over, “‘Independent pharmaceuticals.’”

So when he got out of high school he moved from the semi-rural Wellsburg down here to Clifton and was dealing drugs, and made enough to rent a house. “Dude I was only seventeen when I started, I was just a kid! This was 1984, and here I was, the summer just out of school, and I’m living in this house in Clifton, going to every show that came into town. Oh! Those were the days!

“I did that for four years. Those years were a blur”—he laughs—“I mean, we would have parties, and they would be big parties, all through the first floor of the house, all my friends, all these chicks, it was wild—and then the next day I’d wake up, I didn’t even clean, I just stood up and started the next party!”

He laughs again, where his shoulders are shrugging in a quick bob, and his young blue eyes twinkle quick at the thought.

“It was like, the door would ring and people would start coming over to party, and I’m just getting up and going from the last night’s party—so we took everything from the night before and moved it all to one side of the living room, and I’d point at it and tell people, ‘Don’t drink, smoke, or eat anything from that side of the room, that was from yesterday!’”

We laugh—“Dude, those parties were legend! And then there were afterhours parties, you ever hear of those?”

“What, when the bar closes?”

Share

“Yeah, when the bar closes! But these were wild. Dude, they would wait until 2:30 and it was closing time and they’d tell everyone, ‘Ok you’ve gotta go, the bar’s closing, it’s over,’ and they’d walk up and down the bar and get everyone out. But if you were a friend, or you knew someone, they’d sort of motion over to you, you know, and let you stay. I went to these. I had a friend who knew one of the bartenders and we got to stay.”

“Oh, cool!”

He shakes his head with almost a graven face painted on it.

“Dude, no. No, you don't even know. You don’t even know! This was—this was, dude, this was the best and the most intense party that you can imagine.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Really?”

His eyes are bulging now as he nods, his lips are all in a frown—“Oh yeah! They make sure everyone’s gone except the people they want to party with, that they can trust, and then they lock you in”—he makes a quick turning motion with his hand as if he’s tightly locking the dungeon door—“They lock the doors. And what happens next—”

He just laughs, his shoulders bob, he happily laughs—“What happens next is the most wild, crazy party experience I’ve seen in my life!”

He lets out the “life” in a long, tired exhale, and then straightening back up he continues: “I was young then, I didn't have much experience, and that was a real eye opener. I saw things most people never do. What people did, it was an eye opener, I saw shit there that I had never imagined—it was like Caligula!”

“Oh wow!”

“Dude, you don’t even know. The things people did, and seeing it—I went twice, and that changed everything for me. It opened my eyes.”

“Do you think they still do it now?”

“Oh no. Or at least not like that. That was in the ’80s, back then if you’re driving drunk the cops would follow you to make sure you got home safe. It was a different time. And they didn’t have all the cameras and tracking that goes on now. Back then, people could do things together and it wasn’t so tracked. No, those days are gone.”

I feel the pain and pang of nostalgia, in my head is a quick reel of youth, of the days that are gone, offset with now. “Yeah, it’s all totally different now—we certainly do live in dark, unhopeful times.”

He nods knowingly, his lips pursed in a frown. The young blue twinkle, the face, for a second it’s almost like an old Santa carved in an ancient tree. “Tell me about it. Nothing is how it used to be. Nothing. And you can almost tell—it feels like we’re right on the edge of some big, massive shift. Something just massive!”

“Oh yeah,” I answer quickly as he shakes his head in slow waves, “like the Deagel projections.”

He looks right into my eyes. “The what?”

“Deagel! You ever hear of Deagel?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Deagel.com, D-E-A-G-E-L. It’s some weird military intelligence organization, first went public in the post-9/11 Bush years. They publish international military news and reference reports. I don’t know anything about who runs it, I actually don’t really even know the full backstory, but the deal is they’re supposed to be pretty detailed and accurate, and their reports are used by global intelligence agencies and governments.

“So a couple years ago they published their 2025 world population projections for all the countries in the world. Some went up a bit, some went down a bit. But the United States decreased by about 78%—and so did most European nations.”

His lips purse open quietly, his eyebrows raise. “Dude! That’s some scary shit! I’m gonna look it up!”

“Yeah, look into it, lemme know what you find. It’s weird, and here we are past the middle of March, but there’s still quite a bit of year left.”

“Oh yeah there is,” he says, nodding his head hard and slow. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if something huge happens, something world-shaking. Or world-ending!”

“Well things might be ending sooner or later if the prophecy of the popes is correct!”

“The what?”

“The prophecy of the popes! St Malachy, ever hear of it? It’s called ‘The prophecy of the popes.’”

His eyes are intent now, he’s interested. “No, now what’s that?”

“St Malachy was a twelfth century mystic, and he wrote this prophecy that began with the current reigning pope of his time, Pope Celestine II, and going all the way until the end of the world. Each little list is a short Latin phrase that identifies the pope or antipope by a catchphrase.”

He nods knowingly. “Ah, like the quatrains of Nostradamus!”

“Yeah, exactly! But even shorter. Just a short little phrase. Like Leo XIII was ‘light in the sky,’ and as it turns out on his coat of arms there’s a star with a long tail to show how it’s giving off illumination in the sky.”

“Oh, wow”—his face is frozen hard in a look like he’s just been stumped by a rock and a hard place both at once—“This is like out of The Book of Revelation!”

“Exactly, apocalyptic,” I laugh, realizing that we probably sound like Beavis and Butt-Head to anyone listening. “And all the recent papal claimants are there, like John Paul II was ‘of the eclipse of the sun,’ and he was born during an eclipse.”

“Dude, that’s spooky! I’m gonna look that up tonight, too!”

“Well it gets even spookier. We’re possibly up to the edge of the last one, Peter the Roman, who will lead until the point when Rome is destroyed and basically the whole world ends.”

“Oh, I’m gonna look that up! I gotta see that! Deagel, and The Prophecy of the Popes! Oh, I know what I’m doing tonight!”

“Crazy times!”

“Oh, crazy indeed. Dude, I live just two streets over, I can be here in three minutes. If shit hits the fan I’ve got you covered—I’ve got three AK-47s and 65,000 rounds of ammo, the shit hits the fan you call me.”

I laugh telling him that I will.

We always reminisce about stuff, especially the old days and youth, and he tells me these stories are the ones I need to write down. And it was just so exciting really to be talking about writing with this real person, this guy who is not a teacher or professor or anything like that at all, he just loves the entertainment and nostalgia of a good story and of the times we’ve all breathed in. It sort of reminded me very clearly and strongly what this long passion and desire in my life was all about, how the fire felt when I was young, and who I need to be aiming for—and what I need to be typing out and doing right now.

He even told me, he’s like, “Dude, you’re sitting here at a store counter pricing out records. You need to be writing down stories! Do it already!”

Oh gosh, just shoot me already. Or hand me a scotch—and make it a triple.