Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

molestation, prostitution and a sense of well being that any sane person would find disgusting and repugnant. And we rarely saw the police because they were rarely called. It was all part of the game. It was as if a cheap, deranged circus had come to town on a death march to the sea of chaos, stopping only long enough to be certain the population would be forever ruined.
    I emerged from that experience with a few of those characteristic patches embroidered into my life-worn quilt. The only thing in my favor was the fact that my parents still held onto a feel for the difference between right and wrong, even if it was driven by fear. In addition, I was the kind of child who carried an appetite for variety andended up befriending some of the more anchored children in the neighborhood. So, I moved back and forth between good and evil the way a chameleon experiences changes in its surroundings.

     
    Nina and Mitch as young children in Detroit
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    In the light of day I took on the responsibility of a paper route, but at night could be talked into attending a session of sexual intercourse between a brother and sister. I was a Cub Scout, yet found myself watching one of my compatriots talk one very poor and needy five-year-old boy into performing oral sex for a nickel and then beat him because he was choking. I attended gang-bang sessions at the house of a dirt poor, eighteen-year-old mother who had no money to clothe her five young children. But, I could never summon up the courage to vilify my acceptance of those situations. I simply didn’t know there was another world to which I could escape, and I accepted my condition and poverty the way a beaten dog comes to rely on the violent abuse of its master as the hand that feeds it.
    There was an instance where, at the age of eight, my teenaged baby-sitter performed oral sex on me. I liked it. She wasn’t merely performing a sex act with her cool wet lips, her warm moist mouth and her tender caring hands; she was touching me and making me feel loved. There is one additional coloring that need be mentioned, and that was when I was made the prey of a soft-spoken and gentle homosexual who didn’t know what any gay organization in America will readily tell you, that gay men never act on a desire for young boys.
    What all this meant was that I would spend a lifetime trying to deal with a sexual dysfunction that would collapse and destroy any hope for a healthy sexual or otherwise safe relationship with another human being. The urge and need to repeatedly experience the instant gratification and inexpensive thrill of a sexual orgasm would blindly decide my priority, in even the most essential list of needs.
    The poverty took its toll in many other ways, too. I wasn’t able to judge the value of money. When presented with opportunity I almost always came down to a selfish determination that had nothing to do with the security and responsibility for others who might be dependent on me for protection or survival.
    And love? Love being the most necessary and selfless gift we can give to another that we care deeply about? The same love that can banish our fears and heal our hurt, suffered at the hands of a world that would destroy us? Does it really exist?
    I know my parents were in love. Not the kind of selfless love that comes from deep caring, but the love that poor folk, in the absence of all other considerations, use out of fear to hold on to each other to keep from drowning in a sea of desperation and loneliness.
    That is my recollection of my childhood. It is not unique. There were other children like me in that neighborhood and there are millions more like us. Fearful cowardsprone to abuse, and if we haven’t got the guts to give it to someone else we turn upon ourselves. Those of us still alive, who are hopeful of change, wait trembling and shaking in the shadows praying to God for the courage to honorably face that one final defining moment, which will mercifully kill us or finally set us free.
    As negative as that appears, it could easily be changed by a few clever strokes of my pen. My life, after all, was not completely horrible. Any person’s story can be altered by the inclusion of warm memories, those flash points of hope and errant love that permeate an otherwise doomed existence. That’s how it is with the poor, clinging to images so radically different from the norm that they grow out of proportion to reality.
    I loved my brothers and sisters. I loved my