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

parents. But it was a love planted in and fed from a bed of sick soil. If anything could survive and blossom into something beautiful and desirable it would be a miracle.
    That is what I hate so much about the privileged in society. They proudly take for granted what the rest of us have prostituted and sacrificed our souls to discover.

Chapter 2
     
    I T WAS A HARD STEEL CYLINDER , no more than four inches long and half an inch thick. Danny McCrary was holding it pressed vertically between his index finger and thumb. He was pressing so tightly his fingers were turning white. He held it two inches from my face, moving it back and forth, back and forth, and he told me how he had to wear gloves to conceal it in his palm. He said it would keep his knuckles from breaking. He gulped down another of the beers we had stolen from his stepfather’s cache. For him, the steel cylinder served his insecurities. For me, it elevated my definitions of shock and fear to a place well beyond anything I had known or imagined. The physical brutality left me stunned and speechless.
    The fight, which we used to call a rumble, should have lasted only a minute or two, but Danny was lost in a freak ascending reality as he slowly and thoughtfully drove the older boy down through his pride and humiliation. You could see the degradation take root, step-by-step, in the older boy’s eyes. At first he was bemused. Who was this punk, three years younger than himself, who wanted a beating? And then, when his teeth tore through his bottom lip, he began to fight harder. He was angry. Next his eye was cut and blood streamed over his vision. He sensed his situation and fought harder but his remaining flinching eye took on a desperate look. Next, the broken nose, and a half-inch of cartilage shot out to the ground. The older boy still fought, but he was retreating. Danny pressed forward and, with an unstoppable barrage of punches, brought the older boy to his knees. Now, spitting blood and unable to see, the boy managed to cry out, “That’s it. You win.”
    Danny drew him in with one arm and held him closely to his body. The moment took on a bizarre gracefulness as Danny methodically, again and again, began viciously bringing the hidden cylinder down upon the older boy’s head. I couldn’t take my eyesaway. A few minutes later, when there was no movement except for an involuntary shaking, no apology or pleas to end it, and the older boy lay on the ground with several concussions, a broken nose, ruined eye, broken hand, missing teeth, severed lip, and covered in blood and his own urine. Danny said, “Let’s get out of here.” I looked back at the boy, and on his face and through his tear-filled one good eye I could see that Danny had taught him fear.
    I don’t know if it was that moment in which my cowardice chose to adhere to my soul or if it was, instead, those years of growing up in that neighborhood and gradually realizing there was no way out. But somehow it melted into my being and became, without question, a part of me.
    Danny filled an extrinsic vacuum. When he first arrived with his divorced mother, and older brother and sister, it only took him a few months to emasculate the boys in the neighborhood. Since his mother, brother, and sister were never home, he had nothing but idle time. Danny savaged the streets, promoting or badgering his victims into fighting each other to the strict requirements of the mutated gamecock festival that lived in his head. If that failed, he beat them when he could catch them.
    He was polite. I mean, Danny never actually went to anyone’s home and said to the parent or parents, “May I see your son for a minute? I’d like to break some parts of his body.” By the time his mother had found another man, Danny had already established his gang of followers, amongst whom I found myself. We eventually settled in and became single-mindedly bent on increasing our financial and territorial power at the expense of our neighbor’s material and emotional belongings.
    Movies, magazines, billboards, and television showed us what was available to all Americans. In fact, they made you feel un-American if you didn’t possess everything they were selling. Two of the things they were pushing we had arranged to secure in abundance: cigarettes and alcohol. We then turned our attention to bigger ticket items. The gang had already amassed a portfolio of burglary and larceny charges by the time Danny’s new stepfather moved