dee dee

"We had all these other songs with 'I Don't Wanna' - 'I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You,' 'I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement.' The only other positive song we had was 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue'..."

--The Ramones


Last Monday was September 18th. Unbeknownst to me, it was the late Dee Dee Ramone's birthday.

As I sat at home, recuperating from an all-night coke bender that left me too tired to go to work and too sniffly to put anything else up my nose, I became possessed by the spirit of Dee Dee Ramone.

I've always dug The Ramones, because it was hearing them that caused me to realize that I didn't have to wait until I was a masterful musician before I started my own group; I could just do it NOW, while I was young and willing, and I never stopped.

But I never considered Dee Dee to be anything but the bass player of The Ramones.

Then I read Legs McNeil's history of punk music, Please Kill Me. Dee Dee was quoted liberally in it, and he was the real thing: A junkie-poet-musician-painter who grew up in Germany and came to Forest Hills, Queens with his family and fell in with a bunch of delinquent no-future-having outcasts; he turned tricks in Manhattan and scored smack and sniffed glue and got into fights with his harpy of a girlfriend; and through it all, everyone seemed to love Dee Dee because he was so sincere, so honest...

And now, I love Dee Dee.

The voices of other dead rock stars and celebrities were echoing in my head, telling me to not stop with just one day off work, to go whole hog and quit the job altogether and spend all of my money on coke and sit in my apartment and let my hair grow and stop shaving and stop going out and stop doing anything creative because all I needed was a line up my nose and nothing else...

Instead, I got up and called The Snake, a buddy from the Holly Golightly days. He's been helping me promote the animation I've been working on for two years by trying to get it featured on the hit TV show he is working on currently. He told me to come by and he'd call in a drive-on set pass for me.

I rolled up in the rusty Sentra, my nose bloodied and coagulating. I parked in front of the In-N-Out mobile restaurant, whose address (according to the print on the side of the truck) is situated somewhere in Baldwin Park, on "Hamburger Lane"-- no doubt the nearest cross street being Milkshake Drive.

At one point, I went to the souvenir store and bought two DVDs: Richard Pryor Live In Concert and End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones. Dee Dee's ghost was whispering something into my ear.

The message: "1-2-3-4!"

To make a long blog entry short, I ended up on the set of the TV show, talking with the stars and describing the contents of my store bag. It turned out that a girl I knew from way back was working as a guest star on the show, and in between takes I walked up to her and asked her if she remembered me. She did. Before long, I was being talked to by the stars of the show, and because I'm not a star-struck numb-nut bastard I held my own and paid my respects at the same time.

It was a great moment. I think it helped me somehow, just being who I am, not trying, not caring. I should've been at work, I should've been sober, I should've been giving a fuck.

I didn't.

After The Snake and I retired to a bar for a quick drink and a chat, I dropped him off at his place near the River Bottom in Burbank. Then I listened to The Ramones' second album on the way home.

I kept playing "Commando", a Dee Dee composition, if I'm not mistaken. It's a song about a commando flying back and forth between Vietnam and Germany, recruiting soldiers to fight off the Communist threat.

The music is propulsive, as most early Ramones tunes are wont to be. I drove through red lights, cut off slow cars, ratcheted up my speed to beyond the legal limit (the speedometer in my car is busted, so I have no idea how fast I was going) and plowed through surly traffic doldrums like a hot bullet through gelatin.

I got home and watched the Ramones DVD, and the transformation was complete: for all intents and purposes, I am Dee Dee Ramone now.

I just don't care anymore. You only have one life to live, you know.

Check out this link to Dee Dee's artwork before you go.