CITIZEN RUANE, FULL TEXT Options

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CITIZEN RUANE


A MEMOIR IN THE FORM OF A MEDITATION

TO THE READER
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
--Robert Frost

“No wonder [the French] think we’re all crazy, We are crazy to them. We’re just a pack of children. Senile idiots. What we call life is a five-and-ten-cent store romance. That enthusiasm underneath – what is it? That cheap optimism which turns the stomach of any ordinary European? It’s illusion. No, illusion’s too good a word for it. Illusion means something. No, it’s not that – it’s delusion.”—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

"The world is my country, and to do good my religion."--Thomas Paine

Billy Ruane. Born November 10, 1957, died October 26, 2010.

10-5-89 notebook. Excerpt from a fiction written 6-14-1990:
I remember Billy best from when in years past I would hop on back of his orange scooter and go with him to bare lofts in factory districts hard by half-razed tenements to see punk bands so raw and loud no regular club in town would have them. At one such show, Billy, mouth flecked with beer foam and calamari, wild-eyed and whiskey-faced, leapt in front of the band as out groaned harsh, flat discords. I stand by in wonder as he throws off his filthy tweed jacket and rolls on the floor, howling as if in pain, which I only now suspect might have been less theatrical than real.

After college we both remained in Cambridge as carpetbaggers, malingering in the margins of the workforce. I took a variety of phone survey jobs to pay the rent on my slum flat and he lived in an apartment subsidized by his father. He worked desultorily but was mostly idle by day and spent his evenings searching for the mostly bizarre and now forgotten punk ensembles in now-long-defunct venues where now the stage stands bare and mute. Billy, hyper, unable to stand still or on two feet for very long, because he was well known to that underground scene, was eventually able to parlay the connections made over the years in dripping-damp basements and filthy fifty-floor loft spaces into a booking business.

I don’t know what his father thought about all this. I remember him as a beefy but enigmatic businessman with a bulbous port-wine nose, steel-gray hair, and a hearty but somewhat sarcastic spirit of camaraderie. I knew him when, and that is how I came to work with him at the Middle East, which attracted students and music fans but where also every eccentric and shiftless vagabond from years past, and a few more he met along the way, congregated every week.
Nita Sembrowich: Billy’s mental illness, for want of a better term, made him seem slightly inhuman, even supernatural. Billy the person suffered within and was consumed by his own persona and mystique, which fascinated the rest of us, as did his outrageous antics. It was easy to see him as a fire-spirit, an ‘elemental’… Peter Pan or Ziggy Stardust. Possessed by a divine or demonic energy, he became Dionysus, or a minor avatar of Shiva, dancing death, chaos, destruction, and creation. Now, looking back, I also think of him as a sort of Mad Maestro orchestrating the scenes of my youth. Because he tended to evoke these undying archetypes, Billy’s death seems particularly poignant and shocking. The masks he borrowed are ripped away. He was mortal after all.
“He was mortal after all.” So. Why should the ostensible story of Billy Ruane, a small-time nightclub impresario, interest us at all? Well, if that’s the way you feel, I don’t mind, to quote the American philosopher Todd Rundgren.

But small-time nightclub impresario is not the sum of Billy’s accomplishments. You should know that. But maybe you don’t. In my opinion, the full story has yet to be told. Billy Ruane: Local character, busy bee, wild shaman, mad actor, or something less (or more)? Read on. I’ll leave it for you to decide.

We often remember Billy in his role as conduit, catalyst, fixer, broker. King of the Bohemians. Patron of the arts, and eccentric dispenser (and sometimes defaulter) of all the money that goes along with such patronage. And also as a heedless, headlong, almost inadvertent manipulator of the politics that goes along with the local arts scene.

Billy’s notoriety, already considerable by the late 1980s, grew out of his 1988 association with the Middle East and the Sater Brothers, Joseph and Nabil, and their extended family; refugees from war-torn Beirut, and devotees of the artsy Hamra neighborhood. Many today who claim to have known Billy probably knew him best from his role in fomenting that whole Middle East Café scene.

Those who knew him, and many who didn’t, talk of Billy as being eccentric, the proverbial loose cannon, Captain Id, a wild man. We tell each other that Billy was one of those people who were always “on.” (Not so.) There are no lack of stories about “Wild Bill.” (I myself have more than a few.)

Some might have seen Billy as cartoon character. Or as a literary archetype: The Monkey King: Or as a living embodiment not of string theory but of The Yo Yo theory. As a walking, bleating demonstration of Blake’s dictum: “Energy is eternal delight.”

Chris Rich: “Billy was enthusiasm and saw getting carried away as an important job.”

I myself have tried, many times, to see him whole. Now that he is gone, I feel that one of the central tragedies of Billy’s life was that he was known of by nearly all, loved by many, but he gave the impression of being a lonely soul who didn’t really feel very close to anyone; at least, not for very long. Someone as incorrigibly cynical as Nick Eberstadt once observed, back in 1978, that Billy was “the closest thing to a truly good person that I ever met.”

If only there wasn’t that stupid money, that stupid stupid money, I am tempted to say. He might still be with us today. But Billy didn’t really care about money itself, but for its transformative effect. No more than a wizard cares about his book of spells; only for what magic its knowledge and its application can effect.

Out-of-towners, some of them, surely thought he was some sport of humanity, some sort of combination of ardent music fan and local character. (I typed the words music fan local character into Google and Billy’s name was the fourth one that came up.) Or perhaps they saw him as some local exhibitionist such as Pittsburgh’s Anna Buckalew (aka Ringside Rosie), or John 3:16, the “Rainbow Man”. Or even as some viral media phenomenon-slash curmudgeon along the lines of Epic Beard Man or Rufus the Stunt Bum. I don’t mind saying that this whole perception vs. reality thing in regards to Billy Ruane really has me bugged. On the one hand, who cares about the opinions of the ignorant and the uninformed? After all, you know what they say about opinions, don’t you? “Opinions are like hemorrhoids. Every asshole has one.” And yet, in the days following October 26, 2010, it seems that every John, Dick and Harriet weighed in, somewhat too often with some inane platitude or self-serving fable about the wonderfulness of Saint William. It is natural to follow the edict de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est. And I don’t want to come off as some sort of latter-day Holden Caulfield, inveighing against the phonies. But let’s be brutally frank. A great many of these people who now wax poetic on the death of young Mr. Ruane would not have given him the sweat off their ass when he was still alive.

On the other hand, consider all the out-of-towners, the cynics, the skeptics, the nay-sayers—what if they have to say about Billy Ruane is actually the more accurate perception? What if they find baffling and inexplicable this sudden outpouring and affection for a rare but occasionally ominous fellow who was nearly always both generous and hail-fellow-well met, but also vaguely frightening? What if they’re right? Oh, they’re most certainly not right. But what if Billy had not been instrumental, after Sue Miller had tested the waters, in founding the Middle East with Skeggie Kendall and Joe Harvard (and later with Jennifer Cares and Mike Higgins and Eric Doberman nee Motte and Chris Rich and (modesty be damned) myself? Then perhaps his death would be little noted and not long remembered.

With Billy’s death we also tragically lost a great deal of music history and historical knowledge.

Dan Spockster: “…Billy would trace each band's lineup to all of the previous bands the players had been in with a kind of curatorial mania. He was the genealogist of Boston rock. An incredible store of knowledge in that man's head.”

Perhaps one of the reasons so many otherwise stable people liked him, approved of him, even loved him, is because they lived vicariously through him. As H. L. Mencken put it, “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”

Billy was like the recent hobby of yarn bombing. Call it Billy Bombing. He added color to an ugly town. He made a statement virtually every day on earth.

Come as you are. For Billy, it wasn’t an invitation. It was a mantra.

If you wanted to be cynical about it then you could say that in some respects, Billy’s whole adult life was like a stand-up act with no jokes. More specifically, it was a movie about a guy whose whole shtick was this character he played called “Billy Ruane” and this guy, who was always on, soon discovered that he had no real personality outside of his act. Call it “Mr. Wednesday Night,” because Billy Crystal will not play the lead in any Hollywood version, and, no, there was no devoted younger brother who was there to manage his affairs.

Why do I say that Billy’s was a stand-up act? Because I am very much struck by something Gershon Legman once said which seems frighteningly descriptive:

"Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone and against everyone. In the culminating laugh by the listener or observer--whose position is
really that of the victim or butt--the teller of the joke betrays his hidden hostility and signals his victory by being, theoretically at least, the one person present who does not laugh. Compulsive storytellers and joke-tellers express almost openly the hostile components of their need, by forcing their jokes upon frankly unwilling audiences among their friends and loved ones, and upon every new person they meet. Often they proffer this openly as their only social grace. The listener's expected laughter is, therefore, in a most important but unspoken way, a shriving of the teller, a reassurance that he has not been caught, that the listener has partaken with him, willy-nilly, in the hostility or sexuality of the joke, or has even acceded in being its victim or butt....This is particularly clear in the type of rambling or pointless anecdote, nowadays known as the...'shaggy dog' story....in [which] the avowed butt of the joke is simply the person who has been tricked into listening." (RATIONALE, 1st Series, first page.)

There were certain affinities to Billy’s act and that of a stand-up comic reduced to fronting a karaoke night at the local Chinese Buffet, where he gets every now and then to sing snatches of Sinatra in between requests for Piano Man, Achy Breaky Heart and She Bangs.

In October of 2010 I had just finished reading Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Would that it covered more than simply United States foreign policy, for if it were, in fact, an encyclopedic work, then Billy would certainly merit an entry. He was something out of a figure in mythology. Boston’s Icarus: he flew too close to the sun and ultimately, he scorched his wings. Icarus is the figure to cite if you choose to be cheerful about what happened to him. But for a man of saturnine thoughts and face and dark, watchful eyes, a disappointed romantic turned cynic, the operative myth might well be Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and as punishment was chained to a rock to have his liver picked at by vultures for an eternity.

Was he really a multi-faceted personality, as some people would insist? Billy himself maintained that without alcohol and caffeine he was “a rather dull fellow”. He said this in an article published in the Noise #100, in 1991. (The saying is also attributed to David Letterman: “If it weren't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever.”) But I think he was being too modest, in that infuriating fashion inculcated into all aristocrats practically from birth. (To quote George H.W. Bush, "Ask others about me. I'm not good at talking about myself. That is part of my make up. Some people see it as 'false' modesty. But my mother taught me not to brag and she is still watching me.")

I want this to be a memoir. So I am going to rely mostly (though not exclusively) on my own impressions and speak for the most part only about what I remember and have personally witnessed, though in some cases I will also report the memories of people known to me. And use these to fill in occasional gaps and lapses in my own memory and knowledge.

And yet at the same time, this is going to be something more than a memoir. It will also be a series of anecdotes and meditations on the nature of Billy Ruane, a person who was my friend. Because I cannot bring myself to look fully into the black hole of his constant loneliness and occasional despair, I will be merely circling around the subject; it is for the reader to decide whether in so doing I have done him any justice at all.

So, ultimately, I want this piece to be a memoir in the form of a meditation. It will focus less on a stark chronology of his life and be more, I hope, of an explanation as to why. Why was Billy the way he was? What was it about Cambridge that nurtured his best qualities and encouraged some of his worst ones? And, the hardest question of all to answer, and one I have not yet fully grappled with, what meaning did his life have?

There will, of course, be stories about Billy as I have observed him. They will not all be complimentary. But I don't want to write a hatchet job. Billy was neither all saint nor mostly devil. He was driven by internal forces which he could not completely control,
howsoever dazzling his intellect and howsoever sharply defined his own sense of self seemed at most times to be.

I mean to make some sort of lasting statement about Billy's life, but I do not wish to write something that is dull. That is going to be my second most difficult task: to make something interesting to read out of a life which was in turns, spectacular, tragic, and extraordinary, without in any way trivializing the person whose memory I am trying to honor: both by speaking only the truth (admittedly, as I see it), and by trying to explain who he was, and what his role was within his milieu, which he both shaped and was shaped by. Interesting, I hope, even for those who barely knew him, or who didn’t know him at all.

Again: this is a memoir but also a meditation.

Billy didn’t need to have a novel based on him. Billy didn’t need to write a novel. Billy’s life was his novel. He needed someone close to him to write it all down. All of it. But who could stand to be with him all the time?

I know I should try to keep my distance but I am no clinician. I think I can understand some of the impulses that drove Billy to behave the way he did, for in some degree, I share them. These are:

Impulsivity: Blurting out the first thing that comes to mind, regardless if the social context. Impatience with the slowness of other people’s thought; talking over them, talking at them, interrupting them, verbally bulldozing through them on occasion.

Didacticism: I myself have been accused of this, frequently. An urge to teach, instruct, guide, lead; be the alpha dog in every intellectual (and ever strictly non-intellectual) interaction, regardless of (and often even in spite of) ones actual qualifications.

Need for attention: This perhaps comes from being made to feel as though one is the smallest and least consequential person in the room. You’ll show ‘em. Show ‘em you’re actually the biggest person in the room, if not in size than in sheer brainpower. Then they’ll be sorry they treated you this way. (We see this thought process driving the behavior of individuals as disparate as fictional mad scientists and troubled superheroes, computer hackers, televised tycoons, and endless pop stars. See, for instance, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen”.)

A desire, verging upon a need, for perpetual distraction. If you don’t have children (seemingly purpose-made for such people) then you must find the outlet elsewhere. Many people eventually settle down. Maybe even take the opposite tack. Long for a time when every second of the day is not occupied. Though when they finally get their wish, they feel bereft. Look at the sadness of the unemployed and laid-off; of empty-nesters; of newly minted college graduates who have failed to line up a lucrative gig; of retirees. Or of the dead, whose ghosts are said to haunt us because of unfinished business in the previous life.

Impatience with routine drudgery. Sure, I’ll wash the dishes. But first, I’ll let ‘em pile up and make a project of it. Sure, I’ll pay the bills. Write the letters. Read the homework assignment. Write the paper. Deal with the bureaucracy. But I’ll do it tomorrow, next week, someday, never. Right now, I have other fish to fry. All that stuff is OLD and I’ve got a NEW thing here that I’d much rather be doing NOW. Plus, there’s something BIG going on tonight.

This goes hand-in-hand with…an inability to systematize effectively. Do it on the fly, that’s the operative mantra. Planning ahead is for frightened people and chumps. Improvisation is of all acts the most impressive and therefore the most glorious. Bury yourself in trouble, then brilliantly, splendidly dig yourself out. This, I think, is how Billy often ran the Middle East Café during its heyday.

These are, in case you haven’t guessed it, all traits associated with creative people who have been diagnosed with ADD, aka ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

“Today most clinical professionals -physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and others- believe that ADHD consists of three primary problems in a person's ability to control behavior: difficulties in sustained attention, impulse control and inhibition, and excessive activity. Other professionals (myself included) recognize that those with ADHD have two additional problems: difficulty following rules and instructions and excessive variability in their responses to situations --particularly doing work”. –Russell Barkley
http://www.ukessays.com/essays/health/adhd.php

Billy himself thought his problem (insofar as it was a problem; insofar as he conceived of it as a problem) was ADD. Boston-area impresario Mickey Bliss once told me, in 1992, that “just about everyone under forty has ADD.” There is a germ of great truth in this offhand observation. I’m not blaming television, though it does play a role. I’m not pointing to the ever-growing-more-frenetic pace of modern life; I’ll leave theories like that to Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, who has explicated this historical phenomenon far better than I ever could.

But there was something going on with people born in the late 1950s that made its people passive rather than active observers.

And then there was also another factor: IMPATIENCE.

In Billy’s case, his impatience with things as they were drove people nuts. On the other hand, his impatience translated itself into innovation. Arguably, Billy was the motive force behind at least two still-potent cultural memes: The Invention of slam dancing. (I have long maintained it started with him). And the whole “unplugged” phenomenon. (He was doing promoting shows with that concept back in January 1988. Whereas, “In 1989, MTV began to premiere music-based specials such as MTV Unplugged, an acoustic performance show, which has featured dozens of acts as its guests and has remained active in numerous iterations on various platforms for over 20 years.”)

If you were at or near Billy’s level, you could interact with him, and he with you. But you had to accept the interaction on his terms. (I think that to an extent, his money and his reputation gave him a greater ability to set such parameters.) If you would not, or could not do that—because you were much smarter than he was (not likely, within his preferred milieu), or because you were somewhat saner than him (very likely, within his preferred milieu), then you were simply left with ENDURING him. Or leaving the room.

Billy was definitely a decided influence on me. He was the most colorful character I’ve ever met, and I’ve met more than my share. Catnip for any writer in or out of his right mind. But slippery as hell.

He had his moods. Moods in which he felt humiliated. Sometimes even devastated. Hey, I understood. I have felt pretty devastated and humiliated too. Frequently. Fortunately for my ongoing sanity, I know that these black dogs only last for two or three days. Then I find some shiny bauble to occupy my monkey mind. I imagine that Billy managed to keep himself busy and that was a form of compensation he took from a world that seems cold on its surface, but which can actually surprise us from time to time with its beauty and senseless grace.

Maybe that’s why so many people found him remarkable. And some found him unbearable. He was resilience in motion.

Sandra Monticello Neades: “I once saw him rocket straight up out of his seat when The Tijuana Brass came on the Green Street Grill jukebox. It was marvelous.”

What is it about music that stirs the soul and makes us want to jump and shout? Is it merely a form of mathematical alchemy that short-circuits our logical synapses and sends them into epically balletic contortions? Billy seemed nearly always to be brilliantly corybantic, but it was
also nearly always in the context of music of some sort.

He was also extremely intelligent. Scarily so. I was once told by Professor Gary Thurston that anybody whose IQ is 25 points higher than virtually anybody else around them is considered scarily off the scale. And even in the Boston and Cambridge area, one with no shortage of extremely smart (and extremely stupid) people, Billy could more than hold his own (or not).

It is not true that all bipolar people are geniuses, nor is it true that all geniuses are bipolar. Correlation is not causation. But there is a trend.

I have heard from many sources that Billy was a child prodigy. Capable of speaking to adults on an adult level, while himself only a few years removing from being a toddler. Of course, we all know of the fate of the child prodigy who grew up to become an obsessive loner who for the remainder of his life spends all of his time doing something …utterly inexplicable, like collecting bus transfers. Cambridge was (and probably is still) full of these sorts of people.

But our culture as a whole does not admire or celebrate our generalists and renaissance men. Not unless they invent a bomb or murder a tyrant.

All right, so maybe I’m reaching a bit here. Sounding like a radical stripling in my encroaching senescence. (Did I mention that I am currently the same age that Billy would have been, had he lived to see his 54th birthday?) But look around you. Unless you are so top-out-of-sight extraordinary that you are celebrated for that trait alone—like being an exceptionally tall basketball player, say, or a person exceptionally good at striking a ball traveling in speeds of excess of 94 miles per hour with a bat—then you are nothing. True acclaim goes to the people who amuse or astonish us without in any real way threatening either us, or our assumptions. The United States has been like this for quite some time. And curmudgeons have always bewailed this fact. H.L. Mencken admitted to a sneaking sympathy for Rudolf Valentino, but abhorred his rapacious fans. It is a fine paradox that in a democracy, those who rise to the top are those who please the greatest numbers of people, to spread ambiguous dark surmises among the vulgar, "Spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas," as Vergil put it. Or, to quote Leigh Hunt::

See that the others Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers; Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate, Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate, Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short, Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court.

Elitists with true skills and high qualities are often left in the dust.

This tendency is not unique to democratic republics. One might also say the same thing of other republics and empires, where military and athletic prowess is celebrated and intellectual accomplishments are considered suspect. In the 1950s, Senator Hugh Butler regarded the Secretary of State and sneered, "I look at that fellow. I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes, and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, 'Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years!'" It’s the whole Sparta vs. Athens divide. Cambridge, of course, is firmly on the side of Athens. Boston was once called “The American Athens.”

The cruel joke about America is that many Americans have been brainwashed into believing that they must somehow better themselves in order to advance within society. While, at the same time, the society itself is acting in subtle ways to keep them in their place. We deplore the fact that teenagers do stupid things because of peer pressure. We do not deplore the fact that adults are also constrained to mostly act as other people do.

One might even take Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as an object lesson in precisely how to lose friends and antagonize people. One word: pride.

Billy was not proud. But he had a great deal of pride. Make of that what you will.

Billy without money? What I often, in darker moods, thought of as his “stupid, stupid money”? Unfathomable. Without money, he could never have followed his avocations as seriously, and as strenuously, as he did.

Well, he did work at jobs. I suspect this was for what mobsters, and droll pensioners, like to refer to as “walking around money”. Back in the late 70s and early 80s he worked at a Mexican restaurant in Harvard Square with the singularly imaginative name of “Casa Mexico”. It was famously derided as inauthentic by none other than Hunter S. Thompson. (A writer who, incidentally, Billy admired immoderately.) Maybe it was inauthentic. But it was good enough for drunk and hungry college students. Maybe a cut above merely ordinary. Remember that 30 years ago, Mexican cuisine was by no means as ubiquitous as it is today. Salsa had not yet replaced Ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. There simply weren’t that many Mexican restaurants in the Boston area. Billy’s job was that of a plongeur. Basically, a dishwasher, or other menial restaurant worker, ala George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. (Could you see Billy as a waiter at a swanky brasserie? Starched white shirt and bowtie, regally bearing steaming platters on high? Unlikely. He was too scattered. A top-flight albeit temperamental celebrity chef, barking orders to quavering underlings? That I could see. Maybe, someday. But such was not to be….)

Self-indulgence. We’re all capable of it. Did Billy think of himself as self-indulgent. Never? Seldom? Or maybe all the time. He did seem to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement.

Some people use tranquilizers; some use stimulants. Billy used both in a way that stimulated him while at the same time calming him. I know about the seductiveness of speed and alcohol. I have been drunk while on speed exactly once that I remember. It was in 1981, but I recall the sensation vividly. It gives one a marvelous lack of inhibition while at the same time one’s mind is seemingly undulled. But the consequences—the subsequent let-down—is brutal. Once was certainly enough for me. Once, a philosopher; twice, a pervert, as Voltaire so wisely opined.

I do not think that Billy regarded consequences. He bulldozed his way through life. He had no use for marijuana or other, less benign stupefacients and hallucinogenic palliatives. Some find the altered state imbued by these drugs to be enormously seductive. I believe that to be Billy was to already live in an altered state—colors were brighter, music more profound, three conversations could be followed and even directed all at once. Pain? What is pain? Who cares? Pain is in the past, or awaits the future. This is now, so live it fully.

Picture a continuum of people, eminent to infamous, consisting of:
Mahatma Gandhi
Albert Schweitzer
Mother Teresa
Abraham Lincoln
Martin Luther King
Bobby Kennedy
J. Edgar Hoover
General Curtis LeMay
Adolf Hitler
Joe Stalin

I guess I’d put Billy somewhere between King and Kennedy, but with the caveat that he could range all the way from Gandhi to Stalin. It was the variability of his strenuous life, I think, which held the key to his character, if such a key can ever be found.

What really strikes me is that the story of Billy is, in its way, a story about America. The Great Gatsby, if Gatsby had been born rich to begin with. And had had a father who loved him and wanted him to be happy.

We hear so many stories about people whose fathers were strictly by the book. We do not often hear about what, exactly, it was that wrote that book.

I suspect that it was World War Two.

That is why so many of the fathers of Baby Boomers were hardasses. Tough as nails. The kind of fellows who in their formative years responded half in their sleep to commands like shoulder arms and dress right dress and move it on out. How could they help but to look at their sons—no matter how tenderly they regarded them--and not fear that they might be soft and in need of some rigor—some meticulous toughening up? And that is why the sons of so many of these fathers were so often fucked up. Skeptical of authority and determined at every corner to outrun or defy it.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the cohort born in 1957 was anomalous; a lost generation. The last of the old boomers were born in 1956; the first of the new cohort, known as young boomers, were born in 1957. 4.2 million of them. More than any year before. A record that would stand for 51 years. But the 1957 crew were also born on a major cusp. Neither wholly of the old nor of the new. Barely old enough to be aware of and terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis. But just old enough. Barely old enough to understand and be traumatized by the Kennedy assassination. But just old enough. (Imagine how your child might feel if told the world might be destroyed in flames, or that Superman, or Santa Claus, had been gunned down in the public square.) Too young to be hippies and a hair too old to be convincing punks, the 1957 cohort often found itself uneasily suspended between two camps. Perhaps that is why so few of these people born in 1957 have accomplished great things. Let’s see:

Scott Adams
Osama bin Laden
Berkeley Breathed
Steve Buscemi
Nick Cave
Andrew Dice Clay
Katie Couric
Fran Drescher
Bill Engvall
Gloria Estefan
Falco
Nick Hornby
Marlon Jackson
Hamid Karzai
Matt Lauer
Denis Leary
Spike Lee
Dolph Lundgren
Jon Lovitz
Bernie Mac
Donny Osmond
Susan Powter
Judge Reinhold
Ray Romano
Shannon Tweed
Vanna White

I rest my case. (OK—I stacked the deck. We also had Frank Miller, Sid Vicious and Mira Nair. Still….)

The 1957 cohort was young enough to have escaped the Vietnam War, but old enough, in 1969, to be aware that being drafted to serve in it was a distinct possibility. I suppose every cohort considers itself special, but the 1957 cohort truly is.

What was really wrong with Billy? I can’t say. But during the Middle East years, in a letter to Bettina Miller, dated 9-22-88:, I wrote: “I have the impression that some ostensibly insane people are just faking it and using their irrationality to build a wall which protects them from unwanted contacts—until, quite naturally, the wall becomes an intrinsic part of their mental architecture.”

Billy was allegedly bipolar. I’m not a Doctor, and I’m not going to try to second guess this diagnosis. But Bipolar is a diagnosis, not a template. I think there was something more to who Billy was than a handy file number taken from the DSM-IV.

Bipolar. What do these labels really mean? According to NIMH, “26.4%--about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. The condition known as Bipolar disorder “affects …about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year.” That means that it is likely that a minimum of about 2,600 living in Cambridge have the disorder. Or, looked at another way, out of every 25 people you know, one of them is bipolar.

Before the abolition of rent control in December 1994, the percentage was probably much higher. Afterwards, the increased rents very likely drove some of the mentally disturbed to seek cheaper neighborhoods.

This might seem glib, but to me, Billy was a lot like a bipolar St. Nick: Dr. Santa and Mr. Claus.

Billy would have been great as one of those legendary colorful Southern senators like Lyndon Johnson and his many predecessors—think Foghorn Leghorn, based on the fictional character Senator Claghorn. In late pictures of him, Billy looks the part. Silver mane, unfashionably long. Pot belly. But still self-possessed, with that indomitable ATTITUDE of his.

I don’t really understand bipolar illness. Perhaps future psychiatrists will dismiss the condition as a quaint catch-all, a relic, much as they regard terms such as “neurasthenia” or “fugue state” or “phrenology”. Point being that psychiatrists are by no means immune to the cultural imperatives of their day. If the society perceives a need for a diagnosis such as “hysteria” (or “bipolar,”) then the diagnosis will be duly arrived at, and a set of symptoms will be checked off from a swelling list.

Don’t get me wrong—I have studied motivational psychology under David McClelland
and developmental psychology under Dante Cicchetti, and group psychology under students of Robert Bales. So I am no agnostic when it comes to the very real phenomenon of mental illness. I do believe that at least certain psychiatrists can ably minister to people who are in emotional distress. But thanks to—call them what they are—medical drug cartels—psychopharmacology has erected an edifice of supposed magic bullets for all manners of so-called ailments such as “social anxiety disorder”. I strongly suspect that many of these drugs are still blunt instruments—hammers in search on an elusive nail, when it is scalpels that are called for. Twenty years down the road, things may change even more than they have in the past twenty years. But that change will come too late for some.

The trouble with the drugs used to treat mental illness is that sometimes the people with depression or anxiety or unspecified borderline ailments prefer being the way they are, even if their lives are in utter perpetual turmoil due to their inability to fit in. In time, they cultivate that turmoil and even deceive themselves into thinking that they cannot fully live without it.

This point of view is anathema to people who consider themselves normal. After all, aren’t we schooled, practically from the age of five or earlier, that the highest good consists of a reputation for being one who “plays well with others”? Aren’t we taught these lessons from K through 12? Those brigands who cultivate their inner madmen are frightening, even repulsive.

But then there are always those pariahs who simply will not, can not, so not fit in.
I am reminded of the lament of the beat writer Gregory Corso, in his poem “Marriage”: “How to be other than what I am?” And of the words of the 19th century poet John Clare:

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live - like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

Think also of Melville’s Billy Budd. Or of his Bartleby the Scrivener, whose constant refrain was “I should prefer not to.”

Billy was very much a figure out of Melville.

“... for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is Jove appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory—the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity.”—Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne, 1851

A figure out of Russian Literature, too:
“Have you ever noticed what makes Russian literary heroes different from the heroes of western novels? The heroes of Western Literature are after careers, money, fame. The Russians can get along without food or drink—it’s justice and good that they’re after. –Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

Or think of Salinger’s doomed prodigies, beginning with Holden Caulfield. Or of the young, “frail, but charismatic” (and ultimately doomed) Jordan Legier, in James Kirkwood’s second novel, Good Times/Bad Times.

Finally, think of Edward Dorn’s poem Gunslinger. The title character says, to the character Kool Everything,

Hang light, Kool
The earth moves beneath your feet
Like a ball bearing

Billy was like that ball nearing. Or like some celestial body whose gravitational force altered the orbit of anything he drew near to. Or maybe you could think of Billy as reincarnation of Prince Myishkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Or, in his lowest moments, as Prince Hamlet:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.-- Hamlet I,ii

People have spoken about Billy's generosity to bands and to friends and to people off the street, and it was all true. I have personally witnessed it countless times. It seemed motivated by some archaic sense of noblesse oblige, a salutary notion that nowadays we do not expect to see among people with money. He did not give things away simply to impress and become well known to people whose opinions didn’t matter to him; people who might otherwise have despised him. In many cases I have heard of, he gave to the needy. To people who needed a hand up. It was Carl Sandberg (him, with his crusty Americana) who expressed this impulse best:

Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem everybody liked to have this Jesus around because he never made any fake passes and everything he said went and he helped the sick and gave the people hope….I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

Billy seemed to live his life by Lincoln’s credo: “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

Ultimately, I do not think Billy thought there was anything wrong with who he was and the way he was.

Billy had a weak stomach. A decided disadvantage for someone who was so very fond of alcohol. Not to mention caffeine. Sometime in the early 1980s Billy had to go to Mass General Hospital to be treated for a serious stomach operation. A doctor told him that if he took caffeine in any form ever again he would be dead in a couple of years. Doctors are apparently given to saying such things to scare their patients into adopting healthy habits. Dave McMahon, Greg Devore and Georgio Della Terza apparently visited Billy while he was there. They were smoking and drinking and, according to Dave, “it was a real Marx Brothers scene” because the nurses kept telling the visitors that smoking and drinking were not permitted and that visiting hours were over and that, anyway, the patient was permitted to have no visitors. Meanwhile, Greg kept offering various substances to Billy. Alcohol. Xanax. Vivarin. Billy kept declining: “No, no, I can’t do that, no no, I’m not supposed to have that.” All the same, a few days after leaving the hospital, Billy was apparently back to his old tricks.

About the way that Billy dressed: I don’t believe it was anything as simple as his being a holy fool making some sort of anti-fashion statement. Billy wanted to please his father and conform to his demands but not at the expense of his own integrity. So in time he wore the suit for which he had been fitted, but he allowed it to turn into a raggedy-assed remnant. It’s almost like he was reenacting a Potemkin replica of his father’s notion of proper dress; a mocking, scarecrow simulacrum; something, perhaps, out of Hawthorne’s Feathertop..

Billy also had a darker side that only a few of his intimates were aware of, but you may not hear much about it from other sources in the weeks and years to come because, again, as the saying goes: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But I’m not those other guys. Billy could sometimes be of “opprobrious demeanor and condescending attitude.” Rarely. But the potential was always there.

The goal of relaxation must surely have been part of whatever search Billy was engaged in. Because it seemed as though he simply could not simply relax.

”[How do I remember him?] Jumping up and down and screaming with a beer in his hand.”—Tom Hutcheson.

There are certain biographical facts which should be mentioned and perhaps looked into to better present a somewhat more well-rounded portrait of Citizen Ruane. Billy attended the Cambridge School in the 70s. he lived in North Cambridge for a couple of years in the mid-70s. He moved into a Harvard Square apartment over the Grolier Bookstore circa 1976. In mid 1982 he moved to an apartment across the river in Boston, then, in the late 1980s, he finally moved to an apartment in Central Square, over Keezer’s Used Clothing (irony, there), where he stayed until the year of his death.

How Billy got evicted from the Grolier apartments is indicative. He brought itinerant street musician Mr. Butch home there one day. Mr. Butch, and some ex-con pals he met, presumably in stir, practically took up residence in his apartment. Eventually, Billy was evicted from the Grolier when, late one evening, these folks got drunk and frisky and threw a fire extinguisher down an airshaft, with predictable results.

While at the Grolier, Billy hung around with and was well-known to Harvard undergrads, which is how I first met him and got to know him. He appeared in a play I adapted, a dramatic version of Gunslinger, put on at the Loeb Experimental Theatre in the Spring of 1978. (He was quite a good actor.) I would characterize Gunslinger as an adaptation, but even that is stretching it. It wouldn’t be fair to say I wrote it. The first two acts were almost word for word from the Edward Dorn’s cryptic and brilliant epic poem. Andy Borowitz played the lead. We had disagreements. For starters, Borowitz wanted to interpolate Bee Gees’ theme from "Stayin' Alive" into an ostensible Western. I felt then, and still feel, that in drama, these pandering strategies and cute stunts are never a good idea. They cheapen the work, and the insult the intelligent members of the audience. So I opposed the move. Strenuously. But the Director overruled me. I had no choice, I felt, but to allow it. I had had only one very negligible stage credit to my name at that point. A funny scene from a comedy sketch review titled “Do It Yourself”, which, unfortunately, was never produced because the review never got off the ground. Possibly because I had decamped to Rochester New York for spring break. (Where I paid a dollar to take a sledgehammer to a car. The rest of my stay there is rather woozily recollected, if at all.) I did recycle the scene for a play called “The Pleasure Bar,” also never produced.

In Gunslinger, Billy portrayed a character called Kool Everything. He was brilliant. (Check out Dorn’s Gunslinger to get an idea of the character and the role Billy had to play.)

The play was, itself, hardly a rousing success. It was a cryptic poem and I was so in awe of Edward Dorn, with whom I had discussed the adaptation, that I did hardly anything to change his poem in order to make his work even slightly more stage-worthy.

Except for one innovation. Act III was recast as an 8 page comic book that playgoers were to read in lieu opf an intermission. Unfortunately, I had no money to reprint dozens of copies so I had to edit the work down to two pages, rendering it basically incomprehensible. The artist, Billy’s friend and former Exeter classmate Gus Murphy Moynihan, who also designed the absolutely brilliant poster and fabricated out of felt cloth and wire the horse’s head for another character, Claude Levi-Strauss, was not at all pleased.

There is one thing I remember about the play, other than Billy’s own stellar performance and my own drunken antics at the after-party, where I ill-advisedly drank my first and last boilermaker and tried to climb a rope suspended over the stage from the ceiling (and failed, drunkenly, ignominiously). I also recall that, following the second act, I was told that a patron ran out of the theatre screaming, “The author is trying to fuck with my head!”

The play was not reviewed in any of the local or even any of the school newspapers. Richard Smoley, Billy’s friend (likely the man who introduced me to him) had been called in as a consultant to the production. He said to me, “It was a good typing job.” John Batki, the creative writing teacher who knew Dorn and had introduced me to him, said, ruefully, “Well, at least you tried.”

Billy was enrolled for many years in the Harvard extension school. One time, I recall, he was assigned a 20 page paper on Emerson. He wrote 200 pages, with no end in sight, and if he handed it in at all, it was months late.

I was at a party given by his father for his 21st birthday, in a high-end Chinese Restaurant on Mass Avenue. Presumably the date was on or around November 10, 1978. Billy was relatively restrained; his friends all got exceedingly, hilariously drunk. Billy's father came up from New York City to preside over the gathering and towards the end he read a poem--a bit of doggerel in which he pointed out how much his son loved to collect records and do all the other Billy Ruane sort of stuff that his father apparently found incomprehensible. I would characterize his attitude toward Billy as ruefully baffled exasperated pride. I do not believe at that time that Billy had been diagnosed as bipolar. The 70s were, after all, a crazy time, and Cambridge was full of eccentric characters.

The father remarried, and I hear that the new wife did not care for Billy at all and--this is rumor--saw to it that Billy stayed in Cambridge rather than move to New York.

I spent time in NYC in the summer of 1978—this was not the place for Billy.

Sometimes a person is difficult to understand unless seem in the context of his milieu…in fact, to a certain extent, a person is his milieu.

Some friends of mine—Gus Murphy Moynihan and Nick Eberstadt in particular--said Billy changed after his mother committed suicide; at least one person I spoke to, Dave McMahon, said that, actually, in his opinion, although his mother’s death clearly scarred him, Billy didn't change all that much; he said that even in 10th grade Billy was always interested in esoteric jazz; always compulsively taking Vivarin; always talking a mile a minute.

From his beloved Emerson: “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you have gained, you lose something else.”

And from Milan Kundera: “Right in the middle of Prague, Wenceslaus Square, there’s this guy throwing up. And this other guy comes along, takes a look at him, shakes his head, and says, ‘I know just what you mean.’”

And from Hermann Hesse: "I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely the artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil."

Joe Harvard, Skeggie Kendall and Billy worked together at the Middle East practically from the start, which was 26 January 1988. Then came Jennifer Cares. I started working there in earnest sometime in June or July of 1988. At first, at office work; eventually, working the door along with Jennifer Cares and others. I saw Jennifer Cares nearly kill him on at least one occasion. As an employer, Billy could be quite exasperating. As a club promoter, his behavior could be inexplicable. For instance, On Easter Sunday in 1989 Billy got up on the stage of the Middle East Up and gave a brief (and presumably intoxicated) talk to the small crowd, culminating in his saying, "Fuck you all very much".

We flatter ourselves that we are somehow very different from the animals whose antics we observe with mingled amusement and scorn. That we are somehow profound. But we operate under many of the same cruel imperatives and instincts. Only we assign them names. Names which justify them. Names like “rationalization” and “common sense” and “logic”.

Animals are superior to us in at least one respect: they do not deliberately mutilate and confuse themselves. Unless they are imprisoned.

Many people are imprisoned by the mores of society. Billy was no different from most of us; only he loudly rattled his tin cup against the side of the cage and shouted Yadda Yadda at the warden.

There is always a price to be paid later for such behavior.

Billy was not a sly evader of society’s strictures. He was a bulldozer. I have always observed this tendency of his with mingled awe, amazement and envy.

There are, of course, many ways to bulldoze. Look at these, from Robert Greene and Joost Elffers’ book The 48 Laws of Power (a big favorite, incidentally, with prisoners, who, I have been told, steal it from prison libraries more than any other book):

Court Attention at all Cost
Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
Re-Create Yourself
Create a Cult-like Following
Be Royal in your Own Fashion
Create Compelling Spectacles
Assume Formlessness

(Nowadays, one can also be a cyber-celebrity, though that is like being the most famous criminal in the Phantom Zone.)

Americans have a penchant for putting celebrity nonentities on a pedestal and ignoring the people with actual talents. And Americans love their temperamental celebrities. They are the national Id writ large and they perform in a spotlighted stage. They are our kooky relatives in a nationwide kabuki farce. However, displays of temperament from people who are deemed unworthy of our own devotion or attention are summed up thus: “He’s an asshole”…”She’s a bitch….”

Billy willfully transformed himself into a local celebrity. It was a long slog. The details are vague. I would say it took him about thirteen years. Cold, imperious Boston was an unlikely launching platform in many ways. But tolerant, eccentric, and brilliant Cambridge was another matter. There, you could become a local “character” in a matter of months. Ask Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Brother Blue, or any of a number of other celebrated people. But one’s staying power was another matter. According to my friend, and Billy’s, John Price Carey, Cambridge, in the early to mid-1980s, was Babytown, I found this an intriguing notion and we set composing a list of its attributes.

Crammed croissants, pocket bread sandwiches, ice cream stores, flyer distributors and canvassers. Woody Allen film festivals and non-stop Australian sensitivity and French tu jour amour cinema. We Love Russia agitprop, dogs with bandanas, and crazy wheat-pasted posters which make no sense. Self-adulatory folk singers and white boy blues musicians. Cyclists with white plastic helmets and tiny mirrors bowling up the street the wrong way and knocking over pedestrians and old ladies, and Pedestrians walking into the middle of the street. Humid muggy weather with the aroma of rancid catfish, roaches, and overpriced vile little markets with fly-ridden produce that smell like 1963. Bums who collect bottles and street singers and assorted panhandlers. And a shrewd, ungrammatical Mayor, given to making pronouncements which occasionally sounded crazed.

Also, Nita Sembrowich has reminded me, “Cookies as big as your head"... ice cream shops on every corner... adults and children alike sucking on nippled bottles... pizza and hamburgers for every meal….”

It was in this milieu Billy thrived. At his best he was a very sweet person but he also had a mischievous streak. Billy the Patron Saint of Boston Bands he may have been, but he also was a Saint with an edge. And the more well-known he became, the more this edge manifested itself.

And then, of course, there was the booze. It’s a social lubricant, they say. Maybe because it brings everybody up—or-down—to a certain level. IT CHANGES THE RULES. Billy was, for a time, quite conversant and very good at manipulating the rules of Boozeworld. (Not so much in later life, when he visibly overindulged in an unpleasant way and was barred from the very premises he had boozed himself up to storm and conquer.) The rules:

Say what you think. It won’t be held against you. You’re lit. And who’s going to remember anyway? And even if they do, so what? That’s the past.

Be affectionate. Inappropriately so. Ditto.

Most of all, BE YOURSELF. That was Billy’s inner guiding light. No wonder he drank! Booze is a license to swill.

The 1957 cohort had an ambivalent attitude towards booze. Our older brothers, the hippies, preached that the sauce was fare for the so-called greatest generation; a death-trip for lifers. Dope was where it’s at. Our younger brothers, the punks, said dope was for fossils and zombie slugs. Booze was good. Speed was better. Why not both?

But I suspect that Billy was addicted to his manic state most of all.

Billy’s two great romantic attachments—that I was aware of—are living people who I am unwilling to discuss except in the most general terms. He had one long-time 80s girlfriend. I will call her the Dark lady. She lived on Mission Hill. She was dark in appearance but fair in her demeanor. Circumspect. Perhaps a bit of a homebody. And most of all, kind and patient. I may be entirely wrong, but these are the impressions she left me with on the few occasions I saw her. I am told that Billy found with her some degree of domestic bliss and contentment. She was lovable. This is a woman with whom he could have settled down. Or so I am trying to convince myself. Wishful thinking?

There was another woman. I will call her the Fair lady. Fair in her outer appearance but a bit wild, a bit mystical. She lived in Cambridge. For a brief time she lived in my apartment. She was up for excitement. But she had morality. She didn’t do bad things because doing bad things made her feel bad. I do not know if Billy could have ultimately found contentment with her. Although at the time he was excessively smitten with her. I know this because I have a written record of all the phone messages he left for her.

She loved music. But was that enough? Could anybody, man or women, compete with, challenge and stimulate Billy, on that playing field? Pat McGrath is a musician who runs a record store. He is about as knowledgeable as any person I’ve ever met. And even he has stated that he could not outdo Billy in that field. I believe him, implicitly. I’m no slouch in that field myself. I studied ethnomusicology in college.

But Billy could have taught ethnomusicology. Only he didn’t really play music. (Drums, I’ve heard. That’s rhythm. There’s more to music than rhythm. Don’t get me wrong—drummers are musicians. There are never enough good ones. Over 25 years of reviewing music locally has convinced me of that much. ) Billy could have taught music appreciation, only what college would have hired him? He didn’t have the academic credentials. (Colleges tend to be fussy about that.)

If he weren’t otherwise so scattershot, such a loose cannon, he might have been a genius DJ. Not some bored college intern or some grinning on-air automaton, either, but a legendary, taste making DJ whose acumen could have enriched thousands more. Billy was such a person, but he didn’t have a platform. (So was the late John Peel, and he did--but that was the UK.)

Trouble was, his taste wasn’t what businessmen (or anybody else) would regard as commercial. In fact, his taste seemed deliberately, resolutely, anti-commercial.

Let me explain. I have already discussed, and given examples of, Billy’s mind-numbing eclecticism. But what I didn’t mention was that once you’ve tapped into Billy’s world-view, you were no longer satisfied with “garden-variety Alabama country fare”—to quote Van Dyke Parks. It was akin to having tasted the forbidden fruit. I am overstating my case, perhaps, but not by much. Billy was always three moves ahead of everybody else on the great chessboard of musical taste. His opinions may not always have been, but always seemed, unerringly right. If not in this world, then in some other, better one. He was a visionary in that respect. He saw potential in bands whose members might not have even been aware themselves that any potential existed.

So—Billy would be a good A&R man, right? Well, maybe in that mythical other, better world. But as I have mentioned, his taste and temperament were resolutely anti-commercial. One example (of many): late in 1989, Billy booked a Boston band called Gingerbutkis at the Middle East. Critic Chris Rich thought they were brilliant; soundman Eric Doberman praised them to the skies; I myself did everything I could to champion them. A bunch of townies and civilians, somehow attuned to the buzz, showed up to see what it was all about. They hated them. It was a Captain Beefheart-Pere Ubu level of incomprehension: What IS this shit? But Gingerbutkis gave a superb performance. One of the 20 or so best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen thousands. It’s just that they were over the heads of that particular crowd. They played quirky jazz rhythms. Their melodies erupted in abrupt spasms. They had an over-the-top dynamism that could give epileptic fits to a yellow dog. If you were educated in the School of Billy, all this was like sweet sweet balm. If not? Then if probably sounded like dogshit. If you don’t believe me, try to hunt down their track titled “Pan-Blackened Anger” (aka "Men With Tools in Hand"). You’ll immediately see what I mean.

I’m a music critic, among other things. I use words on a page to express my enthusiasm for what I like. Billy was a music promoter. And something more. A music evangelist. An impresario who brought to public light the music he was convinced that as many people as possible simply had to hear. What motivates this impulse? I never knew Billy’s thoughts on this, but my own might be similar enough.

Let’s face facts: Theodore Sturgeon was an optimist. In 1958 the science fiction writer famously stated that “90 per cent of everything is crud.” Life is short. Why waste your time with shit? OK, so music appreciation at its best involves trying new things. But a deadened musical palate means you’ll only favor paintings rendered from a limited primary color palette. (Mixed metaphors; I know.)

Many people use music as a soundtrack to their lives. Like Koala Bears who insist on a diet of Eucalyptus leaves only, they either can’t or won’t appreciate any sounds that they didn’t grow up with. That’s why you see so many sad old duffers crying into their beer with Sinatra on the juke. Never mind that the man was a snarling mad dog at worst and a thug at best. Man. Can that guy sing.

Don’t get me started on Pierre Bourdieu, who said (more or less) what you like is determined by your social status, and vice versa. It explains a lot. It even explains Billy. Eclecticism was his vice. Generalism was his drug. Glorious and wretched excess was his delivery system.

Cambridge, of course, is full of proselytizers. In our time, Billy was the one who rose t

This post has been edited by dimenno: Oct 28 2011, 08:23 PM

[dimenno]

A MEDITATION

“You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, ‘Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.’
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”
Thus I became a madman.
And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”—Kahlil Gibran, “The Madman”

“He was a man of great complexity, of reckless, even dangerous extremes. His was a life touched by early tragedy, a setback which…led him…into other worlds with which he was unable to deal….”—Alexander Theroux, The Enigma of Al Capp

Some etymology: Roane/Ruane: Scots/Irish: “Red Seal”. More specifically: Another surname derived from “rua” meaning red. Originated in East County Galway. Galway East is characterized by rich farming plains. In parts of County Mayo the name has evolved into Ryan.

While what I am writing is basically a memoir, it is also shaping up to be a type of meditation on the meaning of Billy's life and on the meaning of lives in general. Billy was born the same year I was, and our mutual friend Nita Sembrowich has suggested that much of our cohort's sadness at his having so suddenly died may have something to do with the perception that it is our own youth passing away along with him. A seemingly banal perception, perhaps, when looked at dispassionately; but a profound one as well, if one is directly affected by it.
Fifty-two is a good age to clean up your act. Medical science concurs. By about your fiftieth year, your sleep patterns change and your metabolism slows. Losing weight become more difficult. Cellular deterioration becomes progressively less reversible. You memory and strength begin to noticeably fade.

But judging from the pictures I’ve seen, and from the stories I’ve been hearing, Billy didn’t slow down at all.

I have written or tried to write about Billy before and have mostly failed. Perhaps while I lived I was lacking that sliver of ice in my heart that would have enabled me to regard him with dispassion. Unfortunately, tragically, he is not alive, and that sliver is ice is forming and it is growing. Growing, but is by no means fully grown.

In 1982 I wrote a play between Gunslinger, in 1978, and PRNDL, in 1988. It was called “The Pleasure Bar” but it might as well have been called “Waiting For Billy”. In it, a group of characters in a mill town huddle during a blizzard on an icy winter evening in a bar so named. One of the characters tells stories of this “legendary” figure that is expected to arrive at any minute. Various stories are told of his myriad exploits. The “legend” in question never does arrive. Is he dead? AWOL? This is never revealed. The play was never produced.

Billy was never truly appreciated in his lifetime. In former times, Boston used to burn its witches. Nowadays it just ignores them. In former times, Boston was a citadel of American culture. Nowadays, it seems, its only culture is in its frozen yogurt, and that’s dead too.

You might say that Billy was in love with the limelight. Because he was afraid of the darkness.

You talk of Billy and you have to think back. Way back. The Eleusinian mysteries, sure. And also the Shakers. And all the God-mad prophets who spoke in garbled tongues. There’s was nothing particularly mystical in Billy’s mind set. But he was a mythic sort of guy. Yeah, I know, Aleister Crowley, every man and woman is a star. I’m not talking about that kind of nonsense. I’m talking Jungian archetypes. The Fool in the Tarot Deck. Later, the Hanged Man. Ultimately, the Tower.

Around 1980, at Aggisiz hall, in a building of many windows situated in the Radcliffe Quad, Billy’s father took me aside at an after party for a play that Billy had performed in. He sensed, perhaps, that I was totally adrift. He advised me that I could make my mark by interviewing and writing biographies of eminent businessmen for the prestige magazines. It was eminently sound and practical advice…which I resolutely ignored.

And yet, some thirty years later, in some strange way, I am acting on it. Little did Ruane Sr. then realize that I would be writing about his own eldest son.

I think Billy’s tragedy, and his glory, was that he simply couldn’t not be himself. He did not wear the mask of JFK and the face of LBJ, as DeGaulle famously said of the United States at the flood-tide of its empire. He couldn’t put on a mask, an act. The Billy Routine? He could dim or brighten it like a rheostat but he couldn’t really switch it on and off like a light. In a sense, Billy was quintessentially American. After all, “The pure products of America,” as William Carlos Williams said in his 1923 poem “To Elsie”:

The pure products of America
go crazy--

…
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

It is this pureness, in particular, that was his triumph. And his tragedy. (I feel these words are ominous, for perhaps one could say as much about me.)

Some pertinent details.

He was somewhat on the short side. Not stocky; not rail thin either. Of average build. Not as chubby as Truman Capote; not as wiry as Sean Penn. Somewhere in between. Seemingly frail, but physically strong. But what you sensed was his emotional fragility gave you the impression of a certain phantom frailty. Not entirely or even partially physical; almost spiritual. (But let’s not talk mumbo jumbo here.)

I never knew him to get into a fight with anybody. I never heard of anybody actually cleaning his clock, though more than a few people actually physically assaulted him, and many people were tempted to try. Men and women.

But Billy would assault people. That leaping for the face to plant a stubbly kiss. Like he was some old school Italian Don. You halfway expected him next to do a Don Corleone number and grab the loose skin of your cheeks between scabby fingers and murmur, ala Marlon Brando, in broken Sicilian. He certainly had a histrionic side.

Not surprising. He loved old movies. According to Pat McGrath, his favorite was by Godard’s “Contempt”. But he had many favorites. I’d go with him to the Harvard- Epworth Church (or maybe he would drag me along) to see crazily obscure Samuel Fuller movies like The Steel Helmet, or Verboten! Or sometimes we’d go to the Brattle to see a revival of some unfathomable foreign classic like Orpheus Descending. We also attended some German film festival at MIT where we saw films like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and real obscurities like Jane Is Jane Forever (Jane Bliebt Jane) by Walter Bockmayer and Rolf Buhrmann.

John Carey: When you went to the movies you would be very likely to see Billy; but not for long. He noted down everything that was playing all over town on a particular evening and, with an encyclopedic knowledge of film, calculated which scene in each production was most worth seeing. And so he would pop up now here, now there, a dapper little figure brandishing a scribbled list, teleporting perhaps across the distances between.

What was it about Billy and movies, and later, vintage television shows? Did he live inside them? Did they make him forget himself for a while? I don’t know. Maybe the latter. At his Boston apartment he had a battered black and white television set that he might have rescued from a garbage can—I wouldn’t be surprised if the antenna was a coat hanger—and late at night, unable to sleep, he would watch old movies. I never saw him watch the thing otherwise. He loved the great films. Foreign, domestic, silent. But he also loved junk. He was inexplicably very enthusiastic about “Every Which Way But Loose”-- in which Clint Eastwood plays opposite an Orangutan. (Then again, maybe he just really liked Clint Eastwood.)

He also liked, and cultivated, celluloid obscurities—the stuff that fell in between the cracks. His eventual booking agency HELLDORADO was allegedly named for one such old movie. Which, in turn, was named for a Las Vegas festival: “1935, and [as] the free-spending construction crews began moving on, business got slow fast. That year a showman named Clyde Zerby, with previous experience organizing festivals to bring tourism to small towns, pitched the idea here. The Las Vegas Elks lodge sponsored it, named it Helldorado,” http://www.1st100.com/part1/cashman.html

He loved Mickey Spillane and old pulp crime novels. He also loved 19th century American literature. Emerson and Thoreau, to be sure, but also long-forgotten authors who had been literary sensations in their day. (Don’t ask me to name any. Even I don’t remember.)

He had impeccably eclectic taste. I still have his copies—underlined—of Forced Exposure Magazine. (I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he took some of his out-of-town booking cues from the reviews in that magazine.)

He was supportive of, and an enthusiastic fan and advocate of, any number of local bands. We all know this, if we know anything at all about him. For a person who was at all times on the cutting edge of hip (and even more on the cutting edge of “so-cornball-it’s-perversely-hip) he had a sentimental side. In particular, he loved the Salem 66 song “Across the Sea”. Listen to the lyrics some time. It is a sad and wonderful tune. I once saw him at T.T.’s as Salem 66 performed it, and he was utterly enraptured by it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSrTLiD3xb0

That accent of his—affected Brit or was it something else? His friend Dave McMahon says “Connecticut”. But was the accent something more? A key to his character? Something stemming from what was once the shadow of a calm inner essence once known but otherwise almost irretrievably lost?

Anywhere other than Cambridge he probably would have been locked up long before he actually was, in 1990. Cambridge, which should be known as the East Coast Capital of Crazy. Full of drug burn-outs, wrecked minds, broken souls. Homeless, down and out, street people. Crazed eccentrics abounded. People with colorful names. Brother Blue—entirely harmless, and wholly benign. And others, less so. The Yankee Doodle Man. There was an elderly black man, a former MIT professor it was rumored, who I would regularly see walking down the streets of Central Square forming imaginary equations with his fingers and mumbling.

And then there was Karmu the Healer, who is said to have “healed 20,000 people.” (http://www.shaktitechnology.com/KARMU/index.htm)

“He fed a lot of hippies and gave them a place to sleep. He would tell a girl he was beautiful and you would see a girl become beautiful right before your eyes.” –Bob McQuaid

This sounds an awful lot like a description of Billy.

And then there was Mr. Butch, known for a time as “The Rasta Wino.” Billy had quite a history with him. Who, but Billy, would have given Harold Madison III (the birth name of Mr. Butch) his own Saturday afternoon show, from 12 to 2pm? This cracked alternative programming reigned during 1989 and part of 1990. Every week, Butch would complain that he didn’t make enough money, even though we gave him two dollars for every person who paid to get in, and sometimes supplemented his salary from our own pockets. A few of these shows—not the best ones—were videotaped by Tom Blue. For the most part, Mr. Butch would strum a few bizarre chords, sing a few cracked songs, prance around in a mask and cape backed by “The Mystery Band” (aka Killdevil Blues) and spend the bulk of his set telling the filthiest jokes he knew, intermingled with anecdotes of his life on the street. Not exactly guaranteed to get the critics from the Globe and the Herald out of their Saturday morning beds to come down and have a look.

The West coast equivalent of Cambridge was San Francisco. But I spent some time there in 1980, and also in 1987, and Billy Ruane was not a San Francisco kind of guy. In his more lucid moments, at least, he was too much of a skeptic to swallow any new age nostrums. And too much of a pragmatic liberal to give himself over wholeheartedly to utopian schemes.

Digression: I was in San Francisco the day John Lennon was shot. I was disconsolate. I saw people walking down Market Street, preoccupied with their Christmas shopping, smiling, even laughing, and thought, with mingled despair and rage, “You fools! Don’t you know what’s HAPPENED?”

I never felt that way again until almost 30 years later, on October 26, 2010 at about 9pm, which was when I first heard the news of Billy’s death, via Steve McDonough, someone I knew from the Middle East Cafe.

Billy was not a political crackpot. But he did have an abiding interest in geopolitics. Sometimes, in my lowest moments, I would think, I don’t care if the world caves in. I’m already living in a cave. But Billy cared about such things. Cared too much, maybe. His mind was too active and wide-ranging, his antennae too sensitive. He could not ignore the world and shut out the unpleasantness. He could not even put it off to one side, as it is said that well-adjusted, well-balanced people often can.

He did give me one great piece of political advice. Circa 1983, he and I attended a documentary film, “The Day After Trinity: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb (1980). It might have been at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. Afterwards, I was very depressed. He could see this. He suggested that if I wanted to do something, then maybe I should get involved with the Boston chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Do something about it. Do anything. But don’t mope.”

What influence did Billy have on the Boston music scene as a whole. Great.

What influence did the Boston music scene have on music as a whole? Not inconsiderable.

I only knew him well in the summer of his years. That would be from 1977 to 1999. I feel impelled to write about him in part because of the influence he had on the turns my own life took.

Before I met him I was mostly into folk music and conventional big-ticket acts such as the Beatles, Stone, Who, Kinks, Zombies, Animals—even the dreaded prog rock. Billy was heavily into jazz and avant-garde rock and also steered me in that direction.

College radio station DJs would frequently borrow his jazz and rock obscurities, which was why, eventually, he would put his name on his LPs. People had a tendency to “borrow” his records and never return them. (confession: I still own one such record myself: Special View by The Only Ones.)

He loved jazz and esoterica and cocktail music and cheesy American songbook stuff and schlocky Americana in general and in particular, Herb Albert, and the whole corrupt Sinatra-Martin-David Jr. Hollywood showbiz crowd tickled him pink. Billy practically single-handedly geared the zeitgeist back towards what hipsters in March of 1987 were referring to as Grandpa Music. He called it “Ruane’s Mainstream”.

But Billy also introduced me to some great rock music. “Cloud 149” by Pere Ubu. The Spiral Scratch EP and “Orgasm Addict” by the Buzzcocks. “The Ramones Leave Home.”
The Stranglers. The first album by the Clash, which he had purchased as a British import. He owned albums by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The first time I heard “Birth of the Cool” by Miles Davis was in his Harvard Square apartment. The standard stuff, but also some overlooked obscurities. Both versions of Coltrane’s “Ascension,” to name just one example. Ornette Coleman’s “Live at the Golden Circle”, both volumes, to name another. But he also owned albums by Tin Huey, The Bizarros, The Music Machine, and other outlandishly obscure and strange American punk and proto-punk bands. Owned them, and left them out, and not just for show, or for (reverse) snob appeal. He listened to them.

Most people only turn themselves up to 7, or, at the most, 9. Billy, I believe, started out at 10. He could ramp up to 16 or 17 and could ramp down to 12, occasionally at a moment’s notice. Often he could bring himself down to 8, or even 6. Then there were the debilitating, suicidal depressions. About which I do not care to speculate. Surely, when he slept he dialed himself down to one or two. And surely he must have slept. How many hours each night? I don’t know. But I believe he routinely lived his life at an intensity 25 per cent greater than average. Perhaps that is why he died nearly 25 per cent sooner than the average. In the words of Kerouac, he was one of those people who burn burn burn. More importantly, like Kerouac, he was one of those people who lived for the people who burned. Not for Billy to mope around in public, bemoaning his fate. His depressions were mostly private. I saw him in a funk from time to time. Not often. But more than once. I knew the possibility existed that he was depressed. I had this confirmed by certain of his intimates (whose names I am not going to cite).

Many people who got to know him were put off by his use of the telephone. It was not unusual for him to call you at some outlandish hour like two in the morning. It was not like he just wanted to have a conversation. His phone calls would devolve into harangues. He would let you get a word in edgewise from time to time, but just enough to keep you on the line. And he never wanted to hang up. One of his tics (or tactics) when finally concluding a conversation was saying, “Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.” And waiting for you to hang up first.

How well did anyone really know him? (I know—how well does anybody ever really know anybody else? I’m way ahead of you.) I suppose you would have to be similar to him in certain ways to understand him. I am, or so I flatter myself. But I can’t say I really knew him. He was like grabbling a blob of quicksilver; hard to get a grip on, and possibly even toxic if you didn’t handle him with care. He was like a hummingbird whose wings beat so rapidly that he had to consume three times his weight to stay alive. He was a living uncertainty principle: The more you poked at him the less of him you actually saw.

Nobody, I believe, would have been unduly shocked had he died at age 65. But dying just before one’s 53rd birthday seems so…so 19th century, almost.

How did he manage to maintain his energy level? Other than the Vivarin, and whatever other substances he swallowed? By eating. Yes, he was quite the gourmand. Obscure, bizarre foods were his forte. Lionel Pauling, I am told, was his medical doctor. I’ve seen Billy eat crazy stuff like raw lamb tongues and have heard that he also ate goat tripe. In general, common fare was not for him, though it would do in a pinch. I once saw him puke after eating a few vile ten-cent Saturday afternoon hot dogs at Fathers Six in Harvard Square. This was probably in 1978. Nick Eberstadt and I were with him. Afterwards, we indulged in a common boyhood prank to punish him for his weakness. Outside, we sprinted away from him, climbed over a tall cyclone fence, and didn’t wait for him to catch up. In the slang of the day, we “ditched” him. Strange (or not so strange) to say, some ten years later, ten cent hot dogs were on the menu again, this time at the Middle East Saturday afternoon blues jam. We both knew that blues musicians never had money for food. I think that Billy wanted to see to it that they at least had something in their stomachs before they got blind drunk on black-and-tans, even if that “something” happened to be the rendered remains of hog eyebrows, chicken feet, variety meats, soy byproducts, and other unmentionables.

Billy had a love of fine food and his tastes, as in everything else, were eclectic. At his riverside Boston Apartment near Newbury Street, I once saw him pour vodka into his hot and sour soup and drink it down with great relish.

About that riverside apartment. Billy lived there during much of the 1980s after his banishment from the Grolier Apartments, described elsewhere. (He might have been forgiven the transgression with the fire extinguisher, but he made matters far worse by slipping a bizarre note into the doors of each and every resident of the building.) From the roof of this apartment, at least, I imagine that he could look westward and see Cambridge in all its cracked glory on the other side of the Charles. The apartment was ideally situated; very close, for instance, to one of his favorite bookstores (now defunct), The Avenue Victor Hugo. Also on that same street was Newbury Comics (still there) and other book and record stores. Berklee and the ICA were both within fast walking distance. And it was only two miles by foot from Harvard Square—about eight minutes by subway and less than eight minutes by cab—during those years (before he bought the notorious scooter)—his preferred mode of transportation.

About cabs. Billy at one time went everywhere by cab, as though he were living in Manhattan. He paid for these rides by means of some mysterious scrip known as vouchers. I suppose his father paid one or more cab companies up front for this privilege. If so, it was a wise and judicious use of money. Perhaps it is needless to mention that Billy always tipped these cab drivers generously. Even when venturing far afield to places such as Belmont; even when the cab drivers, some of whom spoke little English, had trouble locating and delivering Billy to the places he wanted to go.

I don’t know who, if anyone, taught Billy how to drive. Don’t know if he had ever had a license for the scooter. But as far as I know, reckless as he was, he never got into a truly serious accident. Unlike his old friend Mr. Butch, who crashed his scooter and died on July 12, 2007.

A charming anecdote:”One time, waiting in line at the License Commission in Cambridge, I caught a glimpse of Billy's picture -- taped up on the glass facing the clerk.”-- Damon Krukowski

Billy had apparently been troubled by a charge of drunk driving sometime in 1988. I know few of the details, or what the eventual outcome was outcome. I do know, however, that he consulted a lawyer.

He was incredibly reckless on the scooter. If you were foolhardy enough to ride with him, you were either very brave or you had a subconscious or even a conscious death wish.

Billy was all about giving. He once gave me a ticket to see the Ventures at J. Swift’s in 1980. How can you forget a gift like that? But he didn’t want to be taken for a sucker. (Although unfortunately, he often was.) He once saw in my possession the third Velvet Underground album; a record that had gone missing from his own collection. He asked me if I had borrowed it. I showed him the price tag inside the sleeve; I kept these; a habit of mine, if only to facilitate a profit upon resale. He borrowed the record from me and was very careful to return it to me, unharmed, with my name written on it in his own hand. I still own the record. (How could I sell it, after that?)

A composite of Billy at a show. I saw him at dozens of these. At The Underground, a former Laundromat in Kenmore Square, he danced himself into a terpsichorean frenzy ala Nijinsky sitting in a cave on the Austro-Hungarian border and greeting the liberating Soviet troops in 1945 with spectacular leaps and unrivalled grace in his last dance —well, maybe I wouldn’t go quite that far. To a trained eye, it might have seemed more like an ungainly white boy thrashing about. Perhaps he was drunk. Whatever his condition, he was utterly lost in himself and in the music. I heard that on a subsequent occasion, he crashed into a pillar or a post or some sort of immovable object, and gave himself a hernia.

In Cambridge Mass., circa 1979, while hanging out with some people I had known in College who had started up an organization called UFI (Unidentified Flying Idea), I first met a rather strange, elderly man. His revolutionary idea: Heroin addiction could be "cured" by hashish and massage. It was one the UFI people practiced by holding daily massage clinics, in which same-sex massage were de rigueur. They also spoke frequently of the strange "lenticular cloud formations" --ones recognized by the National Weather Service but assigned no particularly arcane significance. Except for their predilection for gobbling LSD like candy, they were a fairly benign bunch. The Cambridge City Council even invited them to give a presentation regarding the work they were doing. As I mentioned, every now and again a strange, shuffling, bearded old man would drop by. The UFI folks accorded him enormous respect. It wasn't long before I learned that he was, in fact, a man I had met before. Harold "Doc" Humes. Of course Billy knew who he was. Billy knew who everybody was. It was Billy who first introduced me to him.

For six years after graduating from college I led what might charitably be called a peripatetic life. See America First, the pre-hippie public services announcement on ubiquitous television had commanded, and duly indoctrinated, I did. I didn’t find myself. I didn’t lose myself either, but I was already lost. I just about hit rock bottom in the summer of 1985. Billy was one of the people who, howsoever inadvertently, helped me find myself. It was his inviting me to a party at the Store 54 that enabled me to meet T. Max. Writing every month for publication in the Noise gave my life some purpose. I do not overstate the case; I do not know what would have become of me had I not found some sense of purpose in my life. I was 28. It was late, but not too late.

He was a great networker, well before that term was widely used.

Billy introduced me to people like Harry O., a skateboard punk who used to hang out and make his moves near the Harvard Square subway entrance.

He also introduced me to people who would later have varying influences on my life.

Mr. Butch, whose Middle East Saturday afternoon show I hosted for several months.

Tom Blue, the Cambridge-based videographer who hooked me up with a videographer gig at the ME and a 15-year affiliation with Cambridge Community Access Television.

Dave McMahon, the avant-garde pianist and figure on the New York no wave scene.

Timothy Maxwell. Jimmy Ryan. Wayne Podworny at Store 54.

In 1985 he basically reintroduced me to Joey Harvard nee Incagnoli. What are you doing these days? I asked him. Joey: “Jack of all trades and master of none.”

To the Mystery Girls.

To Corey Loog Brennan and Kate Tews, at a party given by the Amorys in one of the high-rent districts of Boston.

Later, Eric Doberman nee Motte. Mike Higgins. Andrew Lypps. All three soundmen at the Middle East. Chris Rich, later to take over his booking chores when Billy was committed in 1990. Dave Sheehan and Martin Doyle, Rich’s successors.

The list goes on and on.

Lastly, Greg DeVore, the son of Irwin DeVore, a professor of anthropology at Harvard.

Greg DeVore sounds like Greg Devour, but I swear I’m not making this up. “The Lizard King” as my friend John Price Carey called him at an infamous Harvard Advocate party.

Andrew Morvay: “I recall a couple of visits by Greg DeVore to [our apartment at] 494 [Mass. Ave.] (whose very name seemed to evoke awe, fear and trembling) with Billy. They seemed to have a special bond.”

Greg died sometime in the mid-90s. He had cleaned himself up several years before, and had suffered relapses on a few occasions. Ultimately, a life a wretched excess had eventually taken its toll. He couldn’t have been much over 40. Liver failure, it should have been. I think he might have sampled virtually every substance known. I tried some ether proffered by Greg one ill-advised evening, for the first and last time. I had a headache for three weeks afterwards. It hardly seemed to faze him at all. Greg cleaned up his act, circa 1988. At least, for a while. He seemed to be following the twelve steps. He made amends to me, AA style. I did have to remind him that one time he collapsed in my bed, pissed himself, and ruined the mattress.

Greg actually died when he fell in the bathroom and hit his head.

Billy spoke at Greg’s memorial.

In certain respects Greg was Billy’s dark spirit, or at least that’s how I think of him. The gray eminence to Billy’s garishly lit Shamanic antics. There were two angels standing on Greg’s shoulders. One was actually a devil, and the other was a truly ferocious devil. There was also something feral about Greg. A friend of his told me that Greg Devore lived in the Kalihari Desert in Africa “among baboons and a tribe of Bushmen at the ages of 2 to 4 and the ages of 5 to 7.” Greg told this friend that he and his father “were with the tribal celebration Cooking Ceremonial” and Greg did something forbidden and his father hit him. This blow apparently scarred him, psychically, in a way that is difficult to explicate. “His family,” says this informant, “was like something out of a Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” When Greg was about five years old, he would “hunt cats and dogs in the neighborhood and bring them back to his house, all while running around dressed in loincloths.” He got a whipping and was told that henceforth “he was not to kill the neighborhood cats.”

Like Billy, Greg DeVore had a low tolerance for the strictly maudlin. At an infamous August 1981 Harvard Advocate party I made the ill-advised decision to play a slow number and chose a Smokey Robinson song. “Choosey Beggar” I think it was. “Turn that shit off,” snapped Greg, looking and sounding for all the world like the demonic Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Why, I asked him. “It’s self-pitying bullshit, that’s why.”

Greg was what Claude Brown of Manchild in the Promised Land would have called a boss thief. At Pinocchio’s pizzeria in Harvard Square I saw him steal a foot long meatball sub right out from under the nose of the counterman. Other folks have told me that he could steal booze from package stores and never get caught. He could burglarize cars and even homes, and, if apprehended, would always spin a tale plausible enough to ensure that the police were never called.

Billy probably first met Greg circa 1973, though I have been not been able to pin down the exact year. Was Greg a baleful influence on Billy? I am inclined to say yes. How could he not be? But I have been reminded that Greg was a baleful influence on nearly everybody. Myself included. And you also have to consider this fact: Billy seldom did things against his will. Would Billy’s life have been very different had he never met Greg DeVore? It is hard to be sure, but the answer is probably no. Billy, to some degree or other, was indestructibly Pure. Oh, I know this is going to sound like a lot of nonsense to people who didn’t know him. I’m not going to indulge in histrionic speculations about some halo or white aura which emanated from the physical corpus of Enlightened Master Ruane. But there was…something. I practiced Kundalini Yoga for a brief spell, and in a trance state, one could deceive oneself into thinking that one saw certain…auras.

When I say Pure, I don’t mean pure in the sense of maculate, unspotted. I mean pure in the sense of purely himself. An indomitable spirit, if you will.

I don’t have much truck with AA-inspired pseudo-psychoanalytic jargon, but Greg was an enabler, all right. In mostly a destructive sense. And so was Billy Ruane. But mostly in a constructive sense.

But Billy, I am beginning to realize, was ultimately defined by his anger.
Pat McGrath: “Billy needed anger really badly. Because he was really traumatized. And anger was the only emotion strong enough to cover everything up. The people that he was shittiest to, invariably, were the people he knew loved him the most. 'Cause he thought that they could endure that barrage. The abuse that he could heap on. Billy's mother killed herself in front of him. And Billy was really bright. He knew that he had diminished capacity. I think he mourned his confidence and the ability that he knew he didn't have. He was so smart that he knew he wasn't like the other boys. I think that's what fueled the bad Billy, and good Billy was just good Billy. He needed to go bad, because he needed to be angry, he needed to tilt at windmills, he needed all of that. It was hard for him, because he had no real problems – in the external world. He was fully taken care of. He would do things like, he lived in a not-so-nice place and four blocks away he's got a three-thousand-square-foot penthouse. Just beautiful. That he picked out.”
As for me, personally? Whatever little I gave to Billy, he gave back more. Way way more. There are many tales of his generosity. One anonymous account is interesting:

I am a longstanding "never was" in the Boston Music scene. I spent many years playing around town with no kind of recognition anywhere. I was standing in line at my bank in Cambridge one afternoon and Billy Ruane approached me. I knew who he was and was shocked to find out he knew who I was. He asked me how I was doing and how my band was---when I replied we were close to breaking up after 5 years of playing once or twice a week to enormous indifference he insisted that we keep playing , how much he loved us and how people thought we were really something special . He offered to book us at a few rooms where he had relationships with the owners, and insisted we couldn't stop playing because he felt we had so much to offer. To make a long story short we ended up playing for a few more years...... it didn't really amount to anything, but Billy literally forced us, through the strength of his interest, to keep on playing! I am now living in the 'burbs, with a wife and kids, still playing and I think about Billy once in a while. When I heard the sad news of his passing it really made me think about a guy who would approach a stranger to tell him how he appreciated his music and to not quit ! An enormously special guy.

Then there’s the flip side: An enormously special guy he was. But he sometimes angered me. At other times, among people he knew well, he could put on a certain air of infuriating hauteur—of aristocratic disdain. I do not believe that this was merely assumed. I detected a certain amount of pride, of snobbishness about him. Part of an aristocratic heritage. Like I said, he was sort of a Gatsby in reverse.

There are many local songs that remind me of him:

“Dot on the Map” by Volcano Suns.

“100,000 Fireflies” and “Railroad Boy” and “Lovers from the Moon” by Magnetic Fields. (Listen to the lyrics of the latter of the three. You will be shocked. They describe him to the letter.)

“Criminal Child” by Uzi.

“Tugboat” by Galaxie 500.

“Red and Grey” by The Neats. (One of his favorite songs.)

Billy was an early and enthusiastic champion of countless bands, and not just local ones. An incomplete roster of out-of-town bands which he brought to the region—many here for the first time--to play at the Middle East includes Beat Happening, 11th Dream Day, Jack O’Nuts, and far too many others to mention.
Chris Rich: Billy was here to point things out. He was the purest advocate ever seen. I worked the formal institutional side of advocacy for my philosophical reasons and he worked the freewheeling side for his. We respected each other’s methods. I worked to be the least visible as he easily became the most. 20th century art and music in all its daunting intricacy was for Billy to find and extol to the sky like some avid beach child roaming all over the strand to find tide carried things and rush back to the group to share the find. He was the best town crier and witness the avant-garde ever had.
Billy didn’t seem to care too much about stand-up comedy. Plays, yes. Movies, yes. Surely he admired the classic silent film clowns like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. There was something a bit Chaplinesque about Billy, now that I think of it. There was also a bit of Harpo Marx in his temperament. A sort of angelic impishness. Billy might not have been wholly out of place in a Marx Brothers film, and it seems that from time to time that he would create and then inject himself into some strangely Marx-like scenarios.

Nita Sembrowich: Those who knew Billy as a child speak of his uncanny intelligence and precocity, which must have been an early manifestation of his bipolar condition. Due in part to his small frame, even as an adult he still gave to some extent the impression of a precocious, uncanny child. His mind had a peculiar, paradoxical quality; there was the sense of a flashing, expansive intellect trapped by and struggling to express itself through limiting, imperfect vehicles: ordinary human language, which moved far more slowly than his racing thoughts, further accelerated by NoDoz, and his own wayward brain, presumably the source of those thoughts. Of course he was angry and frustrated. The gifts and the deficits came as a package. He had the terrifying, distorted brilliance of an imploding star. He knew also, I’m sure, that people were too-often inclined to dismiss him as ridiculous. Maybe that’s why he forgave those who respected him enough to consider him impossible. His neediness and insecurity made him exquisitely sensitive to trends. He was the scenester par excellence, surfing precariously on the ever-breaking, ever dissolving crest of THIS IS IT.
III
AN ACCOUNTING
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." —E.M. Forster.

“Children have more need of models than of critics.” --Joseph Joubert

I want a drink, and here's a twenty
And bring my change in dimes
There's a song on the jukebox
I want to hear a thousand times
It used to be our love song
We played it here before
So let's be sure it's playing
When she walks through that door

You see, I had her but then I lost her
But I got one more chance tonight
And if she hears it playing
Maybe things will turn out right
So waitress, take a handful
I've just got to hear that song
And I'll wait here for my baby
If it takes me all night long

I'm sure it's nowhere near
The greatest love song in the world
But I hope she still remembers
That I wrote it for my girl
Here she comes, and Lord she's smiling
Cause she just heard that song
And I just got a feeling
That tonight we're going home
—David Wills, “There’s a Song on the Jukebox”
Chris Rich: “He claimed to be descended from Chicago bootleggers and his dad served in World War Two, got a GI Bill education and obtained a seat on the Exchange at Wall St. His classmate was Warren Buffett, Billy's honorary uncle. His father became one of the legendary old guys, value investors of the highest quality. I learned less about his mom but sensed she was the one who imparted his depth. She left him with some guidelines for life but marital despair and whatever else led her to a walk into Long Island Sound when he was in his [late] teens.”
1964
The ubiquity of the Beatles back in 1964 was almost enough to make a freethinker and nonconformist like Billy grow to hate them. Why fawn over these four British fops when there was plenty of other music on the radio? Calypso such as “Yellow Bird”. Movie themes, such as “Never on Sunday”. Exotica. Plus all the American songbook singers, from Sinatra and Tony Bennett on down. No, even a six year old could figure out that rock and roll was a pretty unsubtle form of musical expression when so contrasted. No real melody, except in the crude ballads; no real sense of musical proportion, subsumed as it was beneath the monstrous, bludgeoning beat. As for rhythmic subtlety, compared to jazz drumming, rock and roll had virtually none.

1966: Other than the Church--and perhaps even there--the only aesthetics were the aesthetics of Moloch. "They're Coming to Take Me Away (Ha Ha)" was the song that, in the late summer of 1966, was all the rage. Other contemporary songs on the jukebox would be Herman and the Hermits' "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am," an insipid and odious bit of music hall whimsy for those who were too old to appreciate the Beatles, and "Winchester Cathedral," a novelty tune by the New Vaudeville Band, and the name says it all. The other songs would be blowsy big band standards and Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin and Perry Como and Dean Martin moaning about "Strangers in the Night" and the whole atmosphere of adult interactions seemed to a nine-year-old grim and dank and smoky and the ambiance was of ill-lit and ill-fated and potentially fatal assignations.

It seemed as though the old folks in the middle nineteen-sixties treated sex, not like a sacrament or a pastime but like a sordid and dirty business transaction. Unlike the nascent Hippies on the West Coast, they weren't looking for a secret land of bliss where they could carve out some kind of modern-day Sleepy Hollow and enjoy the stolen fruits of a sexual cornucopia; instead, they were seeking an unspeakable fantasy--Shirley Temple's face on Jayne Mansfield's body.

And yet….

1967:
Billy’s cousin discussing going to Uncle Billy’s house at age 12—he ran back to the pool on a 90-degree day only to discover young Billy, aged 10, dressed in a suit and reading Russian literature.—Timothy Maxwell

This post has been edited by dimenno: Oct 28 2011, 08:22 PM

[dimenno]

BILLY AT EXETER.
Even in high school, Billy was what an earlier age would have called a bohemian.

Prior to the Cambridge School, he was enrolled in Exeter, where he met the son of a senator and the son of a man instrumental in founding the OSS. Spooks and pols. Much later these connections would prove significant, though not in a way that one might suspect.

A longtime friend of his has sent the following account:

Circa 1972:
You know the vomit-at-will scene?
A good one.
Billy could vomit at will.
When introducing him I’d always mention that.
Any time the introducee noted it,
he'd say yup, and vomit a bit, splattering his shoes.

Maybe why he grew to avoid me in public

I major popped Vivarin in high school.
Learned that too much made me sleepy.

Q: Was it you, or Eberstadt, who said that the closest thing he had ever met to a truly good person was Billy Ruane? Were those the exact words? I was very much taken with the opinion at the time....

I never said any such words about Billy Ruane.
Don't think I ever came close to that thought.
Thus, natch, got no idea of any exact words.

I have heard this question before.
No doubt, little doubt, from you.
But I really doubt that Eberstadt said it either.
I remember Eberstadt disliking and distrusting Billy.
Perhaps he was testing the irony thing.

Was Billy a truly good person?
Not a truly awful person...perhaps.
I don't have any interest in music.
I hate being forced to dance.
We had little in common.

Smoley said it!
I remember in detail!
Well, yeah I met Billy at Exeter.
We both dressed like bums with neckties.
He took to me in a rather alarming way,
wanting to spend as much time with me
as he possibly could.

He was like a groupie.
I just ain't groupie friendly.

When I got up at 6:30 every morning,
after maybe two or three hours of sleep,
I’d find him sleeping across my doorstep.
I was going to the fucking shower,
and did not want witnesses.
He never took the hint.
The hint like Don't be here in the morning!
Still, there he was, every morning.

I was certainly uncomfortable.
Did he want me to fuck him?
Yuk.
Did he want to fuck me?
Double plus yuk.

Estragon to my Vladimir.

He was in a play in high school
with a huge prop top hat.
He wore it around all the time,
'til they took it away forcibly.

He was very fond of a giant prop top hat.
In high school. They didn't let him keep it.

Did he still have the Wapati mounted head?
Were the strings still working?

A lot of the campus of Exeter Fancy Ass High School
is little mimics of Harvard, with some later nods to Yale.
Billy was in an ivied barn in the large southern ring of
ivied barns. Just like Harvard Yard!

North of this appended yard is the core, oldest part.
The classroom buildings and the older dorms.
Very quaint. Lots of ivy. Ancient quads.

(I lived my whole time there north of that old batch o' quads.
Across the highway, impinging on an ancient decrepit graveyard.
Modern dorms. I saw up close idiot architecture meets idiot engineering.
Just sharing -- this bit is of no use to Citizen Ruane.)

Billy was at Exeter for less than a year.
He was very noticable. Got the boot hard.
He would play Captain Beefheart
at full volume at 2 or 3 AM.
He was not exactly popular.
Blew off most classes.

He devised many ways of escaping from his
fourth floor dorm box. (He kept it both empty and messy.)
I suspect that he sometimes climbed down the vines,
at considerable risk of his life.
Mostly he snuck out down the stairs.
There was a strict(ish) curfew,
and he pissed in its face.

I always knew Vladimir would outlive Estragon.
But I thought Vladimir would be sadder.

1975, or 1976, the first Billy Ruane song: Mine!
Really!
You done sung it y'rself: Jesus Helmholtz
Melvin [,] 68 Profane [,] Gucci Gucci Sambo [,]
Melvin M. Ruane! 'Twas a negotiation.
He asked me to rename him, and I
insisted first on having a tune. ---M.

BILLY AT THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL
Circa 1973.
Shortly after the wake I drove about 30 miles to interview a friend of Billy’s, who knew him at the Cambridge School.

I opened up a book in the friend’s apartment. The random passage I selected read as follows: “A nose which was red and swollen on the end is a sign of an enlarged heart and an overburdened circulatory system”

In regards to etiquette—Billy had manners but chose not to use them. In regards to body odor. Billy did not like to take a bath.

He lived for about two years on Mission Hill with a girl named Karen.
When he was with Karen he was normal all the time.

There’s some spooky shit right there.

I was 19 when I met Greg Devore. 1974. Billy and Greg were only
two years behind me at the Cambridge School. My mother taught a class
there with Greg and Billy. I asked her if that wasn’t the craziest class she ever taught. She said that it was the best class that she ever taught.

Billy was all about listening to jazz, talking about jazz, and going to shows.

Linus Pauling would prescribe vitamins to Billy. Ones found in their
food sources. Chicken livers, avocados, oranges, carrot juice.

1974-5. Billy’s father told him he had to go to two psychiatrists a
week, and if he missed one appointment his father wouldn’t pay the
rent.

His mother was crazy as a loon, drunk and drugged. At a gathering of
some of Billy’s friends, his mother offered around seconal and Jack
Daniels” as though these were party favors. “She passed out with her
dress pulled up over her head.” “She was an unhappy lady [who had
divorced Billy’s father several years ago because he wasn’t making
enough money]…she took an overdose…they say Billy and his sister
watched.

First time I ever met Billy the school was half boarding and half day
school, half male and half female…[very] diverse…rich, middle, lower
class, over, middle and underachievers—native Americans and inner city
kids. A lot of people got sent there is they got kicked out of other
schools. But famous people went there. Billy had a pronounced
Connecticut accent. Billy was into art, dance, theatre, music. The
Cambridge School had a good math, science and English department—no
phys ed to speak of except a rag-tag soccer team…and dancer chicks.
People [there] were tripping [at the time]…Billy was right in the
middle of a [school full of] acidheads…but he probably never took
[acid] himself.

He was really bookish—writing and writing—he had a killer jazz
collection with people like Eric Dolphy…

I don’t remember him drinking that much until he moved to his
apartment in Harvard Square.

Dorothy Straight—she knew him over the longest period of time…from the
time he was at the Cambridge School right up until the end. She was in
communication with him.

When I came back from New York age 26—Billy pushed me into an
Eventworks thing 1981-2…just may have been about my last major public
performance and it was a disaster—my father dumped some coke onto the
keyboard and it really fucked me up…the performance never coalesced…it
was a 12 piece no wave/modern classical piece. The bill was Dave
McMahon, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Red, and Martha Sweatsacks.

Billy attracted strange people. He and I hung out with a guy named James Fish: ca. 1985. He was an Acid dealer who slept under leaves in the J.P. Arboretum and buried his money and acid there, as well as his bicycles and guitars. Under piles of leaves.

Billy took 20-40 Vivarin, sometimes in a single day.

Billy never drank soda; Greg did all the time.

Billy was sometimes very depressed—suicidally so--all the time—he was
sort of never really happy—faking happiness.

If you were really his friend, then he did not owe you anything and
you didn’t owe him anything.

In 10th grade I tried to re-live “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. Billy was also fond of that book.

Greg wasn’t all bad. I called Billy in the Back Bay with a phone card—Greg Devore was
there; Greg got me into detox with his Cambridge address. Greg got me
sober and nobody else would have done it for me—but, on day two, he
got into the detox and throws Xanax and pot and nips into a drawer [in
my room]—he has a lit joint in his mouth—I chased him out—later after
getting out I found the Xanax in my suitcase and fell off the wagon.

Billy went in to the pharmacist and got me a prescription for Xanax—a
stronger sort of valium—a muscle relaxant—hugely abuses—tanazopam is
still abused today—one of the most abused drugs in the world: XTC
(MDMA), meth, tanazopam

Greg DeVore and Billy were both addicted to caffeine pills…they can
make your pancreas explode—it is also so hard on your stomach—he
started taking ‘em at age 11 when he found the pharmacist would give
them to him without question.

Billy always contended that NoDoz does nothing compared to Vivarin.
Vivarin had an added ingredient--Phenactin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenacetin

Digression: Was this the same as stimucin? I found no online sources to suggest as
much. This may or may not be an urban legend.)

NoDoz:
Active Ingredients: Each caplet contains: Caffeine (200 mg)

Inactive Ingredients: Benzoic Acid, Corn Starch, FD&C Blue 1,
Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose, Microcrystalline Cellulose, Mineral Oil
(Paraffinum Liquidum), Polysorbate 20, Povidone, Propylene Glycol,
Simethicone Emulsion, Sorbitan Monolaurate, Stearic Acid, Sucrose,
Titanium Dioxide
Do not give to children under 12 years of age. For occasional use
only. Not intended for use as a substitute for sleep. If fatigue or
drowsiness persists or continues to occur, consult a doctor. The
recommended dose of this product contains about as much caffeine as a
cup of coffee. Limit the use of caffeine-containing medications,
foods, or beverages while taking this product because too much
caffeine may cause nervousness, irritability, sleeplessness, and,
occasionally, rapid heartbeat.


Vivarin:
1)Kmiller, you are correct in assuming that V is 'just caffeine'. All
info on the net confirms this.
Old personal users do beg to differ. Before the late 90s. V had 160mg
dextrose as active ingredient plus a 'secret' active ingredient the
makers called 'Stimucin'. Stimucin was advertised on the front of the
box throughout all owners of the product from 1969 to the time of
SmithKline Beecham. This company was purchased in late 90s (when V
enjoyed 58+% market share) and the new company made the change with no
info given about the change; in fact, launched a $20,000.000.
Advertising campaign for new users.
Just a guess, but the 'just caffeine' product was substituted for the
original because the original was perfect for some ADD users and
cheap, without a perscription; it was too effective. Around the time
ADD became better recognized, medications such as the prescribed
$200.+ per bottle Provig** debuted, the "original" over the counter,
V, availiable everywhere for under $6.00 per box for 40... disappeared
with little tracable information.
Good for the company. Not good for those who have found nothing as
effective, prescribed or not.

2) 2d2, I love a good conspiracy theory, but I think I'm going to have
to scuttle this one. (BTW, I did self-medicate with this many, many
years ago!) An online check shows an application for the term Stimucin
was filed 4/83; JB Williams Co (which also registered the name Vivarin
in 1969, and which sold Geritol as a quick fix for fatigue and was
sued by the FTC for false advertising!) conveyed rights to the name to
Beecham in 3/84 (I'm guessing the online records don't go back to when
JBW registered it); and the name was registered to Beecham as a
trademark in 11/84. Beecham merged with SmithKline in 1993. The
trademark office description of the "goods and services" called
Stimucin: Caffeine Sold Only as an Integral Component and Active
Ingredient in Stimulant Tablets.

So, there ya go. It's all marketing. And thanks very much (!?!) for
giving me something to hyperfocus on at the expense of everything else
I had to do today. ;D

3) (Who’s we?) It’s caffeine and always was – and this old personal
user was one who was there and knows. I don’t think we’re saying that
caffeine’s not effective to some degree in helping address ADD issues
of mental energy and focus. What I am saying, though, is that there
was never any additional active ingredient or “secret” formula to
Vivarin, although the company that trademarked “Stimucin” clearly
wanted people to think so. Of course we all know diagnosed and
undiagnosed ADDers who self-medicate with Starbucks. It makes some
sense: caffeine blocks adenosine reception in the brain (binding of
adenosine causes drowsiness) so neuron activity is not slowed down and
you thus feel more alert. The increased neural activity sets off
production of adrenaline, which is what gives you a boost. Caffeine
also increases dopamine levels in the same way that amphetamines do
(but milder) to make you feel good.

http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13029
Vivarin:
Active Ingredients (in each Tablet): Caffeine (200 mg). Inactive
Ingredients: Carnauba Wax, Colloidal Silicon Dioxide, D&C Yellow 10,
Aluminum Lake, Dextrose, FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake, Hypromellose,
Magnesium Stearate, Microcrystalline Cellulose, Polyethylene Glycol,
Polysorbate 80, Starch, Titanium Dioxide.
Nausea, stomach upset, insomnia, restlessness, nervousness, tremor,
headache, lightheadedness may occur. Large amounts of caffeine may
aggravate ulcers, cause frequent urination, flushing, muscle twitch or
irritability. If any of these effects continue or become bothersome,
inform your doctor. Notify your doctor if you experience: dizziness,
depression, rapid breathing, chest pain, confusion, fatigue. Abrupt
stopping of caffeine intake after several weeks of regular daily use
may cause withdrawal symptoms such as headache, anxiety or muscle
tension within 12 to 18 hours. If you notice other effects not listed
above, contact your doctor or pharmacist.


BILLY AT HARVARD
Billy didn’t need to write a novel. Billy’s life was his novel. He needed someone close to him to write it down. All of it. But who could stand to be with him all the time? I’ll tell you this right now: I’m not up for it. This is a warning: What I write is not definitive.

A coincidence is just a cosmic form of irony. That’s the only way I can explain how it was I came to meet and get to know Billy Ruane. The odds against such an encounter were staggering. (But the odds against nearly all our life-changing events surely are. Mysticism will have little place in this memoir, except when we speak of holy fools, of shamanic rituals, and even –dare we mention it?--of blood sacrifices.)

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Reared in slums and housing projects. Left for nine months to fester in a boy’s home. Brought up by relatives. I was largely on my own from age sixteen.

I am terse. Because I was angry about these things. I still am. I fear I always shall be, to some extent. Juvenal has said Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, quam quod ridiculos homines facit. “Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest/ Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jest.,”And Haut facile emergunt quorum virtutibus opstat res angusta domi. “Slow rises worth, by poverty deprest.” Both are Samuel Johnson’s translations, in his “London”. (It is a useful poem to read if one wishes to understand Boston as well.)

But I got a scholarship to a boarding school in Rhode Island. That saved me. And a scholarship to Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that very nearly ruined me.

Billy had a lot of anger in him as well. Unlike me, however, he seldom felt the need to repress or hide what he felt. That turned a lot of people off. Including Erna, my girlfriend at the time, who told me “You and your friends were always trying to get me to go places with Billy and I didn’t want to and you always insisted.” (Why do angry young men so often do this to the women they love?)

“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”—Lou Reed

Chris Brokaw claims that this was one of Billy’s favorite lyrics. If so, it seems particularly apt. There was no filter with Billy. Late 70s Harvard was all about chilling out. Billy wasn’t having any. Billy wasn’t built that way.

Humorist Artemus Ward said of George Washington that “He never slopp’d over.” Billy was the anti-Washington. He nearly always “slopp’d over”.

In his recent book At Home, Bill Bryson describes a man assigned to head up a nineteenth century parsonage as a man who is very fortunate indeed, particularly if he is a man of an intellectual bent, for he had adequate time, income and leisure to follow his avocations. A boarding school in the latter part of the twentieth century was not very different. Boarding school was hard work. But it was also a sanctuary in which one could, if one chose to, cultivate one’s own intellectual garden.


Why do boys get sent to boarding schools? “Go away son, you bother me.” That about explains it. Boarding schools were (and to some extent still are) a warehouse for the unruly sons of the ruling elite. Also: They are (and were) training grounds for elite etiquette.

Exile (of a kind) from NYC (which might very well have eaten him alive).

Billy used Vivarin, from one account from age 11. I don’t know when he started to drink but I assume it was well before the legal age in Massachusetts, which was then 18.

He never had much to do with pot. I’ve seen him take a reefer when proffered—it was ubiquitous in that era—but he always passed it along to the next person. He was no pothead, that’s for sure. And he wasn’t into hallucinogens at all. At least, not as far as I know.


Another thing I was trying to figure out is whether Billy ever used coke? Or heroin, after the one time I actually saw him try it, in 1985.

As for Cocaine? Not his bag. It didn’t agree with him. If he were ever into it at all, even briefly, I never saw it. Besides, it was so…vulgar. Insufflating this horrible hospital-smelling powder up one’s snot-garage. It vaguely reminded one of sickness and people dying and death. You never saw bright-eyed and healthy-minded people using it, and if they did, they didn’t stay that way for long. Lady Cocaine had a talent for dragging them down to her level. It was all right to flirt, but a full-fledged relationship was bound to end poorly. Besides—cocaine on top of everything else that Billy was all about would have been an insult to sense and decency. Like throwing nitroglycerine onto a bonfire.

Coffee was another matter.

Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water. ~The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder. --Honore de Balzac, "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"

Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drunk. ~Alphonse Allais

Sometimes Billy was so hyper that he reminded me of a line from Lenny Bruce’s classic bit, “The Palladium”:

"Some of these boys come here and do their shows...and they're not very f-funny...But you...YOU have a knack for making people vicious!"

Billy also had “a knack for making people vicious”. Viz:

Gerard Cosloy: I had nowhere to crash [in NYC] that night and Billy assured me his father was a member of the Harvard Club and we’d find some shelter in that opulent setting. No dice. Apparently, there was a picture of Billy next to the front desk with instructions saying something to the effect of “Do not let this man in.”
But he also stuck up for the underdog.
Andrew Lypps: Billy gave me my first paying live sound gig when I got to Boston in 1990. Turns out it was a West Virginian Neo-Nazi band at Green Street Sta. and was the only sound guy who'd do it... ;-)
Very soon after that, Billy gave Andrew a coveted job as one of the three official soundpersons at the Middle East. (I also did sound, but pro bono, so to speak. At one time or other, for some shows I was the one who was doing sound, and shooting video, and collecting money at the door, and introducing the acts, and feeding and watering the talent, and serving as a bouncer as needed, and settling any other of the many beefs, squabbles, misunderstandings and minor emergencies that took place during Saturday afternoon blues jams and open mikes.

For the first half of the 1980s, other than my roommates, Billy was one of my few Boston-area friends.


Billy’s father would have liked Billy to go into the family business. But it never happened. You did not look at Billy and think, “Businessman”. And he was extraordinarily poor at it. His initial forays into booking were disasters. I have heard this from several sources. One example of an early booking foray: Andrew Morvay tells me ca. 1983 Billy promoted Human Switchboard at the Channel and lost 500 dollars—a not inconsiderable sum in the early 1980s. It would be like losing 1500 dollars now.

For his part, Billy himself it seems never wanted anything to do with the business world, which requires at a minimum, persistence, as well as a specialized acumen in financial matters, which he seemed to have little interest in. There is, perhaps, also the matter of business decorum. Can anyone who knew him imagine Mr. William Ruane Jr. dressed in a neatly pressed suit and power tie exchanging dry quips about politicians and sports figures while getting restrainedly well-lubricated at the 19th hole? I imagine that, if he made a supreme effort, he could have briefly tortured himself into that role. Particularly if it were in the context of a play or a stage performance. Billy, as I have mentioned, was a fine character actor. But day after day the role—and it would decidedly have been a role—would have proven oppressive. Inside of three years I would bet he would have had an ulcer. Or maybe something even more damaging. Damaging to his soul, psychically eating at him from within.

It’s not as though he couldn’t play a role. But it had to be a role of his own choosing.

For many years he worked at the reception desk of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Room (not the rare book room, as erroneously reported) at Harvard’s Widener Library. His was the first face seen by those with a love of antiquarian volumes. (The HEW room had a Gutenberg Bible.) Andrew Morvay: He worked in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial room, in the center of Widener, a dark wood paneled room, like an old gents club, with the portrait of Harry on the wall. The room is not Houghton, the Harvard rare book library. But it housed Harry' s personal collection of rare books including the famous Gutenberg bible. ( Harry was on a book buying trip to Europe when he went down on the Titanic.) There are all kinds of stipulations for the room that went with the bequest to build the library, including the fresh flowers everyday.


It was a 35 or 40 hour per week position which he split with another person, whom I never met. Knowing Harvard’s employment policy from the inside, he was likely an employee at will, essentially a temp, with no job security, no paid holidays—in fact, no benefits of any kind save a not unduly onerous job and a reasonable but my no means extravagant hourly wage. It was by all means easier than working in a restaurant, which he also did when still a teenager. In fact, it was something of a sinecure. One friend of mine has remarked that there was humor to be found in the fact that he was the face of Harvard’s rare book room. He was like an antiquarian book himself, in certain respects—somewhat fragile, practically unique, priceless to people of a certain temperament and elusive and incomprehensible to the unlettered and unlearned.

Billy’s father wanted him to go to graduate school and take a degree in library science, presumably so he could get a professional-level job in some library or other. Say whatever else you will about him, but the old man was no fool. Had Billy actually taken a professional library job, he would have been a more-than-adequate reference librarian, given his wide and eclectic range of interests and his fabulously retentive memory. Billy might have been an even better collection development librarian, particularly for an institution looking to build a comprehensive collection of twentieth-century music or motion pictures. He would certainly have been an enthusiastic and effective reader’s advisory librarian, given his wide-ranging knowledge of and interest in literature of all types.

But the library world is a comparatively sedate one, and acting out is considered a problem, and is not encouraged. Whether Billy would have had the patience to endure the drudgery of cataloging, bibliographic instruction, or business and government reference, is an open question. (Library school was good advice. For me, at least. I did it and was never sorry. )


Billy himself seemed to lack the ability to write fiction, He showed me a page he had written one time. It wasn’t really fiction; nor was it poetry. It was essentially a list. A disjointed list of seemingly random words—all assonance, ala Joyce, but no through-line or plot. A would-be sycophant of his who was also in the room also read it and proclaimed it “brilliant”. I should have asked Billy if I could keep it. It would now be a most valuable artifact. (Besides, first impressions can be deceiving. )

Billy might have become a writer. I see an essayist or a critic of some sort. He had the intelligence, the critical acuity, the imagination. And most of all, the memory.

But he didn’t have the sheer drive to sit down in front of a keyboard and so the work on a consistent basis. Long-form wasn’t his strong suit. He wasn’t built for the grueling long haul—mentally, physically, or emotionally. Furthermore, clear and concise writing
demands that one reign in one’s frenzied associative leaps and that one provide connective tissue between the spontaneous and out-of-context thoughts, that one provide the reader a beginning, a middle and an end, and proceed in a fashion that shows evidence of some sort of consistently applied logic, howsoever intuitive or thematic or even symbolic. In other words, long-form writing demands SANITY. That…well, you know. Or maybe Billy saw writing as the mug’s game it all too often seems to be. You sweat bricks for days, weeks, months, maybe even years--and the end product is read in a matter of minutes and hours. Then put aside, and, in nearly all cases, forgotten.

First thought, best thought. That was the dictum of Ezra Pound and his acolytes, the Beats. Billy’s thoughts were racing, constantly racing. But he didn’t have the patience for exacting and sometimes excruciating revisions. Indeed, he himself said as much in one of his email correspondences with QV.

But good writing demands revision. Saul Bellow revised some of his sentences ten times. And good writing takes patience. Most of all, good writing takes detached observation. But Billy was seldom content to watch a room; he always seemed to want to act upon it in some way. Billy was not really a pure observer. He had to go into any situation like a rogue molecule and act upon the situation, upon every interaction that he could.

I also almost never saw Billy in repose but at some point or another—maybe lying in bed, unable to sleep—he surely must have read. A lot.

You wouldn’t have to talk with him long to realize that he had a quick, retentive mind. I can’t imagine that he forgot very much. That, of course, can be a curse as much as a blessing. Perhaps the booze served to soak up some of the less desirable recollections.

He also possessed a vastly counterintuitive sense of good taste.

A cynical side too. He did not suffer pretentious fools gladly. Nor liars.

He had a certain compulsion to put things into what he considered to be some kind of order. Diane Bergamasco: “[I remember] Billy sitting on the living room floor of my apartment on Green St. in JP "organizing" my vinyl record collection for hours. I could never easily find what I wanted to listen to after that. And going to the beach with Billy in Wellfleet, his skin as white as the sand, scampering up a dune just as maniacally as he danced. “

I first met Billy as an undergraduate at Harvard. Probably through Richard Smoley, and the Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine which we both belonged to, which is how I met him. Richard lived off-campus in a third-floor apartment with a rotating cast of roommates who included Sam Seymour and Maura Moynihan and Erik Breindel. It was a brownstone located at 1679 Mass. Ave. The first floor had a general practitioner M.D.; the second floor was occupied by the office of Alan DerKazarian, D.D.S., whose drill could be heard on certain mornings.

Billy was a fixture on its campus dating back to at least 1974 and possibly earlier. I first met him in the fall of 1976 (or was it the Spring of 1977?). I had begun to run with a fast crowd my sophomore year. It was probably through Richard Smoley that I first encountered Billy. Smoley lived off campus his sophomore, junior and senior years, in an apartment just past the law school, smack on Massachusetts Avenue, with folks like Eric Breindel, Maura Moynihan, Sam Seymour and other folks whose names escape me.

He enrolled in the Harvard Extension School. Did he even try to get into Harvard proper? Does it matter? He might as well have gone there. Many people assumed that he did.

At the insistence of his friend Nick Eberstadt I was persuaded to warn Billy off of trying heroin. (I suppose that, at that time, Breindel was dabbling in it. It was an Exeter thing, according to my then-girlfriend Erna, who decidedly did not run with that crowd. ) As a matter of fact, I threatened to kick his ass if I ever heard about him even dabbling in the stuff. I guess he took me seriously. I heard no more of the matter, Until about seven years later.

I suppose that Billy moved into the Grolier apartments sometime in 1974 and 1975. Dave tells the story of how a bunch of people were crashing in his room, including some young ladies. Michelle Le Brun and Jean Rosenberger, David McMahon and David Kohlberg. Greg DeVore and Giorgio Della Terza. In the darkness, Billy said, in that quaintly lilting somehow-not-quite-British accent of his, “Do you mind if I masturbate?” One of the girls says, “Ewww!” Billy imperturbably replies, “It helps me to relax”.

Richard Smoley: Circa 1974 Billy apparently took up residence in a storage unit at Harvard’s Mather House. [But] the first memory I have of Billy Ruane is of his staying overnight in the living room of Canaday G-21. When he emptied his pockets, a handful of little yellow Vivarins scattered all over the already-disgusting living room floor.

May of 1978: “Seeing quite a bit of Billy who gave a party at the Advocate a month ago [to which he had invited some street people who hung out down by the river and] which some [of those] street people turned into a brawl.”—letter to GMM dated 6/24/78

That was quite a festive event. It was at Billy’s instigation, I think, that we threw the party, which I sponsored as a member of the magazine, and it was, of course, duly attended by the campus literary crowd, who, whatever their bohemian avocations might otherwise have been, were, at least to Billy’s eyes, a rather stodgy bunch. Billy decided the party needed some livening up, so he went out and like some Pied-Piper in reverse, brought all the street rats he could locate into town and into the Advocate building, where they began swilling free vodka with all the avidity of starving tramps who have just happened upon an abandoned picnic table groaning with treats. My parties tended to be somewhat wild affairs, because instead of the standard disco and Motown fare served up by more conventional litterateurs, I favored wild hippie booze and other heavy duty rock and roll. This music was not conducive to a peaceful time; the party turned into a riot. Me, my friend Steve Bonsey, and a muscular girl named Leslie were backed against the wall in a small booth-sized area by a crowd of marauding thugs. A hand wielding a bottle was aimed at Bonsey’s blonde California God-boy head. I deflected it. Leslie, in her turn, clobbered a fellow who was set to brain me from behind. The police were called. I I’ll never forget the tragic, twisted look on the face of one of the townies as he heard the sirens and bolted down the stairs. After wards, I was testosterone charged and elated for having survived the encounter. Me and Leslie forthwith went down by the river to neck. It was too cold for outdoor fuck. We lost the mood, and later ended up going to the room she shared with one of my best friends’ girlfriends, who, unbeknownst to me, had a secret crush on me. I left a medallion behind, she figured out what was going on, and was mad at Leslie for weeks. Later, Leslie came out. Good times.

Lots of people used Billy. I used Billy. As a potential girlfriend test. If a girl could remain in his presence for twenty minutes she was probably patient, understanding and unflappable and could therefore presumably put up with me. In 1979 I took a girl I was quite sweet on named Sandra DeJong to meet him. All went swimmingly. For about 15 minutes. I left briefly to take a stand-up piss in his bathroom. Sure enough I heard a noise from Billy. It sounded like this: WAAAAUGH! Sandra had spilled something on the rug and was bending down to clean it up and Billy was screaming at her that he would do it and that he wouldn’t hear of her doing it. I made up some cockamamie excuse and, Sandra in tow, we got out of there fast. Something had dropped.


THE 1980S
"The novelist… is conditioned by what he guesses about other people, and about himself.” —E.M. Forster.

“…that emasculated humor we call fun…”—F.Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

“There is a land of Cockayne where all the world is merry, and at whose frontier cause and effect cease to have power; where vice is always innocent and never ugly; where men when drunk become inspired; where everyone is witty….No one grows old in this country, and those who are old already are unendowed with an immortal youth of spirits.”—Mary Heaton Vorse, “Bohemia as It Is Not” (1903.), cited in Grana and Grana, eds., On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled, p. 310.

http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks%3A1&a...nG=Search+Books

1976: When Billy was 19, his mother committed suicide. I have heard it said that she walked into the ocean and drowned herself. And that Billy and his younger sister witnessed this.

An anonymous source who knew the full story reveals: His mother's suicide was even more horrible than you describe. You probably know this, but she told the kids she wanted them around her when she committed suicide, and forbade them very harshly to call the police. They secretly did so, anyway. After drinking the booze she went down to the beach with them trailing after her, distraught, hoping the rescuers would get there in time. The responders got lost,
couldn't find the house at first, but the Ruanes could hear the siren and see the lights, and Mom was tipped off. She went into the ocean screaming curses at them for disobeying her orders. By the time the police or firefighters got there, they couldn't get save her. The sea, obviously, was freezing. The image of those kids on the beach has always haunted me.

I had a suicidal, alcoholic mother who had a diagnosis of “schizophrenia” listed on her death certificate. I can attest that the world can seem a harsh and arbitrary place to a person whose source of nurturing is so afflicted. A generalized mistrust of humanity can easily take the place of fond attachments to any one person.

Circa. 1978: Russ Gershon: Sound advice... on another note: you were right, Billy did eventually get a Harvard extension degree in library science. In his early Cambridge years in the late 70s, what was turned out to be so funny was that he was attending the most hot, intellectual courses around Harvard, making the most erudite and outrageous comments, and nobody seemed to realize he wasn't actually enrolled. He even fooled professors, who couldn't quite find him on their class lists and were perpetually perplexed.

Circa 1978: James Gussen: I think I may actually have had a class with him - Nat Sci 90 (remember that?). I've always remembered the guy I'm thinking of as Peter Sellars (who went on to become a famous avant-garde theater director), but now I think it may have been Billy. I don't suppose anyone knows if he "took" Nat Sci 90... - ? The guy I'm thinking of showed up only sporadically, made no pretense of having done the reading, and said odd things that aggravated the teacher.

1978. Dim Sum in Chinatown with Billy, Gus Murphy Moynihan, Nick Eberstadt, Richard Smoley. Billy caused a scene. He particularly seemed to piss off Chinese people, who apparently had little patience with clowns. They allegedly love children, but not, it seems, children of a larger growth. Curious thing though—Billy pretty much started the fashion for wearing those flat-soled Chinese slippers.

Letter to RMS dated 2-20-79.
February 17, 1979. I didn’t leave the party at 1679 Mass Ave. until it had thinned out entirely, and would have stayed longer except [Billy’s friend] Greg DeVore took too many percodans and washed them down with too many gallons of lager, so we had to take turns walking him around. An incredible asshole friend of Billy’s, some hyper-conceited dancer type, damn went and said to Greg, said, “Why don’t you die?” I breezed in, gabbled with Greg, said “C’mon, Smiley, let’s dance,” and occupied him long enough so that an incredibly twisted smile animated his ashen face. I left early because I didn’t want to aid Billy in any mad scheme he might have had at four in the morning and zero degrees to walk Greg back to the Square.

There is a rumor that sometime in the late 70s or early 80s Billy played drums for a band called Havoc, Inc., but I have not been able to confirm this.

Circa 1980: Daniel Gewartz: “I first saw Billy dashing and weaving about Harvard Square, obviously loaded, long ago, perhaps the late '70s or early '80s. He had on a suit and tie, as he often did when I saw him in subsequent years. And he appeared to me as an apparition, as some kind of nearly symbolic image, a flash from some stylish, half-made preppie from 1957 come back to grace us.”

1980: Following a screening of “Cutter’s Way.” chastising an undergraduate who “didn’t know what he was talking about”. One thing Billy knew well (besides the jazz, besides the obscure 19th century American writers, besides virtually everything you’d never heard of but Billy had) was old movies.

February 1980: Billy loans me a picture of a crucified Christ with eyes that open and shut. He claims that he had obtained it during a visit to Vatican City. He eventually claims it back.

July 1980: I’m utterly broke. Billy gets me in on a temp job that he also has, pasting labels onto envelopes for the Freshman Dean at Harvard. (Nor would this be the last time Billy gets me a job.)

[dimenno]

THE 1980s [Continued]

August 1, 1980. Harvard Advocate party. Nita Sembrowich: “Billy was in scary whirling dervish mode. I seem to recall him walking around the room, snapping his fingers in a violently insistent manner. And dancing of course. Also, I remember that he carried on an incredibly long, only semi-coherent conversation with John [Price Carey] about Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. Most particularly, I recall you gesturing at Billy and saying, “There’s a flame flickering.”

BOTTTVOG notebook: August 1980. Billy arrives late at the Underground for a show headlined by a band called I-Ses. Erik Rieselbach: “Billy arrives distraught at not yet being drunk, after having consumed half a bottle of Madeira.” Billy does his wild dance. A big guy gets knocked over by Billy, and begins to brutalize him. After about twenty minutes of frenzied protests by Billy, the guy (wearing a POOH’S PUB t-shirt) leaves. From the stage someone from I-Ses comments, “Ladies and gentlemen—Billy Ruane, the human mop.”

Letter dated 11-18-1980: Saturday, August 15, 1980. Billy had talked me and Erik Rieselbach into going to see V; and I-Ses at the Underground (the site of a former student Laundromat). He had confided in us that he was in love with the lead singer of V; who was plump, blond, and had a singing voice that was throaty but not raspy. That evening she was dressed in military gear, and he phrasing seemed somewhat reminiscent of Grace Slick.

We got there at about 9:50; Billy didn’t arrive until much later. V;’s first, twenty-minute set sounded to me like a vague agglomeration of all the shrill, shrieking, banshee noises ever dreamed of in the devil’s worst nightmares. They were so intense that their music went right through you. They had all the panache of a train wreck full of grinding metal and sonic confusion, disjoint and diffuse. Background music it was not. Next came I-Ses, a seven-piece reggae outfit, who played for about forty minutes. Midway through their set, in comes Billy, who along with practically everybody else, immediately begins dancing. The dance is a spectacle to behold. Wild, frenzied, furious, and almost completely unpredictable. Fine, everybody’s getting into the music; there’s no problem. But then I-Ses finishes their set, and V; comes back on after a fifteen minute delay, during which time Erik and I discover that Billy, having failed to get drunk on half a bottle of Madeira wine, had polished off the remaining half as well. People have begun slowly clearing out of the room, so that when V; begins there are perhaps about a dozen people left. Erik leaves, claiming fatigue. V; had done about two or three short songs, exceedingly loud. Billy, apparently fueled by his drunkenness as well as his professed crush on the lead singer, is the only one who can stand the noise enough to get up close to it. As a result, he is the only person dancing, in this musty, dark, cavernous and stingily-lit room. He looks rather bizarre. People gawk. Eventually, in the course of his eccentric weaving and bobbing, he knocks down a huge, muscular bruiser wearing a Pooh’s Pub t-shirt, sending him sprawling. He might have been some sort of bouncer there, from the looks of him. The bruiser becomes extremely annoyed, and picks Billy up by the scruff of the neck, threatening violence just short of murder and all sorts of other messy consequences if Billy doesn’t calm down. Billy, totally intimidated but also furious that his fun is being spoiled by such an obvious lout, promises to behave and leaves the room temporarily, just in time to be out of hearing range when one of the members of V; (not the lead singer) suggests that when one dances, one does not thereby need to knock people down. A few minutes later, in comes Billy again, and whoops, down goes another fellow, somewhat smaller in stature, whom Billy, gyrating madly, has just knocked down. The Pooh’s Pub bouncer is furious at this insubordination (he had warned Billy; the BAND had warned Billy) and once again grabs Billy, warning him in tones even more bloodthirsty than before that he had better restrain himself. Billy forms a mick-straitjacket with the sleeves of his shirt and meekly walks away. But when the music inspires him, he once again begins hopping around as madly as before. The big guy is really angry now, and warns Billy to sit down or else, and Billy, in a heartrending voice, protests that he only wants to dance and isn’t hurting anybody. He then skips off and begins writhing on the floor. Several other people present rush up to restrain the bruiser, which they manage to do, but only just barely. Billy, not content to leave it at that, then begins to drink beers left on top of the amps by the band for their own consumption. He does this not once, but twice, and the big guy is really furious now. Someone comes over to be and asks, “Do you know that guy?” I say yes. He says to me, “Then you’d better get him out of here before we throw him out.” I say, “Wait until this song is over” and the guy says, “NOW” I just sit there, and a few minutes later, he returns and says, “You’d better throw him out, because I don’t want to do it.” So I get up and try to steer Billy off the floor. Billy, who has been beseeching me all night to dance with him, is delighted, until he learns my real purpose. At which point he says, “No, no, it’s all right, everything’s under control,” and refuses to leave. Throwing up my hands, I return to my table. A few minutes later, a woman, not wanting to witness murder, gently leads a now-compliant Billy away. As a postscript, I-Ses returns, and so does Billy, as well as all the other dancers who had been there earlier, before V; had done their second set. At the end of their second set, I-Ses does an encore, and Billy, who has been rolling around on the floor, screams “MORE! MORE!” The singer says, “We’ll be back again some day.” Billy says, “I’ll be back, too!” The singer replies, “Good! We’ll need you; it’s hard to find people to clean the floor.” (I’m not sure if I’m imagining this, but I seem to recall that someone else added, from the stage, “Ladies and gentlemen—Billy Ruane, the human mop.” I-Ses packs up and loads out; I apologize to Billy for not dancing; he says he understands, and, since he seems inclined to stick around for some mysterious reason, I leave without him. Looking back on the incident, I now realize that all I could have done was sat back and watched quietly as Billy nearly got himself a brutal beating. Had I intervened, I myself might have been badly injured.

June 1981. Letter to David Joslin dated 9-21-81: “Toward the end of the month Billy Ruane took me to see the Ventures—he almost got beat up in an inevitable altercation with some burly toughs, but the J. Swift’s people interposed and everyone involved got a free t-shirt for their troubles!

October 1981: An excerpt from a story about Billy titled “Tell Old Bill”:

First time she saw him he was hunched over his desk at recess trying out his new pen that wrote in three colors and giggling at the faces he engraved into the yielding wood. “He’s crazy,” she thought, “only crazy people use those pens.” From the corner of his eye she watched him; the pinched, pointed face, the beady eyes, the rat’s nest hair—he resembled a discarded plastic doll you’d find in the town dump. She saw a scruffy kook who should wear his jacket backwards; a babbling banana dangling from a stalk amid the chatter of a rain forest.

From a letter to DDS [dated as having been begun 10-3-81]:
Knowing Billy Ruane is a plus as he can usually gain me admittance to theatrical events in which he participates without too much botheration, and I for my part am usually glad to attend though very often he has walk-ons in some of the most stinko bombs you’ve ever held your nose to…to his credit he’s usually the redeeming factor in these Aggisiz [Hall] and [Harvard] House-type productions….I’ve been bopping around with Billy Ruane, who’s being kicked out of his apartment at the Grolier after long years of habitation for allowing people to use his place when he wasn’t there…these people included street derelicts and the street derelicts invited knife-wielding ex-cons and the ex-cons got the amusing idea of throwing a fire extinguisher down an air shaft at some incredible a.m. in the morning with rather…explosive results; the [other] tenants refused to pay their rent until Billy was evicted, but he managed to negotiate a settlement wherein he’d be allowed to say until the end of June [1982], where he’d have a reasonable chance of finding an alternative abode in which to store both his overwhelmingly diverse possessions as well as himself. No longer attending the Extension school, Billy has been savoring the night-life of Boston, acting in various plays, and generally enhancing daily his reputation as a cult figure. I see him about once or twice a week, usually weekends.

From a letter to RMS and ADL dated 7-25-82.
April 10, 1982. Easter Saturday. C. has come up from her home during her spring break. We drink off the remnants of a six-pack left over from the previous night’s festivities and so we then decide to each take half a hit of acid. Where did she get it? Someone had offered a hit of blotter to her earlier, at some party, and she had hidden it in her mouth. As the drug began enveloping us in its mystic haze, what else was there to do, we decided, than to visit the lad who’s an acid trip in and of himself, none other than Master Ruane. Though the visit was ostensibly to return Ole by John Coltrane, one of the records of his that I had borrowed. Along with “The Classic Roy Orbison.” And the first Lou Reed record. And The Empty Foxhole by Ornette Coleman.

When we got to Billy’s apartment, a guy named Joe was also there. He struck me as a fat, fawning, bearded, older-and-wiser jazz buff who perhaps had taken up with Billy because of his superior record collection. Billy took quite a shine to C. We had a blast of a time singing in falsetto voices along with obscurities like “I Don’t Know Why I Love You Babe” in the cover version by the Jackson 5. We started playing around with a wind-up see-through foot-tall clock-work Mickey Mouse doll, sending it skittering across the floor and laughing our fool heads off. Billy eventually snatched it up and destroyed it, which apparently made C. sad. Billy, as a token of his regard, said that in recompense he would destroy any record C. wanted him to. But C. didn’t want to destroy a record; she wanted to play one. Uh-oh. Billy could be as ruthless as Stalin when it came to controlling the playlist. But Billy in this instance was surprisingly agreeable, and stuck it out through all eight interminable minutes of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of “Heard It Through the Grapevine”, to which we all moved in corybantic frenzy until we were sweating cannonballs and our tootsies were swelling up like poisoned pups. Then the three of us, plus Joe, went to Harvard Square to eat. Joe, on one pretext or other, left the company. At Baby Watson, we ordered a pizza, and who should we run into but Harry O., with whom we shared a slice. (That’s the last time I ever saw him. He left town and returned to the Midwest the following day.)

Billy told us he had plans to attend a three-band bill that night at The Knights of Columbus Hall at 321 Washington Street in Brighton Center, along with David Colburn, and sundry others. We told him we would also attend. On the bill were Christmas, Dangerous Birds, and Salem 66. Billy allegedly had a crush on Thalia Zedek, the lead singer of the Dangerous Birds, and was, rumor had it, assisting her in obtaining bookings. (But the evening itself, according to Liz Cox, had been booked by Michael Cudahy of Xmas.) Billy went back to his apartment; C. and I ran into to Joe on our way to the Harvard Pro to buy rum. At first he tried to pretend as though he hadn’t seen us, but C. recognized him in front of Elsie's and called out to him. We followed him inside and watched him as he ate a huge sandwich crammed with meat. Joe seemed very nervous and asked us not to tell Billy we had seen him. When we returned to Billy’s apartment, we found Greg DeVore, a couple of girls I vaguely knew from Harvard by way of Beverly Hills, and a nervous bearded degenerate from NYC named Don. We all chatted about this and that. Billy had calmed down considerably from earlier that afternoon, when he had deliberately been allowing monstrous gobs of phlegm to dangle vindictively, shamanically, from his mouth, despite the remonstrances of his friend Joe. Anyhow, we stood around, drinking rum, and attempting to get into that much-to-be-desired party mood, and, as the evening progressed, it became apparent to me that Greg and Don from NYC had something going on between them, even though Greg had his arm around a girl dressed in khaki and was staring evilly at C. (who said later that she had totally disoriented him by making a hissing noise and shoving her outspread fingers into his face). I had told Greg to look at my eyes, and he, being the seasoned veteran of drug abuse that he was, immediately knew what state I was in and immediately began running his fingers up and down my arm, saying “I’ll bet that feels real good now, doesn’t it?” to which I sarcastically replied, “What are you trying to do, initiate me into some kind of club?” (Although I didn’t know this at the time, C. thought I had bisexual tendencies…just like her jailbird ex-boyfriend Bill, incidentally…because of some remark Erik and I had made in jest the previous night regarding fucking people up the ass. C. took this to mean that in the past I had performed such actions, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Later, however, she began screaming for all and sundry of the folks at the K of C. to hear that she was sick of me fucking guys all the time.) Back to Greg and C. While Greg was staring speechlessly at her, Billy impetuously kissed her. Shortly afterwards, he came up to me and explained, “I just wanted to feel a little tit.” (Though maybe I didn’t hear him correctly.)

Billy left his apartment for one reason or another, after promising that he would be right back. We played a few records and things were fairly quiet until I slipped on the single version of “Orgasm Addict” by the Buzzcocks. Now, earlier, as I had mentioned, Billy had smashed to pieces his Mickey Mouse doll that C. had insisted on winding up and sending skittering across the hardwood floor of Billy’s apartment. Greg DeVore now retrieved the Mickey Mouse head from where it had been stashed and began jerking off with it in time to the music in the astonished presence of at least half-a-dozen others; he was also hopping about like a headless chicken which had just been corn-holed by a lusty farmer boy. To top it all off, when I actually had the temerity to put on the flip side of the single, Greg really flipped out. The song was “Whatever Happened To,” which, strangely enough, asks the question of Mickey Mouse, among others. When I put that song on, Greg and Don from NYC, who couldn’t seem to sit still for one minute, either because he was high on speed or because he had a sore ass, swerved themselves in time to the music into Billy’s bedroom, where they then proceeded to indulge themselves in a most tempestuous romp, falling upon Billy’s bed in neurasthenic glee, knocking over the books that lined the wall, kicking his telephone off the hook, toppling the lamp and, in the process, breaking it, and in the relative darkness, wrestling on Billy’s bed like barnyard animals.

Shortly thereafter. Billy returned, and, when he got around to answering the ringing phone, the receiver of which I had thoughtfully restored to its hook, he discovered the shambles in his room and immediately erupted into a monumental tantrum, singular in its violence, volume, and intensity, screaming AHHH! AHWAH! AWW! NO! NO! It had been his skateboard punk friend Harry O. on the phone, and I spoke to him. He told me to tell Billy to leave him some money that Billy owed him. When I relayed the message to Billy, he looked under his bed to find the some emergency cash which he had stashed in a clay pot there. When he finally did find it, amid the shambles that his room had become, he discovered that there was nothing in it. Thirty dollars was missing. It was then that Billy flew into a foaming rage of nearly Hitlerian proportions. It was at that point that I saw fit to tell him that his friend Joe had been acting suspiciously when we had encountered him skulking in front of Elsie’s’ earlier that evening. Billy, realizing that once again he had been betrayed by someone he had trusted, yelled, “That Goddamn bastard, he was the only one who knew where that money was!”

I wanted at this point to cancel the trip to Brighton. C. wouldn’t hear of it. C. was up for just about anything. She spent her adolescence in the hinterlands surrounded by roughnecks, bikers, drug dealers, and ex-convicts. Nothing much could faze her. So we all of us crowded into the spiffily-attired Dave Colburn vehicle. Once we had ventured forth, we discovered that Dave couldn’t drive all that well. Perhaps this was due to his NYC upbringing. Even though he was stone cold sober, and he was not particularly reckless or inept, due to the bewildering directions that Billy supplied him, and the homicidal nature of Boston drivers, he nearly got us killed—twice--on the way to Brighton. This might also have had something to do with the general craziness quotient of the passengers. He was probably pretty nervous, and who wouldn’t be, knowing the C. and I were probably the sanest people in the car, and that we were snuggled together in the death seat, unable to quell the incipient riots erupting with alarming frequency in the back seats of the vehicle.

On our arrival at the K of C in Brighton, and following our entrance, we were confronted by a drab hall with wooden floors and some rather incongruous Christmas lights strung in a devil-may-care fashion along the two-foot-high mantel shelf. The dance floor was a sort of squared rotunda of no more than 2000 square feet. The band occupied a stage of adequate length, but precariously narrow width, and the stage itself, along with a portion of the dance floor, was strewn with flowers, mostly roses, and multicolored streamers. In another, smaller room was a bar, which we didn’t end up visiting very often. Because we all had smuggled in beer. Largely on Billy’s insistence. (Billy also brought in a tape recorder, which I was expected to attend to, and mostly did, desultorily.) The pre-show music, transmitted by means of a primitive public address system, was eclectic and included the Jonathan Richman song “I’m Gonna Walk.”

First up was Salem 66, whose set was mostly raucous wails and screeching guitars. I think they performed their song “Playground”, which featured the lyrics, “My love is a playground and you can do what you want.” Lyrics which seemed singularly apropos to the evening. Far more interesting than the band were the dancers, who slowly crept out onto the dance floor following the drunk and uninhibited example of myself and C. The personalities of these people did not shine. But the variety of their costumes did. Fine young gentlemen and their ladies were clothed in a strange mélange of fashions from the 1960s, black-on-black art school togs, and khaki and leather clothing of the type mostly favored by members of military and Hell’s Angels. I saw the first miniskirt I had seen in about ten years.

I don’t recall much of the Dangerous Birds set. Headliners Xmas were not half-bad. Anyway, they did succeed in driving people to the dance floor. And inspired me and C. to new heights of exhibitionism. C. wrapped her legs around my thighs. I picked her up by the ass and from that position she launched kicks at the faces of unoffending people standing on the sidelines. Then, Billy Ruane joined the fun, and, in his inimitable and lovably cunning fashion very nearly managed to turn what had been merely a jive sock-hop for overgrown adolescents into a catastrophic mass brawl. As Billy commenced his spastic dance-psychodramatics, in which I joined him, things began to get wild. C. did a gypsy dance, with a rose between her teeth. I got beer thrown on my face and clothing and was very nearly clobbered by some bruisers who thought that the mock-fight which had erupted on the dance floor between myself and Billy was in earnest. (They later apologized, and told me that they didn’t realize that it was all merely a part of the entertainment.) I wrapped C. in streamers, guzzled beer, screamed in the coming of Easter at midnight, behaved like a total fool, and pretty much had the time of my life. C. danced as though she were in the middle of a barroom brawl. Billy surpassed himself once again with tortured physical pyrotechnics which would have done a Yogi proud. The dancing increasingly became a form of modified slam dance that was more knock-down and sprawl and crawl than the wimpy striking of sparks such as seen on the West Coast. Billy himself took to the stage while Christmas played, and what he said and did while he was up there has been lost to history, unless Liz or Michael remembers, or unless somehow the cassette tape commemorating that evening has been preserved.

On the ride back to Central Square, C. and I were once again snuggled together in the death seat, mostly because I didn’t trust any of the people in the back seat to refrain from molesting her. This fact must have been obvious, for it seemed to agitate Billy, who, at first, said nothing. C. and I began drinking what was left of the remaining Budweiser that had been stashed in the car as quickly as we could. Billy, seated in the back, hollered for the driver to put Wolfman Jack on the radio. I proposed that instead, we all sing “Chantilly Lace.” This irritated Billy, who snarled, “None of that creative shit!” He also began loudly saying things like “Aww…look at the lovebirds.” Once we were in Central Square, Billy said, with a disputative jeer, “Why don’t we just let the lovebirds off here?” We grabbed a few more Buds for the road, and, thankful to be still alive, we returned to my apartment.

May 1982. John Carey: “[That] spring, some Harvard drama group put on an outdoor, peripatetic performance of Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe. In accordance with the playwright's own wish that 'in the future, all persons performing, presenting, reading or publishing Mystery-Bouffe should change the content, making it contemporary, immediate, up-to-the-minute', the character of Rod Stewart had been added to the dramatis personae - and this was the role allotted to Billy. In a pair of skin-tight leopard trousers, gyrating and shrieking himself nearly mute, he was a fantastic spectacle; but I wonder whether the real Rod Stewart was ever half so frenetically Dionysian. “

I lived over Hi-Fi Pizza at 494 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square from 1979 to 1994. Billy stayed at my apartment when I was away in Pennsylvania for 13 weeks, in what was probably the late summer of 1982. [Years later, in 1987, he stayed there again, briefly, in my absence, and was allegedly nearly shot by the teenaged kid upstairs who had gotten hold of a loaded pistol and had fired it into the floor.]
John Carey: On one of the few occasions when I ventured into the now-defunct, and at the best of times ironically-named, Friendly Eating Place - an establishment which I had always instinctively felt to be shadowed by ill omen - I encountered Billy. He was without anywhere to stay, and I impulsively said that he could spend a few days in the apartment, across the street from the Middle East, which I shared with Francis DiMenno and two other friends. This turned out not to have been a very good idea, for reasons which there's no point in going into here; but now, at the comfortable distance of many years, I'm glad it happened. He was subsisting largely on NoDoz, and on more potent pills obtained from official sources. ('They gave me pills to speed me up, and pills to slow me down again; and I thought, What's the point of that? I'll just take the speedy ones.') But one of the things which I remember best is his staring in something like amazement as I sewed a button back onto my shirt. He asked me what I was doing that for, and shook his head as I tried to explain. 'I don't have time for that,' he said; and indeed his own shirt was held together with safety pins.

Erik Rieselbach: I mostly remember him cursing our rotary dial phone while he was staying at 494 --the extra ten seconds it took to dial a seven-digit number drove him up the wall. And he hated the Beatles, or at least claimed to.

Letter to EMD 11-3-83: My one close friend in the Boston area, other than my three roommates, is Billy R., and he gets on my nerves quite a bit sometimes.

Letter to RMS 8-11-84: “as for Billy…he lives in Boston and, according to a mutual friend, seems to be doing better than ever: I’m lucky if I see him once a month …I suppose come September I’ll be seeing more of him….according to this mysterious third party, [Billy has] stopped drinking (also stopped eating No-Doz)….

Letter to ER dated 11-11-84. Chet lets me into to see a show 1-13-85 after “dropping Billy Ruane’s name several times (which drew a guardedly neutral response from Chet).”

Letter to C. dated 5-30-85: On Saturday May 25th I ran into Billy at Haymarket and he invited me to the beach. The day was overcast so instead of the beach we went to this party at a place called the E-Ranch in Allston that took place all day Sunday May 26. It was mostly musicians, as it turns out, including the sister and the father of the drummer for Scruffy the Cat, and assorted other miscellaneous luminaries. At this party they 1) handed out blank pinback buttons for you to write your own name on; 2) had a slide show; 3) played mostly punk/new wave/thrash; 4) had multicolored macaroni salad (a large bowlful of which I took home with me; 5) had an orgy upstairs (they invited me, but I didn’t attend); played crazy 8s in the kitchen (or tried to); 7) had a huge bowl of soupy Jello in which old pork ribs and Crayola crayons were floating.

On Memorial Day Monday May 27, Billy, Karen, Karen’s friend, and a writer named Tim and I went to Scituate beach, Karen’s old stomping grounds. …

July 27th, 1985. I asked Billy was the Great American novel would be about. He said, “Horatio Alger and Marguerite Young, I dunno.” This, from the man who loaned me his copy of The Hucksters, a 1940s novel by Frederick Wakeman. Who turned me on to the movie The Sweet Smell of Success and Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted.

August 1985. A fellow named Sergio ties up in a Central Square apartment. I assist him in this operation. He offers Billy a snort of heroin. His first. I see him accept it. He likes it. Sergio offers me one. I decline. Sergio then tells me that when he went to Roxbury to get it, and when the shotguns came out, Billy hid under the seat of the car and cowered.

August 1985. Lest I forget, Billy was at my very first stand-up comedy performance, at an open mike held at T.T. the Bears, a most unlikely venue (though they have also hosted the likes of Barry Crimmins, a big hero of mine.) Billy, bless his memory, got loud and confrontational with the one of the two MCs when it looked as though he wasn’t going to put me on until the very end. He publicly insisted I go on in the middle of the proceedings (rather than dead last as befitted a neophyte). Having since myself MC’d innumerable open mikes, comedy and otherwise, I now know that pretty much no act is more guaranteed to antagonize and alienate an MC than a preemptory challenge such as that one. Amazingly, the MC caved in to Billy’s demand. And I was terrible. Ill-prepared and nervous—literally quivering with anxiety, under the glare of the scowling MC I made every mistake possible. Basically, I blew 90 per cent of my lines. I did not do credit to myself. Nonetheless, Billy laughed. Making up for everything (almost). Subsequent performances were better. (They could hardly have been worse). Some actually got laughs (from people other than Billy Ruane).

Regarding T.T’s: He was very fond of one of my bits in particular. “My family was so rich that, at Christmastime, when I was bad, I didn’t get coal in my stocking—I got anti-matter.”

Years later, Billy’s father, unbeknownst to me, sat in on one of my comedy sets at the Middle East afternoon open mike. Afterwards, Billy told me that his old man didn’t think I was funny. “What does he know about comedy?” I demanded. Billy replied, “He’s friends with Bob and Ray. (Legendary stars of radio. Two of my boyhood idols. If I had known that at the outset, I might have asked Ruane Sr. for some pointers.)

At Stitches in 1985, when I appearing onstage with Elaine Garcia-Gold, I never dreamed that seven short years later she'd be drooled over by repugnantly senescent Bob Hope. Was she innovative? Not really. Did she have the looks? Yes. And the determination, the discipline, and the connections? Yes. She was responsible for me being blackballed from Stitches Comedy Club for my drunken antics in 1986, when on 3/14/1986 I insulted her at this MIT pub open mike called The Thirsty Ear. Turns out she was pals with the MC at Stitches, George MacDonald. (Strangely enough, she made an appearance at the Middle East Open Mike on February 3, 1989, back when it was run my Jeffrey Gagnon and myself)

Circa 1985, I was in a funk. Billy took me to see Mr. Butch and the Holy Men and Jaxxt at Chet’s. A wild night. Mr. Butch’s band cleared six dollars. Chet paid them in beer. (Lou Giordano is sitting on a reel-to-reel can of Jaxxt performances. I sure would like to hear that some day.)

1986: T. Max and I conspired to promote Billy Ruane in the Noise.

1986 Condo Pygmies Loft Party at 100 Harrison Avenue, Boston 3-8-86
Billy got up during the second set and performed an insanely vigorous version of “Louie Louie” (which he thoughtfully dedicated to the recently deceased musician Richard Manuel). After the music, at about 2am, I was called up to do comedy. There were about 50-75 people there, and the following ensued:

Billy: Francis DiMenno, where are you?
Crowd member: hey-yay!
Billy: The microphone, where are you…our stand-up comedian…Francis, entertain!
Assorted crowd exhortation. I ascend the stage.
Francis: I’m sorry…I guess I…I guess I never should have come up here…no, really, I’m too drunk…
Billy: No, we love you, Francis!
Francis: We…love…you…Francis…
Billy: But you hate us!
Francis: We love you Francis…soothing balm to an ear accustomed to taunts and insults…ooo—oo—ooo—oo….
Billy: Francis, shut up! Francis!
Francis: All right, that’s enough….
Billy: No, keep going, Francis!...Speak into the mike, keep going….


Letter to Kristen dated 12-29-86 re 12-23-86:
Tuesday, December 23, 1986. I gave a party at my apartment. Mostly college cronies, theatre people, comedians, musicians. Billy Ruane came late. Meg Herbig, the comic, was notably unimpressed with Billy, who ignored everybody he didn’t know and insisted on playing Christmas records by the likes of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. (Christmas records which, in fact, only days before, he had given me.) Meg was not notably impressed with my behavior either. This included getting a mean glow on and playing stuff like Mingus’s Black Saint and, in general, obnoxiously attempting to dominate the overall proceedings in my inimitable fashion. The party broke up at around 11pm. The next day, my roommate Andrew Morvay said that the reason he and Billy had left early was because I had taken off Dean Martin singing “It’s a Marshmallow World” and instead slapped on some obscure jazz. I accused [Andrew] of acting like a “Magyar moth hovering around the Ruane flame” and he got so mad he tried to kick me. He said because of the reference to Hungarians. Later, he admitted that he was sensitive about always having to follow people around instead of having people follow him. Anyway, Xmas Eve I basically sat at home and did nothing….

Letter to ER dated 4-4-87
March, 1987. Tony Millionaire is this friend of Billy’s who is said to be marked man on Mission Hill, where he has been accused of devil-worship mostly because he gave this wild party where there were all these dead steer heads. Tony was supposed to be at some WMBR radio show at MIT where Billy was given an hour tin which to play stuff like Shirley Bassey, Harry Belefonte, Nancy Sinatra, Vicki Carr, Sammy Davis Jr., Tom Jones and Troy Cory, as part of what Billy modestly dubs as “Ruane’s Mainstream”. Tony was supposed to do some guest singing but he gets up too late in the morning and therefore didn’t make it over to the station until it was too late. After the show, we retire top Billy’s place, Tony riding on the back of Billy’s scooter. There we drink Woodpecker Cider (five percent alcohol; “almost as good as beer” says Billy) and listen to fantabulous tunes until the setting sun grumbled on the brim of the cold sky.


1987: Billy was at the debut performance of my second play, co-written with
Bill Tivenan, titled By the Same Hand. It was staged by the Alley
Theatre in Inman Square in the summer of 1987. I was perpetually drunk
for much of the time on cheap Brazilian beer bought by the case at a
bodega a couple of blocks away from the theatre. So I don’t remember
an awful lot about it. Except that, tragically, the lady who ran the
bodega was murdered by a robber who was never caught not long
afterward.

The play was roundly panned in the Herald, and Tivenan’s playwriting
mentor scolded him: “You should have workshopped it some more!”
Trouble was, we had work-shopped it. Plenty. We gave the mostly black
cast a great deal of leeway in helping to shape and interpret the
storyline, which was set in the context of the Newark riots of 1967.
It was really Bill Tivenan’s play—he had lived through the events in
question. I had essentially added some linking scenes and some
stagecraft. Again…we tried. Strangely enough, Bill Tivenan became
convinced that Spike Lee’s 1988 film Do the Right Thing bore a
suspicious resemblance to By the Same Hand. I scoffed at the time, but
now I’m not entirely sure that Bill was mistaken.

July of 1988. Billy was there at the staged readings of three of my one-act plays performed at the Alley theatre and performed under the collective title “Life in the Afternoon.” His honking, nasal laughter punctuated the proceedings. Thankfully, this was during the middle play, a dark comedy about a dying man tormented by a garrulous parrot titled “Pretty Bird”. Afterwards, there was a Q&A about the three plays and Billy, bless his soul, put me on the spot with several probing questions pertaining a playwright with whose work I was (and still am) unfamiliar. I still have a videotape of it somewhere.

1988. Billy quits working at the Rare Book Room to focus on promoting shows.

I had always been interested in comedy, probably since about the age of five. Though all the more so at age 17, when I first saw Dustin Hoffman in the Bob Fosse film Lenny. Billy not only encouraged my initial forays into stand-up, but he was also instrumental in getting me back on stage after my interest in the life of stand-up had somewhat lapsed.

Billy got me to perform comedy again at the 1369 club in Inman square, after eighteen months of getting nowhere and another twelve months of sporadic out-of-town performances, none of which went well. The twelve month hiatus was a hiatus which was nearly too long.

Billy encouraged me to cultivate the acquaintance of Jeffrey Gagnon, aka J.Gags. I had already met him at a party in Somerville. He was wearing a tattered t-shirt with a picture of a brontosaurus with a cigarette in its mouth drawn upon it with black magic marker, and the caption “Smoker.” He was excessively drunk.

J. Gags ran an open mike at the 1369 on early Tuesday evenings which he called The Big Black Book. At the time I had been working for nearly three years as a library assistant at the Harvard Law School International Legal Studies Library. The head honcho there offered me a full-time job, but I turned it down. I thought it would interfere with my newly rejuvenated comedy career. They offered the job instead to Steve Helfer, with whom, incidentally, I performed at the 1369, under the moniker The Alcoholics, named after the Jim Thompson novel. (Steve wasn’t that thrilled with the name. Anyhow, it didn’t matter, since we only performed together once.) By July of that year, they had laid me off. I was unemployed for seven weeks until landing at the Kennedy School. The Sate Brothers put me to work in the kitchen. Washing pots. Then as a dishwasher. They later told me that I was the best dishwasher they had ever had. Quite a distinction. They also had me assist them with other dirty chores. I’ll not soon forget helping them replace a sump pump in the basement. I also had plenty of spare time to assist Billy and Mike and Eric and Jen with day to day operations, for which I was usually paid, if at all, with a small percentage of the door. Or, more often, out of the bar.

The 1369 had money problems. J. Gags had started there in mid-March but by the late summer he eventually migrated over to the Middle East, where he lasted until March of 1989, though that’s another, and different story, and one for another time and place. I will mention that the Saters seemed to have trouble with the name “J.Gags” and always referred to Jeff as “Wild Man”. He was indeed, a sight to behold. Often unshaven, with a shaggy and very dirty mane of hair and of a decidedly robust and athletic constitution, he was, by his own account, a jock turned musician from Central Pennsylvania, very much influenced by John Hovorka and other gritty purveyors of songs celebrating the hard-luck working man. Gags and I co-hosted the Big Black Book at the Middle East, but he wanted more money than the Saters were willing to pay him, and so eventually he moved on and I inherited the position almost by default, although I also did everything I could to maneuver my way into the spot. Working alongside videographer Jody Urbati was a local character (later known as “Uncle Scam”) named Tom Newell (aka Tom Blue, who was the semi-official Middle East videographer until I took over that role as well, in January of 1990.) I have him (and Billy) to thank for an affiliation with Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) which lasted for 15 years.

At the 1369 I had mostly just gotten up on the tiny stage there and told dirty jokes—in which I am thoroughly steeped—and this modest stage rebirth eventually became a springboard for J. Gag’s Big Black Book to move to the ME. Black Book eventually came FSAD’s Café Cabaret, the ME open mike. My nearly six-year involvement with the ME was due to Billy alone. In 1989 and 1990 he got me to perform at Catch a Rising Star so I could hone my comedy chops.

[dimenno]

THE MIDDLE EAST YEARS
The contemporary musical programming now offered at The Middle East Café came about from Billy Ruane’s late-1987 involvement with Skeggie from Lifeboat and Joey Harvard from Local 187.

Helldorado. “Music for ten dozens.” First three shows:

Tuesday, January 26.
Tuesday, February 9.
Tuesday, February 23.

I kept these documents. Nobody at the time knew how long it was going to last, or if it was going to last at all. The smart money would have bet against it. But somehow, it gathered momentum and force. The Saters had a great deal to do with it. The years of Billy’s most concentrated involvement with the booking of the Middle East years were essentially from January 1988 to approximately October 1990. His direct involvement with the business was comparatively short. There was a somewhat more lengthy period of indirect involvement as well. Both served to lay the groundwork for the empire which now comprises The Middle East Up and Down, the Bakery, Zuzu’s, and other enterprises. At the time the Middle East was founded, musicians complained about the lack of venues. (Though musicians seemingly always make this complaint.) They were correct in so doing. (Though it seems to me that the situation was nowhere near as dire as it was in the first half of the 1980s.)

By 1988 there was T.T. the Bear’s on Brookline Avenue, next to the Middle East. Across the River was the Rat. Venues such as Bunratty’s in Allston and Green Street Station in Jamaica Plain also provided people with places to play. But there were perhaps only a dozen viable venues and well over 2000 bands in the area. You can do the Math. Assume an average of three shows per night, five nights a week, 52 weeks a year. 780 performances. About 8000 performances for 2000 bands. On average, then, a typical band could get booked to play an average of four times a year. Assuming they could even get booked in the first place. The point of all this math was that there were too few venues even offering so much as an inaugural opportunity to fledgling bands, let alone any positive encouragement. If nothing else, the Middle East Club was a great incubator for new talent, and for musicians in established bands who wished to do solo turns. (To be fair, T.T.’s next door also rendered this service, at least as early as 1985.)

Joe Harvard, Skeggie Kendall and Billy Ruane decided that a new club was needed.

Joe Harvard: A few days after [Billy’s 30th Birthday] show we were talking on the phone and Skeg and I both hit on the same idea: Boston needed a new room, WE needed a new room. The attrition rate for clubs was far outstripping the replacement rate, to the point where whoever was booking a place like the Rat became akin to some fucking autocratic poobah and the bands who'd helped build that place couldn't get a phone call answered. A call was made to Billy. He'd barely answered before laying the same idea on us, and hey presto! A ‘club’ was born. Of course, we still had to talk Joe and Nabil into the whole idea! They owned the place! Billy hit the brothers first, and returned to report that they were a bit cool on the idea. So we all three returned to gang up on them.

Eventually, Joe and Skeggie decreased their involvement with the venue, and Billy became the man in charge. Joe Harvard: “Billy was the real mover behind the booking policy; he truly found his niche and did a fantastic job getting the place off the ground.” What happens when you put a wild, self-destructive Shaman of the tribe in charge of the community’s Dionysian rituals at a venue hitherto devoted primarily to ethnic Greek and Arabic music? Is it any surprise if he should attract other wild shamanic self-destructive types to re-enact those rituals? G.G. Allin. Lisa Suckdog. Mr. Butch. And too many others to even name.

The Middle East. January 1988. Heavy metal and the blues are popular with club owners
because their fans drink lots of beer. I’m not making this up; this is what a club owner once told me. Billy wanted something different. A private club filled with like-minded individuals who would actually sit quietly and listen to the music. Kind of like a jazz club, only with avant-garde rock and solo performers. “Unplugged” before the concept of “unplugged” had caught hold.

Billy wrote all the liner notes for the Helldorado flyers. As far as I know. Who else would have, could have?
Chris Rich: “Fate gave Boston an overly generous dollop of grifters and Billy was their catnip. Boston is insular and stodgy so it viewed the like of him as an irritant. The Boston Rock scene was a ridiculous egocentric shark pit from hell in its prime with Technicolor narcissism. Boston was soaked in heroin and blow with mobsters on the periphery. At least one club owner bullied Billy to a breaking point. Billy bullying was a sport. This was his working world for most of his life. It took lots of energy. No internet, endless mailings, hours on the phone and Billy would agonize about some band he supported to the point of zooming over to other crowded clubs on his scooter to hand out his small funny Helldorado fliers cause he wasn't gonna let that band down, dammit. He might hit 5 dumps in a night.”

You won’t catch me saying that Joe Harvard as an asshole and Skeggie Kendall was something of a dope, and that Billy Ruane was the sole mastermind behind Helldorado. Joe and Skeggie had a great deal on the ball, or Helldorado never would have gotten off the ground. But I will say that I didn’t see much of Skeggie or Joe once the summer rolled around. They basically dropped out after six months and their involvement became sporadic. By then it was essentially me, Jennifer Cares, and Billy, plus the soundmen Mike Higgins and Eric Doberman, and, later, Andrew Lypps, and the shows had gone from two per month two at least three per week and frequently more. It was all the upstairs of course; the Vouros Bakery (aka “The Greek’s) had just been taken over from its previous tenant and wasn’t yet a performance venue (and wouldn’t be for about another two years) and the downstairs was still an abandoned bowling alley, and Zuzu’s wasn’t even thought of yet.

Billy needed a buffer between himself and the Saters. He would sometimes drive them to distraction. With Billy, it was always MORE. That buffer was frequently Jennifer Cares. And me.

I may (or may not) have written the first song about Billy Ruane to be publicly performed, in August of 1988, at the Middle East. (If anyone out there has a prior claim, I apologize in advance, but do come forward.) It was part of a Hillbilly duet worked up by myself and Timothy Maxwell of the Noise. It was called “the Ballad of Young Bill”. The melody bore more than a passing resemblance to that of the 1930s vaudeville hillbilly song “Ma, Pa and Me” by Rex Cole and His Mountaineers (aka Arthur Fields and Fred Hall). The lyrics are not the worst I have ever written. For the record:

Who’s that dancin’, sprayin beer?
Young Billy
I warn you people don’t come near
Young Billy
They say he’s crazy, that’s no lie—
They call him Bill-i-illy
And he is my pal.

Ride a scooter late at night with
Young Billy
If you want to risk your life with
Young Billy
He steers as straight
As a rattlesnake
They call him Bill-i-illy
And he is my pal.

Who’ll always feed a starving bum?
Young Billy
Who’ll feed him whiskey, beer and rum?
Young Billy.
They say he’s crazy, that’s no lie—
They call him Bill-i-illy
And he is my pal.

Who booked us here at the Middle East?
Young Billy
Alone and dancing to our beat was
Young Billy
They say he’s crazy, that’s no lie—
They call him Bill-i-i-i-illy!

Needless to say, Billy got an enormous kick out of both the song and the performance.

Note: I have found since that pride of place might have to be given over to Ed “Moose” Savage and the band Siamese Triplets with a song called “Go To Helldorado” from February of 1988, although it was only actually recorded in November of 2010.) .


A typical day at the Middle East? Billy bustling about. Always bustling. Seldom in any one place. A glory to behold; Blake’s paradigm on energy as “eternal delight”. A quintessential host, majordomo, blackslapping pol. “Swilling the planters with bumbo,” as George Washington put it. “Watering the talent,” as the nightclub lingo had it. Not to mention feeding them. Catering to their needs. Not in a slow, solicitous manner, like a Marcus Welby or a Robert Young. More like in a frenzied doctor forced to perform check-ups in a triage situation. Cursory but thorough. Everyone must feel welcome. The same with his ministering to the bands. He always needed to be somewhere else, but he could never seem to completely tear himself away. Everybody needed to feel welcome. Even the unpaid guests, who by July or August of 1988, were myriad. More of these made it into the Middle East upstairs despite the best efforts of his co-conspirators—at that time, Jennifer Cares and myself—despite all the stern resolutions to keep the comps to a minimum. “Everyone pays,” was Billy’s mantra. With the unspoken proviso: “Except.” There was the rub. Except the media. And the guests of the bands. And their plus-ones. And the staff from other clubs: “professional courtesy.” And the scene hangers-on--who never paid, ever. And, oh, why not let that crazed carrot-topped skateboard punk in for free, too, while we’re at it. He’s probably homeless. Anyway, he has no money. Or so he says. And he’s so persistent. Anybody who wants anything so badly ought to have it.

Billy was no cold-hearted businessman. He was no Don Law. More like his precise opposite. More like Don Lawless.

Plus, of course, there were also the local musicians who absolutely NEEDED to see a certain act. These were always ushered in. Maybe they’d buy some beer. Or maybe Billy would simply bring them some. He was always hustling foaming pitchers of beer from the bar, to the predictable consternation of one or other or both of the Sater Brothers, who surely must have been appalled to see their profits being poured down the ungrateful gullets of insatiably thirsty freeloaders.

And so what if the band didn’t make enough at the door to pay their guarantees? Out-of-towners in particular often asked for, and got, a guarantee. Even if there was no chance in hell the door would ever take in enough to enable Billy to pay it. When the door came up short—and nine times out of ten, it seemed, it did--Billy would have me, or someone else, wheedle some cash out of the Saters to make up the guarantee. More than once he had to chip in some money from his own pocket.

Letter to BM 9-7-88
Wednesday September 7, 1988. This afternoon at the Open Mike about eight paying customers manage to make it into the Middle East and we have to have eighteen to twenty people before I make anything at all in the way of a salary. Jeff got sixty dollars at the 1369 but here they only guarantee twenty and business was so bad I had to settle for fifteen for the whole night. So Jeff got twenty-three dollars and he’d said already that he wouldn’t do it for anything less than thirty. To make matters worse, tonight Billy had to guarantee the two evening bands two-hundred dollars and so far they’ve only pulled in one-hundred and ten dollars so unless eighteen people magically appear in the next hour Billy will be out ninety dollars. Two tweedy yups yelp “too loud” and split. Right now Joseph—the permanently exasperated brother—is having a fit about having to feed the musicians after 8:30pm. I managed to get the drummer a few pieces of lamb and some chicken. If business doesn’t start picking up around here, there’s going to be some changes made. The mother of one of the band members has just spilled some beer all over the table and insists on going and mopping it up. From now on, comes the word on high, we can’t feed or water any of the talent after 8:30pm. They also don’t want us keeping the rear door open during Jeff’s open mike from 6 to 8pm. Joseph wants to put up formica boards on the Brookline Street side advertising the club’s Monday to Thursday rock schedule. T. Max wants to give a 7th anniversary party for the Noise at the Middle East instead of at Green Street Station. Billy doesn’t like the idea. (How did I ever get involved with this political stuff in the first place?)

Tuesday September 13, 1988. Tuesday night I was sort of in and out of the Middle East. The place was cleared out by midnight but this raunchoid blues-rock band called the Visigoths was pretty good towards the end; it was kind of touching, them playing so hard for, I dunno, about twenty people. The headliners, Vasco Da Gama, did a pretty stupendous multi-instrumental dance cabaret protest ensemble schmear.

Wednesday September 14, 1988. I get to the Middle East at about 5:20pm for the 6pm open mike and nobody’s there, none of the microphones are set up, none of the chairs and tables are set up, and to make matters worse, I have no idea how to operate the soundboard. Well, I learned pretty quick. The night before, Billy told me that the Wednesday night band cancelled and that we could fill the whole night with the open like if we wanted to. Then this Jazz/rock ensemble called Strange City, Inc. drops by and I rope them into coming back later to fill out the evening. At about 5:55 Billy calls and tells me where he hid the microphones and fortunately does not inquire as to whether Jeffrey Gagnon has shown up. In walks Jeff at about 6pm. The jazz guys are helping me set up the mikes and soundboard. I open the show with a monologue, “Tyler Texas.” The show gets rolling, finally, around 6:30. Some folks I know from the library as well as the Wellesley contingent Carolyn and Kristen and Gretchen and Barbara eventually show up. This queer old coot who was wearing an impossible-to-envision green and brown checked garment which only resembled a jacket comes in. He says he’s Lightning Slim Number Two and he says he wants to play some blues. He does, beautifully, for about twenty minutes, accompanied by Charles on Sax. Then this allegedly famous guy, “Fast Freddy from Hollywood”, who was on TWERS on Tuesday and who Billy dragooned into coming down for the open mike did seventeen minutes of voodoo gumbo beatnik poetry with burning incense in a beer mug and accompanied by harsh shrill sax bleating and hollers. Pretty keen. Then we had a few comics from Stitches—Brendan, lee, and an old friend of Billy’s, Greg DeVore, who did this brilliant and twisted monologue in the persona of a former drill sergeant wearing a dress. Then this woman, who had a sticker on her guitar case that says “God Is Love” played some pretty little tunes for about twenty minutes. I went up at about 8:05 and did twenty-six minutes, then Steve went up, accompanied by Brian Stiglmeier, making his stage debut on tambourine. The jazz band putzed around for about twenty minutes with the sound, then the bass player split, “to get his guitar strap” )and maybe to call as many of his friends as possible), By 9:20 the guitar player started; by 9:30 the Wellesley girls had split to go to the Plough. The band did about an hour; I got up and did five; they did another forty minutes; and I got up at 11:00 and did another five and closed the show. I managed to scrape up some food and drink for the band, and five bucks apiece. My own take was $4.61, and eleven cents of that I found on the floor. Billy comes in and wants me to stamp some posters from a September 29th Rat gig, but then he loses some white envelope and goes raging about and I’m left to put up the chairs and put away the mikes and I don’t get home until midnight. No sign of Billy, who says he’ll call but never does. Billy says he wants to rent a spare room in my apartment for storage and will pay $150 bucks a month but he won’t actually live there.

Sunday September 18, 1988. Greg Devore drives me back from Stitches and I decide to drop in at the Middle East to say hello to Jennifer. She has some hip ailment and is truly ill and I’m concerned enough to tell her I’ll be back at 9pm to check on her and take over her shift if need be. Sure enough, at ten minutes to nine I get there and she’s gone to the hospital and Billy’s frantic and everyone wants me to stay and do the door and so I do. First up is this God-awful skronk band from God knows where called Dig, and then it’s this somewhat more acceptable acid-hippie-anarchy-post-punk psycho-delic crew called Jasmine Love Bomb, and then 11th Dream day from Chicago, and finally a pick-up band with folks from Blood Oranges and Big Dipper called Crush who sound somewhat awful and afterwards Joseph is bitching about the $300 (read $100) worth of booze that Billy gave away and as usual, I’m in the middle, trying to placate Joseph without making Billy sound bad, or getting Billy irritated at me for presuming to apologize for him. You can bet that by one a.m. I had lapped down quite a few dark ales. T. Max was there, along with Byron Coley from Forced Exposure magazine—when I introduced myself a slightly baffled and scornful look crossed his face but all in all he was quite civil enough.

Letter to BM 9-22-88.
Wednesday September 21, 1988. The open mike was a big success—we pulled in about fifty paying customers, though about three-fifths of them were there to see Strange City Inc., the fusion duo who were the featured act. Unfortunately, no paying customers showed up later for soundman Mike Higgins’ band Hogs on Ice, an R-R-oldies type band who were a least-minute replacement for the scheduled band, Yes, Brazil….

Jeff I think is getting pissed because all-of-a-sudden I am exerting a stranglehold on the bookings for the open mike, due to pressure exerted by Billy R. This week we had a lot of comics—eight, all told, plus a featured band that played for half an hour—so that from 6:30 to 8:40 (we ran very late) I was more-or-less determining who would go up, and in what order. Jeff didn’t think very highly of Strange City and, at his urging, I booked a different act (Bob Wilson, a comic) for the 28th.

Thursday, September 22, 1988. Reggae band One World has attracted about 25 people of whom about 15 are paying customers. I’m at the ME with my friend John Hansen, who has just been talking with Billy Ruane about Cable Television, though Billy was also talking to his lawyer about beating a not-so-recent drunk driving rap. Earlier I had stopped by and got to talking with this fellow named John Barrasco from ASCAP. A self-admitted “failed musician.” I shared with him some of my half-formed theories of rock-as-religion but the sticking point seemed to be priests-as-ascetics vs. rockers and self-destructive and John said, regarding the music industry, “It’s all insecurity and low self-esteem. I woke up in a motel in Atlanta not knowing how I got there and decided there must be something better.”

At 12:35, even though it’s my night off I’ve gotten roped into helping break down after the show, but I don’t mind…much. The Saters are nice in a way that makes you want to do things for them

Wednesday October 5, 1988. At the open mike, this bearded, very drunk guy of about 40 years of age calling himself Thomas Roberts came in and at one point took the mike and got up onto the stage and talked incoherently about having played “with Arlo Guthrie for three years and with Arlo Guthrie Jr. for five years,” and then he went into some rap about his wife and how she threw him out and I was at the soundboard fiddling with the echo and he got so dizzy he fell off the stage and hit a table stage-side with his head and got cut, so I swabbed him with rubbing alcohol and fed him coffee, which was a big mistake because he heckled me for ten minutes or more,… After a break I went back to the club to work the door for Club Rhumbasa and Mackie (Afro-Caribe steel pans) and D.J. Thomas Alien (to whom volunteer soundman Mike had taken an avid dislike, due to his domineering prima donna behavior—just that evening, for his second show at the Middle east—I guess he used to be at Cantares or somewhere like that—he got frustrated at the sound problems and tore a microphone out of its mooring, damaging it). I tallied the take at the door: 40 people at three dollars, six people at two dollars and twenty-two at one dollar, plus a couple of stray donations, which brought the ante up to $157,of which fifteen dollars off the top (the house added another three dollars) was for expenses and another fifteen dollars went to bill as his ten per cent, and the remaining $130 was split 50/50 with the DJ (who had an enormously long guest list) and half with the eight guys in Club Rhumbasa (much to Mackie’s dissatisfaction. And I drank nothing but mineral water and flavored seltzers for the next two hours. After the open mike I decided to give throw a little party at my apartment at 494 Mass. Ave over Hi-Fi Pizza, but, alas, I couldn’t be there for much of it—had to work the door. My friend Carl Smith held the fort at the [arty—I had laid in a supply of Knickerbocker—Col. Carl Smith’s counsel—and much of it was drunk, much by Jeff Gagnon. So Jeff went downstairs to Hi-Fi Pizza later to order a slice and when they tried to fob off a cold slice on him—instead of a freshly baked one—our man Jeff demanded a fresh one because “the customer is always right”. The pizza man chased him out with a pizza pan so our boor stood outside on the sidewalk hollering “the customer is always right.” The cops came and took him to jail and when Kristen and Caroline came to bail him out he was still hollering “the customer is always right”. He ended up paying a ninety dollar fine. (He hasn’t managed to get into too much trouble since—he and Billy have come to some sort of arrangement as of 10-19, or so I am assured by Bill…

Wednesday October 19, 1988. The open mike is getting more and more crazed from week to week. The last three were pretty crummy. Jeff wants to get more money, Billy wants to give him less, and I’m stuck in the middle and getting broker by the minute. I spent the grocery money on records, expecting to get fifteen to twenty dollars for working the door for the Saturday, October 14th rap show, but the whole thing was a bust and the two paying customers demanded a refund. There were never more than twenty people there and half of them were goons from bands like the Eels that Billy bribed with free beer to come and keep order, which wasn’t necessary since the hordes of violent brawling teens that Billy feared would show up apparently had something better to do, so the upshot of it is that I was paid five dollars which I’m expected to live on until Wednesday. I’m not even sure Jeff is going to show up on the 24th….

Thursday October 20, 1988
Tonight Jennifer Cares was a no-show because she figured she would need police protection from the Reggae crowd and Billy figured she wouldn’t so I ended up working the door (which, after having spent four hours scrubbing racks in the Middle East kitchen I was in no mood to do). I had to deal with out ninety people, half of whom wanted to get in for nothing, and since it was a reggae night, I was Babylon personified and/or The Man (seeing as how I had to keep people from sneaking in through the back door). And when Jo the bartendress came up forty-two dollars short I had to play cop (and there was something suspicious going on…seems to me she pocketed quite a bit of the dough because even after I told her we were keeping track, a good ten to fifteen dollars in addition went unaccounted for).

Anyway, after the show this guy Mike was giving me grief because he wanted $150 to pay the prizewinners immediately after the show and when I told him that it was customary to wait until the end of the evening for their pay, they started acting as though there were some sort of conspiracy afoot to keep them from getting to sleep on time to get to their day jobs and when I told them to stop acting like pissants that’s when the shit hit the fan and Joseph had to step in and play “good cop” (and in the process, gyp the M.C.s out of half of the dough.)

Tuesday October 25, 1988
Galaxie 500/Beat happening show. Billy threw yet another fit on account of the promoter Marc Alghini’s alleged greed and ineptitude. Billy ended up hurling a ten dollar bill in Beat Happening’s face and I ended up spending twenty dollars in a futile effort to smooth things over (buying the Beat Happening LP and Girl trouble album and t-shirt).

Wednesday, October 26, 1988.
At two in the afternoon Billy calls me, frantic, saying we have to cancel the open mike because he’d booked Slaughter Shack and an African drum ensemble and four other bands and they needed the time to do sound check and I managed to persuade Bill to let us run from 6 to 7, though it ended up being more like 5:50-7:10. This comic named Michael Lee was pissed because we bumped him (so the feature act could do fifteen minutes instead of ten, so he wouldn’t be too sore to do a full half hour the following week.) We got the whole thing on videotape courtesy Tom Blue, this scruffy hippie Billy likes to hire to do videos.

Wednesday November 2, 1988. Same old story with the open mike—Billy losing money left and right virtually every night and he wants to videotape the open mike instead of giving money to Jeff and I told him that half the people who were there were there to see Jeff (though most of them don’t pay to get in, notably the Wellesley girls) and he looks at me and says, “We’ll just have to start over!” He hollered at me for pausing to eat a salad instead of immediately jumping up and nurse-maiding a mailing list sign-up sheet I’d just tended to a moment ago and I told him that if he didn’t get off my case I would throw the same kind of fit that he was so famous for throwing.

The open mike was pretty political this time around—I’ll just say that people were so impressed with Atlanta-based pinko punk folkie Chris Chandler that they chunked an extra ten bucks and change into the hat, particularly when Jeffrey mentioned that he was living out of his car.

Tuesday September 8. I skipped the benefit for Saundra Graham’s reelection and I’m glad I did because from what I heard later Billy had given this local jazz celebrity Stan Strickland a big guarantee and had to pay him most of it out of his own pocket. Jennifer Cares had wanted me to work that night but the previous Friday Billy had told me he wanted Jennifer at the door because she was much more diplomatic. Even though she hated Saundra Graham.

Wednesday November 9, 1988. Not so bad—I only made fifteen dollars—and only five for the open mike—but I got to leave early. Unfortunately, the door only took in fifty-five dollars all night and Billy had promised $210 and could only get Joseph to pitch in $25—the Saters are freaking out because business has been slow and they recently spent a lot of money to remodel the space (during Chandler Travis’ set on November 2nd some loose plywood sheetboard fell down with a resounding crash though fortunately nobody was hurt or even much more than mildly startled. There was a DJ who billed himself as Club Rey-Rey who also manages a seven-piece Latin dance Merengue combo called Destino, fronted by a white-suited Hispanic gent by the same name. Mike-the-volunteer-soundman was wisecracking about the music because he lived in the South End and it’s mostly Hispanic and he hears that kind of music all the time ….

January 3, 1989.
Kyle moves in to my apartment at 494.
Phone Log of calls for her.
1/5: Billy called 10:18pm.
1/6. Your father called 12:02pm
1/6 Billy called 6:12pm
1/6 Billy called 9:05 pm.
1/12 Call your house 8:47pm
1/13 Be at home by 5pm.
1/? Call Billy home or out 4:22 am.
1/31: Your father called—call back. 8:07pm.
Kyle in the interim was looking at several other apartments her father deemed more appropriate.
2/8 Call Beth Israel Hospital 1:41 pm.
2/16 Dr. Rosenblatt called, says he wants to at least “touch base” 1:38pm
2/17 Billy called 12:54am
2/17 Dr. Rosenblatt called 7:37am.
2/? Leave message on Billy’s machine as to when you’ll be in. After 9.
2/25 Your father called 6:04pm.
2/25 Billy will see you at the Rat if you go. 6:30pm.
2/25 Billy is asleep in the bakery…6:52pm
3/6 Billy called 1120pm.

The people living there had to put up with lovesick Billy calling and, when Kyle refused to return the calls, coming to the door at all hours. We also had to deal with Kyle’s furious Dad who wanted her the hell out of there. I remember him coming by to confront me about Billy, as though somehow because I was his friend I allegedly had some sort of influence over him. I remember me, acting out a scene from Mean Streets, with Kyle’s dad the loan-shark Michael, Me as Charlie, and Billy as Johnny-Boy: “I’ll talk to the kid…I’ll talk to him.”

Kyle: I knew Billy from roughly 1982 to his death with many periods of lengthy estrangement and limitations of my ability to be his friend. He was nevertheless the most pivotal figure of my life whose seemingly limitless ability to care for me often astounded me. Billy was everything to me that he was to acquaintances; solicitous, generous, kind, obstreperous, and just too much some of the time. Privately, he was analytic and cerebral over issues better served by undiluted sentiment at times. Yet at the core of Billy’s tendency to analyze all experience with withering precision and lengthy discourse was the manifestation of his real love for you and desire to make your life better for having examined it. It was off putting and somewhat scary to some but when he trained his intellect in the service of caring for another person there was a sense of personal sacrifice in what he was doing that inspired. I have so many happy memories of times with Billy which will have to serve me now; they are full of his wondrous and insatiable appetites for sensation and feeling as well as his intellect. Billy was so much more than a swaggering public showman and ambassador for music, as important as that role was to him and should be in our memories of him.

One of the things I am trying to get to grips with is Billy's love life. One of Billy's old
girlfriends, Kyle, sent me a short message. I happened to have witnessed his obsession with her first hand, since, in fact, Kyle was temporarily living in my apartment at the time. My impression is that Billy would fall madly in love with someone, and would be so obsessive that he would frighten him off. I have never heard of Billy, on the other hand, ever being stalked by any romantically inclined females

Oops--frighten HIM off? Freudian slip? Was Billy gay? I don't think so, but then again, I don't know for sure. He had a very bizarre friendship for many years with Greg DeVore. My ex-wife says that at our wedding one of her friends claimed that she saw Billy sitting on the lap of one of our mutual friends and kissing him. (She might have misunderstood. Billy had been known to get angry when accused of being a homosexual. Not that he was in any way a bigot. He just didn’t like people making assumptions about him.)

Not being able to easily coexist with the feminine gender and sensibility was Billy’s curse. I suspect that any woman smart enough to keep up with him, and keep him, would probably be wise enough to leave him before long.

Would Billy have “settled down” had he found what we conventionally call “the right girl”? Maybe, though I can’t really imagine what his life of domestic bliss would have been like. He would, no doubt, been wonderful when playing with the children. He was something of a big child himself. But what if the child were unruly, or fretful, or became sick, or was injured? I’m not sure how he would have reacted. And the big question is this: given the way he was, what woman would have put up with him long enough to foster forth a squalling brood?

November 5, 1989: The Mr. Butch show begins its run.

THE 1990S
Diary entries 1990-1.
Entry dated 1-21-1990.
Saturday afternoon, January 13, 1990. Mr. Butch from 2-3 made $7 (five dollars from Ed Hyde); Ed Hyde made $27, and Mike the Spike Zero.

Saturday afternoon January 20.
Butch made $9, Ed made $15, and Mike $13.

Saturday January 20, 1990.
J. Gags is going to be a problem. He wants half the profits and full credit. It will have to depend on how many people he brings in a. Joseph Sater is beginning to lose his patience with Jeff. I summoned Jeff into the Bakery to propose changes to the arrangement. Jeff loudly shouted that the Motherfolkers’ warm-up set on January 17 was too loud. Joseph took Jeff’s half-finished pint of dark beer and dumped it in the sink, told him he was drunk and asked him to leave. I ten sheepishly told Jeff that we wouldn’t be making any changes in the billing, but later that night I left a disgruntled message on Billy’s answering machine complaining about Jeff. Billy called me back and suggested I complain directly to Jeff.

Wednesday January 24, 1990.
Wednesday was an excellent open mike—17 performers and 20 spectators. Gags got $26, soundman Eric $15, myself $46, of which I gave $4 to [feature act] Roll With It, to round out their pay to $20, and also for giving me permission to broadcast the set. That evening, Billy got up mid second set and talked about his run-ins with the police for driving a scooter with a permit and DWI. I followed up with an account of being arrested in Georgia. (Billy blew my punch line and I said “I don’t knock the bottle out of your hand while you’re trying to have fun.” Billy seemed both blitzed and hyper—a dangerous combination.)

Thursday, January 25, 1990.
After work I went home, hung out reading for a half hour, then headed over to the Middle east. It was about 11:45—the woman who was working the door wanted to leave but Billy told her to hang out until one, I did the door from about 12 to 2:30. …An embarrassing contretemps occurred when we thought the door was $1,024 (on the basis of which Billy had promised Mickey Bones $850). It was actually $924. Mickey only got $779. I went through the breakdown with him and he said he believed me. Mickey, his girl, Eric and Roy [soundman at T.T.s] went over to my apartment after. MB and his girl left at about 3:15.

Wednesday January 31, 1990.
The open mike was ill-attended: I made $10, Jeff made $10 and asked Joseph for $10 more, which was in poor taste.

Saturday February 17, 1990. The Iris and Ofer Quartet were the evening show. They went on late; Billy screamed an ultimatum over the phone. I was drunk and stoned and they were highfalutin and annoyingly demanding and as a result of that show, Billy has cancelled the Wednesday open mike, moving it to the worst slot of all, Saturday from 12 to 2pm, though he didn’t bother informing me until Saturday the 24th that the last Wednesday would be the 28th. He promises to do some ticket giveaways to bring people in.

Wednesday February 21st. Iris and Ofer made a big stink about my doing the door and brought in their own guy; I was relegated to floater. Then they were upset because there was no audio on their video and demanded a thirty dollar refund on top of their forty-five dollar refund for mailing expenses. Billy threatened to fire me unless I surrendered the audio tape I had made on my own machine. Half of it was the open mike, so I refused, but later I called him and told him I had taped over it anyway, and he accepted that excuse.


Saturday, February 24, 1990. Me, Richard Smoley and Margie Patrie got to a party featuring the Pirhana Brothers at about 10:30. The band was holding forth in this basement which was so decrepit (Overhanging pipes and the like) that me and Richard speculated that it would cost 50K to replicate it [as a stage set]. Billy showed up, kind of crocked, around midnight. I obliquely accused him of stabbing me in the back. He said my behavior had been evil because lately “you’ve been so high…on yourself.” While saying this, he was trying to cook some hot dogs directly on a gas grill while swigging from a bottle of Budweiser, which later, much to his consternation, disappeared. I put the hot dogs in a pot with water and cooked them. He wolfed them down. Me, Richard and Marge later took Billy home to his place in Central Square at about 4am, and on his insistence. We entered his third floor apartment and listened to Paul McMahon tunes and saw a video of his in which he sang “Smash your crazy head against the win-dow-pane…curse the gods, the fucking gods who made you be this way.” Very indicative [I thought] of Billy’s feelings at the time. I talked to Billy for about five minutes. He said Cathy [Houlihan] and the Doughhead girls were taking over Sundays and getting him in Dutch with the owners and he wanted to move Saturdays to Sunday and put in Reggae on Saturdays. He pleased for my help and said he needed me on his side. I told him I was upset about the short notice on the Wednesdays (the Wednesday before I had told him that if he fired me it would be his loss and hung up on him) but that I would back him up. (He might have been mad at me because I was talking about videotaping the T.T.s Wednesday open jam; because he bought some shitty camera from Artie Freedman who used the money to turn around and buy superior equipment which the technicians had been urging on Billy all along; because I told Joseph (and particularly Nabil, who vehemently agrees) that 18-plus was not a good policy; because for weeks I’d promised Billy that the Wednesday open mike would end on time and it hasn’t (the 21st ran until 8:05 pm due to difficulties with the camera equipment; that I’d promised I wouldn’t MC the Wednesday evening shows anymore and went up four times before Iris and Ofer and insulted the audience; because the open mike costs the Club $30 and hasn’t always drawn enough people to cover expenses; because Billy wants to get rid of Jeffrey Gagnon (Jeffrey, in his turn, wants to get rid of Ed Hyde at Green Street on Tuesdays and has offered me the MC job; now Billy’s talking about bringing Ed Hyde back to the ME on Saturdays); because I insult customers by Billy’s account; and should have been fired long ago; because people have complained about me to Billy; because I get drunk and/or stoned for the Wednesday evening shows (after promising I wouldn’t anymore) ; because I have two shows—once since August 21, 1988 and the other one since April 1, 1989 (unless you also count the Thursdays which ran from about November 1988 to around February of 1989 from 6 to 8) and they’ve taken a toll on me; because I’ve been spending Sunday to Tuesday in Providence and Thursday and Friday evenings at work and I haven’t been available for the Saturday 7 to 10 show.

Wednesday February 28, 1990. Final Wednesday Open Mike.

Wednesday, March 21, 1990. In the Club, in front of Cathy Houlihan, Billy said he’d fire me if I weren’t a welfare case. Cathy’s nice, but Mike isn’t working tonight or Saturday afternoon. Joseph just asked me if I’d be all right to work tonight and Eric isn’t as friendly as usual.

Wednesday, May 2, 1990.
188 (225) X-Tal
65 (80) BL’HTA
40 (60) Mike
30 (35) FSAD
20 Mfolk
10 B&B
253 + 100 =353

May 6, 1990.
Libretto to BILLY BUDD, SUPERSTUD
[See Appendix One.]


Wednesday August 22, 1990
I used to be amused by Billy Ruane; now I am mostly dismayed and dreading each new outburst from him. I very nearly got fired three weeks ago for having two weeks previous to that blown off this guy from Downbeat who wanted a plus one. Billy himself very nearly got axed over a Psycho Drama bill which later he moved to Green Street. The Open Mike second anniversary was tonight, but we’re celebrating it on Saturday August 26th. Last week, the 19th, only one person showed up; two weeks ago, Ray McNeice, whom I’m apparently shepherding it, showed up, nonchalant but nonplussed.

MCLEAN’S ASYLUM
At age 32, weeks before his 33rd birthday, Billy was committed, essentially involuntarily. The actual details are somewhat murky. One version of the reason for this was because of “caffeine addiction”. This sounds ludicrous until one considers that Billy was known to consume up to 20 Vivarin tablets at a time, and as many as 40 a day, maybe more. Each pill carried a load of 200 mgs of caffeine. Each pill was the equivalent of 1.5 cups (12 ounces) of brewed coffee per day. 20 pills would equal 30 cups, and 40 would equal 60 cups of coffee. 8000 milligrams of caffeine. Balzac was known to have drunk two dozen cups of very strong coffee a day. Close to the same amount of caffeine, though nobody knows for sure. He did so to fuel his admittedly prodigious literary output. Balzac died at age 51. I quote an anecdote from Balzac’s “Treatise on Modern Excitants” (cited from page 104 of the High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs) regarding a man fed on nothing but coffee who “lasted two years”:

The man of coffee died burnt out, as if the fires of Gomorrah had roasted him to a crisp. You could have made lime out of him. In fact, somebody proposed that—but the experiment seemed contrary to the immortality of his soul.

Right around the time that Billy was committed I stopped drinking. Cold. It was like a switch had been thrown in my head. It probably saved my life. No AA, no focus groups, no psychiatrists, no interventions. Funny thing is, I worked at the Middle East fifty-one more months following that decision. I was surrounded by rivers of booze. All the free beer I wanted and I never touched one drop of it.

Billy, even while at McLean’s, was still trying to call the shots. Jody Urbati remembers him calling her from Maclean’s in 1990 to go and videotape a show.

A fuller account of Billy’s state of mind at the time was published in Noise #100.

Shortly after Billy’s hiatus, by about December of 1990 the first, old crowd was being pushed aside in favor of newcomers who were, in fact, long-time locals rather than transplants from elsewhere. Some of these folks like Cathy Houlihan, Dave Sheehan, and Jessica Victor became very dear friends. Others, not so much. No matter. Eventually, many of the newcomers were gone as well. The business chews you up and spits you out pretty quick. You have to have a certain temperament to endure it. Somewhat akin to that of an EMT or an ambulance driver or a fireman. Truly, fireman is most apropos. IN a nightclub, you are always putting out small fires. In chapter four of his autobiography, Dick Gregory several paragraphs to this topic, and although he is writing about the late 1950s in suburban Chicago, his description of the rigors of low-level show-biz still rings true today:

In January I loaded everything into the car and headed out to Robbins. Opening night was only hours away. Halfway out, I realized I had no change. At seven o'clock I opened the doors of the Apex Club and leaned back with a smirky smile to watch the people trample each other in the mad dash to get in.

1990: Rumor that Billy had Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love staying at his apartment.

It was some time at the end of October 1990, Billy was committed. We all saw it coming for about the past four months.

November 1990: In my home studio I shot a tribute (I use the term loosely) to Billy Ruane titled “Billy Budd, Superstud.” It was a 20 minute film later shown on CCTV. It was essentially a parody of Jesus Christ Superstar with a soundtrack consisting of compositions based on sampled excerpts from the JCS LSO recording accompanied by pictures of superman in shackles, pictures of superman in prison, a poster of Superman with Stalin’s head taped on, etc. [See APPENDIX ONE.]


FALL
1991-2004
“I have all that money can buy. I want more people, but no more things.”—E.M. Forster

Following his commitment, Billy was more or less absent from the Middle East for a considerable spell. The Sater Brothers offered the booking job to soundman Mike Higgins and myself, but we wisely turned it down. We, along with Eric Doberman and Jennifer Cares, were essentially already responsible for many of the day to day musical operations of the club. Furthermore, we decided that we had virtually no practical experience in booking, few of Billy’s contacts, and little if any of his charisma or expertise. Chris Rich was recruited, with, by his own account, Billy calling many of the shots regarding booking decisions from behind the scenes. From late 1990 to 1992, Chris oversaw the Middle east booking as it hosted many innovative acts, along with the open mike for new talent—initially for all comers , but, under Martin Doyle and later Dave Sheehan, especially a showcase for comedy. The Saters pulled the plug on the comedy open mike in December of 1994—just as (it seemed to me) this unlikely time (Saturday afternoon) and venue (a rock club) was starting to gain traction among area comics. By the time this happened, Chris Rich, Martin Doyle, and Dave Sheehan were all long gone.


In retrospect, I was lucky to last at the Middle East as long as I did…from the summer of 1988 until December of 1994. (The then bookers apparently decided I was too expensive to keep on the payroll, and in early December I was given 30 days’ notice.)

Circa 1992. Unfinished ms. about Billy. A lengthy story which I planned to turn into a novel, though I don’t believe I ever finished it.

The great purge of Billy from the Middle East took place in 1995. In Lost Illusions, Balzac says something very apropos:

When you have ruined your life and your digestion in order to give life to this creation of yours, you will see it condemned, betrayed, sold and swept into the backwaters of oblivion by the journalists, and disregarded by your best friends. Will you be able to wait for the day when your work will emerge again into the light of day? Who will resurrect it, and when and how? –cited in Grana and Grana, eds., On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled, p. 402.

Chris Rich: The post McLean period was all about others profiting from the work he did as he was marginalized personally by the very buffoons and grifters now making the biggest displays.

I more or less lost touch with Billy after that. I would see him around town, but certainly not daily, as before. By March of 1995 I had given up my apartment at 494 Mass. Ave. and had more or less relocated to Providence RI, where I performed comedy monthly at AS 220, with periodic forays to Cambridge to perform at venues such as Jack Powers’ Stone Soup at T.T.s, Liberty in Central Square, and Mickey Bliss’ Club Bohemia on the Cambridge Somerville line. But it wasn’t the same. After the spring of 1998, I went on hiatus from comedy, except for occasional forays such as private parties or a one-off club gig at places like Club Bohemia or the Lizard Lounge. By then I was in graduate school and about to get married. I was simply too busy.

[Circa 1998]… if he was your friend, you had an ally, who would make other people help you and work with you, regardless of individual clubs, profits and losses and all the other BS.—Darcey Leonard

Spring of 1980 he met my future wife. He was “on something” as she remembered. He hitched a ride along with me, her, Kathy McCarthy, Peggy. We took him to the train station. He didn’t want to go to the train station. We offered to take him to the jazz club where a friend of Cathy’s was playing. He didn’t want to go there. We offered to take him back to the train station. He didn’t want to go there. Eventually, we dropped him off at the bus station on Providence Street.

1999. Billy at my wedding. He asked to attend. I suppose he heard about it through my friend and former roommate John Hansen. He promised to “behave”. Meaning, in his case, not the ruin the wedding reception. He did not. He was, in fact, the life of the party.
My wife said he was “turning cartwheels”.

I now reflect how curious it is that he had a perception about how he himself was perceived. And that to some extent he could turn such behavior on and off at will.

Russ Gershon: [Billy rented a room across from him in Somerville as a storage space.] “Billy sublet about 600 square feet of space from me in Somerville from 2002 - 2004, which he intended to use as storage and as an office for archivists to organize his voluminous collections. Instead, he had some people install shelving up to the 12 foot ceilings and fill up the place with boxes of CDs, LPs, video cassettes, books, printed matter, you name it. Nobody returned for at least two years. Billy was consistently late with the rent and kept raising his own rent out of guilt. Finally, he decided it would make more sense to move the stuff to cheaper storage bins somewhere.”

[dimenno]

WINTER
2004-2010

"Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses." —E.M. Forster.
http://www.musicandmeaning.com/forster/quotes.html

The last time I spoke to Billy was probably in 2004, during the time of the Afghanistan and, specifically, the Iraq war. I thought he was cracking up. It was a long, incoherent phone call. A long, psychotic ramble. I have since tried to push it out of my mind. I say psychotic because Billy seemed delusional. Billy was talking as though he were a major player on the world stage. He was going to call his connections in New York and Washington. He was going to see to it that this war came to an end. The only thing I remember exactly from his call was that I recommended to him that he take a look at the 1982 book The Real Terror Network: terrorism in Fact and Propaganda by Edward S. Herman. It was a source he was familiar with, but had forgotten. “Oh yeah, that’s a good one,” he said. Eventually, he rang off.

Advocate reunion. 2005. Mary Rhinelander was there, I think. And others. All of them asked about Billy. Sadly, I had little to report other than that he was in a bad way, based on that phone conversation. I had my own problems at the time he called, and could not engage with his to the fullest degree. We all have our own problems. Billy needed someone who wasn’t burdened with their own problems to listen to him. An honest broker. Pat served that purpose, I am supposing, from everything that I have gathered. But Pat was only one man and I suspect that even a dozen would have barely been enough. Maybe Billy’s father was correct to insist that he see two psychiatrists a week.

Pat McGrath took over Billy’s affairs in 2002.

PAT MCGRATH: You have to strategize with people. And Billy had a lot of fun the last eight years, I know. It wasn't matter of, oh, he lived some kind of diminished existence. He did all kinds of wild shit. But I just didn't ever let him get what he wanted most of all -- which was that crazy mania.

As mentioned previously, the great purge of Billy from the Middle East took place in 1995. In 2010 Billy was trying to get involved with the Middle East again.


--- On Fri, 4/16/10, w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com
Subject: Fw: to blakey , # 7 (4/16 11 am)
To: nblakey23@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, April 16, 2010, 12:52 PM

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com
To: bfhite@aol.com
Sent: Fri, April 16, 2010 12:42:54 PM
Subject: to blakey , # 7 (4/16 11 am)

Billy Ruane April 16 at 11:40am
nicholas,

if it isn't clear from the three and the third the most
explicit in this , but also the longest and the one you may
not have got through reading, ..and i pulled any specific
references , cause i don't wanthis to be about the
individuals i'm thinking about,

i'm saying to the middle esat waht i've said before, buthis
time with real rage at jospeh , millen and virr and with
nabil on my side, that i feel the place needs one or a pair
or ombudsmen, not bookign agents, which of course is a
draining job.. and why in november of 1990 , the sumemr of
1999 and the summer of 2001 i wanted out or inthe middle
case a simplification to bebop jazz which i may fnd (in
combo with large ensemble) at the rosebud down the line..

it takes a toll and i don't understand people who don't
burn out from it.. they are zombies and joeph has beomce one
too .. and i can't deal wth them and don't want to .. i've
not set foot in the place since september 2008 ..and won't
unless i see core moreal and periperal behavioral reform
there.. and i am not t he one to do it, casu nabil's suport
is fragile.. i am considered a lunatic to be indulged only
so far..

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword; The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck'd the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see! Hamlet 3:1

In a somewhat gruesome bit of irony, Billy died on October 26, 2010. He died the same day as Paul the Octopus, “whose correct predictions of the outcomes of eight World Cup 2010 games fueled his meteoric rise to stardom.”

Meg Ormond: He was a true philanthropist---giving directly--no middlemen-- to the real people who needed help. God Bless him!

Anonymous: We all recognize Billy's extraordinary generosity and bottomless (and often exasperating) enthusiasm for life. But Billy's true genius, and it was genius, was his skill in making each one of us the center of the universe while we were engaged with him. He had the rare and unnameable capacity to make everyone feel like... a rock star. The seemingly instantaneous assessment that we really could be in reality what we thought we were in our hearts and minds. Billy constantly accosted this shy girl with way too much eyeliner, who went to shows Upstairs at the Middle East three or maybe four nights a week, always alone and reading a book between sets. He was relentless in pulling me out of my self-exile and into the world, united in our love of books and rock and roll.

Lauren Leja: Billy was a human gyroscope, a ceaseless cheerleader, that crazy, badly behaved uncle at the weddings that we all took for granted but could never imagine life without.

THE WAKE
“Cloaked creatures of the starlight strip the slain.”—Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts.

Chris Brokaw interviewed at the wake by Brett Milano:
"He found value in the smallest and greatest of gestures. But I think he found the constriction of expression to be the greatest affront to humanity, and he fought that constriction without compromise. He often paid dearly for that stance; but he took his place in the world unblinkingly and without apology. That said — and despite his refusal to utter 'the L word' — he loved and was loved as fiercely as anyone I've ever known."

Russ Gershon: Billy was a larger than life character and used his flamboyance, intelligence and wealth to keep people at a certain distance, or at least in a position he could control, much as he used all those resources to try to keep his own pain under control. What struck me at his funeral was that despite the veils and the smokescreen he put up, so many people still felt a really personal connection with him and were truly touched by his humanity. Sure, everybody has a collection of Billy stories involving extreme behavior, one wilder and funnier than the other, but they also have stories of the music, books and movies he turned them on to, and of course the random generosity he showered on people in the name of making something worthwhile happen, whether it was extra money in the pot on a pathetically under-attended gig, or taking ten people out for an extravagant dinner, or lending out the condo, or who knows what else. Billy turned himself into a cartoon figure and annoyed the hell out of everyone (including all of us), but his essential goodness was not lost on people. And the residue of that was what I witnessed at the wake, much more than the freak show one would almost have expected.


As I mentioned at the outset, I tried many times to write about Billy. I knew deep down that he was not going to be with us for a very long time. A short story I began in 1980 but never finished was titled “Tell Old Bill”. It was about Billy’s death. The title was taken from a fine old song definitively rendered (in my estimation) by Dave Van Ronk, in his inimitable style.

Tell old Bill when he comes home this morning
Tell old Bill when he comes home this evening
Tell old Bill when he comes home
He’d better leave those downtown girls alone
This morning and evening so soon
Bill left by the alley gate this morning,
Bill left by the alley gate this evening,
Bill left by the alley gate,
and old Sal says, "Now don't be late."
This morning, this evening, so soon.
Sal was home, she was baking bread this morning,
Sal was home, she was baking bread, this evening,
Sal was home, she was baking bread,
when she heard the news old Bill was dead,
This morning, this evening, so soon.
Oh no, that can’t be so this morning,
Oh no, that can’t be so this evening,
Oh no, that can’t be so,
Bill left here ‘bout an hour ago,
This morning, this evening, so soon.
You know, they brought Bill home in the hurry-up wagon this morning
They brought Bill home in the hurry-up wagon this evening,
They brought Bill home in the hurry-up wagon,
And poor old Bill, how his toes were a-dragging,
This morning, this evening, so soon.
TELL OLD BILL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncJf9uzwhSg

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, butburn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlightpop and everybody goes "Awww!”—Jack Kerouac, quoted by Mary Lou Lord
Mary Lou Lord: “Billy was found sitting in his chair, computer on. We put some clues together and realized that “Lucky Old Sun” was the last song he must have heard before he passed.

Up in the mornin’
Out on the job
Work like the devil for my pay
But that lucky old sun got nothin’ to do
But roll around heaven all day.
Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids
Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray
While that lucky old sun got nothin’ to do
But roll around heaven all day
Dear lord above, can’t you know I’m pining, tears all in my eyes
Send down that cloud with a silver lining, lift me to paradise
Show me that river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do but roll around heaven all day
But roll around heaven all day
Send down that cloud with a silver lining, lift me to paradise
Show me that river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do
But roll around heaven all day—Lucky Old Sun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elZsGYHilc


You have to wonder: what if?

What if God's mad clown had found lasting love; what if he had been successfully treated for whatever demons were consuming him (there were demons; he simply never spoke of them); what if he had something to truly fulfill and stabilize him; what if he had found a place in a world which seemed to have no place for one such as him?

But that would be the subject for a fairy tale. And we live in a mostly colorless world. One made more so, now that he has gone from us soon, so soon, far too soon.

Jim Sullivan: “[The wake] extended to ZuZu… more than a few of us thought that Billy might burst through the door, shirt untucked, chest sorta bared, eyes darting every which way, at any minute.”

Johnny Angel Wendell: The more I think about it, the more I like the idea that Billy's ashes were thrown all over the audience at the Middle East at his memorial. Beats being shot into the moon or sun. The folks there all claimed to be close to Mr. Ruane, well, if they complained about him literally down their shirts and pants, they were lying. Good for his family that they recognized his loopy sense of humor over conventional decorum.

Ultimately, I suspect, Billy cured his hatred for the world’s cruelties by letting the world
consume him.
Nita Sembrowich: Like William Blake’s London, Billy Ruane was “a Human awful wonder of God.” He paid an exorbitant price for the extraordinary wealth, tangible and intangible, that he showered on everyone he knew. Perhaps it was karma. I’d like to think that Billy, a free spirit, is now free. Otherwise, this story is just too sad.

We must pity him. And we must also pity ourselves. We now face a world without Billy.
More than one person has described him as “a force of nature.”

I am reminded of Hosea 8:7: “For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.”
Ah well, it's only over. And there'll be nothing can we call our own but death. That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.—Dalton Trumbo, Executive Action
A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.--Ben Hecht
So many morall maters, and so lytell vsyd ;
So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente ;
So myche translacion in to Englyshe confused ;
So myche nobyll prechyng, and so lytell amendment ;
So myche consultacion, almoste to none entente ;
So myche provision, and so lytell wytte at nede ;—
Syns Dewcalyons flodde there can no clerkes rede.
--John Skelton, "Speke Parrot," 1521
AFTERWORD: QUOTES TAKEN FROM BILLY’S FACEBOOK PAGE
"nothing in the world is any good unless you can share it" --robt. mitchum,'out of the past'

"love 'em all , brucie. love 'em all" - -walter matthau, 'strangers when we meet'

"weirdo, weirdo. shakes pepsi bottle to get in heat." -- nicholas eberstadt


A NOTE ON SOURCES
Note: Memoir, I have discovered while writing this one, is a slippery thing. When you’re young, the blessing and curse of writing is that it eats up a lot of your time, of which you have plenty, but you don’t have any memories of having lived your life for you haven’t yet fully lived your life and so you don’t have much to say. The blessing, and curse, of writing when you’re older is that you have much more to say, but it eats up a lot of your time, of which you have little.

Memoir differs from fiction. Fiction may be based on real people, as in a roman a clef. Incidents can be wrenched out of their original contexts and rearranged into new ones, to serve the story the author wishes to tell. Memoir also differs from biography. Though both are based on fact, memoir also relies more on memory, and is more subjective; closer to fiction, without actually partaking of it. By subjective, I mean to say that memoir is based much more upon reconstructions of what happened, rather than solely upon actual documented facts. Also, in meoir, the author is given more leeway both to choose the facts he wishes to report and to interpret them as he sees best.

OK, I’ve read my Montaigne. Though not enough of it.

There were places in this story where my part in it diverged from my subject’s and where therefore my direct involvement was nonexistent. I have tried to fill in those gaps, as needed by direct quotes from people I have reason to believe were actually present and on the scene. I have not, however, made unwarranted assumptions about how people thought or why they acted. As Caroline Weber has said, “In the absence of textual proof, it is not ‘safe to assume’ anything about a historical figure’s unrecorded viewpoints.” All of the people described herein, whether named or not, are real; not composites. Certain of the incidents herein are composites, but clearly identified as such. I have changed some names of some individuals and omitted the names of others, but have otherwise represented what they had to say as accurately as possibly.

[dimenno]

APPENDICES

APPENDIX ONE
BILLY BUDD, SUPERSTUD

Bands:
Book my band, we are number one
Take me on, I’m the best around
Drink all the beer and wine you choose
Drown yourselves in yards of booze
Book my band we are really fun
Please give me an extended run
Drink all the beer and wine you choose
Drown yourselves in yards of booze
Promise us a guarantee
They just booked us down the block
Let your father pay the tab
Get the owners out of hock

Billy:
My club should be filled
With happy stage divers
But you have filled it with connivers!
Shut up! Shut up!
I’m almost out of here
Getting sick of beer
I have booked this place for three years
Now I’m 30, now I’m 30…


BOOK MY BAND
Bands:
Book my band or we can’t get booked
Pay up front or we’re going to walk
Someone said that your Daddy’s rich
Pay up front or we’re gonna talk
I’m in the tank and I can’t make bail
Stranded here and I can’t pay rent
Someone said that your daddy’s rich
Take the loot and let’s all get bent

Will you book will you pay me Budd,
Will you book will you feed me Budd,
Won’t you book you can pay my bills,
Won’t you look you can cure my ills

Budd:
I don’t like you—or your music
It’s all too damn—confusin’
Book yourselves!

NOTHING YOU SAY WORKS NOW
Layla:
My father is crazy, thinks that I’m lazy
Thinks that you are scary
I think that he’s right and I’m going to leave

Budd:
Then I’ll have to stay up all night,
Stay and knock on your door all night

Layla:
You can try, you can try,
But I won’t let you in no-how

I DON’T LOVE TO KNOW HIM
Layla:
I do not love to know him
If I even turn him on
He’ll never change—he’s so deranged
I haven’t got a wink of sleep
He’s knocking at my door
Oh, how I’d love to lose him
Can’t he see how he hounds me
A crazy man, a lazy man,
If he doesn’t treat me like a whore,
Is he a fairy boy—or just a bore?
Should I go berserk, should I lose my keys,
I should break my leg, I should break his knees
Oh how I hope he’ll go away
Hope he’ll leave me be—

I for one think that he’s crazy
It’s a part of his condition
He has always been
So mad, so crazed, I’m so amazed
That he can book a show
He doesn’t know

I always hoped he’s give me up
Wished he’d leave me be
But since the day he’s met me
He’s been almost single-minded
I’m his hope—his only hope
I’ll drive him mad—I’ll go away
I’m going to have to go
He makes me mad
He makes me sad
His love is bad

PAID FOR ALL MY TIME
Chris:
If I start to book I have to have control
I can’t be treated like some kind of scruffy prole
I’ll have to stop the work I’m doing on my book
I can’t be treated like some sort of nerdy schnook
You can’t afford to pay me what you really should
So my reward will be to try to do some good
I just hope that I’m
Paid for all my time

I have to book I have to be the only one
People might start to say it isn’t fun
I would be surprised if Billy thought so too
Billy is the one who hooked me up with you
You can’t afford to pay me what you really should
So my reward will be to try to do some good
I just hope that I’m
Paid for all my time


Michael you’re a vet a couple years at work
Eric you’re my roommate and you’re not a jerk
We have to make a profit
We have to pay the crew
And if it means don’t pay the bands that’s what we gotta do
You can’t afford to pay me what you really should
So my reward will be to try to do some good
I just hope that I’m
Paid for all my time

Michael:
I don’t want to hear it, of course we will pay you
Just don’t make me count receipts at the door

Eric:
His dad has the papers he needs to commit him
You know his habits—habits and more.

Michael:
We’ll tell everyone it’s an interim booking

Eric:
We’ll pay you a salary, Fridays at four
We just need to know when he’ll be at Foley’s

Mike:
If they catch him drinking

Eric:
They’ll put him in jail.

Chris:
I don’t need this assignment

Eric:
Think for a minute—you’ll get paid from the bar.

Chris: I don’t want this assignment

Mike:
You might as well do it
You’re the best one so far

Eric:
Think of the bands you could bring with your bookings
Hardcore and reggae; Upside-Down Cross
And if you hate reggae and if you hate hardcore
Then simply don’t pay ‘em cause you are the, you are the, you are the boss.

Chris:
On Saturday he is always at Foley’s
Far far away from the Moynihans and Smoleys

Choir:
Let’s go get him, let’s go get him

FREE HOT DOGS
Club staff:
We don’t want to have to mind our manners
We just want to eat and drink for free
And we want to get all our pay each Friday
That’s the only think on which we all agree
Glad we work here part-time at the Middle
Glad that all our friends get in for free
Glad that we can give all the bands the what for
That’s the only thing on which we all agree

Billy:
I’m nuts
I’d fire you all except I have no guts
I think just for tonight I’ll get wasted
Taste a side of life I’ve never tasted
I’m nuts
This is my mind I lose
Losing my mind with booze
If I can forget myself when I get drunk
I must be mad thinking I can forget no
Can’t get her out of my head
I’d get out my blank checkbook, give my whole allowance
If I could share her bed!
Who will take over? Who will take over?

Club staff:
Not I? Who would? Impossible…

Billy:
FSAD will expose me in one of his columns
He will tell stories—and that’s all he’ll do

One of my new hires
One of my club bookers
Will see I get fired

Chris:
What do you mean, ‘fired’?
You will be committed

Billy:
Why don’t you call my dad

Chris:
I don’t even like him

Billy:
Hurry, time’s a wasting

Chris:
Maybe I should call him

Billy:
I don’t care if you call him

Chris:
Once you employed me
Now you deplore me

Billy:
Go, call my father

Chris
You want me to call him!
I don’t even like him
Why should he commit you?
Maybe you deserve it!

Billy:
So what? Shut up! Go and call
Who cares if he commits me—I need a rest—Go!

Club Staff:
We don’t want to have to mind our manners
We just want to eat and drink for free
Pay is by the hour give us lots of power
That’s the only think on which we all agree
Always hoped I’d work here at the Middle
Glad that all our friends get in for free
Glad that we can put all the bands in their place
That’s the only thing on which we all agree

Chris:
You—impresario!
You can’t promote a show!
To make things even worse
Everyone already knows
You’re a crazy lunatic
And you love a crazy chick
A crazy lunatic
A crazy lunatic
And you love a crazy crazy crazy
Loony chick.

Billy:
Go call him! Go call him!
He’s on call, waiting for you!

Chris:
Every time you book the club I don’t understand
How you let the Foul-Mouthed Elves get so out of hand
You’d have managed better if you’d had them banned—

Club staff:
We don’t want to have to mind our manners
We just want to eat and drink for free
And we want to get all our pay each Friday
That’s the only think on which we all agree
Glad we work here part-time at the Middle
Glad that all our friends get in for free
Glad that we can give all the bands the what for
That’s the only thing on which we all agree

Billy:
Will no one buy a drink for me?
Cathy? Jen? Ralph?
Will none of you drink to me?
Cathy? Jen? Ralph?

FOLEY’S
Billy:
I’d only like to mention
I’m under so much tension
It wakes me up it’s safe as coffee
Vivarin—it’s not a drug

Wakes me up, it has changed me not a bit
How I hate booking

Once, I was alert
Now, I’m tense and hurt
Listen surely I’ve attracted notoriety
Booked for three years, now I’m thirty
Did it every week for just a buck and change
But if I quit
Let them sign the papers, do the things they ask of me
Let them talk and talk and talk and smear me in the press
Happy to go, happy to go by God
Happy to leave, happy to leave by God
Why should I quit
Are they going to care that I booked three years without a break?
Will they say that I was just an omnipresent fake?
There’s a thousand reasons why I should go ahead and quit

OK, I’ll quit
Just see me quit
See how I quit

Once I was alert
Now I’m tense and hurt
After all, I booked for three years
Now I’m 30
Why then am I bored and restless
I need rest and I never got it
Now I’ll interrupt
Let them lock me up
O will let them sign the papers
Tell the world I have the vapors
Take me bind me hold me lock me up—
Before I lose my mind

Chris:
There he is—drunk as a coot.

Billy:
Do you really want to take this job?

Club staff:
Billy’s nuts, we’re taking over now
Hang on, Chris, we’re gonna side with you

Billy:
Put away your pens
It is time for me to go now
I lost money, now I’m gone
Why are you so obsessed with booking?
Stick to drinking from now on

Club Staff:
Tell me Bill what the doorman makes
What is the length of an average set
Do you know what the soundman takes
Do you know how the price is set?
Do you think you will ever book
Are you planning to write a book
Do you think that McLean’s is vile?
How do you view an insane asylum
Come with us to see Doctor Pike
You’ll just love the loony house
You’ll just love seeing Doctor Pike
You will puke in the Doctor’s house
Come on Bill this is not like you
Some people say there’s a missing screw
Your support staff plans to stay
You might book again some day
Tell me Bill what the doorman makes
What is the length of an average set
Do you know what the soundman takes
Do you know how the price is set?
Come with us to see Doctor Pike
You’ll just love the loony house
You’ll just love seeing Doctor Pike
You will puke in the Doctor’s house

Now commit him, get him committed
Now commit him, get him committed

Dr. Pike:
Billy you must realize
The tests and medicines waiting you
You say that you need a break
To get a handout, well is it true?

Billy:
That’s what I said, I said I was

Eric:
There you have it Billy boy
You’re as crazy as a louse
Chris we thank you for the info
You can go and live in Billy’s house

Now commit him, get him committed
Take him to Carolyn
Take him to Carolyn
Take him to Carolyn
Take him to Carolyn

FSAD’S DENIAL
Barmaid:
I think I read some story—I remember
It was about that man who quit the club
I recognize the name

FSAD:
I don’t know who what when where how you know me
And if you’re talking ‘bout poor Billy—I hardly know the guy

Bouncer:
The how come I am sure I read that story
Under your by-line too—and everyone knew

FSAD:
I told you that I only recently just met him—

Old man:
But I read that piece—the by-line at least!

FSAD:
I hardly know him!

Kayla:
FSAD don’t you know what you have done?
You’re saying Chris has won

FSAD:
I had to do it, don’t you see
‘Cause he’ll be booking me

Kayla:
It’s what he told us you would say
How’d he know, anyway?

CAROLYN AND BILLY
Carolyn:
Who is this former boss
Blockading up the hallway?
Who is this former boss?

Bouncer:
Billy Budd, Middle East head

Carolyn:
Oh, so this is Billy B.,
I am quite surprised to see
You are so tiny, act so whiny
We all know that you can diddle,
But do you run, help run the Middle?

Billy:
Is that what they say?

Carolyn:
That’s what they used to say.
No I do all of the bookings.
Rock is in trouble here,
‘Billy Budd Middle East head’.
Why does someone with your job
Dress like such a total slob
An amazing loss—this shabby boss.
Since you used to book the club,
I don’t want to see you, Bub
You’re Chris’s boss! You’re Chris’s loss!

Mob:
Hey Billy yo Billy Billy Billy yo
Billy hey Billy, yo and why
Hey BB, BB, please explain to me
Why your booking schedule has to die?

JOSEPH’S SONG
Billy I am quite dismayed to see you in this state
I have fired you twice before but this time seals your fate
We’ll book reggae, play the Grateful Dead,
Anything but Billy’s bands, they’ve put us in the red
So you are the Budd, you’re the great Billy Budd
Prove to me that you’re no dud—get the crowd to buy my suds
If they start to drink more you can manage the floor
Come on, Billy, My Bud.
Billy, I just can’t believe the bands you’ve booked in here,
Let them tear the place apart and drink up all our beer.
Oh, what a pity, if we lose our shirt
And I will bet reporters come to dig up all the dirt
So you are the Budd, you’re the great Billy Budd;
Prove to me that you don’t drink, I’ll
Offer you a case of Swinkle.
If you stop drinking beer then
I’ll let you book here;
Come on, Billy my Bud.

I only ask thinks I’d ask any of the staff
What is it about you makes us all just want to laugh
Oh, I’m a waiter, when they call in sick,
I’m dying to be shown that you aren’t just another dick
So you are the Budd, you’re the great Billy Budd;
Will you dance the whole night long
If they play your favorite song
Can’t you dance any more?
Why are you such a bore?
Come on, Billy, my Bud.

Yo! Don’t you take my advice?
Are you some kind of Christ?
You’re a joke! You sit and fidget!
You’re nothing but a midget!
Show him the door, he can’t work here no more.

Get out now, Billy by Bud!
Get out of my club!
Get out now, Billy by Bud!

CHRIS’S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
My God he called me he was three-quarters drunk
He talked so goddamn long about supporting Funk
He talked for do damn long he almost turned my head
Now he’s gonna wanna come book Chucklehead
I don’t believe he knows I tried to do some good
I’d gladly let him do the booking if I could
Don’t believe…do good…let him…if I could

Nabil:
Why don’t you go and get you some coffee
I don’t understand—go get some rest
All that you said—have more coffee
The staff turned against him—that’s what you said

Michael:
What you have done will be the joy of the club scene
They’ll write you up in the Herald for this
And not only that we pay a buck and a quarter
And rent in the bargain—how can you miss?

Chris:
Bill, I know you are half dead
But I only did what you hired me too;
Bill, I’d write for The Nation
But now I’ve been saddled with the booking of this
I have been saddled with bands from the South,
I shall be stuck booking Upside-Down Cross
I have been saddled with bands from the South,
I shall be stuck booking Upside-Down
Upside-Down, Upside-Down, Upside-Down Cross!

I don’t know how to know him,
I just wish that he’d ignore me;
He’s just a boy, he’s just a boy
He’s not a boss, he’s just the same
As any one of us
I wish he’d go
When I’m cold and dead he will haunt my dreams
With his petty moans and his careless schemes
I don’t know what to do
My God, I took away this pest’s post

I should have known he’d get upset
Joe, I will never know why you chose me to book

All these foul cruddy bands
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind
I have lost my mind

Chorus:
Good old Chris
Good old Chris

TRIAL BEFORE JOSEPH
Joseph:
So Billy B. is once again in here
And why is this—McLean’s was out of beer?

Michael:
We turn to Joe please go and smell his breath
Next thing we know he’ll be on crystal meth

Joseph:
Talk to me, Billy B.
You have snuck back here
Drunk a non-alcoholic beer and been detected
Listen Billy, my friend,
Where is our schedule?
What about—December?

Billy:
I have got no bookings left to do
I’m done, done, done

Mob:
Talk to me, Billy B.

Billy:
I will call you with my bookings
If I think of one

Joseph:
Then you can book?

Billy:
It’s you that say I can
I book the best
And find that I am banned

Joseph:
What is the best?
Is it without a flaw?
Then why play here?
When they can see Don Law?

Mob:
Boot him, boot him

Joseph:
What do you mean?
You’d fire Billy B.?

Mob:
We’ll do the other bookings! Boot him out!

Joseph:
He likes the songs—and people like to sing

Mob:
We’ll do the other bookings! Boot him out!

Joseph:
There is no reason—we’re breaking even
We had a dry spell but now we’ll fill the venue
Billy’s misguided—thinks bands important
But to keep you staffers happy
Here’s his severance---

Mob:
Boot him out! X 16

THE THIRTY-NINE DOLLARS
[Instrumental]

Joseph:
Where are you from Billy,
What do you want Billy, Tell me….
You’ve got to be careful
You’re unemployed they tell me

Why do you not speak when I offer you a job
If you would stay quiet and only not dress like a slob

Billy:
You don’t know nothing
To hell with you and your whole damn family too
We’ve booked through March and you can’t change it—

Joseph:
You’re a fool Billy B.
What can I do now?

Mob:
Joseph, boot him out!
Nabil is angry! You have a duty
To run the Corner, boot him out now!
Nabil is angry
He’ll move to Boston
Even Chicago—boot him out!

Joseph:
Don’t let me stop your great immolation
Leave if you want to, you misguided Satyr
I wash my hands of your destitution
Quit if you want to you innocent numbskull!

BILLY BUDD, SUPERSTUD
Voice of Chris:
Every time I book for you I don’t understand
How you let the bands you booked get so out of hand
You’d have managed better if you’d had them banned
If you booked today the business wouldn’t be dropping
Central Square in ’88 wasn’t used to club-hopping;
Don’t get me wrong, I only wanna know:
Billy Budd, Superstud,
Why’d you put on all those filthy duds?
Billy Budd, Superstud,
Would you admit your career’s a dud?

Tell me what you think about the people in charge?
Joey Incagnoli’s crowds are not quite so large
Cathy is she where it’s at? The Doughheads made out,
Could Martin move a mountain or was that just his clout?
Did you mean to quit like that are you just a clown or
Did you know this mess you left might close the place down?
Don’t get me wrong, I only wanna know—
Billy Budd, Superstud,
Why’d you put on all those filthy duds?
Billy Budd, Superstud,
Would you admit your career’s a dud?

THE COMMITMENT
Billy:
Dad commits me
Thinks I don’t know what I’m doing
Who is my father? Where is my father?
Vegetarian Platter, why have you forsaken me?
I am thirty.
It is finished.
Father, into your hands I permit the Commitment.
[Instrumental]

APPENDIX TWO: CORRESPONDENCE
Quoted by kind permission of Nick Blakey
From: w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com
Subject: Fw: to blakey , # 7 (4/16 11 am)
To: nblakey23@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, April 16, 2010, 12:52 PM

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com
To: bfhite@aol.com
Sent: Fri, April 16, 2010 12:42:54 PM
Subject: to blakey , # 7 (4/16 11 am)

Billy Ruane April 16 at 11:40am
nicholas,

if it isn't clear from the three and the third the most
explicit in this , but also the longest and the one you may
not have got through reading, ..and i pulled any specific
references , cause i don't wanthis to be about the
individuals i'm thinking about,

i'm saying to the middle esat waht i've said before, buthis
time with real rage at jospeh , millen and virr and with
nabil on my side, that i feel the place needs one or a pair
or ombudsmen, not bookign agents, which of course is a
draining job.. and why in november of 1990 , the sumemr of
1999 and the summer of 2001 i wanted out or inthe middle
case a simplification to bebop jazz which i may fnd (in
combo with large ensemble) at the rosebud down the line..

it takes a toll and i don't understand people who don't
burn out from it.. they are zombies and joeph has beomce one
too .. and i can't deal wth them and don't want to .. i've
not set foot in the place since september 2008 ..and won't
unless i see core moreal and periperal behavioral reform
there.. and i am not t he one to do it, casu nabil's suport
is fragile.. i am considered a lunatic to be indulged only
so far..

you and , even if you have had differnces, barry hite are
the most caring and honorable and at core ethical people i
know in the business.. not seeming shysters and bullies liek
the ones in current employ.. for the middle east adn the
restoraton of quality of ethos that was requested, i
interrupted , sadl;y in the second case not to recover my
own momenta in life.. and , i'll be damned if i'll see it
the corrupt slaughterhosue that it has beocme when i know
that i was brought in however prematurely dismissed once i
borught in new personne,.l , to reform it..

whtether for legacy or just out of loathing, i want to see
a better managed and ethically responsible institution ,and
i can only affect it , especilally at this pont through
third parties who have legtiimacy and respect.. legitimacy
atthis ponti can only come from nabil's support..

and right now, i feel i have it..and can transfer ti to a
vicar/ an gnet or two, as i would have in 1995 , when i
wanted committes to review procedure an to conult on booking
ideas in dfferent genres , etc. then the knife ni the back
and see ya later..

nabil, givng me his email to show thes shitheads that waht
i write for them is not a png pong game where they get to
put oil on the ball to fuck with me, but is conducted
publicly under his nose.. and in front of his eyes.. and
wehre for now i've told the nitwits not to bug me with their
inane anbd pompous repsonses but to take their fucking
whining about waht i have written to nabil and see how he
responds.. and if he finds na iota of value in their
bitching , he'll bnring it back t o me ..as he would to you
and if you have a partner ( as i have found with pascucci in
the past and nabil now, it helps to deal withthe gang fuck
that these critters liek to perpetrate when challenged) to
the two of you for meidation ..

the role involves oversight of ALL contracts for equity
issues,.. consolidatoin of all booking data technologiall
yfor the owners , so it isn't the proprietary of sucmsucking
bookngi agents who then can blackmail the club with taking
their marbles to another club if challenged.. invitation and
encouragement of criticsm of the club's operatoins form
bands, booking agents and patrons..

kicking scum ass and having the authority to do it and if
caleld for reocmmend firing of egeregious offenders, but
that ONLY after making sure t hey can't take club assets
withtem that leve the club in the lurch.,.

bookgin only if you want to bring in individual shows ofrr
push for them or pervcorrormers. .but basically oversight
and tyranny over the scum that sit on thier little olympian
thrones in the booking office an answer to nonone and
frustrate even the owners , nevcer mnid engrage outsiders
liek myslef to the point of not wanitng to go even to tt's
except a couple tiems a year, cause it's too close tot he
shithole an its sewr workers..

intersted if it's a paid positon with real clout ? i hope
so.. get back to me ..

thaks , alter , all best, billy
Billy Ruane April 16 at 11:57am
ps

i asked you your opinions of millen and virr.. you hinted
athis in the past i'd appreciate expansion. .also your new
phone number.. as with any others, i don't daeal with people
who won't allow a phone number.. i'm not a fucking secretary
..adn if others wantto type at me, i want and come to insist
on the abilit to repsond verbally.. and for brainstorming ,
especially stuff liek this, werhe it seems all my emails ,as
tends to be the case with email , nevermind typoridden
screeds like mine , didn' not even manage to communicate
what i wsa looking for in forwarding to you..
howeverimplicitly .. the notoin of ombudsman didn't seem to
come t hrough , so i had to be thta much more explicit in
the email above. .i do not like that i have to repeat myselv
and do feedback correctoin til i want to smash shit in
eamil.. when i wantto talk to somoeno i requewt it and if
you can't deal with talking to people .. in colegial never
mnd tense situations , maybe what i
hope for isnt possible, but i believe in you ..as i do in
barry ..adn am even thinking aliza fomr truth serum may
havea role to play.. butthe joint isa boys club and going
eyeball to eyebal to eyeball i want the smartest adn
ultimately toughtest minds in place.. and the ones who don't
give aflying fuck about laying into weasels.. as you have
seen in my emails, i'm on a tear and hoping to put a little
fear if not shame and respect in the weasels.. but i can't
do it alone nor even just with nabil as a partner.. i know
how long he lasts under pressure.. and what happens when he
snaps.. how many t imes i'v e seen it. .another reason you
wnat a partner or two to back you oup.. people will turn on
you there..and you need a partner to back you up that you're
on the same page with after consultatoin .. that is
reocngised as informedx and thoughtful.. please pop my a
phone number.. i will do my best not to abuse it .. i seem
to have a recent fluency ni writing ,
but resent being caged and tied to the keuyboard by anyone
, epwewically people i want and even need to have a more
flexible and even potentially charged and specific dialogue
with .. i have little time and less patience for
misunderstninding s in email from faiure to get it. .never
mind with typoproofing what i write.. the inevitable
omissions and transpostions form the nerve damage to my
right hand and the servant like obligatoin to correctthem
for others. .are all the more reason i resent those who
relegate me to this medium only.. i should hate for that to
be part of a relation with you i value and hope to enhance
if you consdier working with me on this slash and bunr , if
necessary project..

thanks for tryign to decipher these last two emails that
i'll be damned if i'll typo correct unless there is
somethign you in your opinion,significantly can't figure
out..

til soon , all best, billy





--- On Fri, 4/16/10, w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com wrote:

From: w r <essentuky_17@yahoo.com
Subject: # 9 - from blakey / response from me (4/16 , 12:45 pm)
To: bfhite@aol.com
Cc: nblakey23@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, April 16, 2010, 1:07 PM



i hope you guys don't mind the transparency in emails ..
these , epseically form both of you are private with me ,
but if ther's any chance of either or both of you working on
this project, i want to keep us all on the same page, as i
would hope you two would do if workign with one another..
right now , sequence of repsonse is important..as was , i
hope gong back to the source of my disgust with millen for
his very partial response ( have one perfomer contact his
godship ) out of at leat ten suggeston .. and then zip when
i asked why he didn't bother to comment on the others, never
mind thank me for the suggstions .. cocksucker..




later , all best ,billy


Nick Blakey April 16 at 12:42pm
I do appreciate your kind words but unless the money was
unbelievable - and I mean unbelievable - I would not go back
to the booking world at all, partially because I also have
no idea what the kids want anymore. It is also something
that I could not even consider doing until early 2012 once I
have my degree (I'm slated to finish end of 2011). Stress is
bad bad bad bad bad for me with my condition now - and man I
can't even drink anymore - plus with Amanda not getting any
better the less stress the better. Call me the Peter Dayton
(yeah if only) of booking...Dayton swore once he left music
he would never return...and...he...hasn't...for better or
for worse...
Billy Ruane April 16 at 1:02pm
"because I also have no idea what the kids want anymore. "

who givesw a fuck whatthey want.. i wnat nothign to do
withthe kids.. thsi isn't about booking ..its' about
bringing adults to kick presutuoppus gods in their own mind
kiddie booking agent ass .. where's the stress in tearing
asholes if you have at least one owner behind you.. jospeh
is as bad asthe kids he emplouys.. he's virtually their role
model.. fuck him for now.. as i told him..

this is about oversight of the office.. they micromanage
the poor club employees.. hell, its even about making sure
the employees who deserve it have proper wages and benefits
packagess (yourselves included ) .. it's about making the
fucking snake put an ethical and decent joint to t he best
orf your abilities.. more than that , who can ask. .the
serentity prayer for whatever it's worth talks about the
things we can do and the things we can't.. but you got to
give3 it a try to fnd out..especially in partnership..
potentially wiht barry hit.. who is a very big guy and takes
no shit.. not that you do . .but it's about the stomach for
it.. and the ability to deal with the stress tht you rightly
cite that is why a bad cop partner can be a wonderful thign
.. keep thinkign about it..and let's see how my bombshells
play out..or ifthey are ignored , patronised and
condescended to ( usal and succesfful denail strategies
which of cours keep me at a ditance
indefinitely ) of the scum..

i sent you the full series of emails , whci hstart wiith me
tryign to give millen booking suggestons in a concise and
poltie way.. and then become irkmed athis very minimal
repsonse and then zero response. .this was aperil 1 and 2..
then two weeks later, the gloves come off .adn he can eat
shit.. for all i'[m conerned.. hopefully i've given him (and
virr , to a leser extent and a good helping to hoskins ) a
generous buffet..

later ,all best, billy




Billy Ruane April 16 at 6:32pm
what you feel , mr. b, as bogart would say in c'blacnca ,
on't add up to a hill of beer cans or wahtever he said..

what matters as thsi plays out,is how these inbreds (middle
east family = cult of hoskins with jospeh his enabler adn
juide) feel..

they're circling the wagon (nabil, the last holdout for me)
and working their forked tounges to tell him at that he's a
fool to stand by me.. and that i (and my intrusive no-count
vidoeographers, all i really care about as they
unfortunately know.. one t hign left to lose, anyow )

rosemary's baby or that durrenmatt the visit (der besuch
der alte dame , if remember correctly ) where the
truthteller gets stoned.. or soemthing like that..

scapegoating is the herd instinct , especially the self
protecitve self-entitled opportunistic herd , however
small..

as my affinity and fondness for hunter thompson must be
clear by now, i adapt to ' the scum also rI-ses.. up " (my
spiritual daddy , who died a week before i was born , after
who m i was no doubt named , wilhelm reich on "the mass
psychology of fascsit piglets" ) and does it's best to keep
critics down.. i expect nothing less of these greaseballs..

let's see how nabil takes my emails and if he succumbs to
the parasites who want to benefit ego and money wI-ses off
his institution where he slaves over felafel to little
thanks while his no-count bully of a brother basks at his
stammtisch in sycophantic chicks who trade flattery at least
for free admission and drinks.... and flattery..

this could be fun ( what more than callng scum on their
shit.. i live reminding hoskins i'll call him a ltiing fuck
at he drop of a hat.. he hates it.. puffs up his chest does
the jolly green piglet ) , money adn a sense of decency as
it were..

i hope you've enjoyed my correspondence so far..adn you
have so many emails to look forward to..

i would ask nothign of you without barry as a bad/ tough
cop.. what a wonderful bad cop. heh.. if only.. and that's
maybe a maybe..

but you do have the most finely honed sense of moralitt
..and we have, however little we interact, a good frinedship
i'd say for life.. mutual respect that at least i cant'
imagine being affected by anythingthat could go down on your
end, and i do my best to keep yours.. .

in short, mr. blakey , you're a gentleman and really
egregiously so..

even nabil agreed with me that mark hamilton made a lousy
ombudsman casue he's a cynical go-along getalong from the
model cafe community where pigs feed, and those that flatter
themselves affect social climbing to deep ellum..

you wonder i never go there.. scene of such porcine
behavior by hoskins , i shudder to remember., or delight as
he never showed his truth self so nakedly under his beard of
unctuous suck up veneer...

lord hobo for this catbabridgian when i want barleywine on
tap.. which is always, along with old ale , my preference..
mideast can't rised above pbr.. probaly stockingthat groteqe
naragansett by now..

anyhow, don't close your mind til more shoes fall.. i don't
expect nabil to survive the pussy whipping he will get from
the gnats hwhat buzz around him.. but hope springs eternal
and so does loathing..

f##k fear (facebook wouldn't send this message before..
maybe it's monitoring for cuss words) .. .. it's for
timorous craven employes afraid to stand up to their greedy
bosses.. and infest that bookng office like roaches..

later, all best, billy

APPENDIX THREE
BOB RISKO
Hi Francis,

I have a question about your friend Billy Ruane.

I've been through all the obituaries, tributes, testimonials, and accounts I can find, and it sounds like he was incredibly energetic, charismatic, and intensely likeable personality. But it doesn't sound like he was bipolar. Bipolar sufferers aren't manic, and certainly not persistently manic, in any popular sense of the word. They typically experience brief periods of mania -- a few weeks at most -- followed by periods, often years, of crushing and debilitating depression that leaves them essentially vegetative. If they're creative, lucid, energized, and productive, it's only for very short periods. Mostly, they're extremely depressed, able to participate in normal routines on a limited scale, and then only after years of drug therapy and intensive psychotherapy. (And alcohol would make it impossible to recover.)

I have nothing against Billy Ruane; in fact, I wish I'd known him. But I'm an unimpeachable source on bipolar disorder, and I get wary whenever the popular imagination suggests that it makes you intensely creative and insanely energetic and fun -- the life of the party, if you will. It does not. What it DOES do is make you depressed and suicidal. In fact, 1/3 of bipolars commit suicide -- higher than the unipolar rate -- because it is a horrible, horrible affliction.

I've only known a few bipolars, leading carefully disciplined lives, who've escaped the real horrors of the disorder. The rest are never symptom-free, and many of them are just plain zombies.

So I'm just asking: was he really bipolar?

Thanks,

Bob Risko

Francis DiMenno November 2 2010 at 11:38pm
Bob, it's like you've been reading my mind. I have been mulling over the same information myself and asking myself some of the very same questions. All the more so because I am currently writing a full-blown memoir about Billy Ruane, to be published at the end of the month in the online version of The Noise: Rock Around New England. I was even thinking of pestering a psychiatrist schoolmate who knew Billy peripherally as to whether the diagnosis holds any water at all. Because I think people tend to use the term 'bipolar" as a catch-all term for any sort of manic or depressive behavior. And it's not scientifically valid to simply slap such a label on people…. Short answer: Maybe. Billy was, indeed, manic. Egregiously so. But--usually--he could switch it off. I have observed this many times. He was also prone to depressive episodes. He seldom allowed people to see this, but I was one of his closest friends for quite some time, and I saw aspects of it. It is possible you could diagnose him with Borderline Personality Disorder aka Emotionally unstable personality disorder. Maybe even ADHD. Possibly PTSD. Or even Ganser's Syndrome. I really don't know. I was a public health librarian for two years, but I only know enough to know that I am not qualified to make such a diagnosis.

Francis DiMenno November 3 at 12:00am
The more I read up on it, the more I see it as BPD.

Bob Risko November 3 at 1:04am Report
Well, you knew him, and keen observation is as much a part of the scientific method as anything else.

Francis DiMenno November 3 at 1:11am
I would be leery about making any definitive pronouncements, but your comment has given me a good deal of food for thought. Perhaps, once written , and with your kind indulgence, I can share my floundering and by necessity preliminary conclusions for your appraisal?

APPENDIX FOUR

BOSTON PHOENIX ARTICLE
http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/110963-...T#ixzz14GhHRdJv

GUESTBOOK ENTRIES
http://www.donovanaufierofuneralhome.com/g...ok.php?obit=182

[FrankD]

Obama Bin Ladin was the same age as Billy Ruane was?

[dimenno]

Obama Bin Ladin was the same age as Billy Ruane was?

Born in the same year.

[dimenno]

Bump.


This post has been edited by dimenno: Jan 12 2012, 03:05 PM

[FrankD]

Bump.


This post has been edited by dimenno: Yesterday, 03:05 PM

[dimenno]

Bump.

[FrankD]

Billy never posted here, he wasn't a computer guy?

[TEX]

FINALLY reading this the last few days.

About half way through now, and thoroughly engaged.

Thank you so much dimenno for sharing and an extra special tip o' the hat, cheers and appreciation for all the hard work of compiling it all into one place.(so far).

[dimenno]

Thank you so much dimenno for sharing and an extra special tip o' the hat, cheers and appreciation for all the hard work of compiling it all into one place.(so far).

You're welcome.

[BoztownFuzz]

You should be ashamed of yourself for using Billy's death as an opportunity to show off your long winded writing style. Shame on you.

[dimenno]

I was his friend for over thirty years. And to this day, I don't see anybody else trying to tell his story.

[BoztownFuzz]

you said in an earlier post that you broke social ties with him in the late 80s. if you were such a good friend on the long term you would have looked at his pasty white complexion and told him to get his heart checked out. you are a bad friend. in fact you are merely a maggot feasting on the corpse of someone you and alot of other people could have saved if you actually cared about him. keep writing your self engulgent crap thought. it feeds your ego and does nothing for the legacy of Billy, who lived a life you clearly wish you had. you are a b00tm feeder, and a bad writer. stop it now and look at your self.

[dimenno]

you said in an earlier post that you broke social ties with him in the late 80s. if you were such a good friend on the long term you would have looked at his pasty white complexion and told him to get his heart checked out. you are a bad friend. in fact you are merely a maggot feasting on the corpse of someone you and alot of other people could have saved if you actually cared about him. keep writing your self engulgent crap thought. it feeds your ego and does nothing for the legacy of Billy, who lived a life you clearly wish you had. you are a b00tm feeder, and a bad writer. stop it now and look at your self.

You're ignorant, and I feel sorry for you.

He was at my wedding and I last spoke to him in 2005.

Someday you may realize that it is bad form to criticize with brazen fatuity a text which you have never read.

This post has been edited by dimenno: May 5 2012, 09:35 PM

[dimenno]

Thanks, jtp.

[dimenno]

Original version:
http://thenoise-boston.com/category/more-articles/

[dimenno]

Second anniversary bump.

This post has been edited by dimenno: Oct 26 2012, 04:14 PM

[dimenno]

Another bump.