She hid it and then she came of age and didn’t hide it so much and lived her life, and she can set it aside to go to work. Set it aside to get shit done. But the witching hour starts, the wine comes out and all bets are off.
And that part’s on me. Yeah? On me and Mom and Preach and Tim and my baby sister Lana.
Preacher though, he saw it, called it and said it more than once, “We gotta get Penny in hand, brother.”
He said it but even he didn’t do dick about it.
We all danced around it like…
[Trails off]
So, she’s drunk and chatty and gettin’ loud like she’s been doin’ for, oh, I don’t know…thirty some-odd years.
Then she gets quiet and I know it’s gonna happen, man. I know it.
I know it because it’s happened so many damned times, there’s no way to count.
Each time, sister, hear this.
It’s a knife in the gut.
For me.
So, if I feel that, you gotta get what she feels and how she’s been drownin’ that in booze for decades.
But I gotta give it to her because she’s my sister, yeah?
So, I do. I sit next to her and it happens.
She says, “He’s in his thirties now. He could be married. I could have grandbabies. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if they told him he wasn’t theirs. I wonder if he’ll ever find out his uncle is famous.”
That was a good one.
There were good ones. “I wonder if they sent him to college.” Or, “I hope they weren’t too hard on him during potty training.”
And there were bad ones. “You think he’s okay? I hope he didn’t get sick. Dad got sick. Nick might have something in his family. You think he got sick?” Or, “What if he’s like Nick? What if he does some girl like Nick did me or worse?” Or, “What if he turns out like Ricky? What if he’s dealing drugs to kids? They should know about that. They should know to look out for that and help him around it.”
Got a million of ’em, sister.
A million what ifs.
Torture.
Pileggi opened his mouth and I lost track of how many people came forward, sayin’ their kid was Nick Pileggi and Penny Simms’s kid. Paid for so many fuckin’ DNA tests, ’bout bankrupted me.
Every one of ’em, she’d have hope. Every one of ’em, she’d get crushed. She can’t go lookin’ for him, signed that right away.
She has to wait for him to come to her.
If he does.
I could probably pull some strings. Hell, I’ve got the money.
She won’t let me.
“It’s gotta be him,” she says. “If he doesn’t know, I don’t wanna mess up his life.”
It’s taboo, talkin’ about it. No one can take a stand without gettin’ piled under shit.
And most of the people with the loudest mouths about it have no connection to it. They’ve made up their minds and decided how it’s gonna be for everybody, on both sides.
I’ll tell you what, you gotta have no heart in your chest, you sit a night with my drunk-ass sister who used to be beautiful, used to laugh a lot, now looks like she spent her life at the bottom of a bottle, looks twenty years older than she is, twenty years older than me, and I spent over thirty years in a fuckin’ rock band.
Sit next to her and hear her talkin’ about the kid her mother forced her to give up, and not get it. At least a little of it.
Just a little.
Don’t get me wrong. If my nephew is somewhere out there havin’ a good life, bein’ a good man, loved by his folks, his friends, his woman, if he has one, or his man, whatever…good.
Good.
But I’ll never know that.
Penny’ll never know that.
A woman’s gotta have a choice.
And it’s gotta be her choice.
’Cause it’s gonna be her, not the guy, not some white man behind a pulpit, not some other white guy with a senate seat, who lives with the consequences, either way.
Or it’s gonna be her who doesn’t figure out how.
So, yeah.
Band started with me, Timmy, Nick and Rick Pileggi.
We went on the road, still as Zenith, and we were Preacher McCade, Tim Townes, Dave Clinton and Jesse Simms.
We picked up Tommy on the way.
Later came Josh.
And we were gonna take rock by the balls.
And then came Lyla.
Jesse Simms, bassist, Preacher McCade and the Roadmasters, formerly Zenith:
You seen the movie Roadhouse?
[Off tape]
Yes.
[Laughs]
Well, in the beginning, that’s the kinda gigs Preach and Dave could find us.
[Shakes head]
I still don’t know how Dave and Preacher found the money to buy that old truck-bed camper shell and pickup.
I know they both had cars and then they both didn’t, but we had that truck with the camper shell on it. The kind that went up and over the cab of the truck.
We rolled out, fittingly they picked me up last, so we did this outta my parents’ driveway, heading to our first gig, which was outside Cincy, and Dave slipped a tape into the deck and the opening theme from Star Wars played.
Preacher is behind the wheel and he’s bustin’ with laughter.
Never seen him laugh like that. By then, I’d known him near-on a year.
Never seen him laugh like that.
We were on our way, man.
We were on our way.
Now, I sensed Preacher was a serious dude when he stared down three drug suppliers.
And I was pretty impressed with what he did to Nick, but Nick was an eighteen-year-old fuckup.
Still, Preach was six foot four and a powerhouse.
Back then, you could stand him up and ask a hundred people, “What’s this guy do?” and not a soul would say, “Lead singer and guitar of a rock and roll band.”
I’d bet there’d be a lot of answers of enforcer, though.
I mean he was tall and packed and ripped.
You know, Rocky-style ripped.
We had no money to go to a gym, you hear what I’m sayin’?
But he’d put on that Rangers baseball cap backwards, his cutoff sweats and you didn’t talk to him.
The man could do pushups from his fingertips.
[Shakes head]
Yeah.
His fucking fingertips.
But, until we went on the road, I had no idea Preacher was a bruiser.
And Dave?
Dave was a crackpot.
[Chuckles]
So, they weren’t big fans when people threw their beers at us just because people can be assholes, especially when they’re rednecks and drunk.
Because we did not suck.
We weren’t awesome, but we didn’t suck.
No reason to throw your beers at us.
And in order to play those bars, me, Dave and Tim had fake IDs. Wet behind our ears. We’d barely been out of Mooresville, Indiana, and when we were, it was with our parents to go to Florida to hit Disney World when we were kids or a beach when we were older.
You know?
So yeah, right now I will confirm the lore. In the beginning, there were brawls. And there were a lot of them.
And yeah, right now I’ll confirm that Preach was protective and he didn’t allow shit to fuck with the band.
And last, another yeah, the second Dave saw Preacher’s arm go up to pull off his guitar, he’d jump his kit and be all in.