The Bad Days
It was mid-1985 that everything fell apart for awhile. I had started seeing Philip Tucker near Christmas as I recall; by spring he was seeing one of my bartenders on the side. When we split up, I just didn’t care. I began to embezzle. After all these years, I can admit that I was caught on a small cash register aberration (as managers, we were sometimes required to count). More than three-quarters of my theft never came to light. But my performance at work obviously suffered and soon it all crashed down. Interestingly, the club decided to keep me as the Saturday night disc jockey (after a short month-long vacation); I continued in that post for another three years.
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But that spring in 1985 was the worst. I thought that even the minor progress I’d made since college was all coming to an end. My third relationship done, struck out; no full time work and no radio work at all. For the next six weeks, I got up every morning and took two shots of Stoly from the freezer (yes, many bottles were part of my ‘perks’); then it was off to my clerk’s job at Basics, a household supply store on Newbury Street. I’d taken the job when there was nothing else; at least it took me to the beginning of summer. But even then I didn’t learn my lesson; my mother still has a beautiful set of cutlery from there. But I had hope and, after quitting drinking
– I looked in the mirror one day and saw what it was doing to my hair!
– began to think of how to get back on the horse. I still had Saturday
nights at Spit and so a bit of fame; my old friend Tom Lane had gotten
himself a position at an alternative rock station – albeit a low-powered
one outside of Boston. And so on a wing and a prayer, I quit Basics
with a story about how I was going to intern for their music department
and I’d be on the air regularly in months. Where in the world did
I get that idea? But it was soon to come true.
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WFNX
My commercial radio gig was at WFNX, 101.7 FM in Lynn MA. It had just been purchased by the Boston Phoenix, a local weekly newspaper. I started doing weekends, over-nights and fill-ins.
The first week of September 1985 was spent in Italy with my family. I had just met Mark Enos a couple of weeks before through my light guy, Teddy, and we’d spent some fun times throughout the summer. Now it looked serious and I actually had him stay at the condo while I was away.
My
father, in one of those wild acts of generosity, decided to take his family
on an upmarket trip to the homeland, Italy. My brother was
still married to his first wife Jane at the time so it was the five of
us (even besides the gay issue, Mark and I had really only just met).
Four cities: first Milan, from where we had hosted exchange
students, then Venice (with a drive with Michael Grecco)
followed by Florence and Rome.
Just before returning to America (after a four-day side trip to London to see Dave and Joanne), Mark told me of an interesting phone call. Judith Brackley, who had been PD – and friend of Tom’s, was out and the assistant, Michael Bright was in. But Michael was also the afternoon drive announcer and when Steve Strick (the music director and also announcer) bolted to WBCN he turned to me to fill the gap. Little did he realize that I’d be afternoon drive for the next three years, eventually teaming with Bill Abbate.
People on the address list from that era include Bill Abbate, who developed from being my traffic reporter to a presence in his own right (he lives with his wife Alice and two sons in the Boston area and is a prominent announcer on WBCN), Jeff Marshall (who with his girlfriend Alli Wong runs Monolyth Records), Scott 'Dangerboy' Reich (now at VH-1) and Music Director Bruce MacDonald (he later married Susan who works at Mute Records, the label of Daniel Miller who under the pseudonym ‘The Normal’ put out “T.V.O.D.”).
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