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  To my Dipplo

  CONTENTS

   Prologue

  1 The Beat of a Different Drum

  2 From Dust . . .

  3 . . . To Dust

  4 The Dust Settles

  5 Punk, Pain, and Wayne

  6 Hell’s Kitchen

  7 London Calling

  8 Hey Ho, Let’s Go!

  9 A Long Way Back to Germany

  10 We’re Not Students—We’re Ramones

  11 Wall of Sound

  12 Trickle-Down Economics

  13 Put Me in a Wheelchair, Get Me on a Plane

  14 The M&M Boys

  15 Up in Flames

  16 Dog Days

  17 Road from Ruin

  18 King for a Day

  19 Punk Goes Pop

  20 Hello, We Must Be Going

  21 A Wonderful World

   Photographs

   Acknowledgments

   About Marky Ramone

   Index

  PROLOGUE

  There were many reasons to come down to Florida. There was the weather, retirement, or just a vacation. My friend Mike came down for a kidney. Like me, he was from Brooklyn, but he had a rare genetic disorder and needed a transplant. His specialist told him that all the automobile fatalities in the Sunshine State made it the organ donor capital of the United States.

  Dee Dee and I were in Florida for none of those reasons, even though a new liver, pancreas, or spleen probably would have done Dee Dee some good. The Ramones had just finished a show in front of a thousand screaming, moshing kids in St. Pete, and were set to drive across the state to do a show in Miami Beach the next day. But Mike, Dee Dee, and I decided we wanted to hang out in the Tampa–St. Pete area for another day and catch up with the rest of the band the day of the show.

  Monte said it was okay. He trusted Mike to get me to the show, and he trusted me to get Dee Dee to the show. That meant a lot coming from Monte. To call Monte our road manager was to call da Vinci a painter. Monte had it all figured out, from A to Z. The last time I asked to stay behind, years earlier, things didn’t work out so well. I never made it from Columbus, Ohio, to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and the Ramones had to cancel a show.

  But that was then, and this was now. I had been sober four years going on five and was dedicated to my craft: professional drummer in the world’s first and foremost punk rock band, where if there was a dull moment, it was only because you were dozing. As for Dee Dee, he was a work in progress. Dope, coke, dust, and amphetamines had been replaced largely by lithium, Thorazine, Stelazine, and Buspar.

  He hadn’t found exactly the right combination yet, but he was still the iconic bassist and lyrical genius in that same punk rock band. So when Monte entrusted me to get Dee Dee to the show as well, it was like your parents leaving you in charge of the house and your kid brother. We promised to be good. Maybe we’d visit Busch Gardens or the Tampa zoo.

  The next morning, we took off in Mike’s Chevy Impala and headed south on Interstate 75. It was about a 260-mile route that took us south to around Naples and then veered due east across the Everglades. We had the radio to help us kill time, and there was always lots of stuff to talk about—cars, girls, music. We had a new president elected a couple of weeks before, George H. W. Bush, and were heading into 1989 with a new album: Brain Drain. Dee Dee had written a song for it, “Pet Sematary,” in under an hour down in author Stephen King’s basement, and it was also the title track for the forthcoming movie.

  And with all that to shoot the breeze, Dee Dee chose to rap his way across the state. With his now spiky hair holding pretty firm, he shouted out to central Florida that he was another James Brown and the baddest rapper in Whitestone, Queens.

  Baddest in the Everglades, too. Dee Dee had practically invented punk rock. I wasn’t so sure the world needed another rapper. What I was pretty sure we needed, though, was a mechanic. I had had more than my share of overheated cars for one lifetime, and I knew what I was smelling was not good.

  I asked Mike to pull over to the grassy shoulder. There was nothing on this trip but grass, except for maybe a swamp off in the distance. Other than an occasional overpass, there was not much to distinguish one mile of highway from the next. I couldn’t say I had any idea what town we were in. There were no towns. There were just wetlands linking one side of Florida to the other, plus saw grass that was now dry. Mike told me it hadn’t rained for weeks.

  Mike and I got out of the car, while Dee Dee, no longer rapping, sat in the back. When I dropped down and looked under the Impala, I could see the catalytic converter was extremely hot from the smoke coming off it.

  “Dee Dee,” I said. “You gotta get out of the car.”

  “I’m not getting out,” he said. “I just saw an alligator.”

  I knew what he meant. The nickname for this stretch of highway was Alligator Alley. There were plenty of mosquitoes around, but no alligators. It was the Thorazine talking. Or the Stelazine. Or just Dee Dee. I smelled something else burning. It was the grass beneath the car. I yelled.

  “Dee Dee, get out of the car! The grass is on fire!”

  Dee Dee bailed out like a skydiver, alligators be damned. I put the gearshift into neutral, and Mike and I started pushing the car as Dee Dee joined in. We had a shot. The wind was blowing front to rear, so if we moved fast enough, we could keep the car from becoming engulfed. We rolled about twenty feet and felt the flames licking up our jeans from behind.

  “Forget the car!” Mike screamed.

  He was right. It was a lost cause. He didn’t want us hurt on his account, and we didn’t want him to wind up an organ donor. We let go of the car and ran down along the highway just ahead of the growing flames. The ring of fire stretched out around fifty feet and obscured both ends of the car. It was bye-bye, Impala.

  I had been down this road before when my 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville went up in flames on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. That one wasn’t my fault either, but it caused me to miss a rehearsal and was the beginning of a downhill run, and pretty soon it was bye-bye, Ramones. In my mind, I already saw Monte’s disappointment. Worse, I could see John’s anger.

  We jogged down the highway to maintain a safe distance. The brushfire was now covering an area equivalent to two city blocks. Mike understood the situation. He agreed to stay behind while Dee Dee and I hitchhiked. We would figure out the rest after the show, hopefully.

  No matter where we were, we looked like Ramones. We had the T-shirts, sneakers, leather jackets, and the hair. We had the attitude. Sticking a thumb out on the Bowery would have stopped enough cars to snarl downtown traffic. But out here in the Everglades, Charles Manson had a better chance. And the inferno behind us wasn’t helping.

  At least a dozen cars, trucks, and minivans had passed us by. I didn’t have Claudette Colbert’s legs, and this wasn’t It Happened One Night. But I knew the universal language, and it was greener than the burning grass. So I pulled out a small wad of hundred-dollar bills and began waving it around. Within a minute, a Ford F-150 pickup truck pulled up alongside us. The driver got out and walked around the front of the vehicle.

  “Where you boys headed?”

  He looked like a nice, hardworking, enterprising guy of about fifty. He had on a John Deere cap and was missing a couple of teeth.

  “Miami Beach,” I said. “We’re musicians.”


  “Okay, then,” he said. “I’m going that way, and I have room in the cab.”

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Before I could reach over and grab the handle of the passenger door, something rolled off of Dee Dee’s tongue. It spread faster than the grass fire and was harder to put out.

  “Marc, how big do you think this guy’s dick is?”

  We all heard it loud and clear. No matter how much rapping Dee Dee had done along Alligator Alley, there was no rhyme to this. Or reason. Dee Dee was straight, married, and, like me, had a lot to lose if we didn’t make it to Miami Beach on time. I saw the pickup driver’s eyes go from Dee Dee to the money in my hand, back again to Dee Dee, and once again to the cash. Then it was settled.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You boys are gonna have to make yourselves comfortable in the back of the truck.”

  I nodded. I held out the cash, and he took it.

  Late November in the Everglades can be chilly, especially when you’re in the open air in the back of a pickup truck doing seventy-five miles per hour. I didn’t bother to ask Dee Dee what he was thinking. I didn’t want to know. I just kept staring at the two rifles mounted in the back window.

  When we pulled up to the front of the theater, Dee Dee and I were huddled in the back like a couple of immigrants being smuggled across the border. The Miami Beach Ramones fans were already hanging out in front, and when they saw us stand in the back of the truck, a small cheer went up. I am always happy to sign autographs, but I was so cold, I didn’t know if I could hold a pen.

  The sound check was in ten minutes. I would have to hold sticks, and Dee Dee would have to hold a pick. And use them. So we ran into the dressing room to try to warm up quickly. John came by. He seemed a little edgy but mostly relieved.

  “Marc, I was getting worried. We have a sound check.”

  I had no doubt John was worried about us and about a possible lost payday. Joey came in next. He was the member of the band with an obsessive-compulsive disorder at times so severe that getting him to leave his apartment was an all-morning affair. But Joey had beaten us to Miami Beach by almost a full day.

  “There was a huge fire on the highway,” Joey said. “Alligator Alley. It was just on the news. Did you guys see that?”

  “Yeah, we saw it.”

  We were still shivering and not too talkative yet. But when Monte walked in, he wanted to know everything. Who could blame him? How the hell I got here was a question I asked myself just about every day.

  1

  THE BEAT OF A DIFFERENT DRUM

  My father’s father, Peter Bell, came to America from Holland in 1920 along with my grandmother. My father was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on August 11, 1931, and christened Peter, after my grandfather. My grandfather was a chef at the Copacabana for ten years before becoming the head chef at the “21” Club. The Copa, as it was known, was located on East Sixtieth Street in Manhattan and was owned by mob boss Frank Costello. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin made their debuts there. If you were a singer, bandleader, or comedian in the forties and fifties and made it to the Copa, you had made it, period.

  My grandfather worked at “21” for eighteen years, right through its heyday. Established during Prohibition and located on West Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, you could always spot the place thanks to all the painted statues of jockeys above the front entrance. Everyone who was anyone ate at “21.” My grandfather got to meet and hang out with stars including Humphrey Bogart, Jackie Gleason, and Judy Garland. These weren’t just a bunch of tall tales—my grandfather had the pictures to prove it! Whenever we visited my grandparents’ house, I would just stare at those photographs in awe that my grandfather actually knew the same people I saw on TV and in the movies.

  In 1944, my father and his parents moved from Hoboken to Brooklyn. My dad went to PS 217 elementary school on Coney Island Avenue, and that’s where he met my mother. My mother’s maiden name was Gertrude Joest. Most people called her Trudy. Her mother, Johanna, was French, and her father, Julius, was German. They immigrated to America in 1923 and settled in Willoughby, Ohio. My mother was born on September 10, 1931, in her parents’ home. Julius was an electrical engineer, and the family was middle class, but most babies at the time were still delivered by a midwife instead of in a hospital.

  When my mom was only two years old, her mother died. A few years later, Fredrick, my mom’s older brother, died of pneumonia at the age of ten. Little Trudy and her dad moved to Cleveland for a few years before relocating to Brooklyn, New York. They lived on Ocean Parkway for a couple of years, and then moved to a four-story brick apartment building at 640 Ditmas Avenue, a few blocks south of Prospect Park. It was a solid working-class neighborhood made up mostly of modest private homes.

  Mom and Dad were friends for quite a few years before they started dating when they were around eighteen. About a year later, on December 15, 1950, they got married at city hall in Lower Manhattan. On July 15, 1952, my twin brother, Fred, and I were born at New York Infirmary Hospital.

  Our family lived with my grandfather Julius in a three-story brick walk-up, off the corner of President Street and Rogers Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The buildings were all attached, usually with a little store on the ground floor and a separate stairway to the apartments above. Fred and I shared a room with bunk beds, which was fine with us because we got along really well.

  My father was a card-carrying longshoreman, and my mother worked as a secretary. They sent Fred and me to a racially integrated nursery school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood just to the north. In the mid-fifties, most neighborhoods were segregated, but Fred and I were happy to be with kids from different cultures and made friends right away.

  One strange thing about our nursery school was the school bus. We didn’t have one. What we had was a Cadillac hearse converted into a kind of station wagon minibus. It was big and black and came rolling up to the school like there was a funeral to attend. When the kids saw the hearse coming up the block, we would all run to try to get into the backseat first. It was roomy and padded back there, and it was cool to think this same compartment was once used for dead bodies. I loved riding with the window down. We all loved looking out the back window and making weird faces at the cars behind us.

  The only thing I really didn’t like about nursery school was when they put us all down for naps in the middle of the day. I thought it was weird the way they set us all up on little floor mats and turned the lights out. There was plenty of daylight still coming in through the windows. I knew I was supposed to be quiet like everyone else, but it was hard. I knew there was no way I was going to fall asleep, so the best I could do was lie there with my eyes closed.

  I daydreamed about doing anything else but taking a nap. There were toys put away on shelves all around the room—wooden blocks, a Slinky, Play-Doh, Mr. Potato Head, a Lionel train set—and they were begging to be played with. After our nap, the teachers let us play a little rough, especially outdoors where we could just run around in the yard and make up our own games. To me, lying down on that mat and faking a nap was just a big waste.

  In 1957, Fred and I turned five, and we moved along with Grandpa Julius back to the four-story building at 640 Ditmas Avenue, where my mother had lived when she was little. The bunk beds moved with us, so I still had to share a room with Fred. That was fine, because we still got along.

  Dad and Grandpa Julius put their mechanical skills to work for Fred and me by helping us build a huge electric train set, which we played with for many hours. Dad also got us started building plastic models of cars, airplanes, and battleships. Fred loved making models of the Universal Studios monsters—the Mummy, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He painted them almost lifelike.

  All the models required Testors glue, which had a very powerful smell that hit you sharply way up your nostrils. The smell was so bad it was good, and we got a little buzzed from it. That was the bonus of building m
odels.

  There were no more naps once we got to elementary school. PS 217 was the same place our parents first met. Mom packed our lunch boxes. We got to play in the schoolyard at lunchtime. I got along with the other kids for the most part but got into a fight here and there. One time some kid in the bathroom accused me of stealing his grape juice. Why the hell would I want some kid’s grape juice? So we got into it right then and there by the urinal until one of the male teachers burst in and broke it up. It was just kids’ stuff.

  When Fred and I got home, our grandfather Julius watched us until Mom and Dad got back from work. The deal was we would usually get our homework out of the way before we played. If the weather was bad, we would watch reruns of The Three Stooges Show, Abbott and Costello, or Adventures of Superman. The Three Stooges Show was probably my favorite because they were out of their minds with the slaps, hits, and smacks, but at the same time they were a unit—a team. It was like three times as much comedy packed into a half hour as anybody else.

  Most days, I’d be waiting outside our apartment building for my father to come home from work. When I saw my dad, I’d run toward him to give him a big hug. I really looked up to my father. He was very relaxed about most things but firm when he had to be. My dad was six-foot-two-and-a-half, 230 pounds, and wore the thick, black-rimmed glasses that were popular at the time. He reminded me of Clark Kent. My mother looked like an actress. She was outspoken, and she was tough when she had to be. But my parents seemed to have a great relationship. I don’t think I ever heard them argue, even once. If they did, it was never in front of us.

  When the weather was decent, Fred and I would usually play punch-ball or stickball with our friends from the neighborhood. Stickball was basically street baseball using a broom handle. When that got boring, we moved on to more exciting things like climbing fire escapes or sneaking into boiler rooms. We got into fights with kids from other blocks in the neighborhood, usually because someone was on someone else’s turf. We were just your average kids from Brooklyn.