By Charlie Seller
Once GG and the Murder Junkies got started it got very loud and very crowded inside the hot tiny cement space.
His tweed coat was hanging open and Hero saw almost everything. GG wasn’t wearing more than a pair of loose, soiled jockey shorts underneath. He reached for a styrofoam cup and sloshed the crowd with what Hero guessed was a mixture of piss and shit. The blond girl got hit with some and stayed right up front.
“Too weird for me,” said Hero as he watched it all with Johnny from the relative safety of the little P.A.room. The crowd started throwing shit back at GG along with bottles, a couple of metal folding chairs, beer and they were screaming, loving it. When Johnny One Eye saw that GG was throwing the shit back and running into the crowd, attacking them with body checks and clothes-lining them 2 at a time.
The sun came out for the first time that day to make its way down and across the panes of cracked chicken wire glass that were part of the large window opposite Hero’s cell …
“That’s it!” Johnny shouted and then he pulled the plug. The crowd was crazy – going at it with GG: drunk, piss and shit flying in specks everywhere, GG hitting people over the head with his fists – but not too roughly – everyone spilling beer and screaming like a flock of burning loons. The people who’d been listening from outside came into find out why the music had stopped and then stayed to watch the noisy spectacle of the naked madman covered in shit, piss and corruption. Johnny pulled the roll down gate closed with a resounding, “Brrllang!” and told Hero, “That’s it! Get the mics, get the rest of the shit!”
Hero went out first and caddy-cornered the P.A. cabinets up against the wall just in time to see GG run out of the garage in great bounding steps like he was dusted or walking through 2 feet of snow – naked but for his World War I helmet, his jump boots, and some shit smeared on his thighs and torso followed by the rowdier portion of the crowd. Oh, and he was still wearing that very dark pair of cheap sunglasses that looked like Wayfarers but really weren’t Wayfarers, just pretty decent knock-offs.
His beard and mustache were frothy with beer and spittle.and Hero thought that GG looked, and behaved, a lot like someone who had rabies.
Johnny was arguing with a paper-thin, white junkie over a mic stand. The guy’s “wife” was holding a baby who was undoubtedly the only clean one of the trio. Hero. recognized the guy. He used to play this weird homemade “guitar” that he’d made using a piece of 2”x6” wood planking for its body outside the Cooper Union at the corner of Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place for change. He was always filthy and disheveled and he always played motherfucking Rawhide and he would get really into it no matter how much everyone told him he sounded like shit. Everything else he played was phony “experimental” stuff, very limited due to the design of the instrument itself. That rawhide shit made Hero want to see if he could get away with breaking dude’s “guitar”- that is- if he’d brought it with him. The only people whoever dropped change in his little box there on the sidewalk were either tone-deaf or tourists who just didn’t know any better.
Johnny was just beginning a tug of war with him over the Mic stand when the guy’s “wife” came up yelling – with the baby perched on her hip – the two of them screaming high holy murder while her free hand flailed wildly in front of John’s face. She was the quintessential, wet, gray bag of bones and her hair was dark with dirt and slimy-stringy, too. She was pale with drug acne for highlights on an otherwise pretty face – just too many holes.
The crowd was freaking and all hell had broken loose… and someone turned up a TV.. The Simpsons theme song was playing, Hero heard it in the fading sunlight of his powerless cell. They were ripping apart the makeshift bar and howling. Some punks outside were arguing with the promoters in an effort to get a refund (for more beer now – more beer later – more beer) while the already drunk punks were busy tipping over 10 foot tall, 2-ton metal sculptures with fire hydrants for breasts; rolling empty 55-gallon oil drums to blockade the yard’s gated entrance and throwing loose garbage that had yet to become great works of art at each other. Empty 40-ounce beer bottles sailed through the air like footballs thrown from 3rd Street by disappointed – drunk – GG Allin fans.
Louie stood up in the truck bed, dragging the cinderblock, and barked deep and gravely like, his back arched and his short brown coat bristled all along his neck, spine and tail like a series of staggered, broken razors. The words “mast fed razor back” kept swinging inside Hero’s dopey head. The more he looked at Louie, the more the dog’s head appeared to resemble a spade shovel crossbred with an anvil and some ancient mythological beast that had been a highly favored weapon of its master. If Louie didn’t like you and got hold of you – you were ass-out: he might even elect to leave with a piece of you. The dog was no fucking joke and commanded more respect than a lot of men he’d known.
Hero ran over to John after he saw him push junkie dude into the wall with the business end of the mic stand, which prompted dude’s “wife” thing to try to hit John with her free greasy fist all girly-like and overhand from the elbow. Hero picked up a piece of what had been a part of the bar not 2-minutes earlier, an old wooden table leg, and hit dude a few good whacks about the calves while shouting at him to, “Let go, asshole!”
Dude’s “wife” backed off when she saw, the table leg, and then he’d dead-eyed her droopy ass. In that split second a combination of primordial fear and attraction re-familiarized itself with the inside of her dope addled cerebral cortex squelching any of her remaining resistance to withdraw.
Upon regaining her composure she started bitching at Hero from the side of the action when he shut her down – again: “That was nothing – so shut the fuck-up or you’ll be picking up your boyfriend here at the emergency room – you can take up this bullshit about the mic stand with the promoters – so step off!”
The junkies left and came back with a couple of the cops who were in force out on the streets around The Gas Station. Hero and John were packing up the P.A. and the racks when they all rolled in together from the bar entrance lead by “wifey” and baby-cries-a-lot. Dude stayed back aways playing the poor innocent victim. Shouting over the noise outside that indicated a definite mini-riot in progress, it took Hero and John all of about one minute to tell the cops their side of the story.
That, and one good look at McDude and “wife” was about all that was necessary to end that fiasco. That plus the sounds of Louie’s insane barking, the bottles smashing and the drunk chorus of screams coming from outside, had all begun to inspire expressions of serious alarm on the policeman’s faces.
More patrol cars pulled up on Avenue B. The passengers were truly in a state of shock at what was apparently happening all by itself: they had just passed a man running north wearing nothing but a German World War I helmet and a pair of sunglasses being chased by a crowd of twenty or thirty drunk, screaming punk rockers. The officers decided to let them all be because it looked as if the man running was covered from head to toe with shit and blood. One of New York’s Finest had commented that he hoped the guy ran all the way past 14th Street and into the next precinct; he was off duty in half-an-hour and wasn’t interested in any overtime that looked anything like that.
Hero and Johnny loaded up. Hero rode in the back with the equipment – armed with the table leg – while Johnny drove and Louie rode shotgun with his window rolled two-thirds of the way down.
The next day it was rumored that GG Allin had o.d.’ed on heroin inside a vestibule somewhere along Avenue B and had been found naked and dead in that order. That was bullshit though. It turned out that after running up Avenue B naked, smeared with shit and blood, chasing cars and screaming at anyone who got close, he went to a friend’s house to get cleaned up and got high on some really strong shit and then died from an overdose.
And that’s the story of GG Allin’s “last gig.” The Murder Junkies cleared out as soon as the power went off.