Diamond in the Rough (10 page)

I saw Bud now and then over the years after he left New York. He and Julie came to visit and showed up at my gig at the Lone Star Cafe. Buddy managed to record my set off the board and still talks about it. That’s Bud, the archivist. He joined Emmylou Harris’s band, and I happened to see him in Memphis around 1995 while both Emmy and I were there. Over the breakfast table, he took out a bootleg CD and pushed it across the table to me. “Listen to this,” he said, and I looked at the disc. Patty Griffin. It was the first album she’d recorded with a producer, and it never saw the light of day, but upon first listen I was completely blown away. And now I’m in a band called Three Girls and Their Buddy, with Emmy, Patty, and Buddy. This is evidence of good karma, surely.

How do I explain Buddy Miller? He is made of music. He is made of light. He’s like your best big brother and your sweetest child. There is no one kinder. He once gave me a book called
How to Torture Your Children.
It was Buddy who recently turned me on to
Some Kind of Monster,
the Metallica documentary. On tour he gifted us with plush monkey toys that flew and screamed. He reveals little about himself but steps up to the plate as a producer, something I’m about to be witness to, since he’s going to produce my next record. Buddy and Patty just won a Grammy for the gospel record he produced for her. Bud has religion, but he doesn’t preach it, he lives it.

We almost lost Bud in 2009. Three Girls and Their Buddy were touring. In Baltimore, Buddy confessed after a show to having acute indigestion, but Carolyn, our tour manager, thought it was more than that. She carted him off to the Johns Hopkins ER, where it was determined he was having not acute indigestion but a massive heart attack. He was stabilized—only barely, though. By early the next morning, the surgeons opened him up and performed a triple bypass. It’s notable that instead of having three major arteries going into his heart, as most people do, Buddy possesses four. He has a special heart. This fourth artery was not completely blocked, and it, along with Carolyn and Johns Hopkins, saved his life. It’s a good thing, too, because once God
did
get the memo on Buddy, I can assure you he broke the mold.

But back to 1980. The Buddy Miller Band consisted of its namesake, myself, Lincoln Schleifer on bass, Karl Himmel on drums, and Larry Campbell on everything—guitar, pedal steel, fiddle, and mandolin. Years later, when the movie
Dances with Wolves
came out, Larry’s wife dubbed him “Walks with Instruments.” Buddy found Karl in Nashville, I believe, and knew of his work with Neil Young. Larry and Lincoln were young New York City boys ripe for the picking, and Buddy sniffed them out somehow. I have been in a lot of vans with boys and should know more than I woefully do about how men operate. I recall things like the time Lincoln was snoring in the backseat. I tape-recorded him and called the piece “Mammals of the Bronx.” The only thing I can say with certainty is that given enough time and alcohol, most of them tried to sleep with me.

We played several pseudo–country joints in the city, most notably City Limits on Seventh Avenue. I remember other places, like Home and Spaghetti Western, but our main haunts were City Limits, and the Lone Star Cafe. Buddy’s band also played a circuit of bars up through New Paltz and Albany, New York, hazardous undertakings given that we all drank. On Larry’s birthday, in fact, between sets we were all downing kamikazes, which consist of equal parts vodka, triple sec, and lime juice, and in an effort to be one of the guys I confidently offered to drive us all back to the city. At some point during that drive, I lost consciousness, I guess for only a second or so, because when I came to, we were still on the road.

I wish I could remember a set list from Buddy’s band. I was so drunk. Bud picked out a song for me called “Runnin’ Wild,” and he and I did a duet called “Rock, Salt, and Nails” that he’d done first with Julie and would later record with her. Larry turned me on to a song by his friend Roly Salley, called “Killin’ the Blues.” I did that one, too. And, of course, the “Orange Blossom Special.” Buddy used to call out the set list to us, song by song. He decided on the fly what to play, and he always needed to tell us what key the next song was in—we knew so many that the rest of us would forget, although he never did. Always he would announce each song to us like this: “Okay, ‘Silver Wings’ in the key of G … like a little baby goat.” Or “‘Six Days on the Road’ in E … like a tiny egg.”

After mooching off each band member for a place to stay over the course of a few weeks, I finally found an apartment in the East Village, a true shithole for two hundred dollars a month on East Third Street between First and Second avenues, known as the Hells Angels block. I was ecstatic to get it. It was a studio in a six-floor walk-up with crumbling plaster, rotting linoleum, a bathtub in the kitchen, sporting the luxury of its own toilet in a little cubicle near the tub. The ceiling literally fell from that cubicle one day and made a nice pile of plaster and drywall inside the toilet bowl, upon which, luckily, I was not sitting at that moment. The apartment was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. Water was leaking from the ceiling into my room one day, and I discovered, after knocking on his door, that the guy above me was a hoarder and had stacks of newspapers four feet high everywhere. He had no idea his radiator was leaking, because it was practically impossible to see, let alone get to.

East Third Street, 1981

I fell in love with New York. The geeky, neurotic weirdo I’d always felt like began to seem downright normal compared to some of the things I witnessed every day! And I loved the feeling that no matter the time of day or night, New York City was open. The Bay Area always felt too spread out for me to get a grip on, but New York was laid out on a simple grid that made it feel small. No matter what I needed, it was just around the corner. There were the Ukrainian diners where I’d buy a quart of split-pea soup and a loaf of pumpernickel bread and live off that for a week, and the electronics store on the corner was where I bought my first television, a thirteen-inch black-and-white. I didn’t have to sweat not having a car; the subway was all I needed.

And I met Stokes.

He just showed up at one of my gigs. I think it was at the Other End. I know there was an introduction, but I don’t remember it. He wasn’t in my life, and then one day he was. Roy Stokes Howell. He was called Stokes. He could talk to anybody about anything. You meet Stokes and he already knows you. Then the next time you see him, you just say, “Well it’s Stokes, of course,” and there you are. He’s your friend.

Stokes and I are kind of the same person, except that he likes for rooms to be hot and I like them to be cold. We are both attracted to insanely wrong lovers for ourselves. In some way, shape, or form, we contemplate suicide daily. We think
Waiting for Godot
is one of the funniest things ever written. We would be lost without fart and shit humor. I watched
Silence of the Lambs
like five times, and Stokes accused me of being sick, but he watched
Blue Velvet
at
least
five times. He also reads a lot of books about serial killers and shark attacks. We love the line from
Shadow of a Doubt
where Joseph Cotten asks his innocent young niece, “Do you know the world is a foul sty?” This means a lot to us. We not only like but can also
relate
to the film
Repulsion.
We love
Huckleberry Finn.

Stokes grew up in Missouri; he’s a small-town boy. I grew up in South Dakota. Small-town girl. We both became New Yorkers so as not to be seen as strange anymore. We were
Romper Room
compared to most of our neighbors in the East Village. Stokes studies Buddhism. Buddhists really do believe that the world is a foul sty, but Stokes and I come by that point of view naturally; it’s in our bones. We are both kind, honest friends, dedicated and passionate and open in our work. In fact, Stokes, a writer, is so open in his work that one of his friends declared his first book of short stories “a cry for help.” You would want us on your jury if you did it but didn’t mean to. We understand. He lived practically just around the corner, on Sixth Street between Avenue A and First Avenue.

Stokes nursed me through months of torment—hell, maybe years—with my first real adult boyfriend, John Leventhal, staying on the phone with me for hours. He drove a cab during the day and stayed up all night writing. So if the panic attacks came in the middle of the night, I would hightail it over to East Sixth, where he would have a small paper bag ready for me to breathe into to stop the hyperventilating. That’s love. Then he’d let me sleep in his bed until early morning, his bedtime.

After I stopped drinking, Stokes was at the ready to handle the strange fallout from the void. I remember days when I would robotically go downstairs to the corner deli and buy one Diet Pepsi at a time, drink it and chain-smoke, toss the can in the trash, and head back down for another. Back and forth. I was like Paula Prentiss in
The Stepford Wives
after she gets stabbed in the gut by Katharine Ross and her mechanics go haywire, causing her to retrieve teacups from the cupboard again and again. Turn, drop them, go back, turn, drop, all the while repeating, “Oh Joanna! My new dress! How could you do a thing like that? Just when I was going to give you coffee! How could you do a thing like that? I thought we were friends!” Nobody stabbed me, but my machinery was broken and had switched to an out-of-order autopilot. By putting his hand on my arm, Stokes could stop the loop, and then he would rub my shoulders. Human contact. I stopped. I felt. I wept. I needed a witness; it was too frightening otherwise. Stokes was one of my witnesses.

Nothing was too out there for Stokes and me to discuss, from sexual perversions and experiments gone awry to the lowest in fart and shit humor up to and including our own ghastly moments of scatological mishaps, my favorite being a bus ride Stokes once was on in Missouri. As he took a poo in the back restroom, he discovered the lock on the door to be broken and so had to hold it shut. The bus then rounded a tight corner, launching poor Stokes out of his throne and into the aisle as if to wave a quick, pants-at-the-ankles hello before the bus turned in the other direction and set him back down on the toilet. And these weren’t every now and then whispered and giggled confessions—this was dinner conversation. It still is.

Me and Stokes, NYC, 1983

What I loved about New York wasn’t just having Stokes in the neighborhood. Even the music community seemed small and tight-knit. If our band didn’t have a gig, we were usually out seeing someone else’s, and it was totally copacetic to be in more than one band. Soozie Tyrell, who fronted a group called High in the Saddle, had a revolving door of girl backup singers that included Elaine Caswell, Lisa Lowell, Patti Scialfa, and me. We’d play in duos, trios, whatever got us hired, and Soozie was a master at sniffing out work. They all could sing anything—Elaine killed on Bacharach & David, Lisa wailed on Wanda Jackson, Patti channeled Ronnie Spector and Dusty Springfield, and Soozie—she played the hell out of the violin and sang absolutely everything with the most joyful, gigantic, shit-eating grin and a toss of her fiery red hair. Not only that, she hand-beaded bustiers for all of us girls in her spare time and could drink every one of us under the table.