Back From The Ledge

It was 1985, for fuck’s sake. If Ronnie James Dio could build a two-story hydraulic dragon with laser eyes for his Sacred Heart tour, the Dominator would build a three-story job that could spit human skeletons for his perpetually-forthcoming Choke On My Bone tour. If Ronnie James had two eight-foot medieval knights in full armor with giant light sabers made in Japan, the Dominator would have twice as many eight foot fucking robots, with two light sabers apiece, made by Industrial Light & Magic. That little Guinea fruitcake could sing all the Rainbow and Sabbath songs he wanted to. The Dominator’s stage show would pummel his midget ass back to the goddamn Bronze Age. All he needed was a band. And some songs.

It was only 11am, but the Dominator was getting high on amphetamines and faded glory. He plotted and connived, scrawling obscene cartoons on one of the many legal pads his ex-wife had left at their clandestine fuck pad in Miami Beach. The place was legendary back in the late ’70s. When the wife was out of town, Dom and his entourage would close down the Cockpit every night and bring the party back to his place. Glenn Hughes—of the Village People, not Deep Purple—would snort huge rails of coke off his own mustache and once punched out Dennis Wilson for fucking up the words to “Macho Man.”  Rob Halford used to crash out in one of the many guest bedrooms. Wilson would usually crash on the floor. They would both be wearing nothing but leather g-strings.

Those were the days. These days were strictly shitsville. The Dominator stoked his hate with methedrine and revenge fantasies. It had been a hell of a year so far. The bad news rolled in like a brown waterfall made out of middle fingers and turds: Sabbath reunited with Ozzy at Live Aid. Zeppelin reunited at Live Aid with Phil Fucking Collins on drums. Diamond Dave went solo and Halen replaced him with that clown from Montrose. David Byron, formerly of Uriah Heep, took the high hard one right in the liver: Death by drink at age 38.  The only bright spot had been watching Dee Snider and Frank Zappa ram the First Amendment right up Tipper Gore’s sanctimonious cornhole at the PMRC hearings.

Meanwhile, the Dominator’s much-ballyhooed supergroup with Vinny Appice and Mark Mendoza never materialized. The idea was to come out with a scorching twin-ax Priest/Lizzy-style attack featuring George Lynch and Fast Eddie Clarke on maximum screaming-whammy guitar action. But the whole thing imploded when Dom discovered that George and Ed wanted to kill each other. They’d both banged the same groupie back in ’82—or at least they thought it was the same groupie. Turns out it was actually twin sisters, and during some future unspecified encounter Ed and George had gotten them confused accidentally-on-purpose and a huge beef erupted. Even the sisters weren’t speaking with each other. To top it all off, Dom had accidentally-on-purpose gotten into a fistfight with some young upstart named Lizzy Borden in the Rainbow parking lot last week. And lost. But only because he was completely shit-hammered at the time.

From where Dom stood—on the roof of his former Miami Beach fuck pad, about four inches from the ledge—it looked like his life was circling the drain. He had that feeling in the pit of his stomach that he used to get back in Vilnius when Big Daddy Paskas would whip his belt off and start slowly wrapping one end around his fist. Dom knew he was about to get the piss knocked out of him, but there was nothing he could do about it. So he did what any other fat, washed-up, pansexual, drug-addicted, barely-English-speaking “lead singer” would do:  He called Domino’s and ordered six large pizzas with everything on them. Then he fished the Yellow Pages out from under the sink. It was time to get the old band back together.

This bullshit originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Decibel magazine.