(NOTE: Some of the names have been changed in this memoir – many have not been changed. If your name is in here and you’d rather remain anonymous, suggest a pseudonym to me, and I’ll substitute it.)

THE SAGA BEGINS

My Dad, Gary E. Johnson, was born to an unwed Ruby Riley in 1942 in East St. Louis, Illinois. In 1946, they moved to the Wayne-Westland, Michigan area west of Detroit, where Grandma first noticed her son's artistic inclinations. By the age of 15 or 16, Gary had already charmed some of his schoolmates' parents by hand-picking small tattoos on their kids' young hides with a little homemade rig he still keeps as a memento today. Not yet fully realizing his ink aspirations, Dad ended up driving a truck for the local incinerator in Inkster, and married a pretty girl named Sharon Hedger he'd met at Palmer Road Baptist Church - a church both my grandparents had helped construct and organize. Grandpa Roscoe Hedger was a deacon, and Grandpa “Johnny” Johnson was a youth minister there. My mother was 17 and my dad just barely 19. I’m not sure whether or not he owned a shotgun, but Grandpa Roscoe acted pragmatically to arrange for a wedding; He held a steady job as an orderly at nearby Eloise, one of the state’s biggest and oldest mental hospitals.

Although my Dad was the son of a local cop (who would eventually become a preacher), he says he would have fit the profile of "hood" at the time (Preachers' and cops' kids are always troublemakers, aren’t they?). Several members of the Johnson family also held jobs at Eloise Hospital, and Dad himself worked in the cafeteria — pouring coffee for the hardcore alcoholics; He recalls that by about halfway through his rounds, many of them had the shakes so bad that they’d managed to spill the entire cup, so he’d have to start all over. I first saw the light of day in 1962 in the small town of Wayne, about 20 miles West of Detroit, and my brother John appeared a couple years later. When my Grandpa Johnson saw his first grandson in the maternity ward, he nicknamed me “Rocky” after the famous wrestler (Wrestler Rocky Johnson was the father of future wrestler / actor “The Rock”). All through childhood I was called “Rocky” and to this day, my immediate family still calls me that, although I prefer to go by my middle name, “Roscoe”. Both my brother and I would follow their Dad into the Ink trade and John would also eventually enter the ministry.

Let’s rewind a bit and be more candid: Dad got kicked out of Wayne Memorial High School for punching out his drafting teacher, but the advantage of having a cop for a father was that he was able to strike a bargain to enlist in the U.S. Army instead of going to DeHoCo – otherwise known as Detroit House Of Corrections. Dad got his first professional tattoo at a little shop outside Ft. Wood, Missouri during US Army basic training. When Mom became pregnant with me, he was able to opt-out of Viet Nam and get assigned to the reserves; but the experience of getting that crude $6 heart and dagger tat was enough to convince him to pursue a career in ink. Unfortunately, in 1965 it wasn't all that easy to break into the tattoo business: Trade secrets were still pretty closely guarded.

He made road-trips to visit already-established tattoo artists, making the acquaintance of Lyle Tuttle and Cliff Raven at earlier stages of their careers; From them he was able to glean valuable tattoo advice and inking technique. He traveled to Spaulding & Rogers in Voorheesville, NY to establish a tattoo trade supply source. His persistence paid off, as he began to acquire equipment and develop his tattooing skills. By 1969, he was able to open his first tattoo shop, House of Tattooing. He rode with a local motorcycle club back then, who were mostly booze-fueled characters until he introduced them to the delights of weed. My brother and I were oblivious at the time, but Mom says she once discovered a big stash in the attic, and spent several hours flushing it down the toilet a handful at a time — apparently it took so much effort because the weed floated and resisted swirling down the hole; she was very determined!

His shop was located in nearby Westland - a fairly small conservative community - so local authorities were probably none too happy to have outlaw bikers carousing and hanging out in their town; It was almost exactly like one of those low-budget biker exploitation flicks of the ‘70s around there! Grandpa Johnson by this time had undergone FBI training, and was a detective with Wayne County Sheriff, ironically heading their Outlaw Biker Investigations Unit. Grandma worked at City Hall — connections which must have helped Dad procure Judge Bradley’s former courthouse for his first shop. One of the more colorful stories about Grandpa Johnny involves a local bike gang who made a threat on his life, adding, “We know where you live!” Grandpa calmly went to the armory, signed out the flashiest machine gun they had, then went home to wait on his porch with the weapon at ready and a 5^th of whiskey at his side. As the gang drove by the house on the corner of Grand Traverse and Decatur, there were some tense moments … then they moved along, never to bother him again. I guess he knew how to speak their language!

When the “Born To Be Wild” biker lifestyle became too much for her, Mom filed for divorce. She’d brought us kids up in a Southern Baptist tradition, and wanted us to continue in that direction. Dad wanted to open an exotic pet shop in conjunction with the tattoo business, so our house was filled with fish tanks of piranhas, cages for boa constrictors and lizards, tarantulas and scorpions. And lots of cages of mice, since the snakes and piranhas had to eat! The scorpions were absolutely the last straw for Mom, so she posed an ultimatum, ending in the separation.

The other kids at school thought it must be cool having a biker / tattooist as a father, but I could never live up to the expectations of coolness that would go along with that distinction; I was a fat pimply geek, regardless of how cool my Dad was. Both of my parents were artistic though, and I must have inherited some creative tendencies from them. As far as tattoos went, I was naïve and embarrassed by the rustic quality of the work I saw back then - a style I now recognize as “traditional” (and which is now back in fashion). I remained active in church and serious about my relationship with the Lord, going on to sing in choir, attending youth meetings a few times a week, going on "visitation," where we would drop-in uninvited on friends and put them on the spot with prayer and Jesus-talk. I memorized scriptures and carried a small Bible with me all through junior high school, making me the target of all kinds of cruel mockery and alienating me from most of the other kids. We visited with Dad on the weekends, going fishing or checking out local hipster hangouts like The Trading Post or The Carousel Mall. Dad had grown his hair and beard really long, and had a beautiful custom chopper he’d sunk a lot of work into. I was too young to buy the underground comics I saw at these “head shops” — but the colorful covers with titles like “Zap”, “Mr. Natural,” and “Freak Brothers” made a real impression on me, and as soon as I was old enough to obtain copies at comic conventions, I did. Until then, I kept entertained with Mad, Creepy and Eerie.

TROUBLE AHEAD

Certain "end-times scholars” had interpreted Biblical prophesy to indicate that the Antichrist was born in 1962 - a date endorsed by a Sunday night guest at Palmer Rd. Baptist Church - and it caused me grave concern ... since I was born in 1962 and was just entering that phase of child development that filled my head with a swirling hormonal confusion of "unclean" thoughts. The only explanation I could muster was that I must be The BEAST! I prayed and pondered this heavy issue: If I was the Antichrist, and would just be fulfilling prophesy as destined, could I really be held accountable and spend eternity in Hell? A dramatic act of self-sacrifice was an option, but I was pretty sure that would also seal my Hell-bound fate. These concerns eventually faded, but for several months, I was a very troubled child. I couldn't possibly talk to an adult about it, as I tried my hardest to please my parents and teachers, and was a pretty good kid; Admitting that I was the Antichrist would, well, tend to shatter this illusion.

As I mentioned, I’d grown into a strapping young lad - That is to say that I was a big fat kid. The other brats used to taunt me with compliments like “Hey Johnson – You need a BRA!” My lifelong struggle with my weight probably stems from this early harassment. Anyway, kids my size were expected to be bullies, so the “real” bullies were always challenging me; and when backed-into having to physically defend myself I’d get whipped, because I was not tough or athletic and didn’t like confrontation. When my parents found out what was happening, they sent me to Grandpa Johnny for some self-defense instruction. The stress of police work had driven him to liquor trouble in those days, but he had been a Judo instructor in the Korean War, and set about teaching me some of the basics. During one of these sessions, I ended up with a wrist laceration serious enough to warrant a call for an ambulance. At the hospital, they laid me down on a table with bright lights overhead, my arm extended out for examination, and began to poke around in the wound to determine how much damage there was. By this time, my Dad and Mom had both arrived (Separately, as they’d divorced by this time), and it was pretty surreal for me looking up at all these familiar faces reunited in the haze of whatever pain-killer they’d given me. To figure out which nerves had been damaged, they had to ask if I felt anything each time they would pluck at various strands from inside the wound. In the delirium, my arm seemed like some kind of guitar fret-board they were plucking the strings on, but instead of hearing musical notes, I would feel a corresponding twinge of pain (Maybe my fascination with extreme music stems from this experience). The fact that Grandpa was struggling with his drinking further complicated the emotional intensity surrounding this accident; His judgement while in custody of my brother and I was obviously in question, and he seemed so grief-stricken over the whole thing that I was more worried about him than myself; Poor Grandpa – how was he gonna live this one down? This event was probably a catalyst for his later decision to give up drinking altogether.

 It turned out that there was a severed tendon and some nerve damage. A surgeon named Dr. Larson was called-in to reattach everything, and I had follow-up visits with him for a year or so afterwards. The surgery left me with a 4-inch trail of rough stitches  the inside of my right wrist that reminded me of the way the Karloff Frankenstein’s hands were sewn-on. The scar, along with my being big and clumsy, made me feel even more like a misfit – so I really did identify with the Frankenstein Monster. Dr. Larson’s office was in a medical complex in downtown Detroit right on Woodward Avenue, and my Dad was given the responsibility of taking me to the appointments every few months. I look back on these trips with particular fondness, as 1.) The divorce was hard on us kids, and time spent with my Dad was therapeutic 2.) The mystique of ‘70’s downtown Detroit was a thrill to a suburban kid, and 3.) We would go to this great used bookstore across the street called Big Books, where I first developed my love for old books and publications. Big Books was dusty and damp and smelled of decaying wood pulp. There were shelves of strange books on UFO’s, old Science Fiction and Horror Pulps, and I could sneak peeks at old issues of Playboy without being harassed. I always came away with a few old Mad Magazines, back issues of Creepy or Eerie, and another UFO book to pore over in the waiting room of Dr. Larson’s office.

NEAR DECAPITATION

I was very good at art and school in general; but, I only had one real friend, Mike who I keep in touch with to this day. I applied myself to making perfect grades, and working on the school newspaper qualified me to also assemble and print the church bulletin. This, along with a part-time church-cleaning job allowed me a key to access the church, where I could hang out by myself. I am not proud of the following anecdote, but for the sake of offering some humble comic relief, here it is: The extremes of boredom and teenage hormone overdrive once led me to try-out (ahem, in the Biblical sense) the church vacuum cleaner. Little did I know that the blades of the motor lurked 4 or 5 inches inside the opening where the hose attached, and I withdrew in sudden alarm when the blades grazed the tip of my curious extremity. Thank God I’d narrowly avoided “decapitation”, as I had this picture in my mind something similar to the hospital scenario with my wrist injury, only with another appendage under scrutiny … and a lot of awkward explaining to do.

When I got old enough, I taught Sunday School and led Vacation Bible School activities at Palmer Road. The adults and other youth thought I was the perfect little saint, but secretly, I knew the horrible truth: I had engaged in carnal union with an industrial vacuum cleaner on church premises, and although I had outgrown the notion that I was the Antichrist, I also knew that I couldn't hope to live up to my own unrealistic self-imposed spiritual standards.

After Mom remarried (to another Palmer Rd. alumni named Lonnie Landers, who’d had his own run-ins with Officer Johnny as a teen-ager) which eventually yielded us 3 sisters, Heidi, Ruth & Cheryl. Mom & Lon became dissatisfied with the Southern Baptist experience, so we went church-hopping to find another one. We visited big, fancy churches and little storefront missions, finally landing right across the street from our previous church home, at a “full-gospel” fellowship. There, I again took on the task of assembling and printing the weekly bulletin. Having solitary access to this church building was even cooler because there was a bass guitar & amp to make noise with! I taught myself how to play the bass-line from Devo's "Mongoloid," at a volume that made the church's stained glass windows rattle like crazy.

Now this was back before the wide use of photocopiers, so I had to lay out the text with a typewriter and a messy Gestetner stencil repro machine setup, and would run them off with a hand-cranked printer device I had to fill with gooey black ink. I would sometimes purposely plant humorous "typos" in the copy of the church bulletin as I typed. Once, I mischievously spelled out:

f……………………………

u……………………………

c……………………………

K……………………………

y……………………………

o……………………………

U……………………………

… along the left margin of the weekly announcements, reading down. And nobody caught it! Talk about “teen angst” or “issues” … poster child, here!

This new church was a Holy Ghost church, complete with healings, "speaking in tongues," "slaying in the spirit," and weird dancing in the aisles. As a teen, I didn’t understand ecstatic religious experiences, so frankly it seemed bizarre to me; and I couldn't get the gift of tongues no matter how hard I prayed. If I thought the invitations and endless repetitions of "Just As I Am" at the end of the Baptist services were drawn-out affairs; the torturous invitations at this Full Gospel church were never-ending ordeals I knew would only subside when I went forward to confess my accumulating hypocrisies and guilt!

Our youth group organized an evangelical theatrical production that traveled from church to church, scaring people into salvation. The theme of the production was “The Judgement” and focused on the Lamb's Book of Life. We had space off to the right that was HEAVEN, complete with dry-ice clouds, angels, and Handel's Messiah. To the left, of course, was HELL, complete with fiery strobes, a creaking door, demonic sound-effects, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and black-robed skull-faced Hells’ Angels. The Archangel at the helm of the Book'O'Life was played by who else, but . . . Yours Truly …

 … Costumed in white robes and glitter-encrusted wings. A spotlight would follow a script full of various sinners and saved, stumbling confusedly down the aisle towards me, having been unexpectedly punted into the afterlife by various auto accidents and health mishaps. There was the drunk, the promiscuous woman, the woman who aborted her baby, the group of kids partying in their car when it crashed, and even the self-righteous but lost church-goer who mistakenly assumed that she was a shoe-in. As each dramatic scenario unfolded, I would either find their name and usher them into heaven; or grimly declare the omission of their name, and introduce them to eternal damnation. We performed this play dozens of times at various churches in the Detroit area (including Landmark Baptist Church, where televangelist Jack Van Impe was pastor) and always got resounding results.

By 1978 - I was entering high school, and a part-time job at Little Caesar's Pizza enabled me to maintain a rusty Ford LTD station-wagon with an 8-track deck. The car was the only place I could listen to music without parental censorship, and this restriction itself probably doomed me (or liberated me, depending on your perspective) more than anything, as I began listening to metal and punk. I had Funkadelic, Stooges, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Zappa, Patti Smith, King Crimson, Monty Python and the Ramones on 8-track cartridges that I practically wore out. I also continued to read horror and science fiction books and comics.

A few teachers at Wayne Memorial High School were big influences on me at this stage; Douglas Markham (my German teacher, who sponsored the Science Fiction club at school) chaperoned members on a trip to a local science fiction convention and introduced us to some of the writers there; I remember meeting Harlan Ellison, Alan Dean Foster, A.E. Van Vogt, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Lynn Asprin, and Joe Haldeman. Asprin spent the whole time trying to hustle the scarce female fans and Ellison spent most of the time drinking at the hotel bar, being loud and obnoxious. The author who made the biggest impression on me, though, was Haldeman, a Viet Nam Veteran with a war disability who described himself at the time as an “anarchist” - a concept that was new to me.

Two writing teachers at Wayne also left a lasting impression on me — Cheryl Brunette and Betty Schonhoffen. Brunette was in her last year of teaching in the public schools, so she’d thrown caution to the wind and  was teaching her students risky concepts like “thinking for themselves” and (!) “questioning authority.” She also bought one of my drawings at a school art exhibition - an act of kindness that first clued-me-in to the idea that it might be possible to earn revenue from my art. Shonhoffen was a dear old matriarch near retirement, who left the most encouraging and helpful notes in the margins of my creative writing journal — it was really the first time any adult had given me the impression that my writing was worth reading.

My academic record qualified me for some financial aid for college, to supplement what my parents could spare, so in 1981 I went off to the University of Dayton in Ohio to study graphic design. The need for pocket cash prompted me to ask Dad to get me started with the tattoo needles around this time, and I rendered my first crude tattoos on fellow students. My dorm-room-mate and I also cooked-up an unlikely money-making scheme whereby we would hire ourselves out as assassins – that is, for a price, we’d surprise a targeted victim with a sudden whipped-cream pie-in-the-face, and even supply photo-documentation of the “hit.” It was fun, but didn’t really earn us much revenue. I gradually realized that I could draw better than some of my art professors at Dayton, so I transferred back to the Detroit area to pursue my second year at an actual art school, the Center for Creative Studies. That was a big year for me, as I finally lost my virginity and tried hallucinogens in attempt to find that elusive “ecstatic state” that the Holy Spirit had never gifted me with.

Reagan had come into office, and immediately cut student financial aid in favor of military spending (an omen, as it turns out). I couldn't afford to continue higher education, and was too proud to retreat home, so I joined the notorious ranks of “art-school dropouts” living in squalid low-budget accommodations, getting whatever work I could. I even impersonated a student in order to continue attending a few courses at CCS - until the profs discovered, and booted me out in front of the real students (Was that ever embarrassing!).

DETROITER

My most vivid memories of this period are of working afternoons and nights at a horrible 15-story urban nursing home called The Detroiter Residence, a historic former Carmelite Sisterhood convent across from the old Motown offices on Woodward. This place was owned by a successful urban real-estate investor named Ike Wiggins, who also owned City Club, one of the most popular punk and alternative music clubs in town at the time. He had a luxurious penthouse apartment in the building - with breathtaking religious frescoes on the walls and ceilings. Below him, filling 14 floors, were Detroit’s most desperate, poor and dispossessed disabled and elderly, barely surviving in unbelievable squalor alongside roaches the size of rats and even bigger street-hardened rodents the size of small dogs or cats. He would be gone for a week or so at a time, and it was my job to feed and clean up after his dogs, which liked to  crap all over the exquisitely tiled floors. He would return sometimes late at night with young male hustlers he'd picked up. I’d try to convince him to bring more hardcore acts like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks to his club, as I ferried them up to the penthouse in the old-fashioned manually operated elevator.

Once, a crew of us from The Detroiter were sent to a nearby slum  to collect an old blind woman from her apartment – all her bills had lapsed and she had nobody to take care of her as her health worsened. Water leaked from the ceiling and the apartment reeked of mildew. We gathered as many of her personal belongings as we could and stuffed them into cardboard boxes, to be stored in the basement of the Detroiter until she eventually passed away. She had dozens of old notebooks filled with hand-written “evil eye” spells, cryptic diagrams and urban hoodoo recipes, which she must have assembled before blindness set-in. It was intriguing, and also pretty depressing to witness her decline.

Another image that will stay with me forever burned itself into my memory while I was on mop-bucket duty: I swabbed the floor of a room that seemed unoccupied, then entered the bathroom to finish the job; Inside was a terribly emaciated old woman tied to the toilet with medical restraints stretched between the handrails on either side of the commode; She wore only a tattered backless cotton hospital gown and looked like a skeleton with old leather stretched around it - no perceptible sign of life in her sunken eye sockets. I was sure that she was dead, but she weakly mumbled something unintelligible when I asked if she was okay. I couldn’t tell how long she’d been abandoned in this position. I wish I could say that I untied her and carried her back to her hospital bed, but I was so horrified that I just returned to my mopping duties and tried to put the image out of my mind. (I feel horribly guilty to this day, and sometime would like to further explore how folks confronted with this kind of situation can so easily enter into denial and become complicit in the problem). Months after I finally left, I learned that 2 residents had stumbled down a back stairwell and their bodies weren’t discovered for 3 weeks. I had the hobby of tape-recording the sounds around me back then, and I still have cassettes made at the Detroiter Residence; Listening back to these documents is rather haunting for me, as you might imagine.

I attended some performances at a cramped funky venue in the Cass Corridor called The Freezer Theater, which got me really interested in live music: I saw the Necros open for The Misfits there and thought they were cool, but I never suspected what punk icons the Misfits would eventually become. I was more impressed by a noisy art-damaged Indiana band called “The Dancing Cigarettes” who played a halting, dissonant kind of music that reminded me of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I roadied for a local punk band called Private Angst, and all this inspired me to get together with art-school friends to start a band of our own, "WeirdWorld;" It consisted of Marty Hutchinson on Guitar, Joe Sopkowicz on Bass (after Percodan-addled former Sillies bassist Michael Profane had proven unable to stay conscious for more than 15 minutes at a time), Rick Maertens on Synth, “Roland” on drums, and me on vocals. (Profane and Maertens are both now deceased. Marty lives in Grand Rapids. Joe is now a successful forensic photographer for the Wayne County Medical Examiner.)

Punk and Hardcore were the cool musical trends of the time, but for whatever reason, we decided to cut across the grain and go “psychedelic,” influenced by bands like Chrome, Butthole Surfers, The Birthday Party, Brainticket - and in no small way by the easy availability of LSD on the scene at the time. One of the main suppliers was an Army National Guard medic named Scott Wolfman, who somehow had access to actual pharmaceutical-grade acid. Another neo-psychedelic band on the scene, the Linkletters (with former members of the legendary L7) took us under their wing and gave us a few memorable gigs opening for them. There was no such thing as techno, electro or industrial music as of yet, so we were one of the first (non-disco) bands to use a drum machine for percussion; I think we even pre-dated Steve Albini’s legendary Big Black on the drum machine forefront – I’m not saying it was a great sound, but it was different, and a lot easier than finding a reliable drummer! Just as our band was gaining local attention, I decided I'd had enough of the cockroaches, dead-end minimum-wage jobs, and living well-below poverty level; Wolfman had brought my attention to options in a military direction, and I did something that shocked everybody I knew: I enlisted in the U.S. Army.

UNIFORMITY

My initial contract was a 4-year Special Forces deal with a “Journalist” MOS training. A few days after signing the paperwork, I came to my senses, realizing that I was far from true Green Beret material: No desire to leap out of airplanes or bite the heads off snakes; I crawled back to the recruiter to change my enlistment contract, and instead ended up doing basic and 64-C truck-driver courses down at Ft. Wood, Missouri, where both my Dad and Grandpa had previously endured their basic training. My first choices for final assignment stations had been Germany or Ft. Ord, California - so ironically, the Army sent me to Hawaii (?!) to drive trucks for the Service Battery of a field artillery unit in the 25th Infantry Division "Tropic Lightning" (where the famous WWII movie "From Here To Eternity" was filmed) ... Hawaii was considered a “dream assignment” to most of the other enlistees. I’d never had any curiosity about or desire to visit the tropics whatsoever, but there I was! Conscious of the perception that Hawaiian duty must be soft, the Army leaned on us extra hard at Schofield Barracks.

Why bake in the tropical sun, frolic in a tropical paradise, when I could spend my spare time in the barracks experimenting with electronic noise and difficult music? This was 1982 - before “Industrial” went “disco,” so I suppose what I was doing at the time might fall under the “Industrial” category. I explored audio with salvaged musical instruments in varying states of disrepair and various noisemaking items not necessarily intended for musical use. I did crude multiple-overdubbing using various tape recorders, headphones, walkman-type players, and used the tiled latrine in our barracks to add a natural reverb effect on vocals. … All the while devouring pizza and absorbing uncertain quantities of Schlitz Malt Liquor; Waking up the next morning with only minutes to shave, get my boots shined and my uniform ironed. Since I spent most of my off-duty hours engaged in arcane and incomprehensible experiments, my fellow soldiers didn’t know quite what to make of me; I was rightly perceived as an eccentric and was given a barracks room by myself. When the company commander learned that I could draw and paint, I was held-back to paint things around the battalion while the rest of the unit was out in the field training. (Thank God! – because I could never get used to squatting over a hole I just dug, to take a crap; meaning that I’d have to hold my bowels for a week or longer at a time rather than endure such primitive toilet accommodations.)

It was strange how widespread the recreational use of LSD was in the ranks. Since acid didn't register on urinalysis, there was widespread enlisted abuse. Years later, I read about the Defense Department’s history of experimenting on its own soldiers with the use of hallucinogens for interrogation and mind-control. Maybe my experience was part of some kind of similar experiment, because when I mention it, the microchip implanted under my scalp starts to itch: I sense constant electromagnetic interference until an antique rhinestone-encrusted Shriner's fez I found in a resale shop in Kalamazoo is placed on my head. My theory is that some device sewn into the hem of the ritual headgear somehow jams reception of remote messages from Pentagon. Science recently proved that “tinfoil hat” devices only magnify the signal. Without going into unnecessary detail, Hawaii comes up frequently in various research on mind control. Please note that, while I occasionally joke about receiving remote commands, I believe in following God-endorsed free will, and pulling my own puppet strings.

CANADIAN ERA

Throughout my short military career, I’d corresponded with a pre-enlistment girlfriend from Windsor, named Susan, and after my tour of duty was completed in ‘84, we married. She and I moved to Toronto, where we were allowed to live in her aging grandfather’s basement in exchange for looking after him and the house. The marriage effectively disintegrated within a couple of years, but I stayed-on, looking after her ailing grandfather. My interest in music persisted in Toronto, where I became aware of sampling technology, and made recordings under the name "Wigglepig". I'd become acquainted with a colorful Toronto experimental-electronic multimedia group / anarchist collective called Violence And The Sacred (VioSac), who were very helpful in teaching me how to network in the indie / cassette underground, and who showed me some fundamentals of home-recording. Later, I was honored to have Ted Wheeler (guitar) and Graham Stewart (bass, cello) of VioSac later become part of W.Pig after VioSac fragmented. I made payments on an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard for a year and a half, and by that time it was already considered "old tech." One recording, called "Glue Factory" appearing on a local cassette compilation (“A View From Somewhere” on Myke Dyer’s John Doe Records imprint) got the attention of Cevin Key of Skinny Puppy, and he included Wigglepig in his "Top-10" list in a Canadian music journal; That right there was just enough encouragement to nudge me over the edge and assure that almost all of my spare income for the next 15 years would go towards self-indulgent audio experiments that would never pay for themselves.

I bought a used Tascam244 Portastudio cassette 4-track recorder from a woman named Metra, who had been an early collaborator in a band called BelVox (Believer’s Voice Of Victory) that was a fore-runner of VioSac. She'd survived an automobile accident that had caused notable damage to her speech and motor responses, and was leaving the experimental music scene to pursue the Christian life; I wasn't exactly sure why the two concepts had to be mutually exclusive, but it wasn't for me to judge. The sampler and 4-track became my main composition tools. My recordings were often in "song" form, but I still approached them from a "collage" perspective. Especially meaningful to me was the activity of capturing sound-bytes from the deafening media environment surrounding us (audio pollution), and rearranging them into something that made more sense to me. 

I never considered renouncing my salvation, but I wasn’t very interested in prayer or Bible study at that point of my life. One summer I attended the Anarchist Gathering in Toronto, where I first encountered the idea of Christian Anarchism. Christian Anarchism seemed to lean more towards socialism than I was comfortable with, but I realized that I’d lost my faith in organized religion, but not in Christ. I began to pursue what I jokingly called "Disorganized Religion.” If you are born into a Christian household and raised that way, you never really have a chance to CHOOSE – you just continue to seamlessly believe what you were taught. Although I got saved as an early teenager - after exploring the vast possibilities out there, I was able to CHOOSE the Christian life; So, I don’t regret my past explorations - they strengthened my faith and helped make me who I am today.

I rediscovered the Philip K. Dick & C.S. Lewis books I had read as a teenager and re-examined Blake. I contemplated genetic replication and realized I didn't feel convicted to perpetuate the species: I went and had a good old-fashioned vasectomy. I began a conceptual art project offering free corporate trademark tattoos to those willing to participate in an experiment to reflect corporate ill-intent back to its source. The project went nowhere, as few people seemed to really understand the concept; most just wanted free tattoos. Myself, I rendered the Coca-Cola logo on my forearm in Hebrew, and the Xerox logo on my left inner wrist. 

Around this time, my “WigglePig” project got exposure in Subgenius Rev. Ivan Stang's book "High Weirdness By Mail," which put me in touch with the cassette underground and author Thom (“Not the White Supremacist”) Metzger's Ziggurat Ministry. I still exchange tape letters with Metzger today, almost 20 years later. I studied printing technology at George Brown University before again running out of tuition. One of the most interesting (if not completely archaic and obsolete) parts of the program at George Brown was learning to set lead type. I found work as a graphic artist and typesetter before ending up in the photocopy trade at Kinko's Copies near U of T. I remained Kinkoid for over 5 years, sinking all spare change into costly independent musical and ‘zine projects. Not very glamorous work, but the copy shop was a kind of hub where all kinds of musicians, writers, religious fanatics, political radicals, occultists, assorted hipsters and lunatic-fringe characters intersected. This was at the height of the “’Zine” revolution of the mid 1980’s, and I was able to use these contacts to advantage in pursuing my own indie music and publishing projects. Being exposed to extremes of political, religious, sexual, artistic and musical possibilities through friends I made there gave me a kind of shockproof quality and taught me tolerance of  other points of view. My own ‘zine, which lasted for 3 issues, was called “F.O.D! Maggotzine.” It started out as a thrash and death-metal fanzine, but morphed into something bigger and much weirder by the third issue, encompassing conspiracy theory, gore and sexual politics.

I was still living in Etobicoke, Ontario just outside of Toronto, looking after my ex’s grandfather all this time, but strange things began to occur around me in this quiet suburb. One night at about midnight, a “phone company worker” installed a black box with a red light on the telephone pole in our back yard. Across the street lived a nice, quiet, but socially awkward middle-aged man named John and his elderly mother. One day, Sri of VioSac was over, showing us how to use our Tascam multi-track recorder, when John unexpectedly came over and knocked on the door. He wouldn’t accept a seat, and stood awkwardly in our kitchen making stilted small-talk that abruptly segued into blurting out an astounding account of the recent illness and death of his mother. We feebly tried to comfort him, but our words seemed hollow in light of the depth of his isolation and despair. What we didn’t know was that Sri had recorded the whole conversation on the Portastudio – an audio document that eventually ended up layered into VioSac’s “Suture Self” record. I’m not sure how I feel about this apparent exploitation of poor John, but the recording is surreal, considering the context, and John’s “audio verite” performance is absolutely wrenching.

After John’s mother died, I began to notice all sorts of unusual nighttime traffic in and out of his house – odd, because he’d never seemed to have friends of any kind before. Then one day, I noticed a camera on a tripod in his picture window, directed at our house. I was baffled by this apparent surveillance, since I wasn’t up to anything more subversive beyond drinking too much strong Canadian beer and smoking a little hash; but in retrospect, my contact with Violence And The Sacred at their co-op house overlooking Christy Pits and various animal-rights radicals and anarchists loosely associated with them probably put me on the radar of some faction of Canadian intelligence or another. The ex’s grandfather became too feeble for me to take care of, and he was moved into professional care. I relocated downtown and shared a Parkdale apartment on Laxton with artist Fiona Smyth and her art-school friend Pete. Fiona’s paintings and illustrations were incredibly popular, and being around her was pretty inspirational. She had large-scale pieces of mural art on public display all over town. I had a strange whirlwind romance with Fiona’s sister Sheila that left me in an emotional funk. Thinking that a change of environment might lift my spirits, I decided to move into an apartment of my own up the road on Crawford.

On Crawford St. I tried to improve my tattooing skills by working on various folks I met on the job or in other music / art projects. Among those I tattooed at Crawford St. were 2 members of the Tradition Front; one a fellow music 'zine guy named Don, who’d written Christian Metal reviews for my ‘zine FOD! I’d watched Don drift into "Identity Christianity" (interpreting scriptures to indicate that White Europeans are God's ACTUAL chosen people, but that the crafty Jews somehow managed to steal their birthright) and the local skinhead culture. He became the voice on the Tradition Front’s “hate line” while an organizer named Graham Bristol (who would later be identified as a planted government agent provocateur) was bolstering the ranks, funneling taxpayer finances into organizing rallies, demonstrations and other activities. I remained familiar with Don while all this Tradition Front business went down, because although I didn’t share his racial perspective, I thought I may have been one of the few non-racist contacts he had, given the insular nature of these groups. Unfortunately, my apartment was burglarized twice after tattooing the TF members, and I suspect that the break-ins were related in some way, since they would have had their chance to “case the joint” while being tattooed at my place. Hard lesson learned that there’s more than one reason to perform tattooing in a proper professional environment.

After 5 years, I’d reached and surpassed burnout level at my Kinko's job. Given my worsening attitude and barely-concealed hostility towards newly appointed know-it-all managers 10 years younger than me pulling rank, it's actually surprising they kept me on as long as they did. To complicate things, other employees had approached me to lead a unionization attempt, which I knew would be total job suicide. I found out later that management was evaluating me poorly in attempt to get me to quit. I finally gave in to the pressure and resigned.

 COPYRIGHT OR WRONG?

While I was employed there, however, I began to pursue art concepts that dealt with issues of copyright, collage, reproduction, plagiarism and forgery. Since these issues explore the boundaries of legality, I sometimes ran into opposition from the establishment. I sampled sound-bytes from Xerox training videos into my music, and recorded the sounds of photocopiers chugging out copies to use as rhythms in other pieces. My interest in sound collage had years earlier made me a fan of a California independent music group called Negativland. I was disconcerted to hear that one of their recordings – a parody of a U2 song – had gotten them into a bunch of legal trouble with Island Records, U2’s record label. They were being sued for a ridiculous sum of money, were ordered to destroy all remaining copies of their record - and to make matters worse, their own record label, SST was also turning against them. Musical “tribute” projects were very popular, and I thought an interesting way to protest the mistreatment of Negativland would be to oversee a kind of “Anti-Tribute” music compilation to U2 in which musicians I knew would purposely desecrate the music of U2, or at least blatantly misuse samples from their music. The obvious name for this project would have to be “FU2.”

The response to this project was pretty enthusiastic, and soon I had more contributions than I knew what to do with. Patient Zero, a friend who was a sound designer and fellow Negativland fan, came to the rescue and helped edit the final project together. Unfortunately, a crusading Toronto entertainment lawyer named David Basskin appeared and set about trying to intimidate me into dropping the project. In light of the mess Negativland had gotten into, I took him seriously. Plans to release the compilation on CD and distribute it accordingly were dropped, and I instead opted for a small run of cassette copies passed around secretly. Basskin had essentially squashed the project, although the tapes that made it out there into the cassette networking fringe gradually built a small appreciative following. Mark Hosler of Negativland called me personally to express gratitude, although he added that my approach was not exactly their style. He also later defended FU2 in a panel discussion at a Toronto event called “Plunderpalooza” that dealt with issues of sampling, copyright, satire, and intellectual property. The panel also included sound-collage artist John Oswald and David Basskin himself.

Patient Zero helped my next band, Surface Noise get some recordings together. Guitarist “The Noise” Phil Emery was my partner in this project, and our idea was to assemble songs specifically ABOUT copyright, sampling, and sound collage. Eventually, we promoted Surface Noise as a “Sonic Franchise” that anybody could themselves appropriate and make into their own – we even supplied tracks of samples that could be used in this endeavor. The heavy concept, of course, went over like a lead balloon. One of the highlights of this project for me was assembling a cover of U2’s cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” We weren’t interpreting the Fab Four’s version – we were intentionally recording a 2^nd-generation cover-tune, a copyright anomaly that would be legally impossible to license. To further muddy the copyright stew, we used samples from 3 other bands’ covers of the song, as well as a couple from the original version; Also layered into the mix were soundbytes from Mr. Magoo and Charles Manson. In another song, we even had the audacity to use samples of David Basskin, the same copyright lawyer who’d intimidated me over the FU2 project. We were delighted to be creating edgy outlaw art that pushed the limits of legality, even if the project really brought us no fame or fortune whatsoever.

My creative life was fruitful, but being frustrated, broke and unemployed, I knew major practical changes were in short order for me. I’d moved into a damp cut-rate basement apartment in the Parkdale district of Toronto, near the Queen St. Mental Hospital - the closest thing downtown Toronto had to a ghetto in 1988. A man soon moved into the apartment next to mine, whose whole purpose seemed to be to harass and irritate me. He would repeatedly let the air out of my bike tires (my only transportation), stare hatefully out his door at me literally every time I would leave or return to my apartment, then would slam his door loudly 8-12 times for my entertainment. At all hours of the day and night, he would shout hostilities at me through the thin wall between our apartments, and would sing this leering and idiotic song at me for hours on end:

"Jewwwwwwwwwww-Boyyyyyyyyyyyyy,

Jewwwwwwwwwww-Boyyyyyyyyyyyyy."

I'm not sure if he was a schizophrenic psychiatric survivor with racist leanings from the nearby mental hospital – who’d mistaken me for a Jew ... or, in light of my brush with local white racial activists, if he was a professional agitator of some kind -  or both. (When you research mind control and connections to the psychiatric establishment, it makes you consider its survivors in an even more complicated light.) He kept it up for 8 or nine months, until I finally made my decision to return to the Detroit area.  By 1990 I’d wasted all I earned on musical and ‘zine projects that never broke even, and ended up in a real bind when the freelance graphic design work had dried up in the wake of the computer graphics revolution.

BACK TO MICHIGAN

I convinced my Dad to drive up to Toronto, and I packed as many of my belongings as I could into his pickup truck to make the journey back to the Detroit area. Dad had wanted me to follow him into the tattoo trade all along, so he drove up to Toronto to bring me back home to Michigan  to work at the newest shop he’d opened with my brother John, “Tattooing By Johnson” in Taylor. I’d kept up tattooing as a hobby on and off since 1981, and friends were also coming to me for body piercings - This was a unique chance to progress from “scratcher” to “pro.” I’m grateful to my brother John, who agreed to house me until I got on my feet again, and to both John and my Dad for helping improve my tattooing chops. I supplemented my experience with workshops through the Association of Professional Piercers (APP) and the Alliance of Professional Tattooists (APT); Over the course of a decade, I gradually built my local reputation and enough clientele to make a modest living in this very competitive field.

I publish a little shop ‘zine called INKling at very irregular intervals. The third issue has taken me years to assemble, but should eventually emerge. I still fool around with music to some extent: I sank ridiculous amounts of money into an audio multitracking program called Logic Audio for Mac, in conjunction with a nice mixing board, a decent microphone, a Korg MS-2000 synth and a rack of effects, but didn’t have the tech savvy to figure out Logic Audio. I can do rudimentary multi-tracking with Cool Edit Pro on my PC's but mostly I just use my recording gear to capture weird old records and edit out the pops and surface noise before burning them to CD.

Looking back at my personal history led me to dig-out old tapes and notebooks; I transferred some WeirdWorld practice cassettes from circa 1982 to digital a while back – and had to cringe in embarrassment at how awful I was in contrast to the skills of my band-mates. My voice has gotten better these days from singing along with old gospel and soul records, but I'm too self-conscious to make noise in front of a microphone or an audience. I'm constantly jotting down lyrics and song ideas into notebooks, but the ideas come so much easier than the sustained effort to realize these visions.

My favorite Bible scripture is "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32) because it doesn't impose truth on you; You will know it when you see it! Left to my own folly, I inevitably kept returning to my Christian roots. I'm a still a proponent of “disorganized religion,” but a few years ago, I began to undertake projects for the Christian Tattoo Association. I designed and printed a T-shirt to help raise funds and have done various graphics for them. I do a music feature at the CTA site, called OFFtrack, and am a moderator on the discussion forum. The CTA is regrouping after a leadership change, and trying to be more dynamic, but is limited by lack of funds. If we can raise and maintain enough revenue, it would be interesting to have some kind of CTA presence at tattoo conventions, Christian music festivals and other events.

I made a 2^nd attempt at marriage a few years back, and I admire my ex’s ability to have tolerated somebody as self-absorbed, eccentric and contrary as me for as long as she did. I’m a natural loner really, and mostly keep to myself when I'm not perforating folks at the shop. If I could just muster the energy and patience to do more "social networking" in the arts and music scene, I could probably build a higher profile for myself in the body modification world. I still have greater artistic aspirations, but a tattooist is hired to express the client’s ideas, not his own. I’d really like to do conceptual work and build a reputation for doing more experimental things with the tattoo medium, but I should know by now that heavy concepts don’t pay the bills.

LOOKING FORWARD

Reading over this document, I note that it doesn’t really seem to resolve itself. If you’ve made it this far, then I thank you for your patience. I’m 44 at the time of this writing, so I’d like to think that this is a summary of the first half of my life, and that a neat conclusion is yet impossible. The next 44 years or so, I’d like to be more focussed and less like a human-pinball ricocheting through the game of life. I’ve known since I was young that fatherhood was not for me, so I won’t have children or grandchildren to take care of me when I’m old. Since I keep to myself and don’t maintain a huge social network of friends and family for support, I sometimes worry that I could ultimately end-up like one of the lonely isolated seniors in the nursing homes I worked at when I was younger. Maybe that’s why I continue to obsessively collect old books, records and movies - to keep myself amused when I’m a cranky 90 yr. old shut-in! This pastime is not without its’ own unique problems: A while back, I discovered that the heavy shelves of vinyl records were warping my floorboards, so I had to redistribute the records around the house to balance things out. Dust is virtually impossible to control with this many books and records cluttering every spare niche, so those with allergies should steer clear of my place! I don’t care for Michigan winters, but consider myself anchored here, since this is where I’ve established my professional reputation. There are no pension plans in the tattoo world, so I’ll probably be tattooing and piercing until I can’t hold the tools anymore.

Within my lifetime, I’d like to see people paying less attention to professional sports, pop-culture celebrities and video games, and spending more time learning history, connecting with fine art, real music, and understanding the U.S. Constitution. Within my lifetime, I’d like to see civil rights fully extend to gays and lesbians. I’d like to see the prohibition of marijuana go the way of alcohol prohibition. I’d like to see the billions of tax dollars spent on the War Machine spent on health care for our citizens. I’d like to see religion step DOWN and the example of Christ step UP. Lastly, I’d like to see the assholes who’ve hijacked my religion and my country exposed for the monsters that they really are.

 - Roscoe, 04-13-06