Loaf Meat - To Hell And Back

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C ontents

for wilma

there are only two kinds of people in the world good people and evil people. no. wait... theres three kinds, if you count crazy people. who could be either good or bad... or neither. no. wait. wait. wait...

P art 1: bat out of texas

B at out of texas

I WAKE UP in a room Ive never seen before. The blinds are drawn, the TV is on. Some talking head is delivering the news. The only problem is hes speaking French.

I stumble over to the window and peek through the blinds. Outside, I see a postcard lake. Men in plaid shirts are fishing in aluminum boats. Couples are water-skiing. I dont like the look of this.

Definitely a hotel room. You can tell from the alpine painting above the bed, and the drinking glass wrapped in crinkly paper. The door to the bedroom opens into another room. On the table I can see a large basket of fruit wrapped in yellow plastic. Nice.

There is some stationery in the desk. Harbor CastleToronto, Ontario. Uh oh. Last thing I knew, I was in Arlington, Virginia. How the hell did I end up here?

I call the front desk. What day is it? Thursday. Are you sure? They are. The show in Arlington had been on Monday, so Ive lost three days. Not good.

There is nobody else here from the band or the crew. Maybe Ive had another concussion (Ive had more than my share). Or perhaps Ive just slipped into another dimension.

Three days ago I was sitting with the band at a Holiday Inn in Arlington, Virginia, waiting for the Midnight Special to come on TV. Todd Rundgren was the host, and hed gotten them to play the Bat Out of Hell video for the first time. No way would they put us on livewho knows what we might do? The show came on and everybody cheered and whistled. Awright! Get down!

What? Theyve edited out the guitar and drum intro. Instead, Bat Out of Hell starts with the piano riff going into the vocal. Calm down, Meatyoure not going to freak out no matter what , remember? We get to Im gonna hit the highway like a battering ram and the tape slows down. Then its all right again. Here we go, first chorus. Damn , theyve edited out the guitar solo, too. But thats okay, Im... staying... perfectly... calm. Fuck the guitar solo. At least the motorcycle bit is still in there.

Everybody is standing up now, singing along. Were heading toward the end of the song. But theres something very wrong with the tape. It starts s-l-o-w-i-n-g d-ooooow-n like Ive taken some weird drug: Never seen the sudden curve until iiitswaaaaaytooooolaaa-yuut . I think maybe Ive imagined it. Anyway, its no big deal, right? You probably see this kind of thing all the time and just dont notice it. I start to relax and it happens again. And aagaaaaaaaiin. Its getting worse.

I close my eyes (as if that might help) and hear a voice saying something about a revolutionary new advance in hair conditioning. I look up and see a woman tossing her long hair over her shoulder in slow motion. Is the whole damn world slowing down? I am completely disoriented. For a minute I think this might still be my video.

Or maybe Im dreaming. This is the sort of thing that happens in dreams, isnt it? Doctor, I dreamed I was watching my video, but it was really a Clairol commercial.

No, this is real. Realer than real. Theyve simply cut off the end of the video. Im sitting there, pathetically asking, Do you think they will pick the song back up after the commercial? They dont.

Im throwing things around the room and bellowing like a big, wounded animal (big, wounded animals are dangerous). Im also on the phone railing at those responsible whoever they may be! Everyone I ever knew, apparently. Especially the people who worked for me.

What are you doing? If this isnt your job, then whose job is it? Im out here on the fucking road. Im going to the radio stations every spare minute I have. Im doing your stupid promotions. Im doing the shows. Am I supposed to quality-check a videotape, fer Chrissakes, before it goes on the damn Midnight Special? Do I have to take care of EVERYTHING MYSELF?

I remember leaving the room, getting on the elevator, and walking out the front door of the hotel. Outside, a sign said, Keep Off the Grass. I didnt. I walked across the manicured lawn toward a bridge in the distance. Then nothing. Total blackout. I woke up in a hotel on some twighlight-zone lake in Toronto.

How had I gotten here? I dont mean the hotel and the lake and all that. I figured I could probably find my way home. But how had it all come to this? Dealing with problems by running into a dark tunnel and trying to disappear (or, even worse, trying to make other people disappear).

What was wrong with me? Didnt I have everything Id ever wanted? Bat Out of Hell was number one around the world: a sold-out tour, limos, room service, dealers.

I lay back down on the bed and cradled the remote in my arms. The news guy was still speaking French, but he was my friend nowperhaps my only friend. There were pictures of dams and beavers and Indians getting out of canoes at some festival.

I got into one of those canoes. I was paddling down a long river. It went all the way to Texas. It ran by our house outside Dallas. My mom was there and my Aunt Mary was waving to me. I would be okay, now. I was home again.

T he vo-di-o-do girls

ILL START AT the beginning. I was born on September 27, 1947, at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Texas. My mother, Wilma, was a schoolteacher. She taught English in the Dallas Public School system for twenty-five years. She was an incredibly smart womanthe valedictorian of her class at Clarendon State. Her maiden name was Hukel. Wilma Artie Hukel. Where the Artie came from, I dont knowmust have been some relative. Why else would you name a baby girl Artie?

My dads name was Orvis Wesley Aday. Before I was born, he had been a policeman for the Dallas police force, and it was from there that he knew Jack Ruby and all those other people connected to the Kennedy assassination. Well get to that later on.

Both sides of my family, the Adays and the Hukels, came into Texas from Tennessee. Ive been told that Aday is a variant of ODay and got spelled that way because thats how people pronounced it down there.

My grandmothers name was Charlsee Hukel, her maiden name was Norrod. She had four daughters: Texie, Cecil, Wilma, and Mary. Texie and Wilma, along with two other women, formed a little quartet, the Vo-di-o-do Girls. My mom had a powerful singing voice, something like Kate Smiths.

Among the many things Ive lost over the years is a poster of my mothers gospel groupfrom when they opened for the Stamps Quartet in some little town in Texas. The ticket price was a nickel. I was really impressed by that poster. To me, that was making it.

My mom and her sisters all wanted to go into show business, but being preachers daughters, forget itthere was absolutely no way. The Vo-di-o-do Girls sang on the local radio station, KRLP, and from there they got on Bing Crosbys show. Bing Crosby had a syndicated radio programit was taped and he would always close the show by saying, And now for our gospel number! The Vo-di-o-do girls would be in the studio and theyd do it live.

Texie went on to marry a guy named Frank Heath who owned a big chain of storesHeaths Furniture Stores. They were huge in Texas in the fifties and early sixties. For Christmas, my parents would always get a couch from them or a new refrigerator. They had a big house in Amarillo. They were the rich relatives.

You know how as a kid everything seems bigger? Well, their house seemed gigantic. I remember driving to their place at Christmastime, being in the car, listening to the radio and trying to sing along. Its a good thing youre never going to be a singer, my mother would say, cause you cant carry a tune in a bucket.

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