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Stack 22

Last week, I left you with the next chapter of my life beginning, and me having no idea what came next. This week, we close that chapter for good. I’ve been looking forward to this one, honestly. It’s been over thirty years since I lived any of this, and I moved on years ago. As I said when I started here on Substack, the point of all this — in addition to telling my story and adding some commentary on life — was to stir up raw emotions to help improve my storytelling. That being said, I’m quite ready to close this chapter.

Let’s start with the house.

While John was still alive but declining, he went through a period when he wanted to show the world what he’d built. He already had the Mercedes and the Rolex. Now he wanted a big house in South Tulsa. So, he and Troy co-signed and bought one, making the down payment in cash. Hmm... where could that cash have come from? Anyway, Troy was buying in for roughly a quarter of it as part of a larger business arrangement tied to The Factory. The three of us lived there at first, and while John was alive (though not well), he instructed me to make the house payment from bar funds. I did. I didn’t question it. I was twenty-three, and I trusted him. After he died, I sat down, did the math, and realized that the house payment was roughly equal to everything the clubs were bringing in combined. That was a problem.

Beyond the house, John had also gone on what I can only describe as an incorporation roll during his illness. At some point, he needed someone to fill the role of Secretary for The Max Restaurant and Club, the corporation established to umbrella IKON, Laffs Underground, and any other ventures he decided to pursue. He needed a signature. “You won’t have to do anything,” he said. So, I signed. I became a corporate officer. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

I should have thought more about it.

Somewhere in the years since his diagnosis, John had also stopped paying business taxes. I didn’t know that. No one did. After he died, I tried to keep the clubs running for about nine months. I was juggling payments week by week — some weeks IKON covered the bills, some weeks Laffs did. Some weeks, we were simply short, so it came out of the money I was living on. It was a constant scramble, and it was exhausting. Then, I made the fatal decision to go to New York for Thanksgiving. It was a trip, John, and I had made every year; the tickets had been booked back while he was still alive, and I was in bad enough shape mentally that I just needed to get out of Tulsa for a long weekend.

When I came back, Laffs (the home base bar) was strangely dead. A couple of the older regulars, the ones who didn’t run with the gossipy crowd, quietly filled me in. Word had spread that I’d pulled all the money from the register and the safe and skipped town. Nice, huh?

Around the same time, the previous owner of Laffs and Tops came after me through a representative I can only describe as being very “gay mafia.” He showed up at the bar one night, made it clear who he was there for, and painted some vivid pictures of what happened to people who didn’t honor their obligations. I had my new friend Mike sit with me (yes, another Mike in my life — more on him later, he matters a lot in my story from here on out) — and I listened. I gave them what I had on hand. Which wasn’t much. He eventually started showing up outside my house, just sitting there, applying pressure. I was now twenty-four, had no credit, and no other income. The well was dry no matter how long he sat in front of my house. Eventually, I let him know I was going to have to file for bankruptcy. He disappeared after that. I think he understood the situation better than the people he was representing. He was just doing his job.

What followed, through the rest of that period and into the year after the bars finally closed, was one of the more quietly devastating experiences of my life. Not dramatic. Just slow and grinding. The people I had considered friends — the ones I had worked alongside, partied with, given my time and energy to — mostly disappeared or, worse, turned on me. I was young enough to still believe that people were basically good at heart. That belief didn’t survive this stretch. What I learned, painfully and thoroughly, was that most of what I had mistaken for friendship was really just proximity to someone who owned something. When that something was gone, so were they. They weren’t friends. They were bar acquaintances who liked being around the guy who was connected to this club or that one. The moment the connection was gone, I was nobody to them. It broke something in me. Not in a way that sent me down a dark path — I want to be clear about that. But it changed how I would deal with people for the rest of my life. I became someone who watched carefully, extended trust slowly, and kept my circle very small. Some would call that damage. I call it a reasonable response to what I lived through.

The bankruptcy closed out John’s estate and shut down the corporations. I had used a family attorney my dad had used — the only attorney we knew or could afford — and it was a mistake. He had no business handling a bankruptcy, and, based on his legal advice, I went in thinking it would all be resolved. I figured the dust would settle, I’d have bad credit for seven years, and I’d deal with it. I was wrong. Bankruptcy didn’t cover the back taxes. I was the only one still alive whose name was on the corporate papers, so the IRS and the State of Oklahoma came after me. I was living in a falling-apart house near TU for two hundred and fifty dollars a month when I found out on payday that my bank account had been frozen. They don’t give the money back when that happens, by the way. So, I called the number on the letter and spoke with an agent from the IRS who was actually pretty decent about the whole thing. He explained that as a corporate officer, I had the legal right to examine the books at any time. Therefore, I was legally responsible for the unpaid taxes. After fees, the total was over $100,000. I was just a bartender, and I had signed something I didn’t understand. I told him that. He was genuinely empathetic, waived some of the compounded fees he was allowed to waive, and set up a payment plan. I would be paying back taxes on IKON and Laffs until I was in my forties. On a bartender’s salary. With bad credit. It was a dim view of the future, to put it gently.

I had landed at the bottom.

What pulled me through, honestly, was my new friend Mike, one good bartending job at the Marriott, and whatever stubbornness had kept me going since I was a teenager riding a motorcycle down Route 66 just to see what was out there. As for Red Red Groove, it didn’t break up so much as it fizzled. I had stepped back during John’s illness, the band played a few shows without me, and the buzz just quietly died down. The music industry was changing fast. Once the heavy metal and rap worlds claimed the alternative scene, we found ourselves too alternative for the mainstream alternative and not quite fitting anywhere else. We never officially called it. It just stopped.

And that was that.

I was twenty-four years old, broke, in debt to the state, no band, and starting completely over. The John era was done.

I condensed the story above to make it more readable — there are a million little sub-stories I could have added, and those were exactly the emotions I wanted to jar in myself for the book I’m working on right now — but they don’t really matter in the larger picture. If you ever want to know something specific that I didn’t cover, just ask. I’m always glad to type your ears off for a bit. What comes next is another detour on the highway of life — a few more rough patches still waiting around the bend, but also something really good. Something that changed everything.

Whew — I’m glad to be done with this story!

That said, I do try to find the positive in even the worst stretches. And this one had two. First, I met Mike — you’ll be hearing a lot more about him as this story continues. Second, somehow in the middle of all that chaos, I managed to release two records in 1993 and 1994 under the project band name Trust. The first single, Faith, is still one of my favorite releases I’ve ever put out. I don’t know how I pulled that off, given everything else that was happening, but I did. Unfortunately, I had zero time to promote them, so they sold horribly. But here’s a fun little footnote to that — I recently found the DAT masters for the Trust project and sent them off earlier this week to be transferred from tape to audio files. Once I get them back, I’ll be re-issuing them on Bandcamp. I also found a bunch of the original records hiding in some old merch boxes, so I’ll be adding those as physical merch in the coming weeks too.

More road ahead next week. Make yours a good one.

Jeff

Audio credits:
Intro/Outro music: Faith by Trust