Minute By Minute
Stack 21
I had a close friend pass away Thursday night. It was fairly sudden and unexpected, and I’ve had her and her husband on my mind a lot this past week as their roller coaster hospital stay carried on. When I heard he’d held her in a hospital bed as she passed, something cracked open in me that I hadn’t expected. I know exactly what he experienced in that moment. I’ve been there. And while my situation with John was nothing like hers in terms of illness, that image has a way of reopening old wounds that had long scarred over. It resurfaced a lot of memories I haven’t sat with in a while. So, I thought this would be the right time to tell that part of my story.
Last week, I wrote about finding out that John had AIDS. Originally, I had planned to spend more time on the club stuff this week — the IKON story, the business decisions, all of that. But with everything on my mind right now, it doesn’t feel right to talk about any of that before I finish telling John’s story. Some things insist on being told when they’re ready, not when it’s convenient. This is one of them.
By 1993, things had started to severely decline.
John had begun taking AZT, and it wasn’t agreeing with him or making any real difference. In response, he started self-medicating with alcohol. He had always been a social drinker, but I had never really seen him drunk until that year. I can’t say I blame him. If I knew I had something that was never going to get better, I might do the same. But the drinking got sloppy. Very sloppy. And despite that, he still wanted to be in control, and got pretty nasty about it. As you may recall from earlier posts, I was expected to attend after-parties as part of the lifestyle. By this point, I hated them. I knew the drugs there were dangerous for someone in his condition, and I didn’t want to be around any of it. But when I wasn’t available to go with him, he’d go out and party with the local dealer on his own. I remember one night working the club when the two of them literally stumbled in through the front door. I refused to serve them. John got mouthy and ordered another employee to fix him a drink or face being fired.
All the while, the city councilor continued to make John’s life difficult. By this point it had become clear to all of us that it was personal. She would actually try to come into the clubs and take notes and pictures. John eventually banned her and had her physically removed one night, which was equal parts hilarious and catastrophic for their already contentious relationship. Then, right before everything really fell apart with his health, there was a shooting in a parking lot near IKON. It had nothing to do with the club — it was kids who weren’t even IKON customers — but that didn’t matter. The pressure it brought down on us was immense. And as John got sicker and less able to fight back, she redirected her efforts toward our landlord. It worked. He eventually decided he didn’t want to renew the IKON lease. She was getting exactly what she wanted, at the expense of the livelihood of everyone who worked those late nights. Pressure and HIV are not friends. Stress accelerates everything. Looking back, I think that period broke something in him that the disease alone might not have broken quite so fast.
Around that same time, I started noticing he was just off. Doing irrational things. Drinking excessively. Not working. Not himself. He even started smoking cigarettes. Then we all took a trip to a new dude ranch that had opened up in Texas, thinking some downtime might do him good. His mind started to go on that trip. Paranoia. Arguments. Dismissiveness. A cruelty that didn’t feel like him, even at his worst. One night, he left. Just took off in my car in the middle of the night and drove himself back to Oklahoma. This was before cell phones. I had no idea where he had gone. I was stranded at a cash-free resort with no access to the credit cards he’d taken with him. Luckily, friends helped cover the bill and got me home a few days later. When I arrived, I found my car dented and scraped, with grass and dirt pressed into the bumpers. He had driven into several ditches on the way back. Honestly, I’m amazed he made it.
From there, it got worse. The behavior turned hateful. That’s the best word for it. I hated being around him, but I knew it wasn’t really him — it was the disease — and I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. Then he went back into the hospital with something that presented like the flu. When I arrived and was directed to his room, I found him in the psych ward. He had developed dementia. Back then, they didn’t have much in the way of treatment for it. Locking patients in a mental ward was largely what passed for care. It was terrifying. I’d visit and half the time he didn’t know who I was. Eventually, they got his levels stabilized enough to send him home.
That’s when I had to make my first real decision about my own life.
I could walk away. Continue with the band, with the music, with whatever came next, and not look back. And honestly, walking away had never felt more tempting — or more costly. 1992 had seen the release of Silence, our second album, and an appearance on an international compilation CD called The Cyberflesh Conspiracy, alongside other up and coming bands like Stabbing Westward, 16 Volt, Chemlab, and Mentallo & the Fixer. The CD was well received and we were getting letters from around the world inquiring about the band. People in places we’d never been, responding to music we’d made in Tulsa. That’s not nothing. That’s the thing you drop out of high school hoping will someday happen. And here it was, finally happening, at the exact moment I had to decide whether to stay or go.
Or I could be a decent person and see this through. I talked to Mike, and we agreed I’d sit out a few shows while we figured things out. In the meantime, I started trying to run the business side of the clubs, which was a full-time job on its own. The frustrating part was that even then, John would grab stacks of cash before I could get it to the bank and spend it. Every waking hour went into keeping things from completely falling apart.
Shortly after that, John had a series of mini strokes. Combined with the dementia and the general progression of AIDS, it was the beginning of the end. He lost the ability to communicate in any coherent way. At first I thought it was stroke-related slurring. It wasn’t. It was something deeper — a complete scrambling of language. I gave him a pen once, hoping he could write what he was trying to tell me. What came back was a jumble of words and characters that didn’t exist. Seeing that at any age is frightening. Seeing it at twenty-three is something else entirely.
By summer, we started hospice. John didn’t have insurance, so everything was being paid in cash. To keep costs down, I took over most of the day-to-day hospice duties myself. Administering injections. Managing the IV. Measuring out morphine. It became my routine.
Then something shifted.
After weeks of hostility and confusion, John’s demeanor changed. He became gentle. Appreciative. Kind in a way he hadn’t been in a long time. I vividly remember him trying to understand why I didn’t seem like my happy self anymore. He was genuinely concerned that joy had seemed to leave my world. What he couldn’t fully grasp, in the state he was in, was that the answer was standing right in front of him. Maybe his social circle had thinned enough that he finally understood what was left. Maybe he just needed time to see clearly what I was doing. I don’t know. But he was different, and I was grateful for it.
Then one day I came home and he was gone. Only a visiting nurse was there. She told me he had decided he wanted to go back to the hospital. He had asked her to take him to pick out a casket first. Then he checked himself in.
I camped out at the hospital whenever I wasn’t opening or closing the clubs. I was beyond exhausted in a way that doesn’t have a clean word for it. Troy and I were the only constants by then — John’s friends had largely disappeared, and Troy and John had a falling out earlier that year that I’ll get into another time, so even that support was thin. It was mostly just me doing the heavy lifting.
After a quiet couple of days, one of the nurses pulled me aside and told me he was beginning to shut down. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I knew I wasn’t going to leave. He had no family there. Almost no one. So I stayed.
That night, his breathing became labored. He wasn’t on life support — just a basic fluid IV and pain medication. We kept the pain meds flowing. And I sat with him, and held him, and he died.
The next chapter of my life had begun.
I had no idea what was going to happen next. Technically, he was my main employer (I made next to nothing from music back then). Would the bars instantly have to be shut down? What about the house — arrgh — that damned house. More on that later. But what was I going to do? How was I going to survive? I had no idea. For that moment in time, I just decided to live minute by minute and deal with whatever I had to deal with as it came.
And it did come. In a major way.
If there's anything I've taken from this week — from losing my friend, from revisiting all of this — it's that it can be incredibly easy to take the people and moments in your life for granted. We get busy. We get distracted. We assume there will be more time. Sometimes there isn't. And sometimes, doing the right thing — the hard thing, the thing nobody asked you to do — turns out to be the thing that makes you most proud of yourself in the long run. I'm not sure I understood that at twenty-three. I understand it now. Maybe karma is real. I don't know. What I do know is that somehow, through all of it, I came out the other side HIV negative. Not something I take lightly, and not really anyone's business, but it felt dishonest not to mention it after everything I've shared here. Hold the people you love a little tighter this week. It costs nothing and means everything.
I hate leaving you on a downer note, so let’s pick it up for a minute before we go. Some good news to end the week on. Ok? Ok.
Mike Castle just put out a new remixed version of the Resonance album, and I have a remix on it. I took the song Do You Remember? and gave it an intentional throwback feel — think 90s club music, like back when all of this was happening. The goal was to keep the spirit of the original intact while restructuring it a bit, adding some new beats, bass, and synth lines to make it more DJ-friendly on the dance floor. Nothing too radical. Just a fun rework of a song I’ve always liked.
Red Red Groove has been Mike’s main project for a while now, and he’s doing great things with it. I step in here and there when the moment calls for it — this was one of those moments. When he asked me to be part of this I didn’t hesitate. The band has always had a special place in my world. Always will.
The album also features remixes by some names you might know — Thrill Kill Kult, Moroderhead, Musim, MONO NOT STEREO, and Blackwell. All good company to be in. The remix album is now available on all digital platforms, and a CD version will be available at his shows this summer. Better news, right?
Ok, well, more road ahead next week. Try to make yours a good one.
Jeff