Free Shut Up and Give Me the Mic by Dee Snider Page A

glasses, overalls, a sweater, and white Capezio dance shoes. What the hell was going on!? This was not the tall, cool glitter rocker I had met six months before! He was doing some last-minute packing for the trip and invited me into his room to talk.
    While I waited for him to get ready, I was introduced to a level of pornography I had never before experienced. This was the seventies, and my exposure was limited to Playboy and Penthouse magazines; porn was not my thing. It was Jay Jay’s. He had imported porn magazines with photo exposés that were staggering to a twenty-year-old bumpkin from Baldwin, Long Island. I’ll never forget the one with a beautiful, blond (Swedish?) woman who, after a long day at work, comes home . . . to do five guys at once. The shot of her with one guy in each hand and the other three in each of her orifices mystified me for a long time. I had so many questions. Talk about your first impressions.
    Our next stop was the Bronx to pick up Eddie Ojeda. Now, if New York City was intimidating, the Bronx was a whole other level.I’d only seen it portrayed in movies like Fort Apache, the Bronx and heard about it in terrible stories on the news; never in a flattering light. I was more than a little nervous to go there.
    Eddie Ojeda is Spanish/Puerto Rican. Growing up in lily-white Baldwin (we had three “Negros” in the whole school), I didn’t really know any Hispanic people (I did have one Mexican friend named Carlos), but again, I had seen their portrayals on television and in films. Not so flattering.
    When we arrived at Eddie’s family’s apartment building on Jerome Avenue, the place was buzzing with activity. Just like in the movies. We pulled up in front and Jay Jay jumped out to go inside to get Eddie. I was amazed at how casually this bizarre rocker/farmer/dancer (Jay was now wearing a fur-trimmed coat) walked through all the commotion in front of the building and went inside. Fearless. As we sat and waited (forever), it seemed emergency sirens were constantly going off. So far this experience was doing nothing to dissipate my fears or preconceptions.
    Suddenly I heard someone screaming. I turned and saw a woman burst out of the front door of Eddie’s building, with her hands covering her face and blood pouring out. What the fuck!? Police and emergency vehicles arrived, all hell was breaking loose . . . then Jay Jay and Eddie casually walked out of the building, chatting and laughing as I sat in shock.
    Sporting a “disco haircut” and wearing a long, herringbone tweed coat, Eddie did not look rock ’n’ roll, but he seemed pretty cool. I quickly impressed him by asking if his last name was actually pronounced O-hey-da (three years of mediocre grades in Spanish, finally paying off), and he proceeded to reinforce every stereotype I had about Puerto Ricans.
    Before we had driven a block, Eddie asked if we could pull over at a check-cashing place so he could get some money. He used the money to purchase a bottle of booze at a liquor store conveniently located next door, then drank it with a brown bag around it! Are you kidding me!? Could he have been any more ethnic? This was atypical behavior for Eddie, and to this day he cracks up when he thinks of how it must have looked to a twenty-year-old, culture-shocked kid from the suburbs. Thanks, Eddie.
    Now that we had the whole band, we began our supposed two-hourdrive upstate to the Turtleneck Inn. The operative word being supposed .
    As night fell, due to the ice travel became even more dangerous, and as we got closer and closer to our destination in the Catskill Mountains, the roads became downright treacherous. Our pace slowed to a crawl, but credit to our intrepid driver Kenny (who had now been on the road close to twelve hours) for ultimately getting us to our destination safely.
    The travel time certainly didn’t go to waste. We talked the hours away and got to know each other. I was really hitting it off with Kevin John Grace,