KGB was once a fairly well-known cover band from the west side of town. I never saw them perform or even heard of them until I met one of the members. He called himself Jimmy Kane but that wasn’t his real name. Someone once told me his real name but I only remember the alias. Our paths crossed through a series of circumstances that involved my relationship with Sandra Falon (see chapters 3 and 4).
Like a lot of other people from the Eastern part of Cincinnati, to me, the West Side was unfamiliar territory. This changed when I started seeing Sandra. Many of her addict friends and connections lived over there. Most of them were either in Fairmount or Price Hill. They existed like nomads because dope led them wherever they needed to be but, sooner or later, it always ended up taking them back to the West Side.
Dink, Sandra’s long-time girlfriend, was married to a guy named Ainsly and they had a house in upper Fairmount. Sandra occasionally hooked her up with dealers from Walnut Hills in trade for dope or money. Once, Dink went on a binge and ended up being passed around from crack house to crack house until her husband finally found her selling little American flags in front of a McDonald’s for drug money. I never saw her again after that. Vicki and Johnny and Fred lived off Queen City Avenue in lower Fairmount. Fred held a steady day job at the Procter & Gamble plant in St. Bernard but the other two were straight-up addicts. They stayed at Fred’s place when they had nowhere else to go. Johnny had several arrest warrants issued against him that he always managed to dodge. He got his dope money by doing odd jobs, working on cars and pimping Vicki out to whoever would have her. She also pimped herself out and tried to con me into joining her client base. Being a gentleman of such sterling character, I would have none of it. In Price Hill, Sandra was once shacked up with a disabled vet turned addict named Buddy. My only run-in with him was on a cold Thanksgiving afternoon. I had stopped by Sandra’s aunt’s house where a few of the extended family were enjoying their holiday meal and, as I was leaving, Buddy pulled up in his car. He got out, approached me in my car and tried to bust through the driver’s side window with his bare hands. We parted without being properly introduced. Squirrely Shirley was also from Price Hill. She and Sandra took an ill-fated drive way out East to Peebles, Ohio; presumably, on a tip that they could score some good dope. When Sandra got back to her mom’s house in Walnut Hills, she called me crying. Shirley had roped her into injecting coke for the first time. A few days later I went over to pick her up and she showed me the track marks.
Jimmy Kane was another user in a long list of users that populated Sandra’s life. He lived about a half mile up the street from Fred’s place, also off Queen City. It was a run-down, ’50s-style brick house that sat on a little ridge above the street. At the time, Sandra was running around with Dink and they somehow managed to find work at a hotel cleaning service company. Jimmy ran the crew they worked with so he had probably gotten them the jobs.
Jimmy Kane’s House
I only met him once. I’d gone over to his house to give Sandra a ride back to her mother’s place. When I got there, she greeted me at the door and let me in. Looking around the place, I could see there where still some remnants of the straight life that may have existed before things went south. Most of it was now replaced by the common run-down, cigarette-ash gray doper pallor that hangs over the living quarters of most hard-core addicts. She told me to have a seat on the couch while she got ready. The couch butted up against the front wall of the house and, for some reason, when she left the room I decided to look behind it. The space between the couch and the wall was filled with garbage: candy wrappers, soft drink cans, dead bugs, piles of dust, spent char, dried up bits of food, magazines, hair, socks, underwear and broken guitar strings. It was the accumulated mess of who knows how many years.
Jimmy walked into the room after I’d been sitting there a few minutes. He introduced himself and sat down in a chair opposite the couch. He was skinny, disheveled and, though a typical West Side white guy, I vaguely remember him looking slightly Hispanic. Sandra may have told him that I played guitar because he started asking me about music.
My memory of the conversation is mostly gone except for one detail. In his rambling account of several experiences in the music business, he mentioned doing studio work in Nashville. This was back in the early ’70s. He had come up with the idea of producing what he called a patriotic medley; something that combined several famous patriotic songs into one piece of music. After putting it together, he and a few other players recorded the tune and shopped it around for a while. They didn’t hear anything back from the record company people they had approached and the project was soon abandoned. A few years later, while riding around in a car, he heard a song come on the radio. It was Elvis performing something called American Trilogy; an exact version of the medley that Jimmy had produced and recorded several years earlier. I remember thinking that the story was bullshit but, then again, who knows?
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© 2014 by Maurice Mattei
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