You Can Feed Your Melting Face at Any Old Place (But You Can Warm Your Heart at Shakey’s)

by BOB GOBLIN

“Now boy, you go tell you and all your friends that if you EVER raid the Leroy church again…I’m gonna comes after you and kill ya. Tell em…Tell em all.”

This was said to me just outside a bar by a patron at “The Square.” A bar just off the center square in downtown Crown Point, IN. This inebriated long haired heavily flannelled man had me lifted at least a foot off the ground, one hand on my neck, feet dangling and was painfully informing me of the aforementioned fate of the Leroy church.

Apparently the Leroy Living testimony church in Leroy, Indiana was raided and vandalized with satanic slogans and I was mistaken for the number one suspect in the case. Yes you guessed it…Donny Crepeau. I have been known to vandalize with satanic slogans (a 666 here, hail Satan spray painted on a white van there) but never at or in a church though…I only stole from churches. Candles, I stole candles.

Anyway, The Crepeuaus were a notoriously under parented and under supervised family of long hairs, metal heads, pot smokers, and acidheads. Picture 5 slightly tanned 6’2” Glen Danzigs running around getting drunk and high and causing mischief all over Crown point, Hebron, Cedar Lake and Leroy, IN…. and that is a pretty good start at visualizing this family. That was the Crepeaus…. with the exception of Donny. Donny was the blonde sheep of the family and on many occasions I would be mistaken for him.

I was just less than six ft. but had the long blond hair that created the Donny Doppelganger effect. Donny was at least 5 years older than I was and would get into more adult trouble that I would sometimes get the heat for…case in point. Now back to the throat handled 15-year-old me.

As my friends stood paralyzed gawking at what was happening to me, words cannot/could not describe what was going through my mind. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me and at the same time it didn’t feel like it was because you see…I was tripping my balls off. A kaleidoscope of colors whirled behind the handy man due to the acid and increasing lack of oxygen affecting my brain… As my heart rate raced I was finally dropped to the ground…Scrapping myself self up rapidly… we ran down main street away from the bar as I hoarsely screamed at my friends,

“why didn’t you fucking help me”

“Dude we are tripping….and that was AWESOME.”

I learned my lesson and never raided the Leroy Church again.

Out of all the drugs I have consumed: alcohol, pot, vicodin, norco, tramadol, Percocet, Percodan, propoxyphene, heroin, morphine, dilaudid, versed, valium, klonopin, Ativan, cocaine, mescaline, PCP (on accident), ecstasy, and ketamine to just name a few. The effect was typically pretty predictable. LSD, acid, blotter was always a very unique experience for me…and I will say flat out unpredictable.

Some of the coolest most intense things I have experienced on acid: Riding roller coasters at 6 flag Great America, attending the Clash of the Titans tour and moshing to Slayer at Alpine Valley, getting hand cuffed and arrested, twice, grinding planks of wood into belt sanders in 8th grade wood shop, strobe lights with smoke, bubbles and weed.

Some of the not so cool, awful things I experienced on acid: Riding roller coasters at 6 flag Great America, attending the Clash of the Titans tour and moshing to Slayer at Alpine Valley, getting hand cuffed and arrested, twice, grinding planks of wood into belt sanders in 8th grade wood shop, strobe lights with smoke, bubbles and weed, working the Taco bell drive through, and fingering my girlfriend.

My first trip had been on Halloween 1988-89. I was in eighth grade and my guitar player and friend Shannon was basically my spiritual guide through that evening. It was an awesome night and one of the best trips I ever had.

Another memorable trip was during the summer that Jennifer broke up with me. If you recall from the trilogy of trauma she and I lost our virginity together…so when we broke up I took it pretty hard. I was selling some acid for a friend of mine so I had a plentiful amount… 2 hits at midnight for a week was the cure for the ending of that relationship.

One of those nights I got in a friend’s car…it had T-tops, a full moon was out, super bright. We were going to a quarry to go swimming. The driver John was wasted drunk, gunning the car around corners, fish tailing, my other friend Matt stood up out of the T tops and hit hat flew off…. I sank further in the back seat… external stimulation overload. “Let me out”, I said. “What”, said Matt…”Yeah let me out.” “OK dude, but you’re on your own.”

Peeling out…as they drove out of site and the sound of the engine roaring diminished…I realized I was alone in the pitch-black night, the sound of cicadas was deafening…. It was immediately clear that I made a huge mistake and I had a 5-mile walk home ahead of me, which is a story for another trauma.

So anyway, I tripped for a week after my last dose during break up week revival and was still pretty upset when I came back to reality so I guess I didn’t really work…I can’t place a number on the many times I have dropped out but I would like to recall with you now the worst day I have ever had…ever. It was the worst, not so much due to what was actually happening but what my perception of what was happening.

Summer going into junior year I made the decision to try out for the football team. This was a big deal as it meant that I would have to cut off some of my hair and dress “differently”. Trade in my concert T’s for polos, acid washed Levis for Z Cavaricci’s.

Years earlier when we moved to Crown Point, IN I met with the 8th grade football coaches. With my hair half way down my back, I was wearing an Iron Maiden Killers T shirt, a chrome inverted cross necklace, a non-inverted gold cross left earing and acid washed jeans with Chuck’s. The coaches gave me a once over a said very directly, “If you want to play football in Crown Point, you need to cut your hair, and wear different clothes, can you do that son?” Uh…Nope.

So years later when my desire to want to play football increased as my super angry angst-y self wanted to hit people legally I decided to go for it. I was a very large kid and the coaches would attempt to recruit me yearly to play but I would hold my hair ground…so conforming and cutting 12 inches off my hair to now have shoulder length locks… yeah was a big fuckin deal.

Summer football conditioning was taking place and I would go to the gym daily to lift weights and run laps at the high school. Assistant Coach Brandt would stare at me in the gym and say things like, “You wanna play football huh… well Coach Smith ain’t gonna like your hair… You better get a buzz cut.” And things like, “You think you’re going to be any good… I don’t think so.” Real encouraging words. Fast forward…. by senior year Assistant Coach Brandt was battling prostate cancer…and I didn’t even give one fuck about it.

Anyway, one bike ride home from conditioning practice I ran into my two Friends Matt and Matt. It was 10am and they were just arriving back from the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show and had 4 sheets of acid. They had five but one turned out to be a rip. Needless to say, they were tripping hard.

I asked if they could come by my house in an hour and I would buy some, they agreed. When I arrived home shortly after, there was a note from my parents telling me that they would be gone for the day and possibly the night. In the early 90’s my parent purchased a houseboat and would frequently stay on it on the weekends. This was awesome on so many levels as I could run free and not have to answer to anyone except the occasional inquisition form my gay brother. Anyway, at the bottom of the note was a P.S. “Here’s some money for chow.” And there was a $20 bill…. BINGO. I’m going to eat…eat some ACID.

When Matt and Matt arrived we made the exchange and with the parents out of town, my brother at work, I decided to just drop 2 of the 4 hits at noon, by myself, on a summer Saturday, in our Victorian wood grained floor and interior wood stained trimmed house. 45 minutes later I was peaking hard and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I called my friend and drummer Keith and told him that I dropped. He told me to come over and hang out and it sounded like a good idea but I was convinced his mother knew that since I even called Keith on the phone she of course knew I was tripping. There could possibly be no explanation as to why I would call Keith…unless I was tripping. So that was out.

Tripping even harder and becoming increasingly paranoid that everyone was beginning to know that I was tripping…I made a decision…I decided that I actually wasn’t tripping enough… and that my brain was half in reality and half out so if I pushed it all the over into the complete drop zone it would even things out and I would become less paranoid and more functional. Yeah… that makes total sense! I took the other two hits, while I was peaking on the first two and well that was awful….

I started making Kraft Macaroni and cheese. I presumed that if I ate food it would also help even things out. As I put the third box in the boiling water… It became increasingly clear that I would not be eating any of this. I needed an out, I had to abandon and just then my brother’s friend, Jennifer who was staying with us that summer, came home.

She approached and said “Mmmm Can I have some when it’s done.” “Sure” I said. Holy fuck, I can’t even read the directions and this pot of boiling water looks like it’s filled with fuckin brains. Shit…shit…shit…she knows…Oh my god she knows. I’m so fucked. I vaguely remember putting the cheese packets in, didn’t stir it, put some in a bowl and ran upstairs with it to my room, locked the door and proceeded to not eat the macaroni and cheese but smash it in my fingers and chew and spit it out. My skin was crawling and I was bouncing of the walls.

Skinny Puppy’s Too Dark Park on cassette was given to me from my brother’s punker friend Shelly. She once told me in art class while painting a picture of an ogre that she was in love with Ogre of skinny Puppy and that she was painting this for him so he would stop doing heroin. Skinny Puppy Too Dark Park should come with a warning label that it should NEVER be listened to while on acid. Now not only did everyone know I was on acid but the underworld of pure evil was coming to get me.

It became increasingly apparent that I needed to get out of the house. But it was so obvious to EVERYONE that I was tripping that I needed to mask my behavior and or actions so the cops wouldn’t ALSO know and or be called. Because by now the cops were circling the block trying to make it look like they weren’t trying to actually look inside my bedroom windows.

I decided that if I was listening to a Walkman any erratic behavior or unwanted bodily movements could be explained. “Look at that not tripping youth getting into his music”, they would say, you know EVERYONE that was watching me walk down the street from the windows of their homes, behind the trees, the trees themselves, from their roof tops, in their cars driving by, and in the sewers that I was just “getting into the music.” Genius, I need to get outside and walk around… I’ll feel better then.

Walkman in hand I unlocked the door to my room, walked through the sea of parquet floors, down the stairs, out the front door, down the gravel drive way and toward the street. Pressing play on the Walkman… YOU Breed… Like RATS… Godflesh’s “Like rats” blasting through the headset immediately paralyzed me. I didn’t know what to do… the music was so intense to me that I yanked the headset off my head… Mustering up enough strength, I turned around away from the street, walked back up the gravel driveway and back through the front door. Up the stairs, back through the parquet floor sea, into my room and locked the door. “Fuck” what am I going to do? Time stood still…

Late afternoon, after the peak I was able to leave the house and go for a walk, everything less intense… the waves slowed down, I could feel the warm summer breeze on my crawling skin, and then I heard a car horn honking, beep beep beep… No!!!… It was Judy, another girl I can’t remember and my friend Jeff. I jumped in the back seat and instantly whispered to Jeff…”I’m tripping so hard”…His response was …”really”? They said they were going to Shakeys.

Sherwood “Shakey” Johnson opened the first Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in a remodeled grocery store on 57th and J Street in Sacramento, California in 1954. Originally established as “ye public house” for pizza & beer, Johnson indulged his passion for Dixieland jazz and added live ragtime music to mix, featuring banjos and player pianos throughout his rapidly expanding franchise. As the concept caught on, the Shakey’s name became synonymous with the World’s Greatest Pizza along with light-hearted slogans such as “You’ll have fun at Shakey’s, also pizza,” and “You can feed your face at any old place, but you can warm your heart at Shakey’s.” http://www.shakeys.com/History.aspx…

So warm my heart I did, thank God it was over.