When I heard this week's,"Open Call," I knew the heavens had finally opened a place for me to tell the world a little more about my adventures as a punk rock truck stop waitress.

In an earlier call I wrote a little about love and the brain surgery I went through to discover love. While it seemed the perfect story at the time I am now realizing it was only the intro to a world to come. In my,"Live fast die young," 30 something years I have had as many brushes with death as I have had sexual partners. I don't know what that says about me, my ability to be in the right place at the wrong time or my love life but that is okay. I will stick with the facts here because that is what I know.

Deathbrush #1: Upon my arrival into this world I was ready to go. My arm came out first and then my head. Like a graphic of a Rob Roskopp deck I was trying to get out of Mom. I began to breathe air and decided I did not like it here. I tried to go back inside of Mom and the doctor had a knee jerk reaction and grabbed my arm to pull me out. He broke my shoulder, neck and several ribs. I was paralyzed for 5 or 6 months. One day when Dad was in Vietnam the prostitute he hired to take care of me heard a noise like somebody was breaking into the house. She was packin and carried the pistol upstairs and shot towards the bed(good idea,Sala). It was the noise of the metal back and leg braces I was wearing. I could move everything and was ready for my next brush with death...

Death brush #2:  It was a rainy Saturday night in Lake Cormorant,MS. My Grandparents had just returned home from Memphis where they spent their night dancing to the sounds of the Sun Rythym Section. The phone rang. It was Uncle Raymond calling to tell my grandpa that a cow had been hit on Highway 61 and they needed to get the cow out of the highway because it was blocking the whole road. My Granpa said I could go but we had to leave now. I was wearing my underwear and a t-shirt ; no shoes; (it is MS). We pulled up to the scene of the accident and Grandpa got busy with the situation and was not paying attention to me. I had to go to the bathroom and since it is still MS that means it was completely normal for me to walk over to the side of the road and squat. I went to the edge of the ditch and tried to stick my feet in tall grass so I would not unrinate on them. The high beams from the truck were shining a perfect silouette of the poor cow laying there. That was her closest brush. Uncle Raymond started talking to me.

" Sugar pie we are going to play a game. You stay real still and I'll give you a $5 dollar bill if you do not move at all."

"Okay."

It was the first time I remember being body concious because my panties were still down. I was told to stare strait ahead and act like a sculpture. As I squatted and stared at the cow I could see my uncle out of the corner of my eye coming upon me in an awkward sideways walk. In one quick, fluid movement he swooped me up into his arms and jumped across the cow and onto the other side of the highway. Just then I heard a pistol go off and Grandpa walked over and picked up a now dead and very large male rattler. He threw it in the back of the truck, threw me in the front of the truck(I had pulled my panties back up by this time), my uncle handed me a $5, and we were out of there.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I nodded yes. "Don't tell your grandmother how we got this snake." I nodded yes.

We got back to the house and I went to bed. The next day I woke up and proudly put my money in the pocket of my Toughskins. We had rattlesnake stew for lunch and I could not keep the story to myself. I never got to go out without boots again but I did get to keep the five.

Death brush#3:  In 1976 my father and stepmom had just put me to bed and I remember going to sleep while looking at the light from the television turn my room different shades of blue. I had not been asleep long when I awoke to the sound of my father screaming at me to get up. I could smell the smoke and see the flames. They had passed out on the couch and a lit cigarette had fallen into the chair my dad was sitting in just before he got up from it to get on the couch with my step mom. The chair caught fire and the flames were fueled by a box fan in the window behind the chair. They must have been pretty far gone when they passed out because by the time my dad woke me up smoke was filling my room and the house looked like a bonfire. I was crying because my cat was trapped in the back of the house where there were flames moving in and the door was locked. My dad wrapped a wet blanket around me  (I don't know why because we did not have to run through flames) and we ran out the front door. As I stood in the front yard, wet, scared and sad I watched the rest of my house burn to the ground. But, even as doorknobs were flying into the air as they popped from the old wooden frames I could see that the television was still on. George Jones was the guest on Hee-Haw that night. The next day we went to the store so I could get some clothes. I talked my dad into getting me a pair of Hee-Haw overalls. They had the donkey, ears of corn and Hee-Haw in a pattern that repeated over and over so that there was not an area of the overalls that didn't promote the show. I got another cat when we moved into our new, old house.

Death brush #4: My grandparents were from Arkansas so every once in awhile we would travel to Blythesville,Ak and several other small towns in between to visit relatives. My favorite place to go in the Summer was Marked Tree, AK. I had cousins there who were my age and there was always something fun to do. This day we decided to go swimming at one of the local mud holes and we had one chapparone, my dad. There was a rope swing and a wooden dock to jump off of. It was a very," Norman Rockwell esque," place. Cousin Gregg says,"Watch this," as he runs from the land end of the dock to the lake end and jumps off. He did not come up for what seemed like five minutes and I jumped in to look for him. Something grabbed my leg and wasn't letting go and I couldn't reach the surface. As fight or flight took over my adrenaline surged and was able to free myself and took in all the air my little lungs could pull in as I surfaced. We later learned that Gregg had gotten caught in some rope that was for some reason buried at the bottom of the lake attached to some tires. It was his hand that had grabbed my leg and I couldn't pull hard enough to free him. I was devastated and felt like it was my fault for a long time. This would become a recurring theme as my brushes with death get more and more personal.

Death brush #5:  I ran away from home to live on the streets of Austin,TX when I was almost fifteen. Originally I was heading for L.A. but on a bus layover in Dallas I called my friend Maggie who was in Memphis. She said that the Police had just figured out where I was and if they did not get me before L.A. they would be waiting in the bus terminal. This was some excellent Police work because I was the only underage kid with blue and white hair that had bought a bus ticket that day in Memphis so they really had to work to put together a map of where I was. I really could not believe thay hadn't gotten to me before Dallas because, if you have ever ridden a bus you know, the bus stops A LOT. I got my bags and hitched a ride to Austin. When I got there I fell in with a big group of street kids who were runaways too. We spent our days ,"Spare changing," drinking cheap beer and trying to figure out what punk show we would go to that night, (Fang, MDC, JFA,Black Flag and/or Butthole Surfers seemed to come up a lot) and where we would stay after the show. One night we decided to go to Liberty Lunch to see a show we thought would be a punk, "oi," band show but turned out to be packed with skinheads. I was drunk and angry and for some stupid reason I jumped into the middle of the pit and started punching skinheads in the balls. I do not reccomend this type of behavior even to the biggest of attention seekers. The next thing I knew I was looking at a fist wrapped with a chain and it was heading for my face. I looked down and he got me right at my hairline. He broke the skin and blood was running down my face into my mouth. I remember that metallic tast and the pain I felt as I was now curled into a ball on the floor and was being kicked with 18 hole,oxblood, steel toe Doc Martins. I was rescued by my punk friends and ended up with a mild concussion, broken nose, ribs and wrist. After this I racked up so much money spare changing in the UT area that after a week I could afford to pay for a deposit and rent on an apartment on 24th street near Guadalupe. We din't have to worry about where we were going to stay for many months. Somehow we were able to keep the apartment going for over a year. Thanks random skin who I now know is serving a life sentence!

Death brush#6: When I was 17 I decided to hitchike to Portland,ME. It was as far away as I could get and still be in the United States. I met some girls who worked at the Green Mountain Coffee shop in downtown Portland who let me stay in their closet. It was a walk in and really bigger than some bedrooms of the lower east side of Manhattan. I became close to both girls and we bought a car together. A 1977 orange Nova for $300. We spray painted all of the generic punk slogans and band names that would fit on the car, got some ju-ju beads to hang from the mirror and some animal rights bumper stckers...have road will travel. Our first destination was Virginia Beach,VA. Michelle,the only one with a valid license had family there and we were going to visit them. We got a weekly rent motel room when we arrived and ended up living there for three months. I was biding my time until I was 18 and could return to Memphis and get grants to go to art school. This place wasn't so bad. If we wanted to see a show we could drive to Richmond, D.C., or Norfolk. I got a job as a waitress at a Pizza Hut down the street from our motel under an assumed name,Christian Blender. It was not meant to make a statement. It was the combination of two of my favorite skaters, Christian Hosoi and Neil Blender. I skated home from work one night and just as I was entering the hallway from the street to the stairs I was jumped for money by a guy with a habit and a butterfly knife. He cut my throat on the left side from my ear to the center. He knicked several vessels but missed my j. vein. Still there was blood coming out fast and squirting in rythym with my heart. This frieked him out and he ran. I walked to the front of the motel and passed out in front of the glass front resataurant on the ground floor so people saw me and were able to get help. I lost conciousness and woke up in the hospital with two detectives who kept insisting I must have an abusive boyfriend and were trying hard to,"Break me." I did not have aboyfriend and they never caught the guy. I only had to get four pints of blood and 37 stitches inside and 24 stiches that I could see. As soon as I could travel I was back on my way to Memphis. I was not yet seventeen and was a little afraid of being put in juvenile detention for running away but it seemed  better than some of the things I had gone through at that point. I returned home three months before my 18th birthday to find out there was no warrant for me being a runaway. I contacted my family but nobody seemed to care I had ever left or that I was back so I could live life freely. That fall I began Art achool at The Memphis Academy of Art, now the Memhis College of Art and started my own band. I had enough money from grants to get a place to live, groceries a used Datsun and all the art supplies I needed. Life is so sweet.

Death brush #7: I decided to visit my friend Alisa in NYC. She was working at the Film Forum and had one of those closet size bedroom apartments I was talking about  earlier. We had been to Central Park that day and were on our way back to her apartment on Avenue B just south of Houston for a nap before we went out that night. It was dusk and we could hear a lot of yelling that was getting closer and louder. We turned the corner near Tompkins Square Park in time for me to get knocked out by a Police officer on a horse. I woke up in a bar across the street from the park. Alisa and some of her friends had carried me in there. When I got up and looked out the window it was like a bad dream. There were cops, protesters, homeles people, media, and random people like me who were just at the right place at the wrong time. People did die that day. There was blood in the streets, on the people and on the hands of the city. The frustration and anger I felt were overwhelming. There was nothing I could do excepet keep myself safe. We slept in that bar that night and watched as new teams of Police officers were called in to stop the homeless from sleeping in the park. All of this was over gentrification. The money meets the deficit. I felt so bad for everyone involved. There were officers there who did not want to be doing what they were told. But they did it anyway. There were people with money there who had lived there their whole lives and weren't part of the gentrification, there were drug dealers who preyed on people who used that park and used in that park, there were the addicts and the mentally ill who were being abused in so many ways it all fed itself. The area is," Cleaned up," now. I did not recognize it last time I was there. Noboby won and nobody lost. There are a lot of nobody's in this world I learned. I am one of them. I am just thankful to be an alive nobody like the rest of us. That makes us all somebody.

Death brush #7: When I returned home from NYC I decided to buy a motorcycle. We all know where this is headed but I feel obligated to tell it anyway. After all that is what this compilation of stories is about.

     Although I rode with a crowd of local hipsters (Panther Burns Motorcycle Club) who all had vintage Nortons, Triumphs and Harleys, I got a 1976 Kawasaki 750. It was cheap and easy to maintain as far as part availabilty and price. I had just tuned the bike with my friend and now business partner,Randy Tremaine. Randy and I went to school together. He grew up working on cars with his dad so he paid his way through school by working on cars and bikes. I learned that I could paint cars and bikes and make a lot more money that truck stop waitressing. He got me a job at the shop where he worked and I had my own bay and it was housed by itself so no paint would get on cars that were having mechanical work done. The business was owned by Doug Goodge. He was a short, round British man and his busines was called, British Motors. We mainly worked on MG's, Triumphs, Jaguars and Austin Healy's with the occasional Morris, Minor or Mini and Saab's too because Randy had been to Saab,"School," and worked at a Saab dealership for awhile. Mr. Goodge was not a citizen and was operating illegally under his girlfriend's name. They broke up and he left the country and we inherited a business. We put the lease in our names, got a license, tax number and began our business on the cars that were still unpaid for when he left. What an awesome deal for us.  Anyway I pulled out of the shop and got on a side street with few stop signs where I could test and tune. I was going about 35 mph when a windowless cargo van backed out of a driveway in front of me. I had a couple of bad options. One; I could hit the side of the van. Two; I could turn the wheel, brake and try to land in someone's yard. Three; ( and this is what I did) I could lay the bike down after braking as hard and fast as I could and hope I went under the van and through to the other side. I am little but the bike was not. In moments like this you really do not have time to think everything through.  I was caught under the bike which hit the side of the van at a time when me and the bike were laying down and skidding. I remember a lady coming over to me with a phone in her hand a telling me she had cakked 911. I told her to call the shop and tell Randy where I was and what had happened. He pulled up in what seemed like seconds in a 1968 International Harvester pick-up truck with a friend. He got the bike off of me and our friend pulled out a ramp and loaded it onto the truck. He grabbed me put me in the truck and drove me to a hospital. I did not have a motorcycle license or insurance and he was concerned I would get in trouble so that's why the criminal like behavior. I spent the next three hours really doped up on Morphine while I went to x-ray and CT and they picked bits of gravel and glass out of my legs and shoulder. I dislocated the shoulder that had been dislocated upon my re-entry into this world, broke my wrist and a tooth and had some serious road rash. I was bike shy for awhile but still rode until I was out riding one day with the friend who had loaded up the bike. He pulled out of a red light and I saw him hit the brake just as he was struck by a woman pulling out of a drive-thru and eating a burger. He went strait into the air and came down on his head and was dead instantly. I have not ridden a bike since. I stick to off road riding on a bicycle. Much safer and better for me. Chad,"This song is for you my brother." You knew a Jim Carroll reference had to make it in here somwhere.

Death brush #8:  I went to my first Mardi Gras the next spring. I was walking around the outskirts of the Quarter in the afternoon when I noticed a man coming towards me. I noticed him because we were the only two people on the sidewalk. I am very observant. As the man approaches me he pulls out a gun and tell me to take off my locket. The gun was shaking as much as he was and I was afraid it was going to discharge on its own. I thought about it for a second and realized I wasn't going to give him the locket my grandmother gave me. Who was I Joe Cole? I ran between two cars and onto the street where I ducked behind the cars until I got to a cross street where I ran into the nearest bar (not hard to find in that area). I told the bartender what had happened and he asked me if I was okay to which I replied,"Yes," and he says,"Welcome to New Orleans what would you like to drink?"

"I'll have a draft."

Death brush#9:  Back in Memphis I was out late with some friends at a Waffle House pouring coffee into my body so I could stay up later and get a painting finshed. We walked out to the parking lot. I was driving a 1976 Oldmobile convertable that summer and a man was waiting ducked down in my front seat with guess what...yes, a gun. He too was shaking and the gun was too. It was even older than the last guy's gun and I thought the same thing. If he doesn't pull the trigger this thing will discharge on its own. He says," Get in the passenger's seat."

My friends were all warching from a distance and I knew that they had probably called the cops. Great the cops are going to scare the guy and the gun will go off. I traded places with him and he tried desperately to start the car. "You stupid bitch your car won't even start. Give me your bag." I actually fought with him for a few seconds over the bag and then just handed it to him. He got out of the car and ran across the street where he stole a newspaper truck.

I got out of the car and ran to meet my friends. I cried while adrenaline once again surged through me. My tears turned to laughter as I was telling the story to the cops. I realized that the reason the car wasn't starting was because I had installed a ,"kill switch," under the dash that had to be turned on before I could start the car. What a funny name for a part that probably saved my life.

Death brush#91/2:  In 1994 I had to have a laproscope done. This is a routine surgery the doctor says. First of all no surgery should ever be called, routine. It is not part of my routine. It may be a common or habitual for the doctor but for the rest of us being cut into is never common or a regular part of our daily business.

       The doctor had to go in and remove some endometriosos from my uterus. I was scheduled for a one day surgery but when I was in recovery she told me that she had to remove my tubes while she was in there because they were, " Filled with endometrial tissue and I was afraid of you having a tubal pregnancy. We are going to have to keep you for a couple of days."  My friends were with me in shifts 24 hours a day while I was there. I started getting really paranoid after the first day and believed the hospital was doing experiments on me. The helicopter landing pad was outside of my window and I told my friend Katherine that they were taking pictures of me. I actually hid in the bathroom a couple of times when I heard the helicopter. The doctor said it was the medication and reduced the mg. I continued to have strange behavior and began falling when I got up. Then I was not able to hold myself up at all. For 10 1/2 hours Katherine watched me lay there and mumble. She would tell the nurses and the nurses would tell the doctor, the doctor would tell the nurses to tell me to rest. Well I couldn't do anything except rest! Finally a nurse came in and Katherine tells me, because I don't remember, that she was freaking out saying that somehow no nurses had ever been assigned to me. She said it had something to do with me coming from one day surgery. Nobody had taken my blood pressure,heart rate any vital signs or anything else. My blood pressure was 52/27. I had been bleeding internally for 2 &1/2 days! I do remember the doctor coming in and saying," I believe I knicked a blood vessel somewhere. We are going to have to give you blood and I am going to have to do an exploratory surgery to find the bleed. What was supposed to be three 1" incisions and a little cleaning up has sure turned into a non-routine procedure.

She ended up having to give me 9 pints of blood and make a hip to hip incision requiring 27 staples.  So many people told me to sue her. What does that solve though really? She ended up losing her job with the ob/gyn firm. I retuned to health with a clear conscience and that zest for life like I had never had. Except for after the other near death experiences in the past and those to follow.

Deathbrush #10: So, I finally got that abusive boyfriend in the late 90's. We were at a small (16' x 20') cabin with no windows and one door that we had built on some land his family owned off of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. We began fighting which was standard operating procedure when he had been drinking and it escalated to the point where I decided it would be a good idea to walk to Asheville at midnite from the middle of the country. I grabbed my backpack and stated walking down the dirt path we used for a driveway. He got in the car and began to chase me. I started running through the woods but the front wheel drive, tiny, 1979 Toyata, Corolla we had was moving with some agility around the trees. I know it seems like a person on foot could easily get away from a person and a car in the woods but it was so dark I couldn't see where I was going and the headlights moving around did not help the situation. I was finally struck and he had jammed me between a tree and the bumper. As he backed up to, I'm going to assume, hit me again I ran back to the cabin. He got out of the car and ran towards the cabin. I had turned off the lantern and was waiting with a tree limb to defend myself if neccessary. I heard a noise and realized he had put the two by four we kept outside, to lock the cabin from the outside when we were gone, across the door and padlocked it. I could see through a small break between two pieces of plywood and I watched him pick up something near the campfire. It was a 5 gallon can of kerosene for the laterns and fire starting. He came back towards the cabin and was crazily cursing me, his father, God and the world. I could hear the burps that the can made as he began to douse the door and side of the cabin with kerosene. He poured kerosene in a line and stopped at about five feet before the fire. He poured some on himeself and kept yelling,"Here it comes, here it comes!" The sky lit up and I heard a thunderous roar. It was thunder. All of a sudden rain and hail were coming down fast and hard. He was angry and he poured kerosene to the fire hoping it would still ignite the line to the cabin which it did. The flames went up the kerosene trail about three to five feet before they went out. He was soaked and getting hit with hail so he got in the driver's seat of the car where he passed out with his head on the steering wheel. A passing vehicle heard the car horn and called the sheriff's department. Two officers and an ambulance showed up. They got him out of the car and got me out of the cabin. He was bleeding from a head wound he had sustained during the drama. I was begging them to take me to Knoxville where I had friends to stay with but they actually laughed at me and refused. Thay had apparantly dealt with him and his family for generations. His family was known for moonshine, spousal abuse and alcoholism. They told me everything would be fine and we should sleep it off. I wasn't drunk. They made him promise to leave me alone for the night, cleaned his wound, took a look at my bruised shins and left!

The next day we went fishing with his dad and uncle as if everything was normal and to them it was. We drove to Knoxville that night where we stayed with friends until I got a house. He lived there for a short while until a few weeks later he did kill himself with an electrical cord and a rafter in the garage. In his note he claimed he was turning into his dad and becoming the abusive drunk and drug addict his father was so he had to do this to rid the world of the evil in him. This is where I took what I had started earlier in my life-the guilt..it's my fault thing- and reapplied it to this situation for too long. My eyes are open now and I see I had nothing to do with it. Once again I was in the right place at the wrong time.  Or was I actually in the wrong place at the wrong time? Lessons we learn and the way we learn them are not always up to us. We must just make sure we are always learning and growing.

Deathbrush#10: The Grand Finale: I was back in Memphis working on a degree in English. I was coming home from school where I had attended a poetry reading and some other events when I had a seizure at the wheel. Two women, in separate cars saw this happen and they guided my car with their bars safely to the side of the road. I was takento the hospital where they discovered a brain tumor. After two brain surgeries and years of rehabilitation I would like to think that my next brush with death will happen when I am 111 years old and very peacefully at home. In an interview I once saw with Jim Carroll he twisted the Nietzche quote,"What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger," to,"What doen't kill you will only make you sleep til; three o'clock the next day." I've slept in a lot in my life. I like getting up early, breathing on the air and knowing that the worst is behind me. To all of you other survivors out there...this story is for you my brothers and sisters. You all inspire me to continue on even in the face of life.