Baptized and beaten: Butthole Surfers in paradise

It took just one night to know that Austin was all I wanted in a city

Life in Austin was actually better before I started writing for the Austin Chronicle and became known. Shows are better when you pay cover because you also pay attention. And when you meet people, they have no preconceptions. They’re not out to impress or dismiss. They just take you as you are.

Butthole Surfers photo by Pat Blashill 4/1/1984

On my first night in an Austin club I found what I’d been looking for my whole life. It was Sunday April 1, 1984 at the Continental Club. Rollo and I had moved into a sad 2/2 on S. 1st near Ben White that day. There were two mattresses, one in each room, because Rollo had slept with the rental agent on his set-up trip a month earlier, and asked her to do us a favor. So the place came semi-furnished. It took a month before we added a table and chairs.

First night in the new town and I went exploring, ending up on South Congress. It wasn’t as sketchy back then as folks remember. A couple prostitutes, maybe a drug dealer hanging out between feed stores, but we’d just come from Hotel Street, man. Plus, I was on LSD and therefore invincible. The psychedelic storefront of Lucy In Disguise with Diamonds and Electric Ladyland entertained me for what seemed like hours. It was the grand opening that day and owner Jenna Radtke was the vibrant greeter.

There’s nothing like the first stroll in a new town, especially this one. I was walking down to Soap Creek #3, where I’d seen a sign for Steve Goodman when we came into town earlier that day- Rollo in his black ‘58 Chevy and me in a U-Haul with all our t-shirts and silkscreens and tattoo equipment. But the Goodman show was the previous night, so I headed back up to the Continental Club, where the sign said “Butthole Surfers $4.” I had to wait about 15 minutes for it to open, then it was just me and Mark Pratz, the owner/bartender for about half hour. Cheryl Newlin, a bartender on her day off, was the second person in. My first friend in Austin! Then, others from Lucy In Disguise stopped by, then the punks, then the college-tethered hipsters, then the lip-chewers.

In Honolulu, the band starts at 9 p.m. and plays until 12:01 a.m., when the DJ takes over. Clubs could get a “cabaret license” to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. if they had live music past midnight, so rock bands were booked just so folks could party afterhours to disco music. They didn’t have opening acts in Hawaii, so when Happy Death came onstage at about 10:30 I thought they were the Butthole Surfers. I was surprised to see another band set up afterwards.

And wonderfully unprepared for the strangeness that would come. Not many people have seen the Butthole Surfers without knowing a thing about them. This was before the penis re-attachment movies and the flaming cymbals. It was just the music, and it was both abrasive and hypnotizing. My brain was locked in on the primal stand-up rhythms of Teresa and King. I’ve never felt so connected to the music, to the people, to the club, in my life.

Thunder for the soul. Teresa Nervosa and King Coffee. Photo Eric Mark Lord.

When the show was over only the punks left. “This guy just moved here from Hawaii,” Cheryl introduced me around. I met everybody: Kaye Klier, Roger Oneknite, Wayne Nagel, Robbie Jacks, Big Rikke, Prince Hughes. “Why the hell would you leave Hawaii to come here, man?” growled Xalapeno Charlie. “I’m into music, not beaches,” I answered. “Well, then, you’re in the right place.”

I was 28 and skinny, with a story. Michael did a lot better with the women than Corky did. Michael met Suzee. Corky eventually repulsed the both of us.

Our first date was Los Lobos at Steamboat, with True Believers opening. This was Feb. ‘85, before I took over Margaret’s column. Suzee drove. Brent Grulke was there, despondent over a breakup with his fiancee in Dallas. Suzee gave him a ride home, too, and when she dropped Brent off first, I figured that she liked me. Every girl had a crush on Brent, including Suzee, who later told me that the reason she agreed to go out with me was because I was friends with him.

She was 11 years younger- and lightyears cuter- than me, and still is. She was also the biggest flirt I’ve ever seen outside of the champagne room. To Suzee, anything short of finger-fucking was innocent play. Years after we broke up, I asked her if any of my friends hit on her, and she named them. It was all of you motherfuckers!

Even though she was short and adorable, 18-year-old Suzee intimidated the other guys before I housebroke her. Attention-starved and loud, she could be an irritating shade of zany. You learned to not wear gym shorts or shirts with pearl snap buttons around her, or else you’d be half-naked in a flash. She’d pop your zits without even asking, and pee at Lazy Daisy’s lone toilet in the ladies room, at the same time as her friend Molly. (They faced each other). This chick was fuckin’ crazy!

“Hey, I remember my first beer!” is a funny insult the first time you hear it, but it gets old every night you go out.

But Suzee didn’t give a fuck what people thought of her. And eventually she won everyone over with a core of kindness. Well, everyone except Alejandro Escovedo. When he wore a snap button shirt to the wedding reception of Brent and Kathy McCarty, Suzee thrust it open. Only those weren’t snap buttons and the shirt was ripped beyond repair. Al still brings that up, though the cost of the shirt increases with each retelling. (Does anyone believe Alejandro could afford a $200 shirt in 1991?)

One night I asked Suzee if I was the first poor person she’d ever dated. “You’re the first poor person I’ve ever met,” she said. She was raised in the gated communities of North Houston, the daughter of an oil exec, so I had to introduce her to the glory of rummages sales, and that became our Saturday morning thing. I would show her how to walk down a rack of clothes using the sense of touch (gabardine! cashmere!) just as David Ornstein, my boss at Daybreak Antique Clothing in Albany, had shown me a couple years earlier.

There was one dark-haired woman who always got there before us, always knew where to target, and you best not get in her way. “Shit, the Dragon Lady’s here!” Later, I got to know Jenna Radtke and told her about the nickname, and she smiled at the compliment.

I doubt that much of this Suzee stuff is going to be in the book. She’s going to end up on the cutting room floor like Terrence Malick was editing. But she’s one of the most original people I’ve ever met, and I’d rather write about real people than to try to make them up. Some folks think I still carry a torch for Mrs. Brooks. This old broad?

Suzee Brooks 2014. Photo by Dave P.

She’s really more like a younger older sister. She berates me for my lifestyle choices and drives me to my colonoscopy appointments, but one time I drove myself. They wouldn’t let me leave the clinic until I called Suzee and she came to pick me up. The nurses just lit into her for leaving me stranded, calling her selfish and irresponsible, when she didn’t even know I’d had a proceedure until 20 minutes earlier. You know what that bitch Suzee did? She apologized. She took the bullet meant for me.

There’s nothing she can say to me that will hurt my feelings, though she tries like hell. And there’s nothing I can… well, Suzee’s got one weakness. She doesn’t like to be called dumb. Because she isn’t, even though she sometimes comes off like the third Tilley sister. She just can’t spell worth a damn. We’ll have a text battle, and she’ll just lay me out cold, but then I’ll come back with “breckfest,” which is how she spelled the most important meal of the day. That’s all I got.

We lasted two years, breaking up between SXSW and Eeyore’s in 1987. I moved on, dating an interesting British woman, who I thought might be the one, and when I met her for lunch one day she had a look on her face. “I heard you used to beat your girlfriend,” she said. WHAT?! “I met your old neighbors from Baylor Street last night.” Suzee and I had lived in a basement apartment, and through the thin ceiling it may have sounded like abuse. Example: One day I put on a tight purple tank top. “Omigod!” she shrieked. “NO! NO! NO!” I played like I was sexy. “Stop it! Stop! Please stop!”

If anyone did the punching in our time together it was little queenie. But I usually deserved it. Like in Feb. 1987. I had taken mushrooms to see the Butthole Surfers, then went with them to their house off Anderson Lane for a little after party. It had been a weird night, with the Surfers playing only one song, a 30-minute jam called “Lou Reed,” because they were pissed off that the Ritz had them at the top of the marquee, when they were supposed to be surprise guest of Roky Erickson.

I didn’t really have a plan to get home from North Austin, except that I would stay up until the morning and take the bus home. But the band had a big fight and I had to leave at about 4 a.m. I borrowed the phone to call Suzee and woke her up. About an hour later she came screeching up to the house (tires and voice) and when I got in the car, she really gave it to me. She had a big test that day, “you motherfucking asshole!” and she’d just gotten to sleep.

“I didn’t know you were still in college,” I said. Oh, boy! You ever see Mike Tyson working a speed bag? That was my arm at every red light the rest of the way home.

How can you live with someone who’s a junior at UT and not know where she goes every day? I never saw her do homework, never met a fellow student, never a word about grades or study groups. She left around 11 a.m. everyday and came home at night in her waitress outfit and I thought maybe she dropped out or flunked out (“breckfest”) and didn’t want to tell me. There might also have been a level of self-absorption on my part. My writing career was finally taking off!

My head was getting too big for that basement apartment. Once I heard Suzee refer to me as “the Mayor” when she was on the phone with her parents. "Mayor?”, I said, “Is that because I fuckin’ run this town?" She spelled it out "m-a-r-e. Short for nightmare. My folks call you 'the Nightmare.'"

The Champenys were soon to awaken from their bad dream. Me and their daughter never really recovered from the Butthole Surfers episode. And to really get me back, she ended up marrying her geology T.A. (But not for long, ha, ha.)

We talk on the phone all the time, reminiscing on those years when we were the king and queen of the Austin music scene.

"I'm just a nobody these days," I complained to her recently. "You're not a nobody," Suzee assured me. "You're a has-been."

I’ll take it.