Rollin' to Austin with Uncle Rollo
Boy, did I hit the lowlife highlife lottery!
The negative things in your life become positive over time. At least that’s how it turned out for me.
My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1973, my senior year of high school, and she passed away near the end of my freshman year of college. My dad quickly remarried evil, and I, the second of his seven kids, was put out into the world, broken and unprepared.
But if all that turmoil didn't happen, I wouldn’t have been raised by Kate Hellenbrand and Michael Malone, a couple from New York City who bought Sailor Jerry’s tattoo shop in Honolulu in 1973.
While my mother was alive I never smoked a joint, never got drunk, never shoplifted, never missed Sunday mass. I even waited until my 18th birthday to go to the porno shops, when there was nobody checking IDs.
But I was on my own at 19 when I sent a letter to Sunbums magazine, asking to be a contributor. My writing samples were in longhand on notebook paper. But Hellenbrand, the editor, liked something I wrote about getting my ear pierced, so she called me up and I came down to meet with her. And there across the desk was this 31-year-old streetwise hippie with a faux-fro and an electric smile.
We were pretty much inseparable the next year or so. Kathy was mentor and dementor. The first time I got stoned was driving over the Pali Highway with K and Sunbums associate editor Leilani, going to see Blazing Saddles. Leilani was also a streetwalker with a Black pimp, so she lost her shit on all the racial stuff. The three of us were howling uncontrollably to the point that the usher came to ask us to please keep it down. At Blazing Saddles!
I bought coke before I ever bought weed. Kate and I split a gram on the day of the Earth, Wind & Fire concert I was to review at the Waikiki Shell in June 1975. She directed me to McDonald’s for some coffee stirrers, which looked like plastic coke spoons back then. Just having drugs in my pocket made me high.
When I got to the Shell that night and went to pick up my ticket, it came with a backstage pass. The groupie soundcheck is seeing where your pass can get you. I just kept walking through the checkpoints and nobody stopped me until I was ALL the way backstage. Now I could do that coke! So I went into the men’s room and found a stall and started dipping in that McCokespoon and, basically, blowing white powder all over the bathroom floor. After a few minutes, there was this big rush of people into the bathroom and I could hear the door lock behind them. They were black guys yelling at each other about getting high before the show. I didn’t see them, but they carried themselves as Earth, Wind & Fire!
They settled their deal in about 10 minutes and after they left, I remember sitting there on the commode with my clothes on thinking “this is the life I am choosing.” And I’ve never looked back. Well, except when I write.
Kathy was my friend and Rollo was her common law husband of seven years. That was our relationship until she moved away around 1976. Rollo didn’t like some guy hanging out with his ol’ lady all the time, but at least I kept her occupied while he worked around the clock tattooing. Rollo had a rule of no wives or girlfriends hanging out at “the scab hut.”
Rollo and I, Yikes! Crawford, became friends and collaborators on Honolulu Babylon, a fanzine we put out for four issues in the late ‘70s. I had just come back from L.A., where I lived with Kate for about six months while she worked at Tattooland in East L.A. I brought with me all sorts of fanzines, and went to work on making my own. I slipped the first issue under the door of China Sea Tattoo one morning. Next time I saw him on Smith Street Rollo was complimentary, something I’d never really gotten from him before. Rollo liked the xeroxed punk attitude, which Hawaii hadn’t seen before. He asked if he could help on the second issue- and basically took over. I was fine with that. I’ve never been blown away by a piece of art like his first HonBab cover, a hula dancer in black bondage boots, cracking a whip.
I was already demented, and Rollo took it to a whole new gutter. He’d come up with fake ads like the one featuring the infamous stripper Charlotte, who could shoot hard-boiled eggs out of her cho-cho. Rollo gave her a new ventriloquist act: she drinks water while her vagina talks.
The gay crowd at Hula’s Bar and Lei Stand on Kuhio Avenue and Hamburger Mary’s next door loved the Babylon, buying about 40 copies in a week, which was 39 more than our #2 outlet. Rollo said “we don’t want anyone to like us,” so the next issue was extremely homophobic, with the “Gay Olympics,” which included such categories as fist-lifting, high-heeled hurdles and the 100-yard mince. The three-legged race was a guy running with a foot up his ass. And the gays loved it even more. Jerry/Trixie of Hamburger Mary’s let me jump the line and even gave me access to the twink speakeasy out back- Dirty Mary’s. This was the greatest gay bar I’ve ever been to. It was six hours of Paul Lynne in the center square. “Gary, Gary, don’t ignore me,” one guy was saying to his friend across the bar, who turned away. “Gary eats pussy!” Well, that got his attention.
Malone, who passed away in Chicago in April 2007, taught me a lot of things (often at the small price of derision), but two that continue to affect me daily are 1) If you say you're going to do something, do it and 2) Cliches are easy- and fun- to avoid.
Malone wasn't the most naturally skilled artist, but he worked harder than everyone else and saw deadlines as a challenge to his manhood. I’ve seen him pull an all-nighter on a t-shirt design for a donut shop.
And then there was his way with words. Malone would never add to the overuse of an expression like "when pigs fly." He'd go into a big windup about how something would happen only "when the little bacon butts are stacked up over LaGuardia." Going to the supermarket with Malone was an hourlong excursion with his constant commentary. He could do five minutes on baking soda. I remember one day we were in tears laughing so hard as we perused the cheese section for "who cut the cheese?" variations. Who parted the provolone? Who gouged the gouda? Who broke the brie? Who choked the cheddar? Who carved the camembert? Who lanced the limburger? Who mangled the mozzarella? Grown men giggling like lunatics.
When Rollo was cool with you, which was about 95 percent of the time, he was the best guy to be around. But if you did something he didn't like, he'd rake you pretty good, often in front of an audience. We took long breaks from each other.
In 1982, I was living in Albany, N.Y., and Rollo asked whether I wanted to run a couple of his side businesses, Mr. Lucky T-Shirts and Mr. Flash Designs. We'd work every tattoo convention, and the thing other tattooers would always say about the flash (tattoo design sheets) was that Rollo knew what people wanted and kept his designs simple. One guy, Pete from Chicago, said he had a separate bank account for all the money he made putting on Rollo's Grim Reaper and the previous year, he bought a new Cadillac with the proceeds.
After we ran ads in Easyriders and Outlaw Biker magazines, the T-shirt business started taking off. Harley Davidson had discontinued its skull designs in favor of a more family-oriented image, but bikers still wanted the badass stuff, and that’s what Mr. Lucky had.
Being on “the Rock,” we had to mail everything first class, about three bucks a shirt. I’d spend about an hour every day waiting in line at the Chinatown post office. We started talking about moving the company, and Rollo's tattoo business, to the Mainland. I had just gotten a postcard from my friend Andrella, who was on tour with the Cramps (her boyfriend was guitarist Bryan Gregory), and she said the band had just played a great show at a club called Raul's in Austin, Texas, of all places. I knew that Lester Bangs lived here for awhile, so I figured stuff must be happening.
Around the same time, Rollo received a newsletter from his old friend Travis Holland's Dallas County Jug Band (with Steve Fromholz), based in Austin.
Middle of the country. College town. Music town. And a river runs through it. Austin just felt right, so we moved operations to an old white house on the Drag that had a shoe repair shop in the front. There wasn't much tattoo business to speak of in Austin in the '80s, and Rollo would kick himself whenever a military payday came and went without customers. Luckily, the tattoo shop was just a block away from the former Austin Chronicle offices, so Rollo had a constant flow of visitors down the back alley. He loved to hold court.
But he didn’t like my girlfriend Suzee, a college freshman, hanging out at his tattoo shop. She’d come in wearing an Easter hat and a Laura Ashley dress, often with her friends Leslie and Ellen, and he’d tell me he might have to change the name of his shop to Little House On the Prairie Tattoo. For six months he referred to Suzee as “Little House,” as in “You have to tell Little House not to come by so much. We’re pirates not prom chaperones!”
I’d tell Suzee this and she’d come by the next day anyway. She’d park in the back of the tattoo shop and walk to class. She’s not intimidated by anyone. One day from the back I heard the magic words, “Hey, Uncle Rollo!” She was golden with him from then on.
When Uncle Rollo would have a new Austin Chronicle cover, he would lay on the padded table and have Suzee hold the cover and bring it to him from every angle- up to down, left to right- so he could properly admire his genius. Sometimes S&R would talk for two hours without her ever popping her head into the t-shirt room to say “hi.” I finally had to tell her that it was rude to not acknowledge me, so they next time she exaggerated her welcome, and she and Rollo giggled like they were in cahoots.
Just like with Honolulu, Rollo loved Austin and despised Austin. He mocked the worship of musicians here and made me write down some of his instant sayings, such as "life is what we do because we can't play the guitar" and "once you put on the clown suit, you can't take it off." That latter was aimed at Dino Lee, the theatrical rocker who tried to play it straight one night at Steamboat and got cracked in the head with a glass.
"The little town with the big head" was another Rolloism.
Rollo was not the kind of guy that ever went for sentiment. When his close friend Keith Ferguson (the only guy I've ever seen hold court when Rollo was in the room) died from drug-related causes, Rollo remarked that one thing he always admired about Keith was that he accepted his addiction and never whined about needing to stop. He was a man about it. Ownership of your actions, good or bad: that was big with Rollo.
When Margaret told me that Rollo had shot himself, I started thinking about what was going through his mind at the time. It never dawned on me that he was depressed. It was just "time to check out," as he stated in his suicide note. We all have to die sometime, and Rollo was not going to let anything else pick his date. He was a man about it.
I’m not a tat guy by any means, but good story.