My name is Harry, my mother always called me Harry the Horrible, my friends would call me Harry Scary, my enemies in gradeschool called me Harry Dick. I've been called Chicken Legs on occasions. It goes on and on I've even created a few moniqers for myself over the years for fun, at this point I'm just rotating through them, I change my name on a monthly weekly, hourly basis.
I've been considered to be SCHIZOPHONIC!! Frenetically. I enjoy words and long walks off short piers,...that was a joke! Seriously. "Fuck! My nuts. Ten Bucks? ...bitch? " I'm personally a Classically educated bum raised on Go-Go junkie jazz and Billy Holiday Bossa Novas, forced by my father to practice Charlie Parker, and co-erced by my mother to Love J.S. Bach.
But I'm really just still fighting over cake with my older brother on his birthday, in the dark, in a truck behind Denny's, getting my ass kicked for the first time cause he hit puberty first and fallin out about being raised by stoners and sailors in what is now a symphony hall parking lot, when back then ( the late 60's early 70's ) it used to be an underground Coney Island drugscapade carnival landscape of negligence. That's when they had what you'd call "The Tolerance Program" era.
My dad says he had 11 go-go dancers in the club where I spent my first two years incubating my impressions (told you I was pretentious) at "The Vault" on 2nd and Union, he owned it for ten years is what I hear, it was probably just a hippie coffe house when I was young but I'm working the hype cause I'm a victim of entertainers.
They said?: in Seattle, ten years, The vault, three stages and a bunch of wacked out customers. He says if you listened closely you could hear 20 shivs hit the ground. But I mostly grew up with mi mum, she played jazz guitar and sang old celtic love songs, a good concoction actually, mixed it up with bedtime billy holiday ballads and bossa novas.
Lovely, quite. A proper acid bath 60's casuality, you know, plays Bach, wears combat boots, doesn't put salt on the food. Drives a caravan of old Panel Vans with Anti-Communist Macarthur era paranoid christian dogma slogans painted huge on the side of them and rolls through small towns with a posse of psychotic vietnam vet hitchhikers she just picked up, and four or five ratty kids half starved to death cashing foodstamps en masse with five cent candies, to get money to buy booze and gas, then on to the next truck stop for free coffee and doughnuts, showers and a couple days rest.
A lot of dissapearing from places in the middle of the night, waking up under a homemade quilt, to the roar of an engine, mumblin fairy tales for a midnight snack and on through the darkness to the next mysterious small town.
Imagine if the CIA was run by hippies and the FBI was a pissed off vaudeville jazz circuit and you pretty much got my life. gotta stay a little hippy and a little Vaudeville. I consider myself solid American Gypsy stock, "Entertainers on the run" ,.,..you know, still looking for my circus troupe. Just need a site specific beginning. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, five minutes is up, yadda yadda. it was fun, boy it was fun and crazy.
-- Harry E. Pierce