My sister was dating an older biker named Joe Cox. She was tiny, demure, had winged white-blonde hair, with a jersey style t-shirt of her favorite local bar band The Machine, and he was all dirty denim and beer belly and scraggly beard. Joe was known for picking up some dude’s “rice burner,” lifting it from the curb, and slamming it down on the street, destroying it while laughing. She would later be known as the very small woman who once bit off a chunk of a cop’s ear when she was on a coke blaze and he pulled her out of the car she just crashed. She usually meant chaos and hostility in the trailer but there were sweet times like on Saturday afternoons in the living room before her sweetheart my dad would get drunk and crank up the jazz from the kitchen, as we watched Shirley Temple or horror and sci-fi movies, she eating her favorite snack, Bugles with salmon cream cheese, throwing her legs on my lap as she stretched out on the couch in front of the TV. I mostly remember Joe for throwing all of my friends out of the back of the trailer when their noise annoyed my sister. I mean, literally picked them up and threw them a few feet off the ground, one by one. J. looked like she could have been in The Runaways, if she’d had any musical talent or ambition and been a bit taller and oh yeah not prone to actual physical cruelty nowhere near a moment’s notice. I probably inherited this album from her, on one of the many tears when she left home to go off and break some older born to lose bruiser’s heart. One of her favorite stories was when a trick slapped her by the bed because he was into that and she punched him hard in the dick.”Cherry Bomb” is one of the greatest album openers of all time, and is the nexus of lust and anger that coursed through us every day in that trailer court (yes, we were the most feared family). Joe Cox ended up somehow losing his legs on the train tracks near the potato factory, rumor was he was held down by a few guys he burned on a speed deal. When I was four, J. pushed me out of the car as we headed into the driveway after visiting a carnival, and my head landed a few bouncy times on the sharp gravel as the car was still moving. The last time was when we received inheritance checks from our Mensa-member grandmother after she passed, and I joked we should go get some cocaine like we did in the 80s on Highway 99 and see a movie like “Pretty in Pink” or “Witches of Eastwick” — but she thought I was serious, and fearing relapse, once again pushed me out of a moving car, this time almost into traffic. That was the last time I’ve seen my sister. This LP was my introduction to Lou Reed’s song “Rock and Roll.”
‘The Runaways’ by Chris Estey
