Year One. Our own personal Ground Zero. People thought my wife Connie was my daughter, but if they only knew. We’d been married 2 weeks here. I was fake-moustache-on-the-run, playing songs wherever I could just to get food in my mouth. I never got the credit I deserved and was repeatedly beaten up and held under water because of the songs I played. Connie and some of her friends gang beat me after my show at the Palomino, where I was so smoked on White Shadow that I wet my pants on stage, then burnt all my hair off with a soldering iron. A few hours later, Connie came back and said she was sorry and asked if I wanted a handful of the nachos she’d picked up. I did. It took a couple more hours before I was able to open my mouth wide enough to eat them, so she soaked them in water and blended them for me. I thought things had to get better, but it would never get this good again.