Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored taking drugs, of “experimenting,” he never stopped. He wasn’t experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?

On the drive home from Tommy’s house, we didn’t say anything to each other until he idled his car in my driveway. Before I got out, he said, “Thanks for coming with me.”

“It’s real bad,” I said. He nodded. I climbed out and then I leaned into the open window to kiss him goodbye.

“At least it can’t get much worse,” he said with a broad smile. “It really can’t.”

Three months later, Tommy finally died. The day after Nik called me about Tommy, I opened my mail and found a copy of the obituary Nik had composed for his Chronicles:

New York Times, February 18, 2004

Tommy Skate, 49, Dies;

Guitarist for the Demonics

Tommy (Skate) Lester, the original guitarist for seminal garage rock band the Demonics, was found dead at his home in Van Nuys, California, on February 16, 2004.

Dr. Sam Wills of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office certified that the cause of death was heart failure. Dr. Wills said no autopsy would be performed. Lester had a long history of drug abuse and alcoholism.

“The Demonics came out of nowhere to totally transform the 1979 scene in LA, working a unique sound counter to both commercial progressive rock and punk rock,” said Robert Hilburn, music critic for the Los Angeles Times. Lester played on the Demonics’ first two albums: 1979’s Waiting for the Game and 1980’s Sound Fantastique. Despite its dark lyrics and art-rock dissonance, Sound Fantastique ’s fatal hooks and crafted melodies made it one of the best-selling records of 1980 as well as one of the most critically acclaimed. Nic Worth, lead singer and songwriter for the Demonics, remarked once that “Tommy Skate’s undulating leads really gave the Demonics their unique, intense sound.” A legendary band that broke up even before their second record was released, their influence long outlived their brief years together. The oft-repeated rock’n’roll cliché about them is that although the Demonics didn’t play very many shows, every person who did see them live seemed to have formed a band of their own.

Thomas Lester was born in 1954 in Los Angeles. His father worked for the postal service and his mother taught piano. His mother bought Lester his first guitar for his 8th birthday. He attended Fairfax High School, where he met the other members of what would later become the Demonics. His first group was the short-lived proto-glam band Sticky Baby, which had a sixteen-year-old Nik Worth as lead singer. They played a simple heavy blues boogie in semi-drag that was later taken up by other bands as “raunch” rock. When Worth and Lester quit Sticky Baby to form the Demonics, they vowed to abandon blues-based rock forever.

After the glory of the Demonics, Tommy Skate was in a number of much less interesting and successful bands. He embraced a harder, faster, and more generic style; he abandoned his eccentric edge (against the advisement of his mentor, Nik Worth) for what he thought was a more commercial sound and eventually he stopped playing in bands altogether. The money he made from publishing royalties from the songs he coauthored on the Demonics’ records helped support him over the lean years, but throughout the eighties and nineties he also worked periodically in fisheries in Alaska, at a hospital, as a gravedigger, and as a garbageman.

He is survived by his mother, Glenda Lester, and his brother, Jim Lester, both of Los Angeles.*

*Correction 2/19/2004:

The obituary for Tommy Skate on February 18 misidentified the high school where the band the Demonics was founded. The Demonics were started at Hollywood High School by Nik Worth, not Fairfax High School. Only after Worth transferred to Fairfax High School did Tommy Skate join the already formed Demonics.

Nik couldn’t help getting his licks in, but he still nailed the odd tone of the rock and roll obituary, the way it would leaven even the most sordid life with comforting obitual formality. I knew this because I was a regular reader of obituaries. Before I read anything else, I scanned the obituaries. I wasn’t always like this, it was a habit of my morbid middle years. I just found myself drawn to them every day. Why? I don’t think it is hard to guess. I first looked for the age of the dead person. If they were under sixty, I looked at the cause of death, usually discreetly rendered in the second or third paragraph. (Nik’s obit for Tommy was less discreet than was typical; usually the drug use isn’t mentioned but just screams between the lines of the rock star found dead of “heart failure.”) Very young people mostly die in accidents. Most have not lived long enough to accomplish anything notable, and they rarely get full obituaries. So the saddest obituaries are the premature but not uncommon middle-aged “young” people, say between thirty-five and fifty. These folks do indeed die and I always took note:

47, ovarian cancer

53, heart failure

58, complications from pneumonia

54, breast cancer

46, self-inflicted gunshot

59, pancreatic cancer

38, motorcycle accident

48, breast cancer

58, overdose (“yet to be determined,” “toxicology report,” and “bottles of various prescription medications”)

35, drowning

46, died in a fall

57, sudden heart attack

50, heart attack suspected

42, heart and kidney failure

45, car accident

59, complications from a brain hemorrhage

49, killed himself by hanging

59, lung cancer

40, sudden cardiac failure

50, ovarian cancer

I think that anyone would get the picture here. No peaceful, natural deaths. It was either bad luck or bad living. Or, I guess, a bad attitude (the suicides).

Nik sent me his latest CD. I found the package in my mailbox (he always mailed his CDs to me). I undid the undecorated, restrained brown paper packaging. The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2, it said on the spine of the CD jewel case. Volume two of twenty volumes. But he counted backward, so the next album would be the first — and presumably the last — volume in this epic series. The O.O.W. was released on his experimental record label, Pause Collective. He began it in the mid-nineties. Every six to twelve months he would release an album in the series. Each CD had an edition number. Mine was number two, which meant after Nik’s copy, I got the very next one. Always it worked this way. There was a handful of fans (let’s be clear here: with the exception of Ada and me, everyone was either an ex-girlfriend or an ex-bandmate) on the mailing list, but I was always number two.

Not only did each disc have a limited edition (10? 12?) handmade cover, but each cover fit into a larger piece. This CD cover would fit, I knew, with the eighteen previous CDs in the series to make a huge self-portrait collage of Nik. Each cover worked on its own but also played a part in a larger mosaic. Just to have the second-to-last piece felt like a long battle almost won — were we really coming so close to completing the epic, endless thing, or would he extend the plan? I didn’t see how he could get out of the finite rubric he had created.