PLEASED TO MEET HIM

I haven't been on this thing in nearly two years.

Not that I've put any effort into maintaining it.

I just stopped writing and started living.
I got married. I changed jobs and started working in a field that enhanced my personality.
I went out more and made a lot of friends.

One of those friends was Greg Verdusco.


I don't remember exactly how I met Greg. I'd seen him around a lot at my friend Todd's shows and later I got to know him at Todd's house. He didn't look like the type of person I ran into at those gatherings. He had a cool factor to him that most people there lacked. He seemed, like myself, to be a lot more critical and less awestruck by what bands were playing onstage that night, yet genuinely supportive of people whom he liked personally. It turned out I wasn't the only one in the crowd who noticed bum notes and/or bad cover song choices.

I was intimidated by him immediately. I was no longer the smartest guy in the room.

I remember the first time I saw him play live. First, he was left handed. You notice that when Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix are your heroes. Second, he had this stunning white left-handed Gretsch Falcon guitar, which he played with this Johnny Ramone/Johnny Thunders-like reckless abandon, which I found so refreshing in this Vegas sea of Randy Rhoads wannabes I find myself trapped in.



Through our mutual acquaintance Todd, I find myself hanging out and chatting Greg up on a regular basis. I realize he knows twice as much about KISS, Cheap Trick and The Ramones as I do, which is a first for me. Normally, I'm the guy musicians and fans call to verify details about those bands.

Soon, Greg became the guy I called when I needed the exact date Gene Simmons started playing an axe-shaped bass and what make and model it was. (1979 Dynasty tour--Kramer Axe Bass...FYI)

Because of schedules, Greg, Todd and myself didn't physically hang out together as much as we would have liked, but we were always in contact talking endlessly about nothing. We had several KISS Trivia game sessions at Todd's new house that went on for hours, literally listening to every CD the band released in the 1970's while fighting to the death until one of us acquired all four cards with members' faces on them to declare a hard but hollow victory. The three of us would then get hit up all the time by other friends of ours who wanted to come down and play but we never really had the time or energy needed to do another one once Todd started living on the road, Greg started a new band and I went to work for both The Beatles and KISS and living out my fanboy dream.

Greg's band became The Bloody Villains. I think I was at their first or second gig. They were awesome. Greg wrote, sang and played lead on all the numbers. They had shades of The Heartbreakers and X and Dead Boys in their sound and performance, but they looked like greasers in a street-rod club. I loved them from the git-go. Greg, as usual, never phoned it in. He was his usual calm and laid-back self until they plugged in and then he became a man on fire. Sweating and thrashing and dropping to his knees in a frenzy you only normally saw in James Brown or Iggy Pop.

I've always said the best live bands such as The Ramones or Motorhead always made me feel like I'd done a long mainline of pure adrenaline without all the negativity and self-destruction that comes with hard drugs. The Bloody Villains really were set on becoming another of those bands in my heart.



Greg and Todd and myself were all keeping very busy but would occasionally have time for a lunch date followed by a visit to KISS Mini Golf and ZIA Records. We literally spent two hours standing in ZIA's parking lot once just talking about Anchorman and Will Ferrell on SNL. It still boggles my mind that we could have these conversations and somehow have wives and families that hadn't deserted us. The three of us could speak about things in a type of shorthand that is very rare among anyone else I've known. I'd known Greg barely three years and yet I felt like I'd grown up with him my whole life, because when he talked about things he felt passion about, I completely knew where he was coming from.



The last time I saw Greg was on Tuesday, September 4th. I was emceeing a rock trivia tournament at KISS that I was dying to get Greg involved in. He finally made it in on our fifth week. He brought in a replica poster of KISS' debut album which I was able to get him a couple bucks for in exchange that we hang it up in the building. He looked thinner and a little tired but generally was in his usual talkative, joking mood. He confided to me that he may have to leave early due to an acid reflux situation which had been plaguing him for weeks. He told me he was scared shitless about a doctor visit the next day to get a scope on his insides to verify if the acid reflux was cancer-related. Being the eternal optimist, I shrugged it off and told him he would be fine and that people go through these weird treatments all the time and they fight back and win due to sheer will power and inner strength, which he had no shortage of.



Needless to say, as days became weeks, I would keep in touch as best as I could. As much as I tried hoping and wishing for better news, as many positive thoughts I could muster up for him and his lovely wife during his treatments, as hard as I tried to make him laugh during our all-too-brief phone conversations, all the fight he had in the world was still not enough to keep him in it.

When he finally left us, it was after an excruciating three months of chemotherapy and radiation. I'm crushed to say that there was one thing in this world that worked harder than Greg did, and that was his illness.

I had never lost a friend before. I have had relatives a generation or two older than myself die and that was hardly easy but it was sort of expected. It all fits into that circle of life concept you learn from seeing The Lion King. As I get older, I hear about people who I kind of knew as a teenager or a twenty-something that have passed on for whatever reason, but they were always people I hadn't had contact with in two decades. That somehow alleviated the shock when I heard the news. But I counted my stars as being one of the few who had yet to lose a real friend at age 44.

I started to keep a new perspective on what I learned from being around Greg. I realized that if I have convictions about anything, whether politics or bands or movies or culture, someone will appreciate those convictions of mine regardless of whether or not they agree with me. If I didn't give 100 % to everything I put my name on, I might as well just give zero to it because that's how much it will mean to everyone else otherwise. The guy was never half-assed in performance or in his conversations with me or in his tastes. Like me, he was incapable of just casually liking KISS, The Ramones or Cheap Trick. We both have very strong, passionate feelings about why and how those bands and their ilk shaped and defined our identities. You either LOVED them with your bones or you had no feeling whatsoever. There was no 'like' in the equation.

As inspired and honored as I am from knowing Greg, I really have to shed an equal amount of that awe and inspiration towards his lovely and amazing wife Allison. She was not only a rock for Greg, but for all of us who wanted to do more leading up to the very end. I visited their house twice in his last weeks and she ended up consoling me and being my rock when I had every intention of doing just that for her. I never wanted to make it about me and I hope she understands that. I don't write this with the mindset that I got the shit end of the stick. Far from it. I am only able to help put Greg's influence on me in perspective thanks to her example of strength and pride and unconditional love in the face of tragedy.

Because of Greg as well as Allison, I guess you could say I'm lucky enough to have two people that changed my life and how I live it.

My only parting thought is to ask yourself who do you know that has changed your life and how you live it? Have you shown that person what they mean to you? If not, what are you waiting for?