"The years since "Agitated" are strewn with wasted time, breath, effort. Great music has been created since the Electric Eels burned the Midwest to a crisp, but bands that rake in reference tags tend to be forgotten until Oliver Stone makes a movie." ( Steve Garnett, Ink Nineteen, July 1996 ).



Using low-voltage emissions to navigate its ascent (the more intense current which will later paralyse or kill enemies is only nascent), a young eel must abandon its warm, shallow cave. Leaving behind the last of several such sanctuaries it has this summer past outgrown, the stunned rudderless refugee swims unsteadily toward a vague horizon where thin veils of fleck-silver mist fly before the coming fall. Deafening first bells of a junior year's assembly are bursting like depth-charges throughout the once placid lake forcing fragile marine life toward it's alien surface. The electric fish has little option but to tresspass a rain-pebbled shoreline on the crest of a freshwater tidal wave!


An April 1967 expulsion from Cleveland's foremost purgatory for Catholic adolescents, the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius College Preparatory High School, kicked off my most exquisite liberty ever — a long-lasting juicy chew of five months, one week, and three glorious days to be precise. Now, regrettably, its final minutes are tick-tick-ticking away just above the hum of yet another early September's reading of "a-call-of-the-roll': "Lavierre, ... Lenz,... Lescheski ..."; the monotone of the cantor's familiar, only the litany's names have changed. And changed considerably, actually. There are decidedly fewer Irish and Italians on the side of town where Lakewood High's not a joke.

Still, even here at my very first public school, I need only know that we're in the alphabet between "L" and "N" to estimate within a few seconds of fast fleeting freedom when'll come time for me to signify and surrender — according to terms of my scarlet probation — unto new gatekeepers. Time's about up. A word from the Administrators of the Void, a nod to the Proctors of Limbo, and I'll be going peacefully where the Guards of Nothing would have me go.

"McMahon!" they intone, using the subrogated voice of a single homeroom teacher to draw me out into the open.....

. . . I'm watching the student river pour past a pair of giant doors opened out onto the hallway; and, as is my inclination when I've a few minutes, I'm on the lookout for any divergent markings on the herd of white-bred faces and dress-coded bodies changing classes. The bell sounds; I spy something that could prove interesting in the form of an outrageous stick-figure of a person entering the planetarium. Another rock lover like myself signed up for first year Earth Science ? But unlike me, he's late! His hair is thick and to his shoulders, yet semi-restrained under some kind of vintage aviator's helmet strapped loosely around an expression of abject discontent. Hmmm ... my sentiments exactly. The goofy headgear is obviously intended to at once comply with ... and mock ... recent vague "personal hygiene" pronouncements issued over the PA by our nervous assistant principal who has obviously plenty of dread but no clear idea of what to do — if anything can be done! — about the "ever-growing number of boys who've begun wearing the long hair!! "...


...Probably trying to make an example of the last student to enter late, the pipsqueak teacher whimpers into the microphone; and thanks to the planetarium's healthy audio budget, it's suddenly the voice of God himself coming from everywhere in the Milky Way, throwing "Mr.David McManus" an astronomological hot potato. But Dave's unintimidated. Here he not only proves himself to be a competent smartass but whip-smart as well, — going on at length about the inevitable gravitatonal collapse of Mr. Yarian's hypothetical neutron star...

. . . Omniscient Narrator: "It was the stark reality of their circumstance that made theBrian / Davy connection immediate, but it had to be their instant appreciation of each other as unyielding defiants of cliquish convocation, per se, that made the connection profound. Stresses,betrayals, and assaults, from without and within — they tended to test each other most harshly — came and went as the pair bided time waiting, hoping for more freaks to show up on campus. But the pickin's stayed slim. Then one day, Dave tells Brian there's someone he'd like him to meet >>>>> ...

"Hi, I'm Noreen Morton, Johnny's mother," says John Morton's mother Noreen, giving me a wormhole into what at first appears a fairly well-ordered universe. Opening the side door and holding it, the friendly matriarch comments that her pie has just gone into the oven; then she ushers us up the hall steps into the kitchen.

"John your friends are here," Mrs Morton calls, throwing her voice (a relative baritone to my mother's high tenor) well beyond the infinity walls of the adjacent dining room where table and chairs float on deep white Architectural Digest clouds. Only then does she begin to set the dials on her oven: ON... 55min ... 375º .

She doesn't preheat!?, I wonder to myself ...


...At the sound of John's footsteps descending the stairs, Mrs. Morton moves to return the oven mitt to its hook under the cabinets, but then, seeming rushed, instead lays it on the counter adjacent the stove.

"That's HIM now; you boys have a nice time!" she exclaims in near-whispers, closing the basement door behind her.

John approaches ... barefoot on the carpet of clouds. Moving with a relaxed but controlled, almost graceful bounce that belies his 220-lb, 6-foot-plus frame, and drawing Gestapo-style on a filterless Gaulloise, Morton cocks his face into a hyberbolic expression of amiable suspicion ... cast first at Davy ... and then at me.

"So, what's up?" he asks.

"Well, your mother's baking a pie", I reply.

John's look changes to one of acute irritation, "Yeah, and she probably left the plastic cover on again."

As Dave mugs a huge slack-jawed gape of disbelief, John crosses to the oven, and with mitt in hand pulls out what looks like a Mrs.Smith's Dutch Apple ... the plastic cover just beginning to melt into its butter-crumb crust.