Bob Galindo remembers.......

It has been called to my attention that I should share some memories about our manager. The wind screamed her name. It was Helen Bond. Her business card said "H-BOND"!!! Get it? It's an H-bomb joke. In case some of you forgot, or are too young to know, we were all scared sh*tless over the reality that our society and technology had allowed us to advance to the point where WE COULD ALL BE DEAD IN 15 MINUTES!!!!

Hmmm! not bad! That would be a good name for a band!

WE COULD ALL BE DEAD IN 15 MINUTES!!!

(notice the use of THREE exclamation points - one was not enough). But that's another story. Someday I will write about band names.

We called her POOPSIE.

Remember, we were all kids, 15-16 years old. We were playing battles of the bands in parking lots of Catholic girl's schools. We were playing promotions at the Walgreen's drug store, on the sidewalk of the old Northwest Shopping Center on Fredericksburg Road. We were playing grand openings at Der Weinerschnitzel!!! We were annointing ourselves nightly in Rob Meurer's garage, the St. Paul's Catholic School gymnasium, The Teen Canteen, The Teen Scene, Teen Town, Teen Time, Swingtime, The Casket, The Mind’s Eye, Love Street, The National Guard Armory, The Elk's Club, The Veterans of Foreign Wars.................for GOD'S SAKE, we even played a luncheon for a ladies' garden club!!!

We were on top of the Teenage World!

So why did we need a manager to take ten stinking per cent right off of the top??? Beats me!!! I cannot remember who had the bright idea to bring POOPSIE into the fold. Anyway, Helen Bond was a very colorful lady. She had a chubby daughter named Laura, who was famous for greeting everyone by saying

"HI-LO!!!"

Laura also had an annoying dance step she liked to do right in front of the band. She would make little six guns with her hands (you know, you've seen it, point your index fingers and cock your thumbs), and she would rock back and forth while brandishing her pistolas............we called that dance step THE HI-LO.

Hey everybody! DO the HI-LO!!!!!

(notice the use of FIVE exclamation points - three was not enough).

POOPSIE was cool. She was always booking us lousy gigs for free. We once drove ALL THE WAY UP TO AUSTIN to play some stupid roller skating rink - for free. Then there was the time she booked us at a VFW hall WAY down in the Rio Grande Valley for $75! We could not believe it. Go ahead, do the math:

$75 minus 10% = $67.5 / six guys = $11.25 each!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For those of you on drugs:

X-Y = Z*1/6 pincheputocabrones = jackshit!!!!

Need I say anything else? So we tried to make the best of it. We went across the border after the gig. We paid an old man dressed in a khaki uniform with a general's cap $.50 to watch our car. We ate really greasy soft rolled chicken tacos for $.25 each at a dive named HENRY'S. We jammed with a really cool Mexican band called Simon Quatro that had a guitar player every bit as good as Carlos Santana and Mike Bloomfield rolled up into one big party sized doobie. We went to a Mexican disco and the guys talked me into posing with some really smelly Mexican cigarettes. Ever smelled one??? You can NEVER forget it! It's smells better than napalm in the morning, it smells better than victory, it smells better than Teen Spirit, it smells like........like....like someone poured kerosene and mothballs into a bag of dog shit, set the bag on fire, pushed your doorbell, and then RAN LIKE HELL!. That's exactly what it smelled like. Later, as we walked back to the car, a guy approached us and asked us if we wanted to have sex with his sister (I am NOT making this up). We did not want to have sex with his sister, but we were curious. So we walked over to a beat up four door sedan and peeked into the window. His sister was lying naked in the back seat. She was probably 11 years old.

I rest my case.

We fired POOPSIE.