From junky to prison to playing drums in one of the most anticipated upcoming alt rock bands & more.

ohthefuture (36)in #music • 7 years ago

A Life Worth Living

It was 2001 when I almost lost my left arm to a radial drill press. It was cold that January and I was thinking about my at-the-time band and what we had coming up. You know, when you are doing something repetitive, you think about stuff. I was thinking about my artistic endeavors and dreams and how to not be working at a machine shop.

I had asked to turn on the heater and was told to put on my jacket, instead. I did just that, cause, again...it was cold. As I put the pieces of metal on the machine, turned the wheel of the drill press and repeating over and over, something happened. In my mind it was in slow motion but the RPM's of the drill were rather high. A string on my left jacket sleave, that I could've yanked off with ease, was snagged by the drill bit.

My memory shows this in slow motion but I watched this small piece of thread wrap around the drill and pull the coat over my hand. It got tighter and tighter...I blacked out...I was spinning under this machine and remember yelling to turn it off.

A co worker stopped this unforgiving World War II bullet making drill press. I was tangled up underneath it. I'm having a slight panic attack just writing this. They had to turn the thing back on and put the drill in reverse to free me and I fell in the arms of my co worker and wanted to go to sleep. I felt the warmth of my blood all over me and remember trying to move my left arm, but only being able to feel the top half of my humorous bone move. The rest of my arm wouldn't move.

I began to go into shock and wanted to sleep. I just felt so tired and wanted to sleep really bad. "Stay awake, Ty", I heard. "No, don't go to sleep", my co worker kept saying.

Once I was in the ambulance, we just sat there. We didn't leave and one of the EMT's even mentioned lunch. I screamed, "Lunch!? Lets fucking go! Do you see this?! I felt every single bump from the machine shop to the hospital. How my boss made it from Miami, Oklahoma to St. Francis hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma before we did, I will never really know. That's a hour and a half drive. But as they wheeled the stretcher out of the bus, there was my boss and step father, who I once had a rough relationship with, looking frantic and lovingly concerned.

The ER was all over me and had been prepared for my arrival. A shot in my side and I was out. 100% unconscious. The last thing I remember is my mothers voice saying, "You have to save his arm. He's a drummer." She never had been fond of my musical aspirations and endeavors.

I had compound fractures of the three major bones in my left arm. The humorous, radius and ulna were pinned back together via modern day orthopedic technology. My arm is now made of bone and steel. Ironic coming from a machine shop, really. Another irony is that my grandmother, whom I have always been very close, was born without a left arm. I still had mine, but barely.

I was 21. I was broken physically and mentally. I had another surgery to stimulate bone growth and then came a settlement from "workman's compensation". I had almost $30,000 to do whatever I wanted.

This was the last thing I needed. My band had fallen apart, I was severely depressed and had "great" doctors. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy substances that make you not feel unhappy.

To please the family I attended college and thought I wanted to go into radio, but watching the music business change and watching my friends in radio play shit they were told to play had me change majors. While I knocked out a bunch of credits, I stopped attending school. I "took the semester off"...for about 10 years.

I remember when I realized I didn't have any more money. It was an odd feeling because I couldn't fathom it. Had I really spent $28,000 ish dollars?

Yes. I had.

I was so lost. I had nothing and the only thing that made life livable was the narcotics that were handed out like candy, because of the obvious injury to my arm.

This was all occurring in the era of OxyContin. A "relatively safe and non addictive" pain medication, as it was marketed. 80mg instant release pills were about $10-$20, but rapidly grew to a dollar a milligram: 80mg = $80. You name it, I have tried it, when it comes to opiates and pain meds, but finally my DOC, or "drug of choice", became methadone. I liked methadone as a "pain management tool", because it lasted soooooo fucking long. And it was strong. Really strong.

At one point I had a doctor prescribing me 100 40 mg methadone wafers, 60 30 mg oxycontin(for "breakthrough pain") 100 2mg xanax, and 30 10 mg valium. This was a one month supply and this went on till that doctor was arrested on the day of my appointment. This doctor was eventually arrested because people all over town were dying and, as I found out later in life, his name just kept coming up. He never spent a night in jail. This is how rich white people in America avoid prison: by being rich and white. Side note: the doctor before this one was also shut down and arrested for medicaid fraud and having sex with patients in exchange for health care. He hung himself.

Luckily I had a reason to get prescribed different kinds of pain meds via pain management doctors, so buying off the street wasn't something I did often, yet, I was becoming surrounded more and more with people who did. I was attracting junkies as I became more and more of one.

Being a musician whose life was changed by #Nirvana and the Seattle world of music, I was also very into literature and poetry. I read William S. Burroughs, Rimbaud and had romanticized opiate drug use. It was inclusive and secret. I bought into the lie. The potions that the devil was selling. The potions that took away my memories and my pains. It also took away my ambition to do anything but opiates.

I had two people overdose and die at apartments I lived over the years. I was arrested for the first time for not having a license on Thanksgiving after being asked to leave for nodding out and clearly high as hell.

Sparing you any more depressing details of my life between 2003-2009, I eventually was charged with addiction related crimes. I could not work because I was mentally ill and made money by selling the medications I was over prescribed. And after one of junky "friends" got a charge they offered him a lesser sentence for buying drugs from someone and recording it.

In 2009 I found myself with nothing. No home. No money. NOTHING. I looked around and saw nothing but death and addiction. I knew I had more to offer. I knew that I couldn't kick on my own either. I decided to turn myself into police, knowing I'd be locked away for at least a few months - little did I know the sentence that awaited me - so I could fully physically detox.

The county jail's idea of "medically supervising" someone coming off large amounts of narcotics consisted of locking me in the drunk tank, an 8 x 11 cell with upwards to 25 people in it, for about 3 months. Their "monitoring" consisted of looking in the cell, that had windows taped off(something the Feds didn't allow in jails) every 8-12 hours.

After about 3 months of the worst withdrawl I've ever been through, and the last, I was put in "general population" awaiting a deal or trial. I was able to walk and stand but not for long.

My brain was readjusting. Realigning and forming the natural opiates(dopamine, enkaphalins, endorphins, etc..) that my brain had not had for over 8 years. Fits of hysteria were experienced, hallucinations, mania, depression were all common occurrences I dealt with during the next 6 months in jail.

I was given 1 option by the D.A. ONE and my public defender wasn't going to fight it. A 20 year sentence with a 1 year judicial review. This meant I would go to prison...PRISON...for 1 year and come back for a review. If I didn't get in any trouble while inside, they would either reduce my sentence or let me out on probation.

You have to understand how prison politics work to know how hard it is to be inside for a year, not associate with the bullies of the aryan brotherhood(I'm white), deal with corrupt as fuck guards, among other things, and not get in any trouble. All I can say was that I was divinely protected. I avoided a full scale race riot, saw and experienced terrible things, and...look...prison is a bad place. It's even harder when you have all your teeth, are well spoken and refuse to associate with the racist pieces of white trash known as the "AB(aryan brotherhood).

I made it. After a year and 8 months of county jail and prison time I made it.

During my time I focused on healing and health. I learned tools to stay clean. I read books on being healthy physically, mentally and spiritually. I took every class there was that would show how I spent my time incarcerated. While most where very fundamentally "christian" based, I took the good stuff and left the doctrine.

The funny thing is is that I was sent to a yard that had a band room in it's recreation area. I started playing drums again while in prison.

In 2011 I was released from the Department Of Corrections and was at a cross roads. I had already thought about what I was going to do and was torn between taking my family's offer to go back to college or follow my heart and play music. I got a job 2 weeks after being released. While it sucked, I stuck it out until I found a better job at a fine dining restaurant.

While working at that first job I tried starting bands with old friends who weren't into drugs, but found they were stuck in the same place they had been from ten years earlier. Just in different ways. Complacent people they were. Good people but to scared to take chances and follow dreams.

Then I found Zach Mobley. Zach had been in many bands over the years, but they kept falling apart due to lack of drive and ambition from other members. Zach had never had a substance abuse problem, was intelligent, healthy, unique and a hell of a songwriter.

Zach had recorded some songs with veteran producer Steve Haigler(Pixies, Local H, Brand New) in New York, and had interest from several labels because of the song 'Perverting The American Dream', but again, keeping a band together can be hard without the right people. Without the people with the right ingredients.

Within 6 months of my release and joining forces with Zach, I was playing the legendary Cains Ballroom, with Zach in the newly formed alternative-rock band, The Bourgeois. We went on to play that venue many more times with acts Eagles Of Death Metal, Pop Evil, Sick Puppies, The Nixons, among others. We have played festivals like SXSW countless times, and alongside bands we looked up to, like Deftones, Alice In Chains at Rocklahoma, as well as, other festivals with Panic At The Disco, Minus the Bear, Thee Oh Sees, etc...

The band has released a full-length LP, several EP's and videos. Featured in Alternative Press Magazine, Impose, Pop Matters, Aesthetica Magazine, and countless other's, The Bourgeois have been deemed "one of the best hidden treasures of alt-rock in the United States" by Jamendo Streaming service, and more.

While recording new The Bourgeois songs with Trent Bell of Bell Labs Studios(Flaming Lips, Chainsaw Kittens) I struck up a friendship with the 90s era guitarist turned producer and began doing some session drumming at Bell Labs and continue to this day. This relationship opened doors and I played drums on a tour with Stardeath And White Dwarfs, because their drummer had been too busy playing with Flaming Lips and Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz.

While continuing to get The Bourgeois off the ground, there was some "dead time" approaching, so I wen't back to school to hone my writing and video making skills. Before even starting a class I had already been a published writer. My first article appeared in The Tulsa Voice, which is about #Spotify from a musicians P.O.V. I still write freelance for The Tulsa Voice today and have interviewed some of the greatest artists, such as, Tom Morello, Ty Segall, Phantogram, and more.

Over the summer 2017 and into the fall, The Bourgeois have been working with #1 Billboard charting producer, Loren Isreal, and are making plans to release our sophomore record while seeking producers to record the album we wrote with Isreal.

'From The Darkest Corners Of The Brightest Rooms' is set to be released early 2018(Late Jan goal).
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Releasing a record independently takes funds to do it right. Many expenses go into it. I have been in the crypto world for a bit now and if you like my story and believe in the power of determination, overcoming adversity, etc...please help support my artistic endeavors by helping The Bourgeois reach as many people as possible with the upcoming release, and help us get to work producing the follow up to it. Several "A list", Grammy Winning producers have expressed interest in us, but they don't come cheap and we want to put the best music out we possibly can.

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I'd like to conclude that my life may not have turned out this way for so long without the undying love and support of the love of my life, Katy, who understands love on the deepest of levels. She is a queen among women, beautiful mother and helps underprivileged kids at an underfunded public school. We've been together for 5 glorious years. She is a Goddess.