The Journey of Friendship

As I have said here before, only my closest friends were in my "inner circle", and by keeping things that way, I stayed safe. The band that was slowly taking shape in mid 1977 was the sum total of all my experience, skills, beliefs, talents, and relationships. And that was why I knew it was going to work. Just a few months before the New York audition had happened, I met a 16 year old, who was the younger brother of someone I had been doing business with.. on and off. I say on and off, because this guy had a big mouth, talked too much about the things he was doing, and I clearly felt that he could be a risk to me. He also had a set of values that I didn't share. When I met his younger brother, who was still just a teenager, it was like looking in a mirror. When I saw this kid, I saw a younger version of myself...an honest guy, who knew the value of friendship..a risk taker, like me...and a very efficient dealer, firmly rooted in the "counterculture", who knew exactly what the risks were, and conducted himself in business in much the same way I did. At 16, he had developed his own inner circle, and was also very selective about who he would "let in". We clicked on many levels...immediately. And we both knew how to have a good time..so we started to hang out together. In a few months time, we had become very close friends, and very helpful to each others' business. And a partnership emerged from that. I took Bruce under my "wing", and advised him about things he might do to protect himself, and me, from legal consequences...and he soaked it all up like a sponge. I was very comfortable with him, and often thought he was mature way beyond his years. Although I didn't feel that comfortable about selling drugs to anyone that young, he was roughly the same age I had been when I had started dealing, and it was obvious to me that Bruce and his friends were already firmly entrenched in the "life"...and nothing I did or didn't do was going to have any bearing on that...so I decided to make an exception in his case. To this day I'm glad I did. Our story is an amazing journey of its own, and that will become clearer later on. I want to say this, though...out of the ten people who eventually became the core of this new band and its crew, two are dead now, killed in highway accidents, but seven of us are still very much friends, and so the "family" that I wanted this band to be, was exactly what it became...