Chris T. Interview
From the "Everyone I Know Is From Lindenhurst" Podcast
How many people have I interviewed in nearly 40 years of broadcasts & podcasts? Hundreds? A thousand? I don’t know. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the tables have been turned. Here a transcript of my appearance on the Everyone I Know Is From Lindenhurst podcast, interviewed by Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri and John Mee.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. So you're currently in Jersey nowadays?
Chris T.
Yes. I live in, Weehawken, New Jersey, where Burr shot Hamilton. Wonderful. So at the end of the block is a view of the great island of Manhattan that [you] could see from the George Washington Bridge on the north down to the Verrazzano on the south.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Gotcha. So we were just talking about, is it the American Dream Mall? Is that what they call it?
Chris T.
Yes, the American Dream. It used to be called Xanadu. It was a project that, like, took forever to actually get off the ground. So… but now it's the American dream. In the Meadowlands is the full name of the place. Yeah. Wow. Where are you guys, by the way?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
We're both in Lindenhurst
John Mee
I'm Lindenhurst.
Chris T.
Oh, yeah. You're living in Lindenhurst, so I used to. I grew up on South Fifth Street, 680 South Fifth Street. Just…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
…to me.
Chris T.
…just south of Montauk Highway. Are you near there?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. I grew up on Walnut Street. Okay. Right off Montauk.
Chris T.
There you go.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
John was North Lindenhurst.
John Mee
I grew up in North Lindenhurst, but I'm currently, like, in the 30s over by the, like, Sunrise and Straight Path over there.
Chris T.
Yeah. Okay. Wow. And so this podcast is all about Lindenhurst?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yes, sir.
John Mee
Generally, yeah. We generally interview people from Lindenhurst and, you know, get… get their takes on growing up here and what that did or didn't do for them.
Chris T.
Well, you know, I am writing my memoir as we speak because, I mean, I was in this punk rock slash hardcore band called the Nihilistics. That's how you found me, I think. Right, because of the… the newsletter, the when we…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
When we first started this thing, the Nihilistics was like one of the first, you know, that… that was top of mind. Oh, sorry. The podcast, but I didn't know who. Exactly, because obviously you're before our time. But. Right. Good to finally found…
Chris T.
I'm one of the olds.
John Mee
We had, we had made a list of people from Lindenhurst that would be ideal guests for us to get on and when they talk about, you know, famous, known people from Lindenhurst, you have Pat Benatar, you have Dan Lauria, the dad from the Wonder Years. You have Hal Hartley. And we knew some people from the Nihilists were from Lindenhurst. And… but we didn't know who or how to get in touch with anything you want.
Chris T.
Well, there was me…
John Mee
Fill it in. Yeah.
Chris T.
There was me, who, started the band and named the band. And then my friend, Mike Nicolosi, see who's been dead for 10 or 12 years or more now on bass. And then Troy, the drummer, was also from Lindenhurst. He was from, what is that street that runs south of the Long Island Railroad? Is it Hoffman? Or is that the one that's on the north side?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
It's Hoffman.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
He was just all that runs adjacent.
Chris T.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so three of us were from Lindenhurst.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. Okay, cool. So let's take it back to the beginning. Talk about your family roots in Lindenhurst and how they ended up here.
Chris T.
Well, I was born in Amityville. Brunswick Hospital. And I was the only member of my family who was born there. Everybody else was born at Good Sam in West Islip. And my grandmother lived in Copaigue. And my grandmother was an immigrant from Malta. Her and her husband came here from Malta in I believe it was like the 19, I want to say the 1920s, maybe the later 1920s, but, originally, like everybody else, they probably landed in Manhattan. Then they went to Brooklyn for a little bit, but then they moved out to Long Island, and they ended up in Copaigue on Marconi Boulevard. And the both of them were working at Grumman at some point in Bethpage. And my mother, you know, who grew up in Copaigue wanted to stay close to her mother because she started having kids. And my mother, she needed that support system of my grandmother there. So that's how we ended up in Lindenhurst. My father was from Valley Stream and, I'm not really clear on where the two of them met. They met somewhere, and, ended up on South Fifth Street in a three bedroom brick ranch house. So, yeah, that was the, the place where I lived until, like, I was 23, 22, 23, something like that.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Okay. And any siblings?
Chris T.
Yes. I'm the youngest. I have, I had two brothers and two sisters. Brother of mine passed away from an opioid addiction and I lost a sister to lung cancer. So, now I've got one brother and one sister. Gotcha. Yeah.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Okay. So obviously ‘60s and ‘70s. What were you getting into as a kid? Like, as far as, did you have an interest in music early on? Interest in art?
Chris T.
I was interested in models early on. I built a lot of models when I was a kid. Like models of, you know, hot rods, motorcycles. I liked the Aurora, line with the different Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and that kind of thing. I got really good. Like, I would spread out newspaper on the dining room table, and I would set up my models, and I'd be perfectly happy sitting there gluing shit together and painting stuff. And I got good enough to the point where the Lindenhurst Hobby Shop, which was on Montauk Highway, I would build models for this guy to display in exchange for, like, free model kits and that kind of stuff. But music didn't really get Ahold of me. Probably until, like, I was, you know, 10, 11, 12 somewhere around there… because mostly I was listening to whatever my brothers and sisters were listening to, and my sisters were really into pop music, the pop music of the 1960s, whether it was the Jackson 5 or that kind of stuff… and my brothers were into rock and roll and, and the first record that really the first record I bought with my own money was Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at the Woolworth’s. And then the first record that made me want to pick up the guitar was… a Led Zeppelin album. Was Led Zeppelin II, down in the basement, which was a finished basement because my father, in addition to being a, you know, being a mechanic, he was pretty handy. So, like, he finished the basement of this house, and that's where we would hang out. That's where the TV was and whatever turntable we had, and the first time, you know, and I didn't have that many records when I was a kid, like my own vinyl. So I would have to wait for my brothers to leave the house, and then I would sneak one of theirs on to the turntable. And I was, you know, I was I was intrigued by the cover of this record, so I slapped it on. And then as soon as I heard a Whole Lotta Love, I was like, hooked. I was like, how are they making those sounds? How is he doing that? And simultaneously, this friend of my sister's, this guy Rodney, who was kind of like a beach bum, he left a guitar at our house, a Harmony Stratotone I found out later. Specifically like a Mercury Stratotone. So it had one single pickup in the front. But the thing about this guitar that was pretty cool is the action was really good. It was a really, I found out later, a pretty decent guitar to try to learn on most starter guitars or shit, you know? Right. But this was a good one and I picked it up and I started playing it. And then the other thing that happened around the same time is the Junior High school–which is now called Lindenhurst Middle School–for the first time ever offered a guitar class. They they had been doing the traditional shit because, you know, the first instrument I took was trombone. And I realized pretty quickly, like, trombone isn't cool, you know? Now I say that acknowledging that two of the kids that I went to high school with who ended up being professional musicians, one of them is Artie Ballas who plays trumpet and trombone, and Adam Tese, whose grandfather built the house that I grew up in. Adam Tese is currently on tour and has been the main saxophone player for Debbie Gibson for many years, who I named my Gibson Les Paul after, by the way. So Adam would be a good guy. He's on Facebook for you to talk to and Artie is still out. Yeah, somewhere. But those guys, you know, playing brass, made long careers in music. Meanwhile, I'm playing the guitar and going nowhere with these various bands that I was in. So…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Gotcha.
Chris T.
Does it… does that answer your question?
John Mee
So, two things. You said they started offering guitar in the Junior High school?
Chris T.
Yeah.
John Mee
Was it like old? Not old, but it was… was it like acoustic, classical, old nylon string guitars?
Chris T.
Yes. Yeah.
John Mee
So I went by the time I was in Junior High school, our music class was filled with guitars that were broken and in disrepair, all on the walls and I have to imagine those are some.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Those are really delicate instruments.
John Mee
Yeah, yeah. But 25 years later, they're still hanging there. You know, they hadn’t been setup or strung up in years.
Chris T.
They were what you would call a wall hanger. They were just guitars that you would hang on a wall and look at. They weren't really amenable to being played. And the… one of the saddest days I had as I started getting into guitar was Rodney reclaiming his Harmony. Like I one day he came, he’s like, I gotta take this back. And I was like, shit. So, you know, I talked my grandmother into buying me an electric guitar. My first electric guitar was a Kay–K A Y–from the Roosevelt Field Mall, and the guitar and the amp together were $99. I still remember, and that guitar ended up being a frustrating instrument to try to learn on, because it also had terrible action and, when I finally upgraded to an Ibanez Les Paul copy that. My grandmother, same grandmother, bought me from the Sam Ash, now gone in Huntington Station, I took the Kay down to the South Side Fish & Clam, which is still there at the end of my block, and I smashed it against one of the exterior walls because I couldn’t… I couldn't take it anymore. And I probably while I was smashing it, I was like this piece of shit. So yeah, yeah, I.. the most the worst thing you could do for a kid who's trying to learn guitar is hand them a crappy guitar to learn on, like…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Right.
Chris T.
The guitars that are nowadays are cheap guitars that are out there are a lot better than the cheap guitars that were available when I was a kid. And, you know, even if they’re… nowadays, everything is made in China, but they crack the code, you know, they can make a decent guitar that won't set you back too much. So…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Sure.
Chris T.
But the Ibanez, that I bought, that my grandmother bought for me at Sam Ash, I played that all through the Nihilistics until I got an actual Les Paul, until I lucked into an actual Les Paul. Do either one of you guys play?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
John Mee
Yeah, both of us do, I play guitar, he's a drummer.
Chris T.
Okay. Excellent.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
Do you play together?
John Mee
But I was going to say, like…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
We have, but yeah. Yeah, quite a bit.
John Mee
But given your age in the time period like those Ibanezes probably would have been like lawsuit era, Ibanezes right?
Chris T.
Yes. Yes…
John Mee
Much just straight up a Gibson but yeah.
Chris T.
Yeah it was a bolt on neck. They didn't have many in stock because I wanted a sunburst one like Jimmy Page's. But when we got to the Sam Ash, they didn't have any. So I settled on a white one because I had stolen a copy of the Be Bop Deluxe album Axe Victim from the Lindenhurst Memorial Library. Actually, the album I stole was Futurama by Be Bop…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Sorry, I have one such guitar here. An ES-335 rip off.
Chris T.
Nice. Very nice, nice guitar.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
I wish this is what I wanted to show up. We had a jazz guitarist, Mark Whitfield, on recently, and I think he said his first guitar was this.
Chris T.
I mean… it was a lot… a lot of people, thank God for Ibanez. A lot of people, that’s how they started. But, so I worked my way…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
I wish. I could play it, but…
Chris T.
Listen, I'm not much better than I was when I was 13, believe me, but, so I, I don't know if, you know, you know, Bill Nelson, who was the guitarist with Be Bop Deluxe, was a really fantastic guitarist. But on the on the back cover of the first bebop deluxe album, which is called Axe Victim, he's posing with a white Les Paul copy. So I remember thinking about that guitar when I was in the Sam Ash, and I said, okay, I'll take the white one, and I wish I had never… I sold it to my next door neighbor, Lenny Castiglione, when I got my actual Les Paul. And that was a dumb thing to do because now I wish I had my childhood guitar. Anyway.
John Mee
Moving back in time a little bit, which, elementary would you have gone to? West Gates? Was that open at that time?
Chris T.
No, I was an E.W. Bower Elementary School graduate.
John Mee
Gotcha
Chris T.
So E.W. Bower is now a private school? I think…
John Mee
So I don't even know if it's a school anymore. But, it's no longer open as, you know, a school in the district.
Chris T.
Yeah. No, that was the nearest, elementary school to me. And, you know, that’s… I was… I walked to school every day, and, I got thoroughly ridiculed because growing up, I used to wear an eye patch over this eye. Because of this, I was weak. So in addition to being a burgeoning fat kid, I would be ridiculed for wearing a fucking flesh colored bandage over my eye. So within a block of the school, I would tear off the bandage. And that's probably why this I still is terrible because I. Because vanity. It was done in by vanity. Yep.
John Mee
Okay. So you were on fifth Street south of Montauk Highway?
Chris T.
Yeah, yeah. So the first block, that first block between Montauk Highway and what is the cross Street? The first cross street, I don't remember.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Is it Broadway or…
Chris T.
No.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Broadway would have. That would be parallel to Broadway.
John Mee
Broadway runs parallel.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Right.
Chris T.
Right. So, one of the one of the east–west blocks, that first block… John Street, would it be John Street? I don't remember. I haven't been back there for a few years. Yeah. So. Yeah.
John Mee
Yeah, it's, you know, it's a it's different than you've been here, you know, the last time you've been here for sure. Know a lot of things opening up and, many microbreweries.
Chris T.
Interesting. You know, I mean, I, when I was a kid, the drinking age was 18. We would underage drink at 16 with fake IDs that we got from Times Square. And there were any number of places, including, the strip joints on Sunrise Highway where you can go and drink. And then Onkel Herman's, which was down on lower Wellwood Avenue south of Montauk Highway, which was a German bar with food, and you would get the little seven ounce beers, you know.
And I was in there one night. Underage drinking with my friends. There was this guy, Ed Fleming, and then Steve something. Derrig, I think it was. And then Jeff Maschi, who I'm still friends with. They got in in Ed's massive, oversized Mopar. It was a Chrysler, I think, or something. Power windows. And Ed promptly drove into the canal. And Steve Derrig who had cerebral palsy, might have been trapped in that car because the windows were up, you know, and I'll never forget, like, sitting in OnkelHerman's because I was going to ride my bike home. I had my bike, but Ed had his car. And by bike, I mean Schwinn, not a motorcycle. And I just remember sitting there until they started to close and they had never come back. And I was like, oh shit, you know? And then finally they showed up, wrapped in blankets, dripping wet. And Jeff told me the whole story. I mean, you, you know, used to be really easy to drive into the canal. They didn't have, any guardrails there. They didn't have anything there. And periodically some drunk would drive into the canal. So… I know I'm going all over the place… but…
John Mee
It's all right that that still happened when I was in high school as well. Yeah. As hard as it is to drive in there now, people, you know where there's a will, there's, there's a way. Yeah.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
John fell in on his own.
Chris T.
You fell in the canal?
John Mee
Yeah.
Chris T.
Nice.
John Mee
I wouldn't say fell in, but, you know, at the height of the, the Jackass television show I thought I wanted to try what I saw on television. So I wrote a Razer scooter into the canal. And, when I tried to climb out, it didn't work as well. And I scraped my legs up on the barnacles and still have scars.
Chris T.
Yeah, not only that, you can get a really a lifelong case of conjunctivitis if you're not careful, right?
John Mee
Yeah, yeah.
Chris T.
Good old, good old pink eye from jumping in the canal.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
So what did the village look like at that time? Like. Like the main part of the village. On Wellwood Avenue. Because it was a ghost town for many years.
Chris T.
You know, it was pretty lively. You had, like, Cieslak's Modern bakery, which is still there, which was one of my first jobs after the Woolco, on Sunrise Highway. I worked there for a couple of years. Then you had that other German bakery. I remember you had Friendly's, you had Music Land, which was my music store. You had a number of bars. You had, you know, dentists and so on and so forth. There was it it was like a a regular downtown. It was like, you know, a pretty decent downtown with mom and pop stores and, people actually going there and shopping and all of that kind of stuff. So it was, you know, you don't realize these things as you're growing up. But I've been writing about this a lot lately, and it wasn't like a bad place to grow up. There were a couple of things I did not like about it, most definitely. But for the most part, it was pretty idyllic existence. I would ride my bike all over the place and never really feel unsafe, you know? And, there was the hobby shop on on Montauk Highway. There was Werner's Bowl, there was the Lindenhurst movie theater. Beyond that, there was the Billy Blake store that became, I think, the TSS store, or it might have been on the north side, I forget, but you had like, A &S right. Abraham & Strauss, you had a JCPenney store there. So within, you know, a pretty small stretch you had everything you needed.You know, I know I’m talking about West Babylon now and you guys are doing a Lindenhurst podcast… so…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
No, that's fine.
Chris T.
…forgive me.
John Mee
Yeah.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
I was going to ask, was Looney Tunes there already?
Chris T.
Yes. Looney Tunes was one of our frequent stops for vinyl because back then that's all you could buy. There were no CDs or there was vinyl and cassettes, you know. So Looney Tunes, I was very happy to see the last time I was out there, that it's still there and has expanded, you know, and is a really good record store, you know. So that was that was a good resource to have. But, for sure, I remember as a kid, like we, we could do all the shopping we needed to do, whether it was for clothes or food or whatever it is. And a in probably a mile or a two mile to radius, you know, we didn't we didn't have to get in the car like the Sunrise Mall wasn't even there. I still remember when the Sunrise Mall opened up, because that was very exciting. But you didn't, you know, if we were going to go to a mall? When I was a kid, it was the Roosevelt Field Mall that was that was there as far as I remember before the Sunrise Mall was there, which is now, what, a ghost mall at this point.
John Mee
Yeah, I know, I think nothing maybe part of the Macy's is open and that's it.
Chris T.
Yeah. Interesting.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. They're talks of it becoming apartments again. You know, just like everything else.
Chris T.
Yeah. Wow.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. Anyway so yeah. So getting into like, junior high, high school, you're playing guitar or you're discovering music. Now, are there other kids you can commiserate with on that? Like, are you finding kind of leaking your tribe? Well, as far as that goes, you know.
Chris T.
Again, in this, this memoir I'm writing is really about Mike. Mike was my best friend who ended up trying to murder me. And so I'm telling the story of how that happened. But I. When I met Mike in junior high because the, the junior high brought together kids from all over Lindenhurst. Like, you wouldn't have met them, right, if you were just. Yeah, you know, E.W. Bower. And then what were some of the other, other elementary schools was there, like William McKinley.
John Mee
William Rall, Harding…
Chris T.
Right. So you so yeah, the junior high was like where all those kids came together and I still remember, like my first day of junior high, going to the lunchroom, and there's this kid who's the fattest kid in school, you know, and fatter than me because I had started to plump up around that time. And, you know, shame based overeating, dealing, dealing with, all kinds of family stress by, taking solace in food, essentially. And then, you know, to see this kid. And Mike was just he was taller than me, but he was also fatter than me. He was the fattest kid in school. And he would walk down the hall and just be, you know, mocked. And kids nowadays, obviously this whole anti-bullying thing. But when I was growing up, they would tell you, they would call you stuff right to your face. They’d call you fatso, they'd call you blimp, they called you fat ass. They called you fat fuck. You know, there was there was no prohibition whatsoever against being mocked for your weight growing up. And so Mike and I bonded over that. You know, we, there was no one sitting near him. And I sat down with him, and we found out that we both like, Mad magazine and Monty Python. He liked professional wrestling. I didn't care all that much. I was more into Evel Knievel and stuff like that. Because of my dad being a mechanic. I was into motorsports. You know, growing up, I wasn't really into… despite the Mets hat… I wasn't into baseball or football or… if you could pour fuel in it and drive it, then I was into it. And so Mike and I bonded over a few of those things. I at that point was about to, start a cover band with my friend Billy Kammerer, who lived over on Wellbrock in what was the newest block in Lindenhurst. It was so new that all the utility cables were buried underground. Like you'd go on Wellbrock and there were no telephone poles, you know, and it looked like a street from some California sitcom. But, my friends…
John Mee
There are two, two blocks like that in Lindenhurst. There's that one. And and Anthony Drive is the other one. But yeah, that's off Shore Road.
Chris T.
So I was best friends with this guy, Glenn Katz, who lived on, Wellbrock. And through Glen, I met Billy, and Billy had a guitar. He had an SG and an Ampeg amp. I think it was a Reverb Rocket. And when he found out that I was getting into guitar, he's like, you should come over and jam some time. So the next thing you know, I'm over at Billy's house, we're learning Who songs together. And then we started this band called Cobra, and we ended up our big gig was playing, what was it? Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. The Christmas dance. And I have a lot of pictures from that. Somebody took pictures. But we played the Christmas dance at OLPH annex. We didn't play in the church, but whatever the annex was, and and so Cobra, when Cobra finally, you know, the wheels came off, I wanted to keep playing. And Mike and I had sort of figured out that there was this thing called the Sex Pistols because of Lenny Lobriano. Lenny Lobrianno was one of those kids that you go to school with and you realize later, oh, he was gay. You know, that explains a lot because back then, you know, as opposed to, I don't know what goes on in high schools now or junior high, but I would imagine if you're gay, you're probably out and no one has a problem with it. But back then, Lenny expressed his individuality by wearing these pins, and one of the pins he wore was the the cover of Never Mind the Ballocks. So it was a little tiny square pin. And I remember seeing Sex Pistols and thinking, what the hell is that? And then there was a report on the news about the Sex Pistols playing in America. In like 1978, they toured the United States and every night, not every night, but on the on the nightly news, there would be these these guys going, you know, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious and Mike and I were like, what the hell is a Johnny Rotten? And what the hell is a Sid Vicious? And we started, you know, going and buying the records. We started, you know, we discovered what was coming out of England and, that inspired us. You know, Mike wanted to play. I wanted to continue playing. I said to Mike, you know, I could teach you some things if you want. We went down to Music Land. I helped him pick out a cheap bass and a cheap base camp, and the next thing you know, we were sort of like, down in my basement, or his playing together and coming up with songs. One of the first we came up with was called Grandma's or Made for kicking, and I wish I remember the lyrics, but it had something to do with kicking your grandmother down the stairs, you know? And, whereas I'm sure we both had perfectly nice grandma's. That's what we thought punk rock was, you know, at the time. Right. And, but then, you know, things quickly progressed. So by the time I'm like, 1979 rolled around, we had met this guy run out at, Legz in Valley Stream. He was from Merrick. He started singing with us. Mike also went through this transformation. He came back. By the time we hit the high school, he had lost 100 pounds and I remember, like, September, he walks into the school and I'm like, how did you do that? And he said, well, my parents put me on a diet. It turned out Mike was a male bulimic, and he was throwing up all of his meals, and he would even do it in the parking lot of the McDonald’s. You know, we would come out from eating our McDonald's and he would go watch this. And as some nice family was walking in, he would just regurgitate his entire meal in front of them and they would go, oh my God. So, you know, but we, we he, he went through the tragic death of his father. His father was, driving home and I think had a single car, car accident. I think he fell asleep at the wheel and ended up lingering in a hospital, unbeknownst to the staff at the hospital. Internally bleeding to death. So we went to this long, horrific death which utterly transformed Mike. Mike… Mike was really, you know, very tight with his father. And when his father died, Mike was like 17, 18 and he locked himself in his bedroom and he started writing these very dark songs. You know, the five songs on the first Nihilistics EP, After Death, Kill Yourself, you're to blame, you know, Love & Kisses. I forget what the other one is, but, those were all those. All came directly out of what he had gone through with the loss of his father and just deciding, you know, that life was unfair and God didn't exist and all this other stuff. So he went to a very dark place. But that's kind of where the nihilistic were born. And, you know, we struggled to figure out what to call the band. And then one day we're at the Salvation Army on on Route 109, and there was this book called Nausea there. And I was intrigued by the title, Jean-Paul Sartre. And I start reading the preface, and in the preface I see this word nihilistic, which I had never encountered before, but I was impressed by how many eyes were in it.N-I-H-I-L-I-C–I see, yeah. And I pronounced it like, do you know the band The Stylistics? Have you ever heard of the band the Stylistics, R&B soul? Yeah. So when I said it, I said it as nihilistic. And then I said nihilistics. Hey, we could be the nihilistics and I'm in the backseat of Ron's Buick, Ron, you know, Ron and Mike. Ron's driving. Mike's in the passenger's seat. I'm in the backseat and I'm looking through this book, and I go, hey, what do you think of the nihilistics? And they were like, the nihilistics. I like that. All right, let's be the nihilistics. So we were the nihilistics and Ron, who was, if nothing else, the hustler started getting his, you know, gigs. We recorded a cassette. Sent it out. He… he got it to Tim Sommer, who had a show at NYU at the time. Originally, I think it was called Oi the Show. And then he renamed it Noise the Show. And so pretty quickly we were recording an EP. And we recorded it at studio 7AI think it was called because there was the A7 club, but then 7A yeah, was a little studio, run by the Bad Brains. And so we paid for two hours of recording, and we went in and recorded that EP amidst the biggest cloud of pot smoke I had seen until that point in my life, and probably got to contact one of the Dead Boys was there, a member of the Dead Boys. I think it was. Jeff Magnum watched us record that record. Jack Rabid was there as well. Tim Sommer might have been there, I don't know. I'm waiting to interview him. And with that EP, it opened up a lot of doors. We were able to, you know, and PRI Record Pressing was in Wyandanch and the minimum order was 200, you know, seven inches. So we did a seven inch EP with five songs on it. And what you would do back then is you would give members of other bands your record. Here's my record, here's my record. You would go to club owners. This is my record. And the record was a great calling card. Cassette was a good calling card too, but a record meant like, oh, you've actually done something, you know? And, so before long we were playing in Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club and CBGB and all of these clubs that are now, you know, long gone. And we had a pretty good run. We probably lasted from, like the first gig would have been late 1980, early 1981, and I left the band around the end of ’84, beginning of ’85. There was just a really bad falling out, and I felt like I couldn't be part of it anymore. And then, you know, finally moved off of Long Island, got the fuck off Long Island. So…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
So I guess like being a punk…
Chris T.
Have I gone to far aield for you guys?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
No, not at all.
John Mee
No.
Chris T.
I’m what you call a self-starter. Because I, my career was in radio. You know, I did radio for many, many years and have interviewed thousands of people. So I may just, be running away with this. Sorry about that.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
No, believe me, that's that's great.
Chris T.
Yeah.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
But I wanted to ask you, like, you know, obviously playing punk at that time, you had your sights set on the city, but was there any type of scene for that out here, like, was it being played in any of the clubs?
Chris T.
You know, Ron, has a different memories of these things than I do. He claims we played one of our first gig gigs was at a VFW, out by Pinelawn, Cemetery. And I do remember playing a club out there or some kind of place out there. I'm not sure if it was a VFW, but that was a very early gig. But there was a paucity of venues out on Long Island. Sooner or later, you know, my Father's Place started booking a lot of punk and hardcore shows, which was cool in Roslyn, and that was an excellent venue. It had really a really good sound system, you know, they seemed to appreciate that you were there, like a lot of these places, in the city didn't really give a shit because you'd be on a bill with five other bands, you know? But…
John Mee
Right.
Chris T.
But if I was gonna count how many times we played on Long Island as opposed to in Manhattan, the ratio would be like 1 to 10. We might have done one gig on Long Island for every ten gigs we did in Manhattan. Just because on Long Island, when I was growing up, it was cover bands and tribute bands, you know, whether it was southern rock…
John Mee
Right.
Chris T.
Someone still needs to explain to me how southern rock became so popular on Long Island. But you had a number of bands that played…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
And country. Now, country is huge on Long Island.
Chris T.
Yeah. I mean, that's why I had to get the fuck off Long Island.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Because, you know, I understand.
Chris T.
The provincial nature of the place was starting to bug the shit out of me just because it’s…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
A bit of a red state. Yeah.
Chris T.
Yeah, yeah. You know, unfortunately, it doesn't have to be that way, but unfortunately. And, you know, and one of the things that sort of led to the falling out with the rest of the I was six was, I think the politic started to get weird because initially we were all about, you know, Reagan sucks. Fuck Reagan. But then at some point I think things started to shift a bit. Also, Mike especially got really into heavy metal and Judas Priest, among other things. And he and he felt like the band needed a lead guitar player. And I wasn't a lead guitar player. I did a combination of rhythm and lead, but he wanted to bring it. They wanted to bring in Ron's brother. So this kid shows up one day with a BC Rich Warlock, which, he was the most on punk rock guitar you could ever possibly play. And he was okay. It wasn't like he was a bad player, but it was a poor fit. It was like trying to graft, you know, these leads on to this hardcore band. And whereas that shit really took off, you know, a little bit later on when ’86, ’87 rolled around. I don't think we were the band to.. to perfect that whole, you know, sort.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
…crossover thing. Yeah.
Chris T.
Crossover thing. Yeah. Which, who who am I thinking of that really perfected that? What was the name? With that guy?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
D-R-I?
Chris T.
No. I can't, I can't remember. It's okay.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Oh, Anthrax.
Chris T.
Anthrax. That's what. Yeah. What was his name? The guitarist in Anthrax?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Scott Ian
Chris T.
Scotty Ian. I've interviewed Scott Ian and I should know this. I've talked to… but Anthrax, like, a few years later, Anthrax came along, and, you know, you had bands that were doing the slow, fast thing. And really, you know, doing it well. We couldn't have done that, I don't think, I don't think that was the thing about the nihilistics whenever, because I've been doing a lot of interviewing for this book, talking to people who knew us back then and knew Mike… and the thing that I keep hearing is you guys were scary. You know, we were frightened of you because we meant it, you know, whereas a lot of bands back then sort of, were joking around to some degree and having a good time, we were like deadly serious about what we were doing. We had a very bleak, dark sense of humor that a lot of people kind of didn't get. But to me, it made perfect sense considering where we came from and what we went through growing up. You know, it was that seamy underbelly of suburbia thing that I think worked out pretty well. You know, the music still holds up. I think the EP and the, the first LP, still hold up and, you know, I'm amazed that the band is still around and Ron has kept it alive all these years. I mean, sometimes I feel like give it up already, and then other times I'm happy that he's doing it. Just because it's keeping it out there and keeping the name alive, you know?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
So, yeah. So in the time that you were in the band, were you touring at all or was it just local?
Chris T.
We made it as far as one time I think we went to Massachusetts, and then another time, I mean, we would play in new Jersey, but it would be like, not that far in the new Jersey. It'd be like Hoboken, you know, that kind of thing. I always joke that we would have killed each other if we had tried to get in a van and go anywhere, any length away. Plus, we were far too blue collar to give up our jobs. Like, you know, I'm good friends with all the guys in AOD. And, the drummer, Dave Scott, just put out his book about, you know, their touring years. And I'm amazed, like, they would get in a van and drive out to California and then tour up and down the West Coast. They toured the Midwest. They they went all over and, you know, however they did it, they did it. If they said to their bosses, hey, I'm taking the summer off. I don't know how they did it. Yeah, but me, I always had a job because my parents didn't pay for anything if I wanted it, they didn't. When I wanted the car, I had to go out and buy it myself. I had to pay for the insurance myself, you know, I had to pay rent while I was still living at home. After I turned 18, my mother wanted rent out of me. So I always had a job and I just never. I never thought that, like, touring with the Nihilistics was going to pay us anything to the point where I could actually afford the stuff that I wanted. So that was a heavy lift. You weren't going to get these four guys to walk away from their jobs to go, you know, in a van across the country, I regret it. I wish we had I think it would have been great. We would've had great stories and stuff. But we never did.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
So, yeah, I think the DIY touring thing was still kind of a new concept at the time.
Chris T.
Yep.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. Yep. Cool. So, bringing it back just a little bit. So this is like just post high school. Did you go to college at all or…
Chris T.
Were you just did I mean, I was working for, like a two years of Montclair State, where I took English and some other classes. And then I got a really good job. So, like a dope, I, I said, why am I paying for this? Because, again, I, I was paying myself to go to college, you know, you know, when I was growing up, the two things I heard more than anything else is we can't afford it. And how would you like to live on the street? And which is why, even now, at my advanced age, I feel like, economic collapse is right around the corner. Meanwhile, I've been supporting myself since I was 16, and, so, yeah, I just thought, like, what do I need with this year? College degree? And then, that was the early 90s. Like, it took me a long time to figure out that I should go to college. And by the time I did, within a couple of years, I was like, yeah, I don't want to pay for this. So I stopped going. But, I did okay. I mean, you know, I had, 16 years at SiriusXM. I had a number of years prior to that working at NPR and CBS radio and a few other places where, you know, they paid me well. And, I was able to, you know, do all the things that I wanted to do. And, you know, on Sirius XM, especially 12 years, doing a live daily talk show, three hours a day, talking to truck drivers across the United States and into Canada. I got to interview people that I never would have thought I'd be sitting across, you know, with people like Tom Jones and Robert Duvall and Carol Burnett and you name them, Ben Kingsley, Jeff Bridges. You know, these people would come down the hall from the Howard Stern Studios because we were on an 11 a.m. hour show. Freewheelin’.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
And the publicists always knew, like, okay, so once we do Howard Stern, we can go down the hall and do this other show. So we we did like a stealth. What I like to think of as a stealth talk show because, sensibly, it was on the Road Dog Trucking Radio channel, and it was for truckers. But we didn't approach it that way because I was never a trucker. My co-host was never a trucker. And but we we liked talking to them. We liked, I mean, until Donald Trump got elected, it was a lot of fun. And then within two years of him being elected, a couple of large trucking fleets decided we were live towards from the northwest, I mean, the northeast, and they pulled out their sponsorship from our show. And once they pulled out, once the big sponsors pulled out, the guy who ran the ad sales department started agitating for us to be gotten rid of. So that's eventually what happened. You know, they made a purely financial decision because and it was weird. I mean, Donald Trump created a permission structure for some of these people to be their worst selves. And so the guys who ordinarily might have kept their mouths shut about such thing would call us up and say horrible things to us. Gotcha. And I have a pretty thick skin. And I always prided myself on using a scalpel instead of a cleaver. But my co-host, she didn't believe it. That she would just take a cleaver and just start chopping these guys to bits. And it ended up, sort of not working out too well for us. So, in April of 2018, they, they can both of us and, and ended our show, and they replaced us with this guy who, they didn't even have to pay because he sold his own line of products. And it was almost like a share time thing, like he he did this show in exchange for being able to plug all of his products within a couple of year. I think he lasted all of two years because he started he could he he he thought he was a nutritionist so he started giving out medical advice on the air. And they told him, you can't do that.
John Mee
Oh no.
Chris T.
And then he he mused on the air about shooting a congressman, and they said, you can't do that either. And then they fired him. So, you know, meanwhile, we went for 12 years without really running afoul of anything until the morning after the election in 2016. And we got all these calls from all these guys going, Well, now you’re going to see what it feels like when we had to live with Obama for eight years… and, I was like, well, and I would love to go back and find the recording because I remember what I said. What I said was, I have a feeling this isn't going to end well. So I said… and I… I think history proved me right on that one. So anyway, I did… I didn’t mean to get political on your podcast.
John Mee
No, it's all right. I believe my friend Annie may have worked on your show in some capacity.
Chris T.
Oh, Annie Witter.
John Mee
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris T.
Yeah. No, she was our producer for a little while. Yeah. We had we had, like, a revolving door of them. There, and, And Annie was was, it was a good one. She was a good producer. What she up to these days?
John Mee
She is living the dream in, North Carolina. She's doing stand up and stuff down there.
Chris T.
Oh. Well. Okay. Very good, very good.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Very cool. I was going to ask, despite the politics, did you see anything in common with the truckers and musicians?
Chris T.
Yeah. I mean, truckers are a subculture, so they're like bikers, you know, they're like musicians in that they have their own language and their own. It’s.. it's.
John Mee
A scene.
Chris T.
It's a scene. It's a world. I mean, I still like truckers, and I'm still in touch with a few of them who were regular callers to our show. There's this one guy, Buzzard, who, not only was a Vietnam Vet and a tunnel rat during Vietnam and who was dropped into Cambodia to do black bag ops and who became a prisoner of war, captured by the Vietnamese in a Vietnamese camp… he also… went when he got out of Vietnam, ended up in Northern California or actually Southern California, where he was hanging out with Charlie Manson because he joined a motorcycle club. And and Charlie wanted them as his own private army. But then in the late ‘60s, decided to go drive a truck, and he still driving a truck. Native American, you know, and every once in a while, we'll get on the phone just to make sure both of us are still alive, kind of thing. Yeah. But then there's a few others that I'm still in touch with. And I think because, you know, I came from a blue collar, working class background, I think I was able to relate, to drivers and to especially, how, disrespected they felt and how invisible they felt to the majority of the public and how, you know, they were doing this truck driving is traditionally a more dangerous job than even being a police officer. There's more ways you could die as a truck driver. If you don't die quickly in a wreck, you'll die slowly from hypertension and diabetes and or other health ailments. And truck drivers are not paid what they should be paid. Very often they're sitting at a dock, unpaid, waiting to be unloaded. I don't know where it is nowadays with the profession, but truck driving had its heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You could be an independent truck driver and no one really could tell you what to do or what to do with your truck. And then that old just started to change. So, you know, it's a very it's a very difficult job. And, a lot of the truck drivers that I knew, you would ask them, like, so what if your kids want to go into the profession? They were like, over my dead body. My kids are not becoming truck drivers, you know, they are.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Similar to touring musicians. Like, no, you're not doing that.
Chris T.
Yeah, yeah. So, so I, I think we did, you know, a really good show and, and drivers still talk about us and still talk about the show and miss the show and Sirius XM just made, you know, I think a really dumb financial decision, like a greed based decision that had nothing to do with the quality of the show that we were doing, you know, and I still have nightmares because towards the end of it, they were making life so difficult. I would put my feet on the floor in the morning, you know, trying to get out of bed. And I would say to myself, you know, how much longer is this going to go on? How much longer do I have to do this? And then, as it turned out, not much longer. So it was a weird blessing in disguise because they were making it impossible because I, you know, there there's a phenomenon that goes on where, you know, even if you're really good at what you do. And I thought I was good at what I did because I had been on FMU since 1986. And when I was offered this job at Sirius XM, it was 2006. So I had been doing radio for many, many years, you know, perfecting what it meant to be a talk show host and the and then middle management would constantly second guess you… would constantly think that they knew better than you. And my response would be like, I would like to see you do a show for three hours. I would like to see you do a show when the phones go out and there's no one to talk to, and you have to vamp for an hour. I want to see you do that, because if you can't do that, then I'm not sure you know why you feel, like, you can tell me how to do my job, you know, and there was a lot of that that went on. There was a lot of, like, not trusting the experts to do what they did. And hey, I don't feel good, fellas. Admitting that the only thing I became a an expert at in my life was being a talk show host, because there's a limited range of those jobs that someone my age can do. I can talk about sports and I don't want to, and I can talk about right wing politics. And I certainly don't want to do that. So after, you know, the trucking radio thing went away, there was there weren't a lot of avenues for me. So I started doing freelance audio, and I still do my own show occasionally. But for the most part, I feel like, you know, the radio career was, a thing that I did, and I did it well. And now my third act is going to be writing this book about growing up in Lindenhurst and and Mike Nicolosi and the night that he tried to choke me to death. So that's that's where things are headed. Okay.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
But, Okay.
Chris T.
Cool. But but Lindenhurst, you know, it. It remains an interesting place for me because, the people who didn't get out, like, you know, I always talk about Mike didn’t achieve the escape velocity. He. There was too much gravitational pull. He ended up in West Babylon. Just over the border. But me, at a certain point, I was like, the first opportunity I get I'm moving the fuck out of here. And the opportunity came in the form of being rear ended by a Checker cab in Long Island City one night. This woman who was driving the night shift coming down a hill didn't even hit the brakes, just plowed in the back of a into the back of this car I had owned for all of six days and totaled. It knocked me unconscious. The passenger at the time was, Paul Bearer, now of Sheer Terror, but back then he was a Nihilistics fan, and we were going to see our friend E.J. in Long Island City. And if it wasn't for Paul–and I said this at his wedding a year ago–Paul reached over from the passenger side, slammed on the brakes with his left foot, and grabbed the steering wheel because we were headed directly for a line of parked cars. And she had hit my car so hard she pushed the trunk back up to the the back of the driver's seat. So she collapsed the rear of the car and I couldn't get the driver's door open. So we both had to get out in the passenger side. We fall out of the car, glass in our hair. Big spreading pool of gasoline, from the gas tank. And thank God the car didn't just explode when she hit it. And, I ended up getting about $6,000 after I sued the cab company. So the lawyer took a third because I think they paid us nine grand, and I got six grand. And that's the stake money. The seed money. I used to not only buy my first decent stereo, but to get the fuck off Long Island. So I moved out of my mother's house finally. And, you know, I it's it's ironic that that's what it took to do it, but I knew that if I stayed on the island, I was going to end up like a lot of people that I grew up with, you know, in just a very sort of dead in existence. And, it's no reflection on you guys. I don't know what your existence is like. And do you like it there? Do you like, yeah.
John Mee
Yeah, yeah. Yes and no. Yes and. Yeah.
Chris T.
Good answer.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
It's good. It's really it's gotten a glow up in recent years. So, you.
Chris T.
Know, I was there. Yeah. I think it was two years ago. I had to go out there. And, my friend Jim Brown and I, Jim grew up, like, east of me, over near where that Narragansett, catering hall used to be, and we were going out there to do something with his father's house because his father had passed away. And so we took a little tour of the old haunts. I drove down South Fifth Street and, you know, Lenny Castiglione, ironically enough, was they're putting his mother's house together because she had died and he was getting ready to put it on the market. But, you know, we we drove down Wellwood Avenue? Through the center of town. And it was looking pretty good. The place looked like, you know, there was stuff going on. I don't know, like, if I could live there again just because of some of the retrograde politics, you know, that I'd have to put, New Jersey's where I at least where I am. It's pretty blue, you know, although I did see a guy at the end of my block of the day walking with a huge Trump flag. I don't know if his pickup broke down or what the deal was, but, you know, and, Jim, oddly enough, you know, there was a moment when Jim was thinking maybe I should just keep my father's house and I'll move into it. I'll move back into my childhood home because he felt like, you know, it's not such a bad place. But, you know, I, I used to hate having to go back in when my mother was still alive. And she would often say to me, why don't I see you more often? And I'd be like, because it takes me three fucking hours to get home because I got to crawl on the Long Island Expressway. It's not getting here that's so bad. It's getting home again. So at the time, I lived in terrifying new Jersey, and I remember one time I clocked it and it took me 2.5 hours to go a total distance of like 60 miles from. Yeah, from Lindenhurst, South 5th Street to Sisson Terrace in Tenafly, you know, and and probably doing 15 miles an hour the entire time. So I, I that was one of the things I couldn't stand is Laurel Expressway. If I never saw it again, it'd be okay by me, you know. Yeah. The just the feeling of like, what am I going to do if I have to get off of this island? I better own a boat, because absent owning a boat, you know, and I always have brothers with boats. I never owned my own boat, but my brothers always owned boats. So, you know, anyway, it’s…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
A you're you're surviving siblings to live out here or or they also…
Chris T.
Also know my brother was the last one, the last holdout. My brother Mark, who at the time was living on a boat, he lived on a, like, a 45ft, ocean going boat, deep hole boat that was moored in, either Amityville or coping, not far from, where the Venice Marina is. And he had a little piece of property that he paid a monthly fee on. And, he wasn't supposed to be living on his boat, but he did. And, he finally got tired of, like, can't take the fucking taxes. Oh, Lord, I can't take it anymore. Getting out of here. So he moved to Mooresville, North Carolina, which, they call, I think it's called the the home of NASCAR or something like that is like on a lot of NASCAR drivers that live there. And I was texting with a recently after all that shit went down in Asheville because he's like two hours east of Asheville. And, and he's okay. He didn't really experience any flooding or anything like that. But I'm like, you know, the reason people live in areas like, whether it's Long Island or Manhattan? I used to say this to truck drivers all the time, because truck drivers would say, you should come and live where I live, I pay $50 a month and I get and I'm like, yeah, but there's nothing going on there. They roll up the side at 10 p.m., there's a fucking Stuckey's in your town. You're lucky if there's a Stuckey's and, maybe there's a Waffle House. I don't know, I don't want to live there. I'm willing to pay to live where there's shit that I can do. You know? And. Yeah. So, you know, move to North Carolina because there's no taxes. But then my brother's a different animal. He's MAGA. And he loves anything you can, you know, go really fast in whether it's a boat or a car or motorcycle or he loves all that stuff. So he gets to do all that stuff in North Carolina. But he was the last holdout on Long Island. And I have no reason to go there anymore unless I come out and visit you guys, you know?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Okay, well, you're always welcome. And, so that's going to bring us. Unless John has any more questions to our closing question.
John Mee
Yeah.
Chris T.
Is there any which I have forgotten to say about growing up in Lindenhurst, that I should say about growing there?
John Mee
I think you know that all. Hey, Anthony has a copy of your yearbook, next to him right now, actually.
Chris T.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. The, the old Bulldog and, you usually use.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
You saw me on stage, you know, Mr. Monsell who ran, the two, there was a two theater groups in the high school. One was the Charles Street Players, the other was Thespians 1895. So I think he ran the drama side of things, and he got me on the stage. But, Mr. Monsell, a little bit of trivia for you. He had George Benatar and Patti Andrewjeski in his class and and because it was alphabetical seating, they sat one behind the other. And so, he I still remember the day he was telling me, you know, I was Pat Benatar, his English teacher. So, that was a pretty cool claim to fame.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Is this you in the TV right here?
Chris T.
Yeah. And that's the aforementioned Jeff Maschi holding the rifle. Okay, so I still know Jeff. Jeff lives in, in new Jersey, not far from me. And, he's still acting. He's still doing community theater and stuff, but awesome. One of the ways that I got out of my shell was, you know, being somebody else on stage, and that’s… that's also me. The other picture of me with the woman, with the with the briefcase. You see that picture there?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Oh, that's you there.
Chris T.
That's me in an old age, wig and old age wig. They put some pictures up on social media so you can see…
John Mee
Yeah.
Chris T.
So, yeah. I am a graduate of Lindenhurst School. Oh, and by the way, my radio career began in Lindenhurst High School because I used to do the morning announcements. Mr. Monsell, also was in charge of who have read the morning announcements, you know, talking about lunch and all that crap. And because I was a fan of mad magazine, one day I read the Mad magazine version of the Pledge of Allegiance, which included the phrase one naked individual. And I read the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the doors to the main office, you know, are swung open by this female gym teacher who comes storming in and all red face gets in my face. What did you just say? I said, and I just played dumb. I'm like, I read the Pledge of Allegiance. Did you just say one naked individual? And I just denied it. And we were called into a meeting and Mr. Monsell stuck up for me. He's like, I don't think he would say anything like that. I mean, back then, the thing was recorded, so there was no record of it. And they suspended me, from doing the morning announcements for a week. But then that went back to doing the morning announcements. So I always consider that like the birthplace of my radio career. And then the other thing would have been we appeared on WBAB back in the day. In the ‘70s, a guy named Bob Buchman used to do a talk show, and he wanted to do one about teenage vandals. And somehow Mike, he convinced him that me and Mike and our friend Neil were teenage fans. I hadn't vandalized anything in my life and I wish I had a recording of that appearance. So we kind of lied our way.
John Mee
This is funny. So, Annie, that worked on your show? I came to know because she interned at WBAB with friends of mine.
Chris T.
Wow. And it's still there, is it? I mean…
John Mee
It is absolutely still there.
Chris T.
Do they actually still broadcast out of that location, or is it like, sort of just about…
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
Yeah. Wow.
John Mee
Yeah, yeah.
Chris T.
Yeah. That was my, you know, hometown childhood radio station was WBAB And along with like WPLJ in the city and you and then later WLIR, those were the formative, you know, radio stations and things that I listened to growing up and, yeah, I'm happy, baby. Still there. Anyway, so cool. So is that, is that good for you guys?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. So that brings us to our our closing question that we ask everyone, based on your time here, if you could describe Lindenhurst to someone who's never been here, what would you tell them?
Chris T.
A bucolic, blue collar town. That, is easy. Easy shot into Manhattan on a Long Island railroad. Great commuter town if you want to live, but now mostly populated by policemen and firemen. It seems like that seems to be a lotta guys who want to have a boat. That seems to be a lot of what the folks who live there… But like anywhere else in this country, even when you think it's a place that is nothing but groupthink, you will find your people if you look for them. There are always going to be a few folks who are not going along with the program. So that's good.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
Yeah.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Fantastic. And, just let everyone know, I know you have a Substack with, some stories kind of like leading up to your book that's coming out soon.
Chris T.
So, yeah, Substack. It’s calle nihilisticbook.com. You could also get there by going to the nihilistics.com… and I try to do a new installment every week. But I also have another newsletter I've been doing since 2014 called See You Next Tuesday. It comes out every Tuesday. And, between the two of them, I try to do something every week. But I'm happy to talk to you guys because I have been thinking a lot lately about the place where I came from and what it meant to me to come from that place. And, during that time, and then, you know, just one more digression, because the thing that I didn't realize as I was graduating high school was it was kind of the beginning of the end for the middle class in the United States. It was, the Reagan dismantling of what it meant to have a decent life. Even if you were just, blue collar or working class, you know, it never occurred to me that, you know, the fact that I, my family was a single, you know, my dad was the only one who was the breadwinner. And we we were able to have a pretty good life on a mechanic salary. But that kind of ended in 1980. And I think that unfortunately, like a lot of other places in the country, they've been dealing with the fallout of that ever since. How's the fentanyl thing out on Long Island? By the way?
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Oh, it's raging. Yeah. Raging.
John Mee
Yeah. No good.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah. They just made a huge bust somewhere like, like enough to kill the entire island.
Chris T.
Yeah. Wow. It’s..
John Mee
They found… Yeah, that one guy had a ton of stuff on it. But to your point, like, I remember in closing, when I was a kid, and, like, half the people I knew as parents losing their jobs, you know?
Chris T.
Yeah. I mean, when I was young, I, there was local factories. You can go and get a factory job if you wanted to. They were still making stuff.
Anthony Vito Fraccalvieri
Yeah.
Chris T.
You know, and and what am I, worse. Jobs was at a place called Vanguard that made electronic relays. And, you know, it was like a little building, north of the railroad tracks, closer to Copiague. And I would go there and they would literally pay you in cash every week. A woman would come unfold a table and take all this cash and stuff it in an envelope and hand it to you. I mean, think about that now. It's pretty remarkable. But, yeah, it's unfortunate that, you know, what ended up happening after the gutting of the middle class is people started looking to somebody like Donald Trump as, the supposed solution to that. And it's, I find it ludicrous, to say the least. But, we got 19 more days to turn this sucker around. So I'm going to go watch the Mets game and see, them lose to the Dodgers.
I’m only half way through and this is mad good. Just awesome stuff. Gonna come back to it.