The Last Bawltz Remembered
by Pat Carney
I can
honestly say that the Last Bawltz was one of the greatest days of my life. It was at the end of the summer of 1990 my
senior year in high school, and was the highlight of that year and that year
was the highlight of my childhood. The
name the Last Bawltz is from the Last Waltz of course, a Martin Scorcese
documentary about the Band’s final concert.
That combined with the word bawltz, which was how you said balls
(meaning testes or testicles) with a thick Long Island accent which none of us
really had. Bawlz must have been every
other word out of my mouth that summer.
I must have sounded like an idiot.
We spent a considerable amount of time that summer sitting around
drinking and watching movies like the Last Waltz. We also had a blaxploitation film festival which was pretty
amazing, but that’s another matter.
Well, most
us in the Real Cheese inner circle were going off to college that Fall, so we
decide to have our own Last Waltz as Real Cheese’s final concert. It was going to be a huge fucking blowout—guest
performers from all over Port Washington, tons of food, tons of beer. One last blowout before we all went off to
college. Preparation started weeks in
advance, but in my mind, the event actually started when Doug Ramsdell and I
want to get beer for the event. We were
under-age of course, but you could always find someplace that would sell you beer
anyway. The only question was how much
trouble you had to go through to get it.
We really wanted a keg, which was harder to get than just cases. We got a tip from one of our friends about
this place in Queens that would sell kegs to anyone. We drove about 45 minutes to get there, wound up in some
neighborhood we weren’t supposed to be in, looked around for about 30 seconds
then got the hell out of there. We went
to our old standby the Northwood Deli in another part of queens and got four
cases, which we deemed to be a “square keg”.
Doug and I got the beer, then we made some “Security” uniforms, which
consisted of hand drawn shirts with “Sikurity” written on the back, sunglasses,
and earpieces like the Secret Service, the usual cut off jeans and
sneakers. We looked pretty badass. Speaking of those jeans, I think I wore the
same pair every single day that summer, and I rarely wore shoes or underwear
back then. That was good livin’. Can’t get away with that these days. Anyway, some time that night showtime
arrived. It was great, we all started
getting totally hammered; there were tons of guest appearances. I read “Green
Eggs and Ham.” This cool girl we hung
out with read a limerick about this asshole gym teacher we had and how he kept
a whore in a cave, one group did TV show themes. Real Cheese came on and they were fucking amazing. They must have played for hours. Matt was at his drunken best. Jeff was so drunk at the end he could barely
stand up. I remember at the end, he was
just ruining his hands on the guitar a la Pete Townshend. Afterward we hung out until about 5AM,
smoked cigars. Doug and I had a huge
argument about tits. “You think you
know tits? Wrong, I KNOW tits!”
A couple of years later in
college I was trying to make time with this chic. I thought I’d try to impress her with how cool I was by showing
her my Last Bawltz videotape. On came
the video, it was towards the end of the show, and there we were all dancing
around like lunatics, tearing our shirts off a la Hulk Hogan, making general
fools of ourselves. I looked over at
her and she was looking at me like I was the biggest axe-murdering psychopath
to ever walk the face of the earth.
Safe to say that I didn’t get anywhere with her. Ah, she was a big pain in the ass
anyway. Real Cheese Rules!
