I first met Joey in 1981 by running an ad in the Village Voice for a drummer wanted for a tour in Spain. He called and came over and I liked his wry smile immediately. He had a mop of black hair and evident sincerity and kindness. At 22, he seemed quite professional, a real rock ’n’ roller from Bayside, Queens.

One of his bands in high school was called the Creedmore State Band, named after a mental institution in their neighborhood, that played in weird time signatures like 7 and 11, which is difficult for the drummer. He had toured the U.S. with a band called The Fast and had stayed in a Jefferson Airplane house in San Francisco. The Fast played Max’s Kansas City and hung with the Velvet Underground and Warhol’s crowd there. He told me that the other two members of The Fast were gay so he got every woman in every gig on tour all across America and all the way back. OK, one or two got away but all in all…

He dressed a bit like the young Elvis Presley and was cool. I think that his surname, Poliseno, means “citizen” in Italian. He hadn’t gone to college but was articulate, thoughtful, observant, and always waited to judge his feelings before answering rather than speak off the cuff like I did. His responses were in a characteristic Queens accent. I played him a tape of our band Big Game and told him we hoped to go to Spain to play in major clubs there.

Like a competent technician explaining matters to a layman, Joey could make beats very clear and perceptible. Counting “One-ee-and-uh, Two-ee-and-uh, Three-ee-and-uh, Four-ee-and-uh,” he could tell me, “Michael, stress the two-and and the three beats and then four-and,” and I immediately understood that was the fourth, fifth, and seventh eighth-notes into the measure. He once hung with my mother at the Knitting Factory listening to a band, and she still swears she learned more about music that night than anytime in her life.

We did indeed go to Spain, arriving in Madrid and crashing at my pal Juan Muñoz’ parents’ country place in Torrelodones, not far from where Generalissimo Franco used to live. The place had a swimming pool and was generally fabulous but a bit unkempt, as apparently nobody much used it, even in summer. I rented a Renault 5 to get around but it was quite remote out there.

Our manager Nacho found us a better solution. A friend of his was a sociology professor at U Madrid and had a house with about five bedrooms and a guest cottage, which spare rooms he rented out to students to supplement his income. A maid came daily to clean up from the previous festivities and prep a lunch for us. The prof had some vacancies, so I returned the car and we went to stay there. Singer Brian and bassist Marla had their own room while Joey and I bunked on the couches. As it happened, two of the inmates were underemployed actresses. I got one and Joey got the other, and we moved to their bedrooms, thus making the maid’s work a bit easier.

In Spain, we became fast friends. The lead singer and the bass player were a couple so Joey and I depended on each other’s company. He couldn’t speak Spanish, so I did a running muttered brief translation of whatever was going down, summarizing as necessary. For example, one critic went on and on about the band we were watching at Sol, the hottest club in Madrid in the day, and I muttered the translation, “He says the band sucks.” Joey nodded agreement.

Every day after lunch, the band would jam on acoustic instruments at the table, with the onlookers participating and we stopping periodically to arrange the tune. Brian and I were the scribes, taking notes on what we played. Joey played passionately on tiny Moroccan ceramic bongos he had bought at a flea market. I was playing a Spanish flamenco guitar I bought for $100 downtown. Brian played his violin or a flamenco axe that lay around the house unused for years, which I had dusted off and repaired. You haven’t heard nothin’ until you’ve heard me do James Brown’s “I Feel Good” on a flamenco axe, with Joey taking a drum break on bongos. Or our version of “Purple Haze” for classical guitar, very amusing to the guests. But mostly we played the band’s songs so Brian could fine-tune the melodies.

And Joey and I had a technical problem, too, in that while Marla contributed a lot to the band’s image, she had the faintest idea how to play bass, so Joey and I had to chop the rhythm section by ourselves with Marla following rather than syncing. It was challenging. We kept my rhythm guitar comprehensible to her. When I had a lead part, Joey just played louder to emphasize the beat and I kept the syncopation relatively simple.

 

The band broke up shortly after we came home. Joey moved around the corner from my apartment and we built a tiny music studio on 13^th Street just east of First Avenue. We would rent it out to other bands and it even had a little 4-track recorder built in. He kept his drums there and I kept my bass and guitar stuff. We had a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer and a vocal system. It was nice, if dingy, but no vermin and it was relatively safe for the East Village.

We tried forming another band called Unholy Partner with a pickup bass player and sometimes a singer friend but it never went anywhere. Joe found work between gigs as a plumber and welder. He married a buxom Canadienne to get her a green card. An attractive girl but with a terrible high-pitched giggle, she got a job with Cirque du Soleil running around in a scanty costume, which suited her fine.

About 1986, I found that I couldn’t support myself with music so I quit the business and closed the studio. Joey and I remained friends even though I was working on Madison Avenue in a Japanese real estate company and our lifestyles got farther apart. His Canadienne took off and Joey got a new girlfriend, a schoolteacher, a nice Jewish girl named Amy. Joey’s comment? “You know, still being married is kinda handy,” meaning that he wasn’t free to marry Amy. Together, they bought an apartment for Joey to renovate while they were living in it.

At first, Joey worked diligently on the place but he seemed to tire quickly after a while and things sat undone for a week at a time. Amy got frustrated and took off. After a few more weeks, Joey went to the doctor. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He finished the apartment renovation by carefully contracting the parts he couldn’t manage, and Amy successfully sold it. Maybe it was partly out of guilt about leaving, but she acted very honorably, giving him a full half of the net proceeds even though technically, he hadn’t done his half of the work. I told her she was a good citizen and she demurred, “Hardly.” I figured that she thought he was just lazy because she didn’t know he was sick. Joey pointed out that in a way, she was lucky to leave because she wouldn’t have to spend her life with an invalid. He was dismissive when I said his story was kinda terrible. “Man, I lived like five lifetimes before I was 19. I can’t complain now.”

After my divorce in 1990, my new uptown girlfriends didn’t much like Joey, so usually I would go visit him without them. He was still active enough for bongos, if not traps, so we came up with a folksinger and bongos act, but never took it public. It was just for fun. One girlfriend from those days used to dance to it.

He moved back home with his parents in Bayside. His mother Mary was a large woman who favored an enormous easy chair in front of the TV. She cooked well and always asked me if I were hungry when I visited. His father Nick grew arugula in the yard of their house, and their table was where I first tasted it. “Yeah, my father, he’s like Fred Flintstone, man. Always tinkering in the basement or making jewelry to sell.” The old couple had given up their booth in the Paramount Diamond Market at Canal and Bowery and pivoted to a stall in the 26^th Street flea market on Saturdays, where Joey sold musical instruments and other rock paraphernalia. And Nicky had to tinker a lot because otherwise his house would fall apart.

When Joey and I went out, it was usually steak and beer. While I have exotic tastes, I can think of better ways to pass the time than convincing people to try tofu and bitter melon. For a while we favored Keen’s Steakhouse in the garment district but by 2000, as he got weaker, this became unworkable. We went more local to him—we’d wheel him around the corner to a steak joint near the LIRR station on Bell Boulevard in Bayside and “shoot a cow.” It wasn’t good for our waistlines but we enjoyed it, kind of like old Mafia guys reminiscing. We talked music and had a few beers, and I would go home.

Rather than our beef habit or his mother’s lasagna, it was lack of exercise that eventually made Joey fat, and this was a technical problem, as it was difficult to get him out of his chair and into bed. I showed a snapshot of him to our former band leader Brian, who pointed to Joey and asked, “Who’s that?” I was closer so I recognized him as he was in his new corpulence but to someone who hadn’t seen him for years, it must have been a shock.

I moved out of New York in 2007, around the time his mother Mary died. His father Nicky found purpose in cooking for Joey and caring for him. The State of New York appointed a caseworker, who arranged for a woman to come to their home for eight hours a day to help. From their point of view, it was cheaper than an institution.

Nicky told me he wanted to make a will so I hired an attorney to help, an expert in State benefits. It was important to plan so that if Joey received any inheritance, he wouldn’t lose his State benefits, which would be a disaster. We made a trust, and I became Trustee. Next, it was evident that they had to move before the old house fell around their ears, so they found an apartment up the street from it and moved to it in 2010.

Nick died in 2014 and I took charge of the probate and trust activation. The State sent round-the-clock nurses. Atrophy has shrunk Joey to the point where he is easy for the nurses to lift. Now paralyzed completely, Joey lives like Stephen Hawking, with a voice command gizmo for his computer, phone, and television. “Computer, down, down, right, enter,” etc. “Television, mute.”

But never a complaint, never imprecations against the Gods or whatever fate had put him there. My mother calls him about once a month is always sad afterwards, but Joey is still a hero. “Hi Barbara, what’s happening?” I visit when I’m in town, say once a year. I’m sure I’ll get five minutes off of hell or whatever for the attention I’ve given Joey over the years but I do it because he’s a prince and because he would do it for me.