Man, I hate tellin' this story. Flat out gives me nightmares most of the time. Makes me kinda sad at the same time, though, and to be honest, I don't know which is worse. Hell, ain't gonna hurt to tell it again, I guess. Probably won't dream at all tonight anyway after I smoke myself into a coma with some of that good old...well, just never you mind with what. Your concern is with this story, right? The Legend of Bulletface. That name always makes me laugh, 'cause to me, he was always plain ol' Ronál DuPlante, my best friend since third grade. We were in a band together, y'know, called Now, his story is a legend. Just lemme light up this cigarette, I'll tell you all about it.
Nobody in Athens knew where his family came from. That's the one in East Tennessee, not Georgia, and definitely not Greece. They just kinda...appeared, y'know? The way that old house down the Anystreet USA folks thought was empty suddenly has people livin' in it. No realtors in and out, nobody ever scoutin' it out, just BAM, a family lives there. My mom said they could've been Creole, but who knows. All the years I knew him, I never bothered to ask. I figured it was more important to be his friend and accept him as I met him; thick black hair that hung in long ringlets, sort of a caramel tint to his skin, and dark green eyes, just like his mom's. What we did know was that Ron had a genuine talent for playin' guitar. He had this old beater that used to be a Jackson Kelly and a brand-new Marshall mini-stack. Weird? Yeah. I didn't ask questions, man. I was nine, watchin' this other nine year old dude play like I thought only grown-ups could play. He made it bark and growl, scream and wail, and weep as mournfully as a new widow. Six years later I still wasn't on the level he was back then. Needless to say, when high school came around, Ron had no trouble callin' female attention to himself. You'd think it would all go to his head, but he handled it better than most teenage boys are capable of. Hell, definitely better than I would've if all those tight little honies had been fawnin' over me like that. I was the bassist, so they seldom did. Even my sister Estelle couldn't help herself around him, and she came up with him same as I had. 'Course, now, she had always been a little bit.......off, so to speak.
So...bet you're wonderin' how a pretty-boy guitar slinger like Ron got a name like Bulletface. That's the second most intriguin' part of the story, my friend. Now, when I say Ron played a mean guitar, that's no exaggeration. By 19, he had put together one monster rig, man, and it was nothin' short of a weapon. He had given up the Kelly for a '76 Gibson SG he found in a dumpster and resurrected with Dimebuckers, a new neck, and a flat black finish. I can't recall for the life of me where he got that bridge, but it was almost the same design as the factory bridge, but twice as heavy, bolted right to the body. Dude would top-wrap the strings, always the heaviest shit he could find. Sustain for days, baby. This monstrosity was pumped through an original Ibanez TubeScreamer he found in a pawn shop and a Crate Blue Voodoo half-stack his dad found.....somewhere....and I have to tell you, I've never heard anything like the tone he built. He spent hours turnin' knobs, adjustin' levels, tryin' shit out, scribblin' it all down in this comp notebook. None of this would've been anything without talent, mind you, but luckily he was loaded with it. I was barely able to keep up sometimes, but hey, I was havin' a blast, right? Now that he was content with his sound, at least for the time bein', he began to turn a little more attention to the fine young women gathered around the stage at every gig we played. His tunes were heavy, not metal heavy, but definitely harder and grittier than his obvious blues influence, and it attracted some wild, smoky-eyed, tattooed lovelies to those tiny clubs.
One black-clad beauty in particular, a pale little imp with a voodoo doll tattooed on the right side of her neck and the longest purple hair I had ever seen, sort of neglected to mention her marriage to one men son-of-a-bitch who packed a nine at all times. When he found out the hard way, high in the saddle and just gettin' into his short strokes when ol' Husband came home unexpectedly after gettin' fired, he bolted out the back door in nothin' but his boots and his ZZ Top shirt wrapped around his junk. He barely got to the next block when he heard chick screamin' over Husband's yellin' and cursin', Gun or no, he wasn't about to let him hurt the little lady, so he wheels around to see what the deal is. What it was just happened to be ol' Husband drawin' a bead on his ass. Ron started to run back. The wife was swinging on his gun arm, beggin' him to stop. He fired anyway. Somethin' about the way she was hangin' there, the old man tryin' to aim, the way Ron turned, ducked, tried to dodge, one of those things or all of 'em, who knows why, caused that bullet to slam into Ron's cheekbone and lodge there. Doc said it was best to leave it there, that was that. Word got around quick, as it will in a small town, and before long, the meanest guitar player in all East Tennessee had a new nickname and a pretty damned cool backstory. We even changed the name of the band to Bulletface, and shit was great. Great for a while, anyway.
