It happened in February 1959 in Clear Lake, Iowa. Singer Dion DiMucci was 19, on a winter tour with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. The tour traveled by bus. A small plane was chartered for the next leg. He was offered a seat.
But $36 was exactly what his parents paid every month for their apartment in the Bronx. He couldn’t do it. He took the bus.
On February 3, 1959, the plane crashed. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot were killed. Dion was alive because he could not bring himself to spend his family’s rent.
He had grown up in Belmont, the Italian neighborhood of the Bronx, around Our Lady of Mount Carmel. His father, Pasquale, was a vaudeville entertainer. Dion taught himself guitar when he was 10. With the Belmonts, and then on his own, he became a star. “Runaround Sue.” “The Wanderer.”
But there was something the hits didn’t show.He had been drinking since he was 12. By 14, he was using heroin. The fame didn’t stop it. The crash didn’t stop it. “You know they didn’t have grief counseling in the Bronx,” he said years later.
One person stayed. Susan Butterfield, his sweetheart since his teens. They married in 1963. In his memoir, he wrote that she had “a high tolerance for unacceptable behavior.” But even Susan had a limit. She told him she could not stay and watch him destroy himself.
On April 1, 1968, he got down on his knees. “I got on my knees and asked God for help,” he said. He has not had a drink or a drug since. That same year, he recorded “Abraham, Martin and John,” a song for the leaders America had just lost. It brought him back to the charts.
And he kept going. In 1989, he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He came back to the Catholic faith of his childhood. He has reached out to men fighting addiction, including men behind bars. Today he writes about recovery with his friend Adam Jablin, a man he has known since Adam was 12. “We are in recovery together,” Dion says.
Every Italian family in the Bronx had a mother like his. The rent money counted out on the kitchen table. Every dollar meant something. Nobody wasted it on a plane.
Dion DiMucci is 87. He and Susan have been married for more than 60 years. In June, he walked onto a stage in Greenwich Village and played a sold-out show. He told the crowd about the $36. He told them about his sobriety. “In the last five years, I have written 40 of the best songs of my life,” he says.
Dion DiMucci said no to a plane seat because it cost his parents’ rent. He said yes to sobriety on his knees in 1968. He has been sober for 58 years, and he is still singing.
No comments:
Post a Comment