If Eric Burdon had written a confession, before he died, it might have read something like this. Maybe I should slow down a bit because Eric was more than a confession. He wasn’t always a bad guy. He had, however, quite a run of bad luck.

He grew up in a small town in Northern Indiana. It may have had a name but Eric only knew it by the names his father used: Hell, Desolation Station, and occasionally Corn Hole, Indiana. His father spent many dreary days working in the depths of a steel mill. His mother provided for the family at home, cooking, making and mending clothing. While they managed to survive they were never very well off.

There came a summer that the mill closed its doors and shut down all the machinery. The lack of life from the mill trickled out into the town like a river of rage and depression. His father began to drink in the desperation and liquor, only showing sparks of happiness when he was all drunk. Later in the year, on a cold night in October, it was a night so cold that it seemed to find every opening in the house and every pore on a body to chill even the warmest soul into shivers. It was on this night that Eric’s father gambled away the last of his family’s savings before disappearing to destinations unknown.

Eric nor his mother ever knew what happened to his father. She feverishly tried to replace her estranged husband with a series of ill-suited men each one worse than the one before. Eric learned that trust was something that only fools believed in, fools and children. He was growing up fast, too fast.

Throughout high school he never really had any friends. What friends he could claim he always kept at a distance. He never brought them home. He mostly kept to himself and walked around town. When he walked he would dream of a world that wasn’t so twisted and hateful in a fruitless attempt to envision a world in which he were master of his destiny.

He tried his hand at writing but couldn’t muster the passion to stay with it.  He barely graduated high school and never went on to college. His mother passed away shortly after he turned 19, leaving behind a legacy of depravity and poverty. Eric was virtually penniless when he moved to Indianapolis in search of a brighter future.

Now back to that confession, you know all you need to know about who Eric was, for all that it matters anyway.

The Confession of Eric Burdon

It might have been the cold weather. It reminded me of that night in October so many years ago. Where normally I would’ve seen people outside milling about their porches, I saw no one. It was as if the entire world had suddenly packed up and left Indianapolis as my prize; a prize that I needed only to walk through to obtain.

It might have been the way the blue neon sign beckoned to me from above. I had never been in this part of Indianapolis, the neighborhood known as Irvington to the locals.  The sign lit up the sidewalk with a colorful display of tragically unappealing French surrounding a beautiful, full moon.

The Le Lune Levant Club didn’t fit into the normal architecture in Irvington. It was a two-story cinder block construction that looked like it used to house a store. The outside had been painted jet black and to break up the darkness an artist had drawn a mural depicting a full moon on the side that faced the road.  The front of the building was home to a window filled with posters of various bands and one curious poster with a woman who leered up at me in sexy, flirty, and yet somehow disturbing way.

It might have been the poster. It might have been destiny. No matter how many times I go over that night in my head, I have come to the conclusion that I will never know what it was that drew me into the Le Lune Levant Club that night.

To Be Continued (Stay tuned this week for the rest of the story)