If this isn’t a familiar logo to my generation…

You know, I have to wonder if EVERY generation thinks that they are the first ever immortal generation.  I know that the friends I went to high school with and I thought we surely must be…

Monty. He was that amazing punk rocker; the first one I ever met. Dude made punk uber cool, in my young eyes. 🙂

I met him through my then-boyfriend/now-bestie, Larry.

Monty had THE HAIR. It was so dark, but it had that white “skunk stripe” through it. I, to this day, do not know if it was natural or Lady Clairol, lol… I do, however, remember Lar introducing me to him. And that stripe fascinated the hell out of me!

I also know that Larry loved him like an estranged, long lost, did-everything-together-when-they-were-growing-up brother.

Monty was bad-ass. Monty was 50 Shades of Cool. Monty introduced this girl to the Ramones. This girl banged her head to more Ramones tunes than any middle-aged grandma should admit to, yet I did. That introduction sent me all over the genre musical map. My love of The Pretenders can be blamed on…no…credited to Monty.

I didn’t know him well, but I knew him, thanks to Larry.

So, the other day, Larry alerts me that Monty is having a huge health issue. That morning we had one of those “never want to have these” kind of conversations that we all start having in our mid forties, but won’t actually admit they are what they are until we are fifty or better.

“So you remember Monty,” I receive.

“Of course,” I reply, “How is he? Please tell me he is okay!”

Because sometimes you just ‘get a feeling’ when messages like this make themselves known, I’d just hoped that he’d had a wreck or something minor, you know…because lottery winnings arent ever brought up like that… In this case? Monty didn’t win the lottery. Oh, no. Dude was dying. Apparently that bastard, cancer, had him by the brain. When Lar told me, my heart broke. It broke a little more when I stalked his and his wife’s facebook pages.

One of my oldest buddies was crying. That doesn’t happen over nothing, for what it’s worth. I picked up, somewhere along the line, that this generation is iron-clad. We are immortal. Yeah, we have our scares… But honestly? They are just that; scares.

From what I gather, he has been sick for a while. As I’ve mentioned, I went through a huge reduction in “friends” on my FB page last summer, so I followed the people I remain close to and stalked the rest…or…friends by proxy. He and his wife started dating thirty-plus years ago. They’ve been married thirty-plus years. They have daughters.

So I was sitting two rooms away from my phone yesterday, with Suck Foot propped, because three hours of walking on Saturday was too much for it, and it (the phone, not suck foot) rang and it was a while before I got to it to see who called.

There was voicemail. My other friend, Brad, whom I haven’t seen, probably, since the summer of 84 when we all hung out at my little apartment in Lubbock, called. Monty lost his battle.

People are wrecked.

My generation is not the first ever immortal generation. Talk about a wake-up call.

Monty, this is for you…and Larry…and Brad…and Brian…and Jeff:

Be strong, you guys! Safe travels, Monty! ❤

(As a post-script – I have had people I care for die, but none have ever been from our generation.)