The long and strange journey of Joe and Steve

Published 1:15 pm Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The first time Steve Lemco was introduced to Joe Walsh — the musician, not the man — he was in the throes of his first and only acid trip, pushed out the door by a man who had earned his enthusiastic welcome to the Lake Tapps waterfront party with a bag of the stuff and a curt “Who wants to trip?”

Lemco was wading in the mournful echoes of his friends’ voices when one put in the James Gang’s “Yer Album,” then “The James Gang Rides Again,” on repeat.

He got it in his head that the guitar riffs were speaking with

“I came to the blitzed conclusion that I was supposed to get some kind of message from the music,” Lemco writes. Then the premonitions came: “Joe Walsh has something to do with my life. He is going to quit his band and be known by his own name. I will write songs about him and meet him many times.

“We will go horseback riding together.”

And meet him he did. Many, many times. In fact, the only part of the premonition that hasn’t come to pass is their shared equestrian appreciation.

It’s the kind of coincidence that can only be attributed to serendipitous happenstance, time travel, or a level of determination unique to the crazed obsessive.

One could be forgiven for believing Lemco’s relationship with Walsh was the focus of his eponymous book “Joe & Me.” But it only serves as the strange thru-line to his memoir and the life that inspired it.

In reality, “Joe & Me” is the story of Lemco and his complicated relationship with his older brothers, each famous — or infamous — in their own circles.

Ed, Ron and Larry: the motorcycle millionaire, the bank robber and the drug dealer to the stars. The three are front and center for the first three chapters of the book, which cover Lemco’s childhood years in Australia, New York’s Bronx and Bonney Lake.

“Joe & Me” is Lemco’s second printed book—he has a handful of children’s stories available only online—after 1999’s sales book “You Gotta Wanna.” A few short years after that book’s release, Lemco’s professional and personal life unraveled and he slipped into depression, which he still suffers from today, he said. Between depressive spells, he’s learned to turn to writing as an outlet.

“I couldn’t just write about Joe, because then it would be ‘I met Joe Walsh, I’m so cool; I know Joe Walsh, I’m so cool,'” Lemco said. “And I wasn’t sure if the biographical stuff was interesting on its own. So they support each other.”

Indeed, the first third of the book reads like a relentless war journal of boyhood: a marathon rat-tat-tat of unintentional fires, failed copped feels and other miscellaneous schemes that, more often than not, involved animal excrement.

Ed, who would go on to open an auto dealership in Albany, Oregon and found the 20 Club model of motorcycle sales training, is conspicuously in the background of the collective Lemco childhood—always mentioned as the pragmatic sibling who pockets his milk money for a rainy day—but his presence looms large over the book’s backstory. Ed died of cancer July 15, a little more than two months after informing Lemco of his illness.

“I had started writing a few days before I found out he was sick,” Lemco said. “And when I found out, it became a race to finish it and put it in Ed’s hands. Which I did. But by that time, he didn’t have enough strength to read it.”

Longtime plateau residents and local history buffs will find descriptions of a Bonney Lake a world apart from the Bonney Lake community of today. The Bonney Lake of Lemco’s childhood is not the moneyed community of today; people eked out a living out of ramshackle houses in the woods. At Sumner Elementary School, he was exotic: “The Bonney Lake Kid.”

The narrative doesn’t find its groove until Lemco’s teen years, shortly before his epiphany. There’s a foreboding sense of life as he knows it falling apart, between his brothers’ exit from his everyday life, a teen abortion and his first experiments with drugs. Once Walsh makes his namesake entrance—almost halfway into the text—Lemco is tossed his line in the ocean. If the average man searches for a meaning to his life, Lemco doesn’t. He has Joe.

It starts with Lemco and a friend posing as roadies to sneak backstage. And from there it just… kind of doesn’t stop. At intervals of several years at a time, he tracks down motorcades to after-parties, hands Walsh poetry, picnics with family of the Eagles, talks his way past armed police and arranges for a connected hotel room next to Walsh’s in a locked down hall. That last example, the third substantial meeting between the two, almost put Lemco on the Very Suspicious list.

“He came back to the room with this big, tattooed guy,” he said. “And he told me, ‘Look man, you’ve been cool the few times we met, but you’ve shown up backstage, you’ve followed me to hotels, and now you have a hotel room next to me. What am I supposed to think?’ So I finally explained everything to him: my vision, how all the opportunities just appeared to meet him. He heard that, he just laughed, shooed his bodyguard away.

“He said ‘That’s all cool, but why on Earth would we be riding on horseback together?'”

Lemco claims he’s met Walsh more than 16 times, each meeting more or less amicable depending on the twitchiness of the security staff that evening. In between, he writes about brother Larry’s success and death pushing blow, his devotion to brother Ron during a 40 year prison sentence for armed robbery (Ron only served four years and has written his own book, titled “Rest Stop”), and the life and death of his own marriages.

The narrative as a whole begs the question: What does Joe Walsh have to do with Lemco’s life, anyway? Is he just a determined fan, or is there something genuinely supernatural at play?

For his part, Lemco opts for the latter, pointing to his apparent sixth sense for arranging meetings and entirely improbable coincidences, such as picking up a hitchhiker who happened to be the cousin of Eagle Timothy B. Shmit.

To date, every one of his premonitions has come true, he said, except for his horseback ride with Walsh.

Lemco published “Joe & Me” shortly after his brother Ed’s death. It is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. His website and blog can be found at www.stevelemco.net.