Pete, born in 1962, and Jennifer Smith Petrovich, born in 1964, married in 1988. Jenny gave birth to a son, Gregory, in 1992 and a daughter, Gloria, in 1994. They divorced in 2002 after Jennifer fell for a high school sweetheart with whom she reconnected on the Internet. She left the family the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving 2001 and resettled in Garfield.
On Gloria's 10th birthday, April 3, 2004, Pete buys Gloria an electric guitar, a royal blue Danelectro Hodad Baritone, which from a distance looked a little like a Les Paul. By her 13th birthday she was pretty good, writing songs for her girl band, Maven and the Night Ravens. "She was beyond her years," as Orin Holman liked to say.
Pete was proud of Gloria's dedication to practice. She had always felt close to her mother, and the divorce was a shocking surprise, an abandonment that wounded the girl. The guitar seemed to be a kind of cure for her anger, her loneliness, and her longing. In addition to the rock music, which was her passion, Gloria also studied classical guitar, and progressed swiftly in technique and interpretation, favoring Baroque works by Lully, Corelli, and Buxtahude. She cared about harmony and theory and dreamed a little about maybe studying it in college.
There were days after school when she would come home, do her homework and chores, and help Pete and Greg prepare dinner. She had the whole evening to sit in her room, plug her headset into her small amp, and play, and some nights she would spend three hours in focused concentration. It was paying off, and the Night Ravens were sounding pretty good for a middle school garage girl band. They were a sextet, a phrase they all loved to use on their parents, each enjoying the reactions with glee and a heightened sense of power.
Her songwriting was a talent, and she would say, "They just come to me, when I'm riding the bus to school, or sitting in math class, the words and the music, together, they just show up on my doorstep.
"Mother"
chords:
F E F E A frets: 1st slide to 2nd/5th
Chorus
DE DEA frets 10th/12th/5th
All she ever craved was a stage,
Her elixir to fix the rage.
Fight, fight the rage!
Dance, Mama! Dance!
With her blue collar mantle and coveted orb,
She stood a queen.
She took no prisoners,
Butchered every Philistine.
I was bought and bartered several times,
Caught off guard by her nursery rhymes!
Fight, fight the rage!
Dance, Mama! Dance!
I'm rereading the Brothers Grimm for thee!
Looking for some empathy,
For thee!
Some days my dad delivers
Truckloads of lumbering advice,
But I just want the zest and a slice
Of my mom.
A crap throw of the dice.
How can the old folks smother me
But with their dreadful sympathy?
Gloria was listening to a lot of old rock and blues, and that led to no shortage of inspiration for the witty, Goth princess of Warhaven. She was curious about the rock satirists like Ray Davies and Frank Zappa, and was enjoying early Dylan recordings like Highway 61. One Sunday afternoon, while being driven back from one of their monthly visits in Garfield with their mother, Gloria spun around in her seat and rapped the following to Greg, who, looking up from his graphic novel, nodded in the rhythm, loving it.
When you're weak and you crave or are cranky,
Don't fret!
Just don your solar-powered cooling hair net!
When you lust for power or are lost for speed,
You bet!
Tighten your solar-powered cooling hair net!
The girls will be envious
And the boys will rave.
No sweat!
With your solar-powered cooling hair net.
When you're obstreperously mean,
Trash talkin' vociferously keen,
My pet!
You've forgotten your solar-powered cooling hair net.
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