My name is Dice. I've been a professional ticket scalper for 20 years. This is my story.
Dice. Weird nickname, I know. But no one in this business gets to pick their own nickname; if they did, there'd be a shitload of guys with names like, "Awesome Mike" or "Steve, The Great." Nope. Someone calls you something and, if it fits, the next day, everyone calls you that. My boy, Snags started calling this one kid, "Seabiscuit" on accounta he's got kind of a horse face (which was his nickname at the time). Horseface hated Snags callin' him "Seabiscuit," which seemed retarded to me. Really. You'd rather people call you "Horseface" than "Seabisuit?" No matter. "Seabiscuit" didn't make the cut. So "Horseface" stays "Horseface" and Snags doesn't get the high honor (just bragging rights, really) of originating another scalper's handle. Personally, I think he was on the money with this one.
Wow, that was a tangent. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. The Beginning. Most everything is true. Ish. I change the names of those who wish and those people and places whose names I cannot recall.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND...
LAWRENCE, 1989
Mary Helen was a petite and coquettish little darlin', 'bout my age, who spoke with a drawl as thick and as sweet as the Pecan Pie her mother was famous for in the tiny, frozen-in-time Alabama town where they were both born and raised. I rescued Mary Helen (her mother says, "a-stole") from the hum-drum life she dreaded as well as the charges she faced for check fraud in the nearby metropolis of Gadsden, Alabama. I spirited her away to Lawrence, Massachusetts where I was neither born nor raised, but which had the cheapest rent near my home town of Andover and was all I could afford at the time.
Cars drag-raced late at night on the street in front while cocaine and heroin were sold openly in the alley behind our run-down apartment building which, at one time, had been a single-family Victorian home. We liked to party. We smoked what passed for good weed back then and had a bar stocked with all top-shelf liquor for when we entertained friends. Truth? We never once entertained friends. It was always just me, Mary Hellen and her two dogs, Bo-bo and Pepper. The intoxicants were all for us and while we tolerated the activity outside our rear window, we generally eschewed "powders", except when we didn't and all hell would break loose.
Growing up, I had always loved music, but for some reason never dove all the way in. I remember I loved playing records on my brother's stereo (The Beatles - Abbey Road and the complete works of Jim Croce come to mind). But I never got a stereo of my own. And though a lot of my friends went to concerts, I rarely did. Before I saw my first show ("Yes" in the round at Boston Garden), I didn't get what the big deal was. But in 1989, both The Who and The Grateful Dead were touring North America and both would be at Foxboro Stadium in July of that year. Mary Helen and I both decided we would go since neither of us had seen either band. But we had almost no money between the two of us and she came up with the idea of buying a few extra tickets for each show (both shows were expected to sell out in under an hour) and use the money from the sale of those extra tickets to pay for our own seats as well as T-shirts and maybe a Limo (Mary Helen was obsessed with the idea and would never abbreviate "Limousine").
Next Installment:
SPRING 1989 - THE WHO @Sullivan Stadium, Foxboro, MA
Onsale - Ticketron - Retro Records, Lawrence, MA
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