JM: Yes I am!

CN: When was the last time I saw you, James?

JM: I honestly, I don’t remember.

CN: I think it was-- you were in Testament and you were staying at the Gramercy Park?

CN: Really, like what kind of things were you doing?

JM: Well I’d be talking to someone and covering a subject, or I’d ask a question and they’d answer it, and literally a few minutes later, I would ask them again as if I never asked them before. And I was doing that a lot—a lot, like multiple times with the same person in the same conversation. And they were like, ‘Oh, you just asked me that.’ ‘Really? I don’t remember talking about it.’ That kind of thing.

CN: Right.

JM: The weird thing was having to go by what my friends and family told me about it, because I don’t remember a lot of it. A lot of that time period.

CN: Right.

JM: I did a lot of great things with my career during that year, and a lot of the memory on a lot of it is pretty scrambled up, if not, missing all together, you know, in my head.

CN: Oh, that’s wild to have done so much good stuff and can’t remember doing it.

JM: Yeah, I remember very little of working on Testament’s The Gathering album.

CN: Well I remember Chuck (Billy) was telling me that you were getting very erratic.

JM: Yeah.

CN: And it’s like, they couldn’t count on you to be at places. Like sometimes you would forget to go...

JM: Yep.

CN: like...someplace, for a show one time he said.

JM: That’s right. But yeah, my memory was so…it was disappearing.

CN: And you were saying, on the website also, that it effected your vision.

JM: Oh yeah. It did. It effected my optic nerves as well, and, scrambled my vision. But my vision has returned. I have pretty good vision now. My vision is much better than what it was a year ago.

CN: Yeah, that’s frightening to lose your sight.

JM: Yeah, in fact a year ago, I was told that I would never be able to drive again.

CN: Wow.

JM: And jjust last week I was told, ‘Hey, you’re ok to drive now, if you want.’

CN: Isn’t that a good thing, you know?

JM: Yeah, and it’s the same doctor so, he’s pretty amazed at, the improvement that I have shown. So a lot of the visual defect was caused by the pressure on the nerves, and once the pressure was removed, it began to come back. You never really know--it’s a roll of the dice whether the nerve was gonna be okay once the pressure was removed, or if the pressure actually caused a irreversible damage--that was a roll of the dice.

CN: Right, right. How big was the actual tumor?

JM: It was about the size of three golf balls the way it was described to me.

CN: Three golf balls? I heard it was one golf ball.

JM: Nope, about the size of three.

CN: Wow man, that’s huge! That’s like, half your head.

JM: Yeah, it’s pretty big, but it was in there. The thing about the brain is that, you know, it didn’t make my head huge, because, the thing about the brain is that you can squeeze it and squish it.

CN: Yeah, and it’s contained in it’s own little…

JM: It’s that, it was a great effect, you know. That’s what happened. It grew upward in my brain, and it put pressure on my brain into the top of my skull.

CN: Right. You had headaches and stuff like that?

JM: I did, yeah, the funny thing though is that I do not remember ever having any. You know, the doctor asked me over a year ago about it, whether I had a lot of headaches. And I said ‘No, I never really had headaches’. And he’s like ‘Wow, that’s amazing.” And, I was talking to my friend and he was like ‘Yeah man, you would always have headaches. You would always wake me up for Advil and ibuprofen and stuff like that.’

CN: And, you don’t remember?

JM: And I’m like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even remember that I had bad headaches’. But apparently I was having severe headaches.

CN: Right.

JM: And I don’t have any memory of it at all.

CN: You know, when you were going through that, I was at…you know, talking to Chuck (Billy) about his whole cancer thing. And…I was having some problems of my own. I went to the doctor and they’re like ‘Well, the thing you’re talking about could be caused by a pituitary tumor’, and I was mortified. Cuz, I knew what you were going through.

JM: Yeah.

CN: And…they told me I had to have an MRI on my head.

JM: Yeah, I just had one yesterday.

CN: So, the thing is that I had a real fear of that because they inject that dye into you.

JM: Yeah.

CN: The radioactive stuff. And I didn’t know, you know, how advanced it is now and whether it’s the same stuff they used to use, like in the late 70’s, because…I had a friend who went in for a CAT scan and they injected that dye, and he had an allergic reaction and he died. So, I was like, so afraid, like I got a kid to take care of. Do I take the chance of having an allergic reaction or just like, finding out whether I have a horrible brain tumor—which will let me live longer… I was so freaked out…

JM: That’s the thing about pituitary tumors. Find out as soon as you can. They are treatable.

CN: Yeah, I was just lucky that I got over my fear and went for it and had it done, and it turned out that there wasn’t a tumor there, but…they were puzzled. They still couldn’t figure out why I was having these crazy symptoms.

JM: Wow.

CN: I dunno, I think it was some kind of medication that they were giving me that made the symptoms. But they scared me to death.

JM: Yeah, yeah.

CN: And, um, you know, and at the same time, to hear that you were going through that, just made me even more frightened.

JM: Yeah, but…if you reached to the point where I was, you wouldn’t…you wouldn’t even hardly remember about it. You wouldn’t even remember to call the damn doctor, you know?CN: Right.

JM: just the fact that, you had the presence of mind…was your vision effected?

CN: My vision…it was really blurry and um…I had the hormonal problems that were going on. But uh…I dunno. I guess it was the medication that they were giving me. My vision was effected, but even more so…my skin started getting dry, I started looking really old.

JM: Oh yeah, my skin got really dry and nasty.

CN: And, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m looking older than what I am. This is scar-ry.’

JM: Yeah, another thing that caused the dried skin is, thyroid problems. Actually, that’s where it comes from when you have a pituitary tumor.

CN: That’s worse.

JM: When it gets messed up. Your glands…your system goes wacky.

CN: Yeah.

JM: I…I now have to take pills to like…you know… to bolster up my thyroid gland. I can probably use the injection.

CN: Right.

JM: It was—my adrenal levels are kinda low.

CN: But, uh, I think um, Piggy from Voivod also takes synthroid or something similar, cuz, you know, he had cancer in his thyroid gland.

JM: Wow.

CN: Like, in the late 80’s.

JM: Yeah, I remember something about that because I was always a Voivod fan.

CN: Yeah, I just saw them recently. Have they been down by you yet?

JM: No, not that I am aware of. None of my friends that I talk to online in this area say shit to me about a show, until a day after. They’re like ‘Dude! That show was awesome! How come you weren’t there?’

CN: Oh man

JM: ‘Because you didn’t mention it to me shithead, when we were talking last week…’

CN: How long was your recovery?

JM: Well…as I was saying, the tumor was discovered very long after it had had an effect on me.

CN: Right.

JM: It was just so gradual, so I basically lost everything, everybody that I knew. They kinda stepped back from me because I had become so erratic. I had become so unreliable and I had no memory to speak of. And like I was saying, most of this was related to me by a whole bunch of other people, you know? Almost everyone I dealt with said that I had so much going on, it was amazing. It was starting to hit me in ’99. From the beginning of ’99, I know itwas hitting me already and then by the end of ’99, it was already in full swing, because I was having major problems.

CN: Right.

JM: And certainly by the beginning of 2000, when I was last in California and then I went to Florida. So…It was bad until it was finally discovered. I don’t remember anything except Chuck’s (Schuldiner’s) death. Cuz it [the tumor] got discovered by accident. I couldn’t even get back to Florida. If my sister wouldn’t have sent me a Greyhound bus ticket, and I if I wouldn’t have somehow found the presence of mind and the lucidity at that moment to focus on that Greyhound ticket, to get to that terminal in time, I would not have been able to…I would have moments where I could grab on to some kind of something, apparently, you know?

CN: Right.

JM: I made it. I must have, because I managed in ‘99 to get more done in my career in that single year than I did in the rest of my career combined. I mean, I played on The Gathering. I recorded for that album. I recorded and released my second solo album, Feeding The Machine. I also played on a full lp and an ep by this band named Konkhra, and played on numerous other albums as a guest, including an Aggressor album, a Vicious Rumors album, and a few other things. I got a lot done that year. But, like I said, by the end of that year, I was…totally shocked. I didn’t remember anything. Somehow in early 2000, my sister sent me a Greyhound bus ticket. I think they had been trying to get me to come home for a while because they could tell that something was really wrong.

CN: When they talked to you, they could hear something wasn’t right, huh?

JM: Yeah, my dad told me that I was calling and asking questions and when we were finished, I was calling back within a half hour.

CN: And ask him again, right?

JM: Yeah You would have thought…most parents who knew their kid was doing that kind of thing would have gotten on a plane, you know? But, I was a grown man and my family has more of an attitude of, ‘what you’re gonna do?’ If I was acting weird, everyone would just let me be, you know?

CN: Yeah, they would just think that you were eccentric.

JM: Yeah, but, you know.

CN: But, there comes a time when eccentric and really off the deep end is a glaring difference, you know?

JM: Yeah, they have never known me to behave that way. Jjust the fact that I went to Florida, my sister was really, you know, just the most proactive being in my family. Somehow it stayed in my mind to stay in the bus until I got back to Florida. But, I still wasn’t diagnosed until about 5 months after I got back to Florida. You see…I pretty much I stayed in every one of my family member’s houses and several friend’s houses, including people that I had met just recently after getting back. Basically, I would sleep 14 to 16 hours a day. I couldn’t control it.

CN: Do you remember getting the diagnosis?

JM: I have a fuzzy memory of it. But what happened was, 5 minutes after I was there my dad blood tested me. He started testing me shortly after I got back.

CN: He thought you were on drugs.

JM: Yeah, right. He was convinced that I was on drugs. I guess he did it to get some proof for the whole family--for everybody, for anybody. He gave me a drug test, but I was not on drugs so I passed it. He gave me a different kind [of test] and I passed that too. So my dad wasn't like, 'Hey, there’s something wrong with him medically.' He thought, 'Well, if its not drugs, he’s gone crazy…' He never thought that I might actually have something physically wrong with me. I actually suggested it to him one time, and I remember it… When I first started to get ill in California, I thought I was suffering from adult onset diabetes.

CN: Why’d you think it was diabetes?

JM: Well because of the fatigue, and in particular the vision was getting funny.

CN: But you didn’t have the thirst…

JM: Oh I was, constantly thirsty. I could not get enough to drink. So those factors all combined, I latched onto that when I still had enough mind to think that it was something medical.

CN: So what I was wondering was, did you remember the diagnosis, or did you remember going to the hospital, or did you just, like, wake up in the hospital like ‘What the fuck happened to me?’

JM: No, it was nothing like that. I knew about the surgery, basically, a month before it happened. Mmy father thought that it was a different thing. Eventually they all stepped back from me, but my sister still wanted to help. At one point she told me that she had found me after I called her, and took me to a hotel and paid for a week’s stay… I had already stayed at her house for a while and uh, I was screwing her up for her job because I would sleep all day and stay up all night when she was trying to sleep. The limited time that I was up was during the night time, and I would make noise that woke her up and kept her awake, and she was screwing up at her job. So she put me up at the hotel and as the week wound down she called my Dad and said ‘You have to help James. Something is wrong with him.’ My dad said, ‘There's nothing wrong with him but mental problems.’ And she said, ‘You gotta help him.’And so my dad came and picked me up as my time ran out there at the hotel, and pretty much took me around to any like free county stuff--took me to county health… From there, it was the weird thing, I went to doctors and they thoroughly checked me out… and they prescribed this generic version of like, Zantac--Ranitidine or something, and said I was having acid reflux. That was another symptom. That was just one symptom of many. I was having all these symptoms and all they could give me was this drug for it. And that was like, a county hospital. So, don’t count on the guys at county hospitals.

CN: So do you have memory of going in for surgery?

CN: The guy probably thought you were nuts.

JM: And the guy behind the counter was just listening to that. So I’m trying to tell my dad, 'Even when one magnifies, Dad, I’ve got a blurry spot, right here. All that it’s really doing is magnifying the blurry spot.' So the optician says, ‘Look, let me give you an eye test. I’ll do it for free, I wanna check him out.’ And he was just an optician, not an ophthalmologist, working behind the counter at Optiworld, doing a little quick one-on-one eye exam. Probably within about two minutes, he was telling me and my dad that he thought I had a tumor. I remember the feeling like you know, like, ‘huh?’ And that day, what he said, this part is burned into my memory, clear as day. ‘I think you have a fully encapsulated pituitary macro-adenoma. It's a benign tumor, but it’s obviously very large by now because its cutting off your optic nerve already. You need to get an MRI right away. You need an ophthalmologist to properly diagnose this, I’m not an ophthalmologist, but I’ll write you a note and you call this ophthalmologist, I’ll give you the number, call him up, you’ll be able to get in quickly and get a vision test, and you’ll need that to get the referral for the MRI.’ And that’s exactly what happened. We went from there. I still need to drop by there, to that Optiworld…

CN: And thank the guy, right?

JM: I don’t remember who he is, I don’t remember what he looks like, so I have to go with my dad and hope that he does. And yeah, basically thank the guy. If he wouldn’t have decided to make an executive decision and give me that free eye exam of his own volition, I would probably be dead now. That was August of 2001 that that happened, and they said I would have certainly been dead by January of 2002.

CN: Wow. So you feel lucky then, huh?

JM: In a lot of ways.

CN: Changes your outlook on life after you have something like that happen to you, doesn’t it?

JM: Sure does, sure does.

CN: So when you woke up in the hospital, you couldn’t really move, could you?

JM: No, not really. I could move my arms and my thighs but very, very little.

CN: Yeah, its not like the pressure was gradually released from your brain. It was really quick, so it couldn’t really mishmash itself back to where it was before.

JM: Yeah, it definitely knocked my whole body out, like my entire body was blacked out.

CN: Yeah because your pituitary really deals with a lot of things. It deals with more than just giving you secondary sexual characteristics, lets put it that way. So it’s pretty serious. How long before you regained enough manual dexterity to think about playing again?

JM: Well, I tried to play as soon as possible. I think I didn’t have a guitar anymore cause I lost everything--all my guitars, all my studio gear, everything. But I managed to recover a small portion of my belongings in California, like a bunch of my old vinyl albums and stuff. The guys who I had left them with, the storage space I had left them in, they were honest enough to give them back to me. But my music gear and guitars, I left them with people in places who weren’t honest at all, stole it all. So my next-door neighbor, next to my dad, his son had an extra guitar, and he decided that he was gonna loan me that guitar so I’d have something to play. They brought it over and I wanted to try to start playing it right away, but I knew my fingers weren’t really up to it. I didn’t really have the dexterity back. But, I would start to build it with that guitar. Just touching the strings and pressing down on them hurt the skin so much that it felt like razors were cutting it.

CN: Well yeah, ‘cause you hadn’t played in a while.

JM: Yeah it was that, and it was the whole thyroid thing. My skin had become extremely sensitive.

CN: Sensitive. Yeah…Also because, you know, your nerves where…not all smushed up.

JM: Yeah.

CN: They’re a little more…free to do their thing I guess.

JM: Yes, it was sore but slowly my fingers started to feel better and I started to play. I kept trying to play every couple of days, until I noticed that it wouldn’t hurt as bad. And I started playing again, and I would say it took me probably most of a year.

CN: Wow. You know, I think that the music probably, because that was the linear thread thread through your life that kept you focused, probably, that’s why you did so well with in that year where you don’t remember much else. Because, at that point, it was hard wired, so much into your being, you know, and music has a lot of curative and power to it. People don’t believe that, but I do.

JM: Oh, I do.

CN: The vibrations of it.

JM: I certainly do.

CN: So, I think that uh,…maybe that’s the one thing that kept you going. So, now that you’re…I mean obviously you’re feeling much better.

JM: Yeah…I still have residual problems…my hands and my joints…pretty much ache all the time. They’re very stiff and very tight.

CN: Did the doctors say that it’s gonna go away?

JM: Nope, the doctors haven’t been able to clear thatup until now. My neuro-oncologist yesterday, during my consultation with him after my MRI, finally, for the first time, suggested something that might be the cause.

CN: Hmm.

JM: Cuz I’m worried about it, so I’m gonna be on top of it and monitor it, as quickly as possible. He said that sometimes in addition, that the pituitary tumors can secrete growth hormones.

CN: Yeah.

JM: He said that could explain the stiffness and pain in the joints.

CN: Yeah, because your bones grow at the ends.

JM: Yeah.

CN: And your feet start getting bigger, that kinda stuff.

JM: Yeah.

CN: Yeah…that could explain it, because it’s like going through puberty again.

JM: Yeah.

CN: Remember the growing pains you used to get?

JM: Yep.

CN: Cuz you guys grow a lot faster than we do. We kinda grow…slowly over a few years, but you guys shoot up within a couple of years.

JM: Well, I will definitely look into it soon, and I hope that there’s a medication that can counteract that, if that be the case.

CN: Hmm, at least it’s not so serious that you’ve turned into a giant or anything,. That’s the extreme…

JM: Oh, no I don’t seemed to have changed size. I’m still wearing all the same clothes.

CN: Well, that’s good then.

JM: Yeah.

CN: Because the extreme end of it, is like giantism, you know?

JM: Yeah, pretty huge…but that’s just a possibility, not a certainty. I still have to get the blood test to check for that marker.

CN: So, how many projects you got goin' now James?

JM: Well, I’m planning to organize the Death tribute project,and I’m trying to get everything together to do another Disincarnate album. And I’m also trying to work up all the material I need to do aninstructional cd-rom to be released on the chopsfromhell.com site.

CN: That’s cool.

JM: Yeah.

CN: So, you still teach around there?

JM: No, I don’t. I wish I had the means to be able to, because I certainly need the income. I have no income at this point, other than the charitable donations, basically.

CN: Right.

JM: And it only just pronounced that my vision was ok to drive. I was still warned to probably not drive very much or very far, because of my medicine.

CN: Right.

JM: It’s easy for me to get disoriented at times.

CN: Ah, I see.

JM: I have to take it five times a day, so that pretty much gauges the possibility of driving very far by car. That’s not even really that big of an issue because, while I still had my license in California and a car, but was already whacked out by my tumor, you can just image that my driving became pretty erratic.

CN: Right.

JM: I went from a perfect driver record to several citations within a short period of time. A very short period of time.

CN: Wow.

JM: And of couse I did not--I was losing everything, along with my memory, so I never paid those citations. Florida communicates very well with California on those kinds of things, so…

CN: Yeah, those computers…they really jam you up, don’t they?

JM: Yeah, I have to take care of about 1100 dollars in citations in California before I could even, get a license here.

CN: Right.

JM: So, if I did, I don’t have a car to drive, and less prospects of getting one soon.

CN: Right.

JM: You know, it’s really good news about my vision, but it doesn’t mean that I’m now running around in the car, you know, takin’ care of business and takin’ care of myself, unfortunately.

CN: That’s true, well you have my e-mail, so what you should do is um... I know it’s probably on your website, but also on the e-mail, send me information. I’ll post it on the site about people sending donations…

JM: The donation links are on my site.

CN: Uh huh.

JM: There’s a donation link…

CN: That I can download and put on mine.

JM: Uh huh. There’s a PayPal button on my site..

CN: Right.

JM: You should be able to take it right off of there.

CN: That’s an idea. But I was also thinking about putting um…maybe putting an ad for people in the Florida area that wanted to take lessons. If you’re interested, I can do that.

JM: Yeah, it’s just that people would have to come to me, and you don’t even understand the boonies that I live in.

CN: Lakeland?

JM: I’m outside of Lakeland by about …I dunno 30…35 miles.

CN: Kinda like where I used to live in South Carolina.

JM: Yeah, I’m…8 miles outside of a little satellite town called Polk City.
The biggest store in Polk City is the feed store.

CN: Oh, yeah...

JM:You know what I’m talking about?

CN: Yeah baby!

JM: Yeah, we live on an acre, acre and a half or so… and we've got a cow…

CN: (Laughing.) That’s a small area of land for a cow, dude!

JM: With chickens and roosters…of course they’re gone now, though. We took them to auction.

CN: I used to live outside of Myrtle Beach.

JM: Oh I know Myrtle Beach quite well.

CN: But if you go up to Surfside, it’s not so nice in Surfside beach. It’s like the poor white trash cousin of Myrtle beach. In “Oh-ree” (Horry) County, as they pronounce it.

JM: The hound dogs are barking…I’ve got some labs..hold on….(talking calmly in background), .‘Hey...I’ve got a suggestion for you guys… Shut up! Yeah, don’t wag your tail at me…man, start shuttin’ up…’

CN: Dude I wish I was there now, its still in the 50’s here.

JM: Yeah, we’ve got a soft shell turtle in our yard. I gotta go let it out of the yard. It’s looking for a way out… I’ve got the wireless phone so..

CN: I was going to ask you if you had a cordless.

JM: Actually I’m gonna grab a camera and snap a picture of this little sucker.

CN: Oh a little snapper?

JM: Yeah, a little shelled ‘toitel’. I’m gonna get a picture of him right now.

CN: So it’s not a box snapper, huh?

JM: I don’t really know.

CN: Well stick your finger in his face and see if he bites you!

JM: Ey! Get away from that, Boomer!

CN: (laughing)

JM: (talking calmly to the dog) ‘That’s an order, not a suggestion!’ I’m takin’ a picture of him.

CN: You've got a digital camera?

JM: Yeah.

CN: Yeah that’s what I need. You’d think, as advanced as my website looks, that I’d be up on shit, but I’m really not. I’m still in the dinosaur age of print magazines. You know what, e-mail me one of the turtle, I’ll put it in on the site...

JM: I definitely will.

(Side One of tape ends…)

CN: So you were saying, your Dad tried to get you to join the Army?

JM: My dad is career military. He was still in the military when I moved out of his house at age 17. And throughout my whole life, when he was in the military and I was a kid, my dad always told me, ‘Son, never join the Army.’ He told me numerous times, ‘Don’t join the Army.’

CN: (Laughing)

JM: But for some reason….I don’t really know why, my mom wanted me to join the Army, and was talking to me about it for the longest time. I think she finally just realized I was never gonna do it so she finally left me alone about it.

CN: Sometimes its like, I know some people are, career military families. And the kids do, just like the parents and the grandparents. But like with my brother, he was kind of a fuck up in school, he didn’t really have any aim or goals, so my dad was like ‘Join the service!’ like he thought that would give him some direction or something. Or like sometimes, I guess they think that the Army is better than being a musician, but I can’t see that.

JM: Every generation equates being a musician with ending up poor and destitute…

CN: And a drug addict, and an alcoholic. Because a lot of them, like, my parents were born in the 40s, and that was the jazz era. And they WERE all dope addicts, you know?

JM: Yes, they were.

CN: So, if they weren’t doing marijuana, they were doing heroin… And the people that were upstanding were all the people that went to war, so I can see where they get that. So good for us that we didn’t go in the military!

JM: Well my dad advised me not to, my mom advised me to do it, but uh, my dad knew better….I’m not the type of person you’d expect, if you speak to me, to be from the background that I have. That is, unless you take into consideration the fact that I was a military brat and pretty much lived all over the world. Because that’s what really molded the person that I am. Not necessarily the fact that all my relatives are like, country-type people in Florida, living in semi-rural or rural area, and have cows and pigs and chickens and whatnot or seeing at some point that they live in the town of Lakeland, you know, whatever… I don’t really have a southern accent.

CN: Yeah, cause you’ve been around a lot too.

JM: Besides from just my career… I grew up sort of all over the place.

CN: Yeah, I think I went to six or seven different schools when I was growing up.

JM: Yeah? I got you beat.

CN: You’re always the new kid so you get good at being friendly

JM: I’m copying the pictures right now.

CN: Oh, on the computer?

JM: Yeah. I’m sitting at the computer right now. When you see this picture of the turtle, the wet spots on his back are dog slobber. The dog decided to pick him up with her teeth.

CN: That rock is movin’ dammit….bite it!

JM: They’re quite silly, both of these dogs…One of the pictures that I just took was of our cat, who just loves sleeping on our dining room table

CN: Aw…

JM: So it just woke up It was curled up in a ball on the smallest thing that’s on the table. If there’s a paper, she’s on the paper…or on the phonebook. If I walk up to her and put my hand in her face, she’ll cuddle up with my hand and use my hand as a pillow.

CN: Aw… My cat likes to sleep on the keyboard of my computer. He’s jealous of the fact that I spend a lot of time on the computer, so if I get up and walk away, he’ll like walk across it, to mess up whatever I’m working on, you know? He’s a smart cat, he’s an albino; he’s white with blue eyes. I found him eating rice and beans out of a dumpster. You know he’s a hungry cat if he’s eating rice and beans! Then again I live in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, Spanish Harlem. Maybe that’s not strange up here, I don’t know.

CN: So, you’re not gonna be traveling any time soon are you?

JM: Well, I don’t have any immediate plans to travel, but I do have some open-ended invitations…to do some traveling. And when I accept the invitations...well, that’s the if and when…