Give Peace A Chance
Since I started this ditty, a lot of people have been asking me when I started saying “keep your dukes up.”
Well, the original line is “put your dukes up,” which was something a jackwad kid would say trying to egg you on in a slugfest in the schoolyard. I flipped it to keep your dukes up and started saying it to my old buddy Bill Ochoa about 18 years ago. Bill was in a fight for his life against a terrible illness and anytime I saw him or talked to him on the phone, I’d always end the conversation with, “Hey, Billy. Keep your dukes up.” Meaning hang in there, don’t quit, stick with it, soldier on, etc. Bill would laugh and say, “I gotta.”
Bill was a classic. One of a kind. He had a hair salon below us in the Village Commons. Anytime he was looking for me he’d go out in the courtyard and start yelling my name. I’d go down and we’d do an off-the-cuff meeting. During one of those meetings, he said he wanted me to start working on a political campaign for him. For what? He said he wanted to run for select board in South Hadley and East Longmeadow, where he had shops. I had to remind the jackass that he lived in Longmeadow.
Then he got the idea to open a day spa. You know, a soothing, relaxing environment. Exactly the opposite of the loud and outrageous way Billy Boy ran things in his hair salons. He wanted me to do some digging and see what people thought of the spa idea. Almost everyone said, “If Bill Ochoa is around, I’m not going near the place.”
So I had to give the wild man the bad news. He said, “I don’t give a damn what they think, I’m doing it anyways. You figure out how to sell it.” So we did. And it worked big time. Here’s how we did it:
I gotta say, Bill Ochoa always had good gut instincts. And you don’t see a lot of that creative courage today. It’s like Buck Norman always says, “When you know what you know, go with the gut.” We lost my dear buddy Bill on Friday, January 17, 2003. He was only 49 years old. Haven’t run into anybody like him since. On my last call to Bill, he didn’t pick up. So I did what I always did. I said, “Hey, Billy. Keep your dukes up.”