Rock And Redemption When Punk Rocker Sancyre Hruby Was Diagnosed With A Debilitating Disease, She Refused To Give Up Her Music

In 1995 SanCyre Hruby began taping guitar picks to her fingers.

Sometimes she used glue.

She turned her back to the audience when the guitar chords fell off into noise during a show.

She blamed her amplifier. She blamed the drummer.

“The truth is, the songs we were playing a month earlier, suddenly I wasn’t able to play them the way they were written,” Hruby says.

As the guitar player for Velvet Pelvis, Spokane’s first all-woman punk band, Hruby found her hands increasingly wooden and numb, her fingers aching and unresponsive.

Frightened and angry, she put on a grand bluff - until a reluctant visit to the doctor ended with a pamphlet thrust at her.

The black type on the cover read: “The facts about Charcot-Marie-Tooth.”

Charcot-Marie-Tooth - CMT for short - is a hereditary disease that devours the nerves and atrophies the muscles of the hands and lower legs. As the pamphlet explained, “… aids may be required for such daily activities as writing, fastening buttons, and turning door knobs and screw caps.”

And don’t even think about playing the guitar.

“My guitar playing was such an extension of myself that when I lost that, I felt crippled,” Hruby says.

The disease, which had actually begun affecting her years earlier, sent Hruby’s life “spiraling into this big horrible nasty void.”

It also ended a band that had been not only a major player in Spokane’s punk scene but also a pioneer for women musicians.

But CMT, for all its theft of feeling and control, has also given Hruby a new grasp on life.

The 28-year-old now sings in a new all-woman punk band and is working to raise money for the organization that helped turn her life around - the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which fell thousands short of its summer pledge goal.

“I’ve come to realize it’s not about our physical limitations,” Hruby says. “It’s about what we can do, not what we can’t do.”

Hruby grew up in Spokane, the youngest of five children. Cared for by her older siblings while her mother worked, Hruby’s home life was, at times, unstable because of alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence.

In an act of love, Hruby’s mother paid what she could for her 7-year-old daughter to move into the Hutton Settlement children’s home, where life was safe and ordered.

Here, Hruby and the girls in her room put on secret talent shows at night. She sang. A counselor taught her to play the guitar. He loved country and Hruby adored him, so she learned to play “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”

Life was good except the girl was clumsy - and in severe pain.

She fell - thump - to the ground for no apparent reason. The kids told her she ran funny - like a duck.

Inside her shoes, her toes scrunched into hammer heads while her arches bridged into exaggerated U shapes.

Doctors hooked electrodes to those feet, zapping them with electricity she couldn’t feel.

Hruby spent the summer of her seventh year in a wheelchair after the first operation to correct the problems developing in her feet.

Then, on her 13th birthday, came the surprise party. Her mother and her counselor gave her a guitar so she would have something to do in the long months to come.

They told her she’d been accepted for another operation at the Shriners Hospital for Children.

Doctors said she had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. But in Hruby’s child-mind, CMT merely meant she didn’t have to take P.E. class.

In a crucial miscommunication, no one explained that the neuromuscular disease would get worse and that it eventually would grip her hands.

“After the Shriners I really felt like I was cured,” she says.

So, she practiced her guitar and scribbled down songs during her months in and out of the hospital. While healing at the Hutton Settlement, the kids gathered around to hear her play the guitar.

“From then on it got me through a lot of rough spots. It was my best friend in a sense. I knew I was going to play guitar for the rest of my life,” she says and then stops.

“Oops, well, that theory didn’t work out so well.”

Suffice to say that Hruby left the Hutton Settlement when she was 14 and soon began doing the things her mother most feared.

She dropped out of high school. She drifted between Spokane and Portland, living in places where junkies passed out in the halls.

She buried herself in drug abuse and bad relationships.

Music still played a major chord in her life. She gave up Duran Duran for punk in the mid-‘80s after she was handed a tape of Suicidal Tendencies and Black Flag.

But her love for the guitar was gamely squashed by guys whose attitudes were clear: Oh, please. Girls don’t play.

She remembers one boyfriend asking her to bring her guitar to band practice for his bandmate to use.

She tuned it for the guy and strummed a few chords.

“And all of a sudden all these punk rock guys just stopped and looked at me and were like, ‘Dude, that’s country,”’ she says. “They totally teased me that whole year about ‘she played country when country wasn’t cool.”’ In Portland, her guitar-playing boyfriend wouldn’t let her practice.

“I’d be in the other room strumming along, and he’d be like, ‘Oh my God, that is so bad. You’re killing my ears.”’ She stopped playing until she met Joanna Bolme, now in the Portland band Junior High.

“Hey, we can play, too,” Bolme insisted. So they did, jamming and writing together until Hruby decided it was time to move back to Spokane.

In 1991, Hruby, along with Heather Swanstrom, Kandi Quasne and Kristie Carlon, carved out a spot in the Spokane punk rock scene, sometimes kicking and throwing punches to make room.

“Velvet Pelvis was the wildest of times,” says Hruby, describing the band as “four angry, strong women.”

They followed the punk rock code, one that gives the middle finger to anyone who thinks you have to be a virtuoso to play in a band.

“It was just a really nice outlet for creativity and aggression and just being with the girls,” Swanstrom says. “It’s almost like there is a certain safety net around you.”

Practice was low pressure and democratic: no men to shove their ideas on them, no men to roll their eyes when conversation turned to bra sales and yeast infections.

“It is so much more equal parts,” Hruby says. “I used to tell any female I knew, you’ve got to play an instrument. It is so empowering.”

On stage, they brandished a spitfire bravado as they belted out searing yet catchy tirades set at punk-blaze speed.

Hruby appeared as the bruiser of the bunch, all brassy mouth, tattooed arms and dreadlocked hair.

Swanstrom stood as a 5-foot devilkin with a feisty attitude. For members of Velvet Pelvis, their music was about having fun. And they would say what they had to to get the audience riled.

“If you ask me, they were the reason more girls started playing instruments in Spokane,” says Joe Ehrbar, who put out a 7-inch record for the band on his Trench Records label. He also covered the music scene at the time for The Spokesman-Review.

“Hey, all you girls,” Hruby would often shout from the stage. “If you like what we’re doing, just pick up an instrument, talk to the girl next to you, call your friend.”

For Hruby, the band fulfilled a longtime dream.

“Velvet Pelvis was everything to me,” she says. “I felt like so many things in my life weren’t working out. This was the only thing I could count on.

“They were my creative release. They were very much my family.”

That changed in 1995.

Hruby picked fights where there were none to be had. In midpractice, she would put down her instrument and quit. Her playing fell apart midshow. Searing pain cut through her hands.

The others finally confronted her. “That’s when she told us. She said, ‘I can’t play. I’ll be playing and my hands stop working. I drop my pick,”’ Swanstrom says.

“The cool thing I remember about that day is we all said, ‘Whatever it takes, whatever you have to do … we’re there for you,”’ Swanstrom says.

“It’s not a question of getting another guitar player. We love you.”

Hruby refers to what happened next as “the big bad bummer.”

After a doctor informed her that CMT was now ravaging her hands, she withdrew from the music scene and her closest friends.

Velvet Pelvis dissolved.

Although Swanstrom and Carlon encouraged her to get back into music, to use her voice instead of a guitar, Hruby couldn’t do it.

“I was just hurt by music entirely,” she says. “Everyone was pushed away except for Patrick.”

Patrick Par, her roommate and the co-owner of BopTech Studios, had seen through Hruby’s rough edges, vitriol and attitude.

The two had begun dating six months earlier, and now he bought books on how to live healthier and learned as much as he could about the disease. He bought her piles of health food products and made her bad-tasting drinks that were supposed to be good for her.

Meanwhile, Hruby’s mind cleared as she stopped drugs and heavy drinking and instead concentrated on rehabilitation.

“My lifestyle had needed a change, I guess, and it definitely came - thank goodness for that,” she says.

Six months later, Hruby found herself more confident and comfortable with herself, more rooted in life and finally able to do music again, this time as the singer for co-ed bands the Crudlers and then Quitters Inc.

She and Par also got married.

“I fell in love with Hruby for the person she is and not for the cool band she was in,” Par says. “That part of her never changed.

“If anything, that part of her has gotten better.”

Now, Hruby and Swanstrom have enlisted Char Getchell (previously of Trucker Mouth and the Let Go’s) to play in an all-woman band called Fur Burger.

“We decided it was time to slap everyone in the face again,” Swanstrom says with a wry smile.

Although Hruby intended to sing only, the inability to find a female drummer landed her behind the skins in a moment of desperation.

At first they just hoped she’d be able to keep the beat. The next thing they knew she was playing the full set and singing at the same time.

“I was just was so amazed,” Swanstrom says. “I stopped playing a few times with my jaw open.”

“I have no explanation for this except osmosis,” Hruby says.

At a recent Fur Burger practice, the trio ran through a set of aggressively melodic garage tunes wrapped in ribbons of surf.

Char, all cupid-red lips and demure features, fluttered the notes from her guitar. Swanstrom, eyebrows furrowed, muscled a bass that seemed the size of her body.

Hruby’s ladylike hands and wrists (slender like her ankles because of the atrophying muscles) gripped the sticks loosely as she pounded the drums.

Her hands have held out so far, since drumming doesn’t involve the same fine motor skills as the guitar.

“We figured if Def Leppard can play with a one-arm drummer …,” says Swanstrom, trailing off in laughter.

“This is with the understanding that if months down the road this becomes a problem, we’ll just find someone else,” says Hruby, acknowledging that CMT is degenerative but that she can always sing. “There is no pressure.”

“It’s all about supporting each other,” Swanstrom says.

On that note, this month Hruby has been calling on bands and businesses to donate what they can to MDA’s current “Be A Star” campaign.

The MDA provides diagnosis, therapy, evaluations, support groups, wheelchairs and camps for people with neuromuscular diseases such as CMT.

The association fell $17,000 short of the pledges it expected to receive this summer during MDA’s annual Labor Day telethon.

Hruby and others who have been helped by the charitable organization are now trying to raise $5,000 of that by the end of this month.

“There have been a lot of people who have come to bat for me, and I just feel like its time for me to give something back,” Hruby says. “They do amazing things.

“My life is so positive now and so wonderful in so many ways.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: How to donate Those who want to help the Muscular Dystrophy Association should make donations directly to the MDA office in care of the “Be A Star” campaign. The address is 1009 N. Washington, Suite A. Spokane, WA 99201. Or call 325-3747. Some of the bands and businesses that have already pitched in include The Fumes, Nodge, Burns Like Hellfire, 4,000 Holes, BopTech and 20th Century Trash.