I wish I looked at this earlier. I b0rked my boot loader trying to install GRUB (good thing I had Slack 9.1 lying around so that I could reinstall lilo).

This is the line I was missing:
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.gz

Mine booted up into GRUB, and from there I didn't know how to get it to load. Thanks!

(I found the GNU documentation confusing, so I tried to do it from Gentoo's install manual -- that initrd line was in there... wonder why I didn't use it )