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San Diego 2010: “Kids! More Of Them Than Us! Hitting Us!”

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[Author’s Note: Certain corroborating details have come to my attention and this story is now most likely from 2010]

This is a bus story but it isn’t about The Bus but rather the one that came after it called Larry Bus. I think that John Benson originally bought Larry Bus with the intention of making it a donor for an engine transplant to The Bus which was still being stored in Albion but it either didn’t work or he thought better of it. It might have been a different bus that was bought for the failed transplant and then he bought Larry Bus with the intention of having shows on it from the beginning.

I’ll most likely end up writing a few stories that center around Larry Bus shows but they will be more scattered in time than the stories from The Bus so it doesn’t make sense to name a subsection after it.

When I repeated my life pattern of moving back to California from Chicago in 2008 one of my reasons was that I wanted to be closer to San Diego in case my father’s health worsened from his terminal lung cancer and my parents needed me to move back in and help them. In the Summer of 2009 I decided that it was time after the discovery of black mold prompted everybody to move out of Apgar and leave me between housing situations anyway.

My mother also had health and mobility issues from multiple sclerosis and my father had found an old Rascal brand mobility scooter in a thrift store that had a wide enough seat to allow them to ride down to the local shopping center sitting side by side. His piloting skills started to waver toward the end and I was washing dishes one day when I saw him accidentally flip it over on them by misjudging the angle on the point of entry from the driveway as they were coming home.

I rushed outside with a pair of manual wheelchairs so I could roll them inside and clean up and bandage their various bits of road rash. They were both on some form of blood thinning medication so it looked a lot worse than it actually was. That was probably the last time they used the thing to go any significant distance and my mother never actually learned to pilot it because my father was always the one driving.

She was also a terrible driver in general. It’s nothing short of a miracle that she never got us into a serious accident when we were children considering that she used to do things like accidentally drive onto the freeway moving in the wrong direction on a regular basis. A huge part of why I still haven’t learned how to drive is that she would frantically yell for me to check her lanes for her from the moment I was old enough to talk and I’ve never quite gotten over the feeling that a rapidly moving automobile is something far too dangerous for me to have any responsibility over.

It wasn’t long after my father’s death in early September that John Benson offered to bring down a more maneuverable power chair that he had been able to restore at little cost from his mobility work. Like most of my friends from the time period he had met my parents and spent time at their house.

[Author’s Note: Now that I know this is a 2010 story it is likely a separate trip from when the power chair was delivered.]

I had set up a 2005 show at Scolari’s Office for Friends Forever and a band he was in at the time called Hale Zukas. On that tour they were traveling in an old ambulance that had been retired after providing medical support to the victims of 9/11 and he had converted to run on used vegetable oil – what was essentially the precursor to The Bus.

I think in 2009 John was also coming down to San Diego because his girlfriend at the time was graduating an art program at UCSD and had some kind of exhibition that might have even incorporated Larry Bus but we both thought it was a good idea to kill every possible bird with the single stone of the trip so I set up a show with a few local bands. I’d be interested if anybody knew the full lineup – I performed as Bleak End at Bernie’s and invited a musician named Bill Wesley who builds gigantic instruments called Array Mbiras that group related tones in a novel layout. He would use these gigantic thumb pianos to improvise songs that sit between psychedelic/prog rock and minimalists like Philip Glass.

We started the show in Balboa Park and loaded up the bands and audience in front of the Centro Cultural de la Raza. My mother actually came to the show even though she had to be physically carried up some stairs to get onto Larry Bus – thankfully there was another mom there and they kept each other entertained by chatting in a special “mom’s section” on the front bench. It was the kind of show where bands only play while the bus is moving and the audience gets to get out and mill around at intermission stops around town.

A hardcore band that I forget the name of played between Balboa Park and Ocean Beach. For my set I got to perform as we drove along the twisting cliffs between Point Loma and downtown. At one point I glanced out a window and my friend Eddie Castro was speeding alongside Larry Bus on a motorcycle. We quickly exchanged the heavy metal hand signal generally referred to as a “Dio” before I returned my attention to the audience I was sharing a vehicle with.

I always think back on this moment as the most stereotypically “rock” thing that I’ve ever done in my life. I imagine that when rappers refer to rock stars and rock culture in their lyrics that quick gesture, combined with speeding tour buses and motorcycles, is the kind of thing they are mentally picturing. I never bothered to play my recordings for my mother so this concert would have been the only time she heard my music. She wasn’t impressed:

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”

As fate would have it we were not the only concert in an untraditional venue that was taking place in Balboa Park that night. A group called PyratePunx was also putting on a generator show in one of the canyons. I didn’t know the organizers or I would have reached out to coordinate the two shows. Sometimes I wonder if this would have made any difference regarding what ended up happening.

I’ve mentioned in other pieces that there was a squat behind Purple Haus called Hellarity. A large group of the kids that lived there pretty much always came along for the Larry Bus out of town trips. You can see one of them in the picture I added from during my live set. His name was Miguel but I always called him Trash Flowers because I first met him in the florist dumpster by the Ashby Whole Foods. I think he was actually the one that got the hardcore band on the show that night.

When Larry Bus stopped back in Balboa Park for Bill Wesley to perform outside all the kids from Hellarity went off to see if they could catch the end of the PyratePunx show. I haven’t mentioned it yet but the friends I’ve been referring to as Sugar Tea and Popsicle were also in San Diego because we were planning on going to Tijuana the next day. I forget why the three of us walked away from Larry Bus – we might have been looking for a bathroom or maybe they just wanted to see a little more of the park,

It wasn’t too long after this that I would learn I was nearsighted at a shadow puppet show and get my first pair of glasses. My deteriorating vision absolutely played a role in the next thing that happened. I thought that I saw the kids from Hellarity walking toward us from about thirty feet away but they had somehow ended up with a couple of dogs. It was actually a group of blacked out drunk and soon to belligerent oogles who were leaving the PyratePunx show.

“Hey! Are you guys heading back to the bus?”

“What the fuck? We don’t need a bus!”

“Where did you guys find those dogs?”

“These are our dogs!”

I’m only paraphrasing those little bits of conversation because all of their responses were heavily slurred and difficult to fully understand. We had been steadily moving closer to each other during these brief exchanges and between the confusing responses and improved visual definition I finally realized the case of mistaken identity. Unfortunately the next thing out of my mouth ignited total murderous rage in these strangers:

“Never mind. I thought you were my squatter friends!”

I haven’t bothered to find out who these kids were and I hadn’t really been hanging out with the gutter punk types down there since a few years earlier when a lot of them would meet the same heroin dealers as me in Hillcrest. This group was three guys, one girl and two dogs. They thought we were snobby hipsters mocking them for being homeless or they were just assholes and liked fighting, I don’t really know.

I don’t know how common this is but when I’m violently attacked in nightmares it often takes place extremely slowly. In this situation the alcohol, and whatever else they might have been taking, left our attackers moving a little faster than the average speed of television zombies. For the most part it was easy to dodge their punches and we probably would have escaped them entirely if not for the slight difference in numbers.

The girl was a little faster than the guys she was hanging out with and the moment we tried to run away she caught up with Popsicle and knocked her onto the ground. From that point on we were locked into a cycle of helping each other off the ground only to have somebody else knocked down immediately afterwards. I tried to explain what had just led to the innocent confusion but any attempt at logic was pointless. The most aggressive among them screamed the same thing at us over and over:

“Do you have a Dick!?”

Besides general homophobia he might have been trying to ensure that he wasn’t about to punch a girl – everything out of their mouths was barely coherent. They tried to get their dogs to attack us but the animals were either badly trained or generally easygoing and friendly. We had no interest in fighting back and just wanted to get away from them as quickly as possible. I saw a flash of white as one unusually well aimed punch caught me on the side of the head.

We had been slowly moving from wherever we were in the park back toward the bus and we suddenly caught sight of a park employee in a neon vest with a walkie-talkie. We ran toward him in the hope that he would do something to help us. As our pursuers chased us around him in a circle he casually replied to someone on the other end of his walkie:

“I don’t know what’s going on, looks like some kind of bitch fight…”

We yelled out to him in exasperation:

“It’s not a fight! We’re being assaulted! Can you either help us or call somebody who will?”

Our cries fell on deaf ears and his expression remained decidedly bemused so after a couple of circuits we broke away and continued to drift toward Larry Bus. It might have moved since the last time we were on it or we got kind of lost in the panic but this took a long time or at least it felt that way. I’m not sure if anyone else ever actually had a punch connect but it was just tortuous slow danger and constantly stopping to help up whoever had most recently gotten ganged up on by two people and knocked to the ground.

I finally saw it so I yelled to Sugar Tea and Popsicle that I’d bring back help and broke into a desperate sprint. The moment I was through the door I breathlessly yelled out to everyone aboard:

“Hey, we need help! Some kids are fucking with us!”

I started to run back toward my friends but when I looked over my shoulder I saw that nobody had followed me. I turned around and ran back to make a second, and even more urgent, attempt at apprising the situation:

“Kids! More of them than us! Hitting us!”

I started to hear sounds of recognition – “What?” and “Hell Nah!” and that sort of thing. A decent crowd followed me this time and we were able to extricate Sugar Tea and Popsicle from where they were now being doubly ganged up on. I’m not sure if it was an act but the girl oogle seemed to suddenly wake up from her black out:

“Where am I? Who are these guys? I don’t want to be with these guys! Can I come with you guys?”

Whether she was being genuine or not she had literally prevented us from escaping the initial assault by tackling Popsicle and we certainly didn’t want her anywhere near us nor did we feel particularly sympathetic that she no longer felt like being part of a violent gang of oogle assholes. Nobody was trying to give them any kind of redemptive beat down we just got our friends back and returned to Larry Bus. Some of my San Diego friends might have tried to tell me who they were a little bit afterwards but I didn’t give a shit.

Maybe I should explain this a little better. I don’t like applying violent rage to other human beings. The few times I’ve been hit by a car on my bike and the driver didn’t just drive away I’ve shouted and waved to prevent them from stepping out of the vehicle and showing me their face. I prefer to keep the rage abstract.

I was in a bad state – out of breath and full of adrenaline and shitty feeling fear and dread brain chemicals and I’d just taken a clock cleaner punch to the head. The three of us all felt fucked up. My sister was bringing our mom back home but there was no way any of us were ready to just go to bed in suburbia.

A friend of mine was having a party so we went over to drink and generally get fucked up and wait for our bodies to calm down. Now that I think about it it’s entirely possible that the reason we had taken a walk in the first place was that we wanted to do some ketamine away from a big crowd of people and my mother. It would certainly explain some of the confusion of the initial encounter and why we were having such a hard time getting away.

We got drunk and did more ketamine and some cocaine because it was there, even though none us really liked it, and spent quality time with some good friends while waiting to feel less shitty and keyed up in some ways and more shitty and keyed up in others until we got to a point where it felt like we could process and make peace with all the shit we’d had to deal with and just pass out.

The next day we’d be heading down to Tijuana and after a few more comedies of errors things would start shaping up to be a decent contender for the worst goddamn weekend of our entire lives. Not that it would win – I’m sure we’ve all got worse. By the following night we would all be arrested then confined to different sections of the Tijuana carcel where the guards mocked us and the other inmates threatened us.

We somehow repeated the previous night’s error of taking an “evening constitutional stroll” but this time we were joined by the girl I call Rocky who was kind enough to disregard our warnings and leave enough narcotics in her purse for the whole group to get jammed up and fucked over.

You can read all about this in the chapter labeled as “Tijuana 2010 : Basically You Had Drugs So Now They’re Going To Fuck You Over!” It’s an engaging read with a second part and if you find yourself enjoying the company of these characters they appear in another two parter about breaking into a bando and making a Haunted House.

We were on one.

Larry Bus? Eventually I’d be back on that too. From here on out it was a lot chiller – or for the most part it was.

There was the time I helped somebody slaughter a goat for bad reasons and the emotions this subjected him to. Another time…

Los Angeles 2000 : “It’s Where Jay Leno Lives”

berniebleak1 Comment

The music scene for mid ‘90s to early 2000’s San Diego is pretty legendary but for the most part I had been out of the loop on what was going on in my home town. I went to a lot of ska and punk shows in High School and occasionally came across something more interesting like the time I saw Los Kagados at a very early incarnation of the Voz Alta space near 16th and C. I heard a lot of the members went on to form Run For Your Fucking Life but the main thing I remember is that the singer was double jointed and contorting his arms and wrists at odd angles with an almost Iggy Pop-like stage presence. One of them had just gotten a colorful neck tattoo of a pair of dragons or something like that – it was so fresh that the skin was visibly raised and puffy.

These details stick out in more focus than any of the ska shows I went to at Soma or the World Beat Center for some reason. Maybe it was just the feeling of being downtown and in an alternative art space instead of a more curated all ages club – this could have been anywhere from 1996 to 1998. I guess they were a hardcore band, a lot of my friends at school talked about hardcore but I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t particularly interested. For whatever reason I was really into ‘80s New Wave at the time, the stuff that was more synth heavy and classified as “New Romantic”. There was a lot of it in the record bins of Thrift Stores which helped.

My other chance encounter with the more remembered music scene of the time was that I somehow ended up at a space on Union and Beech and saw Tristeza. I don’t know what genre I would have classified it as at the time but I definitely liked it and bought the first seven inch, the one that was printed with gold foil on heavy black paper, when I saw it at Off the Record. At this point I had bought some CDs from local ska bands but this was my first time getting small label seven inches with Art object style presentation until I ended up at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later that same Summer.

I went to Union and Beech at least one other time when Francois and I had missed the last bus back toward East County and spent the night wandering the streets downtown. The space was hosting a rave and we snuck in to get off the streets but spent most of the night sleeping in a closet instead of dancing. When it was getting toward dawn we realized that we had been sleeping next to a gorilla mask and one of us took off our shirt and ran out of the closet to dance around for a minute with the mask on. Oddly I can’t seem to remember which one of us it had been – maybe we both did it and took turns.

By the time we drove back to San Diego in the early Summer of 2000 I had gotten a lot more experience navigating music scenes. For my year at SFSU there was a surprisingly robust music community centering on shows in our Student Union and both twee and J-pop; bolstered by the high number of trendy Japanese exchange students. The kid who set them up was in a band called Wussom*Pow! that recorded a Strawberry Switchblade cover and helped me sneak into shows at bars like Edinburgh Castle. My first forays into bars were spent staring in fascination as cigarette smoke slowly drifted against a backdrop of dark velvet curtains and twinkling white Christmas lights – I didn’t drink yet.

I tried to convince Michael from Wussom*Pow! to set up a show for Tristeza in the student Union. I don’t even know if they were actually touring or looking – I just really dug that first 7 inch. I described the music as “emo” because some band members had black hair and that’s what I’d heard the social scene called but he said it was “space rock”. The show never happened to the best of my memory.

I was beyond clueless about the bulk of underground music then. I remember seeing a flyer on campus advertising a Melvins show that would have been small and intimate but I had no clue who that was even though Little Four had talked up The Thrones from a live set at Locust House and I was eager to see it.

Actually there was a show in the SFSU student Union where Thrones was supposed to play but Michael took Joe off the bill out of fear it would be “too loud”. They were on tour with The Rapture who you most likely saw on the flyer at the top of this piece and will pop back up in just a minute. The singer/guitarist (or was it bassist?) was jumping onto tables while playing and the Japanese girls in the audience would shriek and run a few feet away in a combination of surprise and delight.

I thought the most striking thing about the San Diego scene at that time was that Tristeza had a 7 inch that played at 33 RPM while The Locust released a twelve inch that played at 45. I felt the duality of how this went again convention in both directions said something poignant about what was happening in my home town but at the time I became more interested in other city’s music scenes.

After house sitting for a punk TA from one of my Physics classes in a Mission district apartment I spent most of the Summer of 1999 in San Diego before driving out to Chicago with Francois. San Diego music, especially The Locust, was intensely popular in the Midwest by this point but we knew next to nothing about it. We wouldn’t have known anything at all if we hadn’t convinced Little Four to move up to the Bay Area with us and gained access to the record collection she had curated from living behind and going to shows at the “Locust House” on 24th and E.

The scene around the Fireside Bowl in Chicago that year was primarily hardcore and math rock but also a lot of the theatrical experimental stuff that was coming out on the SKiN GRAFT label. I finally started to get into the hardcore most of my contemporaries were so fascinated with but the artier stuff was my real fascination. The two styles generally peacefully coexisted and informed and fed into each other but I do remember one situation when they came into direct conflict.

The band Black Dice was passing through town and a big group of people went up to Milwaukee because they were playing a basement show. I don’t think they were ever really a traditional hardcore band but their earliest stuff was closer to sounding like it and their first seven inch was on Gravity Records which was generally known as a hardcore label. I did a little bit of digging and figured out this show was in May of 2000 at a place called Bremen House.

I actually didn’t know that the band had a reputation for being physically confrontational and attacking their audience and breaking other people’s equipment but all of that would have played a factor in what ended up happening because I just read a different account that said people at the show were already planning on fighting them. From what I saw they were just playing unconventional and noisy music like lots of guitar feedback and drumming in odd time signatures when a bunch of straight edge hardcore guys assaulted them for “not being hardcore”. I’ve always thought of the incidence as “genre violence” – purely instigated by a band not playing in an expected and dogmatic style.

The main reason I think this is that one of the attackers was literally yelling “this isn’t hardcore” or “this isn’t what hardcore’s about” or something along those lines. The frustration was palpable when somebody in the band yelled back:

“We never said it was!”

The other account I read said that the singer threw beer on a straight edge guy but the way I remember it he was just pacing and thrashing around with an open tall can in his hand so that small amounts might have splashed onto people. The thing I have the clearest mental image of is dudes just running up on the bassist and guitar player and throwing punches at them while they tried to defend themselves as best as possible while being encumbered by their instruments. A lot of their equipment ended up getting broken and their attackers slashed the tires on their tour van as a parting gift.

I overheard somebody from either Black Dice or The Rapture, the band they were touring with, react to this final surprise with a touch of weary dark humor:

“You’d think that if they didn’t want us here so much they wouldn’t make it so hard for us to leave…”

I’ll throw the link I found underneath here so you can read and judge for yourself but even though I was there I don’t think I know enough to say if what happened in Milwaukee was just straight edge hardcore guys being typical violent assholes or a case of chaotic and destructive energy catching up with the people who had been irresponsibly pumping it out into the world. Maybe it was some of both. It’s interesting that the street was called Bremen as the Grimm Brothers fairytale called The Bremen Town Musicians is basically about a group of animals who have outlived their usefulness spontaneously turning into a noise band.

https://know-wave.com/black-dice/

One thing that I didn’t realize at the time was that Eric Copeland from the band had been part of an earlier project I really liked called The Ninjas that put out a couple of records on a label called Black Bean and Placenta Tape Club. It sounded like twee pop combined with uncharacteristically aggressive distorted guitars. I only mention this because I haven’t had the records for years or been able to find them uploaded on the internet anywhere in case somebody reading this might have them and a way to put them up somewhere.

San Diego in 2000 had a surplus of really good bands that seemed to have all formed over the past couple of years. I hadn’t actually seen either Three Mile Pilot or The Shortwave Channel but the core members of both groups were now playing as The Blackheart Procession and Camera Obscura respectively. One of the best bands to see live was the instrumental organ heavy doom metal outfit Tarantula Hawk who often had body modification enthusiast Eddie Castro suspending himself from hooks pierced through his skin and illuminated by a projection of black and white static. I wasn’t twenty one yet and every bouncer in town knew who I was so I spent a lot of shows standing just outside the door to listen and peeking inside of places like The Turquoise Room at the long defunct Aztec Bowl.

This story begins with an all ages Blackheart Procession show about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles at the Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana. Lightning Bolt would be playing at The Smell either the next day or the one after that so I got a ride up with the plan of trying to find kids at the show who would be returning to Los Angeles instead of returning with my ride to San Diego. I had gotten pretty confident with approaching strangers to ask for things like rides but the best I found was a couple kids who lived in Burbank. They both offered the same nonsensical explanation when I asked what part of LA that was:

“It’s where Jay Leno lives…”

They didn’t have the kind of parents that would be receptive to unexpected overnight guests so it was up to me to figure out a spot to sleep until public transit resumed in the morning. The neighborhood was the kind with large expensive ranch style houses, or whatever you call the style with stucco and adobe roofs and lots of little wrought iron railings, that also had thick hedges between them so they thought I might be able to hide underneath somebody’s bushes.

I laid out underneath one experimentally but immediately felt conspicuous and almost guaranteed to experience police harassment if I didn’t find something a little more discreet and less residential. Walking toward the traffic lights eventually brought me to a strip mall and a doughnut shop with the kind of locked roof access ladder you can climb by wedging your foot between the metal and the building. When I got to the top I could see that the roof was covered with the big chunked and sharp edged gravel that blankets accessible roofs and forsaken landscaping across Los Angeles.

If I had to spend a night in this sort of setting now I would locate a dumpster for cardboard, and probably just stay next to it, but I was a lot younger and less experienced. I did find a newspaper machine with free Auto Trader booklets to give me something to prevent having to sleep with my face right against the gravel. I’m sure a lot of people would struggle to fall asleep in this kind of environment but I’ve always enjoyed the rough urban camping – no sooner had I stretched out then I was waking up to the harsh glare of sunlight in my eyes and the unmistakable smell of fresh doughnuts and coffee.

I shimmied back down the ladder and came inside to be the first customer of the day. Wall length mirrors seem like an odd decor choice for the type of business that primarily serves the homeless and the sleep deprived but it did give me the opportunity to notice that I had a few lines of newsprint smudged across my cheek in the reverse of how the letters appeared on the page. I wonder if the man behind the cash register realized where I had just come from or if he would have even cared – I certainly wasn’t staying.

My next destination was an apartment my friend Tim shared with some other graduates of the USC film program near Hollywood and Highland. When I stepped off my final bus a pair of bright red sunglasses sat on the plastic bench like they were waiting for me to herald my arrival in Tinseltown. It’s not that deep – I was twenty years old, I put them on my face and walked to my friend’s apartment and knocked on the door and fell back asleep on his couch.

I had scarcely drifted back off when I found myself suddenly and violently woken back up by police yelling and pointing guns and putting everybody in handcuffs. I was probably the only person there who had absolutely no idea what any of it was about but it didn’t take them very long to find the objects and person they were looking for and leave the less immediately culpable among us to explain what was going on to each other.

I’ve mentioned in other places that Tim’s graduating class was the last year that the USC film program would be done using Super 8 and chemical developing processes before making the switch to various digital video mediums. One of his roommates had rationalized to himself that school equipment like cameras, editors and projectors was about to fall into disuse and it would be essentially harmless to appropriate it and even arguably beneficial as it would allow the equipment to continue to be used for its designed purpose.

I don’t know all the details but it must have been easy enough to falsify whatever logs were used in checking out this equipment to obfuscate the identity of whoever had ended up in possession of it. After a few months had gone by with no sign that anybody was looking the assumption was most likely made that nothing would be missed and he put a couple of things up on eBay. By modern standards this is an obvious rookie mistake but in early 2000 the entire concept of cybercrimes was relatively new and most people wouldn’t have immediately realized that anything done online is immediately and easily traceable.

Considering the kinds of things I would be getting into and people I would be hanging out with by the end of the year it’s interesting that my first experiences with many aspects of the criminal Justice system were with a friend I’d generally think of as being on the “straight” side of things. We spent the day driving around and running errands related to the morning’s sudden development.

Our first stop was a seedy bail bondsman’s office on the second floor of the parking lot strip mall that divides Chinatown and Pueblo Los Angeles. I’d gotten into plenty of petty offenses like trespassing, vandalism and even theft of things like a whale skeleton and motorized bumper boat – but so far had never actually gotten charged or caught. Downtown San Diego was full of businesses like the one we visited, and I often spent stranded nights wandering streets where their neon signs were the only things open for business, but I had never really thought about actually needing their services.

Tim was essentially guiltless himself and clearly enjoying playing the role of a character in a crime movie. There was one other friend who also had film equipment from the school and didn’t seem to have been raided by the police yet. Tim gave him a call to warn him to get rid of it but first he drove to a building on Wilshire with a loud outdoor fountain “in case anybody was trying to record his voice”. I seriously doubt that he honestly believed that this level of precaution was necessary but the cloak and dagger intrigue was fun for playing make believe.

Once all that was finished Tim took me to sneak into Universal Studios Hollywood by way of the soundstages in its backlot. He had an ID badge to get past the guard booth from his production work and instructed me to make up a common name for somebody I was supposed to be visiting. I think I went with “John Elliot” – I could see over the guard’s shoulder when he typed this into the computer that the only thing it needed to verify was if someone with this name had worked there ever.

They’ve probably beefed up security protocols since then.

From the backlot it was very easy to slip under a guardrail and get in line for the Jurassic Park ride. Thankfully the ET Adventure dark ride was still open and I got to see the bright psychedelic section with animatronic living flowers that is supposed to represent the titular character’s home planet. At the beginning of the ride they have all the passengers type their names into a computer so ET can offer personalized thanks at the conclusion.

I was curious how the computerized speech module might interpret my unique name after hearing it butchered by substitute teachers throughout my school career. It’s spelled “Ossian” but pronounced “ah-shin” and nobody’s ever gotten it on a first try. The tiny brown alien waved as we drifted toward the exit; addressing each person in turn:

“Thanks Walter and Deborah and Timmy and…”

The figure went silent and abruptly stopped moving. Maybe there was a module in place to prevent the figure from vocalizing profanities in a family park and it scanned the first three letters as an attempt to get it to say “ass”. Whatever the cause I found it amusing that the beloved character chose to make no attempt to address me whatsoever.

Emboldened by the ease we’d had in gaining access to the amusement park Tim went from stage to stage searching for an unattended golf cart. Once we had one he took me on a ride flying off curbs and doing loops around the courthouse square set used in Back to the Future. When the evening came on I needed to get downtown for the Lightning Bolt show.

This may well have been the first time that I ever went to The Smell. I knew that it was around Third and Main and when Tim dropped me on the corner in his little convertible Datsun I could already hear Lightning Bolt playing but I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to go. It took a minute of running around before I realized that the entrance was in the alley and ran inside. They were playing in the corner of the room away from the stage – the space was huge and mostly empty; in less than a year Ride the Skies would come out and they’d be exploding with popularity.

At this point I’d already exchanged at least a couple of letters with Brian Chippendale. I’d been trying to order some Maggots mini comics and the Zone cassette that accompanies their first album. I got the tape but never got the comics – he apologized and gave me a copy of the Conan Tour Seven Inch instead. It was barely a couple days since I caught the ride up to Santa Ana from San Diego and now I was about to head back down.

I’ve talked a lot about how incredibly quickly everything was happening that year but it’s fun to lay things out on a comparative timeline. The Milwaukee show where Black Dice was attacked was at the beginning of May. I didn’t realize how closely they and Lightning Bolt were related yet but I might not have even heard Lightning Bolt yet either. My first show as Spidermammal with Deerhoof was a couple weeks later and then we were moving back to San Diego.

I don’t know when this Lightning Bolt show at The Smell was but I’m going to guess some time in June. Not long after Deerhoof came through the same venue and played with xbxrx. By July I was back in Chicago running into xbxrx playing with Missing Tooth from the Spidermammal show. In August I was living at Fort Thunder, got to read all of Chippendale’s comic notebooks and set up a show for xbxrx that wouldn’t be happening until I’d already left town.

All of this is just dates and band names but the point was that everybody was constantly on tour or traveling and writing each other letters and this loose grouping of what you’d call noise rock bands were crossing each other’s paths and playing together and a few of them were about to become hugely commercially successful. There isn’t any microgenre or -core or -wave name for the thing that was going on but it was definitely a certain kind of energy and the clock was ticking until 9/11 and everything changing.

After the Lightning Bolt show I walked across Skid Row to the Greyhound station for what was probably the first time and I wouldn’t have had any idea that I was about to be traveling to Fort Thunder and Providence and meeting some people that would make it so I probably spent as much time riding Greyhounds over the next two years as I did living in actual houses. I only knew that something exciting was happening and I didn’t care how far I had to travel or where I had to sleep as long as I could be there and be a part of it.

I couldn’t have known that this world had a looming expiration date but the way I was moving you’d almost think I did.

San Diego 2001 : “I like to call it a pack of moments”

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Sometimes I feel lucky that as cool as he was my father wasn’t particularly creative. It’s not an absolutely binding rule but it seems like a lot of the time the sons of extraordinary artists are either total fuckups or pale imitations of their sires – a shadow too large to ever find one’s self out from under it, a pair of shoes that can’t be filled no matter how much you stuff them with newspaper or how many pairs of socks are layered underneath.

It’s generally seen as an indicator of reliability when some technical trade like watch or shoe repair has been passed down through multiple generations and in the case of creative pursuits it certainly gets a toe in the door but the value of that creative output is immediately suspect. Does anybody really prefer the Brian Herbert Dune novels or Bob McKay Little Nemo comic strips?

I’ve seen a few pictures by Yumihiko Amano, son of the celebrated Final Fantasy illustrator and character designer, that I liked but there’s no denying that his work is both derivative of and inferior to his father’s distinctive style. It seems like there are many Marleys constantly performing at Reggae or marijuana themed festivals but are any of them carving out much of a niche creatively?

The three different Hank Williams would seem to be an exception to this pattern as each of them is celebrated both as a songwriter and for expanding country music as a genre but this piece isn’t really about making a list.

I was thinking more about the total fuck up than the pale imitation phenomenon – or at least the situations where the sons go through a total fuck up period on the rocky road to becoming a pale imitation. I wrote a little bit about spending the night in St. Louis’s City Museum in The Miss Rockaway Armada chapters but I can’t remember if I went into very much detail about meeting Max Cassilly.

Another point that is probably relevant here is that great artists often make shitty fathers especially when they have a tendency to reinvent themselves multiple times with new partners and families. John Lennon was undoubtedly a far worse father to Julian than he was to Sean and for whatever reasons made specific efforts to exclude his eldest son from his legacy.

As long as I’m on this topic I might as well as drop in a recommendation for the episode of This American Life about my brother’s biological father, Keith Aldrich, who was never particularly exceptional as an artist but is noteworthy for the sheer number of times he attempted this kind of self reinvention at the expense of family.

The episode is called Twentieth Century Man and is definitely worth a listen. I suppose I could just drop in an actual link or even an embedded player but I still have complicated feelings about that sort of thing. Anyway it’s not exactly the kind of thing where you would necessarily want to stop reading to listen to it at this very moment but it’s easy enough to type it into a search bar if you’re interested later.

I don’t necessarily know whether or not Bob Cassilly was a shitty father during the time that he was married to his first wife, City Museum co-creator and long term director Gail Cassilly, but when The Rockaway came through in 2007 he had moved on to a younger wife he had a much younger son with. It must have already been intimidating for Max to have a father who was essentially a real life Willy Wonka but his new stepmother wanted nothing to do with him and had gotten a restraining order that prohibited Max from visiting the new home they were building in Cementland.

I met the elder Cassilly a few times and had at least one extended conversation with him but my recollections are nowhere near as sharp as the ones I have of his business partner John Patzius. The phrase that immediately jumps up in my memory is “poker face” – I remember him being something of an enigma and always wondering what he really thought about the pod of junk rafts he had invited to his riparian doorstep. Cementland was planned to eventually become a complex of medieval castle style architecture and water filled moats but at this stage it was mostly piles of rubble and a few old planes, buses and other vehicles.

There was an area where Cassilly had built a fascinating little suspension bridge and there was also a bit of decorative glasswork that I believe was done by his new wife and may not exist anymore as I didn’t see it when I looked at photos. I can’t remember if it was a trailer or a free standing structure but the home he lived in with his new family was fairly close to this section of the old factory. I saw, and was seen by, the bride and child as I passed by one of the windows: Cassilly asked me to give it a wider berth in my future explorations.

Max Cassilly, Bob’s eldest son, lived in an apartment above the City Museum. I don’t remember him ever coming by the rafts or to the big Skarekrau Radio concert that eventually happened on top of the concrete pylon on the river – I’m not sure if this would have violated his stepmother’s restraining order as it was technically part of the Cementland property but displaced by a two-lane road and large public park from the rest of it. He did come down and attempt to hang out with us during the slumber party.

He had one of those mohawks that is grown out and not held up by any kind of product – kind of like circa-2000 Anthony Kiedis. I think he was wearing a black t-shirt, green blazer and fingerless gloves. He was noticeably out of his element – it must have been intimidating trying to socialize with people that were close to his own age but friends and associates of his father.

I hadn’t reached the stage of my life where smoking marijuana started to give me crippling anxiety and I happened to have some on me. A few of us were passing around a spliff and Max saw it as an opportunity to attempt to relate to and possibly impress us:

“I’ve got a six foot bong upstairs in my apartment…”

I told him that we were already getting high enough. After a long pause he took another stab at engaging us in conversation. He started this next bit with what I’m going to refer to as an “existential teenage edgelord sigh” and hope that my readers will most likely know the sound I’m alluding to:

“Yeah, I was in Amsterdam recently…”

I cut him off:

“Spare us.”

He didn’t say anything after that and must have gone back upstairs not too long after because I don’t remember seeing him again that night. I was mean – the kid was only twenty one and in an unenviable position socially but I can be extremely unforgiving in matters of aesthetics. I wasn’t expecting him to be his father but I did expect him to have more of a personality than just “weed”. I’m sure he does and I just caught him in a bad moment – I’ve said this before in another situation where I was making a half-handed excuse for another person I didn’t really like but “we’ve all said stupid shit while attempting to fit in”.

When Bob Cassilly died from rolling over his bulldozer I heard a rumor that Max had been non-lethally shot a week or so earlier as a warning to pay off some significant cocaine debts. I only learned recently that a second autopsy concluded that the bulldozer accident had been staged and Bob was actually murdered – beaten to death. I can’t remember where I even heard the cocaine thing, relegating it to hearsay, but I did get the vibe from some of the “St. Louis Party Girls” that Max was always down to party and generous with the drug.

I wonder if there might be some larger connection between the two incidents but I’m not really close to the situation and don’t know anything solid. Max seems to do quite a bit of work at the City Museum now, along with some other projects, and generally appears to have moved past the total fuck-up phase. I can’t say that I would have done any better if I’d ended up with such a culturally iconic father I could never escape being negatively compared to – I really can’t even imagine what that’s like.

Regardless I didn’t start this piece to talk about Max Cassilly – I wanted to talk about this kid from the clique of nerdy film, comic book and video game enthusiasts I hung out with for my last couple years of High School. This crew convened, with the addition of one Peter Pan-like middle aged school teacher, at the La Mesa house where Ben, Chris and James Pearce lived. This corresponded with the time that my friend Tim was in the USC film program and along with a constant stream of improvised camcorder movies everybody worked on his black and white Super 8 films and one full color claymation short.

Spencer’s father wasn’t especially well known as an artist but their North County home was saturated with his paintings. He had a singular vision – every canvas I ever saw featured colossal nude women made of bricks and stone in the form of buildings. People, mainly men, looked out from windows set into the heads and torsos while most of the doors were in the same predictable place. His fascination clearly had a sexual element but none of the works I ever saw were especially lewd.

Having lived in Tijuana I wonder if Roger, Spencer’s father, was ever aware of or had the opportunity to visit the example of this particular architectural folly known as La Mona de Tijuana. I used to take buses to the dilapidated neighborhood by the border to visit this structure but was often run off by packs of wild dogs. In fact LaPorsha and I had met with Armando Muñoz, the sculptor/architect, to discuss holding our wedding in a second, mermaid shaped building he’d built in Rosarito called La Sirena.

His proposed fees were outside of our price range so instead we held the ceremony in the base of a seventy-five foot tall sculpture of the Christian Messiah called Cristo del Sagrado Corazón. We actually probably could have even done things for free in La Mona if we’d really wanted but ending the ceremony next to a beach and sand dunes with ATV rentals sounded more appealing for our guests than a depressing poverty-stricken neighborhood patrolled by aggressive canines.

On the topic of La Mona it might interest any readers planning to visit it or merely glancing at the attached photo to learn that the distinctive pose in which the female figure holds her arm is intended to be symbolic of Tijuana itself: the uplifted appendage is roughly the shape of the state of Baja California and the raised pinky corresponds with the city’s position in the northernmost corner against the International border.

One of the last times I went to see it I ran into a resident of the neighborhood who seemed to have a heavy case of what is referred to as malinchismo: a cultural inferiority complex against Mexico and in favor of the United States. The phenomenon is named for Malinche – the native woman who was instrumental in Cortés conquering the Aztec Empire.

La Mona has fallen into significant disrepair and is covered in hastily scribbled spray-paint graffiti. He demanded to know, in English, why I, an American, would go out of my way to look at something he viewed as an eyesore overdue for demolition. I answered him in my stilted, overly formal Spanish:

“A veces las cosas destruidas tienen una belleza única.”

For those who don’t understand the language – “sometimes destroyed things possess a unique beauty”. Without a moment’s hesitation he answered back, once again in English:

“No. No they don’t.”

It didn’t feel like there was anywhere left for our conversation to go. Like La Mona herself it had found itself on the precipice of a border rendered uncrossable by custom and circumstance.

Anyway back to Spencer’s father Roger:

I only met him a couple of times and he sadly passed away from health complications while Spencer and I were still in High School. I was able to locate his obituary and a small profile on a database of American artists but I couldn’t seem to dig up images of any of his paintings.

When I moved back home from Chicago to San Diego in the Winter of 2001 I got an unexpected call from Spencer. We had never been particularly close but he had heard through the grapevine that I had gotten into drugs which remained taboo, or at least a subject of disinterest, for most of our friend group. I wasn’t doing much beyond hanging around my parent’s house so I took a sequence of buses up to Clairemont or whatever it was to hang out.

Spencer would have been twenty at this point in time but his entire personality was like the bravado of a fourth grader with a stolen beer or cigarette. He’d just gotten some wisdom teeth removed which always netted a small bottle of Vicodin in these days before the stricter sentencing guidelines. I had never taken the stuff, having jumped straight to heroin after getting some Tylenol with codeine from Canada, and I didn’t think too much of its effects.

After we both swallowed a couple of the pills Spencer wanted to try ingesting it in the stupidest way imaginable – crushing a pill down to powder and smoking it on top of marijuana which obviously doesn’t work. Hanging out with him felt like looking at a pair of sunglasses on a puppy – drugs were a self conscious accessory to come off as “bad” and “cool” in a way that just didn’t click with me. We went outside to smoke a cigarette, prompting this piece of deep philosophy:

“I like to call it a pack of moments…”

We didn’t hang out again. Besides the weed and Vicodin it sounded like he’d mostly been using and selling acid – I didn’t introduce him to needles or anything harder and he eventually found at least the second one of these things himself. In the following years I got prescribed Vicodin at least a couple of times when my own wisdom teeth came out but I was already back to injecting heroin at that point and didn’t notice much of anything from it this time either.

In early 2010 I did a cold water extraction on some Vicodin that I’d gotten from a neighbor and finally discovered what all the “buzz” was about, as it were. An oral dose of around 60 mg of hydrocodone combined with a tolerance that had returned to near baseline levels after six or more months of abstinence led to an intoxication that shines brighter in my memory than my first time injecting heroin. The pills that had been the major gateway drugs for most of America’s opiate epidemic only revealed their charms to me at this relatively late stage and I spent the next few years periodically chasing after them in a variety of inventive ways.

I heard a story about Spencer a few years after our 2001 meetup. The Pearces had a grandmother they referred to as “gramonster” because she was evidently scary. She lived alone and spent all of her time between a kitchen, bathroom and couch in front of a loud television without apparently setting foot into the bedrooms toward the rear of her home for years. This allowed Spencer, who’d presumably been kicked out by his own mother, to utilize a rear exit and squat inside her home with her undetected for a significant length of time.

I can’t remember who I heard this story from but I missed a lot of details most relevantly who eventually caught him and whether there was a confrontation. The story was that he was “selling drugs out of her house” but I don’t know how true that is. It seems unlikely that he would have served a constant stream of customers through the back door as that would have dramatically raised the risk of discovery but I suppose nothing’s impossible and it certainly makes for an entertaining mental image.

I did a bit of digging around and discovered a 2017 article in MovieMaker Magazine about aspiring but incarcerated film makers. I’ll drop a link underneath this paragraph but apparently Spencer eventually got into counterfeiting money which caught the attention of the FBI and earned him some prison time. I wonder how much overlap there ended up being between our stories although my own criminal career was made up of arguably “victimless” offenses and never got me into serious trouble.

https://www.moviemaker.com/misguided-visionaries-these-three-moviemakers-are-getting-their-start-from-behind-bars/

One of the last Super 8 short films that Tim and I worked on, and the only one to feature Spencer, was a piece called Two Plus Two Minus. It centered around two “good” and two “bad” characters in the most Boolean possible morality. I portrayed one of the evildoers as the self styled “King of the Bums” with a banana peel crown and the aforementioned older teacher as my sycophantic toady. To really cement our moral alignment we violently robbed one of the good characters who was attempting to raise money to help the homeless.

I wouldn’t exactly call the role “prophetic” but I did end up homeless for several years and often wore what could be called “loud statement” outfits during this period though I never aspired to represent any kind of royalty. I did spend a bit of time standing by freeway exits with a cardboard sign for money – an activity that is briefly represented in the film albeit with a very different sign.

“Homeless Hungry God Bless” usually gets the job done. It would have been an interesting experiment to see what kind of reactions the sign from the movie, “I’m the King of the Bums. Pay me tribute!”, would have garnered in contrast but because I needed to maximize my earnings and retain the good will of wherever I’d found myself I never tried it.

I can’t exactly remember what Spencer’s character was like in the film besides being one of the good ones. If my memory serves correctly our friend Gerry, who happened to be Mexican-American, was the other bad character as a house burglar. The creation of the characters leaned heavily into negative tropes and stereotypes but it’s understandable that Tim didn’t detect any inkling that Spencer would be better cast as the future crook. Even looking at more recent photos there is an goofiness and innocence to them – more like a kid playing out ideas from movies of what a criminal is than an actual danger to society.

I don’t know if I even understand anymore what point I was trying to make when I first started writing this piece several days ago except that I hadn’t written for some time and had lost the momentum that kept me churning out pieces on a near daily basis earlier this Winter. According to the above article Spencer still aspires to creativity and it’s not like I’ve spent the majority of my life as a creative dynamo myself but it felt like he spent some time embodying the total fuckup archetype and I wondered if having a creative father might have played some role.

Mostly I’ve done a lot of talking shit and putting other people’s business on blast. I’m reminded of an incident in New Orleans – a city with an above average share of the dress in black, play in a rock band, work as a bouncer and get into fights over bullshit subculture. Somebody I knew from San Diego had become a key figure in this cohort and some of his droogs overheard me referring to him as a “tweaker”. They went to grab him in eager expectation of watching him deal out an ass kicking in retaliation for the insult. When he saw me he laughed:

“This guy? Last time I saw this guy he was so fucked up on heroin he was practically passing out in the gutter!”

What can I say? It’s nice to be remembered.

Michigan 2010 : The Land of NOD Experiment “Hot Dogs and Mojitos”

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You’ll remember that at the conclusion of The Bus chapters John Benson found a cheap house online in Albion, the closest town in Michigan to where The Bus broke down, and decided to buy it. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to repair The Bus using the planned engine transplant method and even to store The Bus on the property. His reasoning was sound: one generally believes that owning a house gives you the legal right to occupy it and neighborhoods where most of the houses are unoccupied and selling for a pittance on eBay won’t be subject to the vicissitudes of HOAs and the like.

Albion, in these regards, turned out to be exceptional – or at least this particular block of it did. One neighbor decided from the moment John Benson first set foot into the house that we didn’t seem like the kind of people he wanted in his neighborhood and local laws and regulations seemed to be on his side. He found a law to prevent John from being able to move The Bus onto the premises and went to work on tracking down the legal loopholes to keep us out entirely.

This was more of a war of attrition then something that happened overnight – after it became apparent The Bus wasn’t getting fixed a few different people from the extended friend network tried their hand at small town living. Jason Crumer became so frustrated with Albion that he edited the town’s Wikipedia entry to say something to the effect of “full of ignorant assholes”. That didn’t garner a ton of good will with the populace at large.

This was the larger background situation when I passed through Albion on tour with Generation and walked into the house to find a wild opossum hissing at us from inside of a cage in the center of the largest room. No one we knew was supposed to be staying there at the time so as far as we could tell there was an unknown squatter who had a penchant for keeping angry marsupials in captivity. We were feeling a little apprehensive about sticking around long enough to find out when a more innocuous explanation presented itself.

There was one person in Albion that liked having us around and wanted to help in any way he could: a punk kid named Kevin who worked at the one coffee shop. He’d been keeping an eye on the house and had noticed that the opossum had taken up residence in it. He’d borrowed a live trap from the animal shelter and we’d just happened to wander in after the animal got caught but before he’d come back to check it.

I hopped into Coffee Kev’s car for the familiar activity of “taking it for a ride” – driving the opossum far enough away that it wouldn’t find it’s way back to the house. When I was younger a mother opossum had moved her brood into my family’s garage and I helped my father capture and relocate the juveniles. I’ll never forget the way they despondently grabbed onto the bars of the cat carrier with their tiny and oddly human looking hands.

The adult from the Albion house wasn’t being as cute about it’s temporary lack of freedom – it backed into the corner of the trap and hissed every time anybody looked at it. Regardless this is my most vivid memory of Albion: driving down backroads green with tall grass and pasture, chatting with Kevin about God knows what until we decided it was far enough and watched a frightened opossum scurry off into the undergrowth.

Once we got back to the house there was barely enough time to walk upstairs and look around before the cops showed up. Apparently the problem neighbor had dug into local codes and ordinances and figured out that the house was in need of various repairs and renovations that meant it was technically illegal for anyone to stay in it until an inspection indicated the work was finished. The cops seemed embarrassed and were apologetic:

“We wish nobody had called us but unfortunately somebody did and the law is on his side.”

I don’t know what eventually happened to the house or the first bus but I’d imagine that John Benson doesn’t own anything in Albion anymore. Some friends had done some digging on the neighbor and figured out that he liked parrots and motorcycles but that’s not exactly material for the kind of blackmail that could get him off of everybody’s backs. He wasn’t going anywhere. Something to think about when considering buying a dilapidated house sight unseen in a small town you know next to nothing about.

This section of the tour wasn’t that solidly booked and we ended up accepting an opportunity that was bizarre even by noise tour standards. We were supposed to be playing on a miniature bicycle powered stage provided by a recycling themed clown troupe at a major music festival. Our friend Books had been living in Detroit and getting into the clown troupe subculture with a group she called The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos.

I don’t know very much about The Land of NOD Experiment except that there was some kind of New Orleans connection and in 2010 it was attempting to make the jump from a smaller friends camp and jam thing to a larger festival in terms of talent and infrastructure. The headliners were Of Montreal, Eagles of Death Metal and Kool Keith performing as Dr. Octagon with DJ Q-Bert. Besides that it was Trombone Shorty, Ratty Skurvics, some other New Orleans folks and a lot of smaller names.

The tone was set the moment we met up with Books for our wristbands and went through security. On this leg of the tour we were traveling and playing with Forced Into Femininity and an older female security guard thought it would be appropriate to reach out and grope Jill’s breast while asking a question made academic by her preemptive action:

“Can I feel?”

The fact that she asked at all showed that she had some awareness of the necessity for consent but just didn’t care. Trans awareness and social visibility were in a slightly different place in 2010 but this woman’s actions were egregious even for a small town like Jackson, Michigan. She was essentially communicating that she saw Jill’s body and identity as a joke and Jill herself undeserving of even basic bodily autonomy. I can’t remember how anybody reacted but the unfamiliar and isolated setting meant that this violation didn’t exactly feel like a teachable moment.

The second thing to portend how the weekend was going to go was that it immediately started pouring rain and continued through most of the first night. The festival setting was on the edge of some wetlands but the weather effectively changed this to a stiflingly humid mosquito infested swamp. Judging by the sizes of the stages, sound systems, crowd control barriers and the high number of porta-potties the promoters must have been banking on attendance in the tens of thousands but I only saw a few hundred.

I don’t know anything about Eagles of Death Metal, I really enjoyed early Of Montreal when I was deep into the Elephant Six thing and Doctor Octagon was one of my favorite albums in High School. Still I felt the selection of headlining talent was somewhat eclectic, or I’m just going to say haphazardly thrown together, it didn’t feel especially curated. It would have been a great lineup for a free outdoor festival subsidized through grants and corporate sponsorships but with the expectation that people would be paying festival money it just wasn’t there – it felt like something was missing although I couldn’t say exactly what.

Ticket pre sales had evidently been disappointing and any hopes for a last minute rush at the gates were dissipated by the unfortunate turn in weather. Anyone that was feeling out the possibility of a festival experience but riding the fence due to the tepid selection of headliners was probably deciding on the free and dry side of that aforementioned fence.

The crowd that did actually show up seemed to be mainly what I would call “performative festival tryhards” – face paint, some showy hippy/steampunk/raver fashion and a dancing accessory designed to draw attention to themselves. Things like hula hoops that can be set on fire, those fringed suede covered sticks where you knock a third stick back and forth, djembes, megaphones and a few other things I’m forgetting – probably at least a slack line or two.

The main thing was that it felt like these exhibitionist types were hoping for throngs of festival greenhorns they could dazzle and impress with their bouncey stick prowess but of course they were the only ones there. Nobody was directly saying any of this but the body energy seemed clear that their basic need of being watched was not being met as everyone was too busy putting on their own show. The ground was turning into mud and most of the tents had become miserable, collapsed puddles.

The clowns were visibly around and with a few free beverages being passed out in cans they had their work cut out for them. There was a newly launched energy drink on the brink of failure, the ever elusive Red Bull girls and I think even an alcoholic option – but that was only in the backstage areas our wristbands gave us access to. I wasn’t on any oaths or pledges concerning abstinence but I don’t remember drinking and wouldn’t have been taking drugs. If LSD showed up the obvious instinct would be to save it for a setting where you might actually enjoy yourself.

The Generation siblings had opted to sit up all night in the talent area because people had mosquito repellant and the bugs were so bad they couldn’t sleep. Both of them were still quite innocent of certain worldly matters at this time and one of the themes of this tour was aggressive young women making constant confrontational sexual overtures. This made the Pickells extremely uncomfortable.

We were starting to hear talk that a lot of the performers were jumping ship because a) the festival was miserable to be inside of and b) the anemic ticket sales made it a practical certainty that anyone who wasn’t paid in advance was most likely not getting paid at all. This would turn into an opportunity for us. They were serving basic hotdogs on stiff buns without condiments – a sign of things to come.

The first night ended with a surprise headliner: DJ Bad Boy Bill. It was a last minute replacement for another headline act dropping out – Eagles of Death Metal. Ticket sales were low to begin with and I’d imagine a decent number of attendees took this as a pretext for demanding refunds. For some that may well have been the act they had mostly come for but for others I imagine it just presented an opportunity to pull the plug and recoup money on an experience that was not shaping up as advertised.

I vaguely remember watching this set from a classic Chicago House DJ with some degree of interest. The music was decent and the stage show included pyrotechnics and some fancy light effects. I went to try to sleep in the puddle that was my tent fairly early to prepare for whatever performing tomorrow would look like.

While hanging out backstage the previous evening we had chatted a small amount with the stage manager / sound engineer on the smallest stage and mentioned that we were there to perform. I was beginning to discuss the logistics of the miniature bike powered clown stage with Books when he caught my eye and motioned for me and Generation to come and talk to him. It turned out that even the smaller level acts were cancelling at an alarming rate out of fear of no payment and he was struggling to keep live music going on his specific stage for appearances.

Simply rolling an iPod playlist though all the missing acts would veer too close to acknowledging what this whole festival was: a complete and unmitigated disaster.

Books was disappointed when I informed her we wouldn’t be needing the bike stage but she had far more serious disappointments looming on the horizon. We decided to do the kind of Generation / Bleak End set that we had done at BitchPork but switched the orders around due to an unfortunate trend of spectators crediting the entire Generation set to me on the strength of some unconventional blocking. Forced Into Femininity wasn’t interested in playing and Jill generally wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible.

There wasn’t too much of a crowd but it was easily the biggest, fanciest and loudest sound system we had the opportunity to play with on the entire tour. [Note: actually probably not – we were on the main stage at Bitchpork] The unconventional music styles did seem to capture people’s attention and it was exciting just for the bizarre flex of saying we played an official stage for a mid to large size music festival – albeit a failure of one. It’s definitely more fun talking about it now than it was to actually play it.

I was actually super into Kool Keith in High School and Dr. Octagon was my favorite of his albums and personas by a wide margin. Under other circumstances I would have been excited to catch his performance but this wasn’t my first time at this kind of festival. Years earlier I had gotten an unexpected late night phone call from my older brother who turned out to be drunk at a U2 concert in some large East Coast arena. He held his cell phone up for me to hear.

After going to Coachella in 2004 I thought of the drunken U2 phone call as the perfect metaphor for everything that was disappointing and unsatisfying about the experience. Your favorite band in the world could be playing but it still just feels like listening through a cell phone held up by a drunk friend on the other side of the country. This isn’t true for something like Bitch Pork but the Festivals with white tents, beverage sponsors and colorful plastic wristbands always end up feeling this way.

It would have been cool if the Dr. Octagon set had happened a little earlier but it wasn’t even worth asking my friends to stick around for a few more hours. Through the lens of a major Festival, even a sparsely attended failed one, all of the energy that makes live music appealing is simply lost in translation.

Once we came off stage the rest of the group came and found us, Jill, Sugar Tea and Popsicle, and the sentiment was that we should leave as sleeping in a truck stop sounded more appealing than staying here. We packed up our wet tents and started the trek toward the exit when we discovered that Generation had made a profound impact on one fan specifically. A young girl dressed in a zebra miniskirt came jogging up and enthusiastically recapped her impressions of their set:

“Oh my god that was so crazy! You were like “RRURRURRU” and then you were like “reereeree”!

In her impressions she seemed to be imitating the kind of low/high screaming trade off that can be heard in Crust Metal bands like Dystopia, Wisigoth and most likely others I don’t know the names of. I am quite fond of the vocal style but it wasn’t what Generation sounded like by any stretch of the imagination. She repeated this several times with an unflagging surplus of energy as the Pickell siblings chuckled in obvious discomfort.

Her demonstration took a bit of a turn:

“Yeah!, I was so blown away I was like…”

She bent forward at the waist and let her mouth hang loosely open. One would assume this was to indicate shock but she then began to bob her head suggestively while making gagging noises. In case that wasn’t clear enough she added this last bit of commentary:

“Like, stick a dick in my mouth already, ya know?”

There was a bit more nervous and forced laughter until Rain had a sudden flash of inspiration. They had printed these tiny paper flyers with pictures of alien faces and urls for some of their videos and other online resources. Rain quickly handed her one of the tiny fliers. This seemed to throw the zebra skirt girl for a loop and she spent a couple minutes scanning and attempting to decode it. We all took the opportunity to recommence power walking toward the exit as quickly as possible.

We were clearly too far away to chase down again so instead the zebra girl gave a giant wave then cupped her hands around her mouth to scream out a final message:

“I’m gonna stick this in my pussy!!!”

With those words we had reached the gates and The Land of NOD Experiment was firmly behind us. We had escaped. We called Amanda to see if she had friends in Ann Arbor and ended up at a punk house called The Meat House that just happened to have an upcoming generator show full of fresh degradations when we attempted to play it.

I’d like to end this story with some things I didn’t witness first hand but heard through Books – the final fate of the Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos. When the festival promoters found themselves deeply in the red and needing to pick artists, workers or vendors to not pay the clowns seemed like the perfect choice. They had been gathering cans all weekend and Michigan is known across the USA for it’s relatively high beverage can redemption value of 10 cents so they wouldn’t be leaving empty handed. Still the agreement was that they would be paid 200 dollars a head for keeping the festival clean and teaching attendees about the joys of recycling.

The main promoter invited the clowns to their tent for hot dogs, mojitos and a “friendly chat”. The message was essentially that they had to fuck someone and The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos seemed more fuckable than any other entity in this specific scenario. The clowns weren’t trying to take this sitting down but they also didn’t appear to have any options to retaliate. They could dump all the cans back out but that would just mean losing the small money to cover gas and other expenses they would be getting for following through on the recycling message they had coalesced around in the first place.

To make things especially insulting the promoter’s younger sister was tripping on acid, not wearing pants and laughing at everything the clowns said for this entire conversation. Some empty promises were made to the effect that the promoters would be continuing to fundraise and the clowns would be paid just as soon as all the more important people that were owed money were paid first – things like parking attendants, paid hula hoopers and God knows what else.

Based on the logistical clusterfuck of this initial outing it seems highly unlikely that any fund raising was successful. When I checked it’s Facebook page it seemed like they’d transitioned to smaller rabbit themed events around New Orleans. The Festival was dead. I have a feeling The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos didn’t exactly bounce back from this either. Our tour? Our tour went on.

On to Ann Arbor and a thing called “dick time!”

Illinois 2011 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Five “I thought those meals were coming awfully quick”

berniebleak1 Comment

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The black leather cap.

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I viewed this cap as one of my talismans. In a way it was the talisman because losing it had a profound effect on how I viewed the world and magic and ushered in the end of my magical career. I had been self identifying as a “TangleWitch” meaning that I thought my magical abilities were especially suited for entangling things and next to useless for untangling them. I started to see myself and my core talismans as entangled – meaning that the universe was fundamentally incapable of separating us on a permanent basis.

I especially thought this about the cap because of two separate but similar incidents. The first time was at a work party for the Black Butte Center for Railroad Permaculture, coincidentally very close to where I currently live, that I travelled to with Larry Bus. I forget why I was angrily and drunkenly walking through the forest alone in the middle of the night but it culminated in me throwing my cap into the trees.

I’ve been to forests, jungles, savannas and chapparales across a decent portion of the globe and none of them are as visually homogenous as the evergreen forests of the greater Mount Shasta watershed. I figured that my chances of relocating the cap once I woke up sober and regretful were next to zero but I took a walk and there it was. It felt significant.

The second time around was also Larry Bus adjacent. John Benson was making a trip down to San Diego to deliver a power wheelchair he had prepared to my mother, who was suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, and we set up a show in Balboa Park. This was the same trip as the 2010 Tijuana two-parter about getting arrested – the show was a night or two before our trip across the border and when I get around to writing it up you’ll see what a phenomenally shitty week the whole thing was.

I had lost the cap in Balboa Park while getting caught up in a knuckleduster, or in less flowery language my friends and I getting assaulted, so I was reasonably certain that I would never see it again. On a subsequent trip to San Diego nearly a year later it reappeared on my friend Eddie Castro’s porch which is precisely when I started to believe that the thing was karmically bound to me. It had gotten an excessive amount of my juju on it and it started to feel like no matter how far it went invisible forces would slowly but inevitably pull it back to me.

Part of this belief stemmed from the fact that it hadn’t originally been my hat. It had belonged to my cohort Kevin Von Mutant who had undoubtedly added the row of round studs and VIN number plate from a car that was most likely towed out to the desert to be destroyed and I started wearing it during the brief window of time that we had a Death Rock band called Voiheuristick Necromorph. After I had added some colorful buttons, feathers and a rubber bat tucked under the band he declared that there was too much of my juju on it to accept it back.

Anyway enough about this stupid hat: let’s talk about how the three threads of this story come together and I lost it for good. Let’s talk about the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos.

There are a weird sequence of concentric rings pertaining to unfeigned appreciation of beauty and insulating layers of irony that together map out all the different ways of being a “Hipster” and I can say with reasonable certainty that I fit somewhere in there. I’ve been to Coachella, I’ve had numerous vegan brunches, I’ve bought clothing from American Apparel and I used to look forward to bringing home free issues of VICE when it was still a print magazine.

It is neither the first nor the last adjective that would pop up if somebody was attempting to describe and define me but it is certainly one of them.

There were probably some preliminary rumbles and FOMO aftershocks but by my reckoning 2011 was the year of the great hipsterization of the Juggalo subculture. I don’t mean that Juggalos became hipsters or vice versa – for several years it had parsed over into being a prestigious reference, like when I made a talisman out of the lucky Juggalo dollar, but now every hipster worth their artisanal cocktail salt was trying to show up for the Annual Gathering. Clown paint, oversized ICP shirts and hatchetman everything were popping up in highbrow noise sets and fine art installations.

By now the Juggalo movement has been thoroughly plundered and its aesthetics and iconography have been present in mainstream hip-hop for several years – albeit without a watermark and with the serial numbers filed off.

I had gone to Chicago for Bitch Pork and stuck around for the remainder of the Summer when my good friend Dalton from the bus tour and Living Hell informed me that he had a press pass with my name on it and I needed to get my ass down to Cave-In-Rock, Illinois to check out the 12th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos. I asked around about rides and quickly joined some Facebook groups but nothing materialized so I felt like I had no choice but to try to get myself down there by any means necessary and undertake an odyssey I had just learned was especially perilous.

I hadn’t thought about my 2008 arrest in Sullivan, Illinois since I almost lost my tutoring job over it the year before and I’d assumed that unless I visited the actual town or tried to ride a train through it again it wouldn’t manifest as a meaningful factor in my life. I had just started my year long oath of abstinence from opioid agonists and temporary Catholicism and even more recently learned that I had Hepatitis C when I went in for routine testing with the girl I’d been seeing which caused me to cut out alcohol as well – this all meant that an unhealthy dose of hubris was involved as I had adequate cause to feel untouchable from a spiritual standpoint.

There was a venue on the West Side of Chicago on the edge of the open air market I used to cop dope in called The Dust Bowl – it would become the major venue for next year’s Bitch Pork festival but at this point subculture types were still a relatively rare sight in the neighborhood. I was biking to a show there one night that was either cancelled or I was too early for or something but I biked out of the neighborhood a few minutes after biking in. To the cop car stationed on North Avenue that noticed me in both directions this could only mean one thing.

The ridiculous part about this was that I was absolutely done up to the nines. I was going through a white lace period of my larger goth phase and would have had on bloomers, a white lacy apron, elaborate face paint and yards of lace ribbon wrapped around my arms and legs like a mummy. I didn’t even have pockets and there’s no way the corner boys from any crew would have ever served me in this state but that’s the timeless stupidity of Chicago cops: they honestly believe that hard drugs are bought and sold by people in Halloween costumes like in an ‘80s action movie instead of the reality that every white buyer is trying to blend in with jeans and a hoodie.

They refused to believe my honest explanation of course and after searching me they were angry enough that their assumptions had been wrong and they’d wasted their time that they were excited about the prospect of running my ID and finding something to catch me up on. I’d been in a handful of situations that involved getting my ID ran outside of Illinois but now that I was in the same state as my initial arrest the charges came back to haunt me. They already had me in handcuffs and might have moved me into the cruiser when one of them noticed some fine print: I was apparently only eligible for arrest on these charges if I was south of the Interstate 80 and north of the Interstate 64.

Chicago sits just above the 80 – it was like Illinois was a giant hamburger and as long as I stayed in the top and bottom buns I was safe but stepping into the wide swathe of meat in the middle meant that I was gambling with a “Go Directly to Jail” card. The Juggalo Gathering takes place in Cave-In-Rock which happens to be just under the 64. Chicago was safe, the Gathering was safe but even if I had a ride down there I’d be risking the possibility of getting pulled over in any number of small towns in the middle. It would be beyond stupid to try to hitchhike.

I was going to do it anyway.

There’s a Megabus to Champaign-Urbana and I figured it would stop for a meal break somewhere around Effingham. It stopped at the exact same truck stop we’d slept behind in 2008. My plan was to jump out and try to catch rides down the 33 and then the 45 – really small country road type highways. Every time I had hitchhiked long distance before had been in the company of at least one girl and generally on larger interstates so I was picking a hell of a time to try it as a 6’4” guy on his own. I was wearing close to the same outfit that I have on in the photo I posted with this story – considering the kind of towns I was trying to catch rides through that didn’t help either.

I asked around the truck stop for a minute but nobody was going in the right direction. I didn’t want to let it get dark on me so I had to just try to get moving. I forget what I wrote on the sign – probably “SOUTH”. It would have been one thing if I never got any rides at all, then I would have just turned back around, but I got two or three really short ones. Just enough to get me to the middle of nowhere.

There weren’t very many cars so every time one passed it was a big psych out as to whether any of them would pick me up or not. None of them did. I didn’t even look like a Juggalo and I hadn’t written anything about the Gathering on the sign so even if a group of them passed it was completely possible that they wouldn’t have picked me up. It didn’t look like any of them did.

Maybe the hitchhiking advice that the Teddy Bear Juggalos had given me back in Amarillo would have come in handy – I was trying to get into their world. Someone did drive past me and yell “do you suck dick?” when I was closer to town. Maybe I should have said yes. That’s stupid – I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. I just wanted to go to a weird party and not let my friends down.

It was starting to get dark and I was scoping out a church to get ready to sleep behind it when an SUV pulled up.

Red and blue lights. I was fucked.

It turned out that somebody had called the cops on me because they thought I was standing too close to a mailbox. They said they thought I was stealing mail. Like freaks come all the way from the city to steal their Sears Catalogues and shit. I can’t even blame them – the whole thing was stupid and I should have accepted that I wasn’t getting there long before I had the cops called on me on a lonely rural highway.

I knew exactly what was going to happen. I’d been given an absurdly detailed warning back in Chicago. The cops asked me if I knew I had a warrant from Moultrie County and were a little taken aback when I told them I did. It was a Friday – I had to choose between paying a five hundred dollar bond and waiting until Monday to see a judge. I had the money, though not much more than it, so there wasn’t any way I could not pay it. You can’t really sit in a cement box for two days if it’s within your power to make it stop, or at least I couldn’t.

There was a teenage kid in there with me. He asked me if I knew what time it was:

“It’s probably around seven.”

“Morning or night?”

“Night.”

“I thought those meals were coming awfully quick.”

The thing that’s stayed with me about this whole experience is the absolute resignation and depression in his voice as he said that last bit about the meals. It turned out that he was in there because somebody had called the cops on him when they saw him and some friends drinking underneath a freeway bridge and he was the only one that was underaged. Normal teenagers doing normal teenage shit and the people in his town decide to call the cops.

I had gone with Snake a couple of Summers earlier when she had to drop off court paperwork from when she’d gone to a camping party in Central Illinois and gotten a citation for curfew because there was nothing else they could catch her up on. I should have known exactly what Central Illinois was like if I had taken half a second to think about it. The kind of place where people call the cops if they see a stranger standing by someone else’s mailbox or a teenager doing the only thing there is to do in their dead end town or for no reason whatsoever.

“Just to be safe.”

There were things I didn’t like about the town I’d grown up in and I couldn’t wait to get out of it but the conformity of San Diego was nothing compared to the absolute emptiness of being young, bored and trapped in a place like Effingham. God damn effing Effingham. Everything about the town pissed me off but the kid wasn’t even pissed off.

He had just given up.

After an hour or so they had finished processing me and they brought me to the heavy metal door and handed me my paperwork and cut me loose. There was a soda machine between the door and the exit and I didn’t exactly want a soda but I had a dollar on me so I bought a Dr. Pepper. It felt like I almost didn’t have a choice – like now that I had my freedom I had to buy a soda if I had the option and Dr. Pepper was just the best of several bad options.

I stepped outside with my soda and a Bluegrass String band was playing on the grass of the town square outside. The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was watch an old timey String band but it wasn’t like I was about to start walking so I sat on the grass and I opened my Dr. Pepper. I think they were called Strings n’ Things. In Effingham even the air of freedom doesn’t taste sweet.

It’s just sad and mediocre.

It wasn’t a long walk to the same truck stop and I went to sleep behind it again just like in 2008. I found an old vinyl sign, like the banner kind, and I wrapped it around myself so the dew wouldn’t get me wet in the morning. The next day was Saturday and I had already missed the first day of the Gathering but I figured that at this point the worst had already happened. I could show my discharge papers if another cop got called on me so I spent a few more hours attempting what was clearly impossible.

I got to the roadside just after the sun came up and by noon nobody had even slowed down much less stopped for me. It was time to accept the inevitable. I flipped my cardboard sign over, wrote “CHI” on the back and walked to the other side of the street. It was like I had been walking against the wind with all my strength only to stay in one place and then turned around and let it carry me. It was like the sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud, the day got a little brighter, the birds got a little louder.

I hadn’t been standing there for five minutes when a family of smiling Christians stopped and gave me a prepaid Subway sandwich card. It wasn’t like I particularly wanted a Subway sandwich but it wasn’t about that. I had flipped a switch and suddenly people were acknowledging and wanting to help me. I was moving in sync with the Universe. Ten minutes later I had a ride and he was going all the way to Chicago.

It had cost me a day and five hundred dollars but that wasn’t the real price. His name was Doug and he was a deer hunter. The conversation was pleasant enough – just enough to put me at ease to the point that I stepped out of the car in Chicago without realizing that I had forgotten my black leather cap. He lived in Humboldt Park, a couple of blocks from The Dust Bowl, so he had some patina of hipness but not to the extent that I would actually have any prayer of seeing him at anything.

Of course I tried to get it back, I expected to, the message hadn’t sunk in yet that I had made a serious mis-step and it was a consequence. I put flyers all around the block of park that he had dropped me off at. I wrote “Deerhunter Doug” and explained that I had forgotten the hat and it was important to me and I wrote my phone number on the bottom. It would have been less of a blow if he never called but to make the senseless loss all the more frustrating he did.

I stuck around Chicago for a couple more weeks but by the time he called I was already back in California. Of course he remembered me, of course he still had my hat but there wasn’t any way he would send it to me for any amount of money or let me have a friend go pick it up for me. It isn’t vanity that makes me say he was attracted to me and kindling hope that a second meeting might go somewhere – it was just painfully obvious. He was an aging urban professional queen who was cosplaying rural masculinity by dressing up in Real Tree and going deer hunting and I was a hipster cosplaying a gay leather subculture that I wasn’t even peripherally a part of.

Neither of us were going to get what we wanted and I never saw the hat again.

The experience didn’t end my magic career entirely but it checked and subverted my faith in things that I never should have had faith in to begin with. I had been getting cocky and I needed a reminder that even if I had gotten lucky a few times if I tried fate it would try me back. It wasn’t that I wasn’t supposed to be at The Gathering of the Juggalos, I just wasn’t going to get there if I was being stupid about it.

To add insult to injury I met someone from our social group a week later that had driven from Chicago to the Gathering at the exact time that I’d been trying to get there.

Things changed for me slowly. The Library of Congress Tape Player for the Blind that had been providing the soundtrack for my life on consecutive charges of its nickel-cadmium battery took the hit for me when a car knocked me off my bicycle. I performed an Invocation to Venus and eventually met my wife. We performed a series of Planetary Invocations to Saturn, the Moon, Mars and Mercury.

I gradually stopped wearing and using and thinking about all of my other talismans and when I lost them I lost them all at once along with everything else I’d accumulated up to that point in my life.

It didn’t feel like it had anything to do with magic.

Los Angeles 2010 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Four “Murder, Mayhem, Rape, Sodomy”

berniebleak2 Comments

[Photo Credit: Jamspackula]

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The train barreled through the night. We must have been flying along pretty fast because the wind was making the cold nearly unbearable. I live on an isolated mountain forty five minutes from the closest mid-size city but the night of this ride was the darkest sky and brightest stars I ever remember seeing. You can follow dirt roads in the desert to the middle of nowhere but when train tracks bend away from highways and even the possibility of a headlight for hundreds of miles it’s a different kind of night sky.

Deep inky black velvet with stars as bright as planets and the Milky Way screaming through like a tear in space.

The night felt especially cold because Leg and I were in the midst of a “lover’s quarrel” and weren’t on good enough terms to even share body heat. I’ve been kind of skirting around sex and relationships in these pieces, at least the ones that actually mattered to me emotionally, but I’m going to go into the one I had with Leg in a little more detail.

Chicago as a city is really into its corner breakfast spots. They usually have a more in depth menu but everybody is generally getting two eggs, hash brown, toast and either two bacon or two sausages. It’s like every few blocks has its own independent Waffle House – similar to donut shops in Los Angeles and burrito places in San Diego. I was eating with friends at the one we had kind of adopted and been adopted by when the Peter Pan-ish blond waitress slipped me her phone number.

Ours was the only relationship I’ve ever been in where we didn’t spend every moment of our available time together from the instant we decided it was “on”. We would see each other once or twice a week – it’s not my usual way but I liked how “adult” it felt. I would find out later that this was usually because she was seeing other people. It’s not like we had ever discussed being exclusive but she was very private and secretive about it.

Most of my male friends have actually cheated and lied about it as well instead of just being ommissive and I’m not really the jealous type but I would have appreciated knowing what was going on.

My personal tendency is to be completely, and often brutally, honest – especially in matters pertaining to sex, drugs or rock n’ roll. Between the end of the Living Hell tour and Leg meeting up with me in Chicago I had been with a couple of people and I thought it was best to be transparent about it. In detail. In retrospect things would have gone smoother if I just kept it all to myself but fundamentally that isn’t my nature. It was one of the many ways that we weren’t completely compatible and reasons that we aren’t together now.

Generally a freezing cold night in the desert means it’s about to be followed by a brutally hot day. Without clouds all the heat from the sun that the ground absorbed dissipates but it also means that there’s nothing to protect you from that same sun when it comes back up. We maintained speed through most of Arizona which created a breeze and made things bearable but as Brodie’s photocopied map showed me that we were crossing into California we slowed down, did a lot more siding (when the train stops to allow higher priority trains to pass) and the sun inched steadily higher into the sky.

The metal we were riding on got progressively hotter and insulating ourselves away from it with sleeping bags only did so much. I had a pink polyester nightgown that I liked to put on whenever I was feeling like a little whisp of a thing but now I was wearing it so that I could hold it over myself like a tent to protect me from the relentless sun. It helped a little but not too much. The picture is of me and my friend Manal after we discovered that we both had the exact same one.

We called them “Hailie Selassies” for a reason I can’t seem to remember.

The sun was approaching its hottest position of the day, the desert began to look endless and the sidings were becoming both more frequent and interminably long. We carried at least two gallons of water with us when we first boarded in Amarillo but we were nearing the bottom of our reserve. The sun and metal train had heated it to approximately the temperature that one would steep tea in – I’ve heard that hot water is more efficient in terms of hydration but it didn’t feel particularly refreshing or cooling.

After siding in place for an hour we caught sight of an actual highway that we’d gone back to running along and hitchhiking was starting to seem like a better deal than sweating in a hot metal box that wasn’t even moving. We gathered our packs and bags and crawled over to the asphalt. Leg said we looked like the backup dancers from Thriller and she wasn’t far off – we were dirty, our lips were chapped, our eyes were bloodshot, we’d had far too much sun and we were starting to awkwardly move in ways that resembled the signature dance moves.

Leg also figured that the first passing motorist would have to give us a ride as we were in the middle of nowhere and clearly suffering from sun exposure. This wasn’t the case – traffic was slow but the few vehicles that were going by seemed to have no issues not picking us up whatsoever. Finally it seemed that a car had noticed us and pulled over a few yards ahead. He was visibly shocked when we came jogging up because he had just pulled off to use his cellphone but he agreed to give us a ride anyway.

I don’t know if he had genuinely not seen us or if he was just cool with looking at us and leaving us to deal with sun exposure but he at least wasn’t going to tell us no to our faces.

It turned out that we were just outside of Barstow which meant that from around 9 pm the previous night we had covered nearly one thousand miles – really good distance for freight travel. I would learn later that it was coincidentally a stroke of good luck that we’d thrown in the towel when we did as the Barstow Yard is notorious for using both cameras and thermal imaging to pull riders off trains because of the high number of undocumented immigrants passing through on them.

It’s also supposed to be especially harsh concerning prosecution and punishment, far more so than Sullivan, Illinois.

Our ride dropped us at a place called Barstow Station – a combination truck stop, Greyhound Station and Amtrak with an over the top railroad theme. Several restaurants including a McDonald’s were set up in old converted train cars. It was an interesting juxtaposition grabbing free cups of ice water from something that looked a lot like the thing we had just been overheating and becoming dangerously dehydrated in.

I’m not usually one for train themed fashion accessories but I couldn’t resist the Barstow Station embroidered patches they had for sale. They featured a colorful train in blues and oranges with a bit of a Babes in Toyland feel. Maybe there were circus animals poking their heads out of the cars or something. We both got one and I carried mine in my wallet for years without getting around to sewing it on anything until I lost the wallet. I poked around online but couldn’t find any pictures of one.

We were able to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes we were still carrying to catch a bus to Oakland without any problems. I didn’t really start having problems using them until a bit later in the Summer – just before and just after the trip to Australia. It took a lot of having friends drive out to the smaller regional stations but I did successfully finish every trip I attempted. I probably could have stretched it out longer but I decided to quit while I was ahead and hang my hat up early.

I’d had a good run with them – most folks I knew had stopped using them years earlier.

John Benson let us stay in Quinn’s special attic room at the Purple Haus and me and Leg finally made up and she drew a cool flyer for the Living Hell reunion show. I was trying to figure out what to use to replace the talismanic dagger that the train police had stolen when I found a conductor’s baton just stuck into the ground like The Sword in the Stone at People’s Park and it became one of my key talismans and one of the last I lost. The show was the first time I saw Rain performing with her brother Joel but the three of us would end up doing two full US Tours together.

I eventually moved to Oakland and into Apgar and attempted to resume the substitute teacher work I had been doing in Chicago but I dropped off some paperwork in my “street clothes” and got my employment offer rescinded for being a messy, genderqueer goth. It was a learning experience – I only appeared in conjunction with education jobs dressed in “business casual drag” from then on out. I got a job working for a private tutoring company doing programs based on No Child Left Behind funds which is an essay in itself I might get around to some day.

When I made the move to Los Angeles I ended up working in one of their tutoring centers, the Bay Area jobs had always been inside of schools, and for several months everything was fine. Then one day I got a phone call:

“It has been brought to our attention that you have a violation in the section of Penal Code related to murder, mayhem, rape, sodomy…”

“Excuse me?”

“And then the list goes on to lesser and lesser charges…”

“Yeah, trespassing probably. I got pulled off a freight train once. I didn’t report it as a conviction on my application because as far as I knew it wasn’t”

“Needless to say we’ll need to terminate your employment…”

“Ok, it was nice getting to teach while it was lasted.”

That was that until I got another call from them about three days later:

“We’ve looked into it and your charges don’t actually make you ineligible to work with minors so if you’re interested we’d love to have you back…”

It was about as good of a review as I could have hoped for: that even with the severe tone of that first phone call they wanted me back tutoring kids again. Brodie went back to Sullivan to deal with his charges but I just assumed that if I ignored it for long enough it would go away. My employer already knew about it and had decided they didn’t care so I didn’t see how else it would be a problem for me all the way in California.

Then in 2011 I attempted to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos…

Part Five Here

Amarillo 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Three “I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

berniebleak5 Comments

Part One

Part Two

I usually remember what the various Greyhound Stations look like because of how much time I spent in them. I really miss the old one in San Diego that used to be on Broadway and shared the block with a run down Pickwick Hotel. Obviously I grew up there but downtown San Diego seems to have changed more than any other city I’m aware of. The Oklahoma City and San Diego Greyhound Stations both used to have Old West style snack bars with wooden wagon wheels and stuff on the wall.

The New Orleans station is among the most visually arresting – sharing space with Amtrak and having brightly colored mid-century murals on the wall. Using counterfeit passes remained easy here after it was impossible in most cities of comparable size but it’s been ages since the last time I tried it. When I lived there I got a Central Casting job for the movie Elvis & Nixon where they disguised the space as a 1970’s Airport Terminal. I was supposed to be a homeless guy sleeping in the background and I did such a convincing job that the security guard tried to kick me out without realizing I was part of the production.

Anyway I can’t remember the Saint Louis one although as soon as I typed those words I had a sudden vision of a fancy indoor mall with high arched glass ceilings. That’s probably actually Union Station and the trip I’m thinking of would have been onboard Megabus: the company that cut costs by only using curb space at other transport companies’ stations and terminals. No matter how hard I try I can’t seem to conjure up an image of the Saint Louis Greyhound – maybe it was possible to catch it at the small transit center near Cement Land called Jennings.

I think the one in Amarillo looked almost identical to the one in Grand Junction, Colorado that was on the route between Chicago and San Diego so I saw a lot of it. A small building with a low ceiling and windows all around it where the buses pulled up on the side. I think I somehow didn’t have a cell phone yet so I found a payphone to call up LBK. My memory might be inaccurate on this detail but I think I didn’t get a cell phone until 2009.

Wait… I just realized that I must have had one because I suddenly got a stray memory of buying used cell phones from a liquor store in Saint Louis while I was on the Rockaway. This place was in the shopping center next to a Laundromat and a fried fish spot I’ll tell a story about later just down the street from Cement Land. It was a bigger store run by Middle Eastern guys that sold a bit of everything – electronics, embroidered hats and jerseys, probably hookahs but they had a bunch of used cell phones people had hocked with them underneath the glass counter.

I must have been losing or accidentally breaking cell phones a lot, probably by accidentally dropping them in the river, because I clearly remember doing this several times. The phones were either stolen or nobody bothered erasing their photos so it was always a surprise what you’d find on them. One time it was all pictures of kids but another one was full of blurry shots of Black boobs and beads at Mardi Gras.

I remember getting one that had a sample of a dirty rap song as the ringtone and I had forgotten to change it before I went back to substitute teaching in Chicago. I think I was actually teaching a Preschool Class by the projects when somebody tried to call me and the song started playing. The kids all thought it was really funny:

“I was gettin’ some head, Gettin’ Gettin’ some head…”

On that note I called up LBK when we got into Amarillo and he took us to the office he was working at with Stanley Marsh 3. Brodie had told me some stories about Stanley – that the Marsh and Bush families were big into land and oil together and were the richest families in Texas, that he had created a roadside attraction called Cadillac Ranch and various “prank” street signs around town and a number of other trickster oriented public art projects. The big thing I’d heard was that he had paid a mutual friend from the Rockaway five hundred dollars to jerk off onto him.

On this trip I was traveling with Leg who was also my girlfriend at the time so I didn’t see as much of the scene as I did on subsequent visits – Stanley really didn’t like when girls were around. The office was on the fifteenth floor of the tallest building in Amarillo – it was later called the Chase Tower but I don’t think it was on this first visit. The moment you stepped out of the elevator you were in a big room with oversized upholstered pool balls that Stanley had commissioned and large insanely valuable paintings everywhere. I mean like Jackson Pollocks, Rothkos even some Henri Matisse stuff and it was all just leaning against walls and shit.

There was one older guy who worked in the office, possibly Stanley’s son, and an older female secretary but besides that it was a bunch of “art-punk” looking young men – teenagers and guys in their 20s. I’m not sure what kind of work was actually done in there, maybe managing Stanley’s assets and buying and selling his art collection, but it was mostly set up for skateboarding in, working on art and grabbing snacks from a big, well stocked kitchen.

The scene was kind of like the Foot Clan Headquarters in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but also a lot like My Own Private Idaho. Everything was clearly designed to attract and be appealing to the boys who all kind of had the “rough trade” hustler look and Stanley was very clearly a chickenhawk. On this first visit me and Leg were able to get free lunch, this was always hamburgers or club sandwiches with those fancy colored cellophane toothpicks on a plate with French fries that came in those hotel style metal trays, I don’t know where it came from but it seemed to be inside the building.

Me and LBK played around with a color photocopier they had just gotten. We did stuff with aluminum foil and bits of jewelry and experimented with moving the stuff around while the different colors were scanning. If you’ve never played with one of the old kinds it does four consecutive scans: cyan, magenta, yellow and then finally black. You can get cool effects by slightly moving the image either during or between scans. One cool trick is only leaving the image for one of them and then quickly swapping it out with a white piece of paper to make analog color separations.

Stanley would always call on his intercom to ask about whatever friends the guys in the office brought up and if it was younger boys he would ask to meet them in his office. I think this first time he briefly met and talked to both me and Leg but he didn’t try anything. The guys were talking about how I should really see his house called Toad Hall but we couldn’t go this trip because no girls were allowed. We were trying to catch a train toward California that same night anyway.

I never actually made it out to Toad Hall on any of my subsequent visits either so I won’t attempt to describe it but you can Google it – it sounds pretty fucking crazy.

Personally I have a certain repugnance for prostitution at least where I’m concerned. I have no judgement against anybody that does it but I don’t want money to be the reason that I’m fucking somebody or that they’re fucking me. I’m super down with lesser forms of sex work though, I made a solo video for a site called Alternadudes for example, and only having to jack off onto a dude for five hundred dollars sounds like a hell of a payday. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

The next time I passed through Amarillo was on the homeward leg of the 2010 Bleak End/Generation tour. We were grabbing the same free lunch that always gets people in the building when he asked for me to come talk to him in his office. He had an authentic tiger’s skin rug on the floor and laid on a couch where he could watch a wall of TVs like the villain from Watchmen. He’s still the only person I’ve ever met who watched a wall of TVs like this in real life.

I had been wearing a very small pair of black shorts for most of the tour as it was an extremely hot Summer. They had already gotten me kicked out of the workout room at the Providence, Rhode Island YMCA where they said that they were appropriate attire for swimming but not for exercising:

“There are children here!”

I always thought that was a strange argument as children wear small shorts too and there’s nothing overtly sexual about me showing a lot of leg. I could understand if my genitals were full on hanging out or I was brandishing an obvious erection but neither of these was the case. Besides that there were presumably children in the pool too and if anything the water would make the shorts more revealing as it would cause them to cling to my skin.

Anyway in Stanley’s office we were talking about something completely unrelated when he put his hand on my thigh and brought up an acquaintance who had proffered services for payment. I said that I’d heard about it. He gestured toward a pair of buttons on the armrest of his couch:

“If I press this button it will close my door. It won’t be locked but nobody will be walking in and disturbing us.”

I said that was fine. In light of some further revelations I’ll be getting to in a minute here I find it significant that there were two buttons – that there were absolutely situations where he was locking the door. Everybody in that office knew exactly what was going on and never would have opened that door without knocking so the only purpose for the locking button would be something more sinister. More on that in a minute.

I wanted to get right down to business and talk about money but he wanted to wait until after lunch. He was also rather curious about my tour mates:

“What about those other boys, they like getting their dicks played with?”

“I doubt it. They’ve had a pretty strict religious upbringing.”

His plan ended up backfiring for both of us. I didn’t get five hundred dollars and he didn’t get jizzed on. Rain and Joel had been going hard on the snacks – eating gushers and slim jims and shit but once they got wind of what was happening they were grossed out and wanted to leave. They saw the cabinets full of the favorite junk food snacks of their adolescence as a sinister kind of lure which quite obviously they were.

On the way out of the building Joel gestured to a life size bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln sharing a bench with a pair of small children:

“There’s Honest Abe… just trying to get an honest blow job!”

I passed back through in 2011 on the way back to California from SXSW but I didn’t get the payday then either. Stanley went for someone else I was traveling with who, although older than me, maintains eternally youthful features and a surfer’s physique.

I had only ever heard of Stanley’s arrangement going down with legally consenting adults but there was no denying that he was attracted to boyishness and youth. A few months later in 2011 he had a stroke and was criminally charged and briefly arrested in a suit that eventually involved ten defendants he had coerced into sexual acts from the time they were sixteen. It wasn’t the first time this had happened either – similar cases came up multiple times in the ‘90s but disappeared after large cash settlements.

The same thing happened with the 2011 case and according to rumors made each of the plaintiffs a multimillionaire. There are plenty of eighteen year olds who look sixteen or younger but Marsh was clearly attracted to youth and vulnerability and repeated his pattern of behavior for decades. He was a predator and an entire city looked the other way for the majority of his lifetime because of his wealth, influence and status. He deliberately chose victims from the poorest echelons of society in order to get away with it for as long as possible.

He died in 2014 without ever being formally criminally convicted.

Back in 2008 me and Leg went from the office to a space downtown that some of LBK’s friends lived in. I’m not sure if it was normally a performance venue or practice space but it was pretty dark in there and had the black paint and duct tape look of a community theater space. We got some beers and hung out and waited for it to get dark enough that we could catch the train without much possibility of anybody seeing us.

When night fell we grabbed our packs and walked across town to follow Brodie’s map to the proper set of train tracks. A block or two from our destination we ran into a group of Juggalos outside of a Burger King who were clearly on the road as well. They all looked young and chubby, like teddy bears that were completely unprepared for the harsh realities of the dangerous world they were stepping into.

One of them offered us some advice about hitchhiking that I’d largely say was incorrect:

“If you want somebody to give you a ride you gotta have something to offer: either a good story, some drugs or money or you’re gonna have to suck some dick.”

One of the other Juggalos chimed in proudly:

“I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

That might be how getting rides works at Juggalo Gatherings but it certainly hasn’t been my experience for hitchhiking in general. If you’re standing on the side of the road with a sign out people are already going to assume that you don’t have anything. They want you to either talk, listen or shut the hell up and to have the basic situational awareness to figure out which one of those the situation calls for. To “read the room” as it were.

I did get into one ride where the driver wanted us to hurt or murder him but that’s far from the norm and I’ll get into it in a story eventually. I’m sure the sexual expectations are much higher if you’re hitchhiking as a single female but that doesn’t mean it’s a prerequisite for getting rides. When that shit happens you get out by any means necessary and you find another ride.

One of the Juggalos said “Jesus Loves You” and handed us a single dollar. I was carrying it around for a while as a “Lucky Juggalo Dollar” but I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe Leg kept it. For a brief window of time I would have thought of this dollar as a sort of talisman but this was all very early in my magical thinking career- before the “World’s Worst Magician” phase.

I had said earlier that most of my freight rides were in the company and under the guidance of more experienced riders but this was the one case where it wasn’t – or the second case of you count the brief ride across the Mississippi River. I might be wrong about this but I think that when we left Chicago it was Leg’s first time riding freight. I found one of the “nacho boats” I talked about before and we slipped into it.

The train sped up on the edge of Amarillo and we were on our way to California…

[Note: for more information on Stanley Marsh 3 and the charges against him I highly recommend the following article]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/darkness-on-the-plains/

Part Four Here

Saint Louis 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Two “The Do-Anything Say-Anything Zone”

berniebleak4 Comments

[Photo Credit: Tod Seelie]

Part One

At the end of the last chapter I was riding in a gondola between Chicago and Saint Louis with Brodie and Leg. I had written last time that giving everybody acid wasn’t a good idea but that might not necessarily be true. We would have gotten pulled off the train and arrested either way and it certainly made the couple hours we spent locked in cement cells more entertaining. It also slightly reduced whatever possession charges I still have in Central Illinois because the acid was clearly packaged and not particularly well hidden.

As we approached a town called Sullivan the train began to slow down and Brodie was pretty sure it wasn’t siding. He figured that a motorist had seen us and called it in and said we would probably need to get ready to run. We hadn’t been super careless like the last ride I described but we had been peeking over the side a bit to look at the scenery. We mostly put our heads back down when we passed through yards, towns or busy roads – Brodie was a very experienced rider.

The train came to a stop with our car directly between two road crossings and local police SUVs were pulling up to both of them. This was when we realized that they knew exactly which car we were in and we must have been spotted by some kind of automatic camera pointed downward at the tracks as the trains came into town. There probably wasn’t too much we could have done about this besides lying motionless under our sleeping bags with the hope of blending in and that’s a pretty miserable way of riding.

We were just in the wrong kind of car – too much visibility.

There was nothing around but a field of knee-high corn and it was obvious that there was no point in running or trying to hide – plus we weren’t really in the mental state for that kind of thing. We threw our packs and bags over the side, hopped off and started rolling up the sleeping bags and getting ready to move. I also had an eighth of mushrooms and a single Adderall pill in my bag, drugs I’d been carrying for a while but never seemed to feel like taking, so I briefly considered either tossing them, hiding them or just eating it all. They were already jogging toward us with their guns out though so I decided to leave them where they were and hope that they’d be lazy about searching our bags.

The Sullivan Police had pictures of trains on their patches and I was thinking of using one as the header photo but it looks like they’ve changed the design and I couldn’t find any pictures of the old one. I got the impression that their town was quiet enough that all they really did was catch up freight riders. They were excitedly boasting to us and each other about how many they had managed to catch in the last week alone.

They seemed especially proud of having pulled off a group of Mexicans because then they got to hand them over to immigration. They’d probably just recently gotten the fancy automatic camera installed and since then it had been like shooting fish in a barrel. They made us put on our backpacks and then handcuffed us in the front so we could carry them over to the pickup truck they were going to transport us in:

“Let them hoss their own shit!”

They told us that if we wanted we could wait for another form of transport instead of getting transported in a truck bed but we wanted to get the whole ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They had pulled up in SUVs but they probably didn’t want us getting their seats dirty. They made a lot of comments about how dirty we were, how we smelled and that sort of thing.

They took us to a tiny cement substation with a couple of cells for processing. The whole building was roughly the size of the public bathrooms found in parks and rest stops. Inside there was a desk with a computer, some long cement benches they handcuffed us to for processing, a few thin cells and a couple shower stalls. They constantly shuffled us between these spaces for the entirety of the time we were there so that two of us were never together long enough to talk to each other.

We had to leave our bags on the damp grass outside so they could search through them. There was a lady cop behind the computer while I was being processed and for whatever reason she was chatting me up. I forget how she worked this detail into the conversation, maybe she asked me where I was going and why and I told her I was headed to California to play a concert:

“I used to live in Seattle. It was after the whole grunge thing was pretty much over but it was still pretty cool living there with all that history!”

“How’d you end up in a dead end town like this? You move out here for a guy or something?”

“Ooof, don’t even get me started…”

She seemed like she was on the verge of passing me her phone number or asking if I wanted to go get a coffee when we were released until one of her male colleagues with rubber gloves on slammed all of my drugs onto the counter. I immediately took responsibility:

“That’s all mine.”

She gave me a look like I had somehow betrayed her and didn’t talk to me again. She evidently didn’t know very much about the Seattle music scene she was excited to share a city with if she was shocked and offended by a relatively benign and harmless bag of mushrooms. The male cop went through the different baggies with me to identify their contents. I confirmed what the mushrooms and Adderall pill were but I also had a baggie of powdered Syrian Rue that looked like a generic brown powder.

I’d gotten everything from the self-proclaimed shaman guy that lived in Chicago who is mentioned in some other chapters. I’d made the mistake of buying things I didn’t really feel like taking just because they were hard to find and then carrying it around until it got me in trouble. I explained to him in detail what the powder was:

“That’s Syrian Rue, peganum harmala. it’s a naturally occurring MAO Inhibitor that is used to boost the efficacy of other psychotropic drugs but it doesn’t do much on it’s own. It isn’t currently scheduled by the DEA.”

He took my explanation at face value and separated the Rue from the things I could actually be charged for. I wondered afterward if I had said the other bags contained Turkey Tail Mushrooms and a Vitamin C tablet with the same level of conviction I could have gotten away with all of it but that probably would have been pushing my luck. At the very least the Adderall pill had an easily verifiable imprint.

Brodie’s photography monographs hadn’t been published yet but he had either done a few lucrative gallery shows at this point or gotten a decent advance from his representation and he offered to pay everybody’s bail or whatever they were calling the money to be allowed to leave. He stood by the desk with his debit card for a few minutes, then after concluding the charges he was able to creep by me and whisper into my ear that it sounded like “he was buying thousands of dollars in X-Men cards”.

Brodie would most likely not be “road ready” for several hours to come.

They had us all take showers before they cut us loose and made fun of the fact that nobody seemed to want to use the packets of harsh chemical shampoo they provided us with.

Leg threw out a clumsy and club footed excuse while emerging from her shower:

“You see I just don’t really care for the toiletries, you know what I mean???”

Everybody was doing a pretty good job of just coming off like ditzy train riders and not letting on that we were tripping but Brodie did spend a suspiciously long time staring down into the drain. He later said that there were globs of something down there that looked like the liquid form of the T-1000 from Terminator 2. The cops smirked at him and attempted a joke:

“You sure you didn’t consume some of those mushrooms before we picked you up?”

Brodie answered back both in a way that could be construed as evasive and in a somewhat robotic voice:

“I’ve consumed mushrooms that come on pizza before…“

The cops didn’t really push the issue. I guess they can’t really charge you for being under the influence of drugs except for maybe a public intoxication charge but there’s always the threat of being taken to a psychiatric hospital for 24 to 48 hours if they knew that you took LSD and feel like being extra. They didn’t do any of that.

They took us outside where we discovered that the contents of all of our packs were still spread out on the grass. During my heaviest years of magical ideation, roughly 2008 to 2012, there was a sequence of objects I came to view as magical talismans and essential tools for my practice. This included a silver plated pewter goblet, a conductor’s baton or wand, a rubber witches nose, a studded leather cap and a Ukrainian knife with a goat’s hoof handle that was supposed to be cursed.

At this early stage it would have been limited to the dagger with leather scabbard I used for the Living Hell performances and a small glass bottle in the shape of a maple leaf that I mixed my Florida Water with other fragrances in. Anyway the Sullivan police stole the dagger. None of them ever mentioned anything about it and the part of Illinois we were in was popular for hunting so it’s extremely unlikely that there would have been any law against me carrying it. One of them probably just thought it looked cool and decided to keep it – cops do that sort of thing constantly.

They loaded us into one of those prisoner transport vehicles that’s divided into two sections in the back – kind of like the trucks that dog catchers use. They did allow all of us to ride on the same side of it. Out of the three of us Brodie was clearly the least psychedelically experienced and he had been doing an admirable job of holding it together but his self control was starting to slip. He turned to me:

“Are we in the do-anything say-anything zone?”

The back of the truck was separated from the cab where the cop was driving but there was a tiny window so he could see and hear us. He smirked into the rear view mirror. I told Brodie to hang on just a little longer:

“No we’re not quite in the do-anything say-anything zone yet but we should get there as soon as we leave this truck.”

The cop was driving us to the next county over so that if we did get in trouble again it would be another department’s problem. He knew that our immediate destination was Saint Louis so he gave us general directions to get to Effingham from where he dropped us off. He said it would probably be easiest to find a ride heading to Saint Louis from there and departed with a final piece of advice:

“Guys, don’t get on another train. Catch a ride or hoof it but if you get back on a train you’ll just get caught again.”

He drove off. Brodie let out a massive sigh of relief:

“Holy Shit! I am high! I’m so high! I’m tripping my ass off!”

Leg was smiling to herself:

“A pig said hoof it!“

I put a reassuring arm around Brodie’s shoulder and led him over to a small pile of broken chunks of asphalt so he could climb up on it and jump off a couple of times. I thought it would help him feel more in control the same way I used to jump off of a 60 foot pylon into the Mississippi River every morning as a quick wake up while the Rockaway was docked at Cement Land. He was basically fine to do whatever but we needed to start hitchhiking so the sun wouldn’t go down on us in another small farm town and unless we got a “hip” ride this would probably go smoother if we didn’t talk about how high we were in front of the drivers.

It’s possible to hitch hike without a sign but if there’s any way of making one you’ll be a lot better off. As long as the letters are large, bold and legible passing motorists have no choice but to read them and then they’re already thinking about you. It’s the magic power of the written word – try to look at a word in a language you understand and not read it, it’s impossible. Riding trains always involves some degree of hitchhiking even if only to get to and from the remote train yards so we would have already been carrying cardboard and sharpies.

Making a sign is a bit of a gamble because writing the name of a distant destination city can get you lucky with somebody who’s going the entire way but it can also cause potential rides to not pick you up because they don’t think they’re going far enough. For this reason I generally like to just write a Cardinal direction, like “South” in this case, but I might have just written “Effingham” as it wasn’t that far. Generally speaking you want to keep moving even if a ride is barely going any distance but there are some exceptions.

You wouldn’t take a ride from a truck stop if they were only going a couple of exits and potentially dropping you off where there isn’t a truck stop for example.

It took a couple of rides to get to Effingham but I can only remember the first one. A crew cut army looking guy took us down the road a bit to an AM PM. I’m not sure how Brodie ended up in the front seat. Leg and I were a couple at the time but I almost always take the front seat when hitchhiking with a group because I’m good at talking to strangers if that’s what a ride wants. The guy attempted to make conversation:

“It’s gotta be rough hitchhiking in this heat, huh?”

Brodie was staring at his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sleeping bag:

“It beats fighting monsters all day…”

The driver didn’t try to make any more conversation. It was almost dark by the time we got to Effingham. Effing Effingham – I wound up in this same town again a few years later and when the story gets there you’ll see why I have a little more hatred for the place than most of the anonymous small towns I’ve drifted through. We tried to find a ride but eventually we had to consider finding a place to sleep.

The local homeless tweaker guy named Kenny had noticed our arrival and offered his advice:

“You’re probably thinking of sleeping in the woods out back but you don’t wanna do that and I’ll tell you why: there’s snakes and spiders and who know’s what back there. What you wanna do is go sleep underneath that freeway bridge over there: it’s still windy but it’s dry and there’s no spiders and nobody will bother you. How do I know this? Because I slept there last night and the night before that and I’ll be sleeping there tonight.”

The moment he walked away we all agreed that it sounded like a very bad idea to go sleep where Kenny was. He might have been just trying to help but he seemed a little too eager to have us over there and know where we were sleeping. We could have easily outnumbered and overpowered him but it just seemed like a bad scene.

I think we just grabbed some cardboard from the dumpster full of flattened boxes and laid it out next to the dumpster and slept on it. This wouldn’t have worked long term but we were only staying the night. We had talked to a truck driver around midnight who’d said that he was heading to Saint Louis first thing in the morning and he could take us. He also said that he had a free shower ticket for buying a certain amount of diesel he wasn’t going to use and asked if any of us wanted it.

I was surprised when Brodie took him up on it considering how recently we had showered in the police station but he said that he’d always wanted to see what the truck stop showers looked like. He seemed to just be genuinely interested in big rig trucks and truck culture: a couple of years later he was working as a heavy duty diesel mechanic and the last time I talked to him he had started a transportation company and was driving one himself.

Not too far into the next morning we were dropped off on the Saint Louis side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge which is pretty much across the street from Cement Land. Not too far away a handful of old cabooses sat on a disused portion of track hidden behind walls of overgrown vegetation. Some people had started staying on them during the final days of the Rockaway but now Brodie, Alexis and Jacki had moved in full time ever since The Garden of Bling got burned.

Jacki and Alexis had gotten a couple of bantam chickens, I think their names were Chicken Nugget and Lenny Kravitz, and spent most of their time watching the chickens fight and dig up bugs. It seems like a missed opportunity that it wasn’t “Henny Kravitz” but it was probably a rooster – the kind with big hair and bell bottoms made of feathers. Bob Cassilly was getting frustrated that people from the rafts were still living on a piece of property he eventually intended to develop but they were out of the way and I don’t think he ever got around to kicking them off.

While I was exploring some of the surrounding overgrowth I must have disturbed a bumblebee’s tiny nest and it attacked and stung me. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a honeybee’s sting but they don’t die from stinging either and they can do it over and over. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and it directed its serial assaults to the spot where Christ’s fifth wound is – it looked like it was pelvic thrusting against me as it stung me over and over. I was too shocked and surprised to think about brushing it off until it had gotten a good five jabs in.

It kind of feels like a dull ache combined with a slight burning – maybe like a combination sunburn and Charlie Horse.

Brodie was staying in Saint Louis but me and Leg would be continuing on to the Bay Area. I forget if the original plan was to ride trains the whole way but we went to a Kinko’s near the arch so I could make us a pair of counterfeit Greyhound Passes. The new plan was to take a bus to Amarillo, Texas and catch a hot shot to Northern California from there. Brodie photocopied a few pages and maps from his Crew Change and gave us the phone number for a friend of his called LBK.

Amarillo, now that is a seriously weird town. I’ll get into it next time.

Part Three Here

Illinois 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part One “I’ve never jumped from a moving train before”

berniebleak4 Comments

I’m going to try something a little different with the next two or three chapters and thread several related strands together to tell a story that unfolds over several years and in several cities – but mostly in Central Illinois. The narrative starts in the early Summer of 2008 when the Living Hell tour had just come to an abrupt end and I had moved back into my room with Stephany in Chicago. Stephany and I had lived together across a couple of Pilsen apartments for most of 2007 and 2008 but the time that I was actually at home for all of this couldn’t have added up to more than two or three months.

The last place we shared was on 23rd Place near the big cathedral. The Polish landlord had been pretty good as landlords go – we never heard from him unless we were calling him to fix something and then he sent over his handyman named Ziggy. Ziggy had a big bushy mustache and an about medium thickness Eastern European accent and seemed to take genuine pride in getting the bathtub to drain again or the heater working. One month we didn’t have rent the day it was due and when we didn’t get a late payment notice we just didn’t pay it and continued to not pay for several months.

We didn’t know if our landlord had died or left the country or what but we didn’t look too far into the matter because of superstition and that thing about gift-horses and mouths. While I was out traveling a woman named Ewa showed up to the door one day and explained that she had received the building as part of a divorce settlement and rent would now be due to her. It seemed a little suspicious but she wasn’t saying anything about back-rent and it seemed like the safest course of action was to just pay it. This is where things sat when I moved my things into the attic and relocated to California.

Ewa evidently didn’t receive Ziggy as part of the same settlement and wasn’t interested in finding or contracting somebody similar – she was extremely interested in the passive income part of being a landlady but not so much in the maintenance and upkeep parts. Enough things had broken and gone unrepaired in the apartment that Stephany went on rent strike. What Ewa did have was an appropriately evil looking henchman and one day he delivered an eviction notice.

Stephany thought the notice looked suspicious so she brought it to her alderman. In Chicago an alderman is roughly analogous to a city council member in other cities but I feel like they are more involved and helpful in the lives of their constituents. In this case the alderman told Stephany that the eviction notice was a counterfeit – Ewa hadn’t completed any of the necessary steps for a legal eviction and was banking on Stephany just being intimidated by it and moving out.

The alderman told Stephany that she could take Ewa to court and sue for this offense but more practically she could hold it over her head to get free rent in perpetuity because an actual, legal eviction would require going to court at which time the revelation of the counterfeit eviction notice would cost more and get her in more trouble than Stephany’s rent payments were worth. She got the Mexican-American family downstairs in on it and the entire building lived rent free for at least a couple of years until a bank or some other flavor of LLC acquired the building.

Stephany asked them how and where to start paying rent again and they told her “not to worry about it” which is always code for they wanted to blindside her with an eviction notice that was done legally and by the book and delivered too late for Stephany to really do anything about it.

Ewa most likely got out of the landlady business for good but on the off chance she didn’t her full name is Ewa Mogolnika so if you live in Chicago and have a landlady with that name pay close attention to your lease or eviction notices or any other documents and you just might win the lottery as well.

Anyway there’s three things in the title and I haven’t touched on any of them yet. Let’s talk about trains. I got to ride freight a few times but it was almost always with more experienced friends acting as Sherpa. I’ve never personally owned a copy of that Holy Grail document known as a crew change but the people I was riding with usually had one. The fact that I didn’t insist on hitting up a Kinko’s and getting my own reproduction at the first possible opportunity should indicate how serious I was about the whole thing.

I definitely enjoyed my rides and getting to see the kind of true wilderness that only appears when train tracks diverge away from highways but for most of my travels I was always either on the way to see or play a show and hadn’t scheduled for the unpredictable pace of freight travel. Besides the counterfeit Greyhound passes were still nearly universally accepted during these travels and it was generally the faster option.

Technically my first ride was a 2007 short and unplanned trip from Illinois to Missouri. The Garden of Bling’s final port of call was a stretch of river bank in Venice, Illinois – a town that was mostly known for its strip clubs and a creepy daycare in one of their parking lots called Leonard Bo Peep’s. The most revealing anecdote I have about the area known as East Saint Louis is that when I was an extra on an episode of The Real House-Husbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly insisted that the writers amend a joke suggesting he was from there.

His songs did first achieve breakout success in the area’s strip clubs but nobody wants to be known as being from there.

It was a long bike ride to the bridges we were legally allowed to bike across and most of our destinations in Saint Louis were almost directly across the river so we had gotten in the habit of biking across the bridge that was only for trains to save time. One day I was crossing with Alexis when a train came and when we moved to the other set of tracks another train started coming. There was nothing to do but grab our bikes and climb onto the one that was at least traveling in the right direction.

It started to slow down for the curve as it approached the yard so I suggested we grab our bikes and jump off. Alexis was hesitant:

“I’ve never jumped off of a moving train before…”

“Neither have I but this seems like the perfect time to try it!”

We made the jump onto gravel ok but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. A private train cop, or bull, was waiting for us in an SUV blocking the path to the closest streets and bike trail. The entire maneuver with the two trains had been designed to catch us the moment we were spotted illegally crossing the bridge:

“Y’all picked a really stupid and dangerous way to try to get across the river!”

Alexis answered back in feigned innocence:

“Well it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time…”

He ran our IDs and because neither of us had been charged with trespassing on railroad property before this point he let us off with a warning. He tried to give us “safe” directions for biking to our destination that involved an absurdly roundabout path designed to avoid all of the neighborhoods where Black people lived and we pretended to listen then biked right through them like we always did. I can’t think of any part of any city I’ve been to that felt particularly unsafe and especially not in Saint Louis.

A handful of months later when me, Alexis and Jacki rode trains from Memphis to New Orleans for Mardi Gras she was already an old hand at every aspect of the process and carried her own Crew Change. It’s crazy how much people can change in small windows of time. I’ve written about this ride already in the fifth bus chapter. It was the take-a-hit-of-acid-every-hour-on-the-hour train ride.

We were either extremely lucky with this ride or nobody gave a shit about freight riders between Memphis and New Orleans in early 2008 because we were being extremely careless, sitting up where anyone could see us and waving to cars and the like, and we still made it to our destination without interference. We did pass through a city where there were a lot of people hanging around the train tracks – Mobile Alabama. When the train slowed down near what you would call a “hobo jungle”, an encampment of freight riders, drunks and homeless near the train tracks, this guy hopped off that we hadn’t realized was even on the same train as us.

We tried to bum a cigarette off of him as we’d all run out of tobacco at this point but he said he didn’t have one. There were a few people around but nobody seemed to have any. This might be prejudiced by the view of the city from wherever the train tracks go but Mobile, Alabama looked more absolutely busted and run-through than any city I’ve ever been in. Like overgrown-with-kudzu-giant-holes-in-the-side-of-cement-silos destroyed, nothing but blight as far as the eye could see. I forget which of us said it but it perfectly summed up the feel of the place:

“This place looks like it’s been out of cigarettes for a long time…”

Anyway I’m about to tell a story about taking acid on a freight train that didn’t turn out so well. It was the beginning of my trip to California for the Living Hell reunion show and I was trying to get from Chicago to Saint Louis with Leg and Brodie. I wrote somewhere that I knew or met a handful of photographers who were especially gifted at capturing the essence of a generally documentation-resistant underground and Mike Brodie ranks possibly highest among them. If you haven’t seen his book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity you’ll want to check it out.

It even looks like it’s back in print.

I don’t know all the technical names for the different kinds of train cars but from what I saw the best kind to ride on are these ones that are kind of shaped like the little stiff paper trays that hot dogs, french fries and nachos come in. Either a single shipping container or a double stack of them will be in the middle and you can ride in that little space on the end where it slants upward. The containers provide shade some of the time if you’re riding in hot weather and they probably make it harder for the automated camera things to pick you out.

All of this could be different now as I haven’t ridden freight since 2008 but I know that people still do it.

Brodie had moved beyond just using a Crew Change and had gotten some kind of app on his phone that’s probably just supposed to be for rail workers where he could type in the number on the side of a car and see where it was going and approximately how long it would take. Despite this added advantage he was having a hard time finding a good ride for us. We started out in a box-car which is what people always ride on TV but actually isn’t a very good idea as the workers can seal the doors without realizing you’re in there and then you’re trapped.

After a little while we ended up in a gondola. If you’ve ever seen the big dumpsters outside of construction sites you know exactly what these look like – a big metal container that’s open at the top. Sometimes these can be full of coal or garbage or rubble but we found one that was mostly empty. It had gone so well the last time I had decided to while away a long train ride by giving everybody acid and we were finally moving along nicely and I had exactly three hits so I thought it might be a good idea to do it again.

It wasn’t.

Part Two Here

Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”

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[photo credit: Tod Seelie]

The last piece I put up was my hundredth post on here so I wanted to do something special to commemorate one hundred posts. One idea I had was to take an event that someone else I knew had almost as clear a memory of as I did and have them write up their own recollections of the night/show/party whatever and then post both of our recollections together but do it double blind so neither of us could read the other person’s memories before typing up our own.

I still think this is a great idea – if anyone has strong recollections of something I haven’t covered yet and would like to try this give me a shout.

My other idea was to go back and rewrite the introductory piece about going to see The Make-Up in 1999. It might not even be clear to my newer readers that this was the introductory piece but it was the first thing I wrote since BAD FISH several years ago and the device I used to kick off this entire Winter writing project. I was messing with the dates for a bit as a quick hack to put the pieces in the order I wanted but I decided to stop doing that. A friend and mentor whose advice and constructive criticism was instrumental in building both my confidence and momentum at the beginning of this voyage had always said that it was the weakest piece, and it had already gone through a couple of rewrites, so I always figured it would need some adjusting.

When I went back and actually read it again I was struck with how much my voice has evolved and changed over these hundred entries and I found myself mystified and baffled by my earlier overly ornamentative style. Attacking this piece as an editor would feel like I was pulling the legs off of some kind of fragile insect – they say that to write and edit effectively one must “kill your darlings” but as far as I could tell it was already dead. Much like I did with BAD FISH, I opted to leave it pinned to the page as a specimen and curiosity.

I fixed a couple of obvious grammatical errors and adjusted the year but I mostly left it in the form it was originally written in. To measure anything you need a starting point and that piece will serve as origin on the graph of my literary attainment. There is one small detail that needs addressing however – in that piece I made an absurdly empty promise to deliver these various tableaux as a background character. The truth is that I was never a fly on the wall but always a fly in the ointment and the only way to deliver these accounts is the way they happened – with me conspicuously buzzing right in the center of things.

The last bit of business I want to take this moment to deal with is the title – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America. Barkev had introduced me to a book called Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by a Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who became stranded on a failed expedition in 1527 and spent the next eight years living and traveling among indigenous groups who, for the most part, had never seen another European.

The book reads a bit like an ethnography, a bit like a travelogue and a bit like a picaresque novel. When I made the decision that I would be writing up my experiences and stories with what I’ve been referring to as Underground America it seemed like the perfect reference and organizing principle. An entire hidden landscape that pulsed beneath the surface but to its architects, initiates and participants the most vital thing in the world. Even in the ‘90s when the term “alternative” was on every music executive’s tongue it lay beneath the trends – the alternative to alternative.

Anyway that’s why I call it that.

With all of that out of the way I’d like to jump right into telling a story. 2007 to 2008 was an absurdly busy year for me. In Winter I was part of the crew that was laboring to get The Garden of Bling river-worthy while most hands were abandoning the Miss Rockaway Armada project and dismantling the other crafts. To deal with the Lower Mississippi we needed a higher power outboard motor but we would also need to attach a larger transom, the part of the boat the motor hangs on, to the disintegrating plywood of the raft to use one.

Luckily we met one of the archetypical junk sculptor welders found in every post-industrial city living off of Cherokee Street in Saint Louis who was happy to help us and let us use all his fancy tools. He was just about meticulous enough to be a serial killer – he only wore jeans and plaid flannels, he only drank Jimmy Buffet Landshark beer and he only ate stews and chilis he’d made with venison he hunted himself and kept in a big rectangular freezer. I’m going to take a wild guess that he probably killed it all during bow season.

Everything we did was fueled by Sparks which was still available in the highly caffeinated version. Me and Alexis had already bought used wetsuits to go into the freezing water and try to replace the plywood bottom that had been scraped off in successive beachings. I might have explained this before but I’ll explain it again: the rafts didn’t have anything like an airtight hull. They floated on pontoons that were essentially plywood boxes stuffed with styrofoam.

With the bottom missing my favorite analogy was a bowl full of cheerios turned upside down in a bathtub. In this analogy just pretend like the cheerios can’t get soggy – their natural buoyancy keeps the bowl afloat and the edges of the bowl keep the cheerios trapped underneath. If the bowl is rocked by waves or wakes a few of the cheerios drift free. The wakes of passing barges were a constant reality on this section of the Mississippi so chunks of styrofoam, the allegorical cheerios in this situation, were starting to fill the water and litter the beach.

We had a name for our efforts to replace the bottom while floating, The Garden of Bling Dive Team, but we didn’t have much progress or material success. We were trying to drive lag bolts into the two inch edges of 2 x 8s but with the lumber completely water logged and the necessity of driving the bolts upward underwater while being rocked by constant wakes we weren’t really getting anywhere. It didn’t help that my wetsuit was too tight in the arms and shoulders.

We did the same naming thing for our efforts to install the transom – we took pictures for an imaginary metal band called Transom. I wrote a song about the fact that I always had to retrieve dropped tools from the water because I had a wetsuit and I was the tallest:

“Why does metal always sink?

Why’s the River fucking stink?

Holy Shit I’m in the drink again!”

By November none of it was working and I decided to take the cat we’d found, Night Beaver, and go back to Chicago. I wasn’t gone long when I heard that Harrison had broken his back doing a triple flip off of the nearby train bridge while wearing a wetsuit. This might sound serious but he pretty much bounced back from it without issue. This is the thing with Harrison – he’s constantly reckless but when it comes time for life altering injuries or serious consequences it slides off him like mercury and lands on the people around him.

Usually women.

Because it was 2007 and we were underneath a major train bridge agents from the Department of Homeland Security were constantly coming by and expressing how much they’d love it if we were gone. The raft was registered however and we qualified as a “vessel in distress” so they couldn’t make us leave. Boat and water law is different from normal law or even weird Mexico and Louisiana law – when I think about it I picture a yellowed scroll with decaying edges and a red wax seal.

Anyway everything’s legal when nobody’s looking. With everybody off the raft at the same time to check on Harrison in the hospital it was easy for somebody to set it on fire. I’m not necessarily saying it was DHS that did it but they did want us to disappear. Scrappers used to come down to that river bank to burn the insulation off of copper wires so the scrapyard would give them a better rate. Maybe they burned the Bling.

Alexis and I used to talk about burning it ourselves once we realized that it wasn’t going to be earning the Coast Guard’s approval for safe navigation or making it down the river. I was mainly upset that somebody had beaten us to it.

So 2008 came around. I was probably in Chicago for New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was the party at Heaven Gallery or somewhere close to it where I fell and chipped my front tooth on the ice outside. There was a phenomenon at this party we referred to as “Frat-Bro Valhalla”. The way the space was set up there was a special balcony or mezzanine full of frat-bros that seemed to be looking down on the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out how they had gotten to that spot or if it was all the same party or anything else.

I got drunk and fell and chipped my tooth on the ice outside.

I made it down to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras and then to Miami for the International Noise Conference and a couple months later onto The Bus for the Living Hell tour. Out to California for the Living Hell reunion and then to Australia with my sisters. I played the first two Bleak End at Bernie’s shows in Brisbane and Sydney. Sydney is a beautiful city but freezing cold during Australia’s Winter which happens to be Summer in the United States.

The skies are full of sulfur crested cockatoos in the daytime and flying foxes at night. The girl I call Leg had asked me to bring her back a cockatoo feather. After watching a fairly awful modernized production of Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House, it featured playboy bunnies and simulated fellatio, I spent the rest of the night walking the Botanical Gardens. At dawn I found it – a perfect white feather with just a trace of bright banana yellow along its edge.

It seemed too important to entrust to International Mail and Leg had moved up to Portland. It was getting harder to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes. I’m not sure if they changed something in their computers or the station agents were just catching on to us but it was getting to a point where the stations in big cities would turn me away and I’d have to try all the little satellite stations until one worked.

I stopped trying to use them in 2008. I’m sure a lot of people threw in the towel even earlier and some must have dragged it on even longer. It feels unlikely but I’d love to hear that somebody is making it work in 2023.

Anyway I accidentally got ahead of myself a little bit because I thought that the quick West Coast tour with counterfeit Greyhound passes happened when I came back from Australia but I checked a date and it would have had to have been before.

I bought my Boss Dr. Groove drum machine from Rand in Chicago at the end of the bus tour – I used to joke that it used to have a bit of a drinking problem because it would have drinks spilled on it and get knocked off of tables every time Carpet of Sexy played. When I first started writing on it only a few of the buttons would stick but it eventually stopped working altogether.

Bekah had been the other founding member of our Chicago rap group Chew on This and had just moved out to Los Angeles. I had only written a couple of Bleak End songs so we played mixed sets with half Bleak End and half Chew on This material. I have no idea what we billed it as but the shows were probably too last minute for us to be on fliers anyway. Cole from Deep Jew came along and played a second keyboard.

The detail that fixed the dates for me is that we went to GLOW – a public arts rave on and around the Santa Monica Pier. We weren’t playing this event but we were carrying all of our gear with us and I had one of the bigger keyboards tucked under my arm. Someone yelled out the window of a passing van that I looked like Bob Marley which was a little confusing as I was tall, white, wearing heavy eye makeup, didn’t have dreadlocks and was carrying an instrument I didn’t think he was particularly known for.

I guess it was an example of “out-group homogeneity” – to some people the entire diverse landscape of performed music must seem like the same thing.

I had a friend from the rafts named Jaci who lived down the street from the pier, I’ve written a little bit about her sister Jacki who happens to be in this chapter’s photo, and we stashed all the gear at the apartment she shared with her mom. Then I gave everybody acid which turned out to not be the best idea. Cole and I were old hands with the stuff but the girls were fairly, if not completely, new to it. I probably should have split a single hit between Jaci and Bekah but you live and learn as they say.

The plan was simple: spend the night having fun tripping at the public arts rave and catch a bus toward the Greyhound first thing in the morning to travel on to San Francisco and our next show. The moment the drugs kicked in both Jaci and Bekah freaked out and ran off so me and Cole ended up in damage control mode – too busy tracking them down and making sure they were ok to even notice that we were tripping ourselves. I do faintly remember a tiny bit of light shows and dancing but most of the night was spent searching and worrying.

We found Bekah sitting in the shadows underneath the pier, like among the pylons right when the sand hits the water. She was staring off into space and it took quite a while before she was ready to speak. Finally she offered this small glimpse of her internal world at that moment:

“Filas… They’re cool, right?”

I agreed that they were indeed very cool shoes and we spent most of the night on the sand and in the shadows. Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool was on display – a giant concrete roller that leaves behind a topographical map of the city in the sand. In function it was quite similar to the cylindrical seals made of lapis lazuli and other precious stones in Ancient Mesopotamia. They rolled across clay envelopes leaving behind decorative scenes that doubled as proof that the contents hadn’t been tampered with.

The night had been planned to coincide with a grunion run and it may have also been a Full Moon. Me and Cole were splashing around in the tide looking for the fish, who seemed to have missed the memo, and he made some kind of joke about the grunions arriving as spectators to see the crowds of oddly dressed people assembled on the beach. The concept set off an avalanche of questions in my head about what it would be like if the participants in any kind of sub-cultural spectacle were outnumbered by the spectators, or even worse if only spectators showed up.

The question only seems to have become more poignant in the intervening years as live shows have become seas of recording phones and cameras and documentation seems to have superseded experience as a primary motivation. It was very much on my mind when I finally made it to the Folsom Street Fair after years of hearing about wanton displays of BDSM-themed role play. It felt like everyone was there to gawk but nobody was there to be the spectacle.

I’ve also seen the other side of this equation being thrown out of balance when I went to SXSW in 2011. Obviously people show up to the festival just to watch bands but for the small shows I was playing it was nothing but artists hoping to be seen and noticed. The way I figured the only point to playing these shows was rolling the dice to see if you would end up forming a relationship with the band that played directly before or after you. Nobody else was going to see you – everybody had booked five or more shows a day and had to leave the moment they could take their gear down.

Just like I said in my first story about The Make-Up I feel like the Underground is most vital when everybody is acting as both participant and spectator and the line between the two isn’t particularly distinct. I’m sure there are places where this still is happening and it makes sense that I’m not immediately privy to them. I’m forty-two years old and I live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere but I still have faith in the youth.

Back to the story: we had found Bekah but we wouldn’t be able to play our next show without our instruments which were at Jaci’s house. We weren’t able to get Jaci on the phone during the night and now it was going direct to voicemail. I found out later that she had thrown her phone away in a momentary paranoid freak out. Google had one of its offices just down the street from her house and she and Jacki had a running joke where they would approach the receptionist with inane requests:

“Ahem… Naked pictures of Angelina Jolie please.”

In 2008 the special cars that drove around capturing images for Google Street View were still a common and conspicuous sight, this is when they had the special cameras on the roof that looked like soccer balls. There seemed to always be a lot of them in her section of Santa Monica – maybe the Google offices included a special garage that they were coming and going from. Anyway she was frustrated that none of the calls seemed to be going through and she thought the “Google Gang” was stalking her so she threw her phone into some bushes somewhere.

We didn’t know all of this but we knew we needed our instruments so the only thing to try was walking to her house and seeing if she was there. As we walked away from the Pier a group of cyclists started heckling us for being pedestrians. I tried to argue that walking had roughly the same ecological impact as biking but Cole came up with the following joke:

“Oh yeah? Why do you think they call it a carbon footprint?”

Two blocks later we passed the same group loading all of these bikes into a pair of oversized vans. For all of their bluster cycling was evidently only a thing they did to cover the short mile between the party and easy to find parking spaces.

We knocked on Jaci’s door and after startling her mother’s creepy roommate we learned what had happened and were able to retrieve our keyboards. The longer lasting consequence was that Jaci and Jackie’s mother went from thinking I was an excellent chaperone and influence on her daughters to thinking that I was a very bad one who gave them both acid. I did give them both acid at different times. Not that it would matter much – neither Jaci or Jacki would be living with her for very much longer.

We caught the bus toward the Greyhound in accordance with the itinerary I had mapped out to get us to the San Francisco generator show in time to perform. An old wino who was evidently an experienced musician noticed our keyboards and offered this timeless advice:

“You can play all the wrong notes. Every note the wrong note. Just play them on time.”

San Diego 2002 : “Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”

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I’ve been touching on a handful of different parties, observances and festivals here – mostly aligned with experimental music on some level. You’ve got BitchPork, Voices of the Valley, Burning Fleshtival, International Noise Conference, The Wheel and Babylon Bazaar in Maine and of course the Mojave Raves. Then there is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia and celebrating New Year’s Eve in Slab City – the only one of these that blurs the line between calendar holidays and alternative music festivals.

For me and most of my friends from San Diego there was another annual observance that had almost nothing to do with underground music but played a more formative role in nearly all of our lives: The San Diego Comic Con.

It took me much longer to get into Rock and Roll, or any aggressive music, but comic books were exciting for as far back as I remember seeing them. I wasn’t interested in my older brother and his friends’ hair metal records but any comics they might have had were a different story. It must have been at least 1992 when I stumbled onto an issue of the Frank Miller reboot of Rust but I couldn’t have been older than third grade when I found a copy of Marvel’s promotional monthly Marvel Age with a picture of the mid ‘80s X-Men team.

Before this point I would pick out back issues of Power Pack and The Eternals on trips to the comic shop but once I saw the tiny picture of Nightcrawler I was obsessed. I think it was the visual style of the whole team at this point but something about his design and costume really spoke to me even though I initially thought he was holding a whip when I saw his tail. I think I just had a thing for big, puffy shoulders but not in a football player or Rob Liefeld Cable sense – I liked his unconventional silhouette and leaner gymnast’s build.

When I did the thing in third grade that I think a lot of kids do, meeting up with the other comic nerds and designing endless costumed heroes and villains, I created a team called The Blue Dudes where everybody looked like Nightcrawler with blue skin, yellow eyes and pointed ears. This piece would probably get boring if I spent the entire time listing my favorite comics but besides older The Uncanny X-Men issues my favorite thing to get was a book called Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ‘89 – it was an illustrated encyclopedia with full page pictures of all the characters and background information on them in alphabetical order.

The first time I got to go to Comic Con was in 1992 when I was twelve years old. My dad took me for a single day with my best friend Jason. I remember the year because the freebie items were still really good in the early ‘90s and they were giving out tons of stuff to promote the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula – comic books, posters, pins, trading cards and probably some other stuff I don’t remember.

The band Green Jellö also had a booth that year – it was set up like a cool punk house living room with couches and upholstered armchairs pointed at a big TV playing a loop of their music videos. It was probably the most popular thing in the convention with our demographic, eleven to fifteen year old boys, though I didn’t see many adults taking interest. They were handing out free cassettes of their songs and considering the track Shitman had the word “shit” in it and House Me Teenage Rave was full of simulated sex sounds it all seemed badass to us.

I might have paid one more year but it seems just as likely that by 1993 I was hooked up with the programming office to start volunteering. My sister found the connections for this at her Performing Arts High School – we would get a free four day pass for helping out with the different events in the upstairs conference rooms. The only thing I really remember is delivering a bunch of pencils to a figure drawing lesson that the guy who made Lady Rawhide was giving. There wasn’t a model or anything – it was a lesson on drawing unrealistic female bodies from your own imagination.

I do remember a story that my sister and some other volunteers were helping with a Steven Seagal panel and he made them all leave the room while he changed his shirt. They complained about how ridiculous this was considering how often he is shirtless onscreen but he was probably just a little out of shape between movies and didn’t want anyone to see.

The next few years were really the golden age of the San Diego Comic Con, it had gotten big enough to feel like you were living in a temporary city that was only populated by other comic book geeks but it wasn’t so big as to be overcrowded and unmanageable yet. It was also still mainly about comic books instead of television shows and movies because there wasn’t as much superhero/sci-fi/fantasy stuff being made in those years. Every year a few movies were being heavily promoted but nothing like it is now.

We were all into staying at or around the con for the entirety of all four days. On Friday and Saturday the screening rooms that showed anime and old shows and movies were open until three in the morning and there was a big room on top of the Hyatt called the Hospitality Suite where they put out free sodas, chips and candy. There was a decent amount of night time programming like the Masquerade, the Eisner Awards and a big dance party but we also just loved running around downtown San Diego.

The Gaslamp Quarter revitalization had started but there was still plenty of urban blight and the center city could be nearly deserted at night. That was how we liked it – we would explore empty buildings and sneak into parts of the Convention Center and surrounding hotels that we weren’t supposed to be in. My favorite spot was opening an access door to a section of the ventilation system from the mezzanine. If you’ve ever been in the San Diego Convention Center this was just on the other side of the big blue tubes that stick out of the wall in the main hall.

I would always dream up pranks like getting a box of bouncy balls and throwing them out over the main hall from the giant tubes but never actually did any of them. At fifteen years old just sneaking into all these secret nooks and crannies felt devious enough. I would bring friends from my High School and show them around all of these little spots when the Convention wasn’t happening also. Once me and my friend Brandi from The Singles managed to get inside between events and spend a few minutes roller skating the giant empty concrete slab of the main hall before somebody kicked us out.

On top of all this the late ‘90s was just a great time for comic books. There was a little bit of a “black and white explosion” going on but it felt more creative and less formulaic than the one that had followed the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Slave Labor Graphics was booming – Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese had hints of the third wave ska culture we were all into, Jhonen Vasquez was just starting his goth classic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and I got super obsessed with this comic Hairbat that never got a second issue.

Francois was making an independent fanzine called The Comics Review and I got to tag along with him while he interviewed Paul Pope from THB and Stan Sakai from Usagi Yojimbo. Wendy and Richard Pini were reprinting all of their hard to find Elfquest books and had just started up Warp Graphics that eventually spread the franchise too thin but it started out strong. Vertigo was still putting out stuff we liked and Sam Keith’s The Maxx was a cartoon on MTV and we were teenagers and lots of cool comics were coming out – Bone, Stray Bullets, Beanworld, I could list things off all day.

I used to bring a white t-shirt and embroidery hoop to the Con and get all my favorite artists to sign and draw sketches on it. The hoop allowed me to pull the fabric taut in small sections at a time so it was almost as easy to draw on as a flat piece of paper. In the year that Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were promoting the book Mr. Punch, Neil drew a quick portrait of the titular character that he seemed to think came out a lot better than his drawings usually did. Looking at other sketches of his online I’m inclined to agree but my mother washed the shirt behind my back and he was the only person that neglected to use a waterproof marker.

It’s possible that I made it to every single Comic Con from 1992 to 2006 but I remember 2002 as a year of big changes. I had always attended the festival as a straight edge teenage geek but this was my first time in full partying, drinking and hard drugs mode. Me and all my friends had a tradition of gravitating toward the big “C” outside the Convention Center when we were looking for people to hang out with. This is where this picture would have been taken but it isn’t from 2002 – it might be 2003 or 2004.

I am holding a plastic pineapple which despite being completely obvious allowed me to constantly drink in public without attracting any negative attention.

I didn’t get into it until I moved back in 2001 but another thing that went through a “golden era” in late ‘90s San Diego was street drugs. Methamphetamine hadn’t become as ubiquitous as it is now, although there was plenty of it around, and all the Mexican heroin dealers still sold tiny bags of near pure cocaine for shooting speedballs. For those readers who haven’t tried it an intravenous shot of cocaine delivers an intense euphoric rush where time seems to stop for a moment then all sounds take on a metallic echo like they were being processed through a flange pedal.

I wouldn’t recommend it and I’ll most likely never do it again but it was a ton of fun in my early twenties. Especially coming from Chicago where the only thing available was crack and I had to cook it down with lemon juice, having constant access to cocaine so pure it would dissolve the moment it touched water and you could taste it in the back of your throat like silver was certainly an experience.

I would have either made myself a counterfeit pass or asked people that were leaving if I could have theirs – this actually was a solid method of getting one in the early aughts but the last time I tried around 2014 or so it was nearly impossible. Anyway I spent at least as much time chasing down drugs and alcohol as I did at the actual convention this year if not more.

The thing about injecting cocaine, with or without heroin, is that it makes you really want to inject more cocaine soon afterwards so I would have been spending a lot of time in the bathrooms. This is what I clearly remember: arriving early one day and riding the escalators to the upper floors to slam a speedball in a toilet stall. Still rushing I wander into a panel for the new Muppet movie Kermit’s Swamp Years and pop open a tall can of Steel Reserve. The first sip, combined with lingering nausea from the intravenous cocaine, causes me to rush over to the trash can and loudly vomit into it.

I get kicked out of the Muppet panel.

Over the years a list of “must see” panels and presentations started to grow as people from our friend group showed each other their favorite bits of scheduled programming. One of these was called Starship Smackdown and it was basically a fantasy league tournament for imaginary dogfights between space crafts from a range of sci-fi books, shows, comic books and movies. A rotating cast of moderators wrote the names on a dry erase board and presided over a group discussion of who would win each matchup until there was a single champion.

To give a very general idea it would be stuff like the Winnebago from Space Balls going head to head with the actual Millennium Falcoln from Star Wars.

Another popular one was called the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation – a group of cosplayers that created a community theater troupe around the fictional Star Trek race. The sci-fi and fantasy landscape was especially lacking in diverse characters at the turn of the millennium but Klingons offered a way for Black and mixed race fans to depict a group of characters that were faithful to the source material. They wore the costumes and forehead prosthetics of the version that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation and created a fictional ship for all these scenes to play out on called the VSS Stranglehold.

On this particular year I would have been fairly drunk and fucked up on drugs by the time this performance was happening. I noticed a couple of young teenage girls in full Klingon getup and made a crude joke:

“Check out the Klingon jailbait!”

One of the older cast members, quite likely an uncle or even father, pointed his blaster pistol at me in what seemed like genuine anger:

“Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”

I was impressed by his ability to chastise me without ever breaking character.

I’ve mostly been writing about getting drunk and high and being an asshole but there was definitely a lot going on with comics this year that was exciting as well. A lot of the Fort Thunder artists wouldn’t be published on anything with an ISBN number for a couple more years but there was a lot more awareness of their work and screen printed mini comics, posters and calendars were starting to pop up in places like the Giant Robot booth. Highwater Books had been publishing stuff from some Fort-adjacent artists with more of a twee style: Ron Regé Jr., James Kochalka and Jordan Crane.

I’m not 100% sure but I think 2002 was the year that Paper Rad sent out the “peace envelope”. I don’t know if there is an official name for this object but it was a folio size Manila envelope that was spray painted with stencils of hearts and peace signs and probably some other things I forget. It was filled with a selection of zines and mini comics in a wide variety of sizes and colors – stuff from the members of Paper Rad, Dearraindrop and I think CF and Keith Waters, though I might be wrong on those last two.

As far as I know these weren’t available for sale anywhere but had been sent out with a friend in the underground comics scene to be passed out to mutual acquaintances. I know that I got mine when I passed by a booth like Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly and somebody recognized me and grabbed me one from under the counter – not that there would have been any popular demand for their work at this point. As always if anybody reading knows anything more about the object I’m referring to I’d love to hear it.

The most exciting new discovery for me at the 2002 Comic Con was definitely Junko Mizuno and her Cinderella paper back. Her drawing style is generally referred to as “gothic kawaii” but beyond the dark and erotic elements my favorite part was the way her work synthesized the aesthetics of vintage Sanrio, Strawberry Shortcake and the entire spectrum of consumer goods that were marketed to adolescent girls in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In a rare situation the English language release of Cinderella is actually more definitive than the original Japanese one because Mizuno got to have greater control of the colors and printing style – she went for newsprint and four color process for a vintage Western comic book feel.

I was going through a bit of an obsession with the aesthetics of cuteness myself – collecting all of the vintage Lisa Frank gear I could find and hunting for pink and purple apparel with images of unicorns. It’s been crazy watching the proliferation of unicorns and rainbows on every product imaginable in the last few years because in 2002 that kind of stuff was not easy to find.

My outfit for that year’s Comic Con was a white hospital gown layered with a reproduced unicorn tapestry, brightly colored scraps of tie dye and hand sewn prayer flags in a psychedelic style. My friend Joy had given me a single arm guard from a Rainbow Brite costume and I safety pinned on some of the plastic jewelry that came with the same Glitterator that had filled me with anti-Christmas angst as an adolescent.

The things that made Comic Con exciting in the early aughts were a little different from the things that made it exciting in the ‘90s and every year it felt a bit more commercial and mainstream. The last time I went was with LaPorsha in 2014 or so. It was a lot harder to bum passes and the Convention Center had not only been expanded but a special section was added with promotional inflatable funhouses for Adult Swim and The Smurfs movie. We had a good time and ran into Jesse Camp but a lot of the old magic seemed to be gone.

Still I was surprised to learn that things like the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation are still happening every year. It wouldn’t be this one but some year in July I just might make it down to San Diego to check it out again.

If I ever make it look for me under the big “C” where the cars pass in front of the Convention Center.

New York 2010 : “Play Something Slow And Sexy”

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This is going to sound egregiously reductive, mostly because it is egregiously reductive, but all of the Russian girls I’ve met have fallen into two categories. There’s the fresh faced wide eyed with wonder perpetually innocent summer’s child type: these tend to be Yanas and Lanas. The second type are the world weary won’t get fooled again wistfully smoking a cigarette while sitting on the edge of the bed winter’s child type: I can’t remember the names of the ones I’ve met like this but I instinctively want to say Tatianas.

These are very broad generalizations based on first impressions where in most cases I didn’t get to know these women super well but it did seem to be a pattern. It certainly wasn’t a preconceived notion I started with and projected onto the Russian women that I met – it was a thing I noticed over time. I suppose it’s possible that they all roughly start as the first type and move toward the second depending on life experiences but I don’t see it that way: the type ones I’ve known didn’t seem to lead completely charmed lives and the type twos seemed like they had similar personalities as children.

It should go without saying that obviously there are many, many more types of Russian girls and women – I just haven’t met them.

As her name would suggest, Yana was one of the first type of Russian girls I described. I first met her when I went to New Orleans for Halloween in 2008. New Orleans was still a very different city from what it’s like now in that year. It had been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the Military Police, or MPs, were still handling a lot of law enforcement. The spray paint marks of the rescue workers were still fresh on the buildings in affected areas and it wasn’t uncommon to see blocks where ruined buildings vastly outnumbered those in any stage of restoration where the flood had hit hardest.

Rebuilding as a concept had not yet come to represent gentrification and displacement.

I’ve been to a handful of Mardi Gras celebrations in the city, sometimes for the entire season and sometimes for just the last few days, but this was my only New Orleans Halloween. Maybe it’s that all of the festivities are packed into a single weekend or so instead of a longer season but it definitely felt like things had a harder, darker edge. It could have something to do with the academic calendars of the surrounding colleges and universities.

Frenchmen Street in particular had a younger crowd and almost Woodstock ‘99 vibe. I remember joking at the time about how much I enjoyed seeing angry people in costumes and that if none were available it was easy enough to make some. On Frenchmen Street it didn’t require any particular intervention. A quick scan of the busiest intersection revealed a caveman with a giant plastic club screaming at his girlfriend in a blind rage and a group of Medieval princesses giving courtly waves after one of them projectile vomited from a taxi window.

A strong thread connected New Orleans and the people who had been on board The Miss Rockaway Armada in 2008 and I generally connected with and spent time with people from the project when in the city. It was Lisers who plucked Yana from a crowd and introduced her to the rest of the group. At the time she wore blocky glasses, had dark hair with severe bangs and the same infectious smile that helped me recognize her in more recent photos where the first two features are gone.

She carried the kind of large black camera that signifies somebody is trying to get serious about photography – the super youthful kind if you know what I mean by that. I want to say Minolta because that’s what they gave us is Sixth Grade Photography but in reality it was probably a Canon or Leica. I’m not the guy to take a lot of pictures or know much about cameras, hence the thing you’re reading and, at the time of writing, the hundred or so pieces like it.

I showed Yana around New Orleans a bit and brought her to Termite and Vine with the promise that it was populated with besprizornye. It’s a Soviet era word for orphaned children that supposedly lived in Dickensian underground societies – I would have learned it from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don’t know if anyone who lived at Termite that year was an actual orphan but the house was a hotbed of the kind of train rider and jug band informed fashion that was in a special vogue those years.

Yana and I stuck around town at least until November Fifth when Drew celebrated his birthday in a bar at the edge of the Bywater I’m going to guess doesn’t exist anymore. The night ended up being especially celebratory because Barack Obama’s first presidential victory was announced. New Orleans responded to this news with a level of general public jubilation that I didn’t see again until The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.

What this looked like on the ground was every person who was out in public shaking every other person they came into contact with in genuine excitement and every person that was driving a vehicle leaning on the horn and out the window to high five all of the passing pedestrians. I’m sure the city has its share of staunch Republicans and at least more than zero Colts fans but in each of these situations they must have stayed home. I certainly never saw a single human being that wasn’t over the moon about these happenings.

I think the next time I would have seen Yana was back in New Orleans for the 2009 Mardi Gras season. She had just come from Washington D.C. where she had gone to see the historic inauguration first hand. I don’t know if every Russian who learns English as a second language mispronounces certain diphthongs the same way but every time she shared this piece of information it caused every person in earshot to laugh uncontrollably.

The same pun made by a person with actual racist intent wouldn’t have been particularly funny but combined with Yana’s constant wide eyed innocence it was a winner. I have to take full accountability for my role in maneuvering to cause her to repeat this word in front of as many people as possible while leaving her in the dark about what everyone was finding funny about it. I don’t know if somebody else told her, she figured it out for herself or she was just reacting to the obvious energy that she was being made a figure of fun but she started responding with wounded indignance:

“No, Ossian!”

This is another one of those situations where I wish this was in an auditory format because none of this is going to be as funny without her actual voice or accent and the pouting expression she made. On the very slim chance that anybody didn’t get what the original joke was, it was that she was accidentally saying a word that rhymes with the one before “of fun” in the previous paragraph every time she said inauguration. It definitely helped the humor of the situation that everything about Yana was as cute as pajamas on a ladybug.

The next couple of times I saw her she was living on the edge of Williamsburg in New York City. She snuck me in to crash at a famous butoh studio she was living and studying at when I was in town around New Year’s Eve and didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next morning we were walking to the train when I happened to look down and find a mysterious baggie of white powder lying in the snow.

Yana certainly wasn’t into that and I hadn’t been using drugs much that year except for psychedelics and pharmaceuticals. This discovery wasn’t actually that far from where I had tried cocaine for the first time with the intention of it being a gateway drug at the legendary Kokie’s Place. I never really liked the drug that much if I wasn’t injecting or smoking it – without a rush the effects are nothing to write home about.

Still there’s something about found drugs that makes you feel like you have to do them and I wasn’t about to sketch out any of the people I was staying with by searching for needles or attempting to cook up freebase. I don’t know how I decided on The Cloisters as the place to get geeked out but it did feel appropriate. It definitely wasn’t for any historical significance because outside of some questionable analyses of almost certainly cross contaminated mummies it is extremely well established that the substance would have been completely unknown in the setting and era of the exhibited artifacts.

Still the cold weather, drafty flagstone walls and unicorn tapestries I’d been waiting to see my entire life seemed to pair well with whatever I was stuffing up my nose. I had been growing my fingernails out in the interest of dressing like a witch so pinky nail bumps held as much, if not more, than any key. Discreetly ducking behind interesting helmets and ornamental serving dishes to take them was an adventure in itself.

I never put it on a scale but I must have found at least a gram and I wasn’t lying when I said I really didn’t like the stuff. The whole Cloisters thing was fun but there was no way I was going to do a whole gram there. It would have been pure insanity to smuggle it onto a plane but I also couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I went to a lot of different cities and stayed with a lot of different people on this East Coast visit so I’m struggling to remember who I finished it off with.

I want to say that it was either a brother and sister or a male/female couple and they were kind of square. Now that I’m wracking my brain about it I realize that I may be transposing another memory about randomly finding cocaine on the ground in Oakland during the OCCUPY! protests. Maybe somebody reading this will remember me uncharacteristically offering them powdered cocaine somewhere in the North East in early January of 2010.

It doesn’t matter to the larger story, if there can even be said to be one, in the least but little details like this are among my favorite parts of this whole thing. I couldn’t make them up.

The last time I remember seeing Yana she had helped set up a show for me at a warehouse/loft space down the street from her butoh studio. This space felt like it could have existed on a show like Friends – it wasn’t decorated too differently from spaces me and my friends had lived in, with things like painted pieces of mannequins, but something about the energy was painfully generic.

The people who lived there were like hippies who are into circus aesthetics and electronic dance music – basically what I’d call burners. I don’t know if any of the kids who lived there actually went to Burning Man but they definitely seemed like they thought Burning Man was cool. There’s a lot of rave hippy types that I wrote off as burners when I first encountered them, only to discover that they were actually cooler than burners. The SPAZ, Katabatik and Mutant Fest crews immediately come to mind.

Being a burner isn’t the worst thing in the world.

This would have been on the U.S. Tour where Teen Suicide changed their name to Generation and I’m pretty sure we were traveling with Forced Into Femininity. We had been through a veritable tasting flight of artistically trying scenarios at this point: a party in Denver, Colorado where a recently arrived freight-rider freestyle rapped over Reine’s set about how much cocaine he was on; a generator show in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they said we could jump the bill but then refused to let me turn up my drum machine to even half the volume of my screaming voice without a microphone, or the ambient noise of the generator at that, in fear that the show would get broken up before the “real bands” with drummers played; a failed festival outside of Detroit where we were going to play on a bicycle powered stage with recycling themed clowns but jumped to one of the main stages because all of the big name artists were abandoning ship with the revelation that they weren’t getting paid.

Or actually I’m second guessing myself as to whether this was on that Summer tour or if it had been earlier during my January trip. I know that other people besides me were supposed to play this show and I don’t remember it being the acoustic singer-songwriter girls I was touring the North East with that January. I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of the things that I want to say about this show.

The people who lived at this space had a somewhat unconventional idea of what agreeing to host a show means, or maybe there had been a bit of a language barrier when Yana had set it up with them. They thought it would be more like a rave and when it was nothing like a rave they insisted that the people who had been scheduled to play stop playing so that their housemate could DJ some more rave-appropriate music. It’s killing me that I can’t clearly remember who all else I was playing with but I do remember this back and forth conflict between live acts playing and the hosts just DJing building up as the night progressed.

In the course of doing Bleak End at Bernie’s I learned that I seemed to put on the best performances when the crowd, to some degree at least, liked what I was doing and I, to some degree at least, hated them. There was something like a feedback mechanism involved: nearly all of my songs were rooted in feelings of anger, disappointment and disgust and having real time stimuli that helped me tap into those feelings led to a more genuine and compelling performance.

I don’t know if it was because she saw my drum machine or just a coincidence in terms of timing but just as I was taking the stage one of the girls who lived at the venue stepped in front of me in a burlesque costume holding a hula hoop. She glanced back at me over her shoulder:

“Play something slow and sexy.”

I can’t remember which one of my songs I started with but only one of them could be said to fit those parameters and it wasn’t that one.

I gathered my hatred, cranked up the drum machine and started to scream…

Nashville 2008 : The Bus Epilogue “Brand The Dude!”

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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve

Part Thirteen

I ended up going back and rewatching both of the short documentary films, entitled The Bus and Living Hell respectively, and getting reminded about a lot of things about living on The Bus and playing in Living Hell I might not have already written about. They are both great films that document the trip from two very different perspectives and we are fortunate they both exist – I’ll be adding links with embedded videos to the bottom of this piece.

If all of this stuff ends up getting published together in a book this is your head’s up that in that format the links wouldn’t work. You’d have to manually type all of the letters and numbers into a browser bar somewhere – just tapping the paper wouldn’t do anything.

The climax of both films is the Viking Funeral for the mummified squirrel in West Virginia – this incident sticks out as the closest thing to a documented, definitive Living Hell performance. In a lot of ways Living Hell was similar to the raft called The Garden of Bling in the section on The Miss Rockaway Armada. Just like The Garden of Bling was the result of everybody onboard cramming all of their disparate ideas and concepts onto a single sixteen foot deck, Living Hell was what happened when we all piled our musical and performance ideas into a single sub-fifteen minute set.

There was punk, prog, metal, noise, folk and spoken word but the strongest unifying factor was the desire to lean into, but not commit to, signifiers and suggestions that the entire thing was a recruitment tool for a bizarre cult. The name was picked for its religious overtones, we printed pamphlets that falsified the bus’s history and played with the spiritual question before the first show and Rain’s vocals mimicked the form of the sermons she would have grown up with in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. All kinds of things played on the sound system during the long drives but the one we kept coming back to was the Jesus Christ Superstar original soundtrack.

I might not have this totally correct because I was one of the last additions and never played an actual instrument but I think Living Hell came together with most of the members coming up with their parts in isolation. I can say that the closest thing we had to a full practice before the first show in Orlando was an a cappella run through on the drive there where everybody made the sound of their instrument – drums, guitar, keyboard whatever it was. It sounded distinctly less chaotic than most of the live sets.

I can’t speak to everybody’s experience but for me and John Benson it was exactly the kind of band that we had always wanted to be in. I’ve been in other bands that started out as rough concepts and didn’t grow into a coherent representation of these ideas until nearly completing a U.S. Tour. Living Hell never got the opportunity to get there – there was a reunion show that Summer in Oakland but its lifecycle was roughly a creative analogue to a Summer Camp Romance, as limited as the vehicle it had been created to tour on.

In one of the documentary films you can hear some background chatter as to how bad the mummified squirrel smells as it’s burning and whether or not it smells as bad as the “dude’s brand”. The consensus is that it smells worse. The reference is to an incident in Nashville, Tennessee where someone who only travelled with The Bus for a short time decided to get branded with a letter “C” for his girlfriend’s first initial.

Branding seems like an odd choice when you consider that we were traveling with a fully functional tattoo gun and nearly everybody got some kind of ink at some stage of the journey. It’s possible that we didn’t have it yet at this point, that this person didn’t know tattooing was an option or maybe he just wanted to make a brand sized statement as opposed to a tattoo sized one. Alcohol was certainly involved.

We were doing a couple of shows with Lazy Magnet in the project’s heavier hard rock formation at this point and James Lusardi was the one to rise to the occasion as brand ambassador. I actually needed to address a minor correction to some details involving James because in the There’s a Quarterback in Every Huddle chapter I had mistakenly written that the police harassment outside of a Southern Florida Publix was prompted by James stealing cheese from that particular entity.

A kind reader named Adam Boysen reminded me that this wasn’t precisely true. James had carried some cheese around the super market for some time and even placed it in his pocket for some of this time, possibly with the intention of stealing it, but he did return it to the shelf before walking out the exit doors. This feels particularly important to me because it shows that the local police were willing to detain a bus full of people for merely contemplating shoplifting without actually following through.

I remember now that this was one of the moral points that the officers attempted to lecture us on:

“If you take something off of the shelf in a store and carry it around in your pocket but at the last second you get scared and put it back then what do you call that?”

We all thought that the answer to this one should be shopping but even if you accept that there was a window of criminal intent it can hardly pass muster as stealing. Somebody made the argument that he would have to figure out whether or not a particular block of cheese could fit comfortably in his pocket in order to decide if he wanted to buy it because he would be traveling forward on a crowded bus with no refrigerator. This actually stands up as a compelling defense when you consider that most of us were indeed carrying the groceries we had just purchased in our pockets – the parsnip and bunch of rapini I had selected were at that very moment ensconced in my own back pockets.

Regardless, it was all academic considering that no crime had actually been committed. It stands as a testament to the kind of constant harassment merely traveling on The Bus attracted, the utter ridiculousness of Florida cops and as an amusing diptych with the recent Berlin piece Police Speak English! to showcase the kind of philosophical conversations surrounding shoplifting one might find themselves in with law enforcement around the world when engaging in a particular lifestyle.

Anyway back to Nashville and the branding: James had fashioned an extremely rough letter “C” from a wire coat hanger and heated it to the required temperature on a gas burner in the house we were staying in. We hadn’t been traveling with the person who wanted the brand for long enough for most of us to learn his name which is why we egged James on with the following crass-sounding chant:

“Brand the dude! Brand the dude!”

One of the documentaries shows the subcutaneous layers of white fat that were exposed the moment the brand burned through the top layers of skin and there’s no question as to whether or not it made a permanent mark. I couldn’t say if it healed without becoming infected (it was the deepest brand I’ve ever seen administered) or even what the “dude’s” name was. Maybe that’s one of the things I’ll find out after more people read this.

Anyway I think it says something about the culture of the tour that the Viking Funeral for the mummified squirrel was our second experience with the intense smell of burning flesh and our first reaction was to compare it to the earlier one. I had a line drawing of the squirrel in my diary at the time that I was thinking of getting a tattoo of but never got around to. I passed up on an opportunity to get a small “x” shaped brand at a Mojave Rave a couple years later too.

I did get a small witch tattoo on my wrist in the course of the Living Hell tour but if I had any premonition of the carnage that heavy intravenous use of black tar heroin during an era of declining purity would be bringing to my extremities I would have taken every mark available. As it is I look like my arms and legs got chewed up by a shark or I suffered from severe chemical burns. The diary is absolutely lost but somebody from the Purple Haus turned it into a zine after it was filled up a year or so later so I’m holding out a faint hope that I will still get the line drawing back and finally get the tattoo.

I talked a bit in the Cherry Coke chapter about how living on The Bus inevitably demanded becoming somewhat numb to the magic and whimsy of the situation and the effect this would have on those who were seeing it for the first time. There’s a scene in one of the documentaries that exhibits this phenomenon almost perfectly: during one of the many breakdowns John Benson has run back to the engine to diagnose the problem and a random woman in a minivan is excitedly asking him questions about The Bus.

He answers all of her questions but his answers are short and you can hear an edge of irritation beginning to take form in his voice.

I was feeling like all of the pieces I had written about The Bus and Living Hell tour were falling short of describing what it actually felt like to be there and live on it: the way we would pull off in the middle of nowhere to kick a ball around like it was third grade recess, the peace of everybody sleeping while parked at a rest stop somewhere, the mounting breakdowns until the whole thing collapsed…

Fortunately my memories are far from the only surviving document of this time – you can watch the entirety of both of the films produced below. The picture is of a moth that landed on the side of The Bus when it broke down on the outskirts of Albion, Michigan. I’m pretty sure it’s called a Blinded Sphinx Moth.

Living Hell
The Busc
The Branding of the Dude

San Diego 2005 : “This Song’s About Getting Fired”

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After Spidermammal I didn’t actually have a band or project again until Sex Affection. Or at least nothing that ever made it as far as either finishing a recording or playing a show. Here are some of the things that didn’t make it: at El Rancho and The Red House me and Nick Buxton did a lot of planning to start a “8-Bit Metal” band called Dragon Warrior based on the U.S. Release of the first Dragon Quest game. This didn’t mean that we would use synthesizers with actual 8-Bit style sound chips but toy guitars, pots and pans for drums and an actual bass because I had one.

We had all the stuff and I even had a four track in those days but we were either too busy being on drugs or too afraid of failure to get around to actually doing it – probably a combination of the two. The imaginary or at least unfinished songs were Dost Thou Love Me? / But Thou Must!, an instrumental power chord bass thing I still know how to play called Imperial Scrolls of Honor and this one I wrote a few lyrics for called The Metal Slime Hath Taken Thee By Surprise!:

“In mortal combat this, first strike shall not be thine!

The honor-less amoeba hath struck thee from behind!”

Some point after I moved back to San Diego me and my older sister Sarah started working on this thing called The Pointy Reckonings – a reference to a threat that Winona Ryder’s character Abigail makes in The Crucible. I must have either written some parts on bass or used our home’s piano and some music software to create at least sketches of the background music – maybe a bit of all of it. We made songs about the vengeful spirits of drowned girls and mocked outsiders with demon familiars: I’ve Got Dark Things To Do My Bidding.

I remember the couple of songs we were working on being pretty okay but I never even recorded any of it on my four track.

Sex Affection started in San Diego in either 2004 or 2005 with a lot of regulars from the bar and party circuit with an emphasis on Gelato Vero employees. I didn’t make it to all of the shows before I became a full time member but I want to say that in it’s earliest incarnations it was an Art Rock band. I did see a performance in the back room of The Casbah that incorporated a maypole on one of the room’s pillars. Some of the songs were starting to include rapping parts and because I was already trying to grab a mic and start rapping at nearly half the shows I went to I was invited in as an additional rapper.

I came on board in a very transitional time where most of the original members were getting bored of and departing the project. Greta left, Jessica left, I’m not 100% sure if Kevin had ever been a member but if he had – he left. This left Mike Bova, Raquel and now me. Most likely a lot of songs were dropped from the set list at this time because the members who sang or played them weren’t there anymore. There must have been more than one song on the earliest shows I played but I only remember the “shady” song.

The song had been written as a way for the various members of Sex Affection to trash talk their exes. I might be wrong about Jessica trashing on Naked Mike in the original version but it for sure had bits of Raquel trashing on Mikey and Bova trashing on Kate. The first little bit of rap I had written for the band was a little couplet at the end of the Kate section:

“And if I were your boss and if I paid your wage

I’d take all your money and lock you in a cage

And then I’d fire you!”

In the standard incestuousness of a small to medium sized city’s underground music scene Kate and Mikey from the checklist of exes ended up in a relationship with each other. Then Mike Bova and Kate hooked back up and started seeing each other again. I didn’t necessarily know this at the time but this involved some pretty blatant cheating on the parts of both Kate and Mike Bova.

I don’t have the same moral outrage around cheating that most of my peers and contemporaries seem to. The thing I always say is that I’m a huge believer in serial monogamy, people leaving relationships where they aren’t happy and pursuing relationships where they will be. I’ve known plenty of stable, healthy and mutually fulfilling partnerships that began as one or both of the partners “cheating”.

I just learned that Raquel and Mikey are seeing each other again and engaged to be married and I’m sure that all of the things they’ve learned about themselves and what they want in a relationship from all of the different relationship experiences they’ve had over the past ten years can only make them better partners to each other. The thing I do get puritanical about is dishonesty. While I don’t see “cheating” as an inherently evil act I do look at lying about it and hiding it that way unless there is some kind of standing agreement between the two partners concerning discretion.

The main moral outrage is 2005 was, for me at least, that Bova had started seeing Kate again but continued to perform the song that trash talked her at our live shows as if nothing had changed. I can’t remember if he was even doing vocals on the song by that point but the fact remained that it was a song expressly written in part to denigrate his then girlfriend and with full knowledge of that fact he stepped onto a stage to perform it multiple times without a single caveat or qualifier.

Of course this wasn’t the only reason for what me and Raquel then did. The Sex Affection we inherited had a thin oeuvre of scraps of songs that had been written or improvised by the revolving door of former members and Raquel and I were feeling like we wanted to write more, practice more and just generally get more serious about where we were going to go with it. For Bova it was still a party band, an excuse to goof off and get some free drinks at Scolari’s Office, and he wasn’t particularly interested in moving past that.

So we met up in secret and rewrote all the lyrics to that particular song to shit talk Bova and inform him that we were kicking him out of the band. He was our friend and this was a super immature and petty thing for us to do. At the very least we should have been transparent with him about how we were feeling and let him in on the joke so he could decide for himself if he wanted to play the final show with the modified version of the song with us or not.

Now that I’m thinking about it, it would even have been cool if he was given the opportunity to prepare some lyrics shit talking us and I realize that this could be a great tradition for bands that are breaking up or changing members. Kind of like wedding vows, except that it’s totally the opposite thing, all the members could prepare special lyrics about all of the different things they hate about each other and being in a band together to share for the first time in front of an audience at their “farewell show”.

This kind of reminds me of a song called “We’re Sick of Music and We Hate Each Other” by The In/Humanity where the lyrics end with “fuck you” followed by all of the band members’ names.

Anyway that’s not what we did at all. I don’t think we even invited Bova to practice and then came up with this plan because we were angry he didn’t show or anything like that that would make it seem even slightly more innocent on our parts. We straight up schemed. I remember exchanging phone numbers with Raquel because even though we’d known each other socially for years we had never had any particular reason to call each other before this point.

I went over to her apartment for what would turn out to be the first of many writing sessions and practices and by the time we were taking the stage at our next Scolari’s show we were the only two people in the room who knew what was coming.

This brings us to the pull quote. The little couplet that I had originally written for the trash talk song had caught on as a viral vocal hook among our friends and the other band members. People liked it. They thought it was funny. At this last show Mike Bova was pretty much just playing guitar (unless it was bass, it was always bass later) but he grabbed one of the microphones to announce the next tune:

“This song is about getting fired!”

Me and Raquel shot each other the kind of look you can imagine this particular circumstance demanded and then we went into it. This isn’t the kind of prank that would be particularly effective if we had been a screamo band but we had been moving firmly toward our later sound of ‘80s style mid-tempo clearly enunciated rapping. You could tell from their reactions that our friends in the audience were understanding every word.

Mike Bova didn’t actually seem to. I will say in his defense that the Scolari’s sound system was fairly rudimentary with a mixing board right on stage so bands could do their own sound and either no monitors or not very good ones. Still it basically seemed like he wasn’t really listening. He went to the bar to grab a drink after the song, like he basically did after every song, and somebody over there explained what had just happened to him and he just never came back on stage.

He did seem to take it really well. My friend Andy Robillard had told me a story a few years earlier about learning that he had gotten kicked out of GoGoGo Airheart the moment he heard them start playing with a different drummer at a show that he had thought he was going to be playing. It sounded like a very unpleasant experience for him but I also think getting kicked out of bands is a more emotionally charged experience for drummers in general – most drummers I know in successful but not percussion-centric bands seem to live with the threat constantly hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.

I’m not sure how I would have felt or reacted if I had been in Mike Bova’s shoes that night but that’s kind of the thing: me and Raquel had been too busy thinking about how clever and right we thought we were to think about how it was going to make him feel. We were never close friends but me and Mike Bova always got along pretty well – both before and after this incident.

There’s way too much to be said about Scolari’s Office – the neighborhood bar that became the home to San Diego’s underground and experimental music scene for most of the aughts, and Hood Ri¢h – the rap group that Raquel and I created after deciding that we had changed so much from the Sex Affection days that the name should change as well, for me to attempt to encapsulate either one of these things in the space left over at the end of this chapter.

Instead I’ll toss in the thing that Weasel Walter said the first time we played as Sex Affection at the Che Cafe. He would have been playing with xbxrx at the time but I knew him from frequenting Chicago’s Fireside Bowl as early as 1999 when he would have been doing The Flying Luttenbachers and other projects. Anyway, as someone I’d only interacted with as a teenage fan, I was excited to tell him that I would also be playing the show but he’d seen us load in:

“Yeah, I noticed the pro gear and attitude.”

Oklahoma City 2000 : “You going to ‘Run for your Fucking Life’ later?”

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I’ve spent huge chunks of my adult life in San Diego and there’s many things I love about the city but in my late teens and early twenties I was mostly preoccupied with leaving. It’s a little on the small side and the cultural effects of Camp Pendleton and naval housing cause it to lean conservative. One of my vivid High School memories is a group of Marines threatening to kick my ass on the trolley because they thought I looked like I was in the band Spacehog.

College was a good pretext for getting out of town but after two semesters it was obvious that I wasn’t ready for that level of structure. Next Francois and I moved out to Chicago but we signed a lease on an apartment we hadn’t seen yet. We decided that we didn’t like it because none of the floors were level and the main room was dominated by a gigantic heater. We had already paid our first month’s rent and security deposit so we decided to just never pay rent again and leave once the landlord seemed to get serious about kicking us out.

A lot of my pieces pertaining to this era have gotten derailed over philosophical pearl clutching at my past behavior so let’s keep things at this: we were selfish, impulsive and didn’t have very much empathy for people like landlords at this stage of our lives. The eviction notice appeared on our front door in early May so we promptly packed up our things and made the default move of driving back to San Diego.

I’m not sure if the details surrounding this trip would add up to a piece on their own so I’ll get into some of it here. Francois had bought a 1960’s era white Volvo station wagon that looked like it came right out of a surf rock album cover or Trader Joe’s chalkboard art in the Summer of 1999. He never bothered to get a driver’s license or insurance either in California or when we moved to Chicago.

I was just getting started on my lifelong tradition of never helping with the driving so we brought a friend in both directions. On the trip out it was this guy Andy who used to drum in GoGoGo Airheart who we’d met at the pickup soccer games organized by Rafter Roberts from Singing Serpent Studios. On the way back to California we brought along Marianne – a goth/hardcore girl from Sheboygan who later built a room shaped like a coffin in El Rancho.

Me and Marianne had created this thing we called the Triple V Club: vegan virgin vampires. The first two are pretty self explanatory but for the third one it mostly meant that we dyed our hair black and tried to only go out at night and only eat candy from the gas station on Fullerton. Marianne had been only eating candy for so long that the malnutrition caused her to stop having her period – something she viewed as a bonus rather than a legitimate cause for concern. There was no chance that this had a more traditional cause because of the second “v”.

She kind of said the word as “Kendy” because she was from Wisconsin.

Eventually we had to dissolve the club because we both independently lost the second “v”. I had been dating her best friend Sara Lou and Marianne was dating this guy Aaron with really nice cheekbones who lives in Joshua Tree now. We continued being vegans. The vampire part was more debatable but I can say that for myself at least I was making an effort to eat a little better.

I just looked her up on Facebook and it looks like she got a couple of bat tattoos on her chest and continues to dye her hair black and only wear black. I’ve been more lax – I had the nickname “vampire dicknose” for a second but it’s been years since anybody has had reason to call me that.

So early 2000 we are driving back to San Diego when the Volvo breaks down in Oklahoma City. We coasted into the closest mechanic’s shop where it was eventually decided to undertake an entire engine swap. We spent a couple of days in Oklahoma City hanging around a Sonic’s eating tater tots and wandering overgrown river greenways where we could constantly hear the haunting screams of wild peacocks that we never actually set eyes on.

We followed the sloping river terrain upwards and ended up in what looked like it had been an upscale neighborhood before it was abandoned. We ended up in an orange stucco Art Deco style mansion with an empty pool. This was where we slept until finally leaving town – the only downside was the large ticks the same color as the building that we all eventually had to pry from the skin of our stomachs or more vulnerable and less mentionable areas.

The house had been mostly cleared of furniture and anything else that seemed valuable but nobody before us had been interested in the paintings. There was a handful of portraits done in a clean, confident style that seemed to have been done in the 1960’s based on the subjects’ clothing and hair styles. They had been done in temperas rather than oils and this added a striking visual effect where earwigs and silverfish had literally eaten away sections of the paint similarly to the lacework destruction you see in the pages of old books.

Francois and I pulled a selection of our favorite canvases off of the wooden frames for easier transport and brought them along to San Diego. The second best one showed a man in a white t-shirt with a bit of what you’d call the “thousand yard stare” even before insects had eaten the majority of his face – we took this one to be a self portrait. There was no question that the one of a girl in a blue and yellow dress seated on a bed was the prize – the piece was absolutely magnetic.

Like all great portraits it told a story about how the painter felt about the woman sitting on the bed – even if it wasn’t necessarily clear what that story was. Was the artist in love with her or simply in love with light or even with his own burgeoning skill at reproducing not just what was in front of him but why these things were worth looking at in the first place? Every previous looter before us had scanned over this canvas and judged it to be no more worth taking than the broken chunks of cement and plaster that littered the bottom of the empty pool but to us it was not just worth taking but worth fighting over.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this yet specifically but when Francois first moved into my parents’ house the bedroom we were sharing had two twin size mattresses on two twin size box springs on a single California King frame. I was pretty used to sharing beds with my male friends – once a week or so I stayed over with Gabe Saucedo to experiment with recording and music with him and his brother Gerry and we had developed a routine of playfully threatening to murder each other if the other person tried any “gay stuff” before falling asleep in each other’s arms.

Anyway Francois and I had been cohabitating in much the same way – or at least the platonic spooning part, we never bothered with the ritualized threats part. Nothing untoward ever happened but I did decide one day that I would be more comfortable sleeping alone and dug a pair of twin bed frames out of the garage to set up separate beds on opposite sides of the room. I only point this incident out as the first rumblings of the impending and more permanent divorce as we couldn’t well spend the entirety of our adult lives together,

We would both need the space to stretch our legs out and discover what we cared about and who we were – separate bed frames as it were.

As with any separation between parties who had been collectively treasure hunting the question arose of who keeps the treasure. The woman in blue and yellow wasn’t the only point of contention, there was also a whale’s shoulder blade left over from The Natural Museum of California, but she was the main one. I don’t think this was so much about the quality of the painting, although of course it is an absolutely exquisite painting, but rather what the desire to possess it seemed to say about the person so desiring.

We both prided ourselves on being champions of beauty and exemplars of discerning taste. In retrospect I see our squabbles over which of us would become the receptacle for the painting as a form of allegorical sparring over which of us was the “master-aesthete” and which a mere journeyman. Realistically I can only speak for myself but when I unsuccessfully plotted to steal it from the wall of a place Francois was living called Praxis House on some level I was trying to declare my ability to appreciate it’s value as superior to his.

There was at least a little more to it for Francois as his Volvo never made it out of Oklahoma City. I’m at the point where I can’t even say with certainty which occasion of losing everything I owned it was that I lost the remainder of the paintings so I’ve grown less attached to physically holding on to these sorts of things and considered it consonant that Francois had ultimately been the one to keep it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he no longer has it, not because his life has taken on anything like the degree of chaos that my own has seen in recent years but because it stayed with the other party on the occasion of his most recent major breakup. I don’t know enough about either their relationship or presumably amicable separation to comment on whether or not the portrait played the same sort of symbolic role as before but at the very least this detail stands as a testament to it’s finer qualities.

Back in the Oklahoma City of 2000 we leveraged our movie ticket scam to take in a screening of the early Tom Green film Road Trip. We were excited about how the movie’s theme related to our own current activity but didn’t find much shared experience. It looks like a lot of great movies came out in May of 2000 but the options at this Oklahoma City Strip Mall Theater were limited.

We lobby hopped to Dinosaur which I remember finding more enjoyable.

It became evident that the Volvo wouldn’t be returning to working order any time in the immediate future so the guys from the repair shop gave us a ride to the Greyhound station with plans made for Francois to return. We passed the memorial for the victims of the bombings – it was still fairly recent at this point. As we unloaded our bags we caught sight of a couple mullet heads riding BMX bikes and playing with switchblades in the empty loading bay. One of them had a tattoo of Hitler’s face in the center of his exposed calf.

The whole shameless display of Nazi iconography was jarring, not to mention the unorthodox choice of icons, but even more than that they just seemed tough and dangerous in a way that felt completely foreign to us. I mention this because by the end of the same year we would be living at El Rancho, playing with switchblades, using hard drugs and just generally being the scary, intimidating kids to other people. At this point we most likely would have viewed our future selves with the same mix of fear and fascination that we had for the BMX Nazi boys.

We also paid full price for our Greyhound tickets as this all took place before our initiation into the secret society of the Counterfeit Ameripass – another big change coming in a small increment of time. Scamming, as far as we understood it, was an art form and way of life. We’d been messing with pay phones, movie tickets, BART fares, crashing conventions and conferences and the like. The Ameripass scam would be elevating things to a whole other level.

Not quite yet though – we payed for our fares to San Diego and were met by my father who brought us home. Marianne and I were settling into the city’s art and music landscape but Francois had to go back to the Garage in OKC for the engine transplant. I never got a detailed rundown but it seems like a frequent outcome of these last ditch resurrection events is that they end with zero working cars.

Disheartened, Francois returned again to San Diego with the Volvo as no more than a memory. For Chris and his partner, the two mechanics, this probably came as a financial hit but in that business, and 2000 especially, it’s mostly understood that if you fail to get a car running again you should expect to keep the ride and eat the loss. None the less they started calling my parents’ house for Francois a lot.

This next bit will require a bit of background. Chris and the other mechanic were Black. An unrelated group of young, mostly white, punks had just moved from Tulsa to San Diego and were often called the “Oklahomies” – a nickname that can sound quite different out of context. A metal/hardcore band from Chula Vista called Run for your Fucking Life were making a big splash around San Diego / TJ and happened to be playing that very night.

Chris the mechanic called the house looking for Francois that day and my mother picked up the phone. Both of my parents greatly enjoyed talking to their children’s various art and music friends but my mother was the more animated and oblivious. Chris introduced himself and said he was from Oklahoma:

“Oh the Oklahomeys! I’ve heard of the Oklahomeys! Are you the one that’s been interested in my daughter Jenny? Are you going to “Run for your Fucking Life” later?”

The conversation no doubt started with Chris making an earnest and patient attempt to correct and redirect my mother but she was too excited with the prospect of having somebody to talk at to be reined in to any significant degree. Chris would have no knowledge of either my family’s lax social attitudes toward underage dating or the regional punk scene. He most likely heard the voice of a white woman and thought both serious sexual misconduct accusations and threats of murder were being made.

Neither of these mechanics called for Francois again and hopefully recouped some losses with the abandoned body of the iconic Volvo. Despite the creepy realities behind the legitimate fears that catalyzed this “comedy of errors” I remember it with some amusement as just that – an unlikely “comedy of errors” informed by some niche references highly specific to time and place.

I got a chance to come to Oklahoma City again on my last U.S. Tour and play a show this time around. A community network of punk houses had bought up a single suburban block and knocked down all the fences to make one giant shared yard for agriculture, animal husbandry and playgrounds for all the children. It felt good to be there, like they were building something special that would last.

I didn’t hear a single peacock.

Detroit 2008 : The Bus Part Thirteen “Blew A Piston…”

berniebleak2 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve

I’ve actually already written the Vermont show up so I need to retitle that one so as to throw it into sequence with the rest of these. We took a fairly roundabout way to get to Detroit that took us by Niagara Falls. I can’t remember if this was my only time coming here or if I paid to go on the elevator. The structures that are built around the natural waterfall give me a strong archetypical feeling like maybe I’ve visited them, or structures similar to them, in my dreams.

Sometime between this 2008 visit and this current moment I saw the movie with Marilyn Monroe that is set there. The memory is really hazy, I thought it might have been Lucille Ball or an Alfred Hitchcock picture until I just now looked it up. Anyway I liked seeing the structures like stairs and viewing platforms in the movie – what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some things have probably changed since the visit in this story too.

I don’t know why but all of the utilitarian architecture designed around giving tourists a place to stand while they look at the waterfall is more interesting and compelling to me than the waterfall itself. I remember posing for a photo in front of the waterfall where I pretended to be talking on a cell phone as a crass joke about obliviousness to it’s grandeur and beauty but that isn’t what this is. I’m not trying to only remember cement stairs and coin operated binocular machines to be funny, that’s just the way it is.

It just occurred to me that maybe I just didn’t properly see it. Not long after this Bus Tour I went to see a Spanish Language shadow puppet show that my friend Caryl from the Rafts was involved with in Oakland. For the first time in my life I became consciously aware that the words on an opera screen were too blurry for me to read with my naked eyes – I was nearsighted. It’s hard to say if this change had been sudden or gradual. I went to a lot of operas in High School but since then it was mostly foreign films.

I did learn that if I had to listen to Spanish without being able to read the translations I could follow well enough to understand what was going on. I had taken a few semesters of Spanish in College and spoken it here and there but this was my first experience with “getting pushed in the pool” style fluency. Anyway I also went and got myself glasses and it feels entirely possible that Niagara Falls didn’t make as much of an impression for me because I was squinting at it and it was a blur.

The fastest way to get to Detroit from Niagara Falls would have been to pass through Canada but we weren’t about to test the hijinks potential of trying to pass through an International Border. There is a story about getting hassled at the Canadian Border in the El Rancho chapters but this time around we just took a much longer way. It almost seems unbelievable when you consider how much fuel The Bus required but driving over a few extra hours of road ultimately seemed easier than having every single object on board passed through a colander.

There was a lot going on in Detroit and I almost thought this could have been my first time visiting the city until I remembered that I just wrote about a 2007 trip with Garbaj Kaetz. There was a big electronic music festival going on and the Pistons had just won one of their Playoff games which resulted in a parade. When the bus succumbed to total mechanical failure just outside the Motor City it became a very weak joke about performing fellatio on one of the victorious athletes:

“I went to Detroit and blew a piston…”

Not particularly funny but you have to take into account that it was a dark and depressing time for us and double entendres and dick jokes represented a welcome relief from the grim reality that our ship of dreams had run aground. Still I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – in Detroit none of this had actually happened yet and therefore had no impact on our emotional state whatsoever. We went to Belle Isle and explored an empty factory building and sort of but didn’t really play a show.

Question Mark and the Mysterians were performing at MOCAD. I don’t know how official this whole thing was but to some degree we were allowed to pull the bus up and do a Living Hell set. I think Suzy Poling from Pod Blotz had set this up for us – she had been living in Detroit for a while and was just about to make the big move to Oakland and the West Coast.

I had forgotten that Suzy had performed on The Bus while everybody else explored the abandoned factory until I just now typed her name. It was the kind of site specific performance that The Bus was perfectly equipped but almost never used for. The acoustics worked out in such a way that Pod Blotz could be heard from anywhere inside the multilevel factory. I think it was Suzy’s idea that everybody run ahead and explore the structure while she stayed behind to provide the soundtrack.

It was kind of like how I imagine perfect wine and entree pairings must be for the people who are genuinely into that sort of thing. Industrial decay and the remnants of manufacturing machinery taken in under the sparse illumination provided by cell phones and flash lights while tape effects and synthesizers provided novel juxtapositions of sonic textures ranging from barely audible whispers to deafening shouts.

Many artists in the experimental genre have tackled the idea that simply watching them manipulate their instruments and mixers might not be the most compelling visual accompaniment to the diverse sounds produced but this was the most elegant solution to that question I’ve personally witnessed. As an awkward footnote this entire experience was quite stressful and no fun whatsoever for John Benson as he had to stay behind with The Bus and white knuckle through the attentive lights of a police cruiser while hoping that they didn’t realize a small army was trespassing throughout the empty factory he was parked outside of.

So at MOCAD this legendary garage rock band Question Mark and the Mysterians is playing. I would say that they were the biggest name Living Hell ostensibly shared a bill with but some guys from Matmos who jumped the bill in Providence are a close second. When John asked if they could play Jeremy Harris said “the Matmos?” so obviously they are kind of a big deal. In Detroit it was more like we were jumping the bill.

When I was a young child I was curious about and wanted to experiment with the concept of cooking. My first experiment was to put a slice of bologna in the microwave for about fifteen seconds. It wasn’t very good. Anyway that’s what the singer guy Question Mark’s skin kind of looked like – he was wearing dark glasses and didn’t have a shirt on. They played their one famous song 96 Tears and it was great.

We were super excited to invite them onto The Bus but they were very clear about thinking that the invitation felt like a plot device from a horror movie and they wouldn’t be falling for it. Maybe their days of stepping onto mysterious buses full of freaks were behind them or maybe they would have declined the same invitation in 1962 – I couldn’t really say. What I can say is that the MOCAD crowd was overwhelmingly older and looked to the proto-punk band to set the tone as to how to respond to The Bus.

Maybe one or two people in attendance were feeling adventurous enough to take a look onboard. I can’t remember if we went through with performing a Living Hell set or not. Either way it’s awkward – do you perform for the two people who actually showed up or do you inform them that they aren’t enough of an audience for the thing you just invited them to? There’s no good answer.

Pod Blotz outside of an abandoned factory under cover of night was the perfect act to perform for people who weren’t physically standing on The Bus. Living Hell was not – our spectacle was overwhelmingly visual in nature and we played three different times without The Bus after this night in Detroit that were far more memorable than whatever did or didn’t happen this night.

Detroit was tons of fun besides this. We slept at Dave’s mom’s house which I want to say was on Belle Isle but maybe it wasn’t. We drove over to that neighborhood with the stuffed animals and polka dots on the houses. I met up with a girl named Leg that I used to be in love with and she took me to an African themed bead shop where I might have bought some brass effigy bells.

It was time to hit the road and the road hit back. It was about four hours outside of Detroit when, as the title says, we blew the piston. Was it loud? Was there smoke? Did it smell bad? I just remember that we knew it was the end. There was still some hope that The Bus would ride again but certainly no time soon. The more immediate question was how everybody and their music equipment would be moving beyond the side of the road in Michigan.

Ok, how do I even approach this? I don’t follow any iteration of The Grateful Dead but I like to go places to do things and I can say with no reservations whatsoever that “the road” is a place where miracles happen. Case in point: another empty bus pulls off the highway to see if we might need assistance, it just so happens to belong to a Chicago bicycle racing team and is being brought home to Chicago for this purpose. In fact the home of this team and this particular bus’s destination just so happens to be within a couple miles of Mister City – the art space we are scheduled to play in that very night.

Of course our new acquaintance was happy to give us and our equipment a ride to the place where he was basically already going. It was a lot of conflicting emotions – the thing was broken and something was obviously over and some of us were crying but at the same time Holy Shit! Rolling into our scheduled concert on a different bus entirely it was impossible to avoid feeling like the natural laws governing coincidences weren’t at least a little warped in our favor.

John and Dave stayed behind with The Bus to ensure that it got towed to some form of safe storage. The nearest town ended up being a place called Albion. Not long after John Benson impulsively bought a house there when he saw it listed for next to nothing on eBay. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to get The Bus moving and operational again.

None of that really worked out. I’m sure the house will end up popping into some stories here but other people would have better stories than me and more of them. For now I’ve got this one: The first time John Benson ever set foot in the place he found seven dead starlings. I had been the magic consultant on board The Bus so he texted me to ask what it meant. I figured that the counting rules for crows could be applied to any of the corvidae:

One for sorrow, two for mirth

Three for a death, four for a birth

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

That’s magic for you. You might not get an answer that you can use but at least you always get one. You may be thinking: “what if there were eight starlings? Or nine?”

Simple: it wouldn’t have been magic.

Bus Section Epilogue with Documentary Videos:

Pennsylvania 2008 : The Bus Part Eleven “Cannery Row”

berniebleak5 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten

I put Pennsylvania in the title but I guess this might have happened in Ohio, West Virginia or any number of Northeastern states. I wasn’t involved with booking any of the Living Hell shows so for most of the tour I didn’t need to think about where we were located geographically for any particular reason. The things I am certain of is that there were gigantic colonies of tent caterpillars for this leg of the journey and we left the bus in a picturesque little village with an “Old Dutch” feel.

Dave had a couple friends named Jeff and Shira who were getting married and apparently decided to surprise them by crashing the wedding with the entire Bus. There must have been an announcement in the last preceding major city so that anybody who didn’t feel like being at a remote destination wedding could hop off and meet back up with the tour later but I wasn’t about to miss it. Who doesn’t love a wedding?

I didn’t know as much about the ins and outs of wedding planning at the time but I’m retroactively impressed with the graciousness and flexibility of the bride and groom and their respective families for accepting the last minute addition of a bus full of a dozen or so freaks without so much as raising an eyebrow. I guess that’s an exaggeration – a single eyebrow actually does a fair job of approximating the extremely minor reaction. Somebody referred to us as “wooly” – a description of our freakishness which was both accurate and of less than mammoth proportions.

The venue for the wedding was somebody’s family farm. I’m not from that region, I don’t even know where I was, so I couldn’t say if the wild abundance of tent caterpillars was typical for that time of year or not. I mentioned being in Illinois for the emergence of Brood XIII in another one of these pieces but those cicadas had less of an appreciable effect on the overall landscape than these caterpillars. You’d be hard pressed to find a table cloth that they weren’t crawling across.

It created a nice visual theme for the whole affair by lending every single one of the guests coordinated living accessories. I’m the type of person who enjoys the look and feel of being covered with living invertebrates but even for anyone that wasn’t they could only remove the caterpillars that they had actually become aware of. In that way everybody ended up looking “wooly”.

A special pavilion had been set up for performances as the happy couple came from a musically inclined community. All of the guests had actually arrived on a bus though it wasn’t The Bus – a specially chartered shuttle bus ferried passengers from a parking area to the more remote farm. Without our mobile home we weren’t going to be offering up a Living Hell performance but it was the perfect opportunity to try out some other things.

Corey Hucks was already a friend of Jeff and Shira’s and did a few songs on acoustic guitar. The wedding might have even been the moment that brought Corey onto The Bus and tour – I don’t remember the precise details but I know he wasn’t there from the beginning. I also forget if it had been me or Vanessa that first came up with the concept for an a cappella industrial project called Cannery Row but the wedding offered the perfect opportunity to turn an inside joke into a reality.

Dalton joined up with us for this one. The idea was to make rhythmic sounds that simulated a cannery as a back drop for spoken and syncopated lyrics but in practice this presented extremely similarly to what would generally be called beatboxing and rapping. That ended up being something of a theme for me: I had no way of knowing at this point that I’d soon be creating the project Bleak End at Bernie’s that awkwardly toed the line between rap and industrial.

I couldn’t say if our performance was inspired by or prescient of our visit to a former cannery in Liberty, Maine because I can’t remember the order that the two things happened in. Based on my limited knowledge of our tour itinerary and everything else either way would make equal sense. If I had made up the project name I wasn’t inspired by anything in the actual novel, which I hadn’t read yet, but only the status of a cannery as a thing that is industrial.

Vanessa clearly had read the novel as she came up with all the lyrics that directly reference elements of the book. Perhaps Dalton had also read the book and helped make them up. I just remember both of them quickly teaching me the following words:

“What you know? What you know about Cannery Row?

And what you need? It’s all on credit at Mr. Lee’s

Down by the water, across the tracks, in your face!

<raspberry sound>“

It all came together very organically and naturally. I had later, separate collaborations with both Vanessa and Dalton where I basically treated them like flying monkeys – my term for a collaborator who isn’t given any creative input. In Vanessa’s case she played guitar on the second Bleak End at Bernie’s tape and Dalton and I toured the country with a project called Dealbreaker. It can be fun to be a flying monkey, up to a point, and I was acutely aware of the point when it stopped being fun for both of them.

That’s my own weakness as a collaborator. I can be too infatuated with my own ideas to leave enough space for anyone else’s. It would have been nice to do more things like Cannery Row but in my cowardice I always felt creatively safer in total control. Lately I’ve been thinking more about what I would get if I were able to wrest certain things from the cold bony fingers of intellect but I wouldn’t quite rate any of this as a regret.

We make the best little thing we can out of the Legos we were given. Some of us have a knack for it, others might have just gotten cool pieces from the outset.

Cannery Row was a moderate success insofar as it had a certain energy that appealed to the people that ended up seeing it. What I remember was that either Shira or Jeff, the bride or the groom, hadn’t actually seen it because whichever one of them it was had ended up stepping away to use the bathroom or handle some logistical issue. I guess using the bathroom is a logistical issue.

Anyway neither of them actually knew the three of us but the one that had missed it was a little bummed in that their new spouse had just seen it and was a little excited about it. It almost sounds like something out of a fairytale – a performance offered as wedding gift that fate causes one of the partners to miss. The kind of thing that would end in a bad bargain with a dwarf or goblin. In the real world they just wanted us to do it again but the thing about an improvised performance with a certain energy is that you can’t exactly do it again.

To make up for this we improvised a new performance that centered on me freestyle rapping and culminated with me and Vanessa peeing our pants at the same time as I rapped about us doing exactly that. This presented less of a logistical issue. We were pretty drunk. It was a really fun wedding.

I’m not sure if I’ve ran into Jeff and/or Shira since but I had a great time meeting them at their wedding. I hope they’re happy or if they realized they weren’t happy they were at least happy about the decision to stop being married. That probably sounds really weird – what I mean is that I’m a big believer in serial monogamy and people figuring out that they are either happy together or happier apart. There’s a lot of different ways of being happy – it doesn’t always look the same.

I love being married and the institution of marriage. Here’s to it!

<imaginary glass>

Cheers!

Next Part: A Ghost Story

Oakland 2009 : “Speaking of the Hell’s Angels…”

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I had been nominally living with Stephany Colunga across two apartments and the better part of a year but in practice this generally meant that Stephany lived with some of my things and the cat Night Beaver while I was off on the rafts or the bus tour or a tour with CAVE or any other number of things. Eventually I stopped pretending and moved most of my stuff including records and large plastic kaiju monsters into the spacious and completely unutilized attic where I would unfortunately never return for any of it.

I had a little bit of a going away party where I attempted to give away some of my clothes but my personal style seemed to be too eclectic and specific to be much use to anyone else. I didn’t want to see all of the stuff wasted but the little bit that was repurposed ended up being equally psychologically painful. There was a really cool King’s Dominion long sleeved shirt that had belonged to my father and had pictures of the different rides printed along the sleeves. Will Leffleur took it but he cut the sleeves off and threw them away: maddening.

I ended up getting blacked out drunk and unreasonably aggressive as the night progressed. The party concluded with me spraying Will with whipped cream and then urinating on him as he lay in a pile of my unwanted wardrobe. The next morning I just piled it all into garbage bags and left it in the alley. A charitable but completely untrue explanation would be that I was trying to spare Stephany the emotional pain of losing her favorite roommate so I behaved like so much of an asshole that she would be able to be happy with my departure.

The last time that I performed live music also happened to be the last time that I ever saw Will at a Halloween party several years ago. I improvised some backing drums while singing about destigmatizing opiate use, testing for fentanyl and being sure to carry nalaxone in order to be able to reverse overdoses for your friends. At this point in the party Will was already passed out on the ground so he didn’t hear the performance although none of it would have been new information for him.

On the first day of the following year I got the news that he had died. Passing out on the ground had been more or less standard party behavior for Will and allowed everyone to keep an eye on him and make sure he was still breathing in the course of normal partying. He had just gotten his own van which was a warmer and more comfortable place for him to pass out at. It also meant that nobody was there to check on him in the critical moment.

It could have happened anywhere. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Anyway in early 2009 I had showed up in Oakland for the Living Hell reunion show and John Benson invited me to stay in a special attic room he had set up for his daughter Quinn above his own room at the Purple Haus. I actually have barely met Quinn even though she and John had done a band together for a few years called Evil Wikkid Warrior – I was never in the right time or place to see it. In a way it felt like Quinn and I played a similar role in John’s life so both of us being around at the same time would just be excessive. That probably sounds completely random but even in this situation – I was in her room because she wasn’t there.

John first started living at the Purple Haus while he was a student at UC Berkeley and eventually ended up owning it before transferring that ownership to a non-profit created specifically to sustain the house as a true cooperative. The space has been known for shows and parties, with some concerts for legendary East Bay Crust group Dystopia, as well as serving as a host kitchen for Food Not Bombs and similar community resource programs. When my father first went to scout out San Diego as a place for my family to move to he crashed at a hippy party house that eventually became more of a punk party house that my sister and I went to shows at.

The Purple Haus probably has a similar history but I wouldn’t know exactly how far back it goes. It’s cool to imagine the same living room I’ve played in hosting poetry readings for jazz era beatniks but I couldn’t tell you if it would also be accurate. Somebody probably could.

One of the Purple Haus traditions is to celebrate the Mardi Gras season with a sequence of parties and finally a parade centering on a large papier-mâché frog that usually rests on the porch. For somebody with an amphibian totem I know way less about this parade and tradition than might be expected. The reason for this is that the whole thing was ever-so-slightly soured for me for reasons that I’m about to explain.

One of the long time residents of the Purple Haus co-op was a woman named Terry Compost with graying dreadlocks and a slightly Mediterranean complexion. I spoke in the last piece about the necessity of having a system for keeping out undesirables if a punk house is going to properly function. Terry stepped into this role with a bit more enthusiasm than most of her housemates might have preferred. When John invited me to stay in the attic I had been warned about Terry insofar as she would almost certainly give me a hard time and I should make efforts to avoid getting on her bad side.

A couple of the earlier chapters talk about a woman named Eleanor who John Benson had been helping convert a box truck to run on vegetable oil toward the beginning of 2007. I was told that Terry had made Eleanor cry.

I was making a specific effort to avoid spending too much time in the kitchen but I did drink coffee at the time and the Purple Haus kitchen is the perpetual home of a freshly brewed pot of coffee. I made extra special sure to rinse my mug out in the industrial style sink every time I was finished. My mother had a very considerate habit of buying me subculture adjacent books that she thought I might enjoy if she came across them in the thrift store.

She bought me my first copy of Naked Lunch when I was fourteen years old and had gotten me a copy of Crash around the time of the David Cronenberg movie. There’s actually a story I like about that copy of Crash and this is probably the best excuse I’ll get to tell it. I had heard that a girl who went to my High School had been in a serious car accident that resulted in metal pieces being put inside her body to repair a broken bone or whatever.

I think it was supposed to be on her skull in the upper jaw area. For reasons I can’t completely explain this information excited me sexually and I started to feel intensely attracted to her. I suppose she must have been appealing to me physically but nothing of the sort had crossed my mind before I heard about the car accident. I gave the copy of Crash to her in an awkward and completely ineffective attempt at flirting.

Around this same time I would routinely fantasize about another girl I was attracted to shooting me in my left shoulder with a low caliber bullet from fifteen to twenty feet away. This kind of industrial eroticism has only ever appealed to me as a pubescent teenager. LaPorsha and I got into a bad car accident in 2020 that necessitated the addition of metal parts to both of our skeletons but nothing about this information does anything for me (or her) in regards to our shared intimacy.

Anywho big detour. In 2009 my mother had just given me a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. I was holding the book when I went down to get coffee and carrying a book is always a good pretext for a person who was looking for an excuse to start talking to you to start talking to you. She asked me what I was reading. I answered which segued nicely into the actual sentiment:

“Speaking of the Hell’s Angels what are you doing here?”

I do have to admit that I’d been wearing a lot of studded black leather around the time and it was reasonable to presume that I might end up presenting some of the problematic behaviors of the outlaw biker club. I answered, of course, that I was staying in the attic room that John had made for Quinn and was, at that moment at least, cleaning out a mug I had just used to drink coffee. She mentioned an upcoming Mardi Gras party that she needed to make a King Cake for and asked if I might be interested in helping to make it.

Of course this whole thing was something of a test and it wasn’t like I needed to impress Terry or earn her approval but it did sound like the kind of thing that I might be interested in. I had gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the first time the year before but I was either too late in the season or hanging out with the wrong people to actually cross paths with a King Cake. I had heard of the pastry and surrounding traditions though and I was certainly curious.

I actually did like baking a cake with Terry. The whole thing would have been an overwhelmingly positive experience if not for one detail I’ll be getting to in a second here. On the positive side: I had never worked with live yeast before, and actually haven’t since, although recounting the story is making me want to do it again. It’s fun: the dough puffs up as if by magic and then you punch it down and wait for it to puff up again.

This next bit actually left a lasting impression on me as a baker. Rather than using standard food colorings for the frosting Terry thought it would be fun to look for ingredients that would add the required colors naturally. She used powdered spirulina for green, turmeric for yellow and a dark berry jam for the purple. The best part about this is all of these things do have distinct flavors even if they end up being subtle ones.

Later that year I made a layer cake with jalapeño jelly in the middle and spirulina with minced mint mixed into the buttercream icing. The final step was to carpet the outside with nasturtium leaves and a few flowers. The final product gave an appealing contrast between cooling and heating mouth sensations and whatever you call what spirulina tastes like.

A few years later me and LaPorsha got into making cakes and icings with Kool Aid powder for color and flavor. Very different from, but still in part inspired by, Terry’s more organic King Cake colorings.

Anyway enough of the sweet – let’s get into the bitter. The big tradition with King Cakes is that an inedible object is placed inside the ring shaped cake while baking and whoever finds this in their slice is obligated to host the next party of the Mardi Gras season. I think this might have been a button back in the Middle Ages but nowadays it’s generally a small plastic baby. The Purple Haus tradition is to use a small ceramic frog.

Back in 2009 there was a squat called Hellarity around the corner from Purple Haus on Genoa. Hellarity depended on the more stable and established Purple Haus for a million little things – most importantly an extension cord that was run from the backyard. Not the whole time, they must have been stealing power from the city in the usual squat way for at least part of it, but at one point at least.

Terry didn’t want Hellarity to host the next Mardi Gras party. There were lots of people from lots of different punk houses in attendance and her general instinct was that almost none of them would have done an acceptable job of hosting the next party. She was making the same kind of assumption she’d made with me – that these people wouldn’t even help make a King Cake and the fact that this assumption had turned out to be wrong in my case didn’t change her general outlook in any meaningful way.

It wasn’t about what she wanted though, it was about what she did. She knew exactly who she did want to host the next Mardi Gras party and she slipped the ceramic frog into that person’s slice of cake right before she gave it to them. She essentially dosed somebody with an obligation. Obviously this did not sit well with me.

I care about things like ritual, tradition and magic. The King Cake tradition is designed the way it is for a reason and I didn’t appreciate seeing it thwarted. It felt like a perversion of a thing that I had honestly put my time, effort and energy into and nobody likes how that feels. There were things I liked about Terry – she was into folk music, she cared about the environment and I did actually appreciate how ready she was to challenge and be unaccommodating to strangers. It’s an important role and somebody’s gotta do it.

The thing with the frog was a dealbreaker.

Ultimately Terry didn’t quite click with the way most of the other Purple Haus residents wanted to do things. It wasn’t a good match and I think she eventually moved on more or less organically. I’d imagine she did a lot for the house – there’s probably still things growing in the various gardens that she originally planted and things that are organized a certain way in the kitchen because she organized them that way. I mean I wouldn’t know at all, I’m just guessing.

I do hope she’s doing well wherever she ended up. The whole thing reminds me of this Will Oldham song I like:

“Did you like the cake? Some of it was nice

I have made a cake like that in my own home once or twice…”

Happy Mardi Gras season everybody!

Jacksonville 2008 : The Bus Part Ten “Can You Run In There And Grab Me A Cherry Coke?”

berniebleak6 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine

I’ve already talked a little bit about how The Bus operated in a similar fashion to a punk house on wheels. Decisions were made collectively and through a process that looked a lot like a “house meeting” though we never went so far as to count votes or put up a chore wheel. Inevitably different people are going to want different things and when a conflict loomed large enough we discussed it as a group and then acted in accordance with the “room temperature”. It wasn’t perfect but it worked – this was how we decided to end the documentary process for example.

A lot of the times punk houses grapple with the reputation that “anybody can stay there”. I was born on a hippy commune and have long hair and dress weird so I’ve spent a lot of my adult life being mistaken for a hippy. When I’m pressed to explain why I’m not a hippy the explanation I always give is that hippies think most people, including themselves, are essentially cool while I think most people, including myself, are essentially assholes.

I’m getting at some super basic paradox of tolerance type stuff but it all comes down to the fact that the only way to make a space truly inclusive is to have a clear idea of who to exclude and how to exclude them. Creeps, -phobes, lurkers, danglers, stains, energy vampires and occasionally even lames need to be shown the door in no uncertain terms. As cruel and arbitrary as this all can feel we’ve all seen first hand what kind of spaces you get when “anything goes”.

The Bus was exciting and attractive to a large swathe of people for fairly obvious reasons: who wouldn’t love a magical mobile punk house where there’s always a party because the house is the party? It did start to feel like a little bit of an issue that we were getting jaded on the wonder and whimsy of our own existence and situation and weren’t always able to appreciate the excitement of people who were stepping on for the first time but this was relatively minor. The bigger issue was that sometimes people thought the whole thing was so cool that they never wanted to leave but occasionally holes are round and pegs are square.

I don’t know when the tradition of the Cherry Coke was born. There was a whole first Bus Tour that I didn’t come on and a bunch of shows around the Bay Area that created a lot of The Bus traditions and culture. Basically when the situation arose that a new passenger presented as a severe enough detriment to the community at large they would get “Cherry Coked”. The Bus pulls up to a gas station or convenience store and the offending party is given a five dollar bill and asked to run inside and grab a Cherry Coke and by the time they’ve bought the Cherry Coke The Bus isn’t there anymore.

I can’t remember if this ever went down exactly as scripted during the Living Hell tour but there was a situation where we quickly decided to “Cherry Coke” an entire show. There are several collectives within experimental music that define themselves as being composed of whoever says they are in it at any given time. One example would be the Devil Bell Hippies from Chicago, Illinois who some readers may remember not actually showing up to play for the El Rancho Halloween show. Another one would be Super Pizza Party from Jacksonville, Florida.

Super Pizza Party had pulled off a performance on the side stage of Churchill’s during the International Noise Conference a few months earlier that had made a big impression and been a lot of fun for quite a few of the Living Hell members. The basic concept was to get a lot of pizza, DJ lights, smoke machines, fireworks, stuffed animals and of course people with instruments and amplifiers together for a raucous and ecstatic jam.

It was definitely an “anything goes” type situation but the general aesthetic was neon colors, the general music style was electronic and the inspiration was almost certainly the family restaurants Chuck E. Cheese and Show Biz Pizza. The people behind Super Pizza Party are a few years younger than me but our different generations share formational experiences around the consumption of pizza, carnival and video games and a corresponding suspension of responsibilities such as school in early childhood. Under most conditions the shtick worked and we had asked them to set up a Jacksonville show for the Living Hell tour out of faith in this shtick.

It’s a common experience for people to use the exact same words to mean completely different things and never realize that a miscommunication had happened until the thing is already actually happening. The last U.S. Tour I went on was built around exactly this kind of miscommunication: some people thought they were going on a two band tour while others thought it was a three band tour and the detail didn’t actually get ironed out until the night of the first show.

To the members of Super Pizza Party a show is any situation where you bring pizza, play instruments and set off fireworks in front of people who are usually unsuspecting pedestrians. It’s something like a flash mob if anybody remembers that trend. We were expecting other things: additional bands, some level of promotion and an audience that was more appreciative then unsuspecting. These were all things we figured out just as the “show” was set to begin.

The thing about playing and touring in a DIY punk or experimental band is that 99% of the time you will either barely break even or actually lose money but if it wasn’t something you already wanted to do there’s almost no amount of money that somebody could pay you to do it. The boredom and deprivation and constant effort that goes into the 23 hours and 45 minutes while you’re not performing on a typical tour day would be intolerable if it didn’t culminate in a thing you were passionate about. Or actually parts of it are really fun and beautiful but my point is that if you weren’t doing it for love you wouldn’t do it for money.

This wasn’t a situation where we were going to be able to have a meeting and check in but when a group of people are traveling and playing shows together it’s easy to tell when nobody is excited about a particular situation. The Super Pizza Party guys were explaining that the plan was to drive around Jacksonville and then jump out to surprise “normies” with sudden pizza partying. None of us had to express the sentiment aloud for everybody to know that nobody was feeling it.

Basically they had taken their existing shtick and decided how they would incorporate a bus if they had access to one. This wasn’t actually a bad way to go about planning a Bus show – whoever set up the Orlando show had created an entire band and performance around the idea of having access to The Bus. They called it Dude, Where’s My Equilibrium and it centered around hanging drums and amps from ropes to be played by people in wheelchairs and roller skates while The Bus was in motion.

That set was a ton of fun and the whole Orlando show was great. The biggest issue with Super Pizza Party’s plan was that it wasn’t very creative and nothing about it was significantly altered by the presence and capabilities of The Bus. If you think about it it wasn’t any different then what they could do with their own minivan or any vehicle or no vehicle at all. It didn’t incorporate the stage inside The Bus or Living Hell, the band we were touring with, and we didn’t particularly want to participate in any part of it.

It might not have been logistically possible to “Cherry Coke” all of the members of Super Pizza Party simultaneously but as luck would have it they “Pizza’d” themselves. After explaining the night’s activities they asked us to take them to pick up the pizza and all stepped off to go get this pizza together. It just so happened that they hadn’t yet loaded any musical equipment or left any personal property like backpacks on The Bus.

The moment they disappeared into the pizza spot everybody turned to look at each other. Things escalated quickly. Thirty seconds in the general vibe was “are we really gonna ditch them like this?” but after a couple of minutes it was obvious that we didn’t have much of an alternative. In less time than however long it takes to come back with the pizza we were driving toward the freeway and feeling tiny pangs of guilt – like we were sort of being assholes.

It can be uncomfortable to disappoint people but deep down we knew that not bailing on the entire situation would have made us feel worse. We would have felt like idiots.

I’d love to say that we just disappeared into the night and that was that but unfortunately it was 2008 and everybody had cell phones. Somebody had been in touch with them and somebody’s cell phone rang and somebody explained in the most neutral words possible that we had reached a rapid consensus that driving to another city on the freeway was a more appealing option then participating in a pizza party.

It all felt kind of anticlimactic but they weren’t going to not call and we weren’t going to not pick up. It was what it was and The Bus rolled on.

Next Part:

Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Nine “That Shack’s Got a Lot of A”

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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

When we played at Waterfall Arts in Belfast a couple came onto The Bus and expressed their disappointment at the treatment we had received from the local authorities. Because of the significant difference in their respective ages I first assumed that they must have been a father and daughter and have to admit that I was being a bit of a flirt. When I apprised the reality of the situation, that these two people cohabitated romantically, I regretted any liberties that I might have taken as I came to regard the gentleman as somebody who, in my own words, would be “capable of indescribable cruelty”.

Speaking of liberties they invited us to bring The Bus to the cannery they lived in that was located in Liberty, Maine where a dinner party would be held in our honor at the museum opposite Liberty Tool. The couple was Dan and Sveya.

The origin story of Liberty Tool was that Dan and it’s proprietor Skip had found themselves regarding both sides of a mid century phenomenon where historic Maine farming families were throwing in the towel just as countercultural back-to-landers were determined to come pick it back up. They were able to acquire farming tools and related implements from this first group at a pittance and then turn around and sell them to the second at a premium. It obviously helped that in those situations where utopian visionaries might end up discovering that they had bitten off more than they could chew there would also be a profitable turnaround on the crumbs.

The part of the story I don’t remember is if the duo had grown up in the area themselves or arrived with an early wave of back-to-landers but either way Dan bought and began renovating the cannery while Skip ran Liberty Tool. The Museum on the opposite side of the street presumably came about in close to the same manner as Bob Cassilly’s City Museum in Saint Louis. Occasionally objects passed through their hands that seemed to be of too great historical and artistic value to just resell and then grew to a large enough collection to be displayed in a museum.

The Bus had been continuing to exhibit engine problems and their had been some discussion of seeing whether or not flushing the radiator might improve things in any capacity over the last several hundred miles. It was decided to use the time at the cannery to undertake this process and John Benson and Dan were brainstorming the most efficient method of going about this. I don’t think I understood what the whole thing actually entailed at this point in time but I wanted to contribute by digging a hole into the ground with a shovel.

I don’t know what I was thinking – maybe to flush the water and coolant into this hole and then bury it? I must have just felt like I wanted the physical satisfaction of exerting myself through labor or another strenuous activity. Rain and I weren’t doing any kind of workouts on this tour although it would become a feature of our next two U.S. Tours together. The hole idea was vetoed and the radiator flush was accomplished with a sequence of buckets instead.

Like every other fluid on The Bus the water that came out was distressingly filthy. Flushing the radiator was clearly a good idea but most likely made little difference as to the ultimate fate of The Bus.

Dan was giving a tour of the cannery. I don’t think I took the entire tour but I saw a lot of the place and remarked about how satisfying it was that everything there seemed to be made of either wood, metal or glass and nothing was plastic. Dan joked that they had a small jar somewhere that they kept all the plastic in to prevent it from contaminating or spreading it’s influence to the more stolid materials. Maybe this wasn’t a joke. There was a bit of talk as to whether or not it would be a good idea to decant what was evidently a very large container of steel cut oatmeal.

Spring had come decisively to Maine and the weather was nice enough for everyone to go to the river to swim. Sveya pointed out some of the wild herbs along the way: Jack-in-the-pulpit and False Seal of Solomon. The Taboo kids had come along and were talking about how their dog Criminy was only ever interested in the largest stick in any given situation. Criminy had growled at me when they picked me up by the graveyard and when I asked them why they said he was a bad dog.

That was refreshing. So many people are quick to explain it away as a superpower the moment their dog doesn’t trust somebody:

“He wouldn’t act like this for no reason. Something must be wrong with you!”

I don’t know if the museum in Liberty was called the Davistown Museum back in 2008 or not. The one display that everybody gravitated toward was a glass case full of unidentified tools. One in particular burned itself into my memory – a piece of hardwood was carved into a cylindrical “T”, almost like a three way dowel. All three terminations were upholstered in ox blood colored leather that was held in place with what looked like furniture tacks.

There is a small section for unidentified tools on the museum’s current website but I couldn’t find a picture of this thing. Maybe that means that between 2008 and now somebody succeeded in identifying what it’s original purpose was. The whole thing looked well worn and I couldn’t help but suspect the leather had been added to soften the wood as all three ends came into repeated contact with something. An improvised piece of machinery? A shoe or furniture maker’s signature leather-smoother-downer?

I definitely wouldn’t mind if somebody who works at that museum see’s this and can tell what I’m talking about and wanted to tell me if they figured out what it was for.

Considering that I had taken acid during our New York show and then taken acid to walk the Liberty Trail in Boston and now I was taking it in Liberty, Maine I had been taking a whole lot of acid. A group of us took it for this dinner party but not any of the other people in Living Hell – me, the Taboo kids and Ryan who had rode along from Boston. I don’t know if this was the moment that Annapurna Hmal Von Wagner and I first laid eyes on each other but it was definitely when we first noticed.

She strode over meaningfully and slammed something into the palm of my open hand while staring directly into my eyes:

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you really do?”

If people are going to take psychedelic drugs and believe in magic then who’s to say what’s actually happening ever? I was writing a few pieces ago about the definition of the word Noumena – “things that one becomes aware of the existence of without one’s senses”. It’s a hard word to define but it’s opposite is phenomena. Which one would you call it when people experience a shared hallucination or impression?

I had a dagger that I used to focus intention and energy during Living Hell performances but some train police stole it from me when I was later riding freight to California for our reunion show. I was trying to figure out what I would replace it with for that final concert when I found a conductor’s baton stabbed into the ground at People’s Park in Berkeley. I felt like this represented both a message from the cosmos and a clear sign that I was maturing as a magician.

If we view the magician’s tool as an extension of their will then it can certainly be argued that using a conductor’s baton or wand brings a sense of subtlety and finesse that a dagger lacks.

I used to play a game where I would use the wand to focus energy and intention toward somebody’s back at a crowded show or party and they would invariably turn around. If we go with the supposition that this was more than just a coincidence every time it happened then the only explanation would be that these people were somehow sensing the energy I was directing at them but there’s no objective way to measure this. Whether you believe in it or not it doesn’t exactly make for a headlining act at the Magic Castle.

It felt like Annapurna had captured a live bee or wasp and pressed it into my hand so it would sting me. When I looked down to see what was happening it was only an acrylic prism on a thin ball chain. The stinging sensation was only temporary – a painful shock at the moment of contact. Her expression seemed to be saying:

“Yes, I just did that. That’s a thing I can do.”

I never ended up getting to know Annapurna very well so when I heard that she had ended her own life it more or less came as a complete surprise. I find the idea of wishing you had gotten to know a person better before they die somewhat pedantic and insulting. When one of my friends died of a heroin overdose a girl that I had used to have a crush on told me that she regretted not getting to know him better before his death but added that she didn’t want to make the same mistake with me.

The implication was that I would be dying of a heroin overdose sometime in the near future and she wanted to make sure to get to know me first – kind of like when Netflix or Tubi tell you the shows and movies that they will be losing the streaming rights to in the next week or month so you can prioritize watching them. I was so insulted that I never spoke to that girl again. She also ended up killing herself.

I savor this memory that I do have with Annapurna – the gift of a token of interest and a demonstration of magical prowess. We exchanged contact information and spoke a few times and sated our mutual interest by learning a little bit about each other before getting on with our lives. If I were to hope or wish anything it would be that I hope she was satisfied with her decision to end her life and the method that was available to her to end it. Many of us die by accident or surprise so I’m happy for her that she was able to do so by an informed choice.

One of the girls did the trick at the dinner party where you dip your finger into a wine glass and then move it around the rim until it produces a single resonant tone. It might have been Annapurna but it also might have been Bonnie. I do remember that whoever did it made a self deprecating comment about being a dilettante and this being the single noteworthy thing she was capable of – kind of like when the girl in The Breakfast Club puts the lipstick on with her boobs.

It’s such a beautiful sound. I wonder if I would be able to do it.

I found myself talking to Dan in the deepest throes of the drugs. I forget how we ended up on the topic but he was telling me about how the optimism of his youth was brutally disrupted by the Vietnam War and the lives of so many close to him completely truncated. His skin wasn’t particularly unhealthy for someone of his age but in that moment I saw every mark made by time as a wound of circumstance.

It wasn’t long after this tour that John Benson passed along the news that Dan had taken his own life. This one ddidn’t surprise me in the least.

Liberty is a small town. When you walk down from Main Street and turn onto Water Street there is a small dilapidated shack as you pass the trees – or at least there was in 2008. The dinner party was over and everybody was walking back down to the bus. Party Steve offered some commentary in his “funny” voice as we passed the shack but I’m not sure if it could properly be called a joke:

“That’s an ass shack! That shack’s got a lot of A!”

Most nights on tour I had been sleeping in the hammock at the highest point of the bus but the weather was nice that night and I decided to sleep in the shack. There was a phenomenon around those years that came with taking a lot of psychedelic drugs and believing in magic but basically I experienced a personal pantheon of what I would call Cardinal Deities. The first experience was in San Diego while I was trying to read Under The Volcano.

Very early in the book is a passage about lightning in the mountains to the west. The moment I read that I had a vision – I saw a dark and stormy mountain pass, a crescent moon, a silver dagger and a man with shaggy grey hair and a mustache dressed in dark layered cloaks. My instinctual understanding was that I was seeing a personification of the direction West but the name I knew him as was Silver. I feel like I should mention that I wasn’t under the influence of psychedelic drugs when this happened but I was for the other ones.

I still haven’t actually read much of the book but I’ve heard good things about it and should probably give it another chance.

The next experience came while riding a freight train through Mississippi to New Orleans and taking a lot of acid. The train passed a building called Southern Pipe Supply with a large red stylized “S” that bore a gold crown. In that moment I thought “The South is a Red King” and then I saw him. He was dressed in a long red robe with blonde hair in a grown out page boy (maybe the term Masonna cut will be more evocative for some) and a simple golden crown.

He wore a haughty expression like he had power once but lost it and was biding his time until he might have it again. I saw ravens flying and the circles defined by the edges of their wings like in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by William Carlos Williams. I knew him as South.

Looking out the window of that shack and waiting for the drugs to wear off and to fall asleep I saw the third of the Cardinal Deities who I knew as Maine. One of the trees looked like a human face and two stars shone through it to define his eyes. He had an iron thrall’s collar around his neck and facial hair in the shape of the Greek Letter Omega. His hair was like a short mullet with shaved sides and his nose was long and perfectly conical in shape. His color was green.

I understood that he governed over sex and death.

The final one came a little later and broke the pattern in small ways. While the first three appeared in the sections of the country that corresponded to their cardinal directions this one was in the East Bay rather than the East Coast. In the darkest and quietest part of the night I heard an engine attempt to turn over and die – I had probably been on drugs. I had a sudden vision of that scene in Dumbo where his mother is chained down and you see her tiny eye in contrast to her large body and she’s crying.

I knew her as Strength Succumbs Under Bonds.

Her color was black and her metal was lead. I hadn’t gone out of my way to look for these entities but once I had a full set it felt distinctly satisfying and useful. You could say I invented them or made myself suggestible but for a little while it was my go to organizing principle. I realized they should have elements in a Classical sense instead of just a Periodic Table one so clockwise from West it was Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I might have mentioned using them when haunting a house in 2009 and it was Ghost, Witch, Vampire and Goblin.

It’s interesting looking back at this time and how important magical thinking was in my day to day life. It still is but in a very different way. The Cardinal Deities are still here but they’ve faded into the background and I don’t think about them as much. If they seem useful to you, or real, feel free to use them for anything you want.

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