Category: Uncategorized

We left Thousand Palms under cover of night. The 38 foot RV didn’t have too many mechanical problems but it did have a tendency to overheat. I forget their names but a couple of older normie looking tweakers, shorts and polo shirts types, helped us flush the radiator on our way out in case it would help. We pulled into a car wash that was closed for the night – didn’t even have to use a water key they just left spigots out where you could get at them.

The dudes that were helping us used to cook meth and steal diesel from unattended construction equipment but more recently they were getting by on the strength of having the only RV in the Thousand Palms homeless community with a working air conditioner. If anybody found themselves flush with cash buying gas for their AC unit was a lot cheaper and less restrictive than getting a room at the Red Roof Inn which conveniently meant that the RV dudes were getting kick downs of whatever else that cash might go to – invariably meth and booze.

We were probably the only people living out there who didn’t really drink or use meth and we always tried to just park in the shade and suffer through the heat but we ended up donating to the AC unwittingly. We had been away from our RV for a day or so and when we got back they came over with a gas can and apologetically told us they had “borrowed” a couple of gallons because it was a heat “emergency”.

Obviously we weren’t thrilled about our neighbors siphoning our gas behind our backs but considering that they came clean and gave it back we weren’t going to make too big of a deal out of it. They also invited us over to come hang out in the AC. There was always five or six people sitting around in there and the same DVD looping on a little television by the door. It was a fairly contemporary action/crime movie but no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to remember any other details or what it was called.

I didn’t really like hanging out in there but I ended up passing through a few more times – probably killing time with somebody while we waited for heroin. The last time I was in there Phil, one of the older guys who hung around, had just gotten his social security check and was throwing money around like crazy. I don’t know if it was heat, alcohol, meth or a combination of all three but Phil shit his pants while laying in their hallway.

He offered them more money.

I know this style of “pension partying” is fairly standard for older and veteran homeless but this was the only time I’d ever seen it first hand. Phil’s check was somewhere around two thousand dollars – he probably could have found some kind of housing or bought an RV of his own with that much money but instead he spent a couple of days buying gas for an air conditioner, buying everybody booze, drugs and cigarettes and paying apology money for shitting on someone’s floor.

Anyway these two guys were helping us with the radiator on our way out of town. Around the corner from the car wash the RV stalled out and the guys spent a really long time getting it to jump start again. We were parked on the side of some kind of government building that we had gone to before for LaPorsha to apply for some random job. As I searched for a hose to grab some water for the radiator I noticed a very young raptor watching me from the building’s roof – I’m not positive but I think it was a golden eagle.

Phil was one half of the home bum duo Phil and Reno – Reno had a car on one of the side streets that had already stopped running by the time we arrived. It wasn’t even like they hung out with each other that much but they were the two older unattached homeless men who didn’t keep a stable camp so they were thought of as a unit. Or maybe they spent more time together before we showed up – I only know everybody talked about Phil and Reno but I barely saw them together.

When we lived in East Oakland for a while we named the pair of stray dogs on our block after them. I never really thought about the fact that the human Phil and Reno didn’t actually hang out together until just now when I was writing about it. The dogs named Phil and Reno were always together, running up and down the block, until they just disappeared one day. Somebody must have called the dog catcher. They weren’t hurting anybody.

Anyway we had Reno’s heavy duty jumper cables. We had borrowed them from him ages ago when our little black diesel Mercedes 240 was still working. He hadn’t needed them back because his car was essentially a tent and closet but we needed to give them back to him before cutting town. The guys who were helping us with the radiator told us not to worry about it and assured us they would give them back to Reno for us and we should just hop on the freeway while the RV was running.

That’s a mistake I wouldn’t repeat. If you live in a homeless community and borrow something from a peer never trust a third party to give it back for you. It’s entirely possible that Reno did get his jumper cables back because I never saw the air conditioner RV guys again to check either way. I only know he showed up outside our tent one morning and said he didn’t.

This was during a period of time after most of the events that will pop up in the rest of the story when we lived on the side of a Kohl’s in Beaumont but would leave the RV behind and take a regional bus back to Thousand Palms to find heroin. The bus route only ran twice a day in the morning so we would bring our tent with us and sleep in the brush behind the McDonald’s to catch the bus back to Beaumont in the morning.

Reno woke us up at dawn yelling outside our tent. We were the only homeless people in Thousand Palms that weren’t on meth – Reno had probably been pissed about the jumper cables since we left town and then when he heard we were actually back in town he took it as a personal insult. He was implying that he was going to fight me but the main thing was that he needed the issue to be acknowledged and rectified.

We all kept all of our belongings in tents, bushes and cars and constantly left money with each other while waiting for drug dealers: nobody could afford the reputation that somebody took their shit without consequences.

I explained that I thought he had gotten the jumper cables back and gave him twenty dollars to buy another set. I doubt he would have actually gotten another set as even his broken down car wasn’t around anymore at this point but the whole thing was about principle anyway.

Back to rolling out of Thousand Palms at night: We had a minor breakdown a few miles before the dinosaurs at Cabazon that I wrote about in “A Garbage Bag of Desiccated Flesh” then ended up parked in a field next to an Auto-Zone in Beaumont. We had to get something fixed but I can’t even remember what it was – I just have a vague memory of going into that Auto-Zone for something. Maybe I was replacing a hose or clamp from when the driver’s seat got turned into a sauna the night before.

I can’t remember where we were planning on going when we first left Thousand Palms but the next spot we ended up at was the DHS Office in Banning. Our EBT had timed out a month or so previously and we needed to get it turned back on. After a few hours at the office we decided it would be easier to just go handle everything in Los Angeles. It’s possible we needed to replace our IDs too and Los Angeles had some expedited way for homeless people to do that.

The RV might have been up for the trip but we decided to leave it in Banning and take buses instead. We parked it behind a pawn shop in a lot that seemed rundown enough that nobody would tow it while we were gone. Banning didn’t seem to have a proper Greyhound station but they had a line that picked up directly outside of the DHS Office if you bought a ticket online.

It had been a few years since I had made a counterfeit Ameripass and if the service wasn’t retired by 2017 I still wouldn’t have expected it to still work. I mostly decided to make up the confirmation numbers out of necessity. When I looked up transportation options to Los Angeles it was already too late to buy an online ticket but I had bought enough of them to mimic the format that a pair of seats would have come in: two consecutive numbers and some capital letters abbreviating the origin and destination cities.

When the driver looked over the handwritten codes and let us onboard I figured that little had changed from the days when a random ten digit number on a convincing looking facsimile could get you unlimited free travel. That turned out not to be the case. When we got to an actual station somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley everyone who had boarded in Banning was escorted to a ticket counter to check their reservation numbers and ours came up as fake.

I feigned ignorance and said that somebody had bought the tickets for us but we were forced to pay for the distance we had already travelled and didn’t have enough to cover the trip all the way to Los Angeles. Luckily there was a nearby Metrolink train to take us the rest of the way. There had been one or two smaller stops before this station so theoretically a made up reservation number could have worked for shorter distance travel between two towns without actual Greyhound stations but I never tried it again.

It’s actually surprising that they didn’t have a way for the drivers to verify the numbers on their cell phones in 2017.

When we got to Los Angeles we set our tent up under a 405 bridge near the EBT Office at Pico and Sepulveda. Being in town also gave us the opportunity to cop dope that was a lot stronger than what we were getting in Thousand Palms. When we first got out the desert we’d been making trips back and forth to San Diego in the Mercedes 240.

This plug showed up toward the very end of my IV drug using career but was the closest I ever came to a pure product from over the border. It was what you’d call “huff” – a brown powder that only congealed into tar if you got it hot or breathed on it. Even living in Tijuana had never led to that kind of quality.

I found a few people on Craigslist to resell to at enough of a markup that five grams would cover a half ounce’s worth. These were the earliest most carefree days at Thousand Palms when our RV was still parked between all the trucks behind the Flying J station and we were only ever moving around in the cool and quiet nights while the close proximity of other vehicles kept the sun off our windows to sleep through the days.

I’d get loaded and buy giant bags of the gummy blue sharks with marshmallow on the bottom – the kind that look like the sparkly layered tooth paste that was marketed to kids in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had to make sure to finish them all off at night or the heat of the following day would melt the individual pieces into a sticky unappetizing lump. One of the many reasons that I don’t have teeth anymore.

The transmission on the Mercedes gave out and the Flying J station banished all the RVs to the streets and sunlight and the neon nights abruptly gave way to hot and dusty days of moving every week or so before the police could get around to making us. We weren’t quite in a place where the discontinuation of our southern trips led to physical withdrawal symptoms but after a few days the boredom had us looking around for what was available locally.

I asked Phil in the McDonald’s before we really knew him or anybody else yet. This particular McDonald’s really needed to generate positive reviews on that survey thing they put at the bottom of the receipt so they had put the word out among all the homeless that if we gave them top ratings on everything they would give us a a free meal combo instead of the small fries or whatever it usually is. For as long as that lasted the homeless of Thousand Palms practically lived in there.

Actually there had been a sizable homeless camp behind this McDonald’s that got cleared out around the same time that they stopped giving away the free meals for completed surveys. The interior was the oldest of any McDonald’s I’ve been inside of in the last ten years. No hint of the modernized cafe look and the walls were covered in reproductions of Southwestern Native American Art. Pictures of pueblos and groups of men with long braids and sunglasses.

Anyway I’m getting super side tracked. Phil introduced us to a much younger girl called Alexis with a lot of tattoos who lived in a big camp across the street in an unused plot of land you could access from the Denny’s parking lot. She was sleeping with the only dealer for tar in the area: an older Mexican guy who lived in a motor home and had made the bizarre business move of stepping on his stuff so heavily that he could sell five grams for one hundred dollars.

Trying it was underwhelming after the “huff” that I’d been bringing from San Diego but boredom brought me back around and a few months later it was the only thing I’d been doing. There were only a handful of other homeless who did heroin and everybody would always claim they’d found something other than this guy’s shit but it was always this guy’s shit.

Alexis said she knew what he cut it with and that I’d never guess what it was. I’d try listing off common additives like lactose, brown sugar and instant coffee:

“I’d tell you if you guessed it”

Whatever it was it was relatively harmless because I didn’t start getting constant sores and abscesses until I moved to the Bay Area. It didn’t seem to leave behind any weird residue or insoluble fillers but it was definitely frustratingly watered down. We all wished that he would just charge more and cut less but he had his particular way he liked doing things and wasn’t about to change it.

So when we did cop from our old guy, a heavyset Jewish dude in Beverly Hills, it was a lot stronger than what I’d been used to. I overdosed in our tent and we didn’t have any Narcan so an ambulance had to come revive me and I ended up in the Kaiser by Venice and La Cienaga. I pulled my IV out and left AMA, or against medical advice, it all sounds very extreme but at the time I was used to it, it was almost mundane.

The next day we had finished all of our EBT related errands and were ready to head back to Banning. We made our way to the Greyhound to see what our bus options were but tried to find more dope in Skid Row on the way out of town. I talked to another interracial couple and followed the guy to an SRO where he shouted toward an open window for an older dealer named “Shoeshine”. There was a kind of hipster-ish white lady that was copping from him at the same time, like with Amelie bangs, I remember her slyly flashing the small colored balloon she was holding against her palm with her fingertips.

We thought about quickly setting our tent up to have a more discreet place to shoot up but I ended up just propping up a piece of cardboard to block the view and looking for a vein in my foot. When we got to the Greyhound we were approached by a man trying to make money as an unofficial taxi. I told him that we only had forty dollars and needed to get all the way to Banning but to my surprise he said that would be fine.

He was a friendly and talkative older crackhead. He must have already had a decent amount of gas in his tank and just wanted an excuse to get out of town for a few hours. I forget how it came up that we used heroin but he asked us if we needed any more. I told him that we only had the forty for the ride but he said it was fine and took us to some friends of his that lived in one of those big square Coleman tents to buy another bag. We drove around for a little bit so he could get himself some crack and then we hit the freeway.

Out of the money we gave him only ten dollars ended up in the gas tank. It’s amazing how far he took us for how little but we found rides like that all the time that year. A few months earlier we had needed a ride from Thousand Palms to San Bernardino to retrieve the Mercedes after a mishap with a ride-share person and ended up in a fairly similar situation.

It was still pretty early in the morning when we pulled into the parking lot that we’d left the RV in. The owner of the Pawn Shop, an older Chinese man, came and complained about the vehicle and threatened to have it towed when he saw us approaching it. We saw right away that it had been broken into in our absence and a few things were missing. The ignition had been taken apart and it took me a few minutes to put it back together.

There was some kind of problem with the starter batteries that the previous owners had told us to counteract by disconnecting one of the terminals every time we parked. That was probably the only reason we had an RV to come back to at all – the would-be thieves probably assumed the engine and battery was dead when whatever they were doing with the ignition didn’t pan out and never looked under the hood.

We fired it up and pulled into a neighborhood street that looked run down enough that we figured we could park for a minute to collect our thoughts and decide on our next move. We were homeless drug addicts at this point in time and easily recognized by other homeless or near homeless drug addicts. Most of these interactions were positive and mutually beneficial like the ride we had just gotten. People like us sought out the society of other people like us because we could be ourselves without having to hide or be judged for the basic circumstances of our lifestyle.

To outsiders it would probably generally be assumed that the world we lived in was ruthless, cutthroat and unforgiving but that wasn’t usually our experience with it. We were pretty decent at reading people and keeping the ones that felt like the wrong kind of sketchy away but there were occasional little ripoffs or shitty situations. One of these walked down the sidewalk toward our RV, gauged what we were and asked us if we had a clean needle.

Billy was a light skinned Black man a few years younger than me who wore a lot of neon green and tended toward motocross accessories in a style that you’d probably call “urban casual”. His clothes were on the filthy side and had a bit of a Family Dollar look to them, his body odor was particularly foul. He had a broken syringe filled with dirty looking water that was supposed to be a rinse of the meth and whatever else he’d been doing all night. I got a clean syringe and helped him hit his leg with a bandana for a tourniquet.

“That wasn’t shit!”

From the appearance of the liquid and the absence of any notable reaction to a clean intravenous hit it obviously wasn’t. We weren’t interested in meth, or tweakers for that matter, but he assured us repeatedly that he would be able to find heroin for us while pursuing his own drugs.

The thing that caused us to throw in together was the checks. He had gotten his hands on a few checks that were intended as tithes for a small local church and I had a bank account in good standing. The second one of these was a bit of a rarity as most fiends would end up blowing up their accounts with bad checks that bounced after the initial withdrawal was long spent and could not be paid back to the bank.

For that reason the going rate for this kind of arrangement was 50/50 down the middle. It wasn’t the kind of thing I went out of my way to get into but it came up often enough and I was usually down and none of the checks I deposited ever bit me in the ass. The way it usually went was that you could pull some percentage out immediately and wait a couple days for the rest of it to clear and then settle up.

For Billy’s checks that first amount was two hundred dollars. He held onto it and immediately got somebody to grab him an ounce of low grade meth and continued to assure us that he would be tracking down heroin for us any minute. We had to hang around the next two days so the final money could be properly split, not to mention we were depending on him finding us dope.

He lived in a little garage that connected to his sister or cousin’s house that she ran a daycare out of and was filled with tweaker shit like broken dirt bikes and a few old batteries for scrap or barter. We were told repeatedly to stay out of sight, only in the garage and avoid the daycare house. Things were a little looser because the sister who ran the daycare happened to be the person who drove and got the ounce of meth for him but she didn’t seem to use it – just well connected.

With so much time to kill and everybody else doing it and the constantly repeated lie that it would “take the edge off” of opiate withdrawal I said fuck it and joined in the group activity of injecting Crystal methamphetamine. If anything it adds a jagged and unpleasant edge, things like benzos and sedatives are what takes it off. A small circle of scumbags had assembled for the big bag of drugs.

Eventually I’ll go into who all of these new scumbags were: their names, quirks, fears, tragic flaws, rivalries and any other interesting tidbit. I’m going to end this piece on that first injection. About a year earlier I had kicked what looked like an empty yellow box of American Spirit cigarettes in a Thrift Store parking lot and discovered on foot contact it was heavy with an entire ball of high quality glass.

In the moment I had really been craving cocaine and heroin and convinced myself that if I did a large enough shot of Crystal it would feel something like a coke rush. Obviously this wasn’t the case – it just felt scary. I was scared and agitated and the area around my kidneys felt weird and I couldn’t piss. In some ways it was like tripping on psychedelic drugs but none of the good ways.

I spent the night in the bathtub, constantly adjusting the temperature of the water when I felt either hot or cold, and returned to some semblance of normalcy by morning.

In Banning I insisted on a much smaller amount, something like three points, but still had a lot of nerve wracking window-dressing. It wasn’t just the way things looked, I felt off as well like I was a big raggedy balloon drifting above the ground. I was a little dizzy from sounds and colors and needed to get to one of the big dumpsters in the alley to take a piss.

I had walked within visual range of the daycare kids, not while pissing thankfully but on my way to, and it was a problem. Problems. Over the next couple days we would have our share of problems and when the checks finally cleared even this would bring more problems instead of mutually satisfactory closure under the common terms.

As I pissed in the alley the problems were barely getting started.

Part Two Here

I’ve written a little bit about this house and time period but I wanted to go into it some more and hopefully touch on some anecdotes and details that didn’t make it into those earlier attempts. I talked about our landlord Mark in “What is the meaning of Die Mark?” and how our relationship ended but I didn’t say very much about how it started. Like many people with the tendency to repeat toxic interpersonal patterns of behavior Mark came to the table with significant baggage.

His previous tenant had absconded owing significant back rent but the issues Mark was most vocal about were technically out of his purview. Apparently the man had medical troubles that resulted in what the Old Testament refers to as a “running issue”: infected sores that caused pus to ooze from his face. We never saw a photograph to judge the severity of this ignominy for ourselves but “Pusface” came to cast a shadow over the earliest days of our tenancy like a phantom.

He had departed in a hurry and we’d arrived with next to nothing but between the social dance of competitive disgust responses and genuine fear of contagion we threw away nearly everything that could have been useful. Even things as sterile and unimpeachable as canned vegetables went into the bin with the same generic justification:

“Pusface.”

One thing we didn’t regard as tainted was the micro cassette telephone answering machine. We didn’t immediately have a stereo and never got a television so the discarded recordings offered a precious bit of early entertainment. The two messages bolstered and tempered the myth of “Pusface” adding dimension and backstory to someone who had been a kind of cautionary “negative role model”.

The first one had been left by a young woman with a thick Irish accent who had been entreating John, “Pusface’s” actual name, to be a more active and invested coparent to their young daughter. Her voice was fraught with emotion:

“When you’re with her you need to be there John, and I’m not just talking about being there physically. You need to actually be there!”

I’m probably forgetting some important details but I’m pretty sure she at least alluded to sobriety. At the time me and Francois would repeat small phrases from the message to each other in exaggerated parodies of both her accent and emotional urgency after having played it back at least dozens of times. The melodrama had shaped “Pusface” into an at least interesting, if not sympathetic, figure.

The second message was from a friend and contact in the recording industry. From what I could gather “Pusface” was a session percussionist, the house was in walking distance of Berkeley’s storied Fantasy Studios, and competent enough to be flown over a stretch of ocean. A band in Hawaii was in desperate need of a drummer and the money was good. The friend on the recording most likely had an invested interest in getting John the gig as he was trying hard to be persuasive:

“It’s spring time in Hawaii, it’s spring time in the world man! You just gotta get out here man, you’ll see!”

Together the messages told a compelling story and it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Mark didn’t get his rent money, the unnamed Irish woman didn’t get a father to her child but somewhere in Hawaii a music group had rounded out their rhythm section. It’s easy to view “Pusface” as irresponsible and cavalier but I like to imagine his motivations in a slightly more complex way.

Maybe “Pusface” did care about his daughter but was terrified of not being good enough. On one side he was hearing that he needed to do more than be there physically while on the other side he was told that his simple presence would cure all ills. Presented with a classic carrot and stick scenario he ran.

Or maybe he didn’t give a shit about his kid and couldn’t wait to get as far away from her as possible – I certainly wouldn’t know. I do wonder if he would have played on any recordings I would have heard of either in the Bay Area or the mysterious Hawaiian band. I also wonder if his face was even that fucked up looking or if Mark was just bitter and looking to nitpick – that would align with his later behavior.

One unintended consequence of Mark’s complaints is that he showed himself to be a total pushover and both unlikely to retaliate and incapable of doing so if we didn’t pay his desired rent. This was cemented several months later when he gave us written notice of a two hundred dollar rent increase and we flat out refused to pay it but told him we’d go up fifty from what we had been paying. He conceded his power in a near-sniveling tone:

“Well, I’ll take what I can get.”

The second bit of foreshadowing was Mark’s evident comfort in complaining about John’s medical issues in the first place – we were going to learn the extent to which he took an active interest in private and personal aspects of his tenants’ lives. I might have written this little bit up in another piece but it will probably be faster to just type it again instead of double checking to make sure.

Not long after Little Four moved in with us she developed a sensitivity to commercial hair dye. It might have been the curse of “Pusface” but this manifested in pus exuding sores all over her scalp. The problem was fleeting in nature but resulted in a pig shaped pillow from the nearby Ross getting saturated in pus. On the off chance any reader hasn’t had first hand experience with the ill humor it smells absolutely awful – like used band-aids and decay.

She threw the pillow away.

Not long after we heard a knock on the back door. Mark stood outside holding the soiled pillow:

“I don’t understand why you throw valuable things away… I could use this at my house!”

The twin revelations that he thought it was appropriate to both go through our trash and confront us if he disagreed with a particular disposal decision did not move our relations in a positive direction. Our contempt for him blossomed – he was pathetic, disgusting and arbitrarily judgmental. It made for an unappealing cocktail.

Presumably he took home the pus pig pillow.

The neighborhood around Ashby and San Pablo has stayed similar in a lot of ways but much of the “local color” that existed in 1998 has since disappeared. At the time it felt a bit like a ghost town – we weren’t the last occupied house in the area but there were definitely more empty houses than actual neighbors. There was a guy a couple blocks away around the corner who seemed to have some kind of pinball museum in his basement but he didn’t like the look of us and never invited us over to play.

I don’t know for sure if it was Michael Schiess, the curator of Alameda’s Pacific Pinball Museum, but it seems reasonable that it would be. The East Bay may well have more than one pinball historian but my bet would be on it being the same guy. This would have been just under San Pablo on Grayson – I bet somebody will eventually read this that either played or owned a bunch of pinball machines in that spot at the turn of the millennium.

The most welcoming spot was a mid century hot dog and ice cream stand called Twin Castle Express. The building was decorated with a series of paintings of canine monarchs whose nationalities indicated specific selections of toppings. Cartoon dogs seem to have been a popular icon for ‘50s era Bay Area fast food culture – a little further down San Pablo in the Oakland direction somebody had one of those fiberglass Doggie Diner heads.

It might have been outside of a punk warehouse and I heard some kind of story about a rivalry involving serial attempts between two groups of people to steal it from each other. The punk landscape was very much not a place where we fit in so these kinds of stories were always heard at a bit of a remove. I heard about a laundromat nearby where the owners let a group of punks live there in exchange for making sure nobody robbed the change machines. They had a zine with a single syllable name where they interviewed Biz Markie and asked about getting a knuckle ring made of this title but I forget what it was. I went to 924 Gilman a couple times (I might have even worked there once) and heard the story about a dead baby getting discovered in the rafters.

I have no idea if any of these stories are true or not.

I was vegetarian when I first moved up and when Little Four decided to try veganism I adopted it as well for moral support. She gave up on it after a couple of weeks but I stuck with it for the next few years. Luckily the Twin Castle Express offered a tofu sandwich with barbecue sauce and avocado so even in our relative food desert I could always find something to eat. For some reason I vividly remember the tiny sculpture of a toad they kept on top of the cash register – the kind with coins in its mouth and plastic gems for eyes.

A little ways farther down San Pablo there was still an outlet of the Your Black Muslim Bakery chain – a good place to get vegan baked goods and some kind of veggie burger. My eyes always gravitated to the autographed picture of Humpty Hump behind the counter. He had written:

“Hey, I said no cheese on my veggie burger!” on the bottom of the photograph which prompted me and Gabe, Little Four’s temporary punk boyfriend, to speculate as to whether this was evidence for Humpty Hump being a practicing vegan but I’d imagine we were reading too much into it. I’m totally ready to be wrong on that however and wouldn’t be surprised if Humpty Hump was a vegan.

Somebody knows. It would be relatively easy to just Google “Humpty Hump vegan” and if it were true he must have mentioned it in an interview somewhere. I read an interview with him once and don’t remember the question coming up. I’m not going to Google it.

On the opposite side of San Pablo from Twin Castle Express there was this tiny doughnut shop that was really hard to go to because it was only open from about four to seven in the morning. It had the worst doughnuts I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life: small, hard and misshapen. Still, I was obsessed with trying to get them because even on the days when I had morning classes at SFSU it was nearly always closed by the time I got there.

The guy that ran the place had a long flabby stomach than hung over his pants like a pale apron. Apart from the doughnuts he sold hot dogs and lottery tickets. I never actually tried to make sure the doughnuts were vegan but in retrospect they probably weren’t – I would get two blueberry cake ones and a coffee and the whole thing came out to less than two dollars.

I think my fascination was with the fact that the business felt like it shouldn’t logically exist. Not just that it was a relic of the past but that it didn’t seem like it should have existed ever – it was barely open and the product it specialized in was ineptly crafted to an offensive degree and I never saw another human being in there. I kind of wonder if anybody else ever set foot in this Fever Dream of a doughnut shop near Ashby and San Pablo in 1998.

That just reminded me of this little piece of old downtown San Diego called Lee’s Cafe that was kind of close to the first ever Museum of Death location. People smoked cigarettes inside that place and the walls were covered with handwritten signs in English and Chinese and they sold stuff like liver and onions and everything had oddly precise prices like $2.64 or something. It felt like something out of the Gold Rush and I don’t know when it finally disappeared but it probably roughly coincided with the creation of the Gaslamp Quarter.

Going toward Berkeley on San Pablo there was a little storefront called Professor Curtis’s World Famous Cult Videos. It seems like the kind of place we would have been into but we never owned a TV or a VCR when we lived there so we never went into the place. When our last neighbors moved away we snuck into the house under cover of night and found a heavy old CRT TV that we excitedly carried back into our house only to discover it was broken.

I did a little bit of digging into the Professor Curtis guy. It looks like his thing was grind house, martial arts and exploitation movies and he’s also really into conspiracy theories. I met someone a few years later that said he used to hire girls to make some kind of fetish videos but she didn’t go into specifics. He posts movies on the internet now but his shop was the kind of obscure media reliquary that only existed because the internet didn’t.

When I started typing this I thought that it had been in our neighborhood but now that I think about it could have been anywhere around Berkeley: the parking lot where somebody had spray painted this short phrase on a cinder block wall:

“I FUCKING LOVE YOU MAYA”

Whenever we walked past it me and Francois would read the short quote aloud in the Irish accent of the woman from the “Pusface” answering machine tape. I never knew who had painted it or who Maya was but when I mentioned it to one of my Oakland friends a few years later he seemed to. I still don’t know who those people are but it seems entirely possible that I’ve met them at some point in my life.

[Author’s Note: After reading this Francois informed me that he met this Maya on a 2000 trip to Europe. She had red hair.]

With the right perspective every town is a small one.

What’s more interesting to me is the way that some of my friends recognized Professor Curtis or the Maya graffiti when I offhandedly mentioned these things a few years later. We didn’t really know anybody then but I’m interested in the idea that people who read this might have played pinball in a basement or lived in a laundromat or fought over a fiberglass dog’s head. I like thinking about these parallel lives and the fleeting experiences we may have shared in the opposite of intimacy.

I lived other lives in Oakland, with other touchstones and memories, but this was the first one. That first year I spent a lot of time in the SFSU Library media lab either watching The Residents Video Voodoo over and over again or experimenting with the audio listening stations. I forget the specifics of it but the way that the switches that toggled between records, cassettes and CDs were set up it was possible to layer one recording of each medium and listen to them simultaneously.

I was syncing up some Karlheinz Stockhausen and other early experimental and musique concréte stuff when I fell asleep to the soundscape and had a quick vivid dream. I was lying on the little bit of highway in San Diego that connects the Convention Center and the Coronado Bridge and sleeping peacefully. I was gigantic – so big that I roughly filled the patch of road between the two landmarks. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes but I remember it feeling incredibly luxurious.

Something about the way that I grew up seeing the town through the windows of cars and buses – the sign for the carpet cleaning business that had the two guys on a magic flying carpet and the church and cemetery with a starry blue dome off the 94 that I finally drove to and saw in person but it couldn’t compare to the years of walking through it in imagination while staring out the car window.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the psycho-geographical maps that we project onto cities are constantly changing in nearly the same way that the cities themselves are, like the way a city exists in your head when you can still get lost there and this changes as you learn to reliably orient yourself in any tiny part of it. I’m just wondering about the overlap between my maps and ones that belong to people I’ll never meet. Two completely different cities but bordering on a stretch of road that only exists in a shared anonymous memory…

I was thinking about that thing that cops do where they change their voice a little bit and crack a lame joke to signal to you that they are actually the “cool cop” or “party cop” or whatever. It’s always presented like it’s your lucky day and they’re doing you a huge favor by not levying the maximum fines or charges in any particular situation but it’s more like being forced to “bro down” under duress. Obviously there is nothing particularly “cool” or “party” about using complex bureaucracy and the threat of violence to assert authority, that’s literally the point, but for whatever reason they desperately want to pretend.

A big part of this is that most likely the average cop wasn’t particularly popular or well liked among their peers during the formative High School years but now they can force nearly anyone to at least pretend to like them and laugh at their jokes for a few moments at a time. It’s also possible that they had hoped police work would be more centered on stopping violent criminals and actually protecting the public so they genuinely hate responding to noise complaints, busting people for drugs and alcohol and that sort of thing.

Whatever the case there is a very specific tone of voice when they want to transition to this specific form of role play – this is another one of the situations where I wish that there was some way for me to add audio clips (there probably actually is) but I’m sure everybody reading knows exactly what I’m talking about. Nobody in their right mind would completely snub the cop in this situation, unless they were already under arrest or in as much trouble as possible, so few people have seen the kind of wounded wrath elicited by this kind of denial.

The one time I did it was a complete miscommunication and accident for reasons I’m about to describe:

In the Summer of 2010 the Generation/Bleak End tour was passing through New York City and nobody in that town ever seems to be ready to call it a night and go to sleep. We’d already played a great show at our friend Stewart’s loft and now we were following a crowd of party people to try to sneak into some bigger thing at a Brooklyn space called Zebulon or something. The weather was nice, the street was fairly crowded and I got caught up with an open can of Budweiser in my hand.

My reflexes were pretty good and the moment the cop approached I dropped the can onto the ground and managed to kick it so that it disappeared into a raised storm drain about twenty feet away on the corner. I don’t know if there is a special name for what I’m talking about but I mean like where the little brother gets his arm ripped off at the beginning of It. I was pretty jazzed, I’d never been particularly good at goal kicks when I played a lot of pick up Soccer so I was impressed with myself for getting it on the first try and figured that I was off the hook for sure.

I just realized that although I’ve mentioned these games in passing I’ve never actually gone into them in much detail so I’ll write a little bit about them here. Me and Francois first started going to these games when we moved back to San Diego from the Bay Area in 1999 but they may have been going on for some time before that. I think they were on Saturdays and everybody met up in one of the grassy areas of the Banker’s Hill side of Balboa Park and they were organized by Rafter Roberts.

Rafter is probably best known for setting up Singing Serpent Studios and playing in Bunky but he was also helping a lot of different people with recording and production in the late nineties. I probably first met him because he was my helping my friend Steve Lawrence with some production stuff for his band Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship. Steve was a little bit older and an oil painter. His personality and reference heavy colorful canvasses made him popular with the kids in the scene.

He hadn’t worked a job or secured housing for himself for several years but a chain of people took care of him as he continued to constantly paint in garages and living rooms. His paintings almost never sold but around this time he got a set of trading cards printed under the name The Supernatural Peep Show and tried to sell them at Comic Con. Steve had the common character armor techniques of constant sarcasm and giving everybody nicknames but he was hugely influential to me as a budding aesthete and we spent a lot of time talking about art and comics and flipping through his record collection.

He was also the first person I ever became aware was using heroin and other intravenous hard drugs, that I knew personally anyway, but it would be a couple of years before I would think about doing this myself.

Anyway him and the rest of GLXCS moved up to Los Angeles to try to make it as a band and it didn’t work out and his friends got burnt out on constantly supporting him and he became homeless. I used to run into him now and again around Hollywood but it’s been over twenty years since I’ve heard of anybody seeing him and I wonder if he’s still alive. I’ll occasionally try googling his name and the scraps of painting titles I can remember but nothing ever comes up and in a way I find it almost comforting that he belonged so purely and completely to this past sense of underground that there aren’t even traces of him on the internet.

I’m really rambling on this one – back to Rafter and the soccer games.

Rafter had screen printed a bunch of t-shirts to distinguish between the two teams: red for The Venomous Spyders and purple for The Semi-Violent Unicorns. I can’t remember anybody consistently being on one team or the other but it generally worked out that people who felt like playing more seriously were on the Spyders and people who felt like just having fun and goofing off were Unicorns and the Spyders always won. I don’t want to overstate this – everybody was serious and everybody was just having fun and the games were generally close instead of a one sided slaughter but this was still the basic pattern.

In 1999 these soccer games were a who’s who of the San Diego underground music scene or at least the slightly older Casbah crowd. I never saw anybody from The Locust or the younger hardcore/Spock-rock crew but people from Three Mile Pilot and Soul Junk and that kind of thing always played. This might have changed – I was only in town for part of the Summer of 1999 and I don’t know when the games ended or even if they still occasionally take place.

I usually played defense and wasn’t much for taking goal kicks although I might have tried and even gotten a couple. I was almost always a Semi-Violent Unicorn. There was a guy from Belgium on our team named Tomas who as a European was both very good at the game and took it quite seriously but chose the Unicorns out of what was most likely an inherent love of underdogs. He always called me his “tall defender” but with his accent it sounded like “my tall defend-air!”. I played defense because I had a lot of energy at that age and loved running.

I’ve mentioned this already but when me and Francois decided to drive back to Chicago because our friend Brandi needed room mates again we asked around the games if anybody would want to come and help drive and we got Andy Robillard who had been the drummer of GoGoGo Airheart to come with us. Actually Andy had just been replaced in the band in the worst way imaginable. After some obvious tensions with other members he was at one of their shows when he heard a band start and realized it was GoGoGo.

Apparently they had found a replacement just hanging out at the show and decided to go on with this new unrehearsed drummer without saying a word about it or even warning him. He just left the show and went home – I think it was the homecoming show of a long tour. I’ve met other drummers since then, especially in more successful bands, who have spoken of the threat of replacement feeling ever present like the Sword of Damocles.

I read up on GoGoGo Airheart for this piece and found out that they reformed with Robillard back on drums after a hiatus and went on to what was their most successful and well received period. Andy was quoted from an interview about why they finally ended things – they hadn’t been making enough money for the time and energy they put into it especially with everybody getting older and having more responsibilities. It sounded like things had ended in a much better place than they had the first time around at least.

So New York, 2010 : I just kicked my beer away into the sewer destroying any evidence that I had been drinking alcohol in public. The cop still came over and asked me what kind of beer I drank and I said that I didn’t drink beer. This is where things took an unexpected turn. The cop was from the West Indies and had a fairly heavy accent so I didn’t immediately realize that he had clicked over to the more familiar “cool cop” inflection. His feelings were hurt:

“I try to be a nice guy and ask you what kind of beer you drink but you want to be the tough guy and say you don’t drink beer!”

The whole thing was basically a language barrier. We were both speaking English but different kinds of English that made it almost impossible to transmit certain subtleties. There was a bit of a friendly wink in me saying that I didn’t drink beer at all considering he had just seen me but he took it as hard rejection. He probably wanted me to say something like “Budweiser, the best!” so we could pretend that we were just a couple guys talking about our favorite beers instead of being in a situation where he could use his discretion to decide whether or not he was going to make my life shittier and more complicated.

Anyway he wrote me a ticket and I didn’t do anything about it and I don’t know if I still have a ticket in New York City or not. I think this was a one time thing – if I ever end up in another situation where a cop with a heavy West Indian accent suddenly switches to the “cool cop” voice I will know what it sounds like and hopefully respond in a way that is satisfactory so I can get into the minimum amount of trouble.

Chicago in 1999: me and Francois were hanging out and going out to a lot of shows and parties and met a bunch of kids that lived in a house on the corner of Belden. It’s crazy to contrast this time to the stories I’ve written from less than a year earlier when we lived in Berkeley and were absolutely insane and terrible at making friends. We had both started drinking which didn’t hurt of course but I do think there’s more to it as a lot of the kids at the Belden house didn’t even drink.

Now that I think about it it’s probably a couple of things: first off The Fireside Bowl was right in the neighborhood and a really inviting space to hang out and meet people at this time. We’d been to a show or two at 924 Gilman when we lived in the Bay but never really felt like we fit in with the whole membership card thing and the singular focus on a specific political kind of punk and hardcore. The Fireside was fostering something more eclectic that more closely aligned with our tastes.

The other thing, of course, was San Diego. Even though we hadn’t been connected to the scene that everybody was obsessed with we were from the same city and this was enough to make us stick out and make people want to know us. In a larger way this was California in general – the myth of California as a kind of “alternative paradise” was alive and well in the Midwestern imagination of 1999 and we were bonafide Californians.

Actually to be super accurate I’d already met a few of the Belden kids when they took a road trip to California around 1998 or early 99. I forget who all was there but definitely at least Aaron Hahn, Meg and Janice. We started talking because me and Hahn both thought we’d recognized each other and had met before. (We hadn’t.) I was with my friend Dave Malone, aka Blinky, and he must have had a thing for one of the girls because he started boasting about how he knew the guys in The Locust and could introduce them.

I just got a flash of memory from writing this down. It must have been Janice because he was trying to write down his address to give her if she wanted to meet up in San Diego. We were at an Amoeba in store performance I can’t recall the band of in Hollywood or San Francisco maybe. Janice squinted to try to read the paper:

“Does that say Broad Curvy?”

Dave had been living on Broadway, probably toward Golden Hills, but was too drunk to write legibly. When me and Francois moved out to Chicago Janice most likely recognized me the first time we went to a Fireside show. We all lived really close to each other too and got into the habit of hanging out in a breakfast diner on North Milwaukee called The Cozy Corner or as we all called it “The Cozy C”.

Fireside shows usually ended well before midnight but the Cozy C was only open mornings so instead we’d go to an IHOP on Fullerton to have something to do. In San Diego the Denny’s on Pacific Highway had been the go-to hangout after a show or party had caused a group of kids to miss the last bus back to parents’ houses and the suburbs. In Chicago the buses ran all night and everybody lived close by but we were still drawn to an almost identical activity. A big part was that coffee remained the beverage of choice long after most of the crew had started drinking.

There were usually enough of us to fill two tables but coffee was the main thing that anybody ordered and some people didn’t even order that. Very rarely somebody might order an actual meal but the more commonplace thing was sides of hash browns or seasoned red potatoes that I called Red Medicine after the Fugazi album. The big thing I remember is trying each one of the flavored syrups mixed into endless coffee refills – they were all pretty nasty but I got into the habit of using the hazelnut one.

Considering all this and the fact that we stayed for hours and never tipped particularly well we were pretty much a server’s nightmare. As we popped back up night after night they probably argued amongst themselves as to who would get stuck with our table until they figured out a more permanent solution. One night we sat down and waited but after over an hour nobody had so much as greeted or even acknowledged us, much less tried to take our order, so we got the message and never returned.

Anyway I brought up the IHOP on Fullerton because there were a few kids who lived in an apartment more or less directly across the street from it. I forget who all else lived there except for this guy named Jason who we nicknamed 1776 because his hairstyle looked like George Washington on the one dollar bill. I was never over there much but I did go the night they had a party and the cops came out to break it up.

Their coffee table had a bong on it. This was far from a common sight in 1999 Chicago and most of our smaller clique hadn’t even started smoking marijuana yet. The moment the cops came in their eyes landed on the bong and there was some palpable tension in the air as to what they were going to do about it. Thankfully, somebody switched over to the “cool cop” voice:

“Does that bong have vodka in it?”

1776 nervously replied:

“I wish dog, I wish!”

It was a nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question but it served the purpose of protecting that particular cop’s fragile ego and they left with only a warning. I can’t think of a single good reason to fill a bong with vodka or wish that a bong had vodka in it but it makes sense that a cop who’s never smoked marijuana before might think that’s a thing. That entire “I wish dog, I wish” quote became the new nickname that we used to refer to 1776 as.

For whatever reason me and Dave really liked making fun of this guy – not publicly or in front of other people but just to each other. It’s not like we were particularly cooler than him or anything. We weren’t cool, he wasn’t cool and the cop wasn’t cool.

It was 1999 and nobody was cool.

[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…

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.