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I had just gotten back to Chicago from my Fort Thunder trip and a room and job were already waiting for me. The first one turned out to be a problem. Some friends had managed to rent out a former supermarket connected to the Congress Theater and I wasn’t about to miss out. In less than a week I had found someone to take over my room and was ready to experience the warehouse lifestyle as a founding resident instead of a lowly visitor.

These types of houses take on names in a variety of ways but ours was the most traditional. There were probably a few suggestions, something referencing positivity and cooperation, but nothing was going to trump a literal sign hanging above the door. El Rancho Supermercado got shortened to just El Rancho.

The early influence of a semi straight edge band from Michigan ensured that most of the rooms were at least well constructed. Measurements were taken, lumber was cut to order and a system of well framed walls began to divide the open space into individual bedrooms. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the nihilism began to take hold.

An influx of a specific subspecies of San Diego punks called “mutants” after The Beautiful Mutants, a band they arrived with, was certainly a contributing factor. When winter arrived without central heating goading us into shoplifting gallons of liquor and experimenting with hard drugs to combat the frost forming inside our oversized windows the die was set irrevocably. By the time we were hand-making uniforms to challenge our former straight edge housemates as the villains in a softball game we had become known as ERO: The El Rancho Orphanage.

From the street the door opened directly onto a pile of couches facing a pile of televisions where we would assemble for weekly “exotic pornography” nights. Now that we had welcomed in corruption we were pursuing it with the same communal spirit that had built our walls. In an era before the advent of constantly accessible internet porn Justin One was curating a stream of videotapes exploiting and objectifying dwarves, amputees and the elderly.

The common area continued into a modest zine library that briefly housed an unlucky beta fish. Somebody had brought it home in the kind of miniature glass bowl you win at Carnivals, named it “dead bitch” and promptly began neglecting it. When I noticed its stagnant water looking particularly filthy I would transfer it into a coffee mug to clean the tank and gravel. One day I got sidetracked for several hours and it leapt from the cup to its death. It was probably better off.

The kitchen consisted of a pair of electric burners and a perpetually broken refrigerator. Every time the door was opened it would emit a dull rattle like the fan on a dying engine. We joked that the sound meant that somewhere in the world a punk tour or road trip was going to shit. Eventually we started keeping perishables directly in the snow through an alley door that opened onto a chained accordion gate. It was too cold for rats and they lasted longer that way.

We did have a working toilet and a tiny sink in a walled off bathroom. The only shower was a y-shaped hose connected to hot and cold water pipes in the basement ceiling. We would have to stand in a plastic kiddie pool then dump the used water directly into the floor drain. Any feeling of cleanliness dissipated with the first bare step onto the soiled basement floor. This was also the only method for washing dishes meaning the two tasks were often undertaken together.

John had just moved to Chicago from San Diego and we were enemies. You might say that we were just similar enough to see the qualities we most hated in ourselves in each other but the real reason was that we were both in love with the same girl. This was a situation that would repeat itself to varying degrees in the years to come but was made more pointed by the fact that she would constantly fluctuate between us. Eventually she would end up happily married and raising a family with her prior high school sweetheart, proving that we were little more than wild oats in a “bad boy phase”.

John’s room was a late addition to the hallway adjoining the kitchen and his walls were made of cheap brown laminate instead of the sturdier plywood of the initial construction phase. He had stapled up three colored pages from the Mr. Men franchise of early reading books that were intended to showcase his three most frequent emotions: a grinning pig surrounded by money, a red circle angrily shaking it’s fist and a tiny yellow man disconsolately plunging from a skyscraper window. If I had to guess it was probably the second one of these that inspired him to drunkenly punch and kick a series of holes in his walls one night. When he had sobered up enough to miss his privacy he patched these up with tiny scraps of paper.

Somebody had brought back a ridiculous quantity of bottle rockets from one of the numerous discount firework stands that sit on the border of Illinois and any other state. One of our wantonly destructive house games was known as “Run Down the Hallway.” Somebody would shoot bottle rockets at the backs of their fleeing friends as we raced to be the first to avoid getting hit. Eventually the novelty wore off and the excess firecrackers joined empty vodka bottles and crumpled cigarette packages as innocuous refuse on our linoleum floors.

One day I was talking to John in his room when I devised a unique and opportunistic prank. As we spoke I casually picked up bottle rockets and pushed their sticks through the various paper patches until the fuses were resting against them. I carefully maintained a disinterested expression so that my actions would read as mindless fidgeting, no different than peeling the paper off of a cigarette butt. I found a pretext to end the conversation and walked back to my room then quickly returned on tip toes to ignite the papers from the other side.

After about thirty seconds the tiny missiles began shooting into his room and John yelped out in surprise. Once enough time had passed for him to realize what had happened his cries of dismay became even louder. Against all odds one of the rockets had burned a destructive path across one of his most prized possessions: the previously playable surface of a hard to find original CD copy of the Beck album Golden Feelings. I had inadvertently destroyed one of his precious treasures.

I was over the moon.

[Part Two Here]

I’ve already spent a little bit of time talking about being straight edge and talking about not being straight edge but we’ve reached the point in this story where I need to dedicate a decent amount of time to talking about my complicated relationship with drugs and alcohol. Let’s start with memory.

I’ve always been aware that my memory seems to work somewhat differently than the impressions I receive about how memory works for most of the people around me. I hold on to lots of little details, often remember conversations nearly word for word and can sometimes recite back favorite poems or the first pages of favorite books after one or two readings. I also struggle to remember the names and faces of people I have met multiple times.

It comes down to attention. When it comes to appetite I’m somewhat like a snake: I can go for days without eating and barely notice it but I can also eat almost unlimited amounts of food when I do decide to do it. Both sides of my family instilled a powerful taboo in me against wasting food. My family used to call me the “garbage disposal” because I would always finish everybody else’s food when we would go out to restaurants. Hunger is a thing I’m nearly always aware of in a dull, abstract sense and occasionally aware of in an urgent, violent sense. The thing I’m trying to get at is that memory and attention seem to work in pretty much the same way as eating for me.

My earliest memory is actually a triptych. After my family left the commune and before we came to California we lived in a small trailer in rural Arkansas. I would have been three years old. I remember chasing rabbits naked in the fields behind the trailer. This memory is from the viewpoint of a floating eye somewhere in the air behind me and out of focus. I remember my father showing me a three toed box turtle in the garden out front. This memory is from my own perspective and in crisp focus. I remember sitting on my father’s lap as he read me an illustrated copy of The Tortoise and the Hare. Neither of us were wearing shirts and he gave me frequent sips from his ever present beer can. This memory is from across the room and in focus.

This shows us a fundamental truth about how learning and memory function. We learn and remember new things by making connections between them and the things we already know. We can see this in the fact that all three of these memories are thematically related. I don’t know what to say about the different camera angles and if anyone has studied memory enough to have any particular insight into that I’d love to hear it. The two totemic animals will run through this story as separate forces that play distinctive roles on my path to drugs and alcohol.

The excitement to learn and experience everything the world had to offer that kept me essentially straight edge for the first nineteen years of my life will be the hare in this story. The fact that this insatiable appetite for every possible experience would have to eventually include experimenting with drugs and alcohol will be the tortoise. The hare runs a good race but the tortoise always catches up eventually.

I sat through the same D.A.R.E. classes that everybody my age did and eventually figured out that the strange bubbling sounds and floating haze whenever my parent’s commune friends came over meant that they were smoking marijuana and nothing seemed to be wrong with it. My father always had a beer in his hand if he wasn’t at work and nothing much seemed to be wrong with that either.

Once when we were visiting my grandparents in Arkansas I saw a photo album full of pictures where my father and his friends looked emaciated and seemed to be staring off into the distance like they were in some kind of religious fascination. He said it was from when he was a “speed freak” and the pictures were a little scary but I didn’t think about it much. When we moved into our house the old owners had been into motorcycles and the garage was full of pinups from biker magazines of paintings that were probably by David Mann. They showed bikers drinking and sitting on tree branches in the woods at night and those were kind of scary and kind of cool like a lot of the record covers and other psychedelic art that was floating around.

In Junior High I hung out with the “alternative” kids and we all wore Barbie heads around our necks where we had cut the hair and colored it with markers and drawn on heavy goth style makeup with black pens. I called mine “Ophelia” but I don’t think I had read Hamlet yet. They used to make us all come to a group in the Counselor’s Office where we talked about how the other kids kept bullying us and they told us they couldn’t do anything about it if we continued to “provoke” them by dressing weird.

I realized that my friends smoked weed and one day I decided I would try it. I stole some from the round Christmas tin decorated with poinsettias my father kept under his bed and brought it to school in my metal Masters of the Universe lunch box and showed everybody at lunch. After school we went to this girl Daphne’s house but her mom had taken her rolling papers away for not cleaning her room and nobody could think of a different way to smoke it. We ended up putting it in water and microwaving it then drinking the water. I sat on a swing and tried to figure out if I was feeling anything and my friends started making out.

I don’t know if I ever made a concrete decision that I was going to be “straight edge” or not use drugs and alcohol after that. I was just really preoccupied with reading and exploring empty buildings and learning about exotic insects and I think I decided I would just get to it when I got through the books and all the other stuff. I read Naked Lunch when I was fourteen and decided that one day I would get addicted to heroin but I think I thought it would be like climbing Mount Everest or something. Like I would do it one time and it would be sort of hard and after that I could say I had done it and that would be it.

When I started using over the counter drugs I wouldn’t really say it was “recreational”. It was kind of scary and unpleasant and I mostly thought of it as exploration. I had created this whole theory to go along with it called “urban shamanism”. The idea was that if you lived in the woods or the rainforest there were specific psychotropic plants you would encounter and using them would give you experiences and visions related to those places. I figured that for the crowded, polluted and paranoid experience of living in a modern American city that role was filled by the different over the counter drugs you could shoplift from a pharmacy.

When I left San Diego and moved back to Chicago in the summer of 2000 I remember thinking that I had to get out of town because a lot of my friends were on heroin. After going to Fort Thunder and coming back to Chicago and living in the El Rancho Orphanage for a few months I guess I decided that it was time to finally get around to it.

Looking at it on paper the dates seem so close together that it almost seems unbelievable. I guess time just moves faster or slower or at least differently when nearly every experience is happening for what’s more or less the first time and attention and memory are absorbing everything around you with the type of appetite that has yet to experience the feeling of fullness.

I remembered that in D.A.R.E. class they had talked about “gateway drugs” so I figured that if I started doing the more mild drugs like marijuana I would eventually end up at heroin. I tried smoking it a few times but much like the time I sat waiting on the swing in seventh grade nothing ever seemed to happen. I made sure to take every hit I was offered from a pipe or joint as I borrowed I.D. cards to go watch bands at different bars. I’m not sure if new music was simply too exciting in and of itself but it started to feel like I was immune.

Finally I ended up at a party on the North Side where a group of kids were smoking from a six foot bong. When word got out that I had never actually been stoned the crew became electrified with excitement. One helper held the bong while another one handled the lighter and a trio of enthusiastic coaches cheered me on from both shoulders and behind my chair. After a couple of false starts an obscene amount of acrid smoke rushed into my lungs and my ensuing coughs set off a flurry of cheers and high fives.

There were several intense and immediate effects and I can’t recall the exact order in which I noticed them. Every time I felt my heart beat the world around me seemed to take on the exaggerated horizontal scan lines of an old cathode ray computer monitor or television. Every word that I either heard spoken or spoke myself seemed to echo back on repeat in my head approximately three seconds after it was first uttered. This made it extremely difficult to understand what people were saying if they spoke in sentences that took longer than three seconds to finish. Finally all of the solid objects I interacted with seemed to pulse between being themselves and three dimensional computer models that looked exactly like them in a cycle that was roughly analogous to the modulating frequencies of a sine wave.

I don’t remember much of anything else at the party and I don’t think it’s likely that the weed I smoked was laced with anything more serious as nobody else seemed to find it as debilitating. I finally made it back to El Rancho and fell asleep with Robyn. Later in the night I woke up to find the constructed wall next to the elevated bunk we were sleeping on was on fire.

Kiki had been playing Elton John’s Tiny Dancer on loop for so long that none of us even noticed it anymore. A wire had shorted in just the right place to ignite the paper cone in her stereo’s speaker and the flames were licking their way up the plywood wall. Someone grabbed a blanket and put it out but the main thing I remember was still being desperately stoned as all of this was unfolding.

The next morning I had to wake up and take the bus to my job as a furniture salesman and still I was unpleasantly stoned. Somewhere in the course of selling coffee tables and explaining the intricacies of what a futon is to the endless stream of inquisitive seniors I returned to relative normalcy. I continued to smoke marijuana every time it was offered but never to such intense effects and only for the explicit purpose of using it as a stepping stone to bring me closer to heroin.

Soon afterward a group of us took a road trip to Windsor, Canada. The Canadian border patrol found a VHS tape labeled “SEX” in the trunk and began watching it under the assumption that it would be contraband pornography. It was actually a student film that Meg had made for art school where I was dressed in a cardboard robot costume and talked to Meg and some of the other female housemates who were dressed in lingerie.

Recognizing the actors as the occupants of our vehicle, the border patrol agents crowded around the monitor in giddy anticipation of the assumed inevitable moment when the onscreen action might evolve into hardcore fucking. When the tape ran out without ever advancing beyond contact free talking they angrily handed it back and welcomed us to Canada.

In Windsor we went to a casino and I decided to take a dissociative dose of Dramamine. My motor skills were so skewed that after handing the bouncer my ID I had to reach for it three times before my hand made contact. He assumed I was drunk on alcohol and happily waved me in. I don’t remember the inside of the casino much but on the trip there I had been having a long conversation with an imaginary person inside my reflection in the car’s passenger window.

After that we futilely searched for parties in the dorm buildings of the local University. I fell asleep under a ping pong table in the Student Union and later heard about Francois and Dave finding and getting ejected from a minor get together. The room had a welcome mat that simply said “DISTURB” on it but when Francois pointed this out the college kids laughed nervously:

“Oh yeah, we should probably change that…”

The next morning we stopped for a very Canadian breakfast. The diner was full of people dressed in overalls and flannels who were all talking about how drunk they’d been the night before. I decided to perform a parody of a rude American when I went to pay the bill:

“Is that in regular money or this crap with the birds on it?”

The Canadians were not amused. Before returning to our homeland we took advantage of the opportunity to purchase duty free cigarettes and Tylenol with codeine.

Back at El Rancho I gave Robyn a carton of Marlboro Menthols and composed a song on my four note Fisher Price glockenspiel in the style of Philip Glass called “Theme for Duty Free Cigarettes”. That night was later referred to as the “Codeine Party”, I ingested enough acetaminophen to seriously piss off my liver and got thoroughly buzzed on the weak opiate. I used the four available colors of recently introduced cream eyeshadow crayons from the corner Walgreen’s to give everybody a unique pattern of eye makeup.

Somewhere soon after I briefly flew to Los Angeles with Kiki and came home to learn I had just missed an LSD party. I also ended up back in New York with a counterfeit Greyhound pass and accompanied the members of Monotract to an infamous Brooklyn speakeasy known as Kokey’s Place. My first experience with cocaine was severely underwhelming but this short lived notorious club made a bit more of an impression. I remember the glaring eyes of the bouncer as he pulled open the heavy bar of the narrow peep window to see if we were “cool” before we were admitted to a room with mirrored tables and a heavy velvet curtain in the back.

I believe it was November of 2000 when the universe seemed to finally decide I had done enough “gateway drugs” and placed the awaited heroin in my path. Justin One drove his truck to the West Side. The Anguish of Bears, a dirgey track from the recently released Thrones Sperm Whale EP played from the stereo as we rolled through snowy deserted blocks. We pulled to the side when he heard the now familiar call:

“Rocks Blows Park!”

Justin One was the experienced one. He handled the business with the corner boys and drove us back home to El Rancho. He handed me a folded up piece of aluminum foil packed with a thick flakey beige powder. I cut it into lines and sniffed it for my first time but my goal was always to inject it and by my second or third time I got somebody to show me how. I want to reiterate that I wasn’t necessarily expecting it to feel “good” and had never even bothered to ask other users what it felt like at all. I wanted to try out being a junkie the way other kids might want to be cowboys or astronauts.

I did enjoy the dreamy buzz from the drug as I drifted off to sleep that first night but I didn’t think it was anything special.

I would do it off and on for the next twenty years.

[Part Three Here]

The guys in USAISAMONSTER had definitely told me about this Ameripass scam at the Fort but that wasn’t when they gave me the necessary tools to pull it off. They might have sent it to me in a physical letter or it might have been an attachment to an e-mail. The technology was certainly there but most of the people I knew were what you would call “slow adopters”; nobody around me seemed to have a cell phone for a very long time and everybody was writing a lot of traditional paper letters.

When I look at the rate at which everything was happening it’s almost hard to believe that at the same time me and practically every person I knew was also constantly sending and receiving thick envelopes full of multi page letters and handmade booklets and any other kind of art you can think of.

But then I look down at the device I am typing this on and remember that media and information were just fundamentally different animals then and that it is no less remarkable that if some prescient archivist had preserved digital copies of every scrap of paper art being produced it would now fit on a storage chip no larger than my pinky nail.

However I got my hands on it I ended up with a piece of paper with two Ameripass templates that had been photocopied so many consecutive times they were nearly illegible. Analog generation loss is now emulated through a variety of filters and widgets designed to give a “retro” feel to digital text and video but in those days it was very much a fact of life. Eventually Francois would create a PDF that matched the fonts and point sizes of all the original text and made it possible to create clean looking counterfeit passes without having to do old school cut and paste work for the names, dates and Ameripass numbers.

There was never a point when Greyhound Terminals started specifically rejecting the versions that had been made with the distorted looking template. Instead Francois initiated the change proactively as a response to a general shift in the way things worked after 9/11.

Before 9/11 it didn’t feel like every little thing was being monitored and recorded by someone in an official capacity. You could give the cops a made up name if they caught you trespassing and get away with it. There weren’t remote control police cameras on corners in high traffic drug neighborhoods or the ones that grab your license plate if you run a red light.

Before 9/11 you could just show your Ameripass to the driver as you got on the bus but soon afterward they started making you bring it to the ticket counter where someone would type the ten digit number you had made up into a computer. Whatever their computer system was it wasn’t very sophisticated because fake passes with totally made up numbers continued working at least until 2008.

Somewhere in the middle the name was changed for unknown reasons to Discovery Pass. Along the way we started laminating our counterfeits, making two sided prints, retaining the very official looking blue plastic envelopes the things are issued in and generally doing everything in our power to hide the fact that we were clearly up to no good.

What I’m trying to say is that the counterfeit Ameripass, created from the crude artifact that Tom and Colin had sent me and constructed through an archaic process I am about to describe, is as much of an icon of 9/11 and the changes it would wreak onto the American Underground as William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. Generation loss, signal and noise competing in an intricate waltz like those famous pieces of Op-Art that shift between two images depending on whether a shape is viewed as background or foreground and that column of smoke whose vapors would spread imperceptibly to shift and alter everything about what it meant to be an American.

For whatever reason John was the person that decided to accompany me on the trial run, we might not have even been cordial enemies yet at this point. We started by dropping by the Chicago Greyhound Station and digging through the trash for discarded tickets or itineraries that we could use as pass backings. Everything that comes out of Greyhound’s ticket printing machines has the same generic red text on the back. We would be gluing the black and white forgeries we produced of the front side directly onto these.

We headed to the Kinko’s on North Avenue, a place that would remain the headquarters for this particular activity for years to come. I had actually just applied for a job there and been denied, despite extensive experience in the field, for wearing a baseball tee to the interview. We paid to rent one of the computers and quickly typed up and printed our names, the beginning and ending dates for the passes and two random ten digit numbers. I believe Francois eventually determined that all of this information was supposed to be in 10 point Arial but at this point we were doing everything in the default 12 point Times New Roman.

We cut out the tiny rectangles of text and glued them over whatever it already said on the passes. We made one copy, covered the dark edges of the little rectangles in white-out then made another. It was this step that was probably most responsible for the completely blown out appearance of the surrounding text. The template went through at least two or three generations every time it changed hands instead of a single one. We glued the new fronts onto the back pieces we had retrieved from the trash can and trimmed down the edges. If anybody closely inspected the edges they could see it was actually two pieces of paper and holding it up to the light would reveal a whole other set of text behind what we’d printed.

There was nothing left to do at this point but try it. Me and John went down to the Greyhound Station and looked for a bus to try to get on. I think we might have wanted to try going to Miami but the next bus leaving was going to Atlanta so we showed our fake passes to the driver and got on it. The next step would be repeated countless times in the years to come and always in essentially the same way.

We took some seats way in the back, usually the triple by the bathroom that most people avoid because it smells bad, and nervously waited. The driver would occasionally step back on board and seem to look purposefully toward where we were sitting. I’m sure they were probably just counting up the number of available seats but every time it felt like they were on the verge of announcing that our forgeries had been detected and it was time to deliver us into the waiting hands of law enforcement. Finally the driver takes their seat and the bus pulls away from the station.

We had somehow gotten away with it.

I can’t remember which of us had Derek’s number in their little phone book. Phone books were tiny little note books that everybody carried around before cell phones had started being that much of a thing, they were sorted alphabetically and you kept it in your pocket like keys and a wallet. Mine had a little lenticular plastic cover with dinosaurs on it; I think John’s was the black kind with an elastic band. For some reason I can see it in my mind right now with John’s specific handwriting and some scribbles and doodles on the pages. That probably means John had the number and I made the call.

Derek Presnall and Nick White would later have a band that was successful enough to play twenty dollar shows and festivals and the like called Tilly and the Wall. At this point we knew Derek from when he had been living on the North Side of Chicago with a girl named Giha while they both probably went to Northwestern.

They already had some connection to the Omaha, Nebraska scene back then and would play Bright Eyes a lot and The Faint would always stay at their apartment. It was Thanksgiving of 1999 when The Faint was in town and everyone from Belden house went over there that we started the tradition of playing spin the bottle at Thanksgiving parties that were all kids no families. We did the same thing at El Rancho the following year.

I remember I was sitting with one of the guys from The Faint when they played the Fireside the day before or after and The Blank Wave Arcade had just come out and was getting kind of huge. Someone had come from the Chicago Reader to interview them and, rather than lobbing softball questions about growing audience sizes and the joys of tour life, asked pointed questions about the band’s bewildering overnight success:

“So… What’s it like to be liked?”

Anyway Nick and Derek were living in Dunwoody and they hadn’t been expecting us but they said they would come pick us up. The Atlanta Greyhound Station was really intimidating. Somebody had a seizure the moment we stepped off the bus and there were a ton of people around and the energy was on edge in a way I wasn’t used to. I think it was probably the epicenter of an open air drug market, I would get used to those. This guy was selling hot dogs from a little stand and this older Black guy kept telling us that our friend wasn’t coming and we should just get in his car and go with him.

I guess he was trying to sex traffic us.

We went to somebody’s parent’s basement and hung out and listened to records. They probably showed us around and took us to Little Five Points and all the other parts of Atlanta that I never remember because they aren’t interesting. It turned out that xbxrx and Deerhoof were in town and playing at this house called Squaresville. I got really drunk at the show and thought it would be funny if I ran into the shower and came out soaking wet and naked. If I had been thinking straight I probably would have realized that I would have carried a lot more water with my clothes on.

There was a picture of it on the internet somewhere for years. Maybe it was xbxrx’s website. They all wore red button up shirts and red masks while they were performing in those days. I had left a narrow necktie with brown and tan diagonal stripes on.

Nick and Derek were excited about the potential for free Greyhound passes so we made two more for them and we all took a bus to New Orleans. I fell asleep on the bus and dreamed that a baby alligator was trying to bite me and I stuck my foot in its mouth and broke its jaw exactly like the God Tyr does with the Fenris Wolf during Ragnarok.

Back when Ragnarok was a distinct certainty on the future horizon the raiding people of Scandinavia wore a type of shoe that required cutting off little pieces of leather for proper maintenance. Good men were expected to dispose of these cobbler’s scraps in a specific fashion that allowed the War God to use them all to make himself a giant boot and get good and ready for the wolf.

The Fenris Wolf would come riding in with Loki on a boat made from the finger and toenails of bad men who had died without bothering to trim them. Good men were also required to fastidiously adhere to this element of hygiene so that the hellish shipwrights would want for material, should they fall unexpectedly in battle, and Ragnarok could be postponed for as long as humanly possible.

When I woke up the bus was driving on a long, narrow road surrounded by water for as far as I could see in both directions.

We got a hotel room at some big name hotel chain a little ways past the French Quarter on Canal Street. We didn’t actually know about any cool stuff happening in New Orleans so we just hung around Bourbon Street and got drunk on the leftover bits of drinks that were lying all over the street in containers shaped like grenades and aliens. I don’t think any of us were actually twenty one yet but being allowed to buy alcohol legally didn’t seem like very much of a novelty.

We got a little bit lost trying to walk back to the hotel and probably ended up in the Seventh Ward. An excited group of Black kids from about eight to twelve years of age came running up to talk to us and one of them had a baseball bat. They asked us if we were in a band and though none of us were we all eventually would be at one point or another. We looked like we were in a band. They asked us if we had a car or a gun and when we told them we didn’t they asked if we wanted to buy either of those things. We asked if they knew how to get back to whatever our hotel was called and they all pointed toward the darkest street so we walked in the opposite direction.

Later John would say that they looked more surprised by the fact that they didn’t rob us than we were.

Eventually we found our way back to Canal Street and our hotel. I don’t think it was very common for people that looked like us to wind up in that part of New Orleans in those days by which I mean punks or hipsters or whatever you want to call us. Guys who looked like they were in a band. There were a lot of very young Black girls hanging around the hotel who asked us to take them up to our room. They seemed like they were genuinely curious about why we were there and what our lives were like but behind that was the reality that they needed to work as prostitutes. It was pretty depressing.

The next morning John was awake the earliest and Nick and Derek told him to go downstairs and get everyone doughnuts from the lobby. He came back with only two of them and said that every time he picked one up the guy behind the counter raised one of his eyebrows and he didn’t want to see what happened after he ran out of eyebrows. Nick and Derek took a bus back to Atlanta and me and John got on the bus for Chicago. It sounds like it would all be the same bus but it wasn’t, at least not in those days.

It was the only time I ever went to New Orleans before Katrina.

The Deerhoof show had been on December 9th so it was probably mid-December when we got back into Chicago. There had been a crazy blizzard and it took the bus over an hour to make its way from pulling off of the Dan Ryan expressway to actually pulling into the station. All of the passengers started clapping.

By February of 2001 I heard that there was going to be a Fort Thunder group show at a gallery in Philadelphia called Space 1026. I’m not sure how many times I had travelled using a counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass between the previous trip and this point but it already felt completely natural to take a bus all the way from Chicago to Philadelphia just to go to a single show. This time I think it was me, John and Janice. The bus dropped us off a short walk from the gallery around seven at night.

The gallery space was up a flight of stairs. There was a temporary structure in the center of the space similar to Brian Chippendale’s room at the Fort. Instead of the green and orange patterns the print that was being used as “wallpaper” was a picture of a tidal wave similar to the famous Hokusai print. I saw FORCEFIELD perform for the first time. Two members in full body knit costumes played electronics while a third used some type of pneumatic chisel to reduce a cinder block to dust. I don’t know the exact name of the tool but it used tiny cylinders of compressed air, way smaller than a whippet.

I don’t remember talking to any of the band members at the show or thinking too hard about who they were. They really were like superheroes to me in the sense that they seemed to exist completely independently of whoever was on the other side of the mask.

Tom and Colin from USAISAMONSTER were there, they might have even been playing but I don’t actually remember. They were hanging out with Christopher Forgues who I don’t remember meeting before though I had been corresponding with Ben Jones and had seen Paper Radio. It’s completely possible that I had actually met him that last summer at Fort Thunder and simply didn’t remember. I just found out that Jeremy Harris was the mysterious third member of USAISAMONSTER and I don’t remember meeting him until 2008 or so.

[author’s note: USAISAMONSTER was in actuality a four piece when I first saw them play at Fort Thunder. The final member was AT from the band Attitude Problem – another person that I met many years later without remembering the initial encounter.]

I was asking them about a friend and they were clowning me about having a crush on her. I said “Nah, she’s bossy” and Christopher went “He said she’s boss”. I thought it was funny. I can’t remember if any of us from the El Rancho group had to get back in time for work or anything but we didn’t ask anybody about crashing in Philly or getting rides to any of the nearby cities and crashing there. We went by ourselves to a nearby Vegan Chinese Restaurant called Cherry Street then walked back to the Greyhound Station.

We had been in Philadelphia for less than five hours and we were waiting for a bus to Chicago.

[Part Four Here]

When I first travelled to Chicago in the summer of 1998 all of us were supposed to get jobs. The High School Teacher had just bought a brand new Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer from Tim in his earlier San Diego summer job as a car salesman and he ended up becoming a weird SUV version of the no doubt extinct Chicago Loop bike messenger subculture.

I had helped Tim roof a house earlier in the summer but had never managed to get an actual job anywhere in my life at this point unless I’m forgetting. I went to apply at this Wicker Park adjacent coffee roasting company called Intelligentsia that was just starting up and some other places from newspaper ads but I was really bad at hiding the fact that I was only going to be in town for less than a month and my only experience was Volunteer work.

The Chicago Fire was just starting out as a Soccer team and they ran an ad in the weekly to find someone to be the Dalmatian style mascot. I have no acrobatic training but I’m certainly high energy and was feeling pretty good about this one when I took an elevator to an office in the loop somewhere. The moment the woman laid eyes on me she saw that I was 6’4” and the costume had been designed for 5’8” or less. This all could have been sorted on the phone and I wasn’t exactly rich in train fare but I appreciated the surreal experience too much to be angry.

Brandi lived in a walk up apartment in an old brick building by California and Milwaukee that was next to a closed down building called Shakespeare Machine Company that I always imagined was filled with an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. A little ways down the street me and Tim found a pair of junk stores on opposite sides of California Avenue that were owned by an older Black man named Sylvester. Tim convinced him to let us help out for a day but he was never really able to actually pay us so Tim found an actual job as a receptionist somewhere and I kind of just stayed.

One side of the street was full of records and antiques and the other side was mostly piled up with clothes. Sylvester would usually give me ten or twenty dollars at the end of a day or a lot of times I would just ask him to pay me in cool things I had found while sorting through the junk and records like eight millimeter films and Sonic Youth and Blowfly records. One time he told me to clean the basement by filling a mop bucket with hot water, bleach and ammonia and I explained that I couldn’t do that and he also had to make sure to never do that because it creates a dangerous chemical weapon called mustard gas that played an important role in the First World War. He told me that he regretted never getting to go to High School because they kicked him out of school in the Seventh Grade for smoking marijuana.

I always wanted to visit Sylvester when I moved back to Chicago in the following years but after that first summer his stores were always boarded up and empty and the nearby corner eventually became the first Logan Square Starbuck’s where anti-gentrification activists repeatedly broke the windows until it became obvious that a giant corporation can actually fix a window an unlimited number of times and even if your army is an anonymous legion of independent combatants who are only united through shared or similar perspectives on beauty, truth and justice in the words of 19th century British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone:

“You cannot fight against the future.”

When me and Francois moved back to Chicago in 1999 I had to find an actual job. I ended up getting hired at this weird super cluttered lifestyle furniture store on Clark and Wrightwood called Affordable Portables. I could talk about this place all day. The manager was a super chill mildly closeted normie goth named DJ. He played a lot of EBM/Dance/Industrial like Blancmange, Leæther Strip and Ebn Ozn on the store CD player and I had implicit license to play whatever. Most of the music I owned was on vinyl so that only really left Astoveboat, Olneyville Sound System, Ruins, Zeek Sheck and a couple of compilations from super early Load Records and the Ruins’ label Magaibutsu. The customers hated it all with a passion but most of my coworkers dug it.

We worked with an older goth lady named Gianine who was really classy and this ginger guy named Dan who had the shaved sides high ponytail and goatee look. I’m pretty sure all these coworkers partied at Exit Chicago but I ended up quitting before I turned twenty-one. Sometimes if the owner wasn’t in on the weekends we would all get drunk on Zima all day. DJ claimed it was the only thing that wouldn’t leave a smell if we accidentally spilled any but I’m pretty sure him and Gianine just really liked it. On Halloween of 1999 I came to work dressed as devil lock era Glenn Danzig and our boss Barry ran a photo of me pretending to chop Dan’s head off with an axe in our weekly ad in The Chicago Reader.

“We’re taking prices to the chopping block!”

There was also this wannabe yuppy named Mike who looked and dressed exactly like Miles Silverberg from Murphy Brown. Even though nobody made any commission whatsoever Mike was obsessed with being the top seller but I always outsold him because I didn’t care if people bought furniture and I wasn’t a racist who assumed Blacks and Hispanics couldn’t afford it.

Barry hired an older Black woman named Yvonne who was on worker’s comp somewhere else and agreed to work for whatever the rest of us ended up earning after taxes as long as it was under the table. Mike’s racist ass kept running his mouth “I’m a taxpayer, somebody should report her…” type shit whenever Yvonne was out of earshot so I warned her and her husband Darryl to watch the slimeball and Darryl told him to mind his fucking business. It shut him up but he was a big drama Queen about DJ walking him home that night:

“I was just trying to do my civic duty and now I might get capped!”

When I was living at El Rancho in November of 2000 and starting to experiment with heroin and whatever else I started to really hate this job. I made a rule for myself that I would only go to work on three hours of sleep or less so the time would feel hazy and go faster. One time I fell asleep while listening to a complaining customer on the phone so they demanded to talk to a manager but that was DJ and he hadn’t cared for years. He had developed a sixth sense for the type of customers who only bought furniture to call back and complain about it later and had invented a pseudonym to use as the “salesperson” on those invoices for the express purpose of avoiding the calls later: Phil Gazebo

There was a little Italian cafe and deli around the corner called Trattoria Monterotondo that was owned and operated by a very Chicago version of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi: Papa Giovanni the Focaccia Fascist. He was very fun to be around because he didn’t give a shit about making money and would kick out people he didn’t like and tell anybody who complained about his coffee to go to “Sewerbuck’s”. One time this guy who was with his ten year old son threw a hundred dollar bill on the counter after Papa told him the bar seating was for “Member’s Only”. Papa’s face flushed red with rage and he threw the crumpled money back in the guy’s face while bellowing:

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE BEFORE I FUCK YOU FACE YOU NEVER TALK AGAIN!”

Papa was a gigantic asshole but we saw eye to eye on one basic but important concept: Social Capital and U.S. Currency were fundamentally incommutable and there was no such thing as enough money to make you suddenly start liking a person who had already started rubbing you the wrong way. He offered me a job and I grew a mustache and started wearing hairnets and an Italian flag apron. I called him Papa and he called me Boy and it was a very fun job whether I had slept the night before or not. Every afternoon he would lock the door and fall asleep in an old leather chair nobody else was ever allowed to sit on for exactly one hour and I would have just enough time to walk to The Lincoln Park Zoo and see the penguins.

Anyway tilt the clock to November 18th 2000 and Blonde Redhead is playing a show at The Fireside Bowl. I tell Papa that I am going to see a band that night that features two twin brothers who are nice Italian boys and might be feeling homesick. He loads me down with bottles of Italian wine, fancy espresso beans, pastries and a variety of other treats. He actually did the exact same thing when USAISAMONSTER came to town because I had made his mall goth daughter some Greyhound passes and I told him they “worked for the bus company”.

The twins are pretty excited about all the gifts and I’m chatting them up about all the exotic gelato flavors we had been importing that I had never heard of before. I couldn’t bring any because he didn’t have freezer bags and kept it at serving temperature but they seemed to enjoy just talking about it. I told them about how he had specially created Panna del Biscotto con Frammenti il Cioccolato (chocolate chip cookie dough) even though it didn’t exist in Italy for his daughter and I was obsessed with this one called Cassata Siciliana which is basically like those little pieces of nougat with chunks of candied fruit in them.

“Is it good Cassata?”

One of the housemates at El Rancho Orphanage was a girl named Kiki Martinelli who is unfortunately no longer with us and her father was an Italian cop and she was obsessed with Madonna but there were a lot of tragic things about her life I’m not going to get into here. She had a dream of escaping Chicago by moving to Los Angeles and becoming an actress and a huge crowd of her friends came to O’Hare Airport to see her off including this guy nicknamed Dauncy Omega I just remembered for some reason. The flight ended up being overbooked and the airline announced that if anybody gave up their seat they could get a free round trip ticket to anywhere in the U.S.

She really didn’t want to go to Los Angeles by herself so she asked if she could use the free ticket to bring a friend with her on the very next flight to Los Angeles and the airport said that would be fine. I had a few days off work so I volunteered to go with her and got a return trip for two or three days later. The next flight ended up also being overbooked so we technically could have waited even longer and gotten one more free round trip each but it had already been ten hours and we were really exhausted. They had given us free vouchers to go the Airport Sbarro’s and get pizza and we were calling it pay-zza and laughing because we had sleep deprivation and couldn’t talk right.

When we got to Los Angeles Kiki’s gay cousin picked us up and took us to his cool West Hollywood apartment by a bunch of cool ‘90s Drag Queen Wig Stores. He worked the door at this really awesome gay club down the block I can’t remember the name of and his roommate was a Cigarette Girl and they got us in even though we weren’t twenty one yet. The next night we heard that Blonde Redhead was playing at the Viper Room and we took the bus down there and they recognized me on the street and snuck us in somehow. There was this guy standing in the corner trying to look cool in a velvety brown suit with a shirt and tie made out of the same material and a floppy Mohawk and when I saw him in the same outfit on the VMA’s a week or so later I realized it was Anthony Kiedis.

Back at Kiki’s cousin’s house I convinced him to try tripping on Dramamine with me and we woke up the next day with absolutely no memory of the night before and he couldn’t believe he had gotten so fucked up from motion sickness pills without drinking or anything. My last night in Los Angeles me and Kiki went to eat at the nearby Denny’s and she started arguing with this guy at the next table because she was convinced he had been on this show called California Dreams that was like a musical version of Saved By The Bell and he kept denying it. I have no idea if he actually was or not.

I flew back to Chicago and took the train to El Rancho and Francois and everybody had taken acid the night before and gone to a show where Psychedelic Steve Krakow was playing the sitar and I was bummed I missed it. He hates that nickname but that’s what everybody called him back then.

Kiki never made it as an actress and came back to El Rancho Orphanage and ended up on the same drugs that everybody else did.

She never made it out.

[Part Five Here]

Hydrodynamically speaking the junk raft is nearly the worst possible vessel for any manoeuvre that exceeds total, passive compliance with the silent directives of the current. Designs rarely incorporate a proper bow; where one would expect a smart, pointed beak deftly cutting its course through the ever approaching sheaves of water one finds instead a dull, squared off edge reminiscent of a sofa. Despite the ubiquitousness of the term “couch surfing” such constructs are better suited to inertia than motion.

Superficially the junk raft bears a more than passing resemblance to the shipping barge. While unlikely to break any speed records the latter more than holds its own as a celebrated work horse of industry. Two key features separate the shipping barge from its less practical cousin: the presence of an actual hull and the pragmatic patience of cargo. Invariably the junk raft carries a manifest of utopians and dreamers who actually want to get somewhere on a truncated timeline.

The art movement Bauhaus is not known for inspiring junk rafts. The artist’s collectives formed around their construction are better defined by the “Yes And” ethos of Improv and the timeless aesthetic of “more is more”. A spirit of compromise and unflagging optimism leads directly to such design decisions as an impractical mast and sail sharing space with a three story structure that blocks it, thus rendering it inoperable, on a single sixteen foot vessel.

While a junk raft fails spectacularly as a vehicle for movement on water it excels as a vehicle for capturing the popular imagination. Like a peacock struggling against gravity to vault a fence it ignites a desire in spectators to see it succeed against insurmountable odds. The charm of the junk raft transcends age, political affiliation and other demographic divisions through the universal power of whimsy. So powerful is this spell that the very people charged to protect the unencumbered navigation of commercial waterways, the United States Coast Guard, can find themselves throwing in to challenge the inevitable.

Anyone who has traversed the length and breadth of the modern Mississippi can tell you that for all effective purposes it is actually two separate and very different rivers. A system of twenty nine locks and dams ensures that the Upper Mississippi, extending from the environs of Minneapolis to waters just north of St Louis, maintains sufficient depth and placid currents throughout the calendar year. Beyond such artificial measures the Lower Mississippi rushes toward the Gulf of Mexico with all the unbridled power of nature. For the unprepared the contrast is as marked as the familiar trope of suddenly looking down to find one’s self rushing into the waiting jaws of a waterfall.

Had it simply been a matter of effectively navigating the Lower Mississippi River our flotilla of junk rafts, The Miss Rockaway Armada, was in no way equal to the task at hand. Fate had set the stage for failures of an even grander scale. Seasonal variations in depth divert all traffic around the temporarily deadly Chain of Rocks. This detour brought us just three river miles south of an irresistible promised berth at the fantastical Cementland. We felt more than equipped to close the distance being temporarily bolstered by the combined horsepower of a helpful, enthusiastic fisherman and the Coast Guard. We slept that night in Never Never Land, blissfully unaware of our impending head on collision with reality.

Read chapter two here:

Part 1

[Voltron Mode photo from bluecinema on Flickr]

With the stage set for a clash between our heroic pod of junk rafts briefly allied with the arbiters of maritime law and the ancestral gods of an iconic American River we must pause for an at least cursory inventory of the moving parts. To dispense with the least interesting business first I must offer a pair of quick disclaimers. I was neither present nor involved with the original building of the rafts and did not participate in the voyages from Minneapolis to Alton, Illinois. More importantly I will be writing from my own impartial memory and referring to any important characters by name. In matters of accuracy I extend a hearty invitation to any alumni to reach out, gently or otherwise, and correct me. In matters of emphasis and emotional effect I can only take full responsibility and gingerly smooth out a blanket mea culpa.

The general blue print of our variety of junk raft begins with two extended plywood crates similar to the one’s used for shipping valuable works of art and monsters in horror movies. These are packed to capacity Tetris style with the discarded styrofoam that has come to characterize the shipping of electronics. Upon this pair of im promptu pontoons additional layers of plywood comprise the deck. On top of the deck is where the art happens.

Our flagship incorporated three twenty foot sections connected with the kind of knots that can not be tied on Shabbas. The bow held bunks, personal cubbies and a tiller that connected to a pair of rudders at the stern. Middle raft was the galley with a kitchen downstairs and an upper deck for the house meetings that not even leaving dry land can seem to deliver us from. Finally the engine raft proudly boasted a pair of Volkswagen Rabbit engines that had been converted to power propellers and probably had names. A privy, library and network of deep cycle batteries rounded out the best designed and sturdiest of our rafts.

The Garden of Bling was a floating architectural folly I had the dubious honor of calling home. I missed the day when builders were split off into groups but imagine that everybody with ideas so concrete and outlandish that it threatened to dominate other designs just got lumped in together. I’ve mentioned Santiago’s sail and the towering cabin that Alexis planned to use as a pirate radio station. The unifying compromise was setting every single wall on hinges to allow the future pirates to spin al fresco in obeisance to prevailing winds.

Lisers had a small structure at the front intended to serve as a writing studio and a colony of plants she had destroyed in an ironic rage prior to my arrival. Harrison brought the titular bling with ornamental gingerbread woodwork salvaged from Katrina era New Orleans festooning every available surface. Before reiterating that this entire assemblage shared a mere sixteen feet of deck I should also mention that it originally included a museum wing dedicated to artistic taxidermy which was amputated and abandoned for causing the raft to list too dramatically to a single side.

Now we come to several pieces of errata I will outline only briefly in the interest of momentum. The Kirksville was a bicycle powered mill wheel raft named for the home town of it’s trio of designers. The Giraft was somehow giraffe themed, featured a skateboard ramp and a commercially produced aluminum pontoon. There was a small fiber glass skiff with outboard motor for running errands and a larger prefabricated boat that I think had a bird themed name.

The nature of the project allowed participants to come and go to form a scrappy yet steadfast band of adventurers. Due to the length of the voyage and possible scheduling conflicts I want to say that this ratio was drifting away from steadfast and toward scrappy around the time I arrived. On only my second day on board I was enlisted to change a CV Joint on one of the Rabbits and I can guarantee that I wasn’t selected for any particular mechanical expertise. In the end it mattered little, the crew could have been comprised entirely of Thor Heyerdahls and not changed one iota the inevitability of the advent of the day the mighty Mississippi would arrest every hope of forward progress…

Link to Chapter Three:

Part 1 Part 2

Before I found myself on board, the various rafts and boats of the Miss Rockaway Armada travelled close but separately, each under it’s own power. There were constant farewells and reunions, typical to any convoy, and nerve wracking episodes of radio silence. Like so many innovations in human history it started as a prophetic dream. One of the crew members dreamt of a giant robot made up of different rafts, exactly like the anime licensed in America as Voltron, and henceforth all travel was undertaken in “Voltron Mode”. The different vessels were lashed together with bowlines and half hitches, traversing the River like the giant Atoll from Waterworld.

The Coast Guard had been with us since Alton. Like many observers the Junk Rafts spoke to something buried deep inside them. A childhood sense of wonder and enchantment that either predated their decision to go into law enforcement or accompanied a period when they still believed it would be glamorous, noble and exciting. They wanted to see us succeed and prove that we could safely navigate the River and reach our destination.

This wasn’t just a matter of faith however, they were legally and morally bound to actually test us. I understand that the rafts were required to perform a few figure eights and similar maneuvers in order to receive the necessary bona fides for pressing forward. I heard it went swimmingly but had regretfully chosen to feed acid to several vital crew members and play truant across the bridge in a Missouri Nature Reserve.

The next morning we bid adieu to Alton and made our way through Lock and Dam Number 27 with very little incident. For those who are unfamiliar the mechanism is like a hybrid of an elevator made of water and the double security doors in banks and jewelry stores. The upriver gates open first then close behind any passing traffic and the water level slowly drops until it has lined up with the next section of River. A crowd of gawkers and well wishers thronged above to watch the passing spectacle. A white bearded old man with kindly, twinkling eyes played “Old Man River” then threw his harmonica down to us. The Down River gates opened to send us on our way.

As you may have read earlier a short seasonal detour is required through the Chain of Rocks Canal in order to bypass the deadly obstacles it is named after. This deposited us on a muddy bank in East St. Louis where we separated the crafts and tied up for the night in order to start the grueling upriver journey refreshed the following morning. We awoke early to a familiar dilemma. Whoever tied up the main engine raft had failed to leave enough slack and the sixty foot hulk had beached itself at some point in the night. After a few rounds of mud wrestling to raise morale we were able to debeach ourselves with poles, shovels and the combined effort of all available hands. We were back afloat and in formation just in time to make our morning appointment with the Coast Guard.

As hardy as it was our central raft had failed to incorporate the necessity of towing in it’s design phase and presented one major logistical hurdle. No single point was actually sturdy enough to support a tow line. The entire affair was pieced together from smaller pieces of lumber that would easily tear free the moment they were subjected to sufficient stress. Pushing from behind would have been ideal but the position of the propellers from our dual repurposed engines made this an impossibility. Instead a giant noose of chain was tightened around the collar of it’s Bow and leashed to the Stern of a Coast Guard Boat which had, of course, been designed for towing.

On the Mississippi River the tin of a Coast Guard’s badge is tempered by the uncontested power of a pair of diesel outboard motors boasting a whopping 870 in combined horsepower. To put things in perspective our scattered outboards were around 35 hp each and whatever the specs on a VW Rabbit, ours were nowhere near operating at peak efficiency. An aluminum Jon Boat could have had 150 in the back and still been said to fly. The Coast Guard’s dominance stemmed from their simple ability to outrun and outlast any and all challengers on the River.

In our Voltron formation the secondary rafts were distributed on both sides with the Skiff on Port and the volunteer Jon Boat on Starboard. I had found myself on engine detail, trying to coax some life out of the failing Starboard Rabbit. All engines were fired up and pushing for the haul.

When disaster struck it struck in many places at once.

We were passing under a bridge and the obstructions created by it’s concrete pylons caused the water to rush more swiftly between them. We were losing ground and the tow line began to push the nose of the engine raft underwater. For some reason somebody decided to dispatch the Skiff from it’s present position to somewhere else in an attempt to help. When a small attached boat is running under it’s own power it must be attached both fore and aft for stability and these lines must also be released in a specific order. I can only say that whoever cut them cut the wrong one first. The small boat spun out of control and sunk around Santiago’s ankles. He clambered aboard the larger raft for safety, gingerly avoiding the deadly blades of it’s runaway motor.

Over at my Rabbit we still hadn’t managed to get it to turn over and it seemed like we had no hope of gaining ground without it. Ellery Neon, the chief engineer of the Starboard Rabbit, occasionally performed as a Drag Queen. This innocuous little detail was about to take on unprecedented relevance. The moment we choked the Rabbit into life his personal cubby was washed out into the stream upboat of us. One of his enormous platform boots serendipitously found it’s way directly into the freshly spinning propellor. The entire prop shaft bent with the sickening sound of rending metal and a black cloud of oil floated to the surface. A stray piece of line fouled the motor of the Jon Boat next to us. All Aft Starboard propulsion had been arrested in one fell swoop.

At that exact moment the main tow line snapped and the closest concrete pylon began rushing up to greet us.

“All hands prepare to fend!”, shouted our navigator and we took up poles, rushing to the Port side to push away from the pylon. The Coast Guards did not like that directive one bit.

“Cancel that order!”, the Commanding Officer roared through his bullhorn. “Find the most solid thing you can toward the center of the craft and hold on tight!”

Miraculously the anticipated impact never came. The Coast Guards were somehow able to attach another line but remained unable to progress a single inch up River. Eventually the Order came down that plans were changed and we were moving to the closest safe harbor we could find down River. We ended up back on the Illinois side next to a Coal Barge on a rocky bank slightly south of the one we had left that morning.

We tied up and numbly waited for the Coast Guard to come forever banish us from the River. Had the preceding events been a movie the invisible antagonist of the Final Destination franchise would have angrily thrown it’s popcorn at the screen over the sheer scale of wasted opportunity. Despite the numerous intrusions of bad luck and misadventure it was truly baffling that none of our number were killed or injured.

To our surprise the Coast Guards marched onboard excitedly buzzing like a group of children. Their biggest takeaway from the preceding chaos was that numerous mistakes were easily correctable and the voyage remained firmly within the realm of possibility.

Against all odds they were actually excited to try again.

Link to part four:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

[Photo by Lisers Jugert]

For a while there were Documentarians everywhere. Nobody could undertake anything ambitious and outside the box without at least camera cropping up for film festival posterity. It was like a “screw in the light bulb” joke. I had brushed paths with one years earlier while traveling with a band that eschewed stages to perform out of a Volkswagen Type Two and would soon find myself touring on a mobile city bus turned concert venue with another one in two. Of course the Rockaway was no different.

The Documentary Crew on board the rafts differed from the others on two important details. First, they had the most professional approach and equipment for filming. A pair of perpetually placid and pragmatic German lesbians; Nadia handled the camerawork while Almut in headphones carefully positioned the boom. The second distinction is that, to the best of my knowledge, they have not released so much as a production still.

I don’t remember them leaving in particular disappointment or bad blood. Like everyone else they had to make peace with the fact that we were essentially grounded. The engine raft was out of commission and while several smaller crews and vessels were determined to continue nobody had made the necessary changes to contend with the faster current. It’s possible there was some disaster I’m not aware of, lost luggage or destructive effects of airport security scanners. It seems just as likely that the romance simply died and they chose to cut their losses rather than succumb to the sunk cost fallacy.

As Documentarians go they were pretty nice to have around. They did the fly on the wall thing well and never asked anyone to repeat actions or cheat out for the camera. When evenings started to turn toward beer and campfire camaraderie they merged seamlessly into the group. Most importantly the aesthetics of a film crew lent itself well to the absurdity of our endeavor. In the clusterfuck I described in the previous chapter I didn’t mention them for the simple reason that I can’t remember where they were standing and neither of them fell off the raft. Go ahead and picture it now: amid all the chaos and danger they were right there, calmly filming in cargo vests.

The final floating formation of the Armada came to someone in a dream and during these last days I had a dream of my own. The rafts had become a sprawling wooden city hopelessly bogged down in the thick, oozing mud of the Mississippi. None of our efforts could get us floating again and someone had hatched a desperate plan. We would send Nadia’s camera down underneath the decks in order to pinpoint the source of our obstruction on an attached monitor. In impassive tones Nadia explained that the camera was simply too delicate and expensive to literally drag through the mud. Alexis drunkenly squinted at her then coldly said, “You’re so…. Stupid” and began to laugh. Staring off into the distance with her trademark shell shocked expression Almut sadly delivered her final assessment:

“I guess this is… the end.”

Soon after this dream the film crew was gone, several rafts had been either dry docked or disassembled and nearly everyone had left. Two small crews on opposite sides of the River were busily working to retrofit two different rafts and continue down the River. Competing for remaining resources, scrap lumber from the abandoned crafts and the material support of the absent project founders we were often rivals.

Neither of us were going anywhere.

Link to Part Five:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

[Photo from Riverfront Times]

The Mississippi River has served as a combination muse and stomping grounds for visionaries and outsized personalities since the days of Twain. Even within the limiting niche of doomed junk raft voyagers we found ourselves in distinguished company. Prior to our journey a crew headed by someone calling himself Mattyapolis had managed to actually collide with a shipping barge and sink. Soon after it a young Grimes would launch a similar endeavor that never made it out of Minneapolis. Our arrival in Saint Louis put us directly in the orbit of two particular visionaries: Bob Cassilly and John Patzius.

Cassilly’s passion for the preservation of the beautiful had it’s origin in a 1972 honeymoon to Rome when he defended Michelangelo’s La Pieta from a would be vandal. Building his fortune in architectural salvage and restoration allowed him to preserve other less recognized treasures which would have otherwise been consigned to the dust bin of history. This collection grew into his greatest work, Saint Louis’s City Museum, which combined a dizzying array of architectural ornaments with his own, often large scale sculptures. The status of Saint Louis as a prominent port city no doubt contributed to the grandeur of many of these furnishings but an interest in one specific riparian treasure brought Cassilly into contact with our next important character.

The earliest in the day I ever saw John Patzius was seven in the morning and he was already roaringly drunk. His mini cooler of liquor bottles always sat directly behind the driver’s seat of his black pickup truck. Black cowboy boots, black Levi’s and a black Western style snap up completed his daily ensemble. A wiry old man with a grey pencil mustache; his cold, dead eyes and constant inebriation earned him the nickname “drunk snake” among us rafters. It wasn’t something we’d call him to his face.

Patzius was a “River Man” in the most primordial sense. He did a bit of construction, a bit of salvage but first and foremost he was a hustler. He kept an old Greyhound Bus stripped of seats and redecorated with wine red shag carpeting and antique furniture “to entertain prostitutes and politicians” as he put it. I can’t say whether or not he had any connections to organized crime but I can say I never saw him answer to anyone. His wheelings and dealings landed him the title to the USS Inaugural, a sunken WWII minesweeper that he and Cassilly had been scheming to bring to Cementland.

After a distinguished tour of duty in the Pacific Theater of World War II the Inaugural found itself dry docked in Texas until it caught the eye of a Saint Louis entrepreneur in a Navy Surplus Catalog. After an uneventful tugboat journey upriver the minesweeper was installed near the downtown Arch as a floating museum and tourist attraction. By the 1980’s it was in the hands of a businessman and politically connected heavyweight named Floyd Warmann. It was under Warmann that the Inaugural began to grow into an armada of its own.

The first addition was a port side floating Burger King in the style of an old steamboat. Next came an attached helipad for Mississippi River helicopter tours and finally a Taco Bell. The Inaugural had become a connected flotilla similar to our own complex of junk rafts in form if not function. To add to this uncanny symmetry the Inaugural and its multiple sister crafts would find themselves entangled in a disaster scenario involving a bridge and the United States Coast Guard over a decade before us during the legendary flood of 1993.

As the waters rose The Spirit of the River, as Warmann had named his floating strip mall, slipped loose of its moorings and began to drift downstream. After a screeching impact with the Poplar Street Bridge that scarred the bridge, took the Inaugural’s mast and relieved the Burger King of its upstairs seating the individual pieces separated and continued on independently. The Taco Bell sank and the helipad drifted over to the Illinois side of the River leaving the Inaugural and now decapitated Burger King to be rounded up by the Coast Guard. Safely re-moored just south of the bridge the Inaugural began to list and finally sank beneath the River where it remains to this day. I couldn’t find a source on what became of the Burger King.

There are a number of theories and pieces of evidence as to why these events might not be properly referred to as an accident. Most importantly the financial obligations of Floyd Warmann had exceeded the scale of income from fast food, boat tours and helicopter rides; and he was in the process of obtaining the permits to rebrand the Spirit of the River as a casino. Unfortunately the previous mayoral election had unseated his croney and scuttled his hopes of obtaining the necessary approvals in a timely manner. The large insurance policy he had on the complex is not in itself remarkable. More remarkable is that the Coast Guard had observed two of the three mooring cables ineffectually dangling in the current prior to the “accident” and the third left intentionally unlocked.

Another interesting occurrence is that multiple witnesses claim to have seen two men in a dinghy rapidly paddling away from the Burger King section after the disconnection. According to Park Rangers near the Saint Louis Arch they abandoned their small boat to the current after coming onshore and claimed to be employees of a different, potentially rival, boat casino company acting under orders to disconnect the Taco Bell. There does not appear to have been further investigation into the matter.

Whatever role Floyd Warmann might have had in the incident it caused the Inaugural itself to cease being an asset to him and instead become a liability. In 1998 John Patzius was able to convince Warmann to sign over the ship’s title free of charge as a means of escaping all associated debts and obligations. Patzius had plans to donate the most visually arresting pieces to Cassilly’s art projects and sell off the rest as scrap metal. After leasing the land adjacent to the Inaugural’s present position he began to construct a giant earthen incline to haul the wreck out of the River. This plan did not reach fruition.

In 2000 Bob Cassilly was riding his bike through Northern Saint Louis along the River when he passed the decaying remains of the LaFarge Cement Plant and envisioned a theme park on the site: Cementland. He bought the property, partnered up with Patzius and began his renovations. Much like the ramp for the Inaugural this mostly took the form of large scale earthen construction.

John Patzius is certainly a dreamer, absolutely a self-fabulist but above all else a businessman. The uniting thread between these two projects was a boom in demolition and construction throughout Saint Louis and a demand for places to dump the displaced earth, rocks and rubble. Whether it was the ramp for the Inaugural or the growing topographic landscape of Cementland every last pebble was carried in by trucks that didn’t cost him a penny in gas and paid him for the privilege. The Inaugural remains underwater and Cementland never opened its doors but the projects were making money.

When we came through on The Miss Rockaway Armada in the summer of 2007 John Patzius was still talking about raising the Inaugural. Trucks full of rubble were rolling in and out of Cementland as he outlined his new plan: He was going to have underwater welders repair all the damage to the hull then pump out the mud and water and refill it with air. A tugboat would then haul the newly floating minesweeper up to Cementland. It looks nice on paper but it wasn’t going to happen.

Bob Cassilly had invited us all to have a sleepover at the City Museum. The engine raft had made it up to Cementland but the rest of our fleet was either deconstructed or scattered along the Illinois side of the River. A small crew, myself included, was working to ready The Garden of Bling for the final leg of the voyage down to New Orleans. Many people were preparing to leave but wanted to pull parts of the rafts out so they wouldn’t just become more garbage in the River. John Patzius was excited to help with this part.

Next: A Miniature Fitzcarraldo

Note: outside of personal experience and conversations with Cassilly and Patzius much of the information in this segment is taken from an excellent article by Chad Garrison of The River Front Times.

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/the-strange-strange-tale-of-the-uss-inaugural-2482873

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

[Photo by Tod Seelie]

Most mornings at Cementland I would wake myself up by jumping off a 60 foot high concrete pylon into the Mississippi River. A relic from the salad days of the LaFarge Cement Factory, it connected to the bank by way of a narrow, rusted footbridge and had been used to load cement onto waiting barges. We had been given the key to a small gate and moved in our outdoor kitchen setup to begin dismantling the main raft. The pylon’s position meant you could safely plunge into the waiting River downcurrent without worrying about hitting any floating debris. Most mornings this was both faster and more effective than queueing up to find a clean cup and get coffee.

On this particular morning I didn’t even have to bother. I called it my “Sawzall Breakfast”, I had been tasked with clearing all the vegetation from the hill adjacent to the engine portion of the raft. This wasn’t just a question of shrubbery, there were multiple trees as old as I was and the destruction of so much life force was honestly exhilarating. It was actually intoxicating, I was bouncing around and rapping for anyone who would listen:

“I used to hug trees now I chop ‘em. Cap G’s and drop ‘em…”

When it became clear that the main raft wouldn’t be continuing south the more responsible crew members became determined to pull it out of the river. As picturesque as the rafts were they would become a time bomb left to their own devices, eventually dumping nonbiodegradable styrofoam into already unbalanced waters. We adapted the euphemism “shitting in the River” to refer to allowing this to happen. Ironically this was something we had all been doing in the literal sense, the privy on that very raft dumped directly into the water, but now we had access to a park restroom that seemed to be a popular cruising spot.

Bob Cassilly was in trouble with the city after a large rock had tumbled onto the nearby active railroad tracks. It didn’t help that he hadn’t even noticed it happening and didn’t send somebody to move it until after a train that had thankfully braked before hitting it called it in. The inspectors determined that he was building at an illegal grade and Cementland was closed for dumping or any other use until this was corrected.

We had been coming in to recharge our deep cycle batteries, ferrying them through the park and across the road on bikes and wagons. It was now illegal for anybody but Cassilly to be on the premises. He didn’t say we had to stop using his electricity but we were expected to keep a low profile and avoid doing anything that would draw attention.

John Patzius had other ideas. The idea of hauling a raft up a hill and out of the river spoke to something in him. For me it was the parallels with the Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo but if I had to guess I’d say it was the similarity to his own unfinished plan for the USS Inaugural that ignited his passions. Early in the morning, and behind Cassilly’s back, we were opening the gates of Cementland and reversing a giant backhoe through two lanes of traffic. I was given a reflector vest and red t-shirt to stop the vehicles coming in at least one direction. If they didn’t heed my completely imaginary authority they at least paused long enough to notice the hulking monstrosity that would have destroyed them in a collision.

Patzius didn’t seem to be the type to get his hands dirty, at least not anymore. Rather than operating the backhoe himself he had enlisted one of the workers who had just found himself on an unanticipated sabbatical. This was Tim’s first real exposure into the world of our junk rafts and the art, music and culture that informed them. He dove in headfirst. He started small with hanging around and helping with any errands that required a vehicle but within a few months he was wearing striped socks and suspenders and calling himself “Tim Treason”

On this morning he barely came out of the Caterpillar, let alone the butterfly. We had made a chain collar similar to the one the Coast Guard had used to tow us and attached it to the backhoe’s bucket on both sides. Knee deep in mud we used the poles and shovels that we carried for pushing beached rafts back into the water to help keep it moving and counteract some of the friction.

One of the chains pulled taught then violently snapped with a high pitched whine. Miraculously it missed every one of our heads as it flew through the air just above them. Nobody was wearing a helmet. I don’t want to suggest anything so irresponsible as the possibility of some supernatural force protecting everyone on board the rafts from otherwise lethal mishaps but it was certainly starting to feel that way.

True to form Patzius had showed up roaring drunk and had only gotten drunker. He drank like sobriety was a demon hot on his trail and would kill him if it ever caught up. It never did. He was delegating by directing an increasingly abusive stream of invective at his unfortunate underling.

“TILT THE BUCKET UP SHIT FOR BRAINS, TILT IT FUCKING UP!”

Tim gritted his teeth and threw himself into the work, giving an occasional punctuated grunt to forestall Patzius realizing he was being tuned out and thus doubling down. Once the engine raft had given up freely floating it turned its attentions toward the quagmire. Like the noble mudskipper it found itself poised at the threshold between two worlds and rather than marching proudly onto land it was getting comfortable in that thixotropic medium that can not be said to truly belong to either: the mud. The weight of the raft and general agitation of that substance caused the raft to sink and this created suction. The river was loath to relinquish its prize.

Pushed by our poles, pulled by machinery and spurred on by Patzius’s now entirely belligerent mantras the raft finally broke free. Building momentum it scurried up the hill and disappeared from sight into the adjoining field. Applause erupted with victorious hoots and hollers. The successful transposition of a large and heavy object satisfied a primal piece of each observer’s brain and released a surge of intoxicating chemicals en masse. Nearly each observer rather, one was less enthused: an irate Bob Cassilly had just arrived in a decidedly less celebratory mood and thankfully took John Patzius with him to receive a tongue lashing of his own.

The central raft was now just 40 feet long, permanently divorced from its terminal 20 foot section. With the kitchen safely off decks the next two sections would have undoubtedly followed were it not for the dark horse arrival of another determined crew. I started calling them the Chimney Sweeps after their shared taste in the type of old timey influenced train rider fashion that was popular at the time. The name stuck and got shortened to just “the Sweeps”.

Summer was ending and nearly everybody was embarking on permanent shore leave. My short lived and ill favored career as an assistant engineer on the now decommissioned engine raft was decidedly over and I threw in with the never-say-die crew of the Garden of Bling. Banished to the unwholesome environs of East Saint Louis we began the impossible task of preparing the Bling for the Lower Mississippi while the Sweeps started to modify the Kitchen Raft. We were like a pair of twin Sisyphus’s racing each other on opposite banks as the River impassively flowed toward Autumn.

The Engine Raft sat untouched, out to pasture for all eternity.

Link to part Seven: