Tag: Chicago

Los Angeles 2005 : “In case his ghost ever tries to fuck with us”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I was looking for skunks doing handstands and found this truly bonkers BBC video of a spotted skunk taking on b-boys in two of the four elements: breaking and spraying. You’ll have to watch it yourself to see who comes out on top.

The really bizarre part was that the whole reason I was searching in the first place was because I had been in a similar struggle with many of the same tropes being employed in slightly different ways. When I first went to Chicago me and my friend Tim urinated on the side of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. It was Tim’s idea – he said that it would render Wright’s ghost powerless if it ever tried to fuck with us.

Tim’s funny like that and group urination had been a frequent bonding activity for much of the trip. Part of this was pure necessity of course – when traveling long distances by car it’s inevitable that infrequent stops will have a shared functionality but Tim always liked to describe it as an activity in asserting dominance over often abstract concepts.

When he tackled all the driving to traverse the girthy state of Nebraska in a single sitting he metaphorized the SUV we sat inside as a bullet piercing the province’s heart as if it were a living organism. The finishing touch was a shared pee onto a field of corn near the border with the supposition that this act would banish what had been monotonous roadside imagery and conjure something more interesting to look at.

This, of course, turned out not to be the case as we next had to drive through the entire state of Iowa which is far more famous for only giving you corn to look at. In fact the waving stalks of the popular staple would never truly recede into the rear view until the moment the mighty city of Chicago announced itself upon the horizon. Seeing this sight for the very first time reminded me of the depiction of the Emerald City in the original Wizard of Oz movie.

I was going to try to do some kind of golden imagery thing with corn and urine but decided to hold off for a more appealing proposition – an almost entirely unrelated anecdote. As a child my Classical education far outstripped a more traditional one to the point that when I first encountered the term “golden shower” in print my first thought was that it was a reference to Greek Mythology.

In the story of the demigod Perseus his mother Danaë is isolated in a chamber to thwart a prophecy. Zeus appears to her as a shower of gold from the sky to father the hero. As a child with next to no sexual imagination my immediate assumption was that “golden shower” must stand for the concept of Immaculate Conception – something like “watersports” wouldn’t have registered on my radar in that context.

I had certainly urinated on and been urinated on by my friends at that point, including an epic neighborhood war when we realized we could put it into water guns, but this was always done for a different kind of gratification. Like most terrestrial vertebrates we abhorred the sensation of skin contact with the fluids of another organism and therefore did it to humiliate each other and cause anguish.

Back to architecture – I’d been a Frank Lloyd Wright fanboy since grade school and now that I was reaching an age where I could start traveling and visiting his seminal works piss became my paintbrush in an exercise that was otherwise visual tag collecting. For the thousandth time I’ve never really been one for taking photographs so in the pursuit of memories and accomplishments this forbidden act of temporary vandalism made quite the curio.

I got a few more around Chicagoland and got The Guggenheim the next time I was in New York. Unfortunately I only got the exterior in a discrete alley spot as I had not yet watched The Order sequence from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 to be inspired by Richard Serra’s descending Vaseline or its sister ice luge scene in Jim Carrey’s Mr Popper’s Penguins. Either of these might have sparked a resolution to attempt the far riskier proposition of the central ramp.

I’d always planned to visit Falling Water and make this the jewel of my collection for obvious reasons. Perhaps some day but the sad reality is that I will never “catch ‘em all” as a good number are simply no longer standing. For example I recently picked up a hardcover book called The Riddle of MacArthur by the journalist John Gunther. I picked up a habit while homeless of reading any book encountered on the ground which often leads me to unforeseen places.

In the chapter called Tokyo Today I learned for the first time of Wright’s version of the Hotel Imperial – built in 1920 but demolished when it began to sink in 1968. The place looks mesmerizing but my best opportunity to experience it firsthand is a virtual tour on my computer or smartphone. Engaging in my peculiar hobby through this medium would neither be satisfying or particularly advisable with the future health of my oh so precious devices in mind.

After returning to California in the wake of 9/11 I was able to go to Arthur Fest in Barnsdall Art Park in 2005 to see a bunch of freak folk, doom metal and my recent favorite Beatle: Yoko Ono. The building with Earth, SunnO))) and Growing was made inaccessible by a capacity crowd with little incentive to abandon their hard fought floor space.

I found an opportunity to scale a wall into an artist area prompting my long acquaintance Ron Regé Jr., then performing in Lavender Diamond, to take me for a fellow featured performer. I watched the music from backstage and saw the moment a large amplifier toppled into the audience. Much later I would learn special guest Malefic of Xasthur had neglected due diligence when parking in Rite Aid lot and had his vehicle towed.

I did not witness this first hand but read about it after. Malefic was freaking out – pacing the parking lot on his cell phone with the posted tow provider. Someone like Stephen O’Malley thought to buy him a Dove Bar. Malefic sits on the edge of the lot and regains his composure while consuming the frozen treat. Apocryphal as it may be this story has persisted for the way it depicts a known “cult misanthropic Black Metal” icon in a far more relatable light.

After Earth played and I left the building I wanted to take the opportunity to mark the iconic Hollyhock House, but with the crowded festival setting my best chance was to slip behind some of the prodigious landscaping. I’d already started my stream when I realized it had awoken a young spotted skunk who was taking advantage of the same cover vegetation to relax – insulated from the sights and sounds of so many frightening human beings.

I’d seen the handstand display in a taxidermy diorama in a Natural History Museum somewhere so I immediately understood the threat but had already gone too far to curtail my flow and beat a hasty retreat. As the skunk inched toward me in aggression I defended myself the only way I could – by advancing my stream into its path as a warning.

We were in a classic “Mexican Standoff” or, in the jargon of the Cold War, a mutually assured destruction scenario. The skunk backed away – I never pissed on it and it never sprayed me but we effectively held each other at bay. As my bladder began to empty I was able to slowly back away then shake off and sheathe my offensive instrument before stepping back into public view.

I enjoyed the remainder of the festival with sets from Olivia Tremor Control and the headlining Ono. A crowd of protestors outside the gates harped on the myth of her destruction of The Beatles – no doubt viewing her set as performing the action thematic to this piece onto the band’s legacy. I thought no such thing, though I did think she might have announced her band, including her son Sean by name. I left with relative high spirits.

I thought I would conclude this selection with an experience from my vivid world of dreams. In the early 2000s when I returned to San Diego a group of friends including Nick Feather and Nina Amour were renting a popular party house on A Street in Golden Hill. I’ve mentioned in other places my childhood struggles with bed wetting that only abated in my early twenties. This was one of the final incidents.

I fell asleep on a deep chartreuse crushed velvet sofa and found myself in the dilapidated tiled basement bathroom of an anachronistic department store. The man at the urinal next to me was a specific midcentury caricature – pressed suit, fedora and British style horrid teeth. We began our releases in sync then subtly tilted our chins to each other in mutual challenge.

We each began walking backward while arching our streams so they might continue to reach the appropriate receptacles. Things were neck to neck, or Turkey neck to Turkey neck as it were, until the building’s floor plan guaranteed my victory. Just as I stepped into an open doorway he abruptly came against a solid wall. The sudden shock obliterated his concentration.

Suddenly his emission was not reaching the urinal but uncontrollably sputtering and flying into the air around him – soaking his clothing, shoes and the walls and floor as he futilely tried to regain his composure. I continued to back through the doorway as my own issue impossibly extended further and further to the target. When I reached the edge of the hallway I’d entered I proudly stood and concluded my now nearly twenty foot feat.

I had won!

In this feeling of elation I suddenly returned to consciousness and with a shock learned I had only succeeded in soaking my own clothing as well as my friend’s sofa. The sudden speed in which triumphant pride soured into deepest shame nearly gave me whiplash. The damage was reversible as this same vintage settee was later transferred to my family’s home upon the collective house’s dissolution and remained there for years in an odorless state.

I talk to Tim here and there but nothing like the Summer of 1998 when we were near constant collaborators in a variety of mediums. I wonder if he has outgrown such juvenile pursuits or rather if he has revisited them with renewed gusto as the father of a young son. We never compared lists of our respective marked Frank Lloyd Wright edifices and it feels entirely possible that he ended the practice with the first impulsive iteration at the Robie House.

Perhaps I’ll reach back out in the near future and learn for certain – one way or the other.

Chicago 2010 : “I heard you had two girls on chains and you made them do anything you wanted”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I wasn’t necessarily going to write up this whole tour but I wrote the first part last time and there’s a piece from Michigan that would come right after this one a while ago so I might as well do it all and string them together with links. Travelogue is one of those words I use when I want to bury my head in the sand from the problem that this is basically a memoir so I might as well hew closer to that for a hot minute. It sure as hell isn’t “Rock Journalism” or at least not particularly effective at pretending to be.

There was a photo from Iowa City I was hoping to use as the picture for this one where I was holding an ornate magnifying glass over one of my eyes. I just went to try to grab it from Facebook but it looks like it isn’t there anymore. I even had it as my profile picture for a minute but apparently that doesn’t make a difference if the original poster deletes it or unfriends you. The whole reason I joined Facebook in the first place was to get access to some of Joel’s photos from this tour but in the last decade he’s done both of those things: unfriended me and erased it all.

The Iowa City show was in a big warehouse and the closer we got to Chicago and Bitchpork it felt like things were accelerating like we were being pulled into its gravitational field so this was a bigger and better attended night than anything before it. I’d been hearing the name The Savage Young Taterbug for a second but this was the first time I’d actually met him. He was hanging out in Chouser’s room with Sci-Fi Sam when we pulled up.

Chouser wasn’t even Chouser yet, he was still “Jason”, but I probably met him on the cusp of the transformation. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had one of those hairstyles where it’s like a ponytail but on top of your head toward the back but he also had this big illustrated library book about the Wild Boys movement in pre-World War II Germany. By the time he’d finished digesting and synthesizing it he’d be himself.

This was the last show where the Generation set wasn’t ready yet and Rian performed solo as Baby Love. Iowa City has the same issue as a lot of college towns where women greatly outnumber men, especially in the Underground, and male creatives end up fetishized and put on a pedestal. During both of our sets [Rian was still male presenting at this time] we were more or less treated like bachelorette party strippers and got grabbed at to the point that they even ripped our clothes.

At the time I told myself that as a performer my body became temporary public property. I wrote this off as part of the implied social contract between entertainer and audience but now that I’ve had a great deal of time to process things I don’t necessarily look at it the same way. I feel like that kind of license should be explicitly stated – like in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 piece. It wasn’t a huge issue but it wasn’t great and I’d hope our scene’s culture has evolved beyond this kind of thing.

I had a song that was intended to be a curse from this period when I was excessively careless with dark magic. I first wrote it as lyrics for a Living Hell piece but during my set at the first Mojave Rave I started recreating it as a Bleak End song. It was never directed at anything specific – more like a obscenely negative and negligent version of when they release a bunch of doves like in the UNARIUS Conclave of Light.

It had one section that went:

“This breath will fade, This bloom will wilt, This song goes on ‘til blood is spilt”

I felt like it would have more effect as both a spell and bit of stagecraft if that were actually true and the only way to do that ethically was to spill my own. I had been cutting myself every time I repeated that particular lyric with a hoof-handled knife a friend had received as a wedding gift at his Eastern European sham green card marriage but given to me when he’d realized it was cursed.

I wrote about this somewhere else but at this performance I’d gotten a little too giddy and forcefully slashed toward my own stomach. The crowd gasped and when I looked down I realized I’d severed the cord of the microphone I’d been singing into. I wondered about writing that out again but then felt like it would feel stranger to come to this exact point and not mention it – for the people who’ve read everything these bits will be like refrains in a very long song.

Joel had a lot of staging concepts he’d been planning to work into the Generation set including building some kind of oversized baby crib but with Bitchpork looming it had to be reinterpreted and pared down. What he and Rian ended up with was that they’d both hold worklights on long extension cords with very bright or colored lightbulbs and also wear leather bondage collars on long chains.

I would stand in the back wearing a grim reaper’s robe and constantly tug on the chains to pull them backwards as they were singing. The best way to refer to it was that I was their background dancer but a combination of the visually implied power dynamic and the staging for the Bleak End set meant that spectators didn’t always interpret things that way.

We were working out together every day we were on tour with a program of rotating exercises called P90X. There were five or six different ones but the really fun one was called Kenpo-X where you would kick, punch and karate chop at the air in front of you. I had the Pickells return the favor by choreographing a synchronized program of these moves for them to go through behind me while I was doing my songs.

A big part of why everything happened the way it did was that we were sharing a single performance slot at Bitchpork. I forget if this was the way things had been booked from the get-go or if either act was a late addition but with so many bands and a tight schedule it was advantageous to be able to rattle through both sets in under thirty minutes after a single sound check.

At this stage I was performing in a lacey white costume so for maximum surprise factor I’d get dressed where nobody could see me then hide this under the black robe until it was time to make the switch. It was never thought of like either act was “headlining” but having a transition where a robe and chains were quickly pulled off was just faster and made more sense than trying to put all this stuff on in the chaos and adrenaline of the big moment.

The unforeseen consequence was that a hefty chunk of the audience got confused and thought the whole thing was “my” set. I would have thought that the fact that I never touched the computer or sang into either microphone during the Generation half would have made it clear that I had no hand in creating the music – in fact we had even recorded all of my drum machine tracks onto Joel’s computer to speed things along and as he was the only one setting it up and testing levels before we all started it almost would have made more sense to view all of it as “his”.

Of course there were a lot more variables at play: I was older and had a history of living and playing in Chicago so a larger chunk of the crowd was already familiar with me as a performer. I also just take up a lot of space socially, or did back then, I had a large personality and was noticeably more extroverted than either Pickell. The big indication of what had happened was when somebody who hadn’t seen any of it approached me to talk about “my set”:

“I heard you had two girls on chains and you made them do anything you wanted!”

When I talked to Rian about this recently she mentioned how the remark feels affirming in retrospect but I think Joel was especially hit hard by the element of having something he’d been feverishly slaving over and just debuted credited to someone else. Joel is a colossal talent of a songwriter and while I need to say that his work is criminally unknown, even in the underground, I need to acknowledge his collusion as an accomplice in that crime. None of the Generation songs have been recorded and are only available in a dwindling cache of live recordings on YouTube.

For the rest of the tour we often flipped the order of our sets, sometimes did them at opposite ends of a night instead of back to back and on a couple of occasions either Bleak End or Generation didn’t play at all but the damage had already been done. Once we were back in Oakland the role of chain-puller was recast – for any subsequent performances of that Generation set it was John Benson without the black robe to ensure that nobody could even mistake the figure for me.

Nonetheless we had inadvertently birthed certain misconceptions that would cast a shadow over the second Generation tour two years later. The Trapped in Reality tour shirts only listed Sister Fucker and Generation but throughout the booking process we all talked about me and Dalton coming along and performing. Vanessa and Erin in Sister Fucker assumed that would be as part of Generation while me and the Pickells assumed it was so clear that such a collaboration had never happened and never would that nobody could actually assume that.

We had essentially been living in opposite and incompatible realities until the moment we were all in the van together. Now it had to be hastily reconciled into a single awkward reality that we all were trapped in – the tour name had been oddly prophetic. Sister Fucker would have never deliberately planned a three band tour for logistical reasons but on our end we hadn’t even planned it with Bleak End sets that are easy to squeeze in anywhere due to the plug and play nature.

Me and Dalton had created a live drums and bass project that went through a few names but landed on Dealbreaker. This name would also prove to be prophetic – by the end of the tour Dalton no longer wanted to do the project and the Pickell siblings would never collaborate again. Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself, I just wanted to show the far reaching consequences of the Bitchpork set and the confusions of author and membership it inspired.

Anyway let’s go back to Bitchpork. I somehow missed the first one even though I was in Chicago for a decent chunk of the Summer – maybe it happened the same time I was in Berlin. The second year was when it moved to Mortville and really started to blow up. It felt a lot like the 2008 International Noise Conference. Everybody was there, the creative energy of Underground America was bursting at the seams…

Actually let’s go back to just before Bitchpork. While we were driving through the cornfields between Iowa City and Chicago a song suddenly leaped out of the radio that pulled the three of us to instant attention. It started with a strumming acoustic guitar and a woman I later discovered was Rihanna singing an infectious vocal hook. Next Eminem exploded from the speakers and the two traded off building the energy and tension as high as humanly possible.

Love the Way You Lie tapped into everything each of us, in slightly different ways, loved about mainstream pop music. It completely transformed the energy in the car. The moment it ended we immediately wanted to hear it again. Then we did, then we heard it over and over again until it got to the point where we would change the station to try to get away from it only to find the exact same song playing everywhere we turned.

By the end of the tour we never wanted to hear it again.

[Michigan story here:]

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

Chicago 2001 : “Number One you punk! Number Two you Jew! Number Three you gay!”

berniebleak3 Comments

Wow, I really haven’t written anything in a while. I’ve been struggling with this three part piece that isn’t really coming out the way I imagined it and isn’t done yet. It goes into the sort of thing I’ve mostly been avoiding writing about, like sex and relationship stuff, but that isn’t what it’s really about. I think I’m still struggling to understand what it actually is fundamentally about.

I’m sure I’ll finish it and put it up eventually but it’ll probably be a while.

Anyway I decided to just write some more stories about when I worked at this Italian coffee bar called Trattoria Monterotondo. I just read back over some older pieces to see how much I had written about this place already and it turned out to be hardly anything. Sometimes I worry that I’m losing the thread and my earlier pieces had a quality that my new ones lack but then I go back and read some and they’re all full of typos and really short.

It’s fine, everything’s good for something even if that thing is only being thrown in a corner because it isn’t good for anything; if that makes sense. There was a show last night that I helped set up but I got there so late that I only saw the touring band and then had to leave immediately to run errands. I would have felt really bad if it was only sparsely attended but there was a decent crowd and they probably made good gas money so I feel a medium amount of bad.

I hope Ivory Daze made it up to Eugene okay, their van was apparently starting to overheat when it goes up hills and it’s uphill the whole way there and today was really hot. I was reading today about the “Faustian Bargain” where the aerosols from human economic activity actually have a globally cooling effect because they reflect some of the sun’s rays and as soon as we stop creating air pollution it will suddenly get a lot hotter really, really fast.

That sounds perfectly awful but it must be good for something too. Maybe the extreme heat will make it easier to breed lots and lots of insects like crickets in shoeboxes with bits of egg carton in them like you’re supposed to do when you keep small reptiles or amphibians as pets. It’s not like there will be anything else to eat.

Ok, the Trattoria Monterotondo place. I mentioned in the earlier piece that the owner and my boss, Papa Giovanni Moratti, was a giant asshole but I only really talked about him being the fun kind of asshole like refusing to let uppity customers buy his approval with money. To make things really clear he was a racist homophobic antisemitic womanizer shady businessman kind of asshole too.

That part wasn’t always as fun. If you’ve ever seen The Simpsons episode where an old Italian character says he can’t speak Italian but only broken English that was basically the deal with Papa. I’ve taken Linguistics classes now so I have a better grasp of how language fossilization works – basically when a person acquires a new language as an adult they will hit a point where they stop improving and just mispronounce things and forget words that they need to use all the time forever.

Somewhere along the line he must have forgotten how to speak Italian too because sometimes other Italians would come in and try to speak it with him and he obviously couldn’t. Every week I would help him write down a shopping list and he’d always say to write down “silver things” and I’d tell him it’s aluminum foil and the next week he’d say “silver things” again. He told me to go outside and feed the birds in the same way every day:

“Go feed your bird your pidge.”

Anyway that’s probably enough of his charming and harmless catch phrases. Here’s another thing he was fond of repeating:

“We have three rule here: No Jew. No Black. No Gay.”

Sometimes he would throw something in about how he knew I was Jewish but it was all right because he was teaching me how to be better or some crap like that. I know that sort of thing would probably piss a lot of people off but it’s always been like water off a duck’s back for me. It’s entirely possible that the only reason he hired me in the first place was to get one over on the Jewish owner of the furniture store I’d been working at around the corner.

It is what it is.

Everything about his hole in the wall coffee bar was some kind of flex. He had made a ton of money in the ‘70s and ‘80s with a store down the street that sold cheap Turkish knockoffs of Italian designer goods and now he just wanted to show off, have fun and waste it. When I first started working there the main flex was to make the little patch of sidewalk in front of his shop look as elaborate as possible.

Every day we would drag out a table, some chairs, a few planters, an assortment of statuary and a fully functional stone fountain that we put live goldfish in. They only lived inside a bowl on one of the shelves at night and died a lot because of how much they were constantly moved and handled but he kept buying more. If all of this doesn’t sound preposterous enough the main purpose of this tiny pocket of paradise was to tell 90% of his potential customers that everything was takeout only and they couldn’t sit there and it was “members only”.

I guess it was kind of like the concept of a “spite shop” on Curb Your Enthusiasm except that this spite was directed at the world in general instead of a neighboring business. Not that he didn’t have plenty of spite for a neighboring business. I’ll get to that.

This whole tableaux took us at least an hour to set up every day and another hour to pack back up again and it was heavy and most days nobody was ever allowed to sit there. So one day we are in the midst of either dragging out or packing up the heaviest part, the fountain, and a very Black and very gay man dressed in a speedo and sunglasses comes rollerblading down the sidewalk and does a flawless little twirl in Papa’s face before disappearing around the corner.

Papa wiped the sweat from his forehead with the folded little towel that was always stylishly draped over his shoulder and turns to me and says in a tone of total resignation:

“What can you do?”

I don’t think I actually said it but my immediate thought was “I guess you can tell me what you want to do and I can tell you if you can do it or not.” Anyway I think I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing he wanted to do and thankfully, he couldn’t do it. Now that I think about it that dismissive twirl must have done a pretty good job deflating him – it wasn’t that long afterwards that the fountain disappeared and his new flex turned into flying in gelato from Italy even though it would have been cheaper and smarter to just make it.

One of the statues that we set up everyday was a cement donkey pointed at a nearby business on the corner of Clark Street to “frighten the Marrochini.” It was a fairly successful French Restaurant owned by a pair of brothers from Morocco and I guess donkeys are some kind of negative stereotype for that country in Italy. He would refer to them as “used donkey salesmen” and spread baseless rumors about the cleanliness of their kitchen to his fan club.

At some point he made up a story that they were coming and peeking through his window at night to try to learn how to emulate Italian cuisine. This was especially laughable because nothing in our shop was even made there with the exception of a couple weeks that he did paninis – everything else was brought in from off site. The Moroccan guys always dressed well and made a point of going out of their way to greet Papa with some well curated polite contempt.

I used to chat with one of the waitresses that worked over there because we both wore white belts. It was pretty trendy in the circa 2000 hardcore landscape but I never saw her at Fireside shows or anything. Papa was obsessed with trying to get us to hook up but it wasn’t really like that. Her name was Sonia.

Playing matchmaker was a thing he was actually pretty obsessed with with his fan club of neighborhood yuppie transplants but I can’t think of any instances where it was actually successful. He had me write up a poster for his imaginary dating service at some point with a lot of coded wording about the “right kind of people” – basically trying to say no Jews and everybody had to be white.

Out of the group of much younger women that he was always trying to set up with his male regulars he arbitrarily decided one was “his” and tried to make a move on her. When she was less than receptive to his advances he quickly turned a cold shoulder and stopped talking to her entirely. That night he loudly complained about the situation:

“All God damn bitches! Papa wants to fuck too!”

The whole referring to himself in the third person thing was especially creepy but he didn’t do it too often. He just wasn’t particularly interested in names. The entire time I worked there he never bothered to learn mine – he either called me “boy” or “Tom Croo” because he thought my unibrow made me look the famous actor whose name he would have been pronouncing if he ever bothered with the final “s”.

She did not take getting kicked out of his imaginary club very well. She showed up the next day crying and begged me to tell her how to get back in his good graces – if she could maybe give him some kind of food or flowers. What could I tell her? You could throw away your dignity and pity fuck an old bald man you aren’t attracted to but I wouldn’t. When somebody tells you who they are what can you do but listen?

My own relationship status and his suspicions surrounding my supposed homosexuality became a bit more of a project for him. For the period of time that I worked there I was in an off and on situation with Robyn but she never came by the shop and he didn’t believe she existed. After his attempts to hook me up with Sonia from the restaurant down the block didn’t pan out he started hiring girls in their late teens or early twenties for the express purpose of trying to get them to sleep with me.

It only happened a couple of times but it was incredibly awkward. He was shamelessly transparent about the whole thing so I’d try to warn my new coworkers about the nature of the situation they had just found themselves in. I just remember the second girl seeming incredibly suspicious and thinking that I was making the whole thing up as a ploy to actually get into her pants. When nothing happened after a couple of days he fired her and said she smelled like marijuana.

Now that I’m typing this part up I’m getting flashbacks of Karen Centerfold in Los Angeles who also had a cartoonishly obvious habit of trying to get random girls to fuck me. I’ll have to write more about Karen somewhere else later but I most remember her yelling:

“You know what the problem with all you stuck up bitches is? You all want to fuck surfers with big dicks but you won’t do it because you’re too scared!”

Once again I wish I could somehow convey the actual voice. I don’t know what it is about me that all these characters seem to make it a personal crusade to get me laid but even my mother had a similar outlook. When I was about ten years old a family with a daughter close to my age from the commune was staying with us and all the grownups somehow thought it was a good idea to have her sleep in my bed with me.

I wasn’t old enough to get an erection or even know what one was but one of my aunts had just remarried and evidently not been very discreet because the next time I saw my cousin she showed me how to play a game called “honeymoon”. Me and the commune girl went through some of the same motions once all the grownups had gone to sleep.

After that my mom would periodically give me random updates about this girl’s life. Last I heard she became a ballet dancer. Hippy families are weird.

Back to Papa’s spot – it was during the time I worked there that I started injecting heroin and eventually cocaine but Papa took all the evidence of a drug problem and explained it away to himself as a “gay problem”. I would roll in looking haggard after a sleepless night, even taking a final shot in a Port-a-Potty a few blocks down the road, and this would be his response the moment he laid eyes on me:

“What’s wrong boy? Partying all night with the happy boys on Broadway?”

His accusation referred to the popular street in Chicago’s Boy’s Town district – coincidentally I had just moved into an apartment there. I wanted to keep my job and figured he wouldn’t take kindly to the actual causes of my current condition so I parroted sarcastic assent:

“You got me Papa, I just can’t resist those gay discos…”

It was around this time that his “private club” started to include a crew of wise guy Italian cops from the neighborhood. They’d hang around the one outside table most nights and he’d give them some food and booze they were perfectly happy to drink on duty. There was a big story in Chicago around that time about a bunch of cocaine mysteriously disappearing from a police evidence locker and for some reason it came up in conversation.

“Yeah! Wanna buy some? Ha ha ha ha!”

Typical Chicago cop humor…

I didn’t live too far away, this was in the Red House near DePaul University era, and I figured it was only a matter of time until one of them recognized me going into Cabrini Greene or something. It either didn’t happen or if they did see me they kept it to themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were into the same shit. One night Papa obliviously made the comment:

“Isn’t it great boy? All the cops in the neighborhood know your face now!”

Yeah, just wonderful…

I said before that we didn’t make any food there but around that time we were putting together cannolis. This fat cop that the other one’s called Shrek, the first movie had just come out, was always asking me for them:

“You want a cannoli huh? How about I bring you the one with a big fat red strawberry on the end? You want me to dip it in chocolate for you?”

We did in fact have cannolis with strawberries on the end that were dipped in chocolate but I was taking advantage of an opportunity to make stupid jokes about sodomizing him and getting him to perform fellatio on me. In my defense it was a reversal of the usual power dynamic where I was constantly getting harassed by different Chicago cops in my other life as an injection drug user. The other cops were happy for any opportunity to make Shrek the butt of a joke and he licked his lips and clowned it up the way submissive abused Chicago cops always seem to.

Papa was very particular about the coffee we’d be willing to make for anybody. We did straight espressos and cappuccinos or macchiatos but if anyone dared to ask for an americano he’d yell at them to “go to Sewerbucks!”. One afternoon somebody must have asked him for some kind of vanilla something because the moment I walked in he was excited for me to make a coffee menu for the window that listed “Café Milanesi Finnochio”

It basically translates to “faggot coffee of Milan”. His big plan was that if anybody else ever asked for some kind of flavored coffee beverage we were supposed to point to this item on the menu and make them order it by name. He even bought some kind of CostCo vanilla cappuccino mix to complete his little joke. It never actually happened.

I’ve covered him being all the different kind of assholes I listed earlier except for the shady businessman one. He had a refrigerator full of cans of Sprite and one day somebody looked at the bottom of a can and noticed it was expired. You’d think he would have just thrown the rest of them away because we had plenty of orange and lemon San Pellegrino but that’s not what he did.

He had me fill a sink with hot water and soak all the cans of soda in it so I could scrub away the expiration dates with steel wool. Soaking the Sprites in scalding water probably did more to mess up the flavor then the expiration part but it mostly seemed pointless because hardly anyone ever asked for it to begin with. He pointed to the printed expiration dates:

“Just for decoration anyway…”

It was his little phrase he’d use any time he thought he was being sneaky. He said the exact same thing when he had me write out a paper that said “I am responsible for paying my own tax” because the job was under the table. Maybe he’d gotten caught up in some kind of situation with tax evasion in the past but it was never an issue when I worked there – the cops were in our pocket.

The bigger thing was that he constantly and carelessly lied about the nature of the food he sold and where it had come from:

“Everything made fresh today!”

“Everything 100% fat free sugar free!”

Neither of these things were true for anything except for maybe a shot of espresso. He would get cookies delivered from some bakery that would sit in the pastry case for weeks until he’d sold them all. Frozen pasta entrees sat in freezers for months. The pizzas and focaccias were delivered on a daily basis so at least the fresh part was true for those.

We’d get diabetics who were excited about the sugar thing and I’d have to wait until he was out of earshot to tell them that of course it wasn’t true and honestly you couldn’t trust a word out of his mouth. With all of these lies it would have made perfect sense for him to be lying about the gelato being flown in from Italy but that part was actually true. I saw the weird frozen customs cases it came in.

Like I said everything with him was a flex. He liked lying about where various things around the shop had come from too.

“This was Al Capone’s Espresso Machine!”

“This was Mussolini’s bicycle!”

Really pointless little lies. He’d tell his fan club we had a hot tub on the roof and some of them seemed to believe it.

Besides the Marrochini thing I didn’t see too much of him being racist right to people’s faces but this was probably because the Black folks in the neighborhood had already had bad interactions with him and kept their distance. There is a story on Yelp! about a family realizing that the reason he wouldn’t sell them gelato was because they weren’t white. He didn’t outright turn away nonwhite customers for to go orders when I worked there – he’d just say “your department” and have me wait on them.

Honestly things weren’t too different at the furniture store. Besides Yvonne, who was Black herself, most of my coworkers there would blatantly ignore Black customers and pretend they didn’t exist. In a city like Chicago you would almost say Papa’s candid honesty was refreshing but then there was the thing he yelled at the television during a Michael Jordan interview:

“God damn black gorilla! I hate!”

I was getting sloppier from the drugs so eventually he fired me. I forget what specific thing set him off but he shook his finger at me and bellowed in rage:

“Number one you punk! Number two you Jew! Number three you gay!”

At least he got two out of three. It was fun while it lasted. I assume he’s probably dead by now.

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

berniebleak2 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I went to Detroit and blew a piston…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One for sorrow, two for mirth

Three for a death, four for a birth

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

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

Simple: it wouldn’t have been magic.

Bus Section Epilogue with Documentary Videos:

Chicago 2001 : 9/11 Part 1 “The Attack on America Tour”

berniebleak1 Comment

There have been several points in my life where I’ve met people and immediately known the moment I set eyes on them that we are going to have a major impact on each other’s lives. It’s a bit like the concept of a Karass or Granfalloon in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle – but I couldn’t say decisively which one. It has always been unequivocally mutual: me and these people might not end up wanting the exact same things at every stage of our often brief associations but we absolutely experience the same sense of gravity. It generally manifests as attraction of some nature but at its core it feels like some personification of The Universe or Fate has placed tiny statues of us on the same chessboard for some hidden purpose.

The later iterations of this phenomenon manifested in the company of specific and detailed instincts. A silent voice from somewhere deep inside me offered a general warning against allowing things to move in a romantic or sexual direction. It never really made too much of a difference as I’m not really the type to exercise caution in matters of the heart but at least I had some kind of warning that I shouldn’t expect any happy endings. This first time I was running blind and for better or worse I ended up with the only boyfriend of my life.

Jordan was soft spoken and had dark eyebrows with matching close cropped hair. There was a single mole on his face and his brown eyes looked sensitive and innocent. He was a basic type of small town indie rock boy I see all the time but I’m not sure if I did a good enough job of describing it. Think plaid flannel shirts and long silences that are made to appear thoughtful but actually represent not knowing what to say. A faint smile the moment that the warming effects of alcohol begin to take hold and smooth away some of the anxieties that keep him interacting with the world as a spectator.

I met Jordan at a house full of good looking normie skater stoner boys that went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had been working as a baker and wasn’t quite the same type as all of the other guys he’d been living with. He was a couple years younger than me but I didn’t think about that as much as I probably should have. I was young myself, only just twenty one for less than even a month. I looked across the room and our eyes met and then it was already too late to change anything.

I talked to him about my theory of “urban shamanism” – the idea that overdosing on cough medicine created the same kind of synergy with a modern city environment that ethnobotanical drugs presented to the mountains and forests of Stone Age level traditional cultures. He must have liked the way I made it sound because I ended up shoplifting a couple of boxes of Coricidin for us from the closest Walgreen’s. It would be my final baile with the blister packs – the mere sight of the tiny red pills would come to induce uncontrollable waves of nausea after this encounter had devolved into the resulting wreckage.

A DXM trip presents in stages. The first part is giddy with the general visual and auditory trappings of the more traditional psychedelics. We wandered into the simply named Occult Bookstore in Wicker Park and I scoured the shelves for a particular grimoire so obscure it probably didn’t even exist. At the Fireside Bowl I convinced Brian Peterson to let us spend a few minutes roaming around a concert I can’t even remember the genre of let alone who was playing.

We ended up back in Jordan’s basement room which was full of quilts and nice wooden furniture – it looked like the way I imagined the inside of Big Pink from the famous Bob Dylan record. The DXM trip was shifting into what I always referred to as the “featherweight ballerina” phase. Normally it made me feel light on my feet and somewhat otherworldly like I was living in an antique photograph. This particular time there were some unprecedented side effects.

The best way I know how to explain it is that the barriers that generally separate one human consciousness from another were suddenly and unceremoniously ripped away. Jordan and I seemed to be psychically connected and concepts like secrets, disagreements or even personal property had simply dissolved in the light of our intense and urgent newfound connection. As we stared into each other’s eyes I screamed out in frustration at a world of stories that had unforgivably neglected to explore the depths and contours of this new and unprecedented experience:

“I hate every movie ever made!”

When we were finally able to fall asleep we shared his bed but had to separate our gangly frames – any physical contact felt like an electrical shock. This might sound like the kind of thing we would want to explore or experiment with but we actually recoiled from it. We held hands when walking after that but such was the full extent of our carnal relationship. We never once kissed or otherwise pursued the sexual or even romantic side of things. Writing this now I realize it sounds like we were actually friends but we weren’t. We were together, we were a couple. I mean we were kids with no idea what was happening but I’ve been married for ten years now and for the short time that Jordan and I were entangled it fundamentally felt the same.

I didn’t have a cell phone back then, I had never been in the habit of listening to the radio and I didn’t turn on televisions. The next morning was September 11th, Jordan had left at the crack of dawn to make bread so I went over to Dave, Meg and Vanessa’s Ukrainian Village apartment to get a couple more hours of sleep before I had to be at my Italian Cafe job. I woke up and the place was empty so I decided to walk over to the house full of hardcore boys that had played against El Rancho in the Softball Game. I think they called it The Midtown Chess Club.

As I made my way up a side street the neighborhood was particularly animated. Everybody was sitting out on their stoops and balconies and calling back and forth about “when the plane hit the building” and if everybody saw it or not. I figured that one of the Die Hard movies or something similar was playing on a local network television station and people were just excited to get a break from the soaps and talk shows.

I walked into the house and a TV was just on and tuned into the news. Everywhere I went for the next couple of days a TV would be playing like that – just going over the same things over and over until the News Anchors started to look sleep deprived but they just kept going. I saw the smoking tower and that it was news and it was real and America was under attack. Aaron Hahn and Sean Rafferty and whoever else came back into the room and silently stood there and watched it with me.

Somebody was supposed to be going to College but they found out it was closed. There was this irrational fear that any public gathering of two or more people would be targeted in another attack. People thought this in every small town across America that day and we were in Chicago – one of the biggest cities. I figured that I wasn’t going to be going to work.

Jordan and I had talked about the fact that I had been intravenously using heroin and cocaine and had decided that I should stop for a while. I hadn’t been doing it every day or anything like that but it did seem like a good time for a break. Then September 11th happened and I wanted to do something – anything – that felt familiar and normal and that was getting high. I took West Chicago Avenue under the Metra tracks and when I passed the Aldi by Kedzie I was in the zone. The whole city had shut down but the corners were business as usual.

I figured that Jordan was back from work early and I went over to his house. I told him that I’d gotten high but it wasn’t a big deal or anything. The TV was on and his roommates were smoking weed and making really stupid jokes about how the smoking ruins of the buildings were actually giant smoke sessions. Jordan and I decided that we should get out of town for a few days and made plans to take a train to Holland, Michigan and visit his parents for a little while.

There was a noise show I wanted to see at The Fireside that night. Thirteen noise artists were touring together in an RV and trying to play back to back 5 minute sets in the shortest possible amount of time. It was called Phi Phenomena on Wheels. It was actually a great lineup – there were really cool sets from Ortho and oVo and Temple of Bon Matin. Jordan didn’t like the energy and went home early. I forget who was up first but I remember the first thing that was said into the microphone:

“This is the “Attack on America” Tour!”

In the constantly escalating transgressive world of Experimental Noise Music there’s no such thing as “too soon”.

Next Part Here:

Chicago 2001 : The Red House “Is That Bunny Naturally Purple?”

berniebleakLeave a comment

The first girl that Justin Two brought home to the basement immediately imprinted on me and started following me around like a newly hatched baby duck in a cartoon. There are a couple of things about her I feel like I will never know for certain: I’m not sure if she was actually as much of an airhead as she presented herself as or if to some extent it was an act cultivated to appeal to the male gaze. Similarly I will never know for sure if she was actually infatuated with me or had merely grasped onto me as a means of escaping Justin Two’s “sex for drugs” transactional demands.

Her name was Sabrina but she was trying to change it to “Niaomi” pronounced kind of like the cute cat sounds that human characters make in anime. She wanted to move away from the “teenage witch” associations of her birth name because, in her own words, “they get burned” and her cultural background seemed to incorporate a heavy disdain for anything occult:

“My whole family hates ghosts! They think they’re devils!”

There was a very tragic pet bunny living at the Red House called Bun-Bun, I think Kiki might have brought it home. Justin Two used to put Bun-Bun inside of a clear acrylic bread box and hotbox it with crack smoke. I feel guilty in retrospect that I didn’t stop him but it somehow never gave the thing a heart attack. Bun-Bun also ended up getting fed these bright red processed hot dogs that somebody had brought home a giant bag of. After that everybody who slept on mattresses directly on the floor would sometimes wake up to the rabbit gnawing on their fingers.

The poor thing was obviously starving and looking for the closest thing it could find to the meat it had become accustomed to. Eventually Bun-Bun developed one of the sizable tumors that white laboratory bred animals such as mice and bunnies seem to be especially susceptible to due to a general lack of biological diversity. I’d like to think that Bun-Bun was humanely euthanized but I actually don’t know – I just remember the tumor getting bigger and bigger then one day it wasn’t around any more.

Anyway Bun-Bun was dyed purple on the day that Niaomi followed me out of the basement and saw it scurry across the floor.

“Is that bunny naturally purple? Does that mean that one of it’s parents was purple?”

I don’t think I actually made the obvious joke about Bun-Bun having a red father and blue mother, I don’t think I said much of anything throughout the entire encounter. That was how I constantly ended up in those kinds of situations, I never told anybody no. If someone decided to attach themselves to me and start following me around I always just let it happen. It wasn’t the best habit – it would lead to me having sex with people I would have preferred not having sex with and showing up at shows and parties with extremely sketchy random people from the street in tow.

Eventually I learned the very basic skill of establishing minimal boundaries with strangers and casual acquaintances but it took me a very long time – it wasn’t until after I was thirty years old.

On this particular day I needed to walk to the nearby DePaul University Computer Lab to check my e-mail and use the internet. Nobody at the Red House had a computer so this was one of our habitual excursions. The other one was going toward North Avenue to steal books from a Crown Books that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual disbelief that it hadn’t gone out of business yet. We would continue on to Wicker Park to sell the stolen books in the different used book stores then on to the West Side to buy drugs.

On one of the quiet tree lined streets I found an abandoned aluminum briefcase that had evidently belonged to some kind of doctor. The following exchange took place when I picked it up off the ground and opened it:

“Is that your briefcase?”

“It is now.”

“Are those your business cards?”

“They are now.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure. Here.”

Niaomi seemed to be glowing with excitement as I handed her the card as if it represented some token of my affection in an alternate universe where it could actually be used to contact me.

“I’ll call you! You’re MY doctor!”

I didn’t have a phone. She knew where I lived. Back in the basement Justin Two had accepted the impossibility of creating any sense of sexual obligation in Niaomi and was smoking crack with her in resignation. She leaned over and shotgunned the hits into my mouth as a pretense for a kiss. I lay on the living room couch reading a Peter Sotos book as she snuggled against me in perfect contentment.

She disappeared back into her usual life and I never saw her again.

It seemed impossible that somebody who was more or less successfully navigating adult life could exist in such a state of naïveté without even an elementary understanding of cause-and-effect or the other laws governing the universe but there it was. In the sixteen or so hours we spent together she never once broke character or allowed the mask to slip. I’ve met other people with the “ditzy hot girl” persona in the intervening years but never again to such an exaggerated degree.

Our landlord lived next door to us and had introduced himself by showing up on the porch drunk and in a dress and pelvic thrusting as he delivered what we obviously took as a challenge:

“Nobody parties harder than I do!”

We called him Party Sean but he would soon learn that we actually did party alarmingly harder than he did. He could often be heard stumbling through the alley and talking about how he wasn’t usually so drunk so early in the morning. He had gotten some kind of a sweetheart deal on the house because the elderly couple that raised racing pigeons didn’t want to sell to anybody they didn’t know and apparently didn’t have kids to leave the house to. We represented an opportunity to start collecting rent without undertaking any renovations or improvements but he soon regretted it.

Justin Two had been driving through alleys at night to collect discarded wooden pallets in one of his many quick cash schemes. The pallet recycling center was closed or he ended up with a bunch that were the wrong size but for whatever reason he ended up just stacking them up around the back door of the house. I knew that change was in the air when I started to hear Party Sean and his lawyer discussing fire and liability in regards to the pallets. He had also kind of figured out that we were all on hard drugs and probably concluded that it was only a matter of time before we created major damages, a crime scene or both if he didn’t get rid of us. He vocally bemoaned his earlier decision:

“I could have rented this place to a nice Mexican family!”

Midway through the eviction process I ended up taking acid for what was the first time in my life. I got caught in some paranoid thought loops and convinced myself that I had been roaming inside the house completely insane for months but none of my roommates had wanted to contact my family or the authorities about it. I walked up and down the rear stairs until time broke and I saw infinite copies of myself frozen into a kind of figure eight in every possible position ascending and descending the stairs and pulsing with all of the colors of the visible light spectrum.

I tried to lay on my mattress and force myself to sleep but the strings on my electric bass (I’d left it on the bed) felt like writhing snakes that were shocking me with electricity. I ripped all of my clothes off but then immediately felt like I had to get out of the house so I pulled on the first thing I could find. This ended up being a pair of skin tight black jeans that were airbrushed with graffiti style bubble letters from a San Diego Thrift Store. They said “BILLY RAY THE BANDIT” with a large microphone by the crotch and an image of Bart Simpson as a stereotypical pimp.

I wandered into Party Sean’s house where, true to nature, he was having a crazy party. He made a flourish to present me to his guests, a mostly younger Hispanic crowd:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Jim Morrison!”

I could hear people joking about how I smelled like crack (this wouldn’t have been true on this particular day) but I was too out of my mind to be bothered by it. Everybody was smoking weed out of an old school vaporizer where it sat on a tiny sculpture of a skull in a jester hat inside a glass bubble. They tried to show me how to smoke it but I couldn’t really figure out the plastic tubes and how you were supposed to put your finger over a tiny hole. There were platters of cocaine all over the place too but I wasn’t really interested.

Party Sean said he felt bad about having to kick us all out and I told him not to worry about it. I said we were used to it. Eventually the sun came up and I realized it hadn’t actually been months and went home. I wasn’t “out of my mind” tripping anymore but I was still tripping and I couldn’t sleep. I shot a bag of heroin but it didn’t seem to do anything so I immediately shot another one. I woke up soaking wet having evidently just overdosed on heroin while still tripping on acid and then gotten narcanned.

Justin Two took me to a small neighborhood Carnival in Humboldt Park. I ate a coconut paleta and we rode the Ferris Wheel. We spent about ten minutes watching a snail climbing up and eating a yellow dandelion flower. Eventually I did go to sleep and woke up not on acid anymore but in another way it really does last the rest of your life like people say to fuck with you the first time you ever take it.

Everybody at the Red House spent all of their money on drugs and we all ate really badly. Once me and Matt found a dried out piece of cheese under the couch and we boiled it until it was soft then made instant mashed potatoes by using the water we had boiled it in as milk and the chunk of cheese as butter. Me and John found free passes to an early screening of A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger. The movie theater exit passed through a kind of dry storage for it’s Concessions Stand and we stole two gigantic silver bags of nacho cheese that the house pretty much lived on. We ended up using that stuff to make instant mashed potatoes a lot, we kept it in the cabinet because it didn’t have to be refrigerated.

I can’t remember if Party Sean ever went through any of the official eviction paperwork. The pressure built up until he kicked in the front door and turned off the house circuit breaker and yelled that he would kill us if we didn’t leave. Nick and Janice had found an apartment just on the other side of the underpass that marked the beginning of the West Side open air drug markets on Chicago Avenue. We started getting all of our things together to move into this new apartment. A couple of Party Sean’s Goomba friends harassed us and made vague threats about how we and our parents would be “sleeping with the fishes” as we loaded everything into a car. I don’t think any of them were actually Italian.

I do remember one of my housemates rolling their eyes and asking one of our self styled intimidators:

“How’s that Bud Light treating you?”

Party Sean’s lawyer came to all of our jobs to drop off subpoenas. I got mine while I was working at the Italian cafe on Wrightwood. Matt and Joe had broken back into the house to see if we had accidentally left anything important behind and found a Manila envelope full of photos of the house before the mess and superficial damage we had caused got repaired marked “EVIDENCE”. They took it with them.

On the designated day we all showed up in court. Kiki had forgotten she was carrying this cool skull shaped knife so security ended up keeping it. The judge told us all that it wasn’t legal for his lawyer to have served us all at our places of employment. Party Sean and his lawyer tried to talk about damages to the house but the judge said that the hearing was only concerned with whether or not we had surrendered the premises. Somebody handed over the last copy of a key. Janice raised her hand:

“Your Honor, I don’t know if this means anything but I have a photo of our landlord wearing a dress.”

At the time I didn’t understand why she said that but I now understand how brilliant it was. Party Sean had presented himself as a fellow resident of a lawless world of hedonistic opulence then turned around and attempted to weaponize his asymmetric power in the waking world of respectability. He didn’t show up at our front door in a dress as an expression of fluid gender identity but to signify that he was a “wacky” drunk.

The judge had just told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on us legally and Janice took the moment to remind him who he was.

I don’t know what happened with the house next but if he didn’t die young he probably made a decent stack of cash on it. I’m trying to remember his face – he was probably just hitting forty and looked a bit like a red haired Robin Williams.

I’ve met a great number of people who partied harder than he did but he did party harder (in the drugs and alcohol sense) than the only other person I’ve known with party in their nickname. Not in the knowing everybody sense though because almost nobody knows Party Sean but there’s a good chance whoever’s reading this knows who the other person I’m talking about is.

It’s Party Steve.

http://underground-America.org