Tag: Eminem

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

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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 : “Lust for Life”

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I have this theory about the 1990’s. The short version is that the thing that made it such a magical time to be young in America was the convenient temporal bookending of two major geopolitical events: The Fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and The September 11th Terrorist Attacks in 2001. You’ve got The Cold War on one side, The War on Terror on the other and a decade and change in between when it didn’t feel like we were locked into an ideological struggle for existence with a whole other side of the planet.

Maybe it’s bullshit. Everybody idealizes the time period of their own youth and you could probably find blips on the timeline enclosing every decade in history to ascribe the same significance to. The human mind loves looking for patterns – and in many cases inventing them to stave off the intellectual phobia of randomness and chaos.

Everything looks like a face.

Every number means something.

Even without a crystal ball to tell me what was around the corner it was hard not to feel like the sand was running out in at least some kind of hourglass. It wasn’t even a year since we all started “experimenting” with heroin and we’d burned our way through two housing situations most would consider dodgy to begin with.

A former grocery store with barely functioning heat and a couple pipes in the basement’s ceiling instead of a shower.

An ancient house that needed the old glass fuses every time we overloaded a circuit and where some of us slept in a former pigeon coop.

The landlord to that last place was a constantly partying alcoholic cokehead and he still took us to court to make sure he was getting rid of us.

All of us together were getting to be too much for any sane person to rent to so we started spreading ourselves out. Nick and Janice got an apartment right on the edge of the West Side, then known as the largest open air heroin market in the world. They held on to Sebastian – the cat we’d all been living with since the El Rancho days. Sebastian had belonged to the housemate everybody called Crazy Danny and had supposedly been telling him to cut himself through psychic communication.

I don’t know what became of Crazy Danny but at some point he stopped living with us and Sebastian didn’t.

Dave and Meg and Vanessa had one over to the Ukrainian Village side of what was almost the same neighborhood. I had been drifting back and forth without worrying too much about having a room anymore. Janice was at the stage where she was transferring her growing frustration with Nick’s constant appetites for crack and heroin to whoever he was doing it with so I started spending most of my time at the other spot.

I stayed in Dave’s room, the little dude, and for a little while we seemed to be in sync about how much drugs we wanted to do and when. He went to school, I had a job and neither of us had anything close to a full time habit. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life became our go-to soundtrack and anthem for both possible decisions: the resolve to take a night off by either drinking or staying completely sober? Lust for Life. Running in from the block with tiny bags or folded up foil and grabbing our spoons and needles? Same record, same side, same song:

“Here comes Johnny Yen again…”

Pretty much everybody used the same drugs and nobody seemed too worried about it. I don’t remember any of us getting sick or even using the word addict. The closest would have been this kid Paul who used to rap under the name MC Think. I’d heard that one of his schticks had been rapping through a harmonica but he wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore. Picture an Eminem that never made it out of the crackhead phase.

Anyway Paul didn’t live with us – he just came around from time to time.

The last time I saw him he showed up at the Ukrainian Village apartment with an old green Schwinn cruiser he’d obviously stolen. He asked me to help him sell it – either because he’d worn out his welcome at all of the bike shops or just because I looked like less of a junkie. We went to a spot in Wicker Park and one of the employees who clearly knew what was going on gave me forty bucks for it.

When we were biking back to the West Side Paul suggested that he go to the spot by himself so it would be less “sketchy”. He showed back up an hour or two later – high out of his mind with a bullshit story:

“I got jacked man! They jumped me and took all the money…”

I’m sure this seems obvious to most readers and totally my fault for “trusting a junkie” but the thing was we all did heroin and hadn’t been acting like that. At El Rancho and the Red House if people figured out that you were going to cop nearly everyone in the house would give you ten or twenty dollars and when you got home you gave everyone what they’d paid for and ordered. We treated it the exact same way as if someone was walking to a corner store.

One time I did keep John’s money instead of giving him his drugs but this was because he owed me a couple hundred dollars from when I covered his rent once and at that point he was clearly never paying me back. He still was pretty furious about it. While the concept of “blue balls” is manipulative misogynist bullshit “blue brains” is definitely a real thing: the feeling when you’re expecting to get high only to have it not work out at the last moment.

Of course Paul wasn’t really one of us and had probably only come around to rip somebody off in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the same mistake with him again but it was a moot point as he didn’t come around after that anyway. I hope he’s still alive.

At some point Nick’s mom rented an apartment for him in Boy’s Town. She either didn’t know about his relationship with Janice or wouldn’t have approved of him living so close to the drug neighborhoods but Nick didn’t want her finding out he didn’t live there. He rented it out to these hacker/raver kids but they had to get out of town over a kidnapping charge.

I think some kid ripped them off on a big MDMA deal and they had been trying to get their money back but I never heard a ton of details. I worked in Lincoln Park so I figured I might as well get an actual place and offered to move in. I paid some monthly amount directly to Nick and was supposed to avoid interacting with the building manager as he was in contact with Nick’s mom.

The very first night I moved in I had to go to work in the morning and realized I had no idea what time it was when I plugged in my alarm clock radio. I didn’t have a cell phone or wear a watch and I hadn’t even thought about it because I’d never lived alone. I searched for different radio stations and waited for one to announce the time but it just didn’t happen.

I didn’t really know the neighborhood so I walked down Broadway hoping I might run into somebody. It must have been fairly late because the street was deserted. I started looking into the windows off all the closed businesses hoping to catch sight of a clock. I got excited when I recognized an actual clock shop from across the street and rushed over.

All the different clocks were set to different times and I had no way of knowing which, if any of them, might be accurate.

I don’t know if my anxiety about the time played a role in this but I ended up waking up to realizing I’d pissed on myself. You might have read in the Fort Thunder pieces that I had issues with bed wetting that lasted into my early twenties but became increasingly sporadic toward the end. It probably fizzled out completely when I was twenty three but around the time of this story it was about once a year.

The incident in that story was mid-2000 so this 2001 incident was most likely the next time.

I hadn’t moved my clothes in with me yet and I had fallen asleep wearing my only pair of black slacks for my cafe job. After a quick shower I searched around the apartment to see if the previous tenants had left any clothing behind. I did actually find a pair of denim JNCOs but while the waist was a decent fit the length was at least a foot and a half too short for me.

I’m 6’4”.

I’m sure I looked pretty entertaining biking out in a dress shirt with wildly flared highwaters. I went to a Unique Thrift Store that wasn’t too far out of the way and bought an extra pair of work pants. Thankfully it was next to a KFC that let me change in the bathroom and I didn’t have to walk into work like this.

I left the undersized rave pants in the trash can.

Another interesting thing I noticed when first moving to the area was this mural on the side of a public school:

“STEP ON DRUGS LIKE YOU STEP ON BUGS!”

I wondered if the schools administrators realized that they were basically instructing kids to add less expensive substances to drugs for the purpose of raising profit.

My final night in the apartment started with a big tip. Papa was in the mood to show off and we cooked one of his fans a big pasta meal with tons of wine and after dinner liqueurs. This was an isolated occurrence – Trattoria Monterotondo was usually just a coffee bar and takeout spot. When the customer tried to pay Papa told him to give me a hundred dollar tip instead.

With all that cash burning a hole in my pocket it was an almost certainty that I’d be getting high but I didn’t feel like biking all the way to the West Side and I’d never gone into Cabrini Greene alone. I ran into a very sweet young prostitute walking down North Avenue dressed in a heart motif bikini with a full on cape and asked her if she could help me score drugs without having to brave the towers. She explained that those were the only places to score and she was no more excited about the risk of stepping into one than I was so I thanked her and kept walking.

I had one of the paper schedules for the needle exchange outreach van and I saw it went to a nearby neighborhood called Uptown so I figured it must be a drug saturated area. I asked a few likely looking characters until I found an older guy who was willing to bring me with him to the spot. I might have seemed overly trusting in the earlier paragraphs of this piece but that didn’t extend to people I’d never met before. He didn’t know how to get heroin so I got a bunch of crack with the intention of shooting it up back at the apartment.

I needed to break him off some anyway so we found a secluded alley and took a couple of giant blasts from his pipe. The drug made us especially gregarious or as my new friend more eloquently stated:

“Man, I’m geekin’ like a Puerto Rican!”

Somehow the topic of conversation found it’s way to our respective relationships with our fathers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were complicated by hard drug use in each of our cases. My sister had taken it upon herself to inform my parents when she heard I’d been using heroin and they were pretty worried considering they hadn’t seen me since getting this piece of news.

I was especially offended because she had spent her early teenage years heavily using methamphetamine but I’d never ratted her out. Most people believe in certain hard drug hierarchies so while it was disappointing it wasn’t especially surprising.

As crack is cocaine that has been combined with baking soda to raise the temperature at which it vaporizes you need to dissolve it in an acid if you want to inject it. I always used lemon juice and I had one of those squeezy plastic lemons back at the apartment. The rush is identical to what you’d get if you started with powder but the taste of lemon hits your throat through your bloodstream for a little tropical twist.

I had my bass, four track and some effect pedals so I stayed up late recording what I thought was well crafted psychedelic metal made up of layered bass tracks. When I finally got a chance to listen back to it sober it sounded like an uninspired morass but that night all the bits seemed to perfectly sync together. I wanted to put it onto a project I’d been working on called “Cocaine: the mix tape”.

The highlight was an extremely convoluted mix of a song from the Enemymine record. godheadSilo was one of my favorite groups so I desperately wanted to see Mike Kunka’s next project when they came to The Casbah. I’d been going to a lot of over 21 shows in Chicago with borrowed IDs but back in my home town of San Diego every bouncer knew exactly who I was and how old I actually was.

It didn’t help that me and Francois had brought along Andy Robillard, one of the main bouncers, the last time we’d driven to Chicago. I had to wait out by the exit while Francois went inside and recorded the set for me on my Fisher Price tape recorder. At least the sound carried through the wall pretty well being all bass – the thing that really stuck with me was when they hit the first booming note one of the other bouncers ran outside clutching his stomach.

At least I got to meet and talk to the band because before the show they were hanging out a block away watching planes land like the scene in Wayne’s World. San Diego, unlike most cities, stuck it’s airport right next to downtown and The Casbah is on the edge closest to it. Mike gave me an old godheadSilo shirt they’d never been able to sell because of how big it was – the design with a pink bunny.

The live recording came out lo-fi but in the best possible way: a throbbing buzz where you can just make out the riffs and rhythms if you know the songs. The one that was most distinguishable was Coccoon Clo3, if you know the song it’s a very catchy riff, so for the mix tape I painstakingly combined it with the studio version from their debut album the ice in me. Thankfully I had the album on vinyl instead of a CD so I spent forever syncing things up so the live and clean versions dovetailed in and out of each other sometimes even fluctuating with a sustained note.

Appropriately enough “Cocaine: the mix tape” was never finished as my buzz ran out halfway through the first side. Sadly I don’t have a copy of it or the Enemymine recording or any objects whatsoever from this time in my life. Frequently moving had already whittled down my possessions but I went through a complete reset when an RV got towed in San Leandro.

After the night of my own bass recording I had to rush out the next morning to return to work and left the apartment in pretty bad shape. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t misplace my key the next day and because of the odd arrangement the only way to get another one would have been for Nick to be the one to request it. I asked him to but he dragged his ass and a little over a week later the building manager let himself in because a package for Nick had been sitting in the hallway.

When he saw needles all over the place he called Nick’s mom and Nick was in deep shit. She didn’t know about his drug use yet and he was able to (truthfully) tell her that they weren’t his but that meant revealing that he didn’t live there and rented it to other people. Nick was pretty pissed at me over the whole thing but I was already irritated with him that he hadn’t gotten me back into the place I’d payed him for when a single phone call and bus trip could have solved both our problems.

At least I got a chance to go get my stuff.

Anyway it was all feeling a bit unsustainable. I wasn’t anything close to full on strung out but things were definitely chaotic. My whole social group needed a bit of space from each other to figure shit out. Some people left drugs behind and others went deeper into addiction. Nick and Janice broke up not long afterward.

Of course I had no idea that 9/11 and my own personal tragedies accompanying it were looming on the horizon but it was obviously some kind of twilight. I wasn’t thinking about how underground music might be about to change or how the internet would fundamentally alter the face of it but these things are always clearer looking backwards. You can’t define an era until it’s already over.

In the moment I was most aware of a growing hunger for something different.

I’ve got a lust for life…

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Nine : “If you come to my business don’t mention my name”

berniebleak4 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Part 8

There are a ton of photos from The Miss Rockaway Armada. If anybody wants to see more of them and get a better idea of how all the rafts and people looked on a day to day basis all you have to do is go over to the Flickr group and there’s at least ten pages of them.to almost certainly outlast your appetite. It’s really nice that it’s still all there – for some reason the Flickr group for on the experimental opera that Lisers organized in Berlin a couple of years later seems to have disappeared.

What this means for me though is that I have a near endless amount of choices when it comes time to pick one to stick on top of a chapter and they don’t always align with the moments I found important or memorable. My time on the rafts began when I accompanied my friend Melanie or Double or Sphere from the Blog Cabin in Chicago to the Marina they were docked at in Alton, Illinois.

She was going down to start living on them and I was only tagging along to check them out and visit. Things worked out the other way around – she was only down there for a brief visit and I stuck it out on the rafts longer than almost anyone. When I finally went back to Chicago in November of 2007 only four other people stayed behind on The Garden of Bling: Alexis, Harrison, Jacki and Brodie.

The Sweeps might have still been working on their raft on the other side of the river but most likely they had already abandoned it and moved on. Everybody’s goal was to float into New Orleans in time for Halloween. When Halloween hit Saint Louis the thing in town to do was a reggae themed roller skating party in a remote part of the city. It was enough of an outskirt that me and Eric from CAMP and Lester and a couple other people got assaulted by a carload of rednecks for being and/or looking gay.

I don’t remember seeing any of The Sweeps at the roller rink so they probably just went down to New Orleans by other means when it became clear their raft would never make it. Or I could be wrong and they were still in town. It’s entirely possible.

Anyway Alton, Illinois wasn’t actually the first time I ever set foot on the rafts. The Miss Rockaway Armada first set out from Minneapolis some time in the Summer of 2006 but rather than trying to overwinter on the water they found a bar in Andalusia, Illinois called Ducky’s Lagoon where they were able to dry dock everything and work on renovations.

I did actually get a chance to visit in March or April during the Ducky’s Lagoon phase. These events would have been right around the time of the piece I called “We can’t play. Somebody stepped on our flan.” when I was traveling with the girl I refer to as Rocky. We would have just returned to Chicago from our hitchhiking trip to Columbus, Ohio and then decided to go out to see the rafts on her suggestion.

The best way to start hitchhiking out of Chicago is to take a bus down to a truck stop called The South Holland Oasis that sits directly on the Interstate 80. The trip to Columbus had worked out pretty quickly but trying to get West was not working out as well. Now that I think about my attempt to hitch South in Illinois a few years later was even more miserable – Chicago is probably a city that it’s just easier to hitchhike North or East out of.

We had gotten out of the city but just barely and then spent an entire day standing around the side of the 80 with nobody seeming to give us a second glance. It was brutally hot and we were probably sleep deprived because we decided to take a nap underneath a bit of shade in a ditch. When we stepped back onto the shoulder Rocky suggested that I lift her onto my actual shoulders to stand out more and catch driver’s attention.

I was down to try out but I figured we might as well paint our faces with the brightly colored zinc sunblock we had found at the two story Salvation Army on Grand Avenue. It was a trend from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that I’ve been surprised hasn’t made a comeback with all the other big fashion nostalgia from those decades – an opaque cream that comes in white and neon colors like blue and pink. The trend was to put it on your nose or in stripes under your eyes.

It’s probably supposed to offer extra protection to more sensitive skin on those parts of your face.

Rocky never ended up climbing on my shoulders because the moment after we painted colorful designs on our faces a van pulled off to offer us a ride. To everyone’s surprise it was a band that had recently come through Chicago and played at the Blog Cabin: The Minneapolis folk / Gothic Americana group Dark Dark Dark.

If that wasn’t enough of a coincidence they were also heading to the exact same place we were – going to visit the rafts at Ducky’s Lagoon. When we told her our destination Nona from the band said “Get out!” but in a tone of voice that made it clear she was only expressing incredulity at the serendipity of it all and actually meant “get into this van and we will take you directly there with us”.

The sunblock was in brand new sealed packages and we had bought all they had because it was cheap. We decided to leave it all with the rafts because the people on them would be living outside directly on the water and therefore get the most practical use out of it. If you look through the photos there’s a ton that show people wearing it – mostly in an eye makeup style similar to the picture from the El Rancho codeine party.

I thought about using one of the many photos of people on the rafts wearing this neon zinc sunblock as the featured photo for this piece but ultimately decided not to. I suppose I could easily embed one of those photos here. I was about to write a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do that but now I’ve changed my mind again so here’s one of Tracy and A’yen:

I thought that I wasn’t doing very much of making a point of putting up pictures of the people who are in the stories so the one at the top is Rocket and Brandy Gump from The Sweeps. Rocket is on the left and Brandy is on the right. They both liked to play accordion.

Here’s a story about Brandy Gump from before I came to the rafts: the closest town to the beach where The Garden of Bling got stuck is Brooklyn, Illinois. Venice is pretty run down and besides liquor stores and the kind of Chinese Restaurants that are behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass the only thing there is strip clubs. One of them had a creepy day care right in it’s parking lot called Leonard Bo Peep’s.

I think that’s the one from this story – I forget what the actual club is called. I never actually went inside any of them. The story was that before the rafts actually made it down to Saint Louis a big group of people made a special trip to this club to participate in amateur night. Brandy performed to Toxic by Britney Spears and had put on a comic amount of layers of clothing and underwear that she frantically pulled off in a way that was supposed to be confusing to the regulars and still resulted in her having more things on underneath.

The next week she went back by herself and won the first place prize. Presumably she went with a more traditional performance this time around but as nobody else from the rafts was with her only Brandy would know for sure.

Brooklyn and the rest of East Saint Louis have a pretty rough reputation. When I was an extra on an episode of The Real Househusbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly was in the same scene as me and the script included a joke that implied he was from East Saint Louis. He demanded they change the joke and wanted everyone to know that while his music did first find success in East Saint Louis strip clubs he was from regular Saint Louis.

Around the time that Tim from Cementland started hanging out with The Sweeps he had driven everyone to a grocery store where Corey Vinegar got caught shoplifting cheese but Tim ended up getting arrested because he had warrants. The warrants were very much in line with Tim’s personality as a stereotypical character from an early Eminem video when he first started hanging out with us.

To fill out the cliche he had a Pit Bull that had just given birth to a litter of puppies in his house that he needed us to go take care of until he was released because nobody had money for bail. The dogs were all living on a bare cement floor and had, predictably, made a mess. I was with The Sweeps that night because there was a little bit of a flirtation going on between me and Brandy at the time.

It would have put me in a bit of an awkward position if it went anywhere as the two raft crews were essentially rivals but it didn’t go anywhere and things started up between Tim and Brandy not long after he was released. I was reluctant to even include the detail at all but I figured it was important because even just having a little fledgling romance with someone for a single day will alter the way you view and relate to that person from that point on,

There’s a little bit of softness that never goes away and I figured it would be better to just explain it instead of pretending like it didn’t exist. Besides that I got along well with all The Sweeps through every stage of the rivalry more or less.

Tim didn’t have so much as a mop in his house so I made an improvised one by tying a wash close to a hoe so I could clean up the copious amounts of puppy shit. Cementland was no longer a functioning cement factory but Tim must have done some kind of cement related work before starting there because besides his cement floor all the tools in his house were cement style tools. I only mention this because the hoe I used was the kind used to smooth out the surface of freshly poured cement if that helps anybody get a clearer mental picture of it.

I remember hearing later that he’d given all the puppies up for adoption but had the mother put to sleep as she was dog aggressive and human aggressive and would be nearly impossible to get adopted. Josie was particularly upset about this when he told everybody what had happened. I don’t doubt anything he said but even entering it’s home as a stranger when it had a litter of puppies I don’t remember the mother dog behaving especially aggressively.

I realize that these details will trigger intense emotions and reactions for some people but I’m only including them to help readers get a sense of who all these characters are – Josie in this particular instance.

Cementland is on the edge of a North Saint Louis neighborhood called Jennings. I’ve written somewhere else about the liquor store there that also sold hookahs, clothing and used cell phones that were probably stolen as they always still had the previous owner’s photos and contacts left in them. The same parking lot had a laundromat, tiny grocery store and fried fish place so it was a popular destination for everyone on the rafts.

I discovered that the fish spot sold an absurdly cheap meal made from these fried fish called bullheads – as crazy as it sounds I think it only cost three or four dollars in 2007 for two fish, a side and the piece of white bread that I’ll never understand why these places even include. One of the times that Rocky was visiting the Middle Eastern owner struck up a conversation with me and when the rafts came up he expressed interest in coming to see them.

Most people who heard about the rafts wanted to come see them in person so there was nothing especially surprising about that. Meeting people that lived on little floating shanties made out of scrap lumber is a new and unique experience for most people. He asked if he should bring anything to drink and I said he could if he wanted but it didn’t really matter.

He showed up with a twelve pack and immediately mentioned that he didn’t drink alcohol. I thanked him and passed a few beers around to whoever was hanging out. We probably had a small fire going just under the walkway that led to the pylon that had been used to load cement onto barges when Cementland was still a functional factory. That was the usual evening activity but everyone could have been just hanging out on the engine raft as well.

He hadn’t been there long when he got up and abruptly left. My phone rang in basically the exact amount of time it would have taken him to walk back to his car. Through his accent I was getting hints of what sounded like sarcasm and a touch of accusation:

“Hi Ossian! You drink all the beer already?”

I said we hadn’t as it had only been two minutes since he’d walked away. His tone shifted from fake saccharine friendliness to overt irritation:

“Do me a favor, if you come to my business don’t mention my name! I don’t want my workers thinking anything!”

I have no idea what that dude’s deal was. Obviously it had something to do with sex. Muslims often view Westerners, especially people in the kind of subculture the rafts were a part of, as especially promiscuous and sexually available. When he talked to me and Rocky at the restaurant it was clear we were a couple. I don’t know if he was expecting to have sex with her or with me or with both of us. Maybe me as the Park closest to the rafts was a well known male on male cruising spot.

I mean there was no possible chance that anybody would have had sex with him under any circumstances – I just thought it was odd how angry he suddenly got without doing anything to even try to make that sort of situation happen. I guess I was supposed to offer the moment I saw he’d brought us a little bit of beer or something. I went back to the restaurant a lot because it was the only cheap food in that particular neighborhood but I never saw him again.

I don’t think I ever knew his name to begin with. Weird dude.

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