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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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 