Tag: Halloween

Louisville, Kentucky 2008 : “Why do they look like Jimi Hendwicks?”

berniebleak2 Comments

I was going to try to do a thing for my hundredth entry where I would ask a friend to write up their own recollections of something we had both experienced and then post the two stories together – essentially double blind. I thought it would be interesting to compare the two accounts and see what things we remembered differently and what details we agreed on. I didn’t end up finding anybody that wanted to collaborate in that way and I don’t even remember what the hundredth piece ended up being about.

This isn’t that.

A few months ago my friend Katrina wanted to get in touch to see what I remembered about a hitchhiking trip we had taken from New Orleans to Chicago in 2008. She didn’t even know that I was in the middle of an autobiographical writing project but she was working on a memoir of her own and was hoping I could jog her memory on some of the details. We talked on the phone for almost an hour. Mostly I was reminding her about different rides but there were also a few steps I had totally forgotten until she reminded me.

Katrina just sent me the draft of her memoir so far and I’ve spent the last couple of days reading it. Despite the similarities in our two projects they are really quite different from each other. Katrina is writing her manuscript as an offline document and will try to find a publisher when she is finished. Hers is structured, and intended to be read, in straight chronological order. Of course I am also hoping to end up with a published book but I write the pieces so they can be read in almost any order and put them online where they can be read by anyone the moment each piece is finished.

I’m not sure if either of our approaches will be more effective, hers is certainly more traditional, but I hope that we both are successful in finding publishers. I wanted to start on this piece a couple of nights ago but found Katrina’s draft of her manuscript impossible to put down once I started reading it. Despite some overlap in nomadic lifestyle we’ve led very different lives. I used to see Katrina around shows in Chicago but she hardly mentions going to any and never refers to bands or artists by name.

I like how something that was so important to me is hardly worth a mention to her. I used to travel halfway across the country just to see some bands play but in her stories Katrina always travels to see friends or often for its own sake.

Anyway I decided to write my own account of our shared journey. I was always going to cover this trip sooner or later so right after reading her account is as good of a time as any. The story starts in New Orleans on the Halloween of 2008. I’ve covered it a little bit in a 2010 New York piece called Play Something Slow and Sexy and will most likely describe even more details about this Halloween in some future piece but for now I’ll add a single anecdote.

Lester was living in St. Louis when The Rockaway passed through town and spent a lot of time around the rafts. Lester is mixed race and has worn his hair in dreadlocks for as long as I’ve known him. Tall and thin of build, he is generally in good shape from his interests in circus performance and acrobatics. Around The Rockaway he was notorious for his prowess in Sleep-Fu – if you shared cramped sleeping quarters with him his arms and legs would begin striking out seemingly of their own volition the moment he lost consciousness.

By 2008 he had made the move down to New Orleans and for that year’s Halloween he went as “the wild man of Borneo”. The name has been used by wrestlers and sideshow performers but its earliest use came from European explorers giving fanciful descriptions of the orangutan before it was known to science. I’m pretty sure those descriptions were the inspiration for Lester’s costume – he painted his body and tied copious amounts of brown and orange synthetic braiding hair around his knees and elbows.

The big party toward the end of the night drifted over to a dive bar at the edge of the French Quarter called The John. Lester had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep in a seated position just outside the entrance. Tony Bones was playing an “Emilio Estevez” pun game with another friend that followed this basic format:

“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s really jacked from lifting?”

“Emilio Chest-evez!”

“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s in church?”

“Emilio Blessed-evez!”

The two of them had been going back and forth like this for most of the night. Generally the prompts were easy enough to guess but Tony Bones came up with one that stumped his opponent:

“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s passed out on the street?”

When the other guy couldn’t figure it out Tony gestured broadly at our unconscious friend:

“EMILIO LESTER-VEZ!”

Now that I’ve typed it out it doesn’t seem as funny as I remembered it. So much of the buildup was listening to these two guys make the same sort of weak joke for hours and then finally come up with one that was unexpected and relevant to the current situation. Somebody wearing a big cardboard giraffe head was concerned for Lester but we made sure that he got home all right.

On to the hitchhiking trip. I was relatively inexperienced with long distance hitchhiking. My first time had been in 2007 when I accompanied my former fiancée I call Rocky to her home town of Columbus, Ohio. She showed me the ropes with going to truck stops and asking friendly truckers to ask around on the CB radio if they weren’t going in your direction. Over the next year we hitched together a few more times and I made a handful of other trips with friends from the rafts.

The way Katrina remembers it I brought along Snake but I could have sworn that her and Snake were already going together when I decided to join them. Sometimes I change people’s name in these stories to protect their identities but Snake is just a nickname I gave Natalee as a shortened form of “Nattlesnake”. Anyway the three of us already all knew each other from Chicago and were all headed there at the same time so it made sense to try to make the trip together.

I liked to start a trip by going to a truck stop on the outer edge of whatever city I was trying to leave. The Mardi Gras Truck Stop on Elysian Fields isn’t really that – it’s still within the limits of the city proper and is little more than a gas station with diesel on every pump and a lot of vertical clearance. There weren’t even any trucks parked there for overnight breaks so we started off standing on the on-ramp across the street with a sign.

We were out there for a long time. I have a memory of seeing stripped down floats being driven back to whatever lot they are stored in outside of parade season but this sounds more like something you’d see right after Mardi Gras than right after Halloween so I could be mixing up memories. I know that we were on the verge of just giving up and trying to find a bus or something to take us further out of town when we got our first ride.

The young Black college student who picked us up wasn’t going very far out of town. He basically brought us to the other side of Lake Ponchartrain across the long narrow expressway that sits on the water. When he dropped us off it was practically sunset and it’s pointless to try roadside hitchhiking at night.

The spot we were dropped off at had some prefabricated sheds and houses that were set up as advertising models. We theoretically could have checked the doors to sleep inside one of them but we didn’t bother because the same field had some sections of oversized cement pipe. Sleeping inside one of the pipes was enough to keep us warm and protect against the dew that formed the following morning.

Getting an early start and being out on a major highway helped things move along a lot faster the following day. We got picked up by an abnormally horny and pervy truck driver. I knew that traveling with young attractive women greatly increased the odds of getting rides from long haul truckers but most tend to enjoy the female company without trying to push things further.

This guy wasn’t most truckers.

He kept himself entertained by composing and singing bawdy songs into his CB radio. They weren’t very good so I don’t remember too many lyrics but one of them ended with:

“She was a filthy lot lizard with cum on her chin…”

He had a whole radio schtick going where he would insert mock advertisements between the songs. Somewhat predictably these were all sexual references and innuendos as well:

“This song was brought to you by Kotex. Not the best thing in the world but it’s damn close to it!”

The only thing that made the ride tolerable was that he never worked up the courage to directly demand or proposition anything and we all just pretended to not understand the things he was hinting at. After a few songs he asked Snake and Katrina:

“So… Are you girls bi?”

They both said “yup” while staring straight ahead into space. This was followed by a long uncomfortable silence. He must have thought that they would start making out with each other the moment he asked and when that didn’t work it took him a while to work up the nerve to try again. His next statement was directed at me:

“You know what I’ve always wanted to do? Just drive a truck around with a couple topless girls inside and freak out all the people in cars by flashing them through the windows!”

I responded to him with mock enthusiasm:

“Dude! That sounds awesome! You should totally do that some time!”

The emphasis on those last two words got across that none of us were remotely interested in helping him live out his fantasies and he went back to singing into the CB and showing us cheesy memes on his phone. He had one of a baby on a breast that said “The Original Happy Meal”. We were with him all the way until it got dark again.

I don’t remember a lot of navigational details but he probably picked us up in Louisiana and brought us through Alabama and nearly all of Tennessee. We were all going to try to sleep in the back of his cab and continue traveling with him on the following day. He was annoying but seemed like he wouldn’t directly push boundaries and was covering a lot of ground.

It wasn’t too long before Katrina woke up with a start to him attempting to put his arm around her. That woke us all up and made us realize we needed to get out of his truck. Somebody looked at a map and realized that for the last couple of hours his route had started to bring us in the wrong direction.

We were pretty irritated about that because we had been very clear about where we were going and the route we wanted to take to get there. Now that he was being directly confronted about getting handsy and taking us the wrong way he instantly became extremely apologetic. He promised he could fix the situation for us and started calling into his CB to find another trucker to get us back on track.

We were ready to just jump out of his truck wherever we were and get our bearings in the morning but he found somebody super quick. The driver of the next truck was fairly new to long distance trucking and seemed like he didn’t want to be giving us a ride. He must have felt pressured by the more experienced driver the moment he answered the call for “anybody westbound”.

This next driver was going a couple hours back toward our goal but first he needed to either pick up or drop off a load. I forget which one it was but the effect on us was effectively the same. It meant he needed to drive into a fenced off lot and wait around for hours until workers either brought or took his cargo. He wasn’t an owner-operator so it was important for us to stay hidden in his cab the whole time so the company wouldn’t know he’d picked up riders.

It took almost the whole night and he was visibly nervous and uncomfortable the entire time. I imagine he was a lot more guarded talking to other drivers on the CB after that. He dropped us off somewhere in Kentucky and I can’t remember if we found another sleeping spot or if it was already getting light again.

The next ride was our third and final trucker. He was a tall and gangly white man with stick and poke tattoos all over his arms and hands that said variations on “COON ASS PRIDE” in sloppy lettering. We learned almost immediately that this was a term for Cajun as he told us endless stories about getting into arguments with people that thought the tattoos were racist slurs against black people.

The way he told these stories it was like he never realized that “coon” could be a word without “ass” coming directly after it. He might not have realized when he first got the ink done but after so many arguments you’d think he’d realize why people were getting offended. Either way we weren’t about to argue with him over it and he brought us a decent distance into Kentucky.

We weren’t standing out for very long when we got picked up by the first regular car of this leg of the trip. A clean cut white man in his mid twenties started telling us his life story the moment we were back to moving. He’d grown up in a very traditional church and married a young woman from his congregation without ever dating or having any prior sexual experience. They quickly bought a house and had a couple of children in rapid succession.

He said that things had begun to feel different at home and after a little bit of investigation he discovered that his wife had been having an affair for nearly the entire time they’d been married. He said that since he’d discovered this he started fantasizing about being harmed or killed as a way to escape from his life. When he said this next part he locked eyes with me in the rear view mirror:

“I’ve started to be more and more reckless and I’ve been putting myself in dangerous situations like picking you guys up…”

His energy had seemed a little off since we’d first gotten into the car but now I recognized it was a blend of genuine fear and excitement. He seriously believed the stories that all hitchhikers were serial murderers, or at the very least violent thieves, and he was practically pleading with us to harm him in some way.

The whole situation sounds like it could be a premise for a heartwarming movie where we’d take him on a series of wacky adventures and all learn a little bit about life and ourselves along the way. It wasn’t a movie though and we were only interested in getting a ride. He dropped us off on the outskirts of Louisville and went on his way. I wonder if he continued to chase danger after our brief encounter or realized that he would have to finally seriously confront the issues in his life.

Neither option would particularly surprise me.

I know next to nothing about Louisville except for it being the home town of Slint and Will Oldham. I’ve always wanted to spend more time there but this brief visit is the only time I’ve seen it. We got picked up by a gawky guy with glasses and acne. He was excited to have hitchhikers in his car and kept saying he wished he didn’t have to work so he could take us all the way to Chicago.

The fact that I’ve never learned to drive has made me kind of absent minded when it comes to noticing cars and it’s difficult for me to describe most cars that I’ve only ridden short distances in. I’m going to guess that his car was, most likely, a piece of shit because the entire time we were riding in it he was playing a comedy reggae song on his stereo about his car being a piece of shit. The lyrics were simple and repetitive:

“My car sucks! My car’s a piece of shit!”

Every few years I poke around a little bit on Google to see if I can discover the name and artist of the song but I don’t have too many details to go on. In case it isn’t glaringly obvious I would be very happy if any of my readers know of any comedy reggae songs about a car being a piece of shit.

He said that he could take us across the river into Jeffersonville but first he’d need to pick up his little brother from Elementary School. The three of us sat in the back as he pulled up to the school and gave his brother a Super Mario licensed juice drink he’d found at the gas station. The younger boy looked back at us and gasped in excitement:

“Why do they look like Jimi Hendwicks?!”

The older brother answered back in a thick Kentucky drawl:

“Aw man, they’re travelin’ that’s just fashion!”

They both seemed excited to be close to representatives of a bohemian lifestyle outside the small town mannerisms they were used to and the whole thing was very wholesome. When he said that he could only take us across the river though he really meant it. There must have been a way for him to turn back around without exiting because he dropped us directly onto the edge of the concrete bridge with barely any shoulder.

Before we could get a good look at where we were stepping out and potentially argue he was already gone. It was a very nerve racking position to be in – the first cop to see us would almost certainly intervene because our location was genuinely hazardous. There didn’t seem to be a safer shoulder or exit we could even walk to but luck was with us and our next ride pulled up barely a minute later.

Every thing about the girl who picked us up was goth except for the fact that she dressed conventionally and wore no makeup. She was so pale that it verged on albinism and her straight blonde hair was nearly white. She told us that she came from a very traditional Christian family but was following her dream of going to mortuary school against their wishes.

She had just started to live on her own and had a pet squirrel and goth boyfriend. She was excited to show us pictures of both of these things on her phone. Her boyfriend looked like he was a good ten years older than her and had long black hair and the kind of ‘90s grunge chin stripe that was somewhere between a soul patch and goatee. She seemed excited about all of the unconventional things in her life and the opportunity to talk to some other nonconformists who “got it”.

Despite having a legendary music scene it seemed like Louisville and it’s surroundings were positively stifling based on the two interactions we had with sympathetic drivers. It makes sense – so many of the people I met in late ‘90s Chicago viewed San Diego as a counterculture Mecca but growing up there myself made it feel conservative and claustrophobic.

I had forgotten that we spent the night at Snake’s cousin’s house in Indianapolis until I went back over the details with Katrina. She was a bit of a hippy and very welcoming – it felt good to spend a night indoors after the last two nights of dealing with the elements. I had also forgotten about the truck full of Mexicans who let the three of us lay in the bed of their pickup truck the next morning.

All together we’d been making very good time – we scarcely could have made it any faster if we’d had our own car and driven ourselves. Now that I’ve read some of Katrina’s memoir I appreciate more how much of a good luck hitchhiking talisman she was. I kind of knew that finding rides would be a lot more difficult as a single man but it would be a few more years until I’d actually try it.

Short distances were usually fine. Earlier that year I had tried and failed to catch a train out of Memphis and decided to catch Greyhound instead. I’d taken Megabus to get down and found my way to the railroad yard by calling Rotten Milk and having him check satellite images. He was happy to do it because it made him feel like a specific character from a superhero cartoon that he used to watch but I forget what he said the character’s name was.

Once I was there I didn’t know what track to catch out on or what to look for. I jumped onto a junk train moving slowly through the yard but ran off into some marshland when some workers started shouting at me. I found an antique fire truck to spend the night in and allow my shoes and socks to dry back out away from my feet.

The next morning the sun was pushing through the windows and the meadow was absolutely riotous with birds and insects. I started walking down the road that would return me to downtown Memphis with my thumb out for a ride. Cars only passed every twenty minutes or so and none of them were stopping. I saw a turtle with a cracked shell and a leech on its back trying to cross the road.

I carried it safely to the tall grass on the other side and had an intuition that the third vehicle after this would pick me up. Two cars zoomed by and then an old man in an ancient pickup took me all the way there. The way I was into witchy woo woo stuff back then I didn’t ask the old man if he was the turtle – I knew he was the turtle and I knew he was a regular old man with a truck.

When I finally tried long distance hitchhiking alone a couple years later I wasn’t into that kind of magical thinking anymore. I failed to get to The Gathering of the Juggalos and got arrested instead. Back with Snake and Katrina there was one more ride to get us to Chicago. I’m not going to write anything about it though.

You’ll just have to read Katrina’s book whenever it finally gets published.

New York 2010 : “Play Something Slow And Sexy”

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This is going to sound egregiously reductive, mostly because it is egregiously reductive, but all of the Russian girls I’ve met have fallen into two categories. There’s the fresh faced wide eyed with wonder perpetually innocent summer’s child type: these tend to be Yanas and Lanas. The second type are the world weary won’t get fooled again wistfully smoking a cigarette while sitting on the edge of the bed winter’s child type: I can’t remember the names of the ones I’ve met like this but I instinctively want to say Tatianas.

These are very broad generalizations based on first impressions where in most cases I didn’t get to know these women super well but it did seem to be a pattern. It certainly wasn’t a preconceived notion I started with and projected onto the Russian women that I met – it was a thing I noticed over time. I suppose it’s possible that they all roughly start as the first type and move toward the second depending on life experiences but I don’t see it that way: the type ones I’ve known didn’t seem to lead completely charmed lives and the type twos seemed like they had similar personalities as children.

It should go without saying that obviously there are many, many more types of Russian girls and women – I just haven’t met them.

As her name would suggest, Yana was one of the first type of Russian girls I described. I first met her when I went to New Orleans for Halloween in 2008. New Orleans was still a very different city from what it’s like now in that year. It had been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the Military Police, or MPs, were still handling a lot of law enforcement. The spray paint marks of the rescue workers were still fresh on the buildings in affected areas and it wasn’t uncommon to see blocks where ruined buildings vastly outnumbered those in any stage of restoration where the flood had hit hardest.

Rebuilding as a concept had not yet come to represent gentrification and displacement.

I’ve been to a handful of Mardi Gras celebrations in the city, sometimes for the entire season and sometimes for just the last few days, but this was my only New Orleans Halloween. Maybe it’s that all of the festivities are packed into a single weekend or so instead of a longer season but it definitely felt like things had a harder, darker edge. It could have something to do with the academic calendars of the surrounding colleges and universities.

Frenchmen Street in particular had a younger crowd and almost Woodstock ‘99 vibe. I remember joking at the time about how much I enjoyed seeing angry people in costumes and that if none were available it was easy enough to make some. On Frenchmen Street it didn’t require any particular intervention. A quick scan of the busiest intersection revealed a caveman with a giant plastic club screaming at his girlfriend in a blind rage and a group of Medieval princesses giving courtly waves after one of them projectile vomited from a taxi window.

A strong thread connected New Orleans and the people who had been on board The Miss Rockaway Armada in 2008 and I generally connected with and spent time with people from the project when in the city. It was Lisers who plucked Yana from a crowd and introduced her to the rest of the group. At the time she wore blocky glasses, had dark hair with severe bangs and the same infectious smile that helped me recognize her in more recent photos where the first two features are gone.

She carried the kind of large black camera that signifies somebody is trying to get serious about photography – the super youthful kind if you know what I mean by that. I want to say Minolta because that’s what they gave us is Sixth Grade Photography but in reality it was probably a Canon or Leica. I’m not the guy to take a lot of pictures or know much about cameras, hence the thing you’re reading and, at the time of writing, the hundred or so pieces like it.

I showed Yana around New Orleans a bit and brought her to Termite and Vine with the promise that it was populated with besprizornye. It’s a Soviet era word for orphaned children that supposedly lived in Dickensian underground societies – I would have learned it from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don’t know if anyone who lived at Termite that year was an actual orphan but the house was a hotbed of the kind of train rider and jug band informed fashion that was in a special vogue those years.

Yana and I stuck around town at least until November Fifth when Drew celebrated his birthday in a bar at the edge of the Bywater I’m going to guess doesn’t exist anymore. The night ended up being especially celebratory because Barack Obama’s first presidential victory was announced. New Orleans responded to this news with a level of general public jubilation that I didn’t see again until The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.

What this looked like on the ground was every person who was out in public shaking every other person they came into contact with in genuine excitement and every person that was driving a vehicle leaning on the horn and out the window to high five all of the passing pedestrians. I’m sure the city has its share of staunch Republicans and at least more than zero Colts fans but in each of these situations they must have stayed home. I certainly never saw a single human being that wasn’t over the moon about these happenings.

I think the next time I would have seen Yana was back in New Orleans for the 2009 Mardi Gras season. She had just come from Washington D.C. where she had gone to see the historic inauguration first hand. I don’t know if every Russian who learns English as a second language mispronounces certain diphthongs the same way but every time she shared this piece of information it caused every person in earshot to laugh uncontrollably.

The same pun made by a person with actual racist intent wouldn’t have been particularly funny but combined with Yana’s constant wide eyed innocence it was a winner. I have to take full accountability for my role in maneuvering to cause her to repeat this word in front of as many people as possible while leaving her in the dark about what everyone was finding funny about it. I don’t know if somebody else told her, she figured it out for herself or she was just reacting to the obvious energy that she was being made a figure of fun but she started responding with wounded indignance:

“No, Ossian!”

This is another one of those situations where I wish this was in an auditory format because none of this is going to be as funny without her actual voice or accent and the pouting expression she made. On the very slim chance that anybody didn’t get what the original joke was, it was that she was accidentally saying a word that rhymes with the one before “of fun” in the previous paragraph every time she said inauguration. It definitely helped the humor of the situation that everything about Yana was as cute as pajamas on a ladybug.

The next couple of times I saw her she was living on the edge of Williamsburg in New York City. She snuck me in to crash at a famous butoh studio she was living and studying at when I was in town around New Year’s Eve and didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next morning we were walking to the train when I happened to look down and find a mysterious baggie of white powder lying in the snow.

Yana certainly wasn’t into that and I hadn’t been using drugs much that year except for psychedelics and pharmaceuticals. This discovery wasn’t actually that far from where I had tried cocaine for the first time with the intention of it being a gateway drug at the legendary Kokie’s Place. I never really liked the drug that much if I wasn’t injecting or smoking it – without a rush the effects are nothing to write home about.

Still there’s something about found drugs that makes you feel like you have to do them and I wasn’t about to sketch out any of the people I was staying with by searching for needles or attempting to cook up freebase. I don’t know how I decided on The Cloisters as the place to get geeked out but it did feel appropriate. It definitely wasn’t for any historical significance because outside of some questionable analyses of almost certainly cross contaminated mummies it is extremely well established that the substance would have been completely unknown in the setting and era of the exhibited artifacts.

Still the cold weather, drafty flagstone walls and unicorn tapestries I’d been waiting to see my entire life seemed to pair well with whatever I was stuffing up my nose. I had been growing my fingernails out in the interest of dressing like a witch so pinky nail bumps held as much, if not more, than any key. Discreetly ducking behind interesting helmets and ornamental serving dishes to take them was an adventure in itself.

I never put it on a scale but I must have found at least a gram and I wasn’t lying when I said I really didn’t like the stuff. The whole Cloisters thing was fun but there was no way I was going to do a whole gram there. It would have been pure insanity to smuggle it onto a plane but I also couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I went to a lot of different cities and stayed with a lot of different people on this East Coast visit so I’m struggling to remember who I finished it off with.

I want to say that it was either a brother and sister or a male/female couple and they were kind of square. Now that I’m wracking my brain about it I realize that I may be transposing another memory about randomly finding cocaine on the ground in Oakland during the OCCUPY! protests. Maybe somebody reading this will remember me uncharacteristically offering them powdered cocaine somewhere in the North East in early January of 2010.

It doesn’t matter to the larger story, if there can even be said to be one, in the least but little details like this are among my favorite parts of this whole thing. I couldn’t make them up.

The last time I remember seeing Yana she had helped set up a show for me at a warehouse/loft space down the street from her butoh studio. This space felt like it could have existed on a show like Friends – it wasn’t decorated too differently from spaces me and my friends had lived in, with things like painted pieces of mannequins, but something about the energy was painfully generic.

The people who lived there were like hippies who are into circus aesthetics and electronic dance music – basically what I’d call burners. I don’t know if any of the kids who lived there actually went to Burning Man but they definitely seemed like they thought Burning Man was cool. There’s a lot of rave hippy types that I wrote off as burners when I first encountered them, only to discover that they were actually cooler than burners. The SPAZ, Katabatik and Mutant Fest crews immediately come to mind.

Being a burner isn’t the worst thing in the world.

This would have been on the U.S. Tour where Teen Suicide changed their name to Generation and I’m pretty sure we were traveling with Forced Into Femininity. We had been through a veritable tasting flight of artistically trying scenarios at this point: a party in Denver, Colorado where a recently arrived freight-rider freestyle rapped over Reine’s set about how much cocaine he was on; a generator show in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they said we could jump the bill but then refused to let me turn up my drum machine to even half the volume of my screaming voice without a microphone, or the ambient noise of the generator at that, in fear that the show would get broken up before the “real bands” with drummers played; a failed festival outside of Detroit where we were going to play on a bicycle powered stage with recycling themed clowns but jumped to one of the main stages because all of the big name artists were abandoning ship with the revelation that they weren’t getting paid.

Or actually I’m second guessing myself as to whether this was on that Summer tour or if it had been earlier during my January trip. I know that other people besides me were supposed to play this show and I don’t remember it being the acoustic singer-songwriter girls I was touring the North East with that January. I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of the things that I want to say about this show.

The people who lived at this space had a somewhat unconventional idea of what agreeing to host a show means, or maybe there had been a bit of a language barrier when Yana had set it up with them. They thought it would be more like a rave and when it was nothing like a rave they insisted that the people who had been scheduled to play stop playing so that their housemate could DJ some more rave-appropriate music. It’s killing me that I can’t clearly remember who all else I was playing with but I do remember this back and forth conflict between live acts playing and the hosts just DJing building up as the night progressed.

In the course of doing Bleak End at Bernie’s I learned that I seemed to put on the best performances when the crowd, to some degree at least, liked what I was doing and I, to some degree at least, hated them. There was something like a feedback mechanism involved: nearly all of my songs were rooted in feelings of anger, disappointment and disgust and having real time stimuli that helped me tap into those feelings led to a more genuine and compelling performance.

I don’t know if it was because she saw my drum machine or just a coincidence in terms of timing but just as I was taking the stage one of the girls who lived at the venue stepped in front of me in a burlesque costume holding a hula hoop. She glanced back at me over her shoulder:

“Play something slow and sexy.”

I can’t remember which one of my songs I started with but only one of them could be said to fit those parameters and it wasn’t that one.

I gathered my hatred, cranked up the drum machine and started to scream…

Chicago 2001 : Halloween Special “Have You Been Doing Your Homework?”

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I have a whole theory about how the ‘90s in America are better understood as the period of time between Mauerfall in 1989 and the September 11th Attacks in 2001. The Cold War had been a defining part of American existence since the end of World War II and this was echoed in the Underground in a myriad of ways. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union began to dissolve it suddenly no longer felt like half the world was enmeshed in an ideological struggle against what they perceived as our way of life. (and us against what we perceived as theirs) We went to war in Iraq but that was a small war against a small country with clearly defined borders.

Then 9/11 happened and our President dragged us into a nebulous morass called The War on Terror.

To be involved in the huge swath of counter cultures and creative communities I am loosely referring to as the Underground generally meant living in some level of opposition to the State. As a kid I was aware that Communism was the name of a thing that was supposed to be foreign and scary but I had also been born in a place called a commune that I knew my parents and their friends continued to identify with ideologically.

What I’m trying to say is that America’s Wars weren’t necessarily a thing that we in the Underground were aligned with but they were certainly a thing we were affected by. You can compare being at war with a faceless enemy half a world away to an oppressive heater or air conditioner that there were twelve years of relief from and those twelve years neatly bookended the ‘90s.

Things that had felt free and open about the world for as long as I remembered were suddenly starting to feel closed and dangerous. I caught my breath for a minute and began taking a hard look at the state that my life was in. I had dropped out of college, I was using hard drugs intravenously and some of my ideas and philosophies had just seemed to shatter the sanity of a person I cared about. It seemed like a good time to go back home to my parents and reevaluate what I wanted to do with myself.

There were some other smaller factors that still felt like they were probably worth noticing. The Chicago Police Department had just started installing robotic cameras with flashing blue lights in all of the places where I’d go to buy drugs. It wasn’t that I was worried about being caught or arrested but rather that the sudden appearance of these devices seemed to portend disturbing changes in the world at large.

I had also been participating in a paid research study about intravenous crack users through the Chicago Recovery Alliance. This sounds crazier than it is, crack is just cocaine that has been combined with baking soda so it can be smoked. Mixing it with some form of acid allows it to be dissolved and injected instead – I used lemon juice. The pH levels are hard on your veins but besides that it is indistinguishable from injecting cocaine that had never been crack in the first place. Anyway I found out after September 11th that the organization funding the research had been headquartered in the World Trade Center building and no longer existed.

It felt like another sign that the Universe had bigger plans for me than where I was and what I was doing.

There isn’t a concert or other firmly scheduled event to tell me exactly when I made a trip from Chicago to California but I know that I was in Chicago past Halloween and San Diego by Christmas. I remember packing all of my belongings into two cardboard boxes that went into the checked luggage section at the bottom of the Greyhound Bus that I boarded with another counterfeit pass. The bus would have stopped at the El Bambi Cafe in Beaver, Utah – a picturesque but overpriced little roadhouse with the titular character on its sign. One of the other passengers complained:

“El Bambi must be Mexican for The Rip-off!”

I always either put a lot of effort and energy into a Halloween costume or just throw something together at the last minute – or in special situations like this one a combination of the two. In High School I had gone as Rene Magritte paintings for two consecutive years by combining a black suit and bowler hat with a paper mask of the iconic apple and then a lesser known flying dove. Me and my friends had gone trick or treating in Mission Hills – a wealthy enclave that we assumed would net us better candy. This meant that a lot of College Professor types would gush about my costume and then question my companions about what theirs were supposed to be referencing:

“Uh…. I’m a clown sir.”

In 2001 Chicago I had been growing out my hair and allowed my beard to fill in for one of the first times. With my emaciated frame I was a dead ringer for popular depictions of Christ and decided to attempt to recreate the way He might have looked on the day of the crucifixion. I started by wrapping some dry and browned out thorny vines into an actual crown that provided me with a few small cuts around the temples that always bleed profusely belying their relative absence of severity.

I was going to need a lot more blood but thankfully somebody had already bought a Bucket of Blood or something similar that lived in Nick and Janice’s bathroom. I discovered that mixing fake blood with dirt could create fairly convincing scabs that cling to the skin well and simulated each of the Five Wounds. A filthy piece of rag that I found on the ground somewhere or just outside of an Auto Garage was just big enough to create a loin cloth that covered my genitals but did little else – exactly how I wanted it.

I started rubbing some dirt into my face and skin but decided I wanted the specific marks that would be created by impacts. I’m not sure where my visual inspiration would have come from. Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ wouldn’t be released for another three years, I would have seen The Last Temptation of Christ but He doesn’t get as beat down and filthy in that one. I’ve always dreamed of going to the weeklong Passion Play in Oberammergau but I still haven’t made it and I imagine it’s pretty low key.

I asked my friends, that would have been Andy, John, Nick and Matt probably, to start throwing rocks and dirt clods at me. Some kids from the predominantly Black neighborhood saw what was happening and decided to join in. Small kids like Preschool to maybe Second Grade at the oldest and all dressed in little puffy jackets – none of them seemed to have Halloween costumes. Their mothers laughed and started to take pictures as their children reveled in the opportunity to throw rocks at Christ. It had the desired cosmetic effect but nobody was throwing them hard enough to actually hurt me – the attention and overall anachronism of the resulting tableaux was making me giddy.

The weather in Chicago was starting to get cold but discomfort was an essential part of the costume and performance. I was kept warm by self admiration and resolve. We wanted to get on a bus to Logan Square but the bus driver didn’t want to let me board because I was barefoot and almost naked. We liked to imagine that this was actually a variation on the Christmas story of Mary and Joseph being denied lodging in Bethlehem as it continued to happen through the night. Somebody took off their suit jacket and we wrapped it around my waist and she let us on the bus.

We were going to Logan Square for the All Hallow’s Eve performances by the now defunct Redmoon Theater Company. While hunting for photographs I read that this event attracted an audience of 10,000 – it was more or less their breakout year. It was my first time seeing the giant papier-mâché puppets that would become familiar sights at protests and Mardi Gras. My costume was a hit. A lot of people wanted pictures but it was nothing like it would be today. A camera was something that somebody carried if they had planned to take pictures ahead of time – not the ubiquitous device in every single person’s pocket.

Generally speaking people would expect some kind of longer interaction if they felt that our combined costumes constituted a “theme”. Any type of religious costume like priests or angels, devils of course or costumes that generally represented sin – like a flasher with a prosthetic penis or women in the generic “sexy” costumes that had not yet come to dominate the holiday. Then something truly unexpected happened.

A young Mexican American boy saw me and his eyes lit up. I was his hero and that carried a responsibility to behave heroically. Obviously there was a bit of edgelord in my costume choice but I hadn’t done it to be shocking or offensive – mostly I had wanted it to be accurate above all else. He took my hand and his parents stood behind him smiling in implied trust:

“Oh my God! It’s You!”

“Hi! How are you?”

“I’m good!”

“That’s great! Have you been doing your homework?”

“Yes! I have!”

“I’m so proud of you! Listen to your parents and always remember that I love you!”

I didn’t have any pockets but I think one of my friends had some kind of candy. I went to hand him some but his parents politely waved it away – it’s entirely possible that whatever it was hadn’t been individually wrapped. I probably could have asked him about something a little more on topic than schoolwork but I had been kind of put on the spot. You don’t think as you’re covering yourself with blood and dirt that you will wind up as a rough equivalent of a Mall Santa but there it was – it happened exactly once.

I’ve never been a famous person or a passably attractive woman so this was one of my only experiences with having an endless stream of strangers really want my attention and validation in the course of a single night. I’m fairly extroverted and it was great fun for the first few hours but I did eventually experience a kind of “burnout”. I had used my temporary celebrity status to convince the door guy at The Double Door to let me in and was enjoying the relative anonymity of standing at the back of the crowd for a rare reunion concert by indie heroes The Frogs.

A girl in a sexy devil costume saw me from across the room and got excited and came over. She poked me with her plastic pitchfork and I recoiled and winced in a pantomime of exaggerated pain. She continued to poke me and I responded with less enthusiasm. She didn’t seem to be getting the message so I dropped to the floor and assumed the fetal position. She kept poking me:

“What is it going to take for you to understand that I don’t want to play with you?”

She looked horrified and walked away quickly in embarrassment. I’m sure I could have been nicer about it. I should have stopped being in such an interesting costume in public once I realized that I had run out of energy to offer to other people who were just trying to tell me how much they liked my costume. I had a sweater vest with a picture of a kitten on it in one of my friend’s messenger type bags and eventually I pulled it on and I wasn’t Jesus anymore – or at least not as much as I had been.

When I lived on a raft on the Mississippi River I got used to watching the big barges pass and then bracing for the wakes. Nothing much happens when it’s right next to you – it’s afterward that the waves push you up and down and against the shore. I rode one of those waves from 9/11 all the way to California and I watched things bounce up and down as it finished passing. I got to do things after this that I had never managed to pull off in these early stages. I eventually played my own tours and put my own tapes out instead of just trying to jump into other people’s vans or grab their mics to freestyle rap for a minute.

But this was the last thing I got to do in that old world and so looking back it means a lot to me. I don’t know if I realized that the play was in a whole different Act the moment I got to California but there it was. They don’t give you a program when you walk in, you just get to look back over it later. What is it she says in that Joni Mitchell song at the end of the Greenpeace documentary?

“On and on it’s always the way you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone they’ve pulled out the trees and put in a parking lot”