Tag: John Benson

West Virginia 2008 : The Bus Part One “This Beer! This Rock!”

berniebleak13 Comments

This isn’t going to be the chapter where I lay down all the exposition about The Bus and the Living Hell tour but I should at least throw down a little bit of background. This wasn’t the regular style AC Transit bus called Larry that might’ve ended up lasting longer and hosting more shows than this earlier version: the totally tricked out one with plexiglass floors and an elevated loft in back that blew a piston on this tour and never quite made it out of Albion, Michigan. For either version the core concept is essentially the same – John Benson and a crew of collaborators install a bank of power wheelchair batteries underneath a stage in back to create a mobile concert venue.

There are two important things about this earlier bus that may or may not have been the case with Larry. I can only say definitively that I didn’t experience these things on the Larry bus. First off it had been converted to run on used vegetable oil. Everybody was doing these conversions during the first decade of the 2000s. For the earlier part it was a way to convert a resource that most of the world viewed as garbage into what was essentially free gasoline. Toward the later part the world had caught on and pumping out of random grease traps wasn’t always viewed as charitably.

This brings us to the second of the things: the original bus was an absolute cop magnet. Poking around behind restaurants to collect veggie oil without asking for permission didn’t help but there was also the fact that it was just plain weirder looking and the Living Hell tour brought us to some pretty remote sections of America. Whatever the cause I wouldn’t experience the same level of constant attention from law enforcement again until I moved to Tijuana as a guero.

Besides the supply issue that I already mentioned running the bus on vegetable oil was putting a lot of stress on it’s engine. Short trips around town when there had been plenty of time to find the best grease and make sure it was well filtered was pretty different from playing catch-as-catch-can in unfamiliar territory. Or maybe that wasn’t the problem at all – I know that the bus had done a whole other U.S. Tour before I was ever on it and it might have run on veggie just fine for the entirety of that one. Maybe it was just old and worn out, every engine in the world only works for so many miles.

By West Virginia we’d had to cancel a few consecutive shows and the bus was still acting iffy. I can’t remember the name of the West Virginia town but it had a Cummins service shop where John had decided we should try getting an oil change and we were going to have to wait overnight to get it. There was a shopping mall in town that was playing Iron Man in it’s movie theater, nobody went to see it but this detail helped me figure out what year it was.

There was a toy shop set up in the common area with a surprisingly good selection of plastic dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals – I bought a Glyptodon for my nephew and a local cop working security ended up ringing me up. The Glyptodon was similar but unrelated to the modern armadillos and about the size and shape of the cheapest tent at Target. I’ve done a little research into plastic prehistoric animals and come to the conclusion that this was probably the Scheich version that stopped production in 2011. All the best plastic animals come from Germany.

Behind the mall sat some fairly spectacular nature. A cliff leading downwards of a reddish material that you could reduce to dust with your bare hands if you had the time and energy. Off the top of my head I want to say shale but I’m not a geologist. The cliffs acted as a staircase to get down to a river and some sections of forest.

With nothing else to do we all went for a hike behind the mall. John Benson took a picture and put it on the bus Flickr so I’m including it here. You can see me in a fur coat and visor and Shon carrying his unicycle and Upper Dave bringing the party with a case of Milwaukee’s Best. It seemed like a good time for a beer so most of us settled into drinking them. The conversation devolved into a string of repetitive requests and queries centered on passing specific beers from specific rocks.

I really want to explain this so I’m going to just go into it in mind numbing detail. People were saying things like: Could you pass me that beer? This beer? No, that beer over on that rock. This rock? No, that rock. We were in a landscape that had been reduced to beers and rocks. Theoretically anybody could have just picked up and drank from any beer just like they could have crushed any of the rocks just by squeezing them but you know how it is: people want the one they were already drinking out of. Anyway I want you to understand the mind state that caused Vanessa to suddenly stand up and yell out:

“This beer! This rock!”

Maybe it’s a “you had to be there” kind of thing or maybe it’s not even funny or interesting at all. I don’t think it matters that much whether you actually know the people in this story or not. Anyway she wasn’t talking about any specific beer or any specific rock. It was rhetorical.

I was taking LSD a lot at that time which basically meant I was always carrying LSD and selling LSD because that’s the only way to really make sure it will always be around and available. Selling LSD feels more like doing this weird kind of community service than being a drug dealer because the price always more or less stays the same and people will come complain if the LSD they bought six months ago didn’t work. It’s like putting on punk shows – it’s always supposed to be five dollars until the end of time and it’s not really about the money but like everything else it costs money.

Anyway I decided that it would be a good time to take some LSD and Shon with the unicycle wanted to take some too but nobody else felt like it. I don’t think I was selling it in that context – behind a mall in West Virginia wasn’t really the time or place to worry about money. So we wandered into the woods and everybody else drifted back toward the bus.

Once things started getting weird I was bouncing on fallen trees and peeling this thick lichen off of trees and eating it and just generally being a weirdo and it was all a bit much for Shon. He was kind of dissociating and just seemed to be moving toward a quiet introspective kind of thing so I left him in the woods and wandered back to everybody else and the bus.

Obviously the residents of the small town in West Virginia had noticed when a bus full of freaks showed up and then hung around the mall for a little while and then didn’t seem to be leaving town at nightfall. The police had been waiting for a pretext to come descend on us en masse and figure out exactly what we were up to. This turned out to be Upper Dave and Vanessa sneaking into some demonstration prefabricated homes to see what they looked like on the inside.

There might have been alarms or the police might have already been following them but they waited until they had walked all the way back to the bus before popping out to enforce the law. Talking to the police while tripping on LSD is either the worst possible thing in the world or really really fun depending on your personal level of control and experience. I had a feeling that it probably would have been the first one for Shon which is why it was fortunate that he had stayed behind in the woods but it was definitely the second one for me.

They seemed like they were afraid of us but not in a “might randomly shoot us” kind of way – they were just nervously standing together in a line and constantly adjusting the crotch area of their pants and spitting chewing tobacco on the ground. You know the way that cops stand: if you let your legs touch it means you’re gay or whatever. They were giving Dave and Vanessa a hard time and saying a lot of “what, you don’t know what a locked door means?” and then they offered us a deal: unless we let them search the bus and run everybody’s information they were going to arrest Dave and Vanessa for trespassing.

We picked the second option because even though I had a sheet of acid and somebody must have had some marijuana it seemed unlikely that they would actually find it. At some point Shon had called John Orlando on the cellphone and John told him the cops were there and his reaction made it clear that we had to make sure they didn’t interact because he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The problem was they started asking all of us how many of us there were and people were giving inconsistent answers and they started to suspect we were hiding something.

We had to line up so they could run our identification information and see if anybody had any warrants even though it was obviously a waste of time as we wouldn’t have agreed to the option if anybody did. It got to my turn and I savored staring into the cop’s eyes like a predatory animal as he nervously spit on the ground and avoided my gaze. One of the cops asked me if I had bought a plastic armadillo and I told him it was called a Glyptodon. Dalton and John Orlando were shooting baskets on the back of the bus and I asked them if they were playing HORSE:

“No, PIG.”

We stared the cops down as we tossed the ball at the basket and they nervously adjusted their pants and spit and avoided our eyes and flinched every time the ball hit the metal rim and made a noise. When they searched John Benson he just so happened to have a tiny plastic figure of a police officer in his pocket. He hadn’t been carrying it for the whole tour – most likely he’d found it on the ground that very day. The cop did the thing where something they don’t entirely understand ends up in their hand and they look like they’re trying to will it into disappearing.

Actually when they had searched me I had a tiny bottle of White Flower in my pocket – a topical menthol rub for muscle aches if you’re not familiar. The cop asked me what it was and I told him it was Chinese analgesic ointment and he visibly flinched. Most likely he hadn’t understood the Greek derived name for pain relievers and was dismayed to think he was touching something designed for “butt stuff”.

Next it was time for the cops to run Jill’s background information but none of them would look at her and they kept telling her to go talk to the other officer until she had done a full circle and they were all just kind of looking down and nervously laughing: it was incredibly awkward. I’m sure things are still far from perfect in small towns in West Virginia but in 2008 most of the national conversations surrounding transgender identity hadn’t happened yet.

They couldn’t believe that they hadn’t found a giant pile of drugs anywhere on the bus so they went and got a drug sniffing dog to make sure. The dog was thrashing around nervously because of all the people and the smell of our dog Kloot and maybe a bit of stage fright. It kind of looked like a blur of eyes and teeth – it’s reasonable to think that the acid might have had something to do with that. Acid doesn’t smell like anything and Kloot’s smell was too strong for a little weed to get noticed but it did find somebody sleeping in the loft in the back of the bus.

We were so nervous about Shon nobody had really noticed that Rain wasn’t around and she awkwardly climbed out of the bed so the dog wouldn’t bite her. I’m not sure if she was genuinely sleeping or just hiding. The way we all reacted and nervously laughed at her sudden appearance made the cops think there had to be at least one other person. Vanessa said somebody had gone to watch Iron Man and they didn’t press the issue further. They were angry that their strategic gambit had failed and they’d ended up with nothing.

They asked us if we were “following the rainbow”.

I want to throw in that earlier in the night somebody had asked me what Iron Man was about and I told them it’s about a wealthy alcoholic who got hit by some shrapnel so he had to build armor to put around himself to make sure that nothing ever touches his heart. Some of it was the acid but I do really like how archetypical and basic those Marvel origin stories are. I’ve never actually seen the movie.

Finally the cops left and everybody got to do the thing where they’re like “oh shit! You’re tripping on drugs! Are you ok? Let’s go get our friend who’s tripping on drugs!” We walked over behind the mall where Shon was riding his unicycle and listening to his iPod and just generally appeared to have gotten a handle on things. We told him that the cops had been real but now they were gone and we could safely bring him back to the bus where he could lay back and talk about how hard he was tripping to his heart’s content.

I was still “on” meaning I was aware of and sensitive to things I might have missed in an unaltered state. I could feel the town’s disapproving hostility radiating out toward us from the streets, trees and sky. People were clearly aware that we had broken into an imaginary house and the cops hadn’t been able to do anything about it and they wanted justice. A red pick-up truck slowed and rolled down it’s window.

This was it – every muscle in my body tensed up for the coming confrontation. A voice drawled out from the dark interior:

“You fuckers…”

The window went back up and the truck sped off. Clearly the small town in West Virginia had done it’s worst.

I’m pretty sure we were going to be okay.

Next Part:

Vermont 2008 : The Bus Part Twelve “The Band’s Called Death, Turkeys! / A Ghost Story”

berniebleak3 Comments

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven

I was touring in a band called Living Hell on an old Oakland City Bus that John Benson had converted into a mobile concert venue by installing a bank of wheelchair batteries under the stage. There’s so much that could be said about that bus and tour but I’ll mostly do it in other pieces. I will say that this marked the beginning of me being the lead vocalist in bands for the simple reason that no one else wanted to do it. Unfortunately I have never watched The Zen of Screaming, not even to this day, and my voice was instantly shredded and only got worse.

The tour took us to Vermont; I don’t know what city but it’s the one with a statue of a Lake Monster. We met up with a kid named Julian who a lot of the other band members knew already. He had a tape of this band his uncles were in – a forgotten and groundbreaking Punk/Metal/Prog group from the ‘70s made up of Black guys from Detroit. We were all completely blown away by the music and couldn’t believe almost nobody had heard it at that point. He told us a story about some record company suits telling his uncles to change the name to something more commercial. One of the band members lit a joint and put his feet up on the desk:

“The name is Death, turkeys!”

There’s actually a Richard Pryor sketch about a Black punk/metal band called Black Death playing for and then mass murdering a white audience. The fringes of comedy usually express the limits of what the society of its time would or would not realistically be comfortable with. In that decade a Black band called Death was viewed as too militant and confrontational for the major labels and independent music was barely a thing. Over the following years we would all watch the newly released album and an accompanying documentary finally bring the group the recognition they deserved over thirty years after the fact.

The way that bus shows generally worked is John would pick a place to park unlikely to result in noise complaints then load up the local bands and audience for a show. The tour was plagued by mechanical problems – mostly regarding the system that had been installed to allow the bus to run on vegetable oil. In West Virginia we attempted to reverse our fortunes with a Viking Funeral for a mummified squirrel but the relief was only temporary. In Vermont a unique gremlin manifested: the wheelchair batteries had not charged and there was no juice with which to have a rock concert.

Ordinarily this would be a huge disappointment and mood killer but I happen to have a very limited and specific super power. I always seem to know exactly what activity to suggest when the morale of five to twenty of my peers is perched precariously on the precipice of disaffected futility. In this case we were sitting on a bus with a few weak sources of electric illumination but little else, a few brown bags were in a few hands but nowhere near enough for a drinking game.

I proposed that we tell each other ghost stories.

I’m ashamed to admit that while several of these anecdotes were proffered by the contingent of Vermont natives I can’t recall a single detail concerning the substance of these narratives but I have an ironclad excuse. It would have been bad form to steer the gathering toward this most ancient of pastimes without a macabre tale of my own as offering and I was racking my brain to invent one. I tried to concentrate on grief, dread and the supernatural; I employed the device of “this happened to a friend” for veracity and ended up with the following.

It should go without saying that what you are about to read is absolutely and 100% true.

***********************************************

Francois was my best friend in High School and he even ended up living with me at my parent’s house but we didn’t know each other at all when we were younger. He grew up in a slightly rougher neighborhood up the street from me called Lomita Village with his French Canadian mother and two sisters who were significantly older. He had a best friend who lived across the street from him named Jamie and their friendship was founded on one of the most superficial yet stable initiatives for childhood association: Jamie always had all of the best toys and video games.

It wasn’t that Jamie’s parents were rich, the entire street sat just under the line dividing poverty from the middle class, but rather that he had some kind of terminal health condition. Francois couldn’t remember exactly what this was except that Jamie stayed small, low weight and didn’t go outside much. He missed a lot of school. Francois was actually a few years older than Jamie but, as is usually the case in these situations, Jamie’s parents were just excited that he had a friend at all. When Jamie did make it to school he wasn’t particularly popular.

The late ‘80s were a bit of a Golden Age in action figures and home video game consoles and the way Francois tells it Jamie’s house was like a Toys R Us. He had all the Transformers, Thunder Cats, G.I. Joes and even the deep cuts like the short lived holographic Visionaries and Supernaturals. More importantly he had a Nintendo Entertainment System and would get all the new cartridges like the game changing Super Mario Brothers Three. When Jamie was feeling a bit healthier and energized they would play with Nerf stuff in his fenced off backyard and get Blackie, his family’s Labrador Retriever, to bring back the foam balls, darts and arrows.

Eventually Jamie had to go into the hospital and Francois was brought over to visit a few times but he had to go back to his own school and he started to make other friends. Then one day Francois came home from school and his mother was sitting by the phone with the expression of somebody who was desperate to find meaning in a vicarious expression of grief. Jamie had died.

Francois dressed up and went to the funeral with his mother and sisters; Jamie’s father hugged him and cried and held onto Francois like he was the last solid object that could protect him from falling into the yawning reality that had suddenly opened below his feet. Jamie’s mother was smoking a cigarette and staring off blankly into the distance; intently focused on an invisible landmark that nobody could ever reach.

Francois went on with his life but Jamie’s house across the street began to look like it was being swallowed by time. The car never left the driveway, evidently Jamie’s parents had simply stopped going to their jobs, and the lawn grew wild and became overgrown with weeds. White envelopes and colorful junk mail overstuffed the mailbox and the mail carrier started piling it on a little shelf by the door most people used for potted plants. A free local newspaper of coupons and classifieds started colonizing the driveway – turning yellow in the sun after being soaked by rain.

One day Francois came home from school and his mother was wearing a similar expression to the time that Jamie died although she wasn’t sitting by the phone this time. She crossed her arms and declared decisively:

“Francois! You will go to visit them!”

He tried to argue that they probably didn’t want to see him and that he had to finish his work for school but his mother was having none of it.

“You were his best friend! When they go to Disneyland they bring you and even buy your ticket! Now you can not go? You must be too busy to watch the television and use my computer also then, yes?”

There was no getting out of it. Francois nervously walked over and knocked on the door. Jamie’s father opened it instantly as if he’d been expecting him, wearing an almost absurdly relaxed smile that looked like his face had been made of clay and he had reshaped it in front of a mirror. Jamie’s mother had occasionally smoked outside before but now she sat in a cloud of haze in the unlit living room. A large crystal ashtray overflowed on the end table beside her recliner as she gazed in concentration at a television with the volume turned off.

Francois said hello but if she actually heard him she didn’t show it outwardly.

They went into Jamie’s room and it had been left exactly the way it was before Jamie had gone into the hospital. There was even fresh folded laundry sitting on top of the dresser the way it had been whenever Francois had visited in the past. The Sega Genesis had actually come out while Jamie was in the hospital and his parents had bought one in the hope that he would be able to come home and play it. It sat in it’s box and while Francois was as excited to play it as any other kid his age he didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to ask if they could hook it up.

Jamie’s father turned on the Nintendo and Super Mario Brothers Three was already in the slot. I’m pretty sure the same pattern established itself in every materially lopsided friendship of the era: whoever’s house and game it actually was played as Mario and the friend who always came over got Luigi. In my experience I was always taller and more lanky than all of my friends who had Nintendos so the characters seemed to fit. This had also been the case with Francois and Jamie but now Jamie’s father, a full grown man, was controlling Mario and the whole thing just felt wrong.

On top of that Jamie’s father either didn’t know how to play the game or didn’t feel like actually trying. He just died on the first jump or turtle shell over and over but didn’t even respond like anything bad had happened. Francois cleared a couple levels but started to feel embarrassed about how one sided it was and just switched to dying on purpose too. Jamie’s father started saying really awkward things:

“I bet Jamie’s looking down and is so happy to see us playing like this! He probably wishes that he could come play too!”

It went to the game over screen and Francois thanked Jamie’s father and told him he had probably better be going home. He figured that it would be a one time thing but the lawn and junk mail stayed exactly the same and his mother started making him go over every Friday. She did it right before the weekend so she could reward him with a trip to an arcade or a show at a museum he wanted to see but he was basically forced. He hated it every single time but he didn’t have a choice.

Things settled into a routine. Jamie’s mother never stopped smoking, said anything or even turned up the volume on her TV. Francois stopped even greeting her because he started to feel like he was being rude. He would rush to the first Game Over screen but Jamie’s father had figured out how to continue so it became three continues every time. Three continues of rushed deaths and forced smiles and oppressive grief and never moving past the first level; not even out of boredom.

Finally he decided that if he was going to have to be there anyway he might as well get to play the Sega Genesis. Nobody else he knew had been able to convince their parents to buy one and the TV commercials made it look as good as the games they had in the arcade. He turned to look at the box where it was still sitting on top of the dresser and froze.

The folded shirt sitting on top of the pile of clothing was blue. The last three times he had been there it had definitely been red. For some reason he knew instantly that something was very, very wrong. Jamie’s father noticed where he was staring and turned, somehow smiling even wider than the one he had frozen his face into for every one of these bizarre ritual visits:

“Guess what Francois?! There’s somebody here who’s very excited to see you!”

He stood and Francois had no choice but to get up and follow him. He had been raised to never say no to a grownup in a position of authority and wasn’t quite old enough for the first wave of rebellion although it would be coming very soon. They walked out of the bedroom and through the oppressive miasma of cigarettes and absence to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard.

Blackie, Jamie’s Labrador Retriever, had a child’s red shirt pulled over his head and front legs and a pair of shorts that forced his tail to run through one of the leg holes in the back. The moment it heard the glass door begin to open it pulled itself up onto its hind legs and turned expectantly toward Jamie’s father. Blackie would have wagged his tail at least a tiny bit in recognition but it could only twitch because of the awkward way it had been threaded through a leg hole. Jamie’s father called:

“Jamie! Look who’s here to see you! It’s your friend Francois, Jamie!”

The dog’s eyes looked wild and lost, as if it wasn’t exactly sure if it was being praised, punished or some sadistic combination of the two. It let out a faint whimper and started to walk forward in awkward, swaying steps. It couldn’t properly use its tail for balance and this forced it to compensate by moving its front legs in small, stiff gestures that looked like a cross between begging and the expressive movements of an opera singer. It seemed frightened, like it knew how completely unnatural everything that was happening was but some combination of training and crushing, tyrannical need left it helpless to deviate from the very actions that unsettled it.

Blackie inched forward in tiny increments but his expression was frantic. He opened his mouth and made a sound that didn’t quite register as a yelp, growl or bark. Something in between all of these but also different from all of them as well. It was like he was trying to talk.

Francois ran out of the house and no matter what his mother threatened him with he never returned again. Not too long after the car disappeared and he overheard his mother talking to someone about how Jamie’s mother had left. The grass kept growing and the mail kept piling up but he never saw Jamie’s father again.

Even years later he would catch tiny flickers of movement through the windows and quickly look away, crossing to the other side of the street.

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