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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 