Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
I don’t really resonate with the identity of “acid dealer” but for the duration of the Conference that’s what I was. The sheet of acid I had just bought needed to make enough money for me to buy another one so that I could continue to pursue my recent hobby of being a totally ridiculous acid head. In a round about way this temporary occupation would be responsible for generating the name of my future solo project.
I have always disliked the proposition that people who are about to consume psychedelic drugs should be shielded from any negative or unpleasant suggestions out of fear that it might trigger a “bad trip”. It seemed to me that the current emotional landscape of the would-be consumer’s life would be more responsible for shaping their experience than whether or not somebody said “boo”.
For this reason I had taken a mechanical pencil and drawn little sad faces, grave stones, mushroom clouds and other ominous icons on the individual doses of either a previous or later sheet. This time around the blotter was only plain white paper but I made sure to reassure any prospective buyers that they were in for a bad time. Somebody asked me if it was going to be fun:
“Fun? Fuck no! I’ve been taking this shit all weekend and I’m crying blood! This shit is negative weekend! This shit is Bleak End at Bernie’s!”
When it came out of my mouth I wouldn’t have guessed that it would become the moniker of a future singer-songwriter solo project and the source of my only version of the punk name. I just knew that it was a little pun and a clump of phonemes that I liked the heft of in the hand of my mind – like a rock that you would select for attempting to skip on water. If I had to do it over again I would maybe use the name for a song or album but not for an identity defining music thing. It’s a bit too bad-quirky and pop-culture-referencey like Break Dancing Ronald Reagan or Robin Williams On Fire.
If I could go back in time and change it I would probably go with something heavy and esoteric like Lacrimae Rerum or offensive and edgelordy like Human Shit. It’s not like I hate it or anything, it is my name after all and I already lucked out with a killer name from my family of origin. I’m just saying in the best of all possible worlds I’d probably have gone with something better.
If I’m going to be getting into ideal worlds I did always wish that somebody with a label had approached me about releasing music – or reissuing now that the whole thing has been mothballed. I never saw it first hand but I heard that some kids performed once or twice as Bleak End at Bernie’s Two so there is that thing they say about imitation and flattery and obviously there’s some truth to that. I’m human and it’s only natural to want more – out of all the drugs the brain rewards itself with when outside circumstances trigger specific emotions I’d rank validation among the most elusive.
Anyway that was a bit of a tangent: I was selling drugs at a noise music festival. I had been kind of feeling this Dickensian Besprizornye style energy in the mode of sort of leaning against a wall and impudently eating an apple and of course there was just the thing about being on the road and needing to eat to stay alive but I had been eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. I definitely shopped for these with an eye toward accessorizing and because I was wearing some cream colored women’s corduroys and a kind of Jordache looking sporty green top from Rainbow I ended up buying a parsnip and bunch of rapini or broccoli rabe.
For me acid very much makes me feel like an art director looking at my own life from the outside and admiring the composition and color palette. I remember climbing the ladder onto the bus’s roof with the parsnip in the back pocket of the aforementioned pants and thinking the entire ensemble looked pleasantly Fraggle Rock. The rapini became my kind of drug dealer machismo totem as I vacantly grazed on it to kind of ominously loiter as I stared right through my slightly nervous customers – kind of like a toothpick or cigarette for a central casting television show hustler character.
I’d stare off into the distance as I dug into my pocket for the drugs and casually offered bites of the cruciferous greens that the buyers universally accepted to seem “with it”. I don’t mean that I was selling drugs to my friends like this – for them I just did it normal. This was a character I was putting on for the randoms, deliberately campy and extremely self conscious.
This brings us to the pull quote. I had stepped inside of Churchill’s but not all the way in where the performances happen, I was standing near the ATM by the door and talking to Vanessa. A business casual looking guy that I had evidently sold drugs to was heading outside and leaned in close to say some generic outlaw association banter and slyly wink:
“Hey man, thanks for coming through with the broccoli!”
What I’m trying to get as is that you will sometimes hear this kind of outlaw association banter and it sounds too ridiculous to be real. Like code words and what not exist but if the swagger game is lacking you start wondering what the deal is. Tough talk surrounding something as mundane as framing a porch. Sly looks and handshakes for jobs that are legal and generate honest tax forms. This is how the broccoli bit sounded, corny really.
Most of my acid head phase was done in approximately once weekly weekend warrior mode with two major exceptions: when I rode freight trains with Alexis and Jacki to Mardi Gras I had the remains of a sheet where the doses were slightly too small to be effective. We decided to play a game where we would take one square on the hour every hour until they were gone. Most people are probably familiar with the feeling of drinking heavily while sitting down and not realizing how intoxicated you had become until suddenly trying to stand up.
This train ride was similar in that it didn’t seem like we were tripping that hard while the landscape was rushing by us at full speed but when the train would stop and side out we would suddenly realize that inanimate objects weren’t willing to sit in one place. Everything appeared to be creeping or flowing toward the train. The second binge was at this International Noise Conference. Me and Rage just continued to take it the moment it felt like the effects might be subsiding for the entire weekend.
A large part of our dynamic was that kind of art director thing: the way we looked together. A good reference point would be the famous X-Force cover where Polaris is posing on the much larger character Strong Guy. I’m certainly not muscular but I am quite tall and with a tiny woman hanging from my shoulders we looked like something out of a comic book. We started to layer and fuse our distinctive and disparate styles: she put on my leather vest and I ended up in some of her delicate lacey underthings.
I don’t remember where it came from but Rage ended up with a brightly colored toy revolver that seldom left her hand. I have a vivid memory of us wandering the back streets of Little Haiti on the dawn of the second or third day. The older men of the neighborhood were quietly playing acoustic guitars and accordions on their porches, the younger men on the corners tensed when they first noticed the gun but visibly softened upon taking in the entire picture. They offered discrete nods as we passed on by – almost imperceptible but unequivocal in the message of “we mean you no harm”.
I think I was looking for mangos and avocados. They had been everywhere in Florida but were slightly harder to find in this particular neighborhood. I ended up in a Botanica where dried fish were slowly smoldering at the threshold as an offering to the lwa. I bought some Lanman & Kemp Florida Water – a scent that would come to define the indelible stink of magic on the next few years of my life. I had read a little bit about Vodou and asked the proprietor if there might be an hounfour in the neighborhood:
“Not here. Haiti only.”
It wasn’t the kind of acid that prevents you from sleeping but the unrelenting heat of the weekend made it feel like we might as well have not been. There was a certain frantic and desperate energy to the Churchill’s parking lot that intensified it’s effects: from both the drug addled locals and the sleep deprived Conference attendees. Unrelenting sunlight on aggressively grey and medium sized jagged rocks of gravel. It felt like your head was exploding.
Somebody had rented a motel room around the corner so me and Rage drifted over to check out the scene. There was nothing relaxing about it. It was an echo of the energy of the bus, parking lot and Conference: too many people in too small of a space and the demanding auras of piles of clothing and music equipment. The fence was covered with brown anoles urgently flashing bright yellow dewlaps. Also Broke-Bus Brooke was there and there is zero chill within a ten foot radius of that person ever. She ended up harnessing that quality in a later series of deeply uncomfortable performances as Are You My Mother?”
We decided to ditch the collectivist spirit and sneak off for a bit of decadent self care: we went out to sushi. Under the soothing effects of secrecy and air conditioning we ordered a giant platter of sashimi that arrived on a bed of shaved ice. If I had been a zoo animal in those years my diet probably would have been mangoes, rapini and raw salmon. Like the scent of Florida Water these things felt refreshing and most likely restocked some of the vitamins that the constant diet of drugs had been depleting.
We returned to the chaos of the International Noise Conference.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 