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”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 