Tag: Mauerfall

Chicago 2001 : “Lust for Life”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I have this theory about the 1990’s. The short version is that the thing that made it such a magical time to be young in America was the convenient temporal bookending of two major geopolitical events: The Fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and The September 11th Terrorist Attacks in 2001. You’ve got The Cold War on one side, The War on Terror on the other and a decade and change in between when it didn’t feel like we were locked into an ideological struggle for existence with a whole other side of the planet.

Maybe it’s bullshit. Everybody idealizes the time period of their own youth and you could probably find blips on the timeline enclosing every decade in history to ascribe the same significance to. The human mind loves looking for patterns – and in many cases inventing them to stave off the intellectual phobia of randomness and chaos.

Everything looks like a face.

Every number means something.

Even without a crystal ball to tell me what was around the corner it was hard not to feel like the sand was running out in at least some kind of hourglass. It wasn’t even a year since we all started “experimenting” with heroin and we’d burned our way through two housing situations most would consider dodgy to begin with.

A former grocery store with barely functioning heat and a couple pipes in the basement’s ceiling instead of a shower.

An ancient house that needed the old glass fuses every time we overloaded a circuit and where some of us slept in a former pigeon coop.

The landlord to that last place was a constantly partying alcoholic cokehead and he still took us to court to make sure he was getting rid of us.

All of us together were getting to be too much for any sane person to rent to so we started spreading ourselves out. Nick and Janice got an apartment right on the edge of the West Side, then known as the largest open air heroin market in the world. They held on to Sebastian – the cat we’d all been living with since the El Rancho days. Sebastian had belonged to the housemate everybody called Crazy Danny and had supposedly been telling him to cut himself through psychic communication.

I don’t know what became of Crazy Danny but at some point he stopped living with us and Sebastian didn’t.

Dave and Meg and Vanessa had one over to the Ukrainian Village side of what was almost the same neighborhood. I had been drifting back and forth without worrying too much about having a room anymore. Janice was at the stage where she was transferring her growing frustration with Nick’s constant appetites for crack and heroin to whoever he was doing it with so I started spending most of my time at the other spot.

I stayed in Dave’s room, the little dude, and for a little while we seemed to be in sync about how much drugs we wanted to do and when. He went to school, I had a job and neither of us had anything close to a full time habit. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life became our go-to soundtrack and anthem for both possible decisions: the resolve to take a night off by either drinking or staying completely sober? Lust for Life. Running in from the block with tiny bags or folded up foil and grabbing our spoons and needles? Same record, same side, same song:

“Here comes Johnny Yen again…”

Pretty much everybody used the same drugs and nobody seemed too worried about it. I don’t remember any of us getting sick or even using the word addict. The closest would have been this kid Paul who used to rap under the name MC Think. I’d heard that one of his schticks had been rapping through a harmonica but he wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore. Picture an Eminem that never made it out of the crackhead phase.

Anyway Paul didn’t live with us – he just came around from time to time.

The last time I saw him he showed up at the Ukrainian Village apartment with an old green Schwinn cruiser he’d obviously stolen. He asked me to help him sell it – either because he’d worn out his welcome at all of the bike shops or just because I looked like less of a junkie. We went to a spot in Wicker Park and one of the employees who clearly knew what was going on gave me forty bucks for it.

When we were biking back to the West Side Paul suggested that he go to the spot by himself so it would be less “sketchy”. He showed back up an hour or two later – high out of his mind with a bullshit story:

“I got jacked man! They jumped me and took all the money…”

I’m sure this seems obvious to most readers and totally my fault for “trusting a junkie” but the thing was we all did heroin and hadn’t been acting like that. At El Rancho and the Red House if people figured out that you were going to cop nearly everyone in the house would give you ten or twenty dollars and when you got home you gave everyone what they’d paid for and ordered. We treated it the exact same way as if someone was walking to a corner store.

One time I did keep John’s money instead of giving him his drugs but this was because he owed me a couple hundred dollars from when I covered his rent once and at that point he was clearly never paying me back. He still was pretty furious about it. While the concept of “blue balls” is manipulative misogynist bullshit “blue brains” is definitely a real thing: the feeling when you’re expecting to get high only to have it not work out at the last moment.

Of course Paul wasn’t really one of us and had probably only come around to rip somebody off in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the same mistake with him again but it was a moot point as he didn’t come around after that anyway. I hope he’s still alive.

At some point Nick’s mom rented an apartment for him in Boy’s Town. She either didn’t know about his relationship with Janice or wouldn’t have approved of him living so close to the drug neighborhoods but Nick didn’t want her finding out he didn’t live there. He rented it out to these hacker/raver kids but they had to get out of town over a kidnapping charge.

I think some kid ripped them off on a big MDMA deal and they had been trying to get their money back but I never heard a ton of details. I worked in Lincoln Park so I figured I might as well get an actual place and offered to move in. I paid some monthly amount directly to Nick and was supposed to avoid interacting with the building manager as he was in contact with Nick’s mom.

The very first night I moved in I had to go to work in the morning and realized I had no idea what time it was when I plugged in my alarm clock radio. I didn’t have a cell phone or wear a watch and I hadn’t even thought about it because I’d never lived alone. I searched for different radio stations and waited for one to announce the time but it just didn’t happen.

I didn’t really know the neighborhood so I walked down Broadway hoping I might run into somebody. It must have been fairly late because the street was deserted. I started looking into the windows off all the closed businesses hoping to catch sight of a clock. I got excited when I recognized an actual clock shop from across the street and rushed over.

All the different clocks were set to different times and I had no way of knowing which, if any of them, might be accurate.

I don’t know if my anxiety about the time played a role in this but I ended up waking up to realizing I’d pissed on myself. You might have read in the Fort Thunder pieces that I had issues with bed wetting that lasted into my early twenties but became increasingly sporadic toward the end. It probably fizzled out completely when I was twenty three but around the time of this story it was about once a year.

The incident in that story was mid-2000 so this 2001 incident was most likely the next time.

I hadn’t moved my clothes in with me yet and I had fallen asleep wearing my only pair of black slacks for my cafe job. After a quick shower I searched around the apartment to see if the previous tenants had left any clothing behind. I did actually find a pair of denim JNCOs but while the waist was a decent fit the length was at least a foot and a half too short for me.

I’m 6’4”.

I’m sure I looked pretty entertaining biking out in a dress shirt with wildly flared highwaters. I went to a Unique Thrift Store that wasn’t too far out of the way and bought an extra pair of work pants. Thankfully it was next to a KFC that let me change in the bathroom and I didn’t have to walk into work like this.

I left the undersized rave pants in the trash can.

Another interesting thing I noticed when first moving to the area was this mural on the side of a public school:

“STEP ON DRUGS LIKE YOU STEP ON BUGS!”

I wondered if the schools administrators realized that they were basically instructing kids to add less expensive substances to drugs for the purpose of raising profit.

My final night in the apartment started with a big tip. Papa was in the mood to show off and we cooked one of his fans a big pasta meal with tons of wine and after dinner liqueurs. This was an isolated occurrence – Trattoria Monterotondo was usually just a coffee bar and takeout spot. When the customer tried to pay Papa told him to give me a hundred dollar tip instead.

With all that cash burning a hole in my pocket it was an almost certainty that I’d be getting high but I didn’t feel like biking all the way to the West Side and I’d never gone into Cabrini Greene alone. I ran into a very sweet young prostitute walking down North Avenue dressed in a heart motif bikini with a full on cape and asked her if she could help me score drugs without having to brave the towers. She explained that those were the only places to score and she was no more excited about the risk of stepping into one than I was so I thanked her and kept walking.

I had one of the paper schedules for the needle exchange outreach van and I saw it went to a nearby neighborhood called Uptown so I figured it must be a drug saturated area. I asked a few likely looking characters until I found an older guy who was willing to bring me with him to the spot. I might have seemed overly trusting in the earlier paragraphs of this piece but that didn’t extend to people I’d never met before. He didn’t know how to get heroin so I got a bunch of crack with the intention of shooting it up back at the apartment.

I needed to break him off some anyway so we found a secluded alley and took a couple of giant blasts from his pipe. The drug made us especially gregarious or as my new friend more eloquently stated:

“Man, I’m geekin’ like a Puerto Rican!”

Somehow the topic of conversation found it’s way to our respective relationships with our fathers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were complicated by hard drug use in each of our cases. My sister had taken it upon herself to inform my parents when she heard I’d been using heroin and they were pretty worried considering they hadn’t seen me since getting this piece of news.

I was especially offended because she had spent her early teenage years heavily using methamphetamine but I’d never ratted her out. Most people believe in certain hard drug hierarchies so while it was disappointing it wasn’t especially surprising.

As crack is cocaine that has been combined with baking soda to raise the temperature at which it vaporizes you need to dissolve it in an acid if you want to inject it. I always used lemon juice and I had one of those squeezy plastic lemons back at the apartment. The rush is identical to what you’d get if you started with powder but the taste of lemon hits your throat through your bloodstream for a little tropical twist.

I had my bass, four track and some effect pedals so I stayed up late recording what I thought was well crafted psychedelic metal made up of layered bass tracks. When I finally got a chance to listen back to it sober it sounded like an uninspired morass but that night all the bits seemed to perfectly sync together. I wanted to put it onto a project I’d been working on called “Cocaine: the mix tape”.

The highlight was an extremely convoluted mix of a song from the Enemymine record. godheadSilo was one of my favorite groups so I desperately wanted to see Mike Kunka’s next project when they came to The Casbah. I’d been going to a lot of over 21 shows in Chicago with borrowed IDs but back in my home town of San Diego every bouncer knew exactly who I was and how old I actually was.

It didn’t help that me and Francois had brought along Andy Robillard, one of the main bouncers, the last time we’d driven to Chicago. I had to wait out by the exit while Francois went inside and recorded the set for me on my Fisher Price tape recorder. At least the sound carried through the wall pretty well being all bass – the thing that really stuck with me was when they hit the first booming note one of the other bouncers ran outside clutching his stomach.

At least I got to meet and talk to the band because before the show they were hanging out a block away watching planes land like the scene in Wayne’s World. San Diego, unlike most cities, stuck it’s airport right next to downtown and The Casbah is on the edge closest to it. Mike gave me an old godheadSilo shirt they’d never been able to sell because of how big it was – the design with a pink bunny.

The live recording came out lo-fi but in the best possible way: a throbbing buzz where you can just make out the riffs and rhythms if you know the songs. The one that was most distinguishable was Coccoon Clo3, if you know the song it’s a very catchy riff, so for the mix tape I painstakingly combined it with the studio version from their debut album the ice in me. Thankfully I had the album on vinyl instead of a CD so I spent forever syncing things up so the live and clean versions dovetailed in and out of each other sometimes even fluctuating with a sustained note.

Appropriately enough “Cocaine: the mix tape” was never finished as my buzz ran out halfway through the first side. Sadly I don’t have a copy of it or the Enemymine recording or any objects whatsoever from this time in my life. Frequently moving had already whittled down my possessions but I went through a complete reset when an RV got towed in San Leandro.

After the night of my own bass recording I had to rush out the next morning to return to work and left the apartment in pretty bad shape. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t misplace my key the next day and because of the odd arrangement the only way to get another one would have been for Nick to be the one to request it. I asked him to but he dragged his ass and a little over a week later the building manager let himself in because a package for Nick had been sitting in the hallway.

When he saw needles all over the place he called Nick’s mom and Nick was in deep shit. She didn’t know about his drug use yet and he was able to (truthfully) tell her that they weren’t his but that meant revealing that he didn’t live there and rented it to other people. Nick was pretty pissed at me over the whole thing but I was already irritated with him that he hadn’t gotten me back into the place I’d payed him for when a single phone call and bus trip could have solved both our problems.

At least I got a chance to go get my stuff.

Anyway it was all feeling a bit unsustainable. I wasn’t anything close to full on strung out but things were definitely chaotic. My whole social group needed a bit of space from each other to figure shit out. Some people left drugs behind and others went deeper into addiction. Nick and Janice broke up not long afterward.

Of course I had no idea that 9/11 and my own personal tragedies accompanying it were looming on the horizon but it was obviously some kind of twilight. I wasn’t thinking about how underground music might be about to change or how the internet would fundamentally alter the face of it but these things are always clearer looking backwards. You can’t define an era until it’s already over.

In the moment I was most aware of a growing hunger for something different.

I’ve got a lust for life…

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

berniebleakLeave a comment

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”