The black leather cap.
I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I viewed this cap as one of my talismans. In a way it was the talisman because losing it had a profound effect on how I viewed the world and magic and ushered in the end of my magical career. I had been self identifying as a “TangleWitch” meaning that I thought my magical abilities were especially suited for entangling things and next to useless for untangling them. I started to see myself and my core talismans as entangled – meaning that the universe was fundamentally incapable of separating us on a permanent basis.
I especially thought this about the cap because of two separate but similar incidents. The first time was at a work party for the Black Butte Center for Railroad Permaculture, coincidentally very close to where I currently live, that I travelled to with Larry Bus. I forget why I was angrily and drunkenly walking through the forest alone in the middle of the night but it culminated in me throwing my cap into the trees.
I’ve been to forests, jungles, savannas and chapparales across a decent portion of the globe and none of them are as visually homogenous as the evergreen forests of the greater Mount Shasta watershed. I figured that my chances of relocating the cap once I woke up sober and regretful were next to zero but I took a walk and there it was. It felt significant.
The second time around was also Larry Bus adjacent. John Benson was making a trip down to San Diego to deliver a power wheelchair he had prepared to my mother, who was suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, and we set up a show in Balboa Park. This was the same trip as the 2010 Tijuana two-parter about getting arrested – the show was a night or two before our trip across the border and when I get around to writing it up you’ll see what a phenomenally shitty week the whole thing was.
I had lost the cap in Balboa Park while getting caught up in a knuckleduster, or in less flowery language my friends and I getting assaulted, so I was reasonably certain that I would never see it again. On a subsequent trip to San Diego nearly a year later it reappeared on my friend Eddie Castro’s porch which is precisely when I started to believe that the thing was karmically bound to me. It had gotten an excessive amount of my juju on it and it started to feel like no matter how far it went invisible forces would slowly but inevitably pull it back to me.
Part of this belief stemmed from the fact that it hadn’t originally been my hat. It had belonged to my cohort Kevin Von Mutant who had undoubtedly added the row of round studs and VIN number plate from a car that was most likely towed out to the desert to be destroyed and I started wearing it during the brief window of time that we had a Death Rock band called Voiheuristick Necromorph. After I had added some colorful buttons, feathers and a rubber bat tucked under the band he declared that there was too much of my juju on it to accept it back.
Anyway enough about this stupid hat: let’s talk about how the three threads of this story come together and I lost it for good. Let’s talk about the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos.
There are a weird sequence of concentric rings pertaining to unfeigned appreciation of beauty and insulating layers of irony that together map out all the different ways of being a “Hipster” and I can say with reasonable certainty that I fit somewhere in there. I’ve been to Coachella, I’ve had numerous vegan brunches, I’ve bought clothing from American Apparel and I used to look forward to bringing home free issues of VICE when it was still a print magazine.
It is neither the first nor the last adjective that would pop up if somebody was attempting to describe and define me but it is certainly one of them.
There were probably some preliminary rumbles and FOMO aftershocks but by my reckoning 2011 was the year of the great hipsterization of the Juggalo subculture. I don’t mean that Juggalos became hipsters or vice versa – for several years it had parsed over into being a prestigious reference, like when I made a talisman out of the lucky Juggalo dollar, but now every hipster worth their artisanal cocktail salt was trying to show up for the Annual Gathering. Clown paint, oversized ICP shirts and hatchetman everything were popping up in highbrow noise sets and fine art installations.
By now the Juggalo movement has been thoroughly plundered and its aesthetics and iconography have been present in mainstream hip-hop for several years – albeit without a watermark and with the serial numbers filed off.
I had gone to Chicago for Bitch Pork and stuck around for the remainder of the Summer when my good friend Dalton from the bus tour and Living Hell informed me that he had a press pass with my name on it and I needed to get my ass down to Cave-In-Rock, Illinois to check out the 12th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos. I asked around about rides and quickly joined some Facebook groups but nothing materialized so I felt like I had no choice but to try to get myself down there by any means necessary and undertake an odyssey I had just learned was especially perilous.
I hadn’t thought about my 2008 arrest in Sullivan, Illinois since I almost lost my tutoring job over it the year before and I’d assumed that unless I visited the actual town or tried to ride a train through it again it wouldn’t manifest as a meaningful factor in my life. I had just started my year long oath of abstinence from opioid agonists and temporary Catholicism and even more recently learned that I had Hepatitis C when I went in for routine testing with the girl I’d been seeing which caused me to cut out alcohol as well – this all meant that an unhealthy dose of hubris was involved as I had adequate cause to feel untouchable from a spiritual standpoint.
There was a venue on the West Side of Chicago on the edge of the open air market I used to cop dope in called The Dust Bowl – it would become the major venue for next year’s Bitch Pork festival but at this point subculture types were still a relatively rare sight in the neighborhood. I was biking to a show there one night that was either cancelled or I was too early for or something but I biked out of the neighborhood a few minutes after biking in. To the cop car stationed on North Avenue that noticed me in both directions this could only mean one thing.
The ridiculous part about this was that I was absolutely done up to the nines. I was going through a white lace period of my larger goth phase and would have had on bloomers, a white lacy apron, elaborate face paint and yards of lace ribbon wrapped around my arms and legs like a mummy. I didn’t even have pockets and there’s no way the corner boys from any crew would have ever served me in this state but that’s the timeless stupidity of Chicago cops: they honestly believe that hard drugs are bought and sold by people in Halloween costumes like in an ‘80s action movie instead of the reality that every white buyer is trying to blend in with jeans and a hoodie.
They refused to believe my honest explanation of course and after searching me they were angry enough that their assumptions had been wrong and they’d wasted their time that they were excited about the prospect of running my ID and finding something to catch me up on. I’d been in a handful of situations that involved getting my ID ran outside of Illinois but now that I was in the same state as my initial arrest the charges came back to haunt me. They already had me in handcuffs and might have moved me into the cruiser when one of them noticed some fine print: I was apparently only eligible for arrest on these charges if I was south of the Interstate 80 and north of the Interstate 64.
Chicago sits just above the 80 – it was like Illinois was a giant hamburger and as long as I stayed in the top and bottom buns I was safe but stepping into the wide swathe of meat in the middle meant that I was gambling with a “Go Directly to Jail” card. The Juggalo Gathering takes place in Cave-In-Rock which happens to be just under the 64. Chicago was safe, the Gathering was safe but even if I had a ride down there I’d be risking the possibility of getting pulled over in any number of small towns in the middle. It would be beyond stupid to try to hitchhike.
I was going to do it anyway.
There’s a Megabus to Champaign-Urbana and I figured it would stop for a meal break somewhere around Effingham. It stopped at the exact same truck stop we’d slept behind in 2008. My plan was to jump out and try to catch rides down the 33 and then the 45 – really small country road type highways. Every time I had hitchhiked long distance before had been in the company of at least one girl and generally on larger interstates so I was picking a hell of a time to try it as a 6’4” guy on his own. I was wearing close to the same outfit that I have on in the photo I posted with this story – considering the kind of towns I was trying to catch rides through that didn’t help either.
I asked around the truck stop for a minute but nobody was going in the right direction. I didn’t want to let it get dark on me so I had to just try to get moving. I forget what I wrote on the sign – probably “SOUTH”. It would have been one thing if I never got any rides at all, then I would have just turned back around, but I got two or three really short ones. Just enough to get me to the middle of nowhere.
There weren’t very many cars so every time one passed it was a big psych out as to whether any of them would pick me up or not. None of them did. I didn’t even look like a Juggalo and I hadn’t written anything about the Gathering on the sign so even if a group of them passed it was completely possible that they wouldn’t have picked me up. It didn’t look like any of them did.
Maybe the hitchhiking advice that the Teddy Bear Juggalos had given me back in Amarillo would have come in handy – I was trying to get into their world. Someone did drive past me and yell “do you suck dick?” when I was closer to town. Maybe I should have said yes. That’s stupid – I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. I just wanted to go to a weird party and not let my friends down.
It was starting to get dark and I was scoping out a church to get ready to sleep behind it when an SUV pulled up.
Red and blue lights. I was fucked.
It turned out that somebody had called the cops on me because they thought I was standing too close to a mailbox. They said they thought I was stealing mail. Like freaks come all the way from the city to steal their Sears Catalogues and shit. I can’t even blame them – the whole thing was stupid and I should have accepted that I wasn’t getting there long before I had the cops called on me on a lonely rural highway.
I knew exactly what was going to happen. I’d been given an absurdly detailed warning back in Chicago. The cops asked me if I knew I had a warrant from Moultrie County and were a little taken aback when I told them I did. It was a Friday – I had to choose between paying a five hundred dollar bond and waiting until Monday to see a judge. I had the money, though not much more than it, so there wasn’t any way I could not pay it. You can’t really sit in a cement box for two days if it’s within your power to make it stop, or at least I couldn’t.
There was a teenage kid in there with me. He asked me if I knew what time it was:
“It’s probably around seven.”
“Morning or night?”
“Night.”
“I thought those meals were coming awfully quick.”
The thing that’s stayed with me about this whole experience is the absolute resignation and depression in his voice as he said that last bit about the meals. It turned out that he was in there because somebody had called the cops on him when they saw him and some friends drinking underneath a freeway bridge and he was the only one that was underaged. Normal teenagers doing normal teenage shit and the people in his town decide to call the cops.
I had gone with Snake a couple of Summers earlier when she had to drop off court paperwork from when she’d gone to a camping party in Central Illinois and gotten a citation for curfew because there was nothing else they could catch her up on. I should have known exactly what Central Illinois was like if I had taken half a second to think about it. The kind of place where people call the cops if they see a stranger standing by someone else’s mailbox or a teenager doing the only thing there is to do in their dead end town or for no reason whatsoever.
“Just to be safe.”
There were things I didn’t like about the town I’d grown up in and I couldn’t wait to get out of it but the conformity of San Diego was nothing compared to the absolute emptiness of being young, bored and trapped in a place like Effingham. God damn effing Effingham. Everything about the town pissed me off but the kid wasn’t even pissed off.
He had just given up.
After an hour or so they had finished processing me and they brought me to the heavy metal door and handed me my paperwork and cut me loose. There was a soda machine between the door and the exit and I didn’t exactly want a soda but I had a dollar on me so I bought a Dr. Pepper. It felt like I almost didn’t have a choice – like now that I had my freedom I had to buy a soda if I had the option and Dr. Pepper was just the best of several bad options.
I stepped outside with my soda and a Bluegrass String band was playing on the grass of the town square outside. The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was watch an old timey String band but it wasn’t like I was about to start walking so I sat on the grass and I opened my Dr. Pepper. I think they were called Strings n’ Things. In Effingham even the air of freedom doesn’t taste sweet.
It’s just sad and mediocre.
It wasn’t a long walk to the same truck stop and I went to sleep behind it again just like in 2008. I found an old vinyl sign, like the banner kind, and I wrapped it around myself so the dew wouldn’t get me wet in the morning. The next day was Saturday and I had already missed the first day of the Gathering but I figured that at this point the worst had already happened. I could show my discharge papers if another cop got called on me so I spent a few more hours attempting what was clearly impossible.
I got to the roadside just after the sun came up and by noon nobody had even slowed down much less stopped for me. It was time to accept the inevitable. I flipped my cardboard sign over, wrote “CHI” on the back and walked to the other side of the street. It was like I had been walking against the wind with all my strength only to stay in one place and then turned around and let it carry me. It was like the sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud, the day got a little brighter, the birds got a little louder.
I hadn’t been standing there for five minutes when a family of smiling Christians stopped and gave me a prepaid Subway sandwich card. It wasn’t like I particularly wanted a Subway sandwich but it wasn’t about that. I had flipped a switch and suddenly people were acknowledging and wanting to help me. I was moving in sync with the Universe. Ten minutes later I had a ride and he was going all the way to Chicago.
It had cost me a day and five hundred dollars but that wasn’t the real price. His name was Doug and he was a deer hunter. The conversation was pleasant enough – just enough to put me at ease to the point that I stepped out of the car in Chicago without realizing that I had forgotten my black leather cap. He lived in Humboldt Park, a couple of blocks from The Dust Bowl, so he had some patina of hipness but not to the extent that I would actually have any prayer of seeing him at anything.
Of course I tried to get it back, I expected to, the message hadn’t sunk in yet that I had made a serious mis-step and it was a consequence. I put flyers all around the block of park that he had dropped me off at. I wrote “Deerhunter Doug” and explained that I had forgotten the hat and it was important to me and I wrote my phone number on the bottom. It would have been less of a blow if he never called but to make the senseless loss all the more frustrating he did.
I stuck around Chicago for a couple more weeks but by the time he called I was already back in California. Of course he remembered me, of course he still had my hat but there wasn’t any way he would send it to me for any amount of money or let me have a friend go pick it up for me. It isn’t vanity that makes me say he was attracted to me and kindling hope that a second meeting might go somewhere – it was just painfully obvious. He was an aging urban professional queen who was cosplaying rural masculinity by dressing up in Real Tree and going deer hunting and I was a hipster cosplaying a gay leather subculture that I wasn’t even peripherally a part of.
Neither of us were going to get what we wanted and I never saw the hat again.
The experience didn’t end my magic career entirely but it checked and subverted my faith in things that I never should have had faith in to begin with. I had been getting cocky and I needed a reminder that even if I had gotten lucky a few times if I tried fate it would try me back. It wasn’t that I wasn’t supposed to be at The Gathering of the Juggalos, I just wasn’t going to get there if I was being stupid about it.
To add insult to injury I met someone from our social group a week later that had driven from Chicago to the Gathering at the exact time that I’d been trying to get there.
Things changed for me slowly. The Library of Congress Tape Player for the Blind that had been providing the soundtrack for my life on consecutive charges of its nickel-cadmium battery took the hit for me when a car knocked me off my bicycle. I performed an Invocation to Venus and eventually met my wife. We performed a series of Planetary Invocations to Saturn, the Moon, Mars and Mercury.
I gradually stopped wearing and using and thinking about all of my other talismans and when I lost them I lost them all at once along with everything else I’d accumulated up to that point in my life.
It didn’t feel like it had anything to do with magic.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 