Although one of the primary reasons for the three of us to be traveling together was playing shows I can barely remember any of the West Coast ones except for that first one in Portland. It’s entirely possible that we didn’t play an Oakland show on our way down at all. Most likely Skadi and Etain had already played an Oakland show in the week leading up to Halloween that I hadn’t heard about and didn’t go to.
[Note: since writing this I stumbled across a folder of photos from a show we must have played together on Larry Bus. I can’t remember where it was parked, who else might have played or anything about it really.]
I was extremely busy preparing the abandoned house for it’s eventual haunting with Popsicle and Sugar Tea so all of my nights were pretty much taken. I can’t even remember where I was staying in Oakland around this time. Either Apgar had not yet dissolved and I was back in my room or Apgar had dissolved and I was either at Trinity’s house in West Oakland or between places. I may well have been crashing with Lux.
Lux is another piece of the timeline that I am having trouble pinning down. I know that Lux and I were already in a relationship by the time I passed back through Oakland with Skadi and Etain but I can’t remember if it started before or after the haunting. I can’t conjure a single memory of Lux at the haunted house so my best guess is after. That November seems to be bursting at the seams with memorable events and meaningful changes as small portions of my timeline often are.
Lux was somebody that Popsicle knew through SPAZ and 5lowershop parties – basically the Bay Area “indie rave” scene. She was originally from Hawaii which perpetuated a pattern where everyone I met with an X in their name seemed to come from a non-contiguous state. Alexis from the Rockaway and a girl I call James in these stories but actually goes by Ajax both came from Alaska. Since then I’ve met people with “X” in their name who came from the lower 48.
Oh yeah, there was a guy named Djynnx (I might be spelling it wrong) in the Katabatik crew who was also from Alaska.
Anyway Lux looked similar to me in terms of “sparkly goth” fashion but skewed a little closer to what was called the “MySpace scene” look. We used to semi-ironically watch a lot of Blood on the Dance Floor videos together – at that time Dahvie Vanity’s patterns of sexual assault and pedophilia were not well known. We formed a death rock band together called Voiheuristick Necromorph that recorded an album with a label lined up to release it but sadly imploded before it was ever mixed.
Like Skadi and Etain, Lux is a powerful visual artist. She also is a Born Again Christian now and may not use the name Lux anymore. For several years there was a silent power struggle over our MySpace page that had an early recording of our song Matryoshka from before the band became a five piece. She would try to delete the page and I would get a notification as co-Admin and veto it. Eventually I forgot to check it for over a year or however long the veto window was and the page was gone.
Of course if she had simply waited it would have disappeared from the internet anyway. I haven’t dug into the story but whatever happened with the MySpace servers is pretty much the burning of the Library at Alexandria for early twenty first century underground music. I can’t even imagine how many artists like me uploaded music then lost the tapes or files and never archived any of it under the false security that things on the internet last forever.
Maybe there is some way to get some of it back with The Wayback Machine but I’ve never heard of it so it probably doesn’t work.
Anyway Lux and I were definitely seeing each other by the time I was back in Oakland with Skadi and Etain. It was even the second place Lux had lived while we were seeing each other – it’s wild that all of this happened in the window between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Her living situation in West Oakland had been kind of weird so it makes sense that she would have moved in the middle of a month.
Anyway the question of sleeping arrangements didn’t really come up that night because I would have been sleeping with Lux. We never talked about it or used the term but what Lux and I had was essentially an open relationship. She was already seeing someone else when we started seeing each other and then stopped seeing him because he didn’t make her feel good. I wanted her to stop seeing him because of how she told me he made her feel but not really for any other reason – I never felt threatened or insecure about the fact she was seeing him.
We were both just naturally predisposed to candid honesty and the total absence of jealousy. I’ve been in other relationships that were fundamentally “open” but there was usually some degree of secrecy, hurt feelings or anguish over not being faithful to someone else. There was none of that with me and Lux or at least none that I was aware of.
Of course I told her about what was starting to happen between me and Skadi and of course she already knew because the energy palpably hung in the air around us. Her reaction to Skadi and Etain was immediate affinity – she loved them and they loved her. It was like the purer form of what would have been between Skadi, Etain and me if physical attraction never entered into the picture.
There’s no way for me to know for sure if my relationship with Lux played a role in Skadi’s eventual decision to deny and resist this attraction but my immediate instinct is that it did not. She had plenty of other reasons that I will go into when the time comes. I wouldn’t describe myself as poly but this wasn’t the first time that I saw multiple people at the same time. When it does happen I try to do everything I can to treat all parties with honesty and respect.
We all went to dance at the Goth Night at DNA Lounge in San Francisco. I can’t remember if Skadi ever did but Etain definitely referred to herself as goth. I’d say all three of us thought of ourselves as goth but none of us looked a thing like the typical definition – Skadi looked like a lost boy from Peter Pan and Etain looked like a Gelfling Princess and I looked like a granny style acid biker.
In the Summer of that same year I got into an argument with a Rastafarian at a Berlin Night Club over whether or not I was goth. He kept saying things like:
“I Rastafari! No man is goth!”
It wasn’t until much much later that I realized we were probably getting confused by each other’s accents and he thought I was claiming to be God.
We had a great night, we all had fun dancing. I haven’t done it in years but I used to be obsessed with dancing and go out to do it as much as possible. I wouldn’t say I’m especially good, I seem to completely lack any natural sense of rhythm, but I compensate by being creative, enthusiastic and unashamed. A choreographer friend in Chicago was impressed enough to invite me to join a performance of what had previously been an all girl dance troupe.
The other troupe members were not pleased:
“Did she really ask you to join or did you ask her?”
Because of the sparks that were beginning to fly I was paying the most attention to how Skadi danced. She looked defiant – like she was ready to take on the world and lose. Kind of like a main character in a video game or animated movie when the developers are especially angling for a David and Goliath thing. I don’t know that we ever danced together.
I’ve had maybe a handful of experiences with partners that perfectly complement my dance style and we develop spontaneous dancer’s telepathy. I remember one night when it happened on pogo sticks. Me and some mystery woman were wordlessly developing a plethora of new moves together – using our knees to stabilize so we could jump without hands, jumping on two pogo sticks at the same time and then the other person jumps forward and you release one pogo stick and split into two while both jumping backwards.
These dance partners have never been romantic or sexual partners to me. In most cases we never even spoke to each other and I never learned their names. It’s one of the many cruelties of the world that is – it simply has some things it chooses to hold back and deny. I’ve had partners that I danced well with but never transcendently. LaPorsha and I actually used to dance together a bit before an intermediary assured us of our mutual attraction and we became instantly betrothed.
The next stop after Oakland was Los Angeles. I can’t remember how the car configuration worked out but of course I can’t drive so it would have made the most sense for whichever of them wasn’t driving to lay down in the back seat and rest. The slow smoldering of whatever it was between me and Skadi didn’t cause any lopsided-ness in the conversation. I remember it being between all three of us – the constant hunger to learn more about each other disguised the passage of time and made the long hours between cities feel deceptively short.
I hadn’t lived in Los Angeles yet at this point but somebody had connected me with Nora Keyes and I got us onto the Ye Olde Hush Clubbe show at Hyperion Tavern. I would go on to play and help many touring friends play this event when I moved to Los Angeles and the necessity of keeping the volume down was always a problem. For Skadi and Etain it was a perfect fit – both of their performance styles were already on the soft and gentle side.
I don’t know what I did that night. It’s possible I didn’t play at all but knowing me I’m not the kind to pass up an opportunity even if it isn’t ideal. I probably just dialed down the drum machine and reigned in the screaming a bit. I have a scrap of a memory from the night – the three of us wandering up Hyperion to a burrito shop and spending a long time sitting at one of the tables. We were probably a little early for the show.
I have no idea where we slept.
The car we were cohabitating in was a nearly new Volkswagen Jetta that belonged to Etain or someone in her family. It was an early example of the key fob having a computer chip in it meaning it would be both drastically expensive and a logistical nightmare if it were lost. I had just moved into Skadi and Etain’s world but in the short time I’d been there the key was becoming potentially or theoretically lost multiple times a day.
I couldn’t say if this characterized their entire cross country trip or if it was a newer phenomenon. I thought it would help if the keyring was a little larger and looked more like it and the two girls belonged together. I tied on a big loop of rainbow cord I had for making Cat’s Cradles and attached a large acrylic prism. It was the same one a girl named Annapurna used to “sting” me when we first met in Liberty, Maine.
[It’s in The Bus chapters if anybody feels like digging for it.]
That prism had already been through some stuff. When I started hanging around Oakland in 2008 I worked on a three piece version of Bleak End at Bernie’s with Books and Rotten Milk for a big generator show at the Albany Landfill. Rotten Milk made pedal noise and Books added percussion with tap dancing or percussion on a bent saw or scribbling on top of a contact mic’d metal sign depending on the song.
It wasn’t improvised – we spent a long time writing parts and practicing at The Purple Haus. We also took the opportunity to record the three piece versions of the songs on a four track but the morning after an Apgar show my purse was stolen a few feet from the place I was sleeping on the floor and the master tape was lost before we’d had a chance to mix it down. This was the morning that Jesse Short gave me the “Vampire Dicknose” nickname:
“Hey Vampire Dicknose! I found some of your trinkets in the gutter!”
Besides the tape the only other things in my purse were trinkets. One of the ones recovered in the gutter was that prism. It had been attached to a contact mic wire and was the source of a power struggle between me and Books because she was teaching me to solder piezos but was inordinately bothered by me wanting to hang different things from the wires that were purely ornamental in function.
Any way she was right – the weight of the prism caused the wiring on that particular contact mic to fall apart and it became part of a keychain. I kind of think she made sure it was poorly soldered out of spite though. That’s not really an excuse for anything – I took Electric Shop in Junior High and should have already known how to solder myself.
I made the changes to the car key in Los Angeles. We were heading down to San Diego to play a show and celebrate Thanksgiving at my mother’s house and we stopped to go swimming at Black’s Beach in La Jolla. When it was time for us to leave the car key was suddenly missing again. If you’ve ever misplaced car keys at a beach you know how daunting it is to search an expanse of sand where they easily could have become buried.
This was the proof-of-concept run for my modifications of the key chain. If my theory had been correct the visual affinity between the new decorations and Etain and Skadi’s style would cause them to be drawn back together. One of the popular activities at Black’s Beach is paragliding from the Torrey Pines cliffs that sit above it. After riding the winds the paragliders land somewhere on the beach and pack up the canvas sailplane to hike back up the trail.
As we approached the trailhead one such paragliding enthusiast was twirling the key on his finger and looking directly at us. He told us it had been beneath his feet the moment they returned to terra firma and he’d been scanning the crowd for its owner. The moment he set eyes on Skadi and Etain he knew that it could belong to no one else so the experiment was a success. I don’t remember looking to see if that stuff was still on the keys when we met back up on the East Coast but I’d understand if it was removed – it was a change that I had unilaterally made to their world.
Black’s Beach is clothing optional but I doubt the three of us were naked. Whatever was happening between me and Skadi prevented the insular world that the three of were building from existing in Eden-like innocence. Most likely we all had underwear or actual swimsuits on. There were other signs of trouble in Paradise as well.
Because of how tall I am I’ve always enjoyed being treated like a piece of furniture and climbed on. The photo up there is me fulfilling this function for Lux some time after we stopped being in an intimate relationship. My feelings are directly opposed to The Rolling Stones famous lyric:
“I’ll never be your beast of burden…”
I almost always want to be a beast of burden. It’s not totally gendered – I often raise male friends into the air on my shoulders while they are performing but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a special thrill in being scaled by beautiful women. Ideally I would have preferred for Etain to feel equally at home doing this but under the circumstances I can see why my shoulders didn’t quite feel like neutral ground. In fact it was a source of tension:
Etain saw Skadi as looking down on and mocking her from my shoulders – much like a sardonic squirrel. I wasn’t going to put this in here because I’ve already used it in another piece but honestly why would I ever pass up an opportunity to drop in a reference to Ragnarok and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson? Etain saw Skadi in this moment as similar to Ratatosk – the bushy tailed rodent that runs up and down Yggdrasil to ferry insults between Avenir the eagle and Nidhogg the dragon.
I doubt that’s how Skadi would have seen herself.
I didn’t want to make Skadi or Etain feel like I was comparing them to each other but the reality is this probably happened nearly constantly. While Skadi was clambering on me I would have been making remarks about how incredibly weightless she was and it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that weight and self image is a thing Etain struggled with – I have and most girls I know have as well.
More than anything I think she was just feeling ganged up on.
After the debacle with the keys we continued on to my mother’s house. It was the first Thanksgiving since my father’s death and both of my sisters were also in attendance. My mother seemed upset about something, normally this would have been drugs but I wasn’t on any, I asked her if she had some issue with the girls:
“Of course it’s not the girls! The girls are cool as grapes!”
I never did figure out what was bothering her. Everybody seemed to get along and be genuinely excited to meet and learn about each other. My older sister Sarah seemed especially taken with Skadi’s music and went on to follow and listen to it for longer than I did. The three of us went to a produce centered grocery store to get ingredients for pies.
I had only learned how to bake pies a couple of years earlier during a courtship with the girl I call James. Since that time it’s remained an often romantic bonding activity for the period where I am just getting to know somebody. Skadi and I worked together and made both a savory and mixed fruit pie – I don’t remember the particulars except that they were novel (or pie-oneering) and perfectly adequate.
Etain attempted to make something out of grapefruits. It might have worked for something chilled in the general order of key lime but that wasn’t how she went about it. She seemed determined to both innovate and buttress her sense of individuality but at the same time wracked by self doubt and misgivings. Pies are a comfort food and expression of domestic contentment and her dismal failure of one was indicative of a lapse in all of these things – she was feeling fundamentally not okay.
She went outside to an area covered by a gigantic pine tree and began to cry. I followed her out and attempted to comfort her – I was doing too much and perhaps a bit smothering but she did seem to appreciate having me there. Seeing her cry made me feel like I wanted to protect her but at the same time I must have been looking for some form of absolution. I knew that this all was intense for her, that she was pulled into a gravitational orbit with me the same way that she had been in one with Skadi for a long time and the more that things grew between me and Skadi the more Etain would be trapped in a place that was both too small for her and impossible to leave.
I don’t think I could have resisted the thing with Skadi but I did know that it wasn’t fair and what made things even less fair was needing Etain to pretend to be okay to make myself feel better.
Skadi was just getting tired of emotional breakdowns and crises and having Etain’s issues fill her horizon. It was like they’d been living in a conjoined twin costume and she needed her leg back. She was guiltless insofar as she had no responsibility to keep things perfectly balanced or be the world for everyone. I took those responsibilities on even as I saw the impossibility of them. There was hubris there but bigger hands than mine were pulling at least some of the strings.
I couldn’t have created or conjured the forces that were pulling us together. Perhaps I participated in a myth that I did but the reality was that I was just as powerless as anyone. We played a last minute show that night – probably at my younger sister’s house. Actually only Skadi and I played while Etain did not feel up to it. It’s a big thing when you’re traveling for the purpose of performing music in front of people but you don’t even feel like doing it.
It means something’s broken.
That’s where things stood when Skadi and Etain left me in San Diego and continued to travel on back toward the Northeastern States and cities they had started from. Yet somehow we were all still determined to reunite and continue to travel and play shows together when I would fly to New York early the next year. It wasn’t like we thought it was a good idea.
It was like we didn’t have a choice.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 