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The structure toward the back of The Garden of Bling was usually referred to as a “three story structure” but calling it an elevated bungalow with attached crawl space would probably be more accurate. The largest room was accessed by an ladder. I’ve already written this somewhere else but Alexis had designed this area to be a pirate radio station and because it effectively blocked off Santiago’s sail all the walls were put on hinges and could be opened.
Somewhere on the walls she had drawn a little doodle of how things were supposed to function: it showed an approaching FCC vessel and the Bling sailing away on a sudden gust of wind while incriminating but presumably replaceable transmitting equipment flew into the water through the newly opened walls.
It should go without saying that none of this would have worked in real life. Even if the sail had been designed with all the necessary riggings and whatnot the craft itself was an overladen square that sat low in the water and had no semblance of a nose for cutting a jaunty path through the current. A thing called a “mud sail”, basically an underwater flap for being pulled along by water instead of wind, might have been more effective but it wouldn’t have looked as cool so of course that was out.
I never saw any of the walls propped open to be able to judge how effectively this let the wind pass through. I arrived at the Bling toward the end of Summer and it wasn’t long until the weather took a turn toward stiflingly cold. Finally there wasn’t any pirate radio station stuff up there – we at least had a portable cassette player because we listened to the Woods album At Rear House on repeat but that was the extent of our music broadcasting capabilities.
Unless you count the 800 pound electric organ that sat on the deck directly underneath the cabin. Occasionally Harrison did power it on with either a generator or the deep cycle batteries and play for a little while. When the Bling was still floating on the river this created a fairly striking effect – especially when he played at night and lit a bunch of candles and hurricane lamps.
The same could not be said when the raft became beached and sat at an odd angle on the sand and Harrison stopped playing.
Alexis had decorated the roof of the cabin with what was always referred to as “Lenny Kravitz’s wallpaper”. This was a minor exaggeration – all the wallpaper had come from a small workshop in New Orleans’ 9th Ward that had once created some custom wallpapers for the singer. There was no way to know if any of the pieces on our ceiling had this particular provenance but the aesthetics were a decent fit: swirling designs in pinks and purples with metallic inks.
Like all the decorative woodwork “gingerbread” elements it had been scavenged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Alexis only found a collection of smaller scraps as opposed to a complete roll so the ceiling was done in small sections bordered by pieces of two by four. The walls were mostly made of windows so it got a ton of natural light. Here’s a picture of the big statement window we had on the back or stern:
On top of this room was what we called the “troll hole” – a claustrophobic crawl space with an arched ceiling. There was nothing in there but some kind of sleeping pad and a bunch of pillows and blankets. Even in the daytime it was too dark in there to see anything so the troll hole had two basic functions: sleep and sex.
We had a little joke that I’m going to need to provide some background for if it’s going to make any sense. The Bling got beached all the time. Eventually this became so severe that it was surrounded by sand and several feet from the water. There’s no de-beaching that; you just need to wait and hope the river rises.
Far less severe were the beachings where one edge was on sand but the other edge was still in the water. Those could definitely be de-beached – we used poles. When the shipping barges passed by they left behind sizable wakes that made this job significantly easier as it rocked the entire raft up and down. We had a specific rallying cry for situations in which we’d found ourselves beached and an especially large wake needed to be taken advantage of:
“De-beaching wake!”
You can probably guess where this is going. While the troll hole afforded privacy in the visual sense the act of lovemaking did create tell-tale motions that could easily be felt throughout the vessel but especially between the troll hole and cabin as one’s floor was the other’s ceiling. It became our custom to loudly proclaim the knowledge that people were having sex a few feet away from you by shouting out:
“De-beaching wake!”
Most often it was me or Alexis shouting this out while Harrison and Jacki were having sex in the troll hole. I was briefly visited by the woman I’ve been calling Rocky and had occasion to hear the same cry emerging from the troll hole while creating the vibrations in the cabin. Later Brodie finally got back from wherever he’d been for most of the time I was onboard the rafts and he and Alexis received the same treatment.
I don’t remember ever hearing it in the early days when I was with Lisers in a section of the bow she called her writing studio. It’s possible that having all the rafts lashed together in Voltron formation served to dampen and muffle our movements leaving friends sleeping toward the stern none the wiser. We also hadn’t been beached yet, or the Bling hadn’t anyway.
If you’ve ever lived in especially close quarters with friends you know that this kind of thing is an inevitability. You’re going to hear and possibly see each other having sex – not in an erotic voyeuristic kind of way (usually) but in more of a pragmatic “this is the only option and we’re not going to not have sex” kind of way. In that case you probably know how awkward and uncomfortable it can be to lay there in silence and pretend not to notice.
In a way I think the custom of “de-beaching wake!” actually helped to dispel a lot of that tension. It basically serves to say “I’m here and I hear you but fret not. High five and carry on friends!” That’s way too long for general usage but “de-beaching wake!” is probably a bit too niche. It would be cool if there was something universal but nothing comes to mind immediately.
As always it is possible to leave comments here if anyone either has a less specific utterance already in usage within their own social group or ideas for one they feel especially confident about.
It was during one of Rocky’s visits that we found the kitten Night Beaver abandoned on a freeway island. Harrison had been the one to catch her but I carried her close until she was no longer feral and traveled with her before leaving her to live in Chicago with Stephany. She slept with me in the cabin in an old military sniper’s sleeping bag I called my “whistle worm”.
If you remember the line of children’s toys called Glow Worms that is basically what this sleeping bag looked like. It was made of military green quilted fabric and had a hood and sleeves in the upper half but the lower half enveloped the legs in a more traditional kind of sleeping bag bottom. One morning I woke up to find my socks covered in cat shit.
I think what most likely happened was that Night Beaver was sleeping around my stomach area and woke up during the night to relieve herself but wasn’t immediately sure which direction would lead out of the bag. When I had everything zipped up and buttoned the whistle worm fit me about as tightly as a jacket or coveralls and while she could have crawled out through the neck hole there probably wasn’t enough air flow to make it immediately obvious which way that was. She most likely didn’t realize she had picked the wrong direction until she got to my feet and by then it was probably too late for her to hold it while traversing the entire bag in the opposite direction.
It only happened that one time. After that she got really good at climbing up and down the 4 x 4s that propped up the cabin and presumably handled all her business somewhere on shore. We never bothered with a litter box. In an actual house I probably wouldn’t have given a new and recently feral kitten full and unrestricted access to the outdoors so quickly but in this situation I figured that with nothing else around she’d remember where she was being fed.
For the time that we were on the Bling she didn’t even have a bowl – I just fed her directly out of my hand. We had a system where she’d gently bite me to communicate that she wanted more and when she stopped biting I knew that she was full. She was still very small (possibly younger than eight weeks) so it wasn’t a very large amount of food. We both mostly ate different kinds of canned fish and the salmon that comes in pouches.
Now I’m going to talk some more about The Garden of Bling Dive Team. By November the Mississippi River was restrictively cold and because there was a lot of work that had to be done from in the actual water me and Alexis bought used wetsuits to keep warm. I forget how it was decided that I would be a member of the dive team but my height was probably a factor as I was best equipped to retrieve tools that had been dropped in the water.
It’s also possible that when we went to the only seller of used wetsuits in the St. Louis greater metropolitan area the only ones available were an Alexis sized one and a really tall person one.
Our first mission was installing the custom transom for the big outboard motor that would never actually run again but soon after that the entire bottom scraped off so we turned our attention to that. I know I’ve already described all this at least once: no real hull, plywood box full of styrofoam, bowl of cheerios floating upside down, etc. The Kirksville had washed up a short walk down the bank and provided all the plywood and used lumber for these attempted renovations.
The wakes of passing barges that had been so useful for de-beaching and de-beaching adjacent jokes were a liability now. It was already hard trying to drive lag bolts straight up underwater and having both our own bodies and the raft itself bounced up and down in the water only made this harder. My wetsuit at least was a bit tight around the arms and biceps which made any heavy duty tool work even harder still.
I know that Alexis went on to study underwater welding but we’ve lost touch and I couldn’t say whether or not she stuck with it. Man it sure would be crazy if she somehow saw this and we ended up talking again. Good crazy I mean. Jacki too.
Most of the things around the cabin were fancy and elegant and that included a cut crystal brandy snifter that we kept the pharmaceuticals in. By the time I got there this was Adderall and an assortment of benzodiazepines. Me and Alexis got into a work routine where we took Adderall in the mornings and then after a few hours of work we’d strip off the wetsuits and take benzos by a fire. This was especially important for Alexis as she had to work in the panic inducing confines of beneath the raft where there was barely enough room to hold her head above the water.
Even if I’d wanted to do this part I wouldn’t have been able to because of how tall I was. The depth of the water we were working in worked out to where my head usually sat just above the deck if I was standing on the bottom. Anyway if I’m going to be completely transparent about our drug regimen I need to add that most nights ended with copious amounts of caffeine and alcohol by way of Sparks.
I mentioned that we got extremely loaded on this stuff the last time we crossed the river to visit The Sweeps but I didn’t really scratch the surface of how dire the situation truly was. The best description I’ve ever heard of abusing this particular combination came from a scummy older guy who essentially lived in this run down youth hostel I stayed at in Sydney, Australia:
“So I’m chugging Red Bull and vodka all night and around three am the Red Bull says ‘Right, I’m going to bed’ and the vodka says [evil voice] ‘I’m staying up!’”
His story ended with him getting the shit kicked out of him for offenses he was mysterious about, barring an assurance that he absolutely deserved it. When we left The Sweeps Alexis was clearly far too drunk to be driving but bounced all over the freeway while laughing uproariously and singing along to T.I.’s Whatever You Like on the radio. By all rights I should have been terrified but I was as far gone as she was and laughed and sang along instead.
We went to whatever the 24 hour diner in St. Louis was at the time. I can’t say if eating improved Alexis’s condition but it didn’t help much with me. When we stepped outside I got severe tunnel vision and attempted to focus on a chain link fence but the diamonds started to shift around and change color from pink to green. I found that I couldn’t walk directly to where our car was parked but somehow walked backward in a large semicircle that ended with my back against the passenger door that I needed to enter.
Miraculously we made it back to the Bling without getting into a serious accident. I can’t remember whose vehicle we were even driving.
It was around this time that me and Alexis were beginning to realize that the Bling had no chance whatsoever of continuing her voyage. Harrison had almost certainly burnt out our new motor by indiscriminately following the advice of whoever floated down the river even when it was to connect the batteries with the polarities reversed. Between the wakes of passing barges and the waterlogged quality of the Bling’s lumber the new bottom pieces were falling off the moment we put them on.
I can’t remember if it had gotten beached again or not.
Anyway we wanted to just burn it. Harrison would not budge from the idea that we would somehow get it going again and couldn’t be brought over to our side. I don’t remember where Jacki was on the issue or Brodie who was most likely back by this point. They probably would have been down to burn it too.
With no sign of anything changing I hid Night Beaver in a small duffel bag full of clothing and took the Megabus back to Chicago in late November or early December. It wasn’t long after that I got the phone call. Harrison had broken his back and somebody, most likely the Department of Homeland Security, had burned The Garden of Bling.
Brodie and Harrison had put on the two wetsuits and jumped from the nearby train bridge into the river. The drop is probably around one hundred feet and most likely more dangerous in a wetsuit as it increases your buoyancy and potentially the impact from the water. Brodie did a basic pencil drop and broke one of his toes and sprained his neck. Harrison attempted a triple back flip and hit the water with his back and broke it.
I wasn’t there at the time so I don’t know all the exact details of how everything went down. Most likely Harrison realized he was incapable of swimming the moment he hit the water and Brodie helped get him to shore or one of the pylons. A helicopter came to transport him to wherever the nearest hospital was. Brodie never actually got seen by any doctors for his injuries but found a neck brace in the garbage of Harrison’s room and put it on.
They were probably replacing the temporary brace from the helicopter ride with a better one once they got to the actual hospital.
Harrison was extremely lucky. I don’t know the flavor of the fractures or what vertebrae numbers they were in but he made a complete recovery with no lasting mobility issues. I couldn’t say if that’s typical or extraordinary for the specific injuries he suffered. I don’t have any concrete evidence that the DHS were the ones that burned our boat but there was exactly one entity coming around and expressing how much they’d like us gone and it was them.
Harrison and Brodie had jumped off the exact bridge that the DHS was worried about us messing with.
I wish I could have seen it burn.
Honestly I wish that we had just set it on fire ourselves and watched it burn together. The Garden of Bling was a beautiful raft and I loved it but the Lower Mississippi is a monster and unless an army of admirers came to carry it away piece by piece there really couldn’t have been a better outcome.
Harrison left town – most likely he went to his mother’s in San Francisco to recuperate. Alexis, Brodie and Jacki hung around St. Louis. Early the next year I took a bus back down there so we could ride trains to New Orleans for Mardi Gras together. Brodie was supposed to ride down with us but had left town for something and we decided we couldn’t wait for him.
This was before his photography work, mostly pictures of our friends riding freight trains, blew up but he’d been going by his early moniker and writing it around: The Polaroid Kidd. Me, Alexis and Jacki left behind a note for him in one of the St. Louis punk houses we’d been using as a temporary base of operations:
Have fun rolling solo-roid kid!
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 