This is a bus story but it isn’t about The Bus but rather the one that came after it called Larry Bus. I think that John Benson originally bought Larry Bus with the intention of making it a donor for an engine transplant to The Bus which was still being stored in Albion but it either didn’t work or he thought better of it. It might have been a different bus that was bought for the failed transplant and then he bought Larry Bus with the intention of having shows on it from the beginning.
I’ll most likely end up writing a few stories that center around Larry Bus shows but they will be more scattered in time than the stories from The Bus so it doesn’t make sense to name a subsection after it.
When I repeated my life pattern of moving back to California from Chicago in 2008 one of my reasons was that I wanted to be closer to San Diego in case my father’s health worsened from his terminal lung cancer and my parents needed me to move back in and help them. In the Summer of 2009 I decided that it was time after the discovery of black mold prompted everybody to move out of Apgar and leave me between housing situations anyway.
My mother also had health and mobility issues from multiple sclerosis and my father had found an old Rascal brand mobility scooter in a thrift store that had a wide enough seat to allow them to ride down to the local shopping center sitting side by side. His piloting skills started to waver toward the end and I was washing dishes one day when I saw him accidentally flip it over on them by misjudging the angle on the point of entry from the driveway as they were coming home.
I rushed outside with a pair of manual wheelchairs so I could roll them inside and clean up and bandage their various bits of road rash. They were both on some form of blood thinning medication so it looked a lot worse than it actually was. That was probably the last time they used the thing to go any significant distance and my mother never actually learned to pilot it because my father was always the one driving.
She was also a terrible driver in general. It’s nothing short of a miracle that she never got us into a serious accident when we were children considering that she used to do things like accidentally drive onto the freeway moving in the wrong direction on a regular basis. A huge part of why I still haven’t learned how to drive is that she would frantically yell for me to check her lanes for her from the moment I was old enough to talk and I’ve never quite gotten over the feeling that a rapidly moving automobile is something far too dangerous for me to have any responsibility over.
It wasn’t long after my father’s death in early September that John Benson offered to bring down a more maneuverable power chair that he had been able to restore at little cost from his mobility work. Like most of my friends from the time period he had met my parents and spent time at their house.
I had set up a 2005 show at Scolari’s Office for Friends Forever and a band he was in at the time called Hale Zukas. On that tour they were traveling in an old ambulance that had been retired after providing medical support to the victims of 9/11 and he had converted to run on used vegetable oil – what was essentially the precursor to The Bus.
I think in 2009 John was also coming down to San Diego because his girlfriend at the time was graduating an art program at UCSD and had some kind of exhibition that might have even incorporated Larry Bus but we both thought it was a good idea to kill every possible bird with the single stone of the trip so I set up a show with a few local bands. I’d be interested if anybody knew the full lineup – I performed as Bleak End at Bernie’s and invited a musician named Bill Wesley who builds gigantic instruments called Array Mbiras that group related tones in a novel layout. He would use these gigantic thumb pianos to improvise songs that sit between psychedelic/prog rock and minimalists like Philip Glass.
We started the show in Balboa Park and loaded up the bands and audience in front of the Centro Cultural de la Raza. My mother actually came to the show even though she had to be physically carried up some stairs to get onto Larry Bus – thankfully there was another mom there and they kept each other entertained by chatting in a special “mom’s section” on the front bench. It was the kind of show where bands only play while the bus is moving and the audience gets to get out and mill around at intermission stops around town.
A hardcore band that I forget the name of played between Balboa Park and Ocean Beach. For my set I got to perform as we drove along the twisting cliffs between Point Loma and downtown. At one point I glanced out a window and my friend Eddie Castro was speeding alongside Larry Bus on a motorcycle. We quickly exchanged the heavy metal hand signal generally referred to as a “Dio” before I returned my attention to the audience I was sharing a vehicle with.
I always think back on this moment as the most stereotypically “rock” thing that I’ve ever done in my life. I imagine that when rappers refer to rock stars and rock culture in their lyrics that quick gesture is the kind of thing they are imagining. I never bothered to play my recordings for my mother so this concert would have been the only time she heard my music. She wasn’t impressed:
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”
As fate would have it we were not the only concert in an untraditional venue that was taking place in Balboa Park that night. A group called PyratePunx was also putting on a generator show in one of the canyons. I didn’t know the organizers or I would have reached out to coordinate the two shows. Sometimes I wonder if this would have made any difference regarding what ended up happening.
I’ve mentioned in other pieces that there was a squat behind Purple Haus called Hellarity. A large group of the kids that lived there pretty much always came along for the Larry Bus out of town trips. You can see one of them in the picture I added from during my live set. His name was Miguel but I always called him Trash Flowers because I first met him in the florist dumpster by the Ashby Whole Foods. I think he was actually the one that got the hardcore band on the show that night.
When Larry Bus stopped back in Balboa Park for Bill Wesley to perform outside all the kids from Hellarity went off to see if they could catch the end of the PyratePunx show. I haven’t mentioned it yet but the friends I’ve been referring to as Sugar Tea and Popsicle were also in San Diego because we were planning on going to Tijuana the next day. I forget why the three of us walked away from Larry Bus – we might have been looking for a bathroom or maybe they just wanted to see a little more of the park,
It wasn’t too long after this that I would learn I was nearsighted at a shadow puppet show and get my first pair of glasses. My deteriorating vision absolutely played a role in the next thing that happened. I thought that I saw the kids from Hellarity walking toward us from about thirty feet away but they had somehow ended up with a couple of dogs. It was actually a group of blacked out drunk and soon to belligerent oogles who were leaving the PyratePunx show.
“Hey! Are you guys heading back to the bus?”
“What the fuck? We don’t need a bus!”
“Where did you guys find those dogs?”
“These are our dogs!”
I’m only paraphrasing those little bits of conversation because all of their responses were heavily slurred and difficult to fully understand. We had been steadily moving closer to each other during these brief exchanges and between the confusing responses and improved visual definition I finally realized the case of mistaken identity. Unfortunately the next thing out of my mouth ignited total murderous rage in these strangers:
“Never mind. I thought you were my squatter friends!”
I haven’t ever really found out who these kids were and I hadn’t really been hanging out with the gutter punk types down there since a few years earlier when a lot of them would meet the same heroin dealers as me in Hillcrest. This group was three guys, one girl and two dogs. They thought we were snobby hipsters mocking them for being homeless or they were just assholes and liked fighting, I don’t really know.
I don’t know how common this is but when I’m violently attacked in nightmares it often takes place extremely slowly. In this situation the alcohol, and whatever else they might have been taking, left our attackers moving a little faster than the average speed of television zombies. For the most part it was easy to dodge their punches and we probably would have escaped them entirely if not for the slight difference in numbers.
The girl was a little faster than the guys she was hanging out with and the moment we tried to run away she caught up with Popsicle and knocked her onto the ground. From that point on we were locked into a cycle of helping each other off the ground only to have somebody else knocked down immediately afterwards. I tried to explain what had just led to the innocent confusion but any attempt at logic was pointless. The most aggressive among them screamed the same thing at us over and over:
“Do you have a Dick!?”
Besides general homophobia he might have been trying to ensure that he wasn’t about to punch a girl – everything out of their mouths was barely coherent. They tried to get their dogs to attack us but the animals were either badly trained or generally easygoing and friendly. We had no interest in fighting back and just wanted to get away from them as quickly as possible. I saw a flash of white as one unusually well aimed punch caught me on the side of the head.
We had been slowly moving from wherever we were in the park back toward the bus and we suddenly caught sight of a park employee in a neon vest with a walkie-talkie. We ran toward him in the hope that he would do something to help us. As our pursuers chased us around him in a circle he casually replied to someone on the other end of his walkie:
“I don’t know what’s going on, looks like some kind of bitch fight…”
We yelled out to him in exasperation:
“It’s not a fight! We’re being assaulted! Can you either help us or call somebody who will?”
Our cries fell on deaf ears and his expression remained decidedly bemused so after a couple of circuits we broke away and continued to drift toward Larry Bus. It might have moved since the last time we were on it or we got kind of lost in the panic but this took a long time or at least it felt that way. I’m not sure if anyone else ever actually had a punch connect but it was just tortuous slow danger and constantly stopping to help up whoever had most recently gotten ganged up on by two people and knocked to the ground.
I finally saw it so I yelled to Sugar Tea and Popsicle that I’d bring back help and broke into a desperate sprint. The moment I was through the door I breathlessly yelled out to everyone aboard:
“Hey, we need help! Some kids are fucking with us!”
I started to run back toward my friends when I looked over my shoulder and saw that nobody had followed me. I turned around and ran back to make a second, and even more urgent, attempt at apprising the situation:
“Kids! More of them than us! Hitting us!”
I started to hear sounds of recognition – “What?” and “Hell Nah!” and that sort of thing. A decent crowd followed me this time and we were able to extricate Sugar Tea and Popsicle from where they were now being doubly ganged up on. I’m not sure if it was an act but the girl oogle seemed to suddenly wake up from her black out:
“Where am I? Who are these guys? I don’t want to be with these guys! Can I come with you guys?”
Whether she was being genuine or not she had literally prevented us from escaping the initial assault by tackling Popsicle and we certainly didn’t want her anywhere near us nor did we feel particularly sympathetic that she no longer felt like being part of a violent gang of oogle assholes. Nobody was trying to give them any kind of redemptive beat down we just got our friends back and returned to Larry Bus. Some of my San Diego friends might have tried to tell me who they were a little bit afterwards but I didn’t give a shit.
I was in a bad state – out of breath and full of adrenaline and shitty feeling fear and dread brain chemicals and I’d just taken a clock cleaner punch to the head. The three of us all felt fucked up. My sister was bringing our mom back home but there was no way any of us were ready to just go to bed in suburbia.
A friend of mine was having a party so we went over to drink and generally get fucked up and wait for our bodies to calm down. Now that I think about it it’s entirely possible that the reason we had taken a walk in the first place was that we wanted to do some ketamine away from a big crowd of people and my mother. It would certainly explain some of the confusion of the initial encounter and why we were having such a hard time getting away.
We got drunk and did more ketamine and some cocaine because it was there, even though none us really liked it, and spent quality time with some good friends while waiting to feel less shitty and keyed up in some ways and more shitty and keyed up in others until we got to a point where it felt like we could process and make peace with all the shit we’d had to deal with and just pass out.
The next day we’d be heading down to Tijuana and after a few more comedies of errors things would start shaping up to be a decent contender for the worst goddamn weekend of our entire lives. Not that it would win – I’m sure we’ve all got worse. By the following night we would all be arrested, confined into different sections of the Tijuana carcel where the guards mocked us and the other inmates threatened us.
We somehow repeated the previous night’s error of taking an “evening constitutional stroll” but this time we were joined by the girl I call Rocky who was kind enough to disregard our warnings and leave enough narcotics in her purse for the whole group to get jammed up and fucked over.
You can read all about this in the chapter labeled as “Tijuana 2009 : Basically You Had Drugs So Now They’re Going To Fuck You Over!” It’s an engaging read with a second part and if you find yourself enjoying the company of these characters they appear in another two parter about breaking into a bando and making a Haunted House.
We were on one.
Larry Bus? Eventually I’d be back on that too. From here on out it was a lot chiller – or for the most part it was.
There was the time I helped somebody slaughter a goat for bad reasons and the emotions this subjected him to. Another time…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 