I’ve only been to the International Noise Conference the one time so it’s difficult for me to say whether 2008 was especially crowded or a landmark year or anything like that. I do know that pretty much everyone I had been running into on the American Underground Party Circuit seemed to show up that year and of course it was also the year that The Bus was there. The Bus had driven the entire way from Oakland, California and presumably had set up some shows with the bands on board: Problem? and Robin Williams On Fire. I wouldn’t know for sure because me and Rotten Milk were already in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
The official schedule lists our slot time as Rotten Milk vs Bubblegum Shitface but that would have been some kind of miscommunication because we were performing as a high concept project called Envy. Envy is the name of an unsuccessful bright green novelty liqueur that we had found a bunch of half-pint bottles of at a store on Jefferson Highway called Suda Salvage that specializes in remaindered goods, damaged packaging and anything else you can stick on a shelf at a steep discount.
Rotten Milk had come up with the idea because it seemed to him that everybody at INC was trying to sell each other noise tapes when what everybody actually wanted was alcohol or something else to keep the party going. In 2008 it was still happening at Churchill’s, a British ex-pat themed bar in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, but most people don’t like paying bar prices and the area is devoid of liquor stores. As a short lived fringe experimental noise project Envy was a more honest version of what all live music and entertainment essentially is: an expedience to sell alcohol.
The music was a mix of Rotten Milk’s usual noise style and a performance project I had been doing called Happy Feet where I would scream out a medley of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn and other female vocal hits of the ‘90s. Milk had been recording our live sets then layering that recording into each subsequent performance so that the recording became more busy en route to it’s final form through a process of accretion. We referred to the tape as the E Street Band in a random Bruce Springsteen reference because it functioned as a backing band. I can’t imagine what the final product would have sounded like but it was intended to be as disposable as the bottle the syrupy booze came in.
The whole thing was packaged together on paper plates with images of skeletons and held together with Saran Wrap. I think somebody complained to me a year or so later that their tape had been blank and I probably replied:
“But the bottle wasn’t empty, was it?”
We started the trip from New Orleans to Miami in whatever kind of cheap foreign car Milk had that year but an encounter in Orlando moved me more or less permanently onto the bus. First I found a large supply of my favorite discontinued energy drink at a Big Lots: Full Throttle had done an all natural organic type version in a green can called Nature Is One Bad Mother. I guess the flavor was açaí but my attraction was to the name. I liked to imagine that it referred to nervous postpartum rabbits eating their own pups or mother birds kicking hatchlings from the nest. That the world was full of bad mothers and nature was just one of them.
I thought this idea was funny so I wanted to drink the energy beverage. It’s just the weird way my brain works, if you’ve read a few of these I’d imagine you’re kind of used to it by now.
The Orlando show was in a space exploration themed video rental shop and cafe called Blast Off. It happened to be across the street from a discount liquor emporium and I bought myself a fifth of Seagram’s Gin. Neither the spirit or quantity are particularly characteristic for me so I can only guess that it was a really good deal. We had a lot of time to kill in Blast Off and I made myself comfortable by making a sandwich of canned squid, mango and avocado and pouring up some gin and mother with a candy cane.
I noticed that a tiny young woman with a bow in her hair was staring at me in obvious adoration. I don’t want to suggest that a simple emulation of my behavior might produce a similar result in any other situation but she was clearly strongly attracted to my eccentric choices in food and beverage. I could feel myself getting drunker by the moment so I made a move to avoid future complications like locking the messaging functions on one’s cell phone or hiding one’s car keys. I asked her how old she was and found out she was nineteen:
“Ok, whatever happens I’m not having sex with you.”
I realize this is all going to sound extremely questionable so let me attempt to qualify this statement a little bit. It wasn’t so much that I assumed she was going to try to have sex with me or had any problem with her behavior. I was worried about myself. A little over four years after this incident I neglected to ask a girl how old she was until immediately after having sex with her and found out she was twenty. I lost my head a little bit and became infatuated to an embarrassing degree.
I would refer to the time Rage and I spent together over the course of the next week or so as a relationship but I think my initial instinct in setting this boundary resulted in the best possible version of that relationship.
I kept drinking and parts of this night became a blur to me. I remember watching Byron House perform inside the actual venue. They are one of those bands that seem to be absent from the internet and I haven’t lived the kind of life where you can hold on to tapes from over ten years ago. If I’m wrong about this and there are some live videos or something please, by all means, clue me in.
As far as my actual memory goes my relationship with Rage never strayed into the realm of physicality. According to the photo above that clearly isn’t the case. Envy performed on top of the bus and in the course of that performance I both kissed and punched Rage. I also think I carelessly threw some bottles into the crowd and parking lot down below. One or all of those three details would probably explain why what happened next happened next.
I wrote about this in the Red House chapters but some guy broke a wooden chair over my head. He didn’t really look like most of the people at the show: he had on a short sleeve American Apparel shirt and some kind of generic Japanese-fish-and-flowers sleeve tattoos. I think he was probably angry about something and intending to hurt me but having a wooden chair broken over my head didn’t particularly hurt. I sat in a chair at Blast Off for most of the afternoon and evening and it felt sturdy enough to me.
I think at some point in the evening I might have wandered into the alley behind the venue and seen some wooden chairs there. It occurs to me now that maybe those chairs were getting thrown away because they weren’t very sturdy and it wouldn’t hurt very much if you broke one of them over somebody’s head because as everybody knows those are major criteria for the chairs if you’re trying to run a cafe/video rental place. Maybe in his anger he ran and got a chair from the alley without realizing that those were the bad chairs for breaking over a drunk guy’s head.
Joke’s on him…
Anyway he immediately jumped into an absurdly fancy car and drove off the moment that the chair was finished being broken. I was probably in a bit of a fighting mood because I had just had a chair broken over my head and I had just been wrestling with Rage. With my assailant inconveniently disappeared in a super fancy sport’s car there was nothing to really direct this fighting mood at. Somebody told me that they had a video of the guy breaking a chair over my head on their cellphone and I watched it several times in succession – so drunk that the colors in the video were unnaturally bright and my assailant and me were leaving trails as we moved across the tiny screen.
2008 was a little bit before the trend of uploading absolutely everything to the internet so unfortunately this video isn’t just a click away to be regarded through older, wiser eyes. Once again, correct me if I’m wrong.
After that I fell asleep on the bus as it drove on to Miami and from then on it was me and Rage, Rage and me, for the next few days at least. On one of the early days of the International Noise Conference the bus drove everybody down to South Beach and I had gotten a sheet of acid mailed to this artist girl’s house who had recently moved from Chicago and was starting to have a successful Art Basel type art career. Her work was super colorful, I don’t remember her name but Rotten Milk probably does.
She wouldn’t have known what was in the envelope.
I had never been to South Beach, or Miami at all actually, and I was experiencing it for the first time tripping on acid in the company of lots of people who were also tripping on acid. I realize that I was actually taking it in all three of the past entries so it’s probably starting to sound a bit like heroin: something that I took out of habit to more or less feel normal. It wasn’t anything like that. This story is actually several months before the last two before it and I had just gotten the first sheet of my career as a habitual acid head in the mail.
I remember me and Rage wandering into a jeans boutique called Assy Sassy with a phalanx of the giant butt half mannequins that are ubiquitous now but were kind of confined to Miami then. A small army of rail thin white men with grey ponytails and brightly colored silk shirts who looked like Karl Lagerfeld or Bloodscream from the Wolverine comics were walking up and down the Main Street and excitedly jabbering to each other in a mysterious patois I referred to as “Beach Klingon”. Facing the beach a newly constructed row of condos had printed up a banner sign that felt like it had to have been made with at least an inkling of wry sarcasm:
YOU DESERVE TO LIVE HERE!
Next Part:
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 
[…] https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/23/miami-2008-the-bus-you-deserve-to-live-here/ […]
LikeLike