Boston 2008 : The Bus Part Seven “Where’s My Shoe?”

I never learned to ride a bicycle as a child. I have vague memories of circling my family’s cul-de-sac on one with training wheels that must have belonged to someone else. My parents took me to Toys R Us to get one of my own but I told them I would rather have a coloring book. They laughed and explained that the price of the second one of those things was so trivial compared to the first that I could just have both. I told them that I’d just take the coloring book.

I did have a childhood best friend but he shared my indifference toward bicycle riding although I think he did own one and probably knew how to ride it. We were into skateboarding but in a way that bore more resemblance to sledding than the craze that was exciting our contemporaries. We carried the skateboards under our arms to increasingly steep hills around our neighborhood and sat down on them to ride to the bottom. I can’t remember ever standing on it and kicking the ground for momentum – it was like we didn’t know this method of riding a skateboard even existed.

The first person to try to teach me how to ride a bicycle as a young adult was a Spock-Rocker named Paul. The story about this guy was that his life’s ambition was to get a girlfriend and move to Portland. Once he got to Portland the relationships would end up not working out so he would move back to San Diego to find another girlfriend. I don’t know why he never tried to meet new girls in Portland. It could be that he was looking for specific qualities: Spock hair, star tattoo, lei pants and Tredair UK shoes – but it seems like there would have been just as many girls like that in the Portland of 1998 as there were in San Diego.

I never heard if it finally worked out for him and he built the perfect partnered up Portland life of his dreams or if he adjusted his expectations or found new and different ambitions. I’d like to think that he is currently in some stage of the same cycle: either preparing to move back to Portland having just met someone or preparing to return to San Diego after another breakup. There’s no chance it’s true though, I can’t remember who had told me this story about him but it seems likely that it was an exaggeration to begin with. Maybe it was the other Paul.

If the thing they say about learning to ride a bicycle is true, that once you learn you never forget, then Paul never actually taught me how to ride one. He definitely tried: I remember going down a single block of Golden Hills several times. Later that same summer I was finally taught for real by Brandi’s boyfriend Ben on the California block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Every time I attempted to ride one later I already knew how.

The point is that sometimes it takes doing something or learning to do something several times before it actually sinks in. I did eventually have the kind of best friend bicycle riding summer that countless television shows and movies have told me is supposed to happen in early adolescence but it wasn’t until 2012 in Los Angeles with my friend Ryan Riehle. I met Ryan Riehle on the Living Hell bus tour when he set up a show for us at a Boston studio for artists with disabilities he was working at called Outside the Lines.

The only thing is that I had actually met Ryan multiple times before this show but it hadn’t actually worked insofar as I didn’t actually remember. I still don’t remember even though I can remember lots of other little details about the shows and parties that we evidently met at. We talked about it again today, reminiscing over shared details like the theft of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, but when it gets to the moment when we would have met there is only a blank spot in my memory.

Ryan lived in an old house in Allston with cramped staircases that led to long, narrow hallways that divided the upper floors into individual bedrooms. On my return visits to Providence I had passed through parts of Atlantic Mills, Boy’s Town, and another space in the same building that I forget the name of but showed up with a dance troupe called Club Lyfestile. Anyway Ryan’s house was the first space in larger New England I had stepped into that had the same hardwood and screen printed posters feel as all of those Providence spaces.

This guy named Keith Waters lived there, I had seen some little comics he had drawn here and there about tiny anthropomorphic talking airplanes. He said he didn’t draw comics much anymore. There was a gigantic iguana named Azrael in the bay window that barely moved and almost looked like a stone carving under it’s red light. Ryan would be climbing aboard the bus to accompany us up to Maine and that would become something of a pattern every time I returned to the house in Allston. It was the pregame Maine spot.

So at Outside The Lines I was finally meeting Ryan in the way where it’s like riding a bike and you never forget. I had been inside of a place that did the same sort of thing as OTL called Creativity Explored in San Francisco where I saw issues of a mini comic called Whipper Snapper Nerd that I really liked. At Outside The Lines the thing that jumped out was these hand made t-shirts with different Gods drawn on in colored sharpies. I can’t remember the artist’s name. I got one that said Disgusting God.

Sometimes on this tour we didn’t actually feel like doing a Living Hell set and would just make up a different band. In Providence we had played as an improvised punk band called Max Capacity – I can’t remember 100% if I sang for that one too but it seems likely as the main reason for me becoming the singer was that nobody else wanted to do it. At Outside The Lines we created a band with a rotating group of the artists that worked there called Wednesday Surprise.

I can’t remember if this happened instead of or in addition to a Living Hell set but I do remember that it came together in a very casual and natural way – the OTL artists saw the instruments and wanted to try playing with them and then we were making up songs. We went through a long gestural number called Where’s My Shoe? that had it’s genesis in one of my shoes getting misplaced in the general chaos of a combined living and performance space on wheels.

It wasn’t the case with the Outside The Lines artists that nobody else ever wanted to be on vocals. I moved over to bass for a little while. I had heard that a couple of the OTL artists had been in a relationship but it hadn’t ended up working out. One of them was on the microphone while his former partner played the drums. He was singing in the quietest voice you could imagine, absolutely exuding frustration and loneliness for anyone close enough to the speaker to actually hear it.

I was going to put it into pull out quotes but there isn’t really much point to it: I still love you, I miss you, that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the words as the way he was singing them.

He stared at the ground and seemed to feel like his words were falling off the edge of the earth the moment they left his mouth, drifting into the depths of space, never to know gravity again.

Next Part:

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