Tag: Cementland

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Ten : “Let’s go clubbing!”

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When the rafts were still in Alton and for the first week in Saint Louis people were constantly approaching and asking how they could help. As much as I was a new guy onboard my camp counselor-like personality meant that I was instantly an ambassador. It was heart warming how much people who looked nothing like us were ready to offer all lengths of material aid they moment they set eyes on what we were doing.

In Alton a pair of older women drove me to a grocery store and told me to buy two hundred dollars worth of whatever our galley needed – mostly fresh vegetables as it easiest to only cook vegan meals so no one would ever be excluded. Somebody else had dropped off a heroic amount of fried chicken and some gallon jugs of Milo’s Sweet Tea. I have to confess that I succumbed to temptation and broke my pescatarian diet at the time to munch down a couple of pieces late one night when nobody else was within eyeshot.

I doubt I was the only one – while vegan was the most common onboard dietary preference the chicken was steadily disappearing somewhere. This wasn’t the case for some odd looking jars of preserved venison that another anonymous benefactor dropped off. While everybody was curious to look at it I never saw anyone open a jar to eat any.

I heard stories about stops upriver where the populace was less welcoming. In one town some crew members broke into a school to use the showers but got arrested because they let themselves fall asleep on premises. That created some bad blood. In another place the rafts were treated as bad harbingers:

“We know you River Gypsies brought the flood!”

Once we were docked at Cementland we were no longer visible from any road and most curious locals showed up by water. One morning a friendly fisherman showed up on a Jon boat and asked if there was any assistance he might be able to offer. We were good at provisions at that point but the charge was running out on the deep cycle batteries we used for lights and keeping everyone’s phone charged – unlike Alton there was nothing close enough to run an extension cord.

I asked if he could help charge a few of the batteries and then helped load them onto his boat and rode along to go plug them in where he lived. Once he got a little more comfortable with me he asked if anybody on the rafts smoked marijuana and I told them that of course many people did. He gave me a sandwich bag full of pre rolled joints of Mexican brick weed that henceforth lived in a dried out tortoise shell next to the sink where people brushed their teeth.

I can’t remember them ever running out but I do remember Caryl loudly complaining when she wanted a cigarette and the only thing around was endless free marijuana. At the time it felt like one of the moments, like simply living on whimsical storybook rafts, where it seemed especially poignant that the ordinary circumstances of our day to day lives would align with most peoples’ daydreams. Now I’ve worked on marijuana farms and stopped smoking the stuff due to panic attacks and it seems far more mundane for there always to be a surplus of the stuff everywhere.

I can’t remember how the big head carp came up but seeing as we were on a boat with a motor the conversation probably started with one of them leaping aboard. I looked back through the old chapters to see if I’d talked about the carp, or “flying fish”, but I didn’t see anything so I guess I should explain it here. Carp are filter feeders that literally eat other riparian organisms’ shit so some time before 1993 the owners of commercial catfish farms started importing them to help the breeding ponds clean.

Despite assurances that they would never escape into the surrounding environment the big flood of ‘93 resulted in many of the fish escaping into the Mississippi River. As an invasive species with no natural predators they have bred out of control since that point and come to dominate the river – displacing native species and at times growing large enough to weigh hundreds of pounds.

There are special underwater electric barriers to prevent the carp from ever reaching the Great Lakes but I haven’t lived in the MidWest for a while and couldn’t say if these eventually failed and the fish made it through. Anyway they have an adaptation that causes them to leap out of the water every time they hear a loud sound. Any time a motor was on they would leap onto the surface of the rafts – people wore helmets because getting clubbed over the head by an oblivious fish represents an ever present danger.

I remember seeing cool YouTube montages of boaters getting knocked overboard lIke this and a super satisfying shot of one beaning a dude in the crotch. I couldn’t find any good ones when I looked just now but if anybody has a good link by all means send it along and I’ll stick it in here.

Because the carp were bad for the river’s ecosystem we would make a point of beating them to death any time they found their way onto our decks. Me and Ellery used to shriek “Let’s go clubbing!” in exaggeratedly flamboyant voices before reaching for the closest wrench and going to town on them. In a pinch you could just grab the fish by it’s tail and swing it’s head directly against the plywood or I’ve even seen people quickly use their teeth to break the spines.

Because we were killing the fish anyway we figured we should try to make some culinary use of them. The most successful way was to boil them until the meat could fall off the bones to make a soup. This guy named Gabe usually cooked it – last I heard he was running a bar in some frontier town in Montana or something and had grown a big mustache.

The thing about Carp is they are impossible to fillet and their flesh is mucilaginous which basically means slimy like boogers. They’re pretty gross. The last time I bothered with one at all I only ate the three most muscular chunks under each of it’s fins as sashimi. This was only moments after Harrison helped me cut it’s head off with a giant rusty cleaver he called “Broot Strength” and I used it’s still twitching body as a plate while Harrison brought me soy sauce and wasabi in fancy little gilded dishes.

A visiting photographer friend named Brooke or Brookes took pictures but the links he’d sent me were in a Yahoo account I’ve long since lost access to.

Anyway when I was in the guy who gave us weed’s boat we hadn’t given up on trying to eat the things yet and he was incredulous that we’d even bother and asked me if I wanted to go catch some. It was pretty fun – he knew where the rocky berms that attracted the largest numbers were and I got to practice snatching them up in a net as they leapt through the air.

The fish from this expedition were either the last time we bothered with the soup or we put it off too long and had to throw them away. I forget exactly which.

After he brought back those batteries we realized that it would be easier to just charge them across the street in the offices of Cementland. They were pretty heavy and dragging them back and forth was an everyday chore. You could kind of balance one right between the handlebars of a bike, especially one of the choppers with “Ape Hangers”, but half the trip was over grass so it was almost easier not to.

The rafts had an orange and white cat named Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen – she had always stayed close before but the lure of Cementland caused her to move on to a landlocked lifestyle. People said they would sometimes see her wandering the park around sunset but I slept there for about two weeks and never did.

Right around the time we arrived some local independent filmmakers were shooting a sci-fi movie over there and hired us all as extras for the big crowd scene. They gave everybody Tyvek suits and had us haul rocks and act brainwashed in one of the former factory buildings while the film’s heroes snuck behind us. That’s probably how me and Lisers found the old Greyhound bus that John Patzius had modified – it was parked underneath the awning of the same hangar like structure.

It wasn’t so much that the rafts had a lack of privacy and good places to sleep as we were just excited to explore this newly accessible theme park. The bus had been redone with deep red carpets and vintage furniture that for some reason didn’t include a bed. It might have been too hot on there or dusty but almost immediately we moved on to the gigantic smokestack.

It was full of colonies of pigeons but we just brought a tarp along with us so we wouldn’t be lying on birdshot. The acoustics were something else – there’s a special echo kind of like a flanged out shotgun blast you get when shouting or clapping into really long tubes, I’ve noticed a similar sound with the buried cannons at the Marin Headlands.

We invited some other folks from the raft to bring along instruments and experiment with recording in there. It was nice to fall asleep staring at tiny circular portion of the night sky through a little hole about two hundred feet above us – Lisers thought the stars made it look like a drawing of a happy face. We were usually up and moving before the sun had climbed high enough to shine directly into it and heat the place up.

We stayed over there until Lisers went back to Germany. By that point the raft project was over for most people and the last big to-do on that side of the river was a generator show for Warhammer 48K and Skarekrau Radio on top of the pylon. With everybody dancing on a concrete pillar seventy feet above the water and swinging out over on it on this metal gate there would have been a lot of ways for people to get hurt. Thankfully somebody thought to spray paint a warning onto a piece of plywood:

“BE CAREFUL FOR REAL”

That seemed to do the trick. After the show me and the rest of The Garden of Bling crew started staying onboard our raft in East Saint Louis and only The Sweeps stuck around on the Cementland side. It was time to try to get our respective rafts moving again.

The Bling had a tiny little outboard motor that was only about 35 horsepower. Before they had modified it’s transom to include a steering system somebody had to stand on top of it while holding the edge of the wooden structure for stability and try to adjust the motor’s direction by using all of their body weight to shift it from side to side with their feet.

Corey Vinegar had been doing this when he fell into the water and disappeared under the propellor. Blood started floating up to the surface as he forced his head above the water and screamed for someone to give him a knife. Apparently his shorts had gotten tangled up in the mechanism and he needed to cut himself free before swimming to freedom. He had a big scar on his leg after that but got off relatively light considering how close it was to sensitive, vital areas and how sharp propellor blades are.

I guess I threw that in kind of casually. As far as I know it was the most severe accident and injury for both Mississippi River years of The Miss Rockaway Armada combined which is not bad at all all things considered. Any way Corey was with The Sweeps now and we were going to need a much bigger outboard motor.

Harrison found somebody selling a used 150 HP one somewhere nearby. We never actually got it functional but at least we spray painted it gold. I’ll get into that next chapter.

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Nine : “If you come to my business don’t mention my name”

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There are a ton of photos from The Miss Rockaway Armada. If anybody wants to see more of them and get a better idea of how all the rafts and people looked on a day to day basis all you have to do is go over to the Flickr group and there’s at least ten pages of them.to almost certainly outlast your appetite. It’s really nice that it’s still all there – for some reason the Flickr group for on the experimental opera that Lisers organized in Berlin a couple of years later seems to have disappeared.

What this means for me though is that I have a near endless amount of choices when it comes time to pick one to stick on top of a chapter and they don’t always align with the moments I found important or memorable. My time on the rafts began when I accompanied my friend Melanie or Double or Sphere from the Blog Cabin in Chicago to the Marina they were docked at in Alton, Illinois.

She was going down to start living on them and I was only tagging along to check them out and visit. Things worked out the other way around – she was only down there for a brief visit and I stuck it out on the rafts longer than almost anyone. When I finally went back to Chicago in November of 2007 only four other people stayed behind on The Garden of Bling: Alexis, Harrison, Jacki and Brodie.

The Sweeps might have still been working on their raft on the other side of the river but most likely they had already abandoned it and moved on. Everybody’s goal was to float into New Orleans in time for Halloween. When Halloween hit Saint Louis the thing in town to do was a reggae themed roller skating party in a remote part of the city. It was enough of an outskirt that me and Eric from CAMP and Lester and a couple other people got assaulted by a carload of rednecks for being and/or looking gay.

I don’t remember seeing any of The Sweeps at the roller rink so they probably just went down to New Orleans by other means when it became clear their raft would never make it. Or I could be wrong and they were still in town. It’s entirely possible.

Anyway Alton, Illinois wasn’t actually the first time I ever set foot on the rafts. The Miss Rockaway Armada first set out from Minneapolis some time in the Summer of 2006 but rather than trying to overwinter on the water they found a bar in Andalusia, Illinois called Ducky’s Lagoon where they were able to dry dock everything and work on renovations.

I did actually get a chance to visit in March or April during the Ducky’s Lagoon phase. These events would have been right around the time of the piece I called “We can’t play. Somebody stepped on our flan.” when I was traveling with the girl I refer to as Rocky. We would have just returned to Chicago from our hitchhiking trip to Columbus, Ohio and then decided to go out to see the rafts on her suggestion.

The best way to start hitchhiking out of Chicago is to take a bus down to a truck stop called The South Holland Oasis that sits directly on the Interstate 80. The trip to Columbus had worked out pretty quickly but trying to get West was not working out as well. Now that I think about my attempt to hitch South in Illinois a few years later was even more miserable – Chicago is probably a city that it’s just easier to hitchhike North or East out of.

We had gotten out of the city but just barely and then spent an entire day standing around the side of the 80 with nobody seeming to give us a second glance. It was brutally hot and we were probably sleep deprived because we decided to take a nap underneath a bit of shade in a ditch. When we stepped back onto the shoulder Rocky suggested that I lift her onto my actual shoulders to stand out more and catch driver’s attention.

I was down to try out but I figured we might as well paint our faces with the brightly colored zinc sunblock we had found at the two story Salvation Army on Grand Avenue. It was a trend from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that I’ve been surprised hasn’t made a comeback with all the other big fashion nostalgia from those decades – an opaque cream that comes in white and neon colors like blue and pink. The trend was to put it on your nose or in stripes under your eyes.

It’s probably supposed to offer extra protection to more sensitive skin on those parts of your face.

Rocky never ended up climbing on my shoulders because the moment after we painted colorful designs on our faces a van pulled off to offer us a ride. To everyone’s surprise it was a band that had recently come through Chicago and played at the Blog Cabin: The Minneapolis folk / Gothic Americana group Dark Dark Dark.

If that wasn’t enough of a coincidence they were also heading to the exact same place we were – going to visit the rafts at Ducky’s Lagoon. When we told her our destination Nona from the band said “Get out!” but in a tone of voice that made it clear she was only expressing incredulity at the serendipity of it all and actually meant “get into this van and we will take you directly there with us”.

The sunblock was in brand new sealed packages and we had bought all they had because it was cheap. We decided to leave it all with the rafts because the people on them would be living outside directly on the water and therefore get the most practical use out of it. If you look through the photos there’s a ton that show people wearing it – mostly in an eye makeup style similar to the picture from the El Rancho codeine party.

I thought about using one of the many photos of people on the rafts wearing this neon zinc sunblock as the featured photo for this piece but ultimately decided not to. I suppose I could easily embed one of those photos here. I was about to write a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do that but now I’ve changed my mind again so here’s one of Tracy and A’yen:

I thought that I wasn’t doing very much of making a point of putting up pictures of the people who are in the stories so the one at the top is Rocket and Brandy Gump from The Sweeps. Rocket is on the left and Brandy is on the right. They both liked to play accordion.

Here’s a story about Brandy Gump from before I came to the rafts: the closest town to the beach where The Garden of Bling got stuck is Brooklyn, Illinois. Venice is pretty run down and besides liquor stores and the kind of Chinese Restaurants that are behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass the only thing there is strip clubs. One of them had a creepy day care right in it’s parking lot called Leonard Bo Peep’s.

I think that’s the one from this story – I forget what the actual club is called. I never actually went inside any of them. The story was that before the rafts actually made it down to Saint Louis a big group of people made a special trip to this club to participate in amateur night. Brandy performed to Toxic by Britney Spears and had put on a comic amount of layers of clothing and underwear that she frantically pulled off in a way that was supposed to be confusing to the regulars and still resulted in her having more things on underneath.

The next week she went back by herself and won the first place prize. Presumably she went with a more traditional performance this time around but as nobody else from the rafts was with her only Brandy would know for sure.

Brooklyn and the rest of East Saint Louis have a pretty rough reputation. When I was an extra on an episode of The Real Househusbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly was in the same scene as me and the script included a joke that implied he was from East Saint Louis. He demanded they change the joke and wanted everyone to know that while his music did first find success in East Saint Louis strip clubs he was from regular Saint Louis.

Around the time that Tim from Cementland started hanging out with The Sweeps he had driven everyone to a grocery store where Corey Vinegar got caught shoplifting cheese but Tim ended up getting arrested because he had warrants. The warrants were very much in line with Tim’s personality as a stereotypical character from an early Eminem video when he first started hanging out with us.

To fill out the cliche he had a Pit Bull that had just given birth to a litter of puppies in his house that he needed us to go take care of until he was released because nobody had money for bail. The dogs were all living on a bare cement floor and had, predictably, made a mess. I was with The Sweeps that night because there was a little bit of a flirtation going on between me and Brandy at the time.

It would have put me in a bit of an awkward position if it went anywhere as the two raft crews were essentially rivals but it didn’t go anywhere and things started up between Tim and Brandy not long after he was released. I was reluctant to even include the detail at all but I figured it was important because even just having a little fledgling romance with someone for a single day will alter the way you view and relate to that person from that point on,

There’s a little bit of softness that never goes away and I figured it would be better to just explain it instead of pretending like it didn’t exist. Besides that I got along well with all The Sweeps through every stage of the rivalry more or less.

Tim didn’t have so much as a mop in his house so I made an improvised one by tying a wash close to a hoe so I could clean up the copious amounts of puppy shit. Cementland was no longer a functioning cement factory but Tim must have done some kind of cement related work before starting there because besides his cement floor all the tools in his house were cement style tools. I only mention this because the hoe I used was the kind used to smooth out the surface of freshly poured cement if that helps anybody get a clearer mental picture of it.

I remember hearing later that he’d given all the puppies up for adoption but had the mother put to sleep as she was dog aggressive and human aggressive and would be nearly impossible to get adopted. Josie was particularly upset about this when he told everybody what had happened. I don’t doubt anything he said but even entering it’s home as a stranger when it had a litter of puppies I don’t remember the mother dog behaving especially aggressively.

I realize that these details will trigger intense emotions and reactions for some people but I’m only including them to help readers get a sense of who all these characters are – Josie in this particular instance.

Cementland is on the edge of a North Saint Louis neighborhood called Jennings. I’ve written somewhere else about the liquor store there that also sold hookahs, clothing and used cell phones that were probably stolen as they always still had the previous owner’s photos and contacts left in them. The same parking lot had a laundromat, tiny grocery store and fried fish place so it was a popular destination for everyone on the rafts.

I discovered that the fish spot sold an absurdly cheap meal made from these fried fish called bullheads – as crazy as it sounds I think it only cost three or four dollars in 2007 for two fish, a side and the piece of white bread that I’ll never understand why these places even include. One of the times that Rocky was visiting the Middle Eastern owner struck up a conversation with me and when the rafts came up he expressed interest in coming to see them.

Most people who heard about the rafts wanted to come see them in person so there was nothing especially surprising about that. Meeting people that lived on little floating shanties made out of scrap lumber is a new and unique experience for most people. He asked if he should bring anything to drink and I said he could if he wanted but it didn’t really matter.

He showed up with a twelve pack and immediately mentioned that he didn’t drink alcohol. I thanked him and passed a few beers around to whoever was hanging out. We probably had a small fire going just under the walkway that led to the pylon that had been used to load cement onto barges when Cementland was still a functional factory. That was the usual evening activity but everyone could have been just hanging out on the engine raft as well.

He hadn’t been there long when he got up and abruptly left. My phone rang in basically the exact amount of time it would have taken him to walk back to his car. Through his accent I was getting hints of what sounded like sarcasm and a touch of accusation:

“Hi Ossian! You drink all the beer already?”

I said we hadn’t as it had only been two minutes since he’d walked away. His tone shifted from fake saccharine friendliness to overt irritation:

“Do me a favor, if you come to my business don’t mention my name! I don’t want my workers thinking anything!”

I have no idea what that dude’s deal was. Obviously it had something to do with sex. Muslims often view Westerners, especially people in the kind of subculture the rafts were a part of, as especially promiscuous and sexually available. When he talked to me and Rocky at the restaurant it was clear we were a couple. I don’t know if he was expecting to have sex with her or with me or with both of us. Maybe me as the Park closest to the rafts was a well known male on male cruising spot.

I mean there was no possible chance that anybody would have had sex with him under any circumstances – I just thought it was odd how angry he suddenly got without doing anything to even try to make that sort of situation happen. I guess I was supposed to offer the moment I saw he’d brought us a little bit of beer or something. I went back to the restaurant a lot because it was the only cheap food in that particular neighborhood but I never saw him again.

I don’t think I ever knew his name to begin with. Weird dude.

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Eight : “Did they get their dresses dirty?”

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I figured it’s high time I actually finished the story of the junk rafts called The Miss Rockaway Armada and put a nice little bow on the whole thing. It’s been so long since I wrote the earlier chapters that they are way shorter than the kind of pieces I write now and none of them have pictures on them. Maybe I should go back and either add more details to them or lump them together into a smaller number of entries and stick some appropriate photos on them.

You know that thing that people say “a picture is worth a thousand words”? I kind of added both. Compared to my earliest pieces the ones I make now probably have at least a thousand more words and a picture. When I was first starting this project an old friend of mine named Martin Bilben was reading it for me and offering advice and said something along the lines of “every word should be there for a reason”. I think I’ve come around to what’s basically an opposite understanding that to craft the effect I’m shooting for I need to add a lot of words for no reason at all. Tyrant. Cosecant. Quaternary.

It’s not like I’m rambling for it’s own sake. I think it conveys a very specific emotion or something like an emotion when I do it the right way. I couldn’t explain how it works or anything but I pretty much write all these in a single draft and when I read them back it more or less sounds right. I could be wrong – everybody’s mother says they’re handsome if you know what I mean.

Anyway if you haven’t read the earlier Rockaway chapters you could go back and read them now and it would probably only take as long as reading two or three of the new ones. Here’s a link to where it starts to make it really easy:

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part One: On the Nature of Junk Rafts

For whatever reason I didn’t do the thing where I put the year and city in the title but all of this was in 2007 and it was pretty much all in Saint Louis or East Saint Louis except for a couple of days at the very beginning that were in Alton. The rafts went way more places than that but I wasn’t there so I don’t have stories from it.

I’m going to pick things back up immediately after the events of chapter three: The First Annual Junk Raft Rodeo. The Coast Guard and a random fisherman were determined to help us tow all the rafts against the river’s current to dock at Cementland. All hell broke loose but miraculously nobody was killed or injured and the rafts ended up more or less back where they started.

You can read about it in more detail in the chapter I just wrote down the name of.

As they were depositing us back on the banks of East Saint Louis everybody was convinced that the first words out of the Coast Guard’s mouths would be that we were crazy and our rafts were a hazard and death trap and we needed to get them the hell out of the river. Before the failed towing attempt the Coast Guards had been showing us videos on their cell phone of a different junk raft one or two Summers earlier colliding with a barge and getting sucked into the river.

That raft was led by a guy named Matteapolis. I was never sure how to spell his name because I’d only heard it and never seen it written down but this guy named Geoff I met at the Black Butte party this year told me how to spell it. I guess I should have guessed it would be exactly like the name of the city except for the “Matt” part.

I wish I had swapped contact info with the Geoff guy because I’d be interested in talking to him so more. I gave him the blog link so maybe he’ll read this and could reach out.

That would be cool.

So anyway if you’ve read the earlier chapters you’ll know the Coast Guards didn’t say any of those things. They were actually excited to keep trying and already had ideas to increase the chances of it being successful. We had been doing all the traveling in Voltron mode, or with all the individual rafts tied together, but they said it was probably the worst setup for towing. It makes sense – a single junk raft already creates a ton of drag so sticking a bunch of them together in roughly the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece could only make things worse.

The first raft they wanted to try with by itself was the engine raft – to quickly recap it was the best constructed, made out of three parts for a total length of sixty feet and had two Volkswagen Rabbit engines in the back that had been converted to propellers. I had forgotten the names of the engines but I talked to Caryl for a second and found it was Mortimer and Jenkins. We couldn’t have turned them both on during this second tow because one of them, probably Jenkins, had gotten it’s propellor shaft bent out of shape during the fiasco of the first attempt.

I don’t think they were far enough apart that only turning on one would cause the raft to go in circles but it probably wasn’t even necessary to turn the remaining one on. There were no problems during the towing of the engine raft whatsoever. I would say that it went off without a hitch but of course it was necessary to hitch the engine raft to the far more powerful Coast Guard vessels.

You know, for towing.

Once the engine raft was securely tied up at Cementland it was time to try to tow up the smaller rafts and the next one in line was The Garden of Bling. This one was thirty eight feet long, covered with a three story structure and completely useless mast and sail and was the one I had recently gravitated to as my home vessel. This tow must have failed almost completely due to the Bling’s inferior constructions as opposed to our actions as crew members during the tow – considering that none of us had to do anything but sit there while the engine raft was being towed.

At the same time I don’t want to take credit away from us for royally screwing up our responsibilities as crew members while the failed tow was going down because we did that with flying colors.

The entire endeavor had kicked off pretty close to the crack of dawn but between the first disaster, the second success and gearing up for this third attempt it was inching toward evening. I can’t remember what part of the day it was when we started drinking but we were good and drunk. Sparks was the usual beverage for Garden of Bling degeneracy but for whatever reason that wasn’t what we were drinking this time around – it was beer in bottles.

The Coast Guards had given us a walkie talkie so we could communicate with them during the towing process but we kept setting it down and forgetting where we had put it. They were really unhappy about that. Obviously we were all really invested in holding a bottle of beer to drink out of but that still should have left an extra hand for the walkie.

I think what happened was that the bow started to dip under the water and when the deck was getting covered in river water Harrison grabbed a broom to try to push the water back over the edge. He probably set the walkie talkie down somewhere to pick up the broom. When the raft was succumbing to drag and sinking into the water and none of us were picking up the walkie talkie they had given to us to check in during exactly this kind of situation they probably had to radio another Coast Guard vessel to come find out what was going on.

What they found was a crew kind of laughing, being unconcerned about where the walkie talkie was and thinking that pushing water with a broom would make the situation better in any meaningful way – drunk people stuff. If you’ve ever made public servants like Coast Guards or Park Rangers get angry at you by being inappropriately drunk you know the kind of voice – like suddenly serious incredulous authority guy voice.

I remember my exact level of being drunk in the moment as like bright colors and things lurching around but not to the level of feeling motion sick drunk. Sometimes I have dreams where I’m this kind of drunk walking down a street and I fall onto the ground and start sliding forever because in this drunken dream universe there’s no such thing as friction.

In the dream version the fact that I can’t seem to make myself stop moving makes me anxious but in this particular real life situation I wasn’t bothered at all. The situation was probably potentially dangerous and we had just screwed up our only opportunity to get the raft towed to where we needed it to be but if you scroll back up and look at the photo I definitely look I’m having a good time.

Harrison is sitting directly next to me in the center of the photograph. He maybe looks like reality is dawning on him about the severity of the situation and what it means for this particular raft a little bit. He was always the least willing to accept the fact that The Garden of Bling would never get moving again and we’d never make it down to New Orleans like he wanted to.

That’s Nick underneath the neon orange hat. You can’t see his face at all but the angle of his head isn’t exactly expressive of exuberant joy. That’s the thing about photography though – it tells an absolute truth but that truth is limited to the tiny portion of time during which the aperture is open. Maybe a fraction of a second later they looked as happy as I did. Who can say?

We pretty much exhausted the good will of the Coast Guards and screwed things up for all of the other rafts that were hoping to get towed up to our promised berth several miles up the river. Or that would make the most sense. If not for the phantom anecdote.

I have this one distinct memory that is nearly impossible to reconcile with the surrounding facts but I know it has to be based on something g that actually happened. Once The Garden of Bling tow failed and the Coast Guard said they weren’t going to help us anymore and any raft that wanted to keep moving had to prove it could safely navigate the Lower Mississippi nearly everybody abandoned the project and started dismantling their rafts.

We were going to try to keep going on The Garden of Bling even though we were stuck away from Cementland back in East Saint Louis. And then there was another crew that was going to try to keep going too. I nicknamed them The Chimney Sweeps, often shortened to The Sweeps, and the name basically stuck and they started using it.

The name had it’s origins in my friend Josh from Oakland telling me that his housemate Vanessa had made a statement about needing to stop dating guys that looked like chimney sweeps. It basically referred to the mid 2000’s New Orleans adjacent train rider fashion of wearing a lot of striped socks, button on suspenders and just dark colored old timey sort of clothes. And then if you were traveling all of this stuff would usually get really dirty too.

The Sweeps were led by a girl named Brandi Gump. She had originally been connected to The Garden of Bling and had even built a part of it, a small taxidermy museum on the second story, but it got cut off with a Sawzall when it made the raft float lopsided. There was also this shifting relationship thing where she’d been dating someone on The Bling and now that person was dating someone else.

I don’t really need to say who these people were – if you know all these people you already know. That was pretty much a hallmark of The Rockaway anyway – there were some couples like Caryl and Nick that stayed together for the length of the project and probably before it and long afterwards and even to this day as far as I know, but it was much more common for these things to be in flux.

Brandi wasn’t around when I first showed up but she got back to the boats and started putting a crew together. It was her, this really nice girl named Josie that kind of gave house mom vibes and a kind of scrappy feral girl named Rocket that had already been on a famous raft before with someone named Poppa Neutrino that you can look up.

Then it was Corey Vinegar, Soup and eventually Tim from Cementland. Tim worked for Bob Cassily and was pretty much a mainstream vaguely wiggerish dude until the day John Patzius had him operate a backhoe to help pull the furthest aft section of the engine raft out of the river. After that he hung around the rafts as much as possible and at some point him and Brandi started dating and he changed his name to Tim Treason and adopted the chimney sweep fashion all of his crew mates were into.

The phantom anecdote was that at some point I heard that the Coast Guard also tried to help The Sweeps tow another raft up to Cementland and also failed. What I can’t figure out is when this would have happened or what raft it would have been. The vessel that The Sweeps ended up trying to retrofit was the galley, or the central portion of the engine raft, and this had already been towed up in the only successful tow of the three part engine raft.

Obviously it wasn’t The Garden of Bling. That leaves The Giraft and The Kirksville. The Giraft had been built on top of an actual commercially produced aluminum pontoon and Charles started dismantling it the moment after the failed Bling tow so that’s out. The Kirksville was built by girls from Kirksville and was designed to be bicycle powered which I don’t think was especially viable and not long after it came untied in the night and washed up on some rocks downstream and we cannibalized different pieces of wood from it to try to do repairs on The Bling when it started to break down.

The Kirksville seems like the best contender for this failed tow but something about it seems unsatisfying to me. Could there be another raft I’ve completely forgotten the existence of? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Here is the phantom anecdote:

I heard that the Coast Guard tried to help The Sweeps tow whatever raft it was up to Cementland and in the course of failing they briefly had to tie it to the side of a coal barge. This wasn’t something I saw first hand. Either in person or over the phone I was repeating this anecdote to Caryl who had most likely already left the project. The only thing keeping this whole thing in my memory is her response:

“Did they get their dresses dirty?”

Amarillo 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Three “I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

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I usually remember what the various Greyhound Stations look like because of how much time I spent in them. I really miss the old one in San Diego that used to be on Broadway and shared the block with a run down Hotel. Obviously I grew up there but downtown San Diego seems to have changed more than any other city I’m aware of. The Oklahoma City and San Diego Greyhound Stations both used to have Old West style snack bars with wooden wagon wheels and stuff on the wall.

The New Orleans station is among the most visually arresting – sharing space with Amtrak and having brightly colored mid-century murals on the wall. Using counterfeit passes remained easy here after it was impossible in most cities of comparable size but it’s been ages since the last time I tried it. When I lived there I got a Central Casting job for the movie Elvis & Nixon where they disguised the space as a 1970’s Airport Terminal. I was supposed to be a homeless guy sleeping in the background and I did such a convincing job that the security guard tried to kick me out without realizing I was part of the production.

Anyway I can’t remember the Saint Louis one although as soon as I typed those words I had a sudden vision of a fancy indoor mall with high arched glass ceilings. That’s probably actually Union Station and the trip I’m thinking of would have been onboard Megabus: the company that cut costs by only using curb space at other transport companies’ stations and terminals. No matter how hard I try I can’t seem to conjure up an image of the Saint Louis Greyhound – maybe it was possible to catch it at the small transit center near Cement Land called Jennings.

I think the one in Amarillo looked almost identical to the one in Grand Junction, Colorado that was on the route between Chicago and San Diego so I saw a lot of it. A small building with a low ceiling and windows all around it where the buses pulled up on the side. I think I somehow didn’t have a cell phone yet so I found a payphone to call up LBK. My memory might be inaccurate on this detail but I think I didn’t get a cell phone until 2009.

Wait… I just realized that it has to be because I suddenly got a stray memory of buying used cell phones from a liquor store in Saint Louis while I was on the Rockaway. This place was in the shopping center next to a Laundromat and a fried fish spot I’ll tell a story about later just down the street from Cement Land. It was a bigger store run by Middle Eastern guys that sold a bit of everything – electronics, embroidered hats and jerseys, probably hookahs but they had a bunch of used cell phones people had hocked with them underneath the glass counter.

I must have been losing or accidentally breaking cell phones a lot, probably by accidentally dropping them in the river, because I clearly remember doing this several times. The phones were either stolen or nobody bothered erasing their photos so it was always a surprise what you’d find on them. One time it was all pictures of kids but another one was full of blurry shots of Black boobs and beads at Mardi Gras.

I remember getting one that had a sample of a dirty rap song as the ringtone and I had forgotten to change it before I went back to substitute teaching in Chicago. I think I was actually teaching a Preschool Class by the projects when somebody tried to call me and the song started playing. The kids all thought it was really funny:

“I was gettin’ some head, Gettin’ Gettin’ some head…”

On that note I called up LBK when we got into Amarillo and he took us to the office he was working at with Stanley Marsh 3. Brodie had told me some stories about Stanley – that the Marsh and Bush families were big into land and oil together and were the richest families in Texas, that he had created a roadside attraction called Cadillac Ranch and various “prank” street signs around town and a number of other trickster oriented public art projects. The big thing I’d heard was that he had paid a mutual friend from the Rockaway five hundred dollars to jerk off onto him.

On this trip I was traveling with Leg who was also my girlfriend at the time so I didn’t see as much of the scene as I did on subsequent visits – Stanley really didn’t like when girls were around. The office was on the fifteenth floor of the tallest building in Amarillo – it was later called the Chase Tower but I don’t think it was on this first visit. The moment you stepped out of the elevator you were in a big room with oversized upholstered pool balls that Stanley had commissioned and large insanely valuable paintings everywhere. I mean like Jackson Pollocks, Rothkos even some Henri Matisse stuff and it was all just leaning against walls and shit.

There was one older guy who worked in the office, possibly Stanley’s son, and an older female secretary but besides that it was a bunch of “art-punk” looking young men – teenagers and guys in their 20s. I’m not sure what kind of work was actually done in there, maybe managing Stanley’s assets and buying and selling his art collection, but it was mostly set up for skateboarding in, working on art and grabbing snacks from a big well stocked kitchen.

The scene was kind of like the Foot Clan Headquarters in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but also a lot like My Own Private Idaho. Everything was clearly designed to attract and be appealing to the boys who all kind of had the “rough trade” hustler look and Stanley was very clearly a chickenhawk. On this first visit me and Leg were able to get free lunch, this was always hamburgers or club sandwiches with those fancy colored cellophane toothpicks on a plate with French fries that came in those hotel style metal trays, I don’t know where it came from but it seemed to be inside the building.

Me and LBK played around with a color photocopier they had just gotten. We did stuff with aluminum foil and bits of jewelry and experimented with moving the stuff around while the different colors were scanning. If you’ve never played with one of the old kinds it does four consecutive scans: cyan, magenta, yellow and then finally black. You can get cool effects by slightly moving the image either during or between scans. One cool trick is only leaving the image for one of them and then quickly swapping it out with a white piece of paper to make analog color separations.

Stanley would always call on his intercom to ask about whatever friends the guys in the office brought up and if it was younger boys he would ask to meet them in his office. I think this first time he briefly met and talked to both me and Leg but he didn’t try anything. The guys were talking about how I should really see his house called Toad Hall but we couldn’t go this trip because no girls were allowed. We were trying to catch a train toward California that same night anyway.

I never actually made it out to Toad Hall on any of my subsequent visits either so I won’t attempt to describe it but you can Google it – it sounds pretty fucking crazy.

Personally I have a certain repugnance for prostitution at least where I’m concerned. I have no judgement against anybody that does it but I don’t want money to be the reason that I’m fucking somebody or that they’re fucking me. I’m super down with lesser forms of sex work though, I made a solo video for a site called Alternadudes for example, and only having to jack off onto a dude for five hundred dollars sounds like a hell of a payday. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

The next time I passed through Amarillo was on the homeward leg of the 2010 Bleak End/Generation tour. We were grabbing the same free lunch that always gets people in the building when he asked for me to come talk to him in his office. He had an authentic tiger’s skin rug on the floor and laid on a couch where he could watch a wall of TVs like the villain from Watchmen. He’s still the only person I’ve ever met who watched a wall of TVs like this in real life.

I had been wearing a very small pair of black shorts for most of the tour as it was an extremely hot Summer. They had already gotten me kicked out of the workout room at the Providence, Rhode Island YMCA where they said that they were appropriate attire for swimming but not for exercising:

“There are children here!”

I always thought that was a strange argument as children wear small shorts too and there’s nothing overtly sexual about me showing a lot of leg. I could understand if my genitals were full on hanging out or I was brandishing an obvious erection but neither of these was the case. Besides that there were presumably children in the pool too and if anything the water would make the shorts more revealing as it would cause them to cling to my skin.

Anyway in Stanley’s office we were talking about something completely unrelated when he put his hand on my thigh and brought up an acquaintance who had proffered services for payment. I said that I’d heard about it. He gestured toward a pair of buttons on the armrest of his couch:

“If I press this button it will close my door. It won’t be locked but nobody will be walking in and disturbing us.”

I said that was fine. In light of some further revelations I’ll be getting to in a minute here I find it significant that there were two buttons – that there were absolutely situations where he was locking the door. Everybody in that office knew exactly what was going on and never would have opened that door without knocking so the only purpose for the locking button would be something more sinister. More on that in a minute.

I wanted to get right down to business and talk about money but he wanted to wait until after lunch. He was also rather curious about my tour mates:

“What about those other boys, they like getting their dicks played with?”

“I doubt it. They’ve had a pretty strict religious upbringing.”

His plan ended up backfiring for both of us. I didn’t get five hundred dollars and he didn’t get jizzed on. Rain and Joel had been going hard on the snacks – eating gushers and slim jims and shit but once they got wind of what was happening they were grossed out and wanted to leave. They saw the cabinets full of the favorite junk food snacks of their adolescence as a sinister kind of lure which quite obviously they were.

On the way out of the building Joel gestured to a life size bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln sharing a bench with a pair of small children:

“There’s Honest Abe… just trying to get an honest blow job!”

I passed back through in 2011 on the way back to California from SXSW but I didn’t get the payday then either. Stanley went for someone else I was traveling with who although older than me maintains eternally youthful features and a surfer’s physique.

I had only ever heard of Stanley’s arrangement going down with legally consenting adults but there was no denying that he was attracted to boyishness and youth. Later in 2011 he had a stroke and was criminally charged and briefly arrested in a suit that eventually involved ten defendants he had coerced into sexual acts from the time they were sixteen. It wasn’t the first time this had happened either – similar cases came up multiple times in the ‘90s but disappeared after large cash settlements.

The same thing happened with the 2011 case and according to rumors made each of the plaintiffs a multimillionaire. There are plenty of eighteen year olds who look sixteen or younger but Marsh was clearly attracted to youth and vulnerability and repeated his pattern of behavior for decades. He was a predator and an entire city looked the other way for decades because of his wealth, influence and status. He deliberately chose victims from the poorest echelons of society in order to get away with it for as long as possible.

He died in 2014 without ever being formally criminally convicted.

Back in 2008 me and Leg went from the office to a space downtown that some of LBK’s friends lived in. I’m not sure if it was normally a performance venue or practice space but it was pretty dark in there and had the black paint and duct tape look of a community theater space. We got some beers and hung out and waited for it to get dark enough that we could catch the train without much possibility of anybody seeing us.

When night fell we grabbed our packs and walked across town to follow Brodie’s map to the proper set of train tracks. A block or two from our destination we ran into a group of Juggalos outside of a Burger King who were clearly on the road as well. They all looked young and chubby, like teddy bears that were completely unprepared for the harsh realities of the dangerous world they were stepping into.

One of them offered us some advice about hitchhiking that I’d largely say was incorrect:

“If you want somebody to give you a ride you gotta have something to offer: either a good story, some drugs or money or you’re gonna have to suck some dick.”

One of the other Juggalos chimed in proudly:

“I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

That might be how getting rides works at Juggalo Gatherings but it certainly hasn’t been my experience for hitchhiking in general. If you’re standing on the side of the road with a sign out people are already going to assume that you don’t have anything. They want you to either talk, listen or shut the hell up and to have the basic situational awareness to figure out which one of those the situation calls for. To “read the room” as it were.

I did get into one ride where the driver wanted us to hurt or murder him but that’s far from the norm and I’ll get into it in a story eventually. I’m sure the sexual expectations are much higher if you’re hitchhiking as a single female but that doesn’t mean it’s a prerequisite for getting rides. When that shit happens you get out by any means necessary and you find another ride.

One of the Juggalos said “Jesus Loves You” and handed us a single dollar. I was carrying it around for a while as a “Lucky Juggalo Dollar” but I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe Leg kept it. For a brief window of time I would have thought of this dollar as a sort of talisman but this was all very early in my magical thinking career- before the “World’s Worst Magician” phase.

I had said earlier that most of my freight rides were in the company and under the guidance of more experienced riders but this was the one case where it wasn’t – or the second case of you count the brief ride across the Mississippi River. I might be wrong about this but I think that when we left Chicago it was Leg’s first time riding freight. I found one of the “nacho boats” I talked about before and we slipped into it.

The train sped up on the edge of Amarillo and we were on our way to California…

[Note: for more information on Stanley Marsh 3 and the charges against him I highly recommend the following article]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/darkness-on-the-plains/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Saint Louis 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Two “The Do-Anything Say-Anything Zone”

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[Photo Credit: Tod Seelie]

At the end of the last chapter I was riding in a gondola between Chicago and Saint Louis with Brodie and Leg. I had written last time that giving everybody acid wasn’t a good idea but that might not necessarily be true. We would have gotten pulled off the train and arrested either way and it certainly made the couple hours we spent locked in cement cells more entertaining. It also slightly reduced whatever possession charges I still have in Central Illinois because the acid was clearly packaged and not particularly well hidden.

As we approached a town called Sullivan the train began to slow down and Brodie was pretty sure it wasn’t siding. He figured that a motorist had seen us and called it in and said we would probably need to get ready to run. We hadn’t been super careless like the last ride I described but we had been peeking over the side a bit to look at the scenery. We mostly put our heads back down when we passed through yards, towns or busy roads – Brodie was a very experienced rider.

The train came to a stop with our car directly between two road crossings and local police SUVs were pulling up to both of them. This was when we realized that they knew exactly which car we were in and we must have been spotted by some kind of automatic camera pointed downward at the tracks as the trains came into town. There probably wasn’t too much we could have done about this besides lying motionless under our sleeping bags with the hope of blending in and that’s a pretty miserable way of riding.

We were just in the wrong kind of car – too much visibility.

There was nothing around but a field of knee-high corn and it was obvious that there was no point in running or trying to hide – plus we weren’t really in the mental state for that kind of thing. We threw our packs and bags over the side, hopped off and started rolling up the sleeping bags and getting ready to move. I also had an eighth of mushrooms and a single Adderall pill in my bag, drugs I’d been carrying for a while but never seemed to feel like taking, so I briefly considered either tossing them, hiding them or just eating it all. They were already jogging toward us with their guns out though so I decided to leave them where they were and hope that they’d be lazy about searching our bags.

The Sullivan Police had pictures of trains on their patches and I was thinking of using one as the header photo but it looks like they’ve changed the design and I couldn’t find any pictures of the old one. I got the impression that their town was quiet enough that all they really did was catch up freight riders. They were excitedly boasting to us and each other about how many they had managed to catch in the last week alone.

They seemed especially proud of having pulled off a group of Mexicans because then they got to hand them over to immigration. They’d probably just recently gotten the fancy automatic camera installed and since then it had been like shooting fish in a barrel. They made us put on our backpacks and then handcuffed us in the front so we could carry them over to the pickup truck they were going to transport us in:

“Let them hoss their own shit!”

They told us that if we wanted we could wait for another form of transport instead of getting transported in a truck bed but we wanted to get the whole ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They had pulled up in SUVs but they probably didn’t want us getting their seats dirty. They made a lot of comments about how dirty we were, how we smelled and that sort of thing.

They took us to a tiny cement substation with a couple of cells for processing. The whole building was roughly the size of the public bathrooms found in parks and rest stops. Inside there was a desk with a computer, some long cement benches they handcuffed us to for processing, a few thin cells and a couple shower stalls. They constantly shuffled us between these spaces for the entirety of the time we were there so that two of us were never together long enough to talk to each other.

We had to leave our bags on the damp grass outside so they could search through them. There was a lady cop behind the computer while I was being processed and for whatever reason she was chatting me up. I forget how she worked this detail into the conversation, maybe she asked me where I was going and why and I told her I was headed to California to play a concert:

“I used to live in Seattle. It was after the whole grunge thing was pretty much over but it was still pretty cool living there with all that history!”

“How’d you end up in a dead end town like this? You move out here for a guy or something?”

“Ooof, don’t even get me started…”

She seemed like she was on the verge of passing me her phone number or asking if I wanted to go get a coffee when we were released until one of her male colleagues with rubber gloves on slammed all of my drugs onto the counter. I immediately took responsibility:

“That’s all mine.”

She gave me a look like I had somehow betrayed her and didn’t talk to me again. She evidently didn’t know very much about the Seattle music scene she was excited to share a city with if she was shocked and offended by a relatively benign and harmless bag of mushrooms. The male cop went through the different baggies with me to identify their contents. I confirmed what the mushrooms and Adderall pill were but I also had a baggie of powdered Syrian Rue that looked like a generic brown powder.

I’d gotten everything from the self-proclaimed shaman guy that lived in Chicago who is mentioned in some other chapters. I’d made the mistake of buying things I didn’t really feel like taking just because they were hard to find and then carrying it around until it got me in trouble. I explained to him in detail what the powder was:

“That’s Syrian Rue, peganum harmala. it’s a naturally occurring MAO Inhibitor that is used to boost the efficacy of other psychotropic drugs but it doesn’t do much on it’s own. It isn’t currently scheduled by the DEA.”

He took my explanation at face value and separated the Rue from the things I could actually be charged for. I wondered afterward if I had said the other bags contained Turkey Tail Mushrooms and a Vitamin C tablet with the same level of conviction I could have gotten away with all of it but that probably would have been pushing my luck. At the very least the Adderall pill had an easily verifiable imprint.

Brodie’s photography monographs hadn’t been published yet but he had either done a few lucrative gallery shows at this point or gotten a decent advance from his representation and he offered to pay everybody’s bail or whatever they were calling the money to be allowed to leave. He stood by the desk with his debit card for a few minutes then concluding the charges he was able to creep by me and whisper into my ear that it sounded like “he was buying thousands of dollars in X-Men cards”.

Brodie would most likely not be “road ready” for several hours to come.

They had us all take showers before they cut us loose and made fun of the fact that nobody seemed to want to use the packets of harsh chemical shampoo they provided us with.

Leg threw out a clumsy and club footed excuse while emerging from her shower:

“You see I just don’t really care for the toiletries, you know what I mean???”

Everybody was doing a pretty good job of just coming off like ditzy train riders and not letting on that we were tripping but Brodie did spend a suspiciously long time staring down into the drain. He later said that there were globs of something down there that looked like the liquid form of the T-1000 from Terminator 2. The cops smirked at him and attempted a joke:

“You sure you didn’t consume some of those mushrooms before we picked you up?”

Brodie answered back both in a way that could be construed as evasive and in a somewhat robotic voice:

“I’ve consumed mushrooms that come on pizza before…“

The cops didn’t really push the issue. I guess they can’t really charge you for being under the influence of drugs except for maybe a public intoxication charge but there’s always the threat of being taken to a psychiatric hospital for 24 to 48 hours if they knew that you took LSD and feel like being extra. They didn’t do any of that.

They took us outside where we discovered that the contents of all of our packs were still spread out on the grass. During my heaviest years of magical ideation, roughly 2008 to 2012, there was a sequence of objects I came to view as magical talismans and essential tools for my practice. This included a silver plated pewter goblet, a conductor’s baton or wand, a rubber witches nose, a studded leather cap and a Ukrainian knife with a goat’s hoof handle that was supposed to be cursed.

At this early stage it would have been limited to the dagger with leather scabbard I used for the Living Hell performances and a small glass bottle in the shape of a maple leaf that I mixed my Florida Water with other fragrances in. Anyway the Sullivan police stole the dagger. None of them ever mentioned anything about it and the part of Illinois we were in was popular for hunting so it’s extremely unlikely that there would have been any law against me carrying it. One of them probably just thought it looked cool and decided to keep it – cops do that sort of thing constantly.

They loaded us into one of those prisoner transport vehicles that’s divided into two sections in the back – kind of like the trucks that dog catchers use. They did allow all of us to ride on the same side of it. Out of the three of us Brodie was clearly the least psychedelically experienced and he had been doing an admirable job of holding it together but his self control was starting to slip. He turned to me:

“Are we in the do-anything say-anything zone?”

The back of the truck was separated from the cab where the cop was driving but there was a tiny window so he could see and hear us. He smirked into the rear view mirror. I told Brodie to hang on just a little longer:

“No we’re not quite in the do-anything say-anything zone yet but we should get there as soon as we leave this truck.”

The cop was driving us to the next county over so that if we did get in trouble again it would be another department’s problem. He knew that our immediate destination was Saint Louis so he gave us general directions to get to Effingham from where he dropped us off. He said it would probably be easiest to find a ride heading to Saint Louis from there and departed with a final piece of advice:

“Guys, don’t get on another train. Catch a ride or hoof it but if you get back on a train you’ll just get caught again.”

He drove off. Brodie let out a massive sigh of relief:

“Holy Shit! I am high! I’m so high! I’m tripping my ass off!”

Leg was smiling to herself:

“A pig said hoof it!“

I put a reassuring arm around Brodie’s shoulder and led him over to a small pile of broken chunks of asphalt so he could climb up on it and jump off a couple of times. I thought it would help him feel more in control the same way I used to jump off of a 60 foot pylon into the Mississippi River every morning as a quick wake up while the Rockaway was docked at Cement Land. He was basically fine to do whatever but we needed to start hitchhiking so the sun wouldn’t go down on us in another small farm town and unless we got a “hip” ride this would probably go smoother if we didn’t talk about how high we were in front of the drivers.

It’s possible to hitch hike without a sign but if there’s any way of making one you’ll be a lot better off. As long as the letters are large, bold and legible passing motorists have no choice but to read them and then they’re already thinking about you. It’s the magic power of the written word – try to look at a word in a language you understand and not read it, it’s impossible. Riding trains always involves some degree of hitchhiking if only to get to and from the remote train yards so we would have already been carrying cardboard and sharpies.

Making a sign is a bit of a gamble because writing the name of a distant destination city can get you lucky with somebody who’s going the entire way but it can also cause potential rides to not pick you up because they don’t think they’re going far enough. For this reason I generally like to just write a Cardinal direction, like “South” in this case, but I might have just written “Effingham” as it wasn’t that far. Generally speaking you want to keep moving even if a ride is barely going any distance but there are some exceptions.

You wouldn’t take a ride from a truck stop if they were only going a couple of exits and potentially dropping you off where there isn’t a truck stop for example.

It took a couple of rides to get to Effingham but I can only remember the first one. A crew cut army looking guy took us down the road a bit to an AM PM. I’m not sure how Brodie ended up in the front seat. Leg and I were a couple at the time but I almost always take the front seat when hitchhiking with a group because I’m good at talking to strangers if that’s what a ride wants. The guy attempted to make conversation:

“It’s gotta be rough hitchhiking in this heat, huh?”

Brodie was staring at his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sleeping bag:

“It beats fighting monsters all day…”

The driver didn’t try to make any more conversation. It was almost dark by the time we got to Effingham. Effing Effingham – I wound up in this same town again a few years later and when the story gets there you’ll see why I have a little more hatred for the place than most of the anonymous small towns I’ve drifted through. We tried to find a ride but eventually we had to consider finding a place to sleep.

The local homeless tweaker guy named Kenny had noticed our arrival and offered his advice:

“You’re probably thinking of sleeping in the woods out back but you don’t wanna do that and I’ll tell you why: there’s snakes and spiders and who know’s what back there. What you wanna do is go sleep underneath that freeway bridge over there: it’s still windy but it’s dry and there’s no spiders and nobody will bother you. How do I know this? Because I slept there last night and the night before that and I’ll be sleeping there tonight.”

The moment he walked away we all agreed that it sounded like a very bad idea to go sleep where Kenny was. He might have been just trying to help but he seemed a little too eager to have us over there and know where we were sleeping. We could have easily outnumbered and overpowered him but it just seemed like a bad scene.

I think we just grabbed some cardboard from the dumpster full of flattened boxes and laid it out next to the dumpster and slept on it. This wouldn’t have worked long term but we were only staying the night. We had talked to a truck driver around midnight who’d said that he was heading to Saint Louis first thing in the morning and he could take us. He also said that he had a free shower ticket for buying a certain amount of diesel he wasn’t going to use and asked if any of us wanted it.

I was surprised when Brodie took him up on it considering how recently we had showered in the police station but he said that he’d always wanted to see what the truck stop showers looked like. He seemed to just be genuinely interested in big rig trucks and truck culture: a couple of years later he was working as a heavy duty diesel mechanic and the last time I talked to him he had started a transportation company and was driving one himself.

Not too far into the next morning we were dropped off on the Saint Louis side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge which is pretty much across the street from Cement Land. Not too far away a handful of old cabooses sat on a disused portion of track hidden behind walls of overgrown vegetation. Some people had started staying on them during the final days of the Rockaway but now Brodie, Alexis and Jacki had moved in full time ever since The Garden of Bling got burned.

Jacki and Alexis had gotten a couple of bantam chickens, I think their names were Chicken Nugget and Lenny Kravitz, and spent most of their time watching the chickens fight and dig up bugs. It seems like a missed opportunity that it wasn’t “Henny Kravitz” but it was probably a rooster – the kind with big hair and bell bottoms made of feathers. Bob Cassilly was getting frustrated that people from the rafts were still living on a piece of property he eventually intended to develop but they were out of the way and I don’t think he ever got around to kicking them off.

While I was exploring some of the surrounding overgrowth I must have disturbed a bumblebee’s tiny hive and it attacked and stung me. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a honeybee’s sting but they don’t die from stinging either and they can do it over and over. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and it directed its serial assaults to the spot where Christ’s fifth wound is – it looked like it was pelvic thrusting against me as it stung me over and over. I was too shocked and surprised to think about brushing it off until it had gotten a good five jabs in.

It kind of feels like a dull ache combined with a slight burning – maybe like a combination sunburn and Charlie Horse.

Brodie was staying in Saint Louis but me and Leg would be continuing onto the Bay Area. I forget if the original plan was to ride trains the whole way but we went to a Kinko’s near the arch so I could make us a pair of counterfeit Greyhound Passes. The new plan was to take a bus to Amarillo, Texas and catch a hot shot to Northern California from there. Brodie photocopied a few pages and maps from his Crew Change and gave us the phone number for a friend of his called LBK.

Amarillo, now that is a seriously weird town. I’ll get into it next time.

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