The engine troubles that had required the overnight at a Cummins in the small town in West Virginia had not been resolved. In fact we had to stop in another small town in West Virginia where heavy rains had created a temporary chocolate river of muddy water to perform what was essentially a “magical oil change”. As one of the vocalists in Living Hell I had created a character called Deacon Peafowl who was kind of like a revival preacher for the kind of Ceremonial Magic championed by the Order of the Golden Dawn.
I had also been carrying a mummified squirrel in a little red fringed suede purse that had been discovered directly under the bus’s engine the moment it was moved from the backyard spot in Tampa, Florida it had been occupying since the International Noise Conference. There was a running joke that this squirrel had cursed us with it’s dying breath, calling out “nuts to you guys!” as it stiffened with rigor mortis beneath it’s future haunting ground. This joke had seemed innocent enough when just moving the bus from the backyard had caused a valve for the grease tank to snap off and flooded a suburban cul-de-sac with rancid French Fry oil made only more pungent from months of stagnating.
By the time we got to the chocolate river there had been enough mechanical troubles to elevate this idea from joke to valid concern and cast serious doubts as to the wisdom of continuing to carry our own version of the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. It was time to jettison the squirrel and having found ourselves in a near-biblical flood the decided-upon method would be “Viking Funeral”. A small oil can was cut open to serve as boat and a few small tokens were placed along it’s passenger either as offerings or “bad pennies” to be disposed of.
We had been kind of toying with the idea that Living Hell was the evangelical musical wing of an obscure religious cult in different ways: both through vague wording in the mis-information pamphlets I had produced and in the messages within my lyrics and Rain’s spoken word segments. Now that we were making a singing procession to a river bank and reverently lighting a deceased rodent on fire to watch it disappear beneath the swirling waters the lines had been blurred as to whether this was performance, parody or earnest spiritual practice. There is an Igbo expression I am fond of that I read in an essay by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe:
“Let us perform the sacrifice and so leave the blame on the doorstep of the Gods.”
It seemed to have actually had the desired effect – for one or two hundred miles at least. The journey between the chocolate river and New York City was actually devoid of major mechanical issues to the best of my recollection. This changed dramatically on the threshold of that metropolis: the moment we moved to enter through some kind of turnpike or toll-way the bus began violently ejecting hot grease from somewhere it shouldn’t have been that was nearly the same color as the magical river. The attendant quickly closed our lane and asked us to just move along as soon as physically possible without worrying about the toll.
We joked that it would have been a good method for avoiding tolls and tariffs in the future had it not been a portent of serious issues that actually desperately needed fixing.
I can’t remember if we had one or two days in New York before our show at Secret Project Robot but I do remember what the most exciting thing to do in town was. The Whitney Biennial had been a must-see event since the 2002 iteration had given an entire room over to costumes, sculpture, projections and music from the Fort Thunder collective FORCEFIELD. I’ve been to so many of these at this point that I’m almost certain to misplace specific pieces except for the one clear detail that Olaf Breuning’s first home video was on display and everybody was buzzing about it.
I had been wearing a six inch long dagger in a leather scabbard at my waist for the entire tour at this point and had totally forgotten that New York City actually has specific laws against that sort of thing. It was incorporated into the performances as athame with specific lyrics blending the concepts of metal, fire and magical intention:
“Cut the wick, light the spark!
Be the candle, pierce the dark!”
One of the security guards approached me and discreetly pointed to the prohibited weapon:
“That’s a real knife?”
I answered in a completely neutral tone that carefully skirted the division between a clear yes or no:
“Well it’s a dagger.”
Apparently this was the correct answer, he held up the palms of his hands in a conciliatory gesture as he assured me:
“I won’t say nothin’.”
Eventually everybody made their way to Williamsburg for the late afternoon show at Secret Project Robot. I remember hearing that some photos and a review from this show ended up in the Village Voice but this writing project has been unfortunately teaching me that alternative weeklies don’t generally bother with comprehensive online archives. Here’s what I do remember: this was my first time running into my San Diego friend Raul de Nieves in his incarnation as a successful New York artist. There was a group show up on the inside of the space that included a small room painted completely black with an oppressive doom metal soundtrack.
I ended up eating acid again which makes me think it might have been almost a week after the small town in West Virginia with the Cummins but then I lay my memories out and remember that I also ate it to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and go to a dinner party in Liberty, Maine and there’s just no way all of these things were a week apart. I was just eating a lot of acid. With such frequent use it would seem like I would have been developing a tolerance and experiencing diminishing returns but I clearly remember it being potent each of these times so it would either have been really good or I was just to the left of the “overdoing” it line.
This was the only time on the tour that I had taken it just before one of our performances but that’s not too crazy of an undertaking in the dilettante-ish lead vocalist role. We played with one group that had elaborately sculpted costume heads that looked like the figures on totem poles and another group in costumes that played drums with smoke machines and strobe lights. We played with a band that Ned Meiners had at the time called Gold Dust that was probably my first time meeting him. It was maybe a power trio and I really liked it and tried to convince them to just get on the bus and come with us but Ned said he had to work:
“But your job probably sucks and your band is really, really good. This is probably the best band you’ll ever be in.”
I can’t seem to find any recorded music or evidence of this band existing online but I still stand by what I said. CCR Headcleaner certainly had it’s moments but by 2008 I had been to a lot of shows and seen a lot of bands and wouldn’t have gotten this worked up if they weren’t actually great. From 18 to 20 I was probably getting this excited about one or two bands at every show I went to but by 2008 it was one or two bands an entire U.S. Tour.
The show was over and we were packing up to get out of town before it was even dark. Now that the crowds had dispersed and nobody was playing loud music anymore a couple of cops decided that it would be the perfect time to show up and harass us. They were asking really stupid questions about what we were up to as we were clearly doing everything in our power to stop being in their jurisdiction as soon as humanly possible and picking up discarded half empty beers from the ground and asking who they belonged to as if anybody would actually be stupid enough to say:
“Oh, that’s mine. Please write me a citation for an open container.”
This whole time Kloot, a lab-chow mix that Upper Dave travelled with, was losing his shit and barking his head off because he hated people in uniforms. It wasn’t just cops, he also had a deep antipathy for firemen and UPS drivers. For most of the tour this only served to make our frequent police encounters more tense and exhausting but this time around it was actually helpful:
“Ok, we get it. We know when we’re not wanted.”
They got back into their car and left. It was kind of like when an ATM spits out an extra twenty or a hawk swoops down to grab a rat from a crowded street: nobody could quite believe it had just actually happened. It occurred to all of us that if they actually knew when they weren’t wanted it would have to be something they were nearly constantly aware of and it also seemed deeply out of character as most cops nearly always act like they’re God’s Gift to people whose lives are about to get shittier and more complicated.
By now it was dark and we were driving out of New York City. As we were passing under an expressway we either got stuck at a long light or some minor issue needed adjustment or somebody needed to consult a map. I only know that we sat there for a minute and a German girl was staring at our bus in wonder and I hopped off to talk to her. She said that it looked like the train from a German children’s fantasy book called Jim Knopf. She was visibly enchanted, I mean to the extent that her eyes literally sparkled. I fell in love with her a little bit and the entire situation and New York City and us existing like something out of a fairytale for her that suddenly materialized out of the night and would disappear just as quickly.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about her and would never see her again, it was that the romance of the entire encounter was contingent on those two details.
We parked in a town called Orange, New Jersey at the newly branded September 11th Memorial Scenic Overlook. Everybody was going to sleep but that was out of the question for me. Fortunately the rest stop featured several acres of sprawling forest. I didn’t have a flash light so I walked in the dark until I could see in it. I came across a deer that I must have been upwind of or it was really into grazing or I just walk really quietly. Probably a little bit of all three. Regardless it didn’t notice me until I was almost close enough to touch it and it screamed in horror and ran off into the woods.
I had never heard a deer scream before this point and it isn’t something that I’ve had an opportunity to hear again since. I don’t really know how to describe the sound except to say that it sounded really frightened. One of my cats actually tried to intimidate a deer fairly recently but he didn’t frighten her at all. She stomped her hooves at him and put him in his place so she could go back to eating the grapes in the compost pile.
I walked through the woods until the light started to come and I could finally truly see what the woods I had been walking in for hours actually looked like. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful forest I had ever seen but I wouldn’t say that now. The woods that I own and live in and am the steward of are definitely the most beautiful. I didn’t totally realize this until I had written it all down but it sounds like the LSD had definitely put me in a state where I was falling for Ned’s band and some woods in New Jersey and a German girl that I only met for about thirty seconds. It wasn’t always like that for me but clearly it was this night.
Just before I was finally ready to fall asleep I came across a single, gigantic morel growing under a tree within view of the path. A lot of people I know are afraid of eating wild mushrooms but that isn’t the case for me: morels, boletes and chicken of the woods don’t really look like anything dangerous. There actually is a toxic mushroom they call false morel but it doesn’t convincingly look like the real thing. It must have been at least eight inches tall. I brought it back onto the bus and fell asleep dreaming of cooking it the next time we ended up having access to a kitchen. I slept for two solid days.
When I woke up I found out that somebody thought it smelled rotten and had thrown it away.
Next Part:
https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/23/miami-2008-the-bus-you-deserve-to-live-here/
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 