Tag: El Rancho

Chicago 2001 : “Lust for Life”

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I have this theory about the 1990’s. The short version is that the thing that made it such a magical time to be young in America was the convenient temporal bookending of two major geopolitical events: The Fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and The September 11th Terrorist Attacks in 2001. You’ve got The Cold War on one side, The War on Terror on the other and a decade and change in between when it didn’t feel like we were locked into an ideological struggle for existence with a whole other side of the planet.

Maybe it’s bullshit. Everybody idealizes the time period of their own youth and you could probably find blips on the timeline enclosing every decade in history to ascribe the same significance to. The human mind loves looking for patterns – and in many cases inventing them to stave off the intellectual phobia of randomness and chaos.

Everything looks like a face.

Every number means something.

Even without a crystal ball to tell me what was around the corner it was hard not to feel like the sand was running out in at least some kind of hourglass. It wasn’t even a year since we all started “experimenting” with heroin and we’d burned our way through two housing situations most would consider dodgy to begin with.

A former grocery store with barely functioning heat and a couple pipes in the basement’s ceiling instead of a shower.

An ancient house that needed the old glass fuses every time we overloaded a circuit and where some of us slept in a former pigeon coop.

The landlord to that last place was a constantly partying alcoholic cokehead and he still took us to court to make sure he was getting rid of us.

All of us together were getting to be too much for any sane person to rent to so we started spreading ourselves out. Nick and Janice got an apartment right on the edge of the West Side, then known as the largest open air heroin market in the world. They held on to Sebastian – the cat we’d all been living with since the El Rancho days. Sebastian had belonged to the housemate everybody called Crazy Danny and had supposedly been telling him to cut himself through psychic communication.

I don’t know what became of Crazy Danny but at some point he stopped living with us and Sebastian didn’t.

Dave and Meg and Vanessa had one over to the Ukrainian Village side of what was almost the same neighborhood. I had been drifting back and forth without worrying too much about having a room anymore. Janice was at the stage where she was transferring her growing frustration with Nick’s constant appetites for crack and heroin to whoever he was doing it with so I started spending most of my time at the other spot.

I stayed in Dave’s room, the little dude, and for a little while we seemed to be in sync about how much drugs we wanted to do and when. He went to school, I had a job and neither of us had anything close to a full time habit. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life became our go-to soundtrack and anthem for both possible decisions: the resolve to take a night off by either drinking or staying completely sober? Lust for Life. Running in from the block with tiny bags or folded up foil and grabbing our spoons and needles? Same record, same side, same song:

“Here comes Johnny Yen again…”

Pretty much everybody used the same drugs and nobody seemed too worried about it. I don’t remember any of us getting sick or even using the word addict. The closest would have been this kid Paul who used to rap under the name MC Think. I’d heard that one of his schticks had been rapping through a harmonica but he wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore. Picture an Eminem that never made it out of the crackhead phase.

Anyway Paul didn’t live with us – he just came around from time to time.

The last time I saw him he showed up at the Ukrainian Village apartment with an old green Schwinn cruiser he’d obviously stolen. He asked me to help him sell it – either because he’d worn out his welcome at all of the bike shops or just because I looked like less of a junkie, We went to a spot in Wicker Park and one of the employees who clearly knew what was going on gave me forty bucks for it.

When we were biking back to the West Side Paul suggested that he go to the spot by himself so it would be less “sketchy”. He showed back up an hour or two later – high out of his mind with a bullshit story:

“I got jacked man! They jumped me and took all the money…”

I’m sure this seems obvious to most readers and totally my fault for “trusting a junkie” but the thing was we all did heroin and hadn’t been acting like that. At El Rancho and the Red House if people figured out that you were going to cop nearly everyone in the house would give you ten or twenty dollars and when you got home you gave everyone what they’d paid for and ordered. We treated it the exact same way as if someone was walking to a corner store.

One time I did keep John’s money instead of giving him his drugs but this was because he owed me a couple hundred dollars from when I covered his rent once and at that point he was clearly never paying me back. He still was pretty furious about it. While the concept of “blue balls” is manipulative misogynist bullshit “blue brains” is definitely a real thing: the feeling when you’re expecting to get high only to have it not work out at the last moment.

Of course Paul wasn’t really one of us and had probably only come around to rip somebody off in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the same mistake with him again but it was a moot point as he didn’t come around after that anyway. I hope he’s still alive.

At some point Nick’s mom rented an apartment for him in Boy’s Town. She either didn’t know about his relationship with Janice or wouldn’t have approved of him living so close to the drug neighborhoods but Nick didn’t want her finding out he didn’t live there. He rented it out to these hacker/raver kids but they had to get out of town over a kidnapping charge.

I think some kid ripped them off on a big MDMA deal and they had been trying to get their money back but I never heard a ton of details. I worked in Lincoln Park so I figured I might as well get an actual place and offered to move in. I paid some monthly amount directly to Nick and was supposed to avoid interacting with the building manager as he was in contact with Nick’s mom.

The very first night I moved in I had to go to work in the morning and realized I had no idea what time it was when I plugged in my alarm clock radio. I didn’t have a cell phone or wear a watch and I hadn’t even thought about it because I’d never lived alone. I searched for different radio stations and waited for one to announce the time but it just didn’t happen.

I didn’t really know the neighborhood so I walked down Broadway hoping I might run into somebody. It must have been fairly late because the street was deserted. I started looking into the windows off all the closed businesses hoping to catch sight of a clock. I got excited when I recognized an actual clock shop from across the street and rushed over.

All the different clocks were set to different times and I had no way of knowing which, if any of them, might be accurate.

I don’t know if my anxiety about the time played a role in this but I ended up waking up to realizing I’d pissed on myself. You might have read in the Fort Thunder pieces that I had issues with bed wetting that lasted into my early twenties but became increasingly sporadic toward the end. It probably fizzled out completely when I was twenty three but around the time of this story it was about once a year.

The incident in that story was mid-2000 so this 2001 incident was most likely the next time.

I hadn’t moved my clothes in with me yet and I had fallen asleep wearing my only pair of black slacks for my cafe job. After a quick shower I searched around the apartment to see if the previous tenants had left any clothing behind. I did actually find a pair of denim JNCOs but while the waist was a decent fit the length was at least a foot and a half too short for me.

I’m 6’4”.

I’m sure I looked pretty entertaining biking out in a dress shirt with wildly flared highwaters. I went to a Unique Thrift Store that wasn’t too far out of the way and bought an extra pair of work pants. Thankfully it was next to a KFC that let me change in the bathroom and I didn’t have to walk into work like this.

I left the undersized rave pants in the trash can.

Another interesting thing I noticed when first moving to the area was this mural on the side of a public school:

“STEP ON DRUGS LIKE YOU STEP ON BUGS!”

I wondered if the schools administrators realized that they were basically instructing kids to add less expensive substances to drugs for the purpose of raising profit.

My final night in the apartment started with a big tip. Papa was in the mood to show off and we cooked one of his fans a big pasta meal with tons of wine and after dinner liqueurs. This was an isolated occurrence – Trattoria Monterotondo was usually just a coffee bar and takeout spot. When the customer tried to pay Papa told him to give me a hundred dollar tip instead.

With all that cash burning a hole in my pocket it was an almost certainty that I’d be getting high but I didn’t feel like biking all the way to the West Side and I’d never gone into Cabrini Greene alone. I ran into a very sweet young prostitute walking down North Avenue dressed in a heart motif bikini with an actual cape and asked her if she could help me score drugs without having to brave the towers. She explained that those were the only places to score and she was no more excited about the risk of stepping into one than I was so I thanked her and kept walking.

I had one of the paper schedules for the needle exchange outreach van and I saw it went to a nearby neighborhood called Uptown so I figured it must be a drug saturated area. I asked a few likely looking characters until I found an older guy who was willing to bring me with him to the spot. I might have seemed overly trusting in the earlier paragraphs of this piece but that didn’t extend to people I’d never met before. He didn’t know how to get heroin so I got a bunch of crack with the intention of shooting it up back at the apartment.

I needed to break him off some anyway so we found a secluded alley and took a couple of giant blasts from his pipe. The drug made us especially gregarious or as my new friend more eloquently stated:

“Man, I’m geekin’ like a Puerto Rican!”

Somehow the topic of conversation found it’s way to our respective relationships with our fathers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were complicated by hard drug use in each of our cases. My sister had taken it upon herself to inform my parents when she heard I’d been using heroin and they were pretty worried considering they hadn’t seen me since getting this piece of news.

I was especially offended because she had spent her early teenage years heavily using methamphetamine but I’d never ratted her out. Most people believe in certain hard drug hierarchies so while it was disappointing it wasn’t especially surprising.

As crack is cocaine that has been combined with baking soda to raise the temperature at which it vaporizes you need to dissolve it in an acid if you want to inject it. I always used lemon juice and I had one of those squeezy plastic lemons back at the apartment. The rush is identical to what you’d get if you started with powder but the taste of lemon hits your throat through your bloodstream for a little tropical twist.

I had my bass, four track and some effect pedals so I stayed up late recording what I thought was well crafted psychedelic metal made up of layered bass tracks. When I finally got a chance to listen back to it sober it sounded like an uninspired morass but that night all the bits seemed to perfectly sync together. I wanted to put it onto a project I’d been working on called “Cocaine: the mix tape”.

The highlight was an extremely convoluted mix of a song from the Enemymine record. godheadSilo was one of my favorite groups so I desperately wanted to see Mike Kunka’s next project when they came to The Casbah. I’d been going to a lot of over 21 shows in Chicago with borrowed IDs but back in my home town of San Diego every bouncer knew exactly who I was and how old I actually was.

It didn’t help that me and Francois had brought along Andy Robillard, one of the main bouncers, the last time we’d driven to Chicago. I had to wait out by the exit while Francois went inside and recorded the set for me on my Fisher Price tape recorder. At least the sound carried through the wall pretty well being all bass – the thing that really stuck with me was when they hit the first booming note one of the other bouncers ran outside clutching his stomach.

At least I got to meet and talk to the band because before the show they were hanging out a block away watching planes land like the scene in Wayne’s World. San Diego, unlike most cities, stuck it’s airport right next to downtown and The Casbah is on the edge closest to it. Mike gave me an old godheadSilo shirt they’d never been able to sell because of how big it was – the design with a pink bunny.

The live recording came out lo-fi but in the best possible way: a throbbing buzz where you can just make out the riffs and rhythms if you know the songs. The one that was most distinguishable was Coccoon Clo3, if you know the song it’s a very catchy riff, so for the mix tape I painstakingly combined it with the studio version from their debut album the ice in me. Thankfully I had the album on vinyl instead of a CD so I spent forever syncing things up so the live and clean versions dovetailed in and out of each other sometimes even fluctuating with a sustained note.

Appropriately enough “Cocaine: the mix tape” was never finished as my buzz ran out halfway through the first side. Sadly I don’t have a copy of it or the Enemymine recording or any objects whatsoever from this time in my life. Frequently moving had already whittled down my possessions but I went through a complete reset when an RV got towed in San Leandro.

After the night of my own bass recording I had to rush out the next morning to return to work and left the apartment in pretty bad shape. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t misplace my key the next day and because of the odd arrangement the only way to get another one would have been for Nick to be the one to request it. I asked him to but he dragged his ass and a little over a week later the building manager let himself in because a package for Nick had been sitting in the hallway.

When he saw needles all over the place he called Nick’s mom and Nick was in deep shit. She didn’t know about his drug use yet and he was able to (truthfully) tell her that they weren’t his but that meant revealing that he didn’t live there and rented it to other people. Nick was pretty pissed at me over the whole thing but I was already irritated with him that he hadn’t gotten me back into the place I’d payed him for when a single phone call and bus trip could have solved both our problems.

At least I got a chance to go get my stuff.

Anyway it was all feeling a bit unsustainable. I wasn’t anything close to full on strung out but things were definitely chaotic. My whole social group needed a bit of space from each other to figure shit out. Some people left drugs behind and others went deeper into addiction. Nick and Janice broke up not long afterward.

Of course I had no idea that 9/11 and my own personal tragedies accompanying it were looming on the horizon but it was obviously some kind of twilight. I wasn’t thinking about how underground music might be about to change or how the internet would fundamentally alter the face of it but these things are always clearer looking backwards. You can’t define an era until it’s already over.

In the moment I was most aware of a growing hunger for something different.

I’ve got a lust for life…

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.

Oklahoma City 2000 : “You going to ‘Run for your Fucking Life’ later?”

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I’ve spent huge chunks of my adult life in San Diego and there’s many things I love about the city but in my late teens and early twenties I was mostly preoccupied with leaving. It’s a little on the small side and the cultural effects of Camp Pendleton and naval housing cause it to lean conservative. One of my vivid High School memories is a group of Marines threatening to kick my ass on the trolley because they thought I looked like I was in the band Spacehog.

College was a good pretext for getting out of town but after two semesters it was obvious that I wasn’t ready for that level of structure. Next Francois and I moved out to Chicago but we signed a lease on an apartment we hadn’t seen yet. We decided that we didn’t like it because none of the floors were level and the main room was dominated by a gigantic heater. We had already paid our first month’s rent and security deposit so we decided to just never pay rent again and leave once the landlord seemed to get serious about kicking us out.

A lot of my pieces pertaining to this era have gotten derailed over philosophical pearl clutching at my past behavior so let’s keep things at this: we were selfish, impulsive and didn’t have very much empathy for people like landlords at this stage of our lives. The eviction notice appeared on our front door in early May so we promptly packed up our things and made the default move of driving back to San Diego.

I’m not sure if the details surrounding this trip would add up to a piece on their own so I’ll get into some of it here. Francois had bought a 1960’s era white Volvo station wagon that looked like it came right out of a surf rock album cover or Trader Joe’s chalkboard art in the Summer of 1999. He never bothered to get a driver’s license or insurance either in California or when we moved to Chicago.

I was just getting started on my lifelong tradition of never helping with the driving so we brought a friend in both directions. On the trip out it was this guy Andy who used to drum in GoGoGo Airheart who we’d met at the pickup soccer games organized by Rafter Roberts from Singing Serpent Studios. On the way back to California we brought along Marianne – a goth/hardcore girl from Sheboygan who later built a room shaped like a coffin in El Rancho.

Me and Marianne had created this thing we called the Triple V Club: vegan virgin vampires. The first two are pretty self explanatory but for the third one it mostly meant that we dyed our hair black and tried to only go out at night and only eat candy from the gas station on Fullerton. Marianne had been only eating candy for so long that the malnutrition caused her to stop having her period – something she viewed as a bonus rather than a legitimate cause for concern. There was no chance that this had a more traditional cause because of the second “v”.

She kind of said the word as “Kendy” because she was from Wisconsin.

Eventually we had to dissolve the club because we both independently lost the second “v”. I had been dating her best friend Sara Lou and Marianne was dating this guy Aaron with really nice cheekbones who lives in Joshua Tree now. We continued being vegans. The vampire part was more debatable but I can say that for myself at least I was making an effort to eat a little better.

I just looked her up on Facebook and it looks like she got a couple of bat tattoos on her chest and continues to dye her hair black and only wear black. I’ve been more lax – I had the nickname “vampire dicknose” for a second but it’s been years since anybody has had reason to call me that.

So early 2000 we are driving back to San Diego when the Volvo breaks down in Oklahoma City. We coasted into the closest mechanic’s shop where it was eventually decided to undertake an entire engine swap. We spent a couple of days in Oklahoma City hanging around a Sonic’s eating tater tots and wandering overgrown river greenways where we could constantly hear the haunting screams of wild peacocks that we never actually set eyes on.

We followed the sloping river terrain upwards and ended up in what looked like it had been an upscale neighborhood before it was abandoned. We ended up in an orange stucco Art Deco style mansion with an empty pool. This was where we slept until finally leaving town – the only downside was the large ticks the same color as the building that we all eventually had to pry from the skin of our stomachs or more vulnerable and less mentionable areas.

The house had been mostly cleared of furniture and anything else that seemed valuable but nobody before us had been interested in the paintings. There was a handful of portraits done in a clean, confident style that seemed to have been done in the 1960’s based on the subjects’ clothing and hair styles. They had been done in temperas rather than oils and this added a striking visual effect where earwigs and silverfish had literally eaten away sections of the paint similarly to the lacework destruction you see in the pages of old books.

Francois and I pulled a selection of our favorite canvases off of the wooden frames for easier transport and brought them along to San Diego. The second best one showed a man in a white t-shirt with a bit of what you’d call the “thousand yard stare” even before insects had eaten the majority of his face – we took this one to be a self portrait. There was no question that the one of a girl in a blue and yellow dress seated on a bed was the prize – the piece was absolutely magnetic.

Like all great portraits it told a story about how the painter felt about the woman sitting on the bed – even if it wasn’t necessarily clear what that story was. Was the artist in love with her or simply in love with light or even with his own burgeoning skill at reproducing not just what was in front of him but why these things were worth looking at in the first place? Every previous looter before us had scanned over this canvas and judged it to be no more worth taking than the broken chunks of cement and plaster that littered the bottom of the empty pool but to us it was not just worth taking but worth fighting over.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this yet specifically but when Francois first moved into my parents’ house the bedroom we were sharing had two twin size mattresses on two twin size box springs on a single California King frame. I was pretty used to sharing beds with my male friends – once a week or so I stayed over with Gabe Saucedo to experiment with recording and music with him and his brother Gerry and we had developed a routine of playfully threatening to murder each other if the other person tried any “gay stuff” before falling asleep in each other’s arms.

Anyway Francois and I had been cohabitating in much the same way – or at least the platonic spooning part, we never bothered with the ritualized threats part. Nothing untoward ever happened but I did decide one day that I would be more comfortable sleeping alone and dug a pair of twin bed frames out of the garage to set up separate beds on opposite sides of the room. I only point this incident out as the first rumblings of the impending and more permanent divorce as we couldn’t well spend the entirety of our adult lives together,

We would both need the space to stretch our legs out and discover what we cared about and who we were – separate bed frames as it were.

As with any separation between parties who had been collectively treasure hunting the question arose of who keeps the treasure. The woman in blue and yellow wasn’t the only point of contention, there was also a whale’s shoulder blade left over from The Natural Museum of California, but she was the main one. I don’t think this was so much about the quality of the painting, although of course it is an absolutely exquisite painting, but rather what the desire to possess it seemed to say about the person so desiring.

We both prided ourselves on being champions of beauty and exemplars of discerning taste. In retrospect I see our squabbles over which of us would become the receptacle for the painting as a form of allegorical sparring over which of us was the “master-aesthete” and which a mere journeyman. Realistically I can only speak for myself but when I unsuccessfully plotted to steal it from the wall of a place Francois was living called Praxis House on some level I was trying to declare my ability to appreciate it’s value as superior to his.

There was at least a little more to it for Francois as his Volvo never made it out of Oklahoma City. I’m at the point where I can’t even say with certainty which occasion of losing everything I owned it was that I lost the remainder of the paintings so I’ve grown less attached to physically holding on to these sorts of things and considered it consonant that Francois had ultimately been the one to keep it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he no longer has it, not because his life has taken on anything like the degree of chaos that my own has seen in recent years but because it stayed with the other party on the occasion of his most recent major breakup. I don’t know enough about either their relationship or presumably amicable separation to comment on whether or not the portrait played the same sort of symbolic role as before but at the very least this detail stands as a testament to it’s finer qualities.

Back in the Oklahoma City of 2000 we leveraged our movie ticket scam to take in a screening of the early Tom Green film Road Trip. We were excited about how the movie’s theme related to our own current activity but didn’t find much shared experience. It looks like a lot of great movies came out in May of 2000 but the options at this Oklahoma City Strip Mall Theater were limited.

We lobby hopped to Dinosaur which I remember finding more enjoyable.

It became evident that the Volvo wouldn’t be returning to working order any time in the immediate future so the guys from the repair shop gave us a ride to the Greyhound station with plans made for Francois to return. We passed the memorial for the victims of the bombings – it was still fairly recent at this point. As we unloaded our bags we caught sight of a couple mullet heads riding BMX bikes and playing with switchblades in the empty loading bay. One of them had a tattoo of Hitler’s face in the center of his exposed calf.

The whole shameless display of Nazi iconography was jarring, not to mention the unorthodox choice of icons, but even more than that they just seemed tough and dangerous in a way that felt completely foreign to us. I mention this because by the end of the same year we would be living at El Rancho, playing with switchblades, using hard drugs and just generally being the scary, intimidating kids to other people. At this point we most likely would have viewed our future selves with the same mix of fear and fascination that we had for the BMX Nazi boys.

We also paid full price for our Greyhound tickets as this all took place before our initiation into the secret society of the Counterfeit Ameripass – another big change coming in a small increment of time. Scamming, as far as we understood it, was an art form and way of life. We’d been messing with pay phones, movie tickets, BART fares, crashing conventions and conferences and the like. The Ameripass scam would be elevating things to a whole other level.

Not quite yet though – we payed for our fares to San Diego and were met by my father who brought us home. Marianne and I were settling into the city’s art and music landscape but Francois had to go back to the Garage in OKC for the engine transplant. I never got a detailed rundown but it seems like a frequent outcome of these last ditch resurrection events is that they end with zero working cars.

Disheartened, Francois returned again to San Diego with the Volvo as no more than a memory. For Chris and his partner, the two mechanics, this probably came as a financial hit but in that business, and 2000 especially, it’s mostly understood that if you fail to get a car running again you should expect to keep the ride and eat the loss. None the less they started calling my parents’ house for Francois a lot.

This next bit will require a bit of background. Chris and the other mechanic were Black. An unrelated group of young, mostly white, punks had just moved from Tulsa to San Diego and were often called the “Oklahomies” – a nickname that can sound quite different out of context. A metal/hardcore band from Chula Vista called Run for your Fucking Life were making a big splash around San Diego / TJ and happened to be playing that very night.

Chris the mechanic called the house looking for Francois that day and my mother picked up the phone. Both of my parents greatly enjoyed talking to their children’s various art and music friends but my mother was the more animated and oblivious. Chris introduced himself and said he was from Oklahoma:

“Oh the Oklahomeys! I’ve heard of the Oklahomeys! Are you the one that’s been interested in my daughter Jenny? Are you going to “Run for your Fucking Life” later?”

The conversation no doubt started with Chris making an earnest and patient attempt to correct and redirect my mother but she was too excited with the prospect of having somebody to talk at to be reined in to any significant degree. Chris would have no knowledge of either my family’s lax social attitudes toward underage dating or the regional punk scene. He most likely heard the voice of a white woman and thought both serious sexual misconduct accusations and threats of murder were being made.

Neither of these mechanics called for Francois again and hopefully recouped some losses with the abandoned body of the iconic Volvo. Despite the creepy realities behind the legitimate fears that catalyzed this “comedy of errors” I remember it with some amusement as just that – an unlikely “comedy of errors” informed by some niche references highly specific to time and place.

I got a chance to come to Oklahoma City again on my last U.S. Tour and play a show this time around. A community network of punk houses had bought up a single suburban block and knocked down all the fences to make one giant shared yard for agriculture, animal husbandry and playgrounds for all the children. It felt good to be there, like they were building something special that would last.

I didn’t hear a single peacock.

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Chicago 2001 : El Rancho Orphanage Part 11 “Look, I’m Nico!”

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I never experienced the reality of Winter until I moved to Chicago. I’d seen a birdbath freeze solid in Arkansas and passed through dark and snowy versions of New York and New Jersey but it wasn’t a reality I had actually lived with. It must have been toward the end of 1999 and I was waiting for the Fullerton bus to go sell furniture when I touched my hair and was surprised to find it hard and sculpted. I had only ever used styling gel for a tiny second in Junior High School when I was trying to overcompensate to fit in before Grunge and Alternative kicked in and the Thrift Store clothes I had grown up in and been mercilessly teased for wearing suddenly became cool.

It took a solid minute of probing around my scalp to get to the bottom of the mystery: I had run out of the apartment with my hair still wet from a shower and it had frozen into place in that post-shampoo pompadour.

I’m just saying that a lot of the things people from colder climes know instinctually were only introduced to me through trial and error as a young adult. That if you put cold hands into neoprene gloves the only thing they’ll do is keep them cold like a thermos that can hold both chilled cocktails and warm coffee. That if you are walking along North Avenue for several miles your face will freeze into place like a setting papier-mâché mask multiple times and you’ll need to step into convenience stores and wait for it to thaw.

That the end of a year feels like the end of the world and you’ll get depressed and cry and imagine yourself in a dark landscape full of wolves and fire until it one day miraculously starts being Spring again and that doesn’t happen until way after January First.

It was probably all January: the overdose, the cops kicking our walls down and the orgy of destruction that finally forced the slumlord that all our older peers described as really nice to kick us out.

We never had a mirror in the enclosed bathroom but somewhere near the end we had a gigantic hole in the shoddily constructed wall. I was shaving for work when Dave came over and stuck his head through the gap while pointing to any little areas I might have missed on the corresponding sections of his face:

“Look, I’m Nico! I’ll be your mirror…“

The tiny little bathroom became an epicenter of destruction. Somebody had tried to hang themselves and brought down an entire section of the office building style drop ceiling. Eventually both the sink and toilet were also smashed when somebody went on a drunken rampage using one of those retractable belt divider things from the front of night clubs as a sledgehammer.

The kind with concrete on the bottom to weigh it down. It’s kind of impressive that whoever it was got up the strength to swing it like that.

This next part was captured on video with Jamie’s Hi-8 camcorder and became as popular in the last days television lounge as Justin One’s exotic pornography selections and a VHS tape full of 1980’s era regional commercials we discovered after Suzy Poling showed up and got us stoned.

John and Jamie are drinking together when John misplaces his cigarettes. When he fails to find them he starts swinging around a leftover cane or crutch from somebody’s foot injury. Jamie is egging him on:

“Where’s John’s cigarettes? Where’s John’s cigarettes?”

John hooks his weapon into the corner of a fluorescent light fixture and wrenches it from the ceiling. Jamie has just enough time to scream “they’re not in the ceiling!” before the object comes crashing onto John’s head and knocks him from his feet in a shower of sparks and the surging light of exploding illuminated fluorescent tube bulbs. Somewhere in the chaos somebody identifies the situation as a medical emergency and takes John to an Emergency Room.

He came back with staples in his scalp and I joked that he was so much of a stupid hipster that he was physically becoming a zine.

Ray, our Cosby Sweater wearing Eastern European landlord, and his maintenance guy Arturo never really “got” us but at this point things got dialed up to open contempt. We were all evicted effective more or less immediately and the hostility began to be felt at Congress Theater events. Arturo glared at anybody who had ever been seen in El Rancho while operating a popcorn machine at the Fugazi show. By August I had just walked into Ladyfest Midwest Chicago when Ray spotted me (the curse of being 6’5”) and angrily pulled me from the crowd:

“You don’t come in here! You are garbage! You pay fifteen dollars to come in? Here’s fifteen dollars to leave!”

He paid me from his own pocket and assembled the entire security staff so they would recognize me on sight. Fortunately I had lived in the building long enough to be familiar with some more esoteric stage doors and was able to slip back in to see my new favorite band: The Need. They were selling merch on the sidewalk out front to avoid having to give a cut to the venue and I was filling out my collection and probably gushing when I caught the eye of Denver’s Rainbow Sugar.

They must have recognized me from the descriptions provided by Nate and Josh from Friends Forever. The excited buzz of the conversation caught the attention of venue security and I was ordered to stand at least 500 feet from the doors on the other side of Milwaukee Avenue. My final memory from El Rancho was being accosted by Arturo while peering through the front door to see if there’d been any visible improvements. We told him we “just wanted to see what it looks like”.

“What do you mean how it looks like?”, he fired back in the inimitable tones of actual hatred.

“It looks how you left it! Just like shit! Just like you!”

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Chicago 2000 : El Rancho Orphanage Part 10 “Mostly Because I’d Be Prostituting Myself To You For Drugs”

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Justin One had been the first to bring heroin into El Rancho but he wasn’t trying to help anybody make a habit out of it. He had a basic understanding of how to drive to the West Side and cop and he gave Matt some crack he had lying around because he bought it on accident but only with a stern warning:

“That stuff will eat holes in your brain like Swiss Cheese!”

Justin Two was fundamentally different. He knew the corners, crews and housing projects of Chicago’s open air drug markets the way that most of us knew the bands and labels of its regional hard core scene.

I’m not sure exactly how or when Justin Two showed up but I somehow picture him as coming from the basement. The basement was always essentially lawless: anyone could spray paint on the walls, smash bottles and old televisions or practice for as loud and as long as they wanted. By the time we were getting evicted somebody was trying to plug up the drain and run the water until it had become an incredibly filthy version of a swimming pool.

Obviously it is physically impossible for Justin Two to have set a single foot within the basement without first passing through the upstairs living area and establishing some form of valid reason for being there but that is where the recklessness and lifestyle that he represented found purchase.

Justin Two worked construction jobs and drove a White Bronco like the famous OJ Simpson one. Or maybe someone who was there will tell me that it was a similar looking but different car, I’m kind of face-blind and car-blind. He seemed like he had a rough urban poverty style childhood: He would talk about how his father used to be an intravenous cocaine addict a lot.

“Justin Two”

Justin Two was and is a conventionally attractive, classically handsome man but for reasons I never saw the bottom of he was only capable of approaching sexual relations from a purely transactional viewpoint. I have never seen him even kissing another person without first negotiating some kind of exchange of drugs or money. When we shared a basement at the Red House he would bring home girls from parties and I would fall asleep listening to him tell them over and over that they would owe him sexual favors if they smoked his crack with him.

It could certainly be argued that he had some form of a healthy prostitution fetish but I can’t help but think that some level of deep self loathing was also at play. On a night like many others we had been driving around the South and West sides, visiting various drug spots and consuming hard drugs. After a hit of crack he seemed to find himself in the desperate throes of urgent libido the drug is known to trigger:

“Hey Ossian, if I bought you some more crack and some more heroin do you think it would be possible for you to fuck me in the ass?”

“No Justin, I think that that would probably be weird.”

“Why would it be weird?”, he whined in a tone that was bordering on incredulous.

“Mostly because I’d be prostituting myself to you for drugs.”

The statement left little room for continued argument and the matter was not broached again, at least not with me. We continued to buy our own drugs or I bought them for him in exchange for a ride or he bought them for me when he didn’t feel like getting high in the middle of the night by himself.

I can’t remember if this was back in 1998 or one of my post 9/11 visits to San Francisco but I remember looking through a street level window in The Tenderloin and seeing a clearly lettered sign above somebody’s bed that very much reminds me of Justin Two’s attitudes on this topic:

ATTENTION: IF YOU ARE FEMALE AND YOU SLEEP HERE THEN YOU SLEEP WITH ME AS IN HAVE SEX WITH ME

I have talked about The Beautiful Mutants show and the post-Confederate Flag Burning house meeting but I need to touch on another watershed moment in the evolving El Rancho timeline: Jamie’s overdose. Jamie was almost always drunk, had a Mohawk and usually wore a blanket so there were a lot of stupid jokes comparing him to a Native American. I don’t know how much experience he’d had with hard drugs before the Winter of 2000 but once it started going around he was getting in on it.

It was only a matter of time until somebody was going to do enough dope to stop breathing and that ended up being Jamie.

We didn’t know about how you’re supposed to say somebody is “not breathing” instead of spelling out that it’s an overdose on the 911 call. We hadn’t made contact with the Chicago Recovery Alliance yet and gotten prescriptions for the life saving drug Nalaxone. Somebody in the house must have had an early cell phone because we didn’t have a land line. I think Kiki or whoever it was that called was still on the phone with the dispatcher when the cops kicked our front door in.

They didn’t care about whether or not Jamie was still breathing, they just wanted to catch somebody with actual drugs and arrest them. It seemed like they had been watching us for a while and anticipating just such an occurrence. While the female cop in the trio was tasked with the “grunt work” of individual pat downs her two male colleagues made themselves busy kicking the walls of our rooms down and spilling anything that was on a shelf onto the floor.

I just tried to look up the meaning of the Chicago Police Department flag and ended up on a website where the word “HISTORY” is spelled wrong.https://chicagocop.com/history/symbols/the-official-flag-of-the-chicago-police-department/. It gets a little more esoteric than I was expecting. What I’m trying to get at is that if one of the points of one of the stars is supposed to represent clear communication with the community that duty was not neglected:

“We don’t like your kind of people around here!”

In large cities around the turn of the millennium it often felt like the only actual training the police had received was a steady diet of ‘80s cop and action movies where the punk rockers were always the bad guys. Andy Hyde had bright pink hair that wasn’t actually spiked but did stand up on the different sides of his head, a “SHUT UP BITCH!” T-Shirt and a pair of pants that lacked pockets and were held together by safety pins. All three of the cops had zeroed in on him as the obvious drug dealer in the room. They referred to him as “SHUT UP BITCH GUY” and took turns patting him down for drugs there is no plausible way he could have been holding unless they were in a body cavity.

Meanwhile Justin Two, clean cut and half Puerto Rican, was nervously pacing around in a black leather trench coat. I don’t think he was carrying drugs either but I was a bit surprised that they never even searched him.

An ambulance arrived and saved Jamie’s life. We never fixed the front door and it continued to flap open in heavy winds for the rest of the Winter. Most of the walls stayed knocked over and we slept in the lean-tos and open spaces that were left behind. Justin Two spent the rest of the night looking for a piece of crack on the basement floor that he had evidently dropped into the rubble at the moment of the raid, earning him the nickname hubba pigeon from an early internet list of hard drug related slang terms.

I want to say that this all happened before everybody went to California for Christmas but it just as easily could have been after the New Year’s Rave. I missed the Rave because I had stuck behind in California to go see Marilyn Manson in San Jose with Lil Four and Nick Feather. I was getting surprised before by how much had happened in a very short amount of time but now I’m having the opposite experience. I had thought that I had showed up on January 1st or 2nd of 2001 moments after the Rave but it turns out the Marilyn Manson concert was on January 10th.

I know that we broke a bunch of shit and got evicted some time after the Rave but it couldn’t have been in early January. I was underestimating how long we spent breaking and smashing every corner of the space until our landlord had no choice but to evict us. Now that I think about it we had to have been smashing shit for all of January and quite possibly into February.

I’ll get to it next time.

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