Tag: LSD

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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Miami 2008 : The Bus Part Five “Hey Man, Thanks For Coming Through On The Broccoli”

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I don’t really resonate with the identity of “acid dealer” but for the duration of the Conference that’s what I was. The sheet of acid I had just bought needed to make enough money for me to buy another one so that I could continue to pursue my recent hobby of being a totally ridiculous acid head. In a round about way this temporary occupation would be responsible for generating the name of my future solo project.

I have always disliked the proposition that people who are about to consume psychedelic drugs should be shielded from any negative or unpleasant suggestions out of fear that it might trigger a “bad trip”. It seemed to me that the current emotional landscape of the would-be consumer’s life would be more responsible for shaping their experience than whether or not somebody said “boo”.

For this reason I had taken a mechanical pencil and drawn little sad faces, grave stones, mushroom clouds and other ominous icons on the individual doses of either a previous or later sheet. This time around the blotter was only plain white paper but I made sure to reassure any prospective buyers that they were in for a bad time. Somebody asked me if it was going to be fun:

“Fun? Fuck no! I’ve been taking this shit all weekend and I’m crying blood! This shit is negative weekend! This shit is Bleak End at Bernie’s!”

When it came out of my mouth I wouldn’t have guessed that it would become the moniker of a future singer-songwriter solo project and the source of my only version of the punk name. I just knew that it was a little pun and a clump of phonemes that I liked the heft of in the hand of my mind – like a rock that you would select for attempting to skip on water. If I had to do it over again I would maybe use the name for a song or album but not for an identity defining music thing. It’s a bit too bad-quirky and pop-culture-referencey like Break Dancing Ronald Reagan or Robin Williams On Fire.

If I could go back in time and change it I would probably go with something heavy and esoteric like Lacrimae Rerum or offensive and edgelordy like Human Shit. It’s not like I hate it or anything, it is my name after all and I already lucked out with a killer name from my family of origin. I’m just saying in the best of all possible worlds I’d probably have gone with something better.

If I’m going to be getting into ideal worlds I did always wish that somebody with a label had approached me about releasing music – or reissuing now that the whole thing has been mothballed. I never saw it first hand but I heard that some kids performed once or twice as Bleak End at Bernie’s Two so there is that thing they say about imitation and flattery and obviously there’s some truth to that. I’m human and it’s only natural to want more – out of all the drugs the brain rewards itself with when outside circumstances trigger specific emotions I’d rank validation among the most elusive.

Anyway that was a bit of a tangent: I was selling drugs at a noise music festival. I had been kind of feeling this Dickensian Besprizornye style energy in the mode of sort of leaning against a wall and impudently eating an apple and of course there was just the thing about being on the road and needing to eat to stay alive but I had been eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. I definitely shopped for these with an eye toward accessorizing and because I was wearing some cream colored women’s corduroys and a kind of Jordache looking sporty green top from Rainbow I ended up buying a parsnip and bunch of rapini or broccoli rabe.

For me acid very much makes me feel like an art director looking at my own life from the outside and admiring the composition and color palette. I remember climbing the ladder onto the bus’s roof with the parsnip in the back pocket of the aforementioned pants and thinking the entire ensemble looked pleasantly Fraggle Rock. The rapini became my kind of drug dealer machismo totem as I vacantly grazed on it to kind of ominously loiter as I stared right through my slightly nervous customers – kind of like a toothpick or cigarette for a central casting television show hustler character.

I’d stare off into the distance as I dug into my pocket for the drugs and casually offered bites of the cruciferous greens that the buyers universally accepted to seem “with it”. I don’t mean that I was selling drugs to my friends like this – for them I just did it normal. This was a character I was putting on for the randoms, deliberately campy and extremely self conscious.

This brings us to the pull quote. I had stepped inside of Churchill’s but not all the way in where the performances happen, I was standing near the ATM by the door and talking to Vanessa. A business casual looking guy that I had evidently sold drugs to was heading outside and leaned in close to say some generic outlaw association banter and slyly wink:

“Hey man, thanks for coming through with the broccoli!”

What I’m trying to get as is that you will sometimes hear this kind of outlaw association banter and it sounds too ridiculous to be real. Like code words and what not exist but if the swagger game is lacking you start wondering what the deal is. Tough talk surrounding something as mundane as framing a porch. Sly looks and handshakes for jobs that are legal and generate honest tax forms. This is how the broccoli bit sounded, corny really.

Most of my acid head phase was done in approximately once weekly weekend warrior mode with two major exceptions: when I rode freight trains with Alexis and Jacki to Mardi Gras I had the remains of a sheet where the doses were slightly too small to be effective. We decided to play a game where we would take one square on the hour every hour until they were gone. Most people are probably familiar with the feeling of drinking heavily while sitting down and not realizing how intoxicated you had become until suddenly trying to stand up.

This train ride was similar in that it didn’t seem like we were tripping that hard while the landscape was rushing by us at full speed but when the train would stop and side out we would suddenly realize that inanimate objects weren’t willing to sit in one place. Everything appeared to be creeping or flowing toward the train. The second binge was at this International Noise Conference. Me and Rage just continued to take it the moment it felt like the effects might be subsiding for the entire weekend.

A large part of our dynamic was that kind of art director thing: the way we looked together. A good reference point would be the famous X-Force cover where Polaris is posing on the much larger character Strong Guy. I’m certainly not muscular but I am quite tall and with a tiny woman hanging from my shoulders we looked like something out of a comic book. We started to layer and fuse our distinctive and disparate styles: she put on my leather vest and I ended up in some of her delicate lacey underthings.

I don’t remember where it came from but Rage ended up with a brightly colored toy revolver that seldom left her hand. I have a vivid memory of us wandering the back streets of Little Haiti on the dawn of the second or third day. The older men of the neighborhood were quietly playing acoustic guitars and accordions on their porches, the younger men on the corners tensed when they first noticed the gun but visibly softened upon taking in the entire picture. They offered discrete nods as we passed on by – almost imperceptible but unequivocal in the message of “we mean you no harm”.

I think I was looking for mangos and avocados. They had been everywhere in Florida but were slightly harder to find in this particular neighborhood. I ended up in a Botanica where dried fish were slowly smoldering at the threshold as an offering to the lwa. I bought some Lanman & Kemp Florida Water – a scent that would come to define the indelible stink of magic on the next few years of my life. I had read a little bit about Vodou and asked the proprietor if there might be an hounfour in the neighborhood:

“Not here. Haiti only.”

It wasn’t the kind of acid that prevents you from sleeping but the unrelenting heat of the weekend made it feel like we might as well have not been. There was a certain frantic and desperate energy to the Churchill’s parking lot that intensified it’s effects: from both the drug addled locals and the sleep deprived Conference attendees. Unrelenting sunlight on aggressively grey and medium sized jagged rocks of gravel. It felt like your head was exploding.

Somebody had rented a motel room around the corner so me and Rage drifted over to check out the scene. There was nothing relaxing about it. It was an echo of the energy of the bus, parking lot and Conference: too many people in too small of a space and the demanding auras of piles of clothing and music equipment. The fence was covered with brown anoles urgently flashing bright yellow dewlaps. Also Broke-Bus Brooke was there and there is zero chill within a ten foot radius of that person ever. She ended up harnessing that quality in a later series of deeply uncomfortable performances as Are You My Mother?”

We decided to ditch the collectivist spirit and sneak off for a bit of decadent self care: we went out to sushi. Under the soothing effects of secrecy and air conditioning we ordered a giant platter of sashimi that arrived on a bed of shaved ice. If I had been a zoo animal in those years my diet probably would have been mangoes, rapini and raw salmon. Like the scent of Florida Water these things felt refreshing and most likely restocked some of the vitamins that the constant diet of drugs had been depleting.

We returned to the chaos of the International Noise Conference.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/27/providence-2008-the-bus-she-was-totally-hot-too/

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Southern Florida 2008 : The Bus Part Four “There’s A Quarterback In Every Huddle”

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Last bus chapter I was talking about South Beach but I think I need to dial back a little bit and talk about the Publix between Orlando and Miami. John Benson was the primary architect behind both bus incarnations but he wasn’t always the driver. Almost as often, for both the INC trip and the later Living Hell tour, Upper Dave was the one behind the wheel. He looked good there and had the necessary temperament for maneuvering a vehicle of it’s size: one of the reasons I thought it was hilarious when the comparably nervous and high strung Griffin from Sewn Leather started driving a miniature RV.

Anyway this would have been the reason that some of the other members of Living Hell stole a sign from Wendy’s that said “Dave’s Way” and displayed it in the tiny window usually reserved for route information.

Let’s talk about stealing: it was ordinary for the bus to attract negative police attention just for looking weird and being full of freaks but on this occasion a crime actually was committed, albeit minor. I’ve had enough experience at this point to have the shoplifting conversation before walking into a major grocery chain in mixed company on tour and I’m about to lay out the reasons.

It’s always cheese and it’s always a bigger headache for the companions of the actual shoplifter than it is for the shoplifter themselves. Cheese is a cherished food of early adulthood: high in protein and requiring no preparation it often leads to punk house arguments and creates a universal shiver of excitement when found in a dumpster because it brings life and flavor to the thing there’s always too much of: bread.

It isn’t really important who stole the cheese but because I remember let’s share a chuckle at this person’s expense anyway. It was James: then playing with Lazy Magnet and later in a band called Evil Spirits with the members of Taboo. I haven’t heard anything about James in a few years, hopefully this is just because he’s been living quietly but well and not because somebody is about to let me in on some bad news. James stole cheese from Publix and Publix called the police and the police sat us all down on the side of the bus to be detained and lectured.

There are a lot of reasons why the following encounter felt like we were an errant Kindergarten class that had wandered away from a teacher on a field trip and I’m about to list all of them. The first one was that the cops were going to try to explain elementary ethics to us as if we were toddlers and actually simply did not understand:

“How would you like it if I stole your food? You’ve got food in that bag right there, what if I just took it?”

It was disappointing that they didn’t segue from this into a complete primer on the nuances of corporate personhood. An explanation as to why Publix was the equivalent of a friend and ally when it was time to not steal food from them but would magically transform into an LLC the moment a cleaning product gave their employees cancer or a new location’s construction threatened an endangered species. Give a Publix a fish and it eats for a day…

The next reason was that this stern lecture was interrupted by a Publix employee who was bringing us jars of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of bread and a twelve pack of root beer. She seemed to understand that we had simply missed snack time and would return to being polite members of society the minute we’d had a PBJ and nap and all of this was seriously eroding the cop’s assertion that we needed to reflect on the error of our ways.

The next reason was that the “time out” they had us sitting in was completely unfair and arbitrary. John Orlando had bought a submarine sandwich from Publix and even had the receipt to prove it. What he didn’t have was a full set of teeth to eat it with and our temporary stewards had forbidden him from going onto the bus to retrieve his partial denture. He said that he wanted to obey their rules but was hungry and he and I came up with a novel compromise. Because he couldn’t retrieve his teeth I would use my teeth to chew up bites of his sandwich for him and spit them into his mouth like a mother bird.

This is especially funny to me because I’ve now lost all of my teeth and have to wear a full set of dentures while I imagine John is probably back to a healthy complete set as he’s no doubt replaced the partial with implants by now. Anyway John got to eat his sandwich without breaking the rule about going back on board the bus but the cops really didn’t like the way he was eating it:

“Stop it! You’re making a scene!”

We all thought that detaining a bus full of weirdos and making them sit in time out in a Publix parking lot was making more of a scene but what could we say? According to the social contract it is the cops who are the arbiters of proper behavior and not the bus full of freaks. The biggest reason that the scenario felt like we were a rogue troupe of grade schoolers is that the cops were only looking for a proper authority figure among us to release us into the recognizance of:

“Look I know you say you’re all artists and everybody’s equal but there’s a quarterback in every huddle. Who’s the Alpha?”

We suggested that they throw a raw steak over our heads and waited to see which of us got it. Eventually somebody was able to call John Benson who had been briefly traveling in a separate car and his full beard and fatherly demeanor seemed to satisfy the peace officers. Maybe it was the subtle shifts in everybody’s body language the moment he arrived: they’d found the Alpha. He was given a stern warning to prevent us from straying or stealing cheese in the future and we were allowed to continue onward to Miami and the International Noise Conference.

The topic of who exactly was the Alpha ended up being discussed with much interest for the entirety of the Conference. Clearly John Benson was the bus-Alpha and Rat Bastard was both the INC and Laundry Room Squelcher-Alpha but we all felt like there was room for other Alphas. Austin from Right Arm Severed was briefly dubbed the taco-Alpha when he left the bus around two in the morning one night with the promise to buy everybody tacos but this status was revoked when he returned having only bought crack from the guy who had been trying to sell everyone a gay porn DVD.

Nobody suggested it at the time but I’d like to retroactively nominate Aaron Hibbs of Sword Heaven as the artistic Alpha of the Conference. Aaron was an almost Ned Flanders-like figure in the American Noise landscape of 2008: he oozed positivity, was good at everything he attempted and of course he had the mustache. I had first met Aaron a year or so earlier when I passed through Skylab in the romantic company of one of his exes and can report that he was nothing but cordial under the circumstances.

His main project with Mark Van Fleet was certainly among the most anticipated of the Conference combining power electronics style noise with both Industrial which would become a bit of a trend in the next few years and a solid performance gimmick which never goes out of style. On this particular year he had also brought a high concept “joke” project: Rage Against The Cage – an a-capella grunge band. Hibbs and company belted out compositions of “uh’s”, “oh-no’s” and other Vedder-isms to the amusement of everybody who was in on the joke.

I realize that this is all making me sound like a super-fan with a mouth full of dick and to some extent this is probably true, Aaron was my inspiration to get into endurance hula hooping a few years later, but I also haven’t actually listened to any of the Sword Heaven records. I really am trying to identify the most hyped creative force of the Conference regardless of my personal tastes. If I was going to talk about the single most anticipated and best received performance it would probably be Justice Yeldham’s bloody mouth-on-glass presentation but Lucas wasn’t presenting different projects every single day of the Conference.

This brings us back to the afternoon at South Beach where a good portion of the crowd was on acid and the beach front condos said “You Deserve To Live Here”. Aaron was standing in the busy intersection in front of these condos and casually tossing water balloons into the air over his shoulder. When they inevitably came back down onto fancy sport’s cars and open convertibles the angry motorists were deflated when they saw the balloons hadn’t been thrown with a specific target in mind.

Or maybe it was just that he was clearly surrounded by comrades who would have backed him up in the event of a conflict. Either way nobody said anything.

I’m not sure if the bit with the balloons was supposed to be part of the following Noumena performance but the main part was on the actual beach. I looked up the meaning of that word in anticipation of writing this piece but it’s a little hard to either explain or understand. Basically while phenomena are things that are known to exist based on our sensory perceptions noumena are that which exists independently of them. I guess you could say that unless you were actually in Miami in 2008 to see or hear the various things I am writing about for yourself all of them are noumena.

The performance centered around a hollow hemisphere made of plaster that was about six feet in diameter. I’d imagine that this performance was at least partially inspired by Matthew Barney due to the focus on body movement and athleticism. I am going to be referring to the cast plaster sculpture as the cup for the sake of brevity. Aaron floated the cup onto the ocean’s surface where he performed an assortment of handstands and other balance exercises on it’s rim. Things concluded with him crawling out of the ocean with the cup on his back like the shell of a sea turtle.

Maybe there was a sonic element to the performance centered on jazz balloon, it seems likely but I can’t remember for sure and I didn’t see a video of the set when I searched for five seconds.

Anyway a lot of people on the bus were feeling burnt out on cop interactions, especially as they were tripping on acid, and thought that the ocean might offer an avenue of escape based on the presumption that the cop is a land animal. This turned out not to be the case. I know that Capricorn is the name for sea-goat but I don’t know what you would call a sea-pig. I only know that they were there, riding jet skis and blowing whistles, and swimming toward deeper water was a bad way to try to get away from them as it was one of the behaviors they were evidently charged to prevent.

It wasn’t a sea-cop but rather a form of transitional sand-cop that saw the Noumena performance as a thing that was in need of policing. I guess you could say that I was the talk-to-cops-while-on-acid-Alpha, when the familiar question of who was in charge was posed everybody instinctually pointed to me. That was fine. I really liked talking to cops on acid in 2008.

The cop wanted to know if we would be leaving and I reassured him that we would eventually need food that wasn’t sand and water that wasn’t salt and would therefore be going somewhere else. There was something else weighing on the cop’s mind but he didn’t quite know how to put it into words. He pointed to the cup:

“And you’ll be taking your…?”

“Our cup? Yes, we like our cup. We’ll be definitely taking the cup.”

I guess I was the Alpha for this brief window of time because the cop took this cursory exchange as due diligence and proceeded to leave us alone.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/26/miami-2008-the-bus-hey-man-thanks-for-coming-through-on-the-broccoli/

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New York 2008 : The Bus Part Two “We Know When We’re Not Wanted”

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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:

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West Virginia 2008 : The Bus Part One “This Beer! This Rock!”

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This isn’t going to be the chapter where I lay down all the exposition about The Bus and the Living Hell tour but I should at least throw down a little bit of background. This wasn’t the regular style AC Transit bus called Larry that might’ve ended up lasting longer and hosting more shows than this earlier version: the totally tricked out one with plexiglass floors and an elevated loft in back that blew a piston on this tour and never quite made it out of Albion, Michigan. For either version the core concept is essentially the same – John Benson and a crew of collaborators install a bank of power wheelchair batteries underneath a stage in back to create a mobile concert venue.

There are two important things about this earlier bus that may or may not have been the case with Larry. I can only say definitively that I didn’t experience these things on the Larry bus. First off it had been converted to run on used vegetable oil. Everybody was doing these conversions during the first decade of the 2000s. For the earlier part it was a way to convert a resource that most of the world viewed as garbage into what was essentially free gasoline. Toward the later part the world had caught on and pumping out of random grease traps wasn’t always viewed as charitably.

This brings us to the second of the things: the original bus was an absolute cop magnet. Poking around behind restaurants to collect veggie oil without asking for permission didn’t help but there was also the fact that it was just plain weirder looking and the Living Hell tour brought us to some pretty remote sections of America. Whatever the cause I wouldn’t experience the same level of constant attention from law enforcement again until I moved to Tijuana as a guero.

Besides the supply issue that I already mentioned running the bus on vegetable oil was putting a lot of stress on it’s engine. Short trips around town when there had been plenty of time to find the best grease and make sure it was well filtered was pretty different from playing catch-as-catch-can in unfamiliar territory. Or maybe that wasn’t the problem at all – I know that the bus had done a whole other U.S. Tour before I was ever on it and it might have run on veggie just fine for the entirety of that one. Maybe it was just old and worn out, every engine in the world only works for so many miles.

By West Virginia we’d had to cancel a few consecutive shows and the bus was still acting iffy. I can’t remember the name of the West Virginia town but it had a Cummins service shop where John had decided we should try getting an oil change and we were going to have to wait overnight to get it. There was a shopping mall in town that was playing Iron Man in it’s movie theater, nobody went to see it but this detail helped me figure out what year it was.

There was a toy shop set up in the common area with a surprisingly good selection of plastic dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals – I bought a Glyptodon for my nephew and a local cop working security ended up ringing me up. The Glyptodon was similar but unrelated to the modern armadillos and about the size and shape of the cheapest tent at Target. I’ve done a little research into plastic prehistoric animals and come to the conclusion that this was probably the Scheich version that stopped production in 2011. All the best plastic animals come from Germany.

Behind the mall sat some fairly spectacular nature. A cliff leading downwards of a reddish material that you could reduce to dust with your bare hands if you had the time and energy. Off the top of my head I want to say shale but I’m not a geologist. The cliffs acted as a staircase to get down to a river and some sections of forest.

With nothing else to do we all went for a hike behind the mall. John Benson took a picture and put it on the bus Flickr so I’m including it here. You can see me in a fur coat and visor and Shon carrying his unicycle and Upper Dave bringing the party with a case of Milwaukee’s Best. It seemed like a good time for a beer so most of us settled into drinking them. The conversation devolved into a string of repetitive requests and queries centered on passing specific beers from specific rocks.

I really want to explain this so I’m going to just go into it in mind numbing detail. People were saying things like: Could you pass me that beer? This beer? No, that beer over on that rock. This rock? No, that rock. We were in a landscape that had been reduced to beers and rocks. Theoretically anybody could have just picked up and drank from any beer just like they could have crushed any of the rocks just by squeezing them but you know how it is: people want the one they were already drinking out of. Anyway I want you to understand the mind state that caused Vanessa to suddenly stand up and yell out:

“This beer! This rock!”

Maybe it’s a “you had to be there” kind of thing or maybe it’s not even funny or interesting at all. I don’t think it matters that much whether you actually know the people in this story or not. Anyway she wasn’t talking about any specific beer or any specific rock. It was rhetorical.

I was taking LSD a lot at that time which basically meant I was always carrying LSD and selling LSD because that’s the only way to really make sure it will always be around and available. Selling LSD feels more like doing this weird kind of community service than being a drug dealer because the price always more or less stays the same and people will come complain if the LSD they bought six months ago didn’t work. It’s like putting on punk shows – it’s always supposed to be five dollars until the end of time and it’s not really about the money but like everything else it costs money.

Anyway I decided that it would be a good time to take some LSD and Shon with the unicycle wanted to take some too but nobody else felt like it. I don’t think I was selling it in that context – behind a mall in West Virginia wasn’t really the time or place to worry about money. So we wandered into the woods and everybody else drifted back toward the bus.

Once things started getting weird I was bouncing on fallen trees and peeling this thick lichen off of trees and eating it and just generally being a weirdo and it was all a bit much for Shon. He was kind of dissociating and just seemed to be moving toward a quiet introspective kind of thing so I left him in the woods and wandered back to everybody else and the bus.

Obviously the residents of the small town in West Virginia had noticed when a bus full of freaks showed up and then hung around the mall for a little while and then didn’t seem to be leaving town at nightfall. The police had been waiting for a pretext to come descend on us en masse and figure out exactly what we were up to. This turned out to be Upper Dave and Vanessa sneaking into some demonstration prefabricated homes to see what they looked like on the inside.

There might have been alarms or the police might have already been following them but they waited until they had walked all the way back to the bus before popping out to enforce the law. Talking to the police while tripping on LSD is either the worst possible thing in the world or really really fun depending on your personal level of control and experience. I had a feeling that it probably would have been the first one for Shon which is why it was fortunate that he had stayed behind in the woods but it was definitely the second one for me.

They seemed like they were afraid of us but not in a “might randomly shoot us” kind of way – they were just nervously standing together in a line and constantly adjusting the crotch area of their pants and spitting chewing tobacco on the ground. You know the way that cops stand: if you let your legs touch it means you’re gay or whatever. They were giving Dave and Vanessa a hard time and saying a lot of “what, you don’t know what a locked door means?” and then they offered us a deal: unless we let them search the bus and run everybody’s information they were going to arrest Dave and Vanessa for trespassing.

We picked the second option because even though I had a sheet of acid and somebody must have had some marijuana it seemed unlikely that they would actually find it. At some point Shon had called John Orlando on the cellphone and John told him the cops were there and his reaction made it clear that we had to make sure they didn’t interact because he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The problem was they started asking all of us how many of us there were and people were giving inconsistent answers and they started to suspect we were hiding something.

We had to line up so they could run our identification information and see if anybody had any warrants even though it was obviously a waste of time as we wouldn’t have agreed to the option if anybody did. It got to my turn and I savored staring into the cop’s eyes like a predatory animal as he nervously spit on the ground and avoided my gaze. One of the cops asked me if I had bought a plastic armadillo and I told him it was called a Glyptodon. Dalton and John Orlando were shooting baskets on the back of the bus and I asked them if they were playing HORSE:

“No, PIG.”

We stared the cops down as we tossed the ball at the basket and they nervously adjusted their pants and spit and avoided our eyes and flinched every time the ball hit the metal rim and made a noise. When they searched John Benson he just so happened to have a tiny plastic figure of a police officer in his pocket. He hadn’t been carrying it for the whole tour – most likely he’d found it on the ground that very day. The cop did the thing where something they don’t entirely understand ends up in their hand and they look like they’re trying to will it into disappearing.

Actually when they had searched me I had a tiny bottle of White Flower in my pocket – a topical menthol rub for muscle aches if you’re not familiar. The cop asked me what it was and I told him it was Chinese analgesic ointment and he visibly flinched. Most likely he hadn’t understood the Greek derived name for pain relievers and was dismayed to think he was touching something designed for “butt stuff”.

Next it was time for the cops to run Jill’s background information but none of them would look at her and they kept telling her to go talk to the other officer until she had done a full circle and they were all just kind of looking down and nervously laughing: it was incredibly awkward. I’m sure things are still far from perfect in small towns in West Virginia but in 2008 most of the national conversations surrounding transgender identity hadn’t happened yet.

They couldn’t believe that they hadn’t found a giant pile of drugs anywhere on the bus so they went and got a drug sniffing dog to make sure. The dog was thrashing around nervously because of all the people and the smell of our dog Kloot and maybe a bit of stage fright. It kind of looked like a blur of eyes and teeth – it’s reasonable to think that the acid might have had something to do with that. Acid doesn’t smell like anything and Kloot’s smell was too strong for a little weed to get noticed but it did find somebody sleeping in the loft in the back of the bus.

We were so nervous about Shon nobody had really noticed that Rain wasn’t around and she awkwardly climbed out of the bed so the dog wouldn’t bite her. I’m not sure if she was genuinely sleeping or just hiding. The way we all reacted and nervously laughed at her sudden appearance made the cops think there had to be at least one other person. Vanessa said somebody had gone to watch Iron Man and they didn’t press the issue further. They were angry that their strategic gambit had failed and they’d ended up with nothing.

They asked us if we were “following the rainbow”.

I want to throw in that earlier in the night somebody had asked me what Iron Man was about and I told them it’s about a wealthy alcoholic who got hit by some shrapnel so he had to build armor to put around himself to make sure that nothing ever touches his heart. Some of it was the acid but I do really like how archetypical and basic those Marvel origin stories are. I’ve never actually seen the movie.

Finally the cops left and everybody got to do the thing where they’re like “oh shit! You’re tripping on drugs! Are you ok? Let’s go get our friend who’s tripping on drugs!” We walked over behind the mall where Shon was riding his unicycle and listening to his iPod and just generally appeared to have gotten a handle on things. We told him that the cops had been real but now they were gone and we could safely bring him back to the bus where he could lay back and talk about how hard he was tripping to his heart’s content.

I was still “on” meaning I was aware of and sensitive to things I might have missed in an unaltered state. I could feel the town’s disapproving hostility radiating out toward us from the streets, trees and sky. People were clearly aware that we had broken into an imaginary house and the cops hadn’t been able to do anything about it and they wanted justice. A red pick-up truck slowed and rolled down it’s window.

This was it – every muscle in my body tensed up for the coming confrontation. A voice drawled out from the dark interior:

“You fuckers…”

The window went back up and the truck sped off. Clearly the small town in West Virginia had done it’s worst.

I’m pretty sure we were going to be okay.

Next Part:

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Chicago 2001 : The Red House “Is That Bunny Naturally Purple?”

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The first girl that Justin Two brought home to the basement immediately imprinted on me and started following me around like a newly hatched baby duck in a cartoon. There are a couple of things about her I feel like I will never know for certain: I’m not sure if she was actually as much of an airhead as she presented herself as or if to some extent it was an act cultivated to appeal to the male gaze. Similarly I will never know for sure if she was actually infatuated with me or had merely grasped onto me as a means of escaping Justin Two’s “sex for drugs” transactional demands.

Her name was Sabrina but she was trying to change it to “Niaomi” pronounced kind of like the cute cat sounds that human characters make in anime. She wanted to move away from the “teenage witch” associations of her birth name because, in her own words, “they get burned” and her cultural background seemed to incorporate a heavy disdain for anything occult:

“My whole family hates ghosts! They think they’re devils!”

There was a very tragic pet bunny living at the Red House called Bun-Bun, I think Kiki might have brought it home. Justin Two used to put in inside of a clear acrylic bread box and hotbox it with crack smoke. I feel guilty in retrospect that I didn’t stop him but it somehow never gave the thing a heart attack. Bun-Bun also ended up getting fed these bright red processed hot dogs that somebody had brought home a giant bag of. After that everybody who slept on mattresses directly on the floor would sometimes wake up to the rabbit gnawing on their fingers.

The poor thing was obviously starving and looking for the closest thing it could find to the meat it had become accustomed to. Eventually Bun-Bun developed one of the sizable tumors that white laboratory bred animals such as mice and bunnies seem to be especially susceptible to due to a general lack of biological diversity. I’d like to think that Bun-Bun was humanely euthanized but I actually don’t know – I just remember the tumor getting bigger and bigger then one day it wasn’t around any more.

Anyway Bun-Bun was dyed purple on the day that Niaomi followed me out of the basement and saw it scurry across the floor.

“Is that bunny naturally purple? Does that mean that one of it’s parents was purple?”

I don’t think I actually made the obvious joke about Bun-Bun having a red father and blue mother, I don’t think I said much of anything throughout the entire encounter. That was how I constantly ended up in those kinds of situations, I never told anybody no. If someone decided to attach themselves to me and start following me around I always just let it happen. It wasn’t the best habit – it would lead to me having sex with people I would have preferred not having sex with and showing up at shows and parties with extremely sketchy random people from the street in tow.

Eventually I learned the very basic skill of establishing minimal boundaries with strangers and acquaintances but it took me a very long time – it wasn’t until after I was thirty years old.

On this particular day I needed to walk to the nearby DePaul University Computer Lab to check my e-mail and use the internet. Nobody at the Red House had a computer so this was one of our habitual excursions. The other one was going toward North Avenue to steal books from a Crown Books that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual disbelief that it hadn’t gone out of business yet. We would continue on to Wicker Park to sell the stolen books in the different used book stores then on to the West Side to buy drugs.

On one of the quiet tree lined streets I found an abandoned aluminum briefcase that had evidently belonged to some kind of doctor. The following exchange took place when I picked it up off the ground and opened it:

“Is that your briefcase?”

“It is now.”

“Are those your business cards?”

“They are now.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure. Here.”

Niaomi seemed to be glowing with excitement as I handed her the card as if it represented some token of my affection in an alternate universe where it could actually be used to contact me.

“I’ll call you! You’re MY doctor!”

I didn’t have a phone. She knew where I lived. Back in the basement Justin Two had accepted the impossibility of creating any sense of sexual obligation in Niaomi and was smoking crack with her in resignation. She leaned over and shotgunned the hits into my mouth as a pretense for a kiss. I sat in the living room reading a Peter Sotos book as she snuggled against me in perfect contentment.

She disappeared back into her usual life and I never saw her again.

It seemed impossible that somebody who was more or less successfully navigating adult life could exist in such a state of naïveté without even an elementary understanding of cause-and-effect or the other laws governing the universe but there it was. In the sixteen or so hours we spent together she never once broke character or allowed the mask to slip. I’ve met other people with the “ditzy hot girl” persona in the intervening years but never again to such an exaggerated degree.

Our landlord lived next door to us and had introduced himself by showing up on the porch drunk and in a dress and pelvic thrusting as he delivered what we obviously took as a challenge:

“Nobody parties harder than I do!”

We called him Party Sean but he would soon learn that we actually did. He could often be heard stumbling through the alley and talking about how he wasn’t usually so drunk so early in the morning. He had gotten some kind of a sweetheart deal on the house because the elderly couple that raised racing pigeons didn’t want to sell to anybody they didn’t know and apparently didn’t have kids to leave the house to. We represented an opportunity to start collecting rent without undertaking any renovations or improvements but he soon regretted it.

Justin Two had been driving through alleys at night to collect discarded wooden pallets in one of his many quick cash schemes. The pallet recycling center was closed or he ended up with a bunch that were the wrong size but for whatever reason he ended up just stacking them up around the back door of the house. I knew that change was in the air when I started to hear Party Sean and his lawyer discussing fire and liability in regards to the pallets. He had also kind of figured out that we were all on hard drugs and probably concluded that it was only a matter of time before we created major damages, a crime scene or both if he didn’t get rid of us. He vocally bemoaned his earlier decision:

“I could have rented this place to a nice Mexican family!”

Midway through the eviction process I ended up taking acid for what was the first time in my life. I got caught in some paranoid thought loops and convinced myself that I had been roaming inside the house completely insane for months but none of my roommates had wanted to contact my family or the authorities about it. I walked up and down the rear stairs until time broke and I saw infinite copies of myself frozen into a kind of figure eight in every possible position ascending and descending the stairs and pulsing with all of the colors of the visible light spectrum.

I tried to lay on my mattress and force myself to sleep but the strings on my electric bass felt like writhing snakes that were shocking me with electricity. I ripped all of my clothes off but then immediately felt like I had to get out of the house so I pulled on the first thing I could find. This ended up being a pair of skin tight black jeans that had been airbrushed with graffiti style bubble letters from a San Diego Thrift Store. They said “BILLY RAY THE BANDIT” with a large microphone by the crotch and an image of Bart Simpson as a stereotypical pimp.

I wandered into Party Sean’s house where, true to nature, he was having a crazy party. He made a flourish to present me to his guests, a mostly younger Hispanic crowd:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Jim Morrison!”

I could hear people joking about how I smelled like crack (this wouldn’t have been true on this particular day) but I was too out of my mind to be bothered by it. Everybody was smoking weed out of an old school vaporizer where it sat on a tiny sculpture of a skull in a jester hat inside a glass bubble. They tried to show me how to smoke it but I couldn’t really figure out the plastic tubes and how you were supposed to put your finger over a tiny hole. There were platters of cocaine all over the place too but I wasn’t really interested.

Party Sean said he felt bad about having to kick us all out and I told him not to worry about it. I said we were used to it. Eventually the sun came up and I realized it hadn’t actually been months and went home. I wasn’t “out of my mind” tripping anymore but I was still tripping and I couldn’t sleep. I shot a bag of heroin but it didn’t seem to do anything so I immediately shot another one. I woke up soaking wet having evidently just overdosed on heroin while still tripping on acid and had just gotten narcanned.

Justin Two took me to a small neighborhood Carnival in Humboldt Park. I ate a coconut paleta and we rode the Ferris Wheel. We spent about ten minutes watching a snail climbing up and eating a yellow dandelion flower. Eventually I did go to sleep and woke up not on acid anymore but in another way it really does last the rest of your life like people say to fuck with you the first time you ever take it.

Everybody at the Red House spent all of their money on drugs and we all ate really badly. Once me and Matt found a dried out piece of cheese under the couch and we boiled it until it was soft then made instant mashed potatoes by using the water we had boiled it in as milk and the chunk of cheese as butter. Me and John found free passes to an early screening of A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger. The movie theater exit passed through a kind of dry storage for it’s Concessions Stand and we stole two gigantic silver bags of nacho cheese that the house pretty much lived on. We ended up using that stuff to make instant mashed potatoes a lot, we kept it in the cabinet because it didn’t have to be refrigerated.

I can’t remember if Party Sean ever went through any of the official eviction paperwork. The pressure built up until he kicked in the front door and turned off the house circuit breaker and yelled that he would kill us if we didn’t leave. Nick and Janice had found an apartment just on the other side of the underpass that marked the beginning of the West Side open air drug markets on Chicago Avenue. We started getting all of our things together to move into this new apartment. A couple of Party Sean’s Goomba friends harassed us and made vague threats about how we and our parents would be “sleeping with the fishes” as we loaded everything into a car. I don’t think any of them were actually Italian.

I do remember one of my housemates rolling their eyes and asking one of our self styled intimidators:

“How’s that Bud Light treating you?”

Party Sean’s lawyer came to all of our jobs to drop off subpoenas. I got mine while I was working at the Italian cafe on Wrightwood. Matt and Joe had broken back into the house to see if we had accidentally left anything important behind and found a Manila envelope full of photos of the house before the mess and superficial damage we had caused got repaired marked “EVIDENCE”. They took it with them.

On the designated day we all showed up in court. Kiki had forgotten she was carrying this cool skull shaped knife so security ended up keeping it. The judge told us all that it wasn’t legal for his lawyer to have served us all at our places of employment. Party Sean and his lawyer tried to talk about damages to the house but the judge said that the hearing was only concerned with whether or not we had surrendered the premises. Somebody handed over the last copy of a key. Janice raised her hand:

“Your Honor, I don’t know if this means anything but I have a photo of our landlord wearing a dress.”

At the time I didn’t understand why she said that but I now understand how brilliant it was. Party Sean had presented himself as a fellow resident of a lawless world of hedonistic opulence then turned around and attempted to weaponize his asymmetric power in the waking world of respectability. He didn’t show up at our front door in a dress as an expression of fluid gender identity but to signify that he was a “wacky” drunk.

The judge had just told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on us legally and Janice took the moment to remind him who he was.

I don’t know what happened with the house next but if he didn’t die young he probably made a decent stack of cash on it. I’m trying to remember his face – he was probably just hitting forty and looked a bit like a red haired Robin Williams.

I’ve met a great number of people who partied harder than he did but he did party harder (in the drugs and alcohol sense) than the only other person I’ve known with party in their nickname. Not in the knowing everybody sense though because almost nobody knows Party Sean but there’s a good chance whoever’s reading this knows who the other person I’m talking about is.

It’s Party Steve.

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/