Tag: Night Beaver

Columbia Missouri 2008 : “Wait, That Isn’t a Quarter Cup Yet!”

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I’m really struggling to piece together and line up some events from 2008/2009 but it was an insanely busy time for me. The way my memory super power works is that I can usually pull up details and vignettes from anything that attracted my attention and made an impression but that almost never includes calendars – I’m not even entirely sure what day it is today.

The thing that kills me is that I did keep a detailed diary during this period for the only time in my life because my roommate Stephany Colunga gave me one from her job at American Girl for Christmas at the end of 2007. Of course I’ve long since lost it along with every other physical object I used to own but not before a friend in the Bay Area turned it into a zine and made a handful of copies.

His room now sits unoccupied at The Purple Haus with the exception of all his stuff and an ongoing dispute with his former housemates prevents anyone from even looking inside. Of course I don’t know for sure that a copy is even in there but the tantalizing possibility that one could be will continue to torture me until I get a definitive statement one way or the other.

The situation reminds me a bit of something that happened when I moved back to San Diego after 9/11. I was using heroin with a friend named Daniel and decided to lend him my entire collection of Fort Thunder adjacent zines and mini-comics – the drug would still trigger states of intense emotional openness and generosity at this early stage of my use.

Not long after he lost his housing situation and put everything, including my comics, into a storage unit. I would beg him to either take the time to dig them out or drive me there so I could do it myself every time I’d run into him but it never seemed to be a good time. Finally, two or three years later, he lapsed on his storage fees and the unit was auctioned off to someone who most likely threw it all away.

He offered to reimburse me financially but I didn’t see any point as everything in there had been literally irreplaceable and held the kind of conditional and subjective value which is best kept insulated from money as far as humanly possible.

Anyway enough of all that. Here are some sections of timeline I can be absolutely sure of:

  • I bought a used Boss Dr Groove drum machine from Rand Sevilla that he had used in his band Carpet of Sexy while passing through Chicago after the Living Hell tour in June of 2008.
  • After the Santa Monica GLOW festival on July 22, 2008 I went on a short West Coast tour using counterfeit Greyhound passes with Rebekah Clendening and Cole Miller from Vortal Curb where we played a mix of songs from me and Bekah’s defunct rap group Chew on This and what would later be called Bleak End at Bernie’s.
  • The first solo Bleak End at Bernie’s shows were in Australia on a trip that lasted at least until my birthday on August 23, 2008.
  • I was around Los Angeles for the first Mojave Rave on July 11, 2009 and in Berlin the night Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.

I know that somewhere mixed in there I went on tour with the band CAVE but no matter how hard I try to concatenate this onto established dates I end up with weird discrepancies. I know that I played Bleak End at Bernie’s sets at one or two of the shows but I also remember jumping off a tour to ride buses and trains to California with the girl I call Leg when Bleak End shouldn’t have existed yet.

Maybe I’m mixing some details up or there were two different tours I rode along for part of but I’m just going to round the whole thing to somewhere in 2008.

CAVE are a psychedelic kraut-rock band from Chicago that get lumped into a thing called the “Columbia Diaspora” as the core members come from Columbia, Missouri. I tried poking around their Wikipedia page for details that might help me pin down specifics and found some amusing misinformation.

I wasn’t able to follow that [2] hyperlink

Rotten Milk has been using his moniker for long before he started playing with CAVE and he definitely isn’t 49. This reminded me of an incident one or two days after I started riding with the band where Cooper had me answer all of a local reporter’s interview questions specifically because I wasn’t in the band and knew next to nothing about it. With that in mind I realized that media coverage isn’t likely to yield any reliable or useful information.

In the Winter of 2007 I had just gotten back to Chicago from living on The Miss Rockaway Armada and brought the cat Night Beaver to the apartment I shared with Stephany. I was supposed to be sticking around town, especially because I’d just brought home a pet, but every time I left for “just a couple days” I’d wind up gone for weeks. The first time was probably November of 2007 when I rode along for a Minneapolis show and then stuck around through Texas and New Orleans.

I’ve got a lot of memories from Columbia, Missouri so it would make sense for them to be spread over two different trips. In one of them I got blacked out drunk in the house we were staying at and decided it would be funny to keep “accidentally” walking into the room some people were having sex in. The next day Cooper said he saw me and Zach McLuckie engaged in an “Eskimo Fight” – essentially taking turns punching each other as hard in the head as possible.

Neither of us remembered doing this or how it might have started the following morning. I’ve got a pretty hard head and plenty of stories about getting punched or having chairs broken over it without suffering too much damage. It’s possible now that I think about it that this would have been my first visit to Iowa City and not Columbia at all – I think both Jeff Witscher and Brandon “NIMBY” were there.

This next bit is definitely Columbia but once again I drank until patches of my memory disappeared. This time I met a couple of girls at a bar or liquor store and went home with them. Although the part I’m missing is how I ended up back at their apartment, Occam’s Razor would suggest some degree of flirtation and sexual interest was involved.

I came around in the middle of the following performance but first I need to fill in some background. I had performed with Rotten Milk at the International Noise Conference in Miami early in 2008 and traveled with him for some shows before and after. We brought Lisers with us to a Florida house with a tandem bicycle where she accidentally burned a tiny hole in a plastic measuring cup with hot oil while making the popular egg and bread breakfast called “toad in the holes”.

Since then I’d been wearing the ruined cup around my neck with a ball chain. I also had several large bags of Jelly Belly brand jelly beans in my shoulder bag. Stephany had been given them by her father, possibly for Christmas, and wasn’t particularly interested in eating them so she gave them to me instead.

I was doing a bit: I went into the kitchen of the girls’ apartment and announced I was going to cook a recipe that called for one quarter cup of jelly beans. That was the denomination of measuring cup I was wearing around my neck. I proceeded to pour the jellybeans into the cup where they instantly tumbled out through the hole in the bottom and onto the floor.

Much like the earlier incident of pretending to “accidentally” walk in on the people having sex this might have been more amusing to the people around me if I wasn’t in the mindset that it could only get funnier with repetition. I was probably carrying something in the neighborhood of six pounds of jelly beans and I was tenaciously committed to the bit. After the first bag the girls started demanding that I stop but I would not be deterred:

“Wait, that isn’t a quarter cup yet!”

Once every jelly bean that I was carrying had found its way through the cup and onto their floor they weren’t particularly interested in having me in their house any more. They demanded I leave but I only reassured them that I would “after later” before crawling under a table and falling asleep. The next morning I let myself out and somehow found my way back to where everybody in CAVE was staying.

Columbia is essentially a small town so Cooper was curious as to whose house I’d just come from but I was still just drunk enough to have no idea what direction I’d even walked from.

I’ve been chatting with Rotten Milk tonight and consequently throwing my entire timeline into question but it isn’t really relevant to the details that make these stories amusing. At the very least I can say that I went on tour with CAVE in November of 2007 and some of these memories are undoubtedly from then.

The interesting thing to me about traveling with CAVE was that as much as I’d hung out with bands I’d never experienced the kind of archetypical masculine “tour van” energy which is usually thought of as characterizing both underground and mainstream rock music. Although it wasn’t by conscious design nearly all of my favorite bands had included female members and, with the exception of a gentle teddy bear type guest bassist at one show, I’d exclusively collaborated with women in my two rap groups.

The closest thing would have been Arab On Radar but I’d only really ridden with them for some Southern California shows and a day at Venice Beach back in 2000. Friends Forever was all guys but didn’t have the same kind of vibe due to the members essentially caravanning in separate vehicles rather than being packed together.

Actually I remember Friends Forever bassist Josh Taylor and keyboard player Jason cracking a few awkward “gay” jokes because me and drummer Nate Hayden always slept in each other’s arms in the covered bed of his pickup truck with his dogs. Nothing was afoot however – we simply shared the kind of easygoing masculine lumber camp camaraderie that reliably turns sexual in William S. Burroughs novels but in certain real life situations, such as this one, does not.

On the CAVE van energy: I’m struggling a little bit with how to describe this without it being taken the wrong way and I just decided not to worry about it. A van full of dudes makes fart jokes and talks about getting laid in a running tally that becomes competitive as the number of cities increases – it’s fine to think it’s gross as there are definitely gross things about it. I also thought it was fascinating and compelling in a way; like I was participating in a masculine ritual that stretches all the way back to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

I realize that now I’m making it sound like vans full of touring women can’t make fart jokes or keep tally of who get’s laid when obviously they can and do. There’s just a certain flavor of undiluted testosterone and as an indoor kid turned theater kid turned gender non-conforming punk kid I never really had a chance to get acquainted with it.

Although I’m describing all of this with a detached anthropologist’s tone I was absolutely participating and contributing to this reality while it was happening. There was an “odd man out” who functioned as a kind of counterpoint to the general flow of energy in the van but it wasn’t me. It was Adam.

Adam Roberts has been in a lot of Columbia, Missouri bands. I don’t see him mentioned on the CAVE Wikipedia page but as far as I know he was a founding member. When I searched around I saw they had a song named after him but it was probably a kind of tribute from after he left the band. Him and Rotten Milk aren’t in the band anymore.

Adam had a kind of long suffering irritable “mother hen” energy that stuck out in contrast to the general laid back party vibes. He’s the only keyboard player I’ve ever known to tour with a specialized collapsible bench seat. He wasn’t much of a drinker and didn’t seem to share his band mates penchant for marijuana.

I’d say he had the sharpest sense of humor in the van, loaded with bitchiness and sarcasm, but you had to sit close to catch it as his jokes were more often than not delivered just under his breath. When a police officer called Rotten Milk back to his patrol car during a traffic stop Adam drily pantomimed a road side execution:

“You forgot your… kapow!!”

I never played or jammed with the band or even spent too much focus listening to their live sets but I could tell that Adam’s contributions sounded more like organ than piano and were collectively regarded as indispensable. I think the “odd couple” aspects of the social situation were also understood and enjoyed by everyone. I have no way to know but I’d be inclined to suspect his departure was triggered by health issues, general life stuff or any other explanation that doesn’t rest on it all being the way everyone interacted with each other.

On to more of the shows. Rotten Milk had a thing about The Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas that goes like this – in inclement weather there is no place the smoking youth of Lawrence would rather be than the gaslamp heated patio at Replay. Hordes of college students will happily pay cover to drink and smoke the night away in toasty comfort – some of them might even decide to forgo smoking long enough to step inside and watch a song or two.

This feels of only peripheral importance when the entertainer’s contract is written in such a way that the Lion’s share of the door moneys go directly to the artist regardless of whether anybody was actually in the room watching at all — and perhaps a percentage of liquor sales on top. Rotten would often wax ecstatic about how the right cold night at The Replay could pull a national tour from running at a loss to being completely covered and even paying out per diems in a single night.

Spirits were high as this had turned into just such an evening and this most likely colored responses toward the pair of characters the universe had chosen to bring our way. First up was, I believe, Dr. Matthew who found us either inside a record store or just on the street somewhere. The Doctor was essentially a self promoter but painted through with an overpowering stripe of cryptotheological vaingloriousness. He would always offer a brief glimpse into his compositions in this heavy handed way:

“Hello, I’m Doctor Matthew and I’d like to share with you some of the greatest living music that the Lord Jesus Christ has seen fit to manifest through me – if you’re ready!”

I doubt I’ve done it perfect justice but do feel that I captured the general tone. Lawrence is a University town so he may well have been using the honorific Professor as opposed to Doctor. We would have been ecstatic to take him up on his offer but he carried neither instruments nor recordings and had the squirrely energy of someone you should not allow to touch your guitar under any circumstance.

The negotiations suddenly took an unexpected twist. Professor Matthew had removed the option of a recital from the table and was simply looking to buy. God had evidently taken notice of Rex McMurty and concluded that Rex was the only possible percussionist for the Prof’s continued endeavors. While God sees and hears all Matthew had not, failing to take in the group’s egalitarian structure, but he put his faith in his deity and began offering Cooper generous quantities of cash to “buy his drummer”.

This was an untenable offer for two main reasons: 1) Rex enjoyed playing in CAVE and saw himself as an equal partner by virtue of his contributions – a view that was shared by his companions. 2) CAVE was not particularly structured like a slave plantation and there was neither precedent nor protocol to begin selling members off to outside interests. We distanced ourselves from Professor Matthew without ever learning if he had either the chops or Cha-Ching! he’d been hinting at – leaving us only to speculate.

The next proposition unfortunately managed to hit the band in one of their weak spots – right in the drugs. It came from a townie who I’ll call Daniel who did come see the show. Daniel had just gone through a messy breakup and didn’t want to spend the night alone in his apartment. He also mentioned having copious amounts of marijuana and hashish.

Within a couple of exchanges he proved himself to be a deeply unpleasant person to talk to:

“My girlfriend just left me but I’ve got this new twenty year old I’ve been fucking the shit out of!”

Nonetheless the decision was made to take him up on his offer. Along with the promises of a stoner’s cornucopia it seems possible that he also represented the only option for a free crash spot in Lawrence. His apartment had a fairly fancy and modern, for the time, kitchen area with the brushed steel refrigerator and polished granite countertops. Unfortunately besides that it was bleak inside. Plain Pantone #f0ead6 eggshell walls without so much as a single picture, book or even magazine in sight.

I had a tendency to be the last person awake on this tour which often led to whoever we were hanging out with confiding their life story to me. Daniel’s was about as fascinating as you’d imagine. He’d been following The String Cheese Incident on tour until he got left in Lawrence and decided to remain in the college town and work his way up to becoming a mid level drug dealer. The realities of a university aged population allowed him to leverage his limited life experience advantageously against the people he was selling drugs to and having sex with.

Truly inspirational stuff.

Before going to bed he asked us to make sure to wake him up in the morning because he’d gotten a bunch of eggs and stuff for breakfast. I don’t remember it being discussed in so much as a whisper when we cooked, ate in silence and then tiptoed out the door the next morning. Everybody was already on the same page.

I’m trying to double check my memory and I’m pretty sure this trip was the first time I ever set foot in Texas. As many times as I’d traveled between Chicago and California all of my rides and buses must have taken a more Northern route. Anyway I thought Cooper was exaggerating when he insisted that everybody finish any marijuana they might have on them and throw their pipes and papers out the window before we crossed over the state line.

He wasn’t.

We hadn’t even been in Texas for fifteen minutes when we got pulled over and a red faced good old boy dramatically threw open the sliding door on the side of the van. He made a big show of sniffing the air like a witch looking for children in a fairytale before he drawled out:

“When’s the last time you boys got high?”

Slag was in the driver’s seat so he ended up playing point guy to most of the questions:

“We don’t get high sir.”

The cop laughed incredulously:

“Y’all don’t get high? You wouldn’t lie to me would you? You were raised better’n that weren’t you?”

At each pause everybody chimed back with a subdued chorus of “No Sirs” like petulant schoolchildren. He scoffed a second time:

“Y’all are a band ain’t you? What kind of band don’t get high? What kind of music you even play?”

Cooper answered this one:

“Rock and roll sir.”

I would learn a couple of years later when touring with Generation that this was the only acceptable answer – Classic Rock if you wanted to be really careful. After the role play had run its course and the cops had determined that nobody had been stupid enough to leave marijuana where they might actually find it they flipped a switch and became genuinely friendly. They even told us about a shortcut to get into Austin while avoiding traffic so we wouldn’t be late for sound check.

Another reason that I think I must have ridden with CAVE on two separate tours is that they definitely played Emo’s this first time around but I also remember a show in a smaller place with flames on the side that kind of looked like San Diego’s Casbah. An old friend of the band was working at Emo’s and he got mad when we didn’t leave the door to the green room open:

“Hey you guys can’t be sniffing drugs in here!”

This turned out to be projection. I was once again the last person awake and talking when he offered me some cocaine much later in the night. This may well be the first time I turned down free hard drugs in my adult life but a small line just as I was about to try to fall asleep didn’t sound especially appealing.

We must have gone to Austin two separate times because there wouldn’t have been a full day to meet up with Nick from El Rancho on this first tour. The guys in CAVE waited around Nick’s mom’s wine bar while me and him took buses to the other side of town to meet his heroin dealer. The way Rotten Milk described it was that I did a standup routine where I came out of the bathroom nearly too high to even stand without falling and proceeded to obliviously tell awful jokes nobody thought were funny for nearly an hour.

Nick’s mom pretended not to notice like she always does. I wonder if she remembered my name from when I left syringes all over the apartment she was renting for Nick in the Chicago neighborhood Boy’s Town way back in 2001. It is a pretty distinctive name.

The main thing I’m having trouble resolving with the time line is Bleak End at Bernie’s. I think I remember jumping the bill with this project at at least one show but I didn’t even own a drum machine yet for the 2007 tour and the project didn’t exist under that name until the Autumn of 2008. Most of the time on the tours I was just hanging out without trying to perform.

There was a town where we had an extra day and heard about a grunge themed party so we quickly practiced a version of Hole’s Violet where I did vocals. We called the band Uncle Grunge. The party had a cardboard cutout of Seattle’s space needle against the wall and everybody wore flannels. I think it might have been in Milwaukee or Minneapolis.

The reason I feel so confident about this is because of my fan from Houston. I had one “pure fan” in the sense that she didn’t already know me socially before getting into the Bleak End stuff. If you’ve ever watched the Flight of the Conchords show she kind of reminds me of the fan character from that. This would have been at the space called Notsuoh.

Notsuoh reminded me a bit of the kind of artist spaces that mostly got destroyed and evicted in the early 2000’s on waves of gentrification and urban development. Even though it’s in downtown Houston it’s most likely been able to hold onto its space because of the profitable licensed bar on the ground floor. Buying the building during the blighted nineties and possible links to organized crime wouldn’t have hurt either. The owner showed us unused spaces in the upstairs filled with old store fixtures and giant sign letters and that sort of thing. We all ended up sleeping on the roof.

I saw that it’s still open on the internet but I haven’t been back in the last fifteen years to see if the upstairs portions still look like that.

There was supposed to be a show at a space in Monterrey, Mexico called El Garaje but after crossing into Nuevo Laredo CAVE opted not to go as they were borrowing a friend’s van and couldn’t get temporary insurance. I was severely tempted to try to catch a bus down myself but chickened out because I neither knew my way around Mexico and it’s intercity bus system nor had upgraded my Spanish to the conversational level yet.

Although I was never actually booked at the Monterrey show and would have been trying to jump the bill I consider this the first of a series of unsuccessful attempts to play in Mexico. The next one happened in 2012 when I only found out that I’d be able to get onto a Mexico City show after I’d already flown to Cancún. Even now I’ve only ever managed to play Tijuana.

On the 2007 tour we went to New Orleans for what was my first visit to the city since a Greyhound trip in 2000. The Katrina damage was still fresh and there were MPs on the street instead of normal police. I can’t remember if the CAVE show got broken up by these Military Police or if this was a story I’d heard about a Warhammer 48k show that had happened a year or so earlier.

I most likely jumped off the tour in New Orleans and spent a few days with some Columbia Diaspora girls nicknamed the “flavor wasting hoes”, because they had thrown away a bunch of universally admired kitchen spices, before making myself a counterfeit Greyhound pass to return to Chicago. New Orleans was one of the last large cities where you could reliably use one of those without worrying about anybody recognizing the fraud.

I remember the lady at the ticket desk had self-cutting scars covering her arms from the wrists to the insides of her elbows. You don’t see something like that and worry that you’re about to get caught up on anything. She clearly had her own demons to battle so why should she care about the authenticity of my pass?

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Twelve : “Have fun rolling solo-roid kid!”

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The structure toward the back of The Garden of Bling was usually referred to as a “three story structure” but calling it an elevated bungalow with attached crawl space would probably be more accurate. The largest room was accessed by an ladder. I’ve already written this somewhere else but Alexis had designed this area to be a pirate radio station and because it effectively blocked off Santiago’s sail all the walls were put on hinges and could be opened.

Somewhere on the walls she had drawn a little doodle of how things were supposed to function: it showed an approaching FCC vessel and the Bling sailing away on a sudden gust of wind while incriminating but presumably replaceable transmitting equipment flew into the water through the newly opened walls.

It should go without saying that none of this would have worked in real life. Even if the sail had been designed with all the necessary riggings and whatnot the craft itself was an overladen square that sat low in the water and had no semblance of a nose for cutting a jaunty path through the current. A thing called a “mud sail”, basically an underwater flap for being pulled along by water instead of wind, might have been more effective but it wouldn’t have looked as cool so of course that was out.

I never saw any of the walls propped open to be able to judge how effectively this let the wind pass through. I arrived at the Bling toward the end of Summer and it wasn’t long until the weather took a turn toward stiflingly cold. Finally there wasn’t any pirate radio station stuff up there – we at least had a portable cassette player because we listened to the Woods album At Rear House on repeat but that was the extent of our music broadcasting capabilities.

Unless you count the 800 pound electric organ that sat on the deck directly underneath the cabin. Occasionally Harrison did power it on with either a generator or the deep cycle batteries and play for a little while. When the Bling was still floating on the river this created a fairly striking effect – especially when he played at night and lit a bunch of candles and hurricane lamps.

The same could not be said when the raft became beached and sat at an odd angle on the sand and Harrison stopped playing.

Alexis had decorated the roof of the cabin with what was always referred to as “Lenny Kravitz’s wallpaper”. This was a minor exaggeration – all the wallpaper had come from a small workshop in New Orleans’ 9th Ward that had once created some custom wallpapers for the singer. There was no way to know if any of the pieces on our ceiling had this particular provenance but the aesthetics were a decent fit: swirling designs in pinks and purples with metallic inks.

Like all the decorative woodwork “gingerbread” elements it had been scavenged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Alexis only found a collection of smaller scraps as opposed to a complete roll so the ceiling was done in small sections bordered by pieces of two by four. The walls were mostly made of windows so it got a ton of natural light. Here’s a picture of the big statement window we had on the back or stern:

On top of this room was what we called the “troll hole” – a claustrophobic crawl space with an arched ceiling. There was nothing in there but some kind of sleeping pad and a bunch of pillows and blankets. Even in the daytime it was too dark in there to see anything so the troll hole had two basic functions: sleep and sex.

We had a little joke that I’m going to need to provide some background for if it’s going to make any sense. The Bling got beached all the time. Eventually this became so severe that it was surrounded by sand and several feet from the water. There’s no de-beaching that; you just need to wait and hope the river rises.

Far less severe were the beachings where one edge was on sand but the other edge was still in the water. Those could definitely be de-beached – we used poles. When the shipping barges passed by they left behind sizable wakes that made this job significantly easier as it rocked the entire raft up and down. We had a specific rallying cry for situations in which we’d found ourselves beached and an especially large wake needed to be taken advantage of:

“De-beaching wake!”

You can probably guess where this is going. While the troll hole afforded privacy in the visual sense the act of lovemaking did create tell-tale motions that could easily be felt throughout the vessel but especially between the troll hole and cabin as one’s floor was the other’s ceiling. It became our custom to loudly proclaim the knowledge that people were having sex a few feet away from you by shouting out:

“De-beaching wake!”

Most often it was me or Alexis shouting this out while Harrison and Jacki were having sex in the troll hole. I was briefly visited by the woman I’ve been calling Rocky and had occasion to hear the same cry emerging from the troll hole while creating the vibrations in the cabin. Later Brodie finally got back from wherever he’d been for most of the time I was onboard the rafts and he and Alexis received the same treatment.

I don’t remember ever hearing it in the early days when I was with Lisers in a section of the bow she called her writing studio. It’s possible that having all the rafts lashed together in Voltron formation served to dampen and muffle our movements leaving friends sleeping toward the stern none the wiser.

If you’ve ever lived in especially close quarters with friends you know that this kind of thing is an inevitability. You’re going to hear and possibly see each other having sex – not in an erotic voyeuristic kind of way (usually) but in more of a pragmatic “this is the only option and we’re not going to not have sex” kind of way. In that case you probably know how awkward and uncomfortable it can be to lay there in silence and pretend not to notice.

In a way I think the custom of “de-beaching wake!” actually helped to dispel a lot of that tension. It basically serves to say “I’m here and I hear you but fret not. High five and carry on friends!” That’s way too long for general usage but “de-beaching wake!” is probably a bit too niche. It would be cool if there was something universal but nothing comes to mind immediately.

As always it is possible to leave comments here if anyone either has a less specific utterance already in usage within their own social group or ideas for one they feel especially confident about.

It was during one of Rocky’s visits that we found the kitten Night Beaver abandoned on a freeway island. Harrison had been the one to catch her but I carried her close until she was no longer feral and traveled with her before leaving her to live in Chicago with Stephany. She slept with me in the cabin in an old military sniper’s sleeping bag I called my “whistle worm”.

If you remember the line of children’s toys called Glow Worms that is basically what this sleeping bag looked like. It was made of military green quilted fabric and had a hood and sleeves in the upper half but the lower half enveloped the legs in a more traditional kind of sleeping bag bottom. One morning I woke up to find my socks covered in cat shit.

I think what most likely happened was that Night Beaver was sleeping around my stomach area and woke up during the night to relieve herself but wasn’t immediately sure which direction would lead out of the bag. When I had everything zipped up and buttoned the whistle worm fit me about as tightly as a jacket or coveralls and while she could have crawled out through the neck hole there probably wasn’t enough air flow to make it immediately obvious which way that was. She most likely didn’t realize she had picked the wrong direction until she got to my feet and by then it was probably too late for her to hold it while traversing the entire bag in the opposite direction.

It only happened that one time. After that she got really good at climbing up and down the 4 x 4s that propped up the cabin and presumably handled all her business somewhere on shore. We never bothered with a litter box. In an actual house I probably wouldn’t have given a new and recently feral kitten full and unrestricted access to the outdoors so quickly but in this situation I figured that with nothing else around she’d remember where she was being fed.

For the time that we were on the Bling she didn’t even have a bowl – I just fed her directly out of my hand. We had a system where she’d gently bite me to communicate that she wanted more and when she stopped biting I knew that she was full. She was still very small (possibly younger than eight weeks) so it wasn’t a very large amount of food. We both mostly ate different kinds of canned fish and the salmon that comes in pouches.

So I’m going to talk some more about The Garden of Bling Dive Team. By November the Mississippi River was restrictively cold and because there was a lot of work that had to be done from in the actual water me and Alexis bought used wetsuits to keep warm. I forget how it was decided that I would be a member of the dive team but my height was probably a factor as I was best equipped to retrieve tools that had been dropped in the water.

It’s also possible that when we went to the only seller of used wetsuits in the St. Louis greater metropolitan area the only ones available were an Alexis sized one and a really tall person one.

Our first mission was installing the custom transom for the big outboard motor that would never actually run again but soon after that the entire bottom scraped off so we turned our attention to that. I know I’ve already described all this at least once: no real hull, plywood box full of styrofoam, bowl of cheerios floating upside down, etc. The Kirksville had washed up a short walk down the bank and provided all the plywood and used lumber for these attempted renovations.

The wakes of passing barges that had been so useful for de-beaching and de-beaching adjacent jokes were a liability now. It was already hard trying to drive lag bolts straight up underwater and having both our own bodies and the raft itself bounced up and down in the water only made this harder. My wetsuit at least was a bit tight around the arms and biceps which only made any heavy duty tool work even harder.

I know that Alexis went on to study underwater welding but we’ve lost touch and I couldn’t say whether or not she stuck with it. Man it sure would be crazy if she somehow saw this and we ended up talking again. Good crazy I mean. Jacki too.

Most of the things around the cabin were fancy and elegant and that included a cut crystal brandy snifter that we kept the pharmaceuticals in. By the time I got there this was Adderall and an assortment of benzodiazepines. Me and Alexis got into a work routine where we took Adderall in the mornings and then after a few hours of work we’d strip off the wetsuits and take benzos by a fire. This was especially important for Alexis as she had to work in the panic inducing confines of beneath the raft where there was barely enough room to hold her head above the water.

Even if I’d wanted to do this part I wouldn’t have been able to because of how tall I was. The depth of the water we were working in worked out to where my head usually sat just above the deck if I was standing on the bottom. Any way if I’m going to be completely transparent about our drug regimen I need to add that most nights ended with copious amounts of caffeine and alcohol by way of Sparks.

I mentioned that we got extremely loaded on this stuff the last time we crossed the river to visit The Sweeps but I didn’t really scratch the surface of how dire the situation truly was. The best description I’ve ever heard of abusing this particular combination came from a scummy older guy who essentially lived in this run down youth hostel I stayed at in Sydney, Australia:

“So I’m chugging Red Bull and vodka all night and around three am the Red Bull says ‘Right, I’m going to bed’ and the vodka says [evil voice] ‘I’m staying up!’”

His story ended with him getting the shit kicked out of him for offenses he was mysterious about barring an assurance that he absolutely deserved it. When we left The Sweeps Alexis was clearly far too drunk to be driving but bounced all over the freeway while laughing uproariously and singing along to T.I.’s Whatever You Like on the radio. By all rights I should have been terrified but I was as far gone as she was and laughed and sang along instead.

We went to whatever the 24 hour diner in St. Louis was at the time. I can’t say if eating improved Alexis’s condition but it didn’t help much with me. When we stepped outside I got severe tunnel vision and attempted to focus on a chain link fence but the diamonds started to shift around and change color from pink to green. I found that I couldn’t walk directly to where our car was parked but somehow walked backward in a large semicircle that ended with my back against the door that we needed to enter.

Miraculously we made it back to the Bling without getting into a serious accident. I can’t remember whose vehicle we were even driving.

It was around this time that me and Alexis were beginning to realize that the Bling had no chance whatsoever of continuing her voyage. Harrison had almost certainly burnt out our new motor by indiscriminately following the advice of whoever floated down the river even when it was to connect the batteries with the polarities reversed. Between the wakes of passing barges and the waterlogged quality of the Bling’s lumber the new bottom pieces were falling off the moment we put them on.

I can’t remember if it had gotten beached again or not.

Anyway we wanted to just burn it. Harrison would not budge from the idea that we would somehow get it going again and couldn’t be brought over to our side. I don’t remember where Jacki was on the issue or Brodie who was most likely back by this point. They probably would have been down to burn it too.

With no sign of anything changing I hid Night Beaver in a small duffel bag full of clothing and took the Megabus back to Chicago in late November or early December. It wasn’t long after that I got the phone call. Harrison had broken his back and somebody, most likely the Department of Homeland Security, had burned The Garden of Bling.

Brodie and Harrison had put on the two wetsuits and jumped from the nearby train bridge into the river. The drop is probably around one hundred feet and most likely more dangerous in a wetsuit as it increases your buoyancy and most likely the impact from the water. Brodie did a basic pencil drop and broke one of his toes and sprained his neck. Harrison attempted a triple back flip and hit the water with his back and broke it.

I wasn’t there at the time so I don’t know all the exact details of how everything went down. Most likely Harrison realized he was incapable of swimming the moment he hit the water and Brodie helped get him to shore or one of the pylons. A helicopter came to transport him to wherever the nearest hospital was. Brodie never actually got seen by any doctors for his injuries but found a neck brace in the garbage of Harrison’s room and put it on.

They were probably replacing the temporary brace from the helicopter ride with a better one once they got to the actual hospital.

Harrison was extremely lucky. I don’t know the flavor of the fractures or what vertebrae numbers they were in but he made a complete recovery with no lasting mobility issues. I couldn’t say if that’s typical or extraordinary for the specific injuries he suffered. I don’t have any concrete evidence that DHS were the ones that burned our boat but there was exactly one entity coming around and expressing how much they’d like us gone and it was them.

Harrison and Brodie had jumped off the exact bridge that DHS was worried about us messing with.

I wish I could have seen it burn.

Honestly I wish that we had just set it on fire ourselves and watched it burn together. The Garden of Bling was a beautiful raft and I loved it but the Lower Mississippi is a monster and unless an army of admirers came to carry it away piece by piece there really couldn’t have been a better outcome.

Harrison left town – most likely he went to his mother’s in San Francisco to recuperate. Alexis, Brodie and Jacki hung around St. Louis. Early the next year I took a bus back down there so we could ride trains to New Orleans for Mardi Gras together. Brodie was supposed to ride down with us but had left town for something and we decided we couldn’t wait for him.

This was before his photography work, mostly pictures of our friends riding freight trains, blew up but he’d be going by his early moniker and writing it around: The Polaroid Kidd. Me, Alexis and Jacki left behind a note for him in one of the St. Louis punk houses we’d been using as a temporary base of operations:

Have fun rolling solo-roid kid!

Los Angeles 2009 : “It’s OK, Woods Already Played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

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I’ve been really wracking my brain and I can’t seem to figure out how I ended up with the cassette copy of the Woods album At Rear House. I know for a fact that I have never seen the band live but I did look up the label Fuck It Tapes and I was definitely at shows for a lot of the artists releasing music on the imprint around the same time. Somebody might have been selling it along with their own tapes and records or maybe I picked it up as a distro situation when I did a big mail order from Not Not Fun or maybe somebody just gave it to me.

I only know that it became one of my favorite tapes from the first time I played it, the kind of tape that you just flip back over to the first side after the second side ends and keep doing this until when you finally do get into the mood to put something else on you wouldn’t even know how many times you had actually looped it.

I went to the ArthurFest in 2005 to see Yoko Ono, Earth and SUNN O))) but the “freak folk” phenomenon of the mid aughts had been largely a dud for me. I ended up in Providence for a Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom show at AS220 and felt nothing but second hand embarrassment. He felt like an uninspired Marc Bolan clone in imminent danger of eating his microphone; she seemed to be putting too much effort into coming off as fey or ethereal to actually do so. A creepy social climber with Rod Stewart hair from the El Rancho days was their road manager.

They ended things with a “family style” Rusted Root cover. I’d imagine this all sounds glorious to at least one of my readers but it just wasn’t my cup of San Pedro…

The Woods album was the rare kind of singer-songwriter work in the folk/acoustic vein that grips me. The styles are quite different but in terms of effect the closest thing would probably be the Palace Brothers album Days in the Wake. I have mentioned before that I view the acoustic guitar as somewhat unsavory by nature – my prejudice toward the instrument can only be offset by heroic virtuosity or an aptitude for writing “hooks”.

However I got my hands on the tape the period of time where it became a constant soundtrack was on board The Miss Rockaway Armada and more specifically The Garden of Bling. After most of the other project members had thrown in the towel and retreated to other realities the collection of catchy tunes accompanied our increasingly desperate attempts to rend our vessel River worthy in the face of the approaching winter.

A combination of the elements, the constant wakes of passing barges, successive beachings and the slipshod quality of the initial construction were beginning to take their toll. We transferred responsibility onto an aquatic mammal frequently spotted near the raft with the added fiction that it was secretly aided by one of our number; altering the lyrics to one of the Woods songs to reflect this:

“Night Beaver, Night Beaver, Where did you come from?

As I sit you are awful quiet now, when will you be gone?

And I’ve seen it now, you left your tooth marks on the bow, who helped you? Jacki! Who helped you? Jacki!”

One day while my ex-fiancée I’ve been referring to as Rocky was visiting we were driving near the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge when Harrison spotted a tiny kitten that some monstrous sadist had abandoned on one of those circular patches of grass enclosed by a Freeway on-ramp. The poor little thing was so hungry she was trying to catch and eat butterflies. Me and Harrison caught her by throwing a sweater on top of her and I started wearing it with her tucked inside until all the feral was out of her.

I named her Night Beaver and she became a member of our crew and my traveling companion until my hectic itinerary made it clear she would be better off living with Stephany, my room-mate in Chicago at the time. This arrangement was clearly the best thing for her as they live together still. It would have been Autumn of 2007 when we rescued her making her a little older than fifteen years old now. I talked to Stephany on the phone for the first time in forever recently and she briefly put me on speaker.

Night Beaver seemed happy to hear my voice again.

In early September of 2009 I had moved back to San Diego to help my father with end-of-life care. On September 5th I had ended up in Los Angeles and heard that Woods would be playing at an event called Fuck Yeah Fest. This was the first year that the festival grew large enough to require the move to Los Angeles Historic State Park near Chinatown and the only time I was interested in attending as a spectator. In later years when it moved to Exposition Park I would end up working at it on my birthday a couple of times for a pizza company called Spicy Pie.

I was hanging out with Rocky and another female friend I’ll call Snake and the three of us decided to try to sneak in to see Woods. Rocky actually found parking somewhere in Chinatown and we walked down through the Metro Station to sniff out a point of ingress. I had been to Coachella one time but the headliners were bands like Radiohead and The Cure – this was my first time seeing hordes of overly excited millennials thronging to watch bands I had always thought of as “underground” in a festival setting.

It was somewhat disorienting watching what happened when there was too much youthful enthusiasm in one place. Lightning Bolt, who were essentially headlining the festival, offer a simple way to demonstrate this. They had always preferred forgoing stages and setting up in the middle of the crowd but when thousands of kids all want to be the ones standing right there this sort of thing is simply no longer safe or practical.

The thing that always sticks with me was the kid who had just bought a pair of tiny red-eared sliders. We dressed and carried ourselves like cooler, older kids so he was super excited to show them to us:

“This one is called Slime and this one is called Fuck Yeah!”

The acute knowledge that both of these creatures would be dead by the end of the day was palpably painful – the weight of wisdom. You can’t just explain that to somebody in this situation where there is a visceral need to have anything to stick out, distinguish one’s self and appear more interesting. I mean similar turtles are sold and die in Chinatown every single day but I never thought it was something I would see in what I thought of as my community. Maybe I just sound like a condescending, pretentious asshole.

It was getting close to the time that Woods was supposed to perform so we quickly climbed over a fence and attempted to disappear into the crowd. This plan failed for two reasons: we were dressed for the opposite of anonymity and I had ripped the seat of my pants, a bright turquoise pair of Gloria Vanderbilts, while scaling the pokey barrier. Security was, quite literally, on my ass.

We were plucked from the crowd and escorted to the outside of a trailer while the festival’s authority figures most likely had a pow-wow concerning the exact method of ejecting us. You would think that people would have been sneaking in in a similar manner all day but the way that they handled us made it feel like the situation was unprecedented. Maybe we were just the only ones that had gotten caught.

The security trailer happened to be right next to the trailer where the bands checked in or did something else official and we immediately ran into the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Chippendale was surprised to see me:

“Oh! I didn’t know that you were playing this festival too!”

“I’m not. We just got caught trying to sneak in and they’re kicking us out.”

He quickly conferred with Gibson and a person I didn’t recognize who was most likely there in an official capacity then informed our gaoler that they intended to make us their guests. Authority is a drug that certain types of people seem incapable of ever getting enough of:

“Unfortunately they’ve already demonstrated a disregard for the rules of the festival by trying to sneak in so there’s no way they can be allowed to be here.”

I reassured him that we were content with our current relationship with impending consequences:

“It’s OK, Woods already played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

I will always love Lightning Bolt and have seen them play at least two times since the events of this story but my enthusiasm has not sustained itself at the level of when I was twenty years old and they were my favorite band in the world. I imagine that both of the Brians, to at least some degree, have gone through a similar experience with their band. In 2009 I was most excited about their work as a printmaker and animator respectively. On that particular day while I absolutely would have stuck around and most likely had a wonderful time during their set I was most excited to see Woods.

Major Festivals are just all around weird experiences anyway. The next year I would end up performing at a Michigan Festival where Kool Kieth was set to perform the entirety of his Dr. Octagon album but ended up leaving before his set because the environment was making my tour-mates uncomfortable. That record was really important to me the year it had been released but the experience of watching a band at a major festival is comparable to having a drunken friend call you and hold up their cell phone at a concert across the country.

My brother actually did call me drunk and hold up his phone from a big U2 concert was. I became oddly obsessed with a cassette of The Joshua Tree around 2009 when I lived at Apgar but besides that I was never too interested in the band. I kind of remember the song that was playing through the phone though – it was about as exciting as watching anybody at Coachella.

Neither of the Brians had any extra pants.

All of the bands that happened to come by during the absurd amount of time that was spent deciding how to kick us out ended up being friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, of mine. I went through more or less the same routine with vetoed guest-listing and a futile plea for replacement pants with the members of Eat Skull and Japanther. In retrospect I probably should have just walked around outside until I recognized somebody who could get us in but it wasn’t the best thought out plan.

I was really in a situation with the pants though. They had been skin-tight and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. It wasn’t a little tear either, the whole back was as open as a New Orleans Liquor Store. I think Snake or Rocky eventually gave me some kind of scarf or extra shirt I was able to crudely tie over the offending area.

It was an especially hot day and as the process was taking forever I started asking for some water. The Security Guard said that I was in no position to ask for anything but I countered that we would become an even bigger headache for them under the effects of dehydration or heat exhaustion. I didn’t think to mention the Geneva Convention.

He angrily handed us a couple of bottles.

Finally a decision was passed down concerning which of the exits we were going to be walked to and cut loose from. This involved walking across a large expanse of the Park that was not being used for the Festival. The vegetation was sparse and more or less typical of Southern California: mugwort, anise, datura and Hopi Tobacco. There were a few rows of corn that appeared to be off season.

Up until this year I had managed to resist ever getting a cell phone but my parents felt that I would be more helpful to them if I started to carry one. My dad had given me an older one of his, it was whatever you call the kind that’s even smaller and cheaper than a flip phone. It had one of those little leather holsters with the clear plastic that clips onto your waist. It was the kind of cell phone that somebody would have gotten if they were already used to carrying a pager.

Anyway after the long wait and the long walk across the field I noticed that this cell phone had fallen out of it’s holster somewhere along the way. The way I look at it there are two possibilities: either the Security Guard had spent so much time in our company he was starting to enjoy it or he had learned enough about me to realize that I wouldn’t stop being a problem until we found my cell phone.

Either way he walked me back through the field and we found the thing. It materialized on the ground the way that things do when you’ve accidentally dropped them and you know that you’re about to retrace your steps and find them again. I feel like I can tell the difference the moment that I realize I’ve dropped something – like I can feel whether it’s gone gone or just waiting to snap back into existence when my eyes scan over it’s new location.

Once I retrieved the cell phone we were finally ready to go on with our lives and put the Festival behind us or at least it’s 2009 iteration. I can’t remember for sure but I think I bought myself some other pants at the Chinatown store that sells irregular pieces and samples from the many sweatshops of the garment district. I would be heading back down to San Diego where it would turn out that my father only had days to live. I’m not sure where Rocky or Snake would end up going next.

I’ve still never seen Woods live but I would very much like to. I don’t have that tape anymore but every now and again I listen to it online again. I checked out some of their other stuff but none of it hit me in quite the same way.

I’d like to think that I will never again have reason to set foot in another Major Festival for the rest of my life but at the same time I’m pretty fond of surprises.

If I’m ever in a band famous enough to headline I’ll make sure to always carry a couple extra pairs of pants with me.

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