If you are anywhere close to my age and consider yourself, as I do, a “scene historian” in any capacity I know of one special trick by which you can force yourself to feel something: important, useless, conscripted, powerless, misguided, etc. i don’t know enough about you to tell you which emotion will be triggered – only that I can promise with near certainty that one will manifest.
Ok, here’s the trick – consider the New York Time’s Bestseller Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Next consider that this milestone in rock journalism as oral history was published in 1996 and the roots of “punk”, according to the text, began to seriously gel with The Stooges and MC5 around 1970-ish. I’m not here to get pedantic or start any arguments about who wore glitter or pushed members of the audience first but rather put things in a temporal perspective: approximately a quarter of a century separates the first stirrings of proto-punk from the appearance of Please Kill Me on bookstore shelves around the world.
If, like me, you were traveling the country around the turn of the millennium to drink in the myriad ways that the worlds of underground art and music positively oozed raw creative energy you know that 1) things were just as vital as the punk scene lionized in Please Kill Me and 2) another 25 years later we’ve reached the perfect moment for a similar all-encompassing document as younger generations of kids, led to the tunes by music blogs, file sharing and algorithms, want all the mythology they can get their hands on.
The largest hurdle is the “umbrella problem” or, in simpler terms what to call it all. “Punk’” was the perfect word for a time and place, no matter how disparate various music under the banner may appear, and with the addition of “chain” and “egg” qualifiers many still claim punk with an “if it ain’t broke why fix it?” philosophy. The total cannibalization of the early nineties Seattle scene by A&R zombies screaming “grunge!” instead of “brains!” has left some reasonable reservations towards Greeks bearing gifts in the form of hyped up new genre names.
The last serious effort of this kind I remember seeing was Electroclash! and it predictably fell on its face. The new trend of constantly naming microgenres – Witchhouse, Sea Punk, Vaguewave, etc. feels more like a self referential joke than a serious marketing attempt – not to say it can’t sell records. I’d still like a catchy name that combines the tolerance for total artistic experimentation with the DIY ethos that colors the most compelling music of this era but may have to satisfy myself with something as simple as “noise rock”.
Anyway we’ve waded impressively far into this review without even a mention of the literary work that inspired it so now’s a good time to mention that Schneider characterizes Arab on Radar as “No Wave” – a more experimental and unapologetically art-inflected movement that predates punk. It is also important to look at Arab on Radar within the diverse experimental music landscape of Providence, Rhode Island. As a San Diegan I met my fair share of underground residents who idolized my hometown due to The Locust and other hardcore acts but in my own case I felt a special magnetism toward Providence.
If I’m going to be super technical things started for me with The Talking Heads, although they weren’t technically a RISD band, but Shepard Fairey would be a less tenuous starting point. By 1994 he’d moved to San Diego and assembled a powerful street team from my friends and acquaintances in the graffiti subculture. His Obey Giant stickers also began showing the influence of Russian Constructivism and as a dedicated fan I filled detailed notebooks with examples of every new design and color way – catalogued meticulously by location and date of collection.
The moment that turned Providence into a borderline religious pilgrimage destination came when I finally discovered that my favorite hand silk-screened mini comix and noise rock records were all pouring from a shared art space in a former mill called Fort Thunder. I called their phone, got permission from Jim Drain to move in and spent a month narrowly avoiding subjecting the FORCEFIELD performance costumes to my compulsive bed wetting before spending my twentieth birthday at a formative noise show.
I already knew the Arab on Radar guys before this. I saw them in at least two different colors of Dickie’s and hopped in their van earlier that year to ride along to Venice Beach. As a lifelong Californian it was a bit of culture shock watching pasty New-Englanders rub sunblock (I never touch the stuff) above denim cut-offs and buying matching Ray-Ban’s.
Let me put things a different way: every time friends have dragged me to an East Coast beach with grassy dunes and chilling breezes I feel a certain pressure to pretend to enjoy myself despite every single thing about the water, sand and general ambiance feeling “wrong”. Maybe some of the AoR crew were feeling the same and missing their flimsy wooden fences, salt grass and American beach grass.
Shifting back to music the only word for myself at these earlier stages was “fan”. I’ve read of near empty Fireside shows and hostile fans but can tell you with certainty that me and the Belden House crew brought the energy and enthusiasm at every show from 1999 to 2001. 21 and up was a different matter – I might have even gotten a roomie’s ID cut in half attempting to see the guys at The Empty Bottle.
One of my favorite bits was when Schneider placed the aluminum headstock of his Kramer, or other electric guitar with a strong neck, on the floor and swung forward in an arc with his stomach resting against the lower body. Total annihilation of rock instruments and proletariat bodies was the order of the day, not to mention conventional song structures, and I did my part by running at the old bowler’s benches and causing a complete flip when I threw my shoulder into the “ass groove” and launched my ankles skyward.
Besides buying Repopulation Program, You’reSoaking In It! and any other compilation I could find for Load or Providence I scooped up a vinyl copy of Rough Day at the Orifice. Along with the menacing high pitched guitars and frantic, confessional vocals I loved the pink sleeve design on brown cardboard and the tiny bits of hair Mat Brinkman had mixed in the printing ink. It almost looked like Andy Warhol’s prints with glitter or diamonds if the light hit things right.
Schneider talks about not signing with Load in the book and I do wonder how such a move could have panned out for them. Skin Graft, and then later 31G, seemed to be giving their all but would a local label have been able to give more support? As many great bands were on Load but nobody ever sold quite like Lightning Bolt, questions about relative sizes of fish and ponds are reasonable – there’s no easy answer.
It was always a riot throwing Rough Day on the family turntable and hearing my father read out the title in his Arkansas farm boy drawl. You wouldn’t be missing the pun or double entendre if he had anything to say about it – and he always did. Although I may have once and simply forgotten I really do regret not seeing the band with Andrea. I’ve played in only a couple of bands without women and it’s not something I’m looking to repeat.
The energy changes and I’m just not at home in a “guy van”.
My father, himself a complex discharge from the navy for insubordination, also got a real kick out of reading out the dirty song titles and lyrics. I went to Mr. Pottymouth’s poetry reading at Quimby’s and never felt too offended by the subject matter. When Joey Karam from The Locust started Le Shok with that one explicit record cover it always felt like they were low key biting AoR’s schtick – in a way that wasn’t especially shocking.
Maybe Eric Paul, aka Mr. Pottymouth, would cringe at the comparison but in recent years I’ve always thought of his former stage persona as a living avatar of Quagmire from Family Guy. (in terms of repressed New England sexuality, not his poetry skills). I actually wanted to talk about the working class and, for want of a better word, “townie” aspects of Arab on Radar. Schneider makes it clear that he and his band mates came up around Federal Hill, had family members connected to former mayor Cianci’s “Old Providence” and never quite fit in with the RISD and Brown students.
From my view across the country I never saw things looking too cliquey but there were clear cultural delineations between bands: On the “townie” side sits Sub-Pop signed Six Finger Satellite, Arab on Radar, Dungbeetle, Landed, Olneyville Sound System, White Mice, Curmudgeon Clique, perhaps 25 Suaves and assorted J./Jon von Ryan projects. On the art school side we start with Les Savy Fav, then Black Dice, Mudboy, Lightning Bolt, FORCEFIELD, Lazy Magnet, Kites, SHV, Russian Tsarlag and more recently Human Beast.
I don’t know enough about the early lounge/exotica movement to place anyone and even my favorite Providence folk duo, The Iditarod, is as much of a mystery in this regard as Amoebic Ensemble. It’s hard to know every tiny detail about a city you only slept in for three weeks – even if you’re as big of a nerd as I am. The class struggle bits are not to talk shit but instead an overly simplified attempt to pick Arab on Radar apart and see what made them tick.
The death of the trades, the entitled attitudes of art school kids and a constant feeling of “impostor syndrome” in the world of experimental music could account for some of the shoulder chips but not all of them. If Schneider is to be believed good old fashioned sexual frustration filled the balance. Even with a national roadmap to the finest purveyors of extreme European pornography and a religiously followed rotation as to who cranks the hog in what order when in hotel bathrooms it seems like nothing could effectively stem the pressure.
Imagine bailing out a sinking boat but the boat is full of mayonnaise that pours down the leg of some terrycloth shorts and you start to get an idea. Sometimes the simple act of release takes on the dimensions of a Herculean Labour. In these sections Schneider starts to almost read like Peter Sotos and it’s entertaining enough. In contrast to the old saying that “an army travels on its stomach”, Arab on Radar appear to have done so on their nutsacks.
Despite the constant urges Jeff and his band mates behaved respectfully to any female artists, promoters and traveling mates they accompanied except for one exception. TheNeed was an experimental metal band from Olympia, WA who happened to be lesbians and something caused Jeff to view them as a band “that put identity above music” and even blame them for the disappearance of free thought in the music underground.
Perhaps being a little younger, growing up in California instead of New England and identifying as a feminist my whole life shifted my views on lots of this stuff. I never once considered The Need an overtly political or identity centered band. They were a shredding guitar band with innovative upright drum parts and vocal melodies and the fact that I wouldn’t get attacked for my colorful eye makeup watching The Need but would seeing death metal heavyweights Nile (ironically if you know how ancient pharaohs wore makeup) was simply a bonus.
It sounds like someone from AoR was defacing The Needs’s posters when touring ahead of them and a small verbal altercation ensued. For those that didn’t tour in 99/2000 posters in a venue was all the promo you had unless a weekly ran an ad or blurb. Schneider is a therapist now so maybe he’s made some progress on this.
Most ironic is that while complaining that The Need were “political” and “pushed identity”, Arab on Radar did the exact same thing in a different way. As a working class band in a scene dominated by art school kids their plumber style uniforms were a statement of class struggle and a clear message that they held more in common with the workers stocking green rooms with band’s rider cheese and veggie plates than the entitled would-be “rock stars” throwing this shit out the window.
Enough of that. Let’s break this rock music autobiography down in terms of what the public expects in books of this type:
1) SEX – all the frustrated masturbation you could dream of. One band member suffers family loss and drowns the emotions in all kinds of women. I thought it odd that Schneider hints at every member dallying with a fifteen year old girl but himself – did he abstain or is he being discrete for his wife’s sake? Glass houses and all… Some band business conducted in peep shows and strip clubs is vividly described.
2) DRUGS – mostly absent. Plenty of weed is smoked and sometimes it fucks with guitar playing. If the hard stuff shows up I blinked and missed it. Probably for the best – the last thing the kids need is another Please Kill Me telling them they can’t be authentic punks unless they pick up a needle but if you only read rock bios for dope and coke stories this ain’t for you. Someone trips and has a bad time in Dunkin’ Donuts.
3) ROCK N’ ROLL (aka FIGHTING) – According to the book these guys grew up rough and the move to cerebral art rock didn’t slow them down any. Best section for this stuff is definitely an early Marilyn Manson gig in Rhode Island. Disgruntled fans learn how far the opening band (AoR) can be pushed. Not too far it turns out. I seem to have forgotten a knuckle duster or two – more surprises for you when you read it!
Finally, should you read this book? Absolutely! While primarily focused on his own band Jeff clearly cares quite a lot about music and documents 94 – 02 Providence, and the national underground circuit, perfectly. His views on squat houses (and their watered down spaghetti) are hilarious and it’s definitely a fun day or two of reading with no lags. Plenty of super funny random anecdotes out of left field.
The biggest tragedy of the turn of the millennium underground is that everything was being documented on early websites and hosting services like Angelfire. That’s all gone now and lost to the ether. If a service is free you’re the product and our burgeoning scene stopped being profitable for our digital “hosts” a long time ago. Something to remember when entrusting our content to Facebook, X, Instagram and my own reliance on WordPress. Shit, I really need to make a backup.
Anyway it’s a minor miracle that Jeff remembered as much as he did, took the time to write it up and even created a printing house for himself and other voices. These kinds of efforts need to be lauded and supported.
They’re all we have and when Instagram, Facebook and others eventually shutter their virtual doors Psychiatric Tissues will still be a physical book with no wi-fi or web hosting required.
That said, if you are a close AoR fan left lost and angry from the divorce and want to know why Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other no more this is not the book for you. Something ego – Something substance problem – all super vague. Fans closer to the 2002 breakup and failed 2010 reunion might see more in these passages than I could. Eric, the singer’s, testimony might be more detailed but less believable. Couldn’t say.
I prefer to remember how things were that last night I saw them on Oops! Tour in 2002. Knitting Factory in Hollywood! Tried to bring my insane homeless friend but se said it sounded “really annoying!” Arab slayed! Bolt slayed! Locust slayed! Hella’s not really my jam.
Maybe I’m totally wrong about this but I imagine that there are some readers who are mostly here for the underground art and music stuff and just kind of roll their eyes through the drug sections or scan ahead until I start talking about a show again. And then of course there would be readers who just want to hear about crazy drug stories and just kind of feel like:
“Why the fuck would I want to read about some lame ass band that broke up in less than a year? Get on to the sniffing, smoking and shooting!”
Then of course there would be the third type of reader that absolutely lives for the content that focuses on these separate but connected worlds like a rarely available but absolutely delicious version of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I could be drastically underestimating how rare this kind of reader is. Books about the earliest days of Punk like Please Kill Me are absolutely full of bands and drugs and clearly have a broad audience but I feel like that’s a little different only because all of those bands have gone on to be at least moderately well known.
I was thinking about something kind of like this when I was just recently having a conversation with AT from Attitude Problem at the Blog Cabin Reunion that just went down in New Mexico. I had discovered since writing the Fort Thunder chapters that both AT and Jeremy Harris from Lazy Magnet had been playing in USAISAMONSTER at the show that happened on my twentieth birthday. I remember that the band was five different people but for whatever reason I had only really talked and vibed with Tom and Colin.
While I’m on this topic I should also mention that I recently remembered that the band Mastodon played the same show. They were a still fairly underground group at this stage as opposed to the mainstream metal juggernaut that they are today and didn’t seem particularly out of place. I might as well mention that a group called Duct Tape Union also played – I don’t know anything about them except that they were probably local.
Anyway meeting AT and Jeremy many years later I never realized that we had all actually met at Fort Thunder way back in August of 2000. So I was talking to AT about what was exciting and attractive about Fort Thunder and I brought up this thing that Mat Brinkman said in an interview in The Comics Journal – basically that people who are into noise records are mostly not that into comics and people that are into comics are mostly never into noise records.
I know it’s not completely never as the thing that first drew me to Fort Thunder was discovering some of Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale’s mini-comics and then what cemented my need to actually go there was separately discovering the music of Lightning Bolt and Forcefield. I think my earliest exposure to the Fort Thunder comics world was a booklet called Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue that was handed out free at the 1997 San Diego Comic-Con as a joke about Marvel declaring bankruptcy.
All of this is probably extremely interesting to a certain subset of people but I’ve already spent way too long in random asides so I’ll leave it as yes the bankruptcy was real, Chippendale had a Daredevil comic in it and beyond that you’ll have to look stuff up yourself. The worlds of underground music and comic books remain connected. While at the party I got to read a newer comic from Anya Davidson of Coughs called MNSTRFCKR
Image via Anya Davidson’s Whatever We Call Twitter Now
I also got to see a bunch of experimental music and take a lot of drugs. Yay comics! Yay noise music! Yay drugs! – anyway on to the actual story.
In early November of 2013 me and LaPorsha were living at my mom’s house in San Diego. We had been subletting somebody’s apartment in Koreatown but got sick of the constant hustle to come up with rent money and didn’t think living in Los Angeles was really worth it. I had just ridden down with Griffin from Sewn Leather for a show he was playing at OtrasObras in Tijuana.
I’ve already written at length in other places about the things that would eventually inspire us to move down to Tijuana ourselves but this was the period of time when we were going down a lot for shows and art openings but hadn’t actually lived down there ourselves yet. You could say it was our “honeymoon phase” with Tijuana.
I had been down enough to have contacts to set up a show when my friends from Moira Scar hit me up about playing Tijuana with their project V.E.X. It looks like Gmail has deleted the messages but I’m pretty sure I tried Otras Obras first and when that didn’t work out I was able to set it up with Mustache which shared the exact same back patio anyway. The date they needed was November Second which just so happened to be Dia de Los Muertos.
For those unfamiliar with the holiday there are actually two days of the dead. November First is for those who died as children and November Second is observed for those who died as adults. This should clear things up for anybody confused about the date. I billed the show as a “Cempasuchil Social” – the Spanish name for the marigold flowers used in Dia de Los Muertos observances and an acquaintance from the Tijuana artist community named Zophie Felina made a flyer for it.
Like most shows it didn’t really turn out the way I had pictured it. I was hoping that the locals who were interested in coming out would have just had things like marigolds and sugar skulls lying around and would maybe bring some along to decorate the place. I can see in retrospect how that was an unreasonable expectation. Dia de Los Muertos is a very traditional, family oriented holiday and deciding to go out to a goth show to see some American bands is kind of the opposite of that.
If I had already been living in Tijuana I could have made a lot of that happen myself. As it was I rode down with V.E.X. at more or less standard load in time. It no doubt would have helped things to have an actual local act on the bill but for whatever reason that didn’t happen. It might have been that the venue only wanted three bands and Little Debbie was already attached to the bill. Maybe I just didn’t try to find one.
Anyway it was a perfectly fine modestly attended rock show.
I don’t think I would have been on any drugs this night. At this point in time I was still primarily using pain pills and by the time we had driven to the venue all of the pharmacies that sell that kind of thing would have been closed. There was a homeless junkie kid I knew down there who made his living walking between all the popular downtown bars and selling assorted snacks and pre rolled joints of the shittiest weed imaginable.
I do remember a particularly dramatic moment in the night when he was lying in the actual gutter injecting himself with heroin. All of the bars knew all about his drug use and never would have permitted him to set a foot inside their bathrooms. That was most likely his best choice to have enough streetlight to see by while still using the edges of parked vehicles to stay out of sight of passing law enforcement.
So obviously it wasn’t the kind of social situation where I could just disappear with that guy to go get high for a minute. In fact I never copped with him at any point even after making the move over the border. I ended up independently discovering a trap house in a notorious neighborhood called Coahuila that this dude had heard of but said he would never go to because of how sketchy and dangerous it was.
I’m not saying this as a flex but as observation on how it can feel like there are two different sets of rules for natives and foreigners when it comes to this kind of stuff. I eventually met a few other American junkies while crossing back and forth over the border who said they frequented the same trap house so it’s not like I was particularly tough or badass for going over there.
As long as I’m on the topic I might as well mention another observation I made a few months later when I was living in Tijuana. After the trip to Northern California to look for trim work that this story will culminate it LaPorsha made a batch of weed cookies to try to sell in the United States. We accidentally brought them over the border with us and although they hadn’t attracted the attention of Mexico’s drug sniffing dogs it seemed unwise to take the same chances with their American counterparts.
We weren’t interested in eating them ourselves so the only option was to sell them off in Tijuana at a much lower price. This brought me to the kind of punk and reggae themed bars that were popular with teenagers but I wouldn’t have normally frequented. In these places I noticed that openly smoking black tar heroin seemed to be viewed as socially acceptable – this certainly wasn’t the case with the older, hipper crowd I hung around. The hardest opiate any of them openly used was tramadol.
I can’t help but wonder what’s become of the Tijuana drug scene since the cartels have switched out fentanyl for tar. It’s nice to think that they would continue to grow poppies to supply their own people but considering both the cost and labor involved and general Mexican attitudes toward drug users it doesn’t seem especially likely. It’s probably at least as hellish as things have gotten on this side of the border.
Even if friends had offered to let all the bands and entourage crash down in Tijuana the middle of the night is the only opportunity to drive back into the United States without hours of waiting so the only real option was to drive right back to my mother’s house. As soon as Roxy got back over the border one of our friends that had ridden along, a girl from Los Angeles named Ariel, started demanding that we find a 24 hour fast food drive through.
Nobody was especially sympathetic as food is everywhere in Tijuana. Not just street taco stands, there’s a straight up Burger King a couple of blocks away from the venue we were staying at. Also all kinds of clearly sanitary packaged foods like chips and cookies in every corner store and probably even the bar we played at. The dude shooting up in the gutter had sealed bags of Funyuns even.
Ariel said that she didn’t “trust” any of the food in Mexico. Roxy was way too tired from a full day of driving and wasn’t about to stop anywhere. Ariel had a full on tantrum – like actual crying. I don’t know what she did when we got back to my mom’s house. I guess either ate something there or just went to sleep.
Anyway her tantrum was a big part of why we wrote a “passive aggressive” invitation to our wedding in Mexico the next year. We didn’t want to deal with people who were afraid of the food or whatever else down there. My siblings said that message was the reason they didn’t come to the wedding. It was probably for the best.
We were sticking around San Diego for a couple more days because we had a show that Monday at The Void. That Sunday we spent the day checking out the different Thrift Stores around Spring Valley. When I’d been growing up there hadn’t been any in short walking distance from my parent’s house but now there were a couple of big ones.
I was walking through the parking lot of the one that used to be a small movie theater when I saw a yellow box of American Spirits on the asphalt. I always kicked cigarette boxes when I saw them – you can feel in an instant the difference between an empty one and a not so empty one. A not empty one might have cigarettes in it, which I did smoke in those days, or even money as people occasionally use them as wallets.
This one happened to contain a moderately sized baggie that was bulging at the edges with methamphetamine.
The feeling of this discovery reminded me of finding a five dollar bill in an Emeryville ball pit my first year of college – I instantly felt like it must have represented a far greater loss for whoever dropped it than it did a gain for me. In the ball pit this would have presumably been a young child. This time around it had to have been somebody who liked meth enough to buy a sizable quantity of it.
I don’t particularly like methamphetamine.
I had bought a sizable quantity of it at one point in time, three and a half grams or an eighth of an ounce, for the express purpose of smuggling it to Chicago with a counterfeit Greyhound pass and selling it at a profit. I have sniffed, smoked and injected the drug more times than I can count off hand but have probably declined offers of it an even greater number of times. To the best of my recollection I’ve never bought any quantity of it for personal use.
I never actually weighed the bag of meth I found but it was probably either 3.5 or 1.75 grams – an eighth or a sixteenth or “teener” which is a unit of measurement I’ve only seen used with methamphetamine. The shards were completely transparent and mostly on the smaller side although there were larger pieces. Based on my limited experience I’d classify it as mid-tier methamphetamine.
Middle-Shelf in the parlance of bar and now budtending.
Still I had found free drugs and in a respectable quantity. If you discount drugs that I’d previously bought and then misplaced it was probably the most drugs I’d ever found. It was undeniably a “come up” and I wanted to at least exchange it for something else of value – probably money. Not that differently than I would have expected if I had found a rare fossil or gold or gems.
One thing that did make it different was that I found it at least one night before me and LaPorsha were going to catch a ride up to the Bay Area with Roxy and Lulu to continue North and look for trim work. I can’t seem to remember if I found it the morning of our show at The Void but it seems like that show would have been an unsurpassable opportunity to try to find somebody who might want to buy it from me. Maybe we stuck around one extra day after that before leaving town.
What I can say for sure is there was a night at my mother’s house where I had the meth and also had a bag of clean syringes. I had the syringes because I had recently run into the woman from the piece called White Tiger’s House who used to sell me Vicodin. The whole situation at White Tiger’s House had imploded and she’d become homeless and was living near the closest shopping center. She told me she was diabetic, gave me the syringes and took me by another person’s camp she thought might be able to help me find heroin.
That hadn’t worked out. She also didn’t have any Vicodin at that point in time. She told me that she’d be getting a couple of bottles in the near future and would give me one of them if I could find her a tent.
Things hadn’t worked out for me to come across my preferred drugs for a little while. I’d been mostly messing with pain pills but my first love was injecting cocaine and heroin. I’d injected meth before but only one or two points at a time and I’d never noticed a recognizable rush.
I thought if I did a bigger shot of meth it would give me something comparable to the rush from injecting cocaine. At the same time I knew this wouldn’t happen. It was kind of like this moment years ago when my friends Steve and Badger asked this guy named Antonio to bring them drugs and when he asked what kind they answered “water soluble”.
Obviously the process of injecting drugs is an addiction in and of itself.
If I had to guess I’d probably say I did between .3 and .6 grams in a single shot. Without a scale and actual knowledge of how much the bag contained to begin with it’s nearly impossible to know. I wouldn’t describe the immediate sensation as a “rush” but I guess it’s all relative to whether you like the way something feels or not. Inhaling a blast of crack would probably feel pretty fucked up if it wasn’t something you were in the mood for or particularly liked.
At the risk of sounding inanely repetitive I don’t particularly like meth.
I did feel something immediately but it was pretty much dizziness, nausea and panic with no sense of euphoria or pleasure. I spent most of the night in a bathtub experimenting with soaking in either very hot or very cold water but neither felt especially better. I desperately felt like I needed to urinate but couldn’t seem to make it happen. I consider myself lucky that it didn’t result in some kind of permanent organ damage.
Most people in the house didn’t have any idea what was going on. Meth isn’t one of those drugs where you can just be like:
“Hey I found a bag of this on the ground! Does everybody wanna do some?”
Cocaine is. In fact I’ve done that exact thing with cocaine I found on the ground. There’s a story about it up here somewhere – I think the one called Play Something Slow and Sexy. Polite society is generally either down to do some or at least not offended by the offer.
But I digress…
There was at least one girl in the house who liked meth. A friend of LaPorsha’s named Tina of all things. She has a “scene name” that she’s better known by. I guess I could add it in later if she wants to be easily recognized.
Anyway she had lost her wallet shortly before I found the meth. Maybe in Mexico or maybe even in Spring Valley. Now that I think about it she might have noticed it was missing at that very thrift store and the reason that I found the cigarette box was that I was helping her search for it. That would explain this next part a little better.
I happily gave her some of the meth. About the amount a casual user would take to be high on meth for a single night. She expressed to LaPorsha however that she felt like I should have given her all of the meth:
“I think that the Universe was intending for that to be my meth wallet!”
I do understand where she was coming from in an “every cloud has a silver lining” kind of way. She had just experienced significant misfortune so she was most deserving of significant good fortune. Maybe I even specifically found it because of her loss. Still like a home run ball at a baseball game I was the one that caught it regardless of how bad a day the kid sitting next to me might have been having.
It would have been nice if she’d offered to buy it from me for significantly less than current market value. She had just lost a decent chunk of cash (and for all I know a much smaller quantity of meth) in her wallet but she always could have offered a future electronic transfer of some agreed upon amount. That would have been a win-win for everybody.
Maybe I was being unreasonable. Tina, if you’re reading this now and I had a Time Machine I’d totally just give it to you and call it a day. It certainly didn’t do me any good.
I did feel a little bit guilty about keeping it a secret from Roxy and Lulu that I was transporting drugs in their van. Still from a legal standpoint Roxy having no knowledge of it’s existence was the best possible outcome if it was going to be there anyway. In the unlikely event that we were pulled over she would have no reason to behave nervously and raise suspicion and if it were somehow discovered I could easily claim ownership and probably be the only one arrested.
I had hidden it pretty well.
This is actually the moment that I consider to be the most entertaining in this story and the reason I decided to type it up in the first place. I had hidden the meth inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector. Man I really just want to write that again.
The meth was inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector.
For the unfamiliar Worlds of Wonder was the company that created and marketed Teddy Ruxpin. Their main innovation was to use the left and right channels of an audio cassette to combine a story with instructions for simple animatronics. You only hear the channel with the bear’s voice coming out of the toy but the opposite channel is full of weird sounding noises that tell the motors in the mouth and eyes when to move.
Teddy Ruxpin was eventually supplemented by a caterpillar named Grubby. While only Teddy Ruxpin can play cassettes Grubby also speaks and moves his eyes and mouth by way of a special eighth inch cable between the two toys. Anyone familiar with audio work will notice that the plug on this eighth inch cable is slightly longer than the usual one on headphones and aux cables.
That extra little bit is for the robotics stuff.
When they created the Talking Mother Goose toy they decided to use the same technique from Grubby to add a small duck looking character called Hector to talk along. The main book he works with is called The Ugly Duckling so it’s possible that he is actually intended to be a very young swan. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not as knowledgeable about all the Worlds of Wonder lore as I’d like to be.
Since moving down to San Diego my main source of income had been buying vintage toys at yard sales, swap meets and thrift stores and then reselling them on eBay. I had gotten especially lucky with one big yard sale by my mom’s house but I was also at the point where I could look over a box of random toys and recognize obscure monsters from The Real Ghostbusters line and that sort of thing.
The same yard sale had netted me a Teddy Ruxpin and Grubby but I had already sold those off along with nearly everything else I’d accumulated. For the rarer stuff I always seemed to get the most money from an auction as opposed to a fixed price and offers and it just worked out that our ride with Roxy and Lulu coincided with a day left on this last auction.
Here is the video I made to assure potential buyers that the two toys were functioning properly:
Deep Worlds of Wonder fans will notice that this is the later version of Talking Mother Goose where the head does not move from side to side. You will also see me and LaPorsha’s first cat Catrick wearing the blue leather harness that we found for him in Tijuana. He was actually fairly used to traveling and even going to parties but we decided to leave him with my mother when we went to look for trim jobs.
An interesting and unexpected coincidence was that the woman from White Tiger’s house called me the exact moment we were pulling onto the freeway toward the Bay Area to tell me that she’d gotten the Vicodin and see if I possibly found a tent for her. I wish I had found one for her, mostly because she was older and had health problems but there was too much other stuff going on with the shows and everything and me and LaPorsha didn’t have our own vehicle yet.
Now that I think about it she used to ask me if I could help her find anything for “energy” or to “stay up” when I’d come by White Tiger’s house to buy pills from her so she probably would have been down to trade the Vicodin for the bag of meth instead. The idea didn’t even cross my mind at the time.
We stopped very briefly in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles because Roxy and Lulu wanted to go to a Farmer’s Market. I wanted to try to unload the meth but didn’t have any ideas as to what part of that neighborhood to go to or anything. I bought some tacos for me and LaPorsha and while I was waiting there was a standard issue but slightly on the softer side looking cholo guy waiting across for me.
I asked him if he fucked with meth and he said he did. I gave him a tiny bit to try in the bathroom but he only had around ten dollars on him. I gave him what seemed like twenty dollars worth but showed him how much I had and told him I was trying to get rid of it cheap if he could call anyone that might be interested.
He seemed like he was in a similar situation to me in that basically every person in his life wasn’t cool with this particular drug and he had to keep it a secret from everyone around him. The difference was that he did actually like using it while I do not. There wasn’t anybody he could call.
We continued on to Oakland and Roxy and Lulu dropped us off at Tuna Town. I really like those kids and would love to hang out with them again under better circumstances. The secret I was keeping and constant nervousness around the possibility of getting pulled over detracted from what should have been a really chill ride up a boring chunk of 5.
Maybe they’ll need a show between the Bay and Portland and decide not to do the coastal thing – that would be really cool.
So now there was no longer the lingering fear of complicating other people’s lives or getting them in trouble but I still felt like I had to get rid of it before making the trek to marijuana land. If I knew then what I know now, that half those weed farmers are tweakers and it’s worth more farther from big cities, I would have just brought it along but we didn’t feel like it would be a good look or reputation while searching for trim work for the first time.
Me and LaPorsha tried hitting up a few people but everybody said they didn’t know anybody that fucked with it which is completely understandable. I don’t currently know anybody that fucks with it – at least not very well.
I decided to try walking toward the triangular park on San Pablo because the last time I lived in Oakland I had a decent amount of success finding pain pills there. LaPorsha decided to come with me, probably because she was worried something might happen to me. We walked until I saw a guy who looked like he fucked with hard drugs sitting on the bus stop in front of that closed down 24 hour burger spot that used to take forever to make your food at night.
Maybe some other Oakland people remember this spot. I’m talking about the one that was directly across from Ghost Town Gallery where I recorded my live album called Nothing Happened. The spot was really tiny and might have had one of those San Pablo Giant Burger signs. No inside seating, just a take out window.
The deal with that place was that it was owned by a brother and sister and was essentially two different restaurants as she ran it during the day and he ran it at night. In the daytime it was pretty normal and reliable – it didn’t get too busy and the lady was very talkative and finished your food in a reasonable amount of time.
At night it was always insanely busy and the brother was always too stoned to function.
I’m talking about circa 2009 or so. It was the only possible 24 hour food spot in that part of Oakland and there was usually a decent sized line of punks leaving punk shows and super dressed up hood guys who must have been coming from a popular nightclub in the area I don’t know about. Actually good hamburgers take a long time to cook to begin with but this was amplified and exacerbated by how cartoonishly out of his head on marijuana the guy cooking the burgers and taking the orders was.
A regular hamburger took at least an hour and at the end of the hour he might have just forgotten about you and you need to order it again or cut your losses and go to sleep. I remember one night when he announced that somebody’s cheeseburger was ready and all the guys in line had ordered regular hamburgers but they started offering him double or even triple the price just to be able to get something that was actually ready. He didn’t let anybody buy it because he was worried that the actual person who ordered the cheeseburger might come back which still hadn’t happened by the time I got whatever I ordered an hour or so later.
Anyway the place went out of business not too long after and different restaurants opened in the same spot but never lasted long. I haven’t been to Oakland in a while so maybe there’s a successful business in there again. At the time of this story it was vacant.
I sat next to the guy at the bus stop and asked him if he fucked with meth or knew people that did. He said he was interested but I needed to wait for a minute so he could get well. He had a pill bottle with some black tar heroin and was adding powdered milk with a folded lottery ticket. The bottle had a couple of pennies in it for weight and he shook it to combine the two substances.
This was my first time ever seeing tar heroin prepared for insufflation in this way. I had used dope around San Francisco in the early 2000s but I was shooting it and so were the people I had been using with. A couple years earlier at Apgar some guys on the block had said that they could get me powdered heroin but it had to be made in a blender. I always pictured some kind of sophisticated machinery and never would have imagined it was just the simple household items in front of me.
After trying this one time I decided that I got a better high from doing a cold water extraction on twenty dollars worth of Vicodin and didn’t ask the neighborhood guys to score me heroin or “hop” again. I’d imagine that sounds hard to believe to a lot of people – in my earliest years of heroin use I assumed that prescription pain pills would be so weak in comparison that I wouldn’t even feel them. Of course that isn’t true and Oakland always seemed to have especially shitty heroin – even weaker than Portland although the second city is much farther from the Mexican border.
I waited for the bus stop guy to use the same folded lottery ticket to shovel several heaping piles of the powder he’d just created into his nose. He had the same constant sniffle of everybody who habitually consumes tar in this way. He asked me if I wanted any heroin or cocaine but I told him that I was only interested in money.
I hadn’t put a specific number on how much I thought the bag of methamphetamine I had found might be worth before this point but in the moment I decided on sixty dollars. Looking at the number now it doesn’t even seem worth the risk of traveling in a vehicle with it from San Diego to Oakland but that’s drugs. You take outsized risks that are never worth the money.
He counted out sixty dollars and handed it to me so I handed him the bag of meth. He crushed a small amount of it and sniffed it then immediately said that it didn’t burn and seemed to be weak. I hadn’t sniffed any of it myself but knew it was moderately potent from injecting it. That wasn’t the point anyway. He was working his way up to ripping me off.
He then said that the bag was small and looked like less than a gram which was definitely not true. I wasn’t as familiar with sizes and quantities back then but it had to be around two grams give or take. I told him if he didn’t like it he could give it back to me and I’d give him back his money. He said he was keeping the meth and repeated the demand for me to give back the money.
LaPorsha had been standing behind the bus stop and waiting. I stood up and said that if he was determined to keep the drugs we evidently had a deal and we started walking down San Pablo in the opposite direction of Tuna Town. He jumped on his bike and started riding on my heels repeatedly demanding the money back.
I don’t know what I would have done or what would have happened if I’d been alone but with LaPorsha with me I didn’t want to take the risk of him doing anything to her and just gave him the money back. By myself I probably would have tried to run somewhere a bike couldn’t follow but who knows how that would have even worked out. I also wouldn’t have wanted to lead him back to Tuna Town.
He was heavier set than I was but I wasn’t particularly afraid of him. I just wasn’t interested in fighting him over sixty dollars. Mostly I just picked the wrong guy – he was a sniffly dusty annoying motherfucker; not worth having anything to do with. My situational awareness was off.
Years later when we were homeless junkies in Oakland I never would have gotten ripped off by someone like him but that’s not some huge flex. It’s better to get ripped off by someone like him and not be a homeless junkie. Mostly they were just two different times in my life. It’s not like I’ve got huge regrets on either end.
From the moment I found it the bag of meth was a… I don’t know what to call it. It seems like there should be some reference in folklore like a monkey paw or albatross but nothing seems to exactly fit what I have in mind. Something that seems like a boon when you find it but ends up being a burden until you finally get rid of it.
I’d say bad penny but who gets excited about finding a penny? Maybe bad twenty would be more appropriate. Or just bad moderately sized bag of stigmatized hard drugs you don’t especially like using…
The Talking Mother Goose and Hector sold to somebody in Germany which shouldn’t be that surprising if you’ve ever sold Worlds of Wonder talking storybook toys on the internet. The buyer eventually sent me pictures of damage where I knew the pieces of the mouth or whatever it was could just snap back together but I had to give them a partial refund. That’s kind of on me – I should have done a better job packing the toys and adding reinforcement and padding around their heads.
This story is working out to end on a bit of a bummer note and while that can be cool I’m not really in the mood for it. So I’ll end it like this:
While we were still staying at Tuna Town I was walking back there one night by myself when I came across a tiny baby opossum sitting in the center of the roof of a parked car. The car was under a tree so presumably it had fallen or climbed down. When it saw me it tried to run to the different edges of the car’s roof but I would stand at those edges so it would retreat back to the center of the roof and I could keep looking at it.
I wanted to go get LaPorsha and bring her back to show her but I knew that as soon as I was out of sight it would climb off of the car and back into the tree. That was probably for the best. At a different point in my life I might have tried to catch it in my hands but there was no need for that.
There will be other baby opossums to show LaPorsha…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 