Tag: The Miss Rockaway Armada

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?

Missouri 2008 : “It seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

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This will probably be a shorter story because other pieces scrape right up against the edges of it. Things pick up right after the end of the final Miss Rockaway Armada chapter and then lead into a train ride which after a lot of digging I figured out is briefly described in The Bus Chapter Five. Now that there’s so many of these I occasionally get the feeling that I’m repeating myself or perched on the edge of an incident I had described the opposite side of elsewhere.

Sometimes it can be hard to remember exactly where this happened because almost anything can remind me of something else and there’s little anecdote orphans all over the place. Before I got back into writing Rockaway stories I had ended up with some bits and bobs and even entire chapters that are Rockaway stories in everything but name.

This bit is going to be about my first time going down to New Orleans to experience Mardi Gras but just the hitchhiking part. This also worked out to be my first long distance ride on a freight train but Alexis wanted to catch a specific train that runs between Memphis and Metairie. To get from Saint Louis to Memphis we’d need to hitchhike.

I forget how many different rides it took us altogether but I just want to talk about one truck driver anyway. At this point I already had a handful of experiences hitchhiking with truck drivers but in a lot of ways they pretty much just run together. It got me thinking about how rarely I actually bother to provide complex visual descriptions of the characters in these stories but for truck drivers this is especially challenging for one particular reason.

They’re practically invisible.

Society doesn’t want to see them – we’re only interested in the products hidden away inside their trailers for which they represent a necessary inconvenience. You notice when your local store suddenly doesn’t have the thing you were looking for on the shelf but the person that needs to drive all night to get it there doesn’t cross your mind. Even as a hitchhiker your primary interest is something in whatever your destination city is no matter how much you love the little bits of color along the way.

The other thing about truck drivers is they’re kind of drained of color – especially if they’ve been doing it for a long time. Just like the faded upholstery in an old car they’re right there for every mile of highway and every hour of glaring sunlight even if they throw on a pair of BluBlockers sunglasses. Also even though long distance trucking is actually a very diverse profession I’ve only ended up in long rides with the white ones.

One of these did refer to himself as a “coon ass” in sloppily lettered stick and poke tattoos covering every inch of his exposed skin but besides that he didn’t look too different.

It makes sense. If they’re contract guys instead of owner operators the white guys are going to be a lot more comfortable flouting the company’s “no riders” rule as if it didn’t apply to them while their black and brown counterparts are going to be aware that a single slip up will mean their asses. Even if they are owner operators there are plenty of good reasons to feel less safe giving hitchers a ride.

It’s not so much what we might do to them as what we might accuse them of.

Back in 2000 a special cabinet started popping up in arcades called Sega 18 Wheeler. It was designed to mimic the cab and controls of a big diesel truck and if you picked the Japanese character you get a custom vehicle covered with flashy LEDs and cultural decorations around the windshield. Now that I live by Mount Shasta I constantly see Sikh truckers on the road who decorate their vehicles with special art for fallen comrades similar to tribute airbrushed t-shirts in the hood sphere.

One of those makes a good featured image for this chapter but unfortunately I’ve never had a chance to ride in something like that. It’s usually a monochrome Peterbilt with air ride and a dark wood like walnut for the switch panels. Those do have a cool look, and I always make sure to complement a driver on a sharp, well maintained ride, but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Anyway it’s hard for me to remember exactly what the driver in this story looked like. He probably had a baseball cap that had grown to look like it was part of his head and denim pants worn down around his keys and wallet. A bit of a belly in front but completely flat in back – the usual result of truck stop food, little exercise and long hours trapped in a single seat. A beard going white and a sleeveless tee with an eagle or something on it.

You know what truck drivers look like.

The ride had been unremarkable enough. Maybe he was the driver who asked me to make sure not to brush my hair as he’d never be able to explain away a long black hair to his wife. Light hearted jokes like that. The fact that there were three of us hadn’t been a problem – there’s a lot of room in those cabs with attached bunk area in case you’ve never been in one. It was an overnight ride and the energy abruptly changed at the crack of dawn.

We’d smashed some decent miles but he’d just pulled into a lot to stretch his legs and brew some coffee. He pulled out a miniature three cup drip pot while happily chattering away about how great it worked and how he’d take regular Folger’s over the fancy stuff every time. He suddenly froze.

After what seemed like a quick internal debate he asked us if we’d seen a small Tupperware container of ground up beans. We told him we hadn’t and made an exaggerated show of shifting our bags and bedrolls to the side so he could see every inch of his bunk. There was no sign of the thing. He popped open a Coca-Cola from his mini fridge and took long drags from a Marlboro Light while staring vacantly into space:

“You know, it seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

We didn’t say anything. What was there for us to say? A tense silence lasting the time it takes to smoke a single cigarette settled over the scene. At the end of it he shook himself with new determination. From the moment he’d stiffened up when his search came up empty he’d been purposefully avoiding our eyes but now he made sure to give each of us a meaningful stare:

“Whatever. I’m gonna step outside to take a piss. I’m sure it’ll be here when I get back!”

He was halfway out his door when his eye caught a mug full of loose change in his cupholder. He reached back in to grab it and held it close to his chest while shooting each of us a final glare. He closed the door behind him.

Finally we were free to talk among ourselves:

“What the fuck? This dude thinks we stole his coffee! We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

The situation was palpably absurd. What would we, who were on the road without electricity, do with a couple of dollars worth of unbrewed coffee? It wasn’t the instant kind and it’s not like you can just eat the stuff.

Still it hardly mattered. The sense of menace was real enough and his demeanor had clearly shifted to that of a rattlesnake. He was on the ugly side of sudden caffeine withdrawal and paranoia. We had no idea what weapons he had or what else he might blame us for if we didn’t slip away now. I was already reaching for the handle of the passenger door when the driver’s side one flew back open with the reassuring sound of lighthearted laughter:

“Man I suffer from CRS sometimes! Can’t remember shit! I was laid out in my bunk puffing a roach yesterday when the DOT guy came to the window! There’s a little hole that goes to my cargo containers (little spots for personal property that lock and are accessed from outside the truck) and when I dropped the roach in the coffee must have fallen with it!”

He never apologized for the accusations that he hadn’t quite directly made but the danger had clearly passed. The change mug returned to the cup holder. As the pot of coffee was brewing he eagerly wafted the rising hot air into his open nostrils:

“Oh man, the juice! If God made anything better he kept it for himself,,,”

I’ve heard a lot about truckers and harder stimulants and saw a lot of meth when I was homeless at a truck stop but never came across it hitchhiking. I didn’t need to. Plain old caffeine was plenty scary enough.

We rode a little farther with him. It wasn’t all the way to Memphis because we got to Memphis when Alexis ran up to an entire rugby team leaving an ampm. They were actually going the whole way to New Orleans for a game but we only wanted to ride as far as Memphis so we could do freight.

They took us all the way to the yard which was nice as it’s a bit out of the way.

They were about what you’d expect. Mostly talked about getting fucked up and partying but there were a couple of them broing down hard over Twentieth Century American Short Fiction:

“JD Salinger? Those are some good ass short stories! You read Hemingway bro?”

Probably just took a class or something.

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!

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Eleven : “One flame for each!”

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[Photo by Tod Seelie]

Living on a beach in Brooklyn, Illinois got to be isolating once nearly everybody from the project had left and there weren’t any vehicles around. It was a long bike ride to any bridge we were actually allowed to cross over to the Missouri side on. There was a train bridge right next to where we were but me and Alexis got caught by railroad bulls our second or third time using it and had to stop after that because we’d been formally warned that they’d arrest us for trespassing if they saw us on it again.

This was 2007 so although the 9/11 hysteria had died down significantly there was still a Homeland Security watchlist that the bridge was on. We’d occasionally see tanks and other military vehicles being transported across it so the extra strictness did make sense. There was actually a Homeland Security agent who would come around to complain that we weren’t gone yet but under maritime law we were a “vessel in distress” so he couldn’t do anything about it.

That particular law would be a good loophole to exploit if somebody wanted to squat next to any waterway indefinitely but that’s not what we were doing. We unironically were trying to get going down the river as soon as humanly possible. One night the line that connected us to shore was too short and a stark drop in the water level left us drastically beached. This frustrated the Agent even more:

“What if somebody came here when you weren’t around and pushed this thing back into the water?”

I guess whatever kind of Agent he was didn’t require any kind of background in engineering. We answered that we would be extremely grateful to that someone were it to happen but considering that the raft and everything on top of it weighed in around three tons we wouldn’t be holding our breath. After a while we stopped seeing him come around.

There was one guy who would sometimes give us rides or lend us his truck but the trade off was he was extremely annoying to be around. He was part of a group that dressed up in period costumes for the Lewis and Clark expedition and gave informative speeches to anyone who would listen. One day he showed me a lean to he had constructed from natural materials a little ways up the bank at an oblique angle to the raft.

The revelation that he spent an unknown number of hours essentially spying on us was one more red flag for his pile but we weren’t in any position to be selective. Sometimes Alexis would convince him to lend her his truck for a few errands and then disappear for most of the day. I’d have to babysit him as he got drunk, constantly asked rhetorical questions about when she’d be back and vaguely hinted at extracting some kind of sexual payment in exchange while being too much of a coward to just come out and say it.

On one of these afternoons a pair of Black fishermen offered me a small sturgeon that they’d caught and either didn’t have use for or was below the legal limit. Sturgeon grow to impressive sizes and always look like they are wearing funny mustaches. To prepare them for consumption you cut off the head and then squeeze the flesh out of the leathery layer of outer skin – it’s white and fatty kind of close to the texture of lobster tail meat.

For the rest of the day the Lewis and Clark guy kept making a point to talk about the fish “our African American friends gave you”. Every time he said those two words it was like they were a mysterious morsel of food that had somehow found it’s way into his mouth and he was trying to make sure he didn’t accidentally swallow it while at the same time trying even harder to disguise the fact that he found it unappetizing in the first place.

That kind of behavior was pretty normal for older white men around the Midwest – unless they were just transparently and unashamedly racist. After the railroad security recorded our IDs he had suggested that we bike into the city proper by taking an absurdly long and circuitous route that carefully avoided anything resembling a Black neighborhood.

We pretended to appreciate the advice but the neighborhood next to a train yard was actually a spot we’d already been coming to to explore an abandoned church. It had the remains of a unique kind of pipe organ where all sounds came out of the square shaped wooden structures that are often called train whistles. We each took a few of the small ones and one or two huge ones for bass tones – I felt kind of bad about stripping it but it was already incomplete and scattered and it seemed unlikely it would ever be repaired.

The other thing inside that church was a cache of treasure left by neighborhood kids who had evidently been pretending that the building was an archaeological tomb. It got pretty elaborate – most of the artifacts had been written on in a special script but they’d made sure to leave a key so we could learn it all belonged to King Shabbogabbo. They didn’t have much costume jewelry so they had covered a bunch of plastic poker chips in aluminum foil to look like coins.

I can’t even make up excuses for taking that stuff. King Shabbogabbo’s Curse is definitely on me and Harrison and we deserve it. That lesson can take a long time to learn – that when you discover something that cool there is more value in leaving it behind for future discoverers than taking it with you.

Besides the beaching situation which we could do relatively little about the most pressing order of business for The Bling was locating a larger outboard motor. Harrison found a redneck good old boy who was selling off a massive 150 HP unit. When we went to his workshop/garage he said that I looked like I have “sticky fingers” – while I pretty much never steal from associates or peers I understand that the fact that I don’t bother to hide my interest while looking at strangers’ stuff can be disconcerting.

When we first showed up he was having trouble getting the thing to start. I don’t know a ton about outboards but him and Harrison got it going with a lot of tinkering and connecting a hose while it was mounted on a transom. It was clearly a bonding moment for the two of them as they exchanged high fives and repeated variations on:

“Oh yeah, this baby’s gonna fly!”

Not the first thing that I’d expect a vehicle located on water to do but distinctions didn’t really matter. We’d never even get it started again.

After using Harrison as a pack animal to haul it on board he spray painted it gold and we turned our attentions to the matter of constructing a transom. I’ve written in another piece about our imaginary metal band of the same name and the friendly local who gave us access to his workshop of welders and torches. It’s not in a Rockaway chapter but you can read it here:

Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”

Here’s a few details I left out: the weldy guy lived in a mostly empty former apartment building that had a gigantic but empty beehive in one of the upstairs closets. It reminded me of a Matthew Barney sculpture and you could still catch a tiny drip of honey from the bottom to taste it. He made biodiesel in his garage and one of the byproducts was glycerine.

He told me that he would spread it on the ground in the woods to attract the deer that were the only thing he ate and he probably hunted with a bow. He was warm-hearted, extremely helpful and kind of gave off the vibe of how serial killers are depicted in popular media – everything about him was just a little bit too fastidious and methodical.

Once we had gotten the different scrap metal components of the transom in place we went to mount the motor and accidentally dropped the entire thing into the water which is probably the main reason it didn’t work. As crazy as it is for something designed to operate so close to water to be vulnerable to being fully in it that’s how it was – something designed to operate so close to water was vulnerable to being fully in it.

It probably didn’t help matters that Harrison took the advice of some passing fishermen and tried connecting the battery with the polarities reversed. There was an audible snap and the sound of burning. Whatever wasn’t broken from it’s little dunk got good and fried then.

Alexis stepped up and also found someone online who claimed he could help. He’d be coming by after a regular work day and had a rider of sorts – we needed to have a case of Bud Light waiting. He didn’t look at the motor at all that first night but he did completely change our perspective on fires.

The weather had been turning cold and the beach offered plenty of firewood that we usually burned in a metal barrel on deck. A couple visitors commented on how a fire on board a completely wooden vessel was a recipe for disaster but nothing ever happened. I think the plywood was mostly swollen and saturated from absorbing water by this point.

Our mechanic brought along a friend and they turned their noses up at our dainty barrel and dragged over the entire trunks of several fallen trees. They arranged them into a five pointed star pattern on the beach and got a huge blaze going in the center where they all met. The idea is that you gradually slide the trees inward as more of them burn and from then on that’s exactly what we did.

Most nights the flames grew higher than the towering construction on top of The Bling. We didn’t even have to manually light it again, just stirring the coals and throwing on a couple of smaller pieces in the mornings was enough to get it going again.

The mechanics told us that they were good on a sleeping spot and cuddled up next to their bonfire in matching horse and cowboy pajamas. They had a routine going all night where they were constantly wrestling and calling each other gay before going back to spooning. It reminded me of the sleepovers I used to have with my friend Gabe Saucedo while I was still in High School.

It was pretty cute.

The next morning they were pretty much useless for figuring out anything with our motor. It seemed like the whole mechanic thing was a put on and they just wanted to see our raft, get some free beer and hang out. It was around this time that me and Alexis began to realize The Garden of Bling would never move again and only semi-ironically floated forward the idea of burning it as the only way to get Harrison to accept reality.

We left him to fuss with the clearly broken motor and turned our focus to working on the wooden parts of the body while wearing second hand wetsuits to withstand the river’s increasingly freezing temperatures. There were still some project resources like power tools around but most of them were with The Sweeps across the river.

One night we went over to grab some of them while disgustingly loaded on Sparks. It was still legal to sell alcohol and caffeine in the same beverage and nonstop consumption of both led to this intense tunnel vision I’ve never experienced on anything else. Jacki tagged along with us and was laughing derisively at the modest size of The Sweeps’ campfire:

“Look at it! One flame for each!”

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Ten : “Let’s go clubbing!”

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When the rafts were still in Alton and for the first week in Saint Louis people were constantly approaching and asking how they could help. As much as I was a new guy onboard my camp counselor-like personality meant that I was instantly an ambassador. It was heart warming how much people who looked nothing like us were ready to offer all lengths of material aid they moment they set eyes on what we were doing.

In Alton a pair of older women drove me to a grocery store and told me to buy two hundred dollars worth of whatever our galley needed – mostly fresh vegetables as it easiest to only cook vegan meals so no one would ever be excluded. Somebody else had dropped off a heroic amount of fried chicken and some gallon jugs of Milo’s Sweet Tea. I have to confess that I succumbed to temptation and broke my pescatarian diet at the time to munch down a couple of pieces late one night when nobody else was within eyeshot.

I doubt I was the only one – while vegan was the most common onboard dietary preference the chicken was steadily disappearing somewhere. This wasn’t the case for some odd looking jars of preserved venison that another anonymous benefactor dropped off. While everybody was curious to look at it I never saw anyone open a jar to eat any.

I heard stories about stops upriver where the populace was less welcoming. In one town some crew members broke into a school to use the showers but got arrested because they let themselves fall asleep on premises. That created some bad blood. In another place the rafts were treated as bad harbingers:

“We know you River Gypsies brought the flood!”

Once we were docked at Cementland we were no longer visible from any road and most curious locals showed up by water. One morning a friendly fisherman showed up on a Jon boat and asked if there was any assistance he might be able to offer. We were good at provisions at that point but the charge was running out on the deep cycle batteries we used for lights and keeping everyone’s phone charged – unlike Alton there was nothing close enough to run an extension cord.

I asked if he could help charge a few of the batteries and then helped load them onto his boat and rode along to go plug them in where he lived. Once he got a little more comfortable with me he asked if anybody on the rafts smoked marijuana and I told them that of course many people did. He gave me a sandwich bag full of pre rolled joints of Mexican brick weed that henceforth lived in a dried out tortoise shell next to the sink where people brushed their teeth.

I can’t remember them ever running out but I do remember Caryl loudly complaining when she wanted a cigarette and the only thing around was endless free marijuana. At the time it felt like one of the moments, like simply living on whimsical storybook rafts, where it seemed especially poignant that the ordinary circumstances of our day to day lives would align with most peoples’ daydreams. Now I’ve worked on marijuana farms and stopped smoking the stuff due to panic attacks and it seems far more mundane for there always to be a surplus of the stuff everywhere.

I can’t remember how the big head carp came up but seeing as we were on a boat with a motor the conversation probably started with one of them leaping aboard. I looked back through the old chapters to see if I’d talked about the carp, or “flying fish”, but I didn’t see anything so I guess I should explain it here. Carp are filter feeders that literally eat other riparian organisms’ shit so some time before 1993 the owners of commercial catfish farms started importing them to help the breeding ponds clean.

Despite assurances that they would never escape into the surrounding environment the big flood of ‘93 resulted in many of the fish escaping into the Mississippi River. As an invasive species with no natural predators they have bred out of control since that point and come to dominate the river – displacing native species and at times growing large enough to weigh hundreds of pounds.

There are special underwater electric barriers to prevent the carp from ever reaching the Great Lakes but I haven’t lived in the MidWest for a while and couldn’t say if these eventually failed and the fish made it through. Anyway they have an adaptation that causes them to leap out of the water every time they hear a loud sound. Any time a motor was on they would leap onto the surface of the rafts – people wore helmets because getting clubbed over the head by an oblivious fish represents an ever present danger.

I remember seeing cool YouTube montages of boaters getting knocked overboard lIke this and a super satisfying shot of one beaning a dude in the crotch. I couldn’t find any good ones when I looked just now but if anybody has a good link by all means send it along and I’ll stick it in here.

Because the carp were bad for the river’s ecosystem we would make a point of beating them to death any time they found their way onto our decks. Me and Ellery used to shriek “Let’s go clubbing!” in exaggeratedly flamboyant voices before reaching for the closest wrench and going to town on them. In a pinch you could just grab the fish by it’s tail and swing it’s head directly against the plywood or I’ve even seen people quickly use their teeth to break the spines.

Because we were killing the fish anyway we figured we should try to make some culinary use of them. The most successful way was to boil them until the meat could fall off the bones to make a soup. This guy named Gabe usually cooked it – last I heard he was running a bar in some frontier town in Montana or something and had grown a big mustache.

The thing about Carp is they are impossible to fillet and their flesh is mucilaginous which basically means slimy like boogers. They’re pretty gross. The last time I bothered with one at all I only ate the three most muscular chunks under each of it’s fins as sashimi. This was only moments after Harrison helped me cut it’s head off with a giant rusty cleaver he called “Broot Strength” and I used it’s still twitching body as a plate while Harrison brought me soy sauce and wasabi in fancy little gilded dishes.

A visiting photographer friend named Brooke or Brookes took pictures but the links he’d sent me were in a Yahoo account I’ve long since lost access to.

Anyway when I was in the guy who gave us weed’s boat we hadn’t given up on trying to eat the things yet and he was incredulous that we’d even bother and asked me if I wanted to go catch some. It was pretty fun – he knew where the rocky berms that attracted the largest numbers were and I got to practice snatching them up in a net as they leapt through the air.

The fish from this expedition were either the last time we bothered with the soup or we put it off too long and had to throw them away. I forget exactly which.

After he brought back those batteries we realized that it would be easier to just charge them across the street in the offices of Cementland. They were pretty heavy and dragging them back and forth was an everyday chore. You could kind of balance one right between the handlebars of a bike, especially one of the choppers with “Ape Hangers”, but half the trip was over grass so it was almost easier not to.

The rafts had an orange and white cat named Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen – she had always stayed close before but the lure of Cementland caused her to move on to a landlocked lifestyle. People said they would sometimes see her wandering the park around sunset but I slept there for about two weeks and never did.

Right around the time we arrived some local independent filmmakers were shooting a sci-fi movie over there and hired us all as extras for the big crowd scene. They gave everybody Tyvek suits and had us haul rocks and act brainwashed in one of the former factory buildings while the film’s heroes snuck behind us. That’s probably how me and Lisers found the old Greyhound bus that John Patzius had modified – it was parked underneath the awning of the same hangar like structure.

It wasn’t so much that the rafts had a lack of privacy and good places to sleep as we were just excited to explore this newly accessible theme park. The bus had been redone with deep red carpets and vintage furniture that for some reason didn’t include a bed. It might have been too hot on there or dusty but almost immediately we moved on to the gigantic smokestack.

It was full of colonies of pigeons but we just brought a tarp along with us so we wouldn’t be lying on birdshot. The acoustics were something else – there’s a special echo kind of like a flanged out shotgun blast you get when shouting or clapping into really long tubes, I’ve noticed a similar sound with the buried cannons at the Marin Headlands.

We invited some other folks from the raft to bring along instruments and experiment with recording in there. It was nice to fall asleep staring at tiny circular portion of the night sky through a little hole about two hundred feet above us – Lisers thought the stars made it look like a drawing of a happy face. We were usually up and moving before the sun had climbed high enough to shine directly into it and heat the place up.

We stayed over there until Lisers went back to Germany. By that point the raft project was over for most people and the last big to-do on that side of the river was a generator show for Warhammer 48K and Skarekrau Radio on top of the pylon. With everybody dancing on a concrete pillar seventy feet above the water and swinging out over on it on this metal gate there would have been a lot of ways for people to get hurt. Thankfully somebody thought to spray paint a warning onto a piece of plywood:

“BE CAREFUL FOR REAL”

That seemed to do the trick. After the show me and the rest of The Garden of Bling crew started staying onboard our raft in East Saint Louis and only The Sweeps stuck around on the Cementland side. It was time to try to get our respective rafts moving again.

The Bling had a tiny little outboard motor that was only about 35 horsepower. Before they had modified it’s transom to include a steering system somebody had to stand on top of it while holding the edge of the wooden structure for stability and try to adjust the motor’s direction by using all of their body weight to shift it from side to side with their feet.

Corey Vinegar had been doing this when he fell into the water and disappeared under the propellor. Blood started floating up to the surface as he forced his head above the water and screamed for someone to give him a knife. Apparently his shorts had gotten tangled up in the mechanism and he needed to cut himself free before swimming to freedom. He had a big scar on his leg after that but got off relatively light considering how close it was to sensitive, vital areas and how sharp propellor blades are.

I guess I threw that in kind of casually. As far as I know it was the most severe accident and injury for both Mississippi River years of The Miss Rockaway Armada combined which is not bad at all all things considered. Any way Corey was with The Sweeps now and we were going to need a much bigger outboard motor.

Harrison found somebody selling a used 150 HP one somewhere nearby. We never actually got it functional but at least we spray painted it gold. I’ll get into that next chapter.

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Nine : “If you come to my business don’t mention my name”

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There are a ton of photos from The Miss Rockaway Armada. If anybody wants to see more of them and get a better idea of how all the rafts and people looked on a day to day basis all you have to do is go over to the Flickr group and there’s at least ten pages of them.to almost certainly outlast your appetite. It’s really nice that it’s still all there – for some reason the Flickr group for on the experimental opera that Lisers organized in Berlin a couple of years later seems to have disappeared.

What this means for me though is that I have a near endless amount of choices when it comes time to pick one to stick on top of a chapter and they don’t always align with the moments I found important or memorable. My time on the rafts began when I accompanied my friend Melanie or Double or Sphere from the Blog Cabin in Chicago to the Marina they were docked at in Alton, Illinois.

She was going down to start living on them and I was only tagging along to check them out and visit. Things worked out the other way around – she was only down there for a brief visit and I stuck it out on the rafts longer than almost anyone. When I finally went back to Chicago in November of 2007 only four other people stayed behind on The Garden of Bling: Alexis, Harrison, Jacki and Brodie.

The Sweeps might have still been working on their raft on the other side of the river but most likely they had already abandoned it and moved on. Everybody’s goal was to float into New Orleans in time for Halloween. When Halloween hit Saint Louis the thing in town to do was a reggae themed roller skating party in a remote part of the city. It was enough of an outskirt that me and Eric from CAMP and Lester and a couple other people got assaulted by a carload of rednecks for being and/or looking gay.

I don’t remember seeing any of The Sweeps at the roller rink so they probably just went down to New Orleans by other means when it became clear their raft would never make it. Or I could be wrong and they were still in town. It’s entirely possible.

Anyway Alton, Illinois wasn’t actually the first time I ever set foot on the rafts. The Miss Rockaway Armada first set out from Minneapolis some time in the Summer of 2006 but rather than trying to overwinter on the water they found a bar in Andalusia, Illinois called Ducky’s Lagoon where they were able to dry dock everything and work on renovations.

I did actually get a chance to visit in March or April during the Ducky’s Lagoon phase. These events would have been right around the time of the piece I called “We can’t play. Somebody stepped on our flan.” when I was traveling with the girl I refer to as Rocky. We would have just returned to Chicago from our hitchhiking trip to Columbus, Ohio and then decided to go out to see the rafts on her suggestion.

The best way to start hitchhiking out of Chicago is to take a bus down to a truck stop called The South Holland Oasis that sits directly on the Interstate 80. The trip to Columbus had worked out pretty quickly but trying to get West was not working out as well. Now that I think about my attempt to hitch South in Illinois a few years later was even more miserable – Chicago is probably a city that it’s just easier to hitchhike North or East out of.

We had gotten out of the city but just barely and then spent an entire day standing around the side of the 80 with nobody seeming to give us a second glance. It was brutally hot and we were probably sleep deprived because we decided to take a nap underneath a bit of shade in a ditch. When we stepped back onto the shoulder Rocky suggested that I lift her onto my actual shoulders to stand out more and catch driver’s attention.

I was down to try out but I figured we might as well paint our faces with the brightly colored zinc sunblock we had found at the two story Salvation Army on Grand Avenue. It was a trend from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that I’ve been surprised hasn’t made a comeback with all the other big fashion nostalgia from those decades – an opaque cream that comes in white and neon colors like blue and pink. The trend was to put it on your nose or in stripes under your eyes.

It’s probably supposed to offer extra protection to more sensitive skin on those parts of your face.

Rocky never ended up climbing on my shoulders because the moment after we painted colorful designs on our faces a van pulled off to offer us a ride. To everyone’s surprise it was a band that had recently come through Chicago and played at the Blog Cabin: The Minneapolis folk / Gothic Americana group Dark Dark Dark.

If that wasn’t enough of a coincidence they were also heading to the exact same place we were – going to visit the rafts at Ducky’s Lagoon. When we told her our destination Nona from the band said “Get out!” but in a tone of voice that made it clear she was only expressing incredulity at the serendipity of it all and actually meant “get into this van and we will take you directly there with us”.

The sunblock was in brand new sealed packages and we had bought all they had because it was cheap. We decided to leave it all with the rafts because the people on them would be living outside directly on the water and therefore get the most practical use out of it. If you look through the photos there’s a ton that show people wearing it – mostly in an eye makeup style similar to the picture from the El Rancho codeine party.

I thought about using one of the many photos of people on the rafts wearing this neon zinc sunblock as the featured photo for this piece but ultimately decided not to. I suppose I could easily embed one of those photos here. I was about to write a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do that but now I’ve changed my mind again so here’s one of Tracy and A’yen:

I thought that I wasn’t doing very much of making a point of putting up pictures of the people who are in the stories so the one at the top is Rocket and Brandy Gump from The Sweeps. Rocket is on the left and Brandy is on the right. They both liked to play accordion.

Here’s a story about Brandy Gump from before I came to the rafts: the closest town to the beach where The Garden of Bling got stuck is Brooklyn, Illinois. Venice is pretty run down and besides liquor stores and the kind of Chinese Restaurants that are behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass the only thing there is strip clubs. One of them had a creepy day care right in it’s parking lot called Leonard Bo Peep’s.

I think that’s the one from this story – I forget what the actual club is called. I never actually went inside any of them. The story was that before the rafts actually made it down to Saint Louis a big group of people made a special trip to this club to participate in amateur night. Brandy performed to Toxic by Britney Spears and had put on a comic amount of layers of clothing and underwear that she frantically pulled off in a way that was supposed to be confusing to the regulars and still resulted in her having more things on underneath.

The next week she went back by herself and won the first place prize. Presumably she went with a more traditional performance this time around but as nobody else from the rafts was with her only Brandy would know for sure.

Brooklyn and the rest of East Saint Louis have a pretty rough reputation. When I was an extra on an episode of The Real Househusbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly was in the same scene as me and the script included a joke that implied he was from East Saint Louis. He demanded they change the joke and wanted everyone to know that while his music did first find success in East Saint Louis strip clubs he was from regular Saint Louis.

Around the time that Tim from Cementland started hanging out with The Sweeps he had driven everyone to a grocery store where Corey Vinegar got caught shoplifting cheese but Tim ended up getting arrested because he had warrants. The warrants were very much in line with Tim’s personality as a stereotypical character from an early Eminem video when he first started hanging out with us.

To fill out the cliche he had a Pit Bull that had just given birth to a litter of puppies in his house that he needed us to go take care of until he was released because nobody had money for bail. The dogs were all living on a bare cement floor and had, predictably, made a mess. I was with The Sweeps that night because there was a little bit of a flirtation going on between me and Brandy at the time.

It would have put me in a bit of an awkward position if it went anywhere as the two raft crews were essentially rivals but it didn’t go anywhere and things started up between Tim and Brandy not long after he was released. I was reluctant to even include the detail at all but I figured it was important because even just having a little fledgling romance with someone for a single day will alter the way you view and relate to that person from that point on,

There’s a little bit of softness that never goes away and I figured it would be better to just explain it instead of pretending like it didn’t exist. Besides that I got along well with all The Sweeps through every stage of the rivalry more or less.

Tim didn’t have so much as a mop in his house so I made an improvised one by tying a wash close to a hoe so I could clean up the copious amounts of puppy shit. Cementland was no longer a functioning cement factory but Tim must have done some kind of cement related work before starting there because besides his cement floor all the tools in his house were cement style tools. I only mention this because the hoe I used was the kind used to smooth out the surface of freshly poured cement if that helps anybody get a clearer mental picture of it.

I remember hearing later that he’d given all the puppies up for adoption but had the mother put to sleep as she was dog aggressive and human aggressive and would be nearly impossible to get adopted. Josie was particularly upset about this when he told everybody what had happened. I don’t doubt anything he said but even entering it’s home as a stranger when it had a litter of puppies I don’t remember the mother dog behaving especially aggressively.

I realize that these details will trigger intense emotions and reactions for some people but I’m only including them to help readers get a sense of who all these characters are – Josie in this particular instance.

Cementland is on the edge of a North Saint Louis neighborhood called Jennings. I’ve written somewhere else about the liquor store there that also sold hookahs, clothing and used cell phones that were probably stolen as they always still had the previous owner’s photos and contacts left in them. The same parking lot had a laundromat, tiny grocery store and fried fish place so it was a popular destination for everyone on the rafts.

I discovered that the fish spot sold an absurdly cheap meal made from these fried fish called bullheads – as crazy as it sounds I think it only cost three or four dollars in 2007 for two fish, a side and the piece of white bread that I’ll never understand why these places even include. One of the times that Rocky was visiting the Middle Eastern owner struck up a conversation with me and when the rafts came up he expressed interest in coming to see them.

Most people who heard about the rafts wanted to come see them in person so there was nothing especially surprising about that. Meeting people that lived on little floating shanties made out of scrap lumber is a new and unique experience for most people. He asked if he should bring anything to drink and I said he could if he wanted but it didn’t really matter.

He showed up with a twelve pack and immediately mentioned that he didn’t drink alcohol. I thanked him and passed a few beers around to whoever was hanging out. We probably had a small fire going just under the walkway that led to the pylon that had been used to load cement onto barges when Cementland was still a functional factory. That was the usual evening activity but everyone could have been just hanging out on the engine raft as well.

He hadn’t been there long when he got up and abruptly left. My phone rang in basically the exact amount of time it would have taken him to walk back to his car. Through his accent I was getting hints of what sounded like sarcasm and a touch of accusation:

“Hi Ossian! You drink all the beer already?”

I said we hadn’t as it had only been two minutes since he’d walked away. His tone shifted from fake saccharine friendliness to overt irritation:

“Do me a favor, if you come to my business don’t mention my name! I don’t want my workers thinking anything!”

I have no idea what that dude’s deal was. Obviously it had something to do with sex. Muslims often view Westerners, especially people in the kind of subculture the rafts were a part of, as especially promiscuous and sexually available. When he talked to me and Rocky at the restaurant it was clear we were a couple. I don’t know if he was expecting to have sex with her or with me or with both of us. Maybe me as the Park closest to the rafts was a well known male on male cruising spot.

I mean there was no possible chance that anybody would have had sex with him under any circumstances – I just thought it was odd how angry he suddenly got without doing anything to even try to make that sort of situation happen. I guess I was supposed to offer the moment I saw he’d brought us a little bit of beer or something. I went back to the restaurant a lot because it was the only cheap food in that particular neighborhood but I never saw him again.

I don’t think I ever knew his name to begin with. Weird dude.

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Eight : “Did they get their dresses dirty?”

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I figured it’s high time I actually finished the story of the junk rafts called The Miss Rockaway Armada and put a nice little bow on the whole thing. It’s been so long since I wrote the earlier chapters that they are way shorter than the kind of pieces I write now and none of them have pictures on them. Maybe I should go back and either add more details to them or lump them together into a smaller number of entries and stick some appropriate photos on them.

You know that thing that people say “a picture is worth a thousand words”? I kind of added both. Compared to my earliest pieces the ones I make now probably have at least a thousand more words and a picture. When I was first starting this project an old friend of mine named Martin Bilben was reading it for me and offering advice and said something along the lines of “every word should be there for a reason”. I think I’ve come around to what’s basically an opposite understanding that to craft the effect I’m shooting for I need to add a lot of words for no reason at all. Tyrant. Cosecant. Quaternary.

It’s not like I’m rambling for it’s own sake. I think it conveys a very specific emotion or something like an emotion when I do it the right way. I couldn’t explain how it works or anything but I pretty much write all these in a single draft and when I read them back it more or less sounds right. I could be wrong – everybody’s mother says they’re handsome if you know what I mean.

Anyway if you haven’t read the earlier Rockaway chapters you could go back and read them now and it would probably only take as long as reading two or three of the new ones. Here’s a link to where it starts to make it really easy:

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part One: On the Nature of Junk Rafts

For whatever reason I didn’t do the thing where I put the year and city in the title but all of this was in 2007 and it was pretty much all in Saint Louis or East Saint Louis except for a couple of days at the very beginning that were in Alton. The rafts went way more places than that but I wasn’t there so I don’t have stories from it.

I’m going to pick things back up immediately after the events of chapter three: The First Annual Junk Raft Rodeo. The Coast Guard and a random fisherman were determined to help us tow all the rafts against the river’s current to dock at Cementland. All hell broke loose but miraculously nobody was killed or injured and the rafts ended up more or less back where they started.

You can read about it in more detail in the chapter I just wrote down the name of.

As they were depositing us back on the banks of East Saint Louis everybody was convinced that the first words out of the Coast Guard’s mouths would be that we were crazy and our rafts were a hazard and death trap and we needed to get them the hell out of the river. Before the failed towing attempt the Coast Guards had been showing us videos on their cell phone of a different junk raft one or two Summers earlier colliding with a barge and getting sucked into the river.

That raft was led by a guy named Matteapolis. I was never sure how to spell his name because I’d only heard it and never seen it written down but this guy named Geoff I met at the Black Butte party this year told me how to spell it. I guess I should have guessed it would be exactly like the name of the city except for the “Matt” part.

I wish I had swapped contact info with the Geoff guy because I’d be interested in talking to him so more. I gave him the blog link so maybe he’ll read this and could reach out.

That would be cool.

So anyway if you’ve read the earlier chapters you’ll know the Coast Guards didn’t say any of those things. They were actually excited to keep trying and already had ideas to increase the chances of it being successful. We had been doing all the traveling in Voltron mode, or with all the individual rafts tied together, but they said it was probably the worst setup for towing. It makes sense – a single junk raft already creates a ton of drag so sticking a bunch of them together in roughly the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece could only make things worse.

The first raft they wanted to try with by itself was the engine raft – to quickly recap it was the best constructed, made out of three parts for a total length of sixty feet and had two Volkswagen Rabbit engines in the back that had been converted to propellers. I had forgotten the names of the engines but I talked to Caryl for a second and found it was Mortimer and Jenkins. We couldn’t have turned them both on during this second tow because one of them, probably Jenkins, had gotten it’s propellor shaft bent out of shape during the fiasco of the first attempt.

I don’t think they were far enough apart that only turning on one would cause the raft to go in circles but it probably wasn’t even necessary to turn the remaining one on. There were no problems during the towing of the engine raft whatsoever. I would say that it went off without a hitch but of course it was necessary to hitch the engine raft to the far more powerful Coast Guard vessels.

You know, for towing.

Once the engine raft was securely tied up at Cementland it was time to try to tow up the smaller rafts and the next one in line was The Garden of Bling. This one was thirty eight feet long, covered with a three story structure and completely useless mast and sail and was the one I had recently gravitated to as my home vessel. This tow must have failed almost completely due to the Bling’s inferior constructions as opposed to our actions as crew members during the tow – considering that none of us had to do anything but sit there while the engine raft was being towed.

At the same time I don’t want to take credit away from us for royally screwing up our responsibilities as crew members while the failed tow was going down because we did that with flying colors.

The entire endeavor had kicked off pretty close to the crack of dawn but between the first disaster, the second success and gearing up for this third attempt it was inching toward evening. I can’t remember what part of the day it was when we started drinking but we were good and drunk. Sparks was the usual beverage for Garden of Bling degeneracy but for whatever reason that wasn’t what we were drinking this time around – it was beer in bottles.

The Coast Guards had given us a walkie talkie so we could communicate with them during the towing process but we kept setting it down and forgetting where we had put it. They were really unhappy about that. Obviously we were all really invested in holding a bottle of beer to drink out of but that still should have left an extra hand for the walkie.

I think what happened was that the bow started to dip under the water and when the deck was getting covered in river water Harrison grabbed a broom to try to push the water back over the edge. He probably set the walkie talkie down somewhere to pick up the broom. When the raft was succumbing to drag and sinking into the water and none of us were picking up the walkie talkie they had given to us to check in during exactly this kind of situation they probably had to radio another Coast Guard vessel to come find out what was going on.

What they found was a crew kind of laughing, being unconcerned about where the walkie talkie was and thinking that pushing water with a broom would make the situation better in any meaningful way – drunk people stuff. If you’ve ever made public servants like Coast Guards or Park Rangers get angry at you by being inappropriately drunk you know the kind of voice – like suddenly serious incredulous authority guy voice.

I remember my exact level of being drunk in the moment as like bright colors and things lurching around but not to the level of feeling motion sick drunk. Sometimes I have dreams where I’m this kind of drunk walking down a street and I fall onto the ground and start sliding forever because in this drunken dream universe there’s no such thing as friction.

In the dream version the fact that I can’t seem to make myself stop moving makes me anxious but in this particular real life situation I wasn’t bothered at all. The situation was probably potentially dangerous and we had just screwed up our only opportunity to get the raft towed to where we needed it to be but if you scroll back up and look at the photo I definitely look I’m having a good time.

Harrison is sitting directly next to me in the center of the photograph. He maybe looks like reality is dawning on him about the severity of the situation and what it means for this particular raft a little bit. He was always the least willing to accept the fact that The Garden of Bling would never get moving again and we’d never make it down to New Orleans like he wanted to.

That’s Nick underneath the neon orange hat. You can’t see his face at all but the angle of his head isn’t exactly expressive of exuberant joy. That’s the thing about photography though – it tells an absolute truth but that truth is limited to the tiny portion of time during which the aperture is open. Maybe a fraction of a second later they looked as happy as I did. Who can say?

We pretty much exhausted the good will of the Coast Guards and screwed things up for all of the other rafts that were hoping to get towed up to our promised berth several miles up the river. Or that would make the most sense. If not for the phantom anecdote.

I have this one distinct memory that is nearly impossible to reconcile with the surrounding facts but I know it has to be based on something g that actually happened. Once The Garden of Bling tow failed and the Coast Guard said they weren’t going to help us anymore and any raft that wanted to keep moving had to prove it could safely navigate the Lower Mississippi nearly everybody abandoned the project and started dismantling their rafts.

We were going to try to keep going on The Garden of Bling even though we were stuck away from Cementland back in East Saint Louis. And then there was another crew that was going to try to keep going too. I nicknamed them The Chimney Sweeps, often shortened to The Sweeps, and the name basically stuck and they started using it.

The name had it’s origins in my friend Josh from Oakland telling me that his housemate Vanessa had made a statement about needing to stop dating guys that looked like chimney sweeps. It basically referred to the mid 2000’s New Orleans adjacent train rider fashion of wearing a lot of striped socks, button on suspenders and just dark colored old timey sort of clothes. And then if you were traveling all of this stuff would usually get really dirty too.

The Sweeps were led by a girl named Brandi Gump. She had originally been connected to The Garden of Bling and had even built a part of it, a small taxidermy museum on the second story, but it got cut off with a Sawzall when it made the raft float lopsided. There was also this shifting relationship thing where she’d been dating someone on The Bling and now that person was dating someone else.

I don’t really need to say who these people were – if you know all these people you already know. That was pretty much a hallmark of The Rockaway anyway – there were some couples like Caryl and Nick that stayed together for the length of the project and probably before it and long afterwards and even to this day as far as I know, but it was much more common for these things to be in flux.

Brandi wasn’t around when I first showed up but she got back to the boats and started putting a crew together. It was her, this really nice girl named Josie that kind of gave house mom vibes and a kind of scrappy feral girl named Rocket that had already been on a famous raft before with someone named Poppa Neutrino that you can look up.

Then it was Corey Vinegar, Soup and eventually Tim from Cementland. Tim worked for Bob Cassily and was pretty much a mainstream vaguely wiggerish dude until the day John Patzius had him operate a backhoe to help pull the furthest aft section of the engine raft out of the river. After that he hung around the rafts as much as possible and at some point him and Brandi started dating and he changed his name to Tim Treason and adopted the chimney sweep fashion all of his crew mates were into.

The phantom anecdote was that at some point I heard that the Coast Guard also tried to help The Sweeps tow another raft up to Cementland and also failed. What I can’t figure out is when this would have happened or what raft it would have been. The vessel that The Sweeps ended up trying to retrofit was the galley, or the central portion of the engine raft, and this had already been towed up in the only successful tow of the three part engine raft.

Obviously it wasn’t The Garden of Bling. That leaves The Giraft and The Kirksville. The Giraft had been built on top of an actual commercially produced aluminum pontoon and Charles started dismantling it the moment after the failed Bling tow so that’s out. The Kirksville was built by girls from Kirksville and was designed to be bicycle powered which I don’t think was especially viable and not long after it came untied in the night and washed up on some rocks downstream and we cannibalized different pieces of wood from it to try to do repairs on The Bling when it started to break down.

The Kirksville seems like the best contender for this failed tow but something about it seems unsatisfying to me. Could there be another raft I’ve completely forgotten the existence of? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Here is the phantom anecdote:

I heard that the Coast Guard tried to help The Sweeps tow whatever raft it was up to Cementland and in the course of failing they briefly had to tie it to the side of a coal barge. This wasn’t something I saw first hand. Either in person or over the phone I was repeating this anecdote to Caryl who had most likely already left the project. The only thing keeping this whole thing in my memory is her response:

“Did they get their dresses dirty?”

Amarillo 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Three “I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

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I usually remember what the various Greyhound Stations look like because of how much time I spent in them. I really miss the old one in San Diego that used to be on Broadway and shared the block with a run down Hotel. Obviously I grew up there but downtown San Diego seems to have changed more than any other city I’m aware of. The Oklahoma City and San Diego Greyhound Stations both used to have Old West style snack bars with wooden wagon wheels and stuff on the wall.

The New Orleans station is among the most visually arresting – sharing space with Amtrak and having brightly colored mid-century murals on the wall. Using counterfeit passes remained easy here after it was impossible in most cities of comparable size but it’s been ages since the last time I tried it. When I lived there I got a Central Casting job for the movie Elvis & Nixon where they disguised the space as a 1970’s Airport Terminal. I was supposed to be a homeless guy sleeping in the background and I did such a convincing job that the security guard tried to kick me out without realizing I was part of the production.

Anyway I can’t remember the Saint Louis one although as soon as I typed those words I had a sudden vision of a fancy indoor mall with high arched glass ceilings. That’s probably actually Union Station and the trip I’m thinking of would have been onboard Megabus: the company that cut costs by only using curb space at other transport companies’ stations and terminals. No matter how hard I try I can’t seem to conjure up an image of the Saint Louis Greyhound – maybe it was possible to catch it at the small transit center near Cement Land called Jennings.

I think the one in Amarillo looked almost identical to the one in Grand Junction, Colorado that was on the route between Chicago and San Diego so I saw a lot of it. A small building with a low ceiling and windows all around it where the buses pulled up on the side. I think I somehow didn’t have a cell phone yet so I found a payphone to call up LBK. My memory might be inaccurate on this detail but I think I didn’t get a cell phone until 2009.

Wait… I just realized that it has to be because I suddenly got a stray memory of buying used cell phones from a liquor store in Saint Louis while I was on the Rockaway. This place was in the shopping center next to a Laundromat and a fried fish spot I’ll tell a story about later just down the street from Cement Land. It was a bigger store run by Middle Eastern guys that sold a bit of everything – electronics, embroidered hats and jerseys, probably hookahs but they had a bunch of used cell phones people had hocked with them underneath the glass counter.

I must have been losing or accidentally breaking cell phones a lot, probably by accidentally dropping them in the river, because I clearly remember doing this several times. The phones were either stolen or nobody bothered erasing their photos so it was always a surprise what you’d find on them. One time it was all pictures of kids but another one was full of blurry shots of Black boobs and beads at Mardi Gras.

I remember getting one that had a sample of a dirty rap song as the ringtone and I had forgotten to change it before I went back to substitute teaching in Chicago. I think I was actually teaching a Preschool Class by the projects when somebody tried to call me and the song started playing. The kids all thought it was really funny:

“I was gettin’ some head, Gettin’ Gettin’ some head…”

On that note I called up LBK when we got into Amarillo and he took us to the office he was working at with Stanley Marsh 3. Brodie had told me some stories about Stanley – that the Marsh and Bush families were big into land and oil together and were the richest families in Texas, that he had created a roadside attraction called Cadillac Ranch and various “prank” street signs around town and a number of other trickster oriented public art projects. The big thing I’d heard was that he had paid a mutual friend from the Rockaway five hundred dollars to jerk off onto him.

On this trip I was traveling with Leg who was also my girlfriend at the time so I didn’t see as much of the scene as I did on subsequent visits – Stanley really didn’t like when girls were around. The office was on the fifteenth floor of the tallest building in Amarillo – it was later called the Chase Tower but I don’t think it was on this first visit. The moment you stepped out of the elevator you were in a big room with oversized upholstered pool balls that Stanley had commissioned and large insanely valuable paintings everywhere. I mean like Jackson Pollocks, Rothkos even some Henri Matisse stuff and it was all just leaning against walls and shit.

There was one older guy who worked in the office, possibly Stanley’s son, and an older female secretary but besides that it was a bunch of “art-punk” looking young men – teenagers and guys in their 20s. I’m not sure what kind of work was actually done in there, maybe managing Stanley’s assets and buying and selling his art collection, but it was mostly set up for skateboarding in, working on art and grabbing snacks from a big well stocked kitchen.

The scene was kind of like the Foot Clan Headquarters in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but also a lot like My Own Private Idaho. Everything was clearly designed to attract and be appealing to the boys who all kind of had the “rough trade” hustler look and Stanley was very clearly a chickenhawk. On this first visit me and Leg were able to get free lunch, this was always hamburgers or club sandwiches with those fancy colored cellophane toothpicks on a plate with French fries that came in those hotel style metal trays, I don’t know where it came from but it seemed to be inside the building.

Me and LBK played around with a color photocopier they had just gotten. We did stuff with aluminum foil and bits of jewelry and experimented with moving the stuff around while the different colors were scanning. If you’ve never played with one of the old kinds it does four consecutive scans: cyan, magenta, yellow and then finally black. You can get cool effects by slightly moving the image either during or between scans. One cool trick is only leaving the image for one of them and then quickly swapping it out with a white piece of paper to make analog color separations.

Stanley would always call on his intercom to ask about whatever friends the guys in the office brought up and if it was younger boys he would ask to meet them in his office. I think this first time he briefly met and talked to both me and Leg but he didn’t try anything. The guys were talking about how I should really see his house called Toad Hall but we couldn’t go this trip because no girls were allowed. We were trying to catch a train toward California that same night anyway.

I never actually made it out to Toad Hall on any of my subsequent visits either so I won’t attempt to describe it but you can Google it – it sounds pretty fucking crazy.

Personally I have a certain repugnance for prostitution at least where I’m concerned. I have no judgement against anybody that does it but I don’t want money to be the reason that I’m fucking somebody or that they’re fucking me. I’m super down with lesser forms of sex work though, I made a solo video for a site called Alternadudes for example, and only having to jack off onto a dude for five hundred dollars sounds like a hell of a payday. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

The next time I passed through Amarillo was on the homeward leg of the 2010 Bleak End/Generation tour. We were grabbing the same free lunch that always gets people in the building when he asked for me to come talk to him in his office. He had an authentic tiger’s skin rug on the floor and laid on a couch where he could watch a wall of TVs like the villain from Watchmen. He’s still the only person I’ve ever met who watched a wall of TVs like this in real life.

I had been wearing a very small pair of black shorts for most of the tour as it was an extremely hot Summer. They had already gotten me kicked out of the workout room at the Providence, Rhode Island YMCA where they said that they were appropriate attire for swimming but not for exercising:

“There are children here!”

I always thought that was a strange argument as children wear small shorts too and there’s nothing overtly sexual about me showing a lot of leg. I could understand if my genitals were full on hanging out or I was brandishing an obvious erection but neither of these was the case. Besides that there were presumably children in the pool too and if anything the water would make the shorts more revealing as it would cause them to cling to my skin.

Anyway in Stanley’s office we were talking about something completely unrelated when he put his hand on my thigh and brought up an acquaintance who had proffered services for payment. I said that I’d heard about it. He gestured toward a pair of buttons on the armrest of his couch:

“If I press this button it will close my door. It won’t be locked but nobody will be walking in and disturbing us.”

I said that was fine. In light of some further revelations I’ll be getting to in a minute here I find it significant that there were two buttons – that there were absolutely situations where he was locking the door. Everybody in that office knew exactly what was going on and never would have opened that door without knocking so the only purpose for the locking button would be something more sinister. More on that in a minute.

I wanted to get right down to business and talk about money but he wanted to wait until after lunch. He was also rather curious about my tour mates:

“What about those other boys, they like getting their dicks played with?”

“I doubt it. They’ve had a pretty strict religious upbringing.”

His plan ended up backfiring for both of us. I didn’t get five hundred dollars and he didn’t get jizzed on. Rain and Joel had been going hard on the snacks – eating gushers and slim jims and shit but once they got wind of what was happening they were grossed out and wanted to leave. They saw the cabinets full of the favorite junk food snacks of their adolescence as a sinister kind of lure which quite obviously they were.

On the way out of the building Joel gestured to a life size bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln sharing a bench with a pair of small children:

“There’s Honest Abe… just trying to get an honest blow job!”

I passed back through in 2011 on the way back to California from SXSW but I didn’t get the payday then either. Stanley went for someone else I was traveling with who although older than me maintains eternally youthful features and a surfer’s physique.

I had only ever heard of Stanley’s arrangement going down with legally consenting adults but there was no denying that he was attracted to boyishness and youth. Later in 2011 he had a stroke and was criminally charged and briefly arrested in a suit that eventually involved ten defendants he had coerced into sexual acts from the time they were sixteen. It wasn’t the first time this had happened either – similar cases came up multiple times in the ‘90s but disappeared after large cash settlements.

The same thing happened with the 2011 case and according to rumors made each of the plaintiffs a multimillionaire. There are plenty of eighteen year olds who look sixteen or younger but Marsh was clearly attracted to youth and vulnerability and repeated his pattern of behavior for decades. He was a predator and an entire city looked the other way for decades because of his wealth, influence and status. He deliberately chose victims from the poorest echelons of society in order to get away with it for as long as possible.

He died in 2014 without ever being formally criminally convicted.

Back in 2008 me and Leg went from the office to a space downtown that some of LBK’s friends lived in. I’m not sure if it was normally a performance venue or practice space but it was pretty dark in there and had the black paint and duct tape look of a community theater space. We got some beers and hung out and waited for it to get dark enough that we could catch the train without much possibility of anybody seeing us.

When night fell we grabbed our packs and walked across town to follow Brodie’s map to the proper set of train tracks. A block or two from our destination we ran into a group of Juggalos outside of a Burger King who were clearly on the road as well. They all looked young and chubby, like teddy bears that were completely unprepared for the harsh realities of the dangerous world they were stepping into.

One of them offered us some advice about hitchhiking that I’d largely say was incorrect:

“If you want somebody to give you a ride you gotta have something to offer: either a good story, some drugs or money or you’re gonna have to suck some dick.”

One of the other Juggalos chimed in proudly:

“I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”

That might be how getting rides works at Juggalo Gatherings but it certainly hasn’t been my experience for hitchhiking in general. If you’re standing on the side of the road with a sign out people are already going to assume that you don’t have anything. They want you to either talk, listen or shut the hell up and to have the basic situational awareness to figure out which one of those the situation calls for. To “read the room” as it were.

I did get into one ride where the driver wanted us to hurt or murder him but that’s far from the norm and I’ll get into it in a story eventually. I’m sure the sexual expectations are much higher if you’re hitchhiking as a single female but that doesn’t mean it’s a prerequisite for getting rides. When that shit happens you get out by any means necessary and you find another ride.

One of the Juggalos said “Jesus Loves You” and handed us a single dollar. I was carrying it around for a while as a “Lucky Juggalo Dollar” but I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe Leg kept it. For a brief window of time I would have thought of this dollar as a sort of talisman but this was all very early in my magical thinking career- before the “World’s Worst Magician” phase.

I had said earlier that most of my freight rides were in the company and under the guidance of more experienced riders but this was the one case where it wasn’t – or the second case of you count the brief ride across the Mississippi River. I might be wrong about this but I think that when we left Chicago it was Leg’s first time riding freight. I found one of the “nacho boats” I talked about before and we slipped into it.

The train sped up on the edge of Amarillo and we were on our way to California…

[Note: for more information on Stanley Marsh 3 and the charges against him I highly recommend the following article]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/darkness-on-the-plains/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”

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[photo credit: Tod Seelie]

The last piece I put up was my hundredth post on here so I wanted to do something special to commemorate one hundred posts. One idea I had was to take an event that someone else I knew had almost as clear a memory of as I did and have them write up their own recollections of the night/show/party whatever and then post both of our recollections together but do it double blind so neither of us could read the other person’s memories before typing up our own.

I still think this is a great idea – if anyone has strong recollections of something I haven’t covered yet and would like to try this give me a shout.

My other idea was to go back and rewrite the introductory piece about going to see The Make-Up in 1999. It might not even be clear to my newer readers that this was the introductory piece but it was the first thing I wrote since BAD FISH several years ago and the device I used to kick off this entire Winter writing project. I was messing with the dates for a bit as a quick hack to put the pieces in the order I wanted but I decided to stop doing that. A friend and mentor whose advice and constructive criticism was instrumental in building both my confidence and momentum at the beginning of this voyage had always said that it was the weakest piece, and it had already gone through a couple of rewrites, so I always figured it would need some adjusting.

When I went back and actually read it again I was struck with how much my voice has evolved and changed over these hundred entries and I found myself mystified and baffled by my earlier overly ornamentative style. Attacking this piece as an editor would feel like I was pulling the legs off of some kind of fragile insect – they say that to write and edit effectively one must “kill your darlings” but as far as I could tell it was already dead. Much like I did with BAD FISH, I opted to leave it pinned to the page as a specimen and curiosity.

I fixed a couple of obvious grammatical errors and adjusted the year but I mostly left it in the form it was originally written in. To measure anything you need a starting point and that piece will serve as origin on the graph of my literary attainment. There is one small detail that needs addressing however – in that piece I made an absurdly empty promise to deliver these various tableaux as a background character. The truth is that I was never a fly on the wall but always a fly in the ointment and the only way to deliver these accounts is the way they happened – with me conspicuously buzzing right in the center of things.

The last bit of business I want to take this moment to deal with is the title – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America. Barkev had introduced me to a book called Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by a Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who became stranded on a failed expedition in 1527 and spent the next eight years living and traveling among indigenous groups who, for the most part, had never seen another European.

The book reads a bit like an ethnography, a bit like a travelogue and a bit like a picaresque novel. When I made the decision that I would be writing up my experiences and stories with what I’ve been referring to as Underground America it seemed like the perfect reference and organizing principle. An entire hidden landscape that pulsed beneath the surface but to it’s architects, initiates and participants the most vital thing in the world. Even in the ‘90s when the term “alternative” was on every music executive’s tongue it lay beneath the trends – the alternative to alternative.

With all of that out of the way I’d like to jump right into telling a story. 2007 to 2008 was an absurdly busy year for me. In Winter I was part of the crew that was laboring to get The Garden of Bling river-worthy while most hands were abandoning the Miss Rockaway Armada project and dismantling the other crafts. To deal with the Lower Mississippi we needed a higher power outboard motor but we would also need to attach a larger transom to the disintegrating plywood of the raft to use one.

Luckily we met one of the archetypical junk sculptor welders found in every post-industrial city living off of Cherokee Street in Saint Louis who was happy to help us and let us use all his fancy tools. He was just about meticulous enough to be a serial killer – he only wore jeans and plaid flannels, he only drank Jimmy Buffet Landshark beer and he only ate stews and chilis he’d made with venison he hunted himself and kept in a big rectangular freezer. I’m going to take a wild guess that he probably killed it all during bow season.

Everything we did was fueled by Sparks which was still available in the highly caffeinated version. Me and Alexis had already bought used wetsuits to go into the freezing water and try to replace the plywood bottom that had been scraped off in successive beachings. I might have explained this before but I’ll explain it again: the rafts didn’t have anything like an airtight hull. They floated on pontoons that were essentially plywood boxes stuffed with styrofoam.

With the bottom missing my favorite analogy was a bowl full of cheerios turned upside down in a bathtub. In this analogy just pretend like the cheerios can’t get soggy – their natural buoyancy keeps the bowl afloat and the edges of the bowl keep the cheerios trapped underneath. If the bowl is rocked by waves or wakes a few of the cheerios drift free. The wakes of passing barges were a constant reality on this section of the Mississippi so chunks of styrofoam, the allegorical cheerios in this situation, were starting to fill the water and litter the beach.

We had a name for our efforts to replace the bottom while floating, The Garden of Bling Dive Team, but we didn’t have much progress or material success. We were trying to drive lag bolts into the two inch edges of 2 x 8s but with the lumber completely water logged and the necessity of driving the bolts upward underwater while being rocked by constant wakes we weren’t really getting anywhere.

We did the same thing for our efforts to install the transom – we took pictures for an imaginary metal band called Transom. I wrote a song about the fact that I always had to retrieve dropped tools from the water because I had a wetsuit and I was the tallest:

“Why does metal always sink?

Why’s the River fucking stink?

Holy Shit I’m in the drink again!”

By November none of it was working and I decided to take the cat we’d found, Night Beaver, and go back to Chicago. I wasn’t gone long when I heard that Harrison had broken his back doing a triple flip off of the nearby train bridge while wearing a wetsuit. This might sound serious but he pretty much bounced back from it without issue. This is the thing with Harrison – he’s constantly reckless but when it comes time for life altering injuries or serious consequences it slides off him like mercury and lands on the people around him.

Usually women.

Because it was 2007 and we were underneath a major train bridge agents from the Department of Homeland Security were constantly coming by and expressing how much they’d love it if we were gone. The raft was registered however and we qualified as a “vessel in distress” so they couldn’t make us leave. Boat and water law is different from normal law or even weird Mexico and Louisiana law – when I think about it I picture a yellowed scroll with decaying edges and a red wax seal.

Anyway everything’s legal when nobody’s looking. With everybody off the raft at the same time to check on Harrison in the hospital it was easy for somebody to set it on fire. I’m not necessarily saying it was DHS that did it but they did want us to disappear. Scrappers used to come down to that river bank to burn the insulation off of copper wires so the scrapyard would give them a better rate. Maybe they burned the Bling.

Alexis and I used to talk about burning it once we realized that it wasn’t going to be earning the Coast Guard’s approval for safe navigation or making it down the river. I was mainly upset that somebody had beaten us to it.

So 2008 came around. I was probably in Chicago for New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was the party at Heaven Gallery or somewhere close to it where I fell and chipped my front tooth on the ice outside. There was a phenomenon at this party we referred to as “Frat-Bro Valhalla”. The way the space was set up there was a special balcony or mezzanine full of frat-bros that seemed to be looking down on the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out how they had gotten to that spot or if it was all the same party or anything else.

I got drunk and fell and chipped my tooth on the ice outside.

I made it down to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras and then to Miami for the International Noise Conference and a couple months later onto The Bus for the Living Hell tour. Out to California for the Living Hell reunion and then to Australia with my sisters. I played the first two Bleak End at Bernie’s shows in Brisbane and Sydney. Sydney is a beautiful city but freezing cold during Australia’s Winter which happens to be Summer in the United States.

The skies are full of sulfur crested cockatoos in the daytime and flying foxes at night. Leg had asked me to bring her back a cockatoo feather. After watching a fairly awful modernized production of Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House, it featured playboy bunnies and simulated fellatio, I spent the rest of the night walking the Botanical Gardens. At dawn I found it – a perfect white feather with just a trace of bright banana yellow along it’s edge.

It seemed too important to entrust to International Mail and Leg had moved up to Portland. It was getting harder to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes. I’m not sure if they changed something in their computers or the station agents were just catching on to us but it was getting to a point where the stations in big cities would turn me away and I’d have to try all the little satellite stations until one worked.

I stopped trying to use them in 2008. I’m sure a lot of people threw in the towel even earlier and some must have dragged it on even longer. It feels unlikely but I’d love to hear that somebody is making it work in 2023.

Anyway I accidentally got ahead of myself a little bit because I thought that the quick West Coast tour with counterfeit Greyhound passes happened when I came back from Australia but I checked a date and it would have had to have been before.

I bought my Boss Dr. Groove drum machine from Rand in Chicago at the end of the bus tour – I used to joke that it used to have a bit of a drinking problem because it would have drinks spilled on it and get knocked off of tables every time Carpet of Sexy played. When I first started writing on it only a few of the buttons would stick but it eventually stopped working altogether.

Bekah had been the other founding member of our rap group Chew on This and had just moved out to Los Angeles. I had only written a couple of Bleak End songs so we played mixed sets with half Bleak End and half Chew on This material. I have no idea what we billed it as but the shows were probably too last minute for us to be on fliers anyway. Cole from Deep Jew came along and played a second keyboard.

The detail that fixed the dates for me is that we went to GLOW – a public arts rave on and around the Santa Monica Pier. We weren’t playing this event but we were carrying all of our gear with us and I had one of the bigger keyboards tucked under my arm. Someone yelled out the window of a passing van that I looked like Bob Marley which was a little confusing as I was tall, white, wearing heavy eye makeup, didn’t have dreadlocks and was carrying an instrument I didn’t think he was particularly known for.

I guess it was an example of “out-group homogeneity” – to some people the entire diverse landscape of performed music must seem like the same thing.

I had a friend from the rafts named Jaci who lived down the street from the pier, I’ve written a little bit about her sister Jacki who happens to be in this chapter’s photo, and we stashed all the gear at the apartment she shared with her mom. Then I gave everybody acid which turned out to not be the best idea. Cole and I were old hands with the stuff but the girls were fairly, if not completely, new to it. I probably should have split a single hit between Jaci and Bekah but you live and learn as they say.

The plan was simple: spend the night having fun tripping at the public arts rave and catch a bus toward the Greyhound first thing in the morning to travel on to San Francisco and our next show. The moment the drugs kicked in both Jaci and Bekah freaked out and ran off so me and Cole ended up in damage control mode – too busy tracking them down and making sure they were ok to even notice that we were tripping ourselves. I do faintly remember a tiny bit of light shows and dancing but most of the night was spent searching and worrying.

We found Bekah sitting in the shadows underneath the pier, like among the pylons right when the sand hits the water. She was staring off into space and it took quite a while before she was ready to speak. Finally she offered this small glimpse of her internal world at that moment:

“Filas… They’re cool, right?”

I agreed that they were indeed very cool shoes and we spent most of the night on the sand and in the shadows. Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool was on display – a giant concrete roller that leaves behind a topographical map of the city in the sand. In function it was quite similar to the cylindrical seals made of lapis lazuli and other precious stones in Ancient Mesopotamia. They rolled across clay envelopes leaving behind decorative scenes that doubled as proof that the contents hadn’t been tampered with.

The night had been planned to coincide with a grunion run and it may have also been a Full Moon. Me and Cole were splashing around in the tide looking for the fish, who seemed to have missed the memo, and he made some kind of joke about the grunions arriving as spectators to see the crowds of oddly dressed people assembled on the beach. The concept set off an avalanche of questions in my head about what it would like if the participants in any kind of sub-cultural spectacle were outnumbered by the spectators, or even worse if only spectators showed up.

The question only seems to have become more poignant in the intervening years as live shows have become seas of recording phones and cameras and documentation seems to have superseded experience as a primary motivation. It was very much on my mind when I finally made it to the Folsom Street Fair after years of hearing about wanton displays of BDSM-themed role play. It felt like everyone was there to gawk but nobody was there to be the spectacle.

I’ve also seen the other side of this equation being thrown out of balance when I went to SXSW in 2011. Obviously people show up to the festival just to watch bands but for the small shows I was playing it was nothing but artists hoping to be seen and noticed. The way I figured the only point to playing these shows was rolling the dice to see if you would end up forming a relationship with the band that played directly before or after you. Nobody else was going to see you – everybody had booked five or more shows a day and had to leave the moment they could take their gear down.

Just like my first story about The Make-Up I feel like the Underground is most vital when everybody is acting as both participant and spectator and the line between the two isn’t particularly distinct. I’m sure there are places where this still is happening and it makes sense that I’m not immediately privy to them. I’m forty-two years old and I live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere but I still have faith in the youth.

Back to the story we had found Bekah but we wouldn’t be able to play our next show without our instruments. We weren’t able to get Jaci on the phone during the night and now it was going direct to voicemail. I found out later that she had thrown her phone away in a momentary paranoid freak out. Google had one of it’s offices just down the street from her house and her and Jacki had a running joke where they would approach the receptionist with inane requests:

“Ahem… Naked pictures of Angelina Jolie please.”

In 2008 the special cars that drove around capturing images for Google Street View were still a common and conspicuous sight, this is when they had the special cameras on the roof that looked like soccer balls. There seemed to always be a lot of them in her section of Santa Monica – maybe the Google offices included a special garage that they were coming and going from. Anyway she was frustrated that none of the calls seemed to be going through and she thought the “Google Gang” was stalking her so she threw her phone into some bushes somewhere.

We didn’t know all of this but we knew we needed our instruments so the only thing to try was walking to her house and seeing if she was there. As we walked away from the Pier a group of cyclists started heckling us for being pedestrians. I tried to argue that walking had roughly the same ecological impact as biking but Cole came up with the following joke:

“Oh yeah? Why do you think they call it a carbon footprint?”

Two blocks later we passed the same group loading all of these bikes into a pair of oversized vans. For all of their bluster cycling was evidently only a thing they did to cover the short mile between the party and easy to find parking spaces.

We knocked on Jaci’s door and after startling her mother’s creepy roommate we learned what had happened and were able to retrieve our keyboards. The longer lasting consequence was that Jaci and Jackie’s mother went from thinking I was an excellent chaperone and influence on her daughters to thinking that I was a very bad one. Not that it would matter much – neither Jaci or Jacki would be living with her for very much longer.

We caught the bus toward the Greyhound in accordance with the itinerary I had mapped out to get us to the San Francisco generator show in time to perform. An old wino who was evidently an experienced musician noticed our keyboards and offered this timeless advice:

“You can play all the wrong notes. Every note the wrong note. Just play them on time.”

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Providence 2008 : The Bus Part Six “She Was Totally Hot Too!”

berniebleak1 Comment

By the time of the Living Hell tour I was starting to get used to documentarians as a new fixture of whatever you call it when transportation, performance and audience participation coalesced into whatever the specific thing was. I don’t think I was actually with Friends Forever while their documentary was being filmed but I at least rode along for a social call with the aforementioned documentarian. The most conspicuous example was a pair of German documentarians that had arrived on the Mississippi River Junk Raft project I spent time on the previous summer called The Miss Rockaway Armada – they did the thing where one of them holds a boom mic that visually screams “documentary crew” to anybody that might be looking.

To a certain degree it can probably be said that the best documentarians are outsiders in relation to their subjects. I’d imagine most of my readers would at least be aware of the true crime streaming miniseries called The Staircase that played out as a cautionary tale against documentarians over identifying with the people on the other side of the lens. We expect them to be a little older, a little square and to be dressed in cargo shorts and vests in different shades of khaki. These things are somewhat comforting in that they reinforce boundaries that actually do feel important and we expect to exist.

When I came up with the nickname “the stooge” for our documentarian I wasn’t trying to be especially mean-spirited or exclusionary. It was a riff on the character referred to as the bond company stooge in the then recent Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between that director’s films, my generation’s tendency to self-mythologize and the steady commodification of anything resembling a hipster trope. In a lot of cases the assignment of a nickname is a harbinger of the outsider’s acceptance into a group as it means they are both seen and referred to in a way that unites it’s subject with the larger group against newcomers.

There isn’t one perfect way for a documentarian to collect footage or interact with their subjects but there is no mistaking the sensation that it is being done wrong. One thing that should certainly be addressed is that throughout the loose organic process of deciding who would be in Living Hell or coming on the tour the prospect of a documentary film wasn’t actually discussed. The bus functioned a lot like a collective punk house in that things were decided by group consensus and there was a tendency to assume nearly anything was fine until somebody expressed that it wasn’t. My point is that there were people among us who wouldn’t have been comfortable with even a near perfect documentarian.

I can empathize with the feeling that cool things are happening in front of you and need to be captured by any means necessary but ultimately I’m here to tell you about what it felt like to be on one side of the camera as opposed to the other one. These were the little things that made us uncomfortable: being asked to repeat an action that was just performed but wouldn’t have naturally been repeated. attracting more negative attention when sneaking behind restaurants and stealing used vegetable oil out of the used vegetable oil trash can. being constantly asked little questions and just generally feeling that the camera was less of a fly on the wall and more of a fly in your ear.

All of this would have been fine and natural steps in the mutual acclimatization process if most of us didn’t feel like we were repeatedly voicing concerns only to feel like nothing was actually changing. We also felt like even if all of us accepted the necessity of the documentation process and everything it entailed the same could not be said for all of the people in the various cities we visited who decided to come to our shows. Insofar as the camera represented an invasive gaze we didn’t want to feel responsible for subjecting friends and strangers to that same invasive gaze.

There was a galvanizing moment when growing reservations shifted decisively to the entire situation being simply untenable. I can’t remember what city or show this was at, which is probably for the best, but as I often do I remember what was said in precise detail. I’m not trying to imply that the following stupid statement defines the person on the other side of that camera. We’ve all said stupid things when trying to fit in. They approached me and Rain:

“Hey, this girl just walked into my shot and took a piss without noticing my camera! She was totally hot too!”

Before this moment we had been discussing the numerous smaller uneasinesses but had been trying to shoulder them for the sake of the resulting document. John Benson had been pouring heroic amounts of energy and material resources into keeping the bus rolling for years at this point and the prospect of a documentary film backed by a major music magazine felt like too big of an opportunity to pass up. The preceding revelation was a deal breaker: the most charitable way of saying it is that it wasn’t a cultural fit.

I can’t remember why this had happened but our paths diverged and then reconnected in Providence, Rhode Island. A conversation was had to the effect that filming and traveling together would not continue. I remember watching the documentarian calmly walking away down the single exit street that the bus had parked on for the show. They seemed to take it well. The short documentary did come out. I’m glad it exists. I imagine if you could peek under the hood of nearly any documentary film in existence you would see some of the same things: discomfort that segues into schism, compromise or some combination of the two.

The show was outside of a venue called Mars Gas Chamber. Jeremy Harris had made a large sign from a stop sign or something to direct people to where the party was that said something along the lines of “Oakland Acid Bus”. I thought that I had met Jeremy for the first time earlier that year at INC but ended up learning in the course of these stories that he was actually playing in USAISAMONSTER when they played Fort Thunder during my 2000 pilgrimage. We share a lot of friends and acquaintances but have settled into a kind of convivial mutual indifference.

I told him that it didn’t feel quite right to have the word “acid” sitting there as descriptor. I’ve been talking about the stuff non-stop for the last three chapters or so but at this particular moment in time it felt incongruous to me, not just for me but for the bus in general. Like it was too reductive when used to describe what we were about. I don’t remember Jeremy’s exact words here but I’ll do my best to paraphrase:

“That makes sense. I used to think that you weren’t that cool of a person and it was because of acid.”

That little exchange didn’t really bother me, I’m used to people thinking I’m an asshole so something like “I used to think you’re an asshole” doesn’t even track. It took me a long time to figure out I was nearsighted and I still don’t wear my glasses as much as I probably should so I constantly look like I’m narrowing my eyes at everyone in disapproval. Anyway I want to get back to not liking how it said the word “acid” on the show sign.

It’s uncomfortable seeing yourself the way that other people see you. The human voice sounds significantly different traveling through air than it does when carried to the inner ear by bone. When someone talks as much as I do people say “they love the sound of their own voice” but I don’t. Nobody does. Those of us who make recordings and frequently speak or sing through amplification have to try to make peace with it but it still sounds wrong almost every single time.

This is all to say of course it was uncomfortable to become part of the subject of a documentary and it will be uncomfortable for the person who made that documentary if they read my descriptions of what it was like to be there when they were making it. I think it can probably feel like I’m just stirring shit or being a sanctimonious prick when I write about this sort of thing and while I don’t think I’m exactly doing either of those things I did make a conscious choice to just stop thinking about how any of this might make anybody feel.

Way back in the Fort Thunder section I referred to USAISAMONSTER’s performance as “amazing” but the reality is I don’t remember much about what they sounded like that night. I remember Colin waking up and brushing his teeth right before they played and how excited they were about the counterfeit greyhound scam and riding with them after the show to the Silver Top Diner with a girl I had a little crush on and accidentally leaving these brown rubber monster gloves with fake fur on the back in their van.

If I feel bad about anything it’s for using a shallow, vapid adjective like “amazing”. There’s really no excuse for it: It was disrespectful to them, it was disrespectful to you my readers and I’m going to make a sincere effort to simply not do that sort of thing again.

Next Part:

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Odds and Ends From (Mostly) America : “How You Live? How You Stay Alive?”

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I’ve been thinking a bit about what the definition of a story is and how many of my favorite stories wouldn’t actually qualify as stories under commonly established criteria for defining them. I went through a period of reading the nosleep subreddit a lot and tried my hand at writing a few pieces on it that weren’t very good. When I wrote The Dreams in the Red House I thought it would be a good idea to share it there as it was my first piece that actually felt scary.

It got removed after a couple of hours for not being a story. Apparently detailed descriptions of a series of nightmares and sleep paralysis events doesn’t count as a story on that board unless it results in real world consequences. I thought of adding a throwaway final sentence like “and then I woke up and the monster was in my room” and resubmitting it to be obnoxious/funny but decided to just leave it alone.

Now one of my pieces, The Name Is Death Turkeys!, does actually contain a piece of original horror fiction but I’m not sure if it would count as a story either. I don’t want to put in too big of a spoiler in case any readers feel like clicking over and checking it out but I’ll say that the story is somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not anything supernatural happened. I wonder if there are pieces by writers like Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft that are horror classics but wouldn’t count as stories on that subreddit either.

Anyway the things I am going to be calling stories in this piece are just situations where strangers said things that I thought were funny. On the non sequitur to joke continuum most of these little sketches would probably list toward the former. I was thinking earlier today that this whole bit might work better as a comedy album because so much of it is going to depend on vocal mannerisms and timing. I know the exchange rate between words and pictures is fixed at one thousand to one but where would it be for audio?

The first selection in what will probably be a triptych comes from San Diego and was most likely the late nineties as I don’t think I was drinking yet. I was sitting with Francois at the prototypically San Diegan twenty four hour burrito shop on Third Avenue and Washington Street – I want to say that it was early in the afternoon but it could have been the middle of the night. Francois was telling me a story that wasn’t one about the type of tea that is supposedly picked by monkeys.

The story always goes more or less the same way: somewhere in China there are wild tea plants growing on mountainous peaks and ledges too precarious to be reached by human hands. Instead a tribe of wild monkeys has taken to collecting the tender leaves and exchanging them for fruit with the nearby villagers in an arrangement as old as time. I kind of doubt the reality is as idyllic as this anecdote would suggest but even at it’s worst it would have to be a million times better than the somewhat related cottage industry of force feeding coffee berries to wild civets and waiting for them to shit it out.

The following character was seated at the next table over: a bald and slightly heavy set white man with a soul patch dressed in a leather jacket and one of those colorful caps made up of triangles in different shades of leather suggestive of the 1970’s and Funk Music. He held a small brown paper bag that was crumpled at the top to accommodate the fluted neck of a forty ounce bottle of malt liquor. He looked significantly in our direction and offered the following observation in a voice tinged with sadness and wisdom:

“I’ve heard they uh… steal your belongings and what-not. The monkeys…”

If you’ve seen the Tupac Shakur movie Gridlock’d his voice and speech style were nearly identical to that of the small time heroin dealer and jazz musician character called Mud. The film is set in Detroit but I’m not sure if this monkey man was from there. He seemed to have stepped out of a timeless world where saxophones, poetry and cigarette smoke compete for space in the stilted air of an endless afternoon. Soulful eyes speaking out in earnest wistfulness for an endless stream of pilfered cameras and sunglasses.

The next bit comes from around 2005 or so in the hey-day of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass. I was crossing the desert on my way to or from Chicago and stepped off the bus to stretch my legs. The sharp eyes of a young Desert Rat lit upon the book I carried and the finger as bookmark to indicate it was no mere accessory. Having now spent time living in different versions of what is essentially an oasis of artificial irrigation surrounding an Am-Pm I understand why such a simple sight would have stood out as both significant and encouraging.

He was dressed in what is more-or-less the standard uniform of a dusty California nomad whose life can be neatly divided into long walks either to or from the convenience store. The brimmed cap with protective neck flap was there but what leapt out even louder was the refillable and sun faded insulated soda barrel. It was the kind that the guys who hold the stop sign for road construction crews always carry – probably 64 ounces if I had to guess. He had a long plastic straw to allow sipping without having to lift this burden any higher than waist level:

“Whatcha reading?”

I held up my copy of a popular translation of The Saga of the Volsungs and told him it was The Saga of the Volsungs. He proudly held up his own significantly thicker volume that I have to confess I stopped reading the title of after recognizing the Dragonlance logo. I understand that the books have a bit of a reputation and following but I struggle against deeply ingrained culture snob tendencies. The entire situation reminds me a bit of teenage trick-or-treating dressed as a Rene Magritte painting and causing my friend’s clown costume to appear especially pedestrian in comparison:

“Uh… yeah. This one is epic poetry about the Germanic Hero Siegfried…”

He crumpled his chin and attempted an expression of grave intellectualism. His rejoinder would have been hilarious as piss-taking mockery of my snobbishness but as a genuine attempt at pantomiming a Classical Education it was timeless. In the disaffected tone of a worldly scholar:

“Yeah… Socrates… Siegfried and Roy… I’ve read that stuff…”

I could throw out something wry about the Western Tradition here but honestly I think this particular pull-out quote speaks for itself.

The final bauble comes from a situation where a person whose natural register already falls within the “comedic voice” category suddenly switches to a different, intentionally comedic voice. This isn’t the actual bit but during the production of the experimental opera Fever of Unknown Origin in Berlin in 2009 Raul and I went out to the Museeinsel dressed as goblins. I was in black leather with a witches nose and a badger’s preserved fur mask as headdress; Raul was wearing a horses mane in tanned leather on the back of his head and high platform boots.

We hadn’t specifically coordinated our looks but the entire trip had been goblin-themed for me at least. A woman politely asked in precise German if she might take our picture. I was actually the only member of the American contingent to understand German but I pretended not to because we’d been posing for pictures all day and I was getting bored of it. She asked her male companion what language he thought we might speak in the same precise German and he shrugged.

She asked in German again but with an exaggerated goblin voice like the character Blix in Legend. I still pretended not to understand and we didn’t pose for a photo but I think about this lady and this moment all the time. That rarest of anomalies: a German attempt at humor that was actually quite funny.

This brings us to the third and final thing that I am loosely referring to as a story. I was with Jacki for this one, the brief Jubilee to my Wolverine: a mouthy teenage Asian sidekick. I think this happened in Los Angeles but it could have been Saint Louis or New Orleans. We met on the Rockaway and did a bit of traveling.

I am going to refer to the man who we met on the street as a “crackhead” but the facts of the matter are that we only ever saw him smoking marijuana. I am using the term only for some specific tropes concerning voice and character. A Court Jester like persona and the type of deep and raspy speech you can no doubt already hear in your head. He had asked us to smoke his weed with him and we weren’t smoking very much of it so he complained that we were getting him “drunk” as he took one uninterrupted toke after another.

As these guys are always wont to do he was holding court on nothing much of anything:

“The other day my kids come up to me and say…”

This is where things got odd. When he switched to the character of his “kids” his voice got even deeper and even raspier. Think of somebody that already speaks in a stereotypical “crackhead” voice and now imagine that person doing the most intense exaggerated impression of a “crackhead” voice they could muster. The tone was still light and comic but the edge on the voice was like something out of a horror movie:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

My response was almost involuntary:

“Damn! Your kids got some fucked up raspy ass voices! They even older than you are?”

We all laughed. I was making my wife laugh telling this story again in the car with me. She’s getting near her wit’s end with the stories which is part of the reason I started writing them down in the hope that getting some of it down in print would save me from cycles of endless repetition but she never gets sick of this one. I thought about the absurdity of telling the story, doing his voice and then doing him doing the voice.

As always I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with the hypothetical children. It occurred to me today that maybe they weren’t children in the usual biological sense at all but rather some type of deeply fried homonculi he had inadvertently created by spilling blood on the ground like in the first Hellraiser movie. Twisted, skeletal golems of wire, bone and garbage clawing their way out of the mud and desperately wanting to know:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

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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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