At least Duane Peters liked us

It was the Daggers' first show and we wanted to make a splash. My friend Mike, who runs Beer City Skateboards and had put out a couple Lunkhead records, was putting on a skaterock festival at The Rave in Milwaukee and had asked us to play. It was a big room and gonna be a big show, so we wanted to do something memorable. I was just coming off almost a decade of playing, booking, promoting, writing, recording, and travelling with Lunkhead and told Rob I just wanted to play guitar, trade off vocals Rancid-style and write about half of the songs and that was it. He was gonna be in charge of everything else. Rob was really into bands like The Dictators and the Toy Dolls, confrontational-type stuff, and he came up with the onstage assault idea (a gag that would become unfortunately real like 5 years later, but that's a different blog for a different time).

The idea was this: we'd get a breakaway bottle like they used for movies and stuff, and have Rob and Christian argue throughout the set, culminating in Christian breaking the bottle over Rob's head as the last song ended. What could go wrong?

Christian found the bottle at a prop supply house and got a couple blood packs for good measure. It was a quart-beer style bottle and looked exactly real. We soaked a Budweiser bottle in water and got the label off, sticking it to the fake to add authenticity. It was also super expensive, so we wrapped it blankets like a baby made of china to transport it around.

We got to the show and loaded in. It was super crowded and we were giddy with the excitement of our impending shenanigans. And also our first show. But mainly our shenanigans. The U.S. Bombs were also playing and we spent a few quality hours in the bar with those guys getting acquainted. Their singer is skateboarding legend Duane Peters, and Duane was really stoked that we'd fashioned our band after the evil skateboarder gang from Thrashin'. "The Daaaaggers, maan, thaaat's cool...!" he kept slurring. Everyone was getting more and more wasted, it was one of those all-day type deals and we were both at or near the end of the bill and I started to worry about everyone being able to maintain until we took the stage. I went outside to collect my thoughts, but could still hear Benzer howling in the bar.

My head had reached sea level by about the time we were set to go on, so I headed back in to tune up and whatnot. Rob and Christian were already on stage setting up, with wry smirks on their faces while Dan yelled at the audience. I set up and plugged in while surveying the crowd. There were a LOT of people here. Sweet. Rob and Christian had already started bickering amongst themselves but I think that part was legit.

We started the set and ripped through the first couple without stopping in between, and when we did, on cue Christian and Rob started jawing at each other. I sorta played onstage peacemaker, while Dan screamed at the crowd.

We played a few more and Rob and Christian started yelling at each other in between songs. I told them to can it, only half-joking. They were really starting to go at it, and I was scared they'd either oversell it or actually start fighting. Dan screamed at the crowd.

A few more and another break, applause from the crowd (who seemde to be digging it at this point), and more Dan screaming and more arguing.

We went into the last block of songs and I saw Rob slyly slip the blood packs into his mouth as he grabbed his beer off his amp. Now they were actually yelling at each other DURING the songs, really going after each other. It was uncomfortable and awesome at the same time, like when you see two drunks fight really violently, but you hate them both, so you don't care that one is putting the others head through a window. Like that. And Dan was screaming at the audience.

We got to the last song and hit the last note and as Rob turned to the mic to say his goodnights and goodlucks, Christian leapt over his drum set quick as a cat and blasted Rob across the back of the head with the bottle, shattering like real glass all over the people in the front. There was a second of silence, then an audible gasp as Rob slumped violently to the stage, while security (unaware of our hijinks) and Dan (screaming) pulled Christian off the stage. I went over to check on Rob. He staggered to his feet blood pouring from several places on his face and he was woozy. Turns out, his overly-realistic 'passing out' led to him smashing his face on the stage monitors. So, in addition to the fake blood running from his mouth, he had real blood pouring from his forehead. I grabbed my guitar in one arm and him in the other and dragged him off the stage and pushed out the door through a confused, mortified, and angry crowd, all the while I could hear Duane in the background screaming above the din, "The DAGGERS, maaaan! The fuckin' DAAAAAGGERSSS!!!!!"

Tonight I'm going to jail (part 2)

It's the next day and the DAGGERS show up at Trax recording studio for our after-hours, under-the-table time as the previous, better, more responsible band was loading out the last of their gear. Trax is a really nice, really professional studio that's super big money and staffed by consummate professionals. Luckily for us, one of them was sorta goofy and had agreed to record us after his paying customers are done that night, it was only one song, we should be able to knock it out in a couple hours.

We loaded in our gear and started setting up, it was about one in the morning. Rob and I set up our stuff and went to go wander around and check the joint out. It was beautiful-hardwood floors, and crazy windows, and a full kitchen! Sweet! Me and Rob began rooting around to try and make coffee. We found coffee grounds in the fridge, but couldn't find a coffeemaker. We banged around in the cupboards, opening and slamming drawers and doors and swearing loudly when we hear from the door way behind us,

"Wellll, hellllo boyyzzz, whaddaya doooin'?"

I knew the voice instantly, instinctively. But, how, why, here...? I turned around and sure enough, there in a white terrycloth bathrobe, stood JELLO BIAFRA. Wow. And we'd woken him up!

I apologized and told him we were pulling an all-nighter in the studio and were trying to make some coffee. He was nice, said it was no biggie, he was just crashing there while making a new LARD record. And as far as coffee goes,

"Alllll we've got is a french pressssss..."

We did our thing in the kitchen, then did our thing in the studio. We were loading back out as the sun rose misty and cool over Lake street while a cop car parked nearby, backed up against a wall, it's windows all fogged up.

Tonight I'm going to jail!

So, my band THE DAGGERS had somehow lucked into a Friday night show at the Double Door. It was our first time playing there, and while most bands would be stoked at the opportunity, we just saw it as a chance to act like assholes through a nicer p.a.. We were already a week late delivering a song for this compilation we were supposed to be on and hadn't even recorded it yet. We had set up some under-the-table recording time at Trax studio for the next night after-hours, but had been forced to shitcan the last couple practices and were pretty rusty. And drunk. So, Rob decides we should just play the song we gotta record in 22 hours, "Tonight I'm going to jail", ten times in a row. It was a brilliant idea then and it's a brilliant idea now, so it was a go.

My guitar amp was on the fritz, so I sauntered up to the girl who played guitar for that evenings headliners, whose name I've long since forgotten. I introduced myself and asked if I could play through her amp that night.
"Ummm, I guess..., but you can't touch the knobs...." she said, seeming a bit miffed.
"Can't touch the knobs, why not?" I asked
"My boyfriend set 'em for me." she replied.
Huh.
Ok.

So I found the dude from the other opener and asked him if I could use his amp and he said sure and rolled it over. I got acquainted with it and tuned up while Rob wrote out set lists that just said, 'Tonight I'm going to jail' over and over.

We were up. Rob leaned into the mic and yelled, "We are the Daggers and this one's called 'Tonight I'm going to jail'!" and we ripped through it, a little sloppy though. Next song, "This one's called 'You're Weak'!" and we ripped through 'Jail" a second time. Better. Next song, "This is a song about broken hearts, it's called 'If my baby rides a Variflex'!", boom, 'Jail', pretty good. By about the six or seventh time, we had really hit our groove, really fuckin' nailin' it. It was dead silence between songs, except for the bartenders laughing. We really having a blast and besides, we had to record this thing in a few hours and don't really practice. We wrapped it up after an encore ('Tonight I'm going to jail') and said our goodnights.

While loading out, As I walked past that chicks guitar amp and took my finger and ran it across the tops of the knobs, turning them all the way up. Every single knob.

Rainbow Gathering

We’d been on tour for a couple weeks and were broke, dirty, and hungry. The show in Louisville had been cancelled and it was too late to make the drive to Nashville, so a free place to crash was the order. Rob said that some hippies he met in a gas station told him about a Rainbow Gathering nearby. A Rainbow Gathering is a floating hippie commune of sorts that moves around from one national park campsite to another. The idea didn’t hold much appeal but Pete mentioned that our friend Chuck might be there. We discussed it back and forth; how sweet it would be to hook up with our friends, eat some free food, scope some naked hippies. On the flip side, it WAS a Rainbow Gathering.

We said fuck it, and decided to try and find it, so Ron and I located on the map what HAD to be the correct national park while Pete and the others loaded up the vehicles. There were already eight of us on this tour and the thought of adding three more of our closest friends to wreak havoc on Kentucky hurried us along.

After a few hours, we pulled into a gas station outside the entrance to the park. I filled up the van while Ron went in to grill the attendant for info; perhaps he’d seen an unusual number of dirty hippies for this part of Kentucky. Suddenly a Subaru station wagon passing on the road locked up it’s brakes and skidded sideways into the gas station. The car slammed into reverse and and screeched up next to van. I feared the worst. Then, amidst much screaming, who should appear from the Sabaru but Chuck, Arnold and Cathi! Much rejoicing was done in that gas station in Kentucky and we were all reminded what a small fucking world it is indeed.

So our caravan had become two cars, a van and eleven people. We were gonna TAKE OVER this hippie bullshit! As we sped along the gravel roads through the beautiful forest we told the new arrivals how the tour had been going (great, except tonight’s cancellation), and Arnold told us how their traveling had been going (great, except for Cathi’s crazy ex-boyfriend). Cathi was in one of the other vehicles, so Arnold recounted the story at length. Apparently, Cathi had met some guy, one of those old street sweepers who hang around any given scene to prey upon it’s young, naive female members, and had “fallen in love”. They bought a school bus together (the hippie equivilant to the first home) and headed off together. A week later Arnold got a frantic call from Cathi on a pay phone in Mississippi. It went bad, and she’d split, but he was chasing her. She was hitchhiking home, but he kept appearing in the bus, and she kept having to hide. Arnold and Chuck the drove to Oxford, Mississippi to resue her from ‘Sparrowhamk’ (kak!), as he apparently liked to be called, and they were now heading back.

After an hour of circling this huge park we stopped to have a conference with the others. Noone had seen a car or a fire burning or any signs of life of any kind. It certainly didn’t look like it, but this HAD to be the place. We laid out the map on the warm hood of Tom’s VW and figured that, if we kept on the way we were, we’d hit it eventually. Suddenly a roar that would’ve waken the dead erupted from the forest and headlights appeared from the opposite direction, coming towards us-FAST! We all jumped off the road as an enormous, dilipadated school bus screamed by, missing the vehicles by inches. The bus passed us and tore on into the forest without even slowing down, leaving us in a cloud of dust and monoxide.

Arnold came running up and told us that that was Sparrowhawk on the school bus! He must be staking out the Gathering looking for Cathi. We were now positive we were going the right direction and moved on, hoping to avoid any hippie domestic disputes.

We started to see these little piles of rocks here and there along the roadside and figured these must be some type of hippie marking system. Soon after we found the camp, our hearts racing at the thoughts of free food and nudity.

We rolled into the parking area and were greeted by a grungy, naked man of about 50 named Marty. Marty weighed about three bills and shook each of our hands very enthusiastically. I assumed because it had been so long since he’d touched a clean hand. Marty said to go ahead and scope a campsite wherever we wanted. Dave asked about the rumors of free food at these things and Marty sadly told us of a rift in the ‘Rainbow community’, as he called it. It seems another faction had set up a Rainbow Gathering of their own at a different national park campsite about a hundred miles away. Problem was, this splinter group had all the foodstuffs and kitchen appliances. Most of the people were just getting doughnuts at the gas station, Marty said, but they were working on constructing a new stove. I imagined a circle of confused flower children fussing over a pile of deconstructed bongs and VW parts. But, Marty said, we should have food soon. What were they gonna make, I asked. Doughnuts, Marty replied, natural ones.

We left Marty in his own stench to cordone off some solitude for ourselves. The group was tired from the drive and the heat and wanted some sleep before we plotted our next move, which would almost certainly involve doughnuts.

Pete and I counted four naked hippies on the way to our site. All dudes, all dirty as hell, topped off by the last one, a sullen-looking chap who wanted to know ‘what the hell we were looking at’.

After a few hours of listless sleep, punctuated by slapping at mosquitoes both real and imagined, Chuck, Dave and I had enough and decided to go check out the ‘kitchen’ ‘and see if there was any ‘food’ yet. At the ‘kitchen’ the ‘cooks’ were busily setting up road signs over a fire pit and generally being naked and dirty. Apparently, that was some sort of prerequisite for these things. Despite the fact that national parks have bathrooms and showers these people remained dirty as Frenchmen.

We milled around the site, kicking around empty doughnut and granola bar boxes looking for leftovers. Chuck asked for some water and a dude in a filthy GIVE MOTHER EARTH A HUG t-shirt pointed vaguely at a pile of milk jugs next to a pile of rancid garbage.

Dave and I were writing anti-hippie slogans in the dirt when we heard someone yell, “NO, not that one, that’s GASOLINE!” and turned to see Chuck throw a jug across the ‘kitchen’. We ran to help him as he sputtered and spat, retching to get it all out. Dave asked him if he’d swallowed any. Yes, Chuck said between heaves, a lot.

He didn’t start actually vomiting, per se, until we got him back to the campsite. Within a couple minutes he was on his side vomiting every couple minutes. As fountains of puke poured forth from him, Jeremy commented that it must really suck for Chuck to be tripping during all this. Seems he and Chuck had each dropped a couple hits of acid while everyone else was trying to sleep. Oh. Man.

The decision was quickly made to send Chuck home with Cathi and Arnold. It was only a days drive and with no health insurance, there weren’t a lot of options. The rest of us decided to head to Nashville. Sleeping on the side of the road was starting to sound pretty good. So we stopped at the gas station, bought the last three boxes of doughnuts, and rode on.

Slapnuts

Slapnuts was a weird kid, no doubt, but I never dreamed he’d kill his own father in law. The father in law, Rick, was the one who’d named him Slapnuts. Now, Slapnuts certainly was no prize, but Rick was a real piece of shit.

Rick ran a warehouse on my delivery route and had hired Slapnuts soon after he’d married Rick’s youngest daughter. He was only 21 years old and had already done time for felony car theft, been kicked out of the army, and gotten married and become a father. It wasn’t easy for a 21 year old ex-felon to find work and Rick felt sorry for him so he’d given him a job and soon after, let he and the daughter move back in with him after they’d been evicted from their first apartment. Slapnuts spent most of his workday lying around on the stacks of flattened cardboard in the back of the warehouse and regaling the other employees with stories of his misadventures. This would have been a problem in most workplaces, but Rick was in a different world up front in the office.

Rick spent hours and hours hiding out in his office having x-rated webcams with various online sluts. Several times I’d walked up front to refill my water bottle to find Rick pushed up against his desk with one hand underneath while a nasty old woman danced in shitty lo-rez on his computer monitor. Apparently, he had a thing for real-life S&M as well, the shipping guy, JonJon, told me he’d come into work early one morning and found a naked woman tied to a table with Rick fisting her. Upon being discovered, Rick’s reaction was not one of shock or embarrassment, instead he calmly turned to JonJon, still buried wristwatch deep in this unlucky tramp and asked him, “Do you want some of this?”

I’d seen Rick’s wife there a couple of times. She ran a dog kennel, and was one of those women who looks like she ran a dog kennel. Kind of like how you can tell a woman who works with horses for a living just by how she LOOKS. Rick’s wife was short, dumpy, and mousy with a vile disposition and filthy mouth. Rick himself was no looker, either. His redneck demeanor was accentuated by his stringy mullet, slouchy posture and constant smoking. He also wore huge eyeglasses with brown tinted lenses, like ladies glasses. He was the most vacant looking man I’d ever met.

By some grace, however, Rick’s daughter/Slapnuts’ wife was absolutely beautiful. A short, dainty girl with fire engine red hair and earnest eyes. She was a woman who didn’t know she was beautiful, probably unable to recognize her own beauty having grown up with such ugliness all around her. I had a little fantasy about her, about meeting her earlier in life and running off to Appalachia together and keeping her barefoot and pregnant and braless. She flirted with a charm and innocence that it made you wonder if she was flirting at all, or was instead reaching out in some small emotional way for something.

Rick was one of those guys who answered the question ‘hey, howyadoin?’, but actually answering how he was doing. I hate that. Thing is, having grown up in the Midwest, that’s how I greet everybody. So I ALWAYS heard about how Rick was doing. I’d try to train myself not to address Rick like that when I went up front to fill up my water bottle, but usually forgot and would have to stand there and listen to this asswipe, silently cursing myself and this slimy bastard and his fucked-up problems.

As the weeks went by, his fucked-up problems became more and more about Slapnuts. Slapnuts stole this or Slapnuts broke that. He’d holler insults at him through the open office door and Slapnuts would just smirk, pull his baseball cap down over his eyes as he lay on the cardboard.

Rick started getting really worked up about Slapnuts after a while. I’d mindlessly ask Rick how he was doing while bent over the water cooler and he’d just start yelling shit at Slapnuts.

“That broke-dick motherfucker over there owes me for bailing his ass outta jail!” or “I gotta ulcer cuzza that piece of SHIT!!” The fact that Rick was married to an awful harpie and smoked about fifty Parliament cigarettes a day were not to blame for Rick’s problems; Slapnuts was. Rick’s poor performance at work wasn’t due to his perverse distractions; It was that lazy fucken Slapnuts. I couldn’t say anything just stayed neutral in my short comments while I imagined smashing him in the face with a baseball bat.

Then, one day, Slapnuts killed him.

Kind of.

JonJon met my truck outside one afternoon as I pulled up. He hollered that they were closed. I turned off the truck.

“Rick died.” JonJon said.

JonJon couldn’t believe it either. He’d come in that morning and found no Rick so he let himself in and got to work. An hour or so later the phone rang, it was the corporate office and Rick’s wife had called them. It seems the night before Rick and Slapnuts had really had it out. The fight went on for a while and finally Mr. and Mrs. Slapnuts grabbed their kid and stormed off in a huff. Rick chased them outside and he and Slapnuts continued to scream at each other while they loaded up the car. As Slapnuts was about to get into the car, he snapped and took a swing at Rick, popping him square in the face and shattering his creepy Elton John glasses, slicing up both Slapnuts’ hand and Rick's face. Slapnuts then jumped in the car to make a break for it and they scuffled for a minute through the car window. Slapnuts began to speed off with a white-hot angry Rick chasing him down the street. Rick stopped in the middle of the street joined by his wife and screamed obscenities after them. Then he dropped dead. Right then and there. Heart attack. Broken ladies frames still hanging awkwardly off his face, dead at the end of his own driveway.

Slapnuts and his beautiful wife drove off, towards Appalachia and freedom…

Waiting for THE MAN

So, me and Pete are milling around outside of some dump movie theatre up in Rogers Park that was showing Rocky Horror, waiting to score some acid off this chick whose inside playing Magenta. It's like two in the morning and were doing our best not to look suspicious while we wander around and smoke and read the same movie posters over and over when the usher guy comes out to cast disparinging looks our way every couple minutes. We don't even know if she has the acid or not, but we've got nothing better to do and the heat in our loft got turned off, so we might as well just hang out on the streets and hope for the best.
There's this fat, scummy dude who appears to be doing the same thing nearby. Me and Pete joked that maybe he was trying to score acid, too. He's one of those weird punks who straddles the line between punk rocker and legitimate crazy street person and was also the size of an NFL offensive tackle. We kept our distance.
Eventually the fat guy came over to bum a smoke off us. He smelled terrible. Even outside.
Pete gave him a Camel and the dude lit it, exhaled, and then just kinda lingered there. Shit. He's our buddy now. He asked us what we were doing there and we told him we had to give someone a ride home. He said he was waiting to score some coke off someone inside. Pete and I looked at each other.
"Hey, you guys look like rock and rollers, y'all wanna join a band?" he slurred, leaning in too close.
We had just started Lunkhead the summer before, but even if we were indeed bandless; I wouldn't share a cab with this winner, let alone a stage. We told him vaguely that, yes, we had a band.
"That's too bad, I'm starting a new punk band and need a guitarist and drummer. It's more of a backing band, though."
"A punk BACKING BAND? What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Well, we really just need some guys to back up our singer. We got an AMAZING singer..." he said.
I was too scared NOT to ask.
"Who's the singer?" I asked.
Fat Guy took a long, conspiratorial drag on his smoke, "Y'all ever heard of GG Allin?" he leered.
Fuck. I shoulda known. Fat Guy was a scumfuck, one of those insane GG Allin superfans who actually like to get GG's blood and shit on themselves, or get maced by him, or whatever. I always viewed GG as a circus freak, not an actual musician. Sure, he had a couple good tunes ("Don't talk to me" springs to mind), but, seriously, the guy's a douche and his music and fandom both totally suck. Not to mention I didn't believe a word of this guys schpiel. He swore he was in GG's new band, apparently offended that we didn't believe him, and we ignored him while we studied the exiting crowd behind him, looking for our connection. We saw her, and scooted outa there.
Turns out she didn't have any acid and we somehow ended up at an apartment inhabitated by two witches, a dude in all black and a chick in all white. We were there till the sun came up.
A few months went by and one day we were all hanging out in Pete's room when a friend of ours showed up with a haggard-looking videotape.
"It's GG Allin! Like 5 shows!" he practically squealed.
We put it in and laughed derisively at the clown and his antics. A couple shows went by (the shows were short, a couple songs that degenerated into a clusterfuck of stupidity and self-mutilation. Suddenly, one of the stages looked firmiliar...
"Isn't that Medusa's?" Pete asked.
We ejected the tape and on the tattered labels were all the show locales, and sure enough, this WAS Medusa's (the legendary all-ages punk club/goth dance hall (where I once saw Sludgeworth play one of the greatest sets I've ever seen to, like, 7 people)). The Medusas show was surprisingly sedate, for GG. In fact, he seemed to be spending most of his time making fun of the bass player, just berating him.
Oh. Fuck.
Upon further review, the fat bass player was, undeniably, unbelievably; the Fat Guy! No shit! We rolled over laughing while on the screen GG punched, kicked, and otherwise assaulted and slandered our once and future bandmate for the better part of half an hour. It was great.
They say opportunity only knocks once, but Pete and I were happy to not have answered. You never know, we coulda been somebodys, we coulda been contenders, or we coulda been Toilet Rockers...

Reno, Nevada

It was five-thirty a.m. in Reno, Nevada. The biggest little Shithole on Earth. Lunkhead had played a show earlier and had wandered into this casino for the cheap breakfast buffet. We stopped to try our luck on the nickle slots (choice of the world-class loser) before the feast. My head was swimming and I felt like I was in slow motion. I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and had lost my last dollar before the show in a vending machine. A city chock full of people losing their last dollars on flips of the cards, rolls of the dice, and pulls of the slot arm, and I lost mine to a crooked Pepsi machine. The house always wins.
Pete was as hot as you can get on a nickel slot and seemed to never lose. It went on and on, and I slumped down in the machine opposite him. There was a woman behind us, whom I was now facing, who was the living embodiment of the term 'slot jockey'. She was more than a slot jockey, though, she was a slot Goddess.
Manning THREE machines at once, she moved like an orangutan. Her long, puffy arms snaked around rythymically. Sliding back and forth, in and out, shifting and swaying, sliding in tokens and pulling back arms, she was a master at work. It was glorious, hundreds of pounds of loose flesh rolling to and fro beneath a flimsy housedress. She danced to a music that only she could hear, like a perpetual gambling machine.
I stared at her, getting more and more entranced. This woman had done something most of us could only dream of. She had found her ONE TRUE CALLING. Everyone seeks their true calling, everyone wants to find that one fucking thing that they do better than anyone else. And Slot Goddess had done just that, right here right now, amidst the neon lights, oxygen-enriched air and the tang of losing.
Suddenly, something went wrong. Drastically wrong. Slot Goddess stopped abruptly and leaned in to study one of the displays. She tapped it a couple timkes, then started punching it. Then she let out a howl, leapt to her feet, and began to slam her body into the machine. I stood up in disbelief as she rammed herself into the offending machine over and over like a defensive lineman hitting a two-man sled. By the time the men in suits were able to claw her off the stingy slot machine half the casino was watching this human tragedy unfold.
It took five huge mooks to finally drag the screaming, crying, shrieking Slot Goddess away. It was sad, I really felt for her. You can't just stifle a person's gift like that. She got hosed. She probably got hosed all the time, but this was different like taking away Picasso's brush, or Michaelangelo's chisels, or Ron Jeremy's cock.
We didn't really feel like being there any longer and decided to move on. Pete pocketed his winnings of eighty-five cents and we shuffled out into the electric blue dawn.

A and B and C

The summer before eighth grade was one of the strangest of my life. It was before I discovered skateboarding and punk rock and made the friends that I would keep to this very day, but I had become too old for my G.I. Joes and Star Wars toys. My best friend was Mark who had moved to California during the winter, leaving me and Paul to go it alone on our block. Paul was from Thailand and the only thing we really had in common was Mark, but we each had noone else. Well, we had our families, but I only had sisters and Paul only had one sister and some really freaky parents. They had drinking glasses with naked men and women on them and gutted fish in their driveway. Also, when you ate over, they used kleenex as napkins. So, we played catch with the football and looked at the drinking glasses and lamented the loss of Mark and all the games that had now been rendered unplayable with only two participants.
One morning I was bored and wandered down to Paul's house and a tall, angry looking thai teenager opened the door. I asked if Paul was home and he looked at me like I had snot on my face. "Paul? PAUL?" He walked away without a word, leaving the door hanging open. I leaned in and there were two more of them. Also teenaged, also pissed-off looking. Huh. I went around back and found Paul and his mom gutting fish from a pail. I asked who the kid who answered the door was. Paul said that it was his cousin. What's his name?, I asked. We just call him 'A', Paul answered. Does he have a real name, I asked. Paul said that he did but it was long and weird, so they just called him 'A'. At the time, this made perfect sense, but looking back I wonder since these kids were thai and Paul was thai, could the name really have been that difficult for him?
I watched Paul's mom for a while, she would grab, slice, and gut the fish in one fluid motion, a real pro. I was always real curious about Paul's parents. They were obviously horny as hell, but they were also ugly as sin. Constantly sweaty and covered in zits, they were always barking orders at Paul in thai. They didn't seem to like anything, let alone sex, but noone serves Kool-Aid to company in glasses like THOSE unless you were way into sex. The little sister was cute as heck and would develop into quite the little sexpot quickly, making me think Paul's mom musta been fine in her day, but watching her fling fish guts across the lawn I found that hard to picture.
Paul asked me if I wanted to play soccer with him and his cousins. I hated soccer then and I hate it now, but the fish guts smelled rank in the summer heat and we had nothing else to do so I said yes and he trotted up the back steps to get the others while I tried to look down Paul's mom's polyester blouse. She never, ever said one word to me. I don't know if she was physically capable of speech. Every time she had something to say she'd walk over and whisper into their ears. Maybe that's why Paul's horny dad liked her.
Now, when I was a kid growing up in middle America, soccer was a game wimps played to avoid getting hit while playing football, the official sport of our neighborhood. Which was yet another reason to mourn Mark's moving; he was always the pro-football swing vote. I sighed and tied my shoes as Paul and his cousins came trotting down the stairs.
Since we had five players, we recuited Patty to play goalie for our team, agreeing that the two youngest players would be the goalies. What are the other two kids' names, I asked Paul. The middle one is called 'B' and the youngest is 'C', he said. Of course.
I'd never met anyone who was actually good at soccer before, it had seemed to me like being good at lawn jarts or something, but they scored two goals so quickly I had barely moved from the spot on the lawn I'd started in. I caught Paul's mom smirking at us as A banged goals off the fence so hard I thought it would go right through it. Patty dove out of the way, shrieking, and I was super glad not to be the youngest. The ball didn't come near me until we were down four to nothing so I figured I'd better put a little American whoop-ass on these guys and started up the field. I took about three steps up the field and was lining up what would surley be a cannonball of a shot when I got plastered from behind by a lightning-quick B. I skidded into the fence and rolled over as they ran past me, laughing and passing the ball between them, ending with A booming another goal off the rickety wooden fence, actually cracking a couple slats this time. Patty wascowering in the corner, watching the action between her fingers.
It went on like this for a while. They would, push us down, blindsiude us, trip us, laugh at us, and bang goal after goal off the fence like a goddamn wrecking crew. Finally me and Paul joined Patty in the garden, out of harms way, and they got bored and wandered off. I went home and vowed never to play soccer against anyone except Americans ever again.
A couple days later I was at the beach with my sisters when we ran into a couple kids I knew from school. They asked if I knew these chinese kids that had beaten them up. Yes, I do, but they're thai, I said. Apparently they'd caught Tom outside of Spot-Lite, a local mini-mart type place we went to for candy and baseball cards and shit, and had beaten him up and took the money right out of his pockets. I felt lucky to have gotten off just having my ass kicked on the soccer field.
That's how it went for the rest of the summer. A and B and C would wander the neighborhood, beating up local kids for no apparent reason, jabbering at them in thai and stealing whatever they had. Apparently my friendship with Paul had bought me some kind of immunity. I'd see them riding by on someone elses bike or eating someone elses candy and they'd just glare at me. I never said a word to them, just looked down at my shoes until they were gone. Then one afternoon, my little sister Corinne came home and told me they'd stolen her bike while she was swimming at Battershall beach. Shit. I was gonna have to face them for sure. I spent the rest of the day trying to devise a plan that would result in getting the bike back without getting destroyed by A and B and C.
That night I went over to Paul's after dinner and asked if he wanted to play catch. We hung out in the front yard while A and B and C watched TV, ignoring us. They had zero interest in every sport except soccer and ass-kickings. When it got too dark we went inside and hung out in the basement drinking Kool-Aid out of naked lady glasses and watching the A-Team on TV. When I was leaving I made it a point to leave through the garage and unlocked the side door on my way out.
I went home and Corinne asked me if I'd gotten her bike back yet. Not yet, I told her, just be cool. She was a little girl and was never cool and she told me if I didn't get it back soon she'd tell dad and then I'd really be in trouble, both for being friends with a family of theives and being too much of a wimp to stand up to them. I assured her I'd handle it.
That night I lay in bed waiting for everyone to fall asleep then waited a half hour and climbed out my bedroom window and shimmied down the drainpipe as quietly as I could. It was a Wednesday night and deathly quiet on the block as I crept down the street to Paul's house. I hid in the shrubs outside and listened for signs of life. I could her the angry yammering of Paul's dad, but not A or B or C, so I figured he must be talking to his mute wife. I decided to make my move. I crept around to a side yard and hoped noone had noticed I'd unlocked the door. I grabbed the knob and turned it as gently as I could and it popped open. I slipped into the garage and saw Corinne's bike and wheeled it carefully to the door, making sure not to bump into anything. I set it on the lawn outside and closed the door without taking a breath.
I jumped on the bike and was about to ride away when I heard voices coming down the street, peering around the corner I saw A and B and C in the streetlight. Shit! This was bad. I was caught between houses and they'd see me for sure when they went to the front door. There was only one way out. I picked up the bike and threw it over the fence into some bushes, then jumped over after it, trying to be as quiet as possible. I ran through Paul's backyard and threw it over the next fence, then jumped over again. I did this the whole way down the block, hopping the fence, tossing the bike, hopping the fence again. I moved quickly so if anyone heard me I'd be into the next yard before they got to their window. I reached the end of the block and looked around the side of the house I was next to, and saw the trio entering Paul's front door at the opposite end of the block. I raced back up the street to my own house and snuck in the back door, stashing Corinne's bike under a tarp in the yard so I wouldn't wake my parents opening the garage, then snuck upstairs to bed, exhausted.
School started soon after, and just as quickly as they'd appeared A and B and C disappeared. I didn't see Paul much after that, my birthday was right around then and my parents got me a Variflex skateboard. I just didn't have much to say to Paul after that. I started hanging with a crew of guys from another block and running the streets more. One night towards winter I was skating home at dusk when I went past Paul's house and in the front yard were three teenaged thai girls playing jumprope with Patty. Hey Patty, I hollered, who are those girls? Oh, she called back, they're my cousins, A and B and C. I laughed and pushed on home.

Land Race

It was a perfect midwestern summer night and I was working my job as a delivery truck driver for the local newspaper. The kinda night that makes you wish the sun would never come up, never bring the heat and humidity. Windows down, Art Bell on the radio, I whisked through my route in near-record time, spurred on by the fact that it was my last night of work before our band, Lunkhead, left on tour on Wednesday. I didn't even have to wait for our roommate/roadie Dave to finish his route because he'd borrowed Ron's car, so I could just drop off my empty company van, walk across the street to where I'd parked the band vand, and bail home.
As I crested the hill on Washington street, the sun glistening off Lake Michigan, I saw that the cops had cordoned off Sheridan road, the street our barn was on. Hm. I cut over and hopped on the Amstutz to come the back way in. As I passed the garage I could see that there'd been an accident right in front of the barn doors. There were cops everywhere and a couple smashed-up cars strewn about. I squinted against the morning brightness, and I wasn't positive, but it sure looked like our band van was a little farther forward in the spot than I remembered parking it. My stomach jumped into my throat as I raced down the side street and into the alley up to the garage, and between the buildings I could see that Ron's car looked askew also.
I squealed to a halt in the parking lot and ran through the building to the front and the commotion. As I raced through the office my boss Tim called out to me but I burst through the doors and onto the street, hoping my eyes had decieved me.
Fuck. They hadn't. And it was worse than I thought. The vans front end was gone and the side of Ron's car was caved in, both cars, along with two others I didn't recognize, were completely demolished. One guy was just sitting in his totalled station wagon, arm on the door, apparently waiting for someone to get his door open so he could get out. The other car was empty and there were cops all over the place, but no Waukegan cops.
My first reaction was anger. We had a fucking rock tour to go on, dammit! Who the fuck did this?!? I jogged up to a group of Zion cops.
"What the fuck is going on?!?" I hollered at them.
One broke away and walked over to intercept me.
"Uhh, sir, please remain calm, there's been a fatality." he said in a hushed tone.
What? A fatality? Who? How?
The cop pointed at the guy waiting to be let out of his station wagon, and he was not waiting for anything, he was dead.
It was crazy, though, no visible blood. He didn't even look like he was in pain. That only made it worse. They huustled me back into Tim's office.
We spent the next few hours filling out forms and getting bits and pieces of the story. The reason that all these were outa town cops was that this high speed chase had started up in Kenosha and screamed down the straightaway of Sheridan Road through Zion, Winthrop Harbor, and Beach Park before t-boning this poor couple on their way to their jobs as nurses at the local hospital. They were only three blocks away.
It also turns out that the guy who did it was alive and well and in custody. He was an escaped mental patient. An honest-to-God escaped mental patient. He'd stolen a car and was delusional. Later in court, he'd say he didn't know the cops were CHASING him, he thought he was in a "Land Race" and if he won the race he'd get some land. I don't know anyone who has ever heard of a land race.
So, with the tour hanging by a thread, Dave and I walked home in a daze to break the news to Ron. Both totalled vehicles were in his name. Ron had lost two cars without even getting out of bed. Ouch.
Ron took the news surprisingly well and we sat and drank coffee and let it all sink in. We'd lost the only two working vehicles in our household. Our band was scheduled to leave on our next tour in mere days. Things looked bleak.
But as usual, we were at our best when the pressure was on. First thing monday morning, we were working the phones, grilling the insurance company and resceduling the first couple shows. Two days and about a hundred phone calls later (Ron was great, he was really pouring it on to everyone at the insurance company, "Do you know what this is doing to our REPUTATION?"), a terrified little woman from the insurance company was dropping off a check at our slanty shanty on 10th street in the heart of the wrong side of the tracks. Within hours we were standing in some rednecks driveway in Antioch while Blackjack checked out an 84 Dodge Ram van and haggling over the price.
Shortly we were cruising down the country roads, smoking a celebratory joint in our captains chairs (no more sitting on the floor around the burn hole in the carpeting for us!). We built a hutch in back, packed it up, kissed our chicks, and soon Wildwood was receding in the rear view mirror.

BREAK UP NOW! BREAK UP NOW!

So, my band The Daggers was playing a friday night gig at this local shithole we loved called The Big Horse. It was a taco stand/rock club, the kinda place were you could get away with pretty much anything as long as the bartenders were making good coin. As we pulled up the street we saw that they had Milwaukee avenue blocked off. "What the fuck.." Christian murmured and swung the suburban into the alley and we parked. Turns out, the Rolling Stones, who were in town to play Soldier Field, were gonna play an 'unannounced gig' at the Double Door, which was like three doors down from the Horse. We went out front and there was a camera line set up and a red carpet going into the Double Door. So much for 'unannounced'.
Never the type of band to put musical performance ahead of good, old anarchy; we sent a buddy of ours to stand outside and keep an ear on the Stones and to come let us know when they were done. We were gonna heckle the Rolling Stones.
The other bands played and we wandered in and out to watch the goofballs lining Milwaukee avenue. I saw Roger Ebert and Oprah going in. She wasn't interested in coming to the punk show, despite my loud pleadings. When it was our turn, we set up the shit and The Stones were still playing. We launched into our set and we were wailing our way through it, when our lookout came running up to the stage to tell us the Rolling Stones were done.
We threw done our equipment and along with the entire crowd, all the other bands, and even the Horse waitstaff went pouring outside and TOOK OVER one side of the red carpet line leading to the limos lining the street. All the punks elbowed, shimmied, and clawed their ways into the best possible spots. I climbed a bus stop sign and was hanging over one of the limos. Sure enough, they began to come out, one at a time, with a chick each; real, live Rolling Stones. And each time, our chant would swell louder and louder, "BREAK UP NOW! BREAK UP NOW!", until it was all you could hear. "BREAK UP NOW!!! BREAK UP NOW!!!"
First was Charlie. "Break up NOW! Break up NOW!".
Then came Ron, "Break up NOW!! Break up NOW!!!"
The, out sauntered Mick, "BREAK UP NOW! BREAK UP NOW!"
Then, looking like an absolute undead corpse, out stumbled Keith Richards. He had a drink and a smoke in his hand and a tramp under his arm and he was WALKING RIGHT TOWARDS ME! I was hanging two feet from Keith Richards' limo! He was closing in, I had to think fast, I had to make an imprint on Keith Richards. The crowd was at a fever pitch, "BREAK UP NOW!!! BREAK UP NOW!!! BREAK UP NOW!!!" He opened his limo door, about level with my knee and looked up at me.
I did what came naturally. "FUCK YOU, KEITH!!!!" I screamed right in his face, flipping him the bird at the same time.
He gave my the funniest look, a combination of terror, and "what this bloke's problem, then, mate?".
Why did I feel the need to flip off Keith Richards and say fuck you to him and to chant at them to break up now, you ask?
My answer is simple. I've never seen the Rolling Stones live, but millions of people have and you might be one of them. But, they don't remember you. But, sometime, somewhere, Keith Richards will remember me.

OJ

OJ


Being on tour in a rock band is an isolated existence. You become so obsessed with keeping everything together and trying to get to the next town on time that it’s natural to lose track of the outside world. The only things that matter on the road are the things inside the van’s smelly walls.
It was in this state of frenetic cluelessness that our band, LUNKHEAD, stumbled into Los Angeles. We rolled into town at five in the morning after driving all night from Tempe and woke up Tina. Tina was Pete’s girlfriend who had recently moved out here to L.A. and was putting us up for the next couple of days. She was expecting us, so she had prepared a treat and we sat in the pool of her apartment complex smoking a joint the size of a baby’s leg as the sun came up. Someone said that her building looked like Melrose Place and she said that Perry Farrell came there to buy heroin.
After some sleep Tina took us out sightseeing and we saw all the bullshit, but I also saw Angelo from FISHBONE getting his saxophone out of the trunk of a dope-ass Mercedes in the A & M parking lot. Me and Arnold were really broke so while everyone else bought meals and sat at the outside porch of this Mexican restaurant, we spied this mother and daughter who were obviously not pleased with their food. Sure enough they got up and left, leaving behind their almost complete meals. We leaned in off the sidewalk and stole the plates right off the table. While we were sitting on the curb eating our stolen food (how’s THAT for a punk rock cliché?), who should walk by but skateboarding legend Christian Hosoi! Arnold had tapped me on the arm… “Dude, check HER out…”
I looked up and saw some typical Hollywood glam-tramp wearing a dress made only of string, leaving nothing to the imagination. But the short asian dude walking with her was undoubtedly Christian Fucking Hosoi!!!
“Fuck her-“ I said, pointing, “Check out Christian Hosoi!”
“Holy Shit!” Arnold said, laughing, “Fucking Hollywood…”
That night Tina tells us she’s got the keys to this luxury home she’s keeping an eye on while its owners are on vacation. They were a sex fetish video producer and his stripper/video star wife. Tina’s roommate was a stripper who had gotten to know this girl, who was apparently living the good life. A bunch of us piled into the van and drove through swankier and swankier neighborhoods until we pulled up into the driveway of a huge stucco palace. It didn’t seem like a place where a porn tycoon would live, it was kind of classy.
Me, Pete and Arnold made a beeline for the fridge and went nuts, while some of the others ploughed through the huge cabinets of videos looking for the porn. They couldn’t find any actual pornography but they did find a bunch of tapes with the word ‘fighting’ on them. We popped them in and realized this wasn’t a porn dude, this was some creepy chicks-play-fighting-in-bikinis dude! It was horrible, these ugly girls would wrestle around for a few minutes for no apparent reason and eventually one of them would get their bikini top pulled off and it would end. People PAID for this?!? We were laughing our asses off when Tina poked her head into the room.
“Oh, that’s Cindy.” She said pointing at the screen. The blonde in the striped bikini was the person whose food we were eating. It was weird. Tina said we should go check out the roof. The stairs to the roof were in the master bedroom, which we recognized from the video. D.I.Y. porn. Cool.
The roof afforded us a great view of the Los Angeles basin. It was high on a hill and you could really see how far L.A. sprawled out into the smog. I paced around smoking a cigarette and noting all the differences between L.A. and Chicago. Lower skyscrapers, smog, cleaner streets, more traffic copters. At least I thought they were traffic copters. Why else would there be that many helicopters in the sky? I figured L.A. has a lot of freeways, hence, a lot of traffic reporting going on.
“Jeez, look at all the helicopters.” Tina said.
“You mean it’s not always like this?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
We watched them float over us and more and more joined the action. This was getting strange, there were at least fifty helicopters in the sky over us. RIGHT over us. What the fuck?
We went downstairs and took the catfighting video out, much to the guys’ dismay and pit on the local news. Apparently O.J. Simpson was running from the police for some reason.
“Yeah, he killed his wife, you guys didn’t know that?” Tina asked.
What?!? O.J. Simpson? The football guy?
“Yeah! Where have you guys been?” Tina laughed.
We all looked at each other. We know where we’d been. Tour.
Tina told us that apparently a couple days ago O.J.’s ex-wife and her boyfriend had been hacked to pieces in a house that O.J. owned and that suspicion was mounting around O.J. himself. Jealous rage kind of thing. Wow. Who woulda guessed?
The news went on to say that he was on such and such highway heading for such and such address to some house.
“No way!” Tina yelled, “That’s right over there!!”
We ran back up on the roof and Tina pointed and sure enough about a block and a half down the street there were cops up the ying yang. The bronco was blocked by some bushes so all we could see was cops milling around. The helicopters were swarming by now and it became more interesting to see if any of them would collide. It was like a giant swarm of gnats, all hovering perilously close to each other, jockeying for position but never touching.
The standoff got less and less interesting. We couldn’t see anything and the bullhorn guy was all muffled and hard to understand. We watched for about another half hour, smoking a joint on the roof while half the L.A.P.D. swarmed underneath us, then left for the show.
We met back up with Ron, who was having lunch with some relatives when Al and O.J. drove right past the place. Ron said the counter guy had been keeping tabs on the chase and hollered to everyone when O.J. was almost there. Everyone ran outside and cheered them on like idiots. I told Ron he shoulda stolen all their food.
The show that night was the worst one of the tour. We played to an empty hall with some straight-edge bands who, despite being FROM L.A., managed to draw about ten people. We played, hated it, loaded out, and left. The whole thing took about an hour and we were on the road to Reno.
We drove through the night, alternating between O.J. coverage and Art Bell on the van’s crappy AM radio. Art Bell eventually won out, in deference to the fact it was his home state we were now in, and his tinny voice kept us company until the sun came up red in the desert.

Bullet In My Head

Skatopia is like the Parthenon or the Great Pyramids, one of those places with a geniuinely mythical quality to them. The kind of place you hear stories and tall tales about, but never expect to see in person. Like everyone else, I'd seen the gnarly pictures in the magazines and heard the stories. Rob had been there the previous summer and described it as simultaneously the best time and the worst time of his life. So, when our band, The Daggers, were invited to play one of their annual uber-parties, I was super-stoked, what could go wrong, right?

For those who don't know about it, Skatopia is an 88 acre backwoods skateboarding compound built and overseen by vert stud Brewce Martin in Rutland, Ohio, near the Ohio/West Virginia border. As you enter the immense compound off the dirt road there is a huge billboard that reads "NO LAW ENFORCEMENT PAST THIS POINT!", citing the constitution, but you'd have to be fucking Robocop to take this place on. It's all about freedom at Skatopia. You wanna pack a .45 in your waistband and pop off a few rounds to accentuate something you've just said? Great! You wanna blow up some strangers car with a bomb you made? Go for it! It's like Kurtz's camp from Apocalypse Now. Only with skateboards.

So, we hit the road to Cincinnati, where we met up with our friend Don and skated a ghetto junkpark during the day and rampaged through town that night. Shit had gotten ugly the night before, and when I wandered out onto the front porch for a smoke with my morning (noon) coffee, I found Dan sound asleep on the front sidewalk. In what is a recurring theme with Dan, he at some point or another had lost his pants and ended up here on the sidewalk, with people stepping over him, clad only in bikini briefs and a Motorhead T-shirt. Dude, it was fucking NOON! In downtown Cincinnati! If I saw some half-naked tattooed maniac asleep on the sidewalk in front of my house for THIRTY SECONDS I'd call the cops! Gratefully amazed by the locals' acceptance of our drunken escapades, we bade Cincinnati and Don farewell and continued east towards Rutland.

The directions we'd gotten were sketchy to say the least. The last three or so roads before you hit Skatopia didn't even have names-shit like 'county road 22'. We wanted to be at Skatopia before dark, but the sun started to fall as we continued to sail down country roads.

We estimated that we were about an hour out of Skatopia when we noticed that it seemed like our headlights had started to dim. Initially, we wrote it off to the fact that we were so far in the boondocks, away from any extraneous light, that it just LOOKED darker. But, soon it became apparent that this was not the case, and we were going to break down. Rob stood on the accelerator and wetore down the dirt road, straining to see while we tried to get as close as possible before we finally crapped out. We rooted him on desperately and pulled our two flashlights we'd brought out of the back, then me and Dan hung out the windows and shone them on the road in front of us. Soon enough, we were driving by flashlight only, and after a few minutes of this the car coughed and died, rolling to a stop in front of the only house we'd seen for miles.

The house was dark but we knocked on the door anyway and not surprisingly, nobody answered. Christian tried to call Brewce on his cell, but couldn’t get any service out this far. So we sat on the side of the road and waited for a car to go by.

After about 45 minutes a minivan approached and we flagged it down. It was a nice couple who turned out to be friends of Brewce’s and said they’d drive us up there. Me and Christian left Rob and Dan with the broken down station wagon and hopped in.

As we drove up the front road, past the ‘no law enforcement’ billboard, Christian and I stared out the window in amazement. There were cars and atv’s and people tearing around everywhere, fireworks going off, and live rock and roll screaming out of one of the buildings. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

They dropped us off and we found the ramp, and found Brewce right away, amazing considering the masses of people everywhere. We told him the situation and he turned to the dude sitting next to him on the platform and said, “Are you skating right now?” The dude said that he was not. “Then go fucking get them!” he yelled. Brewce fucking rules.

We piled into the dude’s old International Harvester Scout and tore out of there. He flew down the road, chugging beers and scaring the shit out of me. But after a few minutes of seeing how that Scout stuck to the road like a fucking Indy car, I felt fine. This dude was completely in control, drunk or not. We found the guys and loaded up the back of the Scout with the guitars and drums. We left behind our bags, skates, amps, and tent with the hopes that we could somehow find our way back to get them later.

The stage area was somehow even more chaotic than the rest of the place. After lugging the equipment up some crazy steep, unlit, handrail-free staircase we found the guy who’d booked the show. Turned out there was no band order, it was as much of a snake session as the one going on next to the stage in the bowl.

I went over to the bowl and took in some of the greatest skateboarding I’ve ever seen in my life. Brewce would drop into the shallow end of the 13 foot kidney and rip that fucker so hard it SHOOK THE BUILDING, no shit! The barn would creak and sway slightly as Brewce powered through 20 tile grinds at a hundred miles an hour, pounding down frontside airs so hard it was louder than the gunshots occasionally popping off outside. Then Science Fair would roll in and do a twenty wall run without doing the same trick twice. Multitudes of other rippers took their turns abusing the pool. Bonelesses off the benches along the platform were done by some while others ground the pool coping so fast they flew into the crowd like a race car flipping over the fence into scattering spectators.

There was a really weird vibe with most of the bands and none of them would let us borrow any equipment, so the booker guy rounded us up some odds and ends. It was the sorriest gear I’d ever seen. The ‘guitar amp’ I got was a practice amp that would’ve been adequate were the show in a rest stop bathroom, and Rob and Dan’s were no better. We set up and tuned up, cranking up these tiny amps as loud all the way and still getting no oomph from them at all. This was gonna suck.

We started our first song, “Independent Trucks” and it was dug by the sizable crowd, despite sounding like quiet shit. That was a relief, it sounded like shit and they didn’t care. Cool. About two bars into the second song, there was a tremendous explosion outside and everyone rushed to the windows. We stopped and looked outside. Someone had blown a car up and it was engulfed in flames about a hundred yards away. Naturally, the crowd poured out of the room to watch the fun and in a matter of seconds we were playing only to Science Fair who doffed his clothes and skated naked while we finished our set, stopping to cheer us on and catch his breathe before dropping into another two-minute run. We stopped after about six more songs and trudged outside, depressed, tired, thirsty, and cold. None of us had a change of clothes, and as the temperature was dropping our wet clothes chilled us to the bone.

There was a group of folks from North Carolina who we buddied up to and sat by their fire and the other guys drank their beer while we recounted our story for everyone. They were sympathetic and said they’d help us in the morning. Meanwhile, I wandered around with Rob to observe the chaos and keep my mind off the gnawing in my gut.

Fires were burning, trucks and three-wheelers tore through the clearing between the buildings and seemingly everyone (including us) were packing heat. Every group of people we came upon had at least a couple dudes with pistols in their belts and I even saw a couple guys with rifles strung on their shoulders. But I had bigger problems.

I was really getting thirsty. The hunger I could deal with, but I hadn’t drank anything for about 12 hours by then, it had been balls hot, AND we’d played a show. Clearly, with no running water on the premises, the situation was gonna get worse before it got better. At every ad-hoc campsite there was a cooler or two, so I set out on a commando mission. I went campsite to campsite where I’d sidle up to the cooler, and as casually as if I’d put them there, rooted through the endless beer bottles for just one bottle of water. I checked at least ten coolers and not one contained anything except beer. Fuck.

Eventually I flopped down at our pathetic “campsite” which was really just a spot on the grass where our wet t-shirts were laid out to dry, and curled up to get warm. The sun was coming up, I hadn’t eaten or slept for 24 hours and I was so thirsty my tongue hurt. I had no warm clothes, or sleeping bag, or tent, or bug spray, or long pants, or a jacket. Dan, of course, was having the time of his life, drinking and hollering with the locals and popping off the occasional round with the .44 bulldog he’d brought along.

A fat guy ambled up.

“Ya’ll might wanna take cover, they’s gotta bomb they gonna blow.” He said to us, fanning himself with a filthy straw hat. He turned to go, then turned back to us.

“Hey, have ya’ll got any DOUGHNUTS?” he asked. Doughnuts??? We don’t even have a campsite, jackass! We’re sleeping on the fucking GRASS here!

To add to my good times, something set him off so Dan screamed and emptied the Bulldog into the air, right next to my head. Each of the five shots brought stars to my eyes and I was deaf for hours. I watched Dan silently shout apologies at me, then wandered off to the ramp/stage area to try and get some sleep on the stage. We still had a car to fix and a twelve hour drive home in a few hours. I wasn’t the only person with that idea, as I found Christian among the ten or so people scattered about the stage, sleeping. I found an empty spot and curled up under a smelly leather jacket I found at the back of the stage, hid my eyes from the harsh early morning sun under my filthy-ass shirt, and slept fitfully.

I awoke at about eleven and the jacket I was sleeping under was nowhere to be seen. I guess the rightful owner claimed it. I wandered outside and found Christian, who told me that earlier that morning Brewce’s 12 year old son, who had renamed himself “Hell-Skull”, had tried to mug him for his t-shirt at gunpoint. Well, BB gunpoint. But, nonetheless…

I had a horrible migraine from dehydration so I went to our campsite and looked into the Carolinian’s cooler. What I saw was gnarly. I mean, it was REALLY GNARLY, but I had no other option. It’s a matter of survival, I said aloud, and lifted the cooler to my lips and stared down all the scum floating on top of the tepid water. I picked the big bugs and leaves and sticks and paper out, then gulped down mouthful after mouthful with my eyes closed.

We found the North Carolina folks, packed up our shit and headed into town. Christian had been able to get a hold of a tow truck driver who would meet us and tow us to an auto parts store in Rutland. I was still dehydrated and starving, but at least we’d procured a tow truck. We set out towards the car with a bleary optimism.

They dropped us off and headed back east, and we repacked the car and waited. I knocked on the door of the house again hoping to get some water, but again no answer. Dan and I looked all around the house for a spigot, but none existed. Upon further review, there weren’t even wires of any kind going to this house. No phone lines, no power lines, nothing. Talk about isolated.

We’d been waiting an hour when we started to get worried about the tow truck. We’d done our best to explain where we broke down, but had no idea where we were so we started to worry that we’d given bad directions to the tow truck guy. Christian ran frantically from hilltop to hilltop to try and get a cell signal to no avail. I lay down in the shade of the car, beside myself with misery.

“Please, Dan. A bullet. Put a bullet in my head…” I pleaded, only half-joking.

Soon Dan began to run around in the road, screaming and shedding his clothes.

“We’re gonna DIE!!” he screamed, laughing, “Woo-HOO!! We’re fucking, DEAD, Matt! DEAD!!”

He collapsed and laid down in the middle of the road, clad now only in his bikinis and was still laying there, when, like a rickety messiah, the tow truck appeared. The guy stopped in front of us, eyeing Dan up and down. He hooked us up quietly, making no excuse for taking three hours to show up. He said he had room to take to of us into town in the cab with him, “Not him.” He said gesturing at Dan with his thumb, so me and Rob leapt into that truck and off we went. Tow guy had a buddy he called to go pick up the other two and said he’d take ‘em into town for a couple bucks. We all met at the Autozone in Rutland, where the nicest auto parts dudes in the world helped us put a new alternator on the car and pointed us in the direction of a Subway where we ate like a pack of crazed wolves.

The drive home was like a journey back from war. Silent, contemplative, happy to have survived.

We stopped at a rest stop and as I waited for my shitty machine mocha, Dan turned to me and said, “Hey, isn’t today your birthday?” I looked down at my digital watch, and he was right. It was my birthday.