Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby (Louis Jordan, "G.I. Jive")

March 19th, 2013           South Padre Island, Texas

            When we pulled away from  South Padre Island at 10am, I had my arm pinned under  the bass drum, and the fake zebra fur that had covered the drum was pinned to my margarita-stained cheeks.  We had never quite transitioned the stage from its’ performance position to the proper sleepytime state, and so pillows and instruments competed for space in, on, around the sandy bodies that had wearily made their way back here before the party had even ended.

            We’d decided that morning to make it out to South Padre Island and spend a day at the beach.  At 1am, fatigued from an afternoon of splashing out in the waves, an evening of hot-tubbing, and the day in full of flipping the bird to boys who had hoped that I was as desperate for attention as everyone else in this “Spring Break” wasteland of humanity where reason and self respect go to die, I’d downed a cheaply-made margarita from a bar whose name I never even glanced at.  A live band was playing covers of all the pop songs of the last 20 years that happen to refer to the ocean.  A drunken boy in a red shirt said he liked the way I move and then almost hit the gangly guitar-player who refused to quit playing Blondie’s “The Tide is High” in order to instead cover “I like the Way You Move” for my personal benefit.  The breakers of spring were all wearing t-shirts that recounted either their academic endeavors, latest travel destination, or sexual prowess, in the form of a poorly-formed pun.   I talked to another boy with a name impossible to remember and that I felt oughtn’t belong to a human. He’d been arrested earlier that day “because I’m big,” he’d said with a pout.  I reassured him that he looked nice to me, and he said, “but you’re not the kind of girl to kiss,” and I agreed, but left him with a pat on the back.  I danced with the wide-eyed and light-footed Dave before returning to the bus just as the bars were closing.  The plan was to gather the drunkards spilling out from the bars and make a round of the major hotels to drop them off.

            To our shock, almost the entire crowd dispersed into separate gas-guzzling SUV’s, peeled out with cries up to the gaggle of girls we had sitting up on the roof, and disappeared into the night.  We were able to get a few strangers on board with us, but there were neither enough of them to justify charging them, nor few enough to simply give up entirely.  The last thing that I recall is snaking my way through the mini-crowd of neon-clad, tequila-filled girls, toward the safe crook of Jonny Cat’s arm as another couple of Destroyers-of-the-Vernal-Equinox entered the bus with the same high-pitched queries as the last.

            I awoke, anyhow, with my contacts still in and my neck crooked, curled into a ball away from the sleeping forms of our Shaman, Eddy, on one side and our equipment manager Chris on the other.
Recognizing my tour-mate, I let my left leg slide toward Chris’ back a little to give it a stretch– but he shivers in his sleep, and so I recoil back into my fetal position.  The bus can be more comfortable than a bed when we’ve arranged ourselves correctly but the current modus operandi is one of chaos and my normal nestmates are nowhere to be found: where is Ian?  Why did Jonny leave? 

            As we’re pulling away, Ian and Drew appear with tales of basking in a warm pool all evening, and just as suddenly, the cherub-faced JonJon hops down from the top bunk with a cry that his wallet is missing.  Despite his declaration from the night before that I am something of a shrew: a dark, self-conscious, pedantic woman with a constant frown to greet all of his boisterous joy, JonJon chooses me as the audience to the tale of his evening.  He’d walked off with one of the beauties who’d been trying out the pole.  Her name was Paradise and she wore blue contacts, and JonJon didn’t mind that the color of her eyes was faux because, like the Little Prince who values the fox because he’s tamed him, JonJon had made her his own by showing her the ocean for the first time in her life. 

            “I put my wallet in her little backpack and held her hand and we walked out on the ocean.  We held hands the whole time.  I never got to show someone the ocean for the first time before!  I need to find that chick, for my wallet,” he says.  There is much discussion, delay, more discussion, a visit to a gas station to use the restroom, a visit to the dorms to return “no-name,” a long-haired vixen who had flashed us as part of a gopro video about Drew, and through all of it I do nothing but change sleeping spaces: top bunk Jonjon had vacated, to the bench seats, to a hammock with one pillow and my ridiculous fur coat covering me, and finally back to the sleeping pad once I see Ian has returned to it.  A man with one leg (or, to be more accurate, about one and two thirds of leg) has joined us at some point while I was sleeping.  He invites us to stick around so he can BBQ us some shrimp, and when we tell him we have a show to get to, he instead make it an invitation to come in and use his shower. 

Throughout all of this, Jonjon sleeps on the floor, oblivious to the fact that no progresss has been made in recovering his wallet.  Finally we all agree that JonJon must stay behind on the island in order to fulfill this reconnaissance mission, and the rest of us will go forth to McAllen. 

            “Doesn’t anyone feel like we’re marooning him?” I ask, looking down at Jonjon’s pink-white cheekbones. His fingers are curled into his mass of blonde hair and the nuggets of foliage he’s collected there. He is wearing one shoe and smiling in his sleep.

Jonny, who is observing Jonjon as well, says: “Just leave him by himself on the island? He’ll die.”

            “Have some faith.  It’ll be good for him.”

            “Even if he can’t find his wallet and that girl, he can always stay with no-name.”

            “What if he can’t even find no-name?”

            “He can stay a night with this guy.  He just offered.”

            “That’s right, sure.  Come stay with me.  He can help me carry this beer back inside, since nobody seems like they want it.  You all are great kids.  We’ll find some women together.  Women love the parlor tricks – I can take this guy right off, the leg, I mean– ”

             “He won’t want us to leave him.”

            “We have to just tell him this is his only choice.  He’s on a holy mission to find his wallet.”

            “Yeah! Consequences  He has to figure it out.”

            We wake up JonJon to tell him we’re leaving, and that we’ve decided he should stay here.  To our surprise, he is delighted,

            “Oh, dudes! I’ll see that chick again!  The one on the beach.  I’ll probably hook up with that chick tonight!”

            “Ok good; now hold still.  I gotta write some numbers on your arm.”

            “What?  Why?  I don’t want that chick to think I am getting a bunch of girls’ phone numbers…”

            “You’re gonna lose your phone, dude.  Don’t lie to yourself, ok?”

            Ian, Zweng, Drew and Chris tackle him down in order to write their phone numbers on him. 

            “Don’t make it look like girls’ handwriting, ok?”

            Ian signs his name to the number he’s scratched into JonJon’s left forearm.

            “And you can find someone with facebook to find us, too.  Like Jonny did that one morning.”

         
            Our crusty old seaman has successfully removed the false lower portion of right leg and is sitting on his bottom, waving the nub goodbye to us, and as the bus pulls away from him we all wave back.  “Pray for Jonjon,” someone calls out.  I nod; go back to writing; slip into my day. 

When we get back to McAllen, I go with Mayra to the little clothing shop she owns, and, in a fit of desperation for estrogen-based contact, I touch and try on every single frothy-laced pink scoop-necked delight the store has to offer.  I eventually buy a pair of heels, that in their height and strappy elegance make me wonder how I could ever return to the world of the busso-boys again.  The chirpy laughter of the saleswomen, the perfectly folded onesies and cream blouses and well-executed darts on sleeveless heart-neckline dresses are nearly as satisfying to my soul as were the first lines of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s poetry when I wondered to myself at age seventeen if anyone had ever felt that way.

         
            Hours later, we’ve gathered back together on the bus and are pulling up to Sahadi’s. 

            “Has anyone heard from Jonjon?” I ask [again].  His phone has been dead for a couple of hours.

            Miraculously, as we pull up, we see an old pick-up truck that has Jonjon and our one-legged bandit both in the bed, sitting cross-legged.  They have arrived even before we have, and remembered not even the address to the house we’ve been staying at (and which was written somewhere on him), but the address of the show and the time we ought to be there.  He has his wallet in hand and the kindly old seadog with him asks me for a dance once the music starts.  Ah, serendipity.

6:07pm            McAllen, Texas – the Dr’s house

            “Where are we going?”

            “Four hours ago we were going through Austin again, to pick up Shawnee, and then up to Memphis – “

            “Why do we have to go back to Austin?”
            “I’ll get laid in Austin.”

            “To get that girl Shawnee who’s flying in to meet us.”

            “There are checkpoints between here and Austin.”

            “I don’t think we need any more girls then.  There are girls in Tennessee, right? No checkpoints.”

            “Actually, we’re picking up Kayla, too, so there are two girls we’re getting in Austin.  Two girls!”
              “Yeah?  I don’t know man.  I really hate checkpoints.”
           

2:16am                        Austin, Texas – “Jack in the Crack”

            We went through the checkpoint anyhow, although with no trouble and onward toward the girls we need to pick up in Dallas.  I’ve been sleeping, for the most part, and texting the girls I miss so much, all while comfortably wedged between Jonny Cat and CG.  I woke up briefly around 10pm when Jonny switched spots with Zweng, and again around midnight in order to tuck blankets in around Zweng, asleep at a nearly perfect right angle to me.  Just now I awoke again in order to use a restroom that turned out to be out of order, and JonJon asked if I’d take his place and help Ian stay up.

            So here it is, my first ride in the Babe.  In the space of time it’s taken for me to make the switch, Rocky has disappeared. 

            “He texted his Austin girl and she came to get him.  He said he’ll be back in 15 minutes,” Ian explains.  “Am I in first?  This feels like third.”

            “First is right in the middle, but a little to the left,” says Drew.

            “Oh, don’t mind that sound,” Ian says referring to a strange buzzing that has just begun somewhere to my left.  "That’s how you know she’s having a good time.  This car is… She’s a little donkey.”

            The interior of the babe is dark, but with a flip of one switch can be lit in purple and gold rope lights.   Just as Ian is putting on some music via his phone, someone from the busso calls, interrupting it.  “Yeah, we’re right behind you!”  Ian is disgusted.  “Some people!" He says, while plugging his phone back into the speaker system, “have no respect for Ray Charles!”           

            A few minutes later, “Do you think that there are mom and pop gas stations in Texas?”

            I have known for awhile now that Ian is not well.  He snapped some time ago, back in Marfa, I think it was, and mine is the unwitting ear to the nonsense that sooths his lawyerly soul.
            “What?” I ask, “You mean a family business where they pump their own gas out of the ground in the yard?”

            “Yeah, their children wander around covered in oil.”

March 23^rd            Little Rock, Arkansas

            I find the cold grey swampy sky and the skeletal deciduous forest below it both nostalgic and exotic – nostalgic for the time I was in Ireland with my family but also exotic because of a sense ingrained in me from childhood that the fog holds magic. The forest Guinevere and Arthur – or else Guinevere and Lancelot – loved in looked like this.  The grasses over which the beautiful Finn McCoul trod were at once as green and also inhospitable as these.  The trees that beguiled the mighty Finn as he searched for the brown-speckled hide of his wife-turned-deer were as black-specked, orange-topped, and aggressive as these spindly birches that ache through the seemingly endless indgo-grey sky.  There are spots where the grass ends, and the ground disappears entirely into long boggy brown pools covered in the brown leaves the trees have left behind – and it must be in these that the Tuatha de Dannan, the old kings and goddesses of Ireland, the “good people” of the forest, are hiding and waiting for me…if only I could find the strength to dive from the windows of this bus.

            It’s funny how quickly the new becomes old again:  Carl Elliott, while writing my favorite book Better than Well, noted that after four to six weeks of living and writing on the beach that the waves had already lost their luster and fallen to the background and that his mind had begun to wander elsewhere.  The underlying desire to be continuously kept in wonder; the need for exoticism, the search for the ever-stranger-than-the-last thing is what drives the heart of a traveler or artist.  I wouldn’t say that the bus has grown old just yet, mainly because we are never in one location long enough that we learn it fully.  I don’t even yet know the rocker boys I am traveling with well enough for them to have grown boring: the conversations have yet to run dry.  Oddly, the movement factor in and of itself has grown old; the pace of things no longer seems exotic: far stranger are the moments of quiet when we have time to reflect with one another on what it is we believe, or how it is we learn. 

            Last night at the historical Stickyz venue in Little Rock, AR, Michael Warren Grant (MG) and I were talking and I said once again how odd it was that I haven’t read even a page of the four books I brought on the trip with me.  I thought I’d have needed to buy new ones by now at least, but the truth is that I haven’t been reading books because I’ve been too busy reading the people around me.  I take notes on what they say, but I also read their expressions and the way their bodies curve into or away from one another, or each one’s relationship to the bus, to the stress of the road, or the need to be always shoveling more media into the infinitely ravenous gullet of the internet. 

            I’d been taking time for something like self-pity, a longing for the science-types that I seek out in my selfish and somewhat naïve desire to pick up knowledge by osmosis: the jargon of microscopy, a vague sense of time dilation, a near-ability to recognize different coding languages.

            I just want to be full enough with reference, inference, creativity, that I can read “See Spot Run” and extrapolate from even that that meager scrap of written effort a sense of what it is to human.  My greatest desire is to open my eyes to each person we meet on this trip, judge as I may, but all the while giving myself the opportunity and time to learn each one’s story.  It isn’t just the ones who can articulate their own tales who are worth listening to.

March 24^th, 2013            Memphis, TN

A reflection of desire:

            “I just want 7^th graders in Minneapolis to be crying while listening to this one year from now; I want kids on mushrooms watching our videos and flipping out, ‘oh dude, is this really happening?  Look at his hands, man, oh dude, how does he do that? Mannn.’  That’s all I want.”

Snippets of jargon:

            “So we’re doing it at 88?”

            “You said there’s a tape delay around here?  Two track or something?

            “We’ve got something a little more lo-fi. Hampton calls it the kaslap.”

           

            “You have any idea about when they stopped making Fairchilds?”

            “No, although – you know Hampton called up Long Island directory assistance, got the name of whatever it was that Fairchild became.  Man.  They had huge transformers in there; made more of a difference than the tubes.”

            “So they’re recording to tape, am I right?”

           

            The boys have already been in the studio yesterday, and on into the night – I only dropped by for a moment myself before hitting Beale St with the other kids.  As a tourist trap, it’s at least as nice as the old crab shacks along the wharf in San Francisco used to be, back when the crab crackers were hot deadheads and you were guaranteed to hear a live version of “Johnny B. Good” if you sat inside at the bar.  Personally speaking, the guys playing old blues standards were to me like guardian angels sent to me from the wharf, or maybe Hunter's Point Senior Center.  When Dave and I had first arrived, we'd run out into the night hand in hand splashing puddles and screaming "Horns! Where are horns?!" until we found and followed the trailing sound of a trumpet into P & H cafe.  Guinness in hand and butt shaking, I was finally home.  But I digress.

            We arrive at 2pm and the sound engineer greets us with “Good morning,” as Zweng nonchalantly goes over to the kitchen area and cracks open a beer.  At least I made them get up in time for breakfast this morning.

            Ardent Studios is laid out much like a labyrinth, with a tiny patio-garden as its’ center.  The general progression of wonders tiers best when the studio is entered from the side door, which faces the parking lot.  Immediately to the right are offices, and a brick wall to the left.  You make another right into a hall that is flanked by an open mini kitchen area on your right (where the 101 North Brewing Co keg is being tapped for artistic growth), and the doors to studios A and B on the left.  The mini kitchen area forms two sides of the glass box that is that center garden.  If you continue down the hall you reach a strange closet on the left that holds shelves on one side stacked sound blankets and concrete slabs, and on the other side piles of old mixers, pianos, guitars, and one ancient computer stuck with a faded postit-note reading  “Why???”  Walking through this closet, you reach a tinier hall, although better lit, that leads to studio C, where the boys are recording.  This teeny hall is hung with records from ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, Toots in Memphis. Al Green, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Joe Walsh, Don Nix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and is as quiet, solemn, and full of ghosts as an old cathedral (or I suppose it’d be a Baptist church, out here).  In the bathroom at the far end of this tiny hall are two books: an old black-and-white coffee table book of Beatles photos and a paperback entitled, “Presidents: All You Need to Know.”  The tiny, glassed-in, center patio garden has a eucalyptus in each corner, some tall, robust, likely Japanese grasses around each tree, but otherwise cement ground, and a 6 ft high fountain in the center that spills into a 4 ft diameter brick-lined pool.  The wrought-iron bench is too cold in this weather to enjoy, but even standing outside for a minute brings to mind the same sense of wonder, reverence, peace, and need to create beauty that the Berkeley City Club (a Julia Morgan building where I’ve performed theater) inspires.  Ardent studios to them, and by proxy to me, is what the Giants locker room was to my brother.  It’s what the Globe is to any thespian. 

            A young man with a ukulele, a quarter-smile, and a plethora of tales about records gone by, tells me that the clan is coming to town this week.

            “Don’t much like your family, huh?”

            “Not my clan, the KLAN.”

            Signal a record scratching to a full stop.

            “I’m serious,” he answers the silence, “they’re coming to demonstrate because – well, the city parks here are named after Civil War Veterans.  The city wants to change the names to something a little more… benign.  Klan doesn’t like that.”

            “Oh my –”

            “Oh, don’t worry.  If the Klan comes here, they’re going to die.  I have friends talking about protesting, but honestly?  Just stay home.  This is where Martin Luther King Jr. died.  Trust me that no one is going to allow them to get away with this.”

            I nod.  Jonny appears, saying, “Jesus, my neck hurts.  I think I fell on my neck.  Butler, you aren’t really the type of girl to just give massages, are you?  That’s ok.  I know you aren’t.  It’s just that my neck hurts.”

            I have hit a period of unwonted maternal passion for these boys, and pull Jonny’s head to rest on one knee, and then Zweng's to rest on the other.  Zweng’s forehead is facing up and I use my thumb to stroke his third eye, while Jonny is facing down into the tiny bits of thigh fat that I am for once thankful, and I stroke his long gypsy hair.  To CG I give a sweet wink and assure him of his manifest destiny as the one true prince for Honeybaby, for all of the honeybabies. 

            “I’m so proud of you!” I tell my little murder of crows, and then I leave them to their recording so that I can bombard the sweet night watchman who “was depressed and useless 28 years of my life – I’m 29 years old,” with ever more questions about how it was that Lavinia, Tennessee, population 200, came to spit out one of the most articulate men I have ever met in my life (accent not withstanding).  I am already half-determined to make it my next project to write the life and times of this mysterious Buddist/ukulele blues master. 

            

On the Road Again (Willie Nelson, "Honeysuckle Rose")

7:13pm March 12^th            Austin, Texas

            We’ve settled into two separate houses, both friends of CG.  We’re all gathered at one and have BBQ’d for all the neighbors.  People have been trickling by all day, purportedly to ask after our host. They wandered in past the bus, mouths wide, and into the living room where the girls have been gathered around the wifi and power strips that we brought in from the bus.  Joelle is transcoding and Nicole is editing and I am cutting apart the writing I did on the bus, trying to post invitations to our shows here, and talking to Zweng’s girlfriend about a job in Austin.

            I go out to the bus to gather stragglers (both Ian and Zweng are missing), and I pick up Ian’s singing before I even get on the bus.  I step up and see him in a red hammock slung across the inside of the bus, using the sink cabinet to swing himself.  He’s belting out  Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon," wearing a cowboy hat, no shirt, but a leather vest and red scarf. 

            “Jesus Christ, Ian.”

            “This is how I relax.  I’m beyond sleep now.”

            “Texas has chewed you up, missed the spittoon, and hit this hammock.”

             “That’s right!”  He flashes me a toothy smile,  “So: I’m the beer-tender; you need one?”

            I have him pour me a beer from the keg nestled near his head and walk over to the Baberaham next.  Zweng is in there passed out, as I expected, and when I ask him if he’d like to join us for dinner he mumbles something through cracked lips about wanting food and not being able to move.

            Inside, the neighbors laugh and share the cucumbers, rice, corn, steak, chicken strips and guacamole.  I bring out a plate to Zweng, and on my way back inside, run into Neil mucking with a toolkit and simultaneously tossing women’s lacy stockings, still in their shrink-wrapped packages, onto the living room couch.  For someone who has just run out of money, has lapsed on his rent, and lost bus insurance, he is ridiculously giddy with happiness. 

            He’s like the carpetbagger uncle in a novel by Upton Sinclair who arrives with strange baubles for the girls just as the family has lost hope entirely. I actually suspect that he knows he’s lost our trust and has squirreled away these stockings from his trip in Thailand just for this inevitable moment.  I recognize the ploy, I see the glint in his lascivious eyes.  If it had been a week ago, I’d have rolled my eyes and continued writing, but we’ve been on the road so long that my shirts all smell like body odor from bodies not even my own, and cigarettes and feet.  My mind is still on Sinclair and my lips say the words, “Neil, you’re ridiculous,” but my body moves to crowd around him with the other girls admiring the sweet eyelets on the grayish fishnets and the cute bows on the oh-so-silky thigh-highs. 

            I’ve just looked up to glance around the room again and – “Hi Rocky!”

            “Hey.”  Rocky winks and, with the self-conscious vanity of a woman pulling pearls to sit in the crest of her cleavage, turns his backside to me while adjusting his pants to sit lower, revealing the beginning of a deep crevice whose ultimate end is the human waste evacuation mechanism.  I am not sure when or how both Rocky and Neil came to malign the female mind so much as to expect a plumber crack to be appealing to it, but the result of this irreparable error in their judgment is the travesty I see before me: jeans that appear to be on the brink of falling, an undesired preview of the things I’ll never be seeing. 

            “You should see the babes here.  Texas-sized.  Yeah, this girl weighed like 165 pounds.  Slammin’ big fat butt.”

            Joelle comforts Nicole and me.  “Look at it this way: It means we’re safe,” she says, indicating the smallness of our three selves.

            Suddenly I realize that the tools Neil has been fiddling with are for fixing the bass.  We only have one bass guitar and somewhere between Vegas and here, the connection to the amp has been ruined.

            “We could have taken another one!  We could have-“

            “Ta-da!”  This is why we keep our trust in Neil.  He’s somehow fixed the connection.  That first chord he strums is like the longed-for nightingale to this Romeo’s ears.  I think the music is my Juliet today.  The metaphor fails if we take this any further…

            Our desired, agreed-upon time of departure is 11pm.  At 10:54pm, Nicole is tugging on a new bra with one hand and struggling to put on my cream eyeliner with the other. 

“Zweng! Rocky doesn’t believe that I’m a D!  FUCK.  Frame rate has to change on all the gopros before we mount anything.  Photos looked like shit the other night.  Where is Dave?”

“God, I wish I had my heels.  Do you think we’ll go back to the other house to get our things? Zweng?  And – I’m not sure where Dave is, but are we getting a time lapse on one of those?”

I love these girls.

10:51am Wednesday March 13^th

            I wake up with a tiny lego guy stuck to my arm and tucked within space-themed bed sheets.  We are at Billy’s house, and I am asleep in the bottom bunk of his sons’ bed.  Nicole, I know, is asleep above me in the top bunk, and I am comforted and amused by the presence of these half-pint grown women in the little-boy beds.  As I admire the boys’ taste in space-age décor and also their little league trophies, I suddenly, to my dismay, overhear the girls who followed us home last night talking to Billy. :

            “Can we play more music?”

            “It’s 10am, girls.  I think we’ve played out the music.  I’m about ready to start work again.”

            “You should come with us, Billy!”

            “Well girls, my boys live here.  And my wife – that’s her picture.  The band’s asleep.  I think it’s time y’all went home.”

            Skip to about two hours later:

[We lost internet/my power cord around this time, so most of the following is copied from my notebook that has been sitting in my tiny fannypack (now destroyed).  A German man who got on the bus asked, “What are you writing?” and I said simply, “everything.”  He didn’t believe me.]

“Listen, from now on, we don’t bring the party home.”

“And we test a girl’s IQ if the boys insist on bringing her with us.”

Rocky steps in, “Yeah.  Stupid and skinny? I can’t deal.  Now if she had a bottom so big she can’t walk, that would be something to negotiate.”

“Now, now.  You girls are just territorial.”

“ Doesn’t matter even if we are. No more strippers!”

“She wasn’t a stripper!”

“She told us that she wasn’t a stripper three times, when no one had asked.  She was a stripper.”

            “Look, this is not our fault.  It is just that we happen to make music that strippers love.”

            “And we’re gentleman!” says Jonny with a look far too genuine for this conversation.  “So we can’t turn them away.  Into the streets? No.”

            “Zweng, you don’t really want strippers around.  Tell me the truth.”

            “I am just trying to tap into the eternal human essence.  It’s important to add to the stories of your life and care about people while you can.  You die alone.”  He laughs maniacally and orders another strawberry and lime swirled margarita.           

3:51pm March 16^th            Austin, Texas South by Southwest (SXSW)

            It’s like Lord of the Flies out here.  It all started last night.  CG doesn’t usually reach a point of actual drunkenness, but when he does, he tends to get on a path to destruction paved with inaccurate and continuous use of the word “fags” (changed here to idiots, because that is what he means by the word, and because it nauseates me to type that word) and the quietest, most mild-mannered little tantrums the world has ever seen.  Sometimes the complaint will be that he isn’t being featured enough in media, and other times it is that someone he doesn’t like is around, and just as often it stems from a sense of overprotection toward the girls.  Whatever the cause, the result is the same: a pouty man mumbling in the corner, brushing off any attempts to console him, and

Last night a rival band from San Francisco boarded the bus.  The Coo Coo set had been over for a little while and Neil had been jamming out with Chris (our equipment manager) and Ian (general manager – finances, insurance, etc.  His job is to keep Neil from running this thing into the ground).  CG didn’t like other people playing.  “This sound sucks.”
            Zweng tells him to be calm. 

            “I’m mellow, but it sucks.  Sounds bad.  I don’t like idiots playing my instruments.”

            “It’s cool man.  Think about how cool we’ll be if we’re famous, and we let our roadies play a last set, jam on our stuff just for fun.  We want to be those guys.”

            CG won’t listen.  He storms off and Zweng and I continue to talk about his girlfriend, or skyping or something, when suddenly Neil is yelling and CG is pouting loud, and I run back to the back of the bus along with Zweng in time to see Neil trying to kick CG off of the bus.  “Don’t do this.” I tell Neil, but he is on a rampage.  Neil isn’t entirely in the wrong, either.  CG tried to smash his own bass guitar after seeing his rival playing on it.  We’ve already broken this bass once on this trip, and cannot afford to buy or ship out another.  Neil finally takes the argument far enough that CG leaves in a huff.  Nicole and I walk off of the bus with him.

            “Why would he leave me? I can’t call anyone without a phone.”

            “He hasn’t left.  The bus is still parked.  And we’re with you, CG.”

            “But listen – I wasn’t even mad.  I just thought it would be funny.”

            “But you can’t smash your bass.”

            “He was about to leave me.”

            “No one would let that happen – but CG, you Can NOT smash your bass!”

            “Nah, dude.  Sometimes the music doesn’t even matter as much as getting rid of the idiots.”

           

            This went on for hours, until finally we end up back on the bus, except that I go to call Paul underneath a willow tree.  “I don’t know why I’m here,” I tell him.  I get back on the bus and Ian and Neil aren’t speaking; Dave and Chris aren’t speaking – I decide to speak to no one. 

            Things continue this way, or perhaps getting worse every hour, until we pack up and get onto the bus.  I’ve been crying, because keeping up with photos and the “right” tags, and also my own desires and how to voice them to Neil without being shot down all seems too much.  I don’t like the yelling, the insistence that we can do more than I know we can afford.  I ache for the quiet Sundays I’ve spent curled with my head on Paul’s knee and his head on mine, like a yin-yang, looking into his liquid brown eyes and feeling the strength of his arm with my wiry fingers as we talk about nonsense – the existence of a genetic marker for psychosis, psychopathy; what stars are made of.

            We hardly want to take the bus out, but when we do, the band sounds better than ever, and Jonny catches my eye self-consciously, but smiles when I smile, and Zweng is soulful and Chuck looks like a boss.  We start to run like the well-oiled machine that we are, even despite each of our own inner emotional turmoil issues.  I get someone else to man the door, and the beer, and just rock out at the bus’ stage. When little journalist from the night before finds us, and asks me why I am here, and I say it is because the way that we operate allows me greater artistic freedom than ever before; because when we are at our best, I’ve been at my personal best; because I believe in the sound of the Coo Coo Birds; because I have always wanted to be the Kerouac of our times – I want to record the strangeness of today.

6:21pm March 18^th            McAllen, Texas

            We arrived in the middle of the night after I’d had a little too much of one of MG’s elixirs and not enough ginger.  They’re all natural herb drinks meant to loosen joints or heighten senses “or just let you sleep, princess,” but I hadn’t eaten enough and almost had to spill their spiritual goodness from the innards of my royal bowels upon the perfectly manicured lawn of Doctor Love.  I stepped into the house barely able to function and was led to a tiny room with a tiny bed and its’ own bathroom.  I stumbled in my fatigue, and Dr. Love assured me again, to please tell him how he could help me heal, that I could even write out my symptoms if I felt embarrassed.  What a kind, kind man.

            Doctor Love owns a house more beautiful in and of itself, but also full of separate things more beautiful, than anything I have ever seen.  On one of two islands in the kitchen sits a 3-foot high four-cornered structure with various glass tubes and ropes and perhaps a bubbler of sorts: I think it is a relic of chemistry gone by.  There is a stand-up bass and piano and 8x6 foot painting in an auxiliary living room that is otherwise almost entirely bare: “for when the circus comes to town,” says MG, referring to ourselves, but also a suspicion that these wonderful people have hosted others as well. 

            Doctor Love’s wife is a dream, a platonic perfection of what you’d dream of in a doctor’s wife.  I awoke this morning to the sound of her laughter and thought that it must belong to a much younger woman.  She is bright, beautiful, happy, clad in yellow and wearing glasses, with hair that curls around her cheeks, and is determined to feed us all.  Her eyes were wide with wonder as one after the other of our boys walked through the room – so many tall, fit, shirtless, bright-eyed men, just one after the other after the other.  Even her brother asked me what we all did for fitness, that he never saw so many fit people in one room together.  I tell him that I can't speak for the rest of them, but I am on the "Rocky diet" - a desperate need to stay under 160 pounds, as that is the weight be proclaims as being the best.

            We’ve just had a beautiful supper: a huge plate of pasta smothered in clams, mussels, garlic, red bell peppers, olive oil, broccoli, and brussel sprouts bigger than any I’d ever had, and white wine. The boys are all in love with Mayra (Doctor Love’s wife), and I am in love with life.

            In the space of time it took to record this and then have a conversation about mutual dislike of second wave feminist apologism for feminine behaviors with a guest of the family, our gracious hosts have cooked up a second meal entirely, of lamb and beans, and then home-made vanilla ice cream slathered with cinnamon-roasted peaches. 

The KKK took my baby away (Ramones, "Pleasant Dreams)

11:50pm Sunday March 10^th:  El Paso, Texas

When we hit El Paso at 9:20pm, Neil was the only one of us not feeling well.  We left him in the bus and hit a restaurant/bar with huge margarita bowls and live music.  It was the first hot food we’d all had in days, and despite the long hours in the bus, we were in beautifully high spirits.  We found a band doing covers of the Cure and the Doors along with songs in Spanish that a crowd of Mexican women with blonde hair and black stretch pants with heels screamed the lyrics to.  We danced with the band, onstage, and took photos with their singer and had our photos taken by strangers and then sat, sweating and happy, to drink margaritas and eat hot fajitas, tacos, enchiladas, rellenos.  We were floating, taking only a moment to feel bad that Neil was missing out.

“What do you think is wrong with Neil?”

“Not sure,”
 “It’s just that he doesn’t have a girl.”

“I heard him say it’s his stomach”

Michael Warren Grant chimed in, “Should I give him something?  I’ve got herbs to stop him up, if he’s having something like diarrhea, but I also have herbs to get him flowing if he’s stopped up-“

“No, no,” insisted CG, “I don’t think anyone needs to increase the number of times they are pooping.  We’re on the bus all night.  In fact, everyone needs to think about pooping less.  CG is always trying to poop less.  CG is mellllow..” 

We loaded back 12 of us onto the bus and 3 into the Baberaham Lincoln around 11pm.  Neil was still sleeping.  Liesel, Drew, and Ian took the Baberaham.  On board the Busso, we sang Beatles songs while Jonny and Zweng strummed them.  We danced away the ache in our bones and I took a moment to feel lonely for my Paul, to think that he’d love this, to be singing to the moon and the endless pressed dust below it. 

“Border Patrol!” Someone cried, and we crowded to the window in order to view the van with large glittering black letters spelling “Border Patrol” that crawled past in the opposite direction on a dirt road.

With nothing left to do but sleep, we dragged kegs, instruments and a few suitcases forward, clearing the back area for pads and blankets and sleeping bags.  We settled in like sardines, Chris Tolan in the driver’s seat, six horizontally in the back media lounge area, three more on seat cushions and camping mats, and two on the bench seats.

I’ve been sleeping for awhile with JonnyCat’s hand on my forehead and my foot between the buttcheeks of the snoring Michael Warren Grant, and Michael Warren Grants’ legs arching over mine, when Chris announces over the loudspeaker that we are approaching a checkpoint in two miles.  I visualize all of us standing shivering in the dark while policemen tossed aside leopard-print coats, bright pink vests, and ladies’ stockings in order to search the various misshapen bags and instruments beneath.  It generally takes us about two hours to build the stage and ready the bus for public consumption.  It could take them a full day to make real sense of everything.  Nicole and I take a moment to question the boys to make sure no substances are still intact, on board, and then fall asleep again. 

“Border Patrol!”  They announce themselves clearly but kindly, then get on the loudspeaker system and do so again, shining lights towards the back of the bus.  We untangle ourselves from blankets and other selves, poking up heads to smile at them.

“Um, are you all US citizens?”

“Yes,” rings out a chorus of cracked voices.

“Well - I think we’ll need to see some ID.”

We wearily reach or scramble over one another for bags.

“Joelle, they’re here.”

“Someone wake Joelle.”

“I am waking her. Joelle?”

“Is that my wallet, just above your head? Joelle!”

“I don’t know. Can’t you see from there whether it’s yours?”

“No, my contacts aren’t in.  She won’t wake up.”

“Is she ok?” One of the officers ask.  Thankfully, she is, and really fairly sober, even, but Joelle always sleeps like rock.

“She’s just tired.  We’ve been on the road awhile now.  From San –” someone elbows me and I don’t finish the word.  “This is her bag.  And here is her ID!”

“Ok then, well. Just show us her face so we can get a visual match.”

I pull back the blankets and step back just as Joelle barely opens her eyes and they flash the light onto her.  She groans, as they say, “Ok,” and then she falls right back to sleep.

They check the rest of us and leave.

We fall asleep again almost immediately, but then the loudspeaker comes on.  “They took Liesel aside.”

“What?”

“The Baberaham was behind us.  Liesel.  They have her in some kind of holding… not cell, but they are keeping her.  Her passport isn’t up to date.  They’re checking it out.”

Liesel is from Germany.  The Babes (Drew and JohnJohn) picked her up selling jewelry on the streets of Santa Cruz a few months back.  “Get in the Babe, babe!”  She did and never yet had gotten out. 

We try to calculate how long her passport might be out of date.  No one could be sure.  Hillary mentions that she’d be banned for five years from re-entering if she was deported. We wonders aloud whether they even cared about Germans.  We wait.

The second call finally comes from the Baberaham.  They are sending her back to Germany, with an allotted 45 pounds of her things.  She wants us to bring the laptop she’d left on the busso back to her.  We decide that we will pull over at the next rest stop and wait for the Babes.  It is nearly an hour before we find an appropriate stop and we wait another half-hour for the Babes.

“We’ll send Liesel her things.  We’re losing shoot time.”

“She must be afraid.”

“She’s a strong girl.”

“She must want her things.”

“We can’t waste three hours on it.  She knew she was illegal.”

“I wish we’d thought to hide her.”

“She must be devastated.”

She is  - and full of malice for we who have abandoned her.  “If you don’t give me my bags within an hour, I have interesting things to tell these officers.”  German threats to follow, but whether of annoyance or empathy, even the emotional onslaught cannot keep us from sleep.

8:00am Marfa

Woke up in Marfa, on the bus, about 6:45am.  The cold snap of dawn that I so loathe was just beginning to seep into all of our bones. This was actually the first time we’ve slept on a parked bus.  Prior to this, we’d rotated sleeping while someone was driving, but have always had a house to land at every eight hours or so.  The girls have been spoiled with new showers each day, and the tall boys were surprised to discover how short the nap-places seem when you’re trying to sleep there for a night’s worth of time. 

Dave jumped up to rig a GoPro for a time lapse of the sunrise but he was already too late, and the GoPros were all dead.  He woke Chris our equipment manager, who’d driven all night, and floundered under the wrath of his curses while struggling with his freezing hands to test the extra batteries for any bit of charge. 

We are parked across the street from a little local shop.  I’m still unclear what it is that they sell here (camping permits, I think), but there is a nice, blue-tiled room with rustic chairs and benches, a tiny blue-speckled table with red candles, a fireplace, coffee and wifi.

“Jonjon is serenading dogs with his flute,” Ian tells us in passing while on his way to get more coffee. 

We are going over the script for the short we are filming today in Marfa.  We’ve finally told Neil that we lost Liesel.  I expected him to be angry, with us, her, or the world at large, but maybe he was too tired to rile himself up. 

I am not sure whether to be disappointed for our friend or, perversely perhaps, impressed by the fact that all immigrants are being discriminated against equally. 

5:03pm Marfa

            It stands thusly:

At 3pm, the cute little store that we overstayed our welcome in whilst writing, editing, and teeth-brushing welcomed us back after we reassured them that we plan on leaving tonight.  They didn’t even charge us a camper’s rate for having used camper’s amenities. Great!

            At 3:30pm, The cute little store that welcomed us back has asked us to leave because our “friend has been asking all of our customers for marijuana. These are families!”  As we receive this news, we see the “friend” in question walking off with yet another young woman.  “JONNY GET BACK HERE” we cry out.  We get him back, though only after his transaction, and we leave.

            While shooting on location at Padre’s bar in downtown Marfa, the Sheriff shows up threatening to put out a warrant for Neil’s arrest because apparently he has pieces of our tail-light in the trunk of his car, which incriminates Neil in the heinous crime of having backed into a small wheeled cart back at the hostel. 

            Somehow, we end up on good terms with Marfa.  Padre’s serves us beer as we’re filming, offers us their offices to film in, wants us to play tonight.  Instead, we make a beeline for Austin.  We want to wake up at SXSW.

Los Angeles, Las Vegas and into the Desert

Wednesday, March 6^th:

Neil’s stated ETD: 7:30am

ETD: 8:00am

Current time 11:53 and not yet departed.

            We’ve loaded in guitars, amps, microphones, pillows, blankets, tea, yoga mats, singing bowls, kegs, generators, newly-installed on-board internet, gopros mounted on the windows looking out, and on the windows looking in, and atop the stripper pole.  Ten of the thirteen bodies that will also be aboard are in place and happily chittering about the benefits of touring Las Vegas rather than Hollywood.

            Someone’s gone back inside to drop off things we’ve weeded out: two guitars, an extra kickstand, someone’s huge and ugly corduroy coat, and someone else has gone to the bathroom and no one knows why we still only add up to ten. 

            “Where is Jonny?”

            “Don’t let Jonny go back!  No one let him back into the convent!  He'll never come out.”

           

10:00pm

We arrive at a mansion up in the Hollywood hills.  The singer of Garbage lives next door and apparently, infamously, was unimpressed with a soaking wet, tuxedo-clad Zweng once upon a midnight dreary.

            The air still carries the daytime burnt-sugar smell of manicured foliage melting in the sun.  Rocky asks me where I am from, and I tell him California. “So you’ve always been spoiled,” he says in wonder, looking out at the lights twinkling through palm trees.  Though his words contain no malice, I resent them. 

            “I didn’t grow up around wealth…” I start, “ I didn’t grow up around this, these big houses, not quite this weather.  I’m a hood rat…”

            Ours is a culture of victimhood, and I am prey to it; San Francisco is one place where the kids want to be a minority (but not too minor!  Something safe.  Mixed, maybe.  Peruvian and English is a prime example.  Tanned but not dark, Spanish-speaking, but not a “beaner.”). Either way, my desperation to deny what beauty life has afforded me is thankfully lost on Rocky.  He is too busy enjoying California; he probably is in some way pleased by the idea of traveling with a native.

           We park at the bottom of a hill and begin piling our things and selves on the stoop of the mansion, but Neil wonders aloud who is staying back to sleep with him in the bus.

            No one answers except Zweng, who tells me that I can sleep wherever I want.  “Do what’s rad, Butlah.”  I follow him to the house.  Jonny is already there, unpacking his guitar in the living room while Eve fusses over him.  He says nothing.  He’s slept most of the way here, back in the media lounge, where we treated him exactly like the cat of his nickname, a quiet, unassuming kind of cat who silently retreats wherever it is that we go. 

4:37am Friday March 8^th, 2013

            We have arrived in Las Vegas.  We escaped the gingerbread house and with it, Eve’s insistent “Do you want to make it?” queries and demands that we not only record every conversation, but also actively drive dramatic interpersonal exchange.  This lovely woman with a lovely home has for the first time in my life made it clear what “selling out” really can mean.  She wants to ask Jonny why his girlfriend didn't come with; she wants to try to create a dramatic storyline about the tension that doesn’t actually exist between Nicole and Neil.  Every half hour she seems to have yet another of the boys cornered in her kitchen, whispering to them a list of what Nicole has been doing wrong.  She has been so fully infected by reality tv that she doesn’t even conceive that anything could be wrong with this, that there is any other way to live.  We want to make a documentary about creativity and the endurance of the team; not pitch yet another show about tearing each other apart. 

            Even the language we use with one another when we’re angry is full of invitation to reconcile.  “I am frustrated because I need your support!” said David, for example.  These are not the men that Cosmopolitan magazine covers warned me about.  These are testaments to the power of art, to the beauty of communal living.  They have to be coddled, cuddled, and spoken to  “Explain it to me because I want it my way but if you give me a reason…” says Neil.  The ellipses is meaningful, because sometimes we do it his way anyhow, but still at least we are all communicating to each other, rather than whispering behind gumdrops in Eve’s gingerbread house.  Part of the reason we really did have to leave LA last night is so that Nicole and I weren’t tempted to push her into an oven.

           

            And so now: we’re staying in a hostel where the fitted sheets don’t quite fit the bed, but we’re welcome here, welcome to stay late, to park our bus, to wander in and out at all hours, to ferry the hostel kids in and out of the main strip for ten bucks a pop.

            As we drove into Las Vegas, I remembered what it was I always thought I disliked about this place.  We drove past a number of brilliantly lit-up recreations of beautiful places and world wonders, and instead of taking on a graceful beauty, the way that certain New York streets do when they’re silent in the middle of the night, they seemed more like a drag-queen whose just taken off her false eyelashes.  They were bare, eery – and it is because Vegas screams at you.  A person who sits quietly staring out of a window and is alone isn’t creepy (like JonnyCat, these people seem somehow more dignified in fact), but a person shouting alone in a room is certainly creepy, and that’s what Vegas is without hundreds of people, just a person shouting alone in a dark room.   Chuck pointed out where he got married ten years ago and it only made it seem more lonely.

Vegas is Disneyland for adults, and just Disneyland filled me with existential angst, so does Vegas.  It is sterile here, washed clean of self-questioning by high proof vodka.  The culture of indulgence is the only one here; but the bright lights and catchy ads seem more a testament to the general populace’s need to be told what to do and led like moths to flame than for their need for luxury, brilliance, inspiration.

           

9:30pm Saturday March 9, 2013

            We’ve cut our stops to the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon, the former because of our time delay due to our necessary visit to the mechanic, and the latter because of weather.

            We stopped somewhere along the border of California and Arizona.  I’d been feeling dizzy for the last few miles, but I’ve mostly just slept today.  I struggled to my feet and dropped again to my knees a few feet from the media lounge, not even quite to the middle of the bus.  Liza gave me water and helped me up. I stumbled forward again, but into Jonny Cat. “Butler, are you ok?”  Someone, I think Ryan, told me to come outside.  I nodded.  The air smelled new to me; someone said it was dusty but by contrary I found the air to be quite clear, desert-clear without the sharp cold that I’ve experienced before in association with such clear air.  I stepped out into the clear air and looked up into a clear sky and lay down on the rocky ground.  The feel of the craggy rocks coming up through the packed dust was unexpectedly wonderful – perhaps it was newness again, the comparison to  the soft den of the media lounge that I’ve been effectively buried in all day.  Even the skeletal shrubs that pulled at my clothing seemed kindly.

            “Butler!” Ryan laughed.  “What are you doing?”

            “I’m just getting some earth, Ryan.  I just needed some earth.”