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.